She sighed, “If we were married, really married, I would be very upset with you right now.”
“What makes this different?” he asked, not stopping his massage.
“Jeremiah, I don’t have the right do be angry at anything you keep to yourself,” she said, stopping only when he made a clear exclamation of contempt.
“You have every right; you always have!” he said. “Don’t get into this rescue crap again. You rescued me as much as I rescued you. What makes you feel so guilty about that?”
“I’ve always regretted that because of me, because of the kids, you didn’t get to have a real life.”
“What, you think I wanted to go play the field?”
“Didn’t you?” she replied. She turned her head to look at him out of the corner of her eye. “You’re a spy. You could be in the hot tub with three twenty-something’s with plastic boobs instead of a nearly forty-something with Caesarian scars and a hysterectomy.”
“I wouldn’t trade you for the Swedish Bikini Team,” he told her.
She patted his hand, and said, “Really that’s sweet, but you’re a strong virile man Jeremiah. You don’t have to be true to me. There’s no reason you should be.”
“I have every reason to be true to you,” he told her.
“Why?”
“You make me happy; I couldn’t imagine my life without you or the kids,” he told her with that specific inflection unique to Slade. She knew how serious he was. “Did it ever occur to you that you and the kids are the balance to my life? The only balance I have to my life?”
“Aren’t there other things you want; other things you need Jeremiah?”
“Helen,” he said, hugging her close and kissing her neck. “There’s nothing I need that you can’t satisfy.”
CHAPTER 14: Treachery
The following day Freddy Waters got off a US government jet and entered an embassy limousine. The driver took him directly to Çankaya Köşkü, the presidential palace. That this was Freddy’s second Middle Eastern leader in the week meant nothing to him. In his world view these men were small fry to be swept away. His heroes were largely gone, excepting the seemingly immortal Castro, but enough of the old infrastructure remained. The regime, led by Oetari, would crush these cockroaches in the New World Order.
Freddy was a die-hard communist. He always had been. The fact that he lived as a very wealthy capitalist was not hypocritical to him; it was the crux of Freddy’s Marxist ideals. Freddy was an elitist, an ideologue who truly believed that the masses should be equal but that they should also be controlled by the intellectuals of society. No one could expect the Homer Simpsons of the world to enjoy life or to appreciate their equality if someone wasn’t telling them what to do.
There were people who enjoyed responsibility and there were people who enjoyed power. Freddy fell into the latter category. Whether it was brow-beating his fellow terrorists in the sixties or brain washing his students at the University, Freddy relished power.
Freddy couldn’t dictate to President Ataturk, however. As he handed a hard copy of the photo he got from Oetari’s iPad, he had to admit that exposing those people who disagreed with him was almost as good.
“The circled man is the trigger-man Mr. President,” he told Ataturk, giving away his fellow American without a sliver of remorse. The pigs deserved what they got. “The rest of them helped him get the job done. They’re a little bonus.”
Ataturk picked up the eight-by-ten photo, pleased to see the names and addresses where neatly printed below each man’s face. “Very good, this will satisfy the more ardent elements in both my family and my government. Thank you Mr. Waters.”
“You know, I’ve had problems with these military pigs since,” Waters began, alluding to a personal story, but the president waved his hand.
“That will be enough. Good day,” Ataturk said brusquely, turning his back on Waters and heading toward his desk.
Two aides moved between Waters and the president. The former terrorist was momentarily confused. The aides made things plain. After Waters gave the president what he wanted there was no more need for him. Freddy was not who he envisioned himself to be; he was just a messenger.
Even Freddy’s maniacally twisted brain burned at the slight, but he’d been down a long road to get back to the coat tails of power. Freddy was patient. Towards Ataturk, he projected the thought, “You and all of your little sand-flea kingdoms will disappear in the new history we’re creating. I’ll make sure you’re nothing more than ass wiping camel jockeys before I’m done with you.”
He left for his hotel. During the drive he put in a call to the embassy, telling them that he would be available to have dinner with the ambassador. The aide told Freddy that unfortunately the ambassador was unavailable. An irked Freddy looked up the ambassador’s general file.
“Bush appointee — I should have known — I’ll have the bastard shot,” Freddy growled. He went back to the hotel and ate dinner alone. While sitting at the table enjoying a five thousand dollar bottle of wine at the taxpayers’ expense, Freddy sent a text to the president. “Saw Pres. A. and passed him the info. Paris next.”
As Freddy pulled into the hotel, a posh, modern place wedged between government administrative buildings and frequented by diplomats and their families, the hotel across the street became a beehive of activity. It wasn’t upscale like Freddy’s hotel but it served a clientele just as varied, from just as many places around the globe. It was an ISIS transit point. Recruits flew into Istanbul or Ankara from all over the world to join the jihad. They stopped here before being funneled south to the border villages and into Syria.
The Turkish government knew all about it, but they did nothing to stop it. As long as there was a Kurdish presence in Syria and Turkey they were more than happy to allow this stream of jihadists to use their facilities and infrastructure.
In one of the two large conference rooms dozens of desks had been set up. Passports, bus tickets, money; virtually everything a fighter needed was set up as an orderly military style reinforcement depot. It was correspondingly busy. There was a tactical desk set up for the depot commander and he was at that moment intently staring at his computer screen.
An aide in the president’s office had just e-mailed him a bombshell.
“Allahu Akbar!” he breathed, shaking his head in wonderment. Amazingly enough, he didn’t have to contact his superiors, he didn’t have to hold a conference. All he had to do was to forward the e-mail to the mosques in the United States.
He typed in, "Search for these soldiers, find their towns. Here are their photos and the addresses. Then show up and slaughter them." Below the simple paragraph was the group photo of Slade and his Delta Force team.
The terrorist hit send and the message went out to a long list of mosques in the United States who either overtly or covertly supported the jihad. There were hundreds of them.
Johnny “Johnny Bravo” Garret was out on the balcony of his small apartment. He was off for a few more days after the operation in Iraq against ISIS. He got his nickname from the swath of blond hair at the very peak of his crew cut and his James Dean good looks. “Honey, the grill’s ready. I’m going to throw the steaks on!”
He slid open the tempered glass door and walked directly into the kitchen. Opening the fridge, he reached for the tray with two marinating steaks. The doorbell rang. Johnny grimaced, almost calling for Sherry, his pretty young wife, to get the door so he could get the steaks on the grill. He changed his mind and shut the fridge; Sherry was six months pregnant. Her back was hurting, her feet were swollen; no, he’d save her the trip across the apartment.