“I thought it was Victor, but seeing you here is making me rethink things.” Chris tried to place the pieces of the puzzle together. “Victor could’ve taken me out when I finished planting the explosives. With his skill as a gunfighter, he’d be the logical choice — make sure the job was done right. Why didn’t he?”
Jim Bob shook his head.
Chris tried to put himself in Victor’s shoes. “I can only guess that maybe Victor isn’t the greatest fan of fratricide. I don’t doubt that he could’ve killed that guard in the office at the Latakia Marina. But who killed Wolf?” Chris pointed to the bloodstain on the wall.
Victor looked at it, and the edges of his mouth sagged. But Jim Bob didn’t look at it.
Chris’s voice became louder. “You can’t look at it, can you, Jim Bob?”
“Look at what?” Jim Bob gave a cursory glance at the bloodstain on the wall before returning his gaze to Chris. “I looked. You see? I looked.”
“Cut the good-ole-boy crap, and tell me where Hannah is!”
Jim Bob stopped speaking.
“Hannah isn’t with either of you, so that means she isn’t with either of you,” Chris said. “But you and Victor sold the Switchblade Whisper to the Chinese, didn’t you?”
Jim Bob sighed and shook his head. “What you’re saying is madness.”
“I’m sorry Hezbollah kidnapped and tortured you. I’m sorry the Agency didn’t rescue you. I would’ve been happy to risk my life to free you. Both of you,” Chris said.
“That’s just the way things happen,” Jim Bob said, his lips becoming taut.
“But God knows that doesn’t excuse you for putting Hannah in danger. And I know.”
“I’m not responsible for Hannah. I didn’t want her on this mission. Somebody upstairs wanted her.” Jim Bob fidgeted. “I don’t know if it was some equal opportunity horseshit or if somebody wanted her out of their corral for a season — maybe somebody didn’t trust me and wanted her to play mommy to us. Whatever the reason, I couldn’t get the green light for this mission without bringing her.”
“You tried to blow us up and left me on that mountain for dead!”
Jim Bob shook his head and motioned for Chris to cool down. “I don’t know anything about that. All I know is that she wanted you on this mission, and when I objected, she threatened to walk out.”
“Where is she?”
Jim Bob sighed. “I’d guess that she’s looking for you, but since she obviously hasn’t found you, I’d say she’s looking for the Switchblade Whisper.”
“And where is that?”
Jim Bob’s mouth twisted. “Victor, the stench is getting worse. It’s past time to take out the garbage.”
Chris shifted his gaze to Victor, who slowly put his duffel bag on the deck but otherwise kept still.
Jim Bob looked at Victor. “You didn’t want to do it before. But now do you see where that road has taken us?” Jim Bob said.
“Why don’t you kill me yourself, Jim Bob?” Chris asked.
“Jim Bob is a hero,” Victor said. “You’ve disrespected him enough.”
“He disrespected himself.”
Victor took a deep breath. “You know, Ron Hickok taught me personally.”
“Ron taught a lot of people. If I perish, I perish.”
Victor remained cold. “You don’t seem too concerned. But you should be.”
“Since I became a pastor, I’ve become closer to God than ever before in my life. I can’t think of a better time to die,” Chris said. “You, on the other hand, would be better off not drawing that pistol.”
Victor grinned. “Why’s that?”
“If you draw, I’ll be forced to draw, too, and I’ll do all I can to kill you. On the other hand, if you succeed in murdering a man of the cloth, it’d be better if you’d never been born.”
The corners of Victor’s smile drooped.
“There is no God,” Jim Bob hissed.
Victor’s eyes stayed on Chris. But he made no move toward his gun.
“Victor.” Jim Bob shook his head. “If we let Chris go, he’s going to peddle this loony story of his around Washington, and he’s going to find someone loony enough to buy it. Then you and I will pay for his lunacy.”
“I can’t go to jail,” Victor said. “I can’t go to jail.”
Jim Bob grinned as if he’d already won.
Victor’s shoulder twitched, but his pistol hand moved, too, as he went for his gun.
Chris performed as efficiently as he could, but he needed speed, too, and he wasn’t fast enough. As his hand grasped the pistol handle, Victor had already brought his pistol out of its holster. As soon as Chris’s muzzle cleared the holster, he rotated the muzzle in Victor’s direction while bringing the weapon up to fire. Without thinking, Chris squeezed the trigger. He should’ve heard or felt his weapon fire, but a tunnel blackened everything except Victor. His first round struck Victor in the knee.
Chris felt like he was outside of his body, deaf and motionless, when the second shot fired. It struck Victor in the pelvis, making him crumple like a paper ball. Victor lost his aim and brought his head down into Chris’s line of fire. Chris’s third shot hit Victor in the skull.
Pop. The heat of a bullet creased Chris’s brow. He twisted toward Jim Bob until the duplicitous good-ole-boy appeared in a blur. Jim Bob’s next projectile parted Chris’s hair.
Chris returned fire, punching Jim Bob in the chest. His next shot cracked Jim Bob’s nose, spraying a pink mist. Jim Bob fell forward, and his chin bounced off the deck.
Shaken and angry, Chris tried to take long, slow breaths — tried to rein in his pulsing adrenaline. “May God have mercy on your souls.” He said the words out of obligation, but in his heart, he hoped they burned in Hell.
Although he should’ve been worried about how the partiers in the nearby yacht would react to the shots fired and about how he was going to find the Switchblade Whisper, he could only worry about one thing.
Where are you, Hannah?
PART TWO
All warfare is based on deception.
13
Chris wanted to kill Jim Bob again, but resurrecting him just to drill him in the face once more wouldn’t bring Chris closer to finding Hannah. Chris had searched through the pockets of dead men before, but Iraq was so many years ago that his senses had forgotten what it was like, and now it felt like he was doing it for the first time. Jim Bob and Victor appeared to be asleep except for the awkward positioning of their bodies and that Victor’s eyes were still open. His unblinking eyes unnerved Chris, so he closed them. Jim Bob and Victor made no snoring or breathing sounds that sleeping men make. In spite of the morbidity of frisking dead men, Chris put aside their humanity and focused on his objective: gather intel.
He searched Victor’s body first, looking for anything that might give a clue as to Hannah’s whereabouts. Victor’s pockets were warm, and the muscles in his legs were at rest and unresponsive, as if he’d fallen into a drunken stupor. Chris discovered a cell phone along with a set of keys. Then he examined Jim Bob’s body and found his cell, too. At any moment, the late-night partiers on the other yacht could call the police and report the gunshots fired — time wasn’t on his side. After pocketing the phones and keys, he opened Victor’s duffel bag and looked inside: Jim Bob’s laptop, Victor’s handheld GPS tracker, an HK416 with a configuration similar to the one Chris had lost in the explosion, and magazines of 5.56 mm ammo. He zipped it back up and carried it by its shoulder strap before scurrying up the ladder to the main deck.