Operator - 01 Page 4

  With some real regret, I bring my right leg up to the outside of his left knee. I’m standing behind George and just to his left, and as I shift my weight and his towards me, I exert a steady pressure with the sole of my shoe on the joint until I hear his anterior cruciate and medial collateral ligaments pop and feel the knee buckle. I ease George to the ground and whisper into his ear. “You just can’t go around beating up girls. Let it go now. We won’t have this discussion again.” I know this guy beat up Mel, but I can’t summon up any anger. I feel only the professional revulsion I have for people who can’t overcome their base genetic programming. This guy has everything: brains, looks and money. Instead of doing something useful with all of that he pisses it away with anger and jealousy.

  The look on George’s face as I lay him on the ground does not fill me with hope that my message has gotten through to him. At least I’ve slowed him down. As I turn around, Veronica is staring at me with a strange expression – as if she hasn’t really seen me before. Which may be true, but it still makes me uncomfortable. I lean over the bouncer, who looks at me with respect and introduces himself as Tana Tautolo. He assures me he will be fine even as he pulls a handkerchief from his pocket to staunch a steady flow of blood from his broken nose.

  “Do you want to wait for the police?” I ask Veronica and Nicole. They both shake their heads vigorously. I look at the bouncer steadily and after a second he nods. We slip away from the gathering crowd. As we part company, I have a queasy feeling about the man I’ve left on the pavement.

  I have good instincts.

  Chapter Three – Sunday

  Joining the Army was never my dream. Enlisting was a hasty decision I made when confronted with the same bleak future that had doomed my father and grandfather to toil their lives away in Conestoga. Military service is a well-trodden path in my hometown. Teenagers have been running away to join armies since the time of Alexander, and small towns bear more than their fair share of the sacrifice. A group of kids I graduated high school with were headed to the military but I never paid them much notice. I had a clear image of my future fixed firmly in my mind: four years playing football at Michigan followed by a stint in the NFL. Then possibly back to college as a coach. So when I left Conestoga I had no idea what to expect.

  For one thing, I had no idea how many jobs there are in the Army. All I knew was that I didn’t want to spend four years confined to the sweaty interior of a tank – I was obsessed with that thought. So when the recruiter asked me to choose a military occupation specialty, I mumbled something about wanting to be outdoors. The man, a polite, clean-shaven poster boy for soldierhood wearing a Ranger tab, smiled like he’d just tasted the first peach of the season. “11x it is,” he said, and in that moment I became an infantryman. It seemed like a straightforward choice. I’d carry a rifle and do a lot of marching. I could handle that.

  By the time I showed up at the induction center for the physical, I noticed that I was different from most of the other Army enlistees. That year I’d been named one of the top 100 high school football players in the country. I could clear 40 yards in 4.4 seconds and bench press twice my body weight. At Fort Benning, I ran the obstacle course faster than all the other recruits, faster than even the Drill Sergeant, who challenged me to a timed race. The man swore sideways when I beat him and broke the course record in the process.

  My hunting experience started to pay off almost immediately. I was so comfortable on the weapon ranges during Advanced Infantry Training that I picked up a nickname, “X-ring,” after the center ring on the bull’s-eye of a paper target. The rifle instructor, a member of the U.S. Army Marksmanship Unit, arranged an informal competition with the M-24, the military version of the Remington 700 – the same rifle I’d used all my life. I won the competition at 300 yards, beating several older men wearing Sergeant’s stripes, with a shot grouping smaller than a silver dollar. The tracking skills I’d learned in the Catskills also proved invaluable during field exercises. Men leave more evidence of their passing than deer, even though most of the suburban kids I trained with couldn’t see it.

  In truth, the Army was a revelation to me. I wasn’t great at everything in high school. I may have been a football star, but there were others who read faster and understood chemistry better than me. In the infantry, though, shooting straight and knowing how to track are huge advantages. The regular infantry doesn’t much care how fast you run unless a sixty-pound pack is strapped to your back, but my speed helped later on.

  Army life suited me. The physical regimen was no more strenuous than football workouts. Army discipline was a shade softer than the rule of law in my mother’s house. My fellow enlistees respected me, even looked up to me, because the cockiness I’d had in high school was gone, doused by my father’s suicide and snuffed out entirely when I’d abandoned my family and my future in one stroke. What I found in its place was a quiet determination to be good at something again.

  Two weeks before I graduated from Advanced Infantry Training, I was called into the Office of the Commandant at Fort Benning. A tall man with sandy hair in civilian clothing sat behind the desk, reading from a file folder. He was not the school commandant. He motioned me to a chair by flicking two fingers downward without looking up. I’d had enough training at that point to know how to sit still and shut up, so I waited there for a full quarter hour before the man looked up from the file. He pulled a paper from it and slid it over to me. It was a copy of an article from the Albany Times Union covering the New York State High School Championship Football game from the previous winter. On the front page was a picture of me in mid-air at full extension, arms stretched out as I descended on the Buffalo quarterback. I knew the article word by word from memory and slid it back to him. The man looked at me for a moment, unblinking.

  “Why did you give up the University of Michigan for this?” the man asked, spreading his hands outward and looking around the sparsely decorated office.

  “My Father died. I have to help support my family now,” I replied. I could hear the strain in my voice.

  “You mean he killed himself. With a shotgun, correct?” The man’s clear blue eyes suddenly fixed on me, challenging me to flinch.

  I didn’t bite. I recognized the tactic. It was like having an offensive tackle whisper nasty things at you, trying to get you angry and put you off balance so he could knock you on your ass.

  “Yes, that’s right, sir,” I said crisply. “It was a twelve-gauge, pump-action Remington Model 870.”

  The man nodded, almost in approval. He continued to leaf through the file. “The Army,” he said, “is more observant than it appears. We did not overlook the fact that you were a top college football prospect. We noticed that you’ve posted exemplary scores here in spite of a marked tendency to,” and here he paused and raised those clear blue eyes from the folder for a second with a significant look, “challenge authority. Oh, and I don’t know if you realized that you were competing with some of the Army’s best snipers in that little sharpshooting competition last week. One was an instructor at Sniper School here at Benning, another a member of the USAMU rifle team, and two of the other soldiers in question flew in from Fort Bragg.” He paused to let that sink in. I was stunned. Sniper School was justly famous in the infantry, and everyone coveted the sniper certification even though no tab was awarded. The Army Marksmanship Unit supplied the Army participants for international shooting competitions, including the Olympic games. And I knew what the man’s offhanded reference to Fort Bragg implied; Fort Bragg in North Carolina was headquarters for some of the Army’s deadliest men – like those in the 82nd Airborne and the Special Forces. The corners of the sandy-haired man’s lips twisted briefly into a shadow of a smile as he saw me processing this. “Their CO will not soon let them forget that they lost to a recruit.”

  There was another weighty pause. “I’d like to describe a career path for you and see if it might be of interest,” the man continued. I nodded slowly.

  “In t
wo weeks you’ll be sent to airborne school. Then you’ll move directly on to Ranger School and if you make it through, you’ll be posted to one of the battalions of the 75th Ranger Regiment. You’ll stay there until your twentieth birthday, when you become eligible for the Special Forces. If your performance as a Ranger is exemplary, you’ll be chosen for Special Forces selection and indoctrination on your first application. They’ll spend about a year training you, then you’ll spend at least two years with SF in the field. If you survive, you’ll be assigned to my unit. To actually enter, though, you’ll have to make it through Delta Force selection and operator training.” The man put down the folder and leaned forward, staring intently into my eyes.

  “Sir, you’re with The Unit?” I asked with a new level of respect. The Delta Force, the Army’s elite counterterrorist force had the reputation of being the toughest sons of bitches in the Army.

  That ghostlike smile passed the man’s lips again as he shook his head. “No, the Delta Force training just warms you up for what we’ll put you through.”

  “Respectfully, sir, just who the hell are you?” His smile got a little broader at my challenge. In truth, I already knew part of the answer. The sandy-haired man had enough pull to commandeer the Commandant’s office. He was obviously so well-connected that he could guide my career in and out of the Army’s most elite units. And he was clearly unimaginably powerful if he felt perfectly comfortable making his pitch in jeans and a white button-down Oxford.

  “You can call me Alpha. I run a clerical support company – one that doesn’t do much clerical work. The name of the outfit doesn’t matter; it changes all the time, as does its divisional designation. We were originally named the ‘Intelligence Support Activity’ and internally we still call our unit ‘the Activity.’ We were established after the failed hostage rescue of those students in Iran in 1980. Remember that, when those helos went down?”

  I didn’t remember because I hadn’t been born yet, but I didn’t interrupt.

  “The accident was the result of poor field-level intelligence from non-military agencies. We exist to rectify that problem. We prepare the battlefield for special ops units by providing reliable reconnaissance and communications intelligence on the ground. Most of our work supports the Joint Special Operations Command units including DEVGRU – that’s Seal Team Six – the Special Forces, Delta Force and a couple of outfits you’ve never heard of. This means we have to get in and out before they can do their work. We often cooperate with local governments or CIA officers on the ground, and we develop some of our own intelligence networks in key areas. You’ll need to learn languages – at least two to a high degree of proficiency. That’s why you’ll spend time in Special Forces before you reach us. They’ll start your language training and teach you how to understand foreign cultures.

  “Most of our people are electronics and communications experts, but we need shooters for our direct action arm. They perform reconnaissance and infiltration assignments and provide security support for our field teams. If you join us, your life expectancy will be shorter than that of a North Sea Oil Driller. Most of your work will be alone. You will go into places that we haven’t dared to send in a team so you can map it out for them. It’s crazy work. But you will save lives. Every time you hear about a miraculous hostage rescue or a terrorist leader being killed, you will feel proud to have served in the Activity, even if your contributions are never publicly acknowledged. Do you understand?”

  I nodded slowly. I knew this was a one-time offer. If I said no, I’d never see this man again. “What happens to my Army benefits if I join?” I asked. Part of the question was practical – I needed to know if the check I was sending home would shrink. The more significant question was unspoken: If I die, what happens to the benefits to my family if I’m not officially in combat?

  “When you join the Activity, you’ll be assigned to a clerical division in Virginia and promoted to the rank of Master Sergeant. The increase in base pay will help with the loss of combat pay. Your record after you leave Special Forces will not reflect your real duties and you will no longer receive medals or commendations. If you expire in our employ, your death will be listed as a training accident and your family will receive normal death benefits, plus a supplemental check from an anonymous Army veteran’s support group every month for twenty years.” Alpha paused. When he spoke next, it was with genuine compassion. “I’m very sorry, but I need your decision here and now, son.”

  There was nothing to decide. It was a dream job. “I’m in,” I said, trying to sound stoic.

  “I’ll be in touch from time to time but you won’t see me again for at least five years – and only then if you’ve done damned well every step of the way. Some of the places we’ll be sending you have high attrition rates. Army Ranger School alone fails almost fifty percent of its students, half of them in RAP week, for example. So the odds are very good that you and I will never meet again. On the other hand, if I’ve assessed you correctly, you don’t give a shit about the odds.” Alpha stood up slowly and shook my hand, looking directly into my eyes for another moment. As I left the office, the short hairs on my neck stood on end. For the first time since I’d left Conestoga, I felt a sense of purpose.

  * * *

  “Son of a bitch, that’s a solid eight-pointer,” Buddy Peterson whispers, peering through a rugged-looking set of binoculars.

  “It’s also seven hundred yards away with a fifteen knot cross-wind,” I counter, not bothering to keep my voice low. From this distance, I might as well be in another state as far as the deer is concerned. I track the antlered buck through the Leupold scope I’ve mounted on the bolt-action Winchester Model 70 rifle in my hands.

  I wouldn’t have chosen to use this particular rifle at all, but I never for a second dreamed that I would end up hunting deer on my first trip back home. It’s not even deer season yet in Greene County. We’ve driven two hours north to Saratoga County in the Adirondacks, the chain of mountains north of the Catskills in upstate New York. My first instinct was to back out of the trip altogether and when the call came from Jeff at four-thirty this morning; I had my excuses down pat. I told him I’d be happy to join but unfortunately I didn’t have a hunting permit, a rifle or suitable clothing with me. I hadn’t imagined that all of those obstacles could be overcome before 5am on a Sunday.

  “No problemo – way ahead of you,” Jeff replied without hesitation. “I got you a permit at Stokeley’s yesterday afternoon – they still had your information on file. Amelia found your father’s old deer rifle in your mom’s attic. It looks pretty clean to me and I’ve got an excellent new scope you can use with it. You’ll be able to count the zits on a buck’s ass, no kidding. Plus you can borrow a set of my camos. The pants might be a little short for you, but I’m sure the jacket will fit just fine.” Which is a nice way of saying that Jeff is a couple of inches shorter than me but sports a beer gut. So now I’m wearing camouflaged gear that has my arms and legs sticking out awkwardly while my midsection swims in extra fabric. Swell.

  I was even more surprised to see the Conestoga Sheriff’s Ford Explorer pull up in front of my motel room a half hour after Jeff’s call. Jeff popped out of the passenger’s seat, explaining that Buddy Peterson had proposed the hunting trip when he heard I was coming back to town. Jeff is bidding for the auto glass contract for the township of Conestoga, which includes the vehicles of the Sheriff’s office. Buddy is a fixture in town, having held the elected office for over twenty years, and no major decision is made in Conestoga without consulting him.

  I stiffened when Buddy extended his hand. He is tall and lanky, with skin the texture of an old leather wallet. Buddy has hazel eyes and slick, straight brown hair cut short and parted on the right. His right cheek bulged slightly over a wad of Skoal. The last time I’d seen Buddy was at my father’s funeral. He’d been one of the pallbearers carrying my father’s casket to the grave.

  In addition to being Sheriff, Buddy is the head of the booster�
�s club for the Conestoga Cougars, my high school football team. In practical terms it means he hits up local businesses for donations to pay for gear and coaching salaries for the team. But during my time on the Cougars, Buddy expanded his role as our unbeaten streak lengthened. It was Buddy, not Coach Howard, who made the calls that got me written up in Sports Illustrated and later persuaded college scouts from USC, Florida, Ohio State and Michigan to attend the state championship game. Of course, if I hadn’t played well that day, it wouldn’t have mattered. But the ten tackles, two sacks and an interception that day brought scholarship offers from USC and Michigan. Without Buddy’s help that dream would never have been possible, even though it was one I’d never realize.

  When I grasped Buddy’s outstretched hand, he surprised me by pulling me into an embrace and thumping me on the back. “It’s good to see you, son,” Buddy said. “I’m so glad you finally came back home. We’re all really proud of you here.”

  That meant something to me.

  The fourth man on the trip is a New Paltz businessman named Jack Millard. Jack owns a car dealership and several rental franchises around the Catskills and is one of Jeff’s largest clients. Millard is also a hunting fanatic, although his experience is limited to four deer hunts – one more than Jeff. Much of the talk in the car centered on equipment; Jeff and Jack debated whether the Weatherby Mark V or the Sako 85 was the better rifle, then moved on to the comparative advantages of tree and ground blinds. I closed my eyes and their voices faded into a drone of white noise. I was asleep in seconds, waking only when the truck pulled into the small parking lot at the trailhead.

  I expected to pair off with my brother-in-law, so I was surprised when Buddy insisted that Jeff and Jack set up a blind at the edge of a small meadow where Buddy had shot a buck the previous season. It was obvious that both men had been hoping to learn from either the Sheriff or the former soldier, but they quickly fell into an animated conversation as Buddy untangled their first hopeless attempt to set up the camouflaged deer blind. The blind was more or less just a tall tent without a bottom. I was relieved I wouldn’t be confined in it with Jeff.