Up in the library the TV was tuned once more to CNN, the talking heads going round and round about something out of Iran.
Hormonal ozone. Human thunderheads.
Finally a PC station freed up. Finn hit both Gmail boxes.
Nothing.
Not from his teammates. Not from Kennedy. Not from anyone.
It was now two full days since he’d had that telegraphic conversation with Kennedy. Give me twenty-four. Twenty-four meant twenty-four. His lieutenant would have been in contact by now if it was at all physically possible.
Which meant it wasn’t at all physically possible.
Which would be the case, for example, if the whole platoon were back out in the field somewhere on some op or other, on comms lockdown. But that seemed unlikely. They’d been back from Mukalla for only a few days and were expected to be there at the base in Bahrain for at least another week, probably more.
Or which would also be the case if…
If what?
Finn couldn’t come up with a plausible second scenario, and he didn’t like that. Kennedy was the platoon’s OIC. Officer in charge. As platoon chief, Finn was their top enlisted man, second in charge. He was not a natural born leader, not like Kennedy, and he knew that. But these were his guys. His responsibility. They were counting on him.
Why wasn’t he hearing from them?
He set up three brand-new email boxes, none identifying him in any way. Gmail wasn’t like sending a letter sealed in an envelope. More like sending a postcard. You might as well spray paint your message on the subway wall. Would his emails be read by someone on board? Forwarded to some functionary up the chain of command? No doubt.
From each of the new accounts he sent a series of three messages, covering a total of nine teammates. Each email was the same: no subject line, just a two-word message:
He closed the PC’s browser window. Glanced around. Same couple in the back again, warming up to perpetuate the species. He looked back at the blank screen.
Finn didn’t care for the Web. He didn’t like putting himself out into cyberspace where his thoughts and movements could be tracked and stored. But he needed to know what was out there.
He opened a fresh window in the PC’s browser, put the cursor in the search window, and typed:
Hit the NEWS tab, waited for the PC’s snail’s-pace bandwidth to respond. Then scrolled through the search results. Nothing pertinent. To focus the search he inserted the relevant date:
Wait. Scroll. Nothing. He backspaced over “incident” and typed in a new phrase:
No results, none that meant anything.
Finn glanced around the space. He was sitting in a corner of a crowded compartment—but it felt like he was alone out on a ridgeline, standing silhouetted against the open sky, the easiest target in the world. He didn’t like being this exposed.
He deleted “terror attack,” hesitated for a moment, then added one last word to the search string:
Looked at the blinking cursor for a moment. Hit RETURN. Waited.
And got nothing.
He cleared his search history, deleted the browser’s cookies. Restarted the computer. He would swing by every few days to check for replies. Like walking the woods to check a string of traps.
His expectations were not high, though he could not have explained why.