0556 hours.
Jackson stared at the thing sitting on his desk, wondering exactly what he was waiting for. Or avoiding.
That damn incident file had sat there unopened for a few hours now, ever since Indy gave it to him, while Jackson attempted to catch some sleep jammed into one of his little couches, his feet jutting out over one end like a victim on Procrustes’ bed.
Finally he’d gone over to his desk and read the whole bloody, horrifying thing, all five single-spaced pages of it.
How Indy managed to get hold of it he’d never know, didn’t want to know. Wished he’d never read it. But he had, and he couldn’t unread it now.
What to do with it: that was the question.
Madone.
He looked up at the God’s eyes on the bulkhead. Jackson thought about the slender little fingers that made them, about his two daughters bent over their craft tables at school, frowning in concentration. His daughters, now grown women with lives of their own. Lives that existed only because they had survived childhood—because they had not been cut short, had not known the horrible intimacy of deadly violence.
There were eight kids in that little farm settlement in Mukalla, eight kids killed along with the rest. Slaughtered. Dismembered. Defiled.
Just five pages, but dear God. The whole massacre was there in all its ugly detail, and while the file didn’t name Chief Finn, they did place a “rogue SEAL” at the center of the whole bloody mess.
Their own Lieutenant Calley.
Why Finn wasn’t arrested right there in Yemen, or later in Bahrain, was beyond Jackson. Probably Indy was right: they wanted to keep him under wraps, keep the entire damn thing from going public. Some mediocre mind had decided the navy couldn’t afford the exposure. So they dropped him on a boat in the middle of the Pacific while they worked out some antiseptic way of making the thing go away.
Maybe SOCOM got it wrong. Maybe Finn wasn’t involved.
And maybe the moon was made of green cheese.
No, SOCOM was right, and Scott was right. Chief Finn had committed unspeakable crimes in Mukalla, and when he came aboard Jackson’s ship he kept on committing them. Chief Finn was the psychotic Lew had described to them, the twisted bastard cooking up his theater of horror. Hadn’t Finn told him as much? A start signal.
He was guilty as sin.
Everything rational told Jackson that.
He pushed back his chair and stood.
He should be turning the file over to Eagleberg. Should, but wouldn’t. He’d lost all trust in the captain’s capacity to act rationally.
But he could take it to the admiral.
He picked up the file and headed for the door.