May 2011
Washington D.C.—Claryville, N.Y.
I inadvertently had become a character in my own story. If only I could have written the rest of the plot line. Admittedly, I wasn’t playing the role of the hero or main protagonist, and unfortunately I wasn’t the handsome prince who ends up with the damsel in distress. However, I did have a major supporting role in a drama that was unfolding rapidly on three continents. The question was, how much of the drama, and now bloodshed, had I actually caused with my journalistic persistence, and how much was caused by events that had been set into motion decades before.
As I sat quaffing a cold beer in the surreal atmosphere of the “Sherwood Forest” safe house near Orkney Springs, Virginia in the Shenandoah Valley, I watched Quindarius Lee and the rest of Sloane’s merry men prepare their weapons for a mission they categorically refused to discuss with me. Drake Herrin sat mesmerized in front of a computer with internet access through a satellite connection. I gathered that he had managed to hack into a CIA classified network with a dated password which allowed him to search old operational archives. He pointedly lowered the laptop’s screen every time I approached. Laura was on the front porch in the middle of a yoga routine. She hadn’t said five words to me since our arrival anyway. Yes, I was a character in the story but with no access to my own script.
I don’t know what connections Quindarius’ people still had to classified information, sources of weapons, explosives, commo equipment, or false documents, but the Sherwood Forest safe house had taken on the look of a CIA warehouse capable of outfitting a war of national liberation in some God-forsaken third-world country.
Tiger Buxton summoned me one morning to a corner of the cabin that had been curtained off to make a tiny photography studio. “Sit down, Max,” he instructed. “Need to take your picture. My apologies to your mother, but I’ve decided to give you a new name. It’s time Max Crandall faded into the woodwork. He attracts way too much attention wherever he goes.” Tiger took a series of photographs and two days later presented me with a full set of personal identification identifying me as Drew Worthington, an auditor in the Virginia state government. In addition to my fake business cards, I had a passport, Virginia driver’s license, Mastercard & Visa credit cards in my new name, and membership cards in the United States Tennis Association and a local Blockbuster in Richmond. I even had a frequent flyer One Pass number with Continental Airlines.
Tiger was loading weapons and communications equipment into a nondescript beige van with tinted windows. I had no earthly idea where they came up with their gear, but I knew by now it was useless to ask. Quindarius took me aside that evening and gave me what amounted to my pre-mission briefing.
“You’re booked in alias to fly tomorrow to Houston and then on to Managua. You’ll arrive in Nicaragua about eight o’clock in the evening. Go to the Camino Real. You’ve got a reservation. The next morning a car will pick you up at nine o’clock sharp. Stand at the main entrance of the hotel and our man will find you. You’ll be taken to see Ortega. He’ll be expecting you this time. What happens then is up to Mako.”
Although most of the group avoided conversation with me, they allowed me to sleep in a place of honor: on the couch with my very own pillow. Quindarius and his buddies snored on the floor in sleeping bags but looked like they had done it a thousand times before. The next morning we took off at the crack of dawn, the van crammed full of weapons and equipment. I had no inkling what most of it was for. I was dropped off unceremoniously in front of the main terminal at Dulles. Quindarius smiled at me and winked. I felt a little like an orphan child abandoned by his parents. The thought that I was to finally meet the subject of my five-year research cheered me immensely, although the fact that I was traveling with false documentation for my own safety was sobering.
Quindarius roared off in the van with his band of merry men and I turned and walked into the terminal.
●
There’s nothing like a drive along the I-95 corridor north of Washington D.C. to make one long for the wide open spaces of the American West or even the Karakum Desert in Turkmenistan. Quindarius Lee did not share the Scotch-Irish ancestry of his companions, but he certainly appreciated the prescience of early 18th century Trans-Appalachian pioneers who felt a creeping claustrophobia when they looked out of their log cabins and saw their neighbors in the distance. He could empathize with their decision to flee the crowded Eastern seaboard. As the van sat in stop-and-go traffic near Wilmington, Delaware on the interstate, Quindarius wondered what those trailblazing nomads would have thought about a traffic jam in the middle of the country with no town in sight.
Drake Herrin hadn’t turned off his laptop for 48 hours and hardly had said a word to anyone. He finally took off his earphones and reported the results of his sleuthing. “Alright, I’m pretty sure he’s not at his apartment on the Upper East Side. I’ve been calling his land line there for two days, and I just got off the phone with his neighbor. They haven’t seen him in about a week. I think he’s at his farm in the Catskills. He’s got no phone there that’s listed. No way to confirm he’s there except to pay him a visit.”
“That’s what we’re here for, Drake,” said Quindarius, stifling a yawn. “I hate to play the heavy with an old man. Not very sporting, really. How old is Mallory by now anyway? He’s got to be around 80, isn’t he?”
“We’re not here to be sporting. I want to know who’s behind the attack on Laura and what Mallory gave away to the Russians. He’s the only one who can tell us that.”
Drake fell silent as the van finally turned off I-95 and headed north toward Allentown based on the new information about Mallory. Herrin turned back to Quindarius fifteen minutes later as if he had just heard the question about Mallory’s age.
“Yes, he would be around eighty now. The odd thing about him is that he looked eighty when he was just fifty. He still smokes those horrid cigarettes he rolls with makhorka tobacco and wears the same black suit and white tie…even when he’s home alone. He’s become quite popular in conservative think tank circles since he wrote, KGB Apocalypse, his simplistic analysis of how the demise of the USSR affected Russia’s intelligence gathering capability. I wonder how much of the material was provided by Putin.”
Quindarius smiled to himself and nudged Tiger with his elbow. He knew Herrin was loathe to acknowledge the intellectual accomplishments of anyone, much less the man who had eclipsed him in the CIA hierarchy and quite possibly had spied for the Russians and made a mockery of his whole career.
The hours passed in silence. The van passed the towns of Stroudsburg, Milford, and Matamoras where it turned due north into some of the most picturesque country one could imagine located just a few hours’ drive from New York City. As the van drew nearer to the target, conversation died and the men began preparing their weapons. The group had discussed strategy, contingencies, and escape routes back at the safe house and each team member knew his or her role.
Mallory’s private driveway was a well-graded gravel road near the hamlet of Claryville, New York that turned left off the main road and followed a serpentine route for another 400 meters. Mallory’s 19th century farmhouse stood in a large clearing in the woods on the bank of the Neversink River. Laura and Tiger were to stay with the van about 100 meters up the driveway from its intersection with Claryville Rd. Their job was to prevent anybody or any vehicle from leaving. Two SMAW-II Serpent shoulder-launched multipurpose assault weapons would assist them in accomplishing that mission, if it became necessary. Both were well-versed in the operation of that light anti-tank rocket.
Except for a cross-country route to the north across the river, the driveway was the only exit for anybody at the farmhouse, and nobody considered an escape by foot to be feasible for the 80-year-old Mallory. He had been the chief of clandestine operations for years, however, and the team could only guess at the security measures he had in place or who was on his payroll.
Quindarius and Tupelo would approach the farmhouse on foot from the east and west, communicating with each other and the van by miniature secure handheld radios (MSHR). Each, of course, was heavily armed with M4 carbines equipped with M203 grenade launchers and half a dozen high-explosive rounds. Both men also carried an M9 Beretta pistol. Neither thought he would be using any of the weaponry. Both were wrong.
The first sign something was amiss came when Quindarius stumbled across a body lying in the woods about 75 meters from Mallory’s farmhouse. The man had been killed quite recently, his throat cut. Blood had seeped into the moist soil from the gaping wound in his throat but had not dried yet. It glistened in the late afternoon sunlight streaming through the foliage. Whoever was responsible had not even bothered to take the man’s assault rifle, which lay on the ground beside him.
“Got a body in the woods to the west of the residence. Be alert and move in slowly. It’s a fresh kill.” Quindarius spoke softly into his headset and strode purposefully through the woods toward the farmhouse. The thick carpet of accumulated leaves from the maple, oaks, and sycamore trees in the forest made it difficult to move silently. Two minutes later he heard Tupelo’s voice in his earphones. “Got one here too. Looks like we’re a little late. I’m moving in.”
Quindarius had already picked up his pace and was covering ground at a slow trot. He arrived at the tree line and crouched down beside a cluster of sugar maples, observing the old farmhouse. A FEDEX van was parked in the semicircle of the driveway, a uniformed driver sitting motionless at the wheel. There was no activity outside the old two-story farmhouse. The residence was a restored 19th century wooden building that had been freshly painted white with dark green window shutters. Two satellite antennae had been incongruously installed on either side of the house under the eaves. Even here in the Catskills, Mallory had no intention of losing touch, it seemed. The front entrance to the house was through a screened-in porch up several concrete steps from the neatly manicured front lawn. A small, red barn with white trim stood 30 meters in back of the house to the right. A sliding door stood ajar and Quindarius could see Mallory’s vintage blue Mercedes inside. Drake was right. He was here.
Motion inside the screen porch caught Quindarius’ eye. Someone was coming out. At the same instant the front door opened, a muffled shot rang out from inside the house.
“Trouble,” whispered Quindarius into his microphone. “We might have just lost Mallory. I count four coming out the door and one in the van. Tupelo, use the grenade launcher…now!”
Five seconds later, two high-explosive grenade rounds exploded almost simultaneously between the van and the tightly grouped target of four. After that, there wasn’t much left for the M-4 carbines to mop up. One of the four targets survived the explosions, and he limped desperately toward the van which was already careening around the driveway with its wheels kicking up a cloud of dust and gravel. Its driver gave little thought to possible survivors among his former colleagues and raced to put distance between himself and the carnage in front of the house. Quindarius and Tupelo each fired one short burst from their M4s, and the survivor toppled to the ground, his torso crisscrossed with six 5.56mm rounds, any one of which would have proved fatal.
Quindarius spoke quickly into his microphone. “Tiger, you have a FEDEX van about to make an appearance at high speed. Driver only. ETA in fifteen seconds.”
Tiger had already deployed the SMAW II Serpent as a contingency and he had the shoulder-launched weapon ready and loaded by the time the FEDEX van made its appearance. The van skidded in the gravel around a curve in the road about 200 meters from Tiger. Laura was lying on the gravel road to the left of the team’s van with an Israeli Neveg light machine gun set up on a bipod and sighted on the rapidly approaching vehicle. Firing a 5.56mm NATO round at a rate of almost 1,000 rounds per minute, the little machine gun had no problem with a target 200 meters away. In fact, it was too easy. Laura raked the windshield with her first long burst and watched the van swerve off the road, crashing into a large oak tree on the side of the driveway. It was over almost as soon as it began.
Quindarius and Tupelo were not concerned about the escaping van. They knew it would never make it to Claryville Rd. and doubted the driver would survive the encounter with Tiger and Laura. Instead, Tupelo took off at a dead run to the back of the house while Quindarius readied his weapons to enter through the front door. Both were confident that all the bad guys were already out of the house, but it would have been foolish not to take precautions.
“Ready,” whispered Tupelo into his microphone.
“Go,” responded Quindarius, and the two burst into the house from opposite sides, their M4s covering the entire room. Nothing moved inside. A dead Chase Mallory slumped over his desktop computer in one corner of the living room. He had been shot once in the back of the head by a large caliber round. Blood drenched the starched collar of his white shirt and dripped steadily onto the keyboard. His black tie lay sprawled to the side on the desk, and his arms hung awkwardly down. Drops of blood fell from his fingertips, discoloring a 5 x 7 Navajo rug which decorated the office. Tupelo called to Quindarius from the kitchen where he had begun a room-to-room search of the farmhouse.
“The house is wired, QL! There are enough plastic explosives in here to take out the entire town. Looks like Russian PVV-5A. There’s a timer, but I can’t tell how much time we have. I say we get out now!”
Quindarius knew the phlegmatic Tupelo McSweeney well enough to understand that the slight emotion evident in his voice indicated that the situation was dire, and there was no time to defuse the plastique or discuss alternate strategies. The two ran out of the front door and tried to put as much distance as possible between them and the house before it blew. They reached the treeline and dashed into the woods seeking the relative cover of the large deciduous trees. The shock wave of the explosion threw Tupelo into a fallen log and knocked him unconscious. The jagged surface of the log left a long gash on the side of his head and he bled profusely. Quindarius was shaken but unhurt. He picked himself off the ground and managed to throw Tupelo’s large frame over his shoulder, being careful to secure the second M4 carbine. He didn’t want to leave any trace of his presence behind. At a lumbering jog, Quindarius carried Tupelo through the woods and out on to the gravel driveway. He saw the wrecked, smoking FEDEX van in the distance and Tiger next to the body of the driver going through his pockets.
“What the hell happened back there?” called out Tiger as Quindarius laboriously trotted by, breathing heavily under the weight of an unconscious Tupelo McSweeney. “Later,” replied Quindarius. “Let’s move.”
Drake had the van’s engine running. Quindarius laid Tupelo on the rear seat in the van while Tiger and Laura secured the weapons in the rear compartment. As soon as they were all back in the van, Drake pulled out of the driveway and headed away from Claryville, being careful to observe the speed limit. Sirens could be heard in the distance, and a thick plume of black smoke filled the sky over the farmhouse. Laura tended to Tupelo, who had regained consciousness and was cursing softly in the back of the van. He winced as Laura cleaned the head wound with hydrogen peroxide.
“Are you going to keep us in suspense, QL?” asked Tiger impatiently. “What the hell happened back there?”
“Bad timing,” Quindarius answered tersely. They killed Mallory. We got four of them coming out the house, but they had wired it with plastique. Tupelo says it was PVV-5A. This was a Russian operation. ”
“What about Mallory’s computers?” asked Drake hopefully.
“Gone. We barely made it out as it was. Looks like whoever it was wanted to destroy Mallory’s computers and files. That explosion was huge.”
“Take a look at this,” said Tiger, handing Quindarius the contents of the pockets of the FEDEX driver.
A wallet contained all the identification and miscellaneous pocket trash needed to back up an alias identity. “Nothing new there,” thought Quindarius. Then he pulled two small photographs from the wallet and stared at them for a few seconds.
“That clears up a few things,” he said softly and handed the photos to Drake, who looked at the images and caught his breath. Taken at close range, the photos showed Laura and Max sitting in the same bar on Capitol Hill where Max had first met Drake Herrin.
“So, it was the Russians who tried to get Laura that night after all,” commented Drake, deep in thought. “Poor Chase,” he said with genuine pity in his voice. “Misguided fool. Why did he choose to betray his own people?”
“So what was this all about, Drake?” asked Quindarius with bitterness in his voice. “Another attempt to shut someone up?”
“Precisely, QL,” answered Drake. “But this time the victim had something to tell.”