Chasing the Lion, page 25
“Hands up,” the tall guy said as his partner stopped and leveled his pistol at me. The tall guy walked toward me and stuffed his pistol in his belt as he frisked me, again missing the knife in my boot. As he came back up, he leaned forward and whispered in my ear, “You’re a dead man.”
His stale breath poured over me, and I got the sense that he had been awake for a couple of days. His eyes were tired, and his hands shook as he felt me up.
“Roger that,” I said, avoiding provoking him.
The lead guard removed a set of flex-cuffs and restrained my hands, cinching them down an extra notch just to make me feel the pain, but I didn’t give him the satisfaction of revealing he had cut into my wrists.
“Tough guy, huh?”
He led me to the SUV and opened the door.
Secretary of Defense Tharp sat in the middle row of the vehicle. The left seat was jacked forward to provide access to the third row of seats, which the second guard used to enter and position himself behind me. The lead guard shoved me into the back, causing me to stumble forward. The rear guard grabbed my shoulders and pulled me into the middle seat as the lead slid in beside me and closed the door.
“Hello, Garrett,” Tharp said. “I understand you killed my wife. Thanks for doing that. The nosy bitch was becoming a problem.”
“Your hit man did that,” I said.
“Not mine, but a minor technicality, don’t you think? They were aiming for you, a well-publicized threat to the country, but they missed and poor Donna was the unfortunate recipient of the bullet.”
He had given the matter some thought, but I was hardly paying attention. I had a gun to the back of my head and one in my side. The SUV was idling, and the Dodge Challenger in front of us had plumes of exhaust coming from the tailpipes. They were prepared to move. My hands were tied together and hanging over the edge of the seat. The exhaust bump through the middle of the vehicle brought my knees higher than normal. I felt my boot top with my bound hands.
“Windows look bulletproof,” Hobart said in my ear.
“Let them know that if they leave, I’m following,” McCool said.
I ignored McCool’s comment and said to Tharp, “She was your wife. She loved you and supported you.” Like the turtle on the fence post, Tharp believed that he had risen to his exalted position solely on his own genius. People like him ultimately failed at some point in time, even if it meant being alone when they died. People in power had enough “friends” to sustain them until that fateful moment when they could no longer do any good for the hangers-on.
“We’re not here to talk about her. You asked for this meeting. It’s generous of me to give you a few minutes. Luckily, I had other business to attend to up here, anyway.”
I turned and stared at him when I said, “I bet. You, Estes, and Owens have something going on.”
A cloud passed over his eyes, but he was a skilled practitioner of the art of deception.
“We’ve always got something going on, Sinclair. The real question is, do I turn you over to these guys and later on stumble across you and claim to be a hero? Or do I let you go hang yourself? Both are equally appealing.”
“You should kill me,” I said. “I know what you’re up to with Parizad.”
He flinched. His eyes batted twice, and his left cheek twitched. “Parizad?”
“Yes, Mr. Secretary. The Iranian successor to Soleimani that your department is charged with confronting. You sent me on a chase around the world to keep me from seeing what it is that you’re doing and to implicate me in your crimes.”
It was a stab in the dark, but it was what I had been able to piece together. The West Pointers were planning something, maybe a consolidation of their power. The vast and far-reaching muscle of the Defense and State Departments, coupled with that of the CIA, made for a potent brew, whatever the endgame.
The tenor of his voice changed.
“Killing you is looking like the best option,” Tharp said.
I wondered about the thugs who were protecting him. They were most likely rejects from the military that enjoyed being near the center of the flame. The man to my left nudged his pistol into my side. The man behind me pressed his pistol into the back of my neck.
“Look at you, Sinclair,” Tharp said. “You always were that straight arrow, but now you look like a fucking homeless bum. Anyway, what is happening is much larger than you, and even if I told you, which I won’t, you couldn’t stop it. It is what this country needs, though, to bring it together. That much I know. All right, guys, dump him in the woods. Your call on what happens to him.”
On that, the guard on the left opened the door and pulled at me while the guard in the rear pushed against the back seat. I already had the Blackhawk special ops knife open and slicing through the flex-cuffs. I rammed an elbow into the nose of the guard behind me—blood sprayed everywhere—as I spun out of the vehicle and kicked the tall guard’s pistol out of his hand. I was sure that Hobart and McCool were watching and that Tharp was a paper tiger. I doubted he carried a weapon.
Two whispers cut through the night, which had to be Hobart firing on the guards along the edge of the woods. A bullet pierced the handle to the driver’s door of the SUV, then two more spiderwebbed the window. McCool was laying suppressive fire.
“What the fuck, Sinclair?” Tharp shouted. “Drive! Drive!”
That was the Tharp I knew. Leave his men behind to save his own ass. Estes and Owens were no different.
The guard lunged toward me, and I stepped aside, shoving the top of his head into the guard with the broken nose, who was again trying to exit the vehicle. Several shots rang out, and tires hissed as the driver, sealed in his seat, attempted to pull forward but bumped into the chase car parked in front. I grabbed the back of the guard’s head and smashed his face into the side of the SUV, denting the rear fender. As the man dropped, the broken-nose guard was squeezing out of the back of the rear seat. When his head popped out, I landed a solid right cross on his temple. He fell like a shot quail.
The driver was turning with his pistol in his left hand as I stepped out of the way of two shots pinging off the frame.
Tharp shouted, “Go! Go! Go!”
I lunged inside and swiped the knife across the driver’s gun hand, causing the pistol to fall at Tharp’s feet. I reached in and grabbed it to prevent him from hurting himself and aimed it at the driver.
“Crawl across the seat and step out, now,” I said calmly. He slid over the console and opened the passenger door. By now, he knew there was more than just me involved in this ambush. He stood quietly by the open door. The one thing about bad leaders was that their troops never went the extra mile for them.
I turned to Tharp, who was visibly shaking.
“Okay, tough guy. Let’s go before you piss your pants,” I said. “Step out of your door. If you try to run, you’ll be shot.”
“You’re making a big mistake, Sinclair,” he croaked.
“Made several already. No biggie. Let’s go,” I said.
I kept the pistol aimed at him as McCool pulled around to the opposite side. Her window was down, and she had a pistol trained on him.
“Hey, big guy,” she said. “Need a ride?”
He looked over his shoulder at me and then at his driver, who was still standing outside the passenger door, maybe calculating the odds. Hobart appeared, holding his rifle at the ready, aiming at the chase car, opening the door, and dragging the driver out. He flex-cuffed both men and piled them in the back of Tharp’s Suburban. Then he took his knife and stabbed the tires of the chase car. He flex-cuffed and loaded the two unconscious guards in the back seat of Tharp’s SUV and took the fobs to both cars, locking both.
He came around to where I was standing with Tharp and mumbled, “Fucking child’s play,” as he snapped a pair of flex-cuffs on Tharp. He led Tharp to the back hatch, lifted it, and dumped him in the back, then tied another flex-cuff around his ankles.
Tharp was screaming, “Hey! Hey!”
Hobart said, “Save it,” and blindfolded him before he shut the hatch door. He turned to me and nodded. “Good job, boss.” Then he jumped in the back seat as I slid into the passenger seat next to McCool. The entire operation had taken ten minutes.
We dropped Hobart a mile down the road at his car in a different strip mall parking lot. He jumped out, and once he was in his car, we drove back to the hangar in silence. We had operated together enough that we knew better than talking in front of a captive.
Fatigue washed over me as the adrenaline ebbed, but I continued to think through the possible permutations of what was happening. If Tharp, Estes, and Owens were teaming up and potentially working with Parizad, I knew what the play might be.
We pulled into the hangar, parked next to the Beast, and shut the door. McCool and I carried a squirming Tharp to one of the empty offices in the hangar, dumped him on the floor, and then huddled in our makeshift command post two doors down.
“Good job, team. Not much time. I’ll question Tharp, but you guys heard what he said. The key, I think, is when he said, ‘It’s what this country needs to bring it together.’”
“External threat,” Hobart said.
“Who is the gravest threat?”
“Iran by a long shot. Russia and China are red herrings,” McCool said. “Nukes oddly keep us safe.”
“Roger that.”
“Parizad,” we said in unison.
“Right. You guys think creatively about what might be going on.” I turned to Hobart. “Joe, Donna Tharp heard that douchebag talking about invading Iran, I think, based on what she and my daughter said. Make some calls. How many carrier groups do we have in the Middle East? Airplanes? Troops? What’s the Eighty-Second Airborne doing right now? Ask all the hard questions.”
I turned to McCool. “Sally, pull the thread on where Parizad is. My money says he’s in America or Europe. Same thing. All the hard questions. Inauguration Day is D-Day. Eleven hours.”
I limped into the room with Tharp, removed his blindfold, and kicked him in the ribs. My rage burned brightly. I didn’t know if it was the drugs or the passion, but I missed Melissa more at that point than any other since her death. But now I was thinking, was it not her death but her disappearance? I knew that I had buried my wife, or was it someone made to look like her?
“Tell me what you did with Melissa.”
31
FEINTS AND RUSES HAVE been a part of warfare since the beginning of time. Like magicians, commanders pretended they were doing something over there so that they could distract their opponents and do something over here. While trickery is basic, it also works repetitively because the best deception plans played to the fallible human minds of the decision-makers and their biases.
So far, there was no app or system that could leach out bias, belief, fear, or passion from decision-making, providing openings that creative opponents could exploit. There was Eisenhower’s head fake at Calais because the Germans believed that the Allies would cross at the nearest point between the British Islands and the European continent. And Alexander the Great when he invaded what we know as present-day Pakistan. General Magruder at Yorktown. The list was long.
I looked at Tharp lying on the floor and thought about every speech he had ever made about wanting a ground war with Iran to overthrow the government. I was certain he would fight to the last American citizen who wasn’t a family member of his, and maybe even those, if necessary. His position was in stark contrast to that of Campbell’s, who preferred leveraging the elements of national power—economic, diplomatic, informational, and military—to achieve her vision of a stable Middle East.
Was Tharp on a rogue mission with Estes and Owens to start a war with Iran? If so, they would need a provocation and an ally. If Parizad was involved in this, it could only be related to the fact that he saw an opportunity for the grand vision he pursued. His was not the schoolyard taunts of “the Great Satan” and “Zionists.” Rather, Parizad was a skilled planner that required tactile administration of his plan. He was never a Muhammad Ali–style trash talker. He quietly and efficiently planned his fights, entered the ring, adapted to the changes, and secured victory. He would be on hand and nearby if this were something in which he was involved.
We had less than eleven hours to determine the plan—provided there was one—and to prevent what I was sure would be much grander than anyone could imagine.
But first—at least this time—Melissa.
“Melissa knew about your plan because Donna told her. You had to get rid of Melissa first because Donna would be too obvious. You bought her silence after you killed Melissa as a show of force, correct?”
He squirmed on the floor in his shiny silk tuxedo and black Italian shoes. He had salt-and-pepper hair that fell just over his ears. His eyes were narrow, and his nose was bleeding, though I hadn’t hit him there. Maybe Hobart had gotten a shot in when he tossed him in the back. The dust from the concrete was turning his tux gray, and he looked like a throwback to disco days as he squirmed on the floor, attempting to alter his entirely inescapable predicament.
I pulled up a gray metal chair and extracted my knife from my boot. The blood coursing through my veins felt electric. I was on fire. Maybe the Yokkaichi drugs were still in play, though I didn’t blame them for my hand putting the edge of the blade against Tharp’s pasty face and hissing, “What. Did. You. Do. With. Melissa?”
Blood trickled down his cheek from the small incision, curling into his mouth as his lips moved.
“I’ve got nothing to do with that,” he said. His voice was high-pitched and filled with fear. His gold West Point ring winked in the dim light. I put my knee in his chest, pinned him to the floor, lifted his bound wrists, and flattened his left hand on the cement. Sliding the knife into the notch between his ring finger and his middle finger, I began sawing into the skin.
“You’re fucking crazy, Sinclair! Oh my God, stop it!”
“What did you do with Melissa?” I asked. “I’m done wasting time.”
“Okay, okay,” he muttered. “Holy fuck. Okay.”
I didn’t stop.
“I said I’d talk!”
I hit bone.
“She knew, okay? She knew. My cunt wife told her.”
I stopped.
“I knew that. What did you do?”
I began sawing into the bone. Blood was oozing through the etchings and engravings of his class ring in rivulets.
“Fuck, fuck, fuck!” he shouted. “It’s Parizad, okay? Parizad.”
I stopped sawing but kept the knife biting into the bone. “Where’s Parizad?”
“I don’t know!”
I resumed sawing and could feel that I was over halfway through the bone, so I just finished the job. His finger flopped off his hand, and the ring spun into a pool of blood, a better metaphor for his class I had never seen if what I believed was happening was true.
“Oh my God!”
His wail pierced my already hypersensitive hearing. He flopped beneath my knee as if he were being electrocuted. His perfect life was being dismantled as he watched, both literally and figuratively.
“Looks rather odd, don’t you think?” I asked him. I put the knife on his left pinkie finger and said, “This will probably be more aesthetically pleasing.”
“He interrogated her,” Tharp spat. “He fucking interrogated her.”
“So you provided her to him?”
He didn’t respond, nor did I saw off his pinkie. I had other plans.
Finally, he nodded.
“The cancer wasn’t real. The doctor wasn’t real. Right?” I said.
He said nothing but finally nodded again.
“What poison?”
He sighed. The pain was probably severe, though he chose not to look at his hand. The reality of missing even a finger might send him over the edge.
“Botulism,” he said.
“The doctors and the treatments were all part of the plan. Not doctors at all.”
“That was Owens’s people! Not me!”
As if that made his eventual outcome any different. Having confirmed what had been percolating in my mind, I transitioned to Parizad and the imminent threat.
“What does Parizad have planned?”
He paused, so I lopped off his pinkie. It lay there next to his ring finger, providing fresh blood to the spreading pool.
“Oh my God, you’re going to kill me, aren’t you?”
I said nothing. He turned and looked at me. My eyes were locked onto his face, looking for the tell.
“A small attack. That’s all.”
His eyes were fluttering, and I thought he might pass out, so I cut the ties on his ankles and wrists. He pushed himself up, blood draining from his mangled hand, and stumbled back against the wall.
“You’re fucking crazy, Sinclair.”
No argument there.
“Where is he?”
“You’ll never stop him. It’s too late, Sinclair. Let me go, and I’ll make sure nothing happens to you.” Tharp was always a master at overplaying his hand and underestimating his opposition. Perhaps he thought I was participating in a deception. His relative freedom seemed to energize him, despite his missing digits.
While he could easily kill his wife, I could easily kill for mine. He didn’t have the capacity to understand the depths of the love that Melissa and I shared, nor could he possibly have any regard for the selfless sacrifice it took to serve the nation and not himself. He was a useless fool drunk with power.
“Where?”
“There’s no time, Sinclair. Now let me and my fingers the fuck out of here!” he shouted and ran toward me.
I sidestepped him, and he fell forward into the knife, or that was what I later said, but whichever version of events actually happened, the knife found his heart and stayed there as he fell to the floor. I flipped him over, retrieved my blade, and said, “One down.”
I wasn’t sure how many were left to go, but I knew there were at least three, possibly four. Estes, Owens, and Parizad needed to be stopped by any means necessary.
