Lost Girls

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

A rather unhappy-looking major with the insignia of the finance corps was waiting for Golden in the lobby of Special Operations Command. He escorted her through the security check-point and they got on the elevator to ride to the floor holding the personnel records.

“What’s so important that it can’t wait until morning?” the Major asked.

Golden looked at his name-tag. “Major Taggart. You have your orders, correct?”

Taggart glanced at her. “All I was told by my CO was to give you access to whatever you wanted.”

“That’s all you need to know.”

“I remember you.” Taggart said it not as a question but as a statement. “You used to work here.”

“I did.” Golden couldn’t ever remember meeting Taggart before, but she knew the building was a cauldron of rumor and gossip.

“You’re the profiler. From the FBI. I heard some stuff about you.”

Golden said nothing as they walked down the corridor to a locked door. She had no doubt her work here had been the subject of much talk and her abrupt departure cause for even more tongues to wag. And there had probably been words spoken about her brief relationship with Sam Cranston. It hadn’t been any different at the FBI: in a male-dominated profession, the actions of every woman were watched most closely.

A sign above the door read: SOCOM G-1: Personnel. Taggart swiped a coded card through the lock and it disengaged. He swung the door open and they entered a large room full of desks with computers on them. A nerve center of Army bureaucracy. Except in this case it was highly classified bureaucracy.

One thing that had surprised Golden when she worked in this building was the amazingly low tooth-to-tail ratio in the Army: the number of soldiers with boots on the ground actually able to engage the enemy as opposed to the number of soldiers who spent their time supporting those on the ground. There were almost four of the latter for every one of the former. She’d found that those men who volunteered for Special Operations training often were leaving regular Army units because of their intense desire to be ‘where the action is’. In many cases, their wishes were not granted as they were assigned duty to a desk pushing paper or, in the modern age, electronic data through a computer.

“If you tell me what you’re looking for, perhaps I can help?” Taggart offered.

Golden pulled her laptop out. “I just need to be patched in to your most current personnel database.”

“We can use my desk,” Taggart said. He led her over to his computer. It took only a minute to patch the laptop in to the system via a USB port.

Golden brought up her profiling predictor program. She began down-loading the thousands of personnel files. “Is there a way to cross-reference people who worked together?”

Taggart nodded. “I can group-tag them according to assignments.”

“Do that. Then I’ll load that program.” She had been thinking about what they knew about the targets — perps, she mentally chided herself, surprised she was falling into Gant-speak in her thoughts. “Also, you have access to their medical records, right?”

“Yes.”

“I need a listing of anyone with a hand prostheses. Also face scarring.”

Taggart sat at his computer and began typing. Golden watched the indicator on her laptop showing the progress of the download. She glanced over at Taggart. He was engrossed in his own task. As the download continued, given that she was hooked into the G-1 database, she began to type commands into her computer. Commands that had nothing to do with the task at hand.

Gant looked at the fourteen-foot high statue of ‘Bronze Bruce’ as he pulled up to the front of the new headquarters for Special Operations Command. “Wait in the car,” he ordered Cranston.

“Hold on here—“ Cranston began to protest, but a glare from Gant was enough to silence him. As insurance, Gant took the keys with him as he got out of the car. The Colonel had added nothing of note during the drive but Gant could almost feel the angst coming off the man as he thought back on his past and what might have caused the current situation. Gant still believed Cranston was lying to him about something.

Pausing in front of the statue, Gant remembered when it had been on main post, next to the old JFK Special Warfare Museum and across the street from the Special Warfare Center headquarters. Few in Special Forces felt any special affinity for the somewhat less than manly looking statue. However, Gant paused and looked at the bronze plaques bolted to the low concrete wall behind the statue and felt the stirrings of feelings long buried. On them were listed the names of those Special Operations men who had died in combat since Vietnam. It was a long list for a country that considered itself to have been primarily at peace since the end of that conflict, at least until the last couple of years. He noted that several new plaques had been bolted on since the dual invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan.

He walked to the left, going back in time and saw the names of the two Delta Force operators who'd been killed in Mogadishu trying to rescue a downed helicopter crew from Task Force 160. He wondered how many civilians even remembered that failed peace-keeping effort or the videos of the bodies being dragged through the streets. Gant remembered it most clearly, most often when he wished he wouldn't. He knew Nero believed that the war on terrorism had really thrown down the gauntlet there, when the bad guys, particularly Osama Bin Laden, believed the withdrawal meant the US was weak when it pulled out after that debacle.

He scanned the names, looking for those of other men he had known. Men who had died on missions with him or in the same area of operations. He spotted a few, the places and occasions of their death as listed in the bronze letters a blatant lie in some cases. At least the names were there though, which was more than could be said about some of the men who had disappeared or died on classified missions in places they weren’t supposed to be. Men who had died in places that the US government would never acknowledge they had sent American fighting men to or on missions that could never be acknowledged as being sponsored by the United States. Men whose families had been told that they had died during training accidents. A surprising number of special operations helicopters had crashed at sea and the bodies never recovered. Which was another reason he didn’t quite believe Cranston’s story. If the story about that three man team was a cover-up, then they should have come up with some original cover-story rather than the tried and true chopper crash.

He scanned until he found three names dated the previous year. Died in a helicopter crash during training:

Gant noted that they were all Army and the plaque indicated they had been assigned to 7^th Special Forces Group. Location of death was listed as Panama. He also noticed that on the day listed there was no corresponding loss of pilots from Task Force 160. It was possible that the chopper had been flown by a non-Special Operations crew or even been a Panamanian or Colombian army helicopter. Possible, but not likely.

Gant ran a finger inside the collar of his black t-shirt, uncomfortable out of uniform in this spot. He felt awkward, out of place. He had not expected this feeling, but standing here at Fort Bragg where he had spent quite a bit of his time in uniform, in front of the names of the dead, he knew he no longer fit. He'd lost something and he wasn't quite sure what it was.

Ghosts. Gant could feel them. He checked the rest of the wall and, as he had expected, his brother’s name was not there. He knew his own name would never be up there either. Once one went into the darkness of the Cellar, they disappeared from even the shadow world of Special Operations Command. Even the CIA had the gold stars in its lobby for agents lost in the line of duty even if it didn’t list all the names. The Cellar was darkness, absolute and final. Other than Nero and Bailey, Gant had rarely met other operatives of the Cellar and then only when a mission absolutely required it.

Gant had no idea how big the Cellar was or how many people were in its employ. From his experience he knew that anyone who worked for the Cellar in the field was an operative, not a support person. For support, the Cellar could always turn to other government agencies where its classification and rank could draw whatever was needed.

Gant strode up the walk, ignoring a colonel who was coming the other way and fighting back the instinct to salute. Even though it was night-time, there were a lot of lights burning in the building and the parking lot was half full. SOCOM units ran missions all around the world so it was a 24/7 operation. Gant pushed open the door to the building and stepped into the lobby. Two turnstiles filled up the way to the left of the guard desk. An elderly black man in a contract security company uniform looked at Gant, noted that he didn't have a badge clipped to his pocket as everyone else in sight did, and motioned for him to come over.

"Are you on the access roster, sir?"

"I doubt it," Gant said, giving the man his NSA ID card.

Noting the designation, the guard checked his computer. His eyes widened as the result came up. He grabbed an access badge. “You have complete clearance, sir.”

Gant knew the guard was surprised at that, particularly since he wasn’t wearing a uniform. He doubted few people not assigned to the building could walk through the door and be given complete, un-supervised access to the building. Gant took the badge and went through the turnstile toward the elevator.

“Tony Gant? How the hell are you? Haven’t seen you in a long time.”

Gant turned as a grizzled, old Sergeant Major came limping down the hallway toward him, hand outstretched. “That’s my brother. I’m Jack.”

The Sergeant Major nodded, shaking his hand anyway. “I remember Tony said he had a twin. I haven’t seen him in years. How’s he doing?”

“He’s dead.”

The Sergeant Major nodded once more, as if he expected that answer. “Sorry to hear that. Who was he working with? Still with Delta? He sort of disappeared.”

That was a question that Gant couldn’t answer. Because at the end, his brother had been working for no one. “He was retired.”

The Sergeant Major frowned. “What happened?”

I don’t know, Gant thought. I don’t even know how my brother really died unless I believe Bailey. “Natural causes. Cancer.”

“Shit. I knew him when we were both in Delta Force. I’ve been here in the puzzle palace ever since my leg got shot up in the ‘Stan.”

Gant shifted his feet. He’d known coming back to Bragg was going to be a tricky proposition. “I’ve got business upstairs.”

The Sergeant Major eyed Gant’s civilian clothes, highest level visitor clearance pass, but didn’t ask any questions. “Sorry to hear about your brother.”

“Thanks.” The elevator arrived and Gant got on board. He was glad when the doors slid shut. He got off on the floor housing the G-1 section and walked down the hallway to the records center. He tried the door, but it was locked and he didn’t have a code key to open it. He knocked on the door and waited. After several moments, a Major opened it. “Yes?”

“Doctor Golden here?”

The Major nodded, glanced at Gant’s access badge and let him. He waited for an introduction but Gant went right past him when he saw Golden seated with her laptop. “What do you have?”

Golden looked past him to the Major. “Could you excuse us, Major Taggart?”

Taggart looked none too pleased about that, but he went out the door, shutting it behind him. Golden kept her head pointed at her computer. “Some interesting material here.”

“You have some names?” Gant asked as he took a chair from across her.

“This is your military record. Quite impressive."

Gant felt the stirrings of anger, which he repressed. “That wasn’t what you were supposed to be doing.”

“The records end six years ago,” Golden said. “I assume that is when you entered the Cellar.”

“You’re supposed to be—“

“Grew up in New York. Military Academy. Had a twin brother who also went to the Military Academy and served in the military and whose records also abruptly ends, several years before yours though. Just like him, you served in the Rangers and then Special Forces. And then you disappear.” She looked up. “Did they show you my file?”

“No.”

“Why not?”

Good question, Gant thought. “Mister Nero probably didn’t feel it was necessary.”

“It appeared to me that Ms. Masterson was the one in charge at the Cellar.”

To that, Gant had no reply. His brother’s death, the letter from his mother, Nero lying to the side of his desk and the woman behind it, this mission teaming with another non-Cellar person— there were just too many strange things going on that he had yet to process — could not process, because the priority was the mission. And there was a clock ticking. Not just Emily Cranston cached somewhere, but other possible killings the targets might have planned.

“So what should I know about you?” Gant wearily asked.

“Nothing,” she said bitterly.

“You felt it was important to know about me,” Gant noted. “Shouldn’t it be important for me to know about you?”

“I’m the psychologist,” Golden said. “You don’t need to know how your target thinks, you just need to be able to see it, right? So you can shoot it?”

“I’m your target?”

“No.”

“And I do need to know how my target thinks,” Gant said. He spread his hands, taking in the building. “I worked for SOCOM for years. I was trained like our targets. I did live missions like our targets did. So I think like them.”

“Not quite,” Golden said. “There’s tens of thousands of people in Special Operations. Very few of them turn rogue. So they have something else in their psyche that you don’t understand.” Golden typed something into her keyboard. “I’ve come up with sixteen probables. I cross-checked them based on assignments and that widens the fields of possible to one hundred and six if one of those sixteen is the leader and suborned his team-mates.”

“Check for Lutz, Payne, and Forten.”

“Did Sam give you that?”

“Colonel Cranston said he lost a team in a helicopter crash. They were the team.”

“If they’re dead—“ Golden began as she looked at her screen and then she fell silent for a second. “Forten is one of the sixteen.”

“He’s the leader.”

“I don’t understand. If Sam—“

“It’s Colonel Cranston, Doctor Golden. I don’t know what your relationship in the past was with him, but let’s act professional.”

Gant was surprised to see Golden’s face flush and he knew he had hit her somewhere deep, but he was tired of sparring.

“If Colonel Cranston says those men died, then why do you believe they could be our targets?”

“Because helicopter crash is almost a Special Operations euphemism for getting killed somewhere you weren’t supposed to be. That’s something I know.”

“But if they were killed—“

“Let’s pretend for a moment they weren’t.”

Golden frowned. “How did you get those names?”

“They’re on the plaque right outside this building commemorating Special Operations soldiers who died in the line of duty.”

“Oh.”

“Also, there’s no pilot listed as killed on that date. Kind of strange to have a helicopter crash with no pilot especially when Cranston says there were no survivors.” Gant hammered home his point. “Cranston’s bullshitting us. Something happened to that team. Something so bad he’s willing to put his daughter’s life on the line to cover it up.”

“Sa — Colonel Cranston wouldn’t do that.”

Gant stared at her. “He’s already done it. I believe he thought those guys were dead. I think now he wishes they truly were. But I don’t think they are. I think they survived whatever happened to them and they’re back and they’re pissed.”

Golden’s fingers flew over her keyboard. “Sergeant Joseph Lutz. Staff Sergeant Michael Payne. Sergeant First Class Lewis Forten. All assigned to Seventh Special Forces Group. All listed as killed in a helicopter crash off the coast of Panama. Their bodies were never recovered.”

“Of course not,” Gant said. “Because there were no bodies. You had Forten as one of your sixteen probables. Why?”

Golden looked at the screen. “Forten was given up for adoption when he was born. No record of birth mother. He bounced around from foster home to youth facility for his entire childhood. The longest he stayed in one place was two years.”

“So he had a crappy childhood.”

“Instability in early family is one of the indicators,” Golden said. She looked up at Gant. “Are you going to listen or are you going to critique me?”

“Go on.”

“He was removed from one of his foster homes when he was eight amidst allegations of abuse by the woman who was responsible for him — his surrogate mother. She was arrested two years later on charges of abusing another child. I checked on her — she’s currently in prison for armed robbery.”

Gant opened his mouth to say something, but he could see that Golden was anticipating him. “Yes. Bad mothers make bad sons. Men act out, women act in.”

Gant frowned and Golden explained.

“It’s easy to say that society places more binds on a female’s ability to act out, or is it that she’s simply too weak to become a predator? But what if women do become predators? What if women routinely act out their years of abuse by also becoming sexual sadists?”

Gant wasn’t following, but she kept on going.

“Maybe these women simply become mothers or surrogate mothers. Now they don’t have to worry about society and they are no longer the weak ones. Men go out into the world and wreak havoc, women turn inward toward their family and do the same. Here lies the difference in a fucked up adult and a murdering predator. The former has a terrible childhood indeed, but the latter has a sexual sadist for a mother. The sadist mother literally invents the abuse that the son later reinvents for his own needs. That reinvention is what I look for. It is the source.”

“You’re blaming mothers?” Gant was incredulous. “You’re saying this woman did something that’s caused Forten to act like this?”

“I’m saying that the odds are very high that a sadist who kills had a sadist for a mother. That is something my research has proven. So. Yes. Men focus their impulses outward: they kill strangers. Notice there are no serial killers who follow in their father’s shoes. They would never be satisfied torturing their own children forever. They would have the strength and the means to inflict their insanity on the populace. Women, as I’ve said tend to abuse themselves and their children. But hey, it’s just a theory. But I did come up with one of the names.”

One out of sixteen, Gant thought but did not say. “We know who they are, but that doesn’t help us much. What we have to figure out is what their next step is. We’ve been reacting. To get these guys we’re going to have to act.”

“To get Emily, right?”

Gant glanced over to the window, looking out at the darkness. “Emily is alive. There’s got to be a reason why they’re keeping her alive. And before this is over, they’re going to give us an idea where she is.” Gant moved behind Golden. “Let me see their files.”

Golden brought them up, one by one, and Gant scanned them. When all three were done Gant had a good idea of all three men’s military backgrounds and training. “All right. Here’s what we’re facing. Forten is the sniper and the leader. Senior man rank wise. You know about SOTI training right?”

Golden nodded. “Special Operations Target Interdiction training. A nice way of saying sniper training. I revamped their screening program.”

“A screening Forten obviously got through,” Gant said.

“Yes. Four years before I got here. There was a reason I revamped it.”

Give her a point, Gant thought. “SOTI is sort of a fancy way of saying sniper school, but there is as much emphasis in that school on shooting things as well as people.”

“I don’t understand.”

“You take a fifty caliber sniper rifle and shoot out a critical component in a microwave relay tower or in the engine of a jet fighter, you cripple that entire system. So we need to keep that in mind, although it’s most likely Forten will be shooting people.” Gant scanned down the man’s list of training. “OK. Besides being a trained sniper, Forten has a couple of other special skills. He was trained as a tracker in Borneo.”

“’Borneo’?”

“A big part of Special Forces training is joint training in other countries. Forten went over there and went through their tracking school, taught by ex-headhunters. So he’s an expert at following and finding people. He’s also a Special Forces medic. Which means he can perform minor surgery. Also knows pills and drugs.”

“Like what shot to give a girl to knock her out.”

“Right. Payne was the spotter for Forten. They worked together for two years. Recorded several kills in Afghanistan. Payne is a weapons man. Means he’s an expert on all sorts of guns. He also is a trained scout swimmer so he can operate in the water.

“Lutz was a demo guy. So that’s not good. We haven’t seen anything with his signature yet, but we need to keep that in mind. He can booby-trap things, blow things up, do all sort of nasty stuff.”

“Lucky us,” Golden said.

Gant stood up. “Let’s go talk to Sam. See if we can jog his memory.”