Swift Vengeance

14

“Do you remember reading about the Doctors Without Borders improvised hospital in Aleppo? In April of 2015?”

“Collateral damage?” I asked.

“One of four improvised hospitals in the eastern half of the city,” said Leising. “A known Islamic State terrorist named Zkrya Gourmat was using it as cover because it was allegedly off-limits to both Assad’s Air Force and coalition drones. Zkrya was a young man, intelligent and charismatic. French born and tech-savvy — a good recruiter. Called his group the Raqqa Twelve. Gourmat was believed to be third in line in domestic IS operations in Syria, behind Baghdadi. The Joint Special Operations Command and the CIA put him on their kill list, no surprise.”

Leising recrossed his legs, sighing. “Gourmat would sneak away from this hospital to make his rounds, and was rarely seen outside. This hospital was a collection of inflatable operating rooms erected within a cave, and other improvised hospitals were little better. One was concealed in a chicken farm just outside of the city. Doctors Without Borders supplied and funded them, but they — the doctors and aid workers themselves — were not officially permitted inside Syria. The hospitals were known as IH-One through IH-Four, and IH-One was Gourmat’s hospital. But he would never stay for more than three days. Then he would appear somewhere else.”

I’d seen pictures from some of those hospitals. Calm doctors trying to put the wounded back together in medieval quarters. “But the Doctors Without Borders volunteers staffed those operating rooms anyway,” I said.

“You bet they did. Such brave people. And while they tried to save lives, Kenny and his Headhunters watched from above. Kenny called it Whac-A-Mole. Gourmat always stayed very close to the doctors and nurses and the White Helmets, who are humanitarian workers, of course. They were his shields. The people of east Aleppo hung on desperately. They even tried to pacify IS by obeying sharia law. Strange as it may sound, Gourmat was actually well liked, Kenny said. The Headhunters would watch him outside the inflatable surgical tent, AK slung over his shoulder, talking and laughing with them. He was banking that the U.S. drones wouldn’t fire on him when he was among innocents, and Assad had granted provisional protection to some hospitals. This was before the Russians came in, and nothing in east Aleppo was spared. It took Kenny and his Headhunters several months, but they realized that Gourmat had to be using footpaths obscured beneath the rubble, and tunnels.

“One day he came up in broad daylight, driving a motorcycle down a dirt path toward a mosque they were using to store arms and ammunition. Kenny contacted the Reaper Operating Center and reported that they’d finally flushed their extremely high-value target. This initiated the ROC ‘kill checklist,’ which establishes all of the conditions, prerequisites, and circumstances needed to take a shot. Gourmat went inside the mosque, and he spent over ten minutes there. But ROC would not approve a launch at or near any mosque or holy site — the same protection afforded to the hospitals. So the Headhunters were ordered to catch Gourmat on the road, alone on his motorcycle, for a collateral-free kill. Gourmat sped back toward IH-One on his motorcycle. Still no approval from the ROC. A common frustration. The American command is careful about such strikes. The CIA, less so. So while Kenny and his flight mates waited for clearance, Gourmat made it all the way back to IH-One. Finally the clearance came through and Voss fired two missiles. But suddenly, and for no apparent reason, Gourmat lost control of the motorcycle and it went into a skid that ended in a pile of rubble not fifty yards from the operating tent. No problem for a laser-guided Hellfire missile. Medical people came pouring out of the hospital to see what had happened. They gathered around Gourmat to see what they could do. Within seconds the missiles hit, and they were all either killed or badly injured.

“Later, Kenny and the Headhunters learned that two of the dead were Doctors Without Borders surgeons, three were nurses, and four were Syrian volunteers. Without them, two hospital patients expired on their cots, awaiting treatment. IS fighters stormed the inflatable shelter to steal painkillers and anything else of value. Back here at Creech, Kenny and his crew watched the spectacle in high-definition color. As I said, it took him two years to tell me about it.”

Hollow silence. A car door slamming in the distance, the soft whine of the heater coming on. Dr. Leising made another short entry in his notebook, then set it back.

War and its secrets. I have mine. And maybe because of them, I’d seen evidence of Lindsey’s torment that first night we met, when she was on her fortune-wrecking roulette-and-booze bender at the Pala Casino. And during the year or so she lived in casita two at Rancho de los Robles, Lindsey had confessed much to me regarding her vices, her failing motherhood, her anger and fear and self-disgust. But not this. A terrorist on a motorcycle and Aleppo field hospital IH-One — at core, the heart of her darkness.

“How was Kenny doing?” I asked.

“He was doing well,” said the doctor. “He’d come a long way in four years. He had stopped the drinking and recreational drug use. He began to like his job — being outdoors rather than cooped up in a flight cockpit trailer. He had begun to date again. So, when Lindsey called to tell me what had happened to Kenny, I felt especially bad. He was thirty-four years old, Mr. Ford. Young, strong, and bright.”

Another silence, this one dedicated to Kenny Bryce.

Leising sighed. “When I saw in my mind’s eye what was done to Kenny in his home, I became sick. His body. His head. The brutality. It took hours for that first wave of nausea to pass.” He smiled wanly. “I apologize. I should find someone to talk to.”

“Talk to me.”

“Lindsey told me about the threats,” he said. “The handwritten letters to all three of them. Can you protect her?”

“She’s safe,” I said.

“Her heart is good,” said Leising. “But she is willful and has been self-destructive. Kenny and Voss internalized. Lindsey acted out.”

I nodded.

“There is such a familiarity in the death letter to Lindsey,” he said. “I hope you don’t mind that she showed me hers. As a picture attached to a text message, I mean. As did Marlon.”

“Theirs to share,” I said. “Be very careful what you do and say. This man is the coldest killer I’ve ever run across.”

The ex-cop in me felt my control of this case fraying. So I let it go. When you turn private, the legal pillars break down, from Miranda to the chain of custody. Sometimes this is good. Lindsey and Voss shouldn’t have shared evidence with their former psychiatrist, but there was no getting the toothpaste back into the tube.

“You’re right about the familiarity in the threats,” I said. “I think that Caliphornia knew all three of them. Or pretends to. He refers to past transgressions in all three Headhunters. Did any of them mention enemies?”

“No,” said Leising. “Kenny had a bar fight not long after he mustered out of the Air Force. Charges were dropped. Lindsey ran up gambling debts but managed to pay them off. Voss, no. He’s very self-controlled. A family man. No enemies that he spoke of.”

“Did they know other people in common?” I asked. “Friends, coworkers, shared contacts or acquaintances. Other than you.”

Leising eyed me, smiling. “Well. They all shared the same chain of command at Creech. I remember a colonel that they all spoke of. A captain as well. I can get names for you. But, really, the Headhunters had all of the United States Air Force in common. Many of them remain in touch with each other. Organizations, clubs, reunions, the Air Force Academy.”

I wondered who else might know them well enough to be aware of their mistakes and misdeeds. I drew blanks. My IvarDuggans, TLO, and Tracersinfo services might help me make connections. I even tried out the idea that the man before me was a clever sociopath staging deadly games with his patients. Which meant Caliphornia was one of them. Sounded like a movie I’d seen.

“Enemies,” I said, as much to myself as the doctor.

“Here’s an outside possibility,” said Leising. “A few years ago, Kenny told me he had been quoted in The Washington Post. A Sunday feature article about the new esprit de corps that the USAF was fostering within the unhappy RPA community. The drone teams were being encouraged in friendly competition against each other. They were allowed to give themselves combat team nicknames, and to create morale insignias for their uniforms. In the article, Kenny told of creating the Headhunter name and patch. There was even a picture of it — a grinning skull with wings of fire. Toward the end of the piece, he deflected questions about widespread dissatisfaction among RPA personnel. And refused to comment on a drone strike alleged to have gone wrong at a field hospital in Aleppo. The Post tallied the dead, citing research by the British group Syrian Observatory for Human Rights.

“Kenny was furious when the story ran. But there was his name, in black and white, and a picture of the Headhunters patch, associated with the dead doctors and nurses. He ill-advisedly threatened a lawsuit.”

“But the camel’s nose was already inside the tent.”

“It most certainly was.”

This was bad news, and the more I considered it, the worse it got. A casual newspaper reader might or might not link Kenny Bryce to a drone attack in Aleppo. But, fueled by the possibility of that connection, a determined actor could discover that Kenny and his Headhunters had fired the missiles. And from Kenny, it was two short lines to Marlon and Lindsey.

“Ladies and gentlemen,” I said. “Please welcome the Headhunters, as inadvertently presented in The Washington Post.”

Leising leaned toward me. “Caliphornia read the Post article?”

“Any fourth-grader can find the Post article.”

“Okay, but why?”

“Nine innocents and one terrorist killed in a drone strike,” I said.

“So Caliphornia might be a friend or a relative, taking revenge for IH-One?”

“Yes.”

“Or is he a terrorist taking on the U.S. Air Force?”

“Both.”

He frowned, peering at me through the small round lenses.

Hall Pass 2 churned through the cold post-storm air as I flew southwest for home, the engine droning and gently buzzing my bones. I thought about Zkrya Gourmat losing control of his motorcycle and the catastrophe this had led to.

I had only faint memories of the attack at IH-One, as reported by the media. The story had broken at nearly the same time that Justine’s sudden death was sweeping me down its dark, deepening tunnel. The fate of the innocents on IH-One had barely registered on me.

Now, as the green hills of Fallbrook eased by beneath me, I considered that a major player was missing from the story of Zkrya Gourmat and IH-One. Someone who had taken the life of one Headhunter and threatened two more.

Caliphornia.

Astride the world with a knife in each hand, I imagined, with one foot in Aleppo and the other in Bakersfield.

Look for him where he started, I thought. Look for him in the rubble.

Rather than go straight home from the airport, I drove the hour south to Point Loma, paid my admission to the Cabrillo Lighthouse Monument, parked, and climbed my way to the whale observation area. The late afternoon was blustery and cold, and the dauntless tourists were few in number and thickly wrapped. I stood at the wall and looked west out over the Pacific, heaving, gray, and endless. I looked for whales as I always do up here, saw none, which is how many I always see. As I strolled past the lighthouse, a peregrine falcon dropped into a hundred-mile-an-hour stoop and out of sight behind the wall in front of me. I figured that some elegant sea bird was about to become the falcon’s meal. Around me, the sage and brittlebush shivered in the wind and the gulls cried and wheeled.

I looked out to the approximate place where Justine had gone down. I lit a cigarette and watched the sun set, an orange ball melting on the curve of the far horizon.

A moment of peace, or something like it.

Until an arriving Telegram message chimed on the phone from the depths of my pocket. It was from Bakersfield detective Marcy Brown, who wrote only “Courtesy of JT.”

I touched the link, saw the brief “Property of Bakersfield Police Department” statement, and then the video played.

Taucher had been right about grainy. The Tuscanola apartments parking area. Poorly lit, filled with vehicles, locked in shadows.

Caliphornia was just as she had described him. Indeterminate race. Twenties or thirties by his posture and movement. Six-feet-plus or-minus, average build, one hundred seventy to two hundred pounds. Dressed like a surfer or boarder, the baggy pants and cloddish board shoes. A flannel shirt under the Air Force sweatshirt. Hood up. Light on his feet in spite of the shoes. Athletic. The two seconds of Caliphornia in profile suggested sharp features and heightened alert.

I watched it again.

Went back for thirds but the screen pixelated brightly, then self-destructed to black. Like one of the Headhunters’ targets, I thought.

I tried to find it again, but it was gone.