The First Casualty

9

A slate sky was spitting snow into a gusting channel gale, the tiny white flakes bobbing like popcorn in the popper. The wind frosted the gray water with white caps that chewed hungrily at the concrete pier as the Sark Shipping Company ferry rounded the brake water. Eddies of the breeze played through the ship’s rigging, an irregular beat of metal on metal. The meteorological maps in European papers had uniformly depicted a huge arctic depression of low pressure resting indefinitely between the Irish Sea and somewhere west of the Urals. That explained the unusual weather — the island’s average temperature this time of year hovered in the high forties — but did little to make it more bearable.

Weather notwithstanding, Jason was glad to get home. He watched from the deck as the ship eased her way to its berth in the little L-shaped harbor. There was no room for a ninety-meter motor yacht anchored outside the breakwater, dancing at the end of her anchor line in the rough seas. Italian made, judging by the sharpness of her bow and the rakish slant of her superstructure. In addition to the complementary Union Jack, she flew the Panamanian flag. Normal enough. The super wealthy would hardly register their ship where they might be inconvenienced by safety regulations, minimum wage, and environmental concerns.

What was not normal was that she was here. None other than masochists went pleasure sailing in the cold, stormy waters of the English Chanel this time of year. The ship would have been more at home in the Caribbean’s sunny climes. Or, at least, the Costa del Sol or the Balearic Islands. Sark had nothing to offer besides near-arctic winds, the surrounding gray cliffs, rocky beaches, and more cows than people.

The island was hardly for the glitterati. With only about 500 permanent residents, most of whom farmed, a new pair of Wellies was likely to draw more attention than a diamond the size of the native potatoes. No place to show off a Ferrari or Bentley, either. Tractors were the only motorized vehicles allowed on the three-by-three-and-a-half-mile island.

No, that yacht was definitely out of place and out of season. Jason’s innate paranoia demanded an explanation. He could well be the reason. Why it was there was a mystery Jason intended to solve. He would inquire of the harbor master, a man happy to receive the small monthly stipend Jason paid for information as to arrivals on the island.

There were no accidental ones.

To reach Sark, one had to get to Guernsey, usually by a Channel Express Fokker F-27 Friendship, a twin turbo prop, departing any number of British airports. Then onto the ferry for the fifty-minute voyage, the sole means to or from the island available to the public.

The last of only half a dozen passengers disembarking the ferry, Jason made his way across the concrete pier to a small, one-window structure at the end. He set his single suitcase down in front of the wooden door and knocked.

A whiff of stale tobacco stung his nose and disappeared in the wind as the door opened. Before him stood a diminutive man whose navy-style pea jacket reached the patched knees of his khaki pants. A walrus mustache twitched like a living creature above a clay pipe smoldering like a subterranean fire, the source of the malodorous smell. Eyes the color of a summer sky twinkled under an unruly thatch of silver, on which rested a faded and rather ragged British Warrant Officer’s cap.

Jason was looking at Sark’s harbor master, Andrew MaCleod.

MaCleod stepped back from the door, making room for Jason to enter. “Mr. Peters! Welcome home! I ken you’ve been gone a spell.”

Jason stepped in, shutting the door behind him. Hobson’s choice: Stand in the cold or endure the smell of the pipe. The single room contained a table on which a computer rested and two swivel chairs with cushions long since flat, but displaying faded embroidered birds. The sports section of yesterday’s Daily Telegraph partially covered a ship-to-shore radio as though the device had snuggled under a blanket to supplement the meager comfort of the electric coil heater that buzzed feebly in a corner.

“Wretched weather!” Jason commented, noting the room was cold enough to see his breath.

MaCleod gave the window a glance as though to confirm or deny the statement. “Aye, but it’d be like spring in Aberdeen.”

Only a Scot would prefer the Channel’s winters to those of his native land.

Jason hugged himself seeking warmth. “That yacht out there, what do you know about it and its passengers?”

MaCleod removed the pipe from his mouth and dug in it with a nail-like instrument. The excavation continued in silence for several seconds. Then, “Not much. The Allegro. She was here when I arrived this morning. No request for customs, no yellow flag, so I assumed she had sailed from either another island or one of the Channel ports.”

Yellow flag, representing the letter Q in the international alphabet. Q for quarantine. Historically, a message there was no disease aboard. Currently, a request for customs service, something a ship arriving from a British or European Union port would not require.

Jason went to the window for another look. The falling snow gave him a view as though through gauze. “There’s a davit on the foredeck but no boat.”

There was wet sucking sound and the hiss of a struck match. Jason turned to see the harbor master staring disappointedly into the smokeless bowl of the pipe. “I dinna ken where on this island would be more comfortable than that ship,” he observed. “But someone must have come ashore last night.”

The same conclusion had already occurred to Jason. He reached for the doorknob. “Thanks for your help.”

The pipe was now issuing a slender tendril of blue smoke. “Anytime, laddie.”

Outside, wind rattled metal rigging against steel masts. The little harbor’s small boats were rolling from gunwale to gunwale at their moorings, tethered animals trying to break free.

Jason squinted in a futile effort to keep the blowing snow out of his eyes. Through the white curtain, he saw movement on the land side of the harbor. A second’s concentration and he recognized Mr. Frache and his two-wheel wagon. When he was not tending to his dairy cows, the man earned a few pounds acting as the island’s taxi service, meeting the ferry and picking up fares to one of the half dozen hotels and numerous guest houses.

Jason waved his arms, yelling. At first, he thought the elderly farmer couldn’t hear over the wind. But then the single horse turned toward Jason and the wagon lumbered over.

“G’day, Mr. Peters.” Frache was looking down at Jason and his suitcase from the driver’s perch. “You’ll be needing transportation?”

Jason tossed his bag into the cart and climbed in behind it. “Sure do. Stocks.”

If Frache thought the request to be taken to the island’s finest hotel instead of Jason’s home was strange, he didn’t show it. It offered what little luxury the island could boast. The beamed dining room’s fare — though modest when compared to Le Havre, an hour by hydrofoil from Guernsey — was the best on Sark. Even so, everyone on the island knew the place was closed from New Year’s Eve to mid-February. Frache didn’t question this, either.

Stocks was also about a quarter of a mile closer to the harbor than the 300-year-old stone Norman cottage Jason currently called home. Approaching the house on foot would give Jason a number of tactical options not available to an arrival by road. If Jason was the reason the people aboard the Allegro were here, surprise seemed a sensible precaution.

The two rode in relative silence, the only sounds being the horse’s hooves crackling through the patina of ice that had formed on the dirt road. Sights were no longer familiar in their winter costumes. The fields were a pristine white, their undulating slopes marked only by tracks of animals seeking forage under the white blanket. Snow coated the upper surface of branches of wind-stunted trees as though they had donned starched shirts.

Only the wind, though far colder than usual, was the same. On Sark, the wind hummed, sang, or screamed. It was rarely silent. Today, it spoke with a white-tinted voice as puffs of talcum whirled across the ground.

It was a time to marvel.

And a time to think.

Jason had come here, what, a year or so ago? It had been what he guessed was an intermediate step in an endless journey that had begun on the darkest day of his life and of his country, a late summer day, September 11.

The morning had begun like any other. Having announced his retirement from Delta Force, Captain Peters, J., had drawn Pentagon duty for the balance of his enlistment. In less than two weeks, he would permanently exchange his spotless, razor-creased uniform for an artist’s smock. His paintings, acrylic on canvas, were selling very well not only in a gallery in Georgetown, but in New York and Los Angles as well.

No longer would his wife, Laurin, worry about his frequently unannounced absences to places he could not mention and from which he stood a good chance of not returning. If his artistic success continued — and the galleries in the aforesaid cities had no reason to think it would not — Laurin would soon retire from her Washington lobbying firm. Her largest client was the U.S. Army, whom she represented before the various Congressional committees in the ongoing interservice rivalry for funds.

It was tragic but not accidental she was in the Pentagon that morning. She had just stuck her head into the cubicle that served as Jason’s office.

“Hi, soldier! Buy a girl a cup of coffee?”

Jason glanced at the coffeepot behind his desk, a device that produced a viscous fluid more akin to motor oil than a drinkable beverage. “Sure. Let me finish up here a minute. Go on down to the canteen and I’ll meet you there.”

“Better yet, I’ll step and fetch. Be back in a minute.’

He watched her turn around. His interest in what he described as the world’s most beautiful ass had not diminished in the six years of marriage. He wondered sometimes if birth of the child she was carrying — but not yet showing — would change that.

He never saw her again.

Almost as bad — they never identified her body.

Unlike most 9/11 families, he had no grave to visit, only the very contemporary memorial erected on the west side of the Pentagon. Whenever he was in Washington, he took time to visit, leave flowers with a card bearing her name, knowing they would be collected and discarded by the grounds crew at the end of the day. It was the only way he had of giving Laurin back her identity, if not her life.

The gaping hole in his soul filled with a burning hatred of terrorists of any stripe and a mounting frustration of his inability to strike back. That opportunity came out of the blue a month or so later when he was invited to visit the Maryland offices of Narcom, a secretive company whose sole client was the U.S. intelligence community. Narcom took on jobs too politically sensitive, too dangerous, or those requiring plausible deniability.

The assignments paid obscenely well. Better yet, all Narcom’s fees, and hence Jason’s, were, by special agreement, tax-free. Aware of the suddenness with which political winds shifted and bearing a healthy distrust of government in general and the IRS in particular, Jason had made his accumulation of wealth as hard to find as possible.

The best part of the job, though, had been the work. Assassination, kidnapping, any sort of dirty trick devised by the warped minds in Washington. Most directed at the same ragheads responsible for Laurin’s death, those who violently mindlessly perverted a religion and culture that was perfecting algebra when Europe was still burning heretics.

Job satisfaction indeed.

But the work hadn’t exactly made friends. Revenging honor was a driving force among friends, associates, and relatives of those Jason had dispatched to their reward of seventy-two virgins. Although he no longer worked for Narcom, extremist nut bags had long memories.

From time to time, he had taken the occasional assignment, more out of boredom than need. That had caused problems with Maria, the Italian volcanologist and ardent pacifist, who, from time to time, shared his life. Now, as was frequently the case, she was on an expedition, this time to study an eruption in Indonesia, leaving Jason to the care of Mrs. Abigail Prince, his grandmotherly housekeeper.

Mrs. Prince had a genuine fondness for Maria, although her Anglican background viewed the relationship as sinful. Hardly a day passed some reference was not made to marriage, in spite of both Jason’s and Maria’s clear disinclinations to commit matrimony at this point. Though she scolded constantly, the woman also held an affection for Pangloss, a large, shaggy, and nondescript dog Laurin had rescued from the pound. Jason suspected she had chosen him because, ugly as he was, adoption by someone else was unlikely. Finally, there was Robespierre, a one-eared tomcat that simply appeared one day after being the obvious loser in some feline dispute. Since no one owns a cat, Jason had been at a loss as to where he might return the animal.

Jason was looking forward to the dog’s eager greeting, even the disdain with which cats view the world. For that matter, he had been looking forward to giving his iPod a rest while he enjoyed his favorite Italian Baroque composers, Vivaldi, Corelli, Bononcini, Albinoni.

All of this he had eagerly anticipated on two different airlines and a ferryboat. Now his homecoming would have to wait. Or at least the one he planned, wait until the question of that yacht was resolved. He doubted anyone intending him harm would have arrived in such an ostentatious manner, but the man in the Mercedes hadn’t been exactly covert, either. He hadn’t lived this long without being cautious.

He—

“Looks like we’re here!”

The wagon was stopped in front of the three buildings in a U, made up of twenty-three rooms in what had been a sixteenth-century farmhouse and outbuildings.

Mr. Frache had his hand out. “That’ll be two pounds, three.”

Jason instantly regretted jumping to the ground. His shoes were now full of very wet snow. He reached into his pocket, produced a clip of bills, and peeled off a five. “Keep it. Thanks for the lift.”

The driver’s smile spread across the weathered face as he touched the bill of his cap with one hand and shook the reins with the other. “Thank you, Mr. Peters!”

Jason took in his surroundings.

A place he had passed or visited hundreds of time now might as well have been on the backside of the moon. The white stone facade, moistened by snow, had become a dirty gray. The five windows across the front were blind eyes staring not onto a manicured sweep of lawn but an arctic plane. The lush, green trees on the hills visible behind the hotel were a hostile thicket of sharp black daggers sheathed in snow. There was no ambiance of the rustic chic hospitality for which the hotel was known. The scene suggested harsh indifference.

Jason picked up his bag and went around to the rear where the swimming pool was like a thermal spring, leaking steam around the edges of a canvas cover. Chairs, recliners, and tables, misshapen with lumpy snow, reminded him of animals gathered around some African watering hole. Low hummocks indicated where summer’s rosebushes were hiding.

He took a step, his socks squishing with melted snow from his ill-advised leap from the wagon. He toyed with the idea of stopping to ring them out. Frostbite was the last thing he needed. No, it would take him less than twenty minutes to reach his house from there.

What exactly he was going to do once he got there? Well, that depended on what a reconnaissance turned up. At the moment there was something he missed even more than Pangloss and Robespierre: His .40-caliber Glock.