Veil of Civility

Chapter Forty-Seven

Nate Crickard knew that he was many things to many different people. To his thirteen-year-old son he was a father, or at least he had tried to be. To his ex-wife he was a deadbeat dad with a drinking problem. To his boss, Karl Lindgren, Executive Chef of the Greenbrier Resort, he was one of seven sous chefs, which translated to peon. To the staff at the VA Medical Center in Beckley, he was a veteran; and to untold thousands of Americans he was a patriot for his service to his country. He'd been called all of these names and more, but one thing he'd never been called was a traitor.

Sitting alone in the single-wide trailer that he called home, a bottle of Jack Daniel's beside him, fingers stroking the gray beard he'd grown during his first vacation in five years, he felt like a traitor to his country and he felt betrayed. He set the latest edition of the Lewisburg Mountain Messenger down on the cheap particle board coffee table in front of him and read the words again to be sure he hadn't imagined them. Terrorist sought in connection with bombing and deaths on the loose in Greenbrier County? was still emblazoned in bold black letters at the bottom corner of the page, over a photo of the suspect.

"Goddammit!" he swore out loud and threw the half-full glass he'd been drinking from onto the newspaper. A rust-colored stain soaked quickly through the paper. This was just his luck. How was it possible that everything he touched literally turned to excrement in front of his eyes? Was it damned bad luck or was he just flat-out damned? He slammed his fist down, cracking the particle board, and swore again as pain shot through his hand and up his arm. For the last ten years of his life, things had gone from bad to worse.

The downward spiral had begun when he had left the Marine Corp where he'd served for over a decade in the 2nd Reconnaissance Battalion, after he'd badly beaten a man he'd found sleeping with his wife. After a court martial, the choices had been made clear; resign his commission with the special operations battalion known as Marine Force Recon and never speak of the matter again, or receive a dishonorable discharge and a two-year prison sentence. He'd chosen the former and then watched as his wife packed up and took their then one-year-old son to live with her bruised and battered boyfriend in Charleston, South Carolina where, as far as he knew, they still lived.

He'd like to have said that things got better after that, but he'd be lying. He'd moved back to White Sulphur Springs where he'd been born and raised and where the employment for unskilled workers was limited to putting nuts on bolts in nearby factories or taking out the trash and maintaining the grounds of the Greenbrier Hotel. Nobody cared that he could break apart an M4A1 rifle in less than fifteen seconds or that he could put a single round between the eyes of a target from hundreds of yards away.

After choosing the Greenbrier, he'd slowly worked his way into the good graces of the hotel's Executive Chef and earned promotions from dishwasher to line cook to sous chef and another forty dollars a week, bringing his take home pay to just over three hundred. Somewhere in between, he'd gained fifty pounds and been diagnosed with type 2 diabetes and neuropathy, which often left his hands and feet feeling numb. The doctors at the VA had told him that his drinking would kill him and he'd told them to shove off. It wasn't like he wanted to live anyway, he just lacked the courage to pull the trigger and end it.

The last good memories he had were of his days in the marine corp running black operations in countries like Iraq, Somalia and Yugoslavia, or whatever they were calling it this week. For years he'd entertained his coworkers at the Greenbrier with tales of bloody daring and steel testicles, and for their part they'd smiled and nodded, allowing him his illusions of grandeur, or so they thought.

For that reason he'd jumped at the opportunity when he'd received a phone call from an old friend, a fellow Special Forces man with the British army, offering him a chance to work side by side again. The last time they'd met was a NATO mission in Kosovo in 1999 and Dean Lynch was one of the few people he'd kept in contact with over the years of his exile.

To the best of his knowledge the Brit had no idea of the circumstances in which he'd left the marines or the shambles in which he found his life. If he did, then he'd never mentioned it, which was fine by Nate. In their occasional e-mails, which Nate read at the Greenbrier County Public Library every Wednesday on his day off, they swapped bloody stories and traded barbs, with Nate always signing off, God shave the Queen.

The +44 country code in front of the calling number had caused him to look twice at the caller ID on his night stand and the British accented voice on the line when he'd picked up had come as a complete surprise. Dean Lynch now worked in the private sector and had needed help locating a specific individual who was thought to be hiding somewhere in the vicinity of Roanoke, Virginia. Lynch couldn't tell him who the man was or why he was wanted, and at the time, Nate hadn't cared. It was a chance to forget the pathetic existence he called a life and to be a marine again, even if it was only for a day or two.

Now, looking down at the image of a suspect in an international crime, he cursed himself for not paying more attention to the national media and realized all he'd been was a convenient patsy in the right geographic location. In the right place at the right time, he thought.

With the help of some other veterans he knew from the VA, Nate had identified four likely areas for a hideout. With the promise of good money and the excitement of reliving the old days, they'd fanned out and watched the areas until the man they were looking for had shown up. Then, together with Lynch, Nate had cornered the suspect, whom Lynch had assured him was extremely dangerous, and they'd managed to take him down without firing a shot, a fact that Nate wasn't all that happy about. He'd just as soon have had the whole thing hit the fan and just maybe he'd have caught a bullet and gone down shooting.

He would certainly have preferred that to feeling like he'd betrayed his country and realizing that he'd been used by a man he'd thought was his friend. Now a man that the newspaper said was guilty of countless murders on U.S. soil was safe in the air, having been hustled away in the middle of the night by Lynch at the behest of some bigwig whose name Nate had never been given and whom he'd never been allowed to see.

I should've known better. That limey bastard better never show his face near me again. I'll kill him and display his decapitated head. Nate's face flushed two shades of red and he unscrewed the cap on the bottle of Jack, taking a long swig directly from the bottle and exhaling loudly as it burned all the way down into his stomach. I can still fix this, he thought, looking at the Washington D.C. phone number listed at the end of the article. The paper identified the number as that of a taskforce that had been setup to find and arrest the suspect, a man named Declan McIver. Surely the FBI could make contact with the authorities in other countries and they could intercept the plane when it landed, wherever it landed.

Why Lynch's employer had cared so much about the fate of an Irish terrorist was beyond him. Who knew why the micks did anything? All Nate Crickard cared about was setting things right and maybe, just maybe, he could salvage some of his former honor in the process. He took another sip from the bottle and screwed on the lid before picking up the phone and dialing the number.