Brown, Dale - Independent 02 (15 page)

 
          
The
array of weapons was dazzling, but Sandra Geffar looked anything but dazzling.
She was wearing a neck brace. Her face was bruised and discolored. She had deep
black circles under each eye, the result of being caught in the terrific blast
when her Black Hawk helicopter was destroyed. She moved with a slight limp. A
white elastic shoulder brace she should not have removed was underneath the
pile of gunleather.

 
          
She
either did not notice or chose to ignore Hardcastle as he walked up to the
range beside hers to watch. She had just finished sighting in her .45 caliber
automatic. She had selected the fifty-yard range, and the man-sized silhouette
target automatically moved out to the fifty-yard position, then motored laterally
to the left.

 
          
“Excuse
me, got time to talk?” Hardcastle asked.

 
          
Her
eyes registered his presence. Without a word she loaded two nine-round
ammunition clips, stowed them in the left ammo pouch of her shoulder rig,
loaded another clip, shoved it home in the .45, chambered a round, replaced
another round in the clip and hol- stered the big semi-automatic pistol in a
right-side holster.

 
          
“You’re
left-handed,” Hardcastle observed, trying to keep it light. “I never noticed
...”

 
          
No
reply. He heard a sudden rattle of paper and turned to see the silhouette
moving rapidly across a thin wire from left to right. Quickly Geffar had the
.45 out of the shoulder holster, aimed and fired ten rounds at the target.
Without lowering her gun hand she ejected the spent magazine, retrieved
another, shoved it home and fired off nine rounds. She loaded the third clip
but she had gotten only three rounds off before the target disappeared behind a
mechanism shield to the right of the range.

           
“Damn it.” She hit the button to
retrieve the moving target, then lowered and safed the smoking pistol. “My
hand’s shaking so bad ... I used to be able to get off all twenty-eight rounds
and still have enough time to pull out the .380 before that target went away.
Now I can’t even shoot straight.”

 
          
“Not
shooting straight?” What the hell was “straight,” Hardcastle wondered. Every
half-inch-diameter hole except two or three were within the center “5” expert
qualification area on the black silhouette. Twenty-five hits. He would have a
tough time, he knew, putting that kind of group into a stationary target at
thirty yards—she did it at fifty on a moving target. “Yeah, a real shame.
You’re practically a candidate for the gang-that-couldn’t-shoot-straight.”

 
          
Geffar
gave him a look as she reloaded the .45. “What can I do for you,
Admiral?”

 
          
“I
just wanted to see how you were doing. Your office said you were still in the
hospital.”

 
          
“I
checked out this morning. I was going nuts. Air Force doctors are even duller
than the civilians.”

 
          
“How’s
the neck?” Said seriously.

 
          
“I
hurt. Okay? I hurt all over. 1 see stars when I move my head. My hands shake. I
can’t find a holster I can carry comfortably because my right shoulder feels
like it’s coming apart. You get the picture?” She finished reloading a magazine
for the .45. “Change the target for me, will you?”

 
          
Hardcastle
pulled off the battered silhouette target, rolled up a new one and clipped it
on the heavy metal clamp. “I’ve got a good idea for you.”

 
          
“What?”

 
          
“Go
home and get some rest.” He let the target unroll as Geffar selected the
one-hundred-yard range. The target sped away.

 
          
“I’ve
been out for a week now and morale at the unit is the worst I’ve ever seen.”

 
          
“Death
can do that. The answer isn’t to punish yourself.”

 
          
“What
did you do after you lost your Falcon—throw a party?” “Forget it. You want to
beat yourself up on the target range, fine. But don’t drag everyone else down
with you—especially when they’re trying to help. Even if you do deserve a kick
in the rear end.” She slammed a magazine home in the .45, paused, then ejected
it and slammed the weapon down on the bench. “I’m very sorry,” she said a
moment later, “but I’m not an old ex-Marine ex-Vietnam vet like you. Truth is,
I’ve heard and read about big shootouts with drug dealers, and I’ve fired a few
shots at suspects, but I’ve never been involved in a deal like the one last
week. I’ve never seen men die like . . .
that
...”

 
          
“Want
to talk about it?”

           
“No.” She dragged the white shoulder
brace out from underneath the pile of holsters on the gun bench. “Sorry. Yes,”
she said quietly as she slipped the brace over her right shoulder and arm.
Hardcastle found a Thermos of coffee, retrieved an extra cup from the range
security office and poured two cups as they walked out along the grassy area
surrounding the range parking lot.

 
          
“I
think I know what you’re feeling,” Hardcastle began. “A virgin out of
Marine Corps Officer
Candidate
School
, I was put in charge of a bomb-disposal
unit and sent to
Nam
. I knew nothing about bomb disposal—hell, I knew nothing about
anything. I lost five guys a week, guys I barely knew. I blamed myself every
time I got a casualty report.”

 
          
Geffar
nodded.

 
          
“You
feel all alone because you’re in charge, but you’re not. There are people out
there waiting to help you, if you let them.”

 
          
“What
happened to you, then?” Geffar asked. He seemed to be walking slowly. “I've
heard you spent time in a hospital in the
Philippines
. . .”

 
          
“Detox,”
Hardcastle said, his voice a monotone. “They called it ‘battle injuries’ or
‘physical therapy’. I was into everything—grass, booze, uppers, downers, you
name it. The Marine Corps cleaned me up, then transferred me to the Coast
Guard. That was twenty-two years ago . . .”

 
          
“You
... a drug addict?” Geffar said.
“How could they let you . . . I mean . . .”

 
          
“Rise
up through the ranks? Become an admiral? Things were different during
Vietnam
. A lot different. Guys looked after one
another back then. Marines looked out for one another, because you knew that
one day you’d have to rely on someone else to save
your
butt. The Coast Guard was almost the same. No matter who you
were or what you did before, the day you set foot on their base or their boats
you became one of them. Personnel files, medical records— they meant nothing.
You proved yourself by how you worked with the guys in your unit, not by what
your personnel records said. That was true for the lowliest grunt or the
highest ranking flag officer.” “But if you have a history of... drug abuse ...
nowadays they bust people for even a minor infraction . . .”

 
          
“Back
then they needed soldiers more than they needed headlines about drug abuse in
the ranks.” He paused, looking at Geffar. “So you were checking up on me.”

 
          
Geffar
shrugged, and there was even a hint of a smile. “It must be going around,
Admiral—I discovered that
my
records
were pulled the other day. From
your
office.”

 
          
“So
you checked on me to get even?”

 
          
“I
asked around, I didn’t pull your personnel files.”

           
“Probably because you couldn’t get
access, one of the few prerogatives of flag rank. I’ll have them sent over to
you.”

 
          
“Good
. . . why are we going round like this, Admiral?”

 
          
“Call
me Ian.”

 
          
“No
thanks, Admiral.”

 
          
“Suit
yourself. I wanted to talk about drug interdiction. Your job and mine.”

 
          
“What
about it?”

 
          
“What's
your opinion of our roles in drug interdiction?”

 
          
“I
think it stinks. We’re understaffed, underfunded, we do fewer and fewer
investigations and more and more sitting around waiting for stuff to happen.
When it does, Customs seems two steps behind, waiting on other people to get
their act together or get out of our way.”

 
          
“People
like the Coast Guard?”

 
          
“The
Coast Guard, DEA, FBI, SLINGSHOT, BLOC, Justice, Treasury, ATF, the military .
. . The Customs Service is supposed to be the primary drug-interdiction force
in the United States—that was true even before the so-called Anti-Drug Control
Act. But we’ve taken a back seat to the DEA for the past five years and now
we’re beginning to get the same ass-end view of your Coast Guard. We can’t make
a move without half the
U.S.
government getting involved. Add in state
and local cops—we just don’t have room to maneuver. A classic no-win
situation.”

 
          
"So
what’s your solution?”

 
          
“Solution?
I’m not sure there is one . . . What are you driving at, Hardcastle? You got a
hidden microphone in your wheel hat there?” “Just tell me your beefs. Compared
to you I’m the new boy on the block in this business. I mean, it’s been your
area for nearly your whole career. I’m just an old jungle pilot.”

 
          
She
looked at him, still not convinced he didn’t have something else in mind beside
hearing her gripes, but what the hell . . . she’d had it on her chest a long
time . . . “Customs fights a losing battle by letting the smugglers get
onshore,” she began. “It’s obvious—once the stuff hits the shore it can
disperse faster and safer than if it was still on a plane or ship. Customs
can’t really operate much beyond the twelve-mile limit. Part of the problem is
the old 1986 Anti-Drug Abuse Act, which gave your people, the Coast Guard, authority
over drug interdiction operations from shore outward—by the time we pick up the
smugglers and take control, it’s often too late. The druggies get the upper
hand.”

 
          
“So
you try to keep the drugs from getting onshore. The stuff comes in from South
and
Central America
or wherever by plane. The smugglers drop
the stuff offshore, and it’s picked up by speedboats. How to stop that?”

           
“Intelligence and presence,” Geffar
said quickly, getting caught up in it. “You’ve got to try to find out when the
stuff is coming in, and you have to have the equipment and manpower to be there
waiting for it. You can try to do one without using the other but it’s not
efficient Once you find them you hit them. Hard. You can’t let them get
onshore. You have to get them
before
they scatter, and you’ve got to nail all of them ... We have maybe one-tenth of
the equipment and manpower we need to do the job. For every one we chase
there's five, ten we can’t run down. We give ourselves official excuses—the
contact is iffy, he’s too slow for a big smuggler—but the fact is that we don’t
chase them all down because we
can’t.
I have only three Citations and three
Cheyennes
here at
Homestead
that can carry out a night intercept.
You
have only eight C-model Falcon
interceptors in the whole Coast Guard—only four here in
Florida
, the rest in
California
and
Alabama
. If we’re lucky we can fly half of them at
any given time; the rest are down for maintenance, busy or deployed someplace.
That’s less than half the planes we need to cover all the night smuggling in
just south
Florida
alone ...”