The Severance (17 page)

“What does it say? I can only read out of one eye,” Jake muttered.

“She’s letting us know that she has heard of our plans and can take us out anytime she’s good and ready,” McBride replied.

“We can’t move The Severance now,” Jake said, sounding defeated.

“Nope,” McBride said.

“This is all my fault.”

“Yup.”

“I deserved to get punched in the face,” Jake said, looking at his sergeant with his good eye.

“She’s stepped it down a notch. The truck was a lethal attack, but the flashbang was just a prank,” McBride said. “She going to talk to us soon. If I had to guess, I’d say she was going to come to us. Time is running short.”

“Jesus, Sir. You really got rocked this time,” Doc Ramirez said, shining his penlight into Jake’s injured eye.

Olsen cackled in laughter, again ensuring that no one else in the tent could sleep.

Ramirez gently felt the swollen area around Jake’s eye.

“I don’t think you fractured your skull, but I’d need an X-ray to be sure,” Ramirez said.

“Gotta keep your hands up, Cap!” Olsen called out.

“Sergeant Olsen, I’m trying to sleep. Could you keep it down, please,” Big Joe complained, bundled in his sleeping bag.

“Shut your mouth, Eastman!” Olsen yelled, throwing a bottle of water at Big Joe. The bottle impacted harmlessly just short of Big Joe’s bunk. He sighed and put in a set of earbuds.

When Parsons objected, Olsen attacked him verbally. “You telling me what to do?” Parsons shrank under the sergeant’s glare.

“No, Olsen,” McBride interrupted. “I’m telling you what to do. Sit down and shut up.”

Olsen scowled at the younger, higher-ranking NCO before slowly sitting down on his cot. He began taking his boots off, muttering under his breath.

Ramirez activated a cold compress and handed it to Jake, along with two ibuprofen.

“You’re going to have a bad shiner, but the swelling should go down enough to see out of that eye in a few hours,” Ramirez said, packing up his medical bag.

Jake held the compress to his head and breathed deeply. If Jessica knew about the details of the plan to move The Severance, then there was no point in going through with the plan. The customs seals were worthless and The Severance might as well have been labeled “Exhibit A for the Prosecution.” Jessica and her boyfriend knew where it was and now they knew how to get it out of the yard. The absolute worst-case scenario was if Jessica and the flyboy took The Severance and got caught with it. With no loyalty to Jake, they would quickly spill their guts to the authorities.

“You going to live?” McBride queried, sitting down next to Jake.

“Yeah, I’m going to look real good on CNN tomorrow,” Jake said.

“Gotta watch out for those light poles, Sir,” McBride said. McBride had told everyone that Jake had accidently walked into a streetlight on the way back to the tent. No one believed that, as Jake’s bruise had the same dimensions as a fist and almost all the men had been socked in the eye or had socked others at one time or another. Everyone assumed that McBride had hit Jake, but could not imagine why. Jake looked at his watch: 2:30 a.m. and it seemed everyone was finally asleep except for McBride and himself.

“We’re out of options,” Jake whispered. “We’ve got to make a deal with that woman.”

“And if we can’t?” McBride asked.

“We’re fucked,” Jake said holding up his hands. “I blew it.”

“She has to deal, Sir. She can’t get The Severance out of this hellhole in a container she can intercept. She needs us to get it out.”

“She doesn’t have to do anything. If her new boyfriend is 101st, then he’s on our redeployment cycle. He can intercept the container for her. We’ve been looking at this all wrong. It’s not Jessica that we need to worry about; it’s him,” Jake said, his hands chopping the air for emphasis.

“Yeah, you’re right, we’re fucked,” McBride said, his shoulders slumping.

“Even if we could keep them from the container, Jessica and Flyboy call the authorities, they find the container, and we get busted,” Jake said, continuing his doom-and-gloom analysis.

“We got no connection to the Intel container,” McBride ventured.

“Yeah, but there is enough physical evidence on the case and on the bills themselves. Fingerprints, hair follicles; it would only be a matter of time before they got us,” Jake said.

McBride let out a nervous chuckle. Up until then, neither man had considered the prospect of actually getting caught.

“D-don’t want to sound like a broken record, but we’ve got to do something about this. I don’t want to go to prison—I have a daughter,” McBride said.

“No one is going to prison. I’m going to make sure of that.”

Jake glanced at the sleeping soldiers and drew McBride closer to him.

“We’re going to destroy The Severance, if it’s not too late. After the awards are handed out. We get in the yard through the way you scouted tonight. Instead of stashing the case in a new container, we take it out with us. We find a quiet spot and we burn the money and bury the ashes,” Jake whispered.

“You want to burn almost five million dollars?” McBride turned pale.

“No, but I don’t want to go to federal prison more,” Jake said.

“The men are going to be furious, Sir. Some of them needed The Severance to get by after this,” McBride said. “They put their faith in you, and you’re going to fail them—”

“Stop. I understand that everything that has happened is my fault. I get that I’ve fucked up; I’ll own up to it. They put their faith and their money in my hands. But what I will not allow is for them, or you, to end up in prison.”

Jake lay back on his cot, applying the compress to his eye. That nagging feeling of something being wrong with The Severance caper clutched him again. There was something here he wasn’t seeing.

“Greg, something isn’t right. I have a feeling, what chicks call intuition. We’ve been operating under the assumption that Jessica, my ex-lover, commandeered a military helicopter, left her base without authorization, stole a pickup truck, used that truck as a battering ram, flashbanged us, and is currently extorting us out of our package.”

“Yeah, that’s about right,” McBride said nodding his head.

“I know this chick. Up until yesterday, I was fucking this chick. She wouldn’t know a flashbang from a frankfurter. She once told me that her first car had a manual transmission and she had to take it back to the dealership because she couldn’t drive it.”

“So?” McBride asked, scratching the back of his head.

“The Hilux had a five-speed manual. You’re telling me that a girl that can’t learn to drive a manual can suddenly develop the talent to work the clutch and shift well enough to launch that truck at me?”

“Okay, then it was Flyboy. Maybe he’s been driving sticks his whole life,” McBride said.

“I’ve done a lot of crazy things for sex. I mean some really off-the-wall nutty things to get in the sack, but I’ve never tried to kill anyone for snatch. I don’t care how love struck this guy might be; that’s stupid,” Jake said.

“What if he’s motivated by greed? Maybe he just wants The Severance,” McBride said.

“You said yourself that they could figure out we were smuggling, but wouldn’t know what we were moving and how much it was worth. For all they know, we’re trying to move a container full of flip-flops. Jessica would be doing this because she’s mad at me, but there’s nothing in it for him.”

Jake went down the list of facts with McBride. Anyone who went to the hospital at Salerno, who knew someone who worked at the hospital, or who had swiped a pen off someone who worked at the hospital could have a pen like the one in the truck. People stole pens without a second thought. As for the extortion note, there were thousands of unsecured computers and printers on the airbase that could have been used to create the message.

Finally, the flimsiest of the duo’s assumptions: Jessica’s transformation from a demure bombshell to psychotic extortionist. This was the work of someone intelligent, capable, and unencumbered, not someone motivated by rage or working with an unstable partner.

When Jake laid out the facts like that, McBride agreed. They were being played.

“Who do you suspect then, Sir?” McBride said.

“I don’t know. The boys have all been loyal and none of them would dare to cross the others for fear of reprisal. Whoever is doing this isn’t cut in to The Severance, and yet knows about it,” Jake said.

“Sir, like I said, we’ve been keeping Lopez and Nelson on Olsen all the time. I stomach his company as much as I can just to keep him close,” McBride said.

“How sure are we about Lopez and Nelson?” Jake asked.

“C’mon, Sir, those two are good to go. You saved Lopez when you spotted that tripwire mine a few months back. That went a long way in his book. I’ll vouch for them. Besides, there is no way Olsen could have flashbanged us,” McBride said.

“How sure are you of that?” Jake asked.

“When we got flashbanged, Olsen was sitting on his fat ass, smelling the tent up with his farts. There is no way he could get everyone in the tent to lie for him like that. No way,” McBride said.

“Maybe he’s the one who’s got help.”

“Are you kidding? None of the boys would cross us to go in with him. Besides, everyone was accounted for when we left. No one was out of their bunks.”

“But—”

“But what?” McBride hissed. “Your whore went nuts and now she’s freewheeling around this air base and out for blood. She wants what you care about.”

“But—”

“Do you know what Olsen got busted for, to get sent to our little ‘rehabilitation’ platoon? He got caught trying to steal a government computer from his old company commander. They found the fucking computer in his car, stashed under a newspaper on the front seat. Plus we got multiple people who saw your ex-honeypot around this base, including me.”

“I know, but—”

“Have I ever let you down? I mean really let you down?”

“No,” Jake said. It was unmistakably true that he could always count on Gregory McBride. Jake knew Olsen was a fool and a loudmouth. If McBride was that adamant that Olsen wasn’t the rat, that was good enough for Jake. But he now had grave doubts about Jessica, too. Maybe the person after The Severance wanted Jake to think that it was a personal vendetta, to scare him into acting rashly. Maybe his attacker wanted him to move The Severance from the container and into the open here in Afghanistan. Once back in the United States, The Severance would be distributed and the platoon scattered to the four winds. The money would be lost to the mystery rat.

Jake realized he had been thinking about the attacks all wrong.
He
wasn’t running out of time to make a play—it was his enemy who was on a time schedule.

“We’re not going to burn the money,” Jake said at last

“But you just said—”

“I know what I just said, but we’re not going to alter our original plan. The idea is to try to spook us into doing what we’ve been planning to do all night—take The Severance out of its original container. If we restash it or burn it, it has to come out of the container. The opposition has gotten hold of the container serial number and for some reason, they need us to open it. Once it’s in the open, my attacker plans to take it from us. So I’m—no, we’re going to deny them that. Stick to our plan and we go home,” Jake said, crossing his arms.

McBride nodded his head as if he believed Jake was his old self again, confident, but not cocky.

“Look, dollars to doughnuts, whoever is coming after us is in our division,” Jake went on. They are going home right around the same time we are, give or take a few days. If they are too greedy to deal with us for a fair cut, then they are too greedy to call customs. We keep The Severance right where it is and I guarantee that these dudes will follow us home. We just got to stay one step ahead of them.”

“I think I punched some sense back into you. But what if we actually catch up with them?”

“We won’t. We’ll do everything we can to avoid them. We won’t move The Severance, either, buying us, and the Severance, time to get back home.

“Okay, I get it, we take our chances,” McBride affirmed.

Jake yawned; they only had a few hours before the pomp and circumstance associated with their award ceremony began.

“We need to get some shuteye. Nothing else can be done right now.” Jake said.

In the tent, he collapsed onto his cot, exhausted, but unable to sleep. Thoughts raced through his brain—Jessica, the money, the boys, what they knew, and who knew more than the others.