The War Planners

First edition 2014.

Copyright 2014 by Andrew Watts

All rights reserved.

Photo: POA(Phot) Owen King/MOD

David Manning was kidnapped outside his Vienna, Virginia home on a Friday evening just after he drove home from work. 

He had texted his wife to tell her that he was leaving, then he went to pick up their ritual Friday dinner.  Pizza night had become a favorite end of week routine for his family.  He turned on to I-66 heading west just as the glow of his cell phone lit up the inside of his car.  He swiped across the screen to answer, and his wife Lindsay’s voice came over the car’s speakers.

“Hi honey.” she said.

“Hey Lins.  How was your day?”

“Pretty good.  But now your daughter has decided that the dog is a pony.  She keeps chasing it around the house, and trying to ride it.  Apparently she picked it up from a TV show.”

“Uh-oh.  Maybe we should have gotten a bigger dog?”  David smiled, picturing his mischievous daughter and the unfortunate Jack Russell terrier.

“I’m looking forward to date night on the couch tonight.  I’ve got the movie all picked out.  It’s a chick flick. You’ve been travelling too much.  You owe me.”

“Anything you say, babe.”  He smiled to himself.

“Hi daddy!” came his daughter’s voice.

“Hey Maddie.  How’s it going?  Are you being good to the doggy?”

“Yeeesss.”

“Your mom said that you—”

Click.  His phone’s screen went red, signaling that the call had ended. 

David smiled and shook his head.  No need to call back.  He would be home soon. David’s calls were often ended prematurely when his three-year-old daughter got the phone.  She loved that red button.  It was like the phone makers designed it to tempt kids to press.  Oh well. 

David scrolled through his radio and landed on NPR.  They were replaying a news story that he had heard this morning on China beginning to unload much of the American debt that it owned.  China’s steel production had also slowed. U.S. markets were getting jittery.  They quoted the usual experts who gave their opinions on whether catastrophe was waiting around the corner.  David flipped the radio to the oldies channel.

Traffic was heavy. Rain began sprinkling the windshield, blurring the red taillights ahead.  I-66 was moving, but slowly.  After about twenty minutes of driving he took the Nutley exit towards Vienna. 

Joe’s Pizza and Pasta was at the intersection of Nutley Street and Maple Avenue.  He pulled into the parking lot and walked inside.  The bustle of a Friday night in the suburbs sounded off.  Loud conversations drowned out soft rock.  Waitresses delivered plastic pitchers of soda and crushed ice.  Families stuffed their mouths with salad and hot slices of pepperoni and mozzarella.

The pizzeria employees knew David by sight.

“Hey, Mr. Manning! The usual, eh?” said the mustached man behind the register.  It looked like he had a young cousin next to him, learning the ropes.   

David smiled said hello.  He was pretty sure that everyone who worked in the restaurant was related. He paid, took the two boxes, and then walked back out to the parking lot.  The bell on the door jingled as he left.  The cool fall rain was coming down heavier now. 

As he got to his car, a black SUV sped past in the parking lot, splashing puddles in the pavement.  The man in the passenger seat gave him a funny look, like he was waiting on him.  David ignored it and placed the pizza boxes in the car. Some people were just impatient.

Driving home, the scent of garlic and oregano wafted through the air.  Those delicious smells tempted him, but David remained disciplined in his most solemn of marital pacts.  It was a well-documented fact that opening up the pizza box before arriving home would reduce the temperature of the pizza and raise the temperature of his Italian wife—and not in a good way. 

A few minutes later, he parked his Toyota sedan on the curb outside of his house.  It was usually a busy Vienna neighborhood, filled with upper-middle class families walking their dogs and cooking out in their back yards.  Today, the rain had sent everyone inside.  David was starving.  He couldn’t wait to crack open a cold beer and take that first bite of steaming pizza.   But he never got to the front door.

He stepped out of the car, pizza boxes in hand, and felt tiny droplets of rain coming down on the back of his neck.   

“David?” 

The voice behind him sounded friendly.  Relaxed.  It had the casual tone of someone that could have been an old buddy from the past, or maybe a neighbor.  There was no reason to brace himself for what was to come.

He twisted around to see who was calling his name.  He never got a good look at the men.  It all happened too fast.

The already dark street went pitch black as a bag was yanked over his head.  The sound of his shoes skidding off the pavement was briefly audible as his feet went out from under him.  He heard a clap as the cardboard pizza boxes fall to the street.  He felt himself falling but never hit the ground.  Hands moved with the precision of years of training, grabbing him, holding him up, and wrapping whatever was over his head tight around his mouth so he couldn’t talk.  He was being mugged!  Panic filled him. He writhed and wrestled with every ounce of energy he could muster, but there were just too many strong hands. 

They were carrying him now.  Disoriented and afraid, he no longer knew which way was up.  He tried to move as much as he could but the gripping hands had him in some sort of wrestling hold.  He tried to scream, but with the gag over his mouth, all that came out were pathetic, muffled attempts.  

David fought to get out of the grip of those hands—how many he wasn’t sure.  He felt like they were all over his body.  A mix of feelings rushed through him: fear, anger, and the urge to urinate.  He felt violated.  He had no control now.  He kept trying to yell for help. 

Had Lindsay seen him?  He was right outside their home.  If she happened to look out the window she could get help…

  He felt his knees being bent, and his arms pulled together behind his back.  Before David knew it, he was hog-tied and tossed on something flat and metallic.  He landed with a loud and painful thud.  A metallic door slammed shut.  The ambient noises of the street grew dull.  He was pretty sure that he was inside a car trunk or the back of a van. 

There were no voices.  No jingle of keys. A faint vibration told him that an engine was already running.  Then a jolt of motion shifted his body.  They were on the go. 
Shit
. 

David had been kidnapped in the blink of an eye.  But there were no eyes that had seen it.  David was pretty sure that no one in his neighborhood had been outside in the rain.  Lindsay would be in the kitchen or the playroom, neither of which had a view of the street.  In those hapless few seconds, the safe and normal world that David had known came to an end. 

The routine Friday night had turned into a night blinded in a cell.  He would have been sitting down with Lindsay and the girls right now.  Instead, David was left alone with his panic.  Rapid streams of thought flowed through his mind as his body jerked with each turn of the vehicle.  This wasn’t just a mugging. It was a kidnapping.  Who had taken him?  What could they possibly want? 

His job.  It had to be his job. 

David worked at In-Q-Tel.  It was a venture-capital firm unlike any other.  In-Q-Tel was a non-profit firm in Arlington, Virginia.  Its sole purpose was to invest in and secure the most advanced information technology for use by the Central Intelligence Agency and other U.S. intelligence agencies.  His job was to identify and evaluate these new technologies that could be acquired and used by the government. 

The people who had taken him must want information on something he’d worked on.  Some technology.  David jumped from project to project every few months. He had worked there for a number of years now.  They could be after information on any number of dozens of highly classified projects.

David tried to think.  They had spoken his name in English.  He tried to remember if there was an accent.  He didn’t think so.  If they were terrorists, would they have an accent?  David was way out of his league.  He had been in the Navy for a while.  But he had been an officer for only a few months before being let go due to a combination of bad eyesight and budget cuts.  He had never deployed or done anything really exciting.  His current job was equally mundane.  It sounded a lot more interesting than it really was.  He spent his first few years out of the Navy working for In-Q-Tel as a low-level tech researcher.  His recent promotion meant that he traveled more and got to work on the higher priority projects.  But it was still research.  David got all of his information about terrorists and spies from books, TV, and the occasional NPR story.  If he had to guess, these guys were probably from a foreign government.   

Would the Russians do something like this?  Or the Iranians?  Would they have spies that had good enough language skills that they wouldn’t have any accent?  Would either of those countries take a risk like that?  It wasn’t like David could build them the technology.  He just knew about the applications: how a voice-recognition software could identify a particular bad guy, or how a new type of computer virus could beat the protection software.  Who would want that information badly enough to capture a U.S. employee on American soil?  Weren’t they stealing it all through cyber warfare anyway?  The United States wouldn’t stand for this.  He had to calm down.  The government would find him.  Rescue him. 
Right
?

But no one had seen him.  Maybe the government would never find out.  God, he hoped he wasn’t going to die.  Death may or may not be imminent.  He didn’t know.  But being tied up and blindfolded in the back of a car like this certainly didn’t bode well for his health.  David thought about his loved ones.  He tried to remember his last interaction with each of them.

He remembered telling his wife, Lindsay, that he loved her when he left for work that morning.  He had kissed her on the cheek as she nursed their youngest daughter, Taylor.  Her eyes were half closed as she sat in the rocking chair, but she had smiled.  David travelled often now.  Lindsay held the house together.  She practically raised the kids herself.  She was the perfect companion.  He owed her everything, and loved her more every day, if that was possible. 

  He had kissed his oldest daughter Maddie on the cheek as she slept in her bed.  Was that the last time he would see them?  If he had known, he would have told his wife a thousand times how much he loved her.  He never would have let go of his daughters. They were the best part of life.  He couldn’t bear the thought of losing them. 

David tried to think of the last time he visited his mother.  It was a year earlier, in the large waterfront home his parents had owned near Annapolis, Maryland.  David tried to remember the last thing he had said to her but couldn’t.  It was probably about his work.  She was always telling him that he worked too hard and too long, and that the government couldn’t keep pushing people like that.  That Mrs. Green’s son from church had a government job and he was home every day at 4 p.m. and never had to travel.  He hoped he hadn’t been condescending in his response.  She only said those things because she cared for him.  If she were still around, she would be devastated if he was hurt—or worse.  A Navy wife for more than 35 years, she had been tough as nails and dedicated to her three children.  She had practically raised them on her own with their father gone so much.  He wished she had still been around when Taylor was born.  It would have been nice to let her see one more crying grandchild.  A slice of heaven for a dying grandmother.  But hardship and sacrifice was the way of life in a military family like the Mannings. 

When your father was an Admiral, it was expected that each child would  serve, go to sea, and give up the comforts of civilian life.  The other two siblings were certainly fulfilling this obligation.  His sister, Victoria, was a rising-star helicopter pilot living in Jacksonville, Florida.  Their brother, Chase, had been a SEAL, and now continued that type of work for lesser-known government entities.  Aside from the occasional holiday, David hadn’t seen much of his father or siblings over the past decade.  Being in the military after 9/11 meant a lifestyle of long and frequent deployments. As the commander of the Navy’s newest carrier strike group, this was likely Admiral Manning’s last time at sea.  David was the only one who hadn’t turned military service into a career.

David thought about his family and realized that the last time he had seen the three of them was at his mother’s funeral.  She died a little over a year ago now. It was a cruel irony that a woman who had loved others so deeply would die of heart failure at the young age of 61.  David had thought about her every day since then, and it had taken over a month for those thoughts to stop drawing tears.  While his siblings used to tease him that he was her favorite, he didn’t care.  They had a special bond, even for a mother and son. 

Her passing had the strange effect of transforming David into a late-blooming athlete. He was by far the least physically gifted of the three siblings.  While the other two had been athletic superstars, David was the bookworm.  With his mother’s death, though, he needed an outlet; something that would provide both meditation and a distraction.  Chase used running as his getaway from the world—always had.  David hoped it could work for him to0.  And that was how, the day after their mother’s funeral, David found himself in a 7-mile run with his brother on the Washington & Old Dominion Trail. David was limping for the next week.  But it was the spark that started the flame.  Eventually he registered for a 5K by himself.  5K’s turned into a half-marathon.  In an email exchange with his brother, Chase had suggested he add swimming to his routine.  Now David was training for a full triathlon.  What had started as a sort of therapy quickly became a healthy obsession.