Dark Sky (The Misadventures of Max Bowman Book 1) (16 page)

The kid held onto Winters’ arm as Angry Cannonball lit into him. PMA stood his ground and told Angry Cannonball we just wanted to talk to him. I finally made it and said the same thing.

“Who sent you?” Angry Cannonball wanted to know. The crowd made some noises that I couldn’t decipher, but they weren’t pleasant. On Roosevelt Island, there were Canada Geese by the score and, in the spring, they would gather around their baby goslings and honk and hiss at anybody who came within spitting distance. This group’s sounds had the same aggressive intent.

“Look,” I said through what little breath I had left, “we don’t want to hurt him. We might even be helping him.”

Michael Winters just looked at us all arguing with each other as if it didn’t have much to do with him.

Angry Cannonball turned to him. “Hey, Michael, you want to talk to these people?”

Michael Winters shuddered, shook, shrugged. “Don’t know, don’t know, don’t know.”

Angry Cannonball turned back to us. “You see how he is? He don’t need this!”

I went with my last resort – the truth.

“Michael,” I said to Winters in as soothing tones as I could summon, “this is General Davidson’s grandson.” I pointed to PMA, who nodded quickly in agreement, because he saw we needed to close this deal fast.

Michael Winters’ eyes widened.

“Yeah, that’s right,” PMA went on. “My grandfather thought you might know something about his son’s – my uncle’s - death.”

Michael Winters turned to the kid and looked him in the eye.

“He ain’t dead.”

Angry Cannonball was puzzled. “What the fuck is this all about?”

Michael looked down again and put his hand on Angry Cannonball’s shoulder.

“S’all right, Tommy, everybody, everybody, everybody. Let me talk to these guys. Let me talk, let me talk.”

Angry Cannonball gave me and the kid the onceover and asked Michael if he wanted him and the others to come along, in case we weren’t legit. Michael said no, this was something he could handle, he could handle, he could handle. The group started dispersing, giving us the evil eye as they went their separate ways. It was clear they were just taking care of Michael, because Michael was just someone who needed taking care of.

I turned to PMA. “How the hell did you get here?”

“I ducked my mom at the airport. I ran out of the terminal and hitched a couple rides up here. I’ve been waiting around here all night.”

“Good on you, sonny boy. You saved my ass.”

“Yeah,” he said with a surprised and delighted smile. “Yeah, I did.”

It was PMA at its finest. Shit, I wasn’t taking away that nickname now – this kid knew how to put a principle to work.

We walked back to Michael’s house, where we once again had to get past his sister the gatekeeper. She grilled Michael and offered to kick our asses all the way to Cleveland if he wanted her to, but, thankfully, our asses were given a pass when he put her off and said he needed to talk to us. He took us into the backyard, where there were a few lawn chairs and a cracked table on the patio.

We sat down. He didn’t. He looked down at PMA.

“You really the grandson?”

PMA nodded.

“How’d you find out about me?”

I answered that one. “General Kraemer.”

Michael began pacing, not looking at us.

“General’s dead. He’s dead. Way dead. You see the news? Scary shit. I didn’t sleep, didn’t sleep at all.”

“Colonel Allen’s dead too,” I said

Michael turned to me and then started looking around the yard, as if spies might be hiding behind the crabgrass.

“I don’t know what’s going on. Nobody would believe me, nobody, nobody.”

“Who’s nobody?” I asked.

“Kraemer and Allen, they didn’t. I wrote them both long letters and no answer. No answer at all. Then I wrote one more letter.” He looked directly at PMA. “To your grandpa.”

“What did it say?” the kid asked.

“I just told him what I saw. He was a father and a father needs to know if his son ain’t dead.”

Michael stopped pacing and looked off into the clouds.

“He was alive. The fucker was alive.”

And then he told us what he saw.

Michael had served under First Lieutenant Robert Davidson in Afghanistan. He remembered how, in 2005, he was told to stay behind with all the other men in the outfit while Davidson went on Recon with the guys from Dark Sky.

I asked if he knew who any of the Dark Sky people were. He told me nobody was allowed to mingle with Dark Sky. Some tall dude named Herman, wearing the Dark Sky uniform, would come to where they were bivouacked and talk with Davidson and Davidson alone. And on this particular night, Davidson went off with Herman and never came back. Later, they received word First Lieutenant Robert Davidson, son of General whatever the fuck Davidson, had been killed by an I.E.D.

I told Michael the story on the news was different – they said Davidson was killed by an Afghan rebel in a firefight. Michael remembered the official story changing. He thought that was “fucking strange, fucking strange, fucking strange.”

Anyway, it was a few years later, 2008, and he was doing his fourth tour in Afghanistan. He could feel himself slipping, could feel his mental state shredding from the constant fighting and the constant terror. They were in the green zone, in the notorious Helmand district, scene of the most brutal fighting of the conflict.

I remembered the time well, because it was when the Pentagon had not only unleashed the dogs of war in Afghanistan, but also injected them with rabies. The Iraq surge, a sudden influx of troops into that beleaguered country, had seemed to turn the tide and the Pentagon had a hard-on to apply the same model to Afghanistan. The code word was COIN, short for counterinsurgency, a line of thinking which advocated overcoming a native rebellion with sheer military numbers. It rarely worked. Even in Iraq, the surge had only ended up as a temporary fix that was actually enabled by underlying political shifts.

Still, in 2008, it was seen as a success, a success that could be replicated in Afghanistan if the strategy was duplicated. With that in mind, more troops were sent in by NATO and America. But, unlike the Iraq surge, more boots on the ground didn’t put out the fire. Instead, they made it burn out of control as the violence continued to escalate.

The Pentagon’s next move was to send in not just more troops, but also more mercenaries, private killing companies like Dark Sky which employed plenty of what they called “snake-eaters,” the most vicious of the vicious former Special Ops forces. They went on a killing spree so insane and undiscriminating, that, two or three years in, Afghan President Karzai demanded that the U.S. remove these elite kill squads from the country; too many innocents were being slaughtered in a desperate bid to turn the tide in an unwinnable war. 

That was the situation in Afghanistan when Michael Winters went nuts.

Michael paced back and forth as he set the scene. It was early evening, just after sunset, when the rebels go on the move and do whatever damage can be done. That was also the time of day when Michael felt the most scared, when the fear gripped him by the throat and made it hard to breathe. Suddenly, there was gunfire. He had no idea where it was coming from or headed to, he just knew with every fiber of his being that he couldn’t stay where he was. He literally felt like his head was on fire. So when he thought no one was looking, he bolted from his unit and out into the middle of nowhere. He ran far and fast over the desolate Afghan landscape, not having any idea of where he was going or why, until he ended up on top of a little hill, overlooking a small camp.

And that’s when he saw Robert Davidson - alive, but maybe not so well.

Instead of his military uniform, Davidson was wearing a muted, blood red uniform with a small “D.S.” logo over the front shirt pocket. Obviously the Dark Sky uniform. But the uniform wasn’t what Michael noticed first. No, what stood out was the fact that Davidson was missing his left arm – and possibly the left half of his face. It must have been missing, because he was wearing a dark brown leather half-mask thing over one side of his face. The mask did have an eyehole cut into it, which maybe meant his left eye survived, and he also had a shaved head, which made him look like a
Friday the 13
th
– Halloween – Nightmare on Elm Street
low budget horror movie villain.

And then, not far from Davidson, Michael spotted his BFF. Herman. Or what he assumed was Herman. He recognized the 6’5” body, the menacing stance…but his brown hair was now blonde, and face seemed to have been somehow…changed. He looked like some kind of movie star. Somebody specific - somebody Michael had seen before somewhere?

I asked if he was carrying a rifle.

That literally stopped Michael Winters – whose back-and-forth pacing had almost become violent - in his tracks.

“How the FUCK did you know that?”

“Trust me, we know,” I replied.

“That’s how General Kraemer fucking died!!!”

I nodded.

Michael took himself back to 2008, back to Afghanistan.

He saw that Davidson and Herman were interrogating a group of Afghans who were tied up at the edge of camp. They evidently weren’t telling the Dark Sky boys what they wanted to know, because, while Davidson laughed with menace, Herman raised the rifle to his hip and shot all the men several times over by lowering and raising the lever action repeatedly. It was like something out of that one old TV show, Winters added. I told him we knew the one he was talking about.

Watching all this happen, Michael decided he must be hallucinating, because there was no way what he was seeing could be real. That calmed him down because hallucinating is like dreaming, and, in a dream, you can’t get hurt. So he slinked off back in the direction of where he came from, and through some miracle, made it back to his outfit.

But it was clear to the others he had snapped. He couldn’t form a coherent sentence, so his C.O. sent him to get examined. The medic couldn’t make any sense of his ranting and raving about Robert Davidson having half a face and diagnosed him with PTSD and possible schizophrenia so severe that he had to be shipped home.

Back in Milwaukee, Michael gradually got a little bit better, but his nightmares wouldn’t stop and neither would his obsession with First Lieutenant Robert Davidson’s inexplicable resurrection from the dead. The more he healed, the more he knew what he had seen was real and that he had been led by the Divine to see what he had seen. And what God wanted from him now was to let the military know what was going on, especially General Davidson. He didn’t think he could reach such a great and famous man all by himself, so he worked his way up the chain of command, first writing a letter to Colonel Allen, then to General Kraemer. No response. So he finally got up his nerve and wrote to General Davidson himself. He might never get the letter, but he had to try.

And one day, when Michael was doing some of his usual pacing back-and-forth in the backyard, the phone rang. His sister called to Michael in disbelief - it was General Davidson on the phone. Michael had put his phone number in the letter.

Michael got on the line and stuttered, he stuttered and repeated himself as he did since his brains had gotten scrambled overseas, but the General was very patient and very understanding. He wanted to hear every word of what he had to say, every detail of what he had seen. And when Michael finally managed to relate everything he knew, the General thanked him very much and told him he would look into it.

Michael Winters thought, at that moment, he would finally be vindicated, that the phone call he had just finished was the start of uncovering the truth.

Instead, as he said to us in his backyard, “That was the last I heard from anybody. Anybody.
Anybody
.”

As those words hung in the air, his sister stuck her head out the back window and yelled at us that we had had enough time with Michael.

Oh, and that we should get the fuck out of her yard.

The kid was hungry. He hadn’t eaten since yesterday and he had been up most of the night. If I was going to be honest, he smelled a little. But I didn’t mind the stink, if he hadn’t shown up when he did, I wouldn’t have gotten anywhere with Michael Winters. He deserved a decent lunch, so we drove off in search of a place to eat.

We were quiet. We were both taking in what we had heard from Winters. Then PMA spoke.

“You believe him?”

“Yeah, I do,” I answered. “But I don’t think anybody else would. Which is why he’s probably still alive.”

It was true. If they did know about Michael Winters, they wouldn’t have bothered to kill him, because it would be easy to write him off as a traumatized freak. If I hadn’t personally witnessed Not-Quite Connors in action, I might have joined the club. But that detail, the Lucas McCain rifle, made the rest of it plausible.

The question was, where did that get me?

For the moment, it got me to a Panera Bread near the motel where I still had a room. I watched the kid wolf down two turkey Paninis, but my stomach wasn’t taking any food requests at the moment. Between mouthfuls, PMA remarked that this was some weird fucking shit we were sinking in. I agreed. And he wondered what the hell we were going to do now.

I had to figure out where we stood before I could answer.

I had worked out a likely chain of events that had led to this point. After General Davidson talked to Michael Winters, he called his old pal Andrew “Uncle Andy” Wright, the king of the spooks, to look into Winters’ story. And for whatever reason, Andrew Wright didn’t want the story verified. So he went back to the General and said Michael Winters was just off his nut and not credible. That wasn’t a hard conclusion to peddle and the General probably seemed like he bought it.

But he didn’t.

Why? Who knows? Of course the General desperately wanted his son to be alive. So maybe he thought Andrew Wright hadn’t done enough and went directly to the CIA to have them find Kraemer and Allen. That would be when I got called in the first time a couple of years ago. And even though I found them, they must not have done the General any good – which means either they didn’t know anything or they were intimidated into keeping their mouths shut.

But the General still didn’t buy it. At least not totally. Because when his health started failing and he realized he was running out of time, he came back to me to see if I could find out anything else about Robert Davidson. It was a random shot in the dark, but he had nothing to lose except some money he didn’t really need, so why not? 

Unfortunately, he once again turned to Andrew Wright to find me and hire me, and we already know Wright wasn’t too keen on his buddy the General getting any closer to a reunion with his long-lost boy. Wright probably figured I wasn’t going to find anything, but he also wasn’t going to take any chances, so he used the flash drive, the credit card and the burner phone to track me - just in case. When he saw I was heading to see Allen and Kraemer, he probably panicked and called in Herman, and maybe Herman went a little further than Wright would have liked to get rid of the officers and scare me off.

Did they really have to kill those two retired officers? It seemed way too extreme for what pieces of the puzzle I had.

In any event, they must have thought that would be enough to make me turn back and give up. But they didn’t know Kraemer had handed me Michael Winters’ name. They didn’t know that Herman, AKA Not-Quite Connors, had given away the game by confirming the craziest part of Winters’ story - the part with the crazy Rifleman in it. So they didn’t know I hadn’t been scared off – at least not yet anyway.

But again – what good did all that do me? Or, as the kid had asked me, what the hell were we going to do?  I was in some kind of no man’s land, a limbo that I didn’t know how to escape from…

…unless I gave up the case entirely.

That would mean doing what everybody kept telling me to do - go back to General Davidson and very politely and quietly talk him into accepting that his son was dead. That was the easy out. But what if he started asking me what happened to Kraemer and Allen? He had to know they had been killed.

The kid asked me again – what the hell were we going to do?

I didn’t have an answer.

We went back to the motel, where PMA instantly crashed on the bed and caught up on some of the sleep he had missed out on the night before. As for me, I couldn’t nap at that moment even if I was on a date with Bill Cosby and had just sampled one of his special cocktails. I was having an existential crisis, I didn’t know where I was or who I was anymore. I sure as hell wouldn’t have taken on this job if I had known I’d get caught in the middle of some weird top-secret death squad shit.

I missed my apartment, where undoubtedly UPS had been repeatedly trying to deliver my new
Fantastic Four
trade paperback which reprinted issues forty through fifty-five, perhaps Lee-Kirby’s finest run on the comic, including the introduction of Galactus, eater of worlds.

More importantly, I missed Jules - and thinking about her made me feel like a giant piece of shit. Her operation was in a week and I had just completely thrown her always-tentative emotional equilibrium into a tailspin by taking on this insane assignment.

General Davidson sent me out his door with a sense of duty – but that sense of duty was very quickly dissipating in a cloud of psycho killers and official deceptions. I didn’t need this. I didn’t need any of this. This wasn’t the time in my life where I wanted to transform into Max Danger, solver of deadly mysteries.

I had to get out of this.

And Howard had to be the guy to cut the cord for me. He got me in, now he needed to take me out. As I watched the kid sleeping, I couldn’t believe how many times I had risked his life – not to mention mine – on this quixotic quest that only led to a guy with half a face and a twisted heart.

It was time to stop playing Secret Agent Man.

I picked up my magic CIA phone and went out to the motel’s pool area. As it was late afternoon in early May, I’d have all the privacy I wanted – and I could make the call without waking up the kid, who would undoubtedly try to talk me out of what I was going to say. I laid back on the dirt-caked lounge in front of the empty pool and hit Howard’s number.

“Yeah?” came his voice on the line. It sounded tight.

“I’m in Milwaukee.”

“What happened?”

“It doesn’t matter. I’m through.”

“Through?”

“I want you to get me out of this. Now. I’m agreeing with you. I’m in way over my head. So – how do we do this?”

“You want to get out of this.” I heard another voice in the room. And then Howard said, “Hang on a second.”

He began quietly talking to whoever else was there. I couldn’t hear what he was saying, but who would he be telling all this to? I heard him hand over the phone, so I wouldn’t have to wait long to find out.

“M-Max…?” said that other person.

Oh, shit.

Mr. Barry Filer.

Oh, Howard.

“If you w-want to wrap this up, we’re amenable to doing that.”

“How nice for you,” I said with steam coming out of my ears. “Does that mean you’re sending over a couple of guys with a body bag to take me home in?”

“Th-there’s no need to be unpleasant, Max. Y-you know, y-you haven’t been in contact with me…”

“Because the fucking PHONE you gave me was tracking me everywhere I went! Because the fucking FLASH DRIVE you gave me was loaded with spyware! Because the fucking CREDIT CARD you gave me left you a beautiful paper trail! Because YOU SET ME UP. So I’m glad you’re ready to wrap this up – I AM TOO.”

I heard him make one of his almost burps and then I went on.

“By the way, what’s your real name, Barry? I couldn’t find you in the phone book.”

“M-Max, we’re fine with ending this contract and we’ll even pay you the rest of your fee, but we n-need you to make one last stop.”

“So the body bag’s not coming to me, I have to go to the body bag?”

“I assure you, y-y-you will not be harmed in any way.”

“Said the man who has done nothing but lie to me.”

“I-I really haven’t, Max, if you want to review…”

“I don’t. Let’s just call it a day. I keep the half you paid me and I get to go home and not get killed.”

Pause.

“I need you to travel to a specific address in Montana, I-I-I’ll text you the address…”

“
Montana
?”

“I’ll be meeting with you there…”

“You want me to pay a call on Dark Sky? Am I correct?”

“I expect you to finish out the c-c-contracted job.”

“Do you think I’m crazy? Well, obviously you do. You just invited me to my own murder.”

“I-i-it’s not in anyone’s interests to kill you, Max. That’s why you’re not dead. Go to Montana and it will all be over.”

He hung up.

It will all be over. What the fuck did those words mean?

I looked at the empty pool ten feet away from me and considered what sound my skull would make while hitting the bottom of it.

“He told you to go to Montana?”

The kid was awake. Wide awake after I told him about the next destination.

“Yeah, and he promised I won’t get hurt.”

“You believe him?”

“Good question.” I sort of did, but no part of my heart, soul or brain felt good about going to Montana. Just thinking about it made me feel choked off by an overpowering darkness. And I wasn’t the only one. For the first time, I saw real fear in the kid’s eyes.

“I bet I know who we’ll find there,” he said.

“Maybe, maybe not. We should let your mother know where you are.”

He understood the subtext of that statement.

“If you’re going, I’m going.”

“Did I say I was going?”

“If you’re going, I’m going.”

I knew how good the kid was at arguing he was going someplace where the other person said he wasn’t going and I wasn’t in the mood to spend a few hours playing “You Say the Opposite.” So I dropped the argument for the moment and wrote out the information Mr. Barry Filer had texted me on the cheap motel notepad.

I then moved over to the Chromebook and checked the address into Google maps. The location was a few hours north of Missoula, above the Flathead Reservation, in the middle of fucking nowhere. I had a hunch the town, named Sonnenrad, would make Booneville seem like Manhattan. It lay at the edge of the Rockies, not far from the Canadian border. Anything would be game up there and I had a hunch that’s exactly why Dark Sky had picked this particular location for the Black Sun facility.

The kid stared at me as I stared at the map.

“So – are we going?”

I looked at him.

“No other options are coming to me.”

Yeah, we were going. 

Tuesday morning.

We boarded a flight from Milwaukee to Missoula, which would take a little over five hours. Our shopping bags were beginning to shred, so, the previous evening, I bought the kid and myself a couple of pieces of legitimate luggage. We now had matching carry-ons, which was cute as hell.

I didn’t argue with PMA anymore about him coming along for the ride. He had earned his spot and, besides, as a Davidson blood relative, I thought he had a much better chance of coming out of this in one piece than I did. He even might be an insurance policy for me – they wouldn’t know he was coming and they wouldn’t want anything to happen to him or there would be repercussions.

I was still arguing with myself about taking the ride at all - but, again, I was out of options. Knowing that Howard was now definitely under their thumb removed any chance at a safe harbor for me – and it also explained why, on the call before this last one, Howard had seemed so…
nice
. They trickled out a little information through him to keep me trusting him – which, in turn, enabled him to keep track of what I was doing for them.  

Was I disappointed in Howard? No. Howard was a company man and Howard wanted his pension. If they told him to cut out my liver and cook it for dinner, he would do the decent thing and think about it for a few minutes before he actually went to work on me with a scalpel. Weak people were weak people and you had to expect them to act badly when the hammer came down.

When we arrived in Missoula, it was chilly, still in the thirties at night even though it was late spring. I used my David Muhlfelder credit card to get my sixth rental car and we headed north. It would be dark by the time we got near our destination, so I thought we’d stop and spend the night in beautiful downtown Kalispell at a Hilton Hampton Holiday Inn. I definitely wanted a whole lot of daylight before we entered hell.

After checking in, we went downstairs and across the street to some pizza joint to enjoy what I was calling our Last Supper, a reference the kid didn’t seem to appreciate. At dinner, he wanted to know what my plan was. I had none. He didn’t appreciate that either.