The Night Crew
Authors: Brian Haig
Tags: #Fiction, #Mystery & Detective, #Police Procedural, #Thrillers, #Legal, #Military
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, organizations, places, events, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.
Text copyright © 2015 Brian Haig
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.
Published by Thomas & Mercer, Seattle
Amazon, the Amazon logo, and Thomas & Mercer are trademarks of
Amazon.com
, Inc., or its affiliates.
ISBN-13: 9781477827482
ISBN-10: 147782748X
Cover design by Salamander Hill Design Inc.
Library of Congress Control Number: 2014952439
To Lisa, Brian, Pat, Donnie, and Annie
Contents
Chapter One
“Do you mind?” the attractive lady asked as I sat at a table.
I looked up and answered, somewhat emphatically, “Yes, I do.”
“But you’re alone.”
“No . . . that seat’s taken.”
She either did not hear or chose to ignore me, and slipped comfortably into the chair across from mine. She sipped quietly from her beer.
“Go away,” I told her.
She
was
ignoring me.
“My date’s powdering her nose,” I said, which was true, and, after a moment, I added, less truthfully, “She has a gun permit and psychopathic tendencies.”
My interloper laughed.
We were in the officers’ club at Fort Myer, Virginia, in the basement bar—to be exact, a replica of an old English pub in a stingy, minimalist sort of way. My intruder was dressed in a clingy red pantsuit that went nicely with her long black hair, emerald-green eyes, pale complexion, and lithe, ballerina-like body; I happened to be dressed in natty civilian attire—blue wool suit, red-and-blue striped club tie, starched white shirt—that did not fit in well with our current surroundings.
Around us everybody wore uniforms—a mixture of mostly senior army officers, a few generals, more than a few colonels and majors. All were men, mostly gray or graying, talking quietly about serious topics and nursing their drinks. But at the next table, drinking more ambitiously, and rambunctiously, were several younger officers: lieutenants and captains with shoulder patches from the Third Infantry—aka, the Old Guard.
The younger officers now were carefully observing my guest. I suggested to her, “They look horny and interested.” I started to stand. “Here, I’ll introduce—”
She grabbed my arm and inquired, not quietly, “Wait, didn’t I give you my phone number?” More loudly, she answered her own question. “Yes, I’m sure . . . I definitely did.”
“Did you?”
“I’m certain I left it on your bedside table the last time I saw you.”
“I don’t remember.”
“You don’t remember?”
Officers at nearby tables now were also staring in our direction. Katherine Carlson, incidentally, was a civilian attorney, formerly a classmate of yours truly at Georgetown Law, and as indicated by our present circumstance, at times she can be a king-size pain in the ass.
She and I had worked together on a court martial a few years before, in Korea. It was a legal and emotional tar pit, a public relations tinderbox, and, if that weren’t bad enough, people had tried to kill me.
But Katherine is a crackerjack lawyer—smart, ruthless, compulsively ambitious—and when she chooses to be, which is most of the time, pushy and dangerously manipulative. Also, she’s a left-wing menace and the aforementioned last time I saw her I was lying in a hospital bed with a bullet in my stomach. Katherine didn’t put the bullet there herself; it wouldn’t have gotten there without her, though.
I got up and moved to the bar carrying my Scotch on the rocks. The bartender, who had the rugged face and stringent butch cut of a moonlighting sergeant, observed, “Looks like you got lady trouble, fella.”
“What was your first clue?”
“Two broads at once.” He wiped a rag across the bar. “Ask me, that’s trouble.”
To which I replied, man to man, “Nothing I can’t handle.”
He laughed. He then nodded in Katherine’s direction. “Well . . . ask me, she’s purtier’n that other one.”
In the right light, in fact, Katherine looked not merely pretty, but beautiful in a way that is often described as angelic. I suppose this is why people are so surprised when she kneecaps them. “She’s the Antichrist,” I informed him. He laughed. Why doesn’t anybody take me seriously?
I sipped my Scotch and, through the bar mirror, kept one eye on Katherine at the table and the other on the ladies’ room door.
The lady in the latrine, Julie DuBois, and I were on our first date after three weeks of shameless flirting. I’m about forty, Julie’s about thirty—a PhD in English lit, a professor at American University, learned, tenured, brilliant, blonde, blue-eyed—and, not that it matters, also quite attractive.
I had been looking forward to this date for a week; I really wanted to get Julie’s take on Marcel Proust’s persistent use of subordinate clauses, a literary mystery I can never seem to get out of my mind—and yes, Julie was having trouble believing that, too. But men who date women for their looks alone are pigs.
But to be sure I mentioned it, Julie hds remarkable legs.
The bartender broke the silence and, with a nod of his chin, informed me, “Course that other one’s a looker, too. That blonde, I mean.”
“She’s smart, also,” I assured him.
“Uh-huh. Well . . . cain’t underrate that. Sure got nice legs.” Another liberated male.
I was about to ask for a refill before he wandered off, apparently to the jukebox, because a moment later Steven Stills was belting out “Love the One You’re With.” This song is in every officers’ club bar I’ve ever been in, for some reason, and a pair of baby-faced lieutenants at the next table got into the spirit and began a slurred, off-kilter sing-along before a grumpy senior officer snapped at them and they shut up. Were we having fun, or what?
When I was a younger officer, officers’ club bars were different: in some ways, better; in other ways, I suppose not. Strippers did the bump-and-grind on small stages and enough cheap rotgut was guzzled to float the fleet, accompanied by enough cigarette and cigar smoke to fuel an artillery duel. Friday nights were command performances, wild bacchanalias with drunken lieutenants launching carrier landings on beer-drenched tables, and tipsy colonels gyrating on stages beside ladies wearing loincloths, nipple pasties, and come-hither smiles.
Upstairs, in the dining rooms, officers acting every inch the gentlemen shared sedate meals and polite conversation with their families; downstairs, in the darkened bars, the barbarians ruled.
No sign over the entrance read “Eat, drink, and make merry, for tomorrow you may die”; clearly, though, this was the animating spirit and the army’s upper ranks, who were too old to share in the festivities, or too stodgy to want to, were surprisingly indifferent, or I suppose, indulgent.
But warrior tribes need their manhood rituals. The Greeks sacrificed animals to their gods. The Mayans tore out human hearts for their gods. The Indians took scalps for their squaws.
All things considered, genuflecting before the porcelain gods in officers’ club latrines was no big deal.
And in a deadly serious profession where young men were forced to shoulder outsized responsibilities, officers’ clubs were the last asylum where boys could be boys and more arthritic warriors could revert back to boys, no questions asked.
The order to sexually integrate the force put an end to all that, of course. Female officers were not amused by drooling senior officers stuffing soggy dollar bills into G-strings, or, I suppose, by randy, besotted peers trying to stuff bills into
their
undies.
Times change.
Today, officers’ club bars are monuments to gentility where your priggish grandmother would feel right at home—or a slightly liberal academic with nice gams, as was my case that evening. And today’s army has become a sexually homogenized, happily integrated force, half a million brothers- and sisters-in-arms who live, eat, work, train, and fight wars together—all for one, one for all, e pluribus unum, Army Strong—and if you don’t peer hard enough beneath the surface, you could almost believe it.
For that, at least, was the party line—though unknown to me at that moment, not a five-minute walk from where I stood sipping my Scotch at that bar, sat a young lady in a small room, accused of crimes that threatened to upend that Utopian myth, facing charges that endangered the very fabric of military order and discipline, even as they shattered the nobility of a war in a faraway land. On a more pertinent note, the bartender returned and graciously topped off my Scotch.
He motioned with his jaw. “Guess you didn’t see what happened ’hind yer back ’fore you came up here, fella.”
When I failed to respond to that surreptitious observation, he informed me, “That purty blonde, she left.”
“Yes, I did miss that.”
“Uh-huh, thought so. Tore outta that latrine like her panties was biting her ass.”
I took my drink and wandered back to the table, and to Katherine.
She smiled at me; I smiled back. I stopped smiling. “What did you do, or say, to Julie in the ladies’ room?”
“I have no idea what you’re talking about.”
“Tell me, Katherine.”
“There’s nothing to tell. I merely introduced myself.”
“No, really.”
“We shared a brief, entirely mundane conversation.”
Katherine is a lawyer, as I said, and she doesn’t lie; the truth, however, after it passes through her lips can be unrecognizable. “Introduced yourself as who?”
“I don’t remember . . . exactly.”
“Settle for inexactly.”
“I think . . . All right, I may have said I was Katherine Drummond.”
She coolly turned her attention back to her beer and I turned my attention to the soccer match on the big-screen TV, which was my way of not strangling her in front of so many witnesses.
We stayed silent awhile, she and I, as I contemplated our history, our present, and maybe our future together, which possibly included a murder. It definitely didn’t include the title Mrs. Drummond.
Though I was dressed in mufti, I’m a lieutenant colonel by rank, Sean Drummond by name, formerly an infantry officer—Airborne, Ranger, Pathfinder, Special Forces, and all that—before I failed to dodge a few bullets and involuntarily sacrificed my spleen for my country. I didn’t complain then and I’m not complaining now; those who’ve experienced a close brush with death, and live to complain, don’t.
In fact, had one of those bullets struck an inch or two lower, Sean Drummond wouldn’t need zippers on his trousers. It was that close. Remarking on my good fortune, the doc at Walter Reed actually informed me, “Medically speaking, both are optional organs. You can still live a long, happy life without a spleen. Without a dick, life just seems much longer. God loves you, son.”
Amen, Doc.
So these days, I’m an army attorney and a happy urinal user, though at that moment, I was seconded, or loaned—or perhaps banished—to a cell in the Central Intelligence Agency. This cell is called the Office of Special Projects, and though its purpose sounds somewhat innocuous, what it actually does is cover the ass of the CIA director. What the pride of the US Army JAG corps was doing in that job was a more interesting question I was still trying to figure out. This, however, explained my civilian attire and my civilian attitude.
The only thing missing was my license to kill—a good thing for you-know-who.
But with the Global War on Terrorism going full-bore, including wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, the work is fairly interesting and at times even exciting, though being in the CIA there’s a real chance of dying of boredom from all the PowerPoint briefings and meetings.
To be truthful, I was experiencing a little cultural dislocation. I mean, the spooks are okay people, and they treat me well enough; we just don’t
think
alike. When I see a nail, I reach for a hammer. They study the nail and obsess over whether it might actually be, or could possibly be turned into, a bolt or a screw, and then they try playing mind games. As often as not, the nail screws them.
My musings were interrupted by my unwelcome guest. “Do you want to kill me?”
“We’re beyond that, Katherine. I’m deciding where to hide your corpse.”
“She had to go, Sean. We need to talk.” She looked me in the eye and stipulated, “Alone.”
“I’d rather drink.” I met her stare and stipulated back, “Alone.”
“I see you haven’t changed.”
“Neither have you, Katherine. You should work on that.”
She smiled. “Is that any way to speak to your adoring wife?”
“If you were my wife, I’d put poison in my morning coffee.”
“No,” she told me. “I would happily do it for you.”
“Touché.”
Back to me. During most of my military legal career, I have been a prosecutor and a defense attorney, specializing in cases where the victim or accused was assigned to classified units. Usually this means Special Ops types and, in those cases, the clandestine nature of their work needs to be protected through legal proceedings that never see the light of day. These are not Star Chambers or anything draconian like that; they are normal military courts, except you won’t see the verdict in the morning papers.
Katherine had her hand up for another beer. “It’s late,” I observed. “Isn’t it past your bedtime?”
“Didn’t you miss me?”
“How can I miss you if you won’t go away?”
“Isn’t that the title of a country song?”
“Here’s a better one. If the phone don’t ring, you’ll know it’s me.”
She laughed.
To tell the truth, I missed The Work, as we called it. Special Ops types tend to be older, bolder, clever, and certainly colorful. In fact, many are trained to be master criminals, and sometimes the professional bleeds over into the personal, and when that happens, their offenses tend to be far more flamboyant and cunning than your typical GI, who usually commits mundane crimes and leaves behind a treasure trove of clues, fingerprints, fibers, DNA traces, and so forth. I mean, a lot of these people, they knot their own nooses in triplicate. But you can’t believe some of the stuff the Special Ops types do, how sneaky, how ballsy, how wily.
Katherine’s legal specialty is, or perhaps, was, military gay cases. More than a job, that was her calling; at least, it was the last time I saw her. “Don’t ask, don’t tell,” was shorthand for the existing policy and Katherine was an attack dog, devoted to using the courts to amend that to “Ask away, sailor; I’m dying to tell.”
The lefties and tree-huggers and whale-savers hung her photos above their beds.
But when the laws are written against you, losing is par for the course, even though she made sure the army victories were pyhrric. Her bills and expenses were paid by a public interest group and for a lady who graduated number one in her class from Georgetown Law, the pay sucked and there were no benefits.