Last Man Standing by David Baldacci
inside the fence and sat atop the team’s sole armored personnel carrier, a hand-me-down gift from the Army. His gaze swept across the row of parked Suburbans. The vehicles had been reconfigured with ladder packages such that they could drive right up to a building and extend the ladder and go knock-knock-surprise! on the fifth floor of some criminal’s lair. There were mount-out trucks that carried their gear, Jet Skis, food service trucks and a rigid-hull boat with inflatable gunnels that had been designed by Navy SEALs. The thing had twin Chrysler V-8s whose effect Web could only equate to being inside a building while it was being demolished via wrecking ball. He had ridden in it on numerous occasions—or more aptly had survived it.
They had it all here, from equipment for jungle assaults to arctic expeditions. They trained for every contingency, put everything they had into the work. And yet they could still be beaten by coincidence, by the blundering luck of inferior opponents or by the skillful planning and insider knowledge of a traitor.
It started to rain, so Web ducked inside the training facility, which was a large warehouse-style building with long corridors to simulate hallways in hotels and moveable, rubber-coated walls. It was very much like a Hollywood studio back lot. If they were lucky enough to get the blueprints of a target, HRT would reconstruct it on-site here and train within exact parameters. The last set they had built here was for the operation where Charlie had ceased to be. As Web studied this configuration, it hadn’t occurred to him that he would never see the insides of the actual target for real. They had never even gotten to the front door. He hoped they would tear out the guts of this place soon, get it ready for the next operation. The result couldn’t be any worse, could it?
The rubber-coated walls here absorbed the slugs, for HRT often practiced with live fire. Stairways were made of wood that would not allow ricochets; however, the team had discovered, fortunately without serious injury, that the nails in the wood could catch a bullet and send it on to unintended places. He passed by the aircraft fuselage mockup that had been constructed so they could practice on skyjacking scenarios. It hung from the rafters and could be raised or lowered for training purposes.
How many imaginary terrorists had he shot down in here? The training had paid off, for he had done it for real when an American airliner had been stormed in Rome. The terrorists had ordered the plane flown to Turkey and then on to Manila. Web and crew had gone wheels up at Andrews Air Force base within two hours of learning of the skyjacking. They had followed the hijacked plane’s movements from their airborne perch in an USAF C141. On the ground at Manila where the jetliner was being refueled, the terrorists had tossed out two dead hostages, both Americans, one of them a four-year-old girl. A political statement, they proudly announced. It was the last one they would ever make.
The hijacked plane’s takeoff had been delayed first by weather and then by mechanical failure. At around midnight local time, Web and his Charlie Team had boarded the plane disguised as mechanics. Three minutes after they got on the plane, there were five dead terrorists and no more slain hostages. Web had shot one of them with his .45 directly through the diet Coke can the guy had been holding up to his mouth. To this day he still couldn’t drink the stuff. Yet he never regretted pulling the trigger. The image of an innocent little girl’s body on the tarmac—American, Iranian, Japanese, it didn’t matter to Web—was all the motivation he would ever need to keep pulling the trigger at rank evil. These guys could claim all the geopolitical oppression in the world, call upon all the grand and omniscient deities in their religious warehouses, make every half-assed justification they wanted to, so they could detonate their bombs and fire their weapons, and none of it meant a damn thing to Web when they started killing innocent people, and in particular kids. And he would fight them for as long as they wanted to perform their perverted little dance of sin and mayhem across the globe, for wherever they could go, so could he.
Web moved through small rubber-walled rooms where posters of bad guys pointing guns at him hung on support poles. He instinctively drew a bead with his finger and blew them away. With an armed person you always keyed on hands, not the eyes, because no one in history had ever been killed by a pair of eyes. As he lowered his “gun,” Web had to smile. It was all so easy when no one was actually firing at you. In other rooms were the heads and upper torsos of dummies on poles, their “skin” and bulk replicating that of a real human. Web threw side kicks to their heads followed by a series of paralyzing kidney punches and then moved on.
From inside one room he heard some movement and looked in. The man there had on a tank shirt and cammie pants and was wiping the sweat from his muscular neck, shoulders and arms. Long ropes dangled from the ceiling. This was one of the rooms where the men practiced their fast-roping skills. Web watched as the man went up and down three times with graceful, fluid motions, cords of muscles in his arms and shoulders tensing and then relaxing.
When the man finished, Web stepped inside and said, “Hey, Ken, don’t you ever take a day off?”
Ken McCarthy looked over at Web and his gaze was not exactly what Web would have called friendly. McCarthy was one of the snipers who had been overhead along the alley the night Charlie Team had disappeared under the wave of .50s. McCarthy was black, thirty-four years of age, a Texan by birth as well as an Army brat who had seen the world on Uncle Sam’s dime. He was a former SEAL yet did not exude the flagrant cockiness that most SEALs tended to. Only five-ten, he could bench-press a truck and held advanced multidegree black belts in three different martial arts. He was the most skilled water operator HRT had, and he could also place a bullet between a person’s eyes at a thousand yards in the dead of night while straddling a tree limb. A three-year veteran of HRT, he was quiet, kept mostly to himself and lacked the ghoulish sense of humor that most operators had. Web had taught him things McCarthy hadn’t known or was having trouble picking up, and in return McCarthy had shared some of his remarkable skills with Web. To Web’s knowledge McCarthy had never had a problem with him, yet the man’s look right now possibly heralded an end to that streak. Maybe Romano had turned everyone against him.
“What’re you doing here, Web? Figured you’d still be in the hospital nursing your injuries.”
Web took another step toward the man. He didn’t like Mc-Carthy’s tone or words, yet he could understand where they were coming from. Web could also understand where Romano was coming from too; it was just that sort of a place. You were expected to do your job, perfectly. Perfection was all they asked for here. Web hadn’t come close. Sure he had knocked out the guns, after the fact. That counted for zip with these men.
“I take it you saw it all.”
McCarthy slipped off a pair of workout gloves and rubbed his thick, heavily callused fingers. “Would’ve fast-roped down to the alley, but TOC told us to sit tight.”
“There was nothing you could do, Ken.”
McCarthy was still looking at his feet. “Finally got the go-ahead. Took too long. Hooked up with Hotel. Took damn way too long,” he said again. “We kept stopping, trying to raise you guys on the mic. TOC didn’t know what the hell was going on. Our chain of command sort of broke down. Guess you knew that.”
“We were prepared for everything except what went down.”
McCarthy sat on the rubber mat floor and drew his knees up. He glanced up at Web. “Heard you were a little late coming out of the alley and that you kind of fell down or something.”
Or something. He sat down next to McCarthy. “The guns were triggered by a laser, but the laser was probably activated by a remote so the fifties wouldn’t kick on prematurely and hit the wrong target. Somebody had to be around there to do that.” Web let that last statement hang as his gaze remained on McCarthy.
“I’ve already talked to WFO.”
“I’m sure.”
“It’s an ongoing AFO, Web,” he said. An AFO was an investigation of an assault on a federal officer, actually lots of them in this case.
“I know all
McCarthy lifted his head and his hostile look faded.
“There was nothing to shoot, Web. There wasn’t a damn thing for the snipers to blow away; all that training and no party to show it off at. We had three guys on the buildings overlooking the courtyard and not one of them could get even a decent bead on the mini-guns. Hell, they were afraid to fire because they thought one of their ricochets might nail you.”
“How about the kid? Did you see the kid?”
“The little black kid? Yeah, when he came down the alley, with your cap and the note.”
“We passed him going in too.”
“You guys must have blocked our view. And the light in that alley really reflected weird up where we were.”
“Okay, how about the other guys? The dudes doing the drugs?” “We had a sniper on them the whole time. They never left where they were until the firing started, then they took off running. Jeffries said they seemed as surprised as anybody. When TOC gave us the green light, we took off.”
“What happened then?”
“Hooked up with Hotel, like I said. We saw the flare, stopped, fanned out. Then the kid came to us. We got the note, your warning. Everett and Palmer went forward as scouts. Too damn late.” McCarthy paused here, and Web saw a single tear slide down the man’s youthful, handsome features; normal features like what Web had once possessed.
“I never heard gunfire like that in my life, Web. I’ve never felt helpless like that in my whole life.”
“You did your job, Ken, and that’s all you can do.” Web paused and then said, “They can’t seem to find the kid. Know anything about that?”
McCarthy shook his head. “Couple guys from Hotel took charge of him. Romano and Cortez, I think.”
Romano again. Shit, that meant Web had to go talk to the man. “What’d you do?”
“I went into the courtyard with some of the others. We saw you, but you were out of it.” He looked down again. “And we saw the rest of Charlie.” He glanced at Web. “A couple of the snipers told me how you went back out there, Web. They saw what you did and still can’t believe you did it. Said you must have the luck of the Irish somewhere in your back pocket to have gone back out there. I don’t think I could have.”
“Yes you would, Ken. And you would’ve done it better than me.” McCarthy seemed startled at this praise.
“After you came back out of the courtyard, did you see the kid?”
McCarthy thought about this. “I remember him sitting on a trash can. By that time, everybody was showing up.”
“Did you see any suits take custody of the kid?”
McCarthy thought again. “No, I sort of recall Romano talking to somebody, but that’s all.”
“Did you recognize any of them?”
“You know we don’t interface with the regulars that much.”
“How about DEA?”
“That’s all I can tell you, Web.”
“You been talking to Romano?”
“A little.”
“Don’t believe everything you hear, Ken. It’s not healthy.”
“Including from you?” McCarthy asked pointedly.
“Including from me.”
As Web drove away from Quantico, he realized he had a lot of ground to cover. This was officially not his investigation, yet in some ways it was more his than anyone else’s. But he had to take care of something else first, something even more important than finding out who had set up his team. And finding out what had happened to a little boy with a bullet hole on his cheek and no shirt to his name.
6
Six funerals. Web attended six funerals over three days. By the fourth one, he couldn’t muster a single tear. He walked into the church or the funeral home and listened to people he mostly didn’t know talk about fallen men he knew better than he understood himself in some ways. It was as though all of his nerves had been boiled away, along with part of his soul. In a way he felt incapable of reacting as he was supposed to. He was terrified he would start laughing when he should be mourning.
At the services half the caskets were open, the rest not. Some of the dead men had fared better with the size and placement of the wounds that had killed them and thus had open caskets. However, staring at pale, collapsed faces and rigid, shrunken bodies in metal boxes, inhaling flower fragrance and hearing the sobs of all those around him made Web wish he could just lie down in a box too and be put away in the ground to hide forever. The funeral of a hero; there were far worse ways to be remembered.
He had wrapped his hand back up in the layers of gauze because he felt guilty walking among the bereaved without a trace of a wound. It was a pathetic thing to be concerned with, he knew, yet he felt like a walking slap in the face to the survivors. All they really knew was that Web London had somehow gotten off with barely a scratch. Had he run? Had he left his comrades to die? He could see those questions in some of the people’s faces. Was that always the fate of the sole survivor?
The funeral processions had passed between endless lines of men and women in uniform and hundreds of others dressed in the neat suits and sensible shoes of the FBI. Motorcycles led the way, citizens lined the streets and flags everywhere flew at half mast. The President and most of his Cabinet came, along with many other VIPs. For a few days, the entire world talked of nothing else except the slaughter of six good men in an alley. Not much was said about the seventh man, and for that Web was mostly grateful. Still, he wondered how long that moratorium could possibly last for him.
The city of Washington was deeply stricken. And it was not entirely over the fate of the slain men, for the broader implications were troubling. Had criminals really become so brazen? Was society coming apart at the seams? Were the police not keeping pace? Was American law enforcement’s crown jewel, the FBI, losing its luster? The Middle Eastern and Chinese news services were having a particularly delicious time reporting yet another example of Western mayhem that would one day bring arrogant America to its soft knees. Cheers were no doubt racing up and down the streets of Baghdad, Teheran, Pyongyang and Beijing at the thought of the old USA falling apart one miserable media-fueled crisis at a time. The pundits on American soil were spouting so many absurd scenarios that Web no longer even opened a newspaper or turned on a TV or radio. If anyone had asked him, though, he would have said that the whole world, and not just the United States, had been screwed up for a long time.
There had been some relief from this crossfire, though its catalyst was another appalling tragedy. A Japanese commercial jetliner had crashed off the Pacific Coast, so the newsmongers had chased after that story and left the alley and its dead behind for now. A single news truck was still there, but scraps of three hundred bodies floating in the ocean was a far bigger draw than a days-old story about a team of dead FBI agents. And for that Web was also grateful. Leave us alone to grieve in peace.
He had been debriefed “uptown” at the Hoover Building and at the WFO on three different occasions, by several teams of investigators. They had their pads and pencils, their recorders and some of the younger agents even had laptops. They had asked Web many more questions than he had answers for. However, when he told each group that he didn’t know why he had frozen and then fallen, the pencils had stopped scribbling on paper, fingers had stopped clacking on keyboards.
“When you say you froze, did you see something? Hear something to make you do that?” The man spoke in a monotone, which, to Web, was one imperceptible inflection short of incredulity or, worse, outright disbelief.
“I don’t really know.”
“You really don’t know? You’re not sure if you froze?”
“I’m not sure. I mean, I did. I couldn’t move. It was like I was paralyzed.”
“But you
“Yes,” Web conceded.
“What had changed to allow you to do that?”
“I don’t know.”
“And when you got to the courtyard, you fell?”
“That’s right.”
“Right before the guns opened fire,” said another investigator. Web could barely hear his own answer. “Yes.”
The silence that followed these meager responses came close to dissolving Web’s already bludgeoned insides.
During each debriefing, Web had kept his hands on top of the table, his gaze steady on each questioner’s face, his posture in a slight forward lean. These men were all professional, seasoned inquisitors. Web knew that if he looked away, sat back, rubbed his head the wrong way or, worse yet, crossed his arms, they would instantly conclude he was a lying sack of shit. Web wasn’t being untruthful, but he wasn’t telling all of the truth either. Yet if Web started talking about how the vision of a little boy had had a weird effect on him, perhaps inexplicably caused him to freeze, thus saving his life—or about then feeling weighed down as though encased in concrete and then seconds later being able to freely move—he would be finished at the Bureau. The higher-ups tended to frown on field agents making insane comments. Yet he had one thing going for him. Those machine gun nests didn’t disintegrate by themselves. And his rifle rounds were embedded in all of them. And the snipers had seen everything, and he had warned Hotel Team and saved the boy on top of it. Web made sure he said that. He made sure all of them knew that. You can kick me while I’m down, friends, just not too hard. I’m a damn hero after all.
“I’ll be all right,” Web had told them. “I just need a little time. I’ll be all right.” And for one awful moment Web thought that might be the first actual lie he had told all day.
They would call him back in as needed, they told him. For now, they just wanted him to do nothing. He was to take plenty of time to get himself together. The Bureau had offered the assistance of a counselor, a mental health professional, in fact they had insisted on it, and Web said he would go, although there was still a stigma at the Bureau for those seeking such help. When things looked okay, Web was told, he would be assigned to another assaulter or sniper team, if he so desired, until Charlie could be rebuilt. If not, he could take another position within the Bureau. There was even talk of allowing him to burn an “office of preference” transfer that would allow him to proceed directly to “Go” in the form of an office he would retire from. That sort of treatment was usually