Golden said nothing as they walked down the corridor to a locked door. She had no doubt her work here had been the subject of much talk and her abrupt departure cause for even more tongues to wag. And there had probably been words spoken about her brief relationship with Sam Cranston. It hadn’t been any different at the FBI: in a male-dominated profession, the actions of every woman were watched most closely.
A sign above the door read: SOCOM G-1: Personnel. Taggart swiped a coded card through the lock and it disengaged. He swung the door open and they entered a large room full of desks with computers on them. A nerve center of Army bureaucracy. Except in this case it was highly classified bureaucracy.
One thing that had surprised Golden when she worked in this building was the amazingly low tooth-to-tail ratio in the Army: the number of soldiers with boots on the ground actually able to engage the enemy as opposed to the number of soldiers who spent their time supporting those on the ground. There were almost four of the latter for every one of the former. She’d found that those men who volunteered for Special Operations training often were leaving regular Army units because of their intense desire to be ‘where the action is’. In many cases, their wishes were not granted as they were assigned duty to a desk pushing paper or, in the modern age, electronic data through a computer.
“If you tell me what you’re looking for, perhaps I can help?” Taggart offered.
Golden pulled her laptop out. “I just need to be patched in to your most current personnel database.”
“We can use my desk,” Taggart said. He led her over to his computer. It took only a minute to patch the laptop in to the system via a USB port.
Golden brought up her profiling predictor program. She began down-loading the thousands of personnel files. “Is there a way to cross-reference people who worked together?”
Taggart nodded. “I can group-tag them according to assignments.”
“Do that. Then I’ll load that program.” She had been thinking about what they knew about the targets — perps, she mentally chided herself, surprised she was falling into Gant-speak in her thoughts. “Also, you have access to their medical records, right?”
“Yes.”
“I need a listing of anyone with a hand prostheses. Also face scarring.”
Taggart sat at his computer and began typing. Golden watched the indicator on her laptop showing the progress of the download. She glanced over at Taggart. He was engrossed in his own task. As the download continued, given that she was hooked into the G-1 database, she began to type commands into her computer. Commands that had nothing to do with the task at hand.
Gant looked at the fourteen-foot high statue of ‘Bronze Bruce’ as he pulled up to the front of the new headquarters for Special Operations Command. “Wait in the car,” he ordered Cranston.
“Hold on here—“ Cranston began to protest, but a glare from Gant was enough to silence him. As insurance, Gant took the keys with him as he got out of the car. The Colonel had added nothing of note during the drive but Gant could almost feel the angst coming off the man as he thought back on his past and what might have caused the current situation. Gant still believed Cranston was lying to him about something.
Pausing in front of the statue, Gant remembered when it had been on main post, next to the old JFK Special Warfare Museum and across the street from the Special Warfare Center headquarters. Few in Special Forces felt any special affinity for the somewhat less than manly looking statue. However, Gant paused and looked at the bronze plaques bolted to the low concrete wall behind the statue and felt the stirrings of feelings long buried. On them were listed the names of those Special Operations men who had died in combat since Vietnam. It was a long list for a country that considered itself to have been primarily at peace since the end of that conflict, at least until the last couple of years. He noted that several new plaques had been bolted on since the dual invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan.
He walked to the left, going back in time and saw the names of the two Delta Force operators who'd been killed in Mogadishu trying to rescue a downed helicopter crew from Task Force 160. He wondered how many civilians even remembered that failed peace-keeping effort or the videos of the bodies being dragged through the streets. Gant remembered it most clearly, most often when he wished he wouldn't. He knew Nero believed that the war on terrorism had really thrown down the gauntlet there, when the bad guys, particularly Osama Bin Laden, believed the withdrawal meant the US was weak when it pulled out after that debacle.
He scanned the names, looking for those of other men he had known. Men who had died on missions with him or in the same area of operations. He spotted a few, the places and occasions of their death as listed in the bronze letters a blatant lie in some cases. At least the names were there though, which was more than could be said about some of the men who had disappeared or died on classified missions in places they weren’t supposed to be. Men who had died in places that the US government would never acknowledge they had sent American fighting men to or on missions that could never be acknowledged as being sponsored by the United States. Men whose families had been told that they had died during training accidents. A surprising number of special operations helicopters had crashed at sea and the bodies never recovered. Which was another reason he didn’t quite believe Cranston’s story. If the story about that three man team was a cover-up, then they should have come up with some original cover-story rather than the tried and true chopper crash.
He scanned until he found three names dated the previous year. Died in a helicopter crash during training:
Joseph Lutz
Michael Payne
Lewis Forten
Gant noted that they were all Army and the plaque indicated they had been assigned to 7th Special Forces Group. Location of death was listed as Panama. He also noticed that on the day listed there was no corresponding loss of pilots from Task Force 160. It was possible that the chopper had been flown by a non-Special Operations crew or even been a Panamanian or Colombian army helicopter. Possible, but not likely.
Gant ran a finger inside the collar of his black t-shirt, uncomfortable out of uniform in this spot. He felt awkward, out of place. He had not expected this feeling, but standing here at Fort Bragg where he had spent quite a bit of his time in uniform, in front of the names of the dead, he knew he no longer fit. He'd lost something and he wasn't quite sure what it was.
Ghosts. Gant could feel them. He checked the rest of the wall and, as he had expected, his brother’s name was not there. He knew his own name would never be up there either. Once one went into the darkness of the Cellar, they disappeared from even the shadow world of Special Operations Command. Even the CIA had the gold stars in its lobby for agents lost in the line of duty even if it didn’t list all the names. The Cellar was darkness, absolute and final. Other than Nero and Bailey, Gant had rarely met other operatives of the Cellar and then only when a mission absolutely required it.
Gant had no idea how big the Cellar was or how many people were in its employ. From his experience he knew that anyone who worked for the Cellar in the field was an operative, not a support person. For support, the Cellar could always turn to other government agencies where its classification and rank could draw whatever was needed.
Gant strode up the walk, ignoring a colonel who was coming the other way and fighting back the instinct to salute. Even though it was night-time, there were a lot of lights burning in the building and the parking lot was half full. SOCOM units ran missions all around the world so it was a 24/7 operation. Gant pushed open the door to the building and stepped into the lobby. Two turnstiles filled up the way to the left of the guard desk. An elderly black man in a contract security company uniform looked at Gant, noted that he didn't have a badge clipped to his pocket as everyone else in sight did, and motioned for him to come over.