Before Dan could speak, his base commander delivered the finale of the lifechanging trifecta: Whether Dan accepted or rejected the appointment to West Point, his Navy discharge was final.
His father had won.
Coming around the rim of the little cove where the rock layers on the beach were tilted nearly vertically, Dan slowed to run his eyes over the narrow battle zone between the waves and the earth and caught sight of a man and a boy of maybe ten, kneeling around a tide pool. His heart snagged on the scene and he slowed first to a jog, then a fast walk.
At that singular moment, he would have given anything to exchange places with the boy on the beach. Or his father.
West Point had turned him out in time to command a Special Forces unit that made a covert grand tour of North Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia.
Later, he had been assigned to Clark Braxton's regular Army unit to do some training and scouting for potential Special Forces recruits when the now famous shrapnelthrough-the-head incident launched Braxton on a trajectory no one could ever have predicted.
The wind buffeted Dan and chilled his sweaty T-shirt as he gazed at the father and his son poking about in the tide pool. Reluctantly, he turned and resumed his run at a jog.
The shrapnel incident made Braxton and him a popular media duo. While Clarke Braxton thrived on the attention, Gabriel found a graceful exit in a command where publicity equaled failure: Task Force 86M.
Pentagon planners originally envisioned TF86M as a covert team designed to challenge security operations at nuclear power plants and military facilities.
The job of the small groups of the most highly skilled Special Forces members, pulled together from all the military branches and wired into the intelligence community, had been to play the role of terrorists and enemy special-forces teams and attempt security breaches at high-priority targets.
While Dan's tactics stirred a firestorm among facilities embarrassed by their penetrations, it also improved security in places most in need. It also kept base commanders on their toes because nobody wanted to be Dan Gabriel's latest victim.
Many of those embarrassed by Task Force 86M never forgot, and it earned him enemies in high places. But in the early days of Task Force 86M, it didn't take long for the Pentagon brass to recognize Gabriel's task force as the best-trained covert attack team in the armed forces. Under Gabriel's command, TF86M became the "go to" unit for covert action. More important, the location of the unit's HQ allowed Dan to study the ocean. He took classes at nearby Cal Poly and entertained fantasies of retiring to live as a latter-day Doc Ricketts.
But before the dream could spin itself out, Braxton tapped Dan as chief of staff and launched him on another career in the upper echelons of the Pentagon.
On this warm summer morning he gave his best finish-line sprint, trying to outrun the memories as the fence ahead rushed toward him.
The military had sustained him, nourished him. Braxton became the axis about which Dan's life had revolved for decades. But now Braxton had handed him a corrosive order that ate at Dan Gabriel's heart more caustically and painfully than his father's betrayaclass="underline" killing Brad Stone.
Nothing felt right. None of Braxton's arguments had found the usual decisive tipping points in his heart: sacrificing for the greater good, closing off the compartments of a sinking ship, the personal obligations, the hell of war. None of those balanced the acids eating at Dan.
Things had grown worse when he pulled Stone's records. He shared a lot with Stone. They'd been enlisted men, performed some of the same kinds of missions. Stone would have fit in at Task Force 86M but had followed his medical dream instead.
Nothing Dan clutched at justified ending Stone's dream. But if he didn't follow through with Braxtons order, he was pulling the pin on a grenade with national- international implications-it would leave Braxton's career and his reputation mortally wounded, his presidency dead, the nation with no other choice but to choose one of the intellectual pygmies and sleazy political tools who had run a great country into the ground with rancor and self-dealing.
Failure to follow the General this time would be the ultimate career suicide as well. Dan had no friends outside the military, no colleagues not connected with it, no support mechanism. Even more seriously, doing this would create mortal enemies among those he had served for decades. He'd be completely isolated, and he had little doubt his actions would push some over the edge and they would eventually come after him. He'd spend the rest of his life looking over his shoulder.
Gabriel did not stop when he got to the fence where signs warned of dire consequences for trespassers. Instead, he cut sharply up the hill and redoubled his pace, slowing only when he got to the road near the restrooms.
He broke into a fast walk here and followed the road beyond the fence with his eyes, spotting his favorite trail in the forbidden area, the one south of Coon Creek making its way over the ridgeline. His old unit still trained over there; somebody would eventually shoot at him if he tried running the trail now.
The decision about Stone twisted like a blade in his chest. Duty and loyalty struggled with right and wrong. His entire career had been about subordinating free will to the command structure. You could not win a war by allowing soldiers to act on orders or not depending on how they felt about the moral implications.
Despite this, Dan realized then he had to stop letting other people make his decisions. And that came down to his life or Stone's. Nothing could alter that no matter how fast he ran.
CHAPTER 59
In less than ten minutes, we settled Myers on the front-room bed with a quilt and loaded our gear, the sniper's personal effects, and her pistol into his truck. I wanted the M21 but Myers needed it for his case.
With time fast running out on our call to Shanker, Jasmine and I said good-bye, and got in Myers's pickup. I drove us away from the shack.
Jasmine stared straight ahead, alone with her thoughts. Somewhere overhead, the sun burned at the fog, turning it into an omnipresent, white, luminous glare that made me squint through the cross-hatching of my own eyelashes. The glare dimmed as the woods closed in on us again. I followed the road through another bright white clearing and back into the trees.
"What time is it?" I asked.
"Ten fifty-nine."
I slowed the truck where the road widened into a flat area, and suddenly a pale silver SUV emerged from the fog way too fast.
"Damn!" I jammed on the brakes and we skidded to a stop inches behind a Toyota 4Runner parked alongside the road.
"Do you suppose…?" Jasmine bent aver, pulled the rental car keys from the sniper's hat, and held them up. I waved a hand at them and looked at my watch.
"It's eleven," I said. "Got to stick to our mission."
"The number's already punched in." She handed me one of the prepaid cell phones. I pushed the send button and got voice mail on the first ring.
"Listen carefully, I don't have much time," Shanker's voice quavered. "Forget my office. They're watching. We have to do this now. I don't think they're listening to this, but in case they are, here's what you have to remember: your grandfather, the Judge, used to tell a lot of stories about you. One he told over and over concerns how that cotton gin made you wet your pants. Meet me there at three A.M. The moon should be down by then. Make sure you're not followed. Park somewhere away from the place. Meet me at the wagon pass-through."
I waited for the menu options, selected the one for replay, and handed it to Jasmine. I studied the Toyota SUV and a plan emerged.
"That's it?" she said as she pressed the "end" button.