“Should’ve taken the shot,” Lantini lamented, sitting in Fort Sherman, Panama, tantamount to a traitor. “Should’ve taken the damn shot!” he added and hurled the beer bottle into the yawning bay.
He grabbed his AK-47 and walked toward the cinderblock hut where Sung had recently held his meeting.
What to do? Lantini mused. What to do?
Interrupting his reverie was a vibration on his satellite phone.
“Wood,” he said.
“Wood,” came the response.
“Yes?”
“You tracking?”
“I am.”
“Good. More to follow.”
“Roger, out.”
Lantini closed his phone and turned back toward the bay. The moon was a bit higher, casting a yellow carpet onto the tranquil water. Lantini thought about Secretary of Defense Bob Stone, Dave Palmer, the national security advisor, Trip Hellerman, the vice president, and Colonel Jack Rampert, who had performed many sensitive missions for him as the commander of Joint Special Operations Command. All good men, he thought, trying to do the right thing.
Now, in hiding, he had to carry out his mission vicariously through cut outs and third parties. Patriot or traitor? That was the most bothersome question. Put it up to a vote, he thought, and it would be 51 %-49 % one way or the other. Regardless, he had to proceed.
He played along with the idea of a second Ronnie Wood who was in contact with Ballantine. For the time being, he was letting the situation develop. It was Frank Lantini who was walking the edge of the razor at the moment. While he conceptually agreed with his alter-ego counterpart, were they like two serial killers, twinning in their drive to satiate utopian desires?
The Philippine action had been all about keeping focused on transnational Islamic extremism. The present course of action offered a gambit of a different flavor. He was inside the Central Committee, perhaps not a fully trusted member, but close. Could he pull off his plan?
Hero or goat?
He sensed a presence hiding in the dark shadow of the cinderblock command center. He tightened his finger around the trigger of the unfamiliar weapon. Hell, if it wasn’t an F-15, it was unfamiliar to him. Still, he had, like a kid, gone to an open field on the Pacific side of the isthmus and “popped caps,” as he called it. While not the most accurate rifleman to ever use an AK-47, Lantini had learned the functionality of the weapon and was confident in his ability to use it as necessary.
“Mister Wood?” Her voice was a whisper, no louder than the lapping waves he had just left behind.
Lantini saw Sue Kim step from the shadows of the cinderblock building, her black hair framing her alluring face. He saw the crinkle of her eyes and her thick lips form a smile.
“Sue Kim,” Lantini said responding to her use of the Stones’ moniker.
“This way,” she said and then vanished.
Lantini followed her along a minor trail that led south through a tight section of jungle. At its end the trail gave way to a small opening framed by two large banyan trees. Lantini could see a large hammock strung between the nearly touching branches of the two trees. Her destination.
“The guards will not see us here if we are quick,” she said, fumbling with his belt buckle.
Looking beyond her bowing head, Lantini scanned the horizon and said, “But I am one of the guards.”
His pants around his ankles now, she was pushing him onto the hammock, ready to slake her desires. She lowered herself onto him, steadying them in the shifting netting by grasping with her hands either side of the hammock above Lantini’s head.
“You are much more than guard, and you know it,” Sue Kim gasped as her rhythm increased.
“And you are much more than mild-mannered assistant to Sung,” Lantini said, joining her motion.
The two lovers remained silent as they intently focused on their personal pleasures, a rare, delicious moment amongst this double-layered job he was doing.
First, he was a most wanted man in the United States.
Second, he was still a patriot. He knew how to get his country back on the right path.
Sue Kim gasped, as quietly as possible, as a frisson of ecstasy shuddered through her. Lantini was not too far behind and they collapsed together into the netting, breathing hard as they had first begun doing in Seoul, Republic of Korea.
“Never forget,” Sue Kim said. “I am the reason you are here.” She paused enough to lift her head from his slick neck. “And that you are safe.”
Lantini lay back in the hammock, their sweat binding them together, and looked at the stars through the thin canopy of trees.
“And never forget, Sue Kim, without my contacts, none of these people would be here.”
CHAPTER 38
Matt stood silently by the upstairs foyer window that provided him a panoramic view of what he and Zachary, as kids, had named the Razorback, a north-south running spine of the Blue Ridge Mountains. The morning drive from Washington, D.C., had been less hassle than he had anticipated. He was thrilled to have spent less than twenty-four hours at Walter Reed Army Medical Center.
“Hey stranger.” His sister Karen gave him a firm hug. “It’s all kind of hard to believe. With Zachary’s death and your injuries last year, this is just kind of mind blowing. Something inside me is having a hard time believing it, as much as I desperately want to be happy about this.”
“It’s still settling over me, too, Karen. Meredith contacted me two days ago and told me she thought Zachary might still be alive. Luckily, things were moving so fast I didn’t have much time to think about it.”
“The things you told me last night on the phone. I’m so proud of you, Matt. I know you’ll get him back,” she said, hugging him tightly.
“I have a lot to make up for,” Matt whispered into Karen’s hair.
“Maybe in your mind, but I always knew you did your best. And you’ll do it again. You’ll get him. We’ll get him. It will be good to have both of you back,” she said, crying into his shirt.
He knew that his sister truly did mean both of them. He had been gone and might as well have been buried in the ground next to Zachary’s grave. In the last eight months, he had been home exactly once and had spoken on the phone with his family less than five times. He had slipped deeper into his darkness when Meredith started her new position at the White House and began drifting away from him.
“I hope you will give yourself a break now,” she said.
“Well, I can’t rest until we’ve got Zachary back. Plus, I think there is something bigger going on here. No way Ballantine could do all of this on his own.”
The nation was under attack in the most unconventional way, but out here in the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains, it all seemed so far away to Matt. And so unrealistic, as if the television transmitted a series of fictional episodes.
“Why don’t we go get some coffee,” Karen recommended.
He was hit with a blast of nostalgia as they sat down at the same pine table at which the entire family had eaten for the past thirty years. He saw the notches he had made with his knife to mark the boundaries for the late-night paper football games he and Zachary had played.
Karen put on a pot of coffee, then turned toward Matt. “What makes you think there’s something bigger going on? The president came on TV and said he thought things were going to be under control soon. On the news they said there were no attacks in the last twenty-four hours. Maybe that’s a good sign.”