At that point, a flame burst from the car’s hood, followed by a tremendous cloud of smoke. (The noise was terrifying, even coming from a button-sized speaker.) The picture shook chaotically. When it came back into focus, it was pointed at the ground. Then, the woman trained the lens on the car. The area nearby was a mob scene. A new figure appeared in the foreground, standing half in, half out of the billowing smoke. The camera circled the car and stopped on a woman waving her arms. He hit the pause button and stared at the face, then hit play again. The camera panned down the street. Bolden was speaking to a trim, blond-haired man. Their interaction was obscured by the constant passage of pedestrians in front of the camera.
A scream punctuated the soundtrack, and the camera whipped back and forth, finally zooming in on Thomas Bolden cradling Jennifer Dance on the sidewalk. The blond-haired guy was gone. The video ended.
“Lady, you’re a regular Robert Capa,” said Franciscus. “I can’t thank you enough for coming forward.”
“I thought it was the right thing to do.”
“I’m afraid we’ll need your tape. Tell you what… I’ll have a copy made for you. If you’d give me your address, we’ll ship it to you as soon as possible.”
Franciscus watched the woman leave, then polished off his coffee. He walked outside and stood in the spot where Jennifer Dance was shot, trying to figure out where exactly the bullet that hit her might have come from. He spotted an open window across the way. He called an officer over and instructed him to go into the building and check for signs of forced entry, shell casings, or any other evidence.
Watching the officer hustle across the square, Franciscus replayed the film in his mind, comparing one of the faces he had seen to that printed in a newspaper article some twenty-five years ago. The two were not entirely dissimilar. The hair was a different color, the face leaner now, sharper, perhaps altered by a surgeon’s knife. But the eyes were the same. That part you couldn’t change.
Franciscus’s impression was that the woman in the movie was Bobby Stillman.
Go figure.
Ole Matty Lopes was right. This case wasn’t cold anymore.
35
James Jacklin, chairman of Jefferson Partners, adjusted his chair and slid the microphone closer to him. “Can you hear me, Senator?”
“Loud and clear, Mr. Jacklin,” said the Honorable Hugh Fitzgerald, senior senator from the state of Vermont and chairman of the Senate Appropriations Committee. “You are one man who never hesitates to make himself heard.”
“I’ll take that as a compliment.”
“You may take it any way you like. Now then…” Fitzgerald cleared his throat, and the reverberation seemed to rattle through every nook, cranny, and crevice of his 350-pound body. “Mr. Jacklin has come to testify on behalf of the Emergency War Powers Appropriations Bill before this committee. He’s here to convince us why it’s so urgent for the taxpayers to hand over six point five billion dollars to the Pentagon to refill our pre-positioned stockpiles.”
Since the Cold War, it had become accepted doctrine to pre-position massive amounts of arms and weaponry (everything from combat boots to M1 Abrams tanks) at strategic points around the globe for rapid transshipment to a combat zone, the theory being that it was quicker, cheaper, and just plain easier to move a fifty-ton battle tank from Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean to Iraq than from Fort Hood, Texas. “Pre-pos,” as the pre-positioned stockpiles were called, allowed the armed forces to field combat-ready troops in days, not weeks. Currently, the armed forces maintained pre-pos in Guam, Diego Garcia, and Romania, as well as floating platforms in the Pacific, the Mediterranean, and the Indian Ocean. Pre-pos were considered a linchpin of the United States’ ability to project power overseas.
“That’s right, Senator,” said Jacklin. “As a former marine and combat veteran, and as a consultant to the Government Accounting Office, I feel it’s my duty to speak on behalf of the fine men and women in the armed forces who find themselves in hostile territory with insufficient supplies.”
“We appreciate and share your heartfelt sincerity,” said Hugh Fitzgerald.
“Then you’ll know why it is that I was so shocked to learn from the GAO’s report that our pre-pos are nearly depleted. Our country is in a state of unprecedented danger. Our troops overseas are operating at the breaking point.”
“Now, now, I do think you’re exaggerating. The report says that only two-thirds of our pre-pos are understocked, and it doesn’t say anything about a breaking point.”
Fitzgerald slipped on a pair of bifocals and gave his attention to the papers lying before him. Behind the half-moon lenses, his blue eyes were hard and depthless as marbles. Ruptured capillaries shot through his sagging cheeks. He was dressed in his winter uniform: a black three-piece suit with a fob watch tucked into his vest like some relic from the nineteenth century. Black wool in winter, ivory linen in summer. He’d been wearing the same damn suits since he came down to the Capital thirty-five years earlier and Lt. James J. Jacklin USMC, freshly returned from Vietnam with a Silver Star pinned to his tunic, was a junior puke doing his two-year rotation as a White House fellow.
Fitzgerald went on. “Frankly, I’m hard-pressed to see how a war involving less than ten percent of our active-duty troops can strain anyone to the ‘breaking point.’ I’m tempted to suggest we take this as a lesson to be more careful before we intervene.”
“Senator, I’m not here to debate policy, but to speak about the facts stated in this eye-opening report,” said Jacklin. It was not his job to like or dislike any sitting member of Congress, he reminded himself. Just to use them. “We have over ten thousand pieces of rolling stock on the ground in the Middle East. Tanks, personnel carriers, jeeps, and the like. Almost all of it came from our pre-pos, not to mention ammunition, MREs, and most important, spare parts for these items.”
“And you propose that I recommend passage of this bill so that we can buy new ones?”
“Yes, I do.”
“Can’t we wait until hostilities have ceased, ship them back to the pre-pos, and use them again?”
Jacklin shook his head emphatically. “The desert is a harsh environment. Tanks break down and have to be fixed. We’re so short of engines and transmissions that we’re being forced to cannibalize our existing combat-ready machinery. I remind you those tanks may be over there for another five years. Less than ten percent of them will be worth bringing back.”
“So we need new ones?”
“Yes sir.”
“New tanks, new personnel carriers, new Bradleys?”
“Yes sir.”
“To refill our pre-pos.”
“That’s right.”
“All so we can go traipsing off to war at the drop of a hat again? I won’t have it!”
“So that we can protect ourselves!” retorted Jacklin.
“I didn’t see any Iraqi planes over Pearl Harbor, Mr. Jacklin. I caution you to differentiate between empire-building and protecting the republic.”
But they’re the same thing, Jacklin replied silently. You couldn’t just sit back and wait till a snake bit you in the ass. They did that once, and it was called World War II. The only way to make the world safe was to spread democracy. You had to knock out the tyrants and despots, and let everyone have a chance at getting their own piece of the pie. It wasn’t empire-building. It was economics. An empty stomach breeds discontent, and these days discontent had one target: America. Get rid of the discontent, and not only did you get rid of the anger, you also opened up a new market.