No Easy Hope - 01 (5 page)

Some friendships happen slowly, over time, and some develop quickly. Even though I had barely spent any time with the Gabe, I felt like I had known him for years. Maybe it was because we had so many of the same hobbies and interests, or maybe we had both lost so many loved ones and were tired of feeling alone in the world. Probably, it was both. Either way, over the next three years, he and I started hanging out more and more often. We hiked hundreds of miles of trails that crisscrossed the southern Appalachians, frequented the local shooting ranges, and wreaked havoc at bars and taverns all over the mountains and piedmont.

Not long after we started hanging out, Gabriel and I started exchanging fighting techniques. I was a decent grappler and a competent striker, but Gabriel made me look like a complete amateur. He is a hell of a lot faster than his size would suggest, and his technique is superb. In addition to black belt level Jiu Jitsu skills, he is an expert striker and is downright terrifying with a blade. He also started competing in freestyle wrestling when he was nine, and kept at it until he graduated from high school and joined the Marines.

When it came to his service in the military, he was reluctant to talk about it for a long time. I had often heard that combat veterans did not like to discuss their experiences, and Gabe’s behavior seemed to bear that out. As time went on Gabe gradually began to open up about some of the things he saw and did during the war. It seemed to help him, somewhat, to share his experiences. In light of all he had seen, Gabriel began to make more sense as a person, but I always got the feeling there was something he wasn’t telling me- some secret he was hiding.

That all changed one night almost three years to the day from the first time I met him. We were sitting on the back patio of my house in Morganton drinking liberally from a bottle of Kentucky bourbon. A low fire was burning in the outdoor fireplace to ward off the last of the stubborn winter chill. Gabe was telling me about the first and second battles of Fallujah. He served in the First Marine Expeditionary Unit at as a scout sniper. The operations were long and brutal, and Gabe had racked up more kills than he cared to remember.

“I still see them sometimes, the men I killed.” He said. “I lie down and try to sleep, and I see their faces. No matter how many times I did it, pulling the trigger never got any easier. Even though the man on the business end of my rifle would have done the same to me given the chance, I was still taking a human life out of the world. I was killing someone’s brother, or son, or father. Even the worst of men have somebody that cares about them.”

“Yeah, but the guys you took down are the kind of people that the world is better off without.” I replied.

“How do you know that?” Gabe shot me a piercing stare. “Put yourself in their place for a minute. A bunch of foreigners come into town and take over everything. They set up shop in your church, start laying down curfews, and confiscate people’s property. They go after the people that try to fight them, and wind up killing a bunch of non-combatants. Not just men, but women and children too. How long do you think you’d be willing to put up with that shit? How long would it be until you picked up a rifle and started trying to chase the invaders out of your home?”

I thought about that for a moment. I tried to imagine what it would be like to live through a foreign occupation. I remembered all the times my mother had told me never to judge a man until you had walked a mile in his shoes. Maybe Gabriel had a point.

“I don’t know.” I replied. “I guess I never thought about it that way.”

Gabriel looked away, anger fading from his expression. “Yeah, well, it’s all in the past now. My soldiering days are over, thank God. As bad as it was, Fallujah wasn’t the worst of it for me. When I went to work for Aegis…” Gabe stopped mid-sentence. He glanced at me, and shook his head.

“Never mind, I don’t want to talk about that.”

“That’s bullshit.” I said. “You wouldn’t have brought it up if you didn’t want to talk about it.” I turned and leaned toward Gabriel.

“Gabe, we’ve been friends for a good while now, and I’ve gotten to know you pretty well. I can tell that whatever happened when you worked for Aegis is eating away at you. You can’t just carry that shit around forever, man. Get it out of your head. Drag it out, and stop letting it ruin your life.”

Gabriel passed a hand over his face, his palm making a loud rasping sound on his beard stubble.

“You don’t understand Eric, I can’t talk about it. If the wrong people found out, things could get real bad for me and whoever I tell. You’re better off not knowing, it’s safer that way.”

“Safer? What are they gonna do, take me away and lock me up?”

Gabe gave me a level stare. “Yes, or worse.”

That stopped me. I looked at Gabe for a moment, and then sat back in my chair. What the hell had Gabe been involved in? What could be so bad that the government would be willing to imprison or kill people to keep word of it from getting out? I had seen enough evidence of past government cover-ups to know that things like that happened from time to time. Mostly it was the result of somebody making a colossal fuck-up, but sometimes agencies of the federal government did some terrible things. In recent years, the news had been filled with exposés and reports about declassified government documents detailing secret military operations, experiments, captures, and interrogations. Gabe watched me as I pondered, and after a few moments turned away and stared at the fire. The light from the flames cast twisting patters of shadow over his weathered face. His gray eyes reflected the firelight, giving him an ethereal, otherworldly look.

“Trust me Eric, there are some things you are better off not knowing about.”

I felt a swell of pity for my friend, but I was also curious to know what could possibly be worse for a man to go through than the horrors of war.

“Listen dude, I’m a grown man. I can make my own decisions, and I can take care of myself. I know how to keep my mouth shut, and I’m not stupid enough to think that the government can’t touch me. You need to talk about this stuff, and I’m willing to listen.”

Gabe looked at me for a moment, his expression unreadable, then nodded and looked away.

“Okay. I’ll tell you some of it, but there are some things that I will have to leave out. Some things are just too dangerous to talk about.”

“I’m listening.” I said.

Gabe nodded, then continued. “Aegis isn’t just a private security firm. They do wet work for the CIA and the NSA. Strictly off the record shit. Not even Congress knows about it. I have no idea how they cover up all of the funding that Aegis gets, but I know that it’s a shitload of money.”

“What’s ‘wet work’?” I asked.

“Killing people. Wet work refers to any kind of mission where the operatives are sent in with the specific directive of killing people, and keeping it quiet.”

My eyebrows went up. “Oh…wow. That’s crazy.”

“You’re telling me. Anyway, on some missions we worked closely with a liaison from the Center for Disease Control.  At least that’s where he said he was from. I have my doubts about that. Those missions were usually pretty simple. When a lethal infectious disease broke out somewhere, and it needed to be kept quiet, strike teams went in to contain or eradicate it. I was a sniper on one of the strike teams.”

“How do you eradicate a disease?”

“You kill the carriers and burn their bodies.”

Suddenly, I began to understand why Gabe was so reluctant to talk about this.

“How many of these missions did you go on?” I asked.

Gabe shook his head, “I don’t know. Too damn many.”

“What kinds of diseases did these people get? They must have been pretty bad for the government to send death squads after them.”

“You have no idea. It was awful. Bubonic plague, weaponized small-pox, mutated strains of Ebola…all kinds of nasty shit.”

“Wait, you said ‘weaponized’ small pox? How do you do that?”

“You make an airborne version and disperse it with bombs. Light it off over a major populated area, and you have an instant pandemic. Panic, death, looting, rioting, the whole fucking pale-horse variety pack.”

I didn’t say anything for a moment. A mental cog turned over and something clicked in my head.

“Is that why you bought the cabin from me? So you could get away from society if something like that happened?” I asked.

Gabe looked away and scowled. “I don’t want to be anywhere near a city if an outbreak happens.”

“Do you think that could really happen? Could a disease actually get out of control like that?”

Gabe nodded, his expression grave. “Not only could it happen, I firmly believe it is only a matter of time
until
it happens. It’s not a question of if, but a question of when. The weaponized versions of these diseases are just too damn easy to make. Any country with half-assed medical laboratories can produce the shit. It is going to happen.” Gabriel jabbed a finger into the table beside him. “Sooner or later, there will be an outbreak, and it will be catastrophic.”

I absorbed that for a moment. “So what should people do? I mean, how do you prepare for something like that?”

Gabe shook his head, “People can’t do anything about it. People are lazy and stupid, and don’t even want to acknowledge that this kind of shit exists. Now an individual person, with the right knowledge, could do a lot to prepare…”

Gabe looked thoughtful for a moment, then abruptly stood up and pulled his cell phone out of his pocket.

“A few years back I wrote down some things I figured I should do to get ready, just in case. I even made lists of supplies I wanted to have. I’m going to email it to you, just in case you want to go ahead and take some precautions of your own.”

I got out my phone and opened the email Gabe sent me. We sat outside on my patio long into the night discussing Gabriel’s work with Aegis, and what I should do to prepare for the worst. At one point, I noticed that Gabe’s survival items included a list of weapons that are illegal in most states that function well with silencers on them.

“Why would I need silencers on all these guns?” I asked.

“Trust me, you don’t want to know. I’ll buy the guns for you, and keep them at my place until you can come pick them up. I’ll get them modified and procure the silencers for you.”

Gabe noticed my surprise and held up a hand. “It’s cool. I know a guy.”

I thought about pressing him further on that point, but decided against it. I already had a lot of information to digest, and I wasn’t eager to add anything else to the pile. I went over a couple more items on the list, and then decided to ask Gabe a question I had been holding in for a long time.

“Where do you get your money from Gabe?”

He looked up from his phone, momentarily taken aback by the change of subject.

“I mean, you’ve told me this much right?” I said. “You already know where my money came from.”

Gabe thought about it for a moment before responding. “I’ll answer that, but first you have to answer a question for me.”

“Shoot.”

“You’ve known me for over three years, why haven’t you ever asked before?”

I shrugged, “I guess I figured you’d get around to it sooner or later. It didn’t really seem that important until now.”

Gabe nodded. “I stole it.”

I blinked.

“You stole it? From who?”

Gabe smiled, showing wolf-white teeth against the firelight.

“From Aegis. Not long before I quit the company, I was working physical security on a shipment of gold bullion in Afghanistan. I never knew for certain, but I suspected they were using the gold to bribe tribal leaders in the region into giving up intel on insurgent troop deployment, and then selling the info back to Coalition forces. Taliban raiders attacked our convoy one night, and I managed to escape in one of the trucks. When I got far enough away to feel safe, I checked the cargo and saw that I had run off with a shitload of gold. I got on the truck’s satellite phone and called a former associate of mine who works in the money laundering business. He got in touch with some of his contacts in the region and helped me smuggle the gold out of Afghanistan. We laundered it through several accounts in Switzerland and the Cayman Islands. By the time I gave my partner his cut and put the rest into my own accounts, it was squeaky clean.”