Power Down (28 page)

Madradora Square was crowded. Several children played in the middle of the large, grass-covered square, while mothers on benches watched and listened to the laughter as their children ran around. Along the sidewalks at the edge of the square stood several cafés and assorted stores.

Dewey well knew the drill here. After all, he’d performed similar exfiltrations on many occasions. The Deltas were likely in the square right now. If they were good, even he wouldn’t recognize them. Perhaps the man stooped over on the front step of the town house to the left, sweeping a broom. Or the coffee drinker at the café, far right.

He looked at his watch and still had five minutes to spare. He was nervous but also excited. He found himself looking forward to seeing how these Deltas did their work—that is, if he still had the skill to spot them.

The time since his service seemed to have passed quickly. He’d lost track along the way, but right now it felt like yesterday—his last hours as a Delta. With each passing minute, with every step closer he got, the feelings rushed back: the sense of steel-bound commitment to the mission, the willingness to kill and die, all of it.

It had been a rainy Friday night at Fort Bragg, a cool evening after a hard run. His team grabbed dinner together after returning from a monthlong training jaunt in the Okefenokee swamp in southern Georgia. They’d gone there to learn jungle survival tactics, thrown into the swamp alone, with nothing more than a piece of string and a knife. They were expected to survive, deep in the heart of cottonmouth country. And that was exactly how Dewey had survived, eating cottonmouths and sleeping in the crotch of a tree.

When he finally got home and opened his front door he saw Holly on the floor of the living room. Her head had been blown apart; his service Colt lying beside her. He could still remember the black hockey tape he wrapped around the butt of the old gun, blood pooled around it. Everywhere. Holly’s blue eyes staring up at him.

They said it was tough to be a military wife. They didn’t have a saying for what it was like to be the wife of a Delta.

Holly had changed after Robbie died. Of course she had. Dewey had too. How were you supposed to respond to the loss of a six-year-old
boy? Dewey was asked to try out for Delta the same week of the leukemia diagnosis. He tried to explain it to Holly, that they needed the health insurance, the income. Should he really just quit? She knew as well as Dewey that it wasn’t about benefits or money. Delta training offered Dewey an outlet for his anger, the bitterness of watching his only child get sicker and wither. But leaving for Delta training left Holly with nothing, not even her husband. At the very end, in Robbie’s final months, Dewey’s commanding officer finally granted him compassionate leave, but only after he threatened to quit. He and Holly endured those last days together, watching Robbie die. After Robbie’s death, Holly’s anger surfaced first, followed by grief, then depression that deepened with each passing day. Finally came the silence.

Dewey realized later that he could never have understood the depth of Holly’s despair. Even now he could scarcely imagine what it was like for her to suffer her bottomless sorrow alone.

This was her last statement to him: suicide, with his own service pistol. He understood the message, empathized with it too. She hadn’t meant to make it look like he’d killed her, as the police and D.A. claimed. She had only intended to say, “Look at what you left me to do, you and your precious duty. Look at what you’ve left me to witness alone, so you can be a soldier.” That was the significance of his old service gun. It had been a private, desperate gesture, not an attempt to make others believe Dewey would actually kill his wife.

Holly’s family had thrown their full support behind the prosecutor, telling them about Dewey’s drinking, his temper and tendency toward violence. They refused to admit their only child could kill herself.

And the prosecutor had been only too happy to listen, glory in his eyes for the prosecution of an angry soldier at a time when the military was unpopular. The police had locked Dewey up a week later.

The D.A. tried him in the local newspaper, on the local television stations, long before any trial. Even all that Dewey didn’t mind. It was his Delta commander he would never forget. He abandoned him. The U.S. military, who he’d given his life to, abandoned him. They refused to help. After so many years of service, of risking his life for country and force, they’d left him to the wolves.

Still, the jury found him not guilty. It took them only half an hour. For his part, Dewey left the courthouse and never looked back. A month in Nepal and Tibet, hiking. Two months later he applied for a job as a roughneck on a Marathon oil derrick off the coast of Scotland. The rest was history.

Dewey stared through the window in front of him, seeing nothing.

He closed his eyes momentarily and forced himself back to the task at hand.

He made himself scan the square again, more slowly this time. There, on a bench in the middle of the square, a large man with reading glasses sat with a book.
Mark one.
At the back right, the man drinking the cup of coffee turned his head and scoured the scene from behind dark sunglasses. As Dewey watched, he stood up and reached for cash from his pocket to place down on the table.
Mark two.

Dewey descended the church stairwell and went through the front door of the church out toward the square. Sunlight filtered through a large oak tree in front of the beautiful façade. Across the square, in the middle of where the children played as their mothers watched, the first Delta, the one on the bench, stood. He made Dewey and their eyes met. Dewey began walking down the slate steps of the church toward him.

From the corner of his eye, Dewey became aware of a third man, a tall man with a dark complexion, baseball cap, shorts, and running shoes. He moved quickly from the sidewalk on the right toward the square. Had they sent three soldiers to meet him? Hadn’t they said two Deltas would be coming?

The tall man moved quickly. The first Delta, coming at Dewey, hadn’t noticed the approaching intruder.

Dewey glanced at mark two, back right, the Delta in sunglasses, who had begun talking with a blond-haired woman. A distraction, Dewey realized, as the long-haired man attempted to brush the woman to the side. A commotion ensued.

Dewey stopped, a cold chill ran through him as he realized it was too late to warn the men who’d come to save him.

A dull, nearly silent thud followed by a pained grunt echoed across the morning air as the blond woman shot the second Delta with a silenced
weapon. He crumpled to the ground as the woman darted away from the café down the sidewalk. Dewey looked back to mark one, approaching from the middle of the square. He still didn’t see the tall man approaching, now practically on him. Dewey pulled his Colt from the small of his back and began a sprint toward the center of the square. The Delta followed Dewey’s eyes and turned to his approaching killer but it was too late. The tall killer’s arm shot out and a silenced bullet entered the young Delta’s skull just above his eye socket. His head splattered blood as he collapsed in the middle of the square, just feet from where the children played.

The tall man swiveled to face Dewey, the black steel of his silencer aiming quickly and firing. Dewey lunged to the side and felt nothing, but heard a shatter to his left as the bullet met the glass of the church door behind him. He fired the Colt, the crack of unmuted gunfire shocking in the square. Dewey’s shot caught the tall man in the chest. A second shot and the side of the killer’s head jolted right, blood and skull silhouetting as he fell onto the bright green of the square’s freshly cut grass, his corpse following soon after and striking the ground, rolling over just feet from where a young mother held her baby.

The screams of women and children filled the momentary silence following Dewey’s gunfire, but Dewey was already turned and running away from the square, looking desperately for the second killer, the blond assassin. But she was already gone. Dewey turned, heading as quickly and calmly as he could for his car. At the side of the church he turned left and sprinted up the brick-paved street. In two blocks he spied the shiny black of the Mercedes halfway down the block.

He had to get away, and quickly. But now he also allowed the obvious question to surface in his mind:
What had just happened?
These were no mere killers. The two who’d just killed the Deltas were not terrorists or mercenaries; they were government-hired, agency-trained
operatives.
What did it mean? Only one group knew of this exfiltration. He shuddered as he realized the implication of it all:
There was a mole.

He sprinted down the sidewalk, knowing he had to get away. In the distance, sirens suddenly crossed the warm Cali air. Soon the Madradora would be mayhem. He spotted the Mercedes, parked on the street
corner a block ahead. But as he came upon the street corner in front of the car, he noticed something, a reflection in the window of the Mercedes, just an instant, a simple swatch of light, then movement: the blond-haired executioner. She stood in a doorway just beyond the street corner, hiding, waiting, arms raised and weapon trained. The reflection in the car window saved Dewey from what would have been, in five feet or so, a warm bullet in the back of the head.

Dewey stopped just before the corner, feet away from where the blond assassin lurked. He looked behind him, down the block he’d just run down, and saw a Laundromat. He dropped back and entered the Laundromat. He ran through the store, pushing his way past piles of laundry and women folding articles, to the back room, where a man sat, smoking a cigarette in front of a pile of papers.

“
Lo siento,
” murmured Dewey as he charged through the office toward an alley entrance, gun in hand. The sirens became louder, multiple vehicles joining in the distance.

Out the door and across the alley and through a dented steel door. Inside, stacks of bread loaves, other boxes of food, the smell of meat. He moved through the storage room and entered the back of a bodega. Colt .45 cocked in front of him, he passed a middle-aged woman who fainted as she saw the weapon in his hand. Catching the eye of the man at the cash register, Dewey held a finger to his lips. There, at the side of the entrance, her back to the store, stood the blond assassin.

Suddenly another customer, an elderly woman, screamed as she saw Dewey with gun. The blonde turned abruptly, leveling what he now saw was an HK UMP compact machine gun with a six-inch suppressor on the end. A full auto hail of bullets crashed through the windows as she swept the weapon east-west. The elderly woman’s screams ended abruptly as a bullet ripped through her head and killed her. The assassin’s bullets shattered the storefront’s glass, but Dewey was already down and partially hidden by a chest freezer, which shielded him from the slugs. As soon as the blonde’s gun swept past him, Dewey had a clear sight. He fired twice, two quick shots into the assassin’s neck and chest, flinging her backward onto the brick sidewalk in a shower of blood and glass.

Dewey ran through the open door and stood over the woman, looking
for a moment at the young assassin. She could not have been more than twenty-one or twenty-two years old. The fall to the ground had knocked her backward, a blond wig now lay behind her head. Beneath, brown locks framed a tanned, blood-smattered face. She was a gorgeous woman, her sharp nose framed by high cheekbones, a vaguely Mediterranean cast to her smooth skin. Her eyes looked up at Dewey; brown eyes, deep pools that expressed the pain of the bullets now riddling her body. She clung desperately to life as blood coursed from her mouth, nose, and ears. He looked down at her chest. A stylish white leather jacket was now ruined in crimson, a black hole piercing her right breast.

She stared at Dewey as he stood over her. In the distance, the sound of sirens grew louder. The beautiful girl’s lips moved as she tried to say something.

Dewey reached down and grabbed her arms, pulling her up with some effort over his uninjured shoulder. He carried her quickly to the Mercedes as the sirens moved closer to the square. Opening the back door, he laid her down gently on the backseat. She would likely be dead within a minute or two, but maybe in her final moments he could make her say something.

He climbed into the front seat of the Mercedes and started the sedan by again crossing the wires that now dangled below the steering column. He glanced over his shoulder at the critically injured woman clinging to life in the backseat. Dewey didn’t care if she lived or died. She had chosen her bloody profession, and like most assassins that had come before her, that decision would soon prove terminal. Still, he couldn’t help noticing her age; he couldn’t help lamenting the misused youth and beauty that would soon be gone from the earth.

He hit the gas and sent the black sedan speeding down the sun-scorched road. Behind him, a green and yellow police cruiser picked up the Mercedes at the block next to the bodega, marked Dewey, took a right and sped toward him, trying to catch up.

Looking in the rearview mirror, his eyes met the young woman’s: still alive. He needed a minute, a quiet place, or she would die before he could try to interrogate her. But the police cruiser was soon joined by another, and he had a situation on his hands.

He flipped the cell phone open and dialed Anson Energy. When the woman answered he asked to be connected again with Terry Savoy. After a brief pause, he heard Savoy’s voice.

“Dewey? Where are you?”

“They were waiting for me,” said Dewey. “They killed the Deltas. They assassinated American soldiers in cold blood. They knew I was coming. These weren’t terrorists. These were professionals. We’re talking
operatives.
”