Wrath & Righteousnes Episodes 01 to 05 (11 page)

To the radical Islamist, the Americans weren’t human, they were
jahili.
Barbarians, subhuman. Decadent and soulless. Without value to God. They had rejected the one True God and so were worthy of indignity and death. And whereas Westerners found value in most cultures or societies, it was not so for the Islamists, who considered Western culture completely devoid of value, populated by savages with whom they could not coexist. Which explained why it was acceptable to kill their children. They
were not
innocent. They would grow up to be barbarians. Was a young scorpion less deadly than the mother who gave it life? Was there any law that insisted they couldn’t kill their enemies until they were strong enough to fight?

Brighton had seen such thinking illustrated a thousand times before. They were not true Muslims, for Muslims didn’t believe in such hate. No, the men he fought were not religious in any way. They were nothing but religious hacks, evil men who had hijacked a religion to further their cause, men who were as likely—even more likely—to kill their fellow Muslims as an American if it furthered their cause.

Brighton understood now that this wasn’t a contest of religions or philosophies. At its core, it wasn’t even a battle between cultures or nation-states. It was a battle for freedom. It was simple as that. Good against evil, black against white.

And it was a battle they were losing. At least that’s how he felt.

Of course, he believed in God. He believed in mercy and redemption. He believed in faith, optimism and hope in the future. But this was beyond that. He had read the Threat File. He knew they were in trouble. Which is why he didn’t sleep at night.

Give him another day, another small victory, another chance at hope and he would regain his optimism. He had been down before and he had always scratched his way back up. But his faith was growing fragile. The battle had worn him out and he was getting scared.

Brighton thought quickly of a copy of an instant message the CIA had intercepted just the day before, an exchange between two Iraqi brothers who had forced their younger sister to participate in an uprising in the Iraqi central town of Ramadi. The message was crude and halting, and translated loosely, but the meaning was clear:

Al-Anbari:
All of the people in the area have started to move. I put our sister in the crowd and thrust my AK-47 in her hand. I see other mothers push their children into rioting crowd. I didn’t think that the people in this area were so heroic. And she was only nine!

Kamal:
Whatever God wants! Blessed be the Almighty!

Al-Anbari:
She just tried to come back, but I shut the door. I told her I would kill her if she dishonored our name.

Kamal:
Oh God! God is great!

Al-Anbari:
It is done. She was killed by our brothers, our own Iraqi police. But we will avenge her. We still have others we can put in the fight.

Kamal:
Do what it takes, al-Anbari. You strengthen my pride.

Brighton thought of the captured exchange and wondered how he should answer his wife’s question about “
How things were at work?
”

Truth was, they were losing. They knew, all of the agents and officers he worked with, that they couldn’t stop it. It was coming some day. So yes, he was tired. He was worn to the bone. He was weary physically, mentally and emotionally. Even his spirit was worn thin, like a sheet that had been laid on for too many years. There were too many battles. Too many enemies. He had to protect the country; he had to protect the president! It was his responsibility to advise him on what he had to do. But there weren’t any answers! At least not enough! Their enemies were like rats climbing over the wall. They were shooting them one by one, shooting as quickly as they could, but there were so many! The rats kept spilling over. Which meant he was failing. But what more could he do?

He glanced at Sara sadly, then forced a smile. Like he did everyday, he pretended everything was all right. “Got to go,” he said as he kissed her hand. “Want to talk to the boys before I leave.”

“See you tonight then,” she said to him. “Are you going to be late?”

“Hopefully not, maybe even early. I’ll let you know.”

He bent down to kiss her forehead and left the bedroom.

* * *

Brighton walked down the winding staircase and into the kitchen where he found his two sons, Luke and Ammon, sitting at the table dressed in baggy shorts and oversized T-shirts. Overflowing bowls of cold cereal sat before them and he noticed the spilled Lucky Charms on the floor. “Morning guys,” he said as he walked to the refrigerator and poured himself a glass of orange juice. He glanced at the bowls of cereal. “You could cook some eggs. Or there’s frozen waffles in the freezer.”

Ammon looked up as he spooned in another mouthful of sugar and bleached wheat. “That’s OK, dad. We’re in kind of a hurry, you know.”

“You are going down to the river?”

“Yeah. Carderock.”

Brighton poured himself a small bowl of rolled oats, added some milk and placed the bowl in the microwave. “Carderock? Is that at Great Falls in McLean?” he asked as he punched the buttons on the microwave.

“Yeah. It’s a good rock. Plenty of handholds, but if you don’t climb it just right you can find yourself hanging under some pretty awesome outcroppings.”

Brighton knew his sons could climb like flies. He was pretty good himself, but he couldn’t even come close to keeping up with them. But sometimes they made him nervous. It was one thing to be aggressive, another to be stupid, and sometimes the line was a fine one, and blurred. “How high is the rock?” he asked.

Ammon shot a quick look to his brother, who paused eating long enough to hunch his shoulders.

“I don’t know, Dad,” Ammon answered, “maybe fifty feet or so. It’s not the highest climb in the area, but because of the angle and outcroppings, it’s one of the hardest.”

Brighton pressed his lips as he pictured Luke and Ammon hanging from their fingers, their hands gripping the tiny ledges that extended from the rock, their feet and legs swinging through the emptiness as they pulled themselves up and over the sandstone outcroppings by only their arms.

He opened the window blinds that looked out on their back yard. “You don’t have any classes this morning?”

Luke poured himself another bowl of cereal. “Ammon’s got labs this afternoon. I’ve got calculus at ten. That’s why we’re in a hurry. We want to get in a couple hours climbing before I have to get to class.”

Brighton watched his sons slopping in their cereal as he sipped his juice. Something was up. He knew his sons too well. “Why are you climbing on a Tuesday? Why not wait until the weekend when you won’t be in such a hurry.”

Again they both paused. Ammon shot a knowing look to his brother, then ducked his head.

Although only older by minutes, Ammon had always been more responsible and it made his father nervous to see the guilty look in his eyes. It was Ammon’s nature to take things a little more slow, and if he was nervous, then his dad got nervous too. Luke, on other hand, was a full speed ahead, let’s-give-it-a-go kind of guy. If he left a wreck behind him . . . no,
when
he left a wreck behind him—he would apologize for the trouble, then speed off to the next crash.

When neither son answered his question, Brighton asked it again. “What’s up guys, how come you’re climbing today?”

Ammon took another spoonful of cereal. “Nothing special, Dad,” he answered. “A couple guys we met last week want to come with us. They’re a couple big-shot climbers from California, at least they think that they are. They were bragging about all the rocks they had climbed out West. We told them there were some pretty good climbs around here, but they didn’t believe us.”

Brighton sipped again as he filled in the blanks. Luke liked to talk. Talked a little too much. So he had met some new friends from California where there were lots of natural climbing walls and had talked himself into a situation where he not only had to prove there were good rocks to climb along the Potomac River in northern Virginia, but that he was the master of them all. Now it was time to make good. And Ammon was going along to keep his brother from killing himself.

How many times had he seen this before? Still, he had to smile. “You’re going to class though, right?” he asked as he sat down.

“We’ll make it, Dad.”

“You know how much tuition cost me?”

“Ah . . . yeah Dad, it seems like you might have mentioned that before. And you’re only paying half.”

“Still, I’m getting my money’s worth, right? You’re not
just
screwing around? Sometimes you go to class? Sometimes you actually learn something, right?”

Quiet for a moment. “We’re learning lots, Dad,” Ammon finally said.

Luke looked up suddenly, “Oh, yeah, that reminds me Dad, my history professor wants to know if you will come in and speak to our class. He’s a flaming idiot, I tell you. Revisionist history, through and through. It was his idea to have you come as a guest lecturer, but I was thinking maybe you could set him straight . . . .”

“Have him contact my office. He’ll have to schedule through them.”

“It would really help me, Dad, if you could come. I’m afraid I might have . . . ah, I don’t know, made him a little bit defensive, maybe. Sometimes I argue too much.”

“Can’t imagine that, Luke.”

Luke lifted his bowl and drained the milk, leaving a white mustache on his upper lip. Ammon looked at him and laughed and Luke wiped it with the back of his hand. “Dad, don’t worry about us missing class,” he said. “We both have partial scholarships—saves you boatloads of money, no, really, it’s OK, no need to say thanks—but we’re kind of thinking we might head out west to school after our freshman year anyway. Maybe UCLA.”

“No way,” Luke shot out. “California beaches suck. What’s the point? Me and the real men are heading to Texas A&M.”

“Whatever,” Ammon answered before turning back to Brighton. “What I’m saying, Dad, is that we’re both probably going to switch schools next year. So we’re trying to keep things cool, you know, enjoy things our first year and all.”

Brighton nodded slowly, a sense of sadness passing over him. His sons were as comfortable in one place as another, but they didn’t call anywhere home. They were happy and adaptable, they could make friends in weeks when others took years, and they wouldn’t have had it any other way, but they had no roots to speak of, there was no doubt.

It was one of the prices his family paid for his military career.

The general finished his orange juice and straightened his uniform. “Hey guys,” he said. “If you’re going to go climbing, I don’t think that sugar crap is going to be good enough. Hang on a minute and I’ll make you some eggs.” He pulled out a large skillet and placed it on the stove.

“No time, Dad,” Luke answered quickly. “And you’ve got to get to work, too.”

“It will take me three minutes. Put some bread in the toaster. You’ll be glad you did.”

Luke hesitated, then walked to the toaster and dropped in four slices of bread. Brighton pulled out an egg cartoon and scrambled six eggs, dumped in some bacon bits as the skillet grew warm, then poured the eggs and stirred them while watching his sons.

Ammon sat at the table, reading the sports page while grumbling about his Wizards who had started 1 and 10 (bottom of the division again!), while Luke grabbed his calculus textbook and started cramming his way through some problems that, no doubt, should have been done the day before. How Luke managed to keep his grades up, Brighton would never know. So far as he could tell, he and his youngest son took very different approaches to life. While he believed that preparation was 90% of the battle, Luke seemed to think that true inspiration came only under great stress, and self-induced stress was the most inspiring kind.

Although they were twins, his sons were different as any two brothers could be. Both were freshmen at George Washington University, but Ammon was tall, a little more than 6’2”, with broad shoulders and long legs while Luke was shorter and stockier, with thick arms and thick legs. Ammon had his mother’s blond hair and fine eyes while Luke had his father’s dark hair and Roman nose. Ammon was smooth as Georgia cream; he could talk himself out of any situation, manipulate any teacher, make any friend. He always knew what to say (even if it wasn’t always
exactly
the truth). Luke, on the other hand, was extremely straightforward; there was no pretense to him. He didn’t sugarcoat the situation, just the opposite in fact, he sometimes made things worse just to liven things up. With Luke, what you saw was what you got and if someone didn’t like that, that was OK with him.

Ammon had been named after one of Brighton’s great-grandfathers, a gambler who had discovered his purpose in life soon after finding a young Alabama blonde and bringing her out to the Wild West. After going straight, Grandpa Ammon had gone on to become one of the most feared lawmen in West Texas, a sheriff who was known for getting his man dead or alive. It apparently mattered not a whole lot to him. Luke was named after the missionary who had baptized his great-grandfather, bringing him religion after a hard life of imposing the law.

Watching Luke and Ammon, Brighton knew he had probably mixed up their names. Luke was the gunslinger, the fearless lawman with the “get ’em or kill ’em” attitude. Ammon, on the other hand, was the mediator, the smooth-talking ladies man. But he was proud of them both, and loved them as only a father could love his sons. If they had any faults, and both of them did, he often found the same faults in himself, and knew that was where most of their weakness came from.

Brighton looked down to see the eggs were cooked and he spooned them onto two plates, buttered the toast and set the plates on the table. The two sons dug in, stabbing at the eggs as if they hadn’t eaten in days, their stomachs apparently forgetting the multiple bowls of cold cereal they had just wolfed down. Ammon scooped his eggs onto a piece of toast, took a large bite then turned to Brighton. “Sam called last night,” he said.