Standing the Final Watch Read online

  The Air Force put a limousine and driver at his disposal, while an Army National Guard colonel met him at the bottom of the aircraft’s stairs. After the warmth of the pressurized cabin, Angriff felt the cold breeze like a slap. He expected to get on the road to Incline Village, where he’d been told the FBI had set up their investigation headquarters, but the colonel shifted from foot to foot.

  “I’m afraid we can’t leave yet, General,” he said. “The highway to Incline Village is closed until noon, sir. The president is in town and is also traveling there.”

  “The president?” Angriff said, surprised. “He’s here in person? I’m very glad to hear that. If we have to wait a few hours, that’s fine; it’s worth it to have him pushing the investigation. Maybe I should try to see him while I’m here? I have some ideas of my own about how we should respond.”

  “Yes, General… I’m sure he will be very interested to hear the latest on the investigation while he’s here.”

  Angriff never minced words, and so he could always tell when someone else did. “What is it?”

  “It’s just that…well, the president is here to vacation at the home of a friend, a well-known film director who lives on Lake Tahoe’s Nevada shore. The trip has been planned for months, and our Guard unit has been training to help secure the route since July. The timing is just a coincidence, sir.”

  “I don’t believe in coincidences,” Angriff said. “So what has the president said about this attack?”

  “He said that while it’s a tragedy, we should not jump to conclusions about it being terrorism before all of the evidence has been collected.”

  “Jump to conclusions? What else could it be?”

  “General, I’m just repeating what I’ve seen on the news. Our alert status was raised right after it happened, but we’re just a Guard unit. We do not have access to sensitive intel like that.”

  “I’m sorry, Colonel, it’s not your fault,” Angriff said. He refused to sigh. “Is there somewhere we can wait that’s out of the wind? Maybe have a cup of coffee?”

  The colonel led him to the Army National Guard officer’s lounge, a small room with tile floors, a stained coffee maker, and an old television. Small talk soon died out and Angriff fidgeted. The program selection on the TV appalled him. Court shows with people suing over unpaid rent, talk shows with women getting DNA tests to see which of multiple men was their child’s father, lie detector tests to determine who cheated on whom, infomercials for useless kitchen gadgets, and panels of women talking about the latest shoe fashions.

  Scanning and re-scanning the channels for anything that might take his mind off his murdered family, he stopped on a kid’s program and smiled.

  “This was my girls’ favorite show when they were little,” he said. “Janine would shower and dress before I left for work, and I’d make their favorite breakfast of Cheerios, grapes, and bacon. I’ll never forget it… Morgan always ate her bacon first, while Cynthia preferred the grapes. Their eyes never left the screen, and mine never left them.”

  The colonel nodded.

  “Damn, I can’t believe this show has degenerated into such crap. Why do three-year-olds need to hear puppets talking about refugees coming into America? It paints them all as harmless women and children, and most of them are. Who wouldn’t want to escape the chaos in the Middle East? They’re terrified and I don’t blame them. But let me tell you, Colonel, there are others infiltrating the country along with them, trained terrorists — murderers and madmen who think it’s an honor to die as long as they kill Americans in the process, like kamikazes. This show makes me sick now; it’s nothing but propaganda.”

  Out of desperation, he changed to the news.

  “My God,” he whispered after fifteen minutes. “What’s happened to my country?”

  Angriff tried to decipher hard information from the various broadcasts, but the news stations paid less attention to actual news than to apportioning blame for anything and everything that had gone wrong, anywhere in the world, including what they referred to as ‘the Lake Tahoe incident.’ Coverage of the war against ISIS and other Muslim terror groups, his personal area of expertise, bore no relation to the reality he knew.

  Some of the channels seemed to understand the dire threat facing the civilized world, but the majority downplayed the danger. Some went so far as to insinuate threats did not exist at all. Illegal immigration tended to be a companion story to the war against terror, with a parade of talking heads droning what were obviously rehearsed points about open borders and unlimited immigration without background checks.

  On both of those issues, the president sided with the radicals. Angriff despised him for it, which in turn had created pressure to force him out of the Army. His command of the battlefield had saved him so far, but it left him depressed and angry. While he risked his life overseas, at home the very things he fought against found welcoming arms.

  Finally the colonel spoke. “General, we can leave now. The Mount Rose Highway is open again all the way to Incline.”

  Leaving the airport, they passed a group of protesters sequestered well away from the exit roads. Angriff tried to read their signs but couldn’t.

  “What’s their beef?”

  “Illegal immigration,” the colonel said. “The president signed an executive order the other day for the INS to stand down from deporting anyone for the next year, for any reason, or even rounding up suspected illegals. Those people don’t like it.”

  “But that’s not legal. There are laws on the books.”

  The colonel shrugged. “Not my call, sir.”

  “You can’t even read their signs from here.”

  “I think that was the point. The governor is a big supporter of the president and didn’t want to upset him.”

  Angriff said nothing more on the ride up the mountain, but his expression spoke for him.

  The FBI had set up headquarters in a luxury hotel on the lakeshore, with space provided for every other conceivable federal agency, from Homeland Security to the BATF. Angriff found himself taken to a conference room filled with agents using computers and talking on phones. After a brief wait an older man with hair graying at the temples approached. Angriff stood and they shook hands.

  “General Angriff, I’m Special Agent in Charge Terry Bettison. I’m very sorry for your loss. Please sit down.”

  Angriff sat back down. “Who did this, Special Agent Bettison?”

  “We don’t know yet, sir. It’s an ongoing investigation.”

  “Don’t bullshit me. You know who did this, even if you don’t have all the proof yet. I’ve been told it was probably Queda, by people who don’t make shit up and don’t lie to me. Is that true or not?”

  “I’d say it’s possible, General Angriff. Maybe even probable, although the group that has claimed responsibility is new. Nobody’s ever heard of them before, which is highly unusual in cases like this. They claim to be part of Queda, that’s true, but there’s no chatter verifying it. We can’t even be sure Muslims are behind this.”

  “Who are they?”

  “They call themselves The Sword of the New Prophet.”

  “Sounds Islamic to me,” Angriff said. Bettison shrugged. “When can I see my wife and daughter?”

  “The… remains… have not yet been identified. It may be several days.”

  “Don’t you need me to identify them?”

  “That won’t be necessary in this case.”

  “Out with it, Bettison. You don’t have to spare me.” Angriff cocked his head and studied the FBI agent for signs of deflection or deception.

  Bettison flicked his eyes left, a brief but telltale movement. “General, the… killers…”

  “Terrorists,” Angriff said. “Call them what they are.”

  Bettison continued as if he had not been interrupted. “The killers used machine guns, probably Uzis, Russian hand grenades, and thermite grenades. The boat was loaded with fuel and the explosion left very little to identify.”


  Red flags ran up Angriff’s spine. “Thermite grenades? Why would they use those?”

  “We don’t know that, but our pyrotechnic people assure me the burn patterns were definitely caused by thermite. The boat was only half sunk and the first thing we did was tow the wreck to shallow water.”

  Despite not having slept in two and a half days, Angriff’s tactician’s mind pictured the scene and the weapons used. He rubbed the bridge of his nose, the way he always did when thinking through a problem.

  “You use thermite to completely destroy things, including human beings, but why use them on a tour boat? It’s unnecessary if your intention is simply to kill people. You don’t need hand grenades at all for that. It’s overkill. Terrorists want to leave visible carnage behind. It’s like a calling card, horrifying images that get sent around the world, but thermite prevents that from happening. Something doesn’t add up, Bettison.”

  “I’m not sure what else I can tell you, General. I can’t read their minds.”

  “But what you are trying not to say is that my family can’t be identified because there’s nothing left to identify.”

  Bettison looked at the floor. “As of yet. We’re hoping for DNA recovery, but there’s not much to work with.”

  Angriff stood, clasped hands behind his back, and stared off into space. “There were children on that boat, weren’t there? Little kids and their mothers?”

  “Yes, there were.”

  “I’m off in a foreign land fighting to keep my family safe, while at home my own country is letting terrorists run loose to murder at will.”

  “That’s not fair. I know you’re grieving, I know how you feel…”

  Angriff turned and glared down Bettison. He trembled with suppressed rage.

  “Unless this has happened to you,” Angriff said, struggling to control his voice, “don’t you ever say you know how I feel. I never said that to the parents of those killed under my command, not until it happened to me. Before that it would have been arrogant and condescending. Only after Morgan was killed did I understand their pain. And don’t ever correct me again, either, do you hear me? Somebody here at home doped off and my family is dead because of it. That’s a fact.”

  The general’s personal aura might have overwhelmed someone less experienced. Bettison said nothing, but his hands curled into fists and his jaw clenched. Like successful operatives in every government since the first Pharaoh united Egypt, however, doubtless Bettison knew how to hold a grudge and how to get even. At the moment, Angriff did not care.

  “I’m going to get a room. Find the killers, Bettison. Do your job.”

  Standing at the end of the hotel’s pier, Bettison felt safe enough to make the call. He punched the number from memory, heard a click, and began speaking without waiting for a greeting.

  “He’s a piece of work, all right. What a prick. He’s suspicious of the terrorist angle. Says thermite is counter-productive to a terrorist’s objectives, and he’s right. That was stupid. This guy’s sharp and knows his shit. I can see why he wins battles, even if he is a turd. Nobody’s going to manipulate this guy, and anybody who thinks they can is going to wind up getting fucked.”

  He hit the off button, crushed the phone under his heel, and kicked the ruined metal far out into the lake.

  Angriff kicked the sheets off the bed as he tossed for hours. His mind kept replaying a short video Janine had sent him just before she and Cynthia boarded the tour boat. In the one-minute video, they laughed on the Lake Tahoe shoreline, eating ice cream cones and telling him how much they wished he could have joined them. That part tortured him most because he told himself he could have done something to save them. Never mind that the terrorists had had Uzis; his mind made up fantastic scenarios of how he could have stopped the massacre. His brain played the video over and over again, and he cried until tears and sweat made his pillow soggy.

  He awoke at sunrise, groggy and drained, and ignored the flood of texts, emails, and phone calls from Army buddies offering condolences. With nothing to do and nowhere to be, he watched TV and smoked cigars, living on room service. The hotel did not allow smoking, and after the third courteous but insistent visit from the hotel manager, Angriff went down to the lakeshore to smoke. Staring over the water, he visualized the attack, trying to understand everything that bothered him about Bettison’s version of events.

  The attack, which news outlets still called the incident on Lake Tahoe, led the national news for several days, but as horrible as it had been, after those days it slipped further and further into the background. When on the third day the lead story became some anorexic boy singer getting arrested for punching a cop who’d stopped him for doing 120 in a school zone, Angriff threw his shoe at the screen.

  Later on day three he drew the curtains, turned the lights off, and only left his room to smoke.

  On day four Bettison displayed purported photos of his family’s remains, but to Angriff they appeared as nothing more than black chunks, like giant pieces of coal. He felt no kinship seeing them, no connection, but it would at least give him something to bury. He called the funeral home in Charlottesville, the Angriff family’s ancestral home and the burial place of his parents and grandparents, his sister, and his beautiful daughter Morgan. There had been nothing left of her except ashes, too. Bouts of tears and vows of revenge came without warning.

  “Please, God, tell me what I’ve done wrong for my family to suffer so much,” he prayed, kneeling beside the bed. “Forgive my transgressions so that one day I may see them again in Paradise. And if it be your will, lead me to their killers, so that I may send them to Hell.”

  The FBI released the bodies on day six. Angriff stood in the hotel lobby on the morning of day seven, checking out, drained and dispirited. Special Agent Bettison called him aside.

  “General, we have some real miracle workers in Quantico. They were able to salvage a few snippets from the tour boat’s onboard security cameras. It’s not much, but if you’ve got a minute, I think you’ll want to see it. It’s for your eyes only. We’re not releasing this to the public, not now, and probably not ever.”

  “About the other day, Bettison,” Angriff said. “I was out of line. I’m sorry.”

  “It’s a difficult time, General,” Bettison said. “It’s hard for everybody.” Opening a laptop, he checked to make sure nobody stood close by and then opened a file. “There’s two short bits of video. The first is very graphic, the second… well, you’ll see.”

  Bettison expanded the image to full screen. Without warning, from stark blackness came the screams of women and children as bullets ripped into them and blood swirled, like from a giant blender. One drop ran down the lens. A woman shielding a little red-haired girl took at least ten rounds before she fell, and despite having witnessed almost every cruelty that man can inflict upon his fellow man, Angriff turned away for a moment. But he refused to weep in public, regardless of the circumstances.

  The first video lasted for nine seconds and then stopped, with the people all motionless on the deck. In the background a man kept repeating Allayhu akbar. The terrorist spoke with a clear and distinct voice, and a harsh Boston accent.

  The second video started right after the first and lasted for five seconds, long enough for Janine and Cynthia Angriff to pass from the right side of the picture to the left. The hand of someone unseen pulled at them and terror showed in their faces. After they’d passed by, a short burst of gunfire rang out and blood again spattered the camera lens.

  “I’m very sorry, General Angriff, but I thought you would want to see for yourself.”

  “I knew it in my heart and this forces me to admit it with my mind. Thank you. Again, I’m sorry about the other day. Please keep me in the loop.”

  “That’s a promise,” Bettison said.

  Angriff wanted nothing more than to go home to Virginia and the Army limousine pulled onto the road at 0900 hours. The president would leave at noon, thereby closing the highway again, aft
er the commander-in-chief had spent the previous week playing golf and fly-fishing. Angriff had waited for a visit to the investigation, or even just a phone call, but nothing had come.

  Chapter 3

  Dim my warrior spirit,

  Lead me to Death’s door;

  What’s the point of living

  When there’s nothing to live for?

  Sergio Velazquez

  December 2nd, seven weeks later

  Outside Charlottesville, Virginia

  At 0814 the doorbell rang. Angriff had fallen asleep sometime after 0400 and stuck his head under the pillow, trying to ignore the buzzing. For weeks he had avoided the parade of journalists, TV reporters, and conspiracy bloggers, and he waited for that one to leave too, but the buzzer kept buzzing. Fifteen minutes later he rolled off the bed and shuffled out to yell at the intruder.

  He opened the door and quit thinking about yelling. Air rushed out of the house like breaking a vacuum seal. “I was in bed.”

  “I can see that,” Norm Fleming said. He turned his head away from the reek. A peek past Angriff’s shoulder revealed an armchair piled with clothes. “I’ve been worried about you, Nick, and it looks like I had good reason to be.”

  “I appreciate the concern, but I’m fine. Now go away.” Angriff squinted and raised his arm, blocking the morning sunshine.

  “You don’t look fine.”

  Red veins webbed Angriff’s eyes, over purple half-moons that appeared black against his pallor. He had not shaved in at least a week. “Who asked you? I don’t need a babysitter; get out of here.”

  Instead, Fleming pushed past him into the dark house. Closed blinds and heavy drapes kept most daylight from entering. He had been a frequent guest over the years and knew the house’s layout, but Janine had kept things tidy and neat. Fleming covered his mouth and nose with a dish towel he found on the floor.