Quest for Honor (5 page)

The general knew exactly what he was talking about. “Of course. Let’s go to my office.” That was only about twenty steps away, and with every step Fazeed fought harder to keep his anxiety level under control. He had thought that after six months, he would be able to discuss this topic without apprehension, but that was not so, not yet. They reached his office. Once inside, they sat in adjacent chairs next to the coffee table. The general’s desk dominated the other end of the room. As they sat, the general looked up at the portrait of his father that hung proudly on one wall, and he prayed to Allah for some of the old man’s strength.

“The ships are ready to sail,” Jafari said without preamble, and the general could not suppress his intake of breath.

A half-hour later, the general shook hands with the mullahs and Jafari as they prepared for the short ride to the airstrip. The Defense Ministry official’s grip was firm and his eye contact said much more than the platitudes they were exchanging. As the general watched the two Land Rovers drive off, he reflected again on what he had been told in his office just a few minutes before. Part of him was filled with pride, for his role in the mission, delicate and hazardous as it had been, was now successfully completed. He was also concerned for his old friend and colleague, a Navy admiral who now was in charge and who now would have to rely on the professionalism and skill of his sailors, the hand-picked crews of the two ships, to bring the mission to a successful conclusion. Of course there were others on board, the security troops from Quds Force and the technicians in charge of the weapons, but they would be little more than passengers until the ships reached their destinations. It was the Navy’s job to get them there. The general said a quick prayer for the admiral and his brave men.

He prayed for their success, and the success of the other men on board, for if they failed, it could mean the end of everything…for the general, his family, his country.

Everything would be riding on PERSIAN METEOR.

CHAPTER FIVE

Wisconsin

A
nnie was pretty
quiet on the drive from the air show back to her place, giving him time to think about what had happened at the gate. The rush of the confrontation was wearing off now, and so was the thrill of seeing the protestor’s eyes go wide with surprise and pain. It was a good thing the cop had come by to break it up when he had, or the guy might’ve gotten seriously hurt. Yeah, that clown had started it, with his insults and taunts and his damn finger poking Jim in the chest, but still…

When they came to a stop in her driveway, she said, “I could whip up some dinner, if you’re interested.”

“Sure.” He’d just assumed they’d be coming back here anyway, having dinner and then spending the night together again, as had been their routine on Saturdays for the past few months. They alternated between her place and his, although if truth were to be told, he preferred her place out here in the country to his little house in town, and once or twice—well, okay, more often lately—he’d wondered if he might someday be asked to move out here permanently, and if he’d accept the invitation.

One thing about Annie he definitely liked was her cooking, and even something quick and simple turned out to be quite good. He helped out by making the salads while she busied herself with the main course, a chili macaroni dish recipe she’d seen in his latest issue of
Men’s Health.
She talked a little bit, too, but it was small talk, about their kids mostly. Nothing about the air show, or what had happened at the gate.

“Very good,” he said when he put his fork down after the last bite. “More wine?”

“Sure,” she said, and he poured her half a glass of the Riesling, leaving enough for him to have about a half-glass himself. She’d put away a couple already, and that was unusual. Annie didn’t drink very much and usually had a one-glass limit on wine.

“Listen, about what happened…”

“You didn’t have to break the guy’s finger, Jim,” she said, with a flash of those eyes that he knew could very well mean trouble.

“I didn’t break it,” he said. “Dislocated, maybe, but it wasn’t broken.”

“He could press charges, you know.”

“I doubt that. The cop was right there and he didn’t take my name. He saw the guy do what he did. He started it, after all. I just finished it.” Jim felt himself getting defensive, but he didn’t care. Sometimes Annie liked to push people’s buttons, and that was one thing he didn’t like about her. Then again, she was more right than wrong about this one, wasn’t she?

“You could’ve walked away. Right from the start. Just ignored him.”

“The guy insulted my brother, he insulted me, and he insulted the United States Army.”

“Just words, Jim.”

He set the wine glass down with a little more force than he needed to. “No, not just words. There’s a lot more to it than that. Those characters come out to events like that air show and wave their idiot signs and call people criminals and nobody ever calls them on it, then they go back to their cocktail parties and brag about how tough they are. They have no idea what toughness really is. Well, now there’s one guy who found out.”

“Yeah, you showed him, Mr. Tough Guy. Did it feel good?”

Jim remembered the man gasping in pain as his finger was bent backward, then his wide-eyed amazement as his arm was wrenched upward and over his shoulder and then the fear and pain as he was bent over backward with Jim’s elbow at his throat. Jim could’ve taken him to the ground but that’s when the cop came over and broke it up.

“Maybe I took it a little too far,” Jim said, “but yeah, it felt good. The guy was a bully. He’s probably been bullying people for the last thirty years. Somebody had to shut him up and today that happened to be me.”

“What do you mean, a bully? He didn’t hit you. Didn’t even really threaten you.”

“A bully can use words, Annie. He doesn’t have to be the kind who pushes you around physically. These guys pretend they’re tough by what they write and what they say in their lectures in their classrooms. I had a few of them back at Platteville and you sure as hell had them in Madison.”

“Come on, Jim, they’re harmless.”

“I disagree. They influence people. They do it now, they did it then. Forty years ago they were the ones spitting on the veterans when they came home from Vietnam. Now they don’t have the guts to do it to guys like my brother when they come home, because the rest of the country won’t put up with that crap anymore. But they still feel the same way. That was pretty obvious, wasn’t it?”

“And you’re gonna set ‘em straight, right? The martial arts master’s gonna teach the big bully protestor a lesson.” Annie had a funny look in her eyes. She was provoking him, giving him more than just the little needling she’d used before when the subject of politics had come up. But he wasn’t really in the mood for playing games tonight.

“I’m not a master, I’m just a student,” he said. “My sensei is a master.” That thought led him to wonder what Sensei would have said about this confrontation. Probably not much. Ah, hell, why couldn’t he have just walked away?

“What do you care what they say about your brother, anyway? You said you haven’t talked to him more than once or twice in years.”

That did it. “Maybe I’d better be going,” he said. He pushed his chair back and stood up.

“Yeah, right. Eat and run. Or you could stay and fight, tough guy.” She stood up, too.

“I think you’ve had a bit too much wine, Annie.”

“Now you’re telling me how much I can drink? Gonna break my arm if I have some more?”

He shook his head and started walking toward the front door. He had his hand on the doorknob when he felt her pulling at his arm. “Don’t you walk out on me!” she said angrily.

He turned, smoothly removed her hand from his bicep and started to twist it, but held back. Her eyes went wide as she realized what might happen. The look cut Jim to the heart. He didn’t want to hurt her, had never hurt any woman, but she had kept pushing him, and he didn’t like being pushed. “Be careful, Annie,” he said.

She was breathing a bit more heavily now, but her eyes changed, from fear to something else, a look that usually excited him. “So you think you can handle me, big guy?”

Jim had seen her like this once or twice, when their foreplay got a little rough. Annie had always taken the lead in terms of sex, right from the start, on their third date. She was aggressive, dominant, and a match for him physically. That had made for some interesting times indeed, and more exciting, to be honest, than anything he’d ever had with Suzy. But while there was passion with him and Annie, there was little of the tenderness he’d known with his wife. Like every other part of her life, Annie considered the bedroom to be a place of competition, where winning was the only option. He had never really been sure how he felt about that, but he was now.

“Yeah, I can handle you, Annie,” he said, letting go of her hand, “but that’s not what I want to do.” He kissed her on the forehead. “Good night.”

Back home, Jim fed the cat and fell into bed, suddenly exhausted, asleep almost as soon as his head hit the pillow, a rarity for him. He dreamed about Suzy, flitting from seeing her on campus in college to their first house together and then…

“No!” He forced himself to wake up, pulling himself out of the dream before it got to where he had never wanted to go ever again, and sat up in bed, eyes wide open. Next to him, Spike stirred and started purring. The clock showed 4:13. He could press a button on it to show the date, but he knew what it was: July the tenth. Exactly six years since that day.

It was better to think about the years before July 10, 2005. They had been good years, very good. Start with that day in the fall of ’80, when he was sitting in his English class at college in Platteville and she walked in. Susan Mitchell had lustrous black hair and dynamite legs, and he couldn’t believe his luck when those legs walked over to the empty desk next to his. She beamed him a smile that lit up his world. Two days later they had a cup of coffee after class, and then their first date on Saturday night. He quickly forgot about trying to rehab his knee enough to get back on the basketball team.

More good memories: graduating in ’83, getting engaged and starting their careers, him in marketing at a cable-TV company in Dubuque, Iowa, just across the Mississippi, and Suzy teaching elementary school in Potosi, a small town on the Wisconsin side. They married in ’84, and Michaela was born two years later. In ’90 he had a great job offer from a company in Milwaukee, and even though she didn’t want to go, wanted to raise their daughter in a small town just like she had been, she came along, of course she did, because she loved him. They settled in a nice suburb, and even though two miscarriages marred their happiness, they got through them, which made her surprising pregnancy in the spring of ’05 all the more special.

Then she got word in early July that her favorite aunt had died back in her hometown of Mount Sterling, so they went to the funeral on a Saturday, and her cousin Edie asked them to stay the night. How could he say no to that? Suzy and Edie had grown up together here among the ridges and valleys of Crawford County. Even though Edie was mourning her mother, she was thrilled to hear Suzy’s news about the pregnancy, and now Jim remembered through tears the sight of the two women embracing and crying, sharing the joy. Sure, they would go to church with Edie and her family the next morning, then hit the road for home.

Now he knew what he had to do. For six years he had avoided it, pushed it aside, denied it, but it always came back. He had to face it. He got up and headed to the shower.

The church looked just as it had six years ago. That morning was sunny and warm, too, and he remembered hearing the greetings passed between the adults as they walked from their cars to the front door, the little kids running ahead, laughing with excitement, just like now.

He sat in the car, watching. The last of the worshipers had gone inside, the bell rang out, and then he heard the sound of the organ, the voices raised in song. He took a deep breath, and allowed it all to come back.

He and Suzy were sitting with her cousin’s family in a pew about three rows from the back of the small sanctuary. About a hundred people were in attendance, enjoying the special music for the day, a father on guitar accompanying his teenage daughter on “In the Garden”. He must have rustled in his seat because Suzy looked at him and whispered, “Are you okay?”

“Have to use the rest room,” he said. He squeezed her hand and got up. The singer began the final verse as he opened the right side of the sanctuary’s double doors, with the ushers sitting to their right. He closed the door behind him. Where was the bathroom? Oh yeah, he’d seen people using it earlier, and it was over there to the right, around the corner by the coat rack.

It must’ve been right about then that the rusty old Chevy Lumina pulled up outside. He didn’t hear the driver’s door open, didn’t see the man getting out, didn’t see the .45 handgun he was carrying, didn’t see him approach the door of the church. Jim went into the bathroom, but before he could close the door he heard the front door of the church opening, heard the heavy footfalls on the stairs, a sound that didn’t belong here. The hairs rose up on the back of his neck. Jim glanced back out of the bathroom toward the stairs and saw the man and knew immediately he was trouble.

He steadied his breathing, just as his taekwondo instructor had taught him. There was a Bible lying on a chair next to the bathroom door. He picked it up.

The man with the gun was just topping the staircase and stepping onto the main floor. He was a white guy in his twenties with a two-day growth and wearing fatigue pants stuffed into his combat boots, a black tee shirt with some sort of heavy-metal band’s logo on the front, and on his head was a black baseball cap with the bill turned backward. He had his weapon pointed straight ahead, toward the doors of the sanctuary, and Jim looked that way automatically and saw one of the doors opening, the same one he’d just used. Suzy was coming through, and she looked at him with a quizzical expression, always thinking of him, surely wondering if he was feeling all right, and then she took a second step into the narthex, the door swinging shut behind her, and saw the gun.

Time seemed to slow down for Jim. He shouted and threw the Bible with a backhand toss straight at the man’s head, and started running. The punk’s head turned his way and his eyes went wide as he saw the book flying at him, and he squeezed the trigger and the muzzle blazed a split-second before the Bible hit him in the face. Jim saw the gun come around toward him as the guy staggered backward. Jim’s training came flashing back to him:
Fight the man, not the weapon.
He came in at an angle, out of the line of fire, and things happened fast now. The end of the gun blazed again and Jim sensed something hot rocketing just past him, a moment before he brought his left hand down to grip the top of the gun and his right fist crashed down onto the gunman’s forearm, right onto the LI-7 pressure point. That brought a shriek from the guy and caused his hand to release the gun.

Jim drove his right elbow around into the man’s jaw, knocking him off-balance even further. With the gun in his left hand, Jim fired a front kick into the man’s solar plexus, driving him backwards and crashing into a cart full of books. Jim set the gun carefully on the floor and took another two steps to the guy who was rolling off the toppled cart, moaning. He came down with his right knee into the man’s exposed left ribcage and he heard ribs crack as the guy screamed in pain. He pushed the man onto his stomach and brought his left arm up into a chicken wing hold, pinning it in place with his knees. “Turn your head away!” Jim screamed. “Cross your ankles! Put that arm out straight!” The guy was slow to comply, so Jim cranked his pinned arm enough to feel something tear in the shoulder, and then there were other hands reaching down to help him.

For the first time Jim became aware of the pandemonium surrounding him, men yelling, women screaming, feet pounding. A red-faced man knelt down beside Jim. “I’ve got him! Go to your wife!” Jim released his grip just enough for the other man to take over and then stood up, looking back toward the sanctuary doors.