Dominatus (2 page)

He, like so many already gone before him, knew just enough to make him a liability.  And if what he knew was enough for them to kill him, what then of me?  How long before I too was eliminated as a gesture of “just in case” by the N.U.N. operatives?

And so, just as Mac had done eighteen years earlier after my father secured his release from a federal prison, I too travelled to Alaska to interview one of the now last few survivors who had dared challenge the original Obama regime.

“You got your dad’s way kid.  Saw him as soon as you walked in here.  I promised him we would talk.  Not sure what good it’s gonna do you, but I owe him a hell of a lot more than that, so we’ll talk.”

His hand shot across the bar and took my own in a firm handshake, and I noted the small Seal Team Six tattoo on his forearm.

“…And I’m sorry to hear about his passing.  The bastards finally took him out, huh?  That’s on me too.  What he did for me.  Your old man, he always called me a hero.  I want you to know – you look at me now, and you hear what I’m sayin’.  Your old man – he’s more of a goddamn hero than I ever was.  He was good people, the kind of people this world is in damn short supply of these days.  And they’re killing them off, all of us off…one by one.

“…Welcome to Dominatus, Alaska son.  Let’s talk.”

The sound of Bob Marley’s
Redemption Song
now enveloped the interior of Freedom Tavern as I prepared to ask the first of my many-many questions.

“Let’s go to my office in the back.”

I followed the tavern owner down a narrow hallway leading to the opposite end of the small building where a door stood partly open, noting the holstered handgun that hung from his waist.  The temperature dropped considerably as the heat from the coal burning stove in the tavern’s main room seemed hesitant to make the trip down the hallway I was now taking.  The door was opened and I followed the man inside where I was greeted by a small but tastefully furnished office space where a large oak desk and leather chair sat swathed in the warm glow of a single incandescent light bulb.  Very old school.  I hadn’t seen one of those light-bulbs lit up for nearly twenty years.  They, like so many other things in America, had been banned from use by the general public, though it was well known a thriving black market was available to those still wealthy or influential enough to purchase such items.

The room’s walls were lined with photos from what appeared to be locations spanning the globe.  Behind the desk was a framed copy of the American Declaration of Independence, and above that hung what appeared to be a genuine musket rifle. One photo was placed prominently in the middle of the wall showing four men with their arms draped over each others’ shoulders with Egyptian pyramids as backdrops – the man on the far left a much younger version of the one who now sat across the desk from me.  

“Many lifetimes ago.  A whole different world then.  I’m the last one left alive in that picture.  Even though I was the oldest of the four of us.  We saw a hell of a lot of shit together.  They had us dropping in everywhere.  Congo.  Malaysia.  Greece.  Then came Benghazi and it all went to shit.  And after that, one by one, we were gettin’ picked off.  Suicide.  Traffic accident.  Heart attack.  So I came up here, before they got to me too.  And I ain’t been back since.  Fuck it.  Fuck them.  Fuck all of it.  And if they want one last fight with this old boy…bring it.”

For the first time I took in just how tired this man I had been told stories of for so long, now appeared and sounded.  My notes indicated he had just recently turned seventy-three, but there was a fatigue in him that suggested a man who felt the burden of years even beyond those of seventy-three, especially in the eyes.   Deep crevices shot out from the cornered rims of his glasses, and equally deep lines encircled both sides of a mouth that inclined downward into a permanent frown.  The closely cropped salt and pepper hair was much thinner than the photos my father had shown me, and certainly more sparse and grey than the man he once was in that photo on the wall.  The shoulders remained broad though, and the firmness in his grip during our recent handshake hinted at a significant strength that still remained in a body trained decades ago by a government to seek and destroy those who would do that government harm, until eventually, that same government deemed him and those like him to be a threat as well.

I took out my recording device.  It had been my dad’s and was nearly forty years old.  I felt its use to be more appropriate to this particular task and subject than something more modern.

“Can we begin?” 

He turned his head back to me and gave a brief glimpse of a smile and an even briefer nod of the head.

“Sure, however you want to do this.  I promised your father to give you have as much time as you need.  Ask all the questions you want.  Whatever…whatever questions you want.”

I noted the faint hum of what was likely the tavern’s generator coming from somewhere outside the office – possibly behind one of the doors in the hallway.

“Please state your name.”

“Mackenzie Walker - people been callin’ me Mac since I can remember.  You can do the same.”

“When and where were you born, Mac?”

“Born and raised in Carville,  Louisiana – 1964.”

“So you are now, at the time of this interview, seventy-three years old, correct?”

“Yes.”

“And when did you enter the United States military?”

“That was October, 1984.  Did a couple years of junior college, then signed up.  Wanted to see the world.  Young and dumb – all that kind of thing.”

“What branch of the military?”

“Navy.  When America still had a military – still had its own Navy before it was co-opted by the U.N.  Was in for just over a year, then applied and was accepted into SWCC.”

“What is that?”

“Special Warfare Combatant Crewman.  Work alongside the SEALs – get in get out operations, and from there…did that for about nine months… I decided to try out for the SEALs.  Knew enough of them by then, and figured I was tougher than most, so why not?  Did my time at BUD/S, passed my PST easily, so easily that some people from JSOC noticed me and I got handed over to them.”

“And that led to your involvement with SEAL Team 6?”

“Yes – DEVGRU.  Naval Special Warfare Development Group.  At that time working out of Fort Bragg. This was around 1987...1988.  Reagan was still in the White House.”

Mac had become much more animated than when I first saw him.  Clearly the subject of his past military experience, at least its beginnings, was a favored one.

“How long did you remain with SEAL Team Six?”

“Nine years, up to about 1997.  Did several months in Eastern Europe, Kosovo.  Black Squadron.  That’s where I started to hook up a lot with the Intel gang.  A bit of NSA.  CIA.  All the voodoo-acronyms.  The real nasty fucks.  Started the transition with them.”

“Transition?”

“NSA was scouring installments like DEVGRU for recruits.  Wanted guys like me who could handle themselves in a shit-storm but had some Intel training too.  Went over my file, report records, all of it.  Liked what they saw and asked me to join up.  They fed my ego.  I was the biggest bad ass on the planet back then – so I thought. Still young and stupid.  Told me how much good I could do for the country, so I said yes.  Took the offer.  And for government work – the money was damn good.  Well, months went by, then years…thought I had made a mistake.  Had me pouring over data inside of a cubicle at Fort Meade.  I was losing my mind there.  Kept making requests to put me in the field and they kept coming back with soon.   Real soon. Then 9-11 happened.  The World Trade Center attacks in New York. The ones the U.N’s curriculum programs, their cultural sensitivity mandates scrubbed from the history books, from all the media logs.  Kids today don’t even know those attacks happened. After 9-11 I was offered to become part of something called Project Icon.  A little in-house zero oversight thing of the DoD’s that also ran through NSA.  In fact, PI was hardly known about, but what we did…we were even deeper behind the curtain than Icon was.  That’s where the picture there on the wall you were looking at comes from.  The four of us there – we were Project Icon.  That’s where I really learned how to kill.  And the more I did it, the more atta boys they gave me.  Just like the movies back then, some shit went down, we got the call…we cleaned it up. Or…we went in and stirred the shit up and then got out and waited.   And we were good at it.  That picture was Egypt…2003.  Five weeks before American military forces hit the sand in Iraq.  We helped pave the road for them. A few Egyptian weapons smugglers helping out Saddam’s military.  First we asked nice.  They ignored us.  Then we executed them.  Then we posed for that picture and slept without a care in the world that night.”

The shock at his last descriptive statement must have clearly registered on my face because he looked at me with more than a bit of amusement.

“I know your dad told you what I was then, and I don’t make any excuses for it.  I was a killer on hire by the government of the United States.  I swore an oath to defend and if need be, terminate any threats, both foreign and domestic.  And that’s exactly what I did.  A whole lot of it too.  Thing is, as repulsive or scary to some people what I was back then might be, without me there is no America.  There’s always been someone to do the dirty work that kept the country going.  Kept it safe.  While the rest of them were sleeping in their beds at night, I was slitting the throats of the ones who wanted to see those beds burning up with them in it.”

“So where did it start to go bad for you?  With the government?”

“Oh – we were a ways off from that.  At least from the time I realized it anyways.  The machine had been put in place though.  Jack was the first of us to start asking questions.  He was the one who said things were getting out of hand, that people were being allowed to get away with way too much, including us.  But that…that wasn’t for a few… another few years yet.”

I pointed to the photo of the four on the wall and asked, “Which one was Jack?”

“The tallest guy with the biggest smile.  He was an Alabama boy, smart as hell.  He started to piece things together way before the rest of us.  And he had a brother who was Secret Service.  Had the presidential detail for Obama during most the first term.  So I assumed some of what he was warning us about was coming from him.  At first…at first I didn’t really know what to make of it and really didn’t care.  By then we had gone private, the four of us.  Left the NSA with a promise of government contracts for as long as we wanted them, and then the money really started to come in for us.  Hundreds of thousands for each of us.    That was the last couple of years before Obama when we started that up…competing with the likes of Blackwater and other PMCs.  Iraq and Afghanistan were crawling with people like us back then – and the money, the money was incredible.  Almost no oversight – none.  If something needed to be done that fell outside military code of conduct, and there was a lot of that – then they called us and we got it done.  We had access to the best equipment, the best intelligence, and they gave us carte blanche to do it how we wanted to do it.  And we did.  

“But Jack…Jack was telling us it wasn’t right.  Not the missions necessarily.  We knew we were dealing with bad guys.  Taking out the bad guys, but all the money and no accountability, and how things were turning inward, that had Jack spooked.”

‘What do you mean by inward?  Turning inward?”

“They started to order up a lot more operations focused on American citizens abroad -   filed it under Patriot Act directives.  Jack would go on and on about the Patriot Act.  Congress passed that back in 2001, and then it kept getting added to.  Bits and pieces here and there.  They would say it was to protect the American people of course, that was how they always justified taking away freedom, and Jack was really starting to get pissed about it.  By the time 2009 rolls around he’s hearing things about the president from his brother, and he’s watching how Congress is expanding the powers of the Patriot Act.  Seizing computer data without warrants, entering people’s homes without them ever knowing – no search warrant, the surveillance stuff they started to have us do by then was really…it started to unsettle all of us.  The drone program, we went from fighting the bad guys who were trying to harm America to watching and detailing the movements of Americans themselves.  And, because we weren’t a branch of the government, like I said – no accountability.  No oversight.  They told us what they wanted and we delivered it to them.”

There was a pause as both of us looked back to the photo of the four men on the wall.

“Who were the other two?”

Mac looked back at me then back to the photo, and his voice softened slightly as he responded.

“The shorter guy, with the glasses – that was Minnick.  Jay Minnick.  He was the tech guy – damn smart.  But he could snipe too.  Thousand yards and more - deadly accurate.  His father was a former Congressman who helped get us set up with the military contracts when we started out.  Weapons, identities, safe-houses…all that.”

“And what about the other one?”

“The Black guy?  That’s Benny.  Benjamin Williams – we all called him Benny.  Or just B.   Always laughing, joking, even when the shit got scary bad…he still kept that smile.  He loved the work.  The life.  Had a hard side to him though, like we all did.  Of the four of us, Benny was the only one I thought I might not be able to take in hand to hand.  He was like a 5th degree Aikido-something, really into the martial arts stuff.  I saw him take out three guys once – no weapons.  It was about a two second blur and there they all were lying on the ground and there was Benny standing there smiling like he didn’t have a care in the world.”