Wrong Town: A Mark Landry Novel (2 page)

Two

Despite driving through the night from northern Virginia to Boston, Mark Landry was not the least bit sleepy. There was simply too much to think about during the seven-hour trip. He had been back in the U.S. for just six days after two solid years abroad and hadn’t had much time to readjust to the sights, sounds, and pace. The drive had given him that much-needed opportunity as he made his way north with the radio off.

As his dark blue Ford Explorer emerged from the I-93 tunnel that runs under the city, the sun started to rise beyond the Bunker Hill Monument to his right. He squinted and reached for his sunglasses. Soon Boston began to shrink in his rear-view mirror as he drew closer to home.

Home
.
Whatever that means
.

Mark had been home only a handful of times since graduating from high school more than twenty years ago. And when he did visit, he was usually in and out within a few days and rarely touched base with the few friends he still had there. He could have stayed longer but instead chose to get back to work. There were places to go, things to do, and bad people to track and occasionally kill.

Thirty miles north of Boston, he turned off the exit ramp onto the last stretch of road toward his hometown. He thought back to his one and only meeting with his high school guidance counselor, about a month before graduation.

“Come on in, Matt, I mean Mark,” she said. “I thought I had met with everyone under my supervision, but I just noticed your name on my list so I sent for you immediately. Are you new to the school system? When did you arrive in town?”

“Kindergarten.”

She forced a nervous laugh, not sure if he was serious. “And what do you think you’d like to do after graduation? You’ve got decent grades so you have lots of options.”

              “I leave for Army basic training next week.”

“Oh, the U.S. Army?”

“No, the Salvation Army,” he said somewhat sarcastically, but with a smile that showed enough respect to soften the barb. “Yes, the U.S. Army. I’m hoping to do four years while I figure out what I want to be when I grow up.”

Before he had finished speaking, she had already dropped her head, checked his name off her list, and called in the next student. When she finally looked up from the stacks of paper on her, Mark had already slipped out and dissolved into a crowd of students in the hall. A month later he reported for duty at Fort Benning, Georgia. There were no tearful goodbyes. In fact, there were very few goodbyes at all.

The toughest part of training for Mark had been the sweltering heat. The rest was relatively easy. Do what you’re told and don’t complain. He made a few buddies in his squad but said very little to anyone else. About half of the fifty men in the platoon were reservists who would be going home after infantry school anyway. Most of the remainder would immediately join active duty units across the country. Four of them, including Mark, had enlisted with the Ranger option and would immediately report to U.S. Army Ranger School, headquartered right there at Fort Benning. Two ended up quitting in the first few days, and the third fractured his leg fast-roping from a Black Hawk helicopter and was medically dropped. Mark was the only one of the four to graduate and earn his Ranger tab. He was immediately assigned to 3rd Battalion, 75th Ranger Regiment, where he would serve with distinction for the next twelve years.

Mark turned right after entering the town limits and decided to drive around a bit to get reacquainted with the scenery and see how much things had changed. The cemetery could wait.

Some of the businesses had changed, and there were more buildings than he remembered. There also seemed to be more foot traffic around town on sidewalks that looked new—or maybe he had just never noticed them before. Traffic was heavier and drivers shared the clean streets with joggers and cyclists. He passed a gas station and noticed a police cruiser tucked back against the side of the building. He glanced at the small airport on the other side of the street, and his thoughts returned to his perhaps soon-to-be-over career in special operations. The tiny runway reminded him of his first taste of combat in Afghanistan just a few weeks after the September 11 attacks.

Upon reaching Afghanistan, the 3rd Ranger Battalion, along with elements from the various Special Mission Units (SMUs—Delta, SEALs, Special Forces, etc.) and CIA paramilitary forces, first spent weeks gathering intelligence on al-Qaeda and Taliban forces. Lightning-fast nighttime raids on active terrorist training camps and enemy positions followed. Mark soon lost count of how many doors they’d kicked in and how many terrorists they either snatched from their beds or killed before they even knew they’d been found.

After a year of missions in Afghanistan, he had returned to Fort Benning for one month before redeploying to Iraq to join the hunt for Saddam Hussein and his deranged sons, Uday and Qusay. As one of only a few Rangers handpicked to join “Task Force 20,” Mark exchanged direct fire with Uday and likely fired one of the bullets that killed him. Four months later, as part of a similar task force, he was within arm’s length of Saddam as the dictator emerged from his infamous “spider hole” near his hometown of Tikrit, although official credit was given to the 4th Infantry Division. As the conventional soldiers basked in the glory, the operators simply moved on to the next target.

Mark’s last mission as a Ranger—although he didn’t know it at the time—was to hunt down and kill the leader of al-Qaeda in Iraq, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. After over a month of surveillance activity, Mark helped laser-guide a pair of five-hundred-pound bombs through the roof of an al-Qaeda safe house as Zarqawi arrived for a secret meeting. Moments afterwards, he arrived at the site in time to peer into the terrorist’s eyes as special ops medics tried in vain to stabilize him. Zarqawi’s dead body was a welcome sight to everyone; he had personally beheaded American civilian hostages and terrorized Iraqi civilians with impunity. But the image that stayed with Mark was that of the mangled bodies of a woman and young child who were also killed in the attack. He never learned who they were or how they ended up in the safe house. The image haunted him for several days, until he was distracted by a most unexpected conversation.

Mark and the rest of the Task Force had been enjoying a well-deserved few days off at their secret base in the desert, still close enough to the war’s center of gravity that they could assemble and deploy to “hot spots” if needed, but far enough away to avoid the throngs of crusading journalists whose antics constantly put troops at risk, as well as the never-ending parade of politicians and celebrities whose visits to the country caused security nightmares for everyone.

Mark had just finished eating lunch in the task force chow hall and was on his way out when a man he’d never seen before called him over to his table and asked him to sit down. The man opened the conversation with a question.             

“How’d you like to get out of this sandbox and work somewhere else for a while, maybe permanently?”

Mark examined the gray-haired man as he continued eating and guessed that he was in his late fifties. The man wore casual navy blue slacks, desert boots, a pressed short-sleeved white button-down shirt, and a tan vest with a slight bulge over his left breast that betrayed his sidearm. He wore a titanium watch on his left wrist. A satellite phone sat on the table next to his tray. Wearing just a black t-shirt, black shorts, and flip-flops, Mark felt underdressed for a moment but didn’t show it.

“Can I bother you for a few more details?” Mark asked matter-of-factly after a few seconds. The man answered without looking up.

“What else would you like to know, Mark?”

He knows my name
.
I wonder what else he knows.

“Well, how about we start with who’s asking. You obviously know—”

“My name is Dunbar,” he blurted while extending his hand. “And you’re right. I obviously know a lot about you already or we wouldn’t be talking, and I wouldn’t have just made you the offer I did.”

“And about that offer, Mr. Dunbar. What exactly does it entail besides getting out of the sandbox?”

The man motioned for Mark to sit across from him. “It’s just Dunbar. I’m offering you a chance to shed that uniform and a lot of the bullshit and restrictions that go with it. You’d be working on an entirely different battlefield with a carefully chosen handful of the country’s best operators … assuming you make it through my qual course,” he added casually. “That’s my standard pitch, which I have given very few times. If you accept and make it, you’ll never see another regular army unit or task force ever again. That’s all I can tell you for now.” Then he awkwardly switched to Spanish and asked for the salt.

Unimpressed with the clumsy change of language, Mark reached with his left hand, without taking his eyes off Dunbar, and put the salt on the table next to his satellite phone.

Dunbar smiled. “
Gracias
.”

Mark nodded his head and looked around the chow hall. Nobody had been watching their conversation—or if anyone was, they were hiding their interest very well. He turned back to Dunbar.

“Would I be familiar with any of the work your unit has done? Any missions I might know of?”

Dunbar put down his knife and fork, sat up straight, and stared intensely into Mark’s eyes, speaking very slowly. “No. There is absolutely nothing we’ve done that you or anyone else would be even vaguely familiar with. That’s the way it has always been. And that is the way it will always be. If you’re looking for glory or think you may want to get an easy book deal some day, then go join a fucking SEAL team. If you want to make history, follow me. Do you understand what I’m saying, Landry?”

The intensity of Dunbar’s eyes distracted Mark enough that he didn’t even notice that the older gentleman had switched to German. He merely nodded and responded, “
Ja, Ich versteche.
”
Yes, I understand.

“Good,” Dunbar continued in English. He then removed a piece of paper from the inside of his vest and slid it across the table. “Here are the financial particulars of the job compared to what you’re making now. It’s not the main reason why anyone joins the Family, but it certainly doesn’t hurt. If you accept my invitation, you’ll learn more as you need to know it.”

Mark looked down at the paper. The next words he heard came out of his own mouth, and yet he was surprised to hear them. It was as if someone else had said the words and he was hearing them for the first time along with Dunbar. “I’m in.”

“That’s the kind of decisiveness I’m looking for,” Dunbar said in a low whisper, but loud enough for Mark to hear. “The process starts right now. See the tall gentleman in the blue shirt waiting patiently on the other side of the chow hall?”

Mark turned his head sideways until he could see the man in his peripheral vision. Then he turned back to Dunbar and nodded ever so slightly.

“I see him.”

“His name is Doc. Go talk to him. Maybe we’ll talk later—maybe not,” Dunbar said as he wiped his mouth with a napkin, picked up his tray and satellite phone, and walked away in the opposite direction.

What followed would be the most intense six hours of Mark’s life that didn’t involve gunfire, sex, or booze.

Three

Doc started by asking Mark about his earliest memories, leaving no stone unturned right up to the moment when they met in the chow hall. Then he whizzed back and forth over the timeline and hammered him with rapid-fire questions that Mark was sure he already knew the answers to. After that, he varied the pace of questioning and asked the same questions in slightly different ways, so as to evaluate Mark’s honesty as well as his demeanor, mental stamina, and patience. He occasionally threw in embarrassing, deeply personal questions. Just keeping up with the barrage of interrogation was an exercise in intellectual gymnastics, but Mark had been around enough to know that eventually his actual answers would be less important than his ability to take the heat. He also knew that the ordeal would eventually end, and that he would never hear the specifics of how well or poorly he performed. He would just get a yes or a no.

“Stay right here. I’ll be back,” Doc said in a soft voice. He opened the door, walked down the hall, and entered another room on the opposite side of the hall. Dunbar was there, with his satellite phone to his ear and his eyes on two laptop computers sitting on the table in front of him. Doc could not see what he was doing but waited patiently for him to finish his call and look up.

“Talk to me. Abridged version please,” said Dunbar.

“He’s all set. No surprises. Raised by a single adoptive mother, Agnes Landry from Watertown, New York. Parents unknown. They never turned up and he never looked for them. Uneventful childhood and upbringing. Much more sociable and charming than I expected from someone with so few friends growing up. Not a single high school teacher could remember having him in class, and it was next to impossible to find anyone in his hometown with more than a fuzzy recollection of him. Good grades but not great. Naturally flies under the radar. No picture in his high school yearbook. He is listed as “camera shy” which means he didn’t care to be included. Growing up, he spent nights and weekends training in the basement of a Catholic church—they called it the dungeon—with a priest friend of his adoptive mother, Father Peck.”

Dunbar raised his eyebrows.

“No, nothing like that. The priest taught him wrestling, judo, and some other mixed martial arts. Rough as hell but not abusive. Never played any team sports. When he wasn’t busy training in the dungeon, he was volunteering with Agnes at various churches, charities, orphanages, soup kitchens, etc., mostly in Lawrence, Massachusetts, where there’s a largely Latino population. That’s where he learned Spanish. Never had much time to be a kid.”

“Sounds like he was raised by Mother Teresa.”

“Not really. Agnes was a nun at one time early in her life, left it behind when she adopted him, and never explained why but never stopped acting like one. A career German teacher in a Catholic school. She also taught him German at home. He has near native fluency in Spanish and German. Physically, he is in excellent shape. No disqualifying preconditions. Social drinker with no detectable bad habits. He’s 5’10”, about 195, and I think he has a high tolerance for pain.”

“What gives you that impression?”

“Downplayed battlefield injuries he’s received over the past few years. Stuff some troops would get Purple Hearts for. Spent the better part of ten years getting knocked around by the priest in the dungeon. He’s tough but not sadistic. I like him. Gets a bit jolted by collateral damage, but that won’t be an issue in his new line of business, assuming he makes it. I have no concerns and I think he has an excellent chance of making it through qual. Green light.”

Without another word, Dunbar stood up and made his way down the hall to the room where a man was waiting patiently to hear about an opportunity that had not existed when he awoke that morning. When he threw open the door, a startled Mark Landry instinctively leapt to his feet.

“Pack your shit, Son. You’re leaving the sandbox today.”

From that day forward a small group of unknown—and largely unknowable—men and women had become his surrogate family. Now, eight years later, Mark was turning slowly into his hometown’s cemetery to say goodbye to the only other family he had ever known.