16

Thursday, January 21, 2021, 8:00 AM, Eastern Standard Time

Joe exited the DC lockup into a cold breeze and parsimonious winter sunlight, accompanied by Maxfield King. His departure had been held up, ostensibly in order to allow the other people he had been arrested with to be released well before him. King wore a goofy hunting hat with earflaps and fashionable Oakley sunglasses that, in Joe’s opinion, completely destroyed the disguising effect of the hat. Anyone who saw him walking the street and knew him at all could not possibly fail to identify him as Maxfield King, Billionaire Warlord and Special Operations Hero (TM).

“Sorry for the holdup,” King said to him. “But it’s probably for the best that we left you there overnight, for cover purposes.”

“No problem,” Joe responded. “You have any trouble in there?”

“Nothing I couldn’t handle.”

“I believe that.”

As they walked down the street, out of the corner of his eye, among a group of people, Joe thought he saw someone familiar. Was that African-American woman Vaneida? He could not be sure, and by the time he had a second to wonder, whoever it was had rounded the corner and was out of sight. Not that there was a shortage of African-Americans in Southeast Washington, he thought to himself.

“So, any intel?”

“I’ll write it up. Not much to speak of. The usual. As I said, the leader probably still bears watching.”

“A looker, huh?” King winked at him.

“Nothing like that. I’m not even sure she plays for our team, if you get my drift. Just a more serious person than usual. You remember. Professor. She could be a big part of their national leadership, if not soon, then later on.”

“Okay,” King said. “No harm in still keeping an eye on her, I guess.” They reached a crosswalk and waited for a car to pass.

“There’s someone I’d like you to meet,” Max said to him under his breath, as if concealing something. They entered the jail’s large parking lot. “We’ll have to drive there.”

Of course we’ll have to drive there, Joe thought. This ain’t exactly the Green Zone. Which is where you spent almost every second of your deployments.

They got into King’s Hummer and pulled out of the lot. “Proud to Be an American” was blasting from the speakers.

“You don’t like Lee Greenwood?” King asked.

“What unit did he serve with again? I keep forgetting.”

“You’re a hard case, Joe. Not everyone can be a sheepdog. Sometimes some of the sheep can be of use too.”

What about sheepdogs that never go outside the barn but run outside and bark every time there’s a camera around, Joe thought to himself. Then he reconsidered. He had to give the guy some props. He had reportedly put his ass on the line a few times before the legend began to outgrow the reality.

“Where we headed?”

“Just across the river. Arlington. My office.”

Joe settled in for the ride. Max turned onto Potomac Avenue Southeast and then got on Pennsylvania Avenue Southeast. What a difference from Pennsylvania Avenue Northwest, Joe thought. In a few minutes they were caught in a traffic jam on Interstate 695.

“So, are you enjoying the work?”

Joe had to think about how to answer that. It had been a long time since he had considered the enjoyability of a job. A job was something you did or did not do. Whether you enjoyed it was something only civilians thought about. And civilian life was bullshit, as far as Joe was concerned.

“Sure, I guess,” he answered. “I mean, I don’t know how to answer that.”

“You’re too fresh from the sandbox,” King said.

“Maybe,” Joe replied.

“Is it what you expected?”

Again Joe was at a loss. It had also been a long time since he had had expectations.

“I didn’t know what to expect,” he said, truthfully. “I guess I have not thought about that.”

King seemed to accept that, and they fell into a long silence as they inched along the highway toward the bridge.

Joe began to think again about bullshit. Bullshit was a major force in the universe, he decided. It certainly had shoved him into his chosen profession. Well, at first it was his personal revulsion against what he saw as bullshit that had caused him to enlist. His dad, Mike, had seemed to him to epitomize a sort of bullshit that seemed to reign over not only his generation, but also the entire phony-assed suburban environment of early twenty-first century America. The things people cared about seemed like bullshit to him. The things that they obsessed over were bullshit. Especially the things they got upset over were bullshit: nothing, meaningless and stupid. People in the suburbs were too tame. They had lost touch with the elemental reality of human life as it had been lived for millennia beforehand. His father seemed to be a man of steady habits, but none of them seemed grounded in anything particularly stable or permanent, much less noble or sublime. As if to confirm his instincts, his parents had divorced right after he left for college. His mother was not full of shit, which had left her in a perpetual state of disappointment with her husband, whom everyone called “such a nice guy.” As he reached manhood, Joe had promised himself that if anyone ever called him a “nice guy,” he would immediately begin to re-examine his entire life.

He wrestled in high school and did well enough to win some trophies. His father drove him to meets but didn’t discuss the reason why his son was so consumed with this thankless arduous hobby. At times Joe caught his father looking at him as if an alien had alit on the passenger seat of his sedan.

His dad had come from a harder upbringing than he had; not Depression-era, but financially constrained, parentally far more strict, and in a much more dangerous neighborhood. Maybe that’s why his father had settled for the mediocre existence of which Joe judged him guilty – simple relief at being able to get “three squares a day,” as he put it sometimes. Any sort of extreme effort seemed to be something he avoided. He had never served, nor had his own father. His father’s grandfathers had served, one in World War I and another in World War II, but if they had seen any action, Joe never heard about it. His dad seemed mired in mediocre inoffensive niceness and comfort. He wasn’t a bad man. He wasn’t a great man. His whole generation, the post-Vietnam Baby Boom, Joe adjudged as sinners by omission. They complained about things like inequality, sexism, racism, corruption, self- dealing by plutocrats. But they had never gotten it together to do anything to stop these things. His dad had gone to a very exclusive Ivy League college, thanks to the sort of generous scholarships available to the less affluent back in the 1970s. He thought it telling that his father’s college class had produced no prominent politicians or warriors, but a large number of well-known journalists. It was a generation of bystanders, kibitzers, commentators – not doers.

So he had joined up after a couple of years of college. His parents weakly objected, which made him even more determined to do it than if they had objected with any sort of passion. His parents’ generation seemed to lack the commitment gene. If things got too hard, just give up. He thought it was telling that you almost never saw a person born before 1970 who had tattoos, but you rarely saw anyone without them who was born in 1980 or beyond. His own generation were maybe too willing to commit permanently, he had to admit. He’d seen a lot of crossed-out girlfriends’ and wives’ names on the torsos and inside the biceps of his fellow service members. Something had held him back from getting tattoos. Maybe he was his father’s son after all. Or maybe it was that lecture on the medical dangers of unsanitary tattoo parlors he’d heard in the service – hepatitis sounded like something he wanted to give a wide berth.

Once he got into the service, his revulsion to bullshit and his otherwise stalwart willingness to commit and not look back had served him well. The memory of the life he was rejecting pushed him forward. He was going to be a very different person from his father, or die in the attempt. Or maybe both; at a certain point he didn’t care. That indifference was honed to fine point by his training. By the time he was out of basic training, he half-realized that he had actually come to crave the (different kind of) bullshit obstacles that his trainers were throwing at him, the pain and the seemingly pointless suffering they inflicted upon him. His superiors noticed, and it was not long before they pushed papers across the desk for him to sign away his existence to a Special Forces unit.

Maxfield King, on the other hand, did not come from a bullshit suburb; he came from what Joe assumed was a far more refined milieu of bullshit – the milieu of the billionaire class. Joe was a little bit hazy on how Max had gotten into the Spec Ops community, or what he had done there, but that did not make Joe unique. Max seemed to preserve a bit of a hazy shroud over what he had or had not done in the service. His path to a commission in the SEALs had certainly been non-standard, and Joe imagined that his father’s wealth might have had something to do with him receiving opportunities that might have been denied to others. But who knew? What Joe did know was that Max had spent an unusually short period in the SEALs, and then had come home and set up what he called a private sector company “to provide technical solutions to nations and NGOs seeking to do good in the world.” Others called him a warlord.

Max certainly was deeply connected to the current administration, for which he provided various well-compensated domestic VIP security services, in addition to numerous domestic “projects” related to gathering intelligence on perceived enemies of the President. He also did work overseas for regimes whose interests coincided with that of the current President, as well as back-channel communications with various Russians and other foreigners. But beyond these, Joe knew that Max was also providing some very large-scale military services for the Chinese government, among others; services that could not conceivably be described as being in the long-term interest of the United States of America, as far as Joe could see.

Max’s genius, as far as Joe could tell, had little to do with any heroic actions he had taken for the United States armed forces, if in fact he had taken any. His tours of duty had been in countries that could not really be described as being involved in hot wars, so the opportunities for heroism would presumably be few in any case. Max’s real core competency was his ability to harvest ex-Special Operators as they exited the service, and rent their heroism to paying clients for a hefty markup, most commonly in security details, domestic private intelligence work, or else in training the forces of client nation-states and other entities (corporate security outfits, paramilitary units, etc.) in their dark arts. His magic had worked on Joe, to be sure; Joe was glad to have been referred to him by his CO at the end of his last tour in 2019, because he had begun to lose the bubble as to what exactly he had been doing to protect American freedom in Iraq and Syria, especially with the way it had ended. And he had not had a free moment to consider what work he might do to pay his expenses when he got back.

So what had he expected from working for Maxfield King’s company? A paycheck. Easier work than being constantly downrange for $4000 a month. A decent apartment, a working automobile, and something to take his mind off all that had happened toward the end of 2019, approximately 6,000 miles to the east of Arlington, Virginia, which they had entered several minutes previously.

Max pulled into a parking garage and took a reserved space near an elevator. He shut off the engine and they both got out of the car.

“So, who are we meeting?” Joe asked.

“A friend,” Max said to him. “I think you guys will get along. You have a lot in common. I think you may even have worked in the same area previously.”

Joe went to the back of the elevator and leaned against the wall. Ten years of training had taught him to live with total situational awareness, but without normal curiosity. Then the elevator stopped at the top floor of the office building, and he followed Max out into the reception area of King Global Services.

Max turned toward him. “I think you know Terry Sweeney,” he said.

Oh, shit, Joe said to himself, while noticing that his hand was extending itself toward the one which had already been extended toward his.

© 2020 Nolan O’Brian