The Warrior

As he makes his way back to his apartment, he’s surprised at his reaction to the whole deal. He should have expected something like this would happen. After all, Andrews and the Director lived in a political world.

But nothing has changed for him, and with that, he takes out his tabla and plays into the night.

A few days later, Broker calls. He hasn’t been able to get much more on Holt or his conduit. Holt seems to have dropped off the grid even though he’s sharing intel with the FBI. Broker’s network has someone who is happy to talk with Zeb, though.

‘Kelly is damaged goods. He left the forces a few years back, couldn’t get over the PTSD after his four stints in Afghanistan. He fed me some good intel, and when he heard I was looking for Holt, he contacted me. He refuses to tell me what he has and will only talk to you. He doesn’t know anything about you, just says he wants to talk to my client directly.’

Broker continues, ‘This could be a setup.’

Zeb thinks about it for a moment. ‘Set up the meet – in the same bar we met, on Allen Street.’

‘Will do. I’ll get back to you when it’s set.’

Two days later, Zeb meets Kelly.

Broker offered to watch his back, but Zeb works best alone. Zeb arrives a few hours early, driving a ubiquitous yellow cab, having paid the cab driver to take the day off, and parks away from the bar, with a good view of the entrance. He doesn’t see any surveillance. He has been wearing Broker’s fancy shades, and those haven’t revealed any tails either.

He sees Kelly entering the bar alone and on time. He waits another half hour and walks down an entire block, either side of the bar, casually. Nothing and no one stands out.

Kelly is nursing a drink alone when Zeb walks to the bar and orders one for himself.

Kelly is grizzled, in his forties and looks like a veteran, with his well-kept body and close-cropped hair. He looks up as Zeb takes a stool, his eyes sharp. ‘Broker sent you?’

Zeb nods. They size each other up for a long moment, and then Kelly downs his drink in a large gulp and signals for another.

‘Holt? You looking to hire him? Or looking for him?’

Zeb doesn’t reply.

Kelly waits a moment. ‘You don’t talk much, do you? Broker did mention that. I’m dying. Liver. Too much to drink. Not many months left now, so when I heard Broker was looking for the lowdown on Holt, I got in touch. Call it conscience or guilt. Whatever you want.

‘Holt and I were in ’Stan together.’ Afghanistan, ’Stan to those who’d served there. ‘Many years and many bodies back. He was our commander. We were deployed at FOB Sharana. We lost so many men there. Not a day passed when we didn’t have a rocket attack, an IED explosion, snipers…everything that was devised to kill American soldiers was deployed there.

‘This was in the days when fighting with the Taliban was at its peak and parlaying with the locals wasn’t done. We spent the days patrolling and the nights afraid to sleep. Over a period of time, a strange bond developed between him and me. I did a lot of scouting, and he relied on my intel. He had excellent tactical skills, lacked an emotional core, but I knew – we all knew – if anyone could get most of us out of Sharana alive, it was him.

‘We didn’t like each other, but he respected my abilities, and I respected his.

‘Very often he and I patrolled together, and it was in the second year that we started patrolling a small village far from our base. There was nothing there; to call it a village was being generous. Maybe not more than thirty people lived there, goat herders and their women and children in a few huts.

‘Holt used to disappear into that village and asked me to keep guard and patrol outside it. I didn’t give much thought to this, since I figured he was just being friendly with the locals and getting information.

‘During the day, the men used to take their goats away for grazing, leaving the women and children behind. One day it took him too long to recon, so I went into the village to look for him. Everything seemed normal, some women cooking, a few kids playing around. Those huts were basic, just mud walls, a roof and a hole for a door and another hole for a window.

‘Holt emerged from the last hut as I was approaching it, and blew his stack when he spotted me. He screamed at me for leaving my patrol and putting us at risk. I was only half listening, because through the hole in the hut I could see a woman getting dressed. I realized what Holt had been up to.

‘Back at the unit I talked with the others. It turned out they knew. But they suspected he was raping the women. All the women in that village.’

Kelly takes a long pull of his drink. His thousand-yard stare looks out at the bar but sees the hills and brush of Sharana.

‘Those were different days. The political climate was different. They were the enemy, and we had to kill them. No one said a word to Holt because he was our commander.

‘A month later we had a sniper attack. Sumbitch took out three of our men. Holt went into a rage. He increased the patrols, triangulated the sniper’s location and tried to track him. But it’s a huge country, and those sumbitches just become invisible.

‘In the evening, Holt went to the village, rounded up two women and shot them. Just like that. Not a word said, nothing. Grabbed them by the arm, took them to a wall, and shot them. And as if that wasn’t enough, he shot a kid, maybe five, six years old. Bam, bam, bam. Over.

‘He then turned his gun on some of the men approaching him; they fell back. And he trained his gun on me.

‘This all happened in less than a minute. My brain was still processing it all when I see this gun barrel on me.

‘He finally lowered it and walked away. Not a word was said at camp the next few days. A rumor spread that the village was sheltering that sniper and they had to be taught a lesson.

‘We were raw guys, eighteen, nineteen years old. Green to the gills and shit scared. We didn’t have the balls to complain to the higher-ups about Holt. I left ’Stan a few months later. I heard Holt had moved around a bit, but slowly lost track of him. Guilt ate away at me the initial few years, and then I started rationalizing the events, and then time did its thing.

‘To this day, I have no idea how he thought, what motivated him. He was an unpredictable sumbitch.’ He wags his finger in Zeb’s face. ‘Remember that. Unpredictable. That’s what makes him dangerous. Assuming you’re hunting him.’

Sounds of the bar fill the silence.

‘I don’t know much about him. He wasn’t very open about himself. I know he had a mother somewhere in Jersey, and he mentioned her more than a couple of times. That’s all that I can give you. I don’t know if this helps you, but it helps me.’

‘Are you sure about the mother?’ asks Zeb.

‘Hell, this was some years back, and my memory isn’t what it was. But yes, he did mention a mother in Jersey.’

Zeb doesn’t remember any kin mentioned in Holt’s dossier. This could be something Broker and he could use.

‘Do me a favor,’ he tells Kelly, ‘spread the word that I’m hunting Holt.’

Kelly smiles grimly and nods.

He settles the tab and watches Kelly amble away. ’Stan had a lot to answer for.

He goes back to his dossiers when he is back at his apartment. Nope. No mother listed for Holt. No kin at all. He calls Broker and briefs him on the meeting. Broker says Holt doesn’t have any siblings, not on record anyway, and his father passed away a while back. That’s in the dossier. So his mother is the only surviving kin.

Broker says he’ll get a list of Holts living in New Jersey who are fifty years old and above, since that will be approximately the age range for Holt’s mother . Broker has access to Social Security and DMV databases. Zeb doesn’t know if he hacks into them or has access to them through his network.