The road that wasn’t a road appeared before me, as I crawled to come to its rough edge.  I was facing Albuquerque.  My sense of direction returned, and the terror of being killed, once again, was replaced by a dedicated desire to right the balance of justice in my favor, but I badly needed water and some sort of liquid sustenance. I surged forward. My fingers had no feeling, but I needed no feeling.

I just needed distance.  Recovery was everything. The danger was not behind me; it was all over until I could place it, again being like a forward observer to determine where the threat was located, accurately, and then bring in appropriate means to moderate or eliminate it.

 I flagged down a car, the only one traveling along the seemingly abandoned utility support road.  It was a pickup truck driven by a woman.

“What in God’s name are you doing out here?” she asked, never having left her driver’s seat to let me inside the cab.

The relaxation I felt was incomparable to almost any other I might have had.  The truck was a symbol of safety, security, and a renewal of life.  The woman was so far from being an agent or a player of any sort that it was ridiculous to even suspert her of being anything but a kindly country woman helping a man in obvious distress.   I’d made it out of combat, again.  But I’d been attacked at home, not twenty miles from where my family and I were located.  Either I had to move, once I made sure they were alright, or the people involved had to die and die quickly, which was just about as bad as having to pick up everything and move out of the state…but not quite.  I was a killer of men, women, or whoever, but I was trying so hard not to be a killer of anyone or anything.  Regardless of such thoughts, however, Quincy had some serious questions to answer before he died, but death was almost assuredly in his near future.

The woman wasn’t talkative as she guided her truck toward a fast-food place that was offering half-gallon soft drinks for two dollars.  That she didn’t care who or what I was felt just fine.  God had reached down with His index finger and selected her to help me, so who was I to object?  The truck drove on until reaching a highway that I knew led back to the interstate highway toward Albuquerque.

“You need liquid,” the woman said, pulling into the ‘Grape Seed Café,” where we’d arrived.  What café?  There was only a small structure, and three gas pumps set into the desert bracken atop concrete-hard earth.  The woman was done with me, which made her even more valuable.

“Get out, and here’s five bucks for the half gallon of grape juice  you  need to get inside your body right now.”

I looked at the tattered bill she held out to me.  There was no way I could avoid taking it.   I smiled.  My life was undone but not revealed to the strange pickup truck-driving woman.  I took the bill, crumpling it into a wad with my dusty fingers.  I was beyond thirsty, and I knew it. I had no shame.  I opened my door and struggled to the window, pushing the fin under the woman’s hand, and waited.

The truck moved.

It was slight, but I felt it.  I looked into the driver’s eyes and saw sorrow.  The truck pulled away and drove off. I stood staring.   I watched the truck drive into the distance.  I didn’t even know the woman’s name.  The huge drink was delivered to the window, but there was no vehicle to receive it, only me. I was not thirsty, but I accepted it into my hands anyway as I stood there.

The gigantic container was cold, and that seemed its best feature until I took a drink through the overly large straw sticking out of the top.  I hadn’t felt thirst, only fatigue, sleepiness, and a bit of confusion.  The first sip did me in.  I drank, not sitting down or leaving the auto pick up window area.  I drank the whole container down, one deep draw from the straw after another.  When I was done, and the straw made those funny sounds of emptiness, I felt reinvigorated and finally gained energy, like it was being poured into me from all around.

I placed the empty container on the attendant’s shelf, as no cars were waiting at the pickup window.  The sliding window slid open, the container disappeared, and another replaced it, just like the first one.

I peered through the half-open window.  The woman asked a question.

“You want it or not?  It’s two for five dollars, and we don’t give change if you don’t want the second one.”

I said nothing, instead lifting the container and holding it in front of me, walking around the building, and entering the main area of service.  I picked a table out of the sun, sat down, and began to drink some more while I thought about what had happened.  The movie North by Northwest entered my mind.  Cary Grant had been taken to a place out in the middle of nowhere and dropped off without comment.  The car, like Quincy’s Land Cruiser, had simply driven away, leaving him in an open, barren field.  After a few moments, the sound of a propeller plane was heard.  It dived toward Cary, and he wisely ran, helter-skelter for the kind of cover that wasn’t there.  The plane tried to machine gun him from the air but failed, like my sharpshooter.  He survived like I survived, more because of luck than great defensive thinking or work.

It took another fifteen minutes before I was fully self-aware again, not understanding truly what the effects of severe dehydration can pretty quickly to to an otherwise pretty healthy human being.  The second container was empty and I had no more money.  My thoughts turned to getting back home and also to a vexing question.  Who wanted me dead and who could hire a shooter like the one I’d experienced to do that kind of work.  I also thought about the transportation.  By my surrendering to Quincy’s vehicle and driving, I’d lost any ability to be free for travel on my own.  The warehouse of weaponry inside my Rover was useless to me.  The newly installed cell phone was useless to me.  My separation from the vehicle could never be allowed to happen again.  I’d been set u by professionals who knew such stuff in advance.  There was only one person of true foundational trust I could call to come and get me, and that was my wife.  Kingsley was also of that ilk, but it was Mary I needed to reach.

I approached the woman behind the counter and informed her that I needed a phone to call home for my wife to come and get me.

“We don’t do that,” she replied, wiping the counter in front of her as she spoke, as if she needed to sanitize anything I might have touched.

“If you let me make the call, my wife will come and get me, and I’ll have her bring two hundred dollars in cash to give to you for helping me,” I replied, and then waited while the woman thought.

“She’ll be driving a new Mercedes to make the pickup,” I added.

The woman considered but took little time in responding.

“You can use the phone here since we don’t have a pay one, but not for long,” she said, relief flowing through me.

She brought the black dial tone phone from another era out and placed it in front of me.

“I have to listen to what you say,” she said, which seemed odd to me, but what could I say?  I picked up the receiver and dialed my home number.

I dialed my home number.  Mary picked up on the first ring, so I knew she knew that something was likely up.

I told her my situation, roughly, without discussing the execution attempt.  She would know I wasn’t out hunting rabbits, but her situation wasn’t very helpful.  She had the kids, and her comment about that went right into my heart.

“I have the kids, and there’s no one to attend to them.  Is this the kind of thing I can bring them on?”

 “No,” I replied.

Once again, her mental acuity was just a step ahead of my own.  The safety of the family was everything to her, as it was to me, although I could so easily lose sight of that.

“I’ll call you when clear, so stay put,” I replied, hanging up the phone.

The woman stared at me over the phone.

“One more call,” I said, but didn’t attempt to make the call, merely waiting expectantly.

“Another two hundred?” the woman asked.

I nodded, with a sincere smile, picked up the receiver, and dialed the Agency number.  I had to trust somebody, and Tony seemed to have proven himself.  I had to know more, but first I had to extricate myself from potentially being in harm’s way.
There was no way I could tell Herbert the real story on an unsecure line.

“I’m in trouble, real trouble, “I began, then feeding him my current burger palace address information.  “I need an extraction, and I need it quickly, and I just pray you know that I would not ask for that without good reason, and the woman here letting me use this phone wants two hundred dollars, or four hundred dollars for her trouble.”

“I have you, so please hold, and the woman is of no consequence. I’ll have the cash ready for her.  If you look out the front window, is there a cleared area not far off?”

“Yes,” I replied, doing what I was told.  There was nothing but open fields all around the burger joint.

“You are seventeen minutes from extraction, so go out there and wait.  They’ll see you, and then the rest is automatic. Tell them the target area for your release.”  Herbert hung up the phone.

I stared across the counter as I hung up the receiver.

“No money?” she asked.

“Plenty of money,” I answered, getting ready to leave and stand outside to identify anything and anybody they might be sending to get me out of whatever I was into.  I was afraid to go out and stand, to be singled out.  I had no idea just how persistent or professional the shooter was, but it was certainly not beyond his capability to have followed and waited for me to be a target again.  That Herbert had so blatantly advised going out was an indication that he’d never been in real combat before.

I didn’t go out following the phone call.  I decided to peer out of the restaurant’s interior and see who showed up and how.
Minutes went by.  The waitress walked over to where I sat and put a plate with a hamburger and fries down in front of me.  I looked up into her expressive and soft eyes.

“I will have money soon,” I said, my hunger all of a sudden skyrocketing upward, just as my thirst had done when I encountered real liquids again earlier.

“You’re waiting,” the woman said with a smile.  I sense that you have people, and that’s wonderful.  Someone is coming for you.  I don’t have people, so I do understand what this means.  The owners will never know I fed you for free, but I think it was the wise thing to do.

I looked down at the hamburger and the plate of fries for a few seconds before looking back up into her eyes.

“What’s your name?” I asked.

“Juanita,” she replied, bowing her head.

“Juanita, what?” I asked.

“Juanita Bartlett,” she said.

“Juanita, you do have people,” I indicated, taking a huge bite of the burger,’ maybe not before but you do have them now.”

I waited for the pickup vehicle, knowing that Juanita likely had no idea what I was talking about.  I was alive.  I’d made it again, like down in the valley.  Anyone wo helped me was to be rewarded and anyone who tried to kill me had to pay the price for failing.

There was no land vehicle coming, I knew as I watched the effect of a U.S. Air Force CH-53 helicopter sweep the parking lot clean of dust and debris as it began to set down.

“Oh my God,” Juanita said, back again at my side, her coffee pot held out in one hand but making no move to pour.  “Is that for you?”

“I guess so,” I answered, taking the burger in my left hand and biting down again before getting up to meet the chopper.  My sense of relief was overwhelming, as I knew that the defensive armament of the 53 was never going to be opposed by a sniper waiting out in the brush for me to show myself.  I took out my Mont Blanc pen and wrote on a The giant helicopter sat on the parking lot asphalt with no one getting out, the huge blades spinning but no longer kicking up dust, as all the dust had been blown away.  I knew that its crew had had to me informed that they were involved in an extraction mission, something they’d likely never been ordered to perform before.

They were not out there in the parking lot kidding or making believe.  To that crew, the defense and protection of their targeted mission was physically subordinated only to their survival.  The guns and missiles would be hot, and the advanced machine’s sensory apparatus would be on full extended alert.  I would have preferred the chopper to be Marine Corps, but in truth, I knew it didn’t matter.  The United States Military, although separate in missions, was one of homogeneous support and inclusion. The Air Force would treat me as one of their own.

I got up and walked toward the front double doors of the place.  I looked back at Juanita, who stood staring at the chopper in shock.  I stopped at the door, still holding the burger, half-eaten.

“You want anything else?” Juanita asked.

I handed her the napkin I’d written the Banker’s Life office number onto.

“Call me tomorrow.  Have you ever worked in a clerical office?  Can you type? Can you take dictation?  Am I the kind of guy you’d sort of like to have for a boss?”

The blades of the chopper beat the air out beyond the door, the noise of their supersonic blade tips revolving to make their presence known, not something that had to be admitted. Discussed or anything else.

“Is this an interview?” Juanita asked, the waving napkin held in her hand.

“I have to go, so no, this is not an interview.  You are hired, if you want the job.”

 “But I don’t know what the job is.”

 “Yes, you do,” I said, over my shoulder. I got up, half a burger in hand, and walked toward the front door.  ‘We’re on a speeding train, and you’ve already decided that this is your next stop…. or your next start. Or not.”

I pushed through the door and bent down against the hundred-mile-an-hour whirlwind pressing down from the chopper’s fast-spinning blades.  I lost my burger and whatever else Juanita might have said.  I was taken into the whirlwind and pushed down.   Bent low, frog hopping and crawling, I moved across the distance.

Juanita disappeared from my mind, like the blown-apart burger, as I attempted to transition from a desert survival mode of existence back into the supremely opulent technological world where I was expected to live, understand, and accommodate.

The chopper flew without a crew chief or anyone else aboard to help me.  The chopper had to be a last-minute rescue attempt, although I would have much preferred a taxi. As was becoming usual, others, beyond my view or understanding, were making decisions about my life, my very survival, without any consultation with me whatsoever.

The chopper surged upward, able to climb to altitude faster than almost any fighter jet.  I love being pressed down onto the runneled aluminum floor, the beating of the wind from both sides as both the chopper’s doors were wide open.  I lay there, taken back to my dream of the night before.  The expense of it.  They’d sent a CH-53 to get me.  The expense of such an extraction, for one man, was huge.  They cared.  Or maybe they didn’t care, but I was lying across those aluminum slats, willing to take whatever care I could get.  The chopper cleared lower denser air and fought itself into the upper atmosphere.  I’d made it, I realized.

What of Quincy? What about that Q agent being a plant to set me up?  What about Tony Herbert, my control officer?  Why had I been targeted at home, and how was my home base even known to anyone? I rolled across the now-cold aluminum floor of the chopper.  It was good to be alive, but where was I supposed to take that?  Did I still have a career as an agent of the CIA, an agent of the insurance company, the creator of an international medical evacuation company, or the creator of a medical insurance company for Americans living abroad who had a tremendous need for such coverage and services?

The chopper circled and then landed at Kirkland AFB, the Air Force Part, not the commercial.  I climbed out, expecting some sort of transport and attention.  I got one.  The chopper lifted back into the air, its turbines spinning the blades and hurting my ears.  I sat on the asphalt tarmac, my hands over my ears, and wondered about my prospects.  I had all this power assembled for others.  None of it for me.  I was alone at the end of an airport runway.

Questions that I wondered how I could ask raced back and forth through my mind as I thought about transportation to my home, the office, or wherever.  How had Quincy been able to find out my home address, go there, and encounter my family without my knowing it? How had he known to get hold of Hans Bethe and spin his tail to him?”  How had he been able to speak to my control officer and be known to him unless he was part of the Agency?  The thought of still being an agent of the CIA crossed my mind, back and forth.  I could not work for the CIA if my family were not secure from the effects of my work.

I needed a ride home from the tarmac.  I wasn’t going to call Mary, and Nguyen was with his family far away.  I went into the hangar and called Kingsley’s number.  It was a violation, as I thought it was.  The man needed Christmas with his family, as I needed Christmas with my own, but my places to turn were limited, and my fear of trouble coming to Mary and the kids was substantial.

I walked to the hangar, went inside, and called Kingsley’s number.  He answered straightaway on the second ring.

“I need you to pick me up at the Albuquerque Kirtland hanger and drive me to the office,” I said into the receiver.

“Twenty minutes,” Ben replied.  “What level of security do you need?”

 “I was targeted, but the sniper missed.  I don’t know the rest,” I answered as truthfully as I could.

 “Sniper, Jesus Christ,” he said, after a full minute of contemplation while I waited.

 “Are we still inside the wire?” he asked.

 “I’m not sure,” I answered, telling him as much of the truth a I could with very little data to back me up.

  “.45 Colt and then a long gun for back up, just in case,” he said before abruptly hanging up.

 I called my wife, waiting impatiently and with some concern as the phone rang without being picked up.  Finally, she answered.

Nothing had transpired at home, and I didn’t tell Mary what had happened to me.  Her fear and loathing about what my working for the Agency might bring down upon us was too great a disaster in our current life, not that she wouldn’t be right about the potential of the current circumstances.

It was Christmas Eve, but I was going to the office simply because it was the only place where I knew the phone line was secure, and my conversation with Herbert was going to need more than encryption.  It would need a fire extinguisher.  When I arrived at the office, Pat was there, like it was a normal day.

“You have Christmas Eve off, “I said to her.

 “I had some things to clean up,” Pat replied, and there’s a man who seems terrified out there in the parking lot, but I’m not sure whether he’s waiting for Mr. Weh or you or anybody else, for that matter.”

‘’Go home and Merry Christmas,” I replied.  I’d deal with whoever was in the parking lot after I planned what to do about almost being killed earlier.

I reached down and backwards into the core of my being.  I went inward, beyond my post-Vietnam limits, to access “Junior’s” unethically limited interior.  It wasn’t about my life.  It was about the life of my wife and kids.  That bit deep and beyond my self-established stops for taking violent action.  The ‘enemy’ had come for my family, had actually spoken to my family, and therefore, the rules were to be set aside.  Quincy had to die.  The shooter had to die.  Those who sent them had to die as well, and it no longer mattered whether I would be held accountable for their passing.  Herbert had to be worked for knowledge.  He wouldn’t understand.  He was a negotiator, but there was no negotiation in this circumstance.  If New Mexico was not safe for my family, then I could move, but the move would require that a lot of people die.  I was not opposed to that at all. Not anymore.

I had moved.  I had lain there in the desert taking fire.  I’d thought about those who could bring such circumstances to me and finally realized that there was only one reply possible.  Death had to be visited upon them, their associates, their accomplices, and even likely their families.  They had all chosen to enter a game of play without understanding the player on the other side.  I knew I would pay for such thinking, such preparation, and such action, but I could see no other way clear into daylight and survival. The cost of taking action had to be absorbed by the benefit of doing so.

I called Ben Kingsley.

 “We’re going hunting,” I said into the receiver.  We need a Weatherby thirty caliber three seventy-five magnum rifle with an Unertl ten X scope.  We’ll also need a Unertl 25X spotting scope.  “I’ve got to reach out from the inside to reach the outside.  There’s no mission, so put it on the AMEX and see if the purchase flies.”

I hung up the phone.

I relaxed back in the office chair.  In my mind, I cradled the ordered but not yet existent weapon to me and felt a sigh of relief.  I was doing something.  I could reach out from my inside to affect life on the outside. I so needed that to be real.

I hung up the phone, hoping that I hadn’t ruined Ben’s Christmas celebration, although I wasn’t sure he was even a Christian.  Nguyen, I would not call, as I knew what the holiday meant to him and his family.

My next call was to Herbert, and I was primed and ready when he answered.

“I don’t know what to say or ask at this point,” I said into the receiver, my anger building to a rage filled with disappointment about likely having a career anymore.  Life insurance was interesting, but not enough.  The international medical insurance operation, the evacuation services, and even my Ph.D. studies would disappear without the Agency’s support and backing.

“Are you armed?” Herbert unaccountably asked.

“Out in the car but not in here,” I replied, truthfully, blurting out an answer that I might have reconsidered if I wasn’t still in shock at being targeted so brazenly and openly.

“Good, now walk out to the parking lot and encounter who and what’s there, and then come back to the office and we’ll talk.  I’ll keep the line open.”;

I was surprised, mostly about him keeping the line open when he was famous for doing the opposite of that.

I put the receiver down on the desk in front of me, leaned forward, and then held my head with both hands together.  I was so tired of shocking surprises and rapid reversals of both fortune and circumstance.  I wanted no more adventure.  No more danger.  No more of being a different creature on the planet that nobody, except my wife, would believe or go along with.  I could not lose here. I had to get my act together.

I got up and went out through the back door, and was immediately shocked.  There sat the Toyota Land Cruiser that had participated in my potential death.

A man stepped out.  He came around the front of the car with his hands out in front of him, not raised like a suspect or any of that.  I understood why Pat had thought him to be terrified.  He was the picture one might find in Webster’s dictionary as a frightened and horrified human being.   No wonder Herbert had inquired as to my armed status.

Quincy walked towards me.

I stared with my hands at my side.

“None of that was as it seemed,” he said.  “Don’t kill me yet.”

I wanted to laugh at his adding on the last word, but didn’t.

“Why, in God’s name, did you come back here?’

I said the words slowly and individually, but deep inside me, I knew that I had it all wrong, which gave me hope.  There was nothing there to be on the outside right now, but everything there if any of what the man might tell me was valid.

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