David White stared at me, his expression one of initial shock wearing toward unwilling acceptance.  Watching him make up his mind was an exercise in patience, but also a participation in entertainment.  I waited for him to move.  Movement meant life.  Movement meant following a decision, even if it wasn’t his own or the one he should be making.  I waited.  I’d never smoked a cigarette in my life, save for the few the Gunny gave me so we could be smoking together while trying so hard not to die down in that valley.  Waiting for Dave to decide would have been a smoking moment in time if either of us smoked or had any cigarettes.

“We’re going to need a boat,” Dave said, breaking the silence in a completely unexpected but welcome way.

I could breathe again.  A team leader needed a team, and Dave was my only team member.

“Now that would be a smart move,” I replied, having no idea what I was talking about but wanting to assure Dave that I was all in on what he’d just indicated he was all in on, and that was my fragile, scary, and independent of the Agency plan.

I’d often heard the phrase Plan B in my life, but wasn’t much of a fan of using it

“This is an island, and if you haven’t noticed, the waters around it aren’t patrolled by the Guardia or anybody else I’ve seen or heard of,“ Dave said, letting me know that he’d spent some time thinking about our situation, although time had been in short supply.  “We can rent a boat and be anywhere we need to be in a matter of a very few hours, if not minutes.”

“We still have the hotel room booked,” I mentioned.

“The concierge gave you up there, it’s true, but that apparent complexity shouldn’t matter, not if what you’re planning is what I’m thinking.

“We need to get back to the hotel, but first, the car and yes, the boat makes sense too.  It seems like we’re on our own but that’s not true.  The Agency has gone silent, but the behemoth that it is has risen and is allowing us to do what needs to be done.”  I said the words more to myself out loud than to Dave.  “We were neck deep in the big muddy, lyrics from an old war song, and we had to keep moving on. The Marine detail needs to help us here.  All the weapons in this place are locked down, but Mallorca has hunters, and that means guns. They’ll know.”

“There’s just the two of us,” Dave said, but the way he said it didn’t make it sound like that was a bad thing.

I reached over and clutched the Audemars in my right hand, pushed back from the desk, and stood up.

“We’ve got to move now,” I ordered Dave, as if the mission was once more fully on.  “Find the sergeant of the guard while I get the DCM of this place to have us taken back to the airport for a rental car.”

I wanted to call home in the worst way, not for my wife’s advice as we were beyond that, but to touch base and somehow regain a solid footing in life itself.  Performing field operations by listening to the lyrics of songs was a form of insanity, but Dave and I were both being driven by emotional forces we could vaguely understand but not communicate with.

When the Marine staff sergeant came into the office, I immediately shared the armament problem with him.  We needed a firearm, particularly a long gun, which might be a great problem acquiring since all the personnel at the consulate would have all weapons accounted for and locked up unless there was some sort of emergency.  Spain was an ally and didn’t have high-risk diplomatic missions, so the Marines didn’t guard the grounds armed.

“The DCM hunts, supposedly, but he’s never taken his rifle out.  Maybe we can borrow that since it’s off the books anyway.  I’ll see to it that it’s placed in the back seat of the embassy car.”

“Just like that?” Dave asked.

“Marines.  Up the hill,” I replied, with a smile.

The ride to the car rental went smoothly, the rifle case wrapped in a nondescript blanket

The Shelby was waiting to be taken for a ride again, or at least it looked that way when we picked it up. I’d been afraid it’d be gone, but there it had been, like it was waiting. I drove hard but not overly fast back to the hotel, checked to make sure the room was still ours, which it was, and then headed over to rent a boat from a marina at a small harbor six miles further up the road from Calvia.  Dave had been concerned about how we’d get the car back since I wanted both of us to be together in bringing the boat back.

“Taxi,” I said, “there are a million of them on this island.”

We’d loaded the rifle into the rental.  I stopped the car and pulled off in the most heavily forested part of the road to the marina I could find.  I had to at least familiarize myself with the weapon.

Once standing deep inside the cover of the forest trees I checked out what turned out to be a beautiful mechanical and artful rifle. I realized the cost of the thing had to be way up there.  The consulate wouldn’t be happy ‘loaning it out’ to anyone, much less for the mission I was planning.

I worked to keep my left eye open as I focused my right eye on an imaginary target a good distance from the car window.  I focused through the Unertl scope attached to the top of the barrel by two brass rings.  I knew about the company that made the scope because the same company built most of the spotting scopes used by the military teams competing in the shooting events, which I’d been a part of with my father when I was a little kid.  Part of the CIA training was to take place in Camp Perry, Ohio, where our family stayed in a cabin on the nearby river.  The associative thoughts about those things were affecting my ability to concentrate on paying total attention to shooting the rifle and finishing the job; neither Dave nor I were ever hired or ordered to do so.  Dave should have been the appropriate shooter, but his training had all been in the use of handguns, not rifles, and handguns were extremely rare on the island, hence the ridiculously low homicide rates.

The rifle wasn’t a sniper rifle, and Dave White, my partner, had no spotting scope or role in its use as one.  The Mannlicher Shoenauer was a finely made Belgian piece in .243 caliber, not something chambered for truly long-distance shooting but certainly effective against a human body at a range of about five hundred meters or less. As a teenager at Camp Perry with my dad, I’d been deadly at the farther ranges with an accurized M-1, although I didn’t want to be shooting at the farther range if at all possible.  There would be no possibility of ‘scoping the rifle in,’ since there was no place not too revealing, at least nearby, on the island.  I would have to go with whatever sighting was set into the weapon, although I could adjust the Unertl for approximate range.  I replaced the rifle in its leather case, and we got back into the Shelby.

The boat had been Dave’s idea when it came down to taking the necessary shot.  I’d explained the problems with the movement of water in trying to adjust for range and deflection, even with a high-powered rifle.

The boat turned out to be a brilliant godsend of a craft.  The twenty-foot fiberglass hull was tough, planed quickly, and held itself level once it got onto that plane.  The two hundred and fifty horsepower black Mercury outboard had a lot to do with that, of course, the only limiting item being its extreme guzzling of gasoline at any significant speed. The letters in blue on both sides of the hull indicated that the boat was made by a company called Fletcher, but I’d never heard of them.  Renting the boat was easy, as the owner of the establishment demanded no real penetration of our experience in boating, only wanting copies of our identification, both fake, and the American Express card deposit of two thousand dollars U.S. and a fee of four hundred dollars a day with an additional rule that the boat was not to leave the harbor surrounding the marina where it was docked.  Dave signed everything.

We pulled away from the dock with me at the controls.  My dad’s Coast Guard duty and cross-training were kicking in.  Small boats were fairly easy to pilot as long as one stayed at the controls and concentrated on where the boat was headed and at not too much speed.  The boat met the waves like they were old friends, gently pushing, cutting, and angling out of the harbor.

“Where are we going to dock this thing?” Dave asked.

“Calvia, the hotel has mooring cables strung down to the bottom of that devilish channel.

“So, we moor the boat off the hotel,” Dave said, as if musing to himself.

“How in hell are we supposed to get back and forth to the hotel if it’s hundreds of feet bobbing around in the ocean?”

I eased the throttle forward to about halfway as we hit rougher water.  The boat changed and went into attack mode, taking the formerly gentle and friendly waves, one after another, right in the solar plexus. Fletcher was a great hull designer, I figured, even if I’d never heard of him…If there was such a ‘him’ at all.  Reaching Calvia would take about forty minutes if nothing changed.  The Fletcher had no speedometer, but I guessed we were doing just under thirty. The hotel, located out on the point of the abutment of Calvia, was a good twenty-four miles away.

The rifle will work?” Dave asked, seeming to grow a bit uncomfortable with the movements of the boat taking on the sea.

I looked over at him sitting beside me for a brief few seconds.  The rifle was a Mannlicher-Shoenauer, chambered for .243 bullets, and those bullets could be of different weights. The twist of the lands and grooves to achieve maximum stability for the fast-moving rounds was a more or less standard one twist for each ten inches.  Dave wasn’t a sniper and neither was I, but my time with my dad at all the gun competitions, many of which I was allowed to participate in at an age nobody thought strange, and then artillery school and all of that, allowed me to be completely satisfied with the weapon, but Dave was just making small talk in his attempt to keep from getting sea sick.  There was a fix for that.

“Let’s make some time out here,” I said, flashing Dave an adventurous smile and then pushing the throttle lever all the way forward.

The boat jumped up and forward, using the wave it was partially inside as a moving launch point.   The two front seats were well-made as Dave and I were pushed back into them, half standing, half sitting.  The hull hit the next swell and bounced, and then did it again and again in an ever-faster cascade of cushioned but hard bounces. Suddenly, as I gently guided the boat, the sea calmed.  At least for us.  We rode the top of the waves, having enough power and hull design to skip along like a never-ending series of rock skips on a pond.

There was no talking between us.  The wind passing by was beating steadily across the bow, and the surface leading up and over the windshield was such that no words would have been heard if spoken.  I glanced over at my partner.  He was smiling while holding his left hand up to guard his face from being buffeted by the wind getting in and around the flat glass windshield.

I took it all in, knowing that the freedom of flying across the top of the ocean, careless and thoughtless of just about anything else, was fleeting, just like the trip Dave and I were on, but it felt magnificent.  It was true that the up and down, side-to-side movements of normal ‘hull speed’ boating that disturbed the inner ears of most humans were almost completely minimized by the boat’s changed orientation, but it was the adventure and challenge Dave was experiencing that eliminated the nausea.

The hotel became visible as we rounded the last point just opposite it, the one I’d dived off not many hours before.  Throttling way back, I brought the craft into the wide slit between the two points, the one I’d dived from and the one across from it I’d hoisted myself, nearly naked, up on.  The boat was easy to moor as there were several floating glass balls held by knotted ropes running down to the rock bottom of the underwater canyon.  I wondered what people on the island had come to have Japanese fishing net balls being used as floats to moor boats, but I realized I’d likely never know.  As gently as I could, I managed to maneuver the stern-heavy craft up next to the hotel’s concrete wall jetty and let Dave unsteadily clamber off.

“I’ll swim in and meet you in the room,” I said to Dave’s departing back.

Once he was off, I pulled the boat away from the jetty and headed back to one of the net-floating balls and tied the bow to it.  I changed into my swimming gear after stripping my clothes off while lying below the gunwales of the hull and folding them into the plastic bag I’d brought along.

The swim wasn’t a swim at all.  I dived in, once again at home in the sea, a sea entirely unlike the roiling wave masses breaking off the night before, and breaststroked over to the edge of the concrete next to the iron rebar embedded ladder.

Coming out of the water and recovering myself was a lot easier in daylight.  The sun was bright, the pool had guests around it, and everything appeared about as resort-perfect as one could imagine.  I fit right in.  Just before entering the hotel, I stopped to check out the boat.   It bobbed right where I’d left it, waiting.  The Fletcher was a great boat, and I knew it might also be our only way off the island if everything went south.  The mission was now my mission, more mine than I could ever have imagined a mission being.  I was running on supposition, not hard evidence, and although that bothered me, it wasn’t the first time I’d been in such a position.  Combat was performed atop a sea of rolling suppositions.  One of the great philosophers of my study at tiny Saint Norbert College in West DePere, Wisconsin, had burned some words into my brain that I knew would never leave me: “I think, therefore I am.”   Once recognizing one’s existence, all decisions result in either/or events endlessly playing out through the present and into the future.  Supposition was merely coming to a conclusion based on an analysis of the facts, or what was thought to be the facts.  In reality, the most important word in that sentence is the word ‘thought.’   Thought does not have to mean real, fact, truth, or any of those.

I shoved the deep thoughts to the back of my mind and dried myself off with a towel taken from a stack of them near the pool.  I had to think about the mission.  I’d killed the Don’s son by accident, and then tried to remove myself from being involved as the person bringing the results of the accident about.  The outcome, however, was kind of a given.  I knew that neither the Agency nor the mafia Don would have any doubts about what happened.  The results were self-evident, or sight positive.  The CIA brought Dave and me back from the flight to ‘slap heated iron’ on the bleeding gash of a mess the initial mission had left gaping open, and that was being done without regard for either the safety or the life of either Dave or me.  It was our choice, or my choice, to proceed, and they would live and accommodate whatever came out of our actions.  My mind went back to San Clemente and the dead Marines on the beach at San Onofre.  The nuclear plant wasn’t only a nuclear plant.  The scientists who weren’t just scientists.  And then my being mixed in with the whole thing.  A Marine officer who wasn’t just an officer.  The results had been both lived with and accommodated in ways that I was never likely to fully understand.  And here I was again.  I climbed the stairs up to the fifteenth floor instead of taking the elevator.  Dave was afraid of staying in the same hotel where the school, the consulate, and even the mafia knew where we were, but that point was exactly why I’d chosen to return.

I didn’t have to knock; the door to the room simply opened, which meant that Dave had been waiting.

Once inside, I headed for the bathroom, preparing to wash off the sea water and plan for what was ahead.

“It’s dangerous to stay here,” Dave said, saying out loud what I knew he had to be thinking.  “Everyone knows we’re here.”

I turned on the shower, only turning the hot knob though.  The hotel water was hot but not burning hot and I needed the tonic of high heat on and across my body.

“We were prey when we came here, not knowing we were prey,” I said, turning to face him.  “Now, we are predators, and they don’t know we’re predators.

We want them to know where we are, and we want them to think they’re coming for us.”

I stripped my suit off and got into the shower without waiting for any kind of response.  After fifteen minutes of basking under the hot water, I was ready to face the day, perform the necessary function, and then get home as fast as we could.  The Don had to be found, although it was likely he wasn’t at his downtown Palma night club or his limousine business.  He was probably at home taking care of the final affairs for his son’s burial and dealing with his wife as best he could.  It was there he could be taken, even if it meant that Mallorca would have its first recorded murder of the year, or several years.  Killing the Don was part of the problem to be solved, but getting away with it temporarily and then permanently was the bigger part.

The Marines had been not only helpful with arming us, but also, apparently, like just about everyone living on the island, knew where the Don’s estate home was located, which wasn’t far from the downtown harbor.

We went right at it, as I wanted to get off the island as quickly as possible, and it was coming on late afternoon when the sun would be at our back if the offshore conditions were right in taking a high probability shot at the man.  So many factors were unknown that I was totally uncertain about how such a loosely planned combat mission could have any possibility of success.  The idea of actually shooting the man was also not bothering me a bit, which surprised me.

The taxi ride back to the marina didn’t take long at all, and we recovered the Shelby without encountering the marina people who might have figured out that their Fletcher hadn’t remained in the harbor at all.  There was a sporting/bait/fishing gear store not far from the marina.  Using the Amex card, we purchased fishing gear, poles, and vests to wear in the boat.  I also picked out a camouflage blanket to cover the shape of the rifle if I was able to extend the instrument over the boat’s transom make the shot.  A rifle’s profile was a very difficult thing to miss in the water.

Once back at the hotel, Dave indicated his surprise that there was no activity there. The concierge desk was there, but no one was manning it.  I changed my clothes for the swim out to the moored boat, packing regular clothing into the plastic bag the vests had come in and tying it off.  Nobody went fishing wearing only a swimsuit.  I’d need dry clothes for comfort and cover if that became necessary. The lack of proper reconnaissance was a bigger worry.

I got to the boat, struggled over the stern, got dried and changed, staying as low as possible, and then started and guided the Fletcher toward the wall foundations fronting the hotel pool where Dave waited.

Once loaded, I pulled away from the wall, thankful that the storm had died the night before, taking the large storm waves with it.

“This is a bad idea,” Dave murmured when I found the entry stream leading to the estuary, the Don’s estate was on the shore of.  It was both easier to find and more secure and private than I’d hoped.

“I know and agree,” I replied, being as straight with Dave as I could.  The man was all in on an enterprise being led by a man he’d met only days earlier.

The water in the estuary was flat and calm.  The freshwater stream that ran toward the sea had been deep enough for the boat, and the mix of salt and freshwater slowly coming together seemed to allow a pond-like condition to form right at the back of the Don’s waterfront estate.  Although I’d have preferred to have a bench rest sandbagged in, I felt the conditions aboard would work.  The distance for any shot wouldn’t exceed a couple of hundred meters as I stared across the water.  I was amazed to see that what had to be the main living room of the home was totally glazed in with huge, probably thick glass plates running across the entire frontage area.  Not only was it easy to see into the room without any visual aids it was also easy to see the Don himself sitting in a huge, overstuffed chair.  A woman stood beside him, her back to us, but it was impossible to make out who she might be.  I discussed the scene, almost in a whisper to Dave, not that anyone was likely to hear us.

“You realize,” Dave asked, hesitantly, “that we don’t know what the Don looks like in real life, only from the file photos.”

“Whom else could it be?” I asked back.

“Well, shooting this guy is a sure way to find out,” Dave answered, and I knew he was technically correct.  We were engaged in potentially killing a man we’d never seen before in real life, in a place we’d never been or even checked out.

Everything I was planning seemed to be a bad idea, but I was driven.  I’d killed the Don’s son and, without Dave and I discussing it, neither of us stood the greatest chance in the world of staying alive, no matter where we went, with the Don intent on killing us.

“Everything’s right, and everything’s wrong,” I said to Dave.

“Seems that’s a place you’re pretty used to living in, from what you’ve told me so far and what I’ve seen.”

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