Jimmy Devlin Misses a Step

 

              

 

 

The trail had taken me to Fort Mitchell National Cemetery in Georgia, where CSM Paul Bishop (the tombstone read: Somalia, Iraq, Afghanistan HE SERVED WITH PRIDE) was no longer buried.

The name had come up a few weeks ago, unrelated to anything else in the case, long after the investigation seemed to have run its course, and everyone else had given up. No leads, no witnesses, no hard evidence – just a hunch, and after the debacles of the last few years no one at INSCOM had much patience for my hunches.

      Still, I persisted – not so much because I wanted to be proved right, but because of the catastrophic results if everyone else was proved wrong.

      I drove into the small city-state of Fort Benning on an unseasonably mild late November afternoon, asking myself again: What did I actually have to go on? Intercepted, encrypted emails, stolen nuclear materials, a talkative witness doing ten years to life in the Chesapeake Consolidated Naval brig; coded messages from page numbers and word counts in The Turner Diaries.

      I drove up the main gate, flashed my credentials to the guard, and got a swift salute as the barrier lifted. The reflexive military gesture of respect buoyed my sprits briefly, but a phone call to the Intelligence and Security Command would flip that one-eighty. I had no official business here and no clearance for what I needed to do. It would come down to bluff and bluster. I heard my COs voice in my head again, as I so often did: Culhane laughing: “Bullshit baffles brains, Jimmy.” And it usually did. Anyway, I had always been good at the bullshit. The look I gave that guard, for instance  -- cold, bored and impatient, had been pitch perfect, as was my unrushed cruise onto the base. The car’s body language said I was in no rush and didn’t have to be. People would wait for me – or come to me when I called them.

      More bullshit of course: I’d managed to burn the last of my credibility as the few scraps evidence had dissolved like the last pile of dirty snow in a rainstorm. The emails were ambiguous – “dirty bomb” was some sort of popular rap lyric, the stolen nuclear material had apparently been accounted for, the Turner Diaries code breaking had yielded only ambiguous hate speech  about wiping out the “towel heads” and “one cockroach in the sink meant a thousand in the walls”  -- no evident master plan, no plan at all really, except that the people using the book would do whatever they had to do to “not be replaced”.

      “Ya can’t repair em,” Culhane had said once. “So what the fuck else are you supposed to do with em?”

      That left the witness, who it turned out would confess anything to anyone about anything in exchange for a shorter sentence or a bigger cell. So it was no surprise that when I came upon the name Paul Bishop and located a Command Sergeant Major of the same name buried at Fort Mitchell, no one had the slightest interest in digging up the grave. I spoke to Bishop’s widow privately and explained me theory: a newly empty grave was the best possible hiding place for contraband you didn’t want people to find.

She hung up on me.

      Not a great career week for James Devlin.

      But, still – it all made sense. If the nuclear materials were still unaccounted for, and the Army had no clear origin point for them … and anyway, you didn’t have to steal radioactive isotopes from a power plant to make a dirty bomb. A few grams of Polonium could be scavenged from a dozen sources, from construction sites to food processing plants to hospitals. You didn’t get enough for a nuclear explosion, but the dynamite spread the radioactive particles over a good distance, and that made the perfect surprise coda to your bomb drama, a lingering reminder of your message and your threat.

And if the coded phrases from the book really did refer to an actual dirty bomb, and if the emails corroborated it, and if that lowlife scumbag convict just happened to be telling the truth for once in his life …

If, if, if.

“If I had ham, I’d have ham and eggs,” Culhane had scoffed at me. “If I had eggs.”

So I was on my own, going rogue as usual. I had used that phrase with Jenny once and she’d said, “I only seem like I’m ‘going rogue’ because I’m right and you won’t do what I say.’ Well, Jenny was right most of the time, whether the subject was a lighter more expensive bit for her mare or the unacceptability of over-head lighting. I gave her those, and she’d give me this one, I was certain. Jenny had good instincts.

CMS Paul Bishop’s grave was full of metal tubing dynamite and some radioactive isotope, most likely polonium 210. But I wasn’t going to debate my theory any more. I was running out of time. It was closing in on Duhl Hijjah, the final month in the Arabic calendar. That meant Yawm-Al-Arafat, the holiest day of the Muslim year, was less than two weeks away. Whoever these people were, I was sure they were going to blow a mosque on that day … probably, given the logistics of the operation, Al-Farook Masjid, the biggest mosque in the southern United States, located in Atlanta, just over a hundred miles north, less than two hours by car from the cemetery. Two of the encrypted messages supported this theory: “Let them die on their knees” and even more alarming: “Careful when you face east. We’re gonna get you when you turn your back on the west”.

That was my case.

I’d made as well as I could, and Culhane rejected it. So I was on my own. Fuck it. I was used to that.

I pulled up to the Admin building, organized my story, and walked inside. On the second floor, amid the quiet rustle of computer keys and the distant ringing of a telephone, the Staff Judge Advocate’s assistant greeted me. He offered bottled water and gave me the list of volunteers. The job involved “spade work” and one of the men, private first class Caden Bowers, had actually been a grave digger in civilian life. I had to smile at that.

Ten minutes later I was driving off the base with Bowers riding shotgun: a square faced, squinting redneck mouth-breather more interested in whatever he was scrolling through on his phone than the job he’d been chosen for, or the man in charge. That was fine with me. I had no interest in small talk.

I badged my way into the cemetery and found the grave in a wide meadow dotted with gravestones, backed by a dense screen of forest.

“Now what?” Bowers asked me

“Now we wait for dark.”

“The fuck are we doing here, Colonel?”

I twisted in my seat to face him. “We’re digging up a grave.”

“Hey no, that aint legal, sir! Plus it’s a sin.”

“The U.S. Army absolves you, private. And you can go to Confession on Sunday.”

We sat in silence for a while. I rolled down my window and let the cool evening breeze touch my face. Crows squawked. I heard a siren dopplering into the distance. Bowers returned to his trusty iPhone.

When it was full dark I turned on the headlights to illuminate the grave and climbed out of the car. Bowers joined me, shovel in hand. “I don’t think we should do this, sir.”

“Noted.”

“I mean, dead bodies, you know … disturbing them and what not …”

“Dig it up,” I said through gritted teeth. Genuine fear moved through his eyes.

“I’m sorry, sir … dig – dig what up?”

“All of it. Dig it all up. I want it all gone. Now.”

“You mean, like body parts … because –”

“Jesus Christ! There’s no body under there, Private! If I’m right you’ll find nothing but the components of a bomb.”

“Like a land mine? If it blows –”

“Relax, it’s disassembled.”

“I don’t know …”

Before I could answer, he swung the shovel at my head. Pain exploded behind my eyes and I found myself on my hands and knees in the grass. He pulled my Heckler and Koch from its holster, and stepped back. He spoke but my ears were ringing. I couldn’t hear him.

He spoke louder. “Now you get to dig your own grave, and I don’t have to handle all that nasty ass plutonium. Kind of a win-win, Colonel. Doncha think?”

“Wait – who … what are you …”

“Come on college boy, time for the post graduate course. We was on to you from jump street and my boys are coming right now to pick this stuff up and get it to A-Town. Oh yeah. Who do you think I was texting back in the car? Uber? Some dating app? We don’t have time for that shit. We got a mission and we’re just a little ahead of schedule now. But you gotta roll with shit, you know? Now start digging.”

By the time I had gotten down to the black plastic back full of aluminum piping, ten-penny nails, Semtex and plutonium, a black Ford F350 had pulled up beside us. I was breathing hard, feeling the stab in my lower back and the raw blisters on my palms.

“Yo, Caden!”

“Hey, T-Bone, we got us a helper.”

T-Bone laughed. “You always was a lazy shit.”

“You AWOL now, cracker,” a third voice chimed in from the truck

“Fuck yeah.” He turned to me, waved the gun at the truck bed. “Start loading up, college boy.” I heaved the bag out of the grave and scrambled after it. “Empty the bag! Get your hands on that stuff. Won’t hurt ya unless you gopt an open blister or something Feel it hit ya. Don’t worry the radiation’ll take a coupla days to kill ya, and you’ll be long dead by that time. So, it’s all good!”

When I was done he shot me five times in the chest and the close-range rounds punched me backward into the pit. The Kevlar had saved me but I could tell some ribs were broken and I couldn’t move as the first shovel full of dirt hit my back.

The darkness saved me. I got my jacket pulled over my head without them seeing, and I had a pocket of air to breathe until they were gone. The dirt was loose but it was heavy and I almost suffocated before my legs could push me out into the air and my hands could claw the soil aside. I stood for I don’t know how long, filthy and wounded, radiation poisoned, trying to get my breath and my bearings. Finally, I lost consciousness for I don’t know how long.

The voice woke me. “Sorry, son. I don’t know what you’re doing out here, but I’m going to have to put a stop to it. Military police from Benning are on their way right now. They can sort this out. You just get yourself out of there, and hold tight till they get here. Won’t be long.”

I squirmed out of the dirt and pulled myself to my feet. I was dizzy, my whole body was screaming in pain, my throat felt choked with dirt. But I managed to disarm the old man, take his gun and club him to the ground. His car was still running. I jumped in, dug the turf up in a three point turn and took off. I could hear sirens in the distance.

I was a fugitive now, and probably dying from the radiation exposure, but I still had a job to do and less than two weeks to do it. By the time I hit interstate 185, I’d figured out my plan.