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Starkey’s number two, Brownley Harris, tended to intellectualize. He’d attended Wake Forest and then gone to grad school at UNC. “The irony is pretty thick here, don’t you think?” he asked as he gazed at the family scene.
“Fuck all, Brownie, you’d see irony in a turkey shoot or in a clusterfuck in a rice paddy. You think too goddamn much,” Warren Griffin said, and rolled his eyes. “That’s your problem in life.”
“Maybe you just don’t think enough,” Harris said, then winked at Starkey, whom he considered a god. “We’re going off to kill somebody this weekend, and here we are calmly barbecuing sirloin steaks for our families. You don’t think that’s a little strange?”
“I think you’re fucking strange, is what I think. We’ve got a job to do, so we do it. No different from the way it was for a dozen years in the Big Army. We did a job in Vietnam, in the Persian Gulf, Panama, Rwanda. It’s a job. Of course — I happen to love my job. Might be some irony in that. I’m a family man, and a professional killer. So what of it? Shit happens, it surely does. Blame the U.S. Army, not me.”
Starkey nodded his head toward the house, a two-story with five bedrooms and two baths he’d built in 1999. “Girls are coming,” he said. “Put a lid on it.”
“Hey, beautiful,” he called, then gave his wife, Judie, a big hug. Judie “Blue Eyes” was a tall, attractive brunette who still looked almost as good as she had on the day they were married. Like most of the women in town, she spoke with a pronounced southern accent, and she liked to smile a lot. Judie even did volunteer work three days a week at the playhouse. She was funny, appreciative, a good lover, and a good life partner. Starkey believed he was lucky to have found her, and she was lucky to have chosen him. All three of the men loved their wives, up to a point. Hell, that was another juicy irony for Brownley Harris to ponder late into the night.
“We must be doing something right,” Starkey said as he held Judie in his arms and toasted the other couples.
“You sure did,” Judie Blue Eyes said. “You boys married well. Who else would let their husbands sneak off for a weekend every month or so and trust that they were being good boys out there in the big, bad world?”
“We’re always good. Nobody does it better,” Starkey said, and smiled good-naturedly at his closest friends. “It doesn’t get any better than this. It really doesn’t. We’re the best there is.”
Chapter 42
ON SATURDAY NIGHT the three killers made their way north to a small town in West Virginia called Harpers Ferry. During the road trip, Brownley Harris’s job was to study maps of the AT, as the Appalachian Trail was called by many of the people who hiked it regularly. The spot where they were headed was a particularly popular place for hikers to stop.
Harpers Ferry was tiny, actually. You could walk from one end of town to the other in less than fifteen minutes. There was a point of interest nearby called Jefferson Rock, where you could see Maryland, Virginia, and West Virginia. Kind of neat.
Starkey drove for the entire trip, no need for any relief. He liked to be at the wheel and in control anyway. He was also in charge of entertainment, which consisted of his Springsteen’s Greatest Hits tape, a Janis Joplin, a Doors, a Jimi Hendrix anthology, and a Dale Brown audiobook.
Warren Griffin spent almost the entire trip checking the team’s supplies and readying the rucksacks in back. When he was finished, the packs weighed about forty pounds, a little more than half of what they used to carry on their recon missions in Vietnam and Cambodia.
He had prepared the packs for a “hunt and kill,” the kind of ambush Colonel Starkey had planned for the Appalachian Trail. Griffin had packed standard-issue canteens; LRPs, meals that were pronounced “lurps”; hot sauce to kill the taste of the LRPs; a tin can for coffee. Each of them would have a K-Bar, the standard military combat knife; cammo sticks, with two colors of greasepaint; boony hats; poncho liners that could do double duty as ground cover; night-vision goggles; a Glock as well as an M-16 rifle fitted with a sniper scope. When he was finished with the work, Griffin uttered one of his favorite lines, “If you want to get a good belly laugh out of God, just tell him about your plans.”
Starkey was the TL, or team leader. He was in control of every aspect of the job.
Harris was the point man.
Griffin was rear security, still the junior guy after all these years.
They didn’t have to do the “hunt and kill” exactly like this. They could have made it a whole lot easier on themselves. But this was the way Starkey liked it, the way they had always committed their murders. It was “the army way.”
Chapter 43
THEY MADE CAMP about two klicks from the AT. It was dangerous for them to be seen by anybody, so Starkey established an NDP, a night defense position for the camp. Then they each kept watch in two-hour shifts. Nostalgia rules.
When Starkey took his shift, he passed the time thinking not so much about the job looming ahead of them as the job in general. He, Harris, and Griffin were professional killers and had been for over twenty years. They’d been assassins in Vietnam, Panama, and the Gulf War; now they were assassins for hire. They were careful, discreet, and expensive. The current job was their most lucrative and had involved several murders over a period of two years. The curious thing about it — they didn’t know the identity of their employer. They were given new targets only after the previous job was completed.
As he stared into the dark, restless woods, Starkey wanted a cigarette, but he settled for an Altoids. Those little fuckers kept you awake. He found himself thinking about the blond bitch they had offed near Fayetteville, pretty Vanessa. The memory got him hard, which helped the time pass. While they were still in Vietnam, Starkey had discovered that he liked to kill. The murders gave him a powerful feeling of control and then elation. It was as if electricity were passing through his body. He never felt guilt, not anymore. He killed for hire; but he also killed in between jobs, because he wanted to and liked it.
“Strange, scary stuff,” Starkey muttered, rubbing his hands together. “Scare myself sometimes.”
The three of them were up and ready by five the next morning, which was shrouded in a thick, bluish gray fog. The air was cool but incredibly fresh and clean. Starkey figured the fog wouldn’t burn off until at least ten.
Harris was in the best physical shape of the three, so he was designated as the scout. He wanted the job anyway. At fifty-one, he still played in a men’s basketball league and did triathlons twice a year.
At 5:15, he set off from camp at a comfortable jogging pace. Christ, he loved this shit.
Nostalgia.
Harris found that he was wide-awake and alert once he was on the move. He was operating beautifully after just a few minutes on the trail. The hunt and kill was a satisfying combination of business and pleasure for him, for all three of them.
Harris was the only one up this early on the AT, at least on this particular stretch. He passed a four-person dome tent. Probably some white-bread family. Most likely “section hikers,” as opposed to “through hikers,” who would take up to six months to do the entire trail, finally ending at a place called Mount Katahdin, Maine. Around the dome tent he noticed a camp stove and fuel bottles, ratty shorts and T-shirts laid out to air. Not a target, he decided and moved on.
