Also sitting in General Hackett’s office were Colonel Stanley Dombroski and Warrant Officer Maggie Taylor. Dombroski was the man who normally gave Brodie his assignments. Maggie Taylor was Brodie’s recently assigned partner.
Hackett looked like a general from central casting: He was six feet tall and had a full head of short gray hair, and his posture suggested he had a ramrod up his ass. Colonel Dombroski, by comparison, looked like a guy you’d see selling beer at Fenway. He was five foot eight, at least forty pounds overweight, mostly bald, and had a permanent six-o’clock shadow. He also looked as if he might not be the sharpest bayonet in the armory—but there was nothing dull about Stanley Dombroski. Brodie suspected that Dombroski would never rise above the rank of colonel. The Army, often to its own detriment, wants generals who look like generals.
The Army had no problem, however, with Maggie Taylor’s appearance, and if Brodie and Taylor weren’t frequently required to go undercover, the Army would have plastered Maggie Taylor’s photo on recruiting posters. She was five foot nine and had short blonde hair, a perfect nose, full lips, bright brown eyes that radiated intelligence, and a CrossFit body.
Brodie was tall with civilian-cut dark brown hair, and he considered himself a pretty good-looking guy, based on the unbiased testimony of former girlfriends and his mother. Today he was wearing jeans, a black T-shirt, and a counterfeit Armani sports jacket that he had bought in Taiwan for twelve dollars. Army criminal investigators usually wore civilian clothing—unless they were undercover, posing as uniformed personnel. Today, however, Maggie Taylor was in uniform because that was the protocol upon being summoned by a general, as Dombroski—who was always in uniform—had reminded them in an e-mail that Brodie hadn’t read. He was sure he’d hear from Dombroski later about how he never checked his e-mail, which was true, because as far as Brodie was concerned most official Army e-mails should be classified as spam.
“Mr. Brodie?”
Male warrant officers are addressed as “Mr.” Female WOs are “Ms.” Warrant officers are not commissioned officers, as are lieutenants, captains, colonels, and generals, and they exist in a gray area between noncommissioned officers—meaning sergeants—and the commissioned officer corps. It was a nice rank, thought Brodie. You had no command responsibilities and no one called you “sir,” but you could still drink at the Officers’ Club.
The wall behind Hackett was covered with framed commendations and awards, as well as pictures of him with other generals and the current Secretary of Defense. Among them was a framed photo of Hackett in desert combat fatigues holding an M4 rifle, which Brodie suspected he’d only fired in training. General Hackett certainly had never had one fired at him by a methed-up redneck riding bareback on a charging mule in backwoods Kentucky.
Wasn’t there some way you could have avoided shooting the mule? The general’s question still hung in the air. And when a two-star general asks you a question, even a stupid one, you are expected to answer.
“I was aiming for the suspect on the mule, sir,” said Brodie. “Not the mule itself,” he added to be as clear as crystal meth.
Taylor stifled a laugh. They’d only worked this one case together, but Brodie was starting to notice that she found the wrong things funny, and at the wrong times. Also, Taylor was absolutely golden when it came to the mule. She’d saved its life.
Two months ago, Brodie and his new partner had been dispatched to Fort Campbell, Kentucky, which was experiencing a major methamphetamine epidemic. Somebody on the base was selling crystal meth to a lot of soldiers, and an M4 rifle that fires seven hundred rounds per minute is not something you want in the hands of a guy flying high on crank. But Army CID agents at Fort Campbell, even with the assistance of the DEA, had had no luck in figuring out who was making and pushing the stuff. So they’d called Chief Warrant Officer Brodie.
Scott Brodie, age thirty-eight, had enlisted when he was twenty-one. He’d been a CID agent for twelve years. In those years he’d apprehended murderers, rapists, Pentagon embezzlers, and people trying to sell military hardware to terrorists. He’d worked hard to establish himself as the guy you send in when the other guys can’t solve a case, and the meth case was one of those times.
He and Taylor had gone undercover posing as clerks in the adjutant general’s office, and in less than two months they had managed to identify all the members of a small cartel. The ringleader was a master sergeant named Enos Hadley who worked at the base National Guard armory, and his cousin cooked the meth out in some backwoods holler. Sergeant Hadley had a dozen guys on the base, some military, some civilian, who acted as his corner boys.
The day the CID was planning to make all the apprehensions, somebody had tipped Hadley that they were coming for him, so he’d left the base in his pickup, taking with him an M4 and enough ammunition to invade North Korea. Brodie and Taylor went after him in an unmarked car.
They hadn’t bothered to notify the Kentucky State Police because the Army likes to solve its own problems. They also hadn’t radioed any MPs for backup, over Taylor’s protests, because, as Brodie explained to her, he hadn’t just spent seven weeks in Deliverance country to let someone else get the glory.
“Brodie,” Taylor had cautioned, “these guys are crazy.”
And Taylor would know. She was from this part of the world—the strip of rugged country that snaked from southern New York to northern Alabama known as Appalachia. It was full of famously short-tempered Scots-Irish descendants, such as one Enos Hadley, who was currently following the genetic imperative of his ancestors and fleeing to the Highlands—or, in his case, the back hills.
“We can handle it,” Brodie had assured her.
And that was the end of it. Brodie outranked her. He was a Chief Warrant Officer Four; Taylor—five years his junior and with only a year in CID under her belt—was a One. He was sure that if she kept at it she’d eventually make Chief Warrant Officer Five, the highest rank. He was less sure about his own prospects. And behavior such as this was a large part of the reason for his uncertainty.
They’d chased Hadley into the hills where he’d been raised, and by the time he got to his backwoods ancestral shack, Brodie and Taylor were less than a quarter mile behind him and saw him run into a barn. Brodie figured he’d barricade himself inside, which would force them to call the local sheriff and tell him to bring a SWAT team and wait the guy out until he either surrendered or blew his tiny brains out.
But that wasn’t what happened. Just as they got out of their car with their 9mm Glock pistols drawn, Hadley burst out of the barn on a mule, which they’d learn later was in such fine and fit shape from spending the last fourteen months carting supplies up to the meth lab.
Hadley charged them like a hillbilly Geronimo, M4 firing on full auto, and it was a minor miracle he didn’t hit either of them. Their car wasn’t so lucky.
Brodie returned fire, trying to kill the guy trying to kill him, which is what they teach you in Basic Combat Training. But it’s a challenge to hit a guy bouncing on a mule, firing a submachine gun at you, while you’re trying to find cover and shoot at the same time. Brodie missed Hadley and shot the mule in the ass.
The mule bucked and Hadley fell off. He rolled once and came up firing. Taylor shot him, hitting him in the right shoulder. She claimed later that she aimed to wound him, which Brodie knew was complete bullshit since the military does not train you to aim to wound. But as they say in the Army, “Whatever I hit is what I was aiming for.”