The phalanx code, p.2
The Phalanx Code, page 2
A broken man, I was barely interested.
I shuffled forward in the line for food, Calles still at my back. Hooper got his glop, then I held up my tray. With his white hairnet and apron, Private Sam McWhorley looked like a fry cook at McDonald’s. Grease-stained white apron. Stringy mustache and beard. Tattoo sleeves on both arms. Hateful sneer on his face. He leaned over and let a long stringy loogie slip between his lips and sucked it back in before it hit the ladle in his hand. He had been a mechanic at Fort Campbell in Kentucky and was here for sexual assault of a fellow soldier. I had been the court-martial convening authority at the time and gave him the maximum punishment. I figured no chow was better than something mixed with his bodily fluids, so I kept shuffling ahead. If there was an inside job to hit me this evening, McWhorley would gladly be the ringleader.
Handing out the sweet tea in plastic cups was Corporal Sonny Jones, a big African American from New Orleans and relatively recent addition to the Disciplinary Barracks population. He put a cup of iced tea on my tray and slid a cheeseburger from who knows where next to it.
“General,” he said with a nod. “Hearing news.”
“Sonny,” I said.
He smiled. A few weeks ago, Jones told me he had posted a long rant about the Eye of Africa battle and how my former Dagger team had saved the country, maybe the world. He said that it was trending on social media and he had used the hashtags #EAB #garrettsinclair #savingamerica.
I sat down and listened to the sounds of chains scraping, men slurping gravy, and guard boots tapping the linoleum floor. The place smelled of decaying meat and disinfectant. I lifted the bun of my cheeseburger after spying a white hair on it. The hair turned out to be a piece of paper with a message:
8 pm tonight. Stay in bed!
I looked at the clock on the wall, which read 7:04 P.M. The clock was circular like we had in Fayetteville Public Schools some forty years ago. It was battery powered and high up on the wall so no one could reach in and use the second hand as a shiv.
In my periphery, I saw McWhorley’s hand flash with a kitchen knife. A small group of unfamiliar prisoners gathered maybe twenty meters away near the kitchen entrance. In the opposite direction I noticed Smyth ascend the steps to a small sally port bridge that looked like a church choir balcony. He stared in my direction as the group near the kitchen began walking toward me like a blocking wedge for a kick-off returner on the football field.
I rotated my neck and rolled my shoulders. I ate the cheeseburger and the piece of paper, which went down smoothly with the warm, diluted tea. Was it poisoned? I pushed away from my table and began to stand to confront the aggressors.
“What’s that?” Calles demanded. She moved between me and McWhorley’s wedge; McWhorley stopped, eyes curious, when Calles inserted herself in the equation. Without her, the battlefield geometry was five to one. After a year of lifting weights, I put my meager prison bank account on me, despite my fifty-two years.
I continued to stand. That was the protocol. If a guard addressed you, standing to pay respects was expected. I was six feet two inches tall, and she was every bit of six feet in her jackboots.
“Cheeseburger, Sergeant,” I said. McWhorley’s group inched forward, some casting their eyes upward at the bridge where Smyth stood.
“The white thing,” she snapped.
“Oh, mayonnaise, I guess. Or maggots. I don’t look at it. I just eat it. Like in Ranger school,” I said.
Importantly, the inmate chatter claimed that Calles had played college softball at the University of Nebraska. The Ranger School comment was probably unnecessary and resulted in a swing for the fences into my kidneys. I would be pissing blood tonight for sure. Was she the artillery to soften up the target for McWhorley and team?
“You’re out of line, Sinclair,” she barked in my face. Then she turned to the halted wedge and said through clenched teeth, “Stand down!”
The entire cafeteria had gone silent. The clock ticked loudly. Time froze. McWhorley’s wedge was conspicuously motionless, maybe stunned by her intervention.
“Yes, Sergeant,” I said.
I was thankful for the interruption, though I wouldn’t have minded a good fight right now. Emotionally processing an abrupt halt to a lifetime of service was already challenging, especially from the confines of a maximum-security prison. So, goddamnit, bring it on. Make me a convict and I’ll act like one.
As I stood there watching the motionless cafeteria like a narrator walking through a three-dimensional movie freeze-frame, I reverted to my observation training as an army Ranger and special mission unit operator.
McWhorley’s knife was a forked garden tool with a wooden handle and tips honed to razor points. The lead man in the attack had a shaved head and tattoos crawling up his neck. He was jacked and the look in his eyes told me he was high on meth. He stood there flexing like a weight lifter who had just bounced a personal best snatch-and-clean on the floor. The two men on either flank of McWhorley were equally muscled. Why they had left the task to the smallest guy in the foursome, McWhorley, was a mystery, but I could guess it was revenge for my sentencing of his rape charge.
I thought of my dead wife, Melissa, and my daughter, Reagan, anger rising again at his crime. Maybe now I could give him an even more proper sentence.
The freeze-frame went from motionless to fast-forward.
The man leading the wedge barreled toward me. Calles attempted to block him but was tossed aside with the flick of the man’s left arm. His demonic eyes sparked red with evil. The two flankers protected McWhorley. The thing about fighting someone doped up on amphetamines is that they are all energy and no coordination. The army had transitioned to a respectable hand-to-hand combat training regimen about twenty years before in special mission units; we practiced combative techniques almost daily. As the commander, I did “man in the middle” drills where my men would come at me one at a time from a different direction as I stood in the center of the circle they formed.
It was rare that I lost.
My mind roared. Make me a convict and I’ll act like one.
I let the wedge leader into my personal space, where I immediately clinched him and landed four debilitating knee strikes into his ribs then used his momentum to trip him forward. I spun to find the right-side flanker dueling with Calles, who had rejoined the fray. McWhorley was pushing the left-side flanker with his right hand. I jabbed the left flanker twice as he broke his focus when McWhorley tried to hide behind him. A roundhouse kick snapped his neck to the left, causing him to stand up straight. I used that opening to land two straight kicks to his larynx with my prison boots. As he clasped his neck with both hands, I put the toe of my boot squarely in his crotch. He doubled over, whereupon I laced my fingers and pulled his head down with my hands and drove my knee into his face, breaking his nose, blood spraying everywhere.
With the wedge breaker and flankers preoccupied, McWhorley skittered haplessly toward me with his modified garden tool. As the wiry, skinny meth head and rapist lunged at me, my hand was like a rattlesnake, latching onto his wrist and twisting his arm upward. I did a sweeping back kick, landing him on the table where I had been eating. Drinks and food exploded onto the chairs and floor. I wrapped my hand like a vise around his left fist holding the weapon and slowly arced it toward his face. The two shiny, sharpened prongs were closing with his eyes. His breath smelled like a dead rat in a week-old garbage pail of rotting food. Piss spread on his orange jumpsuit, and I smelled feces.
I was laser focused on his scared pupils flitting about, looking for help. By now the entire cafeteria full of convicts was chanting, “Sinclair! Sinclair! Sinclair!”
As I slowly lowered his resisting fist toward his face, I whispered into the noise, “Come at me you little bitch? I’m not some fourteen-year-old girl.”
Calles shouted, “Sinclair stand down!” Two guards pulled at me with the weapon scraping McWhorley’s cheek. “Stand down! Stand down!”
As two beefy military police prison guards muscled me away from McWhorley, I released his fist that had been resisting. The weapon shot forward and scraped my biceps as the guards held me in place, almost as if they wanted to do the wedge breaker’s job and make me a target. Calles intervened and flung McWhorley up against the wall where two more military police guards secured him and the garden tool.
“Sinclair, you’re headed to solitary!” Calles shouted as she pushed me through the crowd.
Smyth bellowed from the bridge, “Sinclair! You couldn’t even behave for an hour?” Then, “Sergeant Calles, make sure inmate Sinclair is properly treated in solitary.”
“Roger that, sir,” she said. Another demonstrative thud with the baton drew a thin-lipped smile from Smyth. Pain rocketed through my back into my shoulder blades and up my spine into the base of my skull.
“You’re clearly a danger, Sinclair. I’ll be making a report post haste,” Smyth said. There was satisfaction in his voice. I wasn’t sure if he wanted me dead or mixed up in a fight so he could try to overturn my release. Ankles chained and wrists handcuffed, I shuffled along with Calles, who was shouting down each corridor, “Solitary coming through!”
We arrived in the solitary wing where a guard I had never seen before opened the door and shoved me in, but not before Calles’ baton landed one more blow on my bruised back. She tossed a bottle of Betadine and some gauze on the concrete slab that passed for a bed.
“Get on the bed and don’t move other than patching yourself up. Understand?” Calles said.
I nodded.
“I asked you a question, inmate. Do you understand that for the next thirty minutes you are confined to that bed?”
As if solitary wasn’t enough, now she wanted me in a specific location in a cell isolated from the rest of the prison.
“Yes, Sergeant,” I said as if I was a young lieutenant attending basic training.
The heavy door closed with a metallic clank, the lock snapping with a hydraulic whisper.
I had no wristwatch, phone, or wall clock. The solitary room was simple, but bigger than I expected. It was maybe twenty-five feet wide. A concrete slab on the left was covered with a threadbare blanket and thin feather pillow dotted with the cavity drool of hundreds of previous inmates. There was a concrete divider maybe three feet wide at the head of the bed. A toilet on the right. No lid. No seat. Just a hole.
I sat on the bed, leaned against the cinder block wall, and thought about the note on my cheeseburger.
8 pm tonight. Stay in bed!
The clock in my head told me I had twenty-two minutes to go.
Whatever was supposed to happen at 8:00 P.M., I was in a different location than anyone might expect me to be. It could have been that Smyth preferred I be assassinated here in solitary since the attempt in the dining facility had not panned out. Or it may have been a warning from a friend to protect me from some violent act that was happening at the prison that night. Or it might have been something random, like a gathering to discuss potential informal inmate leadership moves, rule changes, or the latest social media screed about me.
I was breathing rapidly from the exertion and checked myself the way I would do after any airborne or combat operation. Feet, legs, torso, face, neck, skull. Check. Right arm bleeding but not terribly. My back was hurting from Calles’ baseball swings, but there was nothing I could do about that. My lungs were burning from the aerobic exercise, but that felt good. Other than my arm and back, I was fine. I picked up the Betadine and checked the laceration. I peeled away the jumpsuit as best I could, revealing two parallel gashes across my right biceps muscle. Blood was seeping. I dabbed at it with the gauze, then poured the purple disinfectant all over my arm. Once the stinging subsided, I poured more, then wrapped my arm in gauze, which quickly soaked up the blood and medicine.
I used my teeth and cuffed hands to tie the gauze, then lay down on the bed, curious why Calles had instructed me to be in that one spot. My primal defenses were on high alert after the fight and Smyth’s obvious manipulation. Was there a bomb under the bed? Cage fight with another inmate? What was the play?
A small camera was situated in the top right-hand corner of the cell, its smoky gray globe concealing the actual lens. Was it off or “malfunctioning”? If everything was on the level, I figured I should probably stay where I was unless I wanted more shots to the kidneys.
After twenty minutes of reflection about Sally McCool, Joe Hobart, and Randy Van Dreeves, the heart of my Dagger team, my head shot up.
Three knocks on the outer wall, not the door, preceded a blast in the far opposite corner of the cell, blowing inward. Smoke and debris ricocheted around the cell, the concrete divider at my head absorbing some of the blast. A hole the size of a car was left in its wake. Alarms sounded. Lights flashed. Sprinklers sprayed.
Through the smoke and haze, Jake Mahegan stepped into the opening wearing night vision goggles and carrying enough weapons for both of us.
He used a set of bolt cutters to snap my ankle chains and handcuffs, handed me a Beretta pistol, and said, “Follow me, boss.”
3
I FOLLOWED MAHEGAN THROUGH a tunnel until we were walking through frozen mud along the banks of the Missouri River.
We angled north. Neither of us had spoken a word. We had caromed through an earthen limestone shaft that zigged and zagged until we were in the biting winds howling along the river valley, the patter of feet echoing pursuit behind us. After about a mile of moving north, Mahegan dragged a small Zodiac with an electric motor from the deadwood along the shore. As we sped across the river, I was thankful that we didn’t have to swim. A big, lumbering kid from the Outer Banks of North Carolina, Mahegan was a waterman who built his strength by fighting the fabled currents of the Graveyard of the Atlantic off the coast of Cape Hatteras.
We emerged on the far side after some slight drift. The water had huge chunks of ice in it, and as it was, we had to disembark and wade chest deep through the icy muck on the eastern shore where the water moved more slowly and froze more quickly. We cracked ice with the butts of our pistols and Mahegan tossed his phone in the boat and let it drift south as we trudged onto dry land. Soon after plodding another half mile north, we found an old cabin where he said, “Here. Quick,” which was a major conversation for Mahegan, who like Sergeant Major Joe Hobart, was sparse with his words when in full execute mode.
Inside the barren shack, Mahegan had pre-positioned a change of clothes, food, water, medical supplies, communications gear, ammunition, and weapons. He powered up two new phones, checked them, then shut them off.
“Change, kit up, and let’s go,” he said.
I nodded. In less than five minutes we both had discarded our wet clothes and changed. I applied some ointment to the gashes on my arm and bandaged it again. Mahegan tossed the river-soaked clothing into a burn barrel in the ground, poured some gas on them and flipped a lit match inside. The gas burned brightly, blue and orange flames licking upward. It felt good to have the heat stinging my face after even a short period of time in the freezing water.
“Could be tracking devices in your clothes,” he said. “Smart dust.”
“Smart dust?”
“Blanc and his Phalanx company have weaponized microchips the size of a grain of sand that can track you.”
“Roger,” I said, adjusting the new clothes Mahegan had stashed for me: black cargo pants, black polypropylene long sleeve T-shirt, loose fitting jacket, Oakley Light Assault boots, and black outer tactical vest. “Where to next?” I asked. We both took a long drink of water, the sweat quickly pouring through my skin as the fuel burned in the barrel and my racing heart slammed against my chest.
“Link up with Randy and Joe,” Mahegan said.
“You mean to get them out?” I asked. “They’re in prison, too, I heard.”
“Negative. Patch Owens and Zion Black walked them out last night from the Navy Brig in San Diego. Mitch Drewson apparently intervened. That’s all I know.”
“The tech billionaire? The Shoutter app guy?”
“Roger.” He shrugged. “Not sure why, but he wanted you all out. I didn’t need any more explanation.”
I nodded. I was glad and wasn’t going to look a gift horse in the mouth just yet. Patch Owens was an operator who served as a unit medic. He and Mahegan had left the service at about the same time, and both had worked various odd jobs in North Carolina. Zion Black was a former professional football defensive end who was as big as Mahegan at six foot five inches and pushing 280 pounds. He had been with me during the Eye of Africa mission as part of my personal security detail. As were all my crew, they were teammates.
“What’s Drewson’s angle here?” I asked. I wasn’t a social media fan, but something was scratching at the back of my mind. Jake had to blow a shape charge through the wall of the DB to get me out, but Hobart and Van Dreeves just walked through the front gate of the Navy brig?
“All I know is that he’s funding this,” Mahegan said. “I was minding my own business in Cape Hatteras when I got a random visit from him personally. Flew into Manteo from Kinston on a private jet and pulled up in a four-wheel on the beach where I was surfing with some other locals. It’s where all this gear came from,” he said.
He waved his hand around the dilapidated shack.
“Go on,” I said.
“He asked if I was interested in getting you and the others out of jail. I packed my shit and flew with him to Colorado. Called Patch and Zion en route and here we are.”
“Nothing else?” I asked.
He shrugged. “He’s a talkative guy, so yeah, he mentioned an assload of stuff but nothing relevant.” After a brief pause, Mahegan said, “He did mention your grandfather. Something to do with Evelyn Champollion and your grandfather.”
