Free Dead Shot by USMC (Ret.) with Donald A. Davis Gunnery SGT. Jack Coughlin Page A

if ever needed.
    Father and son finished their tea, and after hugging his mother, Jeremy went to the car and tossed his travel case into the back seat. As his father drove, the son wrote a note and handed it over: “You must stay out of London today.” The father read it and gave it back, with a slight nod of understanding. The son tore it into little pieces and fed it out the window, bit by bit, along the morning highway.
    Jeremy leaned back and studied his father, who held the steering wheel lightly with the gentle, sure hands of a talented surgeon, a man who had worked hard his whole life only to see his dreams crushed. He deserved better. The young medical student had fallen in love with England the moment he set foot in the country from his battered homeland of Lebanon. The golden history of the British Empire enthralled him, and he trekked all over the country, wanting to become part of it but knowing that he could never really be a true Englishman because of his deep skin color, his dark eyes and hair, and the accent; a foreigner forever. To close the distance between him and the society of which he so desperately wanted to be a part, he committed the greatest shame of his life, abandoning his country of birth to become a British citizen.
    Aziz Osman gained a reputation as a brilliant young doctor who healed patients of high social status. That was until the old and cancer-riddled Lady Wallendar died beneath his knife. It mattered not that the obese woman was in her eighties, and an extraordinarly poor candidate for any sort of surgery. When Osman opened her up, he found the liver, stomach, kidneys, and heart almost destroyed. Then she had a myocardial infarction while on the operating table, and it was all over in twenty minutes. Lord Wallendar had wanted a miracle and, by God, had paid handsomely to get one. He blamed Osman, and from that moment the surgeon was tainted as just another worthless wog saw-bones. The big door of class slammed shut, with Osman on the wrong side, and his practice and dreams evaporated. Wog! The acronym for “worthy Oriental gentleman” was the ultimate sneer.
    The doctor determined that his children should not have to face that same barrier, and after taking the advice of friends, Aziz Osman went to court and formally anglicized his name. Aziz became Allen; Dr. Osman added a single letter and became Dr. Osmand. The next year, his son was born, and Jeremy Osmand grew up about as English as a boy could be.
     
    The car pulled up at the new St. Pancras International train station in King’s Cross, and Jeremy removed his bag and went inside. Since he would be traveling to the Continent, he ran the magnetically encoded card through a reading device and passed smoothly through customs and an X-ray tunnel, for he had nothing to hide. Once in the sterilized zone for departures, he would not have to go through customs on the other end of his journey, the Bruxelles-Midi station in Belgium. The high-speed Eurostar departed at 6:10 A.M. , with Jeremy resting comfortably in seat 55 on the aisle of the first-class, nonsmoking car number 9, reading an International Herald Tribune .
    The Eurostar sped into the mouth of the thirty-one-mile Channel Tunnel, dashed through the Chunnel, and popped up in Europe. Two and a half hours after leaving London, he was in Brussels. He took a cab to the Silken Berlaymont Hotel on the Boulevard Charlemagne, asked for and got early check-in, and went directly to his room. With the wink of a tiny green light above the handle, the electronic coded card opened the door.
    Jeremy Osmand turned on the television and placed his cell phone on a small, polished table beside the soft chair facing the set, then hung up his jacket and brewed a pot of tea in the little kitchenette. He checked his watch again and transformed himself, the genial personality of the pleasant Englishman sliding away like the discarded skin of a snake. His feelings shut down. He became Juba.
     
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