Free Whistler's Angel by John R. Maxim Page B

no jailhouse brawl. The father of the two who raped Alicia had arranged it.
    “ Not much of a story ,” he’d told Claudia’s mother. “ One thing leading to another ,” he’d said.
    Where it led, at the outset, was him learning how to kill. His father never taught him. The Army did that. It might not have been what his father had intended, but it’s something that the Army does well. If Whistler had to do three years in the service, he decided that he ought to make the most of it. He spent his first year making up his college credits. He considered Officers’ Candidate School, but opted for another kind of education at the Ranger School at Fort Benning. He became an Airborne Ranger. He was in the Gulf War. His team spent three weeks behind Iraqi lines during the chaos of the allied air attacks. His team’s mission was recon until it was ordered to “disrupt the Iraqi chain of command.” In plain English, that meant killing generals.
    His team used Iraqi weapons for the task. This was to make the ambush scene appear to be the work of mutinous troops, most of whom were there under duress. The Iraqis, in reprisal, executed whole units that had merely been in the vicinity. That in turn, however, led to hundreds of desertions. They probably saved more lives than they took. That, at least, was what their own general told them.
    After that, the Army found other ways to make sure that his training was usefully employed. Several of these involved little foreign wars that the public never heard much about. Some were incursions to extract personnel, but most of them were punitive raids against foreign-based terrorist groups. After that, increasingly, they went after drug barons.
    Every branch of the service and many federal agencies had a role in the policy of drug interdiction. Most of these were set up to try to stem the supply. A hopeless task. They made almost no difference. At best, they interdicted one shipment in twenty and many of those shipments were decoys.
    The first punitive raids were authorized in response to the murder of government operatives in several of the trafficking countries. Well, not authorized, maybe. Such incursions were illegal. The teams that went in were made up of volunteers. They did what the law could not do. These raids were soon expanded to avenge other murders such as those of reporters and honest officials, and even, in one case, a Catholic Archbishop who’d become an annoyance to the traffickers. There were also raids that were made to appear the work of rival drug factions. The idea of those, as it was in Iraq, was to set them all killing each other.
    That butchered family, those photos shown to Claudia, might possibly have been a retaliatory hit that grew out of one of his missions. Kate Geller had told him that the family looked Mexican and he’d certainly done work against the Mexican traffickers. The Mexicans had been known to wipe out whole families including grandparents and children. But that family, much more likely, had nothing to do with him. Such a slaughter was a punishment that was usually reserved for one of their own who’d informed or had gone over to a rival. The people who did it would take photos and distribute them. If the victim had informed, they would send a copy to whatever competitor had enticed the betrayal. Briggs and Lockwood must have merely taken one from their files. Anyone could dig up a murder scene photo and claim that so and so was responsible.
    For a while, what he’d been doing had seemed right and just. His targets were all the most vicious of men and, in one case, a woman who was worse. He felt no ambivalence about it. The missions were exciting, a test of his skills, and the targets that he took out would claim no more victims. Again, as in Iraq, he told himself that he was saving lives in the long run. And by taking out targets who’d been killing too readily, he was sending a message to those who replaced them. In that sense, he served as a