The Artifact Read online

  For Teague. Again and forever .

  Copyright © Jack Quinn, 2011

  All rights reserved

  Cover design by Tom Chandler at [email protected]

  PROLOGUE

  Camp Champion, Kuwait

  March 2003

  The half dozen officers and non-coms stood in the harsh light of elevated klieg lamps observing the orderly line of Bravo Company troopers clad in desert camouflage utilities, jogging in place with slung weapons. Each of the soldiers carried forty pounds of gear in backpack and parachute strapped to their chests. Khaki scarves or bandannas tied across the lower half of their faces provided scant protection against the gritty particles of sand swirling around them in the chill night air by the dervish-like sirocco.

  “Airborne! Airborne! All the way!” Their muffled shouts melded with the cacophony of the final loading of heavy equipment, pallets of ammunition, Humvees and helicopters onto C-130 Hercules transports on the cargo tarmac beyond. Standing in the forefront of the observing officer group, his helmet jutting several inches above those of his subordinates, Third Battalion Commander Colonel Clyde G. Callaghan of the 367th Regiment, 82nd Airborne Infantry Division spoke to the man at his elbow without gesture or turn of his head. “That trooper near the end of the line is favoring his left leg.”

  Major Charles Geoff ordered a sergeant to retrieve the soldier in question, and the NCO ran out to the boarding line. He returned at a slower pace to accommodate the limp of the person dressed in non-regulation jump suit, helmet, rucksack and parachute.

  The sergeant came to a halt before the Colonel, snapping off a salute before addressing the senior officer. “Not a trooper, sir.” He turned to introduce the person beside him. “NNC-TV correspondent Andrea Madigan.”

  “Good morning, Colonel.”

  Callaghan cocked his head at the black and red circular patch above her left breast. “Skydiving Club, Orange, Massachusetts,” he read, raising his eyes to the woman’s face under the dented WW II helmet only a few inches below his own. “This is no free fall contest, Miz Madigan. What’s the matter with your leg?”

  “I’ve made seventeen jumps, Colonel, three of them training with the 101st at Fort Campbell,” Andrea answered. “I’m qualified for combat exits and authorized to accompany frontline troops by your own General Paulson.”

  “What’s the matter with your leg?” he repeated.

  “Just a Charley horse. It’ll work out before we’re off the ground.”

  “It had better work out before you board that plane, or you’re not getting on it.”

  “Colonel, I’ve worked my tush off for the past month getting certified for a drop like this. You can’t pull the plug on me now!”

  “If you look like you need help once you hit the ground, a couple of troopers would come to

  assist, ignore their duties, put all of you, maybe the entire squad in danger. The plug is pulled, Miz Madigan.”

  “Let the Doc give you a once-over,” Major Geoff said. “Maybe you can catch up with the ground troops scheduled to follow.”

  The staff sergeant linked his left arm firmly with her right, leading Andrea away from the roaring engines of the aircraft she had hoped to board, behind the officer group, toward a string of tents on the perimeter of the landing strip.

  “Yeah,” Andrea threw over her shoulder, “in a couple of weeks, after you guys find the son-of-a-bitch!”

  Before they reached the flap of the lighted tent with its barely discernible red cross burnished by the abrasive sand and sun, the engines of the first huge transport revved up to taxi speed behind them. Andrea pulled her arm free of the sergeant’s grasp. “No sense bothering the Doc now,” she told him, walking away. “I just missed my flight.”

  Steve Sarno emitted a squeal of pain, sitting bolt upright in his bunk when a feline arm reached under his mosquito netting to dig insistent fingers into his shoulder, as the narrow beam of a pencil flashlight probed his eyes.

  “What the hell...!”

  “Shhhh,” Andrea whispered. “You’ll wake our illustrious peers. Get dressed to go. Bring your stuff. I’ll wait outside.”

  Steve had been Andrea’s cameraman since they had been teamed up together by NNC’s news director T.P. Viola on the morning of 9/11 when both had been on separate assignments in New York City. Steve was a short, pudgy mid-twenties video whiz with no idea in what direction or at whom to point his lens. Under Andrea’s domineering guidance that horrible day, Steve shot some of the most relevant, heart-breaking footage of any news organization in the country, albeit through a stream of tears, fogged glasses and protest met by threats and verbal abuse from the dispassionate senior reporter.

  Andrea was sitting in the passenger seat of a battered Jeep enclosed by a worn canvas top with scratched plastic windows when the cameraman emerged from the darkened tent of his fellow newsmen, which some of them rarely left except for meals and to collect copies of the printed briefings issued by Lt. Brooks, the battalion press officer. Steve placed his roll bag and camera case in the back seat before sliding in behind the wheel.

  “Want me to drive?”

  “Getting kind of uppity for an indentured slave,” Andrea shot back.

  “It’s four o’clock in the morning, Andy!”

  “Drive, Steverino, we need to be in Kuwait City by sunup.”

  In response to her cameraman’s reasonable queries, Andrea related her encounter with Colonel Callaghan ‘over a damned Charley horse’, and his refusal to let her jump with the troops who would begin scouring the Northern Syrian Desert to intercept the anticipated flight from the royal palace in Baghdad of soon-to-be-deposed President Saddam Hussein.

  “He’s probably right,” Steve told her. “Diving out of airplanes at 20,000 feet ain’t exactly stepping off the curb.”

  “I’m a big girl.” She pulled a cigarette out of her fatigue jacket. “I do not need my hand held.”

  “Might be a nice feeling for a change.”

  She turned to glare at him. “I don’t remember giving you permission to comment on my personal life.”

  “Or lack thereof.”

  She punched him hard on the bicep. “Mind your own damned business! At least until your mother allows you to date.”

  Steve shifted gears after clearing the military police guarding the base entrance, changing the subject as he did. “This the same Charley horse you been nursing for the past couple of months, refusing to let the Doc check it out?”

  “Lack of potassium, the pharmacist says. I need to stretch more.”

  He knew from experience that arguing with Andrea was futile. “So why are we going to Kuwait City?”

  “Charter a plane, fly out to find a couple of Callaghan’s patrols.”

  “Geeze, Andy! Mom says you’re gonna get me killed someday, and I’m starting to think it’s on the calendar.”

  “Relax, pal, we’re in friendly territory all the way to the city. We rent a plane and pilot from the contract mercenary outfit the marines use for backup; hire a local guide when we get to the area were Callaghan will probably have ten, fifteen patrols scouring the desert around Saddam’s hometown. We’re sure to catch up with one of them pretty quick.”

  Andrea slumped back in the lumpy passenger seat and closed her eyes. The leg was getting worse. She’d have to get a checkup when they returned to the States. Callaghan was a hunk. She wouldn’t mind letting him hold more than her hand. Ridiculous! They were on different teams in this war. He would struggle to win it with Geneva Convention tactics against religious fanatics who sent suicide missions against unsuspecting civilians. She would try to bring the mistakes and atrocities on both sides to the American public. Anyway, he probably despised her.

  CHAPTER ONE

  Washington, DC


  September 2004

  Rand Duncan stood in the glass VIP booth above the newsroom with T.P. Viola, watching the client monitor. Below them, Frank Morrissey sat alone at the anchor desk leafing through pages of script as the station’s senior cosmetician applied mascara to his graying eyebrows.

  “She’s a goddamn anachronism,” Duncan said, frowning at the television screen on which Andrea Madigan was stubbing her cigarette out against a tire of the local station tech truck 500 miles away. A peculiarly handsome woman, the tall, angular, brunette combed her fingers through the gray streak running through her thick hair from her left temple to shoulder as she studied several sheets of copy through horn rim glasses perched on her prominent nose.

  A makeup girl leaned into the frame to apply the lipstick Andrea rarely wore off camera.

  Andy brushed her aside, picked up the cane propped against the truck fender and limped several paces to her mark. Steve Sarno followed, sighting though the viewer of the video camera on his shoulder.

  “Anachronism or not,” T.P. said, “she scooped the industry with this and worked her ass off getting the story to where we can air it. She deserves to break it.”

  “That’s not the only thing she’s done with her ass over the past twenty-odd years.”

  “Give it a rest, Rand. She’s the best we’ve got and you know it. What do you want to do, put a sack over her head to hide the wrinkles?”

  “A gimp bag lady is not the image I want to project as NNC’s idea of a world-crisis news correspondent.”

  Polished, thirtyish Rand Duncan adjusted the hem of his pin-striped suit coat and turned from the TV monitor to face the harried news chief twenty-five years his senior. “I want her gone from here, T.P. A pretty face and a full blouse sell news today, not a female reincarnation of Edward R. Murrow.”

  “You may get your wish, Rand. If this thing bombs she’ll be dog meat in this wonderful business in spite of her track record. If it flies, she’ll beat you up for more money, you’ll refuse and she’ll quit.”

  In the studio below them, three camera operators made final adjustments to their focus. The audio technician called for silence to check sound levels amid the last-minute hustle before the live broadcast, as production assistants stepped over the snake pit of thick, black cables slithering across the floor in apparent random. Track spotlights on the ceiling burst to full bright on Morrissey as the producer spoke into his mike. “Ten seconds.” Nonessential personnel left the studio; the ambient

  noise dropped to zero, and the first-string news crew took their places. Rand Duncan glowered at

  the picture of Andrea Madigan as he lowered his ample bottom into the lounge chair in front of the monitor. T.P. Viola sat beside him pushing the rolled sleeve of his Tattersall shirt farther up on his forearm.

  The eyes of the floor crew were riveted on the director who stood between camera two and three wearing earphones with attached thin boom mike, her hand raised in the air, listening to the countdown from the glass-enclosed production booth high on the wall at the rear of the studio. Her gaze was glued to her monitor depicting the station sounder and voiceover lead-in to the highly promoted nine PM newscast that could propel the world into another Mid-East crisis. At the producer’s count of ‘one,’ the director slashed her outstretched arm down sharply, her index finger pointing at Frank Morrissey.

  “Good evening,” Frank said to the camera, his confident reportorial demeanor augmented by the force of his bass presentation. “As we have promised during the past week in our own National News on-air announcements and repeated in other media, the following special news program will bring you a startling report on the preliminary findings of an exclusive story that began a year and a half ago in Iraq, but has only recently solidified through the diligence of an investigative team of NNC reporters.

  “In March 2003, on an excursion into the Syrian Desert to join a contingent of U.S. soldiers seeking to intercept the presumed escape of deposed dictator Saddam Hussein, veteran NNC correspondent Andrea Madigan and her party were accosted and detained against their will by a band of Bedouin nomads. This incident has not been reported previously for reasons that will become clear momentarily.”

  The studio camera pulled back to reveal a huge wall-mounted television screen within which

  Frank and Andrea were frozen on videotape, seated across from one another at a small table of

  polished wood.

  “Preparatory to bringing you our firsthand report live from Andrea Madigan at Fort Bragg, North Carolina,” Frank continued, “we will show you an interview conducted here in our studio on April 5th, 2003, a mere ten days after Andrea and her crew were released by their Bedouin captors.”

  Camera One zoomed past Frank to close in on the wall monitor behind him, on which the taped Frank Morrissey became animated. “Welcome back, Andrea, from what sounds like a harrowing experience.”

  “Not nearly as harrowing as puzzling, Frank,” Andrea replied.

  “So I understand. Exactly what happened during your encounter with the Bedouins?”

  “My party consisted of NNC cameraman Steve Sarno, a mercenary pilot known as Mad Dog Murphy, our local guide Amman Habakee, plus his four relatives employed as driver/laborers. Eight people in all traveling in three aging, four-wheel-drive Land Rovers.”

  Andrea shifted her attention from the anchor to the camera recording their interview. “From the ‘Dark Dawn’ mission briefing I attended prior to my unceremonious prohibition from the jump aircraft, I knew the five platoons of Bravo Company would deploy at the outer extremities of three points of the compass from Baghdad—north, east, and west.”

  Frank looked up from consulting a sheaf of paper on the table between them. “That mission to apprehend President Hussein succeeded last December in the city of Tikrit, Saddam’s birthplace and tribal stronghold.”

  “But not by the original Bravo company of the 82nd Airborne,” Andrea added, “which

  subsequently took on the tougher combat assignment of suppressing rebel fanatics in Fallujah

  before rotating back to the States in July of last year.”

  “Exactly where did you encounter the Bedouins, Andrea?”

  “The Syrian Desert extends from Syria, south through Jordan, western Iraq, and the western portion of Saudi Arabia,” Andrea answered, as a colored topographical map of the region replaced the two newspersons, filling the video screen. A green arrow was superimposed over it, pointing at the tiny silhouette of a helicopter moving from Kuwait in the south, across the barren desert, hovering above the junction of a major highway and what appeared to be a road under construction, as Andrea continued speaking off-camera.

  “Our chopper landed at Qasr al Khubbas, roughly 200 kilometers, just over 300 miles west of Baghdad, between a secondary route from the capital and highway 12, a major artery north to the convergence of the Iraq, Jordan and Syrian borders. Since that was the fuel range limit of the chopper, we engaged our guide there, who rented vehicles and purchased camping equipment and provisions. Then we proceeded north in Land Rovers.”

  The image of the helicopter on the screen changed into a truck as the green arrow continued across the map toward the Euphrates River, halting finally in a wide-angle shot covering the vast wasteland northwest of Baghdad.

  “The airborne troopers had dropped some 150 miles north of the capital three days earlier, so I decided to attempt my interception of their patrols as they converged on Saddam’s logical escape route west of Tikrit.”

  The green map arrow followed the tiny vehicle as it zigzagged over the sandy track, halting some distance below the Syrian border before the topographical chart dissolved, and the video returned to the two broadcasters on tape, Frank looking at Andrea, her eyes still on the camera lens as she continued speaking directly to her audience.

  “Two days after embarking from Qasr al Khubbas we were confronted by a band of fifty or

  sixty nomads, about half of them women and children. The rema
inder were men armed with modern rifles, bandoliers and traditional swords, who arranged their camels and donkeys across our path. Amman, our guide, stepped down from the lead truck and went to speak to the tribal leader. I told Steve to record the incident on tape, but as he aimed his camera at the Nomads, a young Arab advanced menacingly, signaling Steve to desist. After a great deal of signing and apparently hostile discussion, Amman returned to tell me that we could go no further. The Bedouin chief had ordered us to make camp until they decided what to do with us.”

  Andrea’s eyes clamped shut for an instant as she drew a deep breath before continuing. “Fully cognizant of the Arab tendency to sadistic torture, Mr. Kelley, our mercenary pilot hired to accompany us as bodyguard, chose that moment to dismount from his vehicle, brandish his automatic weapon, threatening their tribal leader at close range as he gestured at them to leave. A young man nearby began shouting at Kelley, waving his arms in frantic protest as his camel pranced closer to the mercenary standing some distance from our Rovers, even as the tribe appeared to retreat.”

  She emitted an audible sigh and slow shake of her head at a recollection that was obviously painful. “Amidst the young Arab’s distracting hysterics and flailing arms, the tribal leader produced a glistening scimitar, leaned down from his saddle, the blade of his sword flashing in the sunlight, as it struck Kelley on the crown of his head, splitting his skull in two.”

  Frank’s expression displayed his revulsion at the manner of the mercenary’s death. “That must have been a ghastly experience. Were you personally threatened in any way?”

  Andrea seemed distracted by her own description as she turned to answer the anchor. “It

  depends on what you mean by threatened. The harsh punishment imposed on Kelley was a frightening demonstration of our own possible fate. We were forced to make camp in the little wadi where we’d been accosted. That first night, Steve and I watched the silhouettes of the Bedouin tents and campfires on the berm of the depression all around us. We had seen in what low regard our captors held human life. Our guide was adamant in his refusal to attempt an escape, nor did we possess the skills to find our way out of that arid landscape on our own. We had little hope of rescue since travelers in that remote region were unlikely. Even if some of the troopers we were seeking stumbled upon the Bedouin camp, we could be easily hidden from them, or if engaged, their limited firepower might not be able to overcome the desert-savvy nomads with their own automatic rifles.”