| Subject: ...For Meritorious Service, Chapter 24a, part two |
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TxJAG_b
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Date Posted: 14:23:50 10/04/07 Thu
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TxJAG_b
's message, "...For Meritorious Service" on 09:04:26 05/08/07 Tue
The JAG and NCIS man watched as Bud Roberts stumped his way toward the airfield.
“Very good Commander, a couple of more years and you’ll be as good as me….” Gibbs said without looking at Sturgis.
[part two, FMS Ch. 24a]
1158 Zulu
NCIS Headquarters
Washington Navy Yard
Despite getting little sleep last night , Abby was stoked. Could be because of that king- sized Caf-Pow! she had bought on her way in.
After she turned on the lights, she looked around her lab and let out a deep sigh of satisfaction.
Abby was in heaven. Or close to it. Her pictures, her electron microscope, her DNA analyzer, all of it made this job her dream job. She turned on her workstation and put CD from a group called Numeriklab in her CD player.
The song had a catchy beat and the music spoke to her. In the middle of a dancing turn, she slammed into…NCIS Probationary Agent Tim McGee
She squealed and gave Tim a bear hug. “Oh Tim, it’s so good to see you!”
Tim was clearly unnerved by this reception. They had only been on one date and she hadn’t even seemed to be that interested in him. “It’s um, good to see you too, uh, Abby….”
“Timmy?” She said in a disapproving voice, “What’s wrong?”
“N-nothing’s wrong, Abby…” He was as transparent as glass. There was something wrong.
“McGee, don’t tell me you aren’t glad to see me?” Her voice was tinged with hurt.
“Of course I am,” he said softly, touching her shoulder.
The Goth girl cupped his face with her hands. “Look me in the eye and say that, Timmy.”
Tim sighed and pulled away from her. “Abby, I’m just up here because Gibbs and the rest of the team are in Iraq. I’m the understudy, the second string ‘B’ team. When they get back, it’s back to Norfolk for me. I’m still on probation, you know.”
She walked over to where he was standing. Now it was her turn to put her hand on his shoulder. “I know, I know, but I thought you were doing so well, I mean, you were so good with Chris on that bust the other day….
He turned to her and gave her a shy smile. “Thanks Abby. But it’s not enough. Gibbs will send me back. I need an edge of some sort….”
“Now you listen to me, Timothy McGee,” she said sternly. “You’re doing good work here, Gibbs will see that and keep you here. You just wait and see.”
“I wish I could be as positive as you are, Abby.” Tim said morosely, shoving his hands in his pockets.
“Think positively, Tim.” She grabbed his hands out of his pockets and held them as she gave him a big smile. “Repeat after me: it will happen, it will happen, it will happen.”
He felt the warmth rush from her hands to his. He never got tired of looking at her…or her tattoos or ‘tats’ as they were often called. “It will happen…” he said confidently.
1831 Local
NLSO BROFF
Bahrain
Lieutenant Commander T.[iffany] Lexington was sitting in her office wading through reports. She hated the name Tiffany; it made her sound like an air-head. It was hard to present the image of a stern, no-nonsense CO with a name like ‘Tiffany’. And with three new SJAG junior officers to break in, there was a lot for them to learn and she wanted their undivided attention…
Suddenly her intercom buzzed.
She stabbed her intercom button. “Yes, Petty Officer?”
The tinny voice crackled. “I have two gentlemen out here to see you, ma’am.”
The Commander sighed. (One more little detour to make this day last a bit longer,) she thought. She stabbed the button again. “I told you I didn’t want to be disturbed, Petty Officer.”
“Yes ma’am, I know, but they said it was urgent. One of them is from the Judge Advocate General’s Office in Washington and the other is from NCIS, Washington.”
Tiffany sighed again rolling her eyes in exasperation. (Great, just peachy; so much for catching up the paperwork on my desk….) “Send them in.”
“Aye ma’am.”
The door opened and Bud Roberts and Anthony DiNozzo made their way inside.
Bud spoke up first. “Commander, Lieutenant Bud Roberts, JAG Corps, and this is--”
“Special Agent Anthony DiNozzo,” Tony said holding out his badge and ID before Bud could finish, “NCIS, Washington Office.”
Bud immediately wondered if bringing this glib, brash NCIS Agent along with him was such a good idea. Up to now, his experiences with NCIS Agents hadn’t been pleasant ones.
Commander Lexington flicked her eyes up at them. “As you were. Yes Lieutenant, I remember you, what can I do for you…and Agent DiNozzo?” She didn’t offer either man a seat.
Bud and Tony exchanged surprised glances. They hadn’t expected this kind of reception. “Uh, well, ma’am, we need to ask you again about the JAGMAN team you sent to Mirbullah….”
Lexington’s mouth became a thin hard line as she listened to Bud. Tony could tell she was close to grinding her teeth her jaw was so taut.
“What about them, Lieutenant? We’ve been over this ground already….” She started looking through her papers again, ignoring the two men.
Bud and Tony briefly exchanged unspoken comments. Bud: What do I do now? Tony: Ask her about Colonel Livingston. Go on, ask her! So he did.
“Ma’am, did any of your people…Captain Branch, Lieutenant Burns, Lieutenant Seaforth, …did any of them mention working with or talking to a Colonel Livingston?
Commander Lexington stopped reading and looked up from her papers. “Who?”
“Colonel Livingston, ma’am, Colonel Darcy Livingston….”
Her voice betrayed more curiosity than anger.
“The head of the Task Force Makin’s Force Recon Detachment? They might have, Lieutenant, they had to talk with everyone who might have been involved with that clearing operation. Why are you asking me this?”
Tony quickly decided that if they were going to get anywhere with this gorgeous but reticent JAG officer, he was going to have to help the bumbling Lieutenant. “How about working with or talking to Captain Jacques Lewis, Commander?”
She held up her hand. “Lieutenant, Agent DiNozzo; as you can see, I’m buried under a mountain of paperwork while I try and break in three new junior officers.” She made a grand sweeping gesture with her hand at the stacks of paper on her desk “Now normally I’m a very understanding person, but you can probably guess right now, I’m short on understanding. So do you two want to stop dancing around the bush and get to the point and tell me why you’re asking these questions?”
Tony nodded his head and smiled as he spoke up first. “It’s part of an on-going murder investigation, Commander.”
“You mean one in addition to Lieutenant Dodges’ murder?” her voice was incredulous. Why hadn’t she been informed? Was Admiral Chegwidden keeping her out of the loop on purpose?
Tony could tell this comment had unnerved her. He decided to push her buttons a little more. Maybe she knew more about this than she was letting on. “Yeah, Commander, you might have heard there have been several others that have occurred in and around Mirbullah recently….”
“And they all have a possible tie-in with the terrorist attack on JAG Headquarters, ma’am.” Bud added in a respectful but stern voice. Maybe having Tony DiNozzo here with him helped him find his courage.
Lieutenant Commander Lexington sighed heavily and was quiet for a long moment. Then she took a key out of her pocket and unlocked a drawer on her desk. “If you’re certain about that connection, then you two need to see these….”
She pulled open the drawer and pulled out two sealed folders.
She looked up at the two investigators. “Are you two sure about this? That what happened to my investigators might have a connection to the terrorist attack?” was all she said.
“And the deaths of Lieutenant Dodge and several others, Commander,” Tony added just to make her feel a little more ill at ease. (Just what is she going to show us?) Tony loved it when he uncovered something like this….
She nodded in response to his answer, and then began to strip off the tape that sealed the folders. Bud’s eyes widened.
“I sealed these in response to a request from the SecNav when all this began….”
She motioned for the two men to come around to her side of the desk. Bud stood to her left and Tony to her right. Both leaned over and looked at the opened files.
“In my seventeen years as a JAG officer, I’d never seen anything like this in a report. It was like hieroglyphics. There you have his official report and in the margin these, well, hen scratch marks and this extra wide margin at the bottom of the page. I figured Captain Burns had lost his mind….”
Now it obvious why LCDR Lexington wasn’t exactly thrilled about having this conversation. Somewhere along the way, the Bahrain BROFF capped her career at Lieutenant Commander. She had been hurt once career-wise and probably didn’t want to stick her neck out again.
Bud looked at the marks intently. Tony was impressed. Apparently the Lieutenant saw something important in those scratch marks.
“What do you see, Lieutenant?”
“I’m not sure, Ma’am, can I borrow your pencil?”
Lexington was mystified. “Uh, sure, here….”
Bud began to assemble a chart on the lower part of the page. True, there was a lot more room at the bottom of the report’s page then there should have been. A quick check of the entire report confirmed that had been true with each page of this report. Bud scanned the first page again and began to see a pattern. What sounded like a somewhat stilted, slightly odd JAGMAN report was turning into something else.
“It- It’s a code.” he said more to himself. He was intrigued by its level of sophistication.
“A code?” Tony was momentarily taken aback.
“What kind of code?” added the Commander. Her tone was insistent.
Bud was now in his element. “Well, ma’am, if you look at the first word in this paragraph, you can see the each word was chosen because they helped form a different word. When I take the first letter from each of the words in the first paragraph and cross reference them with hidden words in the rest of the paragraph and combine it with the calculations he’s given off to the side, you get this… M-a-r-c-h, uh, 31, I, s-a-w, um, oh wow….!”
Bud gave the piece of paper to Commander Lexington, then returned to his de-ciphering.
Commander Lexington was perplexed. To her this was just more gibberish. “Just what is this you’re handing me, Lieutenant?”
Bud looked up from what he was reading. “Ma’am, did Captain Burns have an affinity for puzzles?"
Lexington growled her response. “An affinity? Try obsession. He was always doing word jumbles, crossword puzzles, mazes of all kinds, if there was an unsolved word puzzle around, he would be working on it. Sometimes to the detriment of his official duties. I once asked him if he’d rather be a crypto officer….”
“Take a good look, ma’am.” Bud said soberly.
“Oh my God….” Lexington whispered with anguish.
Tony picked up on what Bud had uncovered. It reminded him of that movie he’d seen last week, what was it called? Oh well, it would come back to him “Commander, did he try to tell you anything about his report?”
“Almost every day, Special Agent.” Lexington said resignedly. Bud could tell she now realized she’d made a mistake with her JAGs. A terribly tragic mistake that could cost her career. “I-I stopped visiting the stockade, his rambling…it just…just didn’t make any sense. I couldn’t take it anymore….”
“This is like something out of an old spy movie,” Tony said in an impressed voice still admiring Bud’s work. It was unusual for him to ignore a woman, any woman, in distress, but he was absolutely impressed with this junior JAG officer. Whom up till now, he had considered…somewhat nebbish.
That opinion was quickly changing.
“Well, I’ll be damned….” Lexington said aloud as Bud continued to work the graph. The more text was de-ciphered, the more they learned about what had really happened to the original JAGMAN team.
It fit perfectly with Commander Rabb’s and Lieutenant Colonel MacKenzie’s theories about Darcy Livingston and Jacques Lewis. Bud and Tony exchanged grim looks. Bud went back to deciphering Burns’ notes.
“Agent DiNozzo, look at this….” Bud handed him several papers with words circled. Some were diagonal, some were vertical, some were horizontal, and some were spelled backwards.
Tony took the papers in hand. “It looks like a one of those word puzzles…you know, um, word find?”
Bud knew he meant ‘Find-A-Word’ but the NCIS Agent had the right idea.
“Exactly; match these words with the coded numbers and --”
“Viola’, the hidden report comes out…good job, Lieutenant…Bud.”
Bud Roberts would have smiled, but the current situation wouldn’t allow it. “Thank you…Tony.”
All three looked at Burns’ hidden report as discovered by Bud. When they reached the concluding paragraph, they all reacted to the final words with stunned horror.
Tony was the first to recover. He looked over at the Branch’s Officer-in-Charge. “We need to see Captain Burns right away, Commander!” he said with an air of urgency.
Commander Lexington didn’t need any further prodding. She stabbed her intercom button. “Petty Officer, we need a Hum-vee out front, ASAP!
“Aye ma’am!”
1831 Local
Baghdad International Airport [BIAP]
Baghdad, Iraq
Faith Coleman hated BDUs.
They weren’t as crisp as her regular uniform and they had an annoying habit of being dirt magnets – even worse than summer whites, if that was possible.
The boonie hat she wore also ruined her perfectly coiffured hair. She would never be like Colonel MacKenzie or the others who could just ram their hair under these covers and not worry about it.
She was still recovering from her bumpy and dusty helo flight from Mirbullah. She desperately wanted to find a ladies room and clean herself up, but that might take too much time.
At least her briefcase was still intact. She walked towards the terminal exit. Hopefully, her ride would soon be here and she could get this job over with….
“Commander Coleman?” A young Shore Patrolman was standing by a ratty looking Hum-vee, well, it was ratty looking to her. He threw her a hasty salute.
“Yes Corporal?”
“I’ve been instructed to bring you to Marine Corps HQ, ma’am. Special Agent Phillips is waiting to speak with you.”
Faith fought the urge to say ‘in that?’. The two ton truck looked as if it had seen better days.
“Then let’s go, Corporal,” she said burying that thought as she gingerly opened her door and got in.
The SP gave her a friendly smile as she settled in the seat next to him. “Don’t let her looks fool you, ma’am, she’s still got a lot of life left in her. She’s just a little beat up from the daily wear and tear….”
(‘Wear and tear?’) This thing looked look it was a refugee from a demolition derby.
Thankfully, the HMMWV started right up, the engine actually seeming to purr. The Corporal put her into gear and eased her out into the airport terminal traffic.
*~*
“Nightingale is on the move….” Gibbs was listening through his headset to Director Morrow back at the Multiple Threat Assessment Center (MTAC). Sturgis pulled out into airport traffic behind a three-quarter ton truck and a beat-up Volvo station wagon, a couple of vehicles in back of the SP’s HMMWV.
“Solid copy Bravo two,” Morrow intoned as he watched the airport security video of Faith’s HMMWV followed at a respectful distance by Gibbs and Sturgis. “Remain in Overwatch. Don’t let her out of your sight. We don’t know who in Agent Phillips’ unit may also be in on this.”
“I copy Bravo one, we’re in position, two vehicles back, maintaining overwatch….”
Sturgis struggled to maintain his position in the early evening Baghdad traffic. Several blue and white Iraqi police cars passed them. The officers gave them momentary scrutiny until they were distracted by traffic violator of one sort or another. A couple of Army trucks passed them as well. The former Dolphin was not trying to win any race or trying to get back to his base. His goal was to stick as close to Faith as possible without it becoming obvious that they were following her.
He had never really thanked her for her defense of Harm after he was accused of murdering Lieutenant Singer, now he just hoped he wasn’t following her to her funeral.
*~*
Faith cleared her throat. “How much further, Corporal?”
“We’re almost there, ma’am,” slowing down to make a left turn, “better get your identification out now, the guards here get really jumpy after dark…”
1921 Local
USS Patrick Henry
Persian Gulf
Nicole Hollands, aka ‘Supergirl’ stood at the rail on Vulture’s Row, watching Tomcats and Superhornets land and take off. The flight surgeon had told her she needed rest, or he’d ground her. He didn’t specify where she had to do it.
“I thought I’d find you up here.”
Nicole turned to see her friend and RIO, Sandy ‘Dust Storm’ Ribkins, coming through the door to settle down next to her.
“You’re supposed to be relaxing, taking it easy, doctor’s orders.” Sandy gave her friend a wry grin.
“I think you’re supposed to be doing the same thing.” Nicole said knowing neither one of them would.
“My mistake, I made a wrong turn down below, you know how confusing these big boats are to me.”
Nicole laughed. That comment was far from the truth. Sandy probably had a mixture of jet fuel and sea water running through her veins.
“What’s your excuse?”
“Insomnia.”
Another Tomcat slammed onto the deck and caught the second wire, bucking to stop.
“Yep, this will take care of that problem…” her friend said sarcastically.
“Meaning, Lieutenant?” Nicole said trying to sound serious.
“Meaning the avgas fumes will knock you out and I’ll have to drag your sorry butt down to your rack, ma’am.”
Nicole chuckled as she looked back at Patrick Henry’s deck. “You’re lucky I like you, Dust Storm, otherwise I might think you were being insubordinate.”
“Me, insubordinate, Supergirl? Never.”
Sandy’s tongue could cut anyone to ribbons that got in her way, or on her bad side.
“Hey, here comes the COD….”
Nicole looked out to sea behind them and saw the carrier’s Grumman Greyhound C-2 winging its way toward the carrier on its final approach.
“I sure hope these Reservists aren’t too rusty.” Nicole said as the plane edged closer to the carrier’s deck. “The old man will have a fit if any of our birds end up in the drink because of them.”
“So is that them?” asked Sandy, as she leaned on the rail to get a better look at the incoming COD.
“Yep,” said Nicole tersely, “I just wanted to see what kind of prospects we have as replacements.”
They watched as the C-2 touched down on the carrier deck and began taxiing out of the flight line.
The plane feathered its left prop and circled around to face the two women. It took the plane several moments to feather the right prop and begin deplaning its passengers.
“Well, here they come,” Sandy said as the replacement pilots came out of the open door and onto the flight deck.
They watched as several ordinary looking men and women got off the plane. Sandy began categorizing the men as they stepped off the plane.
“Boring…dull…boring…hey, he’s not too bad….”
Then Sandy caught the arm of her friend.
“Don’t look now Argosian, but it looks like the call for pilots netted a jolly green giant.”
Nicole’s eyes flared in surprise as the tall Naval Commander stood on the deck looking around. It was obvious that the man was enraptured with what he was seeing. Nicole just hoped that he wasn’t too starry eyed to fly. (Probably his first time aboard a carrier,) she thought.
“Wow, he’s a big one,” was all Nicole could say.
“Wonder how he crams himself into a Tomcat cockpit?” mused Sandy.
---TBC...
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