Drachman’S Departure

By Thomas G. Livernois

After a routine business trip to Iraq results in his being taken hostage, seriously wounded, and rescued by U.S. Army Rangers, Frank W. Drachman discovers that his life is more complicated than he could have ever imagined. Soon after returning home, his friend and business partner, Andy Brooks, is murdered for being in the wrong place at the wrong time. Drachman is pushed over the edge as he scrambles to find Andys murderer and tries to resolve other seemingly insurmountable dilemmas.

• Language: English
• Publisher: AuthorHouse
• Release date: Oct 16, 2014
• ISBN: 9781496932532

Thomas G. Livernois

Thomas G. Livernois lives and works in the United States.

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© 2014 Thomas G. Livernois. All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted by any means without the written permission of the author.

Published by AuthorHouse 11/12/2014

ISBN: 978-1-4969-3254-9 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-4969-3253-2 (e)

Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Thinkstock are models,

and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.

Certain stock imagery © Thinkstock.

Because of the dynamic nature of the Internet, any web addresses or links contained in this book may have changed since publication and may no longer be valid. The views expressed in this work are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher, and the publisher hereby disclaims any responsibility for them.

Contents

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

This book is a work of fiction. Any character that appears similar to any real person, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

Chapter 1

What doesn’t kill you can make you miserable, but not necessarily stronger.

Reverend Amos Brenneman

Except for limited on-demand restroom breaks, I had been locked in a dark, hot, cage-like room for several weeks and fed only drug-laced food – probably phenobarbital. Mostly I felt blurry, incompetent, and alternately ignored and challenged. There were iron bars on the glassless window that separated me from a hallway.

On this particular day the usual two followers, whom I called One and Two, shuffled and mumbled their way to my door and handed me a cloth sack through the bars.

Infidel Drachman, you will put this sack over your head, said One.

Then you will be coming this way with us with no resistance, said Two.

You will both pump off, I replied. Phenobarbital, I assumed, in addition to making me sluggish and moldable, was supposed to cause mellowness; but only one out of three applied. They were indignant at my response; looked at each other, said nothing, and opened the door. After a surprisingly brief scuffle I was handcuffed with the sack over my head, and we were coming this way. But not without resistance.

Where the hell are we going? Take your hands off of me. Ronald Reagan was right. Peace through strength. I knew that they understood English and did not like me. I didn’t care. I didn’t like them either. They did not care. Nobody cared. I continued trying to get a response. I’m going to bury you both with a ham hock. One plus two equals NOTHING…

Two stopped and elbowed me hard just below the sternum. It knocked the wind out and caused me to fall to a knee. Now I knew they understood. Trussstt but veriffffy. Long live Salman Rushdie. I could manage to say nothing more. Maintaining recalcitrance kept my mind off other matters. This level of stubbornness under the influence of phenobarbital was something of a gift.

Strength in numbers, infidel. Never mind peace, Two told me.

May American special forces find you when you least expect it, I whispered prophetically. They said nothing and Two kneed me in the groin. The debate of the moment was finished. I was led through several doors and halls into what had come to be known by the hostages as the mass media room.

I had seen the bearded, angry faces of One and Two many times and, frankly, felt worried. I supposed that the good news was that I had not been allowed to see anybody else, not even any other hostages, or my Mishukodo colleagues, so perhaps they were not going to eliminate me anytime soon. I just did not know.

When we arrived at the entrance of the media room, I smelled electronics the way a Labrador retriever smells food. The room smelled like an old cassette recorder and was filled with sounds of busy-ness. Recalling that at least a few videotaped excerpts of infidel beheadings were readily available on the Internet, I wondered what those unfortunates might have been thinking as I walked into a room similar to those observed in the internet snuff-for-god tapes. Fear would not be the proper way to describe my emotions. I was still in a state of disbelief that my colleagues, a group of five Japanese engineers from Mishukodo Electronics, and I had actually been taken hostage. We were supposed to be in a safe zone! The six of us had traveled to Baghdad to investigate the feasibility of installing key segments of a cellular phone system in and around Baghdad.

Soon after the 2003 United Nations invasion of Iraq, the U.S. Committee for the Rebuilding of the Iraqi Economy (USCRIE) requested feasibility studies and bids from several American, British, Japanese, Italian, and Australian companies for various infrastructure projects. The Chinese weren’t invited because they did not participate in the invasion, and the Russians weren’t invited because they could not deliver. The other European nations waited. Projects opened for bidding included road and bridge repair, electric power generation, and the installation of at least one major digital wireless network. The smell of opportunity and explosives filled the air. Mishukodo Cellular Electronics, a Japanese company, was awarded a very lucrative, multi-million dollar contract to install ten cellular towers equipped with satellite uplinks and hardwire downlinks for flexible COTS communication capability in and around greater Baghdad. COTS, of course, is a military acronym meaning commercial off the shelf. In effect, the COTS strategy was an admission by military procurement groups that, for certain applications, the global free market was the fastest and least expensive way to get access to and apply the latest technologies in even the most difficult locations.

Fortunately, I had come to know the top people at Mishukodo Electronics through my work with General Motors on their upgraded OnStar cellular-based emergency system. It was based on code division multiple access (CDMA) 2000 technology and was the most robust digital cellular network available in the United States. Mishukodo had been awarded the global business for GM’s in-vehicle phone modules used for the OnStar system; their contract was worth more than ninety-million dollars per year.

Peter Fleece was my GM procurement executive contact, and he knew Mishukodo’s capability. He also knew people in the U.S. military procurement area. Once all these ingredients were mixed, the Iraq safe zone cell phone system implementation process was launched. To my good fortune, soon after Mishukodo was awarded the USCRIE contract, they realized that they needed an ah-merry-conn engineer to interface with the U.S. military. My company, Forward Research and Test, had achieved good standing with all the right people and I had been chosen. Only God knows how this occurred. So, on a Monday, at a confidential location, I was introduced to Mishukodo Electronics as the Principal of a lean tech company that could help them get around the safe the zone. This qualified as misinformation at its clearest.

On Tuesday, I had lunch by myself in Dearborn (near Detroit) at El Sheik Kabob, and on Wednesday I took the top three Mishukodo associates (Japanese companies call their employees associates) from their San Francisco based research subsidiary out to lunch at the very same restaurant. During my solo lunch on Tuesday I offered Ali, the Iraqi-born busboy at El Sheik Kabob, a generous tip if he would pretend to understand my Arabic the next day. I told him: Tomorrow after lunch I will say something meaningless, but foreign sounding, and all you have to do is reply to me in Arabic that my future is free from daggers. Then we should both laugh lightly as though we talked this way just about every time I had lunch here. He reluctantly agreed to do it when my offer went from twenty to fifty dollars. Even the curious busboy, who loitered near our table for the entire Wednesday lunch, was a tough negotiator. He’d make a good taxi driver.

On Wednesday I met three high-level Mishukodo associates for lunch at El Sheik Kabob. After loading them up with beer, garlic, and lamb, I spoke confidently with Ali as he cleared the dishes from our table. I could see my guests nodding, smiling politely, eyes squinting. They kept looking at me then at each other, followed by more nodding. The ploy worked brilliantly. Say what you want about the Japanese and their checkered foreign policy history, when they are in the United States socializing for business, they could be downright naïve. I had proven, yet again, the established American business mantra: illusory marketing can be as useful as a demonstrable skill set.

I walked down the death hall, tried to clear my thoughts, and began to question if I really was in good standing with all the right people. Then One and Two led me through the mass media room doorway. The questions What the hell is happening? and What will happen? were heavy on my mind. I also thought, for God’s sake, this was the first trip to Iraq by the Mishukodo-Drachman team and the purpose was simply to identify possible cell tower locations to better understand possible signal interference risks and to identify infrastructure requirements. It had not become clear to me how a conspiracy had evolved so quickly.

It was more important to keep my head on straight and figure out a way to get away from One and Two and their misguided comrades. I wondered if I should have listened to Andy Brooks, who was my sole employee at Forward Research and Test in Madison Heights (suburb of Detroit). He told me before I left for Iraq not to go and that he found me very confusing because my motives were unclear.

You have a young son and a wife here in Michigan, he said. Why don’t you stay here and let me go to Iraq? He was serious but did not understand my answer to his question because I responded with a cliché. During the past three years something happened to my wife, Cindy. I remain bewildered. It could have been me; I don’t know for sure. But something was happening and I did not want to face it. I had cleverly deduced that a major change in Cindy’s behavior correlated precisely with my success with Forward Research and Test, but had no further insight. It was difficult to explain this to Cameron, who had just turned three, so I avoided it with great effort.

All I could say in response to Andy’s blatant challenge was:

If not now, when?

When Cam grows up a little, that’s when. He’s only a kid once and only for a short time. Clearly he did not accept my reply so I reverted to quoting deceased relatives to provide more insight.

I recited to Andy the last words of my late great Uncle Samuel, which were spoken twenty-five years ago: Set and center… which, according to the attending paramedic, were uttered with his last breath, while he lay dying after a heart attack in his car at a red light on Harper Avenue in Detroit. Samuel was a Grand Trunk Railroad service engineer. He was allowed to drive the diesel powered trains from the active line to the maintenance area. Nothing more. Poorly managed sugar diabetes prevented him from ever actually driving the trains outside the yard boundaries because there was great fear that he would pass out and crash a train. Sadly, his unmet career goal was to guide a train outside the yard boundaries. Upon learning his final words, I did some research and discovered that ‘set and center’ was a safety-related phrase used to warn railroad employees that a train was about to move. If you could hear someone say it, then you were close enough to be run over by the moving train.

Set and center, Andy. Don’t you see? Don’t you get it? He looked even more puzzled but by then I had come to believe that it was important to try to understand the meaning of a person’s last words, family or not, whenever I gained knowledge of them. The police officer on Samuel’s emergency call noted in his report that Samuel kept both feet on the brakes with the transmission in park, even after his heart stopped and he was dead. Based on this evidence, I concluded that Uncle Samuel was simply trying to stop and die safely.

At his wake, his wife of thirty-seven years, Aunt Marla, smoked heavily and drank her way through the afternoon, and told any mourner who would listen: As far I knew, Samuel lived a good life. But you never know someone like him all the way. It’s just too bad he died in the car with his feet on the brakes. What a way to go. Then she would weep a little and move on to the next person.

I took Uncle Samuel’s last words to mean that thoughts and actions in the final moments of life were about the same as the day before, or even the moment before, but perhaps amplified. I also concluded that the realization that one’s time is up would add urgency to just about any message. Even with this insight, neither I, nor Andy, openly acknowledged why I wanted to go to Iraq.

Sometimes I just don’t understand you, Frank, he said to me. I just don’t see the connection you’re making. You must be reading another one of those live-in-the-moment-do-it-while-you-can books. Of course he was only partly correct. I had concluded after reading The Power of Now that Eckhart Tolle was a weird little egoist who had turned himself over to his own drivel. And it sure was drivel. He and L. Ron Hubbard, I explained to Andy, were carved from the same pile of bullshit, just like Rasputin. That was the end of the discussion and Andy was shaking his head right up until he dropped me off at the McNamara terminal at Detroit Metro airport.

In retrospect, Andy had a good point, to which I had no answer other than to say flatly that adventurers require adventures. Or vice versa. But frankly, I did not fully understand my motives or decisions. Maybe sometimes you just have to do it? Was it that simple? Why else would a test engineer with marginal technical skills and an artificial, selective knowledge of the Arabic language accompany a group of Japanese electronics engineers to Iraq to develop a statement of work for setting up cellular network towers in and around Baghdad?

These questions stumbled around in my head while I stood and waited to see what would happen in the brightly lit mass media room. I could see lights and shadows through the cloth bag even though I was supposed to keep my eyes closed; I would remain defiant even if I shit myself out of fear. I heard new voices, all non-English, and for a brief moment wished I’d spoke much more Arabic than I actually did. Someone removed the sack from my head, while I kept my eyes closed, and replaced it with a tightened blindfold pulled over my eyes. But I could still sense the bright lights. One sat me on a stool, tied my hands tightly, and I sat down quietly with his assistance and thought of the beheading videos. Blood rushed to my arms and legs and I was sweating profusely as my heart pulsed…

Then it became fuzzy. I heard a loud KA-BANG; there were rapid flashes and a burnt, smoky smell. Then screaming. Then darkness, and a stronger burning, sour smell, and pop pop pop pop pop and flashes. More commotion followed and I was knocked off the stool. Then pop pop pop and screaming followed by pop pop pop pop. Somebody shouted Allah…, pop pop pop and someone else screamed Mohammad…, pop pop pop. I thought of Don Imus and screamed Jesus! as loud as I could. One last series of pop pop pop…

A heavy tarpaulin was thrown over me and it was quieter but still loud. I felt wet and tired and things became nearly silent. Then it was very calm. My rescue