Chapter 11 Meeting David Lee Sondermeyer
Musical theme: Brothers in Arms by David Knopfler
Jainie looked at David Lee. He was exchanging greetings with Dave, but he was looking at her. He was the real deal, there could be no mistake. She understood in that moment why a grizzly bear will back down from a wolverine.
David Lee turned to her. “You, of course, are Jainie.” They shook hands.
“I never thought the ship’s cat would show up some day with someone as cute as you. Pardon me, Dave, if that is out of line.”
“Jainie likes to be told that she is pretty. It’s fine, Sond.”
David Lee smiled at Jainie. “Jarheads call me Sond. You wear a name tag with your last name on it, so they shortened it, and there you are. You could call me Angel if you liked. Lot of people in the Cowah call me that.”
“You don’t like the Corps too much?”
“Pretty salty for someone doesn’t like the Cowah, darlin’.” He looked at Dave.
“It’s perfectly all right, Sond. If you offend her, she will let you know.”
“I bet she will. She knows what I am, and she’s not afraid of me. Shall we go in?”
They did. “I bought a bunch of that heavy dark beer Dave likes. I’ve got Jose Cuervo, Jack Daniel’s, Bacardi, and all that sort of stuff. Everclear and fruit juice. The hard stuff is in that cabinet, the fruit juice and sodas are in the reefer or in the cabinet, there. My house is your house. You want a drink, come in here and make it. You guys are in the room at the end of the hall on the right, or your truck. I assume you’re going to drink, and so I assume you will stay the night.”
“We will. Oh, was that Marie Antoinette?”
“Yeah. Marie, kitty kitty kitty.”
“Jainie, Marie Antoinette is my cat. She is a margay. I stole her from someone who wasn’t very nice to her.” He flashed her a wicked smile that told her the someone who was not very nice to the margay was not among the living. “She has trust issues. But she will get to know you.”
Jainie got down, and sat on the floor. She made a swee swee sound, and said kitty kitty. Marie Antoinette came out and began to orbit her, coming just close enough to be petted fleetingly. After a few orbits, she came over and put her front paws where any number of men would have liked to put their front paws, and smelled Jainie’s hair. She licked Jainie's cheek, and Jainie started petting her gently. Then she started scratching behind Marie Antoinette’s ears, and suddenly they were playing an attack cat game. Jainie ignored the bloody scratches on her hand, and fake provoked Marie Antoinette, who growled and made fake bites on her hand.
Sond stared. “I’ve never seen that cat act like that. Man, your girl must be part cat.”
“Wildcat.”
“Pure bred.”
“No doubt.”
“Knock it off. Especially you, Angel. Dave says all kinds of absurd things, but you understand about showing respect for your buddy’s wife. So be Southern.”
“Yes ma’am.”
She went back to the attack cat game. Dave looked at Sond. Sond looked at the ceiling, and back to Dave. “I have all this alcohol for you guys to drink.”
“I would like a Shiner bock, or a Ziegen bock, if you have it.”
“I have both. What would you prefer?”
“Deschutes brewery porter, but if you had that, I’d be truly amazed.”
“I do have Alaskan Amber.”
“Oh, yes, please.”
“Dave?”
“I’d like an Alaskan Amber, too.”
Sond came back out with the beers, and a glass in his hand that looked like tequila. He opened the beers and distributed them, then sat in his chair. “So the wildcat wants to hear war stories? Is it OK if I call you wildcat?”
“Sure, Angel.”
“Our story opens in about 1964, when Freddie, who is an EOD man in the Cowah is called in on his specialty, a hostile device. In other words, a booby trap. Freddie looks the thing over and notices that it is rigged not only to go off if the tripwire is hit, but also if it is tampered with. So Freddie reworks it so that it looks like it has been tripped, but did not go off, but it will go off when the original guy tries to figure out what went wrong with it. He comes back and finds it reworked so that it looks like the guy did try to find out what was wrong, and it didn’t go off. So Freddie sets it up so that if you touch it, boom. He comes back, and this guy has changed it again.”
“Wow. Like a duel between bomb makers.”
“She loves this kind of thing, Sond. Please continue.”
So Freddy puts a motion detector in a tree, and pre-registers a one five five fire mission on the location, and when the detector goes off, he calls in a closing circle fire mission.”
“I don’t know what that is.”
“Sond, do you have a picture of a one five five battery?”
“Yeah.
The desktop computer was displaying three 155 mm artillery pieces firing. “That’s battery B from the First Marines regimental artillery in about that time.”
“Giant cannon.”
Dave corrected. “Cannon usually means smooth bore. These are rifled bore heavy guns. They shot about, what, 16 miles, Sond?”
“Something like that. The projectile weighs about 150 pounds. A closing circle is a spiral pattern that ends at the center.”
“So the guy didn’t have a chance.”
“No,” Dave said. “No chance at all.”
“That isn’t fair.”
“It was a war ma’am.”
“That’s a sad story.”
“Honey, war stories are almost always sad stories. The V.C. guy won in a way, because Freddie couldn’t beat him at his own game.”
“But he’s dead.”
“Half a million Vietnamese are dead for no reason. That’s the war summarized.”
“Let me try another one, ma’am. In Beirut, Lebanon, they had a civil war. Bad guys were shooting people in the other side of town just for being there. A Moslem terrorist would shoot someone on the Christian side, and vice versa. So one day, a guy shoots a 13 year old girl. But as it happens, her father has a lot of money, and nothing to live for but his daughter since they also have shot his wife. He loses it, and hires a mercenary to get the guy who killed his daughter. The guy goes to the same window every few days at the same time when the light is right, and the father has been told about this. So the merc sets up a hide about ten feet back of a window in a building on the other side. It’s a bitter cold winter, but the merc doesn’t use any heat, nor does he close any of the windows, either. For three days, he waits for the bad guy. On the third day, The bad guy is lining up to shoot an old lady on the street, and the merc fires. He has a Remington Police and Military bolt gun chambered for .300 Winchester Magnum. His range is 1,219 yards, and he center punches the bad guy with a 200 grain Sierra bullet. I know the man who fired that round, and I know it hit.”
“How?”
“Because I was his spotter.”
“What about the old lady?”
“She never knew a thing. Went home and made lunch for her grandchildren or whatever.”
“I liked that one better. Tell me another.”
“There was this nasty guy who raped a young woman every night. He was a big shot in Afghanistan at the time, and nobody could stop him. A Marine found out what was going on, and put a surveillance camera on her room. Next day he watched the film. This Marine went to her house, and through an interpreter, volunteered to protect her. Her father had died in the war, and so had her mother. Her younger brother, who was a kid, really, agreed. The bad guy came that night to rape the girl again. The Marine killed him with a Marine Corps fighting knife, and then he and the brother took the body out into the boondocks and left him for the scavengers. The girl was able to marry honorably, with nobody knowing except her husband, who will never tell.”
“What about the Marine?”
“Still in the Corps. He is an officer today.”
“That’s a nice one. Do things like that happen in wars very often?”
“They do. War brings out the best and the worst in men. That Marine, well, he was the pure metal. And it showed.”
“Remember the ethics book question, Angel?”
“Set it up for her.”
“I was reading this book about ethics. In the book, there was a hypothetical. An American is in some South American country where things are out of hand. So this local warlord kind of guy is getting ready to shoot a bunch of villagers. And the American says he should not do it, they are innocent. So the warlord guy says, “How about this? You take this M-60 machine gun, and blow away the ones to the left of the tree, and I’ll let the ones to the right of the tree go.” So the question is, can you murder a dozen people in order to prevent someone from killing two dozen of them?”
“What would you do?”
“Save whoever I could at any cost. But I like David’s answer better.”
“What would you do, David?”
“I’d say ‘hell, give me that M-60. I’ll shoot them all.”
“David, so it happens, is an expert with the M-60.”
“Why would you do it, David?”
“Then when I got the piece, I’d turn around, and smoke him and his buddies if I could do it faster than they could get me. It would be very sporty. If I pulled it off, I would tell the villagers to get all the daughters out, over you know, 16 at least. And I would take the prettiest one for saving their village.”
“What would you do with her?”
“Depends on what she liked to do.”
“I’m not sure I like that part of your answer.”
“I’ll try you with another Mideast story. Three guys decided to go into the girl whorehouse business. Their business plan was they would kidnap girls like, 10 to 14 or so, and force them into prostitution, and if they become inconvenient, then murder them. Business was good. Real late one night, some guy visited them, and cut their throats with a Marine Corps fighting knife. And a couple of other guys stole a truck from the Army, and these guys put the girls on the truck, and an Arab guy who was very, very opposed to this sort of business took the girls and the money and valuables from this business, and drove them across a very dangerous border. He got them enrolled in a boarding school, which put them on the records as being nice young ladies who had been in the school for years, some tragically orphaned from the wars and such, and graduated them, and they were all married honorably to nice young men.
“Curiously, there were two guys who had apparently financed the whole nasty scheme, and each one of them was shot in the eye with a .375 H&H magnum, according to all indications. Nobody, though has every come up with a who or why.”
“That’s a nice story. Would it have anything to do with anyone in the Marines?”
“Well, actually not. But I can tell you, not for attribution, and strictly within this room, that there is absolutely no doubt that it happened.”
“I really like that story.”
David indicated a gunny sack against the wall. “Irrelevant to that story, of course, I happen to have 50 pounds of pistachio nuts to give you. Apparently someone in Israel likes you.”
“How would something move that fast?”
“Oh, I have no idea. But I could tell you that you could, if you knew the right people, send a diamond from here and have it arrive in Lebanon tomorrow as oranges.”
Dave went into the kitchen. He got two more beers. “Tell her about Juventina.”
“I was in Columbia. We were doing a job with an international combined task force against a cartel. They were doing dope, which does not push my buttons too hard, but also slavery and they made snuff movies, and they did some kidnapping, and usually killed the victims. So they were not ever so nice. We raided their whorehouse, and they had these girls they had kidnapped all over Latin America, and forced to prostitution. We didn’t take any prisoners.”
He seemed to be looking somewhere far away, but he was looking out a window into the darkness. “What they do to these girls is unimaginably cruel. I’m a hard guy, Jillian, but I can’t tell you about it. I just can’t.”
After a long pause, he continued. “They had her handcuffed to a bed, so they could rape her. I had a key, and I took the handcuffs off her. She was a lovely young girl, but you had to see that past the bruises and, and, the cigarette burns and, well a lot of things like that. I asked her where she lived. We would try to take her back, but maybe she would never really be able to do that, because people are so awful.”
“Her own people?”
“Would likely consider her a whore.”
“What did she say about all that?”
“She said ‘Take me home with you, Cowboy.’.”
“What did you do?”
“I took her home to Oklahoma.”
“Past customs, INS, military check points?”
“I went to a small air base in Oklahoma, and a crop duster took us to my neighbor’s ranch, no questions asked, paid in cash.”
“And Juventina?”
“I hid her here. Then they had this amnesty, and I said she was my housekeeper, and they let her stay.”
“And?”
I married her, and now she is a U.S. citizen, and nobody can hurt her any more.”
Jillian sat back and petted Marie Antoinette, who was purring and half sleeping, working her claws in Jillian’s sweater. “I like that story best. But what happened to her?”
“She went to town. She will probably be back within the hour. She does what she wants, like someone else I could think of.”
“And whom, you need not name. Are you going to tell me any stories with Dave in them?”
“No.”
She looked at Dave, who was bending the bottle cap from the beer. She motioned to her eyes and her mouth. “I need to?”
Sond answered. “No, you don’t. That thing there is a bug sweeper. Dave, you tell me. Now that she knows I have it, is she going to want to see how it works, and is she going to want to sweep the truck when the sun is up tomorrow?”
“Yes to all.”
There was a glare of headlights and a single coyote like yip outside. “Napoleon says it’s her truck.”
“Who is Napolean?” She asked.
“He’s an attack dog. A war dog.”
“I never saw him when we came.”
“Yes. You didn’t see him because you’re not supposed to. Next time you come, he will yip for the Baby. Not a different Volvo semi. He wouldn’t yip like that for any Toyota pickup but Juventina’s.”
“Marie Antoinette knows Juventina is here, too. See how her ears went up?”
“I did.”
The door opened, and Juventina came in like a breeze. “I thought they must be here, because the truck is. You’re Dave and Jillian. I’m Juventina.” She was a petite girl with long, straight blonde hair. It was very fine and soft, like a child’s. She looked much more Spanish than Indian. She wore black high heeled boots that didn’t get her to five feet. Her jeans were the size of a child’s but not cut for a child. They had loops for the two narrow black leather belts she wore. Her sweater was an elaborately patterned cashmere, too perfectly done and fitted to be other than hand knit. She had the face of an angel.
She looked at Jillian. “I’m usually the prettiest.”
Dave got her eye. “You look just fine, Juventina.”
Jillian rolled her hand forward, in a gesture Dave knew meant to go on with it. Sond nodded. Dave looked at Juventina again. “You have it all, in one delightful little package. You’re very cute, Juventina.”
“I’m so little.” She giggled.
“Nothing wrong with that.” Dave said.
Juventina leaned back, looking very pleased. She had apparently wanted the big man to tell her she was attractive. Something about being recognized by a big guy making it ok to be a little woman. Or maybe Dave was reading too much into it.
Jillian was pouring some tequila into Sond’s glass, laughing quietly at something he was saying.
Juventina went to the kitchen. She handed Dave another beer. She gave Jillian an enquiring look.
“I’ll get something when I want it.” “Thank you, Juventina.”
Jillian sat down again. Marie Antoinette shot into the room from somewhere, and jumped into her lap, once again putting her paws up. She smelled Jillian’s hair, and Jillian bent down to touch noses with Marie Antoinette, who acted offended, and then started the whole thing again.
Juventina looked at Sond. “Would it be all right if they…”
“Tell us all.”
“I’m pregnant. It’s a girl. We’re going to name her Lisa Leanne Sondermeyer.”
The fates began stirring their tea. Lisa Leanne Sondermeyer was going to be someone very special, the toughest chick in town and then some, but that is another story, another time, another place.
“That’s such a pretty name.”
“She’ll be a pretty girl.”
“I bet she will.”
“Are you guys going to have kids?”
“We don’t want to. Anyway, I can’t. I was injured as a child.”
David started. “Who…”
Dave held up his hand. “Already discussed. She can take it up with Denis if she wants to?”
“Of course.”
“So we close the book on this.”
“So we do.”
Juventina looked at them. “What are you guys talking about?”
David shook his head slightly, and Juventina looked over to Jillian, as if she had not asked anything. Jillian was still playing the nose touching game with Marie Antoinette. “She really likes you, Jillian.”
“I like her, too.”
“She doesn’t play like that with me.”
“She needs to get to know you.”
“She has known me for 5 years.”
“Do you like cats?”
“Yes. We never had animals when I was a little girl, though. Before…”
“Sond told us the story. It’s sad, all those things that happened to you.”
“My cowboy came, and it’s all fixed.”
“You wanted to be rescued by a cowboy?”
“Of course. You don’t know who is Clint Eastwood?”
Jillian looked over at Dave and Sond, who were discussing something interesting, and making sure the girls did not hear it. What could it be? “Yeah, I know who Clint Eastwood is.”
“I have all his movies. David bought them for me on eBay.”
“A great actor.”
“David has the guns like Dirty Harry. But he has two. Smith and Wesson .44 Mag stainless, 8 3/8” barrels. He shoots with either hand, single action or double action. He came, and he shot all the bad guys dead. Then he takes me home, but he will not let me love him. Not for a long time. But now he does. He makes me very happy.”
“Our men like big guns, don’t they?”
“Yeah, they do. Dave like the M-79. You know.”
“I don’t.” She started rubbing Marie Antoinette in the wrong direction, and Marie Antoinette pretended that she did not know she was being teased, and pretended to bite, kick and scratch.
Grenade launcher. 40 millimeter. Like a single shot shotgun. Dave like the canister round, which is like a buckshot round. When he was spotter, that is what he carried. He can drop an M-79 round in a 55 gallon can at 300 yards. I saw them shoot at camp Jejune in North Carolina. Both of them are astoundingly skilled riflemen, and David is only maybe a little better with handguns. Dave is really good with mortars, and incredible as an artillery or air support forward observer.”
“How old are you, Juventina?”
“About 22 we think.”
“And you know about all these weapons of war.”
“I grew up in war. I have only recently known peace, as a soldier’s wife.” She smiled. “Do you want to see our reloading shop?”
“Sure.”
“Juventina waved to David, pointed to herself and Jillian, and then down, and made a motion of pulling something down. David nodded, and the girls went down to the basement.
“Why do you mime things like that?”
“The Wayfarers have a language of hand signals. It’s considered polite to signal to someone who is talking, rather than interrupt verbally.” She held her hands up. “It’s also more secure. You have to see it to even try to decrypt it.” She walked the fingers of one hand over the other, and then slipped it through. “That means, ‘That is all I have to say for now.’ We can say almost anything in signs.”
“So you are a Wayfarer.”
“I will neither confirm nor deny it.”
“You refuse to answer that.”
“This is ‘I refuse to answer that.’ This is ‘I can’t answer that.’ This is ‘I am unable to answer that.’ Each was a small change in the position of her fingers. She also did won’t, shouldn’t, didn’t, and not allowed to.
They went to a steel door, and Juventina put her thumb on a plate, and the door opened. Inside was a very clean workroom with RCBS ammo master presses on one side, and gunsmithing tools on the other. She unlocked and opened a cabinet on one side of the room, showing Jillian a huge assortment of powder. She relocked it, and went to the other side, and showed Jillian a large supply of primers. Another cabinet held bullets and dies. There were over 100 boxes of die sets. Around the corner was another door. Juventina opened it, and they went into an earthy smelling room. Juventina turned on the lights, and Jillian saw that it was an underground range. There was a 100 foot long tunnel of 8 foot concrete storm drain pipe. At the end was a pile of sand. There were some cans and some cardboard boxes with targets drawn on them. At the near end, there was a door, and two windows closing the opening. “It’s for sound and smoke, Juventina said. “You put the muzzle through the window, just open it as far as you need to, and then when you get done, you close it, leave the smoke in the tunnel.” Juventina turned around, and led Jillian out of the range room. “Would you like to fire a legal class 3 weapon? A .45 Thompson sub machine gun?”
“Of course.”
Juventina opened a gun safe and took out the Thompson. “Handle with care. They are irreplaceable, pretty much.”
She took Jillian’s hand. “The trigger is like this.” She squeezed with a few pounds of pressure and released. “If you hold it like this, you will shoot off the whole magazine. If you jerk the trigger, you will never have control. Dave and Sond think these full auto sub guns are bullshit. They like shotguns and M-79s better. Or else, go all the way to a belt fed machine gun, which nobody laughs at. Dave, by the way, made them drop their jaws at Camp Jejune, shooting the .50 BMG. I swept up brass and stuff like that at the machine gun range, and I have seen them shoot those things a lot. Dave is the best I have ever seen. None of the instructors, even, are close to him. Put your eyes and ears on, and let’s uphold the family tradition.”
They went to the range with the Thompson, and Juventina started Jillian out on single fire. She did very well, so Juventina had her switch to full auto. She did very well on that, also, easily learning to fire bursts of about five rounds, starting a little low to take care of the climb of the piece.
They took the Thompson back to the bench and put it on the cleaning rest, bolt open and magazine out. The boys came down the stairs.
Sond addressed Juventina. “I let you out of my sight, and the next thing I know you are shooting the Thompson again.”
“I like to shoot the Thompson. But I was showing Jillian, actually.”
He made sure his back was to Jillian. He made a sign for ‘don’t show her anything illegal’. Juventina returned ‘I didn’t-won’t.’
“How did she like the Thompson?”
“It goes bang, she likes it.”
“Is that how it is, Jillian?”
“Guns are pretty cool, Angel.”
Juventina turned to Angel. “You guys gonna shoot it, or we clean it?”
“Go ahead and clean it.”
Jillian spoke up. Could Dave shoot a mag for me before you do?”
Juventina handed Jillian the Thompson and a loaded mag. They went to the range and closed the door. “What do you want me to do, Jillian? This is a testing range. It’s not long enough for much of much.”
“Shoot the can.”
He worked the action, and then, not thinking, held the Thompson out one handed, like a pistol, and blasted the can. He raised up, and clipped it in the air before it could fall. It bounced off the sand pile, and he nailed it as it rolled forward. It flipped to the back of the pile, and he shot it again. The bolt locked back. He pulled the sub gun out of the window, closed the window, and holding the Thompson in one hand, and her hand in the other, he took it back out to clean. He dropped the mag and put it on the cleaning stand.
“Wild Bill Hickok.”
Juventina laughed. “We knew that before you ever met him, girl.”
“How hard is it to shoot a can in the air with a .45 Thompson holding it in one hand?”
Sond shook his head. “It’s absolutely impossible. Not even Ed McGivern could have done it.”
He handed her some cotton gloves. “Help fill these magazines?”
“Sure.”
“You wear the gloves because it keeps your hands clean, and you don’t get bit by a sharp edge on a magazine.”
Juventina giggled. “Also, if you need to wipe a gun clean, it is nice to know that the only fingerprints on it are on the outside.”
“She never said that, Jainie.”
“What did she never say, ‘Let’s go up and get another beer’?”
“Oh, that’s what she said.”
Sond ran a cleaning rod through the bore while Dave wiped the outside of the weapon clean. They put it back in the safe, while Juventina swept the brass, and Jillian picked up a few strays. They threw them in one of the 55 gallon drums. Somehow Sond and Jillian had gotten upstairs first, and Jillian was sweeping the room for bugs. When Dave and Juventina came up, he gave the watch what you say sign. Jillian focused on the sofa. She threw a couple of pillows aside, and then picked up a tiny piece of metal, as small as a dime. She took it to the desk, stuck in a pin, and held it to the sweeping tool. “Inactive.” She said.
“One minute 18 seconds. Not bad at all.”
Dave and Juventina went into the kitchen for some beer. Juventina got a Miller, Dave got two Alaskan Ambers. He handed one to Jillian. “Is your bug sweeping instructor drinking some more tequila?”
“I’ll get it in a minute.”
Dave sat next to Juventina. “She is hyper because she has been shooting.”
Juventina shook her head. “I think it’s good to get excited about things. You get older, and you put things behind you, get jaded, and then you find you don’t enjoy much of anything. Then you see that being excited about things is good.”
“Jillian may be too enthusiastic sometimes. She wanted to go too fast in the truck just to do it. She wants to ride fast motorcycles she may not be able to handle, ride dangerous broncs.”
“Sounds a lot like you and Sond. I’m scared about what might happen to him every time he leaves. But I married a mercenary. I put my life in jeopardy, that I might lose my man. He saved me, so if I suffer la