Continuing this week is the fourth season of the hit
drama series following a team of special agents

who investigate Navy and Marine Corps-related
crimes. In this instalment, the agents are stunned
when a marine thought to have frozen to death
wakes up on Ducky’s autopsy table. While the
man is put on life support, the team discovers that
he recently made a secret visit to Iraq.
Ducky gets the shock of his life when the latest
corpse on his table suddenly wakes up. The man
is Corporal Liam O’Neill, recently returned from a
tour of duty in Iraq. O’Neill was found face down in
a snow drift and paramedics assumed he was
dead. “Can’t really blame them,” Ducky says.
“Core temperature 20 degrees below normal. No
discernible heartbeat... It’s not an unreasonable
conclusion under the circumstances.”
The corporal is alive but in a coma, and he is
moved to an intensive care unit where his
prognosis remains grim. As Gibbs and the team
begin to investigate what happened to him, Ducky
provides the first lead when he reveals that
O’Neill’s face was pushed into the snow in a bid to
suffocate him.
The mystery deepens when the team learns
that, while on leave from the war, O’Neill travelled
back to Bagdad as a private citizen, flying with an
air freight business called Fast Flight. The
company’s owner, Nick Taylor, says O’Neill
wanted to see a friend in his regiment, who had
just been injured.
Gibbs is then surprised to hear that O’Neill’s
next of kin has arrived at the hospital, as the
corporal has no known relatives. He receives a
another shock when the family member turns out
be his old mentor, Mike Franks (Muse Watson,
‘Prison Break’). Franks reveals that O’Neill is his
long-lost son, and that he met him for the first time
only two years ago. “He tracked me down. We
met. Had a few beers,” Franks explains. “Didn’t
hear from him again until a couple of days ago –
said he was in trouble.”
Franks has no idea what that trouble was, but
McGee provides a clue when he discovers that
O’Neill tried to borrow $25,000 from a loan shark
called Shaloub. Questioned by Gibbs, Shaloub
says he denied O’Neill the loan because “he was
too risky a proposition”. “He told me nothing
about why he needed the money,” he adds.
O’Neill finally passes away in the hospital and
Franks abruptly disappears – just as Abby reports
that his fingerprint was found on the corporal’s
abandoned car. The print indicates that Franks was
in contact with his son before he was attacked.
When Gibbs tracks down his mentor, Franks
admits that he saw O’Neill in person two days ago.
“He needed money... I got it for him,” he says. Like
Shaloub, Franks claims not to know why his son
was so desperate for the cash.
However, the team soon realises that O’Neill
needed the money to pay for a mysterious
‘package’ that was being shipped in from Iraq by
Fast Freight. The flight in question has just
landed, and when the agents reach the airstrip,
they find three dead bodies – including Fast
Freight’s boss, Nick Taylor. Evidence from the
scene indicates that Taylor was operating a
people-smuggling business, charging huge
amounts of money to sneak criminals and illegal
immigrants into the US. It seems that O’Neill paid
Taylor to transport someone from Iraq – and that
Taylor killed O’Neill in an altercation over the price.
But who was O’Neill trying to smuggle?
Before Gibbs can answer that question, he is
concerned to learn that Mike Franks has gone
missing once again. Police locate Franks’s car
and discover a recently fired gun inside. Forensics
tests show that the gun is the murder weapon
from the airstrip shooting. Gibbs must now
consider a terrible prospect – did his old friend kill
Taylor and the people on the flight in revenge for
his son’s death?