Broken down is the city of chaos, every house is shut against entry.
Isaiah 24:1O
*
CHAPTER 1
Green on blue
July 13, 2010
Kabul, Afghanistan
Captive animals cried unnoticed. The afternoon street market smelled of hot garlic, cilantro, raw sewage, and sweat. Greasy sunrays infiltrated shimmering columns of cooking smoke. Loud voices haggled. Then he saw it: a hulking, solitary armored troop carrier creeping at a snail’s pace down the congested street.
Jahid was stirring sugar into his chai when he caught the truck with a turn of his eyes. Just his eyes, his face aimed surreptitiously down. American combat truck, an up-armored MRAP. Mine-resistant armor protected. A locomotive engine on four enormous wheels nosing through the market crush.
Jahid set his spoon on the stained rattan table in front of the tea shop. Thumbing his rifle sling higher onto his shoulder, he grunted at Rafik, who sipped his chai from an incongruously beautiful Chinese cup. Rafik looked up. Jahid pursed his lips toward the approaching truck. Rafik set down his chai carefully, keeping his eyes low. Americans never came here. Doubly remarkable, this armored truck had entered the market alone, surrounded by people, unable to move freely, trapped. Omar, the third militiaman, exited the tea shop with a steaming cup in hand, halting too as he caught sight of it, falling in seamlessly with their dissimulation.
The MRAP’s motor clattered through decelerations, the thunderous diesel engine revving and falling, as the truck inched forward like an ox wading through a flock of egrets, leading with its square snout, wheels coated in ochre dust, the side windows locked down, the driver a wraith behind the dust, abrasions, and glare on the windshield’s ballistic glass. Advancing in short lunges, a meter or two at a time, it passed the tea shop with its blanket door and cheap street tables, past makeshift awnings of many colors, past bicycle carts, butcher stands, smoking stove fires, fruit displays, and storefronts with discounted clothes mounted on wall pegs. Past potato crates, plastic wares, pots and pans . . . past two sheep. Past people, mostly men, who moved reluctantly aside, averting their gazes as the truck passed, like avoiding the eye of a belligerent bull.
The backplate was up, the truck advancing like a crippled tortoise without so much as a weapon in the turret. Jahid, Rafik, and Omar knew the Americans. They’d fought alongside the Americans, taken their classes, worked on their bases, helped Americans control their fellow Pashtuns. They’d been armed and equipped by them. They worked on an American post. This was not by any measure normal.
Nonetheless, after Benham’s shocking revelation, what they were about to do was an inescapable matter of honor, as Afghans, as Pashtuns, as Muslims. They’d planned to scout the Intercontinental Hotel, but here was a providential target creeping down the street like a holiday gift. Their Galils wouldn’t scratch this armor. Nor would grenades. And the street was crowded, too crowded. So, they would follow. The truck headed down the street through a cacophony of shouts and murmurs, banging metal, vehicle horns, roosters, and feral boys. If they hit here, someone would surely go to the Americans and exchange information for money. Good money. Euros and dollars.
They’d need more space for an anonymous getaway, and they’d need the lone soldier inside to open the truck. Inshallah. Keeping their movements casual, they nursed their sweet tea until the truck was half a soccer field past, then fell in trail.
Short, portly Omar led, lighting a cigarette with a yellow Bic lighter he’d bought from the Camp Virtue Post Exchange, the big base outside the city where they worked. Jahid heard Rafik just behind him, praying quietly. The truck stuttered past the crowd’s encroachment, forcing the men to dawdle. They pretended to browse over sweets and soaps. Then the truck executed a slow turn left.
They picked up the pace, weaving between people on the street.
The truck stopped.
They stopped. They were close enough now to hurl a cricket ball, hearts battering. The opening in the street was as big as they’d find.
The door cracked, then closed, then cracked again, and they quivered with adrenaline.
Jahid spoke to the other two. They angled toward the rear of the truck to cover it. The door opened again, and a filthy American soldier stepped out with nothing but a sidearm. No body armor. No helmet. He was short for an American, eyes a startling green-on-blue, rimmed red with exhaustion, short salt and pepper hair plastered in dry sweat and dust. The American circled around the front of the truck, approaching a food vendor enveloped in fragrant smoke and steam. The driver was about to buy a meal. Jahid drew a long, slow breath to quiet his nerves. He’d never witnessed anything like it.
“Allahu akbar,” Jahid whispered, and unslung his Galil.
CHAPTER 2
How much for this soup?
Dangriga, Belize
April 1, 1990
Garifuna boys are swimmers. Che Lambert was no exception. Swim into the mouth of North Stann Creek, though? Dangriga’s sewage concentrated there.
Running across Havana Street Bridge, bile and dismay burning in his craw, Che heaved the black trash bag over the rail. It splashed and sank, only an air bubble left riding above the water line. Thousands in cash, and it was already bobbing away on the receding tide. You’ll swim, bwai, or it’s out to sea. He broke right at the end of the bridge, paralleling the bag as he ran down the road to Central Market.
Racing through the market at a dead run now to intercept his treasure, he kicked his tattered trainers off as he tore past a fish stall. Gibraltar hadn’t cut him off yet. Nor Hobo Joe. Maybe he’d lost them on Havana Street. They’re kind of stupid, he consoled himself. Tilly heads fat and slow, too. Dey just ugly, maan. Real seed-of-evil, haggish and fraightnin’. Dey catch ya, they kill ya. An me muma need dat money.
*
Abner Dale was twenty-two today. Born the first of April and destined for foolishness. Grampa’s joke every year. He missed Grampa. A lot.
Seven days now in Dangriga? He was losing track. Belize City wasn’t much to his liking, a cancer of frantic vacation parties, drunken expats, and the cheap hustlers who attached themselves to tourists like crabs on a chicken neck. Dangriga, though, had something else. Smaller, funkier, slower, less on the make.
He’d worn a film of sweat since his arrival early last week on this post-collegiate adventure. Habituated to it now, he’d learned to enjoy how his own damp skin surprised him with every breeze. No hotter than the brutal-ass summers of Durham where Grampa raised Abner and his sister after Mom sank into her schizophrenia. He’d awakened hungry as a street dog at the hostel this morning. He wanted something special for his birthday.
The Dangriga Central Market was abustle, men in trousers, short sleeves, and ball caps, women in bright dresses and white straw boaters, a drowsy hungover cop in his tan over blue, vendor women plump from sitting in their booths and nibbling all day. The market women, they had sharp eyes and quick hands. They could shift from scowls to laughter in a split second. He liked the market women, and he never haggled with them. Dale was embarrassed by the obnoxious expats and tourists who worried the shit out of these women over a fucking dollar.
Some of the market women flirted with him. He was small and fit and striking with his black hair and aquamarine eyes. They admired his easy flow between Spanish and English, and were charmed by his unforced smile.
Birthday breakfast. Maybe a big piece of snapper, fried, with an avocado, a lime for both, a couple of flour tortillas, and some of those little, red fig-bananas. He’d need some flour for the fish, and coconut oil.
He would call Mom after breakfast, thank her for his birth. She was lucid for a time when he’d last called, but descended within minutes, muttering about a sable filly with two white socks. At least she’d sounded comfortable.
Stumbling through the market were a couple of painfully pink Pelican Beach tourists with red eyes, but mostly there were locals. He saw three nurses shopping together for their lunches in matching lime-green scrubs with toucans embroidered on the breast pockets. One light-skinned, one dark with long dreads cascading from a white bandanna, one little muscular one with her hair cut short like a man who was looking straight at him. He smiled at her, and she smiled back directly, showing off a gap between her front teeth that made him like her more. Lowering his eyes not to seem too forward. Hearing her companions titter as they picked up on the little exchange. Just then, a shirtless boy with ponytail dreads charged past, bumping the nurses, slaloming past him, careening between the stalls, and trailing a wake of loud rebukes.
Rude bwai!
The fishmonger, a shirtless old man with bony hands, put the snapper in a plastic bag. Dale looked around to spot the nurse again when the market bustle was broken by a blood-curdling scream.
Dale dropped the bag and sprinted through the crowd.
It was a boy (was it that boy?) well out in the water, his screams alternating now with animal retching. Dale, a competitive swimmer in his first two years of college, stripped off his t-shirt without a thought, kicked out of his sneakers as he ran to the edge of the water, and executed a perfect racers dive. Digging in so hard he made a wake, he held his head aloft to breathe and spit and orient on the boy, now gone silent and beginning to sink. He reached for the sinking boy when the hot knives hit him in the legs, groin, and abdomen.
Gasping with the pain, he knew something was stinging him as he clutched the boy’s his pony tail to hold his face out of the water. Through the stunning hot pain, he side-stroked, fighting the sensation that he was about to pass out with an agony that seemed to inflame his every molecule.
“What the fuck!” he choked.
He smelled the silt beneath him and began losing his orientation altogether. Then there were hands, people drawing him and the boy out of the water. Sand dragging under him, into his shorts, across his inflamed skin, the hot knives still stabbing. Feet collected around him, and an odd noise came out when he exhaled. Men talking above.
“Best thing is to piss on ’im.” Some fool laughed. “Naw, f’sure, piss kill the stingers.”
“Turn ya backs, ladies.”
“You’ll do no such thing,” a woman’s voice, authoritative. “Lemme have ’im.”
“That’s a man-o-war, girl. The stingers still hot.”
It was her, the little one with the gap in her smile.
“I know what it is,” she said. “Hold him still and don’t touch the tentacle.”
Detaching a pair of hemostats from her breast pocket, she locked the tips onto a long, poisonous, blue worm and began lifting it off. Abner Dale vomited and blacked out.
*
Somewhere between Carolina blue and Duke blue. All around him, blue. Maybe a deep sky blue? Not quite dark enough to call it cornflower blue. Someone scored a lot of this paint. It covered the walls, the beams, rafters, and the sheathing on the open ceiling. Even the overhead fans were blue. Blue that hurt his legs, hurt his back, his abdomen, his left arm, though the pain was somehow divorced from him. Even with the pain, he was slack and indolent, content to be very still. The pain was a shrike with its kill spiked to a hawthorn. Birds, birds, and more birds. In a solid line midway around the entire wall were paintings of birds in blue wooden frames, dozens of different birds in a circumferential mosaic of riotous color.
“Whatcha say, sir?” Lime-green. She was standing there in those lime-green scrubs, the one with the smile, checking an antique glass-bottle IV.
“Hi,” he whispered.
“Hi, ya-self,” she said. There was that smile that made him like her. “You said something just now, about a strike? Were you dreamin’?”
“Shrike. It’s a bird.”
“You know birds?” Like ‘beds’. He’d been listening to this West Indian accent for a week.
“I know about that bird,” he croaked. “It’s cruel, but not on purpose.”
“I love the birds, sir.” She passed her hand across the room at the line of pictures. “Maybe we talk later. Rest a bit. I’ll be back.”
“God, I hope so.”
He drifted away on the sound of light laughter from a far room.
*
“I’m Vanessa. She Kendra. The other nurse, she call Farah. And you they call Abner, yeah? Welcome to the Blue Clinic, Abner. We saw ya name in ya wallet. It’s dryin’ out now.”
It was the nurse with the dreads. The Blue Clinic. What a surprise!
Kendra was the light-skinned one. She and Vanessa sat him up for a steaming bowl of escabeche.
“Most folks, they just call me A.D. ‘Abner’ makes me the butt of jokes.” His voice was coarse, exhausted, full of gravel.
“Why they name ya that, then?” asked Kendra.
“Great-grandfather’s name. Old name. I’m an anachronism. Wha’d you give me?”
“Morphine, sir. Ya got a big dose,” Kendra told him.
“Call me A.D. Please.”
“Eat ya soup, A.D. Make you better.” Beh-tah.
While he sipped from a spoon, a little astonished by how good the soup was, Vanessa and Kendra told him Farah was taking a nap. This was their clinic. Nurse practitioners, all three of them. They’d gone to school together. He’d been wrapped up with a Portuguese Man of War. The boy he’d dragged out of the river was stung, too, so badly he was now in the regional hospital being questioned by the police. The cops had taken a skiff out and found a trash bag full of money, several thousand Belizean dollars, which, according to Kendra, the cops would split up among themselves. The boy, Che something or other, had stolen the money from local hoodlums and thrown it into the river as a diversion. Farah had made the decision to treat A.D. She wanted to rescue the rescuer. Dale owed the clinic some money, Kendra told him. Hoped he could pay.
“How much?”
With the morphine, a gram of IV Rocephin, materials, and labor, the bill was already past four hundred dollars. He tried not to wince, then they reminded him that was Belizean dollars, exchanged at two-to-one with U.S. dollars. He owed them just over two hundred dollars — a bargain as far as he was concerned.
“How much for this soup?” he asked, provoking an outburst of laughter.
*
Farah Gillet found Dale sitting up in the bed with one hand raising his sheet to inspect the damage.
“Ya likely got a new tattoo.” He looked up, red-eyed with residual morphine, and gave a weak smile.
“Tattoo?”
“Leaves marks for a good long time. I’m Farah. You’d be A.D., heroic sewer-swimmer, rescuer to bad boys.” Sewah swimmah.
He took her proffered hand. It was warm and dry, her grip firm, her eyes shining dark and warm.
“Hate you seeing me like this,” he said. She laughed at that.
“Mister Dale, you look fine now. We seen the worst of ya. Bathed ya, salved ya lesions, put in ya catheter.” He blushed at that and tugged up at his sheet a bit.
“Can I lose this?” he said, nodding down in the general direction of the catheter. “And the IV?”
“This minute, if you like.” He blushed again, and she followed up. “You want someone else to do it?”
“It’s just . . . I remember you. Before this. In the market. Would it surprise you if I said I was about to speak to you before the boy got in trouble?”
“Were ya?” she asked, smiling that smile.
“I was gonna ask you if you’d like to get a coffee or something. Now you’ll associate me with things puke and polluted water and . . .” he tipped his chin, “ . . . catheters. Not a sterling first impression.”
“Let me get ya catheter out,” she replied. “We’ll release ya soon as ya like, if ya promise to go easy.” He looked down again, embarrassed, and nodded.
“Thanks. I promise.”
“I’ll be done ’bout seven this evening. Pay ya bill when ya leave, be back here six o’clock, and I buy ya little bottle of beer with all the money ya givin’ us. If you feel up to it. I’m givin’ you some pills for the pain, so only one beer, yeah?”
He smiled back until she said, “Now, lay back an’ get ya mind ready. This not gonna feel so good.”
CHAPTER 3
Saving Dr. Ryan
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
May 12, 2009
“They’re the same,” Deangela told him, only because class participation was a grading criterion.
She felt like an impostor, despising grades as much as she depended upon them. She especially despised “class participation.” Give me a good lecture any day, she thought. A well-conceived thesis, expounded systematically, and ingested anonymously. Class participation made her feel like a subjugated hound compelled to speak — “Woof!” — for her Bubba Rose biscuit.
Dr. Ryan knitted his brow reflectively. His weirdly small hand tugged at a gold bead posted through his earlobe. His sleeve-mosaic forearm tattoo peeked out from quarter-rolled shirt cuffs. Gym-bod he displayed by jogging around campus in his tank top and nylon shorts, all that hard-won sinew rippling under elaborate, vaguely tribal tattoos. A fair number of female students rewarded him with the attention, for sure. Few of the boys, too. Thirty-nine, prematurely gray, long classic face framed in a rebellious beard and a bad-boy buzzcut.
To Deangela, he was a peacock. It was animus at first sight on the first day of class this semester. Western Moral Philosophy. Level-four, first-year graduate course. Finals in a week, thank God. She concealed her contempt for Ryan, in part because she wasn’t altogether sure why she detested him so immediately and intensely. He was a genuinely knowledgeable and skilled teacher as well as a publishing juggernaut on a fast track to tenure. Brain muscles to match the anatomy. But she abhorred grandstanders, men full of themselves, and she couldn’t overcome the suspicion that there was some lightless toxic void behind Ryan’s freewheeling hip performance.
He was courteous, even deferential to her — the odd girl. That much she had to admit. She was unsure in herself about this revulsion because it felt so personal. Ambivalence was an inheritance from her mother’s syncretic Caribbean Catholicism. Or so she’d theorized.
Cool damp air drifted in through the classroom windows. She smelled fried food. Heard a barely audible conversation about avian flu from the sidewalk one floor below. Listened to birds. House sparrows. A blue jay mimicking a hawk. Robins. Her attention drifted while Ryan waited for his answer. She turned her grudging attention back to the senescent classroom and the underwear-model with the impatient gaze.
Challenging him was irresistible. The question had been, “What are the key differences between Rawls and Nozick?” Her response—“They are the same.”—was an open provocation, cribbed from having read MacIntyre in preparation for class. Ryan leaned back against his desk, arms crossed, waiting for her reply.
He’s posing, she thought, like one of those lizards that fans its throat to attract a mate.
Her fellow students turned. What say you, mutant child?
Philosophy grad students can be tedious, she thought. Not “tedious of the twice-told tale.” More like the confabulated tale, or the overprocessed tale, or the agonizingly arcane tale. Even within the closed system of their terminal geekdom, there were power struggles and dominance displays that gave her visions of stags pissing on each other’s territory and crashing their antlers into saplings. There sat the diminutive, horn-rimmed James who crushed on the prim Methodist Angela, oft quoting a virile Nietzsche against his rival — the prematurely and attractively balding David — who cleaved to a more effeminate Kant.
Deangela bewildered them all. Her ill-attended, tangled hair, her tattered trousers and dirty boots. She appeared at times to be someone who lived in the woods on locusts and wild honey. No makeup. Brows dense and unplucked. Rumors that she didn’t shave. Come on, hirsute was okay for a stoned, aging hippie woman hula-hooping in front of Weaver Street Market, but in grad school, on this eighteen-year-old, it suggested carelessness, or cluelessness, or both. Sometimes she’d show up in dirty clothes, wearing those muddy Danners, looking not like a Carrboro hula-hooper but someone who’d just stolen a carcass from a pack of hyenas. And yet, the whole campus had heard the apocryphal claim that she’d read Tolstoy when she was nine.
She glanced out the window, distracted again by the jay pretending to be a hawk.
“Go on,” said Ryan impatiently.
She turned her eyes back to him and sat up straight, wiping hair away from her face only to have it fall back.
“Well, they’re both anti-Aristotelian, aren’t they? They both define every person as a detached agent, as someone without history or culture.” Her voice was her mother’s voice — fruit and whiskey, Macy Gray. She picked at the edge of a book while she talked, eyes switching from book to Ryan to book again. “Then a group of these rootless guys gets together to form rules for a common good.” Pausing again, she rubbed her index finger in short repetitive strokes over the surface of her desk, like she was crossing something out again and again, her eyes aimed downward now as she retransmitted some distant voice. “They only disagree on the basis for establishing just rules based on competing origin myths . . .” Her hand stopped moving, her gaze on Ryan again. “. . . Rawls with his amnesiac veil of ignorance and Nozick with an Adamic figure who emerges from a cabbage full grown and linguistically competent, who picks up pretty shells on the beach and establishes the institution of property.” Right index finger now poking at two points on the desk, back and forth like a metronome. “But they both assume the possibility of universal norms apart from any named tradition. They both consider male as normative and ignore that this male normativity, along with the other social goods they narrate, isn’t universal at all, but the brainchild of the Atlantic bourgeois history of which both Rawls and Nozick are themselves products.” Ryan steepled his fingers as she continued. “Both of them are elaborately begging the question, arguing from a historically contingent status quo, then asserting that what they’ve already accepted is universal. They disagree only on some particulars about the basis for justice within that status quo. There’s your distinction. But they’re both just proposing decorative rationalizations for liberal modernity.”
She held his gaze for a moment, then looked down at her desk, mad-woman hair falling back over her face. The other eight members of class gawked. Seven were men, so maybe the gender dig got their attention.
Ryan stroked his beard a couple of times, then stood, smiling broadly, perfect teeth eerily white against a suspiciously early tan. He walked a half circle to face the class from behind his desk.
“Okay,” he said, turning to pick up a dry erase marker and giving his back to the class. Did he just lat flare? He made an R and circled it, then an N and circled that, too. “Let’s talk about these competing notions of justice.”
When the clock ran out on class, the students gathered their books and papers. Out the door they went: Steve, the mustachioed and determined local International Socialist who passed out his annoying newspapers and thought all life began with Hegel; Randall, the heavy one who wore Hawaiian shirts tucked in like an old man and always reeked of Axe cologne; Angela, the Methodist (Why wasn’t she going to Duke?); bespectacled David — James’s nemesis . . .
“Have you got a moment, Deangela?” Ryan asked, stopping her.
Ryan believed he had a special sensibility about women, especially young ones. He’d sensed from the first day that this girl needed the kind of affirmation he might give her; that she camouflaged her feelings of attraction with this odd, Aspergerish compulsion to confront. She was undoubtedly brilliant, which had its own allure, kindling within him the ambition to domesticate her like an exotic animal.
He’d peered beneath her ratty clothes (another camouflage for her own desire, he suspected). She was well-muscled, wiry, quite fit. No matter how she dressed, she couldn’t hide that hard little ass, the muscular calves, the almost boyish small swell of her breasts. Even her reputed refusal to shave beguiled him, like a counterpoint to the young women he’d been with who all seemed to have undergone full-body waxes. He liked that — the smooth infantile thing; but he liked variety, too. Deangela Dale was undeniably variant.
She waited with Ryan while the rest filed out. James, Angela’s horn-rimmed Zarathustra, out the door; Déshì, from Taiwan; and finally, as always, Andrei, the enormous and phlegmatic second-generation Russian, who gave a kind of bow and mock salute to Deangela as he made his exit.
She faced Ryan alone now, all five-foot-four of her angled up at his six, daypack slung on her shoulder in readiness for a swift escape. Ryan canted back against the desk again, the backs of his legs now propped against the edge to put him and Deangela at eye level, his legs intrusively stretched out toward hers.
“Deangela, you’re going to make your mark on philosophy, I expect. Have you thought about your future? Do you know about our Parr Fellowship?”
She didn’t reply. There’s that Asperger thing again, he figured, so he powered through.
“I’ve looked at your final paper.”
“Okay?” She shifted her pack higher on her shoulder.
“Interesting choice. ‘Wittgenstein and the Body’.”
“It’s an interesting topic . . . to me.” She tugged with her free hand at one of her anarchic locks, stretching it and letting it pop back. “Is the paper okay?”
He saw that flicker. Of doubt? Of interest beyond the paper? The need for approval? The hair thing. Maybe a pleasure signal?
“I’d like to talk with you about it.”
“I have to go. I have a meeting.” She glanced at the door then back at him. He smiled again. He looked into her black-coffee eyes then shifted his gaze to her mouth.
“Not now, of course. I have office hours this afternoon from three to five. Can you drop by?” She did a little two-step with her head down, then looked up again.
“Orienteering club.”
He cocked his head like a hawk, still staring at her mouth, full like ripe plums.
“Really? What got you interested in orienteering?”
“My father,” she answered, offering no more and ducking her head.
“Well, how about tomorrow then? Do you have half an hour or so in the morning?”
“Between ten and twelve,” she said.
Her eyes skated from the window to the door, to her feet and back at Ryan. He stroked his beard like he was milking it, hands slight, narrow, and knob-knuckled. Like a squirrel’s hands. Incongruous at the ends of his veined, tattooed forearms and the slabs of gym flesh under his shirt. He could bulk up all he wanted, but his hands betrayed a sly, skinny boy peering furtively out from behind all that sweaty-Pelagian sinew.
“Excellent. Can you meet me on the way to work, at, say, eleven?”
“Where?”
“The Mediterranean? They have good coffee.” Finally, something with which she could agree.
“Yes. Do I need to bring a copy of the paper?”
“If you like.” She stood silent. After a beat, he went on.
“Then I’ll see you at eleven. Don’t be late for your meeting.”
*
Worry pummeled her like a red storm. Was something wrong with the paper? Had she confronted him one too many times? Was he hitting on her?
The subject matter was easy for her, God knows. Frozen as text, dissectible as grammar and logic. These people, though, at university. Fucking worm bins of contradictory lacks and competing agendas. Grammars she hadn’t mastered. She didn’t know the rules, even as she appreciated that there was a great deal at stake with them. Her gifts were of no use to her here. She was acutely aware, yet again, of her awkward youth, her atypical parents, her lack of siblings, her biracial status which placed her outside by another measure still.
She raked over the conversation with Ryan, searching for clues.
A comment like, “You’re going to make your mark”?
Was it intellectual flattery, or was he hinting at something else, some project? And why did that frisson of revulsion ripple across her skin when he gazed at her, stroking his fucking beard? Was that leer into her eyes just his way, or was he going for soulful? And why did he stare at her mouth? Hated that! All these indecipherable performances.
Why was she so suspicious of him?
Why did she feel patronized?
What in the hell was this meeting with him over the paper?
Thank God this class was nearly over.
She pushed open the door to the Student Union. Ian, Brett, and Oliver, the other members of the orienteering club, were already seated around one of the coffee tables studying the map for an Umstead Park competition next week.
*
Deangela heard dishes bumping in suds when she opened the apartment door. Samantha leaned over the kitchen sink. Deangela tossed her daypack onto the tattered olive love seat in the corner.
“Hiya,” said Samantha without looking up from the dishes.
“Hey, Sam.”
The apartment smelled like hot yeast and rosemary. Deangela flopped onto a backless garnet divan. The cushion sank precipitously on broken springs. Deangela unlaced her hikers, then fought her way up again from the sinkhole divan to set her boots on the white plastic shoe stand by the door. Sat back down.
“Sam,” Deangela said. “Got a minute?”
“What’s up?” Sam called from the kitchen. She slotted the last plate in the drainer and wiped her hands on a tea towel. Deangela rubbed her own feet. Sam dropped the dish towel on the DVD player by the little television, and sat on the old brown love seat.
“Something happened in Ryan’s class today. Is that bread I smell?”
“Yeah. Mixed it last night. Dutch oven with rosemary.” Accent: Western North Carolina white-girl. Led people to underestimate her. Might serve her well as an attorney.
“Mmm.” Deangela felt a stab of hunger.
“So, what’s up?” asked Sam.
“Dr. Ryan stopped me after class.”
“Oh, shit.”
“What?”
“Well, I wondered if you’d get a pass or not,” Sam said, stroking her hair back with both hands and pulling it through a scrunchy.
“A pass?”
“Hit on ya, didn’t he?”
“That’s just it. I don’t know. But it’s kinda dark you just went there.”
“Guy’s a walkin’ hard-on. Everybody knows. Likes to fuck his grad students.” Sam was direct if nothing else. “What happened?”
Deangela recounted the conversation. “Says he needs to meet me about my final paper at Med Deli. Tomorrow. I mean, meeting in the Med’s safe, right? And he might really wanna talk about my paper.”
“Hmm,” Sam rose with a grunt and went back to the kitchen. Deangela got up to follow. Sam put the tea kettle on and pulled two cups down from the cupboard, one from a local bookstore and one from UNC Law School where Sam pursued her juris doctorate.
“Want tea?”
“Sure. Darjeeling. Black.”
Sam bent to retrieve the tea bags from a floor cabinet. Her ginger frizz came loose from the scrunchy again. She grunted against her own girth. Sam was big-boned, boxy, sturdy, and self-assured in her own skin. Deangela, for all her redoubtable intellect, was eighteen and still casting around to figure out how she wanted to be. Sam was nine years her senior. She very much wanted whatever it was that Sam had — that self-accepting poise.
“De, sweetie, you might be the smartest person at this University . . .”
“Sam, I—”
“Just a sec, you know what I mean. Hell, you might the smartest person in the whole fuckin’ state, for all anyone knows.” She put her hair back in the scrunchie. “What was your GPA?”
“Four plus, but—”
“No buts, De.” The ice blue eyes held Deangela’s with a maternal affection. “You know as well as I do that your paper, whatever it’s about, is prob’ly publishable.”
Deangela looked down. Picked at a callus on her palm.
“Okay, yeah” Deangela said, looking up again at Sam, “but I don’t wanna jump to conclusions. I dislike him. I might be projecting, ya know. I mean, I’m not some campus diva,” she said, rolling her eyes. “I’m the nerd-girl. Nerd squared. I don’t send off pheromones, I secrete footnotes.”
“You ain’t gotta [air quotes] signal Ryan,” Sam said. “Guy like him, you’re exotic. Little hard-body brown girl? Ryan’s probably intimidated, too. Half his age and already runnin’ circles ’round him. That inferiority complex, and your being a teenage female . . . sets a match to his tinder. Guy’s a cockhound.” Deangela laughed at that. “A control monkey, a fuckin’ trophy collector, and he does Not. Like. Women. Thinks he’ll be in control once he gets you to spasm on his little pudenda-poker.” Deangela laughed again, louder. “That’s his little power fantasy. He’s a creep, and danglin’ a paper in front of you, hot damn, sexual harassment, hello?”
“You sure?”
“Prima facie? Nah. But you hear alarm bells, you fuckin’ listen.”
The kettle whistled. Sam got up, cut the flame, and spattered hot water over the teabags. She handed Deangela her tea. Picked up her own. Deangela retreated to the love seat. Sam followed, blowing across the top of her cup.
“Okay, what constitutes sexual harassment?” Deangela asked. “You’re the law student.”
*
May 13, 2009
An unusually warm mid-May day in downtown Chapel Hill, eighty by 10 a.m. Last night’s drizzle left steamy moisture along the seams of the streets. Damp heat rose thick from the hardscapes and patches of grass, ripening the dumpsters.
Deangela was running late. She threw on the same pair of baggy green trousers she’d worn the day before and a freshly washed, oversize t-shirt emblazoned with “The Beatles.” Two-dollar swag from Club Nova Thrift Shop. A red bandana pushed her hair back into a minor explosion and aired out a pebbling of mild acne along the northern boundary of her forehead.
At 10:50 a.m. she left the apartment and walked southeast to jump off Basnight Lane to Cameron. A long cut, hooking around onto Robertson to take Franklin. Kenan was shorter, but she’d been verbally accosted there once from less than thirty feet away by a tribe of drunken frat rats—white guys hooting “brown sugar” at her while they squeezed their crotches and fixed her with malicious alcoholic gazes that thrust into her heart like unwelcome fingers. She never went up Kenan again. Ever.
The Mediterranean was feeding an early lunch crowd. Entering, she was engulfed by air-conditioning and the comingled aroma of coffee, grilled meat, and hummus. Her mouth watered. Ryan was near the back of the room at a tiny round table between the dessert display cases. Jeans with no belt. Loafers with no socks. Gray polo shirt. Grinning like they were old chums, his gaze aimed across a steaming coffee clutched in his knobby little hand.
She dropped her daypack onto the chair opposite and said hi.
“Hi, Deangela. Need anything?”
“Yes, Doctor Ryan, give me a minute please. Gonna get some food. Haven’t eaten.”
“David, please,” he said, shifting side-saddle and throwing a sensitive smile at her. “In graduate school we’re colleagues.”
“David. I’ll be back in a minute.”
“Take your time.” Staring at her mouth again. What the hell!
She ordered a lamb and beef gyro. Lutfi, the youngest son in the family business, a slender Palestinian with big eyes and a day’s growth of thick black beard, told her he’d call her when it was ready. She returned to her seat, unzipped her Bean pack, put a water bottle on the table, and extracted the folder with her paper. Set it next to the bottle. Re-zipped the pack. Plopped it on the floor. Scooted the plastic chair back and squared up to face him.
Ryan swung one leg over the other, draping his left arm over the seat back. Tipped his coffee back to drain the cup, exhaling a puff of steam. Parked the empty cup on the table. Wiped his mouth with the back of his knobby fucking claw, eyes all the while fixed on her mouth.
“Have I got something in my teeth?” she asked.
“What?”
“You keep looking at my mouth.” Ryan dropped his leg back to the floor and his eyes to the table. He flexed out his dismay and interlaced his rat fingers. She was seized briefly by thoughts of fleas and plague.
“Do I?” he asked disingenuously.
“Yes.”
He looked around the restaurant then faced her again, forearms on the table, causing it to rock on uneven legs and almost toppling her water bottle. Deangela caught the bottle and placed it firmly on the floor. You can theoretically stand a pencil on its point, she thought distractedly, but standing a marble in a bowl is a stable solution. Principle of self-organization.
“Sorry,” he said. She wasn’t sure whether this was in reference to the bottle or staring at her mouth. “Nice save,” he said. She looked at him. “The bottle.”
“You said you wanted to talk about my paper.”
Before Ryan could reply, Lutfi called, “DeDe, you’re up.”
“Excuse me.”
“Course.” Ryan felt he had to regroup. He’d read that women were more sexually susceptible if you didn’t face them directly. Makes you appear needy when you mirror. That they somehow experienced an erotic sub-current when you looked at their mouths. Wrong-footed now, he wondered if her autism made her the exception.
When she came back, she dropped her paper plate with the gyro on the table and scooted the chair back under her.
“You mind?” she asked, unwrapping the gyro.
“By all means, go ahead. Do you prefer DeDe or Deangela? I want you to feel as comfortable with me as I feel with you.”
She hesitated while unwrapping her food for a split second. An image of an angry possum chewing on a fence wire flashed through her mind. She inspected the contents of the gyro.
“Deangela,” she said. “About the paper?” She bit off a mouthful, dabbing cucumber sauce off the corner of her mouth with a paper napkin.
“Yes. The paper. Well, you were pretty hard on Kripke. He draws a distinction between metaphysical and epistemic possibility.”
God almighty, I’m exhausted by this already. She took a few seconds to chew and swallow, dabbing again with the crushed napkin.
“Not my issue, sir. He missed the mark. Tried to turn Wittgenstein into a skeptic.”
“I did a Master’s Thesis on Kripke,” he said, head tilted, eyebrows went up.
“On his reading of Wittgenstein?”
She took a swig of water to prep for another bite of the gyro. Damn, she was hungry! She was always hungry, it seemed. Her mother approved of her appetite. Empty crocus bag canno’ stand up, Mama was fond of saying.
“No, no,” he gave a sly smile and turned his eyes down. “On modal logic.”
Well, there you are, asshole.
The way he was cocked sideways on his chair with his elbows on the table, she half expected him to fart. Everything about him was a presentation. She was reminded of a child’s first clumsy attempts at dance steps before he developed an un-self-conscious habituation to his own body.
“Kripke’s not the main character in my paper.” She took another greedy bite of her sandwich and had to chew with her mouth open. She exaggerated a bit, because she had the sudden puerile urge to gross him out. The old “see-food” gag.
“True enough,” he allowed, hesitating for a bit to watch her masticate on her food. “Do you have a boyfriend?”
She slowly placed her sandwich on the plate, swallowing, then dabbing her mouth again.
“I beg your pardon?”
“I just want to get to know you better. Sorry, didn’t mean to pry? Huxley said that an intellectual is someone who’s found one thing more interesting than sex.” He smiled.
“What?” She wasn’t smiling. Hit with a gush of icy antagonism, the last remnant of her anxiety fell away like a muddy brick.
Oliver, fellow orienteer, walked into the Deli. Nineteen-year-old junior from Winston-Salem. Uncombed blond hair. Cargo shorts revealing powerful legs covered in pale down. She waved, sucking at her teeth. He waved back. She held up a finger at him, one minute. Oliver nodded.
“Who’s that?” Ryan asked her.
“A friend.”
“Boyfriend?”
“Friend.”
Ryan revised his Asperger’s thesis. She seemed comfortably sociable with her friend.
“Would you like to get together another time?” He queried. “Perhaps we could have dinner. You seem to enjoy food. We could discuss food as one of the physical desiderata.” He flashed an oily sex-shop smile.
Desiderata! The shit was on now!
“I don’t think so,” she said, wrapping her half-eaten gyro back in the foil. “Dr. Ryan, is there anything wrong with my paper that we need to discuss?”
“Well, I can’t really say—”
“Because, I’m going to be frank with you, sir,” she cut him off. Then she worked a pinkie into the back of her gums to dislodge something. See food, dickhead. “It’s a good paper. I may publish it when this semester ends. I’ve already queried Faith and Philosophy. They’re interested.”
“I’m sure—”
“Excuse me, Doct . . . David. I’m not quite finished.”
“Well, go ahead,” he said, cornered and put out.
“My roommate’s a law student. Last night, she and I reviewed Title XII and Title IX together, as well as the Education Amendments of 1972.”
“Wha—”
“They cover sexual harassment. And while I am not intending to file a complaint against anyone, I believe you might be soliciting a relationship that goes beyond grad school collegiality.”
“But—”
“If I’m wrong, I apologize in advance. David. But for the record, I have neither the intention nor the desire to sleep with you, now or in the future. So, from this point forward, I’ll ask that our intercourse with each other be of the academic and professional kind. That means that any further attempts to seek personal information or personal contact with me will be unwelcome, and therefore fall within the scope of the law.”
Sam’s legal verbiage sounded pretty tough. The scope of the law. Ooooooooh!
Ryan drew himself up in his chair, feet were flat on the floor now, his little hands clamped onto the edge of the table like a squirrel at a bird feeder. His eyes had narrowed into slits, and his mouth — which she looked at now — was a straight, cold line.
“There’s no need for you to be bellicose,” he stated. “I’ll certainly maintain a professional distance if that’s your wish. We came to discuss your paper. Which I think needs work. I know you have a perfect scholastic record, and I assume you want to retain it. I was just trying to help you do that.”
“Dr. Ryan, I’m eighteen. I look even younger, so people jump to conclusions. I’m not worried about the quality of my paper. I know the grade it deserves, and I know you’ll be fair. Because if my grade is questionable, I’ll formally challenge it, which will include a paper trail. I’ll be writing a memorandum for record of this encounter today when I get home. It’ll be witnessed by my roommate, a law student. I don’t want to file an actual complaint. Not because I’m worried about my scholastic record, but because I’d worry about you.”
“Is that a threat?”
“No, Dr. Ryan . . . David. I’d never put anyone in the position of having been publicly accused of improper advances toward me. I’d be terrified that it would get back to my father.”
She suddenly realized that this did sound like a threat. She regretted it the second it was said, like a girly-girl calling on a male relative to defend her honor. Her concern, though, was exactly as stated.
“Your father?” He’d swelled up, sleeve tats hopping, gym muscles contracting, his lats spreading under the polo shirt. “What about your father?”
“I love my dad. I don’t wanna see him in prison.”
“And who is your father?”
CHAPTER 4
Brachial artery hit
Ojo De Agua, Yuscaran, Honduras
June 27, 2009
Sunset burned through the lace of the western tree line. Distant peasants cast long flickering shadows as they ambled back from the fields with their bags, machetes, and hoes. Their dusty footpaths trailed through motley patches of green — cassava here, maize there, beans. One farmer stood in his boxers by a pump outside his one-room cinderblock home with a bucket of water taking his bath before nightfall.
Dale watched through binoculars.
The bathing man, middle aged by the look of him with a wispy Indian beard, was like an actor in a silent film. He’d sink the dipper into the bucket, lift a panful of sun-warmed water and pour it over his coarse hair, rinsing a surf line of soap off his face, over his chest, into his skivvies and down his legs. He was wiry, brown, and veined — sculpted by labor, sun, and simple food. He circled his face with a callused palm, wiping the water out of his eyes.
Dale killed time with dull voyeurism. Other people at least have remotes.
Maybe forty minutes until dark, he figured, the dying afternoon saturating the damp air with a subdued citrine radiance. Primera Brigada’s base lay in the valley, two klicks from his position just above Rio Cangrejal.
Dale felt something crawling under him, jolted when he saw the beetle, and swatted it before he registered it was harmless. The illusion of control is always in danger of being unmasked, he thought to himself, his heart decelerating. Settling himself with a deep breath, he dropped back onto his belly.
Someday he’d be done with this shit, with heat and cold and sweat and bugs and grime and the hundred other little physical miseries that made him a “good soldier.” He’d be done with the rest, too, with accumulating sins that ravaged his sleep. With fear, frustration, and regret.
“It’s the job,” he repeated to himself, taking some resolve from the strength of his reputation. It was a con he pulled on himself. When the rest didn’t make any sense, he aimed at that external reward, where he warmed himself on his special competence and the admiration of his fellows, that thin compensation for all he took and could never give back.
Vanity, he found himself thinking, the ultimate counterfeit currency. A grift you pass along to the next fool. Reputation, not prayer, is the last refuge of executioners.
More and more these days, he skirmished with self-doubt, with the sense that he was a vicious pretender, a fraud making his reputation with corpses. It was solace, but scant solace, that he’d at least fooled them all, these men, his comrades, who paid him with admiration, approval, and rationalization for doing his fucking job.
Seized with an urge to shit, he knew it was because the clock was running. Fight or flight, his body rebelling, a self-critical flip, like the insomnia when you worry about not sleeping or the near irresistibility of sleep when you’re forced to remain awake. The body rebelling against the mind’s evasions and denials.
A storm of mosquitoes shared his shade and whined in his ears. He opened the greasy plastic container of DEET, the Army’s supercharged, thirty-percent stuff that melted the labeling off the plastic bottle. He squeezed a stream into his palm, rubbed his hands together, and patted the toxic-smelling oil onto his neck, the fumes stinging his eyes. He thought about malaria, about protozoa, about the doxycycline circulating in his blood, about the drug’s toxicity in his liver. About photosensitivity, melanoma . . . too much thinking, like the mosquitoes were pitching around inside his brain. More matter with less art, the Queen said.
He pulled the long-gun to his shoulder, he and the gun united now by a purpose. He thought about closet doors, about opposable thumbs, about statues of angels, the flight characteristics of feathers, demolition formulas, a painting called “Piss-Christ,” Entamoeba histolytica. Madame, I swear, I use no art at all.
Through the Leupold scope he inspected the southern quadrant of the Honduran Army base that straddled the valley. Most of the buildings were vanilla white with red tile roofs and tank-cisterns mounted on rusty angle iron alongside them. The grounds were well kept by conscripts who earned less than three hundred dollars a month. “His” building was painted a queasy official yellow. Built in the style of the old U.S. World War II longhouse barracks, two stories were separated by a wrap-around eave of red tile, creating the illusion of a second roof bisecting the structure. Under one of the eaves, an elegant spider’s web was incandescent in the rays of the falling sun.
The old barracks had been converted into office space, the interior subdivided by office panels. Through his scope, Dale picked out desks, computers, a chubby female secretary sitting in a calico skirt and a cleavage-heavy tank top, glasses on a neck-tether, black hair in a single ropey braid. Three sets of unknown legs appeared, disappeared, reappeared — one in uniform, two wearing jeans. Four window air-conditioning units, two up and two down, gathered dust in their intakes, the condensation forming dirty puddles underneath them. The retreating sun suddenly hit one window like a flare, and he flinched, shifting the scope. A half-dozen song wrens picked through a raked-up pile of leaf litter across the driveway looping around the building. A beat-to-hell white Mitsubishi pickup truck was parked in the driveway in the front of what he knew from his intelligence briefing was the operations building, Primera Brigada’s G-3.
The last wink of the sun disappeared and the windows went from embers to ash, leaving the valley enveloped in a yellow-green afterglow, reminding Dale of tornado weather in North Carolina. He started to check his watch, then stopped, pushing down his impatience . . . surrender, someone else makes the next move.
He’d begun to worry that someone would step on his hide site, a wandering child or a curious dog. He’d occupied it for more than an hour now, the rental van parked three kilometers away at Hotel Lenca.
Through the scope, he saw three soldados loitering by the Brigade vegetable garden while they smoked. A tall, slender young officer revved a smoky old Yamaha 250 in front of the Brigade Headquarters, then buzzed away along the winding driveway to the main road. Looking dusty and unused, a lone Chinook helicopter, Honduran flag painted on its side, sat on the airfield above the headquarters. Most of the troops were away, transported in trucks to key locations, he assumed, or locked down.
Something big was happening, he didn’t know what; but this hide, this mission, were part of it. He shifted the scope back onto the operations building. The door opened, and two men laughed at something together as they blocked the door, then jogged down the steps to the scarred and dented white Mitsubishi. The athletic one, with wide-set eyes and a week’s worth of beard, wore pressed jeans and a t-shirt. He was lean and muscular with a .45 tucked into his waistband. Dale found something familiar about him, he wasn’t sure what. The other man climbed into the driver’s seat. He was squat, dark, his receding hair cut short, and he had a mustache. He wore blue work slacks and checkered short-sleeve shirt.
Dale focused, grinding his belly into the leaves to stabilize himself. The window closest to the door at the left end of the building went white. Someone had closed the blinds. His signal that the roadblocks were about to go into place. The mission had a green light.
He reached into the Molle pack he was using as a bench rest for the gun and removed the camera from the outside pocket to secure it in the left breast pocket.
Two kilometers away, the Mitsubishi coughed out a haze of oily smoke, then rattled away with both men. The truck was already in motion by the time the sound of the engine cranking reached Dale. Deep, calming breath. This was it.
The truck grumbled up a long, steep curve on the southwestern slope of “Hill 692,” a metric spot elevation on Dale’s map. The mustachioed driver downshifted, grinding the gears to gain torque up the slope. The truck had only just crested the ridge, when Dale’s first shot drilled the driver straight through the windshield and emptied his skull onto the back of the cab. The body dropped forward, hollow head falling between the steering wheel and door.
The passenger, eyes wide in shock, grabbed the dashboard and the back of his seat to brace himself as the truck angled slowly off the road. The front wheel dropped into a shallow roadside ditch and the truck did a slow-motion quarter-roll to the left, coming to rest with the driver’s side down. The passenger flopped heavily onto the body beneath him. Again, that momentary delay before Dale heard a dismayed bawl.
A 350-yard shot.
The passenger was unhurt but agitated, thrashing behind the shattered windshield. Then he got his bearings. Dale could see it, that return of self-disciplinary calm. I have to get my shit together and get out of here! The passenger started climbing up through the skyward window, shirt painted with his companion’s blood. He hoisted himself up through the window with a tricep-dip, sidearm catching on the window frame. He wiggled the pistol grip loose, and his hips had cleared the window aperture, when Dale’s second shot went through his arm and chest. He went limp as a rag, flapping forward over the edge of the window, legs still hanging in the cab. Dale watched through the scope as a ropy stream of bright red arterial blood poured down over the hanging right hand, a spreading scarlet pool forming in the bare dust.
Brachial artery hit, Dale guessed, the focus on something clinical diverting him from thoughts of fainting mothers, funerals, screaming children . . . his own child looking at him with accusing eyes. He capped his lenses, stood up, shrugged the Molle pack on, slung the rifle, and began picking his way through the brush.
He scrambled clumsily up the last five, steeply eroded meters, losing his footing like a toddler trying to climb a playground slide. Finally, gathering enough momentum to grab a thick root, he hauled himself onto a little perch that was covered in thorny shrubs, holding his rifle out to prevent damaging the scope or plugging the barrel.
He listened for the sound of vehicles approaching. There were none. The roadblocks were in, sealing him away from accountability as a double murderer. His mission required confirmation photographs, up close. He caught the breeze-blown smell of brains, blood, and shit as he danced between thorn bushes.
As he pulled the camera out of his pocket, he saw gluey sap on his left palm from the root he’d used as a handhold.
“Fuck. Fuck.”
He wiped his hand hard against his trouser leg, then pressed his palm into the dust on the road shoulder to neutralize the tack.
“Goddamnit!”
The flies were already on them, the agglutinating blood like a homing signal, or a dinner bell.
Food for flies, it’s all we are.
Angling the camera through the shattered windshield, he twisted his sticky hand in to raise the strangely off-kilter face of the dead driver, a face now unsupported by an intact skull. Dale tamped down his nausea at the smell of brains. He hated that sweet marsh odor worse than the shit and the blood. He blew hard on the corpse’s face to disperse the flies. He snapped a photo. The flash went off. He took one more just to be sure.
Dale circled the vehicle. Holding the camera in his right hand, now, he reached under the passenger’s forehead — this one his actual target. He grasped the heavy shock of black hair in his sticky hand, and raised the head to photograph the dead man.
He froze, staring into a familiar face, a face that denounced him, while a fat fly crawled onto one vacant, unresponsive eye. Dale didn’t even wave away the flies on his own face, marking him with their bloody footprints. In the fading twilight the flash went off again. And again.
CHAPTER 5
Catrachos
Toncontin International Airport
Tegucigalpa, Honduras
June 29, 2009
Dale showed black diplomatic credentials to a childlike Honduran sergeant standing next to the airport scanner. The mustard orange diplomatic pouch in his left hand sagged under its ponderous metallic weight. His hand was still stained with sap, even after oiling it, rubbing it with alcohol and washing it repeatedly in the cold hotel shower.
Waving Dale around the scanner, the Honduran sergeant tried to look flinty, a victim of his own youthful insecurity. This was plainly not his job. As if this isn’t fucking obvious, Dale muttered as he was led around the scanner, his guns dismantled in the oversized diplomatic pouch.
He’d greeted this sleepless morning with the disposition of a crippled bull shark, skipping breakfast to make his flight. He headed up to the mezzanine deck with the little restaurant, Tipicos de la Costa, and sat down, wiping sweat off his face with his suit sleeve.
Lugging fucking guns and fucking carry-on up the fucking stairs wearing a fucking three-piece suit! He hated the stairs, hated the suit, hated the sun and the fucking moon.
When the camarera came over, a late-teen mestiza with crooked teeth and a reassuring self-confidence that reminded him of Deangela, Dale regained his composure enough to be polite when he ordered a balaeda with avocado on the side. Then he saw the first one walking across the terminal below him.
Tall and blond, like the big-boned Scots from the Sandhills back home, this new arrival was tanned and coiffed, wearing his spanking-new “casual” guayabera. With a fucking badge, no less. A badge around his neck! The logo was a blue and white globe, and the letters read: “AT&T. Dan Campbell.” Dale’s sniper-eyes could read it from the mezz-deck. Dan fucking Campbell was here from AT& fucking T.
“Seriously?” he said to no one.
Must be a public utility for sale. Who would AT&T pay? Dale checked his mental list of possibles from the ruling families: Ferraris, Canajuatis, Atalas, Nássers, Kattáns, Facussés, Lippmans, Flores . . . fuck knows. He picked up a copy of La Prensa from another table. A remarkably well-prepared headline story for something that had happened only hours before. Presidente Zelaya was out, flown away to parts unknown under cover of darkness after being dragged out of bed in his underwear.
¡Adios, Presidente!
And every fucking plane flies out right on time!
The U.S. Air Force’s Sotocano Air Base was buttoned up for Zelaya’s flight out of there, the reason Dale had to fly back commercial with his fake-ass diplomatic credentials. Would any so-called journalist ask the question, how did they fly him out of an American air base if the U.S. was “surprised” by the coup?
Then he saw the second and the third. More tanned, Arizona types with their “exotic Honduras” safari duds on and their conventioneer’s badges. Unembarrassed by the shamelessness of it. Did they need badges? Fuckin’ A, why not t-shirts screen-printed to say, “We’re the gringo pricks who are gonna run your fucking telecommunications, you catracho pipsqueaks.”
The camera was in Dale’s pouch with the corpse flicks, war porn for his bosses. He had a Macbeth moment about his sap-stained hand. Out damned spot!
He was calm in the most disciplined way possible now, moving himself like a marionette. Eating like a real boy, he moved his arm, opened his hand, grasped the balaeda that the camarera set before him — “¡Gracias, hermanita!” — leaned in, took a bite, but there they were, in his peripheral vision, more coming. And Frank’s face. Frank’s dead face in the camera, with the nameless driver, the camera in the pouch, the pouch at the airport, and him due at “the chalet” tomorrow morning straight off the red-eye.
How the fuck am I going to get through DC? They will see, someone would see that he was a stack of sandbags being chewed up by silent machine guns — something dissolving, disappearing into chaos.
What have I done? Oh, Farah, what the fuck have I done now?
*
Monkey River Village, Belize
May 12, 1990
South of the Monkey River delta, Abner Dale and Farah Gillet sat in the darkness while the waves stroked the beach. Wearing only swimsuits, they nursed two sweating bottles of Belikin lager. A quarter moon played peek-a-boo behind a shifting patchwork of clouds, giving the two lovers luminous lavender outlines. A howler monkey bellowed like a distant elephant from the forest behind them. Another answered. They heard a distant splash in the ocean among the glassy flakes of moonlight and a low cacophony of frogs upriver. The air smelled of bay cedar and low tide. A sprinkle of lights studded the village to their north.
Farah took his hand slipped it into her bikini bottom where she pressed it over the mound of rough hair. She didn’t say anything. He held very still. Like they were sharing blood. She rose, pulled him wordlessly to his feet, and walked him into the waves until they were waist deep in warm, undulating water. Farah pulled him to her and kissed him for a long time. They were breathing together. Her mouth was soft, yielding, hot, and aqueous. He felt himself disappear.
“Can I trust you?” she whispered after a while. He waited for a long time, feeling the waves caress their legs. They were conjoined at the belly, like cells that wouldn’t split. He looked into her eyes in the lavender glow, wanting to freeze time.
“I think so,” he said. “I want you to.”
She took his hand and led him further into the warm swells.
CHAPTER 6
Semicolon
Combat Applications Group (CAG) Compound
Fort Bragg, North Carolina
June 30, 2009
“The chalet” they called it, housing what was once called Delta Force; but the wide recognition and the general silliness of Hollywood had compelled a change to something more sedative: Combat Applications Group. Of course, everyone knew that now, too. Its founder, Colonel Charlie Beckwith, had warned the original members: “If you wanna keep a secret, don’t tell anybody.”
Then he wrote a book.
That was the beginning of the age of endless self-reference, thought Dale, of everyone feeling like they were captured in a camera lens, of the self-conscious shift from outcome to performance. There’s a kid in everyone, apparently, shouting at a preoccupied parent, Look at me! while diving off the one-meter board.
When I was a child, I used to speak like a child, think like a child, reason like a child; when I became a man, I did away with childish things.
Dale carded into the headquarters and walked straight to Boss’s office — Colonel Richard “Dicky” Baker. Here, he was just “Boss,” “Dicky” behind his back, even “the Big Dick.” In response to unpopular commands, “Dick Head.” Baker was an Anglophile, crazy for British shit. The 22 SAS, CAG’s British counterpart, used “Boss” for its officers, so Baker liked being called “Boss.” From time to time, he used terms like “bloody” and “mate,” forcing his interlocutors to conceal their awkward embarrassment. Dale was suddenly seized by the unsettling idea (or epiphany?) that everyone he’d been working with here for years, each in his own special way, had a screw loose. Crazy as shithouse flies, all of us!
He looked in the office. Boss wasn’t there. Dale poked his head into Regina’s office — Dicky’s secretary.
“Where’s Boss?”
Regina looked up through hugely thick glasses and gave Dale a squinty smile.
“A.D.! You’re back! How are ya, sweetie?”
“I’m fine, you?” A.D. was feeling impatient, but he couldn’t be rude to a Southern grandmother, even if she had a Top-Secret clearance and knowingly worked for thugs, torturers, and assassins.
“Oh, another day another five dollars, A.D.,” she smiled. “Thanks for askin’. Colonel Baker’s swimmin’ his laps, hon.”
Dale was still dressed in the navy-blue Brooks three-piece he’d worn from the airport. When he went through the door of the indoor pool’s locker room, he was enveloped in a miasma of chlorine and ass cracks. His heart raced in anticipation of a confrontation with Dicky, and he was sweating like a quarter horse.
Between the acting of a dreadful thing
And the first motion, all the interim is
Like a phantasma or a hideous dream.
The Bard, always hectoring him. Breathe big breaths.
He took off his jacket as he approached his commander on Lane 3. A new guy from B Squadron was in Lane 6, and an old head from C Squadron was kick-turning in Lane 7. Baker nearly missed Dale standing poolside at the deep end. Baker had started his kick-turn, then leveled out to tread water, pushing up his goggles. He smiled, thinning hair plastered to the sides of his head.
“Welcome back, A.D.” Crossed his arms on the gutter below Dale’s feet. “I hear it went well.” He looked up at Dale immediately knew something was wrong when Dale refused to return a smile. He’s sweating like rats fucking in a wool sock, thought Boss, knowing that very instant that something had gone sideways with his operator.
“We need to talk, Boss.”
Fuck me, thought Boss. Something’s happened, and he’s losing the fucking thread.
He’d seen that look — when they couldn’t separate the squares and circles and triangles any more. And A.D. was one of his best. Old as a tyrannosaur in this business, which was a good thing. Older guys, they didn’t get impulsive on you. Now Dale had The Look, like his compass was busted. Shame. A goddamn shame!
“What’s that shit on your hand, A.D.?”
*
Boss wore a thick white bathrobe and a pair of forty-dollar flip-flops he’d bought from Whole Foods in Raleigh when he and his wife, Nadine, went to the Comedy Club — a massive disappointment that cost them two-hundred dollars and two hours driving he could never get back. He toweled off what was left of his graying blond hair, frizzing it like a deranged professor, his barrel chest covered in a mat of pale fur. This morning’s shave had left his cheeks scratched and raw.
Two large framed posters adorned his office. One was a 22 Special Air Squadron assault team lined up to breach a door, with the caption, “Stand-by, stand-by.” The other was a pen-and-ink print of a military free fall parachutist in full kit, poised mid-air in a hard arch.
Dale loosened his tie, eyes locked on Boss in a challenge, shirt soaked. And that unhinged look!
“My target,” said Dale, folding his arms. “You named him Reynaldo Gutierrez.”
Boss paused for a second and laid the towel on the edge of the desk, leaning back against it with his legs extended. The look, and this, too! It’s gonna to be a really, truly, shitty, fucked up day. Boss crossed his feet.
“Named him?” He didn’t know why he even responded.
“His name was Frank Garcia,” Dale said, his voice flat, “and I was with him in 3rd Bat. He was on the ground with me in Mogadishu. I just killed a former Ranger. What the fuck? Boss.”
“He wasn’t a solider anymore,” Dicky said, wondering how this prior association had fallen through the cracks. I’m gonna march right up intel’s ass once this has been handled and drop a fucking grenade. “Not ours anyway. Not anyone’s exactly. Fuck, A.D!” That goddamn look! Nuts with a secret. Shitty fucking day. And he had to take Nadine — that high-maintenance bitch! — to Sherefe for seafood tonight, too.
“Why?” Dale again demanded in that curiously neutral voice.
Boss stood erect, rocked once on his feet, took a deep breath, and let it out as he circled the desk, furrowing his brow as he dropped into his swivel chair.
“Why?” Dale repeated.
Boss reached in his desk drawer, pulled out a thick cigar, rolled it between his palms and bit off the tip. This is the top-secret Delta Force headquarters, and my fucking office, and I’ll smoke if I goddam well want to.
He spat the tip on the floor, reached back in the drawer, fished out an old-fashioned Zippo lighter, and flicked on a great, lolling flame that made the whole room smell like lighter fluid. Sucked until a good ember was established, and blew out a long stream of appreciative smoke that smelled vaguely like vanilla.
Closing the lighter with a metallic snap, he said, “What do you want me to say, A.D.? You got a mission. You done good.” Looking away for an instant, he muttered, “Goddamn.”
“Why?” Dale repeated.
Looking at the cigar with mock appreciation, Boss said, “Dominican. Impregnated with vanilla. You can buy a piece of pussy there for the price of a Big Mac. Flavored fuckin’ cigars.” He laughed. “I was a wino in a past life. You could make a fortune importin’ these things.” Then he looked Dale straight in the eyes. “Why. Why, why, why, you fuckin’ drama queen. ‘Why’ is a fucking noun or a fucking adverb. You studied English in college, right, Sergeant Dale?”
There was a warning in the use of his rank.
Boss drove on.
“Why, the noun: reason or explanation. Adverb: wherefore or what for.” Subtext to the warning: I’m smart, too, motherfucker; and I outrank you. “Used in a sentence: Ours is not to reason why; ours is but to do and die.” His eyes went all big and clownish to say that part. “Actually, that’s a compound sentence without the coordinating conjunction. This would be signified in writing, I believe, with a semicolon.” Boss puffed the cigar. “Heard that before? Not to reason why! You’re a fuckin’ soldier! You don’t ask goddamn questions!” Their eyes were now locked.
“I killed Frank. Another man, too.” Dale’s voice rose, not to a parade field pitch, but it had a brass edge on it. “Two days later there’s a coup? I’m comin’ back through Tegu Airport and I see AT&T on parade? Wearing fuckin’ badges that say ‘AT&T’? With that little fuckin’ blue and white globe? Did I just shoot a former comrade for AT&T?”
Coup, Boss heard. Sonofabitch! He really, really did not like that look — that madcap aura.
“A.D., two things, and shut the fuck up while I say ’em and listen. Number one, lower your fuckin’ voice, or I’ll beat your ass and we’ll both go to jail. Two, you gotta lose that word. Coup. You hear me? We’re gonna get you some time off, Master Sergeant Dale. You need a vacation. Name it. But, this . . . this is a health warning like on a pack of cigarettes, hear? Smoke this and die. There is no such word as ‘coup.’ Honduras is having a ‘constitutional crisis’. Don’t start . . .”
Both fell silent while a hulking C-5 cargo jet swept overhead, low and loud. The sound faded slowly. Dale’s eyes never left Boss’s. Dale lowered his voice.
“The elected President of Honduras was just pulled out of bed in his fuckin’ tighty-whiteys and put on a plane at a United States Air Force installation?”
Boss responded in his quiet voice to mirror Dale’s.
“You are not hearin’ me, Sergeant. Ten years in the Fort Leavenworth Federal Penitentiary says you will delete the term ‘coup’ from your got-damn vocabulary.”
And so, the conversation reached an impasse.
“I’m done, Boss,” Dale broke the silence. “I’ll have my paperwork requesting reassignment by close of business.” Dale put one hand on the doorknob. “My D-LAT’s say I’m qualified. I’d like my vacation in Monterrey at the Language Institute, please. Get the stench of this criminal fuckin’ institution offa me. Then you can keep me quiet, like those little dogs with their voice boxes removed by little-doggie surgeons. Fuck you, Dicky, and everything about this place. You wanna beat my ass now? Have at it. Delta farce . . . we follow the flag, and the flag follows the cash. Maybe AT&T’ll give us some free minutes on our fuckin’ phones.”
Dale didn’t wait for a reply, and he didn’t close the door when he left.
Dicky exhaled relief in a smoky vanilla sigh, smirking as he picked up his desk phone. This was good. A.D. could cool his heels in California for a year. Good save. Give him a medal before he leaves. And some motherfucker was in the hot seat for not researching who in this unit had served with that turncoat commie cocksucker, Garcia.
CHAPTER 7
Bakhtawara and Storai
Afghanistan, near Kabul
July 10, 2010
Storai spotted one of the kids prancing toward the wadi. If the mother-doe followed, the whole herd would drift down, and she was too small to carry the bigger kids if they slid down the escarpment. Palming a stone the size of a pheasant’s egg, she bounced it in her palm twice for luck and snapped a throw. The stone kipped off a boulder in front of the wayward kid. The kid skip-turned, capering back toward the mother-goat. The kid tried to suckle, but the doe turned away, and the kid followed, both tacking toward the rest of the herd.
Three shaggy rams stood watch in a cluster, one black-and-white and two browns, the old brown one with the looping horns the unchallenged master.
Storai lived with her mother, Bakhtawara, a widow, in the only house across the wadi from the rest of Zama, a village with only thirty-three souls. Three wadis, actually, which converged just below Zama, edged with scrub cedar, thistle, and camelthorn. Their house was a faded ochre, built with sun-dried bricks and mud plaster under timber and cob roofs with high open windows to ventilate the cooking fire. Every house in Zama was smaller than ten meters square, and they roughly circled a well in the center of the village. Bakhtawara and Storai’s house perched precariously next to a short drop-off, but it was well-founded on two layers of solid sandstone flags the color of dry ginger.
Storai raised her eyes up to the bluffs south of their home, at the walls and concertina wire surrounding the giant American base in whose shadow they now lived, settled on the plateau above like a city-sized alien craft.
Casting two more stones, Storai turned the herd of fourteen further from the wadi and tugged her headscarf forward to shade her eyes again from the early morning sun. She glanced back at her mother to see if she had seen how well she could throw, but her mother, was intent on removing a stain from her uncle’s tunban in a bright blue plastic tub of water, wetting it, then rubbing it vigorously between work-thickened hands, then wetting it again.
Bakhtawara’s yellow chadar was covered in fading red dots, patterned like jackal tracks, the ends flipped over each shoulder to keep them out of the water. The wind fluttered the folds of her shalwar around her legs. Smoke mounted from the high window on the front of their home, and with it the smell of hot garlic in the naan, onions, and coriander in the soup. Storai wanted hands like that, like her mother’s — strong hands, capable. If she kept working hard, when she was older, she would have them.
Storai was fourteen now and might be married soon. Her father was dead, killed in an airstrike two years ago when he was trading near Jalalabad, but her uncle had a good reputation, so there was still hope of a kwezhdan, a betrothal. She was pretty, so said her mother, as well as a good singer, and she was virtuous — pleasing to Allah in thought and deed. Her three older brothers were already married. Her late sister had been married, too, to a handsome boy named Pasoon, from Chelozai, who was fighting now somewhere near Khost.
Inshallah, she might someday have children. There was time.
She had no blood yet. Her sister had blood when she was thirteen, but died with her first child at sixteen. Her mother said Storai was stronger than her sister, that having blood later made a woman stronger.
Overhead, a cargo jet roared toward the landing field at the American base on the plateau, jet engines screaming so loudly as it passed that the goats began bleating and stamping their feet. The jet receded, dropping onto the distant landing strip like a great vulture. Storai gathered wisps of dry grass into her pockets for fuel and sang to the goats about the creatures in Ali Baba’s Garden. Her singing pacified the goats.
*
Camp Virtue, Afghanistan
July 10, 2010
“She’s just startin’ to grow titties.”
Gene Pollard peered through binoculars at the girl with the goats. He and Correa had drawn the short straw in the guard rotation and were last night’s designees to man the North-1 Observation Post. Both of them had removed their stale uniform blouses, draped them over the wall to air out before their relief arrived, and stashed their “battle rattle” combat vests and MICH helmets on the floor. There was a good breeze looking out over high bluff, chilly in the morning with updrafts. They sat on grimy plastic lawn chairs. Gene Pollard leaned his elbows on the formed-concrete slab across the front of the guard bunker. There was a hollow storage space below, with a collection of well-used smut mags. Bobby, their acting Team Sergeant, sometimes challenged the rest of the team to guess which ones had his spunk on them.
Kellogg, Brown & Root had built this observation post, just like they’d built all of Camp Virtue, just like they’d built every other overseas military installation since Camranh Bay of Vietnam yesteryear.
Camp Virtue. How that name was chosen was a mystery, but the troops had a ready supply of humorous riffs on it. Favorite quotes among the SF boys: “Virtue is its own punishment.” Or, “There are no angels in Los Angeles, and there is no virtue in Camp Virtue.” Or, “When Tao is lost, there is virtue. When virtue is lost, there is morality. When morality is lost, there is propriety. When propriety is lost, there is chaos, and Colonel Thomas is assigned.” Even Special Forces had its geek humor.
The bunker was reinforced concrete with rocket-propelled-grenade (RPG) screens on the sides, as if anyone could get within range with a shoulder-fired rocket. Galvanized roof on I-beams, with three layers of sandbags on top, and nothing but busted plastic lawn chairs to sit on. This shitty little pillbox probably cost the taxpayers a couple jillion dollars. Thousand apiece for these cheap-ass Walmart patio chairs. They’d painted the outside of the OP desert camouflage, funny enough on its own, as if no one could see this metastasized Masada of a base overflown by a giant bright red, white, and blue U.S. flag . . . to give mortar crews a reference point for adjusting fire — another well-worn joke among the troops.
“No men?” asked Pedro Correa. Correa took shit from the rest of his detachment about his obsessive indisposition to sunlight. A light-skinned Puerto Rican with a mighty aversion to becoming darker. But here in the shade of the bunker he could let the post-dawn breeze blow the stink off of him without worrying that his arms might turn a shade too brown.
“Not today,” answered Pollard. “I think that one dude is her uncle or somethin’. Never stays. Ain’t seen him in forever.” He passed the binoculars back to Pedro and took a swallow of canned Coke while he dreamed of the strong, hot coffee they were missing at the DFAC. Pollard rocked back on the back legs of the plastic chair, bowing it precariously, and lit a smoke.
Pedro stopped focusing the field glasses long enough to complain.
“Fuck, dude! I don’t wanna breathe your tobacco!”
“I’m downwind, chill.” Gene blew a stream of Marlboro smoke straight ahead and watched the wind bend it away to prove his point. Fuckin’ health freak!
“Just a mouthful of titty,” Pedro said, peering through the field glasses again. “I could hold that little ass in one hand, man.” Pedro liked to talk like he was a real Newyorican, but everyone on Detachment 6246 knew that he’d grown up on Long Island with a well-to-do daddy in the insurance business.
“So, we doin’ this?” Gene queried.
“Yo, my man on the gate got us covered. But we got a new team daddy comin’.”
“Good,” said Gene, studying the tip of his cigarette like there was a bug on it, then gazing across the valley at the stone house and the girl with her mother. “Bernie was a fuckin’ slug.”
“Bobby’s okay, man.” Pedro put down the binoculars, picked up his shirt, smelled it, and put it on.
“Bobby’s cool, alright. For goin’ to the whorehouse. Or runnin’ these bullshit recons,” said Pollard. “But we can’t get no missions with Bobby as team daddy. He’s got no ops experience. We’re nothin’ but humps for blood-n-guts Boyd.” The nickname for Colonel Boyd Thomas, their bombastic, foul-mouthed Task Force commander, the subject of the last stanza of the bastardized Tao joke. “Maybe if we get this Delta-boy, Dillon or whatever the fuck his name is, we can get some real shit.”
“Dale, I think it is. And careful what you wish for, homey.”
CHAPTER 8
Wilbur didn’t want food
Weymouth Woods State Park, North Carolina
June 29, 2010
An overnight drizzle had humidified the daybreak. The air was close, like a steam room. Eighty degrees by the time Deangela pulled the parking brake on her ratty, once-white Echo at 8:16 A.M. The overhead haze was dissolving, the sun still screened in the trees. Daddy hopped out of the passenger side, pulled his pack off the floor, and slung it. Deangela cut the engine, climbed out, and pocketed her keys in a venerable pair of baggy Levi’s.
The Echo was the only car in the parking lot. The forest surrounded them in tall straight columns, ground blackened from controlled burns. Three laminated trailhead maps were posted on mossy signposts, the four-by-four posts slowly and relentlessly being consumed by termites.
Deangela flipped up the seat back and grabbed her daypack out of the back, a black-on-gray Lowepro like Daddy’s. His birthday present to her three years ago. Binoculars, spotting scope, camera, field-book, drink, poncho, first aid kit, and snacks were separated into padded compartments. She locked her door, shouldered the pack, and double-checked the hatch lock.
Dale watched her, his head clearing from another “episode.” People, places, and things shifted nowadays, like blocks knocked over, the spaces filled with something soft and dirty like the contents of a vacuum cleaner. His skin would pick up a low-frequency buzz, and he’d have to breathe and count and be very still — a living man trying to remain calm after coming awake in a closed grave.
Looking now at his daughter, he remembered Deangela’s birth — Farah puffed up and sweating with exertion as the infant’s head, body, and feet slithered out on the slippery blue umbilical cord in a flash-flood of blood and water. He’d seen Farah in her even then, her newborn head still compressed like a peanut, her puce skin wrinkled as an old fisherman.
“What?” she demanded when she caught him gazing. He looked down with a guilty smile. “Come on, Daddy,” she smirked. “Birds await.”
Her shirt was more thrift store boodle, a purple tee with a dinosaur head and the word “Philosoraptor.” Knockoff sunglasses, worn across her forehead, held back her hair, a mass of chestnut tentacles. She was short like his people with Farah’s skeletal angularity and soft African facial features. Her complexion, in the shade of the waking forest, was dark honey. Her carelessness of appearance was a constant concern for her Belizean aunts, if not her mother. Her father found it endearing . . . and reassuring.
“Daddy!” She interrupted his reverie again. “You’re making me self-conscious. Let’s go.”
*
“Oh, I got one. Got it. Oh, it’s a . . . warbler. Wait. Uh . . . Blackburnian warbler!” Four chirps and a longer tseeee. “Hear it?”
“Yeah, yeah,” he answered, scanning with his binoculars. “I got it. I hear it anyway.” Dale caught a flicker of motion and a flash of light. Sniper’s eyes, they reached out and took hold, grasping like fingers.
Capture.
Death.
Full fathom five thy father lies . . . those are pearls that were his eyes.
He tried not to lose his place among the foliage. Deangela had her field glasses up, aimed and locked.
“Where?” he asked.
“Gum tree, third of the way up, thick bifurcation.”
They’d committed list after list to memory together as part of her home education. Birds, naturally, but also trees, plants, leaf morphologies, anatomy and physiology, state and national capitals, table of elements, cloud types, weights and measures, the plays (and characters) of Shakespeare (Daddy’s college idol), dog breeds, greetings in dozens of languages, rivers of the world, heads of state, the one hundred county seats of North Carolina, makes and models of cars, butterflies and moths, constellations. She’d become a taxonomy archive, and he with her. Something that was theirs, together, augmenting the endeavors of her childhood tutor, Theodora Hall, whose pay had consumed a goodly portion of A.D.’s and Farah’s salaries for more than ten years.
“Got it!” He rolled the focus ring, pulling the outlines tight. “Pretty. Female.” The white ring under its eye gave the warbler a permanent scowl. Her head popped and rotated. A squirrel gamboling nearby startled the warbler. The bird abandoned their optical fields in a flicker of black and gold.
“Oh,” Deangela lamented. “She’s gone.”
They sat up. Last night’s rain had softened the leaves and deadfall, and they stalked over silent ground. Positioned upwind of a minor swamp, hoping to avoid mosquitoes, they were bothered by only a few. The ground beyond them was pancake-flat for the most part, the forest soothingly monotonous in its piney uniformity, the eccentric hardwoods concentrated only as saplings in the folds. They always sought the little topographical draws, with their boundary niches, intruding hardwoods, and mixed understories. Boundaries were where the action was. A strip of scrub oak gave them good cover, where they could avoid being stained by ground char from this Spring’s controlled burn. They reclined on their sides alongside a stump crater, facing each other like mirror images and twisting their bodies to scan for a few minutes.
Dale sat up abruptly and reached in his day pack, pulling out two thick sandwiches. He held one out to Deangela.
“Hungry?”
“Oh,” she sat up. “I’m hungry enough to eat cat shit.”
“That’s good. I’m pretty sure that’s what this is.”
They laughed a bit, then he looked around as if he had forgotten something.
“You ever noticed,” he asked, “how when you watch one of those TV comedies and pay attention to just the laugh track, it makes you feel like the fraud?”
*
April 2, 1993
Phoenix City, Alabama
“Wilbur didn’t want food, he wanted love. He wanted a friend.”
Charlotte’s Web, Deangela’s favorite first birthday present. She’d peered into it, turning the pages forward and backward, backward and forward. They’d recognized her precocity early. Walking at six and a half months. Chattering in complete sentences at seven, mostly about food, but “hold me” was a recurrent phrase, as were the names of animals. Her favorite word at eleven months was the name of a nearby river, Chattahoochee. She’d titter when she said it.
Dale opened the apartment door, a green gym bag over his shoulder, still in uniform that Friday afternoon. He was about to suggest pizza and a DVD when he saw Farah sitting on the gray sofa with eighteen-month-old Deangela in her lap. Farah’s look arrested him.
“What? What’s happened?” he asked, his voice edged with alarm.
“Put ya stuff away, lover,” she said, her accent crisper when she agitated or excited, “and come sit with us.”
“Everything okay?”
“Ya sure, everything’s okay, but ya got to see.”
“What?”
“Put ya stuff away and seat yourself.”
He disappeared into the “master” bedroom, a hyperbolic description in this cheap two-bedroom apartment, and tossed his bag onto the bed. His face was alert with concern and curiosity when he reappeared.
“Sit with us, Daddy,” the eighteen-month-old said.
“What, baby girl?”
“Sit, Daddy.”
“I’m sittin’, sweetheart. Here I am.”
Deangela clambered into his lap and clutched his neck. Farah collected the book lying next to her and waited for A.D. and Deangela to exchange greetings.
“Deangela, sugar,” said Farah, patting the book. “Show Daddy what’s in this book.” Deangela clambered back onto the cushions between them, plucked the book from Farah’s hand, and opened it to page one.
“Start here, Mama?”
“Ya, baby.”
“Wilbur. Didn’t. Want. Food. He. Wanted. Love.” Her finger traced her progress across the line of text.
Looking at Farah, “More, Mama?” Deangela turned the page. “He. Wanted. A. Friend.” Deangela looked up again for her confirmation.
“Did she memorize this?” he asked, looking like he’d seen old Hamlet’s ghost.
“I reed it, Daddy.” Farah flipped some pages over.
*
Weymouth Woods State Park, North Carolina
June 29, 2010
“How’s your love life?” Deangela stopped chewing her sandwich to roll her eyes.
“Hey, you’re eighteen. Shit happens.”
“You asking if I’m horny, or if I have a beau?”
“Whoa!” He stopped chewing, too. “Maybe I should’ve rephrased that.”
“Or a belle?” she snickered.
“Oh stop! Okay, just wondering how things are at school. What you’re up to.”
She sighed. “Fish out of water. They look at me like a beetle on a pin.”
“Nice images. Mixed metaphors. You come by the fish and water thing honest.” Deangela loved to fish. They were silent for a beat.
“I’m just focusing on getting through grad school.”
Dale swallowed the last of his sandwich, wadded up the plastic wrap, poked it in the pack and wiped his fingers on his jeans. Deangela turned her half a sandwich and bit into the crusty side with a crunch. Dale made his Dagwoods with cabbage.
“Whatcha studyin’ this summer?”
Mouth full, she replied, “Wittgenstein, Aquinas, and Hume.”
“Huh?”
“Philosophers, Daddy.”
“Where’s it all goin’?”
“Dunno, Daddy. Maybe a doctorate in analytical or moral philosophy.”
A bird called in a tiny voice, like ack-ack-ack-ack-ack. Dale grabbed his binoculars. Deangela swallowed hard, dropping the last bite of her Dagwood to the ground.
“Hear that?” he whispered.
“Nuthatch.”
CHAPTER 9
Chlamydia
July 10, 2010
Camp Virtue, Afghanistan
Camp Virtue began as a massive airfield. It called for 8,300 feet by the book for a C-5 Galaxy to land with a full belly, so NATO — or rather, Kellogg, Brown & Root — gave it 11,000 for good measure at about fifty-million bucks a foot. Camp Virtue’s virtue was being a printing press for money. With 500-foot buffers on each end and a six-plus mile security wall, the base was more than two miles long and over a mile wide. In Afghanistan size wasn’t just security; it was a flash flood of cash. In addition to other supplies, planes landing there imported 25,000 gallons of water a day in half-liter plastic bottles and 500-gallon tanks. The latter was ambush bait for overland truckers, justifying the payouts for contract mercenaries to accompany the convoys. Troops running PT (physical training) had a three-mile jogging trail, beginning and ending with the Morale Support Activities gym on the southeast corner. Seen from above, the outer wall was a great rectangle, 11,500 feet by 6,000, wired with motion sensors. There were 200-meter setbacks between the sensor-walls and buildings, putting the buildings beyond the accurate range of rocket-propelled grenades. Along three sides of the base, outside the wall, ran a 50-meter ribbon of sand, raked every day by contractors so the guards could spot footprints that might appear during the night. The north wall vaulted above a drop-off, portions of it almost vertical, the bluff itself laced with antipersonnel mines that troops sensibly hated to check.
Seven in the morning, a hint of a fog nestled along the feet of the mountains, the sky a cloudless washed-out blue, the sun still just an orange line against the horizon. Hardly a breeze stirred. One C-5 was parked in the middle of the airfield like a great winged carp. Off the runway were two tricked-out Sea Stallions, three MH-47 Chinooks, a half dozen Blackhawks with FLIR bumps on the noses, and four “killer eggs” — the ovoid AH-6 Little Bird gunships, two armed with mini-guns and two armed with two-point-five-inch rockets. The choppers were spread equidistant and alternated up and down the field. The occasional mortar round found the airfield, seldom accurate. Nonetheless, separating the birds curtailed the occasional damage and the additional hours spent on post-attack repairs.
People in flight coveralls ambled in and out of four long, arched maintenance hangars surrounded by earthen berms adjacent to the black airfield apron. Three hummers were parked near the hangars.
Throughout the post, KBR’s buildings were strong, angular frame construction, everything one-story, with 12/4 pitched roofs supporting two layers of sandbags that smelled like rotten plastic and clay. The pale green buff of the pressure-treated wood was unintentionally color-coordinated with the surrounding terrain.
Towering over the base, the wrinkled skyline of the snow-capped Hindu Kush showcased wild contrasts with illuminated ridges and dark shadows in the vertical crevasses, the rising sun turning the mountains labial, like a Georgia O’Keeffe print.
Two motor pools had been built, one at either end, paralleling the airfield, the great open spaces delineated by yet more earthen berms laying like giant slugs lined up on the landscape. Twenty-two up-armored hummers, three Strykers, two HEMMTs, some deuce-and-a-halfs and five-ton trucks, assorted trailers and a dozen “water buffaloes” — 400-gallon cisterns mounted on wheels — were sorted and aligned inside both motor pools like the playthings of an obsessive boy. Each motor pool had a maintenance shed, linear arched structures like the hangars, but only half as high.
Headquarters, staff offices, operations, ten-point showers and two DFACs (dining facilities) arrayed in 90-degree patterns, a Tetris-looking patchwork from on high. Alleys ran between the rows, all connecting to one long, wide road running the length of the built-up area. The troops called that one Main Street.
Up and down Main Street, troops walked in tan fatigues and green body armor, their heads covered with Nazi-looking MICH helmets, weapons slung, headed to chow, or to take a post-prandial shit. Mess hours were from six to nine for breakfast. One side of Main Street was guarded by straight rows of squat olive Conex containers, fronted with twelve short chains of ten portable toilets (cost: $15,000 each), their plastic doors making hollow bangs over the hum of dozens of generators.
A space the size of a football field on the eastern side of the base was designated for trash. A hulking heap of garbage mixed with fractured pallets, it stank like hell when the wind changed and seemed to smolder perpetually even when no one was there. This morning there were already four fat vultures picking through the toxic miasma of rotting food and burnt plastic.
Troops stayed in GP Large tents because someone had argued successfully against the CHUs — Containerized Housing Units — the aluminum box dorms used on the other big bases. The tents employed forklift pallets as floors for the rare occasions when it rained and to keep the dust down. Most tent sides remained rolled up in the day, part way on some, all the way on others, leaving just mosquito netting for walls. As per standing operating procedures, sandbags were stacked forty inches high around each tent to protect sleepers in their cots from incoming shrapnel.
The women’s tents, all four of them, were conspicuous because the walls were always down. Shields against the greedy gazes of men. Women were allowed to run air conditioners in the heat with five-kilowatt generators to maintain their privacy, another source of resentment among the same peeping toms.
At night some of the women walked to the crappers and showers with a female buddy or a boot knife, or both. There had been more than one assault in the nineteen months since the troops moved in, none investigated very aggressively, and the women who made accusations generally found themselves reassigned. A Navajo woman, though, an E-4, had stabbed a masher PFC in his scrotum one night last year. Fortunately for him, both testicles survived, and in that particular case, he was the one reassigned, with a Purple Heart for “wounds received in action.” The Navajo woman’s name was Maria Haskie, and a lot of men called her a lesbian after that — which happened to be true — but no one fucked with her anymore.
Contractors lived in town and commuted back and forth from the Intercontinental Hotel in MRAPs — bulky desert-tan armored vehicles, a cross between a truck and a tank. The contractors’ salaries and perqs — rooms and vehicles — were another chronic source of discontent among troops, male and female. The troops traveled in little, up-armored Humvees. A few of the contractors were actual high-technicians of sorts — avionics people, computer geeks, and other brainiacs — but most were former Special Ops guys, overpaid and alcoholic mercenaries who favored comic book cosplay get-ups.
The North DFAC, military-speak for dining facility (or mess hall), where Special Forces A-Detachment 6246 ate was around 150 meters from the team’s tent. Only aviators and their support troops ate at the smaller South DFAC. Inside, the North DFAC was divided into a large main dining room and a smaller dining room for the Afghan Militia Forces who had their own cooks and dietary restrictions. The entrance to the North DFAC had a broad awning that supported a professionally printed sign ($9,333) announcing “North DFAC, Camp Virtue, Task Force Bird” with a great eagle claw reaching from clouds inside a red circle. Every other window was fitted with a 6,000 BTU Frigidaire AC unit powered by a trailer-mounted, 1,500 kilowatt generator.
Seven members of A-Detachment 6246 approached the dining facility in a gaggle, wearing chest rigs and slung M-4s, all but one variously bearded in accordance with the relaxed grooming standards designed to allow them to better fit in with their Afghan counterparts. What a fucking joke, they all said, but a lot of the boys enjoyed growing their beards out to look like Marvel characters or gaming avatars.
Bobby — Sergeant First Class Robert Milano — was the acting team sergeant and the team’s strange attractor, an affable guy who cut up for laughs to maintain the general morale. Bobby played dumber than he really was, an act reinforced by the absence of a cop in his head to direct traffic from his mind to his mouth. He’d say the first damn thing that popped into his head. He was chatting up the detachment, most of them laughing, while they queued at the door of the chow hall, MICH helmets hanging off their battle rattle instead of on their heads — a minor rebellion in the tradition of Special Forces nonconformity.
Each breakfast cost American taxpayers $41.97. Lunch and supper were $48.53. There was a rumor afoot lunch would soon be cancelled, replaced by an MRE ($6.66 each, no apocalyptic numerology intended).
Opie was first in the chow line. It started with his initials for Orrin Pibbles, O.P., which became Opie, sometimes just Ope. Staff Sergeant Pibbles gabbed with Bobby, interrupting himself to tell the civilian server he wanted an omelet “all-the-way,” sausage on the side. Opie was six-three and bony. His enormous head appeared to stoop his shoulders, a slouching habit acquired when he was young and taller than all his companions. The junior weapons man on the team and the team’s primary sniper, Opie had a hawkish face, a thick mop of auburn hair and a little goat-like beard that made him appear even younger than his 26 years. He’d married his high school girlfriend, Mary Sheets, eight years ago and joined the army a week later. Originally from Modesto, California, Opie and Mary lived in Fayetteville off Raeford Road in a beige tract-house they’d bought last year. They had a three-year-old daughter named Rhonda after her paternal grandmother. Opie hated Afghanistan, even though he admitted that sometimes it looked like places near Modesto. The problem with Afghanistan, said Opie more than once, was Afghans. Bobby constantly and paternally humored Opie because, if allowed to fester, Opie’s chronic discontent could infect the team and disrupt the general morale. They’d only been here for seven months and were scheduled for twelve.
Opie struggled to accept his situation, murdering an occasional “suspicious” farmer with his sniper gun to make things more interesting, but the effort at acceptance cost him. He was a beehive of bizarre facial tics — one-eyed blinking, pursing his lips, flaring his nostrils, and unaccountably opening his eyes as wide as he could, giving the impression he’d gone all Charlie Manson on you. He appeared to have no idea about the tics, which disconcerted those who didn’t know him. No one poked fun at Opie, though, because he had a reputation. He’d beaten a man nearly to death two years ago over a minor insult outside a Fayetteville restaurant after a memorial service for a former team member. Three other Special Forces buddies dragged him away before the cops came, but the story circulated through “the community,” including the detail that Pibbles hadn’t had so much as a single drink.
The mess hall was framed wood, spacious at 100 by 200 feet. The salad bar in the center was big as a canoe, outfitted with a half-dozen four-slot toasters and trays of white, wheat, and rye bread, sliced fruit, cottage cheese, pastries, pancakes, French toast, and three kinds of hot syrup on Sterno warmers.
The hot serving line was to the right as troops entered, a green plywood partition marking the boundary between the dining hall and the stainless-steel service docks where the serving line, the pots, pans, stoves, and grills were manned by five well-paid American contract cooks ($91,000 a year, plus room and board, medical, and an additional $40 a day per diem).
Padded blue stack-chairs sat along rows of 5-by-12-foot folding tables covered in plastic tablecloths with tacky flower prints. The rows of tables formed walkways throughout the dining area, allowing the whole detachment, as was their custom, to sit together at one row, separating themselves from most of the other diners.
Detachment 6246 had long ago claimed its spot in the corner farthest from the front door and adjacent to the passageway between the American and the Afghan dining areas. Troops respected these self-organizing territorial claims. The exception was when Air Force aviators occasionally dropped in who didn’t know any better, but they mostly hot-footed it over to Kabul to lounge and dine in hotels.
Even though this was strictly an American/Afghan Militia Forces camp, the walls were decorated with flags from every member of the NATO alliance. Over the passageway between the AMF and U.S. mess hung framed, unsmiling portrait photos of the entire chain of command, beginning with President Obama and ending with Colonel Boyd Thomas, the Task Force Commander.
Bobby ordered a cheese omelet with bacon. The server was Phillip Maro, like Bobby, a young Italian guy from New York.
“Phil, my man. We’re playin’ Seattle today, well . . . tonight here.”
“Fuckin’ home game for the Mariners, Bobby. Hope Vasquez can hold ’em for the whole nine.”
“His fast ball’s off this year, paisano, but the boy still has a curveball breaks like an A-10.”
“Got that right. Have a good one, Bobby.”
“Back atcha, man.”
Bobby was an ex-weapons specialist who’d only recently attended the Operations and Intelligence Course at the Special Warfare Center, and he was — at the departure of the previous Team Sergeant, and prior to the impending arrival of a Master Sergeant Dale — the detachment’s senior noncommissioned officer. Married twice without kids, his current wife was Carolina, the half-Japanese daughter of a retired Air Force First Sergeant. The oldest of six siblings, Bobby had learned the art of leadership through comedic diplomacy. He was the detachment’s funny man, but he also had a fair knack for organization. His efficacy, however, like that of his commanding officer, Captain Robert Dunny, had been compromised long ago by fraternization with the detachment: drinking with the men in violation of a General Order, and their regular collective patronage of a bordello in Kabul that specialized in very young girls. Bobby was a pretty boy, accustomed to the attention of women on the prowl, and it gave him the reputation of some kind of stud among the team.
Peter Townhall, aka “Pete” aka “Chief,” was 6246’s Warrant Officer, or “tech,” the assistant to the team commander, Captain Dunny. Pete had attended Warrant Officer Candidate School as a Staff Sergeant not long out of the Special Forces Qualification Course, with little to no operational experience. He’d joined the army late, after his divorce in 2004, and was thirty-two. It was an open question whether the team distrusted him because he was shifty or whether he was shifty because the team distrusted him, but he lived up to it both ways out of stubborn embitterment over his exclusion. From Bear, Delaware, he was a man with a small frame — he’d passed Assessment and Selection as well as the Q-Course by the skin of his teeth — and his general nervousness was never a good fit with the buccaneer spirit that enlivened most A-Detachments. He had a luxurious black beard that came off as incompatible with his narrow shoulders and slender hands. His shiftiness was accentuated by horn-framed glasses with photochromic lenses that gave him the look of a jazz musician or a bookie. He compensated for his inability to make friends by taking refuge in rules, policies, and regulations, which he could quote chapter and verse. He nodded at Maro and requested two eggs over-medium with (emphasis) “well-done” bacon.
“Fall” was next in the queue and ordered an all-the-way omelet, meaning everything: two cheeses, onions, bell peppers, jalapeños, mushrooms, spinach, and tomatoes. “Fall” was diminutive for Faulhaber, his surname; first name James. A Staff Sergeant from Terre Haute, he was, after Bobby’s rise to team sergeant, the senior weapons man; they’d had three assigned against the table of organization which required two. His hair and beard were ash-blonde, though his mustache, pushed forward by an overbite, was almost black. Squat as a fireplug, and a bit soft around the middle, with blue eyes and thick stubby hands, he was inexplicably attractive to certain women in bars, which is where he’d met his girlfriend, June Buczek, a buck-sergeant in Civil Affairs who was back at Bragg now.
Fall shot the shit with “Sis,” Royal Sisson, the senior communications man trailing Fall through the chow line. Sis was whining about his junior communications man, Pedro Correa, not yet returned from all-night guard duty on North Observation Post 1. Fall had started hanging out with a contractor lately, and everyone knew he had a money-itch for the hundred-K-plus those guys were banking every year for doing miles less than active-duty guys. Most men in “Group” (shorthand for Special Forces) suspected the gravy train wouldn’t last forever and contracting wasn’t as smart as hanging in there for the pension; but Fall was full of schemes, investment ideas and whatnot. Fall held Sis up long enough to get scrambled eggs with cheese alongside bacon and sausage. Meat lover.
“That’s a lazy motherfucker, man,” Sis complained. “Lifts weights for two hours at a time but won’t lift a fuckin’ finger to pick up after hisself.”
“You’re his senior, bubba,” said Fall. “Put his fuckin’ ass to work.”
“Fucker’s got more excuses than a fat baby got farts. You end up workin’ harder to make him do his shit than doin’ it yourself.”
Sis had a baby face with a wispy beard that looked far worse than no beard at all, and the little sophomore’s beard somehow made his complaints seem even more whiney to Fall. Black hair sticking up in a cluster of cowlicks, Sis was wiry and slender, further contributing to his childish aspect, though he was twenty-nine-years-old and a Sergeant First Class. Sis was from St. Charles, Missouri. Like Opie, he bitterly hated being in Afghanistan. His reason was different, though. He was engaged and cockeyed in love with an elementary school teacher back in North Carolina named Diane Painter. They Skyped every chance they got, and she sent him scented letters every day that he read ten times apiece, provoking some of the guys to heckle him about being pussy-whipped. Sis ordered an all-the-way omelet.
Next in line was 6246’s tall, pudgy senior medic, Sergeant First Class William Hillman, called “Woof,” because he raised dogs, read about dogs, and talked incessantly about dogs, and found a way to turn almost any conversation into one about dogs — his dogs. He had a wife and two young boys, and no one on the team could tell you the name of any of them. They knew about his dogs, though. They knew when a Jack Russell named Peewee, or an Alsatian named Molly, or a Pointer called Shotglass received their last distemper shots or had their anal glands expressed. Woof ordered over-easies and bacon.
Behind him, and lagging back a bit, were his junior medic, Staff Sergeant Hector Fermin, and the junior engineer, Staff Sergeant Eduardo “Eddy” Cuellar, both Mexican-American. Eddy was from San Antonio and a taproot Chicano while Hector, called “Baby Doc” by the team, was from a little town in Michigan called Tecumseh, third generation. They hung together not because they were Latinos, but because neither of them was quite as boisterous as the other members of the team, and attempts to include them in the general noise made them both a little nervous. Baby Doc spoke halting Spanish, while Eddy could’ve supervised a Veracruz construction crew drunk. Eddy and Baby Doc also shared a genuine practical interest in their respective specialties — engineer and medic. Baby Doc was the distinguished honor grad during his Phase Two training and Eddy could compute explosive charges or building materials in his head. Baby Doc was single while two years earlier Eddy had married a convention center banquet cook named Inga Nisly, who he affectionately called “Inga la gringa.”
The team meandered past the salad bar further loading their plates, then settled one by one around 6246’s table.
Baby Doc and Eddy sat together at one end of the table while the rest clustered at the other. Baby Doc was the last one to the table. As he pulled out his chair with a squawk on the wood floor, a recently assigned black female Staff Sergeant entered the DFAC, last name Howe according to her name tag. Dark, with prominent eyes, her hair wound tightly across her skull and pinned back securely, she had symmetrical, full features and a high forehead. Tall for a woman, around five-ten, with hints of muscularity under her uniform. Detachment 6246’s table went silent as all of them watched her pick up her tray and disappear behind the green partition to collect her breakfast.
Bobby broke the silence with a smirk.
“What’s your name, little girl?” he asked in a theatrical granny-voice. Replying to himself now in the affected voice of a child, he said, “Chlamydia.”
Woof barked with laughter, others grinned, Eddy and Doc remained silent. Even Chief gave a suppressed snicker in spite of himself.
“That’s a pretty name,” Bobby continued his little vignette as the inquiring adult. Again, in the childlike reply, “Mah mama gimme dat name.”
Suppressing their laughter, the boys kept a watchful eye out for Sergeant Howe. No reason to give direct offense, after all. Just humor, man. Sis leaned across to Bobby with a lascivious grin.
“Bobby, you ever do that?” He nodded toward the serving line, where Staff Sergeant Howe had disappeared. “You ever do a black chick?”
Woof groaned, knowing he was, at least in part, the target of Sis’s inquiry. Woof’s aversion to black people was legendary and his antipathy to interracial sex was a familiar button for the rest of the boys to push. Woof chewed slowly as he stared down at his runny eggs.
Fall piped in, “Bobby used to be a stripper, didn’t you, Bobby?”
“For a while, when I was stationed in Lewis.”
“More pussy than Brian Pumper,” Fall went on. “Didn’tcha, Bobby? Got used like a fuckin’ cheap sex toy.” All eyes were on Bobby now, Baby Doc excepted, and Bobby didn’t pretend he didn’t like it. He grinned in anticipation of what he was about to say.
“Just before we left Bragg,” Bobby began his story, leaning in, “I met this redbone over at Bennigans . . .”
“Aww, fuck,” interjected Woof. “You mean a nigger chick.”
“Light-skinned nigger chick,” Bobby corrected, leaning further in to say it quietly.
More laughter.
Sergeant Howe emerged from behind the partition and carried her tray to the salad bar, walking within ten feet of their table. The table went silent, and the boys returned in earnest to their food, smirks aimed at their plates. When she’d settled safely on the other side of the room, next to Sergeant Baines, a PAO flunky, Bobby beetled back in to resume his tale, his audience likewise slanting in to catch it, Doc quietly eating now and pretending to ignore them.
“She was fuckin’ hot,” Bobby continued. “Ass you could set a cup on, and she comes up and says, like, you know, you look like some actor, and I’m like, yeah?” Bobby forked a load of omelet into his mouth, chewed for a moment, swallowed half of it, then talked around the rest. “Hussy was totally DTF, word. I took ’er home and rode her like a Brahma bull ’til three in the mornin’.”
Fall giggled “Rock ’n roll, man.”
Woof groaned.
“Dude,” asked Fall, “Where was your wife?”
“Oh, the Jap was visitin’ her mom up in New York. Next mornin’,” he continued . . . there was obviously more, “I found this chick’s gold bracelet and shit on the nightstand. I was, like, fuck son, what if I hadn’t seen that? Carolina comin’ home that afternoon.”
“Oohhhh!” was the collective response.
“Seriously, Boo?” put in Opie.
“Serious as dick cancer, yo! Breezy’s active duty, man. Some leg outfit over by COSCOM. I dropped her gold shit over at the CQ desk before work.”
“How do you know she won’t come back to your house like a dumped dog?” Opie interjected again, punctuating his question with an involuntary procession of winks and eye rolls.
“Oh, when I took her back home, I drove the bitch all over North Fayetteville first,” he answered, provoking a hoot of laughter from most of the table.
“Fuck you jungle fever cocksuckers,” muttered Woof, dropping his fork onto his plate and shaking his head.
Chief spoke unexpectedly, and all eyes turned his way.
“How do you know you didn’t get AIDS, Bobby?” It was like the whole table was hit with cold water. Bobby waited a beat, then smiled and ignored him. Fall broke the silence.
“Hey, is anybody gonna pick up plates for Gene and Pedro? They been on guard.”
“I got ’em,” Opie said, then turned back to Woof, wanting to resume the thread.
“Hey, Woof, you don’t approve of splittin’ the black oak?” This time, his face twisted up like he was about to sneeze.
Pete wasn’t going to let it go.
“You know, Bobby, that black women have AIDS at a far higher rate than white women.”
Woof answered Opie: “Hey, you don’t breed a fuckin’ Pointer with a German Shepherd, okay?”
Bobby replied to Chief: “Chief, I’ll tell it to you like my daddy told me. ‘It’s my dick and it’s my soap, and I’ll wash it as fast as I want.’”
Another clap of laughter went up. Chief colored crimson.
Opie went for Woof again. “So, Woof . . . you never, ever fucked a black chick? What I hear, somma you southern boys don’t know white girls got pussies ’til you’re eighteen.”
“You’re risking your life, Bobby,” Chief said. “Your wife’s life, too.”
“Cut me some fuckin’ slack, Ope. Goddamn,” Woof said, scowling at his eggs.
“How about an Oriental or Mexican chick?” Opie pressed. Eddy and Baby Doc looked up at Opie. They weren’t smiling.
“Chief,” Bobby said, not smiling either now. “Why don’t you lemme worry about my wife and my dick? Okay?”
“Not the same,” Woof said to Opie. “Fuckin’ boofs are a human sub-species, man.”
Bobby saw the tension beginning to generalize, so he went back into his routine.
“What’s your name, little girl?” Answering himself again in his little black girl voice, “Dry-humpa.” The laughter returned, minus Chief and Baby Doc. Bobby reverted to the first voice: “That’s a pretty name, baby.”
*
Across the DFAC, Captain Bob draped his battle-rattle over the back of a chair at an empty table. Robert Dunny, Captain, source of commission ROTC at the University of Ohio. Captain Bob was from a town in the same state called Sylvania, around an hour from Baby Doc’s home town in Southern Michigan. Dunny was married, with a two-year-old boy.
The boys had started the “Captain Bob” thing, and it stuck.
He was twenty-eight, good-looking in a bland way, blue-eyed with thinning blonde hair cut very short, athletic, with a thick mustache over a well-groomed beard. Captain Bob passed the boys’ table en route to the salad bar and greeted them.
“Morning, six-two-four-six,” he said, eliciting a flurry of “Mornings” and “Hey, Captain Bobs.” Dunny loaded his plate at the salad bar then carried it to his own table.
The dining facility door swung open, and in walked Dale. The boys went quiet again at a strange face in an SF uniform, older guy, maybe forty years old. Recent haircut with a mere stubble of a beard. Not very big. Black hair, some gray on the sides. Strange blue-green eyes. Dale gave the food line a pass, picking up only a white porcelain coffee cup. He drew a cup of black coffee from the stainless-steel machine and headed straight to Dunny’s table.
He saw 6246’s table, and surmised from the suppressed chatter and the eyes that followed him that this was his new team. Dale did a second take when the Ichabod Crane-looking dude made faces at him, or was he? The guy had a goat’s beard and opened his eyes as far as he could three times in succession, like he was signaling an ‘O’ in Morse Code.
Ooookay.
Hovering with his cup at Captain Bob’s table, he said, “Captain Dunny. I’m Dale. Believe I’m your new Operations Sergeant. May I sit?”
Dunny wiped his chin with a napkin and swallowed his food, standing with his hand extended.
“Omigod, yes. Hi.” He gave Dale a firm shake, looking him in the eyes. “Wow, it’s good to meet you. You’re not eatin’?”
“Time table’s off, sir. From the flights over. Not hungry really.” His accent pure North Carolina, Dunny noted; eastern North Carolina with the ghost of Scotland-past.
Sitting down, “Bob, please. Or Captain Bob. S’what the boys call me. Mind if I call you Top?”
“Not at all. Team sergeant’s moniker since the elder days.”
With an ear-splitting groan, a C-130 resupply bird approached the runway. Dale took a cautious sip from his steaming mug. The plane passed by and the engines screamed into reverse on touchdown, the sound pulling steadily away until it was background noise again.
“Really glad you’re here,” said Dunny. “You’re very well spoken of.”
Dale looked into Dunny’s eyes for longer than was comfortable until Dunny blinked, knitted his brows, and waited for a reply. Dale appeared to have gone into a trance, looking through Dunny by way of his eyes. Then, as if there had been no pause, “By whom?”
“Huh?” said Dunny.
“You just said I was spoken well of. By whom?”
“Oh,” Dunny tried to get back on track. “Well, just people.”
That sounded stupid.
Dunny sighed. “Colonel Thomas talks you up. Talks up your background, your time across the fence. With the Rangers, too.” Dunny inflected up, like he was asking a question. Something about Dale was wrong-footing him, like a kid caught breaking a rule. “And Group. He thinks your background might bring in stronger missions. You’ve got a hell of a lot of experience in operations. Didn’t you just come from CAG?”
“No, sir . . . Bob. Left in June last year. Studied Farsi at Monterrey. Spanish linguist before.”
“Farsi, huh? You test?”
“Three-three, sir . . . Bob. Aptitude for language, I guess. I suck at math though.” He smiled but the strange unblinking gaze took the warmth out of it. Bob whistled.
“Three-three. Pretty impressive.” The conversation ran into an impasse. Bob wolfed two big spoons full of cottage cheese and chased it with a bite from a glazed doughnut.
“Master Sergeant Bernays,” he began again, chewing doughnut. “The last team sergeant, he was a ROAD soldier, retired on active duty. I just got the team three months ago. I could use a strong hand. Bernie left the detachment pretty rudderless. Nice guy, but a fuckin’ slug.”
Dale paused again, a second too long, staring through Bob’s eyes like he was sleepwalking, creating in Dunny a creeping sense of dismay. This guy is fucking weirding me out here. What the hell did we get? Must be some Delta Force psyops shit. Dale dropped his doll-eyed gaze and took a swallow of the black coffee. Looking up again, he was re-engaged.
“I’d like to have each of ’em sometime after chow,” Dale said, “for initial interviews, if that’s workable. Can I use the Ops hooch?”
“No problem,” said Dunny. “Can you take Correa and Pollard first? They were on O.P. all night. They’re gonna need some rack.”
“That’s . . .”
The explosion just outside the DFAC vibrated their internal organs. Dishes smashed on the floor, tables rocked and dust blew in through shattered windows and cracks in the fractured door. There was a long scream, then some shouting. People crawled around on the floor like bugs, trying to put on their helmets and combat vests. More dust streamed in, as if pushed by a second gust of wind. Somewhere in the distance a fifty-caliber machine gun chopped out six-round bursts.
CHAPTER 10
Progress
Camp Virtue, Afghanistan
July 10, 2010
Sergeant Baines was careful of his uniform as he wiped down stacks of juniper-green metal file cabinets and storage containers with lemon Pledge. He couldn’t remember all the whys or hows of finding himself backstage in this press room, eating shit from Major Carroll, bein’ this yellow motherfucker’s boy. Baines was supposed to have been a light-wheeled vehicle mechanic. His plan upon enlistment was to get out of the goddamn Army and make thirty dollars an hour repairing cars back in DeFuniak Springs. They needed one really good black mechanic there, but by the time he’d gone to Airborne School and worked for a couple of months at the SOCOM motor pool, he knew the Army had set him up with some bullshit. This was paint-by-the-numbers mechanics — just turn on the computer and follow the step-by-step instructions, look at the little shitty pictures in the manual. This was no skill at all, no more than you learn working at KFC. Fuckin’ Army!
He wished he’d never learned the dubious art of looking like a recruiting poster, of acing his schools, and earning superlative evaluations. That’s what got him his interview for this fucking job, one everyone told him was a step up, a golden opportunity to be the PAO’s assistant and driver. It got him his sergeant stripes . . . then cursed him to become this redbone Tom’s serving boy.
“He’ll be here in ten, Winston” she said, startling Baines. Anita Barber, Major “Tom’s” office flunky. A Staff Sergeant, she acted like Baines was her bud, but in this weird, rehearsed, almost mechanical way. He couldn’t quite put his finger on it, but something wasn’t right with this white woman. She was here, but she was aimed somewhere else, like a candidate for town Mayor or something, always on guard, trying not to leave tracks. Cute though.
“Got it,” he replied, returning to his dusting. “Thanks.”
*
Inside that perfect uniform is an ambitionless country fuck. Major Carroll braced himself to inspect the press room and face his subordinate, Sergeant Baines. An embarrassment . . . a kind of stubborn refusal to see anything beyond the horizon of some small town in the Florida panhandle, a pig-headed inclination to remain a stereotypical Negro wearing a well-pressed uniform. Carroll tried to anchor his resolve to be civil to Baines, continually confused and a little guilty at how easily he found himself losing his temper with Baines’ seemingly unfocused existence. Today he would be charitable with Baines, find something to praise him for.
When Carrol came out of his backstage dressing room, the house curtains were uneven. His water pitcher was on the left side of the podium, and the glass on the right. His notes were lying on a storage container! The press was already filing in, God damn it!
“Sergeant Baines,” he said ominously, motioning Baines out of sight of the four reporters. The press reps were already at the refreshments table, dribbling coffee on the white tablecloth, and gulping down canapés while two of their cameramen — one white and one Asian, both looking like bored teenagers — were setting up their tripods and pointing their lenses at the podium.
“Sir.” Here it comes, Baines thought.
“This should be very simple by now,” said Major Carroll. “My papers are left-center and squared.” He handed the three sheets to Baines. “Because I turn the pages to right. The curtains are exactly six feet on either side of center. Pitcher on the right, because I am right-handed, glass on the left.”
“Yes, sir.” Why you talk so white, motherfucker? ‘My papers are left-centered on the podium.’
“Don’t yes sir me unless you understand, Sergeant.”
“I understand, sir.” Understand you got that Colonel’s dick in your mouth.
“Then why wasn’t it done?”
“Sir . . .”
“No! No excuses. They’re already out there.” Baines was silent, expressionless, standing now at attention. “Well, get it done, Sergeant.”
Baines went to adjust the curtains, pulling his humiliation in close to him like a hungry baby. Through the open door of the dressing room, he glanced Anita checking her appearance in the mirror over the sink, tucking an escaped strand of dark brown hair behind her ear. Baines switched the glass and the pitcher of water on the podium. So this yella-ass suck-up can read his fuckin’ lines.
Five more noisy reporters entered the room whooping at some inside joke. Two of them, cameramen, naturally, headed to the front row of perfectly aligned folding chairs and began assembling kits. The other three — a fortyish man who could stand in the prop blast of a C-130 without a hair stirring on his gelled head, and two self-consciously blue-jeaned women, one a skinny bottle-blonde and the other a redhead with a high-in-the-back yuppy cut — headed straight for the gourmet coffee and the canapés.
Major Carroll knew the redhead, Rosemarie something, stringing for Fox. She always looked at him like he was a slice of spiced bread with mango jelly. The blonde was Connie Mason — a stringer, too, but she got her name in the New York Times more often than some people who were on staff. The gel-head was George Yowell, from TCN International — a twit, thought Carroll, but an important twit. No one’s stringer, he was a bona fide news personality “reporting from the front lines.” The man had an audience, including now and again the Commander-in-Chief. Be nice. George was going to be in Kabul for the next week to consolidate his chops as a “war reporter.”
They couldn’t care less about the fuckin’ curtains, Baines brooded, watching from the wings as reporters crammed smoked salmon and goat cheese into their mouths and masticated like cattle.
Carroll was in the dressing room, checking himself in the mirror. Baines watched from the wings. Vain bastard. Got this job because he was pretty. Oh, and willing to bury his lips deep in that Colonel’s ass. Always tryin’ too hard not to be scary-black. Like maybe a tennis player or one of them friendly, harmless homos.
Three minutes.
Will Carroll went to stand in the semi-darkness off-stage-right, Anita Barber on the left. They’d done this countless times, or so it seemed. Four more reporters filed in: a very serious-looking white guy who looked like he belonged in a college classroom teaching political science, and two darker guys — Al Jazeera stringers, maybe, or Gulf Weekly. Carroll had seen them before. They took notes and never asked anything.
But then he seldom said anything.
The last reporter in had the look of a man nursing a hangover — fifty-something, crew-cut gray, face hadn’t seen a razor in a few days, wearing sandals with socks, shirttail out over a bloated gut and sweating circles into his armpits. Taking a long pull on his cigarette before the sergeant at the door, name tag — Roof, could tell him to get rid of it, the reporter pushed the door back open and snapped the butt outside, exhaling a dense stream of smoke that drifted toward the coffee dispenser.
That commie prick from France, Gaston Villeneuve. Carroll sighed. Villeneuve was what they called a “spring-butt” back at West Point. Always got a question that’s not in the script.
Sergeant Roof directed reporters to the feeding trough for their canapés and coffee as if they didn’t already know where they were. Same shit, different week. Roof yawned, suppressing the urge to pick his nose.
A Master Sergeant ambled in with wrinkled ACUs, sidearm on, wearing his tactical vest, and carrying his M-4. He strode past Sergeant Roof before Roof could respond and headed to the back. Special Forces patch, but Carroll couldn’t see his name tag. Fucking seriously? Who the hell is this guy? You can’t just barge in on a press briefing! In his battle-rattle, carrying a weapon?
Older guy, Carroll guessed, in his early forties, week-old beard, black hair with gray at the temples, weather-brown over a naturally pale complexion, strangely blue-green eyes. Kind of short and solid. The E-8 went to the back of the room, stood his M-4 in the corner, and dropped his chest rig in a heap. Then he strolled over and drew himself a cup of black coffee, strolled back, sat down in the very back of the room, crossed his legs all the way like women do, and blew gently on his coffee, apparently ignoring the activity around him, including the two women in front who’d both fixed their eyes on him.
One minute. Carroll would have to decipher this afterward. He looked up at Staff Sergeant Barber. She was already watching Carroll’s reaction and shrugged to signal “I don’t know.” They held each other’s gaze for a half minute, then he gave her a covert thumbs-up.
Sergeant Barber took a deep breath and advanced onto the stage with a well-rehearsed false self-assurance, centering herself at the podium. Reporters drifted toward their seats. She switched on the mike, gave it a light tap that reverberated like a shot, waited another beat, and put on a professional smile.
A cargo plane came in close overhead and drowned the room in the familiar din, giving the journalists another moment to choose their seats. Nothing momentous coming. The plane receded, tires squawking in the distance as it touched down.
Anita looked down for an instant, recovered her welcome-face, looked up, and leaned almost imperceptibly into the microphone.
“Ladies and gentlemen, Major Carroll will be out momentarily. Please find a seat and make yourselves comfortable.”
Her lines. Delivered.
As the final journalist sat, several still murmuring, she nodded a kind of thanks, then retreated smoothly back behind the house curtain, stage-right. Carroll strode confidently to the podium. The reporters fell silent.
Slim and athletic, Major Will Carroll had presence. Rosemarie and Connie both suppressed lascivious smirks. The Public Affairs Officer’s very serious mien as he initially pretended to review his notes was transformed into pure charm as he raised his face to his audience with a so-happy-to-see-you-all smile.
“Good morning.”
“Good morning,” the press corps muttered back, several instinctively returning the smile, Rosemarie crossing her legs extravagantly. Major Carroll averted his eyes a moment late, and her eyes narrowed with satisfaction. His smile faded decorously as he launched into his presentation.
“I’m Major Carroll, Public Affairs Officer for Special Operations Task Force Bird, and on behalf of Colonel Boyd Thomas, the Task Force Commanding Officer, I’d like to welcome you again to our weekly operations briefing.
“This week, we have continued to train with Afghan Militia Forces and Afghan police as well as conduct local reconnaissance operations West of Kabul. There have been no major incidents this week, and our work with local militia and the constabulary is progressing.
“Two minor engagements between local Afghan forces and suspected Taliban have resulted in one enemy K.I.A. and no friendly casualties.” Paused a moment to hint at another smile. “I’m aware that such an uneventful report might disappoint our friends from the fourth estate . . .” Mild, polite laughter from the press corps, on cue. “. . . but we welcome this lack of theatricality as a sign that our joint operations are successful in maintaining stability in our sector.”
“Theatricality is a sign that our joint operations are successful in maintaining stability in our sector,” mocked Baines under his breath, standing in the wing.
“So, with that out of the way, my friends, what questions do you have for me today?” Rosemarie’s hand went up like a schoolgirl.
“Rosemarie.” Smile still plastered on.
“Thank you, Will.” Gaston Villeneuve coughed wetly and conspicuously, tugging at his crotch to relieve some apparent discomfort. “I wonder how morale is among the troops right now,” she asked, never losing eye contact. “Has the ambiguity of statements from Washington or the lack of recent combat activity taken the edge off them?” Perfect softball pitch.
“Thanks, Rosemarie,” he began, his smile appropriately emerging and disappearing like little clouds crossing the sun. “Morale is great. As you know, aside from the government contractors who manage the installation and coordinating staff, Task Force Bird also has a Special Forces contingent who work with the AMF’s, and a Ranger Platoon with Special Ops aviators on standby as a quick reaction force. Our troops are mature, quiet professionals. Our current stability is evidence that their work with Afghan forces is making progress, and our secondary mission of supplying Forward Operating Bases has been running very smoothly.
“As to Washington, I’m not sure I’d characterize their statements as ambiguous. I think you’ll find the administration is careful not to generalize about a complex situation. Next question.”
Villeneuve’s hand went up.
Fuck! Springbutt! No smile this time.
“Sir.”
Villeneuve’s English was accented but clean. “Thank you, Major. Gaston Villeneuve with Nouvel Observateur.” Major Carroll acknowledged with an expressionless nod. “This February, the President suggested that NATO and American forces would begin leaving Afghanistan. Your government is also saying that this departure will coincide with a transfer of leadership from the Americans to the Afghans. The progress you speak of — that was your word, progress — is not as evident in the field as you suggest. Roadside attacks continue. Green-on-blue and green-on-green attacks are becoming more frequent. Kandahar is blowing up. Your President just fired his main commander, and you were attacked this morning. Aren’t these claims of progress contradictory?”
“Sir, I’ll begin by noting that I am a small Task Force PAO, and I am neither authorized nor inclined to speak on behalf of the Theater Command or the National Command Authority.”
“Isn’t that what you just did?”
Carroll blushed and noted that the Master Sergeant in the back of the room had finished his coffee, quietly geared up, and was treading silently out the door, dropping the empty coffee cup in the trash as he left.
“No, Mr. Villeneuve,” replied Carroll. Colonel Thomas had instructed him to avoid the topic of the rocket attack if at all possible. “And what happened this morning was a single desperate round, with zero casualties. The attackers were dealt with, and there’s been no disruption to operations.”
Dale stepped out of the press hooch and walked into the alley between rows of bunkers. His head had gone all woolly again listening to that muppet inside. His heart pounded like a drum in his ears, and he stopped to let the breeze cool his face. He gazed up at the electric line running between the press hooch and the Task Force ops bunker. A green bird the size of a house sparrow perched there, tilting its head to watch Dale watching it. Long slender black bill with an orange throat and pale blue lines under its eyes.
Transfixed, Dale didn’t know how long he stood there gazing at the passerine. The muffled drum receded. The breeze raised the bird’s back feathers, then died down, then raised them again. He found himself wondering if the bird was enjoying the wind. A gaggle of reporters came out and climbed into a Chevrolet van, when he was startled by a tap on the shoulder.
Though momentarily startled, he felt an odd sense of tranquility now oozing in through his legs like little minnows. Major Carroll was facing him. The briefing was over already? How long had he stood there?
“Master Sergeant . . .” Major Carroll paused to read his name tag, “. . . Dale. Master Sergeant Dale, would you mind telling me why you showed up uninvited to my press briefing?”
Dale gazed back into Carroll’s eyes for a beat, Dale’s brow suddenly plowed with lines, appearing to think very hard about the question he was asked.
Carroll’s cheeks had begun to color when Dale finally answered.
“No.”
They stood there, Carroll waiting for a reply.
“Well?”
“Yes, sir?”
“Well, what were you doing with a rifle in the press room?”
“They just issued it, Major. I’m headed to the range to zero.”
“But why were you in my press room? You weren’t authorized to be there.”
“Oh, I just peeked in. I saw the coffee and figured I could use a cup, sir. Haven’t slept for shit in days. Jet lag, maybe. Very good coffee by the way. I mean, wow. The snacks looked great, too. Are there any left? I skipped breakfast.”
“Where are you assigned, Master Sergeant?”
“Oh, I just got here late last night. I’m taking over Detachment 6246.” Carroll’s face darkened even more. “Are you alright, sir?”
“Master Sergeant, I’m the Task Force PAO. I suggest you begin to learn how we do things here before you take over anything.”
“Couldn’t agree more, sir. Always good advice. Do you see that bird, sir?” He looked up, but the bird had flown. “Oh shit, you missed it. Well, you see them all the time, I reckon, but that was a blue-cheeked bee-eater. A songbird. Never see that bird in the States. Maybe in a zoo.”
“Sergeant Dale!” Dale was silent, still apparently unperturbed and curious about Carroll’s agitation. Dale waited. Carroll waited. Carroll broke the silence.
“Sergeant Dale, you’re not to enter any building on this installation without authorization. Do you understand?”
“Perfectly, sir.” Dale was tilting his head and gazing at Carroll’s face like he was reading a recipe, or doing a math problem. “Very sorry. Didn’t mean any harm. Won’t happen again.” Carroll waited, unsure for what. “Is that all, Major?”
Another moment passed.
“Yes, that’s all, Master Sergeant.”
Dale offered the Major his hand. Carroll looked at the proffered hand like a live Gila monster.
“Pleased to meet you, Sir,” said Dale without sarcasm, keeping his hand extended. Carroll looked around and grudgingly grasped the hand. Dale gave him one firm squeeze, then snapped to attention and started to salute, catching himself at the last instant. “Silly me. Downrange, right? No saluting. My bad. Been in language school for a year. Tight-assed as hell, those people.”
CHAPTER 11
Outsourced
Weymouth Woods State Park, North Carolina
June 29, 2010
“What’s the difference?”
“In what?” Deangela asked.
“Moral and analytical philosophy,” said Dale.
The nuthatch had spent more than two minutes upside-down, inspecting crevices in the pine bark for unfortunate insects. They lowered their field glasses. Dale had a pretty good notion, having been exposed to Aristotle, Plato, and Aquinas in the course of studying Shakespeare in college. Like another life. But he loved hearing her speak, more so when something absorbed her.
“Hmmm,” she collected her thoughts. “Okay, analytical philosophy deals with what is. Just that, what is reality, or being.” She stopped to worm a finger into her molar and dislodge some of her sandwich. “However that’s constructed. What is reality, being? That kind of thing. Moral philosophy begins with the same question, but tries to impute from its own metaphysical assumptions what we ought to do, what kinds of norms and rules we need to live together in a way that makes people and societies flourish.”
Dale was gazing at her, into her eyes, suddenly seeming somewhere else. He’d gone silent. Deangela waited. And waited. Just before she asked him what was wrong, he returned. With humor.
“Are you mine?”
With a surprised sense of relief, she said, “Hundred and ten percent,” and just as suddenly found herself sad. “Daddy, what’s going on?”
“Wanna walk a ways?” he asked.
“Sure,” she said, frowning with curiosity. They stood and shouldered their packs. She pulled a compass out of her shirt pocket, attached by a lanyard around her neck.
“There’s a nice, dry stretch along a fifty-degree bearing,” she said. “You game?”
“Lead.”
She’d seen him reading maps when she was eight, and asked him to show her what he was doing. He’d explained maps, “a two-dimensional representations of the earth’s surface, drawn to scale, as seen from above,” and taught her how that surface was divided into grids along north-south and east-west axes and the different ways to measure and read these grids. Within two days she was plotting coordinates, calculating intersections and resections, and identifying elevations and terrain features from 1:50,000 military topographical maps. She wore him out asking for more problems. Free weekends were soon devoted to orienteering together, giving Farah a welcome break from Deangela’s incessant interrogations.
Dale had moved out the following year, though they’d neither divorced nor annulled. Farah was a practicing Catholic, and Dale never seemed inclined to push it. Retaining the marital status kept Farah and Deangela on full benefits as military dependents, and the separation still included a fair number of . . . conjugal visits.
“Are you okay, Daddy?” She was looking back as she ascended a slight rise and stumbled in a hole. He rushed forward, but she had already recovered, shaking it off.
“Alright?” he asked.
“That’s what I just asked you,” she replied, stopping now and facing him from uphill, wiping leaves off her legs. There it was again. He was doing that silent staring thing. What the hell, she thought.
“Sounds sticky,” he said. She furrowed her brow at that, and he smiled. “Analytical philosophy. The ‘what is’ part,” he explained. “Don’t we all have our own little abbreviations for that?”
She started laughing.
“What’s funny?”
“You, Daddy. You ought to study philosophy. You just summarized the dilemma of modernity.”
He gave a shake of the head.
“Modernity! Lord have mercy!” then grunted. “Lead on.”
“Daddy, I asked you a question. Something’s on your mind.”
“I’ll get to it,” he said. “Let’s just walk a bit.” She turned, then he interrupted her. “Okay, one more question,” he said. Deangela waited, thumbs hooked into her pack straps. “Okay, you said, ‘I oughta study philosophy,’ right?”
“Mm-hmm.”
“Well, that’s an ought, right. Moral philosophy.”
She nodded, heading over the crest of a small rise.
“Okay,” he said. “I have a moral philosophy question.” He raised the bottom of his pack to adjust his waistband. “So, on the question of oughts . . . of what’s moral [air quotes], right? Can that be outsourced?”
She studied his face like it was a riddle, then her eyes went wide.
“You’re asking about the army, aren’t you?”
“S’pose I am,” he allowed. “Probably an unfair question. Scary one, too. If it can’t be outsourced, my career’s pretty much unjustifiable.” They both sat silently, chewing on that, gazes drifting down to share a spot in the dead leaves and pine straw.
“Your mom. She believes in God.” Deangela looked at him again. “I don’t mean she consents to the existence of God as some proposition, okay? I mean she’d have a conversation with him like they’re sitting across the kitchen table. God’s as real to her as you and me, like this, right now. That’s magic to me, how she does that. I wish I could . . . I can’t get my head around it. Like, what’s there on the backside of infinity. Billions of years and we’re the only creatures thinking about God, and yet we burst with these . . . possibilities. Transcendent possibilities. Terrible, unspeakable possibilities.” A long pause.
She was about to speak, when he said, “Did you know there’s a shampoo that washes body in, not out?”
*
Monterey, California
December 30, 2009
The Trident Room on University Circle was known for frosty tap beer and savory appetizers. More than a thousand different mugs hung from the ceiling on little hooks. For some of the students from the Defense Language Institute, it was an after-class watering hole. Dale was nursing a beer by himself in the corner and trying not to listen to the animated chatter at a nearby table. Three young Special Forces students, fresh from the Q-Course, half-drunk and ranting about a bombing attack that was in the news. Seven CIA agents had been killed in Camp Chapman, Afghanistan, by a suicide bomber who’d been working with the Americans. A so-called “green on blue” attack. The talk then turned to “fuckin’ rag-heads,” and why the only good one is a dead one.
Dale remembered a Peruvian army officer he’d worked with once who, walking past an Indian cemetery near Huachipa, told him, “Aqui hay los indios amigos.” Here are the friendly Indians.
“If there’s a rag on its head, it needs to be dead,” rhymed one of drunks to surly nods of assent. The poet was shaved bald with thick black eyebrows and no chin. One of his companions was eagerly tossing him questions about his time in Iraq, where the poet had apparently been a Military Policeman in the Reserves, only later going on active duty and volunteering for SF.
“I was at Camp Bucca, man . . . you always hear about Abu Ghraib, but at Bucca, man, we never got caught. Down in Um-Qasr, by the ocean. We was workin’ with the spooks, the boys across the fence . . . all of ’em. We got this bitch one day . . . maybe fifteen, with a hot fuckin’ body.”
His colleagues hooked into the story, leaned in, and smiled, signifying like they were in the early stages of a tent revival. “Uh-huh.”
“Me and my boy, guy named Bledsoe, we’re totally in charge, okay . . . we break that bitch in like a mustang.” Hoots of laughter, a bit nervous. “We fuck her twice apiece. Then Bledsoe can’t come the second time, and it pisses him off, so he starts wailin’ on the bitch, and I tell him ‘hold up, dude.’ We can pimp her out if you don’t fuck ’er up.’ So, we start bringin’ in motherfuckers from all over camp — on the down-low, man — and we charge fifty bucks a pop.”
He was slurring his words a bit, teetering between buzzed and bombed, and his story was kind of flowing out of him now. He wore a half-smile, like he was reminiscing.
“We made almost five hundred dollars in a coupla hours. That night, we find the bitch dead. Hung herself in the cell with ripped up clothes.”
“Why’d she do that?” One of his companions asked.
“Dunno,” he replied, appearing to think it over. “She was unhappy?”
This cracked the table up, though there was now a kind of edge between surprise, disgust, and admiration directed at baldy. When baldy got ready to leave, one of his friends suggested a cab, but he waved him off.
“Ain’t but three miles. I’m good.”
Dale called the waitress over, a stocky, tattooed youngster, with spiky yellow hair and trendy glasses. He gave her a twenty for a stuffed potato and a beer and told her to keep the change. She pushed the whole twenty into her apron.
Dale went to his car. He took a pencil out of the glove compartment.
Steven Ricks fumbled in his right front pocket for his keys with one hand, rubbing his shaved head with the other. The parking lot was perpendicular to the bar entrance, divided by a curbed island with four poorly-manicured hawthorn trees. The single security light flickered, but the powerful fluorescents from the entrance to the saloon threw yellow bars of light across the asphalt that gleamed off the cars. Nautical pennants on a cross brace fluttered and snapped in a chilly east wind.
Ricks shivered. He shifted his car keys into his left hand and tried to zip up his Gore-Tex jacket. He felt pleased with himself. His companions would be talking about him right now, calling him a bad motherfucker, cold-blooded, crazy.
He fumbled with the jacket. Fuckin’ zipper won’t line up.
There were levels of respect in the world of men and the highest level was always laced with awe and a little fear. And he actually had enjoyed the hajji bitch. Hearing light footfalls, he turned. It was that short, turquoise-eyed dude from the bar. He’d seen him around the Institute — taking Farsi, if Ricks recalled correctly.
“Say,” called the little guy. Ricks stood six-feet-one. The little guy held out what looked like a napkin as he approached.
“Yeah?”
“I think this fell out of your pocket in the bar,” said the short guy, extending the piece of paper. Ricks looked at him, then down at the paper. When he took the paper and looked down at it, it was just a napkin. A plain fucking napkin. What the . . .
Just then the little guy punched him in the neck, fast — pop! — just like that!
He was about to get pissed when he was overcome by an icy lightheadedness. The color started draining out of everything. The little guy was standing there, not moving, just watching, and holding a shiny black pencil. Ricks reached up slowly and touched below his left ear where he felt a hot sensation. Something was spraying hard like the jet off a pressure washer. The he felt himself hollowing out. He pressed his bloody hand against the car door and lowered himself slowly to the ground. The little guy was walking away now. Everything grew dark and small.
CHAPTER 12
Interviews
Camp Virtue, Afghanistan
July 10, 2010
The clean-up crew were all contractors, wearing plain helmets and body armor over civilian clothes. The generator and its trailer were pulverized. The RPG had scored a direct hit, a tactical miracle given its short effective range and the distance from which it had to travel from gunner to target. Similar odds to a kid shooting an arrow into the air and nailing an unseen rabbit in a thicket half a mile away.
A twenty-year-old Ranger fifty-gunner on the northeast claimed the rocket had come from a vehicle on the road nearest to the minefield, and he’d shot the shit out of a covered Hilux truck, but when a team went to investigate the wreckage, it found nothing in the bed but bloodstained, broken watermelons. They brought back around twenty of the unbroken ones.
Whoever had been on that truck made tracks out of there with the wounded. Being hit with fifty fire was like having lightning bolts drop on you at a rate of 500 a minute. The PAO would call it as “three enemy wounded-in-action, military-aged-males,” and someone would give that Ranger-boy a Bronze Star for meritorious mayhem.
The chow hall was now officially no longer air-conditioned. It would take a week to get another generator. Knock a tenth of a point off troop morale. It had been almost two hours since the hit, and this time fickle fortune had spared the troops any injuries beyond ringing ears, headaches, and maybe some invisible brain damage.
The generator, though, was toast.
A C-5 screeched onto the runway and was reversing its engines, but it carried nothing that could compensate the loss of a cool and dry dining environment for non-aviation personnel. The DFAC crew was already opening windows as the mid-day temperatures climbed past eighty-five.
In the 6246 Operations Hooch, Dale stared at a yellow legal pad and dreaded the interviews. He’d not made it to the zero range after his distraction with Major Carroll.
When he in-processed through ISAF Headquarters upon landing in Afghanistan, he had made a last-minute pitch to shuffle papers, but Colonel Thomas had already intercepted Dale through the grapevine and pulled strings to ensure he’d get the former Delta operator onto his post. Thomas idolized Delta, though he’d never so much as entered the compound; and he thought every operator there could juggle live chainsaws while they recited long passages of Goethe from memory. The bullshit mystique, as Dale knew, had taken root even inside the Army.
The ops hooch had white walls covered in dry erase boards, presentation easels stacked in the corner alongside folding tables, and two big sand tables in the middle of the room for terrain models, complete with drawers underneath to hold all the modeling props, including colored chalk powder in plastic ketchup dispensers, fit-together walls, and lots of tiny toy soldiers. A whole section of the room was set aside for a dozen open cots, three large safes, and a bank of five computers. One wall was dedicated to a bookcase full of field manuals and communications equipment. A cart held twenty folding chairs. Two bands of powerful fluorescent lights made the windowless building feel like high noon. Or a casino.
He unfolded one table and placed two chairs across from one another. He sat in one, staring at the notepad, and wondered what to ask. He’d go through the motions. Truth was he’d lost something between Ojo de Agua, the Defense Language Institute, Chapel Hill, and here. Giving a shit? Yeah, but the other thing, too. Like he’d walked into the woods, marking a trail, but when he’d turned to go back the signs had all disappeared.
A year and a half before retirement eligibility. Fuck! A century! An Aeon! It was more than burnout, more than post-traumatic stress disorder — whatever the fuck that meant. Looking back on his entire adult life, everything which had animated him, aside from Farah and Deangela, felt no more meaningful now than the pair of big red roaches that scuttled under the bookcase when he’d flipped on the lights. One minute he knew his lines, the next minute he was five years old with big fang-and-claw cosmic question marks all around him.
Monterey intruded on his memory, and his head started to feel soft again. Soft and sticky, like cotton candy being ravaged by ants. He needed to sleep. He imagined he was an enormous one-eyed fish flapping its way breathlessly up a stony mountain.
Today was Saturday. The last time he could remember sleeping was — he thought hard — the day he was with Deangela on the 29th? Was that a Tuesday? He’d flown out on Thursday . . . maybe a week? He must have slept, else he’d have been in full blown psychosis by now, but he couldn’t remember when. Maybe a few snatches on the plane, where he’d worn earplugs and tied a cravat over his eyes like a blindfold. He could use a blindfold right now, all around him, like a mummy.
Pop songs he’d heard in odd places, buses, airports, during childhood from Grampa’s vinyl collection . . . they replayed constantly in his head. But the words and voices changed, losing their sense. Someone rapped on the door.
“Come in,” he called. Deep breath, let it out.
It was that guy who looked like a bookie. Dale stood and offered his hand.
“A.D.,” he said.
“Pete Pownall,” Chief said, removing his helmet and shaking Dale’s hand, his eyes cast about the room for threats and disorder. Bone-all, the surname mutated in Dale’s ears.
“Have a seat, Pete . . . or do the boys call you Chief?”
“Chief, yeah. Thank you.”
He unslung his M-4 and leaned it against the table.
Dale settled in and retrieved the notepad, jotting down “Chief Pete” and putting four outward facing arrows around it for no particular reason. He laid the notepad in his lap and looked up. Chief’s lenses were still dark from the sun and unlikely to clear up in this fluorescent tomb.
“You want to be called A.D.?”
“Sure, or Top. Whatever’s comfortable.” Did I say ‘whatever’s comfortable’?
Chief folded his forearms on the table, pushing his face close enough so his eyes grew unnaturally large in the gray lenses.
“I’m glad you’re here, Top.”
“I’m not sure I am, but thanks.”
“No, I mean we need some guidance. A strong hand. This team has problems.”
“I’m sure they do,” Dale said. “Never seen one that didn’t.”
“I mean discipline problems. Pedro, our junior commo guy, he was on deck; but I asked to speak with you first. You need some perspective on these guys.”
Dale wrote “dickhead” in small block letters under “Chief Pete.”
“Okay, Chief. What’s on your mind?”
“They’re a soup sandwich, Top. Bernie, the last team sergeant before Bobby, he had no discipline. I write memos. I’m afraid someday I’ll need them to cover my own ass. They don’t like me, these guys. They don’t see a warrant officer as a real officer. And they’re disrespectful, incompetent. Loose cannons, and I gotta be honest here, not to be disloyal or anything, but the team commander isn’t much better.”
“Sorry to hear that, Chief. That they don’t like you. But you are a tech, not a commander.”
“I just deserve some respect, that’s all. And I don’t wanna die or go to jail for this bunch.” He paused, knitting his brows and licking his lips. “An example, okay? So, we got in this firefight two months ago, out south on a recon. I said ‘break contact.’ Protocol for recon, right? Break contact. They killed two guys anyway. Now they think I was afraid.”
“You weren’t afraid?”
“No, Top!”
“Why not?” . . . What was that? REM?
That’s me in the corner
That’s me in the hot light
Losing my blue pigeon
Trying to sleep walk with you
And I don’t know if I can do it
Oh no, I’ve said too much
I haven’t said enough
I thought that I heard you staffing
I thought that I heard I-Ching
I think I thought I saw you fly
Thirteen minutes later he still hadn’t thought of anything to ask them. Glad to be rid of Chief, though. Fuckin’ whiner. Definitely a dickhead.
The term dickhead suddenly struck him funny, and he could barely suppress laughter. Boy, I need some sleep!
*
Another knock. Deep breath, let it out.
“Come in.”
A gym-fit guy sporting a trimmed black beard. Wavy short black hair. Six feet plus at a glance, with red-rimmed eyes. Hispanic, Dale guessed, dominicano or puertorriqueño, but a self-conscious trigueño with no tan lines. Helmet tucked under his left arm, weapon hanging in his right.
“Hey, Top.” said Pedro.
“Hey. You can ground your gear.”
Pedro set his weapon against the wall, shucked his vest and body armor in one move, and plopped his MICH helmet on top of the heap. He turned and offered his hand to Dale.
“A.D.” Dale said.
“What?”
“That’s what people call me. A.D. Or Top. Now. I guess.”
Pedro smiled, seeming relieved. He wasn’t sure what A.D. meant. Accidental discharge? A chargeable offense, but he’d not accidentally fired his weapon. They weren’t even allowed to have a magazine inserted while on the compound, unless they were taking fire.
“Have a seat. What’s your name?” Pedro looked confused again.
“Correa, Top,” he replied, running his finger across the olive-green name tag velcroed over his left pocket.
“I mean your first name,” Dale explained.
“Pedro.”
“You can sit.”
Pedro settled in across from Dale. This wasn’t the team’s most intuitive member.
“Thanks,” said Pedro. A question. I’m supposed to ask something.
“So, Pedro. Tell me about yourself.”
Fucking brilliant. You’re a managerial masterpiece, Abner Parker Dale.
Within fifteen seconds he regretted the question. Pedro was talking, a lot, about himself. What was he saying? Focus!
Minutes passed before he found himself tuning back in, and Pedro’s mouth was still in motion.
“ . . . my thing is PT. I mean, I’m good on commo, too . . . well, my code’s a little slow, but I can make comms with a fuckin’ barbed wire fence if you need it. Not like they have barbed wire fences in this shithole. You know what I mean, though. But my real thing, you know, is I like to take care of my body. I don’t use tobacco or caffeine or sugar. Sugar is fuckin’ poison, man . . . Top. And I think core work is the key. Abs, obliques, lower back. Get a strong core, and your body’s a weapon, man . . . Top. Hey, how close was that fuckin’ rocket today, huh!”
Dale wrote. Pedro. Dickhead. More arrows, with meandering stems now. Pedro talked. And talked. Fuck! Dale listlessly unwrapped a tootsie roll he found in his pocket. Where had that come from? A Human League cover, performed by Alvin and the Chipmunks.
Don’t
Don’t you haunt me?
You know I can’t reprieve it
When I hear that you won’t flee me.
Don’t
Don’t you haunt me?
You know I don’t deceive you
When you say that you don’t bleed me
It’s much too late to find
When you think you’re strange and blind
You’d better change the pack or we will both be quarry.
Pedro rejoined the team gaggle outside. They abruptly ended their bull session to hear his report.
“Dude,” he began. “He’s not . . .” Tapping the side of his head to loosen the right word, “He’s weird, man. Don’t say much.” Still tapping his head, “But, I’m tellin’ yous, that dude’s got a faulty circuit.”
*
“Tell me about yourself, Gene.”
Studying Dale’s face for clues, Gene asked, “Can I smoke?”
“No.”
“Okay,” he put the pack of Marlboros away. “Okay. Yeah, okay.”
Dale said nothing, aquamarine eyes boring straight into Gene’s. Unnerved him a little. Long seconds of silence, then Gene spoke again to break silence. Sleep-deprived after guard duty, he found himself wanting to spill ideas at Dale.
“Close call today, eh? Fuckin’ hajji don’t even aim. He just lobs shit in the air, says ‘Inshallah,’ and runs like a raped ape. Can’t triangulate him that way. We fucked that truck up, though. Anyway, about me. Okay, me, I wanna see this team do some real shit.”
Dale put pen to paper: Gene. Dickhead. He drew four-leaf clovers around the words.
“Bernie, okay, your predecessor? Bernie was a slug. Well, you’ll hear about . . . anyway . . . how do I . . . it’s like, my favorite movie was Tombstone, you know? Like, that’s what I wanted when I went SF — not bein’ a fuckin’ drill sergeant in a foreign language . . . okay, well, my language is something could work on. Suppose to be Spanish, but the words are all outa order, and I can’t hear it without losin’ track. At least it ain’t Arabic, though, cuz I really can’t make those hackin’ noises like a strangled cat. So, anyway, I like that scene, you know, where Billy Bob Thornton has the shotgun and he’s comin’ after Wyatt Earp, and Doc Holliday, man, he just says, ‘Where you goin’ with that shotgun?’ You know, and like, ‘I’ll be your huckleberry.’ I love that shit. I wish we lived in those times, not hangin’ out in this shithole just to go back to the fuckin’ suburbs.”
Pollard reminded Dale of a bear. With tobacco breath. Lots of dark black hair on his hands and chest, big brown beard, hair thinning up top and a beer belly, or the beginnings of one. Little, beady, red-rimmed, brown eyes. A very animated bear. The guy was waving his hands around, those little bloodshot eyes all alight . . . Dale’s brain went Pink Floyd now . . . still sung by the Chipmunks.
We don’t need no defecation
We don’t need no grassy knoll
No shark knee spasm in the classroom
Teachers leave them kids a clone
Hey! Teachers! Leave them kids a clone!
All in all it’s just another dickhead’s Bhopal.
All in all you’re just another dick that’s too small.
*
Gene emerged from the operations hooch with an expression of stunned wonder. Bobby wanted to interrogate him, but Bobby was next in the box. Gene took the rest of the guys away from the door and lit a cigarette before debriefing them.
Chief had left.
“He just wants you to talk, I think. Like, ‘tell me about yourself,’ then he sits back with this look like you’re a weird bug he just noticed. Coupla times he like laughed a little, but I wasn’t sayin’ anything to be funny, man. Truthfully, that dude is off, man. He hums to himself while you talk. He’s off, you know. Not like ‘different drummer’ off. Home boy’s got his own marchin’ band!”
“See what I told yous,” Pedro said. “That old man is fuckin’ unnatural, dude. They smokin’ some funny shit over there across the fence. It’s like he’s somewhere else, man. Out there. Like lunar-probe out there!”
*
A young Sylvester Stallone. Dale hated Sylvester Stallone. Guy’s movies were all pure shit. This guy was Stallone with a beard. E-7 named Bobby. Grinning like an idiot.
“So, Bobby, what can you tell me about yourself?”
Dale pegged him within half a minute: class clown. This is the ops sergeant? The intel sergeant? Dale longed for Belize, for a cold beer, for Punta music while Farah danced in a crinkle-cotton dress with a pink and blue flower print.
“About myself, huh? Okay, I had a few problems at first, right. Before SF. You probably know. I was a private in the 82nd, and I pissed hot for weed once. [Laugh] So I quit the pot. Got a Top-Secret clearance even with the pot thing. [Laugh again] I just drink now. I’m married after all. Need the check. You married?”
Dale noticed a silence, eventually. He was supposed to answer.
“Separated.”
“Yeah, well, I married this Jap girl, but she has an American name, Carolina, like in North Carolina. I got a topless picture of her in my wallet. You wanna see?”
“No.”
Dale wrote on the notepad: Bobby. Dickhead.
“Whatcha writin’, Top?”
“Nothin’. Keepin’ track of the interviews.”
“So, anyway,” Bobby went on, “I just finished Operations and Intelligence School before this deployment . . . man, that was tough, especially the intel parts . . . okay, some of the ops, too. I’m not book smart, but I’m in good shape. Good shot, too. You ever been with two chicks at once?”
Nice Shot . . .
I wish I could’ve bet you
now I can whittle bait
what you could’ve bought me
I could’ve paved some space
they think that early bending was your schlong
for the most part they’re bright but look how they play beer pong
that’s why I say hey man nice snot
what a good snot man
*
Outside, Bobby was bright-eyed and smiling like a kid who’d just watched a card trick.
“He hums!”
“Yep,” affirmed Pedro.
“What?” begged Opie. “What’s he hum?”
“Hard to say. Like he hums real low, but if you listen while you talk, he, uh . . . he just wants you to talk . . . must be some Delta Force mojo psych technique he knows . . . but while he’s listening to you, he hums real quiet and stares at your eyes without blinking. Captain Bob said this dude can speak Iranian better than I’m-a-did-a-job.” Bobby giggled, “Our team sergeant might be some evil genius, fellas!”
“What’s he want you to say?” Opie asked.
“Just ramble, man. I think he’s tryin’ to figure out how to use us on missions. Like some third-eye shit. Just talk like we talk at the tent. I told him sex stories, and the motherfucker never blinked. Just hums like he’s makin’ his own background music.”
*
Fall spat snuff into an empty Coca-Cola can.
“Tell you about myself. About myself, eh? Well, I know my weapons inside-out. If it’s man-portable, then I know that weapon inside-out. But the thing is, I may not be in that much longer.” Fall leaned forward like he was doing a sales pitch. “See, these guys over at XYY Security, well, my friend, Ben Virden, he’s one of the contractors . . . he’s an old SF commo man . . . he says I can make a hundred and twenty K a year, all bankable, so it’s like, why should I stay in on an E-7’s pay, when I can pull that kinda money down.”
Fall. Dickhead. Dale drew circles with smaller and smaller circles inside them.
“But that don’t mean I’ll sham on ya, Top. I’m gonna work my ass off ’til I sign out. And Virden and them, you know, they make more money than all these . . . I mean, this place is a great big fuckin’ ATM, except when you wear these.” Fall plucked at his uniform blouse. “But until then, Top, you need anything on the weapons side, I gotcha back.”
Yeah, Floyd again . . . Floyd in deep-voice.
Bunny
Yesterday
Get a good slob with purée and your O.K.
Bunny
Gives ya gas
Grab that ass with both hands and make a pass
New car, scimitar, crossbar daydream
Think I’ll buy me a French I-beam
Bunny
Ipecac
I’m all right Jack, keep your glands off my-y-y-y crack.
*
“I saw him write something when I told him I was thinking about going over to XYY,” Fall told them.
“What’s that mean, ya think?” asked Woof.
“Well, he kinda smiled when he wrote it, so it wasn’t like it pissed him off.”
“Was he humming?”
“I couldn’t hear that, but yeah, he like tapped his foot and even bobbed his head, but those eyes, man . . . he puts a radar lock on ya.”
*
Opie. Dickhead.
“I’m the team sniper, Top. I shot twelve of these fuckin’ savages already.” Pursed lips. Un-pursed lips. Lip curl. Thick head of auburn hair. Tall boy with a fucked-up, red turkey-beard. Eyes like blue saucers that would gape open unexpectedly, then squint, then wink.
“Honestly, I wouldn’t trade one American life for this whole fuckin’ place. But until I get back to the world, I’m here to do the job.” Opie winked at Dale again, twice in succession with the same eye. Dale tilted his head. This guy really had no control over this creepy repertoire of facial tics. “I’m a professional. You ask me, though, best thing for this place is a neutron bomb. More of ’em I shoot, the better I like it.” The eyes again, popping open like he was airing out his irises.
Dylan . . .
Now you don’t gawk at clouds
Now you don’t bean no shroud
About having to be loungin’ for your next spiel
Cow does it kneel
Cow does it kneel
To be without a bone
Like a drum beat tone
Like a bowling throne
*
“He’s alright,” said Ope. “Just quiet.”
“Quiet like Son of motherfuckin’ Sam,” said Gene. “I’m telling you, dude, he’s crazy as a sack of squirrels.” Pedro gave eight consecutive nods of affirmation.
*
The next dickhead was the one called Woof. Not Wolf, Woof. Jeez.
“They call me Woof, you know, cuz I raise dogs. Love my dogs. My wife loves ’em. Kids, too. You got kids?” Woof waited for an answer . . . and waited . . . This one was a little chunky, too, thought Dale. The mess hall fed them well here. Georgia drawl. Mess hall, Georgia drawl, mess hall, Georgia drawl . . .
“One,” it finally came out of him. “I have one child. She’s in college.”
“I got two,” Woof resumed his monologue. “Boy six, girl four, and they love dogs, too, like I said. I got a Pointer, an Alsatian, and a Jack Russell. I like dogs better’n people, y’ know. You can tie ’em to a post and beat ’em, and they’re still loyal, y’ know?”
Don’t they say people look like their dogs? This guy didn’t look like any of those dogs. He looked like . . . a dickhead. Woof saw Dale laughing to himself and thought Dale was enjoying his remarks about tying a dog up and beating it, so he drove on, smiling back now.
“I’m the senior medic, but I let Baby Doc do sick call. Hector? He needs the practice, y’ know. But watch for him, that one. He’s a fuckin’ Jesus freak or somethin’. Church twice a week if he can, fuckin’ mackerel snapper . . . you’re not Catholic, are you?”
Who was that guy? Billy something . . .
Come out Magenta, don’t let me mate
You Catholic girls fart then rotate
Aw, but moon a potato that thumbs-down the freight
I might as well be that dumb
Well, they towed you a thumbscrew, told you to weigh
They bit you a dimple and clocked a driveway
Aw, but that cheddar sold Golan Heights a toupee
For rings that your flight had fun
Only the hood fry dung
Only the hood fry dung.
*
Woof was frowning when he came back out.
“I tried to talk, like y’all said. Was like I wasn’t even there. Bobby, that shit you said is stupid. Your boy is fuckin’ whacko. Cheese done slid off his cracker.”
*
“Sis,” Dale wrote. And you shall call me Loretta . . .
“Top, I’ll be honest. The boys say you just want us to talk about shit. So, I’m gonna tell you about the shit I put up with on this detachment. I’m senior commo, but I do most of it. Guess I shouldn’t talk out of school, but Top, since you’re coming in fresh, I don’t mind doing the comms, but all of them? I mean, Pedro? Sergeant Correa? All that guy does is work out and take supplements and shit. Lookin’ at himself in the mirror at the MSA gym. Then he’s too tired to work. I’m puttin’ in, sometimes, eighteen-hour days doin’ all the fuckin’ comms, and he just works out and watches porn.”
Dickhead.
“Sorry, I guess I’m comin’ off as some kinda pussy, a fuckin’ whiner or somethin’. But you check, we always got comms, and all Pedro’s doin’ is watchin’ Malibu Muffdivers while he does flutterkicks.”
“Sergeant Sisson. Sis?”
“Yeah, Top.”
“How many more people are out there?”
“Two, Top.”
“You ever hear this song?” Sis looked at Top like he was a jumping spider. “Hmm hmm hmm . . . We come off the scoop, Palm Beach . . . mm hmm hmm . . . My grandfather had to pee . . . hmm hmm hmm . . .” Dale nodded silently for a moment, then, “There’s a chorus about comin’ home.”
“Top, I never . . .”
“Not important. Somethin’ you said about Malibu triggered a memory, that’s all. Go on. You were sayin’ that Pedro’s your junior and he just works out and jacks off to porn all day, and you let him get away with it, then you have to do all the work.”
“Well, I uh . . .”
“Ever thought of writin’ him up?”
“Well, Top, this team’s done a lot of shit together . . .”
“Ahh, you mean you guys all have shit on each other, right?”
“Top . . .”
“It’s pretty common, you know. A-Detachments go downrange, they do things they don’t want their wives or federal authorities to know about. Now Pedro has you by the short hairs?” Sis was looking at his feet. “It’s alright, Sis. Give it some time. Let me be the heavy.” Sis looked up again, a flicker of hope smoldering beneath his confusion. “Send in the next guy.”
*
“He’s fuckin’ crazy, right?” Pedro said.
Sis looked at Pedro. Then he smiled.
“I kinda like the guy.”
*
Then came Eddy.
“I’m from San Antonio. I should’ve been a medic, then I could’ve done Phase Two at home, but I don’t mind explosives, and tell you the truth, I hate putting my hands in body parts . . . medics, man, they like feeling in guts and shit. Don’t like blood. Don’t want to touch any guts. So, I’m an engineer. My buddy, Hector? Baby Doc? He did San Antonio, but you know where he’s from?”
Eddy. Dickhead.
“Tecumseh, Michigan. What kind of Mexican comes from Tecumseh, Michigan? I love my hermano, but I don’t get people who want to study urine under a microscope and stick a thermometer up your ass. What was your MOS, Top?” Top heard this one, and smiled.
“Infantry. Then a medic.”
Ay, ay, ay, ay
Canta y no llores
Porque cantando se alegran
Cielito lindo, los corazone
He knew those words! This was almost over.
*
The last interview was the junior medic. The “mackerel snapper,” Hector Fermin, a Staff Sergeant from Michigan.
Baby Doc entered and shook hands before he removed his helmet and grounded his weapon.
“Master Sergeant,” he said. He seemed quiet, almost submissive. Short, sturdy, good looking kid. Like Dale back in the day.
“A.D,” Top said. “Or Top. My real name’s Abner Dale, but people tend to laugh when I say that.” Top gave a bit of a laugh. “See what I mean? Even I think it’s funny.” He found himself wanting to cheer up this melancholy kid.
Baby Doc smiled dutifully, grounded his gear neatly alongside the table where he’d propped his rifle and took a seat. Before Dale could ask him to talk about himself, he volunteered.
“Master Sergeant, I don’t think I belong here.”
For the first time today, someone at least had his attention. I don’t know what the fuck I’m doing here either.
“Why are you saying you think you shouldn’t be here? Here . . . on the team? Here in Afghanistan?”
“Both, I think. Maybe not even the Army. I don’t wanna cause trouble, but I’m havin’ issues with a lot of stuff I see here.” Join the club! I’ve been here one day.
Hector was the only clean-shaven member of the team. Having very little facial hair, he’d decided, apparently, not to look immature and unkempt at the same time. He reminded Dale of a soccer player. The best grunts weren’t put together like weightlifters, Dale reflected, but like soccer players.
Baby Doc had a thick shock of straight black hair and the blackest eyes Dale had ever seen on a live person. Darker even than Farah’s, whose eyes you had to study to find the iris in the pupils.
“Stuff?”
“Stuff I think is illegal, stuff against my religion.”
“Are you Catholic?” Dale asked. Doc nodded. “Because if you’re looking at conscientious objection,” Dale explained, “I’ve worked with a couple of guys on CO’s. I gotta tell ya, it’s granted on religious grounds only for particular traditions, and the Catholic Church doesn’t have what they call ‘a consistent and historical commitment to non-violence’.”
“Not that. Maybe that, but I mean stuff that’s goin’ on here in the FOB. Stuff the contractors are doin’. Our guys are kind of doin’ it, too.” Dale thought for a long moment, then sighed.
“Hold on,” he said, reaching for his pen.
CHAPTER 13
Nanji
Afghan Militia Checkpoint, Above Kabul
July 10, 2010
2330 — Local
High along a curve and tucked into a paved turnout on the shoulder of the highway, three militiamen huddled in the dark by a tea fire. Bundled against the night chill, headscarves down around their necks, Kalashnikovs hanging their shoulders, their gazes alternated between the fire and the lights of Kabul twinkling like a thick constellation against the vast and lightless valley below. Cheveaux-de-frise obstacles channeled nonexistent traffic off the main lanes and through the checkpoint, bounded by a surprisingly modern three-beam guardrail.
Nightjars hunted moths and called to one another along the slope. An owl caroled mournfully from above the checkpoint. Crickets buzzed. The men hunkered close to the column of smoke to ward off mosquitoes. The fire drew insects, and the insects drew bats. The bats flashed in and out of the firelight, coming so close that the men could hear the huff of their wings.
They hardly looked up when, ten kilometers away across the black valley, a sudden spray of light erupted — tracers — followed a few seconds later by the distant sound of automatic weapons fire, like someone thumbing a pack of cards. No one remembered a time when gunfire wasn’t part of the background noise like the birds, bats, and bugs.
They heard a truck in the distance approaching from the side of the checkpoint facing away from Kabul. Their eyes strained to penetrate the dark. One guard stayed by the little fire, while the other two sauntered to the middle of the paved apron. The engine grew louder until the beams of the headlights glared and swept along the road cut. Yellow headlights hove into view, high-beams flashing twice by way of a signal. The truck slowed and pulled onto the apron, a dingy-brown, flat-faced Mitsubishi with a canvas-covered stake bed. The Afghan militiamen stood aside. The brakes squealed as the truck slowed to a stop. The driver killed the lights and dismounted.
He was dressed in a gray shalwar kamiz, his head covered with a rose-colored kufi visible now only in flickering firelight. He wore a pistol belt with an American Colt 45 in an antique holster.
Another man jumped down from the covered bed, Kalashnikov in hand.
The men greeted one another with handshakes and air-kisses across each cheek. The driver produced a pack of cigarettes and passed them out to all but one, who refused. He lit them just as they heard the second truck.
Grinding up the slope from the opposite direction, an American MRAP armored truck trundled around the turn. The men turned their faces to the valley, blinded momentarily with the dazzling blaze of halogen headlights.
The MRAP pulled in nose-to-nose with the Mitsubishi. Someone inside set the parking brake and cut the engine. The sudden silence was followed by a sudden blackout when they cut the lights, leaving everyone utterly night-blind. The militiamen heard a door open, a boot hit the metal step, then the pavement. Eyes strained to adjust to the darkness.
A tall sturdy figure blotted out stars. Ben Virden, the American contractor, HK416 assault rifle hung off his massive right shoulder. Big amrekayan with the big muscles. The other door opened. Virden’s confederate, named Paul Shedd — assigned the sobriquet “Peanut” for his oddly shaped head — joined the group carrying an old CAR-15.
The militiamen knew them well. Afghanistan was a tapestry of inside games. The big contractor and his smaller partner were perfectly positioned, legally speaking, with their general immunity from prosecution here or in the States, to prevent ISAF interfering with their enterprise.
A few words were exchanged using bastardizations from three languages. Virden and Peanut were “introduced” to the Afghan driver of the Mitsubishi. The driver led them to the back of the truck, opened the flap and shouted “Ayez piyadeh!”
Bumps and scrapes from inside.
The tailgate gave a rusty squeak as he lowered it. Three disheveled and terrified girls climbed down, gathering their dirty dresses around themselves as they dismounted. Peanut shined a flashlight in their faces, all tear-streaked dust and red eyes.
“Nice,” Peanut said. “Nice young cooz.”
Peanut and the Afghan driver herded them to the MRAP. They called it the “Batmobile.” There was even a dusty little bat decal on either side. Virden’s idea. As he was fond of telling his colleagues, he was like Batman — above and outside the law. Virden handed money to the driver and the militia chief.
*
The “Chinese Restaurant,” so named by its American and European clientele, was no restaurant. The Chinese characters on the sign over the façade actually read “Import-Export.” The proprietor was known as Nanji to the Americans, none of them realizing his name, appropriately so, meant pimp in archaic Chinese and gigolo in the modern. Downtown Kabul, one block off the Kolula Pustha, Nanji’s place was quiet during the day while surrounding shops bustled, appearing to all the world as a dull, quiet office.
Nanji had a high steel security gate over the entrance to a semi-subterranean garage where up to six visiting vehicles could back in and park unobtrusively. The garage gate was manned by a perennially rotating guard, armed with a rusty Kalashnikov passed from one to the next.
In 2005, there’d been a crackdown on the brothels because foolish men had advertised their businesses with signs such as “Paradise” and “Men’s Room.” The NGO staffers and the diplomats reveled inside and out as if they were touring Bangkok, outraging the political Islamists. But Nanji escaped notice. He’d adopted the strategy of discretely catering to a vetted clientele interested in very young women — girls, really.
During the day the street bustled with hawkers, noisy traffic jams stinking of diesel fumes, men carrying food on their heads, hijab-clad women crisscrossing the streets with their heads down and bags held close, and faux-fashionable young men wearing western clothes and gaudy watches.
Now, though, at 2:50 a.m., all was quiet. A single moth-besieged security light illuminated the black steel grille across the front door. The three upstairs windows were likewise caged, with pale green curtains concealing interior plywood window panels that provided around-the-clock separation between the outside world and what went on indoors. The downstairs window was sealed with a peeling green shutter. There were no nearby streetlights. The security lamp cast a lonesome pool of creamy light across the entrance. At this dreaming hour, the air itself held still as a hunted animal.
The quiet was shattered by the racket of the Batmobile, glaring down the length of the street like a searchlight. The Americans pulled in front of the Chinese Restaurant and parked, engine running.
Virden dismounted from the passenger side and strode into the cone of light. He pounded on the steel cage door, and shouted.
“Nanji! It’s me! Open up!”
The door cracked, releasing a slender wedge of light. A small, slight man in silk pajamas appeared when the inner door opened. He unlocked the steel cage-door.
Peanut left the driver’s door open on the Batmobile and trotted to the back of the truck, opening the rear hatch.
“Kata sha!” he shouted Peanut at the hesitant girls.
“They’re not Pashtun,” Virden called him. “They dunno whatcha said.”
“The fuck are they?”
“Iranian.”
“Cool,” Peanut chuckled. He motioned the girls down.
They clambered off the back of the Batmobile, stiff from being packed into the cramped vehicle, big-eyed, trembling, sour with fear. Peanut pushed them through the door past Virden and Nanji.
Nanji’s office was two steps in, to the left before the stairs, with a stainless-steel keypad security door. Nanji left the door hanging open behind him. Virden went into the office, while Peanut herded the three girls up the stairs and through a green wooden door at the top and into the “lounge” — a bunch of throw pillows on an Afghan rug around three massively circular Japanese tea tables.
Nanji’s sleepy boss-girl, a thirty-something known to the Americans as Sugarpussy, met Peanut and led the girls to their new homes — a circle of cubicles around the upstairs perimeter furnished with tick mattresses, floor mats, slop jars, cheap furniture, and two blankets apiece. Sugarpussy barked orders in Dari and Pashto that the girls didn’t understand, shoving them roughly into their respective cubicles.
*
Down in the office, Virden admired his own arms in Nanji’s office mirror as Nanji closed the door. Sleeve tats down both arms . . . nice guns for thirty-five. He wore his chest rig with t-shirts to show off his arms, even on chilly nights like this, like a prairie chicken puffed out in a dominance display.
Nanji stumbled around half-awake still, his thin hair matted by a pillow. People said he looked like a young Deng Xiaoping; but right now, he was all baggy eyes in a sleep-slackened face. A short-sleeved, silver pullover covered his silk pajamas, with white florets and silver embroidery on the sleeve hems and the collar.
The office walls were painted mauve. Saffron trim. Expensive crown moulding. On the walls hung a Qiu Jing print of a red flamingo, a Hua Tunan falcon in ink, and a circular mirror — where Virden admired himself now — framed in polished feather-pattern brass, hanging next to the door that led to Nanji’s bedroom.
Nanji has nice shit, Virden thought, detaching his gaze from his own arms in the mirror and looking around the room, but it’s still put together like a pimp.
The floors were deodar cedar, covered with a Karuqal rug — pale salmon and blue predominating in eight-pointed star fractals. The big wall safe was concealed behind a Zhou Chunya print of two dogs whose lolling pink tongues picked up the mauve motif. Elaborately carved Indian rosewood office desk, surface curved into a great “J”, with matching rosewood round-backed armchair; and yet more blonde rosewood for the stocked minibar. On another wall, a cotton-print hung, pale pink on the border, fading to gold in the middle, black silhouette-figures copulating, the man-silhouette standing, the woman-silhouette wrapped around him with her arms and legs.
Hey, thought Virden, it’s a whorehouse. Virden recognized none of the décor for what it was, but he knew money when he saw it. His family back in Ohio would be blown away if they knew he was doing business now with a Chinese pimp in Kabul. Life was exotic, and he was all over it!
“Euro okay?” Nanji asked, reaching into his safe. “Don’ have enough dollah.”
“Euros are fine,” said Virden.
*
The cubicle was lighted with a single dim orange bulb. Virden did a half-push-up to accelerate his thrusts. He was about to cum. The girl gasped for air as she was relieved of his weight, sobbing and turning her face to the side. Virden and Peanut were awarded the “break-ins” as part of their deal. Virden bumped a flimsy end table, and knocked over an empty pitcher and a washbasin.
In time she’d accept her situation, he knew. He’d been doing this for a while. She’d begin to add her own little touches — postcards that caught her fancy, maybe a radio.
Virden growled as he felt his orgasm wash over him, pushing up inside her as she winced in pain. In another cubicle, Peanut grunted while his girl whimpered. Virden pulled out, not looking at the sobbing girl, reached for the little towel that was provided with the pitcher and basin, and wiped a ring of slippery blood off his deflating penis.
Peanut’s girl screamed at first, but after he was inside her, she seemed to almost disappear, her teary eyes going kind of vacant. Peanut heard Virden cum and took that as his cue to go for it, too. He pulled out at the last moment so he could get up on his knees and pump ejaculate onto her face and belly, something he picked up from watching porn. She flinched out of her trance when semen hit her in the eye and reflexively crab-scuttled back into the darkest corner of the cubicle. Minutes later, the two men were headed back to Camp Virtue.
CHAPTER 14
Hideous dream
Kenan Theater
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
July 1, 2010
The kid was good, his baritone voice brimming with gravitas. A blue-filter spotlight isolated him onstage. Adam Baier, according to the program. Playing Brutus, his face visible over a cloaked shoulder. He addressed a dagger laying in his hand as if reading aloud from a book.
“Between the acting of a dreadful thing,” he told the dagger, “. . . and the first motion, all the interim is like a phantasma or a hideous dream.” The young thespian then raised his gaze to some point on an imaginary horizon. “The genius and the mortal instruments are then in council . . .” He looked down again at the dagger, “. . . and the state of man, like to a little kingdom, suffers then the nature of an insurrection.” Lucius materialized stage left to tell Brutus that Cassius and his co-conspirators had arrived.
Deangela stole a look at her dad. Dale was captivated, half smiling.
*
Dale was dressed in an ivory linen suit with a periwinkle shirt and silver cuff links. He wore a matching blue and white polka dot bow tie and pocket square. He was shaved clean, his hair trimmed short, tight on the sides.
He and Deangela attracted furtive glances in the lobby before the play. A very odd couple they were indeed, him the fortyish white man dressed to the nines, and her, the copper-skinned biracial teen with her explosive, untamed hair and her funky, butch, thrift store threads — old, gray, pleated men’s slacks, a yellow, short-sleeved Polo shirt, and purple Crocs. They both secretly enjoyed the way they perplexed people, and Deangela had been delightedly surprised when her dad showed up so nattily turned out.
Their last “date” before he deployed again, this time for eight to nine months, he said, after which he was going to file his retirement papers. He’d fought the deployment, but his fresh qualification in Farsi caught the attention of the bean counters at the Pentagon, and an intervention from a commander in Afghanistan had matched him up with an open slot in Afghanistan to run a detachment in 6th Special Forces Group. He’d fought the assignment all the way to Washington, D.C., lobbying for a teaching job at the Special Warfare Center so he could remain in North Carolina. He was eligible to start collecting a pension in May 2012, and that’s exactly what he intended to do. Not one day longer. His language was not Pashto, he’d argued, but the branch representative told him that hardly anyone on any of the teams spoke Pashto anyway — they’d all been trained in Arabic, Urdu, and Farsi. For that matter, the team that wanted him was Spanish-speaking. “As you are,” said the dead-eyed branch rep. All Detachments from all SF Groups were getting Afghanistan rotations. Combat is training, is combat, is training. Game over. He was going to Afghanistan.
The play had been Deangela’s idea. Dale had driven up from Fayetteville that afternoon, and didn’t have to report in for pre-deployment processing until the 3rd. He’d crash on the Deangela’s couch tonight. She’d cleared it with Sam.
Dale had studied English literature before he met Farah in 1990. He loved Shakespeare, and had taught Deangela some of the plays — King Lear and Macbeth were his favorites — when she was ten. She didn’t understand many aspects of the narratives then, having little experience of life yet; but what had intrigued and surprised her, apart from the poetry of the language, was the epiphany that people from different times and places were so utterly different from her own. Like she’d opened a secret door, though in the same breath, she’d become reflective in an older and, perhaps, more melancholy way.
They loitered in the lobby with the remainder of the post-performance audience, raising their voices enough to hear each other over the buzz.
“So, what were you grinning at when Brutus was talking to his knife?” she asked.
“The language. And the insight. That feeling in your belly when you’re about to do something with potentially terrifying consequences. ‘Like a phantasma or hideous dream.’” A shadow passed over his face.
Deangela, looking away and not noticing, chimed in, “‘The genius and the mortal instruments,’ the reason and the flesh . . .”
“‘Like to a little kingdom’,” he merged back into the moment. “Microcosm, macrocosm.”
“The great chain of being.”
“You remember that?”
“Late medieval scholastic philosophy, Daddy. Two years ago.”
“So, it all flows together. The die is cast. Well, maybe you don’t, uh . . .”
“I get it, Daddy. The anxiety of a made decision. It’s ‘the nature of an insurrection,’ a rebellion, in action and in the heart . . . the simultaneous dread and thrill one feels before committing transgressions.”
People around them had begun to eavesdrop, pretending they took no notice.
*
They strolled from Kenan Theater down Franklin Street, back to the apartment past the darkened bookstores, restaurants, and boutiques.
The upstairs apartment’s lights burned brightly. Sam was home. Deangela dug a ring of keys out of her pocket to open the ground-floor hallway door. They mounted the worn wooden stairs. The banister was loose. Dale rattled it like a concerned dad. Deangela worked the key into the apartment lock.
Sam came out of the kitchen when they entered, hair twisted and mounted atop her head. She wore a loose, sleeveless calico dress and her Brogues.
“Sam, this is my dad. Daddy, Sam.”
Sam set a colorful Guatemalan shoulder bag on the counter and offered Dale her hand.
“Pleased to meet you, Sam,” said Dale. “I’ve heard a lot about you. People just call me A.D.”
“A.D. Pleasure.” She had a firm handshake and a welcoming face.
“You wanna have a glass of wine with us?” asked Deangela.
“Not tonight, sweetie. Headin’ out as we speak. Filthy Birds are playin’ the Cradle. Buncha law students lettin’ our hair down.” The clock on the wall said 11:10. “Deangela didn’t tell me her pop was so swank. You’re very elegant.”
“Thank you. Special occasion, you know. Shakespeare with my kid.”
“Keep the women off ’im, De,” Sam said to Deangela. Dale blushed a little. Deangela and Sam grinned. Sam put her bag over her shoulder and opened the door.
“I’ll leave you two to hang out. I’ll try not to wake you when I come in, A.D.”
“No sweat,” said Dale. “You won’t bother me.”
*
They’d opted for orange juice instead of wine, finally, and they shared a big bag of pistachios, heaping shells in the middle of the table.
“So,” Deangela said, pushing broken shells around the table, hesitating. “Why didn’t you go to grad school?”
Tense topic. Dale didn’t like discussing the past. But his sudden, seemingly random, cognitive departures lately had given her a veiled sense of unease. Now he was deploying again. Dale sensed her apprehension. He inhaled deeply, sighed, looked at the ceiling, the cupboards, the floor . . . and her. He took a sip of orange juice.
“You were born.” Her face fell a little, and he added quickly, “That’s not to say it was, like, your fault. We were crazy-happy when she got pregnant, but we’d gone into debt some with the marriage and the immigration hassles, and the U.S. refused to recognize her Belizean nursing credentials. So, we needed to send her all the way through nursing school again. It was a breeze for her, but it was expensive.
“I went to a recruiting office and they put me in the army at the grade of E-4 because of my degree. Full medical coverage, housing allowance, subsistence allowance, affordable day care, extra money if I jumped out of planes. A degree in English plus a dollar will get you a bad cup of coffee, so it looked like a good deal.”
“I ask Mama what split you up . . . or whatever it is you two are doing . . . maintaining separate domiciles? She never tells me. You’ve never told me. Was that the Army? Or you? Or her?”
*
Mogadishu, Somalia
October 4, 1993
Specialist Four Abner Dale didn’t know how a thirty-minute, stick-and-move raid was entering its third hour and turning into a complete and catastrophic fiasco. When they’d arrived in Somalia, an old Special Forces medic from Regiment, who’d done the botched Grenada mission, told Dale one day in the hangar that their reliance on direct helicopter insertions was going to get them into trouble. He was just a medic. And a perpetually angry asshole, a dry drunk by some accounts, so no one was hearing it. He turned out to be right.
This was supposed to be a simple snatch, Delta boys on the target, Rangers on the surrounding strong points. In broad daylight. Then came the rocket-propelled grenades, taking down one bird. The other chopper pilots started dodging. The increasingly disorganized choppers threw up blinding rotor washes over the dusty streets. Follow-on birds were forced into unplanned orbits to find landing zones. The birds started missing their planned insertion points.
Dale saw one Ranger on an adjacent bird peel off the fast-rope and burn in from more than thirty feet when the bird jinked. Dale himself hit the ground off the fast-rope and chased his team leader. They ran between a two-story concrete house and a ten-foot concrete security wall. Small arms fire sprayed at them before they reached cover, and Sergeant Franks, his team leader, pulled in with a limp. He’d been shot in the foot. Blood oozed from the ripped toe of his left boot and dust clotted the blood.
“Fuck, fuck, fuck!” Franks kept repeating.
Staff Sergeant Winfro, the squad leader, somewhere else, who the hell knew where, was shouting through Franks’ radio, demanding their position.
Dale and his teammate Jaconette kneeled and oriented their M-16A2’s across the street.
“The fuck should I know!” shouted Franks, then keyed his mike and replied to Winfro, “Stand by, over.”
A burst of incoming machinegun fire chewed up the street right in front of them, and they drew back into the gap between the wall and the building. Stray rounds were breaking off pieces of concrete block like God’s own sledgehammers. Dale dropped into the prone, shouldered his weapon left-handed, and inched back around the shattered corner of the wall to see where the fire had come from. Jaconette was big-eyed, white-faced, and spacey — the first stages of combat catatonia.
Franks pressed himself to the wall and dug the laminated objective-sketch out of his cargo pocket to check his position, trying not to think about how many toes he’d just lost, the pain increasing by the second.
Another burst ripped past, and Dale spotted the muzzle flash from less than a hundred meters out. It had come from what looked like a utility shed or a pump house. He aimed at the structure, and let go with ten or so rapid-fire single shots. Two figures appeared, then disappeared as they withdrew, and he chased them with four more rounds. His own muzzle blast from the last four rounds kicked up a cloud of powdery dust immediately in front of him, and he momentarily lost sight of everything.
Franks got back on the radio, the laminated sketch laying on the ground by his feet, rifle in his right hand, his left on the radio taped to his chest harness.
“Foxtrot Three, this is Papa One, over.”
“Papa One, go ahead,” came the staticky reply.
Another burst, further away by the sound, ricocheted down the street, followed by a crashing boom as an RPG exploded no more than fifty feet off to their left. Now their ears were ringing.
“Fox Three, we are one block west of our planned insertion point, and we are taking heavy automatic weapons and rocket fire, over.”
*
An hour later they’d almost managed to link up with the rest of the squad. They moved from street to street toward where they understood a downed helicopter to be, when they saw the other team of Rangers leapfrogging the same direction.
From the bottom floor of a two-story building, the Somalis let loose on the approaching team with two machine guns, forcing them into an alley, whereupon the other Ranger team returned fire with M16s and a Squad Automatic Weapon. The SAW buzzed through at least a hundred rounds, a lot of them ripping past Franks’ team and forcing it to take cover.
If they fired at the Somalis who were firing at the other Rangers, then they would fire on those Rangers, just as the other group had just fired on them. This was a fratricidal geometry, and they needed to move away — fast.
Dale could see Franks’ foot was hurting badly, the rip in his boot still weeping blood and gathering filth. His limp was getting worse, and he was gray in the face.
“We gotta get one street over,” Franks told Dale and Jaconette. Jaconette still looked a little shocked, too, but Dale had forced him to fire back once to snap him out of his panic-daze. At least he was still responding to orders now. Franks looked like he was about to puke. He pointed to their rear at another concrete wall, maybe eight feet high.
“You two lift me over. Jaconette, boost Dale. Dale, pull Jaconette.” Dale and Jaconette both nodded. They’d done these team wall-clearances more than once in training. When Franks dropped to the other side of the wall, he cried out as his foot hit the ground. Jaconette bent a knee for Dale to step on. When Dale was astraddle the wall he reached down and offered a hand to Jaconette. Dale strained backward against Jaconette’s weight until Jaconette had both of his arms on top of the wall. Rounds snapped around them. Dale dropped down on the other side by Franks, and within seconds Jaconette dropped down too.
They were in some kind of courtyard, with a big house — or what used to be one before this whole city turned into a post-apocalyptic landscape. The courtyard was between them and the street, adjacent to a concrete house with gaping, empty apertures where windows and doors should have been.
Three converted Toyota battle trucks used by Somali militias, “technicals” they called them, drove past on the street beyond the house. The team hit the dirt.
“Fuck me!” Franks said as they rose again.
Then they saw the women, two of them.
They’d appeared, almost like magic, in one of the empty doorways, staring wordlessly at the team. The team stared back.
Dale jumped when shots went off right in his ear — bam! bam! bam! bam! bam! bam!
The two women wilted in the doorway, one twitching, the other still. A heat plume floated over Franks’ barrel.
“The fuck was that for?” Dale demanded.
“They’re spotters,” shouted Franks. “Don’t you fuckin’ question me, Ranger! They’re fuckin’ FOs. Move up and check the bodies.”
Frank was off the rails with pain and fear, pinging, trigger-happy. Jaconette was standing now, wide-eyed again.
Dale went forward and stopped shy of the doorway.
One of the women, with an olive skirt, a green-and-white shirt, and a dingy head covering, was missing half her face. The other, who wore some tie-dyed thing from head to toe, had blood on her belly and chest, her right leg bent unnaturally and bleeding around an exposed femur. She was breathing, just barely, but her eyes were already fixed.
Then he saw the baby. It was wrapped in a filthy gray blanket, propped in a corner on the dusty floor of the empty room with snot all over its face. The baby was too skinny for a baby. She didn’t even whimper. Just stared blankly back at Dale.
*
Chapel Hill, North Carolina
July 2, 2010
12:23 AM
“That was ’93,” said Dale.
Deangela was wordless.
“Went to Special Forces Qualification the next year. That’s when I became a medic. Your mom helped me study.
“Rangers, they’re mostly white boys. After Mogadishu, they’d rehabilitated the word nigger, and all the stuff I’d been denying was out in front of me now, accusing me. Hypocrite, right? I knew how those guys were all along. Joining SF was my geographic cure. What a joke.
“Your mom re-certified in ’95 just before I finished the training. Then I went to Colombia in ’96, Honduras in ’97. I never been sent anywhere to kill white people.”
Deangela held very still, eyes down. She reached up to wipe away a sniffle.
“I was good at it, see. People like doing what they’re good at. And honestly, I liked the recognition, the rep. I was ambitious, and ambition’s constant companion is irresponsibility. Turned out SF had as many racist bastards as the Rangers, but I kept re-convincing myself I could keep work in one box and be home in another one.
“Joined Delta in ’98, another outfit full of racist pricks. 2001, we went to Mazar-e Sharif and that rolled into Tora Bora, the big fight when we lost bin Laden. We got hammered, day in, day out, half frozen, never knowing when the next skirmish would come. And our so-called allies went on murder sprees afterward. Factions realigning as often as they changed their underwear. We’d no idea what was going on anymore.
“At any rate, when I got home to you and Mami, I was a hot mess, hypervigilant and depressed. Terrible insomnia. So, she gave me an Ambien one night. You were downstairs in your room asleep when she came to bed. When I woke up, I had your mama by the throat, kicking on the floor, before I realized whose brown face I was looking at. That horrified look, I can’t . . . dreams are the shrapnel of memories. In that few seconds between asleep and awake, I coulda killed your mama. Moved out the next day. That’s why we keep separate domiciles. I’ve never stopped loving your mama, not for an instant. You either.”
A tear slid off Deangela’s nose.
CHAPTER 15
Farmers and fellatio
Intercontinental Hotel
Kabul, Afghanistan
July 10, 2010
Attacks in years past had forced the Intercontinental Hotel to dig up the exterior vegetation for improved visibility, install security booths and traffic spikes, and post a security guard between the underground parking garage and the hotel. The hills above the hotel were dotted with security positions manned by President Karzai’s army of thugs and thieves so reporters, contractors, and nongovernmental organization representatives could sleep, drink, and sunbathe without having to brave small arms and rocket fire.
The hotel itself was Stalinist architecture, boxy, functional, and soulless. Inside, the décor was a clumsy replica of 1950s Vegas, shiny and smooth, with harsh, high-contrast straight lines and right angles.
The lounge was a twilight zone. Even at high noon on a sunny summer day, like now, the brown parquet floor, the stained wooden walls, the red table settings, and the black Afghan macrame hanging from the dark ceiling beams, all maximized the impression of perpetual dusk. Inevitably, one’s eye was drawn to one of two places: the bright light over the ranks of shiny liquor bottles behind the bar — arrayed on black shelves, of course — or the view through the gift shop and the lobby out onto the swimming pool. That’s where the five reporters’ eyes returned when they weren’t speaking with each other across the table.
Gaston Villeneuve leaned back to study the brown beer bottle in his hand — a cold, sweating Sim-Sim. He hadn’t changed his starched, blue, short-sleeved, button-down shirt since the press briefing. The sweat stains on his armpits had dried into matching wrinkle zones. The lager’s label depicted a palmed oasis at sunrise under Arabic and Cyrillic script.
Rosemarie Kirby sat next to him with a glass of white wine, trying to ignore his dirty shirt and dusty socks — he wears socks with sandals for Christ’s sake — her body turned away.
Next to her, Connie Mason had two empty glasses of Cabernet before her, another one almost drained, and a fourth on standby. For a skinny woman, she always seemed able to hold her liquor. She hugged the table, crossing her legs crossed sideways and twisting her shoulders to hover around her glass like she was protecting a baby.
George Yowell sat next to Connie, gelled hair still stony enough to bounce a bullet. He nursed a bottle of Amstel and looked a little cornered, because a quarrel had erupted between Rosemarie and Gaston. These two sniped at each other every time they came within range.
Between George and Gaston sat Phillip Ferguson, heir to some vague political fortune in Connecticut. He aspired to be a stringer for TIME but mostly wrote filler for a variety of content mills and blogs. Phillip was thirty, but his bantam frame, moonlike face, and hawser of brown hair made him look eighteen. He’d come to Afghanistan on his own dime, as he had to other conflict zones over the last five years, trying to break into “the business of journalism.” No one doubted his initiative or even his bravery in facing certain risks, but his writing was atrocious: unfocused and sentimental. Phillip was pounding a second Budweiser to wash down the fragrant meat dumplings he’d bought from a cooking stall near Shahr-e Naw Park in town. He was never invited to press briefings, so he trawled Kabul each day looking for fresh human-interest stories with his translator-slash-bodyguard, a treacherous looking fellow who demanded the outrageous sum of fifty dollars a day for his services.
“Major Carroll is just doing his job, Gaston,” said Rosemarie. “You treat him like he’s the Grey Goblin. You know what a PAO is?”
“He lacks the drama of a villain. He’s a banal little instrument. As to PAO, it stands for prevaricating his ass off,” retorted Gaston. “Even the title, ‘public affairs officer,’ is cunning, don’t you think? ‘Public affairs?’ It’s an anesthetic. Oblique language to divert the public from his actual role of maintaining America’s acquiescence to this misadventure. Read Uwe Poerksen on plastic words.”
“His actual role,” said Rosemarie, “is public affairs.”
“My God, can you really be that obtuse. His job is to speak lines, like a talking doll or an answering machine.”
George couldn’t resist intervening.
“Why does it have to be an official ‘story,’ why isn’t it the official ‘account.’ You’re editorializing when you frame it that way.”
“‘Framing!’ You people cannot help yourselves. You’ve mastered this bridge-to-power speech until it’s mastered you. No wonder your reporting is shit. So, you believe that combat vignette about the kid killing the ‘terrorists’?” He made finger quotes with one hand still gripping his bottle. “The locals are saying he destroyed a truck full of watermelons and killed a farmer.”
“Gaston,” Rosemarie was back in the game, peeved at George’s attempt to rescue her. “The alleged fact that the truck had watermelons in it doesn’t preclude that it was also carrying the weapon used to attack the base.”
“I’m editorializing?” Gaston laughed, setting down his beer and fishing for his cigarettes in his breast pocket. At George: “You see, she is now his lawyer.” Turning to Rosemarie, who was draining her glass: “Are you his attorney, Rosemarie? Or are you so blinded by your infatuation with him . . . oh,” mocking her, “Good Morning, Will, will you please fill my cup with your knowledge and allow me to fellate you?”
Connie gave a sardonic grin as Phillip and George both blurted out their objections at Villeneuve’s casual sexism.
Rosemarie held her hands up, “That’s okay, boys. I’m a big girl. Perhaps Gaston is jealous that anyone would fellate the good Major — a hotty, no doubt — because Gaston hasn’t been fellated himself since he stopped bathing.”
Connie snorted.
Gaston smiled at the tablecloth as he tamped his cigarette on it.
“Are you sure your consevative network would approve of your carnal affinity for a black officer?” He put the cigarette between his lips and pulled a Zippo out of his pocket to light it. Exhaling a stream of smoke away from the table in a show of mock-courtesy, he said, “You still haven’t responded to my point about the dead farmer.”
“She did . . .” Phillip started to say, but Rosemarie facepalmed him again.
“I said that these farmers may have had RPGs. They may moonlight as Taliban. You can’t not know that.”
“Precisely my point. Neither can you. So, your default is to reproduce anything your boy-toy says from his perfidious podium. Go ahead now, lockstep to your laptops and do your duty as the hotty’s stenographer? Have you even . . .”
“I’d fuck him,” Connie volunteered, now on her fourth glass of Cabernet. “I’d fuck him like a chimp. Doesn’t mean I wouldn’t call him on it if I caught him in a lie.”
Phillip and George squirmed a bit in their seats. Gaston lifted one of Connie’s empties across the table and tipped a half-inch of ash into it.
“To catch him in a lie,” Gaston went on, “you’d have to abandon that presumption that everything that passes his lips is some unassailable fact. But that might entail actually leaving the hotel and the press pool to talk with people who are not on the U.S. payroll.”
“Right,” George interjected. “With our phalanxes of bodyguards and armored vehicles to prevent us becoming the Sunday evening news as a Taliban propaganda video. Do you know how much publicity they could get by kidnapping me?”
“Phillip doesn’t mind touring the town,” rebutted Gaston, almost making Phillip smile. “He has only one bodyguard.” Turning to Phillip, “Where is your estimable thug today, anyway?”
“Rastin’s in the parking garage with the Suburban.”
“Oh, the life of a gunman!” Gaston turned to Rosemarie again, enveloping her in a smog of lager and tobacco. I can even smell his socks, she thought. “I put it to you again, dear Rosemarie. Does this dead farmer merit any inquiries? Do you think he had a mother?”
“I’m not listening to this communist bullshit anymore,” said George abruptly, scratching his chair back over the parquet, tossing back the last of his Amstel, and stalking through the door that led to the lobby, his movements puffy and somehow disarticulated, his hairdo still hard enough to withstand a bomb blast.
Connie signaled the bartender with a raised finger and said, “I love our little back-chats.”
Gaston snickered, pulled on his cigarette one last time and dropped the butt into a wineglass with a hiss.
“One of your chevaliers has quit the field, Rosemarie,” quipped Gaston. “What was all that about communists? Have the Russians landed?”
Connie laughed.
“Your paper is pretty left-wing, Gaston,” said Phillip, emboldened by his second Budweiser and Gaston’s acknowledgment of his physical courage.
“Phillip, my friend,” replied Gaston, “in the United States, everything west of Richard Nixon is considered left-wing. You probably don’t remember him, but he was a paranoid Cold War lunatic . . .”
“I know who Nixon was!”
Rosemarie fluffed the back of her hairdo with her hand, and said, “Gaston, your paper is consistently anti-American, and while we’re not the stenographers of power you claim we are, I happen to believe that our armed forces ought to be allowed a certain presumption of honesty, at least until evidence to the contrary is discovered. It’s a thankless job they didn’t ask for.”
Gaston laughed aloud.
“You are an American religionist . . . no, no wait a minute, you had your say, let me have mine. You nation is your golden calf, one that demands human sacrifice. It’s not just an American thing. Some of my countrymen do the same for Mère France. And the idea that the American armed forces of the United States are doing anything ‘thankless’ is ludicrous . . . wait, hold on . . . it’s ludicrous, because your culture worships them. You refer to them reflexively as heroes — as ‘our’ heroes — even though the vast majority of them have done nothing that could be construed as heroic. By that I mean simultaneously daring and altruistic. English is my third language, cherie, so I attend closely to meanings, like the way a term like ‘hero’ is pauperized as propaganda.”
“Gaston . . .”
“You just told me that we — meaning, I assume, the press — we owe anyone who wears an American uniform the presumption of honesty. The basis for this claim is that their jobs are thankless . . . a non sequitur, by the way, so even if their jobs were thankless, which is demonstrably untrue . . . they are thanked profusely all the time by people who have no idea what they have or haven’t done . . . this is not evidence of any inhering honesty.”
“So, you want to assume the opposite? That they are all liars?”
“I didn’t say that. Major Carroll is not them. I’m sure troops can be remarkably honest. Major Carroll’s job is one in a thousand, and it is to manage perceptions. Lying is his job.”
“Gaston, that’s just a cynical pose, your little dramatis persona. You’re the one who wants to have a desired effect on the public.”
“It’s skepticism, not cynicism, my friend. And yes, we address our work to the anonymous mass, but that’s not the point. The question is, what is our relation to power?”
“It’s not that simple, Gaston,” interjected Phillip.
“What is not . . .” Gaston started to ask, when Connie chimed in.
“You’re a self-righteous prick, Gaston. But we love you. Anyone want to join me at the pool? I’m headed out there to watch tattooed contractors tan.” She scooted her chair back, almost tipping it over. Gaston watched her walk unsteadily away.
He turned to Phillip.
“We should spend more time together.”
CHAPTER 16
Frequency and consistency
Camp Virtue, Afghanistan
July 11, 2010
1615 — Local
The sides were rolled up on Detachment 6246’s billet-tent, the mosquito nets down and tucked under sandbags. A steep shaft of midday sunlight fell across the southern end, warming a stack of large boxes filled with field rations, aka MREs. The men only ate MREs when they couldn’t get DFAC food. Or when the snack bar was closed. Or on patrols.
The rest of the tent was covered in shadow. Cots lined the long axis, personal gear piled at the ends, with a walkway down the center. Parachute cord laced through the interior to hang washed or sweaty clothes. At the north end sat a wide-screen television on a sandbagged camp table. The TV was connected by a hundred-foot power cord to a generator four tents down.
Pedro, looking bored and a little angry, was playing a porn DVD. A woman with a lot of makeup and impossibly high heels was having sex with three men, one with his penis in her mouth as she knelt over another man on his back who thrust into her vagina, and the third man perched behind her with his legs astride the laying man as he thrust into her anus and slapped her ass.
Gene lay on his cot, across from Pedro, gazing surreptitiously at the film.
Pete was in the corner furthest from the television screen trying to shut out the distraction while he typed on his laptop. The moaning on the porno was temporarily drowned out by an earsplitting C-5 passing low overhead on a landing approach.
Baby Doc came in and dropped a tactical medical pack on his cot near the middle of the tent. He sat down and started opening snaps and zippers to inventory the contents. Gene sat up when Baby Doc entered the tent. Baby Doc sighed and pretended not to notice as Gene eyed him. Gene was a hypochondriac, constantly hounding Baby Doc for exam opinions and medications.
“Got a minute?” said Gene, hovering over him. Baby Doc couldn’t even muster the energy to feign surprise.
“What’s going on, Gene? How was guard last night?”
“Is what it is, y’ know. Need to ask you about somethin’.”
“Shoot.” Go away, dude.
Gene sat down next to Baby Doc.
“Last few days,” Gene explained, “I been havin’ problems . . . when I shit.”
What? fucking no! Doc drew a long, deep breath and suppressed the audibility of a sigh.
“Problems how?”
“I don’t shit but every second or third day, and when I do, it’s these hard balls.”
“Sooo, you’re constipated.” A medic’s job is way too much information.
“I mean, yeah, but that’s not normal for me, y’ know? I’m wonderin’ . . .”
“What?”
“Well, if it might mean I got colon cancer or somethin’.”
“It doesn’t mean you have colon cancer. You’re only, what, twenty-six years old?”
“Yeah, but people in my family, they catch cancer quite a bit.”
“You don’t catch cancer, Gene, and constipation isn’t cancer. If you’re so worried about cancer, you need to give up your Marlboros.”
“That’s bullshit.” Oh, the bull-headed belligerence of the addict, thought Baby Doc. “My granddad smoked until he was ninety before he died. But I’m tellin’ ya, Doc, this is really not normal for me. My shit, it looks like rabbit turds, only bigger.”
“Rabbit turds . . .”
“Yeah, and I gotta push so hard to get ’em out, I feel like I’ll pass out.”
“That’s orthostatic hypotension. You bear down too hard, and you’re dehydrated. Your blood pressure drops. Like when you stand up too fast and get really dizzy. That happen a lot?”
“Well, sometimes.”
“You’re not drinking enough water. That’ll constipate you, too.”
“This is more than dehydration,” Gene pleaded. “I been dehydrated before and still shit turds that look like tubes, y’ know, and they float.” No! Stop! “These hard turds I squeeze out every second or third day, they sink like rocks.” There were few things Baby Doc cherished less than mental images of the frequency and consistency of the detachment members’ stool.
“Okay, so you’re not drinking enough water, and you eat too much meat and dairy. Tried eating more fruits and vegetables?”
“I was hoping you might give me some stool softeners.”
“Stool softeners . . .”
“Uh huh.”
In the meantime, Pedro had switched his DVD to something called Gaggers, where guys shoved their dicks down women’s throats until they gagged while honoring them with titles like “cum-slut.” Pedro, the romantic.
“Stool softeners,” Baby Doc repeated mechanically.
He opened a zipper on his tac-sack and pulled out a sandwich bag. He opened the waterproofing bag and pulled out a little bottle of bisacodyl. He opened the bottle and shook four into his palm and handed them to Gene. He didn’t have any stool softeners, but he knew these would put Gene in the port-a-potty within hours . . . with a vengeance, and maybe deter his selective hypochondria next time.
“You’re off today, right?”
“Yeah.”
“Take two of these now, and two more in four hours. Stay close to the latrine. Don’t take antacids or eat dairy products for the next twenty-four hours. And for constipation, drink more water, eat more vegetables, and less meat and dairy.” Gene looked at him plaintively. “You don’t have colon cancer, but if you want, I can send you to the post MD and see if he’ll recommend a colonoscopy.”
“What’s that?”
“They starve you and give you laxatives for two days, then knock you out, inflate your lower intestine like a balloon, and run a fiber optic camera up your ass to look through your lower intestine.”
“Lemme think about it,” said Gene, rising. “Thanks, Hector.”
ODA 6246
Operations Hooch
The Ops Hooch didn’t look like a “hooch” at all, but like a modular classroom the size of a double-wide trailer (which is what it was). Inside, folding tables stood in neat lines, with folding chairs tucked under them. A podium stood before three over-and-under, sliding, white dry-erase boards. Stashed in the corner there were two tripods with butcher’s block tablets hanging from them. Featureless, shuttered windowless with bright fluorescent overhead lights, pale beige walls, and a scuff-resistant synthetic floor, the place could be a hospital room. Or the set for a Beckett drama.
Dale and Captain Dunny sat facing each other. Dale crossed his legs, hands folded in his lap. The captain sat with his feet wide, elbows on his knees, leaning in expectantly. The air conditioner was still shut down. The smells of gasoline and fried onions drifted through the open door.
“So how were the interviews?” asked the Captain.
“Interesting,” Dale lied.
“Their edge is off,” the captain said. “Bernie, their last team sergeant, was pretty uninspiring. Colonel Thomas wasn’t keen on using them for anything except local reconnaissance.”
“Recon is important,” Dale replied. “Is it targeted, or just RIFs?” Reconnaissance in force, searching whole areas without having any particular targets in mind, once called “search and destroy.”
“RIFs. The Colonel doesn’t trust his junior officers, and he really didn’t trust Bernie. Bernie was pretty fat. Thomas hates fat guys. It’s an image thing. But Bernie just wasn’t operationally sound either, and everyone, includin’ the boys, knew it.”
Dale didn’t reply to that. He just looked vacantly into Captain Bob’s eyes. Dunny straightened up a bit, crossed his legs to mirror his team sergeant, rubbed his hands together, shifted his eyes, and smirked.
“What do you know,” Dale finally asked, “about a place called the Chinese Restaurant?”
Dunny’s smirk froze on his lips and died in his eyes. He held Dale’s gaze for a moment longer, then looked down at his watch. He even turned the watch up and squinted at it until it felt silly, then dropped his hands back to his lap and cleared his throat.
“Chinese Restaurant?” he laughed vacantly. “You sick of the chow hall already, Top?”
“I hear rumors,” said Dale. “Rumors you can buy sex with young girls at a place called the Chinese Restaurant.”
Dunny laughed again, returning Dale’s gaze now, almost as an act of will. Was he being solicited?
“Hey, Top, you know the Army. If you haven’t heard a rumor by nine in the morning, you’re required to start one. Haha!”
Dale returned a mirthless smile, said nothing?
“One of the boys tell you that?” asked Dunny.
“Just local scuttlebutt. Heard about it around the FOB.”
“I’m married,” said Dunny, regretting it the moment he had blurted it out. Dale said nothing. “The Chinese Restaurant you say they call it?” Dale nodded, his blue-green eyes still fixed on Bob’s face. “Interesting. I dunno . . .” said Dunny, eyes flicking down and left. Dale broke off his gaze and smiled broadly.
“Hey, if you don’t know, you don’t know. Just curious. I need to go stow some gear, if it’s alright, sir.”
He rose. Dunny was silent as Dale headed to the door. Dale turned back in the portal. “You know anything about a contractor named Virden?” he asked.
“Yeah, Virden,” Dunny’s eyes dropped again for a millisecond. “Yeah, ex-Group guy, communicator. Little on the macho side, but he seems alright. Some of the guys know him. The commo guys. I think Fall hangs with him sometimes. One of the boys tell you something about Virden?” Dunny cleared his throat again.
“Fall seems to think Virden can get him on contract with XYY Security.”
“Yeah.” A skittish chuckle. “Yeah, it’s hard to keep guys in nowadays. XYY, all these other contract security outfits, they pay. Boy, do they pay!” Again, with the twitchy little laugh. “You thinking of that after retirement?”
Dale was already heading for the door when he turned to reply.
“I’d rather shit in my hand and clap. Just curious, boss. Tryin’ to get the lay of the land.”
*
Some sunsets promise, some threaten. Dale couldn’t make out which this was. He’d been hanging out between the DFAC and the Base Exchange along Main Street, hoping to see what birds made an appearance as the sun slid down beyond a rail of clouds leaving a flaming pink incision along the horizon.
Two Specialists, black women, went into the PX, one chubby, one slim, both looking small in their helmets and carrying antiquated M-16A1s. Neither spoke, but they stayed close, maintaining a little moving security perimeter of their own.
Up along Main Street, in the direction of the communications building bristling with antennas, a gaggle of smokers shared their vice and enough humor to evoke a few ripples of disheartened laughter. One of the port-a-potty doors thumped like a tub as a contractor left it and headed toward the construction and maintenance crew’s billet. Dale’s eyes followed him. That’s when he picked up the movement thirty meters away, behind the toilets. Agitated gesticulations.
It was Captain Bob and Fall. The conversation wasn’t totally discernible at this distance, but there was clearly a blade of antagonism. It wasn’t Dunny who was on the offensive, though. Fall was dominating the exchange.
Captain Bob, meek as a fucking mouse before his own subordinate. Shaking his head, Dale drew back into the shadows. These were the birds that interested him now.
Dunny held up his hands in a kind of surrender. Thrusting his face toward the ground like a busted teenager, he was talking a mile a minute. Then the power dynamic changed, and Fall dropped his face and raised his hands. Both stood for a moment, talking it out. Dunny then gave Fall a reassuring squeeze on the shoulder, said something more, Fall nodding his assent. Dunny looked around then slipped away toward the detachment’s tent.
Like a married couple having a fight. This team is compromised, a leaderless clique.
*
Dale held his position in the shadows, as night quickly claimed the base. Afghanistan could be like that: a brief dusk, then pitch-black, the darkness thickened by the post’s mandatory blackout. All apertures closed. No reason to give the enemy reference points.
The garrison flag over the Base Headquarters suddenly snapped in a gust, sounding almost like a shot, and Dale started just a bit. He saw Fall push a chunk of Copenhagen into his lower lip, step out into Main Street, spit once and head in the opposite direction from Dunny.
Fall went into the communications building.
The two women came out of the PX, heading directly toward Dale. When one noticed him standing there against an ammo bunker, concealed in the night shadow, she squeaked and clutched at her partner.
“Sorry, sorry,” he said, then the other one squealed. “Sorry, no problem, okay, no problem. Sorry, didn’t mean to scare you.”
The thin one made a hooting noise, saying, “You scared the shit outa me.” He looked at her name tag. Specialist Clark.
“Oh my God!” was all her companion could say. Specialist Powers.
“Really sorry,” he said again, trying to sound as non-threatening as possible. They made out the six-line chevrons on his collar.
“Master Sergeant,” Powers said. “We just didn’t see you.”
Both busy trying to adjust their comportment to his rank.
“’S okay,” he told them again. “My fault. Really.” They were each holding one hand over their hearts like they were about to say the Pledge of Allegiance.
The door opened again on the communications building down the street.
“I apologize, ladies. My bad. Y’all go on now and get back to your billets.”
“Yes, Master Sergeant,” they said in unison, and whispered as they walked away.
Fall was coming back out, a big guy behind him. Virden, Dale figured. Tall, maybe six-three. Gym body. T-shirt to show all his ink. Shaved dome. Thick, dishwater-blonde goatee.
The door swung shut. Dale couldn’t distinguish what they were saying, but he could differentiate Fall’s breathless midwestern tenor from Virden’s gravel baritone.
“Who?” Virden demanded, so loud that Dale could hear it at this distance.
Then bits from Fall: “ . . . don’t know . . . Dunny . . . Dale . . .”
Dale heard that. The word was spreading. Since his chats with Baby Doc and the Captain, The Chinese Restaurant was starting to look like a blood trail. One he could follow.
*
Will Carrol and Anita Barber fucked in Carroll’s office. Carroll was mounted up doggy-style. The lights were out. She was on the floor, uniform trousers around her ankles, his hands shoved up into her uniform blouse to clutch her breasts while he thrust into her from behind. Only his trousers were down, just enough to do what he needed to do, the tails of his uniform blouse draping her buttocks like a surgical field.
“Oh yeah,” she released a whispered moan. “Oh, push it up in me, right there. Fuck up in me.”
He thrust again, echoing her urgent susurrations, “In you, mama. Right up in you.”
*
A haze of cloud masked the stars and moon. Dale squatted outside the team tent whittling a stick. The sounds of the night were drowned by an incoming cargo plane doing a blackout landing, bearing another deposit of the steady inflow of goods from afar required to keep Camp Virtue watered, fed, busy, patched up, and entertained.
CHAPTER 17
Eagle scouts
Camp Virtue, Afghanistan
July 12, 2010
0040 Hours–Local
Baby Doc couldn’t sleep.
Since he’d told Dale about the Chinese Restaurant the guys had gone all cagey. The Captain looked at him funny, too. He knew Dunny whored with the boys. Bobby, too. Like a team event. Sis didn’t go there, and neither did Baby Doc, so they were the designated billet guards, the odd ones out, with no interest in fucking thirteen-year-old girls. But the SF rule stood: “What happens downrange, stays downrange.”
He’d never have said anything had he not heard Pedro and Woof talking about how young they were. Pedro laughing and nodding when Woof said, “She was so fuckin’ small, man, I had a flashback to sixth grade.”
Now he’d told Dale. A shot that couldn’t be unfired. Baby Doc and Sis would be the rat-candidates now.
Top had said something to someone, Dunny most likely, and the atmosphere around the detachment crackled with suspicion. Baby Doc had months left here, they all did, and a breakdown of trust like that . . . well, it would poison the whole group dynamic. Hector lay on his cot in the dark, denned in with a little wall of gear stacked against around him, listening to the wind make the tent huff and pop.
That’s when he sensed motion and heard whispers, too faint to discern their meaning.
Someone else was awake in the tent . . . more than one . . . two . . . Hector held very still. The slightest motion on the tightly stretched nylon cot made noise like a drum skin. He heard one cot frame creak near the murmuring, then another. Someone was getting up, quietly, on the sly. No one whispered and crept around to use the latrine. They were leaving, up to something!
*
“Gene, you ready, dude?” Pedro whispered, clasping Gene’s arm.
“Yeah,” Gene whispered back. “Lemme get my weapon.” Gene was farting like a bull and surrounded by a toxic cloud that followed him ever since the biscodyl kicked in. He lifted his M-4 gingerly, ensuring it didn’t bump into anything.
“Couldn’t sleep anyhow,” Gene told Pedro. “Been to shit like ten times. Hector gimme some pills.”
“Too much fuckin’ information, homes. I’ll go first.”
Gene heard Pedro soft-step into the darkness and watched his silhouette fill the door flap and vanish. They’d staged their chest rigs outside behind the generator, where the noise would cover them gearing-up. Gene waited a beat and followed.
*
Ford was on the gate — a contractor, of course. He used to be some kind of cop — not a happy one apparently. Leonard Ford loved the money he made as a war-zone rental cop. The other thing he loved was Afghan hashish. Contractors weren’t being drug tested on Camp Virtue, and Lenny smoked that shit like the world was coming to an end. The hotshots and knuckle-draggers picked it up for him at the Chinese Restaurant to bribe him, as they did with two other gate guards.
Lenny loved hash, but Lenny was scared shitless of Afghanistan. He was an unapologetic “fobbit” — someone who never left the Forward Operating Base (hence FOBbit). Totally and unequivocally content to stay inside the concrete and razor wire 24/7 as long as he could ride that cannabinoid train through his own psychic Shangri-La for $342.47 a day plus meals and a bunk.
At night he sat on the gate with his M-16, night vision goggles, beef jerky, salt and vinegar potato chips, Payday candy bars, and Red Bulls, watching the stars, the lights of Kabul far down the valley, and foxes hunting field mice. During his nine months here, he’d gained more than twenty-five pounds.
Fuck it, with that sweet blond charas, you don’t sweat the small stuff. His paranoia about rockets and mortars was attenuated behind three feet of reinforced concrete. Take another bump.
He’d just smoked a piece using a Red Bull can for a pipe, when he heard a Hummer approaching from inside the compound. Had to be Correa and Pollard from 6246. They were resupplying him tonight. The log would never reflect their departure. Unless they were attacked, whereupon he’d modify the shit out of that logbook.
Lenny figured they were headed to the Chinese Restaurant. Get some of that not-even-barely-legal pussy. He couldn’t figure that out; he always liked older women himself. These Group boys were always kind of profane and edgy, though, way further outside the lines than he was. Hey, takes all kinds, no? Special operations means “special” men, and they ain’t all gonna be Eagle Scouts.
The Hummer was blacked out with just the infra-reds lit. Lenny opened the door at the back of the tower, clutching the handrail to descend the concrete steps in the dark. The rider’s side door cracked. An arm extended. Lenny took his package, stepped back up inside the bunker, closed the door, and pushed the button that rolled the gate back and dropped the security spikes.
Gene drove while Pedro navigated.
“Fuck, we’re doin’ this, man,” Gene spat the words for emphasis, pumping himself up like a boxer. He inhaled a deep breath through his nose and banged the steering wheel with the heel of his hand.
*
“Catch that left comin’ up, looks like a big goat trail.”
Gene downshifted, peered through his goggles, caught the track, and slowly turned. Through the night-vision goggles, the infra-reds made phosphorus-green beams that thrusted into the gloom. Pedro raised his goggles to check his GPS again.
“You should hit a high spot for a minute, then it falls kinda steep for around a half-klick, long left, longer right, then up again.”
“Got it.”
The track conformed exactly. They headed sharply back uphill. Pedro lifted his goggles again to check the GPS. Suddenly, there was low ground on every side.
“Stop here,” Pedro directed.
Gene braked, killed the IR, killed the engine.
“Let’s just sit here a few minutes, make sure it’s quiet. We go down there and lose a Hummer, we goin’ to prison.”
Pedro relaxed into the idea. Sure, let’s wait a bit.
“Why does a dog lick his own dick?” Pedro asked.
“Because he can,” Gene answered.
Tension-breaking laughter, subdued.
Another cramp hit Gene in the belly. He got out and shat on the ground. He wiped his ass with a rag from the hummer and threw that on the ground, too.
“You okay?”
“Yeah,” Gene whispered back. “Baby Doc wasn’t kidding. Those pills really worked.”
The house ahead was sun-brick and mud. Through the goggles everything looked like green vibrating atoms. The roof timbers extended past the front of the house like a giant comb. One door led to what they assumed was a root cellar, the other to the living area. There was a high shuttered front window. Sleeping goats were bedded down near the house, their heads turned down like they were hiding their eyes, their forelegs curled underneath them. Insects and amphibians chirped in the low ground behind them.
*
Storai was dreaming of muddy water when she was wakened by the two village dogs. Then one of the rams rose, stamped, and snorted a challenge. Then the rest began to bleat.
Storai sat up in the bed next to her mother, Bakhtawara, and pushed the blanket off her feet, pulling down her night-dress as she rose in the darkness.
“Mor,” she whispered, shaking her mother alongside her. Her mother came awake just in time to hear gravel crunch outside the house, and sat bolt upright.
They screamed as the door snapped open with an explosive crack. Bright white light hit them in the eyes. Men were inside the house, speaking in ugly voices, saying things they didn’t understand.
“Shut the fuck up, bitch!”
One of the light beams fell to the floor, and hands took hold of Storai, one clamped over her mouth, choking her, her sinuses filling with tears. The other man struck Bakhtawara with something. Bakhtawara went silent. Storai wriggled and kicked, but the man had strong hands. He was laying on top of her to restrain her.
“Quit fuckin’ fightin’ me, little bit!”
“Old bitch is out, man. I butt stroked that motherfucker.”
Storai was trying to scream. She thrashed like an eel, but the man was on top of her, his hand mashing her face. He wore hard things that hurt her. He rattled when he moved. His breath stank and she smelled blood.
“Take her outa here.”
“Where’m I gonna take her?”
“Then just do the old bitch, man. Do her with your knife, dude.”
“I’ll get fuckin’ blood all over me, man.”
“Stop fuckin’ fightin’ me, little bit!” Pedro grunted with the effort of holding her down.
“Choke the motherfucker out, then, dude. I got bidness with little bit. You just hold still, li’l hajji girl.”
Storai felt herself drifting away.
*
Baby Doc lay awake. A third person had risen and left. Pedro and Gene had probably headed to Nanji’s place. But this last one? No one went anywhere alone. Ever.
Generators hummed. A vehicle carrying guards. Gusts of wind. Crickets. Geckos. Out in the depth of the night, maybe two miles off, Hector heard the shot. Then another.
CHAPTER 18
Perfect legs
Camp Virtue, Afghanistan
July 12, 2010
0110–Local
Lenny didn’t know this guy, but he knew taking a Hummer out at night alone was a pretty massively bad idea. It was a 6246 Hummer.
“Coupla my guys just left a while ago,” said the passenger as Lenny came out to greet him. “I’m new on the team, and I’m supposed to meet ’em at the Chinese Restaurant.”
“I’m Lenny,” Lenny said, offering a hand. “What’s your name?”
“Dorset,” Dale said, smelling hash and beef jerky as he shook the hand.
“Yeah, you shouldn’t go by yourself, Dorset. Hajj is out there.”
“I’m a big boy, Lenny. Just need directions to the Chinese Restaurant so I can meet the boys.”
*
Chinese Restaurant
Kabul, Afghanistan
July 12, 2010
0220–Local
Nanji looked out at the dark figure pounding on the security door. Dressed in American Army clothes and carrying an assault rifle, the stranger claimed he was a friend of Virden’s. Said he had money — dollars.
Nanji let him in and told him there was no one else there but the girls. It was late.
*
0240–Local
Nanji called her “Lolita” but her name was Peyvand Tehrani. She was fourteen, she told Dale. They whispered together in her cubicle. Dale had paid Nanji triple — a hundred and fifty dollars — for barging in like he did. When Peyvand took Dale inside, she was shocked to hear him speak Farsi. Even more surprised when he said, no sex — just talk. His name was Avner, he told her. She had to keep their conversation a secret.
He asked a lot of questions.
She cried.
He held her hand for a little while, then left.
*
Camp Virtue Dining Facility
July 12, 2010
0700 — Local
The entire detachment, minus Dale and Dunny, sat down to breakfast at 6246’s table. Dunny and Dale occupied a table on the other side of the chow hall. Pedro and Gene were uncharacteristically quiet, looking a little hunted as they picked at their food, exchanging a few covert, red-eyed smirks. Baby Doc was silent too. He stared into his plate like he was searching for something in his eggs, flipping glances up to look at Gene and Pedro. Something happened last night, he knew, and he was uneasy not knowing what it was. Something bad.
Sis was going on about the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico and how it would destroy his uncle, a Galveston shrimper. Opie commiserated with Sis, expressing concern about the difficulty of capping the spill. Eddy remarked that BP should be “burned,” that someone needed to go to prison for this.
“We are those guys,” interjected Opie. “This shit here is about oil.”
“What shit?” demanded Fall.
“This. Afghanistan. The war.”
“Bullshit!” Fall reacted. “Ain’t no fuckin’ oil in Afghanistan.”
Opie came back at him. “Bases, dude. It’s about bases. Putting the Air Force fast movers within range of the oil. Ever hear of China, man? Right there on your map, buddy. Right there, 300 miles from where you and me eatin’ grits and eggs, Hondo.”
“China don’t have that much oil, man. We ain’t after China. Close China, and we’d have to close every store in the States. Fuck, we’d have to close the PX!”
“Not the point, dude,” Opie ready again with the rebuttal. “The man wants to make sure his hand is on the tap. No, Afghanistan don’t have oil . . .”
“Just heroin!” Bobby said, grinning, trolling for humor to divert the conversation into a safer direction. “Hey, you know why women got pussies?”
“So men will talk to ’em,” answered Eddy. “You need new material, Bobby.”
Fall picked up the thread. “You know why women got legs?” The boys were smiling again. The dangerous political talk had passed. “So they don’t leave slug tracks on the floor.”
Everyone laughed except Baby Doc. Gene’s and Pedro’s smiles resembled rictus. They were wearing masks. Baby Doc watched them like they were spiders.
Opie decided to do his part to allay the tensions of vain political speculation.
“You know why you can’t trust women?” Pause. “You can’t trust anything that bleeds five days a month and don’t die.”
Baby Doc spoke before he realized he was about to.
“That’s your mothers and your wives, your sisters and your daughters you’re talkin’ about.”
The tension was back with an embarrassed silence. Opie broke it.
“Lighten up, B-Doc. We just fuckin’ around. Hey, my wife has perfect legs.” Another pause. “Feet on one end, pussy on the other.”
The table cracked up, almost stridently now. Baby Doc’s face grew dark. Pedro and Gene still wore smiles that didn’t reach their bloodshot eyes.
The black female Staff Sergeant entered the mess hall again. She picked up a tray and headed to the chow line. Bobby used his little black girl voice.
“Chlamydia.”
The table hooted.
*
Dunny and Dale huddled together across a table. Red-eyed from his late-night foray, Dale clasped a mug of black coffee with both hands. Dunny couldn’t seem to shut up, like talking could make that big question mark about the Chinese Restaurant go away.
“. . . not trying to turn them into Delta operators, but they could use some tips and training on straight DA operations . . .”
Dale listened distractedly.
*
Green Ramp
Fort Bragg Army Airfield, North Carolina
July 3, 2010
The parking lot was on a rise above the airfield, the July asphalt hot as an engine block, sun glaring off windshields like solar flares. Sparse, dry grass surrounded the lot, pockmarked with fire ant hills. The wind was a blast furnace. One cloud, shaped like a broadsword, had the desiccated sky to itself.
Deangela and Farah watched Dale unload his duffle bag and rucksack from the back of Deangela’s beater. Dale was in his utility uniform, shaved clean, hair freshly trimmed. Sweat trickled from the stubble on his temples and soaked his collar. They hadn’t seen him like that for years — shorn tight and in uniform. Farah’s hair was freshly cut, too, the way she liked it in a tapered boy-cut. She wore a strapless, cotton, blue-paisley shift with leather sandals. Deangela wore baggy shorts exposing her unshaven calves, flip-flops, and a t-shirt with a picture of Nietzsche that read: “Nietzsche is dead.” — God.
Dale suddenly found himself thinking of Farah’s family going to church together in Belize, lining the pews of their little parish, warm damp air flowing through the doors and the open, louvered windows, birds in the rafters, the occasional dog roaming in. Farah’s whole extended family — mother, three brothers, one sister, aunts, cousins — trooping in each Sunday at 8 a.m., like a well-scrubbed occupying army, the girls fussing with each other’s hair, the boys fidgeting in their Sunday clothes.
Dale’s bags were on the ground. Deangela and Farah stood side-by-side, looking at him, him looking back, not a dry eye among them.
He enfolded Deangela in his arms, and whispered.
“Sorry, Sweetbread. Been a little off lately. Last one.”
“Last time?” She looked up at his face.
“Cross my heart. Clearin’ papers in a year.”
Farah let go a sob when he turned to her. She held him like a vise. Deangela retrieved a box of tissues from the car and blew her nose, handed one to Farah. Farah blew, wiped, threw the tissue down. She started to turn away, then swiveled back and gripped Dale’s head with two hands, kissing him on the mouth for a long time. Their arms slid back around one another and they became a single body, an aqueous current flowing between them.
In the terrible magic of time, one moment he was there, the next walking away in the dry shimmering heat, like a beast of burden, rucksack on his back, the fat duffle bag laid across it like a patibulum.
CHAPTER 19
Sharing cigarettes
Intercontinental Hotel — Kabul
July 12, 2010
0843 — Local
Gaston and Emal, his interpreter, met young Juma on the street across from the parking garage exit. Juma was agitated. Gaston could hear the terms “amrekayan” and “topakuna” — Americans, guns. Emal asked Juma a question in Pashto. Juma’s agitation increased, and Emal held up two hands, signaling Juma to wait. Emal turned to Gaston.
“In Zama, he say American soldiers, umm, rape a girl and keel her. Mother, too.”
Gaston offered Juma a cigarette. Juma took one, gave it to Emal, and took another for himself. The Frenchman lit Juma’s cigarette with his Zippo, then Emal’s, then his own. Juma had tears of rage welling up in his eyes.
“Do you believe him?” asked Gaston.
“I believe. He want you go see.”
“See? You mean go with him?”
“Yes. Go with him. He show you girl, show you mother.”
“The bodies? They are still there?”
“Bodies there now. You go see.”
“Where is Zama?”
“Not far.”
“Why me?”
“He does not, umm, trust American.”
*
Zama, Afghanistan
July 12, 2010
0928 — Local
Emal drove the Borrego, expertly dodging the potholes, while Gaston looked ahead at the crowd of huddled men. As soon as the Borrego pulled in and Emal pulled up the handbrake, Emal, Juma, Gaston, and Rastin — the latter on loan from Phillip Ferguson — dismounted.
Emal had to catch up to them. When he did, he noted a surprisingly small old man, even by Afghan scales, who stood front and center before the assembled villagers. He was the numberdar, the headman, dressed in a traditional khet partug with a tattered blue North Face pullover jacket and a white kufi tilted on his head. He had a magnificently thick gray beard and a Kalashnikov slung across his back, muzzle skyward. Two of the headman’s companions carried Kalashnikovs, too, but everyone was at sling arms. Emal had left his Uzi in the car and asked Juma to go back and look after it.
Emal introduced the headman to Gaston as “Rahnamah Lal,” and reminded Gaston to call the headman Rahnamah (Leader). Rahnamah Lal turned, and the gaggle of men parted. Rastin stayed with the Borrego. Lal led Gaston and Emal to the house which perched on the edge of a small drop-off with a sandstone foundation and three worn steps leading to the door.
The door hung precariously on a single twisted hinge and had obviously been broken down. Gaston smelled congealed blood and heard the fly-frenzy before he even mounted the steps. A woman wept loudly in a small brick house thirty meters across the wadi. Several of the men outside cried softly, too.
Gaston’s shadow broke the column of sunlight that fell through the room from the door. Dust particles surged and swirled in the slanting rays. His gaze was drawn toward two white bundles laid alongside one another next to the far wall. Bloodstains made brown maps on the sheets that wrapped the girl and her mother. Bloody streaks crossed the floor like little highways. Someone had dragged the two bodies before they were wrapped, probably the locals.
Gaston flinched when Emal touched his shoulder, indicating he should go on in. Gaston took a step forward, breathing deeply now to wrestle down nausea. Emal and the headman came in behind him, the headman speaking softly with Emal. Emal grunted from time to time, indicating either assent or acknowledgement.
“You can look,” Emal told Gaston. “Give respect, but look. Mother’s name Bakhtawara. Husband dead long time. Girl’s name Storai. Daughter has blood . . .” Emal indicated his crotch, “ . . . here. Virgin . . . umm . . . rape.”
Gaston handed a cigarette to the old headman, who eyes were welling with tears. Another cigarette for Emal, and one for himself. For the smell, he signed, pointing to his own nose. He lit their cigarettes, then moved deliberately and slowly toward the corpses, careful not to step on the blood streaks across the flagstone floor. A rolled-up rug stood like a column against a wall. There were broken pots, he noticed, an upturned chair, and blood splattered on two walls. In the small sleeping quarters lay two tick mattresses, one of them drenched in blackened dry blood.
He squatted next to the longer bundle, holding his cigarette away from it in his left hand, and folded back the sheet with his right. The flies rose briefly then dove back down to feast. This must be Bakhtawara, the mother. A wide gash lay across the left side of her forehead, her face vaguely distorted by a skull fracture. Blood had pooled and dried in her left eye, drawing the flies into a hive there, the right eye scarcely open and cast downward. Dark bruises around her throat — she’d been strangled, too.
Gaston opened the sheet a bit more, looking for other signs of violence, but there didn’t appear to be any. Gently, he folded the sheet back over Bakhtawara.
He pulled deeply on his cigarette, then stood up and set it on a little wooden table, the ember hanging off the edge. He almost passed out from standing too quickly and placed one hand on the cob wall to steady himself. Kneeling down next to Bakhtawara again, he reaching across and opened Storai’s shroud.
Storai’s eyes were wide open and dulled with dry dust. She’d been a pretty girl. He could see that. Now bloodlessly gray, nightgown torn and tangled around her shoulders. There were two gunshot entry wounds right between her tiny breasts, stippled with powder burns: she’d been shot at point blank range.
Gaston couldn’t bring himself to open the shroud to examine her lower body. He’d take their word about the broken hymen. Folding the sheet back over her, he swallowed hard against the bile rising in his throat, then stood, more slowly this time, and retrieved his burning cigarette. That was when he saw it.
It glinted in a ray of sunlight from a seam between the stone floor and the cob wall on the other side of Lal and Emal. A coin of some kind, just the edge visible. Gaston motioned for some room, stuck the cigarette between his lips, and knelt to tease out the coin. It wouldn’t budge. Finally, he took a little pen knife out of his trousers, and pried the coin up. He grasped it gingerly like it might bite, and inspected both sides of it.
“Emal.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Would you get my camera equipment please, and ask these gentlemen to stay outside for a few minutes?” Emal pivoted. “And ask if anyone has found used ammunition, amrekayan.”
CHAPTER 20
The Colonel
United States Military Academy at West Point, New York
October 16, 1987
“Mister Thomas!” called Captain March.
“Here, Sir,” Cadet Thomas answered, double-timing it over to Sergeant First Class Harvey to have his rucksack weighed. He rolled the rucksack off his shoulder and passed it to Harvey. Harvey looped a shoulder strap over the hook on a hanging scale.
“Forty-seven,” the NCO called out, and Captain March wrote it down in his notebook.
Sergeant Harvey removed the rucksack and handed it back to Cadet Thomas. Thomas was a “cow,” a junior. This year the flamboyant head of the Department of Military Instruction, Colonel Richard “Cowboy” Collins, had implemented a program which would select twelve of the cows to attend the Army Ranger School in Fort Benning during their summer break.
Sergeant Harvey had just been assigned to the Department as an enlisted Military Science instructor after a stint as a platoon sergeant with 2nd Ranger Battalion. Colonel Collins was all things macho, and all things Ranger, and he saw the assignment of Harvey as an opportunity to once again start sending hard-assed cadets to Ranger School — a practice that had been suspended thirteen years earlier because of high failure rate and one cadet fatality. Harvey had to have an Officer in Charge and Captain March was chosen as the OIC because he was likewise Ranger-qualified and had just finished a tour with the 82nd Airborne Division as a company commander.
Harvey was given a free hand in the development of the course. His notion was that you don’t take smart kids and try to make them into soldiers; instead, you identify natural soldiers and try to make them into smart kids. He designed a selection course to identify the students who had the mental toughness to get through the demanding training program, insisting that they could train them in the basics once they were selected for their toughness and character.
This was Day One of the selection program. Forty-one cadets had shown up. They’d been told to appear in field uniform, with web gear and a packed rucksack that weighed at least forty-five pounds before they added water. They’d assembled in front of Thayer Monument on the north end of the parade ground. Their task that day was to travel over a marked, manned, and circuitous route that headed up Washington Road, then up past Lusk Reservoir, out to Sacred Heart Cemetery via Stony Lonesome Road, and then back — a total of seven miles. Seven very hilly miles.
Instructions? “Do it as fast as you can.”
In other words, each was racing forty other candidates for seven miles over steep hills with forty-five pounds of rucksack, another eight pounds or so of web gear, and four quarts of water.
Cadet Boyd Thomas had no idea whether he would make the cut. The image of his ruthlessly demanding father spurred him through the course, though, just as it had spurred through West Point so far.
*
Camp Virtue, Afghanistan
July 12, 2010
Colonel Thomas sat at his desk thinking back on that day. He’d come in first out of the whole group of forty-two. The gymnastics and boxing had paid off. Colonel “Cowboy” Collins had been there to meet him at the finish, trademark cigar clenched between his teeth. Collins never forgot him either. Thereafter, every time he saw Thomas, he gave him one of those hail-fellow-well-met handshakes, making the other cadets envious. When at the end of the next summer Thomas, along with eleven of twelve other cadets, successfully completed Ranger School, they’d become Academy legends, seniors with the coveted black and gold Ranger tab already on their shoulders.
“Cowboy” Collins took personal credit for their extremely high graduation rate and SFC Harvey, who’d prepared both the selection and training prior to Ranger School, could do no wrong at West Point from there out. Neither could Cadet Thomas. Those were the glory days!
When Boyd Thomas graduated the Academy in late May 1989 his academic standing wasn’t close enough to the top of the class to be chosen for the 82nd Airborne Division — the choice assignment for Infantry officers — and he’d had to settle for the 24th Mechanized Infantry Division in Fort Stewart, Georgia, adjacent to the ratty and larcenous town of Hinesville. By the time Thomas finished the Infantry Basic Officer Course and Airborne School it was December 1989.
A month after he signed in to the 24th, the 1st Ranger Battalion from nearby Savannah, and most of his classmates who’d been posted to the 82nd Airborne Division, invaded Panama. Some received the gold star on their parachutist wings for the combat jump onto Torrijos Airfield.
Thomas seethed at having missed this operation, and at the thought that any of his classmates had officially become combat veterans before him. He was ecstatic when, during the following year, preparations began for the invasion of Iraq, which involved months of intensive mechanized infantry training exercises at the National Training Center outside of Barstow, California.
In July, his unit was deployed to Kuwait, where they were staged to jump off on the invasion in August. They did, but the Iraqis gave very little resistance, and aside from a couple of pot shots along the way, his platoon of mechanized infantry saw no real combat during the entire operation. When they were redeployed in February 1991, he had his combat infantryman’s badge, but his only other award — aside from a campaign ribbon — was a Meritorious Service Medal, exactly like the ones that every other platoon leader received.
His CIB would hold some weight when he went elsewhere — it showed that he’d been deployed to a combat zone — but in the platoon no one spoke of them, because everyone knew they meant only that they had deployed, not that any of them had ever tasted combat.
He was promoted to First Lieutenant in March that year, whereupon he requested — and was granted — reassignment to 1st Ranger Battalion up the road at Hunter Army Airfield in Savannah. When he’d arrived, the CIB he wore over his left breast pocket at least hinted that he might have been in combat. That, with his still excellent physical condition, stood him in good stead with the young Rangers who typically distrusted Lieutenants.
He ran a platoon in Charley Company for just over a year and got married to a local student from the Savannah College of Art and Design, April Burrus. Then he was moved up to the Executive Officer slot in the Company. By the time he was promoted to Captain in January 1993, he’d participated in no other combat operations.
He requested reassignment to the 82nd Airborne Division — now that his combat tour and his time with the Rangers had given him some juice — and was able to pick up a Company Command in the 1st Battalion, 325th Infantry. They’d been on alert in 1993 to render humanitarian assistance in Rwanda, but that order was rescinded.
Several of his classmates were deployed to Somalia that year, but his unit stayed in Fort Bragg. One of his classmates was even involved in the day-long Mogadishu firefight about which a movie would be made; but Boyd Thomas had missed that one, too.
In September 1994, they deployed to Haiti. Originally a combat mission, last minute diplomacy had transformed the mission into three solid months of guard duty for his troops to protect a giant baseball factory in Port-au-Prince. For that he received a second Meritorious Service Medal.
After the deployment to Haiti, he and April went to see a doctor about why she wasn’t getting pregnant. The physician at the clinic determined that he had some kind of antibody in his system that attacked his sperm and made it incapable of binding to eggs. He was relieved in a way, not being at all sure he wanted children. He applied for the Special Forces Qualification Course and was admitted in February 1995.
By June of the following year, after the Q-Course and six months of training in Turkish, he was assigned to 5th Special Forces Group. But when he arrived, he wasn’t given an A-Detachment — a Special Forces operational team — but a staff job with the 3rd Battalion as an air operations coordination officer, or “S-3 Air.” Inwardly bitter, he still excelled at this job and was promoted to Major in May 1999. His chance to run an A-Detachment, a Captain’s job, was now past.
He was laterally promoted to the position of Battalion Executive Officer — nominally the second in command, and in fact never in command. When the Battalion was deployed to Afghanistan in November 2001, barely two months after the World Trade Center/Pentagon attacks, he was stuck at a forward operating base near Kandahar and never saw combat except for one night when someone lobbed two wild mortar rounds into the perimeter and blew up a stack of pallets filled with soft drinks. It came to be known among the jaded troops as the Battle of Diet Pepsi.
He kept his mouth shut and soldiered on, and in January 2003 he was promoted to Lieutenant Colonel. Unlike many of his peers, who’d accumulated substantial combat experience, he didn’t get a Special Forces Battalion. Instead, he was assigned to the Special Warfare Command in Fort Bragg — the school command for Special Forces — where his operations experience and his experience as an Executive Officer were invaluable in making sure that the right vehicles and aircraft got to the right place at the right time to support the students in the Special Forces Qualification Course and the Survival-Evasion-Resistance-Escape School.
In May 2003, his wife filed for divorce and thirteen days after the divorce was final, she married a Puerto Rican Sergeant First Class from 7th Group. She was already two months pregnant at the time of the wedding.
Between 2003 and March 2005, virtually everyone in every service was involved in combat operations in Iraq and Afghanistan. Medals were being passed out like Halloween sweets, and promotions with them. Reputations were being made. Special Forces was receiving missions one on top of another. And he was stuck at SWC!
Then they assigned him a new First Lieutenant to run one of the motor sections. Her name was Gina Ong. Her family had immigrated from Singapore when she was two. The first time she was alone with him, soon after they were formally introduced, she asked him how old he was. Lieutenants never ask Lieutenant Colonels how old they are. But he looked at her smooth features and her lean, hard body, and instead of putting her in her place, he answered.
“I’m thirty-eight.”
To which she responded: “Men peak at thirty-eight” and went back to work.
And with that he’d found himself a new mission. Sitting at his desk in Camp Virtue five and a half years later, he couldn’t remember what he was feeling then, but he did remember that it was like madness, like possession.
The first time she showed up at the Fayetteville Inn, she walked in without saying a word, pushed him down on the bed, stripped off her panties, hiked up her skirt, and positioned herself with her knees on each side of his face. She was already wet, and she came within a minute. When they were both naked, she went down on him, then flipped him over and rimmed him while she stroked him with her hand.
They climbed through each other like mountains and caves. He couldn’t stop remembering — and physically responding — every time he thought of her, even after everything else that happened.
Four weeks into the affair she told him she was seeing two other people: an Air Force sergeant and a topless dancer. She said she was “polyamorous.” He boiled over, called her a sex fiend and a round-heeled bitch, and told her that she had to stop seeing her other lovers. The idea that she was doing with other people what she did with him made him feel used and devalued. It made him want to seize her by the throat.
He tried to erase her from his mind, but there she was every day at the motor pool. He started to avoid the Motor Pool, he found himself watching her from afar to see with whom she spoke, and how.
Then the calls started. He didn’t want to call her, but he did, again and again. One day, after she stopped answering or responding to his messages, alternating between begging and threatening, he’d left her sixteen messages.
She finally complained to Thomas’s commanding officer, a Colonel Haywood. They were both consenting, single adults, she said, but Lieutenant Colonel Thomas was beginning to frighten her.
It was all handled quietly.
She was reassigned out of Special Warfare Center and over to 18th Airborne Corps. Thomas received orders to report as the new Military Attaché at the U.S. Embassy in Ankara. And there he stayed, for almost five years, liaising with puffed-up Turkish officers, attending Country Team meetings where he seldom paid any attention and no one cared, and frequenting the legal brothels to avoid further romantic entanglements.
To his great surprise in March 2010, he was promoted to full Colonel. There was a Task Force Commander position open that involved working closely with military contractors and Afghan Militia Forces in Afghanistan, at a new base near Kabul. And there he was, Commander of Task Force Bird. Less than four months in he’d begun to see how this was going to be his last assignment.
He’d reached his twenty years the year prior and was already eligible to retire. The last promotion had been a way of quietly encouraging him to do just that. The war was all on the Pakistani border then. Task Force Bird was a do-nothing money magnet for XYY Security and other DOD contractors, whose main mission was to transport incoming supplies to forward operating bases around Kabul. Their contractors accompanied the supply convoys. Thomas’s main mission was to ensure the convoys left on time and to manage the base. In addition to just under 400 support troops, they kept one SF Detachment, a rotating platoon of Rangers, and a section of Special Ops helicopters as a rapid reaction force that hadn’t been needed thus far. He soon decided that he had nothing to lose.
He’d started pushing his one A-Detachment out again and again to gather local intelligence only to discover that they were shit birds. Their captain was bumping dickheads with the rest of the team at some whorehouse. Their team sergeant was a bad comedian. Their wild-eyed sniper, with his crazy tics, was a goddamn loon who shot farmers from the camp’s observation posts, claiming that they were planting mines — on walking trails that only they used. They’d only killed two actual “bad guys,” and that was when their recon was compromised. It was a dysfunctional team, cliquey, the infighting and the fraternizing having eaten away any discipline they might have originally had.
Then he found out about Dale. His old classmate, Dicky Baker, a newly minted General now over at Joint Special Operations Command, had done him a solid.
“Got a guy,” Dicky told him, “One of my operators. Just finished a Farsi course at DLI, and I can get him sent to you. This guy will unfuck your team. On ops, just give him the ball, and he’ll carry it to the end zone.”
Well, Dale was here now; and he’d officially taken the team. Already there was one complaint about him from that pretty-boy motherfucker, Major Carroll. Dale apparently dropped in for a coffee during one of Carrol’s weekly lie-athons with the press, then went off on some tangent about fucking birds.
I like that, thought Thomas. Fucking Viking spirit. Carroll is a fucking mulatto tool. At that very moment, there was a knock on his door. Later that day, he would come to believe that the god of war had finally intervened on his behalf.
“Enter,” he said. It was his Executive Officer, Lieutenant Colonel Bermudy, a man whose bland features and shapeless face reminded him of an oyster.
“You’re receiving a warning order, Sir!” Thomas sat up straight. “High value target!”
*
The Secure Compartmented Information Facility (SCIF) was small and well lit, with a high-security door and no windows. Three of the four walls, from corner to corner, and floor to ceiling, were lined with shelves holding arrays of communications and coding equipment. The files were kept in three large safes.
Captain Palumbo, Thomas’s Intelligence Officer—an olive-skinned, chubby man with bushy eyebrows and a shaved head, whose thick eyeglasses magnified his eyes—leaned smugly on one of the safes with his arms crossed while Bermudy and Thomas studied the four-page printout from the in-line network decrypter.
Thomas read one page, then the next, passing the one he’d just finished to Bermudy. When Bermudy was finished with the fourth and last page, he handed the sheets back to Thomas, who looked at it again. They all stood like a tableau for what seemed like a long time. Then the low buzz of the communications gear was interrupted by a little noise from Thomas — a little owl-hoot of delight. Thomas smiled up at Bermudy, smiling, then over at Palumbo, and smacked the pages triumphantly against his palm.
*
The team hooch was where work happened, such as it was. This morning they’d left the security door open to let light and air in through the bug screen. It was still cool, and the air conditioner was off, leaving the room quiet except for the hum of a generator three buildings away.
Each specialty — command, intelligence, engineer, weapons, communications and medical — had its own field desk. Each had a tan three-drawer file safe. Beige metal folding chairs were scattered throughout the room. Encircling the room were overhead shelves upon which the team’s unused equipment and tools were stored.
Captain Bob was at his desk, clearing off paperwork. Bobby rocked back on a folding chair while he thumbed listlessly through the day’s intelligence summaries. Sis was at the radio panel in the corner decrypting communications traffic. Pedro was sitting near Sis doing one-armed dumbbell curls with a forty-pound weight and making an annoying snort with each heave. There was a knock at the door and they all stopped.
Command Sergeant Major Eaves stood outside, trying to see past the glare on the screen. A short, muscular black man, getting thicker around the middle with age, clean-shaven, with a tight haircut under his MICH helmet. His battle rattle and weapon were worn as if he were heading to the parade ground — clean, symmetrical, at shoulder arms. An olive-drab, cotton-duck shoulder bag hung diagonally across him.
“Six-two-four-six,” he called through the screen, his voice like coarse gravel.
“Come on in, Sergeant Major,” said Captain Bob, already headed to the door.
“Mornin’, sir,” said Eaves, removing his MICH as he passed through the doorway. Dunny had his hand out, and Eaves shook it. Eaves reached into the shoulder bag and headed to Captain Bob’s desk. The rest of the boys were standing at some vague semblance of parade rest: upright, feet apart, hands clasped behind the back.
“Sit down, gentlemen,” said the Sergeant Major. “You’re gonna need the rest.”
He dropped four pages on Dunny’s desk. Dunny circled him to retrieve the papers.
What’s this?”
“Warning order, sir,” Eaves answered. “Colonel Thomas wants to see you and your Team Sergeant ASAP.”
“Five minutes, Sergeant Major. And thank you.”
“Roger, sir,” and Eaves turned to leave.
When Eaves was just out of earshot, Bobby spoke.
“What’s your name, little girl? . . . Chlamydia.”
“Knock it off, Bobby, and go get Top. He’s in the tent. Tell him the Colonel needs to see us. And get the boys to chow. It’s shrimp day.”
CHAPTER 21
The headman of Zama
Camp Virtue
July 12, 2010
Curtis Fisher was “short”; ten more days and he’d be boarding a plane that would take him to Frankfurt, then New York. From New York, he’d connect to Baltimore. That’s where Kayla would pick him up and they’d drive back to Pikesville. They could pay off the house. He could apply to the Police Department, or the Fire Department, depending on which one was hiring, and they could start trying to have a baby.
Two years in this shithole had been lucrative, and Kayla had her coding certificate now, but the separation had hurt him. His shift was from 0800 to 1630, and it was just after ten now. He was thinking about Kayla, about her big brown eyes and her ample hips, considering whether to masturbate now to kill some time, when he saw the dust trail headed toward the main gate.
“Hotel nine, this is main gate, over,” he said to the radio mike.
“Gate, this is nine, go, over.”
“Nine, gate, we got a vehicle inbound, over.”
“Gate, nine, india delta? Over.” ID.
“Nine, gate, stand by, over.”
Curtis picked up the binoculars, aimed them at the approaching vehicle, and rolled the focus ring until the vehicle’s image was crisp. KIA Borrego, looked like three passengers, with a big black-on-white sign in the windshield: PRESS.
“Hotel nine, this is main gate, over.”
“Gate, this is nine, go ahead, over.”
“Nine, gate, looks like press, over.”
“Gate, nine, roger. Log it. Ring back when you find out what they want, over.”
“Nine, gate, wilco, out.”
*
The air smelled like wet dust as the late morning sun chased the last dew off the ground. The sky was spotless from horizon to horizon. Major Carroll saw the Borrego parked in the visitors’ section inside the gate and three figures, two robust and one quite small, standing with the contract guard. Carroll was accompanied by his interpreter, Benham, hatless in an AMF uniform and looking like a priest or an academic, with gentle eyes, a trimmed beard, and a stooped, strangely shapeless, six-foot stature.
Gaston and Carroll shook hands, neither of them looking the other in the eye.
“Major, this is Emal Zazai, my interpreter,” he gestured to Emal, who offered a tentative hand to Major Carroll, “and this is Rahnamah Lal, the headman of Zama.”
Carroll made a slight bow to Lal, and Lal reciprocated without offering his hand.
“And this is my interpreter,” said Carroll, indicating Benham, “Benham Marwat.”
Benham exchanged Salam-Alaikums with the two other Pashtuns, accompanied by light handshakes and buses on the cheeks. When he greeted the old man, Benham gave a bow with the handshake and after the kiss placed his hand on his heart. Lal touched his heart in return.
“What can we do for you, Mr. Villeneuve?” asked Carroll.
“Is there someplace we can talk?”
Carroll tried not to roll his eyes, unsure whether he succeeded.
They pulled up five chairs in the press-briefing hooch, now cavernously empty. The podium and chafing trays were gone, the chairs stacked away, and the floor open and buffed to a shine that made it feel even larger. All five sat stiffly in a circle, Carroll knitting his brows, resting his elbows on his knees, and steepling his hands in front of his face, tapping himself on the chin with his joined index fingers.
*
“Benham, ask him again what time this happened?”
“Daa kaar kum whakht wasoo?” Benham asked Lal.
“Hagha whakht che spozmey ra khatala,” said the old man.
“When the moon rose.” Benham turned to Carroll and said, “About twelve o’clock.”
“Tell him we had no patrols out last night.” Carroll kept his eyes on Lal as he spoke to Benham. “And ask him why he thinks they were Americans?”
“Paroon shpa doi gazma na durloda. Tsa feker kawey, amrekayan wa?” Lal became very agitated at the question, responding directly to Benham.
“Da larey la kabala,” he said leaning forward and holding up two fists. “Khalqo da larey awaz warweida,” he said, touching one ear now. “Amrekayee larey wa,” finger jabbing downward for emphasis. “Bya topakuna,” he continued, shouldering an imaginary rifle. “Dwa fira,” his voice rose, and he held up a thumb and forefinger. “Amrekayee topakuna,” he finished, thrusting his finger toward the ground again.
There were tears of anger pooling in his eyes and his head had begun to quiver as if it weren’t firmly attached to his neck. He breathed in deeply, then sat back, stroking his beard with a trembling hand, and fixed his eyes on Carroll.
Benham translated: “They heard a truck, an American truck. Then they heard shots, two shots, from American guns. Not Kalashnikovs.”
“The Taliban have trucks,” argued Carroll. “This may have been Taliban.”
Lal understood and stood to his full five feet and glared stones into Carroll’s eyes.
“Taleban larey laree. Dda ba taleban wa.”
A beat of silence before Carroll broke their gaze and turned to Benham.
“What did he just say?”
Benham kept his eyes on Lal as he translated to Carroll.
“This has nothing to do with Taliban. They were not Taliban.”
“Doi taleban na wha,” the old man was shouting now, chopping at the air with both hands. “Da talebanoo sara heetch arra na larey. Haga wali wayee taleban wa? Ngelei sara pa zore zena shaway dah. Hagey sara zena shaway dah aw weshtal shawey dah. More bandi tak shawey dei. Talebano nada weshtaley. Hagha amrekayan wa!”
He held still for a moment, as the tears broke from their pools and ran down his face. Then he sniffled and wiped at his face, looking around, slowly sitting again as if he were embarrassed by his outburst.
“Why do you keep saying Taliban?” Benham translated. “This was no Taliban. They were killed. The girl was raped and shot. It was not Taliban. It was Americans.”
“Who says Taliban are incapable of rape?” asked Carroll, then rescinded. “Don’t translate that. Tell him we’ll begin a full investigation.”
Gaston interrupted.
“Is this true? Is that your intent, or are you patronizing this man?”
Carroll cast his eyes downward, and Benham threw a furtive and interrogative glance at Gaston. Gaston gave the merest whiff of a nod, and they broke contact as Carroll looked back up.
“Mr. Villeneuve,” said Carroll, completely ignoring the Afghans now. “I can assure you we will look into this. I can also assure you of our personnel’s accountability.” Then, as an afterthought: “And if Taliban can chop off people’s heads, they can certainly rape.”
“It’s not the same thing, Major, and you damn well know it.”
“And there are militias, too. These militias rape.”
“Well, Major,” Villeneuve said as he rose to his feet. “It seems you’ve already arrived at your conclusions.”
Carroll rose.
“Sir, one of my NCOs will escort you back to the front gate. I have a meeting that started ten minutes ago.”
He looked at his watch and turned. When he did, Gaston moved alongside Benham and pressed a card into Benham’s hand. Benham did not look at anyone as he followed Major Carroll out.
*
“What’s going on?” asked Dale. Dunny looked like he was about to piss himself.
“We’ve got two minutes to be at Colonel Thomas’s office. Let’s go, Top.”
Thomas’s office was less than three hundred meters away, but Dunny broke into a dead run the minute they got out the door.
God save me from this shit, thought Dale, reluctantly taking up Dunny’s under-thirty pace. They were still panting when Dunny knocked on Thomas’s door. Thomas was already circling his desk to meet them when they obeyed the command to enter. They didn’t even have time to come to attention before Thomas was pumping their hands, Dunny’s first and briefly, then Dale’s for what seemed a full minute.
“Bob,” he threw at Dunny by way of greeting, “and this is Top Dale. Dicky told me a lot about you. He was my classmate at the Academy.”
Nearly half a foot taller than Dale, Thomas squeezed in so close to shake hands that Dale had to tilt his head back to look him in the face. Dale could see the hair in Thomas’s nostrils.
The Colonel’s once blond hair, cut close now, was fading to gray. Thomas was grinning now, unnaturally, because years of maintaining a fierce expression had permanently creased the skin around his bulging blue eyes. His teeth had little gaps between them and made Dale think of an alligator.
“I can’t tell you how glad I am you’re here, Top,” Thomas said. “Fuckin’ providence is what it is, a gift from the Big Ranger. Dicky says you’re a bad motherfucker, and we got a bad motherfuckin’ mission.” He released Dale’s hand; Dale having said not a word yet.
“Sit down, gentlemen,” he aimed a flat hand at the two wooden chairs across from his desk, and headed back to his own swivel chair. As they sat, Thomas asked Dale how his in-processing had gone.
“Fine, sir. I’m just getting to know the team now.”
“Well, get to know ’em fast, Bubba, cuz you two got a mission, and it’s not one of those horseshit RIF’s or hajji-trainin’ gigs either.” Dale kept his face and body very still. “We got a snatch.”
He let that sink in. Dale shifted in his seat. Dunny looked like a muskrat in someone’s headlights. When Dale finally spoke, he was tentative, tactful.
“Sir, you want six-two-four-six to conduct . . . a snatch?”
“Get your fuckin’ skates on, Top. Six-two-four-six will conduct a snatch,” he said, still with the alligator grin. Thomas placed both hands on his desktop. “You’re gonna catch me a high-value target and tie a bow on that motherfucker.”
“Sir . . .”
“Sir, hell,” he plowed on. “We’ve got Usman Jahangiri in a village south of Charikar. He’s a Sarbani intel chief, and he works between here and Balochistan across the border. He’s a big-time sonofabitch and I want you to catch his ass alive. Our source has him at his location for at least three days. I need you there tomorrow night.”
Dunny came out of his trance and answered, “Sir, ODA six-two-four-six is ready.”
Dale tried not to react. His mouth hung open before he pulled it together and rearranged his face. These fucking nimrods couldn’t snatch a purse.
“Is this team daddy ready, Captain?” asked Thomas, pointing to Dale. Are you outa your damn mind? Dale wanted to reply.
“Absolutely, sir,” replied Dunny for him, his eyes popped open to mirror Thomas’s manic expression. Dale had been cut out of the conversation.
“What assets do we have?” Dunny asked.
Dale composed himself but started to hear dyslexic lyrics again. That Police song.
A coup d’etat and my mom is lost in space
A gleam of fright fries the holy seed in place
A book astounds but it’s a moon band-aid air base
I’m so old my head needs a brand-new face
Chicken’s fryin’ baby, baby please.
“If I have it, it’s yours, Captain. Let Brother Dale here choreograph actions on the objective. He’s forgotten more than we’ll ever know about surgical ops. Bring me this fuckin’ bad guy. This is a mission that’ll make careers and reputations, Bob. Pull it off, and we’ll all get slow hand jobs from the press.”
Dale was looking through Thomas. Dunny was still exchanging the goggle-eye with his boss.
“Don’t sit there starin’! Go issue a fuckin’ warning order to your boys.”
Thomas squinted. He heard a noise. Was Dale humming?
“Top?”
Dale pulled his focus down to Thomas.
“Yes, sir.”
“Get the fuck outa here. Catch me this raghead cocksucker so I can run eight inches up in his guts.”
Once outside, Dale asked Dunny to announce the warning order in an hour so he could head to the zero range to align his M-4 sights. He’d not made it there the day before.
*
Dale mounted a shallow rise ending at the long row of portable toilets along Main Street. He stopped when he saw Virden exit the communications building. The contractor was in his t-shirt, wearing a hip holster low, like a tattooed cowboy.
Virden swung open a portable crapper door with a hollow squawk. Dale paused his humming to hear the latch slap into place. Dale did it as quickly as the thought came into his head. He walked over, placed a shoulder against the back of the desert tan plastic shell, and heaved with his legs.
The Porta Potty flipped forward with surprising ease, and the noise from inside was part-scream, part-roar. By the time the cabin crashed to the ground, Dale had already slipped into another shell three toilets down and casually locked himself in.
Specialists Clark and Powers, the women Dale had startled outside the PX, were headed down Main Street toward supply with a list for the North Aid Station where they worked. Clark was pissed. She’d heard Captain Pease, their supervising physician, talking with Staff Sergeant Brock, the head medic, about his SOAP notes, and Pease had told Brock that “all women are pregnant until proven otherwise, and all women are liars until proven otherwise.”
“What kinda shit is that?” Powers complained.
Clark looked up from the ground just in time to see the portable toilet crash into the ground fifty meters ahead. Running to see what had happened, they could already hear a stream of loud curses from inside, and lumpy blue fluid was running in every direction from under the toppled shell. They ran to it.
“Oh fuck,” said Powers as they pulled up short. They danced around trying to avoid the expanding pool of blue shit-liquid, trying to figure out how they could roll the shell to release its prisoner. More people appeared. One civilian, a middle-aged man wearing jeans and a blue denim shirt, and two Lieutenants — one male, one female, both wearing Ordnance branch insignia. The male Lieutenant, a stout white man whose name tag read Webber, tiptoed into the spreading blue pool and gave the side a push. The shell only rocked, and the cursing from inside grew even more frantic and furious.
Lieutenant Webber shook his head once, then went ahead and planted his feet firmly in the blue puddle, dropped into an earnest squat, and rolled the toilet onto one side, stepping back as the door dropped open before him.
“Oh. My. God!” Clark said, her hand on Powers’ arm.
Rising out of the liquid, as if the great plastic shell were giving birth to a monstrosity, was a drenched blue behemoth, a spitting, gagging, cursing hulk.
“Die, motherfucker!” the blue hulk roared at everyone, looking here and there, then gagging and spitting. He advanced on the two Lieutenants, who held up their hands in surrender.
“Who did this?” he demanded.
“We didn’t see,” said the female Lieutenant. Her voice was childlike. Virden turned and faced the entrance to the communications building across Main Street. There were two female Specialists standing between him and the door with their mouths wide open. They jumped out of the way as he lunged toward them and the door. The chubby one let out a short scream.
“Outa my way, nigger bitches,” the blue man growled as he went inside, leaving a blue-brown trail. Clark and Powers stood there, stunned.
Dale cautiously emerged ten minutes later and laughed all the way to the range. He finally zeroed his M-4.
CHAPTER 22
Shrimp day
Camp Virtue, Afghanistan
July 12, 2010
Bobby, Fall, Opey, Woof, Eddy, Pedro, Gene, Baby Doc, and Sis sat around the 6246 table, chowing down. It was shrimp day and they’d loaded their trays with deep-fried prawns, cole slaw, hush puppies, and sweet corn bread. Iced tea was sweating in their plastic glasses. Shrimp tails were piled on their plates alongside smears of cocktail sauce.
“Where’s Captain Bob and Top?” Eddy queried. “They’re missin’ shrimp day, man.”
“Warning order,” Bobby said, eliciting groans.
“Another fuckin’ RIF,” Pedro complained, and heads nodded in agreement.
Fall spoke with his mouth full.
“Y’all hear about Ben Virden?”
There was a ripple of laughter. Of course, they had. A story this good spread like pinworms in a kindergarten.
“I heard that boy had to wash off in the leg showers,” laughed Opey, winking with delight. “His own boys wouldn’t let him in the Batmobile ’til he got all the shit off him.”
“He finds out who did it, gonna be hell to pay,” said Fall.
“Fuck you, Fall,” said Woof. “Get your fuckin’ lips off his beaver-basher. That shit was funny, man. He’s a Hollywood poser. A fuckin’ pimp.”
“Yeah, and we’re johns. Big deal. But you know what’ll be funny? When he catches the motherfucker . . .”
Woof interrupted Fall with a mock lat-spread and a growl. Most of the boys cackled, and Fall went dark in the face.
“Yeah, well you know what else?” Fall said. “See if this one cracks you up. Top already knows about the Chinese Restaurant.”
That bit of news dropped onto the table like a subpoena, silencing everyone.
“Yeah,” said Fall, feeling vindicated, “He asked Captain Bob about it yesterday.”
Eddy asked, “How do you know, man?”
Chief said, “There goes our downtown ‘security patrols’.”
Bobby, as always, put a positive spin on things.
“How do you know? Maybe Top likes to get his pipes cleaned, too. Old dude like that, maybe one of those tight little tweens be like a Vitamin B-52 shot.”
“He seem like a friendly guy to you?” Eddy asked. The table grew quiet again. “He seem like someone who wants to frat’nize with the young bucks?”
No,” opined Woof. “Ask me, that hummin’ motherfucker’s unzipped.”
“How’d he find out?” asked Pedro. Heads swiveled. More than one set of eyes settled on Baby Doc and Sis.
Captain Bob came out of nowhere. The boys all turned their heads. Captain Bob looked full of intent.
“Eat up, gentlemen,” he commanded, “and be in the ops hooch in fifteen minutes. Warning order. And not a word to anyone.”
Major Carroll sat on a black mesh office chair — the ergonomic kind with a pneumatic height adjuster. He was rocking nervously alongside Colonel Thomas’s desk, a modular V of shiny brown pressboard resting on black steel file cabinets, the surface covered with satellite imagery, maps, and support coordination forms. Thomas was rocking in his chair, too, not from nerves but impatience.
“Sir, these contractors come and go as they please, and our guys have been strap-hanging with them for months. This place is loose, sir.” Carroll was leaning forward toward Thomas’s elbow, and Thomas kept glancing down at one of the satellite images on his desk. “It may be nothing, but that French fuck smells blood in the water, and he’s got the natives all stirred up.”
“You’re mixin’ metaphors, Will . . .”
“Sir!”
“I get it, okay, Will? But lookie here, we have the first decent mission we’ve had in months . . . a superlative mission, Will, and I can’t be inconvenienced by this shit right now.”
“Sir, it’s probably bullshit, but like I say, we need to be ready to answer questions.”
“These fuckers are lookin’ for restitution checks, okay . . . but you’re right. I trust you, Will.” You fuckin’ half-breed twat! “This is what you get paid for.” Thomas turned toward Carroll, giving him a look intended to convey sincerity. “You handle this, okay, and keep everything off me for the next two days. Then we’ll have a helluva press conference and no one will care that two camel-rags got shot. It’s Afghanistan, for Christ’s sake!”
“. . . and raped.”
“Huh?”
“One of them was raped, Sir. She was fourteen. The village headman had a full-on meltdown right in front of me.”
“They did a forensic rape kit on ’er? CSI Miami show up? C’mon, Will. Keep this French faggot off me for two days.”
Carroll’s face dropped. He sighed. Thomas placed a hand on his shoulder, and Carroll looked up again. Thomas’s smile reminded Carroll of a crocodile with rigor mortis.
“Then we’ll have a story that’ll bulldoze this shit.”
“Yes, sir.”
*
Dale stood in front of the ops hooch watching a black Chinook helicopter fly low over the shipping containers at the end of Main Street. Under the sun-bleached sky, a curling line of dust blew past in advance of a backhoe that crawled toward him. Dale was armed with a notebook to check off the names of the team members as they trudged in, wearing battle-rattle over their t-shirts, weapons slung, MICH helmets hanging off of canteens. Pedro, then Woof, then Fall . . . check, check, check. Dale heard the truck coming up Main Street, but didn’t raise his face to look at it until he heard it decelerate and stop, idling directly in front of the ops hooch.
Fall stopped in the door, holding up the rest of the team, who’d started to grumble. It was an MRAP, driver’s side facing Dale, with a dusty, black Batman logo on the side. The driver’s door creaked open. Virden stepped down from the vehicle, dressed in fresh clothes, holster and belt still shining from wash water. He stood and stared directly at Dale.
Fall dropped his eyes and scuttled into the hooch.
Bobby was giggling about something and headed in behind Fall, oblivious to what had developed. Opie saw it, though, and elbowed Sis. Eddy and Doc walked around them without looking up. Gene picked it up and froze.
They all knew now that Dale was onto the Chinese Restaurant, but they didn’t know if Virden knew that Dale knew. It was on all their minds at that precise moment. The contractors were a law unto themselves, and here was one fronting Top off in plain view of his own men. The only one not reacting was Dale himself, who cast a passing glance at Virden standing there with his shaved head, his tattoos, his war vest, and his wet pistol rig. Dale could have been looking at a housefly, for all the concern he showed.
“I got y’all,” Dale said, a way of telling the boys to snap out of it and get inside. They broke contact with Virden’s threat display and crowded through the door.
Dale waited until they were all inside, then slowly turned and pretended to be pulling his skivvies out of the crack of his ass as he went inside. He heard the vehicle door slam, the engine rev, and the MRAP catch first gear to claw away down Main Street.
Inside, the boys scooched around on their chairs. Opie stood, spitting snuff into a Sprite can. Captain Bob was sitting in front, scribbling something, his knees together to support his notebook, Pete looking over his shoulder. Bobby sat next to Eddy, smiling and whispering as he tugged at his dick. Weapons lined a long white plastic folding table inside the door. Gene and Pedro sat together silently with blank expressions, spaced out now from sleep deprivation and full bellies. Eddy and Sis sat together, eyes on Captain Bob. Eddy worked a pinky up his nose. Baby Doc hung his war vest over one chair and positioned another chair for himself on the table next to Fall.
Captain Bob cleared his throat.
“Okay, settle. This is our warning order.”
The twitching subsided and pens hovered over pocket notebooks.
“Colonel Thomas has issued a warning order for ODA six-two-four-six to infiltrate northeast of Charikar at twenty-thirty hours ZULU, July 14 — that’s zero-zero-three-zero LOCAL, to capture or kill Taliban intelligence chief Usman Jahangiri — that is,” he spoke more loudly and emphatically here, “with a strong preference for capture . . .”
A couple of the boys groaned, but Dale silenced them with a look.
“. . . in order to return Jahangiri for interrogation . . .” Bobby let out a mock squeal and the boys started laughing.
“At ease!” Dale roared. They’d never heard his voice raised before and went all silent and contrite. “This is your warning order, not the fuckin’ Comedy Zone.” Well, there really was an old-school NCO hiding inside that Sybil motherfucker after all. “Go ahead, Sir.”
*
ODA 6246 was on an eighteen-hour planning cycle.
Dunny deferred to Dale on the tactics and concentrated his own efforts on coordination with the aircraft.
Dale organized a layout inspection of everyone’s combat gear to ensure the gear was all serviceable and that all the electronics had fresh batteries.
Bobby organized a test fire at the range for all the weapons from which Dale was excused, having zeroed and test-fired that morning.
Sis and Pedro set up communications, coordinating with the tactical operations center and securing their one-time pads, testing and re-testing every radio.
Doc and Woof inventoried and repacked their aid bags and Woof got on a secure line to have flunetrazepam and ketamine delivered. Dale, the ex-SF-medic, had decided they’d inject their prisoner with this “keta-roofie cocktail” immediately upon securing him.
Gene and Eddy had collected rations and prepped hinge charges in case they needed blow doors.
Pete worked as the liaison between the ops hooch and the Tactical Operations Center.
Opie and Fall picked up ammunition and grenades — frags, CS, three colors of smoke, and two white phosphorus.
Dale hovered over two maps with a protractor and a mechanical pencil.
Bobby came into the ops hooch with a packet. He’d been conducting intelligence coordination and picked up satellite images of their target.
“Top?” Dale looked up. It was Bobby.
“Top, I’m sorry about fuckin’ around in the warning order. Won’t happen again.” Dale looked at him for several seconds, as if he didn’t hear. Then, suddenly, he replied.
“Okay.”
“We’re not used to doin’ missions like this. Or an ops sergeant who knows what he’s doin’. I’m a fuck-up sometimes, Top. But I’m operationally sound . . . promise.”
“That’s good,” said Dale. “Because I’m not going past the ORP. You’ll be the senior enlisted man on the target.”
“Wait. What? Why?”
The ORP, the “objective rally point”: a control measure, a point secured by part of the detachment near, but not on, the objective. From there the rest of the team would launch into its actions on the objective, then return to the ORP to make preparations for exfiltration or extraction.
“That’s our extraction point,” said Dale. “It’s not sexy, but it’s critical. You wanna carry this guy back to Camp Virtue?”
Bobby shook his head.
“I’m not glory-seekin’, Bobby. You guys can handle the close work on this one. Now, let’s see what those sat photos look like.”
Bobby pulled the photos out of the envelope and tossed the envelope into the trash can marked “BURN.”
“Bobby, have you ever considered how fortunate we are to have deodorants that don’t cake up or stain?”
*
Dale had ordered them to maintain silence during meals. In the dining facility the other troops — accustomed now to 6246’s boisterousness — took note of this atypical silence. There was an operation afoot, and not the usual.
*
The ops hooch accumulated paper, then that paper made its way to the burn barrel. When Pedro started to toss one stack of notes into the burn barrel, and saw a sheet with doodles and a list.
Chief Pete
dickhead
Pedro
dickhead
Gene
dickhead
Bobby
dickhead
Fall
dickhead
Opie
dickhead
Woof
dickhead
Sis
dickhead
Eddy
dickhead
Pedro made a mental note to talk to Baby Doc, the only one whose name was left off the dickhead list. Little fucker! Probably the rat!
The tables filled with disposable coffee cups and pop cans, which then made their way to the trash barrel.
The pilots came in with Dunny, going over routes and checkpoints.
Dale pushed Dunny to prepare his operations order within six hours. Dale’s rule was to leave two-thirds of the prep time for code memorization, rehearsals, and rest. Outside, the sky was the color of lead, the sun making a line like a burning bomb fuse as it set along the ridgeline of Mount Ser Devaza west of Kabul.
The order was scheduled for 1900 — Local, after the boys had supper. They’d rehearse after dark at least twice then bed down after breakfast. Night ops call for night rehearsals.
Dale told Dunny he was stepping out for some air. Dale’s fingertips tingled and his head felt like it was wrapped in a loose bandage. He had planned himself off the actual objective. They needed to separate the two leaders and the two medics, Dale told Dunny, making it sound quite reasonable.
Dale still had the sense that he wasn’t really there, that he was planning a mission that was never really going to happen. Farah and Deangela intruded on his thoughts. For years, he’d left home at home and work at work. A well-policed boundary is the key to happiness. Good fences, good neighbors. Something like that.
He found himself strolling down Main Street toward the airfield, past the synthetic-lavender stench he’d created with the port-a-potty gag. He smiled to himself, not thinking of Virden. He’d pretty much made up his mind to kill Virden the first chance he got, thinking of it as a chore or an errand that needed doing, like cleaning a toilet or changing a diaper.
Six russet sparrows lined up on the commo hooch’s roof. Sand martens were swooping and diving through the dusk like the barn swallows back home. It was the birds, he caught himself thinking. Birds were violating his borders. Damned birds don’t respect anything. What are these sparrows eating? Shouldn’t there be some kind of seed?
The sky was gone gunmetal gray with just the western edge drowning in a blaze of apricot as the sun disappeared behind the ridge.
The Temptations.
I’ve shot so much money, the knees canopy
I’ve got a shitty bong and the birds eat the fleas
He walked past other soldiers, kitted up with vests and helmets, taking no notice that they stared at him humming down Main Street, wearing plain fatigues with nothing but a sidearm in violation of about ten policies and general orders. He passed the Base Exchange, the “Hajji shop,” where a local peddled knock-off shades and Afghan “lickies and chewies.” He passed the Burger King trailer where a dozen or so troops were lined up for a familiar dose of meaty monoculture. He advanced into the gloaming, approaching the end of Main Street. In one of the aviators’ bunkers near the airfield apron a dog yipped — one of the few pets on the base.
He thought of his only child. Of how Farah almost died from gravid diabetes during her pregnancy. He thought of Air Force drone operators. They showered in their apartments in places like Nevada, Colorado, and New Mexico. They dressed, came in to work, blew up crowds and houses — men, women, children — thousands of miles distant, then picked up their kids after school or soccer practice on the way home, and watched Law and Order re-runs on the couch and ate microwaved popcorn. Maybe he wasn’t so bad after all. How the fuck did they do that? At least before he killed, he was forced to pass through gates — the good-byes — gate 1, the drive to the base — gate 2, the processing — gate 3, getting on a plane — gate 4, getting off somewhere else . . . like a ship moving through locks. Sure, there was that thing when you were home, that inability to totally reconcile the two realities. Here — your kid is playing a game as she sits in the casement window while the smell of frying garlic drifts in from the kitchen and someone mows grass outside. There — where you’d been a hundred hours ago or a month ago or six months ago — was this other thing, this thing with armed men, wretched lo-tec poverty, corpses left in the open, death lurking in the shadows like the homeless. Here — Farah and Cinema 15 and streetlights and bookstores, Deangela with her binoculars tagging nuthatches. There — Ojo de Agua, Mogadishu, Tora Bora . . . Virden making six figures for doing nothing and retailing kidnapped girls to a Chinese pimp. Here/There — that delusional nitwit Thomas.
Does Thomas have any clue how fabulously fucked up this team is?
He didn’t think he’d slept at all. Dozed a bit, earlier, but he’d begin to dream. Deangela was roaming around unprotected in the commo bunker with Virden. Virden stalking Farah through the wards at Cape Fear Hospital. And these damned songs, they made him want to push daggers into his ears!
The sky threw off a dry chill. Yes, he’d kill Virden soon. Everyone needs a project. Projects keep you sane. Gain proximity; act; leave. Simplicity itself. Shut the door on your mind on the way out. Shakespeare buff, bird-watcher, good dad; murderer. Killer with Deangela, good dad in Camp fucking Virtue. Good killer-husband trying to kill his wife in their Mogadishu, North Carolina bedroom.
CHAPTER 23
Rehearsal
July 12–13, 2010
Camp Virtue
Planning saps energy like a faulty heater. By midnight everyone was a zombie.
The hooch reeked of burnt coffee, which wasn’t overcoming fatigue so much as turning the boys from fried to fried-and-jumpy. That’s when the order was scheduled, though, so there were cups of the foul brew next to pens and notebooks as the team members sat and trained bloodshot eyes on the array of dry erase boards covered in sketches and corkboards with maps and satellite photos. Clear plastic overlays covered the maps and images with variously colored lines and letters indicating the landing zone, their reference points, emergency rally points, routes, the ORP, and the target.
Pinned on one corkboard was an enlarged mugshot of Usman Janghiri from a Pakistani catch-and-release arrest made two years earlier. He had an unusually round face, hazel eyes, and a thick auburn bear. His expression was slightly crazed. Three prominent moles extended from below Jahangiri’s right eye to the edge of his beard like black tears.
Dunny, as pie-eyed from fatigue as the rest of them, had droned through the order’s first two paragraphs — Situation and Mission — and gone through Execution until he reached the Actions on the Objective sub-paragraph.
“For Actions on the Objective, I’m turning the order over to Master Sergeant Dale,” he said, and flopped into a chair flanking the display boards.
Dale’s bowels rumbled in synch with a C-5 taking off out on the airfield, drowning the hum of the generator and the buzz of the fluorescent lighting. The roar of the jet faded and Dale heard Opie spitting snuff juice into a can, strangely amplified. Dale imagined he’d caught a whiff of wet tobacco and stale saliva. Pedro sniffed and scratched his calf. A fly walked along the rim of Pete’s polystyrene coffee cup sucking at the wet sugar. Eddy took a long draw on a Mountain Dew, his thick mustache and jug ears looking suddenly enormous, like a cartoon character. Baby Doc rubbed his eyes, and Dale thought he could hear them squeak. Fall, Woof, and Gene were all getting fat, Dale noticed, their midriffs rolling over their belt lines as they sat. Fattening men with tattoos: Fall’s tribals on both arms; Woof’s wolf on his right shoulder, peeking out from his t-shirt; Gene’s Aces and Eights on a thick forearm. Gene’s thinning dark hair gave the appearance of a pale mushroom extending from his forehead to his crown surrounded on the sides by darkness. Woof dug around in his ear with a pencil eraser. Sis bent over his notebook, face down, looking as if he were about to nod off. Pete, with his tinted transition-glasses, still looked like a bookie. Captain Bob stared. Baby Doc’s hand now, laced through his hair, making it stick up through his fingers like hedgerows.
Dale was seized with the sudden urge to blurt out, “Richer, longer lashes will transform your life,” but he suppressed the urge, along with a cackle of laughter that almost slipped loose. “Do you all want whiter teeth and fresher breath?”
Did I just say that?
“Top?” Dunny called out.
Everyone grew still and looked up at him. He imagined pressing a little button on his back to talk. He imagined he was in Weymouth Woods with Deangela. He saw her raise her binoculars. He spoke.
“The trick on a warbler . . . a snatch . . . is to create a non-lethal zone within a lethal perimeter around the target. The only guy you have to recognize is him.”
He pointed to the photo of Jahangiri.
“Once you identify him, you eliminate the rest without hesitation. This guy, you look at his hands. If he doesn’t have a weapon in those hands, Fall and Pedro will call out ‘WOO-dray-gah!’ and ‘Target, Clear.’ That’s your cue, Baby Doc and Bobby, to move in. Keep clear of Pedro and Fall’s line of sight on the target and lay on hands. This building’s smaller than you imagine. You’ll rub up on each other in there. Keep to your sector, even if it’s only three feet of wall space, or you’ll commit fratricide. Single shot only. Forget you even have automatic weapons. Bobby, you’ll restrain and cuff. Baby Doc, the second his hands are in the flex cuffs, you inject him the lower abdomen with the roofie cocktail, here. That’s his core, and it’s the part of him that will thrash the least while you restrain him. It’ll take a few minutes for the drugs to hit, and it shouldn’t be enough to make him a dishrag. If we can walk him, that’s a big plus. We don’t wanna carry him if we don’t have to. The extraction LZ is still three and a half clicks. When the target is in hand and restrained, Captain Dunny will give three short blows on the whistle. That tells Gene and Pete you’re coming out the door. Gene and Pete will pull off the back of the building, fall in behind the inside team, and cross the street. When Opie and Eddy count out the last man, roll up the file, and make a beeline to the ORP. At this point, speed’s your best security. Haul ass and to hell with the racket. Just don’t shout and carry on with a bunch of ‘go, go, go’ shit. It confuses the fuck out of everybody. Sis will call Woof and me in the ORP on the FM hand-held. If that fails, he’ll send up a pin flare . . .” He broke off momentarily, and stared at the back of the room.
“Top!” said Dunny. “Top?”
*
They rehearsed on the airfield three times that night: landing zone assembly, ORP sequence, and actions on the objective. When they were finished, less than an hour remained before dawn. The sky was moonless. Visibility was nil except for starlight and spotty bits of backlight escaping across the base. That was a good thing, because it was exactly what they could expect during the mission scheduled for the coming night.
Heading back, the first wrinkle of twilight appeared in the east.
The DFAC was preparing to serve breakfast by the time they dropped their gear in the ops hooch. After breakfast they’d all bag out for a few hours.
Dunny walked in and announced that they were about to receive a briefing from the public affairs officer, eliciting an eruption of what-the-fuck-this-is-fucking-bullshit. Everyone was hungry, tired, and cross. What did public affairs have to do with this operation now? They hadn’t even launched yet. Were they expecting Anderson Cooper? Captain Dunny was cross, too, his eyes sandy and bloodshot, and he gave it right back to them.
“It’s not a fucking request, goddammit.” He threw his vest into a corner, dropped his M-4 onto the heap. “In your seats in ten minutes.”
*
Sleepy, irritable men filed in and dropped into chairs. Major Carroll stood front and center, ready with his briefing. When the last man, Pedro, was seated, Dale nodded at Dunny.
“All present, sir,” Dunny said, taking his own seat.
Carroll stood at ease, feet shoulder-width apart, hands clasped behind his back. He turned on a benevolent half-smile as he looked from one man to another. No one smiled back. They all saw the PAO as a trick pony instead of a stallion.
“Thanks, Captain Dunny,” he said, then cleared his throat. “Gentlemen, I apologize for getting you up. I know you’re resting in anticipation of a very difficult mission, but something has come up. There’s a journalist, a French reporter, who’s making suggestions about an incident two nights ago near Dahst-e-Barchi.”
Gene and Pedro held their eyes unblinkingly forward. Doc, who’d been chewing on a fingernail, looked up. Dale narrowed his eyes and bit the pad of his right thumb, holding onto it with his teeth like a mongoose with a toad.
“Apparently, a young girl and her mother were killed,” Carroll explained, “and the villagers claim that the young girl was raped. Could have been Taliban or militia, or could be an attempt to get compensation from ISAF. But some of the villagers insist it was Americans.” His voice said this was obviously bullshit, but American officers had to perform their due diligence.
“We expect to conclude that investigation fairly quickly. Until further notice, however, no one is to say anything to any member of the press. You are to have no contact with the press. We are neither to confirm nor to deny any story to the press or your friends or your family.”
“Where would we meet any press?” Bobby blurted.
Dale and Dunny gave him a look.
“Not only press,” Carroll said. “Say nothing to anyone! No one outside this team. Full stop. Understood. This is close-hold until we’ve completed our investigation. That is all.”
He headed out the door. Dunny called them to attention, and they rose without enthusiasm into loose facsimiles of the position of attention. Carroll stopped and turned, one hand already on the door. “And, gentlemen, this may be the most important mission of your lives. A lot is riding on you. Good luck, and Godspeed.”
CHAPTER 24
Snake
Camp Virtue
July 13, 2010
By noon, disruption of their sleep rhythms and suppressed anxiety about the mission were keeping most of them awake in spite of their fatigue. Men in this situation semi-sleep, fake-sleep, or give in to restlessness and accept that they’ll do the mission on raw endurance. A few men have the gift of no imagination. They sleep. Eddy was like that, and he was snoring like a pug.
Baby Doc leafed half-absently through the team’s medical records. His head wasn’t in the mission. It was on the Public Affairs briefing. He felt a paralyzed vigilance radiating from Pedro and Gene like a radioactive field. Baby Doc had heard the shots, the time of the shots, and the whispered departure that preceded them. There were always distant shots in Afghanistan, but he knew what these were. Each successive confirmation further unbalanced him, the unwelcome knowledge unfurling in his belly like a poisonous flower.
A SOAP note in Pedro’s record. What was this?
S — PT complains of painful genital sore, l/d shaft of penis. O — open lesion w clear discharge, vesicles. A — genital herpes. P — acyclovir, 400mg oral TID x 10 days.
Hector gazed at the note, then through it. He looked across his shoulder. Pedro and Gene lay still on their cots, both their faces turned toward the outside of the tent. Hector stacked the medical records neatly, squaring the edges, then placed Pedro’s record on the top, open to the page with the SOAP note showing Pedro diagnosis to the world.
Pedro tired of trying in vain to sleep, so he put on a porn film he’d seen twenty times, with the sound turned off. A blonde woman in black stockings and shiny-black spiked heels straddled a white man whose face was hidden, topping him, while another man penetrated her anally from behind. The black guy behind her looked a little bored, and the woman’s buttocks rippled every time he thrust into her. It was hard to tell whether her grimace was meant to represent pain or pleasure.
Pedro looked bored, too.
Gene had begun to fidget, pacing around the tent, repeatedly making serial adjustments to his equipment and his rucksack. Hollow-eyed from lack of sleep, his expression seemed hunted. He pulled the detonator assemblies out of the rucksack for the third time. He was re-rolling the waterproofing and the bubble wrap now. When he pushed it back into his rucksack, his eyes fell on the stack of medical records. Baby Doc was nowhere in sight. No one in the tent was looking. Pedro was listless, glued to the silent mechanical threesome.
*
Nine pairs of boots were aligned outside the door of the interpreters’ prayer room. The contractors had built them a day-billet with bunk beds, a ping-pong table, tables for dominoes and cards, and a prayer room with a high window facing West toward Mecca. Benham was inside, alongside Jahid, Rafik, Omar, Hamdast, Rabi, Razi, Payam, and Maalik. Each knelt and bowed on his own prayer rug.
Completing their prayers, they rolled up their rugs and retrieved their boots outside the door. They sat on chairs and cots to tuck their uniform trousers back into their boots.
Interpreters stuck together, in part because the other AMFs — those whose English was poor to nonexistent — were both envious and contemptuous of them, seeing them as suck-ups and collaborators, even as all AMF’s were seen as collaborators by most Afghans. This placed additional pressure on all the AMF’s, but especially the interpreters, to assert their identity as Afghans, more so, as Pashtuns, when they were apart from the amrekayan.
The nine interpreters went into the Afghan dining facility and sat down at their table together. Benham had the floor. He spoke quietly to them all. In the beginning, they ate and listened. As he continued, however, they placed their flatware on their plates, fixing their attention on Benham. A wave of agitation arose as Benham went on, and wrath began to cover their faces like a storm cloud. In a sudden explosion of angry chatter, they became animated, gesticulating, their voices growing louder and more combative.
The clamor attracted wolfish stares from some of the Americans through the open portal. Benham warned them to calm down, slanting his eyes and pushing his lips out at the grim faces of their armed masters. The noise dropped. The boiling fury remained.
*
The prevailing wind over Camp Virtue rolled down of the northwest, occasional gusts twirling the orange dust into dancing columns. That’s why Camp Virtue burned its trash on the South end, near a deep fissure running up the side of the plateau. Garbage, most from the dining facility, was dumped into the fissure, while burnt combustibles formed a ragged heap of ash out of which stuck indistinguishable scraps of charred, black metal, and half-burned pallets.
Three privates from the support detachment — Ames, Rozin, and Long, all in full battle kit — unloaded twenty-three fractured wooden pallets from the back of an open deuce-and-a-half truck. Ames was a black kid, light-skinned, no more than five and a half feet tall with silver braces on his teeth that seemed to sparkle when he talked, which he did incessantly. Long was bigger and darker, with thick keloid scars on his neck where he’d been mauled by a dog when he was eight. Rozin was pale and blond, flat-faced, with high, perpetually sunburnt, Slavic cheekbones. Rozin’s eyelashes were white, making him look sick, although he couldn’t remember ever being sick a day in his life.
Rozin and Long took turns responding to Ames’s incessant monologue, courteously sharing this little burden. Ames, on the truck bed, passed the forklift pallets down to Long, who passed them to Rozin, who stacked them in a heap on the pile of ash and rubble.
“ . . . Penn was good in Milk, don’t get me wrong,” Ames held forth, “but Mickey Rourke is a genius, man. And he gets passed over again. The Wrestler was better than Slumdog, yo, but that’s beside the point. Best Actor should’ve gone to Rourke, not just because he’s brilliant, man, but as a lifetime achievement kind of thing, you know? Who else could’ve played the range of characters Rourke has? Look at the parts. There’s Diner, there’s Barfly, Rumble Fish . . . even in his small parts, like Rainmaker, the guy is the ultimate method actor. He gets inside the skin of his characters.”
The last pallet hit the heap, and Rozin abandoned Long to Ames and the 2009 Oscars to retrieve a short stack of old newspapers from the cab. When he stepped back out of the cab, Ames was still energized, not even pausing as he handed the gas can down to Rozin, while Long stood there at the back of the truck blowing little puffs of air out one after the other that sounded like corks softly popping.
“. . . in Spun . . . hey, just one of the most under-recognized films of the decade, man, his character — the meth cook — man, it was fucking hallucinogenic, man. That speech on pussy? ‘You gotta speak to that pussy, son, make a vow to it.’ Pure genius, homes.”
Rozin was stuffing newspaper all through the heap of pallets. Long did his tiresome duty responding to Ames.
“What? What movie was that?”
Sure, he was egging him on, but Ames was going to talk no matter what.
“Spun, yo!”
Rozin soaked the pile with a half-gallon of gasoline.
“Fire in the hole,” he called out, lighting an MRE match, then using it to light the whole book. He threw the burning book of matches at the heap, running back, and the gas went up with a whump. The papers caught fire, launching glittering bits of ash into the air. Then the wind shifted and bore down from the south, throwing flames into their faces that almost singed their eyebrows.
As they retreated, Ames jumped off the back, abandoning the deuce-and-a-half to its fate if the wind held. The smoke chased them until they sidled around toward the big crack in the ground with the river of putrid food waste.
The garbage drew rats, and some of the guys on post had pellet pistols they’d bring out to shoot at them. Ames, Long, and Rozin alternated between watching the fire shift back and surveilling the garbage for rats. Ames had just transitioned into a soliloquy about the meth epidemic when Rozin suddenly squealed and tottered backwards.
Less than ten feet from where he was standing, slipping out from under the burnt brush along the edge of the site, was a thick Levant viper — a conspicuously fat, orange-and-white snake. Its head was saddle-shaped like a bad comb-over and the size of a pig’s heart. The animal was nearly six feet long, driven into the open by the heat. Ames fell silent, and all they could hear was the crackling of the fire. They stood still at a distance and looked at the viper. It lay motionless and looked back. The fire grew hotter as all three of the Privates wordlessly watched the snake. Undulating slowly, its thick body heaving like a wave, the snake slid and curled back into the garbage and out of sight.
CHAPTER 25
The coin
Camp Virtue
July 13, 2010
Hearing the beep, Major Carroll reached for the Motorola-handheld in the charger. Anita Barber was taking notes for him in the office, and her pen froze above her notebook. The red light on the unit blinked and beeped again.
“Papa Alpha,” he said when he hit the button. “Go ahead, over.”
Barber watched. A moment passed. Carroll scowled.
“Can you tell him to come back tomorrow?”
Another pause, and Carroll put the radio down on the desk, muttered “Fuck me with a Twinkie!”
Barber set down her notebook and pen and rose from her chair.
*
“Tell him that if he doesn’t see me,” Gaston told the gate guard, a tattooed Samoan with his radio held out like a book he was reading, “I’ll be calling my editor tonight with a very scandalous story.”
The guard pulled the radio close again with two hands and looked skyward as spoke: “He says if you don’t let him in, he’s gonna write about a scandal or somethin’.” The guard smiled wearily at Gaston while they waited for a reply. Five seconds, ten, fifteen.
“Tell him someone’s coming to escort him,” came the reply
The guard grinned.
“Someone finally went through their books, huh? You find out how much they’re charging the government for paper plates?”
*
Gaston faced Major Carroll across the desk. They exchanged a pro forma handshake.
“What can we do for you, Mr. Villeneuve? Please, have a seat.” Carroll sat back without waiting. Villeneuve remained standing. Carrol could smell onions, tobacco, and aftershave. The reporter had cleaned up. Across his belly stretched an ironed, button-down, sky-blue shirt.
“Major, could you help me understand a military custom I’ve observed?”
“What would that be, Mr. Villeneuve?”
“Gaston, please. Major, you are familiar with the military custom called . . . what is it? A ‘coin check’?”
“Of course. Everyone in Special Operations is.”
“If I present you with a coin . . . correct me if I am wrong . . . and if you do not have your own coin, then you have to do press-ups or buy me beer or jack me off or something . . . and if you have the coin, once I have challenged you, then I have to do the press-ups or buy the beer. Is that how it works?”
“Push-ups, yes. It’s a fraternal thing. Not familiar with the hand job tradition. Perhaps that’s the Foreign Legion you’re thinking of, or the Armée de Terre.”
Smiling briefly and reaching into his pocket, Villeneuve asked, “Is this the kind of coin you use?”
He held out a large and tarnished nickel-plated coin on the palm of his right hand. It bore an image of the globe with a great 6 over it and a scroll over the top that said “6th SPECIAL FORCES GROUP (AIRBORNE). A scroll along the bottom that said, “DE OPPRESSO LIBER.” Carroll glanced down at the coin without otherwise moving, then back up at Villeneuve.
“Surely, Mr. Villeneuve, you didn’t make threatening noises to gain entry into this installation so you could coin-check me. If I do the push-ups, will you go away? I won’t touch your penis, and I’m not allowed beer.”
“Ah, well, it’s not that simple, Major. I found this coin. I thought that perhaps someone here had lost it . . .”
“Forgive me for being short, Gaston, but you are rapidly closing the distance between here and what we refer to in America as ‘my last fucking nerve’.”
“. . . in a crack in the floor of the house where Bakhtawara and Storai Yusafzai lived until they were murdered two nights ago. It even had blood on it, which I collected for testing. The two NATO five-point-five-six ammunition cartridges which were handled by the villagers probably won’t yield useful fingerprints now.”
Carroll blanched.
“But the other sample I’ll have tested,” Gaston continued, “is feces. Human feces. It was left on the ground, far from any communal latrine, precisely where the villagers showed me the truck tracks. One of the perpetrators needed to defecate either before or after the deed. Someone wiped his cul on a rag there. The tag on the rag reads ‘Town and Country Living, New York.’ Not very Taliban, you see. It may contain DNA. We’ll see. Storai was fourteen, if you’ll recall. She was also raped before she was killed.” He put the coin back into his pocket. “The surname is more a tribal identification, not like Carroll or Villeneuve. Bakhtawara means good luck, or something like that. Ironic, no? Storai means star. These details will humanize these women, though fourteen-year-old Storai will hardly be seen as an adult in the minds of my readers.”
“Mr. Villeneuve, let me stop you.”
“Gaston, please.”
“I told you the last time you were here, we are investigating. We can’t draw any conclusions about this incident until that investigation is complete. Nor should you!”
“Major, I haven’t drawn any conclusions either. I have witnesses who say what they say. I have the photographs of the scene . . . they are horrendous, Major. And I have this little coin, accompanied now by your doublespeak about conducting an investigation of yourselves. I have DNA samples collected from the young girl’s body,” he lied. Doing so would have outraged the armed men of the village who’d have viewed it as corpse desecration. “If I could be convinced that there is a serious investigation, then I might also be convinced to withhold my story until it has a bit more . . . context?”
Carroll was up now, stalking off to Villeneuve’s left.
“Mr. Villeneuve . . . Gaston, if you will hold your story for two days, I will give you details of how the investigation will proceed, and I will promise now to keep you abreast of every development in that investigation. Anyone might pick up a coin that could have fallen anywhere at any time. Surely, journalistic ethics demands that you not trade in innuendo.”
“Thank you, Major.” Villeneuve offered Carroll his hand. Carroll took it. “If you would send your escort in, I’m prepared to return to my hotel. I’ll be expecting a call from you by day after tomorrow. Here is my card with my number. Au revoir, monsieur.”
*
Colonel Thomas no longer seemed distracted. He stood looking at Carroll, and Carrol looked back.
Thomas dismissed Carroll and called his communications chief on the landline with instructions to bring the programmable inline encryption device for an urgent message.
*
JSOC Headquarters (Forward)
Near Jalalabad, Afghanistan
July 13, 2010
General “Dickie” Baker was no longer “Boss.” He had three layers of commanders under him now. The old intimacies of that tight little unit at “the chalet” were a memory, and the operational tempo here was brutal, especially since Obama had fired that fucking loudmouth, McChrystal. Dickie had less than three hours sleep when the message came in from his old colleague, who’d apparently gotten himself into another fine mess, even shelved away at Camp Virtue. Thomas had a special talent for stepping in shit.
Dickie picked up his landline and dialed. “Send me your ‘three’ in person,” he told someone on the other end of the line.
*
Pedro nodded off and dreamed a giant penis pushing through a basement window . . . there was blood on a sweaty bottle of wine . . . Gene smacked him awake with a none-to-gentle slap on the shoulder.
“Carajo!”
Gene was standing over him, someone snoring in the background. Gene’s eyes blazed with antagonism.
“We need to talk.”
Pedro tried to roll over.
“Chill the fuck out, dude!”
Gene slapped the back of Pedro’s head this time. Pedro leapt to his feet, ready to fight.
“Outside,” Gene said. “Now.”
Pedro strained to regain his composure. He leaned into Gene menacingly and whispered.
“Dude, chill the fuck out. Just stay cool, man. It’s just a couple of hajji bitches. We do this thing, we stay alive a few months, have our fuckin’ adventure, and we go back to the motherfuckin’ real world. We had our cake. We ate it, too.”
“Outside.”
“They got nothin’, man, unless you act like . . .”
“You have herpes, motherfucker?”
“What?”
“Herpes. Genital herpes.”
“Dude, whatchoo trippin’ about?”
“I saw your medical records, motherfucker. It says you have genital herpes.”
“Are you outa you fuckin’ mind, huele bicho?”
“I’m married, goddamnit!”
“Dude, what the fuck!”
Gene got within an inch of Pedro’s face, eyes flickering, whispering urgently.
“I fucked her after you did, Pedro. I can’t take herpes home to my wife, you fuck.”
“That what you trippin’ about?” Pedro backed away from Gene’s tobacco breath and grimaced. “Dude, I was cured of that shit three years ago.”
“You can’t cure herpes, Pedro. I looked it up.”
“Says who, man? I got an osteopath, this dude cures it all the time, man.”
“Pedro, this is bullshit. This is just some fucked up bullshit!”
“No shit, Gene! No shit! This dude, he had me eat this shit look like packing plastic every day for a month. Ain’t had a outbreak since. He cured me, ’mano.”
“Fuckin’ bullshit!”
Pete heard their rising voices inside the tent.
“Hey! Tryin’ to sleep here, guys!”
Gene whispered again, “I need to get some antivirals, man. This is so not good, so not good.”
Gene stalked away and Pedro muttered to himself, “¡Me cago en la crica de tu madre!”
Baby Doc watched them through the equipment piles, feeling like he stood in a strong wind on a high cliff at the edge of a black, bottomless canyon.
CHAPTER 26
Dogpatch disappears
Camp Virtue Airfield
July 13, 2010
2005 — Local
Some called it the “already-not-yet,” that pre-mission, ready-to-launch atmospheric. Already committed, already on the launch site, not done yet. Who lives? Who dies? Who gets maimed? Dale was deeply familiar.
Between the acting of a dreadful thing
And the first motion, all the interim is
Like a phantasma or a hideous dream.
The sun had fallen behind the mountains. No longer light. Not yet dark.
They’d committed, but the pieces were still being lined up — the in-betweenness, a state of abstraction magnifying the real. The fear of showing fear stacked on fear, wrapped in denial, tied with pride, prayers from those who did not pray, to a God who seemed not to listen. Operational Detachment-Alpha 6246 sat on their rucksacks as the airfield grew dark, noticing everything as if the volume had been turned up on the world.
Now the maintenance crew was tinkering with that helicopter.
Now one of them coughed.
Now a wrench fell.
Now the sky was painted dead yellow and slate.
Now the late evening birds were startled as a cargo jet roared to a landing in the background.
Now a bat took off from a nearby building.
Now they smelled the smoldering trash.
What might death be like? Which “now” will bring it on? Is death the smell of burnt trash, the flicker of a bat, a handful of gravel, or a hospital room with fluorescent lights and a television proclaiming cheaper hotel rates? So many forks in the road, all of them leading to a dead end. The world will slip and slide along just the same, with you or without you.
Beyond the airfield, amid the high rocks, a golden jackal was startled by something no one else could hear.
The darkness trended toward absolute. Still, they waited on the apron of the airfield, each member of 6246 closed in tightly with his own thoughts. By 2300 hours the choppers were cranked and blasting, rotors thwacking through sparkling trails of phosphorescent light at the edges of the rotor spans.
The MH-47 had two rotors, the old joke being that a Chinook was the only chopper that could have a blade strike with itself. The two AH-6 “little bird” gunships sounded like giant wasps alongside the low-frequency howl of the 47.
The night was cool and starry, the airfield blacked out. A half-moon rested pointlessly between two silhouetted peaks, ready to drop out of sight. Someone somewhere broke the inertia and Dunny passed the command.
“Saddle up.”
The airfield marshal switched on two infrared flashlights, and a dozen equipment-laden black silhouettes stood and lumbered into a queue at the bottom of the 47’s tail ramp. Battle rattle, rucksacks, weapons, and helmets were black, distorted masses balanced atop twelve sets of impossibly thin legs.
The marshal flipped down his goggles and the team lit up in grainy green monochrome, their eyes aglow like animals on a roadway. The crew chief leaned out and gave a whistle loud enough to punch through the engine noise, and the team filed up the ramp.
*
Mountains near Charikar, Afghanistan
Midnight, July 14, 2010
The half-moon had set. A small plateau among treeless mountains. Out of the breezeless silence came a falsetto bhoo’-hoe: an eagle owl, sensing another faraway sound before hearing it. The owl took flight. Barely audible, a hum, slowly growing in intensity to a buzz, then a growl. If any human had been present on this landing zone, the growl would have been accompanied by black holes in the sky, the choppers blocking the stars. The little bird gunships ripped past in the blackness, sounding like sewing machines and flying like angry hornets.
The hornets orbited around the LZ as the howling Chinook sank onto the plateau, the pilots and crew chief watching the edges of the rotors through their goggles. The clamshell in the back was already open and the front wheel stayed two feet off the ground as the detachment plodded off like top-heavy Sasquatches.
Team members stumbled right and left to establish a hasty perimeter.
The big chopper levitated, rocked for a moment, tilted forward, executed a 180º pivot and thundered away. The little birds buzzed twice more through their right-turn orbits, then tagged along behind the 47, noise fading swiftly as if sucked into a black hole.
Each member of the team could now hear himself breathe. They gathered in a huddle and filed out, heading down an unseen slope. Everything on the dark ground was a stumbling block. Hard, hidden things — obstacles pregnant with hazard, hazards behind hazards. The team heard the owl cry out in the distance.
*
Humping is walking, but not walking like giving the dog a stroll or going to the corner store to buy a lottery ticket. When a grunt humps — even if he’s a highly trained, slightly self-important, specialized grunt with a Special Forces tab — he walks in the dark, nearly a hundred pounds over body weight, and his feet slip, scuff, stumble, and strain over black, invisible ground. If he slips just a bit the wrong way, in the wrong phase of his step, he’ll totter and topple with all that weight. The threat of falling is always there. When grunts hump, someone always falls. Over the course of a hump, pretty much every grunt will fall at least once. Maybe that’s how they came to be called grunts — falling foot soldiers who say “Uunnh!” as they hit the ground. In the night, the grunt walks on a compass azimuth over unfamiliar terrain. Small stones bruise his feet, big stones twist his ankles. Erosion ditches can swallow an entire leg. Thorns, switches, and broken branches lacerate his face and hands, and stab the skin under trouser legs and sleeves. Rocks bark his shins. Sudden rises and drops short-step him. He’s ninety-five percent feeling his way, five percent on his meager night vision. The goggles help, but then the headaches start, escalating into vertigo and nausea. So, the grunt night-humps blind, saving the goggles for when he’s on or near the target.
Eleven laden men humped single file, outlines barely visible in the starlight. They’d rested for a few moments, then begun again, scuffing and bumping along in the dark.
Dale walked last in line to ensure there were no breaks in contact. Soldiers on night patrols walk single file. If one person, blinded by darkness, loses contact with the man in front of him, the unit is split. He’d reiterated his standing rule to them during the order.
“You are responsible for the man behind you in the file. Lose him and you’ll answer to me.”
So, they looked back. A lot.
Dale’s feet fell as his mind drifted. The cedar waxwing has a flat yellow line across a straight tail, black mask, short neck, short wide bill . . .
Crunch. Grunt. One of the men fell.
Fall, the man, was on point. He held up a hand, signaling a halt and causing a pile-up. No one saw the hand. The men kneeled. Dunny then wove clumsily through the file to join Fall on point. Fall looked between two boulders at a scattering of weak lights in the valley ahead. Dale came forward, too, squeezing between and through the kneeling men. He dug a GPS receiver and a cut section of poncho out of his chest rig. Covering his head with the poncho, he pressed a button and a seam of green light escaped around his shoulders. Then it was gone.
Dale whispered to Fall and Dunny, “I’ll take point. 200 meters to the ORP. Pass it back.” Each man in the file leaned back to the man behind him to whisper, “200 meters. ORP.”
*
The Objective Rally Point was a piece of ground like a lopsided pancake, covered with stones, dry grass that made noise, and spiny dwarf shrubs that could penetrate canvas. Goggles on, the team formed a small perimeter and waited for ten minutes until the site quieted down while they listened for other activity.
Once cleared, Woof and Dale kept watch while the rest of the detachment dug in their rucksacks, preparing their gear for the mission. When all were finished, they brought the rucksacks to the center and stood in the dark.
Captain Bob told Bobby to make ready. Bobby lined the boys up.
Charikar was visible 800 meters below and dead quiet.
Pete was breathing loudly, nearly hyperventilating. Baby Doc quietly crossed himself. Eddy sensed him do it and crossed himself too. Stripped now to chest rigs, backpack radios, weapons, and helmets, the detachment filed quietly out of the ORP, leaving Woof and Dale to secure it for their return.
Dale whispered to Woof as the last of the team filed out, posting him between two boulders. Dale went to the opposite end of the ORP, facing the target, less than fifteen meters from Woof. Dale found a shallow depression and dropped down on both knees.
For a while, they could hear the rest of the team’s footfalls crunching over the stony downhill slope. Once the noise was gone, Woof settled in and checked his radio.
Very quietly, Dale began taking off his helmet and body armor.
*
The Detachment halted a football field from Charikar’s man road on a tongue of high ground. Dunny’s FM broke squelch in his earpiece, and he heard a vague whisper. He pulled at the radio attached to his sour smelling chest harness, mashed the key, and said, “Last calling station, say again, over.”
It was Woof, from the ORP, code name Nasty. Bear was Dunny.
“Bear, this is Nasty, over.”
“Nasty, Bear, go ahead, over.”
“Bear, Nasty. Dogpatch is mike india alpha, over.” MIA.
Bobby twitched. “Huh?” he said.
Dunny leaned into Bobby, pulling the earpiece out and putting it between their heads.
“Did he say Top is . . . missing?” Bobby whispered.
Dunny whispered back into the mike, “Nasty, Bear, did you just say that Dogpatch is mike india alpha?”
“Holy shit,” Bobby muttered a bit too loud.
This set the rest of the team scuffling around in their positions. Pete was suddenly on them.
“What happened?”
“Top ain’t in the ORP,” Bobby whispered,
Dunny muttered, “Fuck me.”
Pete gave out three consecutive sighs, then gripped Dunny by the arm, almost causing Dunny to drop his weapon.
“We have to abort this mission,” he hissed.
In the ORP, Woof squatted low, sweat running over his whole body. Suddenly, he abandoned radio discipline.
“I am freaking the fuck out here, y’all. I said he is gone. That certifiable motherfucker is gone! I am here all by my goddamn self! Fucking need guidance, over!”
The sound of Woof’s urgent whisper spread over the team, and they became audibly restless.
“Keep it down!” Bobby commanded them in a stage whisper. “Fuckin’ target’s right over there.”
He turned and lowered his voice, “Whatcha gonna do now, Captain?”
Dunny spoke into the FM: “Do not move, Nasty. I say again, do not move. Stand fast and wait one, over.”
“Bad sign,” Pete suddenly said out loud.
Dunny grabbed Pete by the neck so hard it sounded like a slap: “Shut. The fuck. Up.” Then, to Dunny, still whispering: “How in the hell can someone just disappear?”
A sudden repetitive whimper: “Oh my God. Oh my God. Oh my God . . .” Pete, slouching toward panic, an operation’s worst internal enemy. Captain Bob took a long breath and counted slowly to ten as he slowly let it out. Finally, he spoke.
“We continue the mission.” Pete seemed to be praying now; the same murmured prayer again and again.
“No, no, no, no, no . . .”
“Shut the fuck up, Pete!” Bobby hissed at him. “Get the fucking sand out of your clit!”
“Nasty, this is Bear, over.”
“Go ahead, over.”
“We’re gonna charlie mike, how copy, over?” Continue mission.
Another long and anguished pause.
“Roger,” Woof answered. “I copy. Charlie mike. Out.”
*
Colonel Thomas paced like a caged tiger inside the Task Force Operations Center. He did a sudden about face when his signal officer called him, a red-headed Captain named Elijah Bond. Thomas strode through the bustling staff like Moses parting the waters, hovering over Bond who hovered over a communications array.
“What’ve you got, Captain?”
“Sir, the team has lost a man.” Bond kept still in his seat, facing forward.
“Lost him?” roared Thomas, looking around the room like the answer to his question was an escaped gerbil. “KIA? Are they in contact?”
“He’s missing in action, Sir. Code name Dogpatch.”
“That’s fuckin’ Dale!” Thomas roared. The entire staff now crowded around him. “That’s fuckin’ Dale! How in Christ do you lose a fuckin’ Team Sergeant? I’m puttin’ Bob Dunny’s balls in a cider press!”
CHAPTER 27
Actions on the objective
Charikar, Afghanistan
July 14, 2010
0212 — Local
The last control point near the target turned out to be a public latrine — a patchwork of human excrement spread over an indistinct region. A field of shit indicated on no map. Sis was the first to step in it, and when he did the smell burst up like a poisonous gas. From up the mountain where they’d left Hillman and Dale, a spring flowed down past them. They could hear it. Probably where locals rinsed their hands after taking a dump. Eddy dropped down to one knee and mashed out a pile with his kneepad.
He cursed out loud.
Bobby whispered, “Shut the fuck up, yo! We’re like a hundred meters out, goddammit.”
“This is a fuckin’ shitter,” Eddy whispered in protest.
“Shower in Lysol when we get back. Right now, we’re in fuckin’ Apache country!”
Dunny grabbed Bobby by the elbow.
“That’s the house, over there,” Dunny whispered. “It looks exactly like the satellite image.”
He’s getting ahead, thought Bobby.
“Sir, sat-images are deceptive. I’m pretty sure the building’s over there!” He pointed to a smaller structure that was around a hundred meters left of Dunny’s choice. “They all look like the satellite image! Inkblots and dirty diapers look like satellite images.”
“We need to abort this mission!” It was Pete. He’d come out of nowhere.
“Shut the fuck up!” Bobby and Dunny said it in unison.
“Get back there,” Dunny whispered, “and get your shit together, Mr. Townall. We’re not aborting anything.” Pete sighed, then sighed again, stomping off. Bobby turned back to Dunny.
“Your call, sir. You’re in charge. But I remember the sat-image, and there were, like, houses on three sides. I remember three, Captain. That one only has two.”
“It’s on the backside maybe. I’m goin’ with my gut. We hit that one.”
They shuffled into position. Bobby cringed at every noise, every sound amplified by adrenaline during their approach. A dog started yapping in the distance. Captain Bob was bathed in sweat. Eddy couldn’t figure out whether he wanted to go down on his right knee, covered in shit, or his left knee, to take his position on left flank security along the rocky street. So, he stood, even though it silhouetted him. He thought about dying with some strange Afghani’s shit on him.
Opie was on right flank security, his heart fluttering as he knelt there. He couldn’t figure out whether it was anticipation or the Red Bull he’d chugged at the release point. He had a thick dip of Copenhagen in his lower lip, but he wasn’t able to generate enough saliva to moisten it and his stomach burned.
Sis was on rear security across the street — if you could call it that, all ten rocky feet of it — facing the release point. He keyed his mike, and sent the Forward Operating Base the Operational Schedule Code for arriving at the breaching point.
“Hotel-six, this is Lima-niner. Petunia. I say again, petunia, over.”
“Niner, six. Roger. I copy, petunia, out.”
Pete was on the other side of the house on forward security, his hands shaking violently. He gripped his weapon hard and locked the muscles across his shoulders, chest, back, and arms, willing himself into a fixed pose, like a statue — bargaining with an unfamiliar deity that he would never-this or always-that if only he could just get back to Camp Virtue safely.
Gene stood against one corner of the house next to a window, closed tight with wooden shutters, and watched the backs of Pedro, Fall, Bobby, Baby Doc, and Captain Bob. They were lined up in that order, ready to breach the front door, weapons at low-port, pressed together nut-to-butt, each of them lit up inside with that tingling disquiet that precedes a parachute jump or a deliberate attack.
Only Gene would stay outside the structure as local security for the breach.
Dunny reached up with his left hand and squeezed Baby Doc’s left shoulder. Baby Doc passed the signal to Bobby in front of him, and Bobby passed it to Fall. Pedro, as first in the door, was nearly aquiver with anticipation when Fall squeezed.
Pedro keyed the light attached his 12-gauge shotgun, aimed the light at the top hinge and fired. The blast seemed to tear the whole night apart. Down, he aimed the light at the lower hinge.
There was a scream from inside.
He fired the second round, and the door settled a-kilter in the frame.
Pedro kicked it once, then again, and it toppled inside to the right. The entry team’s white lights were on now, their goggles up. Pedro went left to the corner, not six feet away. Fall’s corner on the right was less than four. Bobby and Baby Doc went down the middle toward an interior door. That was where the screaming came from.
Suddenly the door opened.
Pedro hit the old man who came out with a shotgun blast. The old man, wearing striped pajamas, seemed to tilt sideways, then he flopped straight down on the rug beneath him, blood flooding from under him like someone opened a faucet. The old woman came screeching out behind him. As she dropped to her knees to grasp her dead husband, Fall let loose with a three-round burst from the M-4 that tore off the back of her head.
Outside, Gene had been kneeling below the window, facing outward, his head just above the bottom of the window. Two of Fall’s three rounds had passed through the parietal and occipital bones of the old woman’s head. The rounds spalled and hit the stone and cob wall behind her. One of the rounds passed mere millimeters from her head and hit a slightly concave stone embedded in the wall behind her that happened to be apatite — a hard crystal. The bullet, weighing 55 grains before it hit the stone, split in two with the impact. One of the two fragments, weighing 21 grains, flattened into a sharp disk by the impact, ricocheted between Pedro and Bobby, caught the corner of a bit of granite embedded in the other wall, turned downward, pierced the wooden shutters of the window, slowing down to 307 feet per second, and entered Gene’s neck from behind, neatly severing his cervical spinal cord between sixth and seventh cervical vertebrae. When the bullet stopped, Gene was already dead. He folded backward onto the wall, where he came to rest with his head on the ground and his knees still tucked clumsily beneath him. No one saw.
“Go! Go! Go! Go! Go!” shouted Dunny to Bobby and Baby Doc, who were staring at the dead couple. They hesitated, then plunged through the door to the old couple’s bedroom. They waved their flashlight beams across everything — the cob walls, a threadbare rug, a rickety chair, rumpled bedclothes, an old trunk. Then they both stood very still for several seconds.
“Whatcha got?” demanded Dunny from the other room.
“Clear,” Bobby called back. The team suddenly fell into a stunned silence and stood frozen in their own spots. Fall broke the silence.
“Uh-oh,” he said. Then the silence resumed.
That’s when they heard voices from around the village, shocked awake by the gunfire. Bobby and Baby Doc returned to the main room and waved their flashlights around.
“Oh no,” was all that Baby Doc could say.
One by one, the lights were extinguished until the room was black again. Then Fall had a coughing fit. The men tipped their goggles back down while Fall struggled to suppress his coughing. Their eyes became pale green figments hovering in the dark. A gurgle escaped from the body of the old woman.
“Sir, we need to get out of here,” said Bobby.
Another moment of silence, another bubbling noise from the bodies.
“Sir! We need to go!”
Urgent voices were approaching and there were sounds of shuffling feet closing in on them down the unpaved street. Captain Dunny was frozen in the dark. Bobby took the initiative and headed out the door. The other men followed, weapons back at high port. Their boots made sticky noises in the blood. Dunny unfroze and blew three piercing blasts on his whistle to signal withdrawal.
The unseen Afghans on the street went silent.
Two groups of men — Afghan and American — stood silent and motionless within earshot of one another in the moonless night.
As the detachment stepped outside, Pete wheeled around the corner of the structure toward them.
“We ready?” he whispered tensely. “We ready to go? Hajjis are coming.”
“Where’s Gene?” Bobby demanded.
Pedro responded by taking off around the house to look.
“Oh, fuck!” they heard.
“What?” Bobby shouted. Pedro appeared again.
“Gene’s gone, man. He’s hit. He’s dead.”
“Hit?” said Bobby. “How was he hit?” No one had fired but them.
An involuntary cry erupted from Pete, as Baby Doc ran back to Gene’s position. Then they heard Baby Doc’s voice, a quiet voice. “Christ, have mercy!”
Bobby had taken over.
“Baby Doc, Pedro, carry him. Quick! Goddammit! We’re in Apache country!” Bobby was stuck on that phrase. “Captain Bob, you okay?”
Another beat passed before Dunny responded.
“Yeah, yeah. Yeah, okay. Okay, let’s go.” It was as if Dunny had suddenly found his legs. “Let’s go! Everyone across the street!”
Eddy was already across the street, listening to the approach of the Afghans and the commotion at the house. He couldn’t tell through his goggles who-was-who or who-was-doing-what, but when they crossed the street, they were clustered, dragging a body. They dragged, heaved, dropped, then dragged again, their efforts accompanied by curses. Gene was heavy as fuck.
“Oh no! What happened?” Eddy asked as they closed in around him.
A crackle of automatic weapons fire ripped up the street in front of them, muzzle flashes less than fifty meters away. The team hit the ground in unison and squirmed helter-skelter in the dark, each man feeling ahead of him for some kind of cover.
Opie took the first action. He reached into his chest rig for a white phosphorus grenade. He pulled the pin. The pin flew off with a tink, followed by the pop of the fuse.
“Fire in the hole,” he shouted, slinging the heavy grenade down the street toward their earnest opponents.
The grenade thumped onto the street . . . one thousand, two thousand, three . . .
When the white phosphorus exploded, more of a “whump” than a bang, the whole street lit up in a blinding white fountain of fire — ten million candlepower, white smoke snaking through blazing streamers. Opie had thrown it just over the closing assailant’s heads, backlighting three fighters coming down the street, now twenty meters close. The Afghan fighters didn’t even take cover. Two just opened up on full-automatic as they advanced. One rolled on the ground, his back and legs alight with burning phosphorous. The Afghan’s fire was high, directed down the street across the front of the team, and ineffective. Eddy aligned his SAW light machine gun and released a burst of fifty rounds that sounded like a power saw. The two remaining Taliban fighters wilted in their tracks. A child cried loudly in one of the nearby dwellings. Dogs yapped. They heard the crackle of burning phosphorus.
Captain Dunny shouted, “Let’s go!”
“Wait, sir! Wait!” said Bobby shouted. No point in stealth anymore. Baby Doc and Pedro were trying to lift Gene by his arms and legs, but they kept slipping on gravel and falling, the phosphorus still lighting the street like the sun.
“We can’t wait,” Dunny said.
“It’s him,” Bobby said, pointing to the dead face of one of the Afghan corpses. “I think it’s him!”
“Him who?”
“The target, sir! Goose-Man-John-Geary. The guy! Our target!” Bobby was already reaching into his chest-rig, pulling out the digital camera. “Wait here, sir.”
Pedro and Baby Doc had enlisted Eddy and Sis to help carry Gene. Baby Doc produced a pole-less litter out of his bag, and they rolled Gene’s body onto it. Pete was aiming his weapon back and forth along the street, looking as if he were about to panic and start firing. Fall ran out behind Bobby, watching up the street while Bobby leaned over the corpse of one of the Afghans. Bobby took one hand and straightened the dead man’s face a bit, then began shooting pictures with a flash. Little phosphorus fires burned all over the street. There were three moles, all in a row, on that now familiar face. One of the corpses was still burning, emitting green smoke. Bobby finished taking pictures and ran back to the Captain with Fall in tow.
“Capture or kill, sir. That was the mission. It’s him. Mission accomplished.”
Dunny showed a flicker of a smile. “Oh.”
“Let’s book!” said Bobby.
The withdrawal to the ORP was clumsy with men taking turns at the corners of the litter bearing Eugene Pollard’s remains. He was one heavy motherfucker.
*
The loud screaming and scrabbling made Woof’s heart race, terror rippling through his body like a wave. The radio squelched.
“Nasty, this is Bear, over.” Woof blew out a long sigh of relief.
Pulled into a tight perimeter on the ORP, the detachment waited for the extraction bird. A poncho with two bungees had been wrapped around the corpse on the litter. Each man withdrew into himself to wait. One dead. One missing. An old couple laying in their own blood in their own house.
Mission accomplished.
*
0435 — Local.
Clouds had obscured even the stars, the darkness congealed thick as blood. The extraction chopper approached with its killer-egg escort.
CHAPTER 28
Hotwash
Camp Virtue
July 14, 2010
0538 — Local
Two candy-red clearing barrels squatted outside the Task Force Operations building like the pot-bellied cannons from the Civil War. Made from chopped 55-gallon drums with eight-inch holes in one end, and canted at forty-five degrees on angle-iron frames, the barrels were filled with sand and surrounded by sandbags.
Each member of the team dropped his magazine, charged his weapon to eject the chambered round, poked the muzzle through the barrel hole, and dropped the hammer onto an empty chamber to ensure it was clear. Weapons cleared, they went inside to prepare for mission debriefing.
Thin clouds suffused a yellow sunrise, but Camp Virtue was still the color of lead. The team was spiritless, their movements perfunctory. They sensed this was going to be a real hotwash, not the usual self-congratulatory bullshit. Gene’s body had been intercepted by medics at the airfield, but Baby Doc was still carrying Gene’s rifle along with his own.
Major Dean, a plump, balding, humorless man with the face of an otter, was the Task Force G-3. He met them inside and directed them to the meeting room behind him. The room was small for a whole detachment plus the debriefing officers, most of the space taken up by a long, plain, tawny-surfaced table. The walls were unadorned panel-board, and the fluorescent lights threw a sickening blue hue over everything. A quiet window air conditioner slept high on the wall next to the door. The room smelled like furniture polish and burnt coffee.
A fifty-cup percolator was set up on one end of the table, with a tube of polystyrene cups. No creamer; no sugar; no chairs. This was no “Welcome home, boys!” It was an interrogation, and the interrogators were unhappy.
There was barely room to stand, so Bobby, closest to the coffee pot, just started filling cups with black coffee and passing them down like doses of bad medicine. Major Dean, in a freshly pressed uniform and wearing a cloud of cheap aftershave, stood just inside the door, his face blank and unwelcoming. In the time it took for everyone to quit shuffling about. The room already stank of sour sweat and half-dry shit. Their faces were grimy with leftover camouflage paint. Most had dry brown blood on their hands and clothes. Captain Dunny had the long-stare of a man facing execution.
Colonel Thomas burst through the door shouting, “On your feet!” even though they were all standing, and they all snapped to some approximation of the position of attention, made difficult by all the gear still hanging off them. Thomas didn’t issue an “at ease,” and instead launched into a spitting tirade.
“Gentlemen, let me be the first to say I am sorry for the loss of Sergeant Pollard. That said, let me ask, where the fuck is your Team Sergeant, Detachment six-two-four-six?”
No one answered, so he continued.
“It’s a rhetorical question, you cocksuckers, because no one seems to have an answer. I’m gonna to leave you to the Task Force G-2 in just a minute, oh ye saddened motherfuckers of six-two-four-six, for your mission debrief. But let me say this right now. From everything I know, this so-called mission was a world class goat fuck! The only thing that prevents this being an unmitigated goat fuck is that you have — to my understanding — a photograph of Usman Jahangiri’s dead fucking head in your possession. And it fucking well better be unassailably and authentically that fucking hajji cunt’s head!”
He stopped and fixed each of them in turn with his shiny red eyes.
“You all, my staff, and I will eventually generate a 52-card pack of lies for the public about whatever the fuck happened out there, just because we can’t let them know that a goddamn A-Detachment was about as organized and professional as a pack of sewer rats trying to gang-rape a cat. But I warn you now. Right fucking now. Do not fucking lie to my G-2, gentlemen. I want to know exactly what in the motherfucking hell happened out there. And I will find out, or J.C. never hung on a motherfuckin’ cross!” He paused again for a beat. “That is all.” He pivoted, stomped out, and slammed the door behind himself so hard that the whole room shook.
“At ease,” Major Dean said when Colonel Thomas was gone. “Stack your shit the best you can. I’m sorry about Dale and Pollard.”
*
Intercontinental Hotel
July 14, 2010
0640 — Local
That morning, two dining room waiters were trying to keep up with orders at the Intercontinental Hotel. Virden and Peanut were shoveling in bread, fruit, and eggs near the pool. Connie was just joining George and Rosemarie at a table for four, all the reporters looking freshly showered, though last night’s martinis had burst half the vessels in Connie’s eyes. They all glanced over at Gaston. He was dunking a baguette in sweet coffee and talking to two men at his table, European by the looks of it. Gaston’s phone went off in his front trouser pocket with a rooster crow ringtone, and he broke off his conversation to answer it.
*
Camp Virtue
July 14, 2010
0645 — Local
Sergeant Barber leaned over Major Carroll’s shoulder. His office door was open. He alternated between scowling at his laptop monitor and typing furiously. The afternoon press briefing had injected a sense of urgency into the entire staff.
“Not ‘three Taliban,’” she suggested. “Sounds too minimal. Try ‘several Taliban’ . . . no, ‘the entire formation of Taliban was killed during the engagement.’”
“What if they ask how many?” he quizzed her.
“More than a dozen, our detachment was forced to break contact, so the exact number is still unclear. We’re still reviewing the mission.” His fingers danced over the keyboard.
“That’s good,” he said, risking a brief but affectionate glance, then resumed his typing.
*
“When did you realize he was gone?” Major Dean had released the rest of the team, but he was still interrogating Woof in the stuffy, little debriefing room. Dean had brought in two chairs, and they sat across the table from one another. Woof was ragged with exhaustion, his eyes hollow and sandy.
“I keep tellin’ you, sir, I’m not sure. I mean, he told me to cover our approach into the ORP. He went to twelve o’clock . . . or so I assumed. After a few minutes, it got really quiet.”
“How long? How long before you discovered he was missing?”
“I don’t know, sir. When I called Captain Bob . . . Captain Dunny. Maybe an hour, maybe less.”
“No other noises? No suspicious noises?”
“Sir, he was just fucking gone. I ain’t never seen no shit like this.”
“Do you think he was captured?”
“How the fuck . . . sorry, sir. I have no idea. I was with someone, then I was alone. Out there!” He pointed toward a low sky. “I was all alone in the middle of fucking Afghanistan. At night! Scariest three hours of my life, sir.”
CHAPTER 29
Rot in Hell
Mountains near Kabul
July 14, 2010
The wind stirred as the sun warmed the aria long a thing gully snaking between boulders, the morning light throwing off brilliant contrasts. An alligator lizard with alternating fawn and mahogany bands from nose to tail perched atop a red sandstone slab, soaking up the early rays. It cocked its head at the movement below.
Dale was picking his way through the trench taking advantage of its concealment. His body armor and MICH were gone, left in a heap below the ORP. Stripped down to his chest rig, sidearm and rifle, his face still smudged with remnants of last nights camouflage pain, he sweat like a horse even in the cool morning air. He stopped to catch his breath.
Resting against a stone, he felt his age and the serial days of sleeplessness. With less than a quart of water left in his canteen, he dug his last protein bar out of a vest pocket. Over near Charikar, in the far distance, he saw rescue helicopters with gunship escorts searching for him.
Polypeptides, he thought. Polymorphous. Polyamory. Polysaccharide. Poly, many. Polly Molly.
Higher along the ridge crept three Afghanis, Taliban, armed with Kalashnikovs. The whispered tensely. The amrekayan was out of range. More than 500 meters. They debated how to approach nearer for an attack.
Camp Virtue
July 14, 2010
0719—Local
Benham and three other AMF’s breakfasted together in the Afghan section of the DFAC. The conversation was furtive. Benham remained when the other three rose to leave, carrying their trays to the bus tubs.
Intercontinental Hotel
July 14, 2010
0805—Local
Gaston and Emal looked up the street before they left the parking garage. The rising sun lit the mountain behind the hotel, the narrow street outside still at rest in a cool shadow. A breeze agitated the spindly pines. Some idiot had left his Volvo beater parked in the driveway past the entrance and between two high block walls. Gaston cursed under his breath. There was barely enough space to get out.
Emal opened the Borrego’s front passenger door, folded his Kalashnikov, and slid in. Gaston opened the back door, tossed in his battered briefcase, slammed the door, and climbed into the driver’s seat, sucking his teeth. He offered Emal a cigarette, then took one for himself, pushed in the panel lighter and started the engine. As they backed out, Emal grabbed the lighter when it popped, lit his own cigarette and held the lighter up for Gaston, who leaned into it after shifting into drive. Gaston drove out and angled the Borrego wide to the left as he approached the driveway onto the road, angling to squeeze past the rusty gray Volvo, muttering “Merde!” again. There were hardly six inches on either side as he crawled through, and he was about to curse again when the Volvo exploded.
*
Afghan patrolmen, wearing olive green de Gaulle caps, hung around aimlessly with their hands in their pockets. Three militiamen had shown up, apparently to run things, and they were talking to the two Afghani medics who wrestled the shredded bodies out of the Borrego.
Journalists stood in the parking garage in a gaggle with several hotel employees at some distance from the scene of the explosion. Connie Mason was dabbing at her eyes. George Yowell had his arm around her. A collective gasp escaped from the cluster of onlookers when the first body was pulled through the shattered windshield, missing the head and the left arm.
Joint Special Operations Command—Forward Operating Base
Khost, Afghanistan
July 14, 2010
0809—Local
The Prick-150 radio lit up, and Brigadier General “Dickie” Baker waited and listened. “Plaster quest,” came the disembodied voice. Mission complete.
“Roger, out,” Baker replied. A perfect tactical communication. In and out.
Foothills near Kabul, Afghanistan
July 14, 2010
0905—Local
Mehtar, Shamal, and Syal crouched in the gully, weapons hanging across their shoulders on improvised slings, hands on the pistol grips, fingers on the triggers. Mehtar had spotted the enemy minutes earlier, a bareheaded amrekayan, alone with just a rifle, picking his way through the khowarh for cover. They could take him from the high ground. Mehtar motioned Shamal to go first. Without hesitation, Shamal clambered over the lip of a furrow and squatted on top, waiting for the others. Syal climbed out, then Mehtar. Bent forward at their waists, they crept toward the edge of the ravine, flinching when a covey of quail exploded from a screen of olinoq shrubs in front of them.
Syal, the jumpiest of the three, almost fired at the birds. Mehtar was rebuking him when the first two shots—pop-pop, in rapid succession— hit Syal in the chest, dropping him like his strings were cut. The second set of two shots killed Mehtar as he looked for the origin of the shots. Shamal stood erect, looking puzzled, when the final two shots went through his heart and thoracic spine. It was over in less than four seconds, and Dale climbed out of the ditch where he’d circled behind them. He thumbed the M-4’s selector switch to safe. He walked over to them, stopped, and stared at the bodies.
Blood pooled quickly under each of them. Center-of-mass chest shots with open wound tracts. The flies arrived in less than a minute. He wondered who would mourn these men.
“Sorry,” he said, taking bits of their clothing.
Camp Virtue
0920—Local
The filthy and exhausted ODA 6246 filed out of the Task Force Operations complex and back toward their tent. No one spoke as they tramped down Main Street, their gear heavy as dead flesh. Gene’s death and a ponderous sense of failure followed them like a malevolent ghost. Baby Doc was laden with the memory of the old couple left dead in their home. An unbearable hollowness filled him like a poison, his occupancy of space and time—of the here and now—seeming somehow eidolic and gratuitous. He knew that even going home would bestow no refuge from this abandonment, this desolate dread.
Minutes later in the tent, while some headed for showers, some for their bunks, he took his rosary out of his pocket and in desperation began to pray with a newfound sense that whoever heard these prayers had turned away. He looked down as he worked through the rosary. On the floor before him were his spare boots, alongside his MICH, a ragged bit of 550 cord, a used plastic spoon from who knows where. Then he stopped. A tiny seed of fury broke open in him, barely discernible, but something that might at least break his fall. Not hope exactly, just a handhold.
0949—Local
Bobby, just out of the shower, sat on his cot, hair still wet, a towel wrapped around his waist. He took an Asus notebook out of his foot locker and plugged it into the power strip. The team had its own VSAT modem. He booted it up, leaned back onto a poncho liner draped over a duffel bag, kicked off his shower shoes, and pulled his feet up onto the cot. When the notebook booted, he opened his email. There, among the spam for fake Viagra, thicker dicks, and get-rich scams was the subject line, “Sayonara, Motherfucker!”
Sender: carolina-groove@gmail.com. Bobby’s heart leapt. Something was really wrong at home. He opened the message.
“All I can take from you, Bobby. Here’s a little going away attachment. YOU PIECE OF SHIT MOTHERFUCKER! ROT IN HELL!”
There was a video attachment. Bobby looked around, angling the screen away from the interior of the tent, and killed the sound before opening the attachment. The picture was dark and grainy, the camera obviously set down at a distance, and the room poorly lit. It took him a moment before he recognized his own bedroom in Fayetteville. Carolina was in the bed, hands gripping the headboard, legs wrapped around the man who was thrusting into her while she moaned. Bobby turned it off, gazing into the empty monitor.
1035—Local
Staff Sergeant Howe, aka “Chlamydia,” was draped in a disposable blue paper gown, her head enveloped in a matching hood with a plastic eye shield. A Mortuary Affairs Specialist, she prepared to wash Gene’s body. The first one she’d done since transferring here from Bagram. The body was stripped naked, facing up on a stainless-steel table, the eyes now a flat milky blue. He had a post-mortem semi-erection with a drop of dry blood plugging the meatus.
His mouth was open as if he were about to speak.
The morgue was draped with flags on one wall, one for each nation belonging to ISAF. Two high lockers for clothing changes. Wall hangers for various implements, from forceps to plain scissors. Rolls of paper towel at each end near the hand-washing sinks. Plastic tape and packing tape, stainless cabinets. An X-ray machine that checked bodies for debris and booby traps. Big black plastic totes were for the clothing and equipment of the deceased. One of the totes was open, Gene’s uniform and gear inside. In another corner was a break area with a snack table and a mini-fridge. A dartboard hung on the wall with six darts in it—three red and three blue.
Howe dipped a large sponge into a bucket of soapy water and started with the feet. When she was done, and Gene was dried and packaged and shifted onto a gurney for storage and shipment, SSG Howe hosed down the table. The drain in the center of the concrete floor sucked the dirty water down and out of sight, a true memory hole.
*
The secure phone lit up with a simple ringtone. Colonel Thomas picked it up.
“Thomas.” A long beat. “Roger, I’ll turn it on now.”
Red-eyed and unshaven, uniform blouse hanging on the back of his chair, he got up, crossed the room, and picked up his cable television remote. He clicked it at the wall-mounted screen and sank back into the chair, thumbing the keys to pick up TCN International. There was a loop running with the remains of two smoking, heavily damaged automobiles with Afghani cops milling around. The speaker was female, voiced-over.
“ . . . three people were killed, including a French journalist, and at least eight wounded. The bomb, which is suspected to be the work of the Taliban, detonated in the morning just after dawn. On the scene is George Yowell.”
George wore body armor and a Kevlar helmet to face the camera. He was very serious. There was a satellite delay of about two seconds.
“Thank you, Marina. Yes, we’re withholding the name of our colleague from France until his next-of-kin have been notified. But this appeared to be a case of wrong place, wrong time. This is normally a very busy street. It’s actually right outside our hotel. Speculation is that the bomb was on a timer and detonated early . . .”
Lenny Ford was on the main gate again, baked on hash already. He hardly looked up when the three AMFs approached the gate from inside the compound in their ratty Cherokee, holding up their security passes. Lenny waved them out and popped the top on a Red Bull.
CHAPTER 30
Adventures in Kabul
Kabul, Afghanistan
Chinese Restaurant
July 14, 2010
1118 — Local
Colorful sun-umbrellas punctuated the general bustle of the street. The sky was clear, and traffic ground its way through thoroughfares swimming in automobile exhaust. One could almost taste the diesel smoke. White-and-yellow taxis stood out as specimens of uniformity in the chaos. A battered Corolla with a packed interior carried four children in an open trunk. A cart laden with tires was wedged into the traffic, towed by a donkey and led by a man in a blue shalwar kameez with a black cap. Men walked their Chinese bicycles, stopping to talk. An old woman sat on one corner waving flies off the biscuits she sold out of a tub to other women in burqas. Pigeons and sparrows foraged between people’s feet. Children laughed and squealed. A gaggle of girls passed by wearing blue school uniforms with white headscarves.
There was one particularly dusty man in country garb wearing a filthy keffiyeh over his head and face. He carried a large bundle on his back, which he plopped down in front of the Chinese Restaurant. He pounded on the black steel security door.
*
Camp Virtue
July 14, 2010
Noon
“Cocksucker!” Virden muttered as he changed the cables on a faulty SATCOM. He controlled one corner of the commo hooch, a minimalist designation for what was one of the biggest structures on the compound, filled with the technology that supported the Task Force’s electronic semiosphere. If electromagnetic waves were visible, this place would glow in the dark. When Virden had been on active duty, he’d learned that the detachment’s communicators were always under the spotlight. The higher powers wanted communication more than they wanted mission completion. Often enough, just making the communications work was mission completion.
When they’d cross-trained on the detachments, the other specialties always enjoyed doing IVs with the medics, playing with guns with the weapons men, blowing shit up with the engineers, but commo? Bored the shit out of them. Nothing sexy about radios, until they fucking needed one. When the after-action reviews were done, the commanders’ main metric was whether or not you’d established and maintained commo. If not, guess whose ass was on the line? The same motherfucker who humped eighty pounds of radios, batteries and antennas, that’s who! It was all taken for granted, until you were taken to task. Everyone yanked their handles off about how smart the medics were, but no one cared that you had mastered wave propagation theory, that you could copy code, or memorize twenty call signs and frequencies before each mission. Radios don’t bleed or make a big noise. So, fuck it, he was sick of it, and when he found he could do the same shit for $140,000 a year, plus his per diem, it was “gone baby gone.”
He was running late when the SATCOM went down, and he had to meet Peanut like five minutes ago. Check in with Nanji, get a few things in town. They wanted to get in early and get out. Shit was blowing up all over the country. Eight motherfuckers killed in Helmand alone — stay the fuck out of Helmand, and Paktia, too — militias catching hell, car bombs, you name it. Talk was they were going to ratchet down Camp Virtue for a few days; and Nanji owed him an advance on next week’s shipment — two girls from Tajikistan.
Peanut pulled up in the Batmobile. Virden popped out of the door slinging a day pack over his shoulder. He circled the front of the vehicle, opened the door, tossed in the pack, pulled his weapon out of the seat and got in. They drove away, flushing a black-headed jay feeding on a dusty chunk of cantaloupe discarded in the middle of Main Street. Peanut swerved to mash the fruit with a tire. Virden stared up through the tinted ballistic glass, ignoring Peanut’s little fucking games.
*
Post Chapel — Camp Virtue
July 14, 2010
1226 — Local
Pro Deo et Patria. So read the sign on the gable above the chapel door, the words curving down and around a shield, gold-over-blue, like a scrotum on a vaguely phallic coat of arms, the shield itself topped by a glans-like knob composed of two wheat spikes arched over a shepherd’s staff. Below the stubby phallus was a simple sign, again gold over blue.
Camp Virtue Chapel.
The chapel was a simple wood-framed quadrangle with a pitched roof, painted tan to blend with the post’s desert camouflage motif. A four-chain glider sat on the short wooden porch, a place for chaplains to put visitors at ease. The door swung open just as Baby Doc was about to knock, and Captain Nelson, or Father Nelson, stepped out, offering Baby Doc his hand.
“Hi, Hector.”
Father Nelson was in his t-shirt — chaplains were allowed these little deviations — and so freshly shaved that his cheeks were an angry pink, an unnatural contrast with his pale eyebrows and lashes. Nelson’s hair was buzzed almost to the skin, his scalp outlined by a line of eczema.
“Father.”
“Have a seat,” Nelson aimed his upturned palm at the glider, taken a bit aback by how badly Sergeant Fermin stank, still filthy and unshaven. Disconcerting, because Hector Fermin was the only man left on the Detachment who still abided by stateside garrison grooming standards. As for the rest, with those beards and costumes . . . well.
*
Twenty minutes later, Father Nelson asked, “How much of this are you sure of?”
“All of it. Pretty sure. The mission, I was there. The other, I’m pretty sure.”
Nelson sighed and leaned forward, placing his elbows on his knees and his hands over his face. He rubbed his cheeks, licked his lips, and then rubbed his hands together.
“You know that you and I are both prohibited by law from discussing mission details with the public. I’m in the Army just like you. On this other, you need to be perfectly sure. This is very a very sensitive matter, Hector.”
“What the fuck does that mean?”
*
Chinese Restaurant
July 14, 2010
1310 — Local
Virden left his assault rifle in the seat. Peanut stayed behind the wheel, while Virden banged on the security screen with the side of his fist, making a sound like someone shaking a chain link fence.
“Nanji!” he yelled, impatient with the looming threat that they would lock down Camp Virtue and disrupt their cash flow.
The door cracked open and a hand shot out and in to unlatch the security screen. Like a lizard tasting the air. Virden just caught sight of a back disappearing into Nanji’s office. Nanji’s lights were out, and Virden was still sun-struck and half blind. He looked back at the bar of sunlight through the open door, alive with illuminated dust.
“You just gettin’ up, you lazy fuck?”
He entered the dark office, and heard . . . flies? Nanji was sitting at his desk looking at the ceiling. Virden blinked twice as if that would restore his dusk vision. Then a surge of adrenaline washed through him and his scrotum contracted. Nanji’s throat was cut. Virden looked down. He was standing in a sticky map of blood. He went for his sidearm and started to yell for Peanut, turning around, only to see a dirty Afghan man, his face veiled by a keffiyeh. The room jumped to the side, then a star blossomed on the side of his head, and then he was asleep.
Peanut was sitting in the truck watching a skinny dog quiver to shit when the radio squelched.
“Get in here right now!”
Not even a callsign. What?
Peanut grabbed his rifle and ran, then hesitated halfway to the door with the realization he’d left a vehicle and weapon unattended. He ran back, jumped in, pulled the keys, hit the door locks, then ran back into the building.
Two shots in rapid succession took off most of his head. The girls upstairs began screaming. Dale stepped back into the office, looked down at Virden where the rifle butt had felled him, and shot Virden once in his upturned nose, making his eyes bulge. Then he ran upstairs to reassure the girls. There were eight of them, wet-eyed, huddling together in a corner.
He dug his dirty uniform out and left the Afghan clothing scattered on the floor upstairs, where the other girls convinced him to tie and gag Sugarpussy.
Outside, he was frustrated by the locked door on the truck, but then thought to check Virden’s driver. He went through Peanut’s pockets and found them.
Once the Batmobile was open, the back door agape, he shouted in Farsi at the gaggle of girls waiting just inside the door.
“Biaa injaa!”
The grizzled garage guard leaned his weapon against the wall and averted his gaze, wondering if he still had a job, grateful to still have his life.
*
Downtown Kabul
July 14, 2010
1340 — Local
Hamayoon dozed a bit in his old shisham rocker. Hangers full of blue burqas lined both sides of his shop. It made him feel safe, like he was inside a den. His black trousers and blouse made him feel invisible. The breeze cooled his sandaled feet. He was dozing blissfully when he was awakened by the shop bell.
A customer!
His merchant’s enthusiasm liquefied into fear at the apparition. Aquamarine eyes rimmed in red, there stood a begrimed American in a filthy uniform with an assault rifle. The apparition spoke, in Farsi. Yes, he understood a little.
There was blood on the American’s hands, as he pulled out an enormous wad of cash — dollars, euros, rupees, yuan, afghans. Leaves of currency fell on the floor as the crazy man demanded eight burqas, small.
*
Highway A-77, West of Kabul
July 14, 2010
1419 — Local
Seven burqa-clad girls walked together down the shoulder of the road. They’d beaten Sugarpussy nearly to death when he’d returned. Somewhere ahead was Iran, he told them. He’d been singing when he drove away.
None of the girls was sure what to do except walk. Only two were Iranian, after all. The mountainous terrain ahead looked infinitely open and dangerous. Freed into this uncertainty, dishonored, they knew nothing but an abyss of fear, praying together as they walked. A vehicle approached at the bend in the highway. A truck of some kind, maybe military, maybe not, color green or gray or something in between. The glare off the windshield pierced them like a spear. The truck slowed as it approached.
CHAPTER 31
Water people
July 12, 2010
Jordan Lake, North Carolina
Monday was a down day for Farah. She’d come up from Fayetteville to meet Deanglea for a fishing date. Farah had discovered the spot back in the 90’s. It was a weekday, so there were only three cars at her spot, a patch of field between road, water, and bridge, offering access to the bank. A creek emptied into the lake where once a deep draw had been. Ten feet from shore there was a drop-off that plunged to 30 feet, submerging the old stumps and stones from the dry land draw and creating a perfect hot-weather habitat for black crappie, a panfish that worked well in the fourteen Belizean fish recipes Farah had tried. She southern-fried them too, in beer batter, dressing them with her own hot salad. Fusion cuisine.
Farah was a cane pole purist, insisting that Deangela learn cane-poling, too.
“Ya look at them men with they big motors makin’ rooster tails over the water, five-hundred-dollar rod and reels, artificial baits cost twenty dollars apiece. Ya need a trailer for the boat, and ya need a truck for the trailer. Ya not even past the retail phase, then, are ya? They fish all day, get ten pounds of fish, and some trophy photos. All that to catch a fish. Not fair to the budget. Not fair to the fish. Ya need tens-a-thousand-a-dollars to catch a little fish! We come down here, spend twenty on gas, drinks, and some minnows, we go home with ten pounds of fish. Way we do it, my opinion, is closer to art.”
Farah had given this monologue at least twice a year for the last five. Deangela tried not to roll her eyes.
Deangela was competitive when she fished. She pretended she wasn’t, but not very convincingly. She was already grasping for a wet minnow from the bucket to bait her hook while Farah was still at the car changing from sandals to sneakers.
To the southwest, against the tops of the pine trees, a threatening line of clouds encroached against the otherwise blue sky. As Farah looked down the bank at Deangela, a band of wind swept in and stirred the high oak leaves. A cardinal streaked out of a crippled old pin oak, passing behind Deangela like a drop of blood skating across the afternoon.
“Some people are water people.” Watah people. Deangela didn’t ask for an explanation. She knew it was coming. This was the preface. This had come up — wherever it was going — because Farah just landed her fifth crappie to Deangela’s one. Deangela’s mood, in response, was uncharitable. Farah rubbed her nose in it by stopping after each catch, pulling out her fillet knife, and stripping each fish, dropping the fillets into the cooler. Like she had all the time in the world while her incompetent daughter fed dead minnows to four-inch bluegills.
Farah, meanwhile, would give her line a twitch, setting the hook, skate the catch over the surface to her, lip the fish, and pop out the hook with the hemostat she wore clipped to her dirty white t-shirt.
“People live on the water, they all tied to the water.”
“This sounds like a Credence Clearwater Revival song.”
“Don’t be fresh, or I jalapeño ya bottom.” Against her will, Deangela smiled at this.
“I’m not gloatin’ on ya. I’m tellin’ ya somethin’. And if ya drop that bait another foot from the bobber, you’ll hit the slabs instead of them squash seed.”
Deangela grudgingly swung her line back and raised her bobber, pitching a limp minnow in the water.
“They’s mountain people, swamp people, people who work in mines, then there’s most of the people here. They mash buttons and spend money. Okay, so they mash buttons or wiggle a computer mouse all day. They not tied to nothin’ real. People got headlights for eyes, they lost they peripheral vision . . .”
“Oh!” blurted Deangela, as her bobber plunged out of sight, grabbing her cane pole and giving it a snap with her wrist to set the hook. Just in time, because the pole suddenly bent hard as the fish dove toward the bank. Something big enough to strain her shoulder and arm. The line stretched out again for deeper water. Farah was on her feet.
“Holy shit!” Deangela blurted.
“Ain’t a crappie, Sweetbread. Finesse that one. She break ya line and pole on ya.”
Deangela had one foot on the bank, one down in the water, dreading the sudden relaxation of a broken line. But it didn’t. Not yet. The fish pulled hard away from the shore, then gave up for a bit. Deangela gave an exquisitely light rotation to turn the fish without breaking the line. When the fish took off again, hugging the bottom, it went left toward a thick patch of coontail and hydrilla. Farah was saying something to her, but Deangela couldn’t really understand it. Deangela stepped into a hole as she waded in, sinking to her hips and almost capsizing, but she held the pole aloft, maintaining that light tension with her right hand, batting at the water with her left to regain her equilibrium. She wanted the fish in the weeds to impair its thrust, but she knew she had to keep the line high to prevent tangling in the vegetation. With two clumsy steps, she came back up out of the hole to knee level. The fish decelerated into a patch of duckweed, then turned left again, coming right toward her, bending the pole almost double. Farah was shouting that it would break, when Deangela choked up on the pole, re-grasping it halfway up with one hand, and reached for the line with the other. Stepping backward, she held the fish inside the weeds as it approached the shore. Deangela backed up again, hit the little ledge on the bank, dropped onto her behind, recovered, and stepped back, the whole while leading the fish in. She had both hands on the line now, the pole lying useless at the waterline. Then the snout appeared at water’s edge. She’d partially beached it, and it was churning the water into mud. Two feet long from the looks of it.
“I don’t know what that is.” Farah said, standing right behind her and looking down at the snout. “Hand me your pliers.” Farah’s little hemostats were too small for this one.
Deangela was kneeling now, holding tension on the line to prevent the fish gaining any purchase on deeper water. She shifted the line from her right hand to her left, pulled the Leatherman off her belt, and handed it to Farah. Farah flipped open the pliers, squatted in front of Deangela, and grabbed the fish hard behind the barbels.
“Got some frightenin’ teeth, this one. Oh mah jeez!”
Farah lifted the fish up on the shore, Deangela stumbling behind. The great fish heaved against Farah’s strength. Both women yelped at that. The fish was green like tarnished silver, and somehow ancient, cylindrical, almost a snake. The long dorsal fin and the short anal fin almost blended with the tail, so far back were they set, and there was a black bullseye on the tail. The teeth, as Farah had noted immediately, were rows of curved needles, real thumb-shredders. Deangela wondered how the teeth didn’t cut the line. The fish was gasping, it gills fanning, and one of the eyes was covered with dirt and twigs. Deangela was seized suddenly by an uncharacteristic anxiety.
“Put her back in,” she said.
“I don’t know how to cook this anyway . . .”
“Now! Put her back in now!”
Farah looked up with concern now.
Clouds began filling the sky behind them, and a gust of wind raised Deangela’s hair. Farah had never seen Deangela exhibit fear. Not like this. This child had rescued spiders, chased bees, picked up snakes. She could hold a live catfish without getting spiked.
Farah squatted with the fish, gripping hard. She fastened the pliers to the shank of the hook, buried in the fish’s hard pallet, and gave the pliers an authoritative twist. The hook popped loose with a little crunch, like someone stepping on a beetle. She stood, pushed her toe under the fish, and kicked it back into a few inches of water. It lay for a moment twitching and gasping, then battered the surface and disappeared back into the hazy green depths.
A roll of thunder sounded far in the southwest as the clouds overtook the sun. The afternoon went dark, the water turned opaque. The cardinal shot past again. Tears pooled in Deangela’s eyes.
CHAPTER 32
Nuthatch
Marketplace
Kabul, Afghanistan
July 14, 2010
1535 — Local
Abner Dale laughed. He wasn’t sure why, but the fact that he was suddenly rich with Nanji’s cash and roaming around in an Army truck completely outside the lines struck him funny. The opium didn’t hurt. He’d found it in Nanji’s desk drawer, so what the hell. After he’d dropped the girls, he stuck a ball of the O onto the tip of his pocket knife and set fire to it with a lighter, drawing a strand of smoke into his nostrils. The magic melted outward from his core, a languid flood of warmth.
Now he found himself shepherding the truck through a crowded street.
Fuck, I’m hungry! What an eventful day!
He following a column of cooking smoke, turning right then left, punching deeper into the crowded marketplace. He wished he had a loudspeaker so he could say “excuse me” as he nudged forward, feeling an opioid affection for these people all around him.
The thunderous diesel motor clattered, revving and falling. Like an ox wading through a flock of egrets, the MRAP crawled ahead, leading with its square snout, wheels coated in ochre dust, the side windows sealed. On his left, three AMFs were drinking tea, Galils slung over their shoulders. He advanced by short lunges, a meter or two at a time, past the tea shop, with its blanket door and cheap street tables, past makeshift awnings of many colors, past bicycle carts, butcher stands, smoking stove fires, fruit displays, storefronts with clothes for sale, potato crates, plastic wares, pots and pans . . . past two sheep. Past people, mostly men, who moved reluctantly aside, averting their gazes, as if avoiding the eye of a belligerent bull. A cacophony of shouts and murmurs, metal banging, horns, roosters, feral boys.
Dale saw it then, on the street stretching out to the left. A man with a steaming grill the size of a small trampoline covered in sizzling meat and vegetables. That was exactly what he wanted. He turned slowly left.
He started to dismount, then remembered he’d dropped the rolls of cash on the passenger seat. He pulled the door closed, grabbed a wad of afghans, and stepped down, leaving his M-4 inside, and closing the driver’s door.
No longer at war, he was just stoned and really deep-down, molecular-level hungry.
He was organizing his currency when the first shots hit him on the left side and his legs stopped working. The three AMFs were coming, firing, missing, firing again. Train and train, and these guys still hated to aim, he thought; then a sing-song from childhood, buy ya books and buy ya books and all you do is eat the pages.
Someone screaming. Others running, crawling away.
He looked down at a muddy footprint, suddenly infinitely interesting, and when he raised his eyes again, one of the AMFs was looming above him, the Galil’s muzzle brake inches from his face. When he laughed, he made a wet noise and felt a faraway wintry pain in his side.
“Nuthatch,” he said through bloody teeth.
Then the kill shot came.
Dale crumpled and twitched, blood pouring out of his head like a spring. Jahid, Rafik, and Omar looked at one another as if to ask what the amrekayan had said.
Nuthatch?
They were all interpreters, but this was a mystery. Maybe a prayer. Jahid opened the door of the MRAP, tossed in a grenade, and closed the door. People were still running pell-mell to escape. The grenade gave a lusty interiorized crunch, and the windshield spider webbed, bulging like a puffer fish.
Bakhtawara and Storai were avenged.
*
Camp Virtue
July 14, 2010
1645 — Local
Notebooks on their laps, Sergeant Barber and Major Carroll sat facing each other in his office.
“Today is a better day for Afghanistan,” he read to her. She followed the verbiage with her pencil. “The Taliban’s senior intelligence chief, Usman Jahangiri, is dead. Yesterday, in a daring raid by American Special Operations forces . . .” He stopped to mark something out, write something else. “Last night, in a daring raid by United States Special Forces, Jahangiri was killed near Charikar. He was accompanied by an armed Taliban unit. The entire formation of Taliban was killed during the engagement.”
She was making the changes, when he stopped again.
“This ends . . .”
They both looked up at each other, she concentrating, he looking through her as he searched for just the right turn of phrase.
“This puts to an end the terrorization . . .”
He halted again, puffing with frustration, and she knitted her brows, scratching through the notebook and waited again.
“Jahangiri can no longer terrorize Afghan . . .”
She set her pencil on the note book. She’d wait until he had this figured out. Or not. She took a deep breath.
“Jahangiri can no longer organize attacks against ISAF forces or terrorize innocent Afghan civilians,” she offered, and he looked up with an expression of gratitude, and apology. The phone rang. He picked it up.
“Major Carroll.”
Barber watched his expression disappear as he listened.
“Got it,” he said. He hung up landline and sat silently looking at the toes of his boots.
“What?” she asked. He looked up, seeming puzzled by the question for a moment. He started to stand up, then sat back down.
“Three of our AMFs are bringing a body from Kabul. It might be Dale.”
*
1728 — Local
Sergeant Baines watched Major Carroll through the curtain. Today the press hooch’s house curtains were exactly six feet on either side of center.
“Get it right, Baines,” said the Major as he strode past, Staff Sergeant Barber in tow.
“Yes, sir,” Baines replied. “It’ll be perfect.”
Carroll went to his dressing room where Baines knew he applied a dust of makeup. When the door closed on the dressing room, Sergeant Baines unbuttoned his trousers.
The water glass was on the tray ready to be placed on the podium with the pitcher. Baines ran the head of his prick around the rim of the glass three times, pressing down and wiping as he went. Just as quickly, he placed the glass back on the tray and buttoned his trousers. When he set out the glass, the pitcher, and Carroll’s notes, the pitcher was on the left, the glass on the right, the notes left-center and perfectly squared.
Alongside the podium Baines had set out a tripod and mounted a five-foot-high photograph of Usman Jahangiri’s dead face, enlarged from one of Bobby’s photographs. The incoming press beheld the picture like a hunting trophy — a trophy more costly now, “measured in precious American lives.”
Minutes later, reporters swarmed through the room like cockroaches, murmuring, huddled in clusters near the coffee and the hors d’oeuvres. In addition to George, Connie, Ann Marie, and the other regulars, more than three dozen new reporters showed up today. Cameramen assembled equipment. Sound techs tested microphones. Colonel Thomas strode in suddenly and many fell silent. He headed straight backstage and halted in front of Baines, who snapped to attention.
“Major Carroll,” the Colonel demanded.
“Dressing room, sir.”
Thomas tried the door, but the deadbolt was thrown. He banged twice, hearing an intake of breath and a rustle.
“Just a moment, Sergeant Baines.” Carroll’s voice.
“It’s me, Will. Open the fuckin’ door.”
When the door swung back, Carroll started to push through, eyes down. Thomas caught a glimpse of Staff Sergeant Barber, who appeared to be applying lip gloss in the mirror. She threw a nervous glance at the door, then twitched her eyes back to the mirror.
Thomas glared at Carroll, who held Thomas’s eyes with an effort, hoping Thomas wouldn’t look down before his erection shrank. Thomas looked back for a moment, then dropped his own eyes, seeming to shift gears somehow.
“I’m taking this one,” the Colonel said. Will Carroll was momentarily confused.
“What? Taking who? What?”
“The briefing. I’m doing the press briefing. I need your notes.”
Carroll felt the bile rise, but if he had any good instincts, they had to do with his own professional survival. He clenched his teeth and drew a deep breath.
“Sir. Yes, sir. The notes are on the podium. Sergeant Barber will introduce you.”
She was just coming out the door, trying to duck behind them, and looked up as she heard her name.
“What, sir?”
“You’ll introduce Colonel Thomas. He’s taking the press brief today.”
Minutes later, Sergeant Barber approached the bank of microphones surrounding the podium.
“Ladies and Gentlemen, Colonel Thomas will be out momentarily. Please find a seat and make yourselves comfortable.”
The murmuring subsided and the audience settled into their seats. Colonel Thomas appeared from between the drapes and stalked to center stage. He carefully poured a half glass of water and took a small sip, licking his lips to wet them. Baines watched from offstage, slightly disappointed at hitting the wrong target, but still biting back the urge to laugh aloud.
“Good morning,” said Colonel Thomas. A smattering of half-hearted good mornings from the assembled journalists. “I’m Colonel Boyd Thomas, the Task Force Commanding Officer. I’d like to welcome you again to our weekly operations briefing.”
He stopped and turned to look at the photograph of the dead Jahangiri, willing the audience to do the same. Then he turned back.
“Today is a better day for Afghanistan. The Taliban’s senior intelligence chief, Usman Jahangiri, is dead. Last night, in a daring raid by United States Special Forces, Jahangiri was killed near Charikar. Jahangiri was accompanied by an armed Taliban unit. The entire formation of Taliban was killed during the engagement. Jahangiri can no longer organize attacks against ISAF forces or terrorize innocent Afghan civilians, and his intelligence cell has been smashed. This was not a cost-free mission, however. Two brave Special Forces soldiers were killed in action during this operation. Their names are being withheld pending notification of their next-of-kin. On that sad note, I’d like to extend the sympathy of the entire Task Force Bird staff to members of the press for the loss this morning of one of your colleagues in a cowardly bomb attack. Apparently, two American civilian contractors have also been missing since this morning.
“This just underlines why the United States and the International Security Assistance Force in Afghanistan are committed to defeating the Taliban and Al Qaeda, and establishing a new and secure future for the people of Afghanistan. We are staying the course.”
THE END
This is incredible Stan. Messy as all get out, as befits the story of a crazy clusterphuk, another real page turner. Great use of jargon too. And anagrams. The story just pulls you forward, with a sick sense of unease.
Good work.