IT TOOK A FEW MINUTES OF WAKING AND THEN FALLING BACK TO SLEEP BEFORE LEVIN understood that the need was real and he would have to get up.
Old white man’s bladder again. Damn. Old white man’s burden.
He was alone, a white man in a room of black men with guns, in a country at war, a zillion miles from home.
But he was not alone. He was in Liberia, as distant from the rest of his life as it was possible to be. They were close to Julia. He had never been in a place like this. He was surrounded by war, guns, ammunition, and soldiers, by everything he hated. They had come together, the three of them, as different as three men could be. They had one purpose, one goal. Only that goal mattered. Levin knew how to send out a call, how to organize demonstrations, and how to go to meetings. He knew how to sink an endotracheal tube, how to throw in a chest tube, and how to run a code. But here he was just one of the boys. Bigger and smaller than himself.
Levin felt his way along the wall into the empty hallway. He tried each door that opened off the hall as he came to it, the cool metal of each door handle an island of certainty in a sea that was dark and indistinct.
The first two doors were locked. The third door was already open. He stumbled into the kitchen. Four tiny blue pilot lights burned in the darkness but cast no light, glimmering where the big cast iron cook stove had to be.
He turned and felt his way back to the hall. The next two doors were locked.
The third door was closed but opened easily when he pushed down on the cool metal handle. He saw the sign on the door in the dim reflected light as he opened it. Women’s. No reason to care.
He found a toilet and his bowel and bladder emptied. He sat longer, listening, thinking, almost wanting a cigarette, although he never smoked.
He heard the sounds of night before dawn—the whirring and humming of insects in the low branches of trees and the hooting and calling of the night birds. Then there was movement in the night, under the birds, and sound. Sudden, muffled movement. Hard metal sounds. The sticky hiss of tires moving slowly on pavement. Many tires, on trucks running without headlights, on a night with a waning three-quarter moon. Enough light to see by without being seen. The quiet groaning of springs as weight shifted in trucks that moved uphill. The low shudder of gears driving an axle. The click of doors being opened and then eased closed again, eased closed without slamming, so as not to be heard.
The soft thud of a bullet being slipped into a chamber.
The almost imperceptible click of safeties being slid off in the night.
The quiet crunch of tires on gravel as a 105mm howitzer is moved into position.
The click, click, click, click, click of targeting gears as the howitzer was aimed and locked. The squish and thud of a shell as it is jammed into the breech. The clunk of the howitzer feed door jammed shut behind a 105mm round.
The click of the firing button. The almost imperceptible thump of machinery just an instant before the powder explodes. The boom and swoosh as the shell rockets toward the wall of a building, which it will destroy. The explosion, the flash of light and hot wind and the shock wave.
The first shell to hit the front wall of The Club slammed Levin across the room and into a wall. The front wall collapsed, crushing the men beneath it. There was fire, smoke, and dust. And dark. And blindness. There was a horrific buzz, a loud ringing in his ears. Levin couldn’t hear a thing. What? So confusing. He couldn’t breathe
Carl. Terrance. Under the rubble. Gone.