He was Shaw to everyone in the squadron, nobody to the rest of the world. His given name was Dutch Robert Shaw and his grandmother raised him. She called him her Little Dutch, or the more formal Dutch Robert if he was in trouble, but with her gone his pre-squadron life might as well have been buried in the Minnesota soil along with her lifeless body. She was gone now and he was changing.
Special operators lived in the shadows and he was a team leader in the darkest of them. Their lives were classified and they liked it that way, for it let them do their job. The next deployment would be Shaw’s tenth, the team’s fifth together, and he didn’t even think about it as killing after a while. Besides someone having an interesting mustache or getting whacked in their underwear, the kills weren’t worth much of a second thought. Holding a weapon? Two in the chest. Strapped with a vest? Two in the head. If he’d wait a second longer it’d be him on the floor leaking into the ground, or one of his buddies. Maybe a building full of people. It was work. Living over life, way of the knife.
Summer was just giving way to fall then. They weren’t slotted to head out on their next hop for another couple months, but the warmer weather brought an influx of farmers and goat-herders with pockets fattened by jihadist contracts. They’d swarm out of the mountains, deserts, and villages and attack anyone in uniform. Just like back home in the cities, the violence increased with the temperatures. So teams and squads back in the States cleaned their weapons and kept their eyes on the news. There were one hundred three coalition deaths in June. One hundred thirty-four in July. One hundred sixty-one in August. Speaking averages, the numbers usually dropped in September, but then one of their sister squadrons lost fourteen men after a Chinook and a Black Hawk went down in the mountains on the same day. The tally for the month rose to nearly two hundred. Shaw knew they’d be getting spun up early. Bets were placed with each passing day.
“Sir, a refill?”
The girl pouring coffee stood in front of him, her blond ponytail splayed over her shoulders and chest like parted curtains. Her name tag read Stephanie and she’d drawn a little heart to dot the i in her name. She wore khaki pants and a dark green sweater and a little too much eye makeup. She was cute, beautiful soon if she didn’t start smoking or fall in love with any of the guys like the one seated before her. Their profession aged people.
She looked sweet and relaxed and she had her eyebrows raised, as if she wasn’t yet annoyed but was thinking about getting there. Shaw looked older with a beard, so she probably didn’t see him as someone liable to hit on her. He was safe, thus was she, she might have thought. But he wasn’t safe in that regard, merely distracted. He’d been drumming his fingers on his empty cup, focused on the TVs nailed to the walls. The news had been broadcasting widespread suicide bombings in the Middle East for the last few days and the beeper he wore in his pocket weighed heavier than normal. He hadn’t noticed her sweater-strangled breasts hovering mere inches from his face.
“Sir, a refill?” she repeated.
He turned toward the sound, quick and abrupt. He nearly nosed her breasts. The longer strands of his beard pricked the loose wool of her top. He nodded and tipped his cup toward her. Smiled. He had a good smile, deep dimples on both cheeks. “Please.”
The dimples were a strong peace offering. She smiled back and poured.
“Cream?”
He nodded. “Thank you.”
She held her smile longer for him than she did for most customers. She poured from a small silver creamer and stopped when he cut the air with his fingers. He thanked her again, and she had probably just started staring through his beard, recognizing the handsome face buried beneath it, when an older couple seated at another table called her over. An old woman held her white coffee cup in the air with arthritic fingers while her husband sat across from her, asleep, with his head in a book. The old woman looked like she wouldn’t be able to hold the cup up much longer, so the waitress backpedaled quickly over to the old couple, running her fingers through her hair. She kept her eyes on Shaw as she moved and he watched her while he blew waves in his coffee, the tattoos on his wrists freed and visible from his sleeves. His lips hovered over the rim of the cup and he mouthed her name. Stephanie. Stephanie. He watched her pour for the old woman and liked the way she rested her hand gently on the old woman’s brittle shoulder. He could see her smooth hand and the fragile, delicate wrist emerging from the sweater she’d rolled up to pour the coffee. A leather bracelet emerged on her wrist and he wondered who’d given it to her. A family member or friend, maybe. Another man. She probably hadn’t seen Shaw’s fingernails, stained with gun oil, but she might have learned to love that about him.
The news continued blaring in the background, but he was too busy counting strands of the blond hair cinched into her ponytail to care. And she might have started noticing something in him beyond what everyone else in the shop could see: a tall blond guy with a wild beard and large back muscles shifting beneath a trim blue sweater that hugged his chest and waist.
And then the beeper in his pocket rumbled.
He took it out and black stars filled the screen with a minus-2. He let out a breath. The stars meant rush—two hours to get back to base—and it was October second, which meant he owed Hagan fifty. Hagan bet on the first week in October and Shaw the second.
He opened his wallet and fingered the fifty he now owed Hagan and the five that would cover the coffee. He’d just thought of asking the waitress for her phone number when the beeper went off. It was pointless now—he’d be leaving in hours—so he stood up and made sure to catch her eye when he did. He waited for her to turn away from the old couple’s table, and when she did her blond hair caught the sunlight. For just a moment, he let himself think of what it might look like lying next to him on the grass of a farm in the summertime, a baby on the way. Maybe two or three others further down the life line. Then he smiled at her, held the fifty up in his hand, and left it on the table for her.
He’d tell Hagan to shove it. Hagan would be upset only for as long as it took him to talk about the girl he was with the night before.
• • •
Huge tits,” Hagan said.
He was smiling wide and appeared to be quite in love with himself. Shaw thought he might have forgotten their bet entirely. The youngest guy in the team, Hagan had a round, doughy face but carried nothing but muscle on his frame. Dressed in cargo pants and utility shirt like everyone else, he had flecks of dip stuck in his bottom teeth and his lower lip bulged with the brown flakes of tobacco. He stood propped in the doorway leading to the pit, his hands flexed around invisible breasts he’d given himself, and was rocking back and forth on his heels. He looked like a hulking, giddy idiot. A middle-school pervert.
“Huge.”
Shaw nodded because to Hagan they were always huge, and because he needed to be believed. Hagan was fragile like that. Plus, keeping his mind on tits would keep his mind off the money Shaw owed him.
“Congrats on the huge, Hog.” Shaw slapped Hagan on the back and walked around the wooden pallets being filled up with all their gear. Hagan didn’t ask for the money, so Shaw laughed and continued on past him. “And you’ve got shit in your teeth.”
“Huge, man,” Hagan yelled after him, running into the pit. “Did you hear me? Huge!”
The pit was dim and humid, loud. Hagan stopped in the entryway and looked to the ceiling. He yelled, “Huge! Tits!” as loud as he could, his arms spread like Christ on the cross and his chest trembling. Hagan liked tits. Hagan also juiced. Yelling about tits like that all roided out, he looked like a rabid beast and devout sex saint.
The pit was full of tall gray metal lockers and the team bays were separated by numbers and squadron colors. There were footstools housing disassembled, fully automatic weapons lying on rags or propping up half-naked operators drooling into plastic-bottle spitters and ornate metal spittoons the room over. There were lots of sharp, blind corners and dead ends and the smell of sweat and metal ruled the air. State flags and captured weapons hung from the ceiling or outside lockers, along with a few crucifixes and a single Star of David. A clock taken from a raid on one of the royal palaces hung above the pit, attached to a metal D-ring and chained to an anchor in the roof. The hands of the clock traced the face of a dead tyrant’s son and his ghost slowly turned on the chain, keeping watch over the guys who killed him. The reek of gun oil and damp concrete made the men dizzy for the second it took to get used to it. Then they did and knew they were home.
The team bays were alive and frantic. Electric guitars shrieked through speakers nailed to the walls and hop bags were pulled from the tops of lockers and spread out on the floor, their owners hunched over and among them, frazzled or calm, running their fingers through ammo, banger, and frag pouches. Looking for small holes that might lead to big problems. The lockers were doubles and opened in the center like French doors. Extra fatigues and civilian clothes hung inside them, along with the occasional newbie with his mouth and hands bound with flight tape. Shaw had also seen blow-up sex dolls, kegs, and a pet dog or cat in lockers as well. He heard about an MP stashed in one to avoid a DUI charge once, too, though he never saw it.
Dalonna stood in front of his locker with his arms crossed and his eyebrows raised, the folds of his shaved head wrinkled like waves running on the tides of the ocean. He had two daughters and a wife and looked like Gandhi if the latter had lifted weights his entire life. He was expecting a son.
“You’ll never guess, Donna,” Hagan said, when they entered the bay.
Dalonna looked at Shaw. Shaw shook his head, removed his lock, and sat inside the locker on a stool he kept at the base.
“I’ll take a shot,” Dalonna said. He scratched his beard and looked at the ceiling. “She was a supermodel—no, a porn queen. A real dick diva. And they were gigantic, beautiful flesh mountains. Everests.”
Hagan was nodding along aggressively. It seemed like his head might fall off or that he might make himself sick. Shaw was getting dizzy just looking at him.
“Cut that out, Hog,” Shaw said. “Necks aren’t supposed to move like that.”
Hagan waved him off and looked at Dalonna.
“Donna. Check it.”
He brought his hands in front of his chest and flexed them around the invisible breasts that’d gone from cantaloupes when he first showed Shaw to watermelons for Dalonna. Hagan was generous like that.
Dalonna laughed and shook his head. “You’re a caveman. And you’re not allowed near my daughters.”
Someone blasted a stereo and the Rolling Stones drowned out their voices. “Gimme Shelter.”
Ever, Dalonna mouthed over the music. Stay away.
The lockers rumbled with the rifts and guys on their first or second hop ran around hurriedly, anxious to make sure everything was in their hop bags, while Shaw and the other salts pretended to worry about their bags. They didn’t want to be bothered so faked being busy. Anybody not frantically searching for extra pouches, or pretending to look for them, leafed through their wills. Everyone had to figure out who would get what and what they wanted done with their bodies when they died—wouldn’t be allowed on the bird without it—so guys put pen to paper and got morbid. Bagpipes were a common request at funerals, and books, tins of dip, cases of beer, and pouches of tobacco kept pictures of kids or faithful wives company along with the bodies in the caskets. Guys signed over insurance policies to their kids or girlfriends and not their estranged wives. Shaw once knew a guy who requested the ex-wife he hated to be buried with him, though she hadn’t passed yet.
There’d been a shift in Shaw that summer. He might not have fully recognized it, but the exact date, the source of it all, was inked in black on his wrist. He hadn’t changed his will for years before his grandma passed that July. July the twenty-third, to be exact. His grandparents had raised him as their own when his birth parents died in a car crash when he was a toddler, and his grandma had been a mother to him his whole life. He had been home with his grandparents during the crash and couldn’t remember having guardians who didn’t wear Velcro Keds, hadn’t fought in the Second World War, and didn’t bake apple pies religiously instead of attending church every Sunday. He had a teenage phase during which he played up the tragedy of losing his real parents; it helped land a girlfriend or two, but he recognized it as disingenuous and kicked it. His grandparents were his parents. His mother looked beautiful from pictures he’d seen and his father seemed like a man worth knowing from stories, but he couldn’t remember his mother’s smell or touch and couldn’t remember his father’s strength or laugh. Instead, he remembered the smell of his grandpa’s Pabst Blue Ribbon and how his grandma let him get away with anything. That free pass first fanned the dickhead in him as a youth. He’d throw drinking parties in their basement and unhook bras while they slept. Then one night they found him in his room, passed out with an empty bottle of Jack in his hand, puke all over his face and hair, and he decided to stop hurting them. His grandpa’s Now, that won’t do and his grandma’s tears were enough to rearrange his stomach and outlook permanently. And they did. He went on to college, studied business, and graduated magna cum laude, and then the Twin Towers were hit. He was in his first month with an accounting firm in Chicago and quit before the end of the week. Then he went back to Minnesota and told them he was leaving.
Before she died, the details of his will read more like a grocery list, mundane and hardly worth a second thought. He didn’t have a wife or serious plans for one, and no children because of it, so he figured he’d leave everything to his grandparents. When his grandpa died eight years before, on June eighteenth, he had the date inked in black on the wrist protected by the black metal KIA bracelets he wore. Then he listed his grandma as the sole beneficiary. He missed the way he and his grandpa could talk without saying a whole lot. His grandpa had been a Ranger in France, so he understood. The smell of any alcohol reminded Shaw of the stale PBR his grandpa always had in his hand. The dimpled smile and tip of the can as common as his cane. His grandpa’s death hurt, sure, but he still had her. Shaw liked to think of what she would do with the government insurance, nearly half a million, if he died. She probably wouldn’t do anything with it, maybe get another dog, but he hoped she would hire some help for herself. If not, maybe get a nice foot massage twice a day for the rest of her life—the old Vietnamese ladies in town charged only a couple bucks for a half hour. Or maybe she could travel to France. See Pointe du Hoc, where her husband was nearly killed so many years ago in so many different ways.
Then she died on a Saturday night in July and he got piss drunk with Hagan and Massey. He got the date of her death tattooed on the wrist covered by his watch before the hangover had time to sprout. Massey tucked him in that night, wrapped a blanket in the caves of Shaw’s big body, and set a trash can by his face. When Shaw woke, the first thing he saw was Massey sitting on the floor against the wall.
“You okay?”
“No. I’m not.”
Then Shaw looked at the fresh tattoo on his wrist. The ink shiny and black, the skin red and raw. He smiled. Then he cried. Then he threw up.
He needed her. He didn’t know it at the time, but whenever he visited her back home in Minnesota her smile absolved him of every mistake he knew he had made or ever would. She was his mother, his grandmother, and as he was a godless man, his single savior and saint. His kills weren’t murders or ending the lives of others. They were protecting the country like his grandpa had, keeping his sweet grandma from getting blown up on the bus on her way to the market. She was his anchor to the civilian world. To peace. She was the only person he was close to outside the squadron—the boys from high school and college didn’t understand him anymore—and after everything he’d seen and done, that didn’t seem likely to change. When he saw her he saw approval, redemption. He was her Little Dutch, no matter how big he got or how many years passed. When she saw him she still saw the little boy with grass stains on his knees and truth in his heart. And he would be okay with that if he knew. But he didn’t and never would.
After her death he replaced her as beneficiary with a Labrador retriever shelter back home. He loved dogs and had a yellow one named Patch growing up. Patch had a white tuft of skin scarred under his left eye that he got dogfighting before Shaw’s grandparents adopted him when Shaw was five or six. He was a good dog, loyal and smart, with the right mix of goof. Patch used to steal Shaw’s grandpa’s hairpiece while he napped on the couch and then leave it on his slippers for him to find when he woke. Patch lay under the casket for hours after the cancer beat Grandpa—it had taken him like a bullet, unexpected and quick. Grandma ran her hands through his fur on their deck in the summertime, and Shaw and Patch would both fall asleep in her lap. A boy and his dog. So the Labrador rescue would get all his money when he died. He requested cremation over burial, and that made figuring out the contents of a casket pretty easy.
When Shaw finished looking over his will, Hagan was still gesturing with his air breasts. He was closing his eyes, rubbing and slapping the breasts around. Really getting graphic and into it. Dalonna just stared at him. Shaw laughed.
The team. The squadron. The only family left.
A Briefing Officer came into the pits carrying a megaphone and shouted, “Briefing room in twenty, buses in ninety,” and a couple guys booed him and he gave them the finger and walked out. Hagan let go of the breasts and smiled at Shaw, raised his eyebrows.
“Love me some Afghanipakiraqistan.”
Shaw nodded and took his kit out of his locker.
• • •
Fitted flush and tight against chest and back, the kit was an operator’s life source. Everything on it had a purpose, and operators could access anything they needed blinded or in total darkness. They were consistent, yet unique. Each man had his tailored to his person and no two were alike. Shaw ran his hands over the dusty straps, fabric, and worn patches. He could smell on his fingertips the earth of a dozen countries and the smoke from countless firefights.
He shot righty, so he kept three mag pouches next to one another, starting to the left of his belly button and continuing to the right for quick changes. His bleeder kit was on his rear left side so if he had to harness his rifle and use his pistol, knife, or hands, he wouldn’t have to worry about it catching on the bleeder and getting all snagged up. Snags lose time. Lose time, lose lives. Bleeder kits were for the wearer and no one else. Nothing selfish about it, just business. If a guy got hit, whoever came to his aid would be able to locate the wounded man’s bleeder and not have to use his own to patch, clog, or wrap him back up. If a responder used his own to help a buddy and then got shot himself, the next person on the scene would lose time trying to find stuff to clog him up with. Again—lose time, lose lives. Shaw made sure his bleeder was packed tight with anything and everything getting shot or blown apart might necessitate. He packed reams of gauze, stacks of wrap bandages and cotton compresses, a few tourniquets, scissors, tape, and a hollow metal cylinder with plastic wrap for sucking chest wounds. He kept a pack of Skittles or two in there as well, plus a few tampons to plug bullet holes the size of a fingertip. Above the mag pouches he had a pouch for signal tape and others for frags and bangers. Flex-cuffs and ChemLights bridged the space between his radio and bleeder, and the rear of his kit had a water reservoir and eight other pouches for bangers, frags, and other things that smoke, bang, or flash. Front and back ballistic plates weighed about seven pounds each and three-pound plates the size of index cards protected his vitals from the side. All loaded up for a house call, the men’s kits weighed anywhere from twenty to forty pounds. Shaw carried 5.56 in mags, not drums, so his kit weighed in at twenty-seven pounds all topped off. Carrying rucks on longer missions or in remote areas and they’re humping another thirty to one hundred pounds. The teams slept and ran in their kits, climbed ropes, shot thousands of rounds, ate, and shat in their kits. They didn’t fuck in their kits, but Shaw wouldn’t have been surprised if some guys had tried. Hagan was a likely suspect.
Everything was in its place, so he strapped the kit to his ruck and laid it outside his locker.
• • •
The men grabbed seats in the briefing room wherever they could. In chairs. On or under tabletops. Sprawled out on the floor. Elements of two squadrons were relieving the one that had just lost nearly half its strength after the Chinook and Black Hawk went down. Multiple terrorist cells had claimed the kills and the government was still investigating. The party that fired the RPGs wouldn’t take credit for it, though. Their founder forbade it.
The BO stood at the front of the room. He opened the file folder he held in his hands and started reading. “Those of you with families won’t head home to them tonight,” he said. “Those with hot dates should consider them iced, and if you were trying to get out of one, you’ve got an excuse.”
Most of the family men’s hands found their pockets and their fingers started fluttering. The unmarried and childless laughed. The BO spoke slow and calm, a smile curling on the edges of his lips. He looked pleased with himself and continued the speech, telling the men they would be relief for the sister squadron that had lost the fourteen men. Instead of visiting the familiar pussy they were used to, they’d hop on a plane for twenty-three hours and land in the country that’d been on the news lately for its recent surge in suicide bombings, executions, and kidnappings. He told them Intel had noticed a splintering of leadership among multiple terrorist cells and organizations. High-value targets from al-Qaeda, al-Shabaab, the Taliban, al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb, and al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula were leaving their organizations and joining under a new veil called al-Ayeelaa: the Family. Al-Ayeelaa primarily stressed bombings and avoided gunfights with coalition forces, and as a result, they were staying alive longer and causing problems. They also avoided the limelight, never putting out videos or accepting interviews. No one knew who led the cell or the full structure of the network. Intel barely knew any of the major players.
“So we’re going to find them and hunt them down,” the BO said. He took a deep breath and paused. “If anything can roll down the damn street they’ll put a bomb in it. Even if it doesn’t have an engine, they’ll blow it. Bikes, donkeys, dogs, fruit stands. Fuck it, they’ll blow it.”
He closed the file and looked around the room for a while, tapping his palm with the folder. “Bad fuckers, men.” He let the room get quiet and then he pointed the folder at them. “Well, now they’re fucked.”
Shaw shook his head and the room laughed. The BO tried not to smile and walked out. He was slight and clean-shaven, with brown hair cropped close at his ears, temples, and neck. He walked without moving his head or neck much, a desk jockey with his time on the ground so far behind him he probably couldn’t remember what dirt on his boots felt like.
Hagan leaned in to Shaw.
“When’s he moving to the Pentagon?”
“You don’t move there, Hog. You get assigned. And I don’t know.”
“He spoke well.”
“Yeah.”
“You think he practiced that speech?”
“Without a doubt.”
“You think he’s jealous of us?” Hagan asked.
“Jealous how?”
“I don’t know. Not kicking in doors anymore, sitting behind a computer all day.”
Shaw looked at him and raised his eyebrows. “You jealous of his job?”
“Hell no. Maybe. Yes. Kind of. I don’t know. Dude drives a Lexus. He has a hot wife and doesn’t have to worry about Hajji throwing a barrel in his nuts and shooting his guts out. That’s not too bad.”
“Then yeah,” Shaw said, and laughed. “I’d guess it’s probably mutual. He probably misses kicking in doors because he never will again and you think sitting behind a computer would be nice because we’ll never do it. He’s got his hot wife waiting for him at home and not just the Glock and bottle of Jack that’s waiting for us.”
“Damn, that’s depressing.” Hagan narrowed his eyes and bit at his fingernails and then turned up his palm. “And I don’t have a Glock.”
“No, you don’t. But you can use mine,” Shaw said.
“Thanks. And I’m gonna have a hot wife. No doubt.”
“Of course,” Shaw said, and the room cleared out.
• • •
The teams had an hour to get all their gear together and onto the wooden pallets assembled on the hot concrete outside the pit. Rucks, hop bags, and TVs all went in. Shaw saw a couple footballs and a recliner, too. The Commanding Officer of one of the squadrons that didn’t get spun up was sitting in the recliner on top of one of the pallets. He was in his underwear, drinking a bottle of whiskey, and the top of his balding head was getting sunburned. His blond chest hairs gleamed in the light. He was whispering Fuck you to everyone as they put their bags in the pallets. It took only a few minutes to pack the pallets, so Shaw dropped his stuff in, received his Fuck you, and winked back at the CO and headed into the pit.
Back inside, some of the younger guys were beating their chests, grabbing ass, and mouthing off, but it seemed forced. Most guys just sat together in circles quietly and didn’t say a whole lot while Walker, Beam, and Daniel’s made their way around in handles and fifths. They had at least twenty hours of flying ahead of them, so most guys took advantage of getting their last drink in for the next couple months. Once they got in-country they couldn’t even smell it. They were on a twenty-four-hour mission clock. When Shaw got back to his bay, Hagan was sitting on his footstool with his eyes wide. A bottle without a label sat at his feet. It looked like half piss and half moonshine. Copenhagen was swirling around and settling at the bottom.
“Did you see Thomkins?” Hagan asked.
Shaw nodded and shook his head.
“He was drunker than shit,” Hagan said. “Than. Shit.”
“Yeah. Good thing he missed church.”
“Did he tell you to fuck off?”
“No,” Shaw said. “He said ‘Fuck you’ to me. But the sentiment was probably the same.”
Hagan laughed. “How old is he, like fifty or sixty?”
“I don’t know, Hog. Probably not any older than forty.”
“He looks old. Too old to be all pissy in his boxers because he didn’t get spun up. Doesn’t he have kids?”
“Yep. A wife, too.”
Hagan shook his head. “Man, what a goof.” He looked at his feet and rubbed his boots together. “I think I saw one of his nuts.”
“Bummer, Hog. Sorry about that.”
Then Dalonna came into the bay, grabbed something from his locker real quick, and left. “Shitters,” he mumbled.
Hagan watched him leave.
“That sucks.”
“What does?” Shaw said.
Hagan rubbed the back of his neck. “Donna was talking about taking the girls to some lake up in the mountains this weekend. He wanted to teach them how to swim. He’s gonna be pissed. The girls probably don’t understand it yet, though, huh? They’re what, two and three?”
“Just about three and not yet two,” Shaw said. “And no, they probably don’t understand it. Not yet.”
Hagan nodded and started chewing at some calluses on his trigger finger, and neither one of them said much for a while. “Did he have his phone?”
“Yeah, I saw him grab it,” Shaw said.
“Tough, man.”
Most of the men had codes set up with their families. They’d run into the bathroom stalls and call with a code word or send a text that let the wife and kids know Daddy wouldn’t be home for a while. Rumor had it that the bathroom stalls deflected some of the bugging devices, so all the married guys and family men coincidentally headed for the shitters right after the briefs. It seemed like every time a squadron got spun up early a minivan would come through the gate, tires screeching toward the pit, and a wife or soon-to-be would jump out of the car, hair a mess and wearing workout clothes under a sloppily buttoned sundress. They’d hug and kiss their men, restrained for the most part—sometimes a guy would get some tongue or a slap—and the rest of the squadron would give them their moment and then joke about it later on the bus. Kids coming along was different, though. Usually they didn’t know exactly what was going on, the younger ones especially, but they fed off the mood and it messed guys up, family men or not. Pissed-off teens were old enough and knew what was happening, so they would stand by their mothers with hard faces, but the tears still came. No one had gotten kicked out of the unit for breaching classified material in years, so the codes or deflecting walls must’ve worked.
Hagan spat some part of himself on the floor. “I bet a guy’d have to shit in the sink right now, huh?”
“Probably,” Shaw said.
Hagan nodded and then looked at Shaw like he smelled something out of place. “Where the hell are Cooke and Mass?”
• • •
Cooke had his kit, ruck, and hop bag lined up immaculately in front of his locker. He still hadn’t been in the bay since Hagan and Shaw arrived, but Dalonna said he saw him messing with his weapon in the arms room after he got back from the bathroom.
Cooke always seemed to be messing with his weapon. He had a dry sense of humor, was hard to understand or get to know, and unnerved people in general. He was dependable, a natural, and probably some kind of redneck genius. He didn’t talk a whole lot, but when he did he had a way of being heard without ever raising his voice. The team watched Jeopardy! every day in their bay on a little analog TV they had wired up and Cooke always won even though he claimed to have never graduated from high school and Shaw was the one with a college degree. Cooke was from the red-rock brambles of far West Texas, beyond Odessa and Pecos and civilization in general. He could run forever and bench twice his weight despite the standing myth in the squadron that no one ever saw him in a weight room. He also had a habit of lying about his family life.
During their first few months together, Shaw and Cooke were shooting partners on the range one day and Shaw asked Cooke about his family. “My dad liked his whiskey,” Cooke said, spitting on the dirt. “He liked beating us with electrical cords, too.” Shaw didn’t remember his response to that, conversation killer as it was, but remembered sending a mag downrange and that they didn’t have a whole lot of in-depth discussions about Cooke’s family after that. Later on, Shaw found out Cooke had told Hagan his father was an angel preacher who never raised a hand to anyone but the blacks. The team confronted Cooke about it and he had a good laugh and told them his real father went to Vietnam and the jungle swallowed him for good. Cooke said he was adopted by lesbian nuns from Sacramento. The men never found out about his real home life so they just stopped asking. Shaw had seen long scars on Cooke’s lower back, though—thin and red and knotted like a worn-out rope—so Shaw figured he lied about his past so he didn’t have to relive it. Shaw could give him that. Cooke would take over the team if anything happened to Shaw.
Hagan pulled his footstool next to Shaw and offered his tin. “They were huge, man.”
He sounded sad, was looking at his feet like he had spilled something on his boots. He looked like a puppy after a shaming.
“The tits? I know, Hog.”
Shaw grabbed a bite from Hagan’s tin and settled it into the groove he had going at the time. Upper jaw, left side. They had to rotate their sweet spots or the gums would start to blister and thin, Get all cancerous and shit, an older operator had warned Shaw years ago. He worked the upper left to rest his lowers.
Chewing and dipping was an art form. No one smoked because of the cherry tip that’d get them blown away and the smoke signals that’d do the same, so their jaws were always packed to the brim. Every man had his own sweet spots and preferences. Long cut, fine cut, leafs or plugs. They dipped or chewed because they were bored and because it calmed them and sometimes just because they needed something to focus on to keep from focusing on everything else. Shaw was a long-leafer but accepted a dip whenever offered. Refusing a man’s tin was almost an insult. Teams sat in circles in their bays like Hagan and Shaw the whole pit over, drooling or otherwise spitting straight streams of juice into empty bottles. It was an operator’s version of a peace-pipe ritual. Guys who had given it up or never chewed or dipped to begin with even had a habit of keeping gum where the tobacco would’ve gone. It must have felt right to them. Hagan wasn’t picky. He liked his tobacco like he liked his women. Whatever’s available.
“I think I love her, Shaw.”
“Really?”
“Yeah.”
“What’s her name?”
Hagan looked like he was giving it a thought for a second, and then smiled, shrugged. “Hell, I don’t know. Claire, or Meredith. I think I called her Mere and Claire at different times last night. Man, she was hot.”
“Did she get pissed when you called her the wrong name?”
“I don’t remember.”
“So you love Mere or Claire?”
Hagan laughed. “Probably not, I guess.” Then he crossed his foot over his thigh and looked up at the ceiling, let out a slow breath. “This’ll be the one, man. I’m not coming back. I know it.”
Hagan was a bruiser, brawler, and womanizer but a softy underneath it all. He talked about dying all the time. He would admit to being scared with no reservations or second thoughts and then switch gears immediately and talk about something else: tits, a drum set, something that was growing on his nuts. One time he told Shaw he dreamed his own death the night before. It was a real bloody mess, he’d said. Then he brightened and asked if Shaw knew anything about neurons and glial cells. Not a lot, Hog, Shaw told him. Hagan shrugged and turned away, and Shaw looked up the definitions later.
Shaw packed the dip together with his tongue and swallowed the stray flecks.
“No, it won’t, Hog.”
Hagan looked at him and raised his eyebrows. Then he shook his head. “Huge, man.” He whispered it over and over, quietly, until he trailed off and was silent. “Huge.”
Huge.
• • •
The wind was blowing through the open doors leading outside the pit as they made their way to the arms room to get their weapons. The burnt leaves and crops added a harsh bite to the air and it smelled like football and sunny fall weekends. Sweatshirt cookouts.
The arms room was a lead-and-metal paradise. Racked full from floor to ceiling and wall to wall, black metal and camo-painted weapons from pistols and snub-nosed little babies to full-sized scopers sat in metal crates, muzzles pointed to the ground. Suppressors and ammo crates sat stacked neatly in boxes like toiletries in a drugstore. The men could shoot whatever they felt like, whenever they felt like it. They shot every day and had classes and hands-on training with different historical and present-day weapons every few weeks, even though they would see the majority of them only as display pieces in museums. Gun nuts could get hard-ons daily and everyone could master new instruments to add to their steel symphony repertoires. They’d been messing with the German MP40 for the last few weeks and were getting a kick out of it. Some of the guys even had their grandfathers stop by to shoot what the Nazis had thrown at them in France and the Fatherland, and everyone enjoyed themselves like real Greatest Generation cowboys. Shaw held the MP40 in his hands and admired its sides as if the black metal would tell him something worth remembering. When he pulled the trigger he wondered if his grandpa was ever shot at with the weapon. It was likely, but he couldn’t ask him.
Operators grabbed their weapons, racked them to make sure they were cleared, and slung them over their shoulders or fit their hands around the grips and stocks. They’d massage the ribs and divots lovingly, as if checking a newborn for deformities. Each weapon was sure to be the cleanest part of its owner. A man might let his beard grow scraggly, give up toothbrushing and showering for good, but his weapon would be clean at all times. Always. Men not yet fathers, or never to be, would find their babies in the metal molds of the weapons they carried. The men knew when their cough didn’t sound right and what to do to fix it. They cleaned and pampered them, never let them out of their sight, and worried about them constantly.
Shaw and Hagan found Cooke sitting rigid in a corner of the gun room with his weapon disassembled in front of him. Cooke was slim but coiled with muscle, like a steel snake. He obsessed over his weapon, cleaned it more in a single day than he ate. He also mixed his dip with a little bit of gun oil, so there was that, too. Hagan tried it once and threw up. Cooke looked up at them and smiled. His hands were stained black with gun oil and he assembled his bolt without looking down at his hands.
“Boys.”
“It’s clean, Cooke,” Hagan said. “Always is.”
Shaw grabbed his snub-nosed shorty, racked and cleared it, and looped the black sling over his shoulder and around his neck. Hagan did the same and they left the room.
“Save you a seat,” Hagan said over his shoulder, and Cooke gave a nod.
• • •
The ride to the blacked-out airfield took less than ten minutes. Gravel hit the undersides of the bus and the sweet southern air flowed through the open windows and wrapped around the men’s faces. As the buses wound their way through the pines and red hills, Shaw’s world slowed. Voices registered and carried through the cabin but in indecipherable sentences. The tones, pitches, and meanings lost in the rumbling of the bus. His hands tingled, so he wrapped them around his weapon. The grooves, dips, and metal ridges were familiar. Comforting.
Massey leaned in to Shaw.
“I’m on pill duty. Need extra?”
He was the second son to a Guatemalan mother and a white corn farmer from southern Illinois, and people laughed when they heard his name, thinking Martinez or Valdez would be more apt. Massey looked distinctly exotic, especially with a beard, but had a white man’s name and couldn’t speak a lick of Spanish. He was organized, and had a sweet tooth and an admirable knack for fitting in. He started conversations with strangers in supermarkets or gas stations and didn’t walk so much as glide or saunter. He had friends everywhere. Everybody liked him. Even high-value targets would seek him out on objectives, probably trying to catch a sympathetic eye from a look-alike captor.
“I’ll take a few,” Shaw said.
Massey gave him four packets, eight pills total. Shaw could’ve probably killed himself if he took them all together.
“Save me a seat by the shitter, huh?”
Shaw told him he would.
Approaching the airfield, the guys were talking either too much or not at all. The lit cabins of the four C-17s that were waiting for the operators and their gear were the only lights visible on the airfield. There was no parade or receiving line bidding them adieu or good luck, and it would be the same when they came home. Most of their families didn’t even know they were leaving. They left in anonymity and returned the same way, if not in boxes. If guys had the chance to let their wives know they’d be gone, the women wouldn’t be able to tell their kids where Daddy had gone to because they often didn’t know themselves. He was just gone, sometimes for good. They hoped he’d come back. The buses downshifted in groans and hissed to a halt. Men grumbled awake from short sleeps, stretched and yawned to wake themselves. Shaw shook Hagan’s shoulder.
“Let’s go, Hog.”
Sprawled over the seat across the aisle in a jumbled heap, Hagan had fallen asleep. He snored and drooled, and true to form, he woke up and wiped some spit and snot off his shoulder and onto the back of the seat to his front. He smiled and shouldered his pack, sprang to his feet, and ran off the bus. The clean air was ruined by the harsh diesel spitting from the buses and the aviation fuel splattered all over the runway. It smelled like oil changes and greasy kitchens. Shaw’s beard danced in the wind on his way to the lowered ramp of one of the C-17s, and Massey took his place opposite Slausen, beside the entrance of the bird. The two medics stood across from each other, handing out Ambien to the operators as they loaded onto the plane.
Slausen was missing one of his front teeth and had a problem taking in stray cats. The men joked that Slausen’s heart would take them in but his brain would forget he was gone most of the year. The cats would tear his place to shit, clawing one another to death for food. The guys made sure to come with him when he got back home from hops to see his reaction. He’d walk into his place after months of being gone and say, Again? Goddamn, all thick in his mountain-man accent. As if the concept of starvation and neglect shouldn’t apply to his animals. He told bar girls he was a hockey player and liked to give his cats milk—when they were alive—by shooting it from the gap of his missing tooth. One night he was attached to a four-man perimeter team stationed outside the objective while two teams cleared the inside of the home. The first team breached the doorway and cleared the first floor without finding anything more than a wife and her two young children asleep on the kitchen floor. When the second team hit the stairs leading up to the second level, the perimeter team saw someone open a window above them and drop a grenade, then tumble out the window after it. The explosion blew an arm off one of their guys, so Slausen slapped on a tourniquet, but not before Slausen leveled his weapon and put two in the head of the guy who had just come tumbling out the window. One of the wounded guys said Slausen hit the guy while he was in the air, and the other claimed it was after the landing. Either way, the window jumper had an eight in his forehead. Two holes with a shared middle. Slausen finished bandaging the wounded man, then flicked away an apple slice–sized piece of shrapnel smoldering in his calf. Squadron lore was that he was smiling and brushed it off like some crumbs he’d spilled on his pants. Smiling during the ordeal or not, Slausen was still missing half the calf of his right leg. It wasn’t hard to imagine him grinning without that front tooth while his flesh burned and blistered. He was an animal.
“For your zzzz’s, you goofy bastard,” Slausen said, tossing a bag of Ambien at Shaw’s chest. He winked. “Save me a seat by the shitter?” Shaw told him he would, and then Slausen gestured behind himself with his eyes wide. Shitter seats were prime spots. Foot traffic and fumes were better than navigating over sleeping team members sprawled out on the floor. Step on some groggy or drugged-out buddy’s balls, stomach, or head on the way to the john and the aggressor would have his own knocked around some.
As Shaw made his way to the ramp a shorter man emerged from the dark behind Slausen, wearing the operators’ mission tops and bottoms—a mixed salad of earth-toned camouflage. He had a salt-and-pepper crew cut cropped to cliffs on his head and the skin of his face was taut to the bone, lined like dried-out riverbeds. He offered his hand to Shaw and mumbled, “Shoot straight.” It sounded like he was chewing on gravel.
The man had four stars pinned to his top. His face, familiar from press conferences, took on a ghoulish pallor in the moonlight and the wrinkles cast deep shadows on his face. He looked like a corpse. Shaw realized that the man had just been appointed commander of Joint Operations and the new commander tried to strangle or otherwise break Shaw’s hand. Shaw returned the death grip and the four-star clapped him on the shoulder. Shaw walked past him, and a priest standing at his side threw the sign of the cross at Shaw as his boots slapped the ridged base of the ramp. He felt the cool metal ridges under the balls of his feet.
A voice laughed out from behind him.
“No blessing, Father. I’m a Jew!”
“Then you’re fucked!” someone answered from the dark.
Shaw smiled and the cabin of the bird filled with laughter.
The C-17 was a giant steel cross on wheels, more than half a football field in length, with a wingspan to match. Hundreds of men could cram into the empty cabin, but the squadron had two gun-mounted vehicles with .50-calibers on their roofs shackled down in the back of the bird and a few of the wooden pallets. The twenty men of Shaw’s squadron could split up and enjoy the ample space left on the two birds as they saw fit, and the operators did so, spreading their belongings along the floor and canvas seats as if they were claiming territory in a dorm room. The other twenty men, of the other squadron, would do the same on the remaining two C-17s.
Shaw found a couple seats next to the shitter. He grabbed the seat closest to the plastic door and settled in to the canvas, Ambien in hand. He tried not to sleep a whole lot and didn’t feel like tripping, so he aimed to trade. Some guys would give almost anything for the pills. Most men wanted as many pills as possible, but hounding medics would give off the impression of an aspiring doper, so they would get thrifty and trade among themselves. Hagan stood in front of Shaw right away. Hagan did not believe in caution.
“Neck pillow,” he said. “Neck pillow for your poppers.”
He thrust the black-padded crescent at Shaw, hadn’t even sat down yet. Shaw nodded and tossed Hagan a pack and Hagan lobbed the pillow at Shaw’s chest. Hagan took a seat across the aisle. He sat smiling and lusting at the packets, like they had naked women pasted on the plastic. Shaw sat on the pillow and waited for his ass to go numb as Massey moved Shaw’s pack off the seat next to him and yelled over to Hagan.
“Did you trade with him, Hog?” Massey pointed his thumb at Shaw.
Hagan nodded and Massey asked for all of Shaw’s packs. Shaw gave Massey the four he had left after trading and Massey held them up for Hagan to see.
“Oh, fuck you, butt buddies.”
Hagan flicked them off from across the aisle and Shaw laughed.
“Give him a couple more, Mass,” Shaw said.
Massey threw two packets across the aisle and shouted over the awakening engines. “Don’t take more than three at once or they’ll kill you.”
Hagan grabbed the three packs and mocked swallowing them all together. “Better these than Hajji.”
The ramp closed and guys started clearing space with their feet, calling spots on the floor and laying down their sleeping nests. Massey let himself sink into the canvas seat and drummed his fingers on his thighs. He looked at Shaw.
“I feel old, man. Tired.”
“We are old,” Shaw said. He put a chew in, a lighter one so he’d have less to worry about if he fell asleep, and tried to get comfortable in the canvas with the pillow under his ass. “And did you pop already?”
Massey nodded.
“Then there you go, bud. Shit’ll make you drowsy before you nod off.”
Shaw offered him his pouch and Massey shook his head.
The metal clicks of belts buckling spread through the cabin of the aircraft and conversations died down. Everything seemed quiet for a second and then the frame of the bird shook as the engines fired up and drowned out the remaining voices. Guys shifted in their seats and ran things through their hands: rosaries, pictures, bullets that had been shot into their bodies and dug out by doctors, and other small stuff that wouldn’t make much sense to anyone who wasn’t holding it for luck. Shaw saw one guy holding a small pink blanket and running his fingers over a matching beaded bracelet on his wrist. Shaw remembered hearing about the daughter that’d just made the man a father a couple weeks ago. Dalonna had his eyes closed with some pictures on his lap and Cooke ran his fingers softly over his weapon, like it was an old guitar. Everyone looked at peace, calm.
Shaw didn’t have anything to run through his fingers, but he was into smells during the fall in the South. The air is sweeter that time of year to a Yankee, especially when there’s still a little heat left before the winter arrives and the leaves are starting to burn. He couldn’t get enough of it the last couple weeks in September, had the windows open in his room at night and rolled down in his truck all the time. It was clean air. Pure. So he inhaled hard and tried to find any fresh air through all the exhaust fumes, hydraulic oil, and personal touches filling the cabin. The closest he got to the outside air smelled like a woman’s perfume and he shrugged and figured Hagan probably had some panties in his bag. Then he thought of the waitress in the coffee shop and wondered if she’d watched him leave there a few hours before.
The bird rocked free from its blocks and carried them down the tarmac, away from their homes and families and dogs and cats and to a land that didn’t want them.
• • •
The men were left to their thoughts during the flight carrying them to war. Fathers, brothers, and sons turned into trigger pullers while others enjoyed the highs from their Ambien or the whiskey they’d smuggled aboard. Shaw thought of his grandma, how for the first time she wouldn’t be waiting for him on the Minnesota plains when he returned. Usually he’d get on the first flight back north after landing in the States and he’d let himself skip workouts for a whole week. Fatten himself on her cooking. She pampered him and he’d find himself venting, telling her classified information while they split a couple beers on the back porch, looking out over the snowdrifts or the mowed summer grass. He’d tell her about missions and she would shake her head lightly, not in judgment or displeasure but, so it seemed to him, out of a total surprise that the world moved as it did and that men like her grandson were involved in the pushing and pulling of it.
Hagan and Dalonna came across the aisle shortly after takeoff. The three of them got a poker game going with Massey and Slausen, but it wasn’t serious—mostly just to kill the time until the Ambien kicked in. They were all terrible. The lights were blacked out in the cabin, so they played under red headlamps, legs splayed and locked with those of the next guy to form a playing surface on the floor. After the Ambien had weighed down his eyelids, Hagan kept saying, “Hit me,” and the rest of them stopped caring enough to tell him they weren’t playing blackjack. They wouldn’t hit him and he didn’t seem to care. He must’ve just liked the way it sounded coming out of his lips while he was half asleep. Eventually he mumbled, “Bombers are fucked,” and then he grinned slightly and fell asleep sitting up. Dalonna checked Hagan’s cards and then threw his own on the floor of the plane.
“Hog’s got a damn flush,” he said. “I don’t have shit.”
No one had anything to beat Hagan’s hand, so they decided to quit as long as the sleeping one among them had the best hand.
“I’m gonna zone, boys,” Slausen said.
He put on his headphones and lay down across a couple seats above Hagan, who’d fallen asleep on the floor with his back propped up against a seat. Slausen was from Vermont, or maybe New Hampshire—somewhere in the woods of the Northeast—and seemed like he’d been a doper in a past life, or might still be. He’d pop an Ambien or any other sleep aid he had on hand, keep himself awake, and then ride out the high as long as it lasted. Then he would crash into a near coma. He’d come out of it with bloodshot eyes, snot and slobber splattered across his chin. After he put on his headphones he tore open a bag of pills, then another, and held the baggies delicately over his mouth, letting the white capsules tumble over his bearded lips. He crossed his arms behind his head and closed his eyes. A smile spread across his face.
The temperature dropped the higher they flew, so Shaw and Massey took out fleece tops from their packs and Dalonna brought a field blanket out from his. Plumes of white breath started floating in the dark cabin like the clouds had seeped into the bird. The smell of moonshined whiskey and cool laundered clothing mixed with tobacco and farts and emerging hangovers. Hagan started to drool on his shoulder, so Dalonna eased him down to the floor and wrapped a corner of the blanket around his feet. Hagan lay scrunched on the floor with his knees huddled at his chest, a big man sleeping like a fragile baby. He was a man-child. A guy who brought an engagement ring he’d bought for a stripper to the team bay to get Shaw’s opinion on it. The ring, not the concept. Shaw asked for some time to think about it, and before he told Hagan what he thought about the idea, Hagan had pawned the ring and bought a drum set instead. Hagan didn’t play the drums, before or after he bought the set. Hagan’s wallet was loose and he was known to drive remote-controlled cars around the pit with beers and nudie mags taped to the roofs. Some guys didn’t like Hagan because his chest looked better than theirs or because his tattoos fit him well, but he was an animal on the objective—wouldn’t know quit if it hit him in the face with a wooden plank. Shaw loved the contrast in Hagan. He could punch three full mags into a quarter from fifty meters away yet had a habit of gravitating toward kids on the objective. Shaw had seen Hagan put down two HVTs on a target once, then sweep up a little boy with the gentle arms of a father to keep him from running into the room with the dead bodies. Shaw imagined Hagan as the little brother he might have had if his parents’ car hadn’t hugged that oak tree. Hagan fought a lot in the squadron gyms. After one bout, when Hagan had mashed in a guy’s face rather impressively, he’d looked defeated and worn out, the other man’s blood still wet on his gloves. Shaw put a towel over his shoulders and asked him if he was all right. It’s so damn personal, Hagan had said. Shaw asked him what he meant. Hitting guys in the face, Hagan said. Don’t like it. Shaw laughed and asked him how punching a guy in the face was more personal than taking his life. Hagan shrugged and offered his upturned bear-paw hands in response. That’s different, he said. Our job.
“Hog’s got the right idea,” Dalonna said. “I’m out, too.”
He brought out a black watch cap and pulled it down over his eyes. He sat with his back braced against Hagan’s large feet—an arm draped protectively over his calves—and fell asleep immediately.
They were an unlikely duo, the short Filipino father of daughters and the womanizing hulk. Dalonna fought in Golden Gloves bouts growing up in Chicago and taught Hagan how to box right, with finesse and patience. Dalonna’s fatherly touch must’ve appealed to a guy like Hagan, who appreciated anyone who didn’t call him a dumbass or a meathead, and Dalonna must’ve seen Hagan as a big kid who needed looking after. The pair got along well despite their differences, and it was known throughout the squadron that if you wanted to fight one you had to fight both. Dalonna was paternal like that. He reminded the team of things constantly. Don’t forget water. Extra batteries. Oil the shit out of that barrel. Condoms, Hog.
Massey looked over at Shaw and gestured to Dalonna. Dalonna’s mouth hung open and his head kept falling back. As his neck strained, the tendons and veins would enlarge and pop out of the skin. Shaw could see Dalonna’s pulse. Massey smiled and then his hand disappeared in his bag. He handed Shaw some papers.
“I made corrections.”
Shaw had finally convinced Massey to get out of the squadron and give college a shot after years of talking about it on foreign airfields. Shaw could see Massey as a doctor, going home to a beautiful blond wife and three kids after a day in surgery, How was the day, honey? and all that good shit. Massey was an operator but a medic still, his job centered primarily on saving lives, not taking them. The rest of the team seemed destined to grow old kicking in doors, but Massey did not. Massey started applications at around the same time Shaw’s grandma died, and he would enroll in classes next fall. Massey asked Shaw if he would think about getting out, too. They could be neighbors and get drunk and fat together while their kids threw rocks at one another, Massey had said. Be normal people. And Shaw entertained the thought for a moment, but normal to him had become having dirt under his boots at all times. Normal was being clipped into a Black Hawk or Little Bird, flying nap-of-the earth over foreign dirt on the way to raid some towel-headed motherfucker plotting to blow up the Statue of Liberty or his sweet grandma. And his normal was falling apart into something foreign and unknown, like the runoff of a glacier melting into the sea. He couldn’t tell anyone who didn’t do it himself what he did for a living, legal or personal reasons aside, and if he did, he knew they would look at him a little too long. As though if only they looked hard enough they might see the blood on his hands and recognize it, appreciate it as necessary but nevertheless unfortunate, before being relieved that they weren’t the ones stained. There was no other world for him.
Massey handed him one of his personal essays for admission, written in pencil. The script looked like crusted blood under the headlamp. Massey wrote in harsh strokes, nearly stabbing through the pages, but he could write well. The prompt was a funny one. It made Shaw laugh. Describe a time of difficulty and how you overcame it.
“What? It sucks, doesn’t it? It felt like bullshit on the paper.”
“No, you’re good,” Shaw said. “The question is funny.”
Massey frowned and shook his head, looked at his lap. He was writing about applying tourniquets to arterial wounds, having a guy die under his care. Shaw could imagine the graduate student or crusty academic salt tasked with reading Massey’s essays. They would try to determine how well someone like him would do in a biology lab. Tourniquet application, sure—but how would he do in an academic environment? Could he handle the pressure?
“You need to clarify what you’re trying to say here,” Shaw said.
He gave Massey the essay, pointed at a paragraph that needed some clarifying. Massey took the papers and stared at the words.
“You told them about tying off guys.” Shaw raised his eyebrows and tried not to laugh. “What about those experiences would enhance a classroom?”
Massey stared at the pages. “I don’t know, man. Enhance? That kind of thing doesn’t enhance shit. A guy died.”
“Exactly. Mass, you’ll get in. They’ll probably beg you to come. Just try to explain how the experience affected you. Tell them about death. They want to know about leadership, problem solving, and worldly experiences. You’ve got more of that in what you leave behind in the shitter than the person reading your essay.” Shaw looked at him and winked. “Just don’t say that to them.”
• • •
The fuzzy red bulbs of distant headlamps kept Shaw awake long after Massey put his essays away and went to sleep. The lights went out one by one until hours later they were all gone. Then the bird was just cold and dark. It felt like being in a tomb. Shaw imagined his grandma lying alone in the cool Minnesota earth. It made him sad and he wished he’d taken the pills. Every now and again guys passed his face on the way to the shitters and he could feel a slight brush of wind and a little warmth as they walked by. They each carried their own scent. Waxed tobacco pouches. Sun-bleached tops and bottoms. Shampooed beards.
Shaw grabbed Massey’s essays from the pack and was going over them again under the red light of his headlamp when Bear walked by, grabbing his crotch on his way to the shitter. He carried his own toilet paper and patted Shaw on the shoulder with the roll. Bear was a graceful sniper, a gum chewer, and unlike an actual bear in every way except for his hair. He was thin and short, with dark features. With jet-black hair and eyes to match, he grew his hair and beard so long it was hard to tell where his beard ended and the hair on his head began. He could close his eyes and blend into the dark. He was good-looking, but it was hard to tell through the mop of hair that was his face.
Bear walked out of the shitter after a few minutes and tapped Shaw again on the shoulder with the toilet paper. Then he walked away, tossing the roll in his hand, and dropped the roll on Mike’s face. Bear walked on, laughing loud after Mike failed to wake up. Mike was Slausen’s team leader. He was tall, thick and veiny, and wore the Alaska state flag next to the American one on his kit. His auburn beard was overpowered by a mustache with long, wispy hairs running away from the rest on the far ends. They looked like black licorice tails in the dark cabin of the aircraft. He was older than most of the guys in the teams, had three kids out of high school already. Ohio was sleeping next to Mike on the floor. He would take over the team if Mike went down. Ohio was shorter than Mike but broader in the shoulders. He bypassed the squadron beard, opting instead for a mustache darker than oil and thicker than a candy bar. He played lacrosse in college on the East Coast, an Ivy League—Princeton or Cornell, it was said—and had a young daughter he didn’t see much. His ex-wife sent him pictures of his daughter every few months and his locker in the pit was a collage of his daughter’s school pictures. She was a pretty girl, with dark black hair like her father, and was almost at the age when she’d change from being cute to being beautiful and making her dad worry.
Coughs interrupted the steady drone of the bird as it made its way over the Atlantic. If Shaw could forget where he was it might’ve sounded like a lawn mower running in the summertime. He could almost see his grandpa coughing out flecks of tobacco that had loosed from his cigar among the rivets, screws, and tiles of the bird’s cabin. In reality, there were ten operators on that bird and thirty more on another three just like it flying through the dark and the clouds. They were the knife of the military, expressly used to hunt down and eliminate terrorist networks throughout the world. And they’d all be out in the night soon enough, doing their best to kill the right people. And the right people were asleep in their beds while those who would bring them their deaths flew over the ocean. The men and women would soon be waking up next to their husbands and wives, boyfriends and girlfriends. They’d stretch and share a kiss before brushing their teeth. Or maybe they’d already been up for hours with the sun, connecting circuits to car bombs or packing lunches for their children on their way to school. Some of them were probably standing in their kitchens, in their bathrobes, holding cups of coffee and blowing steam away from their mouths. Planning explosions on the dark walls of their homes and organizing dinner the same. Some would be innocent and might wonder if the war had finally reached the apex that would necessitate a move to another country. Perhaps they could move in with family or loved ones who would provide refuge from the car bombs, assassinations, and Western raids that usually got their targets but sometimes didn’t. A little boy would rise from his bed in a remote mountain pass, and one of his uncles would do the same outside a crowded city before pushing his kids on a tire swing in their front yard.
Shaw lay awake in the dark long after putting away the essay and turning off his headlamp, his arms a bed for his head. He thought of the people they’d be after during the night and wondered if they were thinking of him. Then he thought of the little girl from the poppy fields. He could see her face lit by the moon in the steel divots of the ceiling. The steel cables running along the length of the cabin seemed like silver trails of tears if he looked at them from a certain angle. He opened two packets of pills, chewed them to powder, and swallowed them dry. When his hands and thighs got heavy and his head felt thick, he hoped if there were others like that little girl out there in the dark that they’d run.
Because the men were coming.
• • •
The C-17s refueled in the air, and hours later a dip in the trajectory startled the men awake. Shaw found half a ball of chaw sitting wet against his neck, the other half still loose-leafed in his cheek. Dom was awake and sitting across the aisle from him, panting with his thick pink tongue hanging half a foot from his mouth. He dipped his long brown snout to the floor and nosed a tennis ball toward Shaw. Stephens, the Belgian Malinois’s handler, smiled through his red beard and stroked the smooth crown of buff fur between Dom’s ears.
“Might want to roll that back,” Stephens said. “He’s grumpy after a nap.”
Dom’s eyes widened as Shaw reached toward the ball; then Dom lowered onto his haunches, his forepaws resting in a dignified stance of patience. His long white teeth glistened eerily in the light of the red headlamps turning on here and there as men awoke and prepared to land. Shaw rolled the ball back and Dom snatched it in his jaws. He moved into a sitting position and nosed the ball back at Shaw.
“Steph,” Shaw said. “I’m exhausted. Call the Dominator off. He’s just going to get mad at me for underperforming and bite my ass for insulting him.”
Stephens laughed and patted the dog on the side. “Down, Dom.”
Dom dropped to his stomach, forepaws stretched out toward Shaw as before, and rested his snout on the floor. He watched the ball with dark, alert eyes, and when Shaw nudged it back with his boot he snatched the ball in his jaws, dropped it by his paws, and rested his snout on it.
The small white lights lining the floor of the cabin illuminated guys getting to their feet, waking others, and settling into seats. Metal clips snapped and echoed throughout the bird and everyone buckled in the same as they had some twenty hours before. The landing gear descended and a lawless smell filled the bird. A mix of tire fires, sunbaked animal shit, and burnt trash bit at their noses. Some guys smiled as the stench settled in and others coughed. Voices welcomed it in the dark.
There it is, boys.
Shitty stench for a shittier country.
Freedom isn’t free, a voice giggled through the Ambien runoff.
Then it’s not worth it, another answered.
It was a smell of warning. As long as the men smelled it they could never fully relax. Men had gotten blown up in chow halls and checkpoints and shot while instructing locals in counterinsurgency tactics. CIA agents had gotten blown up by their own sources. In this part of the earth, the world was on fire.
“Every time,” Massey said, shaking his head. “It’s been the same damn smell for almost a decade. How do people live in this shit?”
“Birth shit,” Hagan yelled across the aisle. He was all excited, the whites of his eyes gleaming and glassed after the Ambien.
“Bird shit?”
“No. You deaf? I said it smells like birth shit.”
The entire cabin looked at Hagan. The air itself seemed to switch from a smell of warning to one of confusion.
“Haven’t you ever been in the delivery room and seen the women crap while giving birth?” Hagan asked.
None of the men said anything for a long time. Eyes widened and lips strained against rows of teeth waiting to unleash deep laughs from tired throats. Hagan raised his eyebrows and spread his palms.
“Jesus, Hog,” Massey whispered.
Shaw looked at Dalonna, thinking that having had two kids with a third on the way, he might be able to lend an opinion on the matter. Dalonna stared at Hagan, his mouth open a little. He shook his head real slow. It appeared any personal opinion or experience he was keeping as such.
“Donna, you know what I’m talking about.” Hagan looked at him with his hands open. “Tell ’em about it. They poop when they push, right?”
Shaw put his head in his hands, ran his fingers through his hair. The way Hagan said poop made him sound like a middle-school kid explaining his potty mouth to one of his teachers. Dalonna stared at Hagan and ran the tip of his tongue over his bottom lip. He took his time, wet his lips. Then he put his hands on his knees.
“Hog. Do not. Sit next. To me. On. The. Bird. Back. You degenerate.”
The bird seemed to shake with all the laughter as it approached the runway. Cooke had his eyes closed, a wide smile on his face, and Slausen grinned through whatever he’d popped that’d taken him away from everyone, undoubtedly harder than the Ambien did for everyone else. Slausen’s eyes were half shut and he drawled slowly through the drugs, giggling quietly to himself. “A mess of a man,” he said. “That’s you, Hog. Big ole messy Hog.”
“I saw it on TV,” Hagan said, his arms spread wide, preaching or begging. “No shit.” His voice had started loud but seemed to lower with each word. “Swear to God.”
The wheels touched down and the screeching breaks drowned out all the laughter. Hagan’s face was red, his features shrunken and strained. It looked like he’d bitten an especially tart lemon. The sudden bump of rubber meeting earth after dancing weightless on the clouds for so long made the bird groan and shudder. The engines hissed and whined and everything got loud. It seemed like the plane might explode.
“I know you’ve seen it, Donna,” Hagan said, slow and quiet, almost to himself. “I know it.”
The bird rolled to a stop near an empty hangar and the ramp lowered, the men’s laughter draining out into the humid morning air. It was just before 0400 hours and the heat had already found its way into the cabin. Daylight wouldn’t break for another hour or two, but sweat already pooled at the base of Shaw’s neck. Forklifts unloaded the pallets first and the men followed. Shaw picked up the neck pillow, wrapped it around his neck, and walked down the ramp and grabbed his hop bag from the pallets sitting outside the bird. The hot wind stung and the air was thick. Hagan walked down the runway, rubbing his crotch over and over again. He couldn’t seem to find a comfortable place for his balls to rest in the heat. His voice followed the men to the hangar. He hadn’t given up, rarely did.
“It was on a nature . . . science channel, or some crap. A documentary, maybe. PBS?”
Shaw walked ahead of the others. He couldn’t hear a rebuttal, but he imagined heads shaking and guys spitting. Dust leapt from their boots and clouded at their knees, laughter the only thing more prevalent in the air than the heat.
Dim ceiling lights lit the hangar, making the land and dark airfield surrounding it disappear. It looked religious. Like God, if there was one, might be lighting their way and theirs alone. The engines of fast-movers heading out for nighttime bomb runs screeched above the hangar in the dark and Shaw watched the blue-and-orange rings of their engines leaving the ground and burning the sky. It looked like the Devil, if there was one, had come to earth and left his eyes behind. The fast-movers could be a relief, the screeches comforting to those surrounded on a hillside, outmatched and outgunned. They could blanket bombs for miles and split the world in half. The men started gathering in the hangar and set their bags on the concrete slabs. They craned their necks to the fading stars and watched the trails of jet fuel burn up in the sky, listening to the aircrafts shrieking like wraiths.
“So I’m disgusting for watching that?” Hagan followed Massey into the light. “It’s education.” Hagan kept his bag shouldered. He ran his thumbs across the nylon straps. “Every dad sees it. Donna’s full of shit. The nurses clean it up.”
“It’s educational, you mean,” Massey said, dropping his bag on the concrete. “And regardless, you’re sick, that’s sick, and you’re making me sick.”
Hagan slammed his bag on the floor. Dust fanned out and clung to his pants.
“Educational? What the hell’s that? Whatever. It’s the miracle of life, Espresso. Everyone knows that.”
Shaw laughed. He pointed at Hagan.
“There. Espresso was good. End on that.” Massey had dark skin, so the men got clever with him. Hagan, especially, liked it. He probably wrote down good ones that came to him while he was alone in his room. Coffee and bean relations were common. Burrito. Beaner. Java. Jo. Java-Jo. Tobacco-Jo. Cocoa-Jo. Cocoa Puff. Fudge. Brownie. Fudge brownie. “The birth shit’s a stretch. This place doesn’t smell like birth shit, which is probably no different than my shit or your shit, or anyone else’s shit. PBS or not, giving birth or not. It just smells like shit. No one wants to think of birth shit, you animal. Especially not Donna.”
“Why not? He’s the only one that’s seen it. Live show, at least.”
“Hog. Think about it. He just left his daughters and wife. His ladies. He’s got a son in the oven. You think he wants to think of that now? More than that. You think he wants you, or any of us, talking about Mirna like that? Thinking about Mirna like that?”
Hagan nodded and looked at the ground. He lifted his face, bounced his eyebrows, and smiled. “Espresso was good, wasn’t it?”
He looked relieved after defending himself for so long. Proud.
“I thought of that a while back.” He pointed behind himself with his thumb. “During poker.”
“You fell asleep during poker, you big idiot,” Dalonna said. He and Cooke dropped their bags next to the rest and Hagan shook his head at Dalonna. He mouthed, I know you’ve seen it, and kicked Dalonna’s bag. “And why the hell didn’t we carry our rucks instead of the hop bags? I think I’ve got one of Hog’s dead prostitutes in mine.”
“You bitching already, Donna?” Hagan asked.
Dalonna spit at Hagan’s boots and Hagan looked at Cooke and brightened. Cooke was smiling. He had his head tilted back and took in a deep breath of air.
The men were briefed about the air quality after each hop. Government reps would welcome them from the bird, tell them they were glad they made it home safe, and then shake their hands and let them know they’d receive compensation in the future if the air they just left carried carcinogens and they got sick. They meant if the men got cancer and died.
Hagan smiled. “Nowhere else you’d rather be, huh?”
Cooke shook his head.
He looked comfortable, relieved. Happy.
Home.
• • •
The squadron they were relieving lined the outside walls of the hangar. There were twelve men. Beards trimmed, shaved, or styled. Skin tanned. Their gear formed a protective perimeter around themselves and most of them sat with their backs propped against the wall, sleeping or staring at the ceiling. They looked deflated in their wrinkled fatigues and they sprawled limp across the floor like they were shrinking or trying to hide in their clothes. A few guys stood in tight circles with their arms crossed, toeing the floor with their boots. They’d leave in a few hours, after their bird gassed up and passed its checks. None of the men from the exiting or entering squadrons spoke to the other teams as the forklifts dropped off the rucks for the entering squadron.
Red taillights crept up to the hangar in the dark and four black short buses wheeled onto the concrete floor. The squadrons just off the bird threw their hop bags and rucks into the trunks and Shaw sat in a middle seat with Massey, in front of Cooke, Dalonna, and Hagan. The seats were rough with dirt and hard spots. Mud or melted hard candy was worked into the fabric. The buses left the hangars, the smooth concrete giving way to rough rock, and Shaw looked back through the dark windows. None of the men in the hangar watched the buses leave.
“Man,” Hagan said a little while later. “That smell.”
“I’d already forgotten about it,” Cooke said. He winked at Hagan.
“At least we’re not building a FOB out of a damn hillside with Hajji pissing down on us,” Hagan said. “Remember that, Donna?”
Dalonna didn’t answer, so Massey and Hagan looked back. Dalonna had his head on the window glass, and his snores and the sound of rocks hitting the underside of the bus filled the cabin. He might have been faking it but was more likely already asleep. Cooke stared out the window and, though he’d dug the forward operating base out of the hillside with Hagan and Dalonna years ago, said nothing. Massey and Shaw had been with another team then, another country. Hagan shrugged and closed his eyes.
Their FOB was one of the largest in the country. Not yet a full-blown base with Burger Kings and McDonald’s, it was nestled in a low valley separating Shiite and Sunni communities where a formerly private airport had been turned into a public engine of war for the Americans. The original dirt airfield had been paved, expanded, and maintained for the cargo planes that unloaded endless troops and mountains of munitions daily. Numerous helipads had been erected on both sides of the runway, where gentle mounds of earth and air-traffic shacks once stood, and rows of dust-colored clapboard buildings erected from cheap siding and tin roofing housed expensive air conditioners and even more expensive computer systems. The rows of clapboard buildings expanded from the airfield in all directions like the ripples sent out from a rock thrown into a pond. The ripples spread throughout the low valley until the land had been turned into a blanket of concrete slabs, watchtowers, concertina wire, and temporary architecture linking the two Islamic communities that were often at war with each other. Most of the structures lining the perimeter of the FOB housed supplies and troops who would patrol the nearby Sunni and Shiite communities. Smaller communities that flanked the main airfield were separated from the larger FOB by twelve-foot-high concrete blast walls on all sides. Special operators lived in the small communities and built their own private helipads off the main airfield. They maintained their own aircraft for the missions that would take them hundreds of miles away from the FOB in all directions. The maze of concrete checkpoints leading from the main airstrip to the Special Operations communities took the longest to navigate even though they were closer to the airstrip than the conventional unit communities—in some cases by five miles or more.
The buses maneuvered through the endless concrete barriers and checkpoints in the moonlight while small flashes of light burst through tiny holes and cracks in the concrete. If Shaw had strained his neck he could have seen stars and clouds floating above the barriers, but he was asleep. They all were. The buses wheeled past two large concrete slabs joined by a large metal gate with concertina wire coiled from the ground to the top, and then took a nauseating set of sharp turns to pass through a quarter-mile of stone switchbacks, erected to prevent suicide bombers. Then the brakes hit and the buses stopped. The men woke up, got out of the buses, and grabbed their bags and rucks from the trunks. They stacked their bags against a section of wall so the GMVs could pass through and then the buses backed out, navigated the switchbacks in reverse, and sped off.
“Walk it out,” their CO called out. “Briefing room’s got a green ChemLight, war room blue, phones and computers yellow. Tents are red. Anything without a light is a shitter. I’ll check on the chow. Briefing room at 0530.”
Their CO was tall and dark-haired. He had a sharp face with angles that could cut a hand. His mind was tireless and quick, and he didn’t sleep much. He couldn’t stand still or grow a beard the way he wanted, so he grew the hair on his head to his shoulders and kept his face shaved close. Never one to comb his hair, he embraced the mad-scientist look but was handsome enough to be in a boy band. He never doubted his men’s decisions or let anyone else take the fall for a fuckup. The men loved him and would do anything he asked.
It was 0500 hours when the buses had offloaded the men, and their bags and the sun had already begun softening the dark. The men didn’t need headlamps since they could see by the sun preparing to jump from beneath the horizon. Shaw grabbed his hop bag and ruck and followed Hagan and Massey down a wooden walkway to the last tent with a red ChemLight taped to the door handle. Four tin shacks without lights sat opposite the four tents with red ChemLights. A bathroom opposite each tent—four ribs on either side of the wooden walkway sternum. Cooke got to the door of the tent first. He opened the handle and stepped into a fridge. The tents were air-conditioned and running full blast. Years ago they’d land somewhere and have to carve out living quarters in rock or dirt and sleep in the holes they’d dug. Their beds were mounds of dirt and sweat-stained rock. Now they had climate-controlled tents. They were certainly winning the war of comfort.
Hagan danced the length of the tent with his hop bag cradled around his shoulder like a girl he’d decided to fireman-carry. He moved his feet gracefully over the wood floors and each step kicked up a small cloud of dust that vanished in the dark of the tent. He threw his bag on the top bunk of a set in the right corner and Massey took the bed next to Shaw, and Dalonna and Cooke spread out along the opposite wall. The men put their hop bags on the top bunks and unrolled sleeping bags and blankets on the bottoms.
“Let’s find some bottles,” Hagan shouted.
Pissing outside when the temperatures would stay above the century mark for another few weeks was frowned upon. The sun would bake the tin-shack shitters into ovens, so the men used empty bottles. Empty Gatorade ones were a favorite for the large mouth. Bowel movements demanded tolerance for the shit ovens or well-timed breaks during the dark hours.
“That’s fine,” Dalonna said. “But take that shit outside every morning. Last hop I grabbed for some water and drank someone else’s dip spit or piss. I don’t want to know which it was.” The guys laughed and Dalonna turned around to a whiteboard nailed to the door of the tent. It had black lines taped in a grid pattern. “I’m serious. It was sick.”
Dalonna wrote their names in the empty column on the left with a marker tied to the board with a white string. They’d mark an x under the column where they were at all times. Shitters. War room. Briefing room. Gym. Chow hall. Phones. The range.
Shaw grabbed his baseball glove from his hop bag and threw it on his bed. It was ashy black and beautiful, the gloss faded from a decade of sun and dirt and being broken in under the tires of Humvees. It fit like a surgical glove. The ball practically hit his bare palm. Massey threw his on his bed, too. It was a ratty brown, dried-up nightmare. Shaw’s fingers nearly bled just looking at the sharp edges and frayed straps around the mitt.
“Did your dad bring that from Cuba?” Hagan asked.
“Guatemala,” Massey said. “And no. And fuck you.”
Hagan laughed. “Guys,” he said, and put his big arms around Shaw and Massey. “I forgot mine.”
Hagan never had a glove. Hagan was a mooch. Shaw grabbed a catcher’s mitt from his bag and threw it at him.
“It’s stiff,” Shaw said.
“That’s okay, Shaw. I love stiffies.”
Hagan smiled and hugged Shaw from behind. Shaw knocked on his ribs with his elbow until Hagan let him go and Cooke smiled and brought a foot-long metal pole out of his bag and some horseshoes.
“Yeah, you do,” Cooke said. “But stiffy lover or not, we’re gonna knock down these shoes.” He had a huge wad of fine-cut in his lower lip and raised his eyebrows. Then he left the tent.
Dalonna said he was going to the war room and grabbed his rifle and ruck and left the tent. Shaw and Massey followed him while Hagan helped Cooke put the horseshoe stake in the ground outside their tent.
The three found the blue ChemLight leading down a set of stairs not far from their tent. The room was built into the ground, the roof raised a few feet above the earth. Wooden lockers spanned the room from floor to ceiling and end to end. Everything smelled of metal, Velcro, gun oil, and dust. Other teams had already claimed spots, set their helmets on top of the lockers, with their rucks, kits, and weapons placed neatly in the lockers. Cases of batteries and full mags lined footlockers with the tips of their rounds winking bright in the light. Someone had taped up a picture of a woman spreading her legs and pointing a pistol through her panties with Local pussy kills written underneath her in black ink. Hagan kissed his fingers and tapped the woman’s crotch when he passed, and Shaw found a spread of open lockers spanning two walls and a corner and grabbed five. He put up a couple pictures of his grandparents and Hagan saw them and nodded.
“How do, Gramms.” He said it slow, with respect.
Shaw smiled and looked at his grandma. His favorite picture had her billowing white hair tied up in a handkerchief while she held tomatoes from her garden in her hands. She smiled wide and the tomatoes looked huge in her small hands, her pint-sized body. His grandpa’s hand was reaching toward the vegetables at the edge of the shot he’d taken himself. She had a smooth face until the day she died and she wore an agate necklace in the picture. It was deep blue, with smoky white lines running around the circumference. His grandpa said he’d found it on a beach, which was a known and loved lie. Shaw held the necklace in his pocket. He’d had it with him ever since she passed. Dalonna took out a picture of his family and taped it at eye level, flush on the wood that would house his helmet and NODs. His daughters held a shared hand over his wife’s belly. One of the girls was prettier than the other, but they were both cute. They were dressed in purple and pink ballet leotards and smiling wide, both missing a whole mess of teeth. One of the girls had orange painted across her lips and must’ve gotten into a bag of Cheetos before the shot. Dalonna never tired of saying his son was high-fiving his girls in the picture. He smiled while he taped the pictures to his locker. Besides the pictures of his girls, he taped up a photo of an ultrasound that made his son look like a wrinkled old man, a picture of his wife on their wedding day, and one of himself with his grandfather during a visit to the Philippines years before.
Hagan stood at Dalonna’s locker and propped his hand on the wood and leaned in to the pictures.
“Donna, did you get married in the eighties?”
“No, dickhead. We got married in the Philippines. It’s hot as shit there and Mirna’s hair was all frizzy.”
“No shit. All her hair?”
Dalonna looked like he was trying to remember something he’d forgotten. Then he looked at Hagan and shook his head.
“Dammit, Hog. No. Not cool. Not all of her hair.”
Hagan laughed and wandered over to Massey, who was putting up a picture of his niece, Penelope.
“She’s five, Hog,” Massey said. “Don’t perv out.”
Cooke laughed, Dalonna shook his head, and Hagan held up his hands like he’d dropped something on the floor and broken it. Penelope was cuter than Dalonna’s girls, but they all had that careless, invincible shine to their faces. Shaw looked at the pictures of Penelope and Dalonna’s girls. They all looked like the girl from the poppy fields.
• • •
At 0530 hours the operators of the two squadrons, wearing baseball hats and sunglasses pushed up on the crowns of their heads, sat around white tables facing a large whiteboard.
The exiting CO was a thick colonel with a Civil War mustache. Not fast-food thick but hypodermic-needles-before-the-gym thick. Veins were visible through the sleeves of his shirt and the mustache was likely an effort as long as the hop. He could’ve waxed it at the tips, it was so full, but he must’ve used up all his wax or never had any to begin with, because the ends flapped ragged. Like a half-inch rope cut with a knife. He was tapping his foot, held a metal pointer against his forearm, and kept his eyes on his watch. He began right at 0530.
“We’ve got a nice football field–sized community of nylon tents snug between two-foot-thick, twelve-foot-high concrete walls.”
He sounded hoarse, like instead of using scissors, he’d chewed the ends of his mustache off and was having a hard time swallowing the hair. He spoke in declarative fragments.
“Airfields are here.”
He paused to spit in a foam cup on the table behind him. Then he stabbed a large area southwest of their tents with the pointer.
“About a two-minute drive.”
He hit the pointer on a bare spot beyond the phones and computers.
“GMVs and other vehicles here.”
He pulled at his mustache, nodded, and held out his hand.
“About a minute walk from the war room and the TOC.”
He traced a large perimeter to the west of the tents.
“Range is here. It was ours. Now it’s yours. We run it and use it. You see anyone outside your unit on it, they probably shouldn’t be there.”
He didn’t tell the men what they should do in that situation. Just looked at them, shrugged, and continued with his brief. He told them that out of more than a hundred house calls, they took fire from all but three. He cracked his neck, closed his eyes, and shook his head.
“We lost fourteen men to these fuckers.”
He spit in his cup.
“They can’t shoot for shit, but they can blow shit up. Al-Ayeelaa is everywhere. Every house we hit led to more of them. They’re in the damn air you breathe.”
He hit his pointer on a black-and-white photo of an overweight man with glasses.
“Intel’s been looking for Tango1 for the last couple weeks. This is him. He’s likely been involved with recent bombings in the area, but after our two birds went down we weren’t in any shape to look for him.”
He opened his hands and shook his head. Then he hooked his thumbs in the loops of his pants and toed the ground for a little while. Shaw thought of the fourteen men going down in the birds in the mountains. He wondered if they’d felt anything.
“That’s why you’re here. With any luck he’ll pop hot for you guys and you can get the shithead.”
He nodded to himself, spat again into his cup, and walked out the door. Everyone watched him leave the room.
“Great ’stache,” Hagan said.
• • •
The two squadrons spoke briefly after the outbound CO’s talk and then went their separate ways. They would operate as individual squadrons throughout the hop, hitting their own targets in different lands, unless a particularly enticing target required their collaboration. Shaw’s CO told the squadron they wouldn’t get the green light for missions for another couple days, so they made final preparations to their kits, zeroed weapons, watched the news, and straightened out all their shit in general. The muezzin’s salats echoed throughout the FOB from mosque speakers in the surrounding neighborhoods, and the prayers were already merging into the soundtrack of the war. Soon the men would hardly notice the noise at all.
It was hot out even in the early hours after the brief. They shot in T-shirts, without body armor or helmets, and finished their day-zero after a couple minutes, to ensure their rounds would hit where they wanted them to. Then the teams threw rounds downrange for a couple hours to stay warm and give their trigger fingers the workouts they’d become accustomed to. Just before noon Shaw’s trigger finger was pulsing and cramping. He hollered that he was done, and most of the others agreed and decided to call it a day before the night-zero.
“Clips to end it?” Cooke asked.
“Only if the loser really gets nailed,” Hagan said.
“You’ll lose, you idiot,” Dalonna said.
Everyone laughed and Hagan adjusted his sunglasses. He held his weapon in one hand and pumped it to the sky. “I’m a fucking hollow-point god! Invincible and with a foot-long cock! I can take anyone here.”
“I got you,” Cooke said. “When I win you go ahead and take that nice foot-long and sit bare-assed on a GMV that’s been sunning for the day.”
Hagan looked at Cooke for a while, his face set and eyes narrowed. “Cooke, you’re a genuine grass-fed Texas pussy.” He threw a leg forward theatrically and bowed. “Challenge accepted. What do I get if I win?”
“Whatever you want, sweetheart.”
“Good. I’ve been considering this for a while. Years, maybe.” He looked around the range, beyond the concrete blast walls leading to the tops of the mosques and neighborhood homes to the drab specks of mountains in the distance. He spread his arms wide, holding his weapon by the grip. “Gentlemen, we’re in goat country now. Cooke, if I win, you need to take your longhorn-humping ass and go find a goat on an op and stick your small Texas thistle weed in its crusty goat ass.”
Cooke laughed and spit at the targets downrange. “Goat sex. Sure. Sounds like something you’d consider for a while. You got it, bud.”
Hagan looked confused. “What?”
Cooke smiled and shook his head. “Nothing. Don’t hurt yourself. We got a deal.”
Massey, Shaw, and Dalonna brought out some used ammo clips while guys from other teams stood in a line with their arms crossed, weapons slung, and teeth blackened by dip and chaw. Shaw set the clips in a triangle on the wooden base of the target stands. Each clip was no wider than the fingernail of a pinkie and a couple inches in length.
“Three rounds,” Cooke said. “One in each clip, no more than two seconds.”
Hagan stared at him. “Your dick. One goat’s ass.”
“Call the time, Mass,” Cooke said.
The teams stood shoulder to shoulder behind the shooters, their arms crossed and muscled shoulders blotting out the sun and laying a solid block of shade at their feet. The teams stood far enough behind Cooke and Hagan so none of them would catch any brass, but close enough to see the rounds’ impact. Massey told them to get ready and aim, then fire. He clocked the two seconds on his watch and both of the pops from their rifles coughed pop, pop, pop in time. The teams and shooters walked toward the targets and Cooke let out a rebel yell. He’d hit all three clips square in the middle. There was a neat, clean hole through the center of each. Hagan had holed two and nicked the third.
“I hate my life,” Hagan said.
Cooke whistled.
“Don’t worry, Hog. I’ll pick out a nice one for you.”
• • •
It had to be close to one hundred twenty degrees in the sun. The walk from the range to the GMVs really got their swamp-ass running—Shaw’s armpits and crotch seeped through his top and bottoms, and Dalonna was so wet it looked like he’d pissed himself. Hagan’s back tattoos were visible through his soaked white T-shirt and the men had their bottoms rolled up to their knees.
“That one right there,” Cooke said. He pointed to the GMV at the far end of the column. Heat waves shimmered off its armored sides. It was last in line and had taken the sun since it rose hours before.
“You’re still a pussy,” Hagan said, unbuckling his pants and walking to the vehicle. “Big grass-fed pussy from Texas.”
“Ass on, you bum,” Cooke said. “Clock it, Mass.”
Massey looked around. “When did I become the time bitch?”
Laughter trickled around the dry shooting range but no one offered his watch instead. Breaths of wind kicked up small puffs of dirt.
“Fine. Ass on, Hog,” Massey said.
Hagan’s ass was large and meaty. Hairy. The blond hairs twinkled in the sunlight and the operators winced as he eased onto the hood of the GMV, cupping his distended, hairy balls with his hand.
“Foot-long, huh?” Cooke shouted. “Hope you’re as generous with the charities back home, Hog. Lots of puppies and little kiddies could use your help.”
Hagan flicked everyone off and sat on the vehicle with a quick jerk of his knees. He cried out immediately and the men were bent at the waist so fast and laughing so hard they hardly noticed his screams had died off and he wasn’t on the hood anymore. Hagan was howling and shrieking and he’d made his way about halfway to the line of men with his pants at his ankles before most even noticed he was off the hood, standing bare-assed in front of them. He pointed at the hood and said the GMV had grated his ass. Everyone walked over to the GMV and Shaw peered close. He saw little flecks of skin curling toward the sky in the paint of the hood and Cooke whistled again.
“Damn, Hog,” Cooke said. He picked up a small scrap of Hagan’s skin between his fingers. “Just like shredded cheese.” He offered the skin to Hagan. “I’ll give you fifty bucks to eat this.”
Hagan winced and slapped at his behind with the back of his hand. He craned his neck over his shoulder, looking toward his backside. “I’m not eating any part of my own ass, Cooke. I have principles.”
“Principles, maybe. But you can’t shoot for shit.”
“Cooke, fuck yourself. Mass, do we have any ass cream?”
Massey looked at Hagan and raised his eyebrows. “What the hell is ass cream? That’s not a real thing. So no, I don’t have any ass cream.”
“Dammit, Mass. Ointment.” Hagan cupped his ass in his hand and came away with small flakes of skin on the palm. He held the skin up for the others to see. “Balm. Ointment. I need some damn ointment for my shredded arse.”
“Of course I have ointment,” Massey said. “And did you say arse? You trying out for SAS or something?”
“I don’t know what I said. And maybe. I hate all of you. My ass is on fire.”
“Well, thank God it’s your ass and not your arse,” Massey said. “I’m out of British ointment.”
“Mass, seriously. I’m burning. Where’s it at?”
Massey turned toward the tents and pointed. “The tent, you bloke.”
Hagan turned around and walked off to the tents, his pants at his ankles and dirt clouds kicking up at his feet.
“Learn to shoot and you won’t be so ass-hurt!” Cooke yelled after him.
“I bet he would’ve eaten it for a hundred,” Dalonna said. “Hog doesn’t even know how to spell principles.”
• • •
With hours left to waste before the night shoot, Massey and Shaw went to the gym while Dalonna called his girls back home and Hagan rubbed ointment on his backside. The fear and anticipation kept them awake, so most walked with rucks for hours in the hot sun or shot at the range. The gym was private and beautiful and packed with guys who had witnessed Hagan burn himself on the GMV hours before. Muscles were tightening and tested under strained barbells, and white teeth gleamed bright through ragged beards. Heavy metal screamed through speakers one moment and then switched to classic rock, country, or rap the next, and no one seemed to notice or care. The gym was packed with kettlebells, bench presses, pull-up and dip bars, and rows of dumbbells and treadmills. There were even big box fans in the corners of the room to keep the place a little cooler and to keep all the stink out. In the first couple months and years of the war, poles and water cans full of sand or water sufficed for weights and exercise equipment. Sometimes men would just find large rocks and boulders and haul them around for hours.
Squadron and team rules were set in place for working out on hops. They might have seemed restrictive to the true meatheads of the unit, but they made perfect sense to those who didn’t juice. No maxing out on weights, and cardio sessions were maxed out at eight miles or an hour. Whichever came first. There weren’t specific checks in place, but since it affected operational capacities, most operators followed the rules. Screw personal records if they would get anyone shot or blown up. It was a squadron mantra on hops.
Same as with the gym, the chow hall was a noticeable improvement over their food sources in the past. The men were used to eating MREs in birds, GMVs, or in the hamlets, homes, and villages they visited, but the chow hall had wooden tables and chairs and clean metal utensils. There were big steel vats of hot food and it was available at any minute of the day. There were a couple TVs on the walls and local staff had been hired as servers. They stood behind the vats and smiled at the men, saluting them with steel tongs.
Shaw looked at Massey’s tray as they walked over to a table. Massey had four chocolate milks in a line along with a straw set on top of a napkin and a single piece of rye bread.
“What the hell are you eating?”
“I’m on a liquid diet,” Massey said. “You know that.”
“I remember,” Shaw said. “Liquids and peanut butter cups, sure. What the hell’s that?” He pointed at the bread.
“That’s rye bread that’s about to be eaten. I’m expanding my horizons. Let me eat my rye bread in peace.”
Shaw sat down and poked a hole in the rye bread with his finger. “Fair. Eat.”
“You’ve tainted it now.”
“So that’s why you won’t like it? Okay. Enjoy.”
Massey shrugged and turned to the TVs. He ate like a child. He ate turkey with ice cream on top; bacon and pickles and Hershey’s Kisses; peanut butter cups and whole milk. Four chocolate milks and rye bread. It wouldn’t be fair to say he was on a particular diet, because he rarely ate anything at all, yet even the most proven gym rats were in awe of his physique. He was a scientific anomaly, a man ripped from marble after fueling himself with shit. More than one operator had joked that Massey simply wasn’t human, had to be spit from the sack of Zeus. Trips to the cornfields of southern Illinois had been planned to test the water and corn.
Massey finished two of the milks and started pecking at his rye bread with his fingers like a bird on the street. He and Shaw were alone in the chow hall, watching the TVs and eating in silence. Reporters were commenting on the increasing violence and bombings in the country, and a male reporter with dark features and nervous eyes stood outside a mosque that had been blown apart. He held up the wheel of a shopping cart, said the bomb might have been wheeled outside the mosque and detonated after prayers let out. The headline stated that at least twenty-three were dead.
“That’ll rise. The reporters always get there too fast.”
Shaw watched the video feeds intently, hadn’t heard what Massey had said. Blood was spread over the streets like paint and Shaw was staring at a leg strewn among the rubble that the editing team forgot, or didn’t care to blur out. Massey pointed at the screen, and Shaw broke his gaze from the TVs.
“What?”
“Did you see that?” Massey said. “The Mexican cartels are cutting off heads and just burying them. Leaving the bodies out on the street so no one knows who got killed.”
Shaw hadn’t even noticed the stories had changed. He looked back at the TV and pictures of a Mexican field of red rock and police tape filled the screen. He still saw the streets outside the mosque covered in car parts and blood. The leg the camera had failed to blur out.
Massey picked up his bread and gestured around the room with it. The bread flopped loosely in his hand like a rag. Seeds fell on the table. “You think we’ll get sent to Mexico soon—take a shot at all the cartels?”
“Probably not, Mass. The cartels don’t come after us and I think we’re busy enough here.”
“Man. Mexico. Colombia. Everywhere. World keeps churning, no matter how many guys get wasted.”
“This is the world, Mass.” Shaw stuck another finger in Massey’s rye bread. “You know that.”
“Yeah. You’re right. You know what else I know?”
“What’s that?”
“I don’t like rye bread.”
They laughed and got up, cleared their trays, and then walked out of the chow hall. Massey grabbed a couple brownies and put them in his cargo pockets on the way out. Outside, the moon made their shadows dance on the walls of the tents.
• • •
Night shoots were a colorful affair, a favorite among the men. The heat was kept at bay when the stars were out, and with the NODs down and lasers all fired up, the shooting was more like something out of Star Wars than zeroing and throwing rounds downrange. Green lasers swept the range, and orange and yellow fire bursts cracked the dark air. The pop, pop, pop of their weapons quickened and slowed like a rainstorm that couldn’t make up its mind. Gunpowder, dirt, and lead ruled the air. It smelled good. Familiar and right. If townspeople had looked over the concrete barriers from the town surrounding the FOB, they wouldn’t see a thing except for maybe a small glint of the rounds reflected in the moonlight from afar. They would hear only the slight puffs of air from the suppressors and the thwack, thwack, thwack of the rounds finding their targets and punching into the dirt mounds set behind them. It probably sounded like a whole army of housemaids had come outside in the middle of the night to beat their carpets clean at once. Among the spent casings and bottles of water stacked behind them, the CO walked slowly behind the teams, his hands clasped together at the small of his back.
“We’re green in twenty-four,” he said. “Try to get some sleep.”
Nobody cheered or grabbed ass. They welcomed the news by finishing off the rounds they’d loaded up and then by stacking all their gear neatly in the war room and surgically cleaning their weapons.
• • •
Shaw didn’t sleep much. He watched baseball with Massey because the latter was a diehard Cardinals fan and then he got up around 0600 hours after having gotten to bed a little after 0300. The tent was completely blacked out and the air was blasting when he woke. Massey and Hagan were both still sleeping in their bunks, snoring loud, legs kicked out of their blankets. Dalonna was on the phones talking with his wife, and Cooke had marked down that he was at the range. Shaw took a marker and checked off War Room next to his name.
He opened the door and light flooded inside the tent. Hagan and Massey started groaning, but Shaw shut the door before they could start swearing at him. It was warm out already, but bearable. He crossed the sternum wooden walkway from the tents to the shitters and let out a strong stream of piss. The bathroom smelled like stale, flat beer. He scratched his beard and mopped away the sweat already forming at the roots. Then he walked to the chow hall and ate a breakfast burrito and watched the TVs again. There were highlights of the Cardinals game he and Massey had watched just hours before and then updated coverage of the earlier mosque bombing. The death toll had risen to nearly forty. Shaw saw a little girl being carried through rubble-strewn, trash-littered streets by grown men shouting and pulling at their dark hair and yelling into the video cameras. The camera zoomed in on the girl’s pale face and she looked a lot like Dalonna’s girls, only instead of orange Cheetos powder on her lips she had blood streaking her face. His stomach knotted and tightened, so he got up and racked his tray and left the chow hall. The servers stood with their hands behind their backs, smiling at him. One of the servers tipped his white paper hat, said, “Thank you.”
Shaw walked outside and found a shaded section of wall by the war room and pulled up one of the empty ammo cans. He placed the can on the brown dirt that coated his boots and sat down. Then he took out his earphones and tobacco and set a chaw in his cheek. He turned on Pearl Jam and closed his eyes. A light breeze offset the heat nicely and the sun felt good. He enjoyed the smell of the dirt baking in the new day’s sun and thought about baseballs hitting leather palms and how the blades of grass had shined so bright they looked wet under the lights of Busch Stadium the night before. He thought of playing baseball as a kid, the way the dirt felt like soft buttered clay or hard schoolyard blacktop, depending on the neighborhood they were in, and remembered getting raspberries on his thighs from rough slides. The bedsheet would stick to the open sores and he’d have to cut the sheet around the scabs in the morning to keep the sores from ripping open.
It was nice.
He tried not to think of dead little girls getting carried through the streets or live ones crying for their mothers. He felt at peace.
• • •
Getting to your happy place, huh?”
Cooke nudged Shaw awake with his boot. Cooke’s black beard shined in the sunlight. His gloves were streaked and dyed with gun oil and he had six empty mags in his kit.
Shaw nodded and raised his hand to shield the sun. “How was the shoot?”
“Good. I could clip with Hog again, that’s for sure.”
Cooke’s trigger finger was tracing along the trigger guard of his weapon. He looked down at his weapon and then around the FOB, over the concrete walls toward the neighborhood mosque’s minaret.
“He’s probably going to be rubbing crap on his ass for a while before he clips again with you,” Shaw said.
“Poor Hog.”
Cooke spat in the dirt and looked at Shaw. He nodded toward him.
“You okay? You look anxious.”
“Yeah,” Shaw said. “I’m good. Hate sitting around.”
“That’s for sure. Need to get our hit list and start burning through it.” Cooke checked his watch. “Well, we’re greened tonight. That’s good.”
“Yeah, Cooke.” Shaw laughed. “It is.”
Cooke nodded and walked away.
Shaw watched him go. He moved light and airy, like a little kid.
• • •
The beeper lit up with their first 4 of the hop an hour after Cooke walked off. The beeper was crammed down deep in Shaw’s pocket, so the vibration had woken him. The 4 meant that the teams could expect to be on the birds in four hours, so were expected in the briefing room within forty minutes. When Shaw got to the briefing room it was nearly full. Everyone sat at the tables closest to the whiteboard, their knees bouncing up and down. Taped to the board were printouts of an overhead view of the target house they’d visit in a couple hours.
Shaw looked at Hagan when he entered. He and Cooke were sitting next to each other, their faces turned inward, elbows on the table. Cooke was trying to teach Hagan how to get a dip the size of a golf ball into his lip to match the one he sported himself. It was a fruitless effort. Hagan’s fingers were black from all the runoff and he had dip all over his pants. He saw Shaw and smiled, dip falling from his mouth.
“Listening to your suicide music?” Hagan asked.
“Suicide music?”
“Yeah, what were you listening to?”
“Pearl Jam,” Shaw said. “What’s suicidal about that?”
“The lead singer killed himself. Right after they hit it big. He used a shotgun.”
Massey rolled his eyes and let out a deep breath. “Hog, that was Nirvana. Pearl Jam’s still together.”
Hagan narrowed his eyebrows and let his fingertips rest on his thighs. “Nah, that’s not right.”
“Yes, it is,” Massey said.
“All alive?” Hagan asked.
Shaw smiled. “All alive, Hog.”
“That’s one of their songs,” Massey said.
Hagan looked at Massey. “We’re all alive?”
“No,” Massey said. “‘Alive.’”
“Just ‘Alive’?”
“‘Alive.’ That’s it. One word.”
Hagan nodded, the dip still trickling out of his mouth. He stared at the ceiling, like he’d seen something small on one of the roofing tiles. “Whatever. You should be listening to Metallica or Pantera. Billy Joel.”
“Billy Joel?” Massey asked.
“Hell, yeah,” Hagan said. “Dude is badass. ‘It’s the End of the World’? That’s the shit.”
“That’s also not Billy Joel,” Massey said.
“What?”
“That’s R.E.M. Billy Joel is ‘Piano Man.’”
Hagan rolled his eyes. “Fine. Then R.E.M. is badass.”
Shaw sat down and patted Hagan on the back.
“Hog, you look like shit,” Dalonna said.
Hagan had dip spread all over his pants. It looked like he’d spilled a filter full of used coffee on his lap. He frowned and stuck his chin out. “Donna, I’m aware. Thank you.” He pointed at Cooke. “No one can get a dip the size of a golf ball into their lip. It’s not possible. Cooke’s a mutant.”
Cooke smiled.
“I bet Billy Joel could do it,” Massey said.
“Or R.E.M.” Dalonna laughed.
Their CO walked in and Hagan mumbled, “Thank God,” under his breath. The CO held up a copy of the printout hanging on the back of each seat in the room, and the guys stopped joking and quieted down. Small enough to fit once folded in a pocket, the printouts had a headshot of the HVT they were going after, along with personal information. Habits and likely movements. Known family members and acquaintances. Bodyguards liable to be with or around him. Aliases and possible cover stories. Intel’s search during the previous squadron’s hop had paid off. He was overweight and bearded, with glasses. He was also a bomb maker and reputedly had his nose broken at some point in his life by his own mother.
“He looks like Ron Jeremy,” Hagan whispered.
The CO told them the name of Tango1 and began the brief.
“Tango1’s from Yemen. As you know, the outbound squadron had been tracking him. He’s been operating with al-Ayeelaa for the past year. He left AQAP after his father got hit in an airstrike along with his uncles and some other AQAP HVTs. He didn’t like the new leadership, so he left.”
The CO nodded to himself and winced, ran a hand through his long hair. The room got real quiet.
“Tango1 has targeted unusual members for his bombing ranks. Apparently he breaks into homes and buildings known to house mentally handicapped folks. Then he sends them out into markets and crowded public places. He blows them up if they try to take off the vests or get back in the car, or, of course, once they’ve found a large group of people. Sources on the ground have verified the last three bombings in the area—two in bazaars and one at a police station—are his, implemented with these individuals. A guardian of a teenager identified the head of a recent suicide bomber found at a blast sight. He had Down’s.”
The heads of bombers wearing suicide vests usually cleared the bodies from the pressure of the blast before the rest of the body was destroyed. Heads would pop off relatively intact, like the cork of a wine bottle. Heads could clear the roofs of neighborhood homes and fly through the air like a home run out of Fenway. Some of the men in the room had had heads roll in front of them after a bomber detonated a street or two over.
“Intel’s been monitoring likely locations and phones and he’s popped hot,” the CO said. “We’ve traced him to this two-story compound.” He pointed to the satellite images of the compound tacked on the whiteboard behind him. “He makes it back to the compound from town before sunset and has guards stationed outside the two entryways. They carry AKs and are allowed to sit on chairs flanking the doorways. They don’t seem too interested and are probably just locals forced to protect him.”
The CO pointed to the target house and the teams flipped over their sheets. The same satellite images posted on the board were shrunk and pasted on the other side of the printouts. The men bowed toward the pocket-sized sheets.
“The compound is two stories and secluded. The nearest building is roughly four hundred meters from any angle of the house. I want one team on each of the two entrances, follow-ons behind them, and the last pulling security. I don’t give a shit who goes in first or in what order, so you guys can flip for it as far as I’m concerned. We’ll get a 1 as soon as we confirm he’s in the compound, so I’d skip the gym until daybreak. Questions?”
Cooke raised his hand. “Known and expected personnel?”
“Should be four known once we’ve confirmed he’s there, and expected could be close to ten,” the CO said. “The guards rotate inside, so we’re not sure if the shifts stay in a lower level or not. Keep a lookout for potential bombers. First, they’re likely innocents. Held against their will and clueless about what they’re there for. Second, we don’t know how they’ll react. If they’re strapped, they’re strapped. Headshots like anyone else. But they’ll probably be scared shitless with all the noise, so be on it and stay flexible. Don’t take them out unless you have to.”
He asked if there were any more questions and Massey raised his hand, a faint smile spreading across his lips.
“Sir, I think Tango1 works at an Italian deli back home. My mom buys pastrami from him every week. I can have her go over there and off him in like two minutes. Just give me a sat phone.”
Hagan nearly swallowed his chew and the printouts trembled on the tables with all the laughter. The CO nodded and smiled until the noise died down.
“That’s good, Massey. It’s a kill call, so let her know she can finally make some use out of the rolling pins she’s been using as fuck toys since you left.”
“Yes!” Hagan yelled, and the room broke up. Guys nearly fell out of their chairs and gasped for breath. Massey smiled with his arms crossed and the CO raised his hands. Clapping and whistles filled the room.
“Good,” the CO said. “Loosen up.”
The laughs trickled to sniffs and giggles, and Hagan rubbed tears from his eyes. When everyone recovered, the air seemed lighter.
“Nobody else?” the CO asked.
No one raised a hand.
“All right. See you on the birds.”
He left and everyone got up from the tables to figure out flow patterns for the assault.
Shaw and his team were taking the house.
• • •
Once the 1 got beeped through, they would have ten minutes to get to the birds, so the guys stayed close. Guys took last-minute dumps, made last-second phone calls, and gathered in the Tactical Operations Center to watch the kill TVs. Shaw and his team gathered in the war room, making last adjustments to their kits and triple-checking the batteries in their NODs and weapon sights.
“I need batteries,” Dalonna said.
Hagan grabbed a pack of triple-A’s and tossed them over.
“I’ll take more, too,” Shaw said.
Hagan threw a pack at him.
“Me too,” Cooke said.
“Sweet Jesus in Jerusalem,” Hagan said. “I’m not a battery slut. Get your own shit.”
They all laughed, and Massey came in with his arms full of bandages, wrappings, and compresses. He grabbed an ammo can and dropped everything inside. “Take what you want. You guys see Mike’s team yet? They shaved.”
Before anyone could respond, Mike and his team entered the war room. They had carved their beards into prominent mustaches, just like the Civil War colonel who had given them their entering brief. Except for one of the newer guys with red hair, the mustaches were thick and untamed.
“Excellent, guys,” Cooke said.
“Terrible,” Hagan said. “You guys look terrible.” He pointed at the newbie. “Mrs. Rawlins. My first fuck was Mrs. Rawlins a few doors down the street. I was twelve. She had a thin line of strawberry pubes sitting on top of her happy place just like that. It was beautiful. You are not.”
Slausen laughed. He wagged his finger at Hagan.
“Hog, you’re just jealous because your blond ass can’t handle this kind of lip dressing.”
“Nope. Vaginas. Your mouths look like vaginas now,” Hagan said. “Congratulations on the mouth vaginas.”
Ohio stroked the ends of his mustache and raised his eyebrows. “Hog, you’d be arrested for pedophilia if you ever shaved a mustache out of that half-assed pubic mess of a beard on your face. And as the father of a daughter, I’d be the first to call the cops.”
They walked outside laughing and Hagan yelled after them.
“Nice to see you again, Mrs. Rawlins!”
He looked at his team after Mike and the others left and he spoke in a soft voice.
“Guys. I could rock a ’stache, couldn’t I?”
Dalonna turned to Hagan and shook his head.
“First, no way any Mrs. Rawlins let you have her when you were twelve, Hog. Second, Ohio’s right. Don’t chase the ’stache. Your blond ass would look like a two-bit recreational porn star from the eighties. And not the cool eighties. I’m talking like last gasp of disco, early eighties.” He shook his head and looked to the floor. “You with a mustache would easily be the worst thing that could happen to any one of us. Why would you do that to us, Hog?”
He walked outside without waiting for a response, and Hagan stood in the war room, his mouth hanging open as the rest of the team passed by him, laughing.
• • •
The 1 came through just after 2330 hours and they put their business suits on. Dalonna kissed the picture of his family he had tacked on his locker, and Cooke and Hagan threw in a large chaw. Shaw looked at the picture of his grandma and traced the agate necklace in his breast pocket. The ballistic plate pushed the stone into his chest. No one slapped the top of the door frame walking out of the war room like they do in football locker rooms or beat their chest. They all fingered their kits and weapons, made final adjustments to their helmets and Peltors, checked radio frequencies, and tried to feel as limber as possible. They bent down to the ground to stretch, and operators throughout the war room jumped up and down to make sure nothing bounced or flapped, fixing anything that did.
Outside, the moon shined down bright and the stars were green under their NODs. Gravel crunched beneath their feet. They hitched onto pickups that drove them to their small airfield, and they arrived as another group was taking off. The rotors of the exiting birds pounded the air and kicked up dust from the dirt surrounding the airfield, and the teams offloading from the pickups were hit with a warm slap of air as the birds took off, blended into the night, and disappeared. Then the wind was the only sound for a moment until the birds waiting to hunt Tango1 screeched to life in high screams. There were four Little Birds and a Black Hawk. Another group of birds a few klicks out were getting spun up at the same time and would mirror their movements in case things got bad.
Shaw sat on the bench of one of the Little Birds, a small helicopter with a fuselage slightly larger than a VW Bug, and clipped the D-ring of his safety line onto an anchor bolted into the floor of the cabin. The bench was cool and he swung his boots over the tarmac. Cooke sat next to him and Dalonna and Hagan sat on the other side. Massey linked up with Slausen and grabbed a seat inside the Black Hawk.
The men plugged their comms in and waved to the pilots.
“One okay,” Shaw said.
“Two okay,” Cooke said.
Hagan and Dalonna sounded off Three and Four.
The pilots ran over final checks and the men waited for them to get the go.
It came and they went.
• • •
The air was clearer away from the cities, and it would be another couple weeks before the wind started biting with any force, so the draft from the bird’s flight felt good. Shaw’s tops and bottoms rippled on the wind and the moon lit up the ground like it was daylight under cloud cover. The birds would hug the earth and foliage to hide from view when possible, flying at a hundred knots and keeping at least two klicks away from the objective at all times to minimize the sound of their approach. As they flew on, the earth looked like the chalked bones of pale skeletons. The rotors of the Little Birds sounded like swarms of bees in distant forests. Lasers from the bird’s gunners painted the ground in wide, green arcs below them. Cooke and Shaw took turns painting the ground below with their lasers, and Dalonna and Hagan did the same on the other side. There was an empty sedan in a charred field. A full sedan driving down a highway. A herd of goats grazing on harvested crops. A group of kids on top of a roof, some who waved and some who shook their fists. Slums had given way to open fields, and the fields had led to ravines and lush riverfronts. They even flew over palm trees for a few minutes.
It was nice.
After nearly an hour of flight the pilot keyed in.
“Five mikes out.”
Cooke and Shaw each held a single hand up with their fingers extended and Dalonna and Hagan did the same on their side. The teams dangling their legs from the other four birds followed suit at different points in the sky. It looked like the men were waving to one another with their feet. After the five-mikes call, chatter on the comms picked up and Shaw’s hands started tingling. He felt hot. His pulse rose. They received updates from the pilots and the surveillance teams monitoring the satellite footage every few seconds.
No movement outside the compound.
Two guards stationed in front of doorways.
Two mikes out.
Guard entered building.
Guard exited building.
One mike.
They flew over a small lakebed between trees flanking both shores. Then the bird decelerated and banked for its approach. Shaw unplugged his comms, keyed into the team frequency, and grabbed the D-ring anchored to the bird. He and Cooke gave each other a thumbs-up, and the bird touched down and they unclipped their D-rings, got off the benches, and ran off the bird. Shaw scanned the sector to his front and right while Cooke, Dalonna, and Hagan mirrored his movements on their own sectors. It was loud and blasts of air beat down off the rotors. Dust swarmed Shaw’s face. He tasted dry earth and dead crops. Grains of dirt got stuck in his teeth. Hagan had spit out his chaw as soon as he touched the ground and got a mouthful of dirt and animal shit instead. The four took a knee and the birds lifted off and left them. Then the other birds climbed away from their loads and it was quiet and the twenty of them moved east.
Their footsteps seemed loud.
The compound sat just over two klicks to the east on the western outskirts of a relatively sparse village, and Intel had ten or twelve dwellings strewn east from the objective across another klick. The target house itself was isolated, and at a slow, deliberate pace, not even a half-hour walk away. They walked over the dried earth and over the shorn crops in the fields, their lasers lighting up the countryside. Shaw painted a depression in the ground to make sure it wasn’t hiding anyone or anything that would blow. There was a small tangle of weeds but nothing else. He kicked aside large rocks and hard clumps of earth at his feet and they crumbled apart—either goat shit or baked mud—and Hagan and Cooke scanned their flanks, Dalonna the rear. Snipers were attached to each of the assault teams and Barnes, their sniper, joined them on the move south while Bear moved with Mike’s team. Barnes was a redheaded woodsman from Appalachia, tall and thick. He had thighs like the base of an oak tree and he held his long-scoper at the ready, muzzle down, while the others scanned their sectors. The three-foot-long rifle looked like a crowbar in his big arms. Massey linked up with them on the movement and he and Barnes settled in the middle of the other four. After a short walk over the dirt farmland, the lead element came over the comms in a whisper. It was Mike.
“Lights ahead, six hundred meters.”
Four lampposts marking the perimeter of the target house cast a hazy bulb of light against the darkness in the distance. The cloud of light seemed fuzzy and jumpy, like it was moving. A soft wind blew. If there was tall grass it would’ve bowed at their feet. The teams kept moving toward the compound until Mike whispered again.
“Three hundred meters from the light posts. Synch watches on me.”
Shaw took a knee and fingered the buttons on his watch.
“Three. Two. One. Mark.”
Shaw started his watch and nineteen others lit and beeped the same.
“Jump-off at fifteen flat,” Mike said. “Radio silence until positions confirmed.”
Shaw led his team south while the others broke off on their respective approaches to the objective. The halo of light surrounding the compound spread as they neared, and Shaw could make out a guard seated in a chair. Shaw brought his hand up and made a circle around his head. He took a knee and the rest of his team hugged the ground. The guard had a weapon cradled over his lap and wore a dark baseball cap turned backward on his head. A baggy white T-shirt and brown pants. He had his legs crossed and his foot was bouncing, like he was bored or anxious. Shaw couldn’t quite tell if he was wearing sandals or shoes, but it looked like they were black low-tops.
Barnes crawled up beside Shaw at the head of the element. He laid a couple mags down on a towel he had grabbed from his kit and placed them in front of the trigger guard of his rifle. “Jittery fucker,” he mumbled. He brought the rifle against his shoulder and checked his sights. “Go ahead and move that foot. But don’t move out of that fucking seat.”
The team formed a static line a few meters apart. Barnes at the head, Shaw and Cooke beside him. Massey faced the rear, directly behind Barnes, and watched their six. Dalonna and Hagan turned away from the compound to watch their flanks. Their watches hadn’t hit ten minutes yet.
Barnes kept his eye to the scope, shooting hand on the grip and finger inside the trigger guard. He picked loose bits of tobacco from his teeth and rubbed his fingers on his pants. It looked like he was picking at, and eating, small shreds of dried grass from in front of him. Barnes was mumbling quietly to himself and Shaw could see waves of red hair flowing out of his helmet. Hagan wiped the dirt and earth from his tongue and Dalonna brought his sight to his eye and then relaxed. The wind had blown dried earth into the air and it looked like dust kicked up by someone running, but there wasn’t anyone around. Cooke rocked back and forth on his knee and took out his chew, buried it, and put another in. He tested the seal on his suppressor and sent a stream of tobacco forward. A few stray clouds passed quickly in front of the moon and then carried on down the sky. The night was beautiful, temperate and with a light breeze. Shaw thought of Florida nights during training hops.
Shaw watched the guard bouncing his foot and wondered if he would feel the air splitting before the point of Barnes’s rounds found him. Then the guard leaned forward and started picking at his feet. Shaw could almost see the bones of the guard’s back shifting underneath his shirt. He was so skinny. Then he righted himself and threw something to his side.
“Yeah,” Barnes whispered. “Throw that shit away. Clean space, clean life. Good boy.”
Shaw checked his watch. Thirteen minutes. His head and hands throbbed and the ground seemed to pulse up and down. He tried to breathe slowly, tightening his hands on his rifle and running his tongue across his teeth. If there were any kids inside he hoped they’d locked themselves in a bathroom.
“Show’s on, boys,” Barnes whispered.
Shaw checked his watch. Fourteen minutes and running. He keyed the comms once and a short static went out. Three others echoed in return. Then it seemed like the wind stopped and everything got real quiet. Peaceful. His head felt heavy, like he could lie down and sleep for hours. He counted individual blades of grass and could see the circular treads in Barnes’s boots.
Then the guard put both of his feet on the ground as if he were going to stand.
And he did.
The guard turned to walk inside and Barnes released a breath. Shaw felt air kick back on his face and tremors rippled through his chest and arms. The round tore through the guard’s back and he crumpled behind the chair, legs splayed at impossible angles.
Shaw and his team were up and running before the shot finished its echo. They entered the light of the lampposts, running over soft dirt that crumbled at their feet, and Barnes came over the comms as their legs pumped to the doorway. “South guard down.”
Then Bear. “East guard down.”
Shaw ran straight to the opening, his sight fixed on the doorway just a few steps from the dead guard’s feet. He put two rounds in the body lying in the dirt, pop, pop, and pressed against the wall to the right of the door as the team stacked behind him. Blood was splattered all over the wall and he could see there wasn’t a door but an open entryway leading inside the dwelling. The hem of a shag carpet stuck out from inside in the moonlight.
“Bang it,” Shaw whispered.
Hagan came to the other side of the door from the last spot in the stack, banger in hand. Then Cooke squeezed Shaw’s shoulder twice. Shaw nodded at Hagan and Hagan threw the banger into the entryway.
Shaw charged through the doorway and the banger lit up the room, flashing and bursting loud. Bam, bam, bam, bam, bam. The smell of metal, spices, and stale sweat hit harsh and hot. Like a bag over the head. Cooke peeled off Shaw and a high scream pierced the air. Shaw hugged the wall, moving quickly along the perimeter of the room, kicking aside boxes until he felt carpet give way to concrete and a landing of stairs. The layout was open. There were two doorways and a staircase in three corners of the room. Flashes and a banger from another breach point had already popped in the room off to the left when Shaw entered the door. There’d already been shots. Hagan and Dalonna entered the room to the right and Cooke and Shaw climbed the staircase on the left. They curled right toward the only doorway on the second level.
An overweight man in a white tank top and with a black mop of hair came into the frame of the door, groggy and holding an AK-47 loosely in his hand by the wooden stock. Like it was a stage prop. He looked dizzy with his eyes half closed and ran his thick pink tongue over the ends of his mustache. Shaw sent two rounds through his chest and the rounds punched through the loose white shirt and coughed out the back. The man wheezed and snorted blood from his nose and then collapsed over a bedside table before falling to the carpet. He bobbed and trembled slightly, like a fish out of water for a moment. Then he lay still.
Cooke and Shaw stepped over him and entered the room. The blood blooming from the body had saturated the carpet and painted the ground a deep red. Shaw kicked the AK away from the body and Cooke started opening drawers, moving boxes, and leafing through papers. Shaw looked at the man. His eyes were partially open and they twitched toward Shaw and then away toward the door. Shaw ran his hands along the man’s arms and legs and didn’t find anything in the pockets, but the man had wet himself, so Shaw’s gloves were wet. They shined as if rubbed with a gloss. The piss was warm on his hands. The dead man’s skin looked sickly in the bright light of Shaw’s tac light. The curly dark hairs of the dead man’s belly stood out sharply on the pale flab of his stomach.
Shaw keyed the comms. “Upper level secure. One EKIA. Probable Tango1.”
“Got a thumb drive,” Cooke said, holding it over his shoulder. He put it in a baggie and kept shuffling through a drawer. “IDs and a checkbook. Lists, too.”
Hagan came over the comms from below. “Lower level secure. We’ve got a live one down here.”
Mike came over the comms right after Hagan. “Three additional EKIAs confirmed in North sector, lower level.”
Shaw radioed in Objective secure and the CO came back over the comms, told them they had ten minutes for SSE. “Exfil at South ORP in twenty mikes,” the CO said.
Cooke and Shaw began searching and toeing the walls of the room. They checked the paneling along the wooden floor and the sections of drywall for hidden compartments. There were more ID cards in a cigar box under the bed, along with handkerchiefs and a rifle-cleaning kit and two full mags of 7.62. Dust piles clung to the corners of the room and it looked like someone had kept the place clean but didn’t plan on needing to for long. A pair of black tennis shoes sat neatly under the bed and a teal windbreaker hung on a nail in the wall. Shaw opened the drawer of the bedside table and found a copper slimline cigarette holder and a few pictures sitting in a white envelope. He smelled the holder. It had a sweet, peppery odor, and Shaw wondered when the dead man had smoked it last. He looked at the pictures before throwing them in Cooke’s bag. There was a picture of the man on the floor holding a weapon. A picture of the man on the floor smiling. A picture of the man on the floor not smiling. A picture of the man on the floor looking serious with other men looking serious and cradling rifles across their shoulders like yokes. Shaw took a large black bag out of one of his cargo pockets and grabbed the shoes, windbreaker, and cleaning kit, and put them all inside the bag.
“All right,” Cooke said. “I’m good. Let’s go see what Hagan’s got alive down there?”
Shaw nodded. They looked around the room one last time and left. A team member came up the stairs to take pictures and fingerprints of Tango1 as they walked down the stairs. Command wouldn’t want them lugging six bodies back to the FOB if they didn’t need to, so prints and photos were enough.
The lower level was mostly bare except for boxes full of automobile parts. Cooke and Shaw joined the follow-on teams rifling through the things scattered all over the floor of the room they had first breached. Wires were splayed randomly among dirt and oil-streaked carburetors and gearshifts on the floor. Boxes of Winston cigarettes and discarded clothes were set on the carpets, and prayer rugs were rolled neatly in the corners of the room. The northern room, the one Mike and his team had cleared, held a large table in the middle with cardboard boxes set on top. The boxes held metal ball bearings, nuts, bolts, screws, and washers, along with other small, lethal bits that would rip and tear and cut. Maim. Shaw grabbed a handful of the small metal pieces. They drained from his gloved hands like steel confetti. Large jars of industrial glue lay around the boxes, and paintbrushes were lined up in a cup. The walls and floors were white and the room reeked of machinery, bleach, and the dead men’s dinner. There was a small stove with hardened rice in a saucepan and a jar of curry sitting broken on the floor.
Two slight men with dark hair and clean faces lay on the floor around the table. They looked asleep, as if pleasantly dreaming. Blood formed in small ponds around the bodies from the holes in their chests. A fatter, bearded man lay slumped over the table. His beard was graying around the jaw and neck, and his mouth was open and seemed frozen in mid-sentence. Mike and Ohio had breached the room, killed the men, and were running their hands along the dead men’s arms and legs. They had two rifles and a pistol gathered into a corner of the room. The cardboard boxes on the table were wet and soggy from the runoff of the fat man. The room was spotless without the bodies and the blood. There were large Ziploc bags of white powder strewn about, and Cooke held one up.
“TATP?”
“Probably,” Shaw said. He shrugged. “Or cocaine.”
Cooke laughed.
“Hey,” Hagan said. He was standing behind them in the doorway. He motioned with his head to the other room. “Come here.”
Shaw and Cooke walked around to the other room while Mike and Ohio took stock of the items on the table and gathered them into large black bags. In the next room, Slausen and Massey were kneeling on the floor, placing bandages on a trembling body lying in the fetal position on the floor. Dalonna nodded to them as they stood in the doorway, then he just shook his head. Hagan whispered something Shaw couldn’t hear. It looked like Slausen and Massey were having a hard time keeping the body on the ground, so Shaw leaned forward to help. His hands hit cold, trembling flesh. Wild eyes darted up toward him from a mass of tangled black hair on the floor. It was a boy, stripped of all his clothing except for a white pair of briefs with a dark mass smeared on the bottom.
Massey wore latex gloves and ran his hands over the boy’s face and hair. His fingertips came away bloody and streaked with black residue. The boy was thin and slight. Fragile. He had a metal clamp around his neck chained to a concrete block in the center of the room that kept his head close to the floor. His knuckles were bruised and bloodied, and swelling had set in so thick it was impossible to tell where the bones separated from flesh. His coal-black eyes darted about the room and his body tensed and flexed. He looked like a trapped animal and the medics were doing their best to soothe him like an old scared horse trapped in a stall. Massey and Slausen were light with their movements, gentle. Small, flaky white bits of something that looked like oatmeal or vomit, maybe both, peppered the boy’s hair. There was a small puddle of dark, grainy fluid on the floor where he sat. A harsh smell grew stronger the longer Shaw stood in the room. He realized the boy had shit himself.
“Donna, cut him,” Shaw said.
Dalonna nodded and Hagan gestured to his pack. Dalonna grabbed bolt cutters from Hagan’s pack and opened the pincers, setting the chain between the teeth. He squeezed and the chain fell loudly to the ground. The boy’s eyes grew wide and he stared at the chains and lock on the floor. He tried to stand up, but Slausen held him down. A small bubble of spit formed on the boy’s lips.
“I don’t think I can cut the thing around his neck,” Dalonna said.
“Don’t worry about it,” Massey said. “They’ll take care of him at the FOB.”
Massey had the boy’s mouth open and ran his fingers inside it, tracing the jawline and looking for broken teeth. His fingers came away bloody. Shaw wondered what the boy’s breath smelled like.
“He’s missing some teeth,” Massey said. The boy’s eyes were darting around the room, but Massey kept his head still. Slausen rubbed the boy’s back with his big gloved hand. “Anybody got a blanket?”
Hagan nodded. “I’ve got an extra top in my pack.”
He gestured to Dalonna again, and Dalonna brought out the top and gave it to Massey. Massey took the top in his hands, looked at the boy, and mimicked putting the top on. The boy took the top in his hands, rolled it into a tight ball, and held it tight against his bare belly. He started rubbing it back and forth, hard. Massey shrugged and Slausen just kept rubbing the boy’s back.
“All right,” Shaw said. “Let’s go. Bring him on the bird.”
• • •
They took what they needed from the compound. The tech devices, papers, checkbook, IDs, and the three phones, along with other stuff they weren’t sure about but figured might’ve had some value. Shaw held the black bag over his shoulder while they walked to the exfil. He’d put the slimline cigarette holder in one of Tango1’s shoes, thinking Intel could run it for DNA and maybe get traces of other HVTs. They gathered the car parts, the electrical wiring, and the bags of white powder into a big pile a hundred meters west of the compound and dumped the cups of glue and bags of metal pieces on top of the pile. Then they set a charge to detonate and blew it while they waited for the birds. There was a bright flash of orange and white and a loud crack that made the wind shift and the ground tremble beneath them. The boy nearly fell over, but Hagan steadied him. Then everything was black again and thick smoke clouded over their heads.
Massey and Slausen led the boy over the ground to the exfil, their arms around his shoulders. They gave him an extra pair of socks and he trampled over the earth with the baggy, too-big socks flapping on the ground like a second set of feet. He had Hagan’s top wrapped around his shoulders and his ribs were sharp and cast jagged shadows on his stomach in the moonlight. He had a Snickers bar in his hand, not yet open.
Hagan walked next to Shaw and gestured to the boy.
“What’ll they do with him?”
“I don’t know. Hopefully find somewhere and someone for him.”
Hagan nodded. “Chained to the floor to shit all over himself.”
“Yeah. Fucked up.”
Shaw looked around. The night was as beautiful and quiet as it had been when the birds first left them. He watched Slausen and Massey walk the boy over the uneven ground. He’d seen the same look in that boy’s eyes when rabbits got their legs caught in the steel traps his grandpa used to protect their garden. He’d stopped eating the rabbit stew he loved as a boy after a certain age.
“You think he knows he can eat that?” Hagan asked.
“Eat what?”
“The Snickers.”
“Probably, Hog.”
Hagan nodded and looked south. “Man. I could sure as hell eat that. I’m starving.”
“Why don’t you ask him for it?”
“Really?”
“No, of course not. Get a hold of yourself, you animal.”
“Man,” Hagan said. “Chained to the floor. Poor kid.”
The teams all took a knee and waited for the birds. Shaw looked back at the compound, at the bodies they’d left outside. The six corpses lay next to one another like firewood or cigarettes in a pack. The operators left them so anyone who cared could bury them in the morning. They tried to be mindful of local custom, even in death. When the birds started touching down, a team huddled around the boy and Slausen and Massey took the boy’s hands and lifted him into the cabin. He didn’t look comfortable, the big metal collar around his neck weighing his head down, but he wasn’t fighting back, either. He sat between Slausen and Massey and they put their big arms around his young shoulders. The boy nearly disappeared between them, he was so small. Eventually he propped his elbows on their thighs. He held the Snickers bar rigid, propped straight up on his knee like a trophy.
• • •
The birds flew through black clouds of burning trash on their way back to the FOB. Shaw’s nostrils burned and he felt a stinging heat in his throat. Those dark clouds were what the government reps talked about if the men ever got sick and were owed government compensation. They were probably breathing in their own deaths.
The birds touched down on the tarmac and the muffled chuckles and drumming of snuff cans filled the air as they whined and shut down. It wouldn’t be light for another couple hours, they could still get spun up for follow-ons, but everything felt quiet and light despite all the noise. Peaceful. The guys walked slow and calm and Shaw let his shoulders sag and relax under the weight of his kit. Massey and Slausen took the boy off the tarmac and around the gravel barrier separating the dirt from the airfield. Then they disappeared behind the concrete blast walls. Back at the war room, Hagan took off his helmet. The pads left indented rows of honeycombs in his blond hair. Dalonna kissed the picture of his girls and sat down on his footstool with his kit and helmet still on. He let out a deep breath. Cooke set his weapon in his locker and took off his helmet and kit.
“Good shooting,” Cooke said. He stretched to the floor, touched his toes. Shaw took off his helmet and placed it in his locker. He took off his kit and let his head rest against the wooden locker.
“I would’ve been aiming at kneecaps if I’d seen that kid,” Hagan said.
“Hell, that would’ve just wasted rounds,” Cooke said. “None of ’em are breathing anymore.”
Hagan unwrapped some tape he had coiled around his knees. “You guys hear the kid screaming?”
Dalonna shook his head. He glanced at the pictures he’d put up of his little girls.
“I heard someone screaming when we breached,” Shaw said. “I heard Mike and Ohio shooting and then some screams.”
“That was a death scream,” Hagan said. “Sounded like an old woman getting beaten to death with a stick or a club.”
Cooke took off his kneepads and tossed them in his locker. “Well, he was gonna get blown up in a market or police station, and we came in and killed everyone around him. So that sounds about right. And a stick or a club, Hog?” Cooke unlaced his boots and rested his elbows on his knees. “Colorful. Very precise.”
Hagan shrugged and they were all quiet for a while, taking off their equipment piece by piece. Shaw sat on his footstool and grabbed an empty bottle from under his locker and put in a big chaw. He let his head rest against the wooden walls of the locker and started feeling the sweat in his bottoms getting cold and wrinkling the skin of his ass and legs.
Hagan got to his feet, stretched his arms above his head, and clapped his hands. “Well, all right. AAR in ten or fifteen. I’m gonna go take a shit.”
Cooke said he’d join him, and the two ran out of the war room together.
Shaw disassembled his weapon and started cleaning the bolt and upper receiver of the rifle with a bore brush, Q-tips, and some CLP. Dalonna stayed in the war room with him and neither one said anything. Dalonna was holding a full mag in his hands and unloading and reloading the rounds.
“Donna. You all right?”
“Yeah.”
Dalonna answered quickly, glancing at Shaw and then back down at the mag. He kept nodding, even though neither one of them said anything after that, like he was listening to his own private music.
“Okay.”
Shaw left him alone. Seeing a kid all messed up like that on his first mission of the hop probably wasn’t the best thing for him. Take the kid out of the equation and it would’ve been business as usual. Shaw looked at Dalonna’s girls taped on the wall. The gap-toothed smiles and Cheetos lipstick. Guys came into the war room quietly or talking privately among themselves, and they exchanged hellos and head nods. Some guys made their way to the briefing room or the TOC, still holding their weapons and all kitted up. Most grabbed coffee or spitters and ate energy bars. Shaw finished cleaning the bolt and set it on a clean rag. Dalonna kept his head toward the floor. Shaw wondered if he’d fallen asleep. He watched him, moved his head around to see if he could see his eyes. Then Dalonna looked right at him.
“Fuck it,” Dalonna said. He got up off his footstool and left the war room.
Massey came in as Dalonna was leaving.
“What’s up, Donna?”
Massey watched Dalonna leave and then he shrugged. He turned to Shaw with his hands on his hips and stretched his back.
“The doc up at the CASH said the kid probably has Down’s. But he’s not sure.”
“Isn’t that something he should know right away or not, being a doc and all?” Shaw asked.
Massey shrugged. “Not sure.”
“The kid looked comfortable around you and Slausen.”
Massey smiled. “Yeah, I don’t know. Maybe. Probably not. I don’t think he knew what to make of any of it, to be honest. Pretty fucked, huh?”
“Yeah, it is. What’ll happen to him?”
Shaw grabbed the upper receiver and ran a bore brush through the barrel. The black, ashy carbon pushed out of the barrel onto the white swab came from rounds that killed a man. He thought about that for a second. Then he looked at the swab, thought of the kid in the chains, and let the swab fall to the floor.
“No idea,” Massey said. He rubbed the back of his neck with his hand. “The doc I left him with said there isn’t any kind of orphan system in operation or anything around here that can guarantee his safety. And finding any relatives is unlikely. If he has any.” He looked at his hands. “Is that the kid’s blood?” He spit on his hands and rubbed them on his pants and shook his head. “Sick. I told the doc they should see if they can’t fix him up with a job serving food or something around one of the bases. Give him a job he can do. That’d keep him alive for a lot longer than sending him out on the street would.”
“That’s a good idea,” Shaw said.
“Yeah, it is. Be a hell of a lot better than the job he was chained to the floor for, anyhow.”
Shaw put his weapon back together and cleared it. The bolt slid smooth and the metal sang.
“You ready for the AAR?” Massey asked.
Shaw nodded.
“That motherfucker was gonna strap a bomb to that kid and blow him up,” Massey said. He raised his eyebrows and looked Shaw in the eyes. “And that kid would’ve walked out into a market just happy to get away from those guys. No idea what he was wearing.” Massey nodded to himself and then slapped his hands on his kit, took it off, and put it back in his locker. “Let’s go to the AAR and then throw some weights around.”
• • •
They had their after-action review in the TOC. Guys wore baseball hats, T-shirts, and sandals while the kill TVs showed live footage of other raids. Some of the men had their boots and kits off, while others were still all kitted up and weapons slung. Ready to go back into the dark. Guys held coffee and spitters in one hand and printouts in the other. Shaw was breaking in a Cardinals hat for Massey. With the playoffs running full blast, Massey was getting superstitious and wanted Shaw to rub as much dirt and CLP on the cap as possible. He didn’t say why and it was starting to stink. Shaw felt like a wrench monkey.
Their CO was hands-off during planning and execution, but the AARs were his property. He leaned forward and his eyes narrowed. He spoke fast.
“Describe the layouts of the first and second floors.”
“What did you have to avoid on your movements?”
“What did the rooms smell like?”
“Were they hot or cold?”
“What kind of metals did you find? Anything you hadn’t seen before?”
“What would you change?”
“What surprised you?”
It was a debrief, not an interrogation, and the teams would answer in as much detail as possible. Shaw could almost see the information taking the CO inside the objective as his eyes widened, the nuts and bolts of his brain moving overtime. Putting puzzle pieces together and saving others for later. Everyone, everything, had patterns and trends that could lead to the next target. So the men tried to describe a smell as closer to a tulip than a rose if it would spark a trend and a follow-on raid. A shade of brown more Hershey’s than Godiva. After his questions, the CO leaned back, relaxed, and they discussed strengths of the raid and lessons learned. They agreed that the strengths of the raid were the speed and precision of violence, and minimizing their time on the objective. They agreed that the surprise afforded by walking in instead of roping onto the roof or landing right outside the compound outweighed the risks of being compromised on the infil and taking casualties. They didn’t mind the walk. The men inside were armed and likely to shoot it out if they had heard the birds approaching.
The CO rubbed the tops of his knees with his hands.
“Good shooting. Good movement.”
He nodded to himself and looked toward the kill TVs flanking the walls, at the other raids and possible targets.
“No follow-ons tonight,” he said, watching the screens. “Get some sleep.”
He looked like he could’ve used some.
The operators got to the war room and changed the batteries in their NODs and lasers. They emptied stale water from their reservoirs and filled them up again with fresh new bottles. They reloaded mags and adjusted their kits and then left for their tents. Outside, the sun would soon be up. The Intel teams would dissect the files and tech devices while the men who took them off the objective slept. The next targets would be waiting for them when they woke.
The machine was up and rolling.
• • •
Hagan pointed his horseshoe at Cooke in the sunlight.
“You know what I like about you, Cooke? You just suck. You know that? Literally suck and are the worst at everything in the whole world. Don’t know what the weather will be like in the next week or two, but one thing’s for sure. Cooke’s gonna keep on sucking.”
Hagan let his horseshoe fly. It missed the stake.
Cooke laughed and pointed his horseshoe at Hagan.
“Hog, listen carefully.” He aimed the horseshoe at the stake and spit at his feet. “Your single greatest accomplishment in life,” he said, letting the shoe fly, “is being a sometimes invalid whose mouth makes him a genuine all-the-time one.” He ringed the stake. “Now bend over real nice like your mother.”
Hagan stood upright with his hands on his hips. “What the hell is an invalid?”
“Look it up,” Cooke said. He gestured with his fingers for Hagan to turn around.
“I will look it up,” Hagan said. Then he flicked Cooke off and dropped his pants. Cooke rubbed his boot in the dirt and kicked Hagan in the ass.
Dalonna laughed, squinting in the bright sunlight. “Hog, why do you keep offering your ass up so much? You’re worth at least double what he’s paying you.”
Hagan turned around to face Dalonna, his pants at his ankles. Then he flicked him off and turned back around to let Cooke kick the other cheek as they had agreed.
It was late in the afternoon, still hot though the sun was getting lower. Dalonna seemed to have cheered up from the night before, and they’d eaten and lifted as a team after getting a few hours of sleep. Shaw had gotten up before the others. He grabbed his ruck and walked around the FOB for a while. Birds flew overhead every now and again and the salat al-’asr echoed throughout speakers from the mosques. Even though the air seemed to be on fire and the dirt was blowing in his face, it still felt good to move around.
They got a 4 while Hagan had his ass hanging out of his pants. Cooke was ready to give him another boot and both he and Hagan paused mid-kick and looked at the beepers clipped onto their belts. Shaw looked at his and so did Dalonna. Massey had marked that he was at the CASH, so he’d be making his way over shortly. Hagan stood up. He pulled up his pants and tightened a fake tie, lifted his chin and put on a snooty face.
“Gentlemen. I am going to masturbate. Do not bother me. See you at the brief.”
• • •
It was early for a brief, 1800 hours.
Like the night before, satellite images were tacked to the thin cardboard strip on top of the whiteboard and individual printouts sat before each seat at the tables. Unlike the night before, the satellite images were of a sprawling city. Clusters of concrete dwellings seemed patched together like the cloth of a quilt, ten or twenty dwellings per block. By the time their CO walked in, nearly forty men had gathered—teams from both squadrons. Guys walking in loose and joking saw the images and got quiet, sat down stiff.
“We traced a number from one of the Tango1 phones found last night to this house,” the CO said. He pointed to the sixth of ten structures running north to south in a crowded neighborhood. “Lots of buildings. Lots of people in the buildings. So we’ll have a few more men than last night. At least double, with options for conventional attachments.”
The men crossed their arms and shifted in their seats.
“The exiting squadron monitored numerous HVTs operating in different al-Ayeelaa cells throughout the city. Three of them travel together—Scar1, 2, and 3—and we’ve got reason to think one of their numbers is the one we traced to this house. They’re not soldiers or button pushers. They’re former academics. Scientists. They’re from the bombing-operations wing of al-Shabaab and rumored to build bombs for Tango1. None of them live in the house, so we believe they’re holding some kind of meeting or clinic. Maybe coordinating with others to distribute their operations throughout different parts of the country.”
He ran his tongue around the inside of his lower lip and pointed to the three headshots on the printouts. “Snatch and grab tonight, boys. We want to get these birdies chirping, so do your best to get them alive.”
He was quiet for a little while then, and put his hand on the back of a chair.
“You guys know the risks of areas like this. We want to get these guys without taking unnecessary causalities, our own or civilian, but it can get messy. Watch your sectors and pull out if things get too thick. I’d rather scrap it on the ground than have news crews running in after we leave.”
He paused and nodded to himself.
“As soon as one of these guys pops we’ll be getting a 1. So no one at the gym. It’s too crowded for the birds tonight. Get the GMVs up and running.”
He left and the men broke into their respective teams, clearing up team-specific issues and then delegating responsibilities and coordinating with others. Shaw and his team drew support. They’d be attached to sniper units on the roofs or staged on the street for immediate insertion on the target.
The city was waiting for them.