For Your Tomorrow (21 page)

A
T
F
ANJOY’S
P
OINT
, it’s not the usual Canada Day weekend of kayaking, playing horseshoes, building a bonfire on the beach and lighting fireworks. Marion and Russ haven’t heard from Jeff for several days. They stay within hearing range of the black rotary phone in the corner of the living room, willing it to ring. Marion keeps busy, preparing for Jeff, Sylvie and Ry’s visit in August. She paints their bedroom a warm yellow and sets up a crib for Ry; arranges toys, stuffed animals and picture books. Russ hangs a baby swing from a branch of a tall poplar. He puts the mast up on his new sailboat, tests all the rigging, winches and blocks—all set for him and Jeff to hoist the sails for the first time in Grand Lake.

By July 2, it’s been ten days since Sylvie—or anyone—has talked with Jeff. When he finally calls, he tells her that he’s been in the field constantly on surveillance.

“Something doesn’t feel right … I’m nervous,” she says. “Maybe it’s just getting too close to the end.”

“It’s time to search the real estate listings,” he says, “see what’s up for sale around the Downsview base. Maybe we should look for a four-bedroom.”

“Why four?”

“We’ll need one for guests,” he says, a grin lightening his voice, “and maybe Ry will have a little brother or sister sometime soon.”

Half a world between them, they conjure their sustaining vision—finally a home together, the three of them. They talk about Ry, seven months old today—his first tooth just poking through. “He can sit up all by himself now,” Sylvie says. “He loves banging on the pots with a wooden spoon.”

“Cool,” Jeff chuckles, “can’t wait to be there and drum along with him.” They talk for forty-five minutes, their longest phone conversation since he’s been in Afghanistan. When it’s time to say goodbye, she can’t let go.

“I don’t have a good feeling,” she says, choking back her tears.

He tries to reassure her with his motto: “I’m coming back. I’ll be home soon.”

After the Canada Day celebrations at KAF, the Lucky 13 team returned to their desert outpost on July 2 without their second-in-command. Sergeant Clay Cochrane has flown to Italy to spend his leave with his wife and children. Meanwhile, Major Chris Henderson’s infantry company and their partnered Afghan National Army have closed in on the IED cell responsible for the deaths of their three comrades on June 20. Intelligence reports reveal that it’s an experienced group of foreign bomb-makers. They could be hiding in Nakhonay, a village east of their post—an area the company doesn’t often patrol. Its inhabitants are mainly
the Noorzai, a major Pashtun tribe and the most pro-Taliban.

An operation is planned for the early morning of July 4—“to kick the hornet’s nest,” Major Henderson says—to surround the cell and flush them out into the open. With a combat team of eighty Canadian troops and sixty Afghan soldiers, it will be one of their largest operations. On the night of July 3, soldiers clean their weapons, load magazines, install fresh batteries in night-vision goggles, check explosive bags and mine detectors. As they’re organizing their kit, Jeff decides he needs to talk to Major Henderson. The plan is for Jeff’s crew to set up an operating post atop Salavat Ghar, a mountain near the village. Equipped with a suite of radios, they will have networks open for communication with ground and air forces—Major Henderson and gunners in the village below, and task force headquarters at KAF. They’ll be listening for aircraft roaming the skies overhead, and surveying the environs with high-powered field glasses. As artillery FOO, Jeff will call in and coordinate artillery gun support, mortars and helicopter gunships should a fight break out.

“Boss,” he says, “I’ve been thinking about my positioning in the operation tomorrow.” He takes a seat across from the major’s desk, covered with a relief map of the Panjwaii district. “If I’m up here on the mountain,” he says, pointing on the map to Salavat Ghar, “and there’s ground fog in the valley, I won’t have a clear view of the village. It’ll be tough to pinpoint exact locations of enemy fire if I need to call in some rounds.”

The major furrows his brow. “You’re right. The valley fog can be pretty thick early in the morning.”

“What if I stay with you on the ground and my crew goes up the mountain for observation?”

“That makes sense. Good plan, Captain Francis.” Henderson nods. “I should have thought of it myself.”

Jeff meanders up the hill to the Hotel and gazes up into the bejewelled sky, awed by the incomprehensible infinity of blinking stars and planets.
All the stars are abloom with flowers
. He thinks about the Little Prince, living and laughing on one of those stars. And about his granny. Which star is hers? He can still hear her soft easy laughter—whenever she told the story about opening her door and seeing him with the two provosts; or about the time they drove Jack’s Oldsmobile into the ditch. He smiles, infused with memory.

A meteor flares across the sky. An omen, he thinks, but can’t recall if it’s for good or ill. Just before he steps down into their bunk room, he feels for the block letters he chiselled into the rough plywood siding. He traces each letter with his fingertips:

He carved one letter a week for the past seven weeks—marking his time, leaving his name in the desert. He stretches out on his cot and drops into sleep. A jackal yips and yowls in the distance.

At 1:00 a.m., the soldiers are up, packing gear into the vehicles. As Jeff’s crew mounts their LAV, he pounds fists with each of them—Steve, Carlo, David and Adam. “Be
sharp up on that mountain, brothers,” he says. “See you in a few hours.” And he climbs into the back of Captain Matt Dawe’s RG-31 Nyala.

At 3:00, the eighteen-vehicle convoy moves out into the pre-dawn darkness and rumbles along the desert track without headlights. Drivers navigate through their night-vision goggles. Intelligence reports warn that the Taliban has put more than eighteen IEDs in the area, so they’re taking a route they normally don’t travel. It’s slow going along Lake Effect Road as thick ground fog obscures the rutted trail.

They reach the outskirts of Nakhonay; infantry soldiers and snipers sneak around to the north end to block an escape route. Engineers and LAVs set up another cut-off on the east side. Then the convoy thunders down the main road towards the village, raising whirlwinds of powdery dust. Tanks, with mine-clearing rollers and ploughs, lead the way. Jeff listens through his crackling headset, ready to call in “danger close” fire support.

A pale sun burns through the fog at 5:30. The armoured vehicles form a leaguer—a circular defensive position with LAV guns facing outward—where a crew will stay behind to operate the radios and weapons systems, and monitor movement in the surrounding mountains. The soldiers dismount, prepare their backpacks and set out on patrol. They troop through the narrow laneways, the village as eerily still as a ghost town, skirt the perimeters of the two walled-in compounds and tromp through the stubbly fields. Patrolling with Captain Matt Dawe, Sergeant Sean Connors and their Afghan interpreter, Jeff feels eyes tracking them.
Two radios strapped to his back, he picks up chatter through his headset: “Taliban are in the area, watching our every move—stay alert.”

They come upon some villagers and stop to study them. How would they even recognize a Talib if they met one? Black beards, dark turbans, baggy brown kameez—they just blend in with the locals. Captain Dawe questions them about Taliban hideouts, caches of weapons and bomb-making supplies. The men shrug their shoulders, plead ignorance. But their shifty eyes belie their words. “Yeah, right,” Captain Dawe glares at them. “Another fucking wild-goose chase for the elusive Taliban.”

They plod on into the pitiless heat of the morning. Traversing an open field, they assess the ground before every footfall. Packed soil is okay. Loosened dirt is suspect. They’re halted by a wadi, a gully almost two metres wide rushing with runoff from the Arghandab River. A dog is barking somewhere close by. “How do we get across this?” Sergeant Connors asks, as they stare into the muddy water. “I wonder how deep it is.”

“There’s only one way to find out,” Jeff says, taking a few steps back. He makes a running leap and lands in the middle of the stream. After trudging for two tense hours in the sun—twenty-five kilograms of equipment strapped to his back, twenty kilos of armour encasing his sweating body—this is as good as it gets. He whoops and splashes as the waist-high water swirls around him.

When the major dispatches the order to head back to the vehicles, the mid-morning sun is scorching. There was
no kicking down doors and ransacking houses to uncover a bomb-making lab. They are more concerned with showing respect for the villagers and trying to gain their trust. Soldiers strip off their gear, guzzle water from canteens and load up. Jeff’s crew and LAV are a couple of kilometres outside the village, so he’ll catch a ride back with Matt Dawe. He radios up to Steve at their operating post atop Salavat Ghar. “Just mounting up,” he says. “See you guys back at camp.” He’s about to step into the RG when he hears a commotion around the LAV behind him. Jason is barking one-word commands and gesticulating, trying to round up some Afghan soldiers and steer them into the vehicle. “Master Corporal Francis,” Jeff shouts, “having fun?”

Jason turns around to see his cousin’s face lit up with laughter. “There’s never a damn’terp around when you need one,” Jason calls back, rolling his eyes.

Jeff flashes him a wide smile and disappears into the RG. He pulls the door tight and nods to the men inside the dark steel box. He buckles the seat belt across his torso, settles back against the hard plastic seat and looks around.
The windows are nice, and it’s the safest vehicle we’ve got. But it just doesn’t have that secure homey feel of Lucky 13
.

B
Y
10:30
IN THE MORNING
of July 4, it is already heating up to another sizzling day at the Kandahar Airfield. Captain Scott Lang is strolling down the boardwalk on his way to work at Canadian Military Headquarters when he meets a colleague from his regiment. “There’s just been another
bomb go off,” he tells Scott. “We’ve lost one of our artillery call signs—G 1-3.”

G 1-3? That’s Jeff
. “Lost?” Scott asks. “You mean killed?”

“Yeah—six soldiers dead.”

Scott has seen his friend but a few times in the past five months. Jeff was constantly in the field. The last time was on Canada Day—three days ago. They had a beer together, and he noticed the Lucky 13 tattoo on Jeff’s forearm.
The last time
. The words sear into his mind.
Impossible
. Jeff’s face appears before him—his shy smile, his open infectious laugh. A montage of memories replays in an instant: seeing Jeff cold, wet and miserable during basic training; seeing him hot, sweaty and exhausted in officers’ training; seeing him pushed to his limits in pre-deployment exercises.
Seeing Jeff at his worst meant seeing him at his best. I never saw him defeated by anything
.

And in that gut-churning moment, Scott knows what he must do to honour his comrade, what he needs to do to repay his debt of friendship. He marches over to the National Command Element building, headquarters for the Canadian contingent in Afghanistan. He asks to speak with the casualty administrator, the officer who coordinates all aspects of a fallen soldier’s return and repatriation. “Sir, I request permission to serve as escort for Captain Francis,” Scott says, blinking his eyes quickly to keep the tears down. “I believe I am the best person to carry out this duty, sir.” He explains their intersecting career paths, their common circle of acquaintances, their friendship. “The love the soldiers felt for Jeff as a leader and a friend was universal,” Scott says, his mouth completely dry as he tries to swallow.
“It would be an honour and privilege for me to escort Captain Francis back home.”

The evening of July 5, a pale yellow moon rises above spotlit Canadian flags drooping half-mast in the warm windless air. Standing at attention on the Kandahar Airfield, Captain Scott Lang feels the day’s heat still radiating off the pavement. Six LAVs trundle across the square; six red-and-white-draped caskets protrude from their open hatches. The vehicles come to a stop. Each casket is eased out by eight soldiers in tan camouflage uniforms and sandy combat boots. They hoist the coffins up onto their shoulders and carry them, slowly, along the yellow line of the tarmac between fourteen rows of troops. A soldier bearing a beret in his open hands follows each one. The bagpipes wail into the darkness: