Knife (9780698185623) (17 page)

Intel had watched the courier, the driver, for nearly a year. He was thought to run for all three of the Scars at one time, but he'd stopped doing so for the last couple months. The change made Intel wonder what he was doing instead—whether he was dead, running for someone else, or had come to the light—so they increased the surveillance on him and put out requests with other foreign agencies. It turned out he'd been coming in and out of the country often, five or six times in the last four months. He utilized two different safe houses on his trip back into the country and the houses were hundreds of miles apart on the same border. Intel let him continue without bothering him to see who he might lead to, and after his second trip in a single month they started watching him full-time. He was busy. He'd get across the border without any issues and then drive all over the country, picking up women, children, and older men. Intel started calling him the Mayor for the way he made his rounds. When he stopped using his phone Intel really perked up on him. Then one day he picked up a balding man with glasses in a white pickup truck. The balding man was the holder of a Jordanian engineering doctorate. He'd taught at a London university and was asked to leave after his name popped up on a list of donors to a charitable organization that had laundered money to associates of a known bomb-builder. The story had been printed in
The
Times
. He entered the country legally after losing his post, and international intelligence services kept tabs on him for years ever since, letting him move freely and make acquaintances but watching him still. When the Mayor picked him up in the truck, Jordanian intelligence services following the bald man contacted Intel. Intel beeped through the 1 immediately, and the Little Birds were sent out to meet him.

The trunk of the truck was full of packaged fertilizer, hair spray bottles, batteries, five-gallon drums of gasoline, and other white powders in addition to two prototype vests the professor had developed. He saw the birds in the rearview mirror and riffled through a duffel bag in the backseat, arming the vests just as the truck came to a stop. He was a brilliant mathematician, but miscalculated by inches. Intel figured he didn't want to be taken alive and decided to try to kill as many of the operators as possible.

“We couldn't question the shoulder or wrist we found,” Mike said. “But at least they didn't blow in a market or busy street.”

He wore a black ball cap and T-shirt with his bottoms and a pair of shower sandals. He rubbed his hands over his knees and picked at his kneepads with his fingernails. Then he started mumbling softly and no one could hear him over the air conditioners running in the tents. He shook his head and his voice trailed off for good and no one said anything at all. He rubbed his eyes and held his head in his hands. When he looked up again his eyes were red.

Close,
he whispered.
Close
.

•   •   •

D
alonna and Shaw passed their concussion checks six days after the blast. Dalonna trimmed the ends of his sutures to keep them from catching on anything and Shaw walked around during the day in full kit and helmet for hours to see if anything felt off. The kit felt sown to his chest and shoulders and the pads of the helmet found their slots in his skull and hair. Everything felt good. Tight and right. They were on the green again.

The sun was dipping into the horizon and cool air blew on the wind. Fall had left summer for winter during their week off the green and the cold had crept in. The men wore zip-ups, long-sleeve tops, and winter hats to their briefs. They left their tents more during the daylight hours to shoot and play Wiffle ball, and some of the shit stench seemed strangled by the colder winds. They were pitching horseshoes when they got the 4 and Shaw was glad for it. He hadn't ringed a shoe yet and started getting a headache after concentrating on the stake for so long. He didn't want to start having second thoughts whether he should be greened or not. He needed the distraction, saw the boy in the pass whenever he closed his eyes.

“We should grab Donna,” Hagan said.

Then he ringed a shoe. Probably the first anyone had ever seen him land.

“He's on the phones,” Massey said.

Hagan looked off toward the phone tent. He didn't seem to have noticed his shot.

Shaw stood up from the ground where he'd sat staring at the gray mass of clouds overhead. A long gray wall spanning the entire sky. “I'll grab him.”

Hagan nodded and spat in the dirt. “He told me to leave him alone a while ago.” He threw his other shoe and ringed it again. “I think he's messed up.”

“All right. I'll get him,” Shaw said. “Thanks, Hog.”

Cooke pointed to the stake. His mouth was open and his dip had settled untamed in the gaps of his teeth. He pointed to the stake, at the two horseshoes Hagan had ringed.

“Hog, you've never ringed a shoe as long as I've known you, and you just ringed two. What kind of shit are you pulling?”

•   •   •

D
alonna was sitting outside on the dirt with his back propped against the wooden shitter shacks across from the phones. He wore a zip-up and a watch cap pulled low on his head. He had an old pipe in his hand and smoke curled in thick leaden tails from his lips. The clouds were gray and heavy, low in the sky. The same color as his smoke.

Shaw walked up with his hands in his bottom pockets. “Nice pipe.”

Dalonna acknowledged Shaw with his eyes and threw the pipe to his side. It landed in the dirt, the tobacco spilling out on the ground. “It was my granddad's. It's supposed to calm.”

“Does it?”

“Nah. Mainly just tastes like shit.”

Shaw nodded. “You all right, Donna?”

Dalonna's stitches were clipped so close that one or two had broken free from the skin. Shaw could make out small dots of dull red blood that had dried to his face. Dalonna looked at him for a brief while and then shook his head. He let out a heavy breath.

“Little Danny isn't doing too good.”

Shaw tried to picture a Danny they knew. Couldn't find one.

“Who's Danny, Donna?”

Dalonna smiled. “Daniel Dalonna. My boy.”

Shaw said the name in his head a few times, mouthed it with his lips. Daniel Dalonna. Danny. Danny Dalonna. It rolled well. Sounded good.

“Danny Dalonna. Daniel. That's a good name,” Shaw said. “I hadn't heard his name yet.”

“Hadn't told anyone yet.” Dalonna smiled.

“What's wrong with Danny, Donna?”

Dalonna spat at the pipe, missed. “Abnormal nuchal fold.”

Shaw raised his eyebrows.

“It's a fluid buildup in the neck,” Dalonna said. “They can see it on the ultrasound and measure the levels. They have safe levels, averages, and then levels of concern. Mirna had an ultrasound today and Danny's levels aren't good.”

“Not good or bad?”

“Bad.”

“And what does bad mean?”

Dalonna sighed and raised his hands. “Not sure yet. They stabbed Mirna with a needle and took some samples from Danny's neck to test for issues with chromosomes.”

“They took samples from his neck? How the hell do they do that?”

Shaw imagined Dalonna's Danny, the little guy squirming in his mom's fluids and getting tapped with a needle. He probably wasn't even the size of an acorn yet.

“They stabbed Mirna in the stomach with some big-ass needle and took samples from his neck,” Dalonna said. “Maybe his body. I don't know. He's the size of a fucking plum. A lime.”

Shaw looked at his hand. He imagined a small fruit that could sit in his palm. “Damn. Donna, I'm sorry.”

“The needle could've killed him to begin with, and Mirna said it hurt like hell, but the doctor said it was necessary. If we wanted to know if he'll live or not.” Dalonna rubbed the heels of his boots in the dirt.

“Live? Why wouldn't he live?”

Dalonna shrugged. “That's what the tests will say, I guess. Larger nuchal folds can mean Down's syndrome and trisomies, or other disorders that can kill him before he's even born.”

“Can mean isn't a sure thing. Right?”

“Yeah, that's what I told Mirna. But apparently the doctor was freaking her out. He told her to consider her options for the pregnancy.”

“Options as in?”

“Termination.”

“Because of a fluid buildup in his neck?”

“Yeah. He gave Danny a twenty percent chance of living. Less than ten for having a normal life. Based off his experience.”

“His experience.” Shaw spat. “Twenty percent? Because of some fluid. How much experience does this doc have?”

“I don't know. At least thirty or forty years. He's a gray-hair. Mirna said he's some expert in the field. He's not her normal doctor. They called him in when they saw the nuchal-fold levels.”

“Screw him, Donna. Gray-hairs don't even know how to drive.”

Dalonna laughed and wiped his hands in the dirt, rubbed them together slowly. He locked his fingers together and looked at his boots.

“Man, I want a boy. I love my girls. But I want a boy.”

He sat propped against the shitters with his shoulders slack and deflated. His neck hung exposed and limp to one side like he was waiting for a blade to take his head off. He looked scared and young. Fragile. Then he brought a hand up and started picking at his stitches. He took one out, and then the others. Blood started to trickle down his face in slow beads that left behind thin trails.

“Mirna almost lost one of her boys a couple days ago and Danny could be waiting to die inside her.” His hand disappeared into one of his pockets and he pulled out the beeper. “I got the 4.”

“You can get out of it, Donna. No worries.”

“I'm good. Just need a few minutes.”

“Donna—”

“I'll be fine. Meet you at the brief.”

Shaw nodded because he didn't know what to say. He turned around and left Dalonna. Then he turned back and Dalonna waved him on and Shaw walked to the briefing room. On his way he kept opening and closing his hands. Shaw imagined the smooth skin of a plum nestled in his palm. It would be so easy to break.

•   •   •

T
he men ate frosted Halloween cookies sent over from Massey's niece, Penelope, as they waited for the brief to begin. Dalonna came in after the others had already gathered. He grabbed a cookie and the laminated printout in front of him and studied both of them for a while. Then he put down the printout, ate the cookie, and rubbed Hagan's head and patted Shaw on the back. There were twenty of them in the room. Four teams.

“We're getting off the Scar intel for a while,” the CO said. “After the village and the car bombing we're going to develop the intel a little more before moving on any more of it. We'll be heading up north tonight. There's already some snow up there.” He shrugged. “So it'll be a little cold.”

The men were already wearing long sleeves, zip-ups, and winter hats. The real cold might've saved itself for the night in the south where the FOB was, but it had already crept into the daylight throughout the rest of the country. The mountains were full of snow. A couple of the southern boys had full jackets on.

“Our target's with one of his wives tonight,” the CO said. “They loaded into a black SUV with a few other FAMs and left the city in the morning. Not sure if they're making a run for the border and just squatting for the night or just dicking around, but we can't risk it. As you can see”—he pointed to the satellite images—“they're completely isolated. Not another building for at least a klick in any direction, and most of them are goat-herding squat shacks already abandoned for the winter.”

They went over the target and his accomplices during the brief, their reasons for catching Intel's attention. The FAMs were given the moniker Pup1–4 for the way they followed the target, Lion1, around like his puppies. Lioness1 was the wife.

“She might talk more than any of the men,” the CO said. “We don't usually get a chance at the women if little kids are around, so getting her alive will be priority one.”

Lion1 was a Saudi in his late forties, an old man for the region he was from. He grew up in a centuries-old village carved into the side of a mountain, and as a boy he was rumored to have killed his own father for abusing one of his sisters. Apparently he ran away to a madrassa for refuge and found his fire. He was a leader from an early age and he'd grown tall and crooked at the hip from a round that had found his legs during the war in the region with the Soviets in the eighties. He was known to hack off the legs of those who fell out of his favor and he kept the de-legged alive to spread fear among his ranks, forcing them to act as runners in firefights. They'd wheel ammo carts tied to their middles and have to crawl around boulders and rocks. He walked with a limp but carried no cane and was known to shave his peppery beard when he planned on making a move. He hadn't been seen in four years and then a CIA asset on the ground had sent pictures of him with his beard shaved just the day before and Intel pounced.

Lion1 had formerly led an al-Qaeda cell the squadrons had decimated. In the first years of the war his network owned the western regions of the country. If a bomb blew or a body showed up missing its head in an irrigation ditch west of the capital, Lion1's network had a hand in it. At the height of his power he even had his name thrown in on the ballot for election to the position of Ministry of Defense for the rebuilding government. But he didn't win and the political move poisoned his network. Captains in his cell alleged that he was straying off the sect's polarized path of sharia, getting too Westernized with his political aims, so there were assassination attempts. One day his car blew up as it idled next to a fruit stand in a bazaar. He'd gotten out to look at some clothes for sale across the street when the bomb planted in a melon stand next to his car by one of his exiled lieutenants detonated. The blast killed the driver, liquefied the seats, and twisted the metal skeleton of the vehicle. But Lion1 didn't die in the blast, so he killed the exiled lieutenant and his family and left the bodies in an irrigation ditch off a dirt road. Then he started getting paranoid and killed off his other officers. His cell leaders showed up bound on the sides of busy roads with bullets in the backs of their heads. Weeks and months passed and the killings didn't, so he lost his clout and his followers. Other cells took over his network while it was reeling, killing those who refused to switch allegiances, until there was nothing but scraps left. The Pups were his oldest living son, his nephew, and two cousins of one of his three wives. The shaved beard and trip up north were reason enough for Intel to move, so the 4 came through.