Knife (9780698185623) (22 page)

“What a cluster,” Hagan said.

Shaw watched him close his eyes and unbuckle his helmet, rest his head against the carrier. Hagan breathed deep and raised his voice.

“We're gods.”

T
he head of al-Ayeelaa sat in his upstairs bedroom, with the window open, puffing on an American cigarette. He'd seen footage of the raid in his city, in the very compound he owned, on the TV from his house nearly an hour away. Had he looked out the right window at the right time, he might have been able to see the smoke rising into the sky. He rubbed the bridge of his nose between his fingers. The smoke of his cigarette trailed out the window, reaching toward the morning sun.

“Should we be worried?” his wife had asked him earlier.

Images of explosions and screaming masses flashed on the TV behind her. He knew many of the faces on the TV. She had her hands on her hips.

“No,” he said. “We shouldn't.”

“You're sure.”

“Yes.”

“You're positive.”

“Yes.”

“Okay.”

She walked out of the room and tried herding her three children outside to play on the tire swing in the front yard. He had left the TV and climbed the stairs, sat on the edge of his bed.

He smoked only upstairs and had chosen Marlboros exclusively for the last decade, no matter how hard it was to get them. When he'd fought the Russians he smoked only Sobranies. He sat with his legs crossed, a wrist balanced elegantly over his knee. He looked at the leather bracelet on his wrist. A hunk of marble mountainside blasted by a Soviet rocket that had literally landed in his lap was fashioned between the dark leather straps. Pieces of the rock had lodged in his legs when the rocket hit, nearly killing him. He'd packed the rock in his sack and steeled his men and they held out and the Spetsnaz retreated. The man had called it a victory, though he probably knew it just hadn't been a defeat. He had bracelets made up from the hunk of rock for his nephews and nieces, and their eyes lit up when they saw the flecks of ruby in the smoky rock. It made him smile. One of the nephews he'd given a bracelet to—his favorite and the only one who'd fought with him—was dead and another was missing. He vowed to care for the dead nephew's wife, so he had her remarried to one of his top lieutenants. He hadn't made it to the family pass yet to speak with his brother and formally grieve. Make peace.

The morning's fight in his compound would complicate things. He and his wife had talked about what she would do if he was ever taken by the Americans. There would be one call from the phone buried in plastic in their compost pile out back. The family would wait, he hoped he'd return, and then they would have to go into hiding. They hadn't had to yet, but he knew that probably wouldn't last.

Most of the other cell leaders were arrogant and dead, or soon to be. They made videos claiming responsibility for attacks, and doing so restricted their movements. Meanwhile, he had been able to walk around, live a normal life with his family. His oldest daughter was even in the West, of all places, studying at university. It was his suggestion, helped with appearances.

Then the family phone rang and he heard his wife's voice. She called him downstairs. He closed his eyes, took a deep breath, and rose off the bed. He turned and smoothed the bedspread with his hands, his cigarette stuck to his lips. It was his wife's side of the bed. He stood upright, left the window open. His children's rooms weren't far down the hall. He wet his fingertips and squeezed the lit tip, then he left the cigarette on the windowsill.

He walked downstairs, picked up the phone. A man's voice. Speaking fast. He cut him off.

“You called my home. Still, you called my home. Did they find anything? No. You're sure. What happened to the computers? And everything was moved. You're sure. Slow down. It's okay. No, I'm not mad at you. It was a matter of time. Yes, the mountains. I don't know. Could be tonight, could be weeks. Years. No. I'm not mad. Yes. I'd leave right away. Yes, we'll have to leave soon. This is your cell? How many cards do you have? Get rid of them. Yes, all but the one. Yes, theirs, too. Yes. All of them. No throw them away, you should have long ago. Good-bye. See you.”

The call took only a few minutes, the man's voice on the other end rushed and breathless. It was the last time the two would speak and the man who received the call likely knew it, for he would put everything in motion. The ambush would buy him and his family time, but at the expense of the lives of others. Those decisions had been made so many times now that he probably didn't even think twice as he said good-bye to the man who would soon be dead.

His two boys were at his side when he put the receiver back in the cradle. He hadn't seen them enter from the yard. The call was distracting. They tugged on his pants with their little hands. His shirt. They pointed outside to the yard and he looked through the living room window. His wife stood at the tire swing with her arms held out, palms turned up. She shrugged and laughed. She couldn't push as high.

“Okay,” he said. “Grab your sister. She likes to fly, too.”

The boys ran off, babbling excitedly. They screamed for their sister to come out of her room while the sound of an insect buzzing came from the kitchen. He walked over, craned his neck over the kitchen sink, and looked out the window. Helicopters flew overhead lazily in the sun. They looked like the pair his men had put down just a month or two before.

W
hen the operators got back to the FOB, news of the raid was already streaming through the international news outlets. Video of the streets and bodies all torn to hell flooded the different broadcasts. Crowds were rioting and burning American flags, holding the Koran up and spitting in reporters' microphones. The teams gathered in the TOC for the AAR and watched the news feeds, looking at the streets they'd been on hours before through the eyes of Al Jazeera, the BBC, and CNN. A reporter held up a teddy bear and talked about possible civilian casualties. One of the techs watching the raid in the TOC pointed at the bear. “Ten bucks they placed that in the street after we left,” he said. “I've seen it before. And civvies don't tote weapons. What the hell, CNN?”

During the AAR, guys watching the raid on monitors back in the TOC told the teams people were running toward the compound like water rushing into a sewer. People were hopping rooftops and sprinting from storefronts and alleyways carrying AKs and RPGs, anything that threw fire. People came forward in waves and the men dropped them all as long as they carried weapons. Men or women, it didn't matter. Their CO looked gaunt and exhausted. He held a cup of coffee in his hand during the meeting and it shook gently during the whole brief. He looked like he hadn't heard a single word the teams had said. He kept rubbing his forehead, running his hands through his hair, and nodding along even after they'd stopped talking.

The whole squadron was put off the green for a week so command could sift through the blowback and decide how much to release to the public. The phones would be locked down and the men's families would see all the news broadcasts and think about the calls that weren't coming, and the smart ones would connect the dots. The two governments would posture with each other and make demands and accept political apologies in public, exchange partial truths and come to commonsense understandings in private.

While they were off the green, the men lifted and ate and shot at the range. They read books and watched feeds from other countries and targets. The news broadcasted reports on the raid for days and the men pointed out discrepancies during meals and between sets. Some tallies had hundreds of deaths while others had them as low as forty-six. After the AAR, they came up with eighty-three. But the birds couldn't verify the kills like the men could. Regardless of the reports, a lot of people weren't breathing anymore. The guys felt confident they didn't drop anyone who didn't have a weapon and Shaw knew he didn't, but the men still didn't paint the mission a success. They didn't find a single device, let alone a single FAM. The family men in the squadrons took the news reports calling them murderers of children especially hard. They ran until they puked and wore their hats down low on their faces.

Shaw dreamt for a few nights about the woman he and Hagan flex-cuffed, and decided he didn't need the sleep bad enough. He packed his ruck and walked around during the day and night, logging more than a hundred miles during the week. He would watch the clouds pass and blot out the sky and let the wind bat his beard. In one of the dreams Hagan used the knife to slit the woman's throat when she lifted her chin. It was a bloody mess. In another, her face was covered by her chador and then she ripped it off and it was Shaw's grandma. She smiled at him with bloody teeth.

He and Massey had a catch every day. They talked about the raid and others that had passed and about Penelope. The leather struck leather for hours in the sun. It felt good. Like home and childhood. One afternoon Shaw was wearing one of Massey's Cardinals hats for him again and Massey told him not to mess with the brim.

“You told me you wanted me to break it in.”

“Break it in, yeah. Not fuck it up.”

Shaw gave the brim a tug and Massey winced.

“How're you a Cardinals fan and a Bears fan?” Shaw asked.

“What do you mean?”

“Well. You're from Illinois. So you got the Bears, I'll give you that. But what about the Cardinals. Why not the Cubs or the Sox?”

“We're closer to Saint Louis than Chicago.”

“Then why aren't you a Rams fan?”

“The Rams were in L.A. when I grew up,” Massey said. “Plus, I don't like the AL and I'm not a martyr, so being a Cubs fan is a definite no-go.”

“Got it.”

“You giving me shit about my teams? You've got the Vikings and the Twins. Don't get me started on hockey. You couldn't even hold on to your damn team. Or basketball. You don't want me to get started on basketball.”

“We've got rivers and lakes and Mother Earth. You can keep the Cards and the Bears.”

Massey laughed.

They were really hitting the leather well. The sun was starting to dip and Shaw felt good. He went into his chest pocket, took out the envelope holding his grandma's necklace.

“Do you think Penelope would like this?”

He held it up by its silver chain. It looked beautiful in the light. Every shade of blue was crisp and clear, the lines of white thin and pure like silk or diamond threads. The sun cast its blue mass in the dirt. It even made the dirt look nice.

“That was your grandma's.”

Massey wasn't asking. Every man in the squadron had probably seen Shaw's grandma wearing it in the picture taped to the locker. She was beautiful for her age and the necklace hinted at royalty. Guys passing by might have thought Shaw was related to some foreign queen or duchess.

Shaw nodded.

“Why would you want to give it away?”

“Not so much wanting to give it away as hoping it would get better use than sitting inside one of my pockets,” Shaw said. “My kit'll crush it.”

“Penelope would love it. You're sure?”

Shaw nodded. He was. “Just give it to her in person. I want to hear about how excited she is. And I don't trust the damn mail.”

“You've been wearing it under your kit?”

Shaw nodded.

“In the envelope?”

Shaw nodded. He walked over to Massey, put the necklace in the envelope, and handed it to him. Massey held the envelope up in his hand.

“Must've brought you some luck,” Massey said. “That blast should've killed you and Donna. And I won't put it in the mail. Maybe it'll bring me some luck, too.” He put the envelope in his cargo pocket and closed the flap.

They threw the ball over the dirt for hours, stopped talking for a while. The only sound the ball striking mitts and the birds that flew overhead. Then their arms got sore and they forgot about it in time. Shaw hadn't had a catch that long in his whole life. He felt weightless. Then Massey spoke.

“You think we're killing more than we're making?”

“What? Who?”

“Terrorists. Al-Ayeelaa. Bomb makers. HVTs. Resident dickheads. Whoever.”

Shaw caught the ball and ran his fingers over the stained off-white leather. “I hope so. We're killing a lot.”

Massey nodded to himself. “I think I'm glad I'm getting out. The war's changing.”

“Changing how?”

“Drones. Kid suicide bombers. Al-Ayeelaa. No one wants to shoot it out anymore. We're barely going after key guys anymore because we already killed them. UBL. Zarqawi. Saddam and his sons. No one even knows the structure of the damn cell. Nothing but wannabe dons and kid lieutenants left and we're wasting them before they get big.”

“You want to let them get big? You don't have to be big to blow people apart.”

Massey nodded for a while and then threw the ball back. “I got six of them the other day, Shaw. How many of them were innocent? We got what, eighty-three?”

It had gotten cold out. They could see their breaths rising in front of them.

“Angles and opportunities, Mass. And you didn't hit anyone that wasn't trying to hit you. Did you see anyone get hit without a weapon?”

Massey spat on the ground and caught the ball. He shook his head. Then he was quiet for a while. The ball smacked the leather for a few more throws, neither one of them saying much of anything. “But that was a lot of people. We didn't get any of the Pikes. They weren't even there. No computers. No phones. Nothing.”

“Yeah, they must've ducked out after popping hot,” Shaw said.

Massey looked at the sky and shrugged. “Or they were never there.”

The clouds were moving fast and disappearing over the mountains, tiny teeth of the earth in the distance. Massey fired the ball. It hit the meat of Shaw's palm, stung hard.

“You ever feel like a murderer?”

Shaw dropped his glove to his thigh. “That's a hell of a question, Mass.”

Massey shrugged.

Shaw thought about it and rifled the ball back at him. He tried to make it hurt. Massey didn't let on, but Shaw thought it marked his palm pretty good.

“Probably not. Maybe. No. No. We kill people, but that doesn't mean they were murdered. You hold a weapon, you can only be killed. Not murdered.”

Massey let his hands fall to his sides. “That boy in the pass wasn't holding shit. And that little girl in the poppy fields? Whenever I see Penelope I see that little girl. Smell those damn poppies. Hell, I can't hold Penelope's hand without feeling the hand of that little girl. I'm fucked if I ever have a daughter.”

Shaw thought of their last deployment, the night their team hit a river hamlet in a field of white and pink poppies and three squirters fled the objective. Two men had weapons and a woman looked to be strapped with a device, so the team took them all out. Shaw walked up to the bodies with Hagan, Cooke, Massey, and Dalonna, and they began checking the dead. Then there was an animal shriek, a high squeal coming from the dirt that sounded like a fawn Shaw had hit with his grandpa's truck when he was learning to drive—the fawn's legs had gotten all wrapped up in the Ford's axle like a barber pole. Shaw rolled over the dead woman and there was a little girl lying trapped beneath her. The woman had been carrying the little girl like a backpack. The girl was wailing and pulling at the dead woman's black hair and Massey freed her from the corpse and walked her back to the house while the team finished searching the bodies. They found out the woman was the girl's mother and one of the dead HVTs the father, so they had orphaned her. Shaw watched the little girl standing at kneepad height, holding Massey's hand while he walked her away from her parents. She had leaves and little poppy petals in her tangled black hair and she kept looking back at her mom and dad lying dead at Shaw's feet. In Shaw's dreams, her cries had turned to laughter.

Shaw had a big dip in and it was getting stale, not settling right. His stomach started fighting back. He spat it out and ran his tongue over the stray flecks, gathered them together and started spitting them out in bursts. He shook his head.

“I hope he was a lookout, maybe for those two guys Mike put down the night before. If that's the case, then it was operational security and just part of the knife.”

“And if he wasn't a lookout?” Massey asked.

“Then yeah, I think we could've murdered him. But I gave the call and it's on me, then. And that girl—” He shook his head. He saw her eyes and her face with the poppy petals in her hair. Always. He saw Massey holding her hand and walking her back to her home while he searched the mother and father. Always would. “She was a mistake. We shouldn't have killed her mom.”

Massey caught the ball and took off his glove and rubbed the ball between his hands. “A mistake.”

“Yeah. A mistake. A bad one.”

Massey nodded to himself and tossed the ball back. “Hell of a mistake. She doesn't have parents anymore.” He rested his glove under his armpit and rubbed his hands together again. “My hands are sore. And I think we murdered her.”

“We didn't do anything. I gave the damn order and Hagan took the shot. It's on me. And if it happened once or twice it doesn't mean it's a habit or an identity. Who we are.”

Massey smiled at him and nodded. He held his glove out like a serving platter. “I'm worn out, I guess. Over the war. And one of us would've taken that shot with or without you saying so. You're a good shit, Dutch,” he said. “Not sleeping for shit, though, huh?”

“You watching me sleep?”

Massey laughed. “Nah, I'm not that creepy. Eyes and ears, you know?” He walked to Shaw and slapped him on the back. “Part of the job.”

Shaw spat and rubbed his beard. Then he took off his hat and rubbed his eyes.

“There's no shame in it, Dutch. Hell, we all sleep like crap.”

•   •   •

E
veryone was losing it being off the green. The teams walked around the compound loaded up with hundreds of pounds of gear and shot on the range until trigger fingers blistered over and popped. If the days were theirs to do as they pleased, they spent the nights together watching feeds from other raids as if it were required. Hagan decided it was okay to start whacking off in the tent, so he just put a blanket over himself and pretended no one else was there, grabbed a
Playboy
or a
Hustler
and
went to town on himself. Dalonna told him he was disgusting and Hagan just called him a prude and started asking for pictures of Mirna before he propped up his whack tent. Dalonna picked his battles, though. He didn't split Hagan's lip or mash up his guts. He waited.

Then the last night they were off the green he got Massey, Cooke, and Shaw to leave the tent when Hagan said he was too tired to shoot, ruck, or lift. Dalonna told the three of them to wait outside the tent and then he ran off to the other tents and rounded up the other teams. Somehow nearly twenty guys crept into the tent without Hagan hearing them. Sure enough, Hagan was huddled under a blanket, his hairy white ass sticking out bare and naked in a gap of the cloth. The blanket was rocking back and forth and a dim bulb of light was visible through the blanket. The men could hear the crinkle of magazine pages being turned. Dalonna slapped Hagan's bare ass and Hagan let out a high yip and they all grabbed ahold of his arms and legs. They carried him out into the night screaming and ass naked, his hard-on slapping his thighs and belly. Then they taped him to the railing of one of the shitters and his hard-on drooped in the cold air like a limp flag on a dead wind.