Knife (9780698185623) (26 page)

The smaller structures blended in well with the arced ridgeline covered in snow, but the smoke coming from the pupil compound in the middle of the structures did not. Whoever was in the building wasn't thinking about keeping their necks from getting slit but rather their nuts from freezing. The perimeter teams radioed in that they were breaking off and setting up around the flanks of the buildings. They would post up along the ridgeline and start looking for tunnels as soon as the teams started knocking down doors. They'd take care of anyone squirted out of the warmth.

When they were a couple hundred meters from the first few dwellings, Shaw radioed in that they were making their approach. The pupil compound sat above the others by at least a full story, but it was smaller than he thought it would be. Made of stone or dried mud, the second story sat above the small, wooden shedlike structures like a top hat. The sheds were even smaller—some entirely covered in snow. Mike's team got parallel to Shaw and they started their walk. The perimeter teams spread out around the compound and hugged the ridgeline, looking for tunnels. Shaw looked up and saw the strobe of a Spooky circling thousands of feet above. From the aircraft watching them on surveillance, the men must have looked like the expanding head of a firework just after it bursts.

A shed not tall enough for a grown man to stand upright in was the first structure on their movement. It didn't have a door, so Shaw just painted the inside, found it empty except for a shovel and a bucket, and they continued to the pupil. The ground between the structures was dirt beaten flat into hard-top by the weather and treads from the jeeps and pickups that disappeared over the hills. Snow was beaten down into the ground, and sparse patches of dead grass sprang out every couple feet like weeds through pavement. The air felt damp and everything smelled like wet wool and smoke.

They lined up to the left of the pupil's door and Shaw stepped into the doorway and ran his hands over the frame. There was a padlock the size of a man's hand on the door, holding a clasp lock shut. The door was flimsy and seemed out of place against the hard foundation.

“Hard charge,” he whispered into the comms.

Mike came over the comms from one of the smaller structures to their right.

“We got three doors at head height,” he said. “They're all padlocked. They look like a storage shed we could clear with a flashlight. Maybe we should breach the pupil all together and handle the sheds afterward. Advise.”

That made sense. The pupil was far larger and Shaw could use Mike's team. Shaw looked at the clasp lock shut before him and thought about the shed he'd breached before. There wasn't a door on it, let alone a lock, and it was a genuine shed. Nothing but a shovel and a bucket inside. If the other sheds were that small it would be pointless to breach the pupil alone. But Mike said he had three head-height doors padlocked alongside one another. They sounded bigger than the shed Shaw had cleared.

“I'll come over and take a look,” Shaw said.

Shaw stepped back from the door and looked at the height of the pupil. It seemed smaller now that he was standing in front of it. If it was smaller than they'd assumed from the satellite footage, then the sheds must be even smaller. If they were as small as the shed he had first breached, then they would all breach the pupil together and have the perimeter teams check the sheds. No matter how long they studied layouts, they always had to adapt to the situation on the ground. He looked toward the sheds surrounding the large structure and paused, almost told Mike to just come on over with his team and get on the other side of the wall. Instead he looked behind him and motioned to the door.

“Hog,” he whispered. “We're blowing it. Get the charge set up and we'll blow it when I get back.”

Hagan gave a thumbs-up and Shaw made his way over to Mike's team.

•   •   •

W
hen the investigation into the bombing mentioned a pressure plate, Shaw knew that wasn't right. At least not if the plate functioned properly. He would've been blown apart before he even got a chance to finish checking the door frame for wires. It had to have been detonated by remote. The bomb was placed directly under the doorway like a welcome mat, only a few feet below the earth. The investigating teams insisted that a pressure plate could have been used, maybe Shaw had simply missed stepping on it, but once they reviewed the footage and saw him standing on top of the threshold they dismissed the possibility. They agreed that someone must have been waiting in the woods or on the ridgeline—maybe in one of the small sheds—and blown the thing by remote.

In the ambush sprung immediately after the blast from a few of the smaller shacks, the perimeter teams wiped out the nine fighters within seconds. Then a team found and entered a tunnel carved into the rock and killed Iris1 shortly after the other nine were killed. He was sitting on an ammo crate with a handheld radio, an AK-47, and two bodyguards. None of the bodies had a trigger device on them, but that didn't mean they didn't blow the device that killed Massey, Hagan, Cooke, and Dalonna. The teams might just not have found it. Or maybe they did and it was dialed from one of the eight phones the SSE teams picked up. Either way the bomb blew.

Shaw was told by those watching the monitors that he was blown into the shed with the three small padlocked doors along with Mike and Ohio, but he couldn't remember it. The rest of their team was blown behind the shed and across the fields, a few meters between each man, like leaves that had fallen from the same branch of a tree on a strong wind. The bomb completely destroyed six of the small shacks and nearly collapsed every other structure around the pupil. The pupil itself was sheared down the middle, the half housing the doorway leveled to a pile of stone and the other half knocked over completely and resting on its side. From above, it looked like someone had cut the building down the middle with a giant knife, smashing the doorway side into rubble and leaving the other half neatly resting on the ground relatively intact, as if the two sides might one day be reconnected in the middle.

There was nothing to find of Hagan. He was in front of the door, directly on top of the bomb when it blew, and they couldn't tell if his body parts were any of the small bits of tissue, fatigues, and blood stuck in the rubble or blown into the walls of the surrounding structures. He was nothing but vapor and mist. Massey was last in line and they actually found the part of his torso with his dog tags zippered into the pockets, so they could identify him. He had the agate necklace in his cargo pocket and it was blown to dust. There was nothing left of it. There were pieces of arms and legs found under and between the rubble but nothing recognizable on sight. DNA matches were used to identify Dalonna and Cooke based off the small bits of flesh found somewhat intact—part of a hand or foot, a section of jaw with a couple teeth still in place—but that was it. Shaw never had the nerve to ask, but he heard of a hunk of wrist found with a pink yarn bracelet wrapped around the flesh. He never found out if it was true or not, and hoped not to.

S
tag1's wife woke up the morning after her husband was taken and found the front door unlocked. They always locked their door. She could see faint lines of dirt or mud tracked in on the carpets as well, so she sat on the couch in the living room and told her children to play outside. She did not turn on the TV. She sat. After she'd fed her children their lunch she went to the backyard, put on plastic gloves, and thrust her hands into the compost pile. The compost covered a large section of ground, but they had dug a shallow hole in the middle of the pile and her hands found it. Then she found the phone wrapped in plastic and took it out of the compost pile. The battery and SIM card were separated and wrapped in plastic inside the larger plastic bundle. Intel did not have the phone from the compost pile traced. In fact, it was the first time it had been used. Stag1 bought the prepaid phone and the SIM card from different countries and buried them immediately. He'd never even turned it on himself, but now his wife took the phone, the battery, and the SIM card inside. Then she washed her hands and charged the phone for a few minutes. She put the SIM card in, turned on the phone, and called the wife of her husband's dead nephew as she'd been instructed. The wife she called had remarried the man the Americans referred to as both Pike1 and Iris1. The two code names were given to the same person. After the call, Stag1's wife hung up the phone, removed the battery and SIM card, and smashed the pieces with a hammer. Then she threw the broken plastic in the trash, packed bags for her family, and hoped her husband would return.

The call was too short to monitor the weak phone signal originating outside the home around lunchtime, and even if it could be monitored, the number couldn't be tracked. It had existed for only a moment. Iris1's wife told her new husband that Stag1 had been taken. He in turn immediately left for the mountains. His men had dug underground tunnels into the pupil years before. The tunnels led to the small shacks so the men could enter the pupil and move around the entire area underground without ever appearing to have left.

The bomb had been constructed inside the pupil and buried from inside by using a tunnel under the front door. No surveillance videos were able to detect it, but they did detect smoke. The smoke originated not from a fire to keep the inhabitants warm, as the operators supposed—the inhabitants had blankets for that—but rather from the cooking of the TATP used to detonate the device. Intel had been monitoring the very preparations for the deaths of Hagan, Dalonna, Massey, and Cooke all along.

After his release, Stag1 immediately gathered up his family and the silver piece-of-shit van picked them up and drove them into the city as they had planned. Drones followed the van during the whole ride, but as the bombing didn't happen for hours after his release, nothing seemed amiss. By the time the bomb blew, Stag1 and his family had picked up the wife of Iris1 and disappeared among the masses. Intel's been looking for Stag1, his family and the driver, and the piece-of-shit van ever since.

S
haw came to in the war room. He was surrounded by Slausen, Mike, and Ohio, and so many other guys he couldn't see the walls for all the camo in front of him. They gathered around him close to break the news and he fell into their arms. Later, Slausen had his hands on Shaw's face and was rubbing his cheeks. Shaw didn't know if Slausen was checking for broken bones or whether he had found something he was trying to put back in place. He couldn't feel Slausen's fingers until he took them off his skin, and only then because his face began to tingle. He never felt any of the sedatives or fluids Slausen had injected from the IVs into his veins. They kept him heavily medicated.

“Open your mouth,” Slausen said.

Shaw did and Slausen put an opium lolli in his cheek, patted it gently with his hand. Shaw didn't remember anything after that, surfing the morphine swells as he was. He couldn't tell whether the hours on a clock were running forward or back until the CO and Slausen stood in front of him hours, maybe days later.

“Massey wants you to escort him home,” Slausen said. “It's in his will.”

Slausen's eyes were tiny black slits hiding in his red puffy eyelids. Shaw was sitting in a chair in the war room. He didn't say anything. It felt like milk was flooding his eyes, blinding him. Slausen and the CO were fading into Mike and Ohio sitting next to them, and they all just formed a big jumbled mass of beards and fatigues. Depression and pity. Anger. Slausen leaned toward him. Shaw felt a beard on his face, warm breath on his ear. He smelled Copenhagen and sweat. Slausen whispered soft. Slow.

“He wants you to take him home.”

•   •   •

S
lausen passed him a handful of pills before Shaw got on the bird with the caskets.

“Take all of them,” Slausen said. “You'll piss hot, but everything will melt away. No pain. So no tests for two or three weeks.”

Shaw nodded and popped them, ground them to powder, and swallowed. His mouth felt chalky and dry.

“Listen to me,” Slausen said. “Get someone else's piss or tell them you need to see the shrink.” He put his hands on Shaw's shoulders and brought his face close. Their noses nearly touched. “Do not piss for them. They'll kick you out.”

Shaw ran his tongue around his mouth and swallowed some grains that'd lodged between his teeth. Slausen looked behind him, at the flags draped over the metal caskets holding what was left of their friends. He sniffed and shook his head.

“Don't kill yourself, all right? They already got four of us.”

Slausen hugged him and then bit at his fingernails.

“Make sure you're sitting or lying down within a half hour. They hit hard.”

Shaw nodded, didn't say a thing. He could already feel a tingling in the back of his head and spreading from his elbows. He kept licking his teeth.

Slausen looked him in the eyes.

“We'll see you in a week or two, okay? Come back.”

They both nodded and Slausen turned away. The ramp started to close. From his seat, Shaw watched him walk away toward Mike and Ohio and the rest of the guys lining the airfield in the fading sunlight. Then Slausen stopped and turned toward the bird, his hand held up in a wave. Shaw watched his fingers close into a fist, then the ramp cut him off and the bird darkened.

Shaw never asked Slausen what he'd taken, but they worked. Everything fuzzed and melted away and he started feeling heavy and weightless at the same time. The person guarding the door of the cabin changed from a man to a woman and then disappeared entirely and he couldn't be sure there was anyone at all. He saw bodies and sad little girls and smiling friends who had been alive but were now lying dead in caskets at his feet. He didn't know if he clocked out at the half-hour mark like Slausen said he would, but the nearly daylong flight felt like only a few minutes. What he did remember of those few minutes seemed thick, cloudy, and invented like a dream.

Normally body parts of the fallen would be washed and prepared for burial after they were analyzed and the coroner's final reports made. Then the remains would be put in caskets and flown home to their families. Since the bomb turned the four of them to mist, Shaw wondered if he was sitting in front of four empty caskets. He thought maybe there was only the one chunk of Massey's chest and a couple jars of whatever they could find of Hagan, Cooke, and Dalonna lying on the metal beds underneath their flag blankets. He almost got the nerve to look.

He vowed to quit, sitting in front of his friends. He finally admitted to himself that he couldn't do it anymore, that all the ghosts had finally caught up with him. He'd seen the young boy from the pass wave, not point at them, too many times, and the little girl's cries had turned into menacing laughter. The laughter was enlightened and harsh, like she was saying
You might have killed my parents, but you're the one who's fucked.
His grandma's face had come through the woman's chador after Hagan slit her throat in front of all those kids, and she had smiled at him. He thought if he quit maybe they'd all leave him alone, maybe he could get some peace. He thought maybe he'd be able to explain himself when they visited at night. He could tell the little girl her dad was an HVT, a known cell leader who massacred dozens of innocents, and that he was sorry about her mom and didn't mean to kill her. He could tell the boy in the pass that he should have hidden from them, kept himself alive, and that others like him had reported positions and gotten guys blown away. He could tell his grandma that they never killed the woman, he had only dreamed it, and that the children would put it behind them and study hard and make good lives for themselves.

And then Shaw remembered Stag1's smile, those white-as-shit teeth. He remembered the way he blew smoke at his knees and how it rose up into his face, and somewhere Shaw knew, even if Intel didn't yet, that Stag1 had screwed them. Shaw remembered Hagan's last words. They were
Getting the blood moving.
Shaw couldn't place last words to Dalonna, Cooke, and Massey, and that pissed him off, so he thought of Massey with those kids in the CASH and Cooke cleaning his weapon as if it were a baby and Dalonna staring at the pictures of his family before leaving the war room to kill the fathers, brothers, and sons of others. He knew he could never escape the fate waiting for him at the end of some Hajji's det-cord or rifle barrel. If it wasn't one of theirs, it'd probably be one of his own.

Then he thought of Illinois. He knew he'd have to walk over the ice-chapped cornstalks of its southern border with Missouri and visit Massey's family, lay the box of what was left of him into the ground and never see the agate necklace around Penelope's neck. He thought of Chicago and how he'd have to visit Dalonna's wife and hug his daughters, maybe make them a bracelet with one of their dad's old bootlaces and how he'd have to see Dalonna's son grow up and turn into his father because there's no way he wouldn't. He thought of the dry West Texas plains and wondered if there was some drunk, hard father out there among the tumbleweeds who used to beat his kids and might give a shit to see one of them buried in the oil fields. He thought of Hagan, their Hog, and how he wasn't ever getting the wife he'd wanted to bring back to the land that killed him and show her how fucked up and beautiful it all was.

He thought about what Massey had asked him. About murder. He thought that even though that little girl probably just wanted her parents to braid her hair or read her stories before bedtime, her dad still needed to die. Her mom didn't need to, but the daughter she carried like a backpack looked a hell of a lot like the straps of a suicide vest and the operators died when they hesitated. He'd tell the boy they had no idea if he would rat them out or not and weren't willing to wait and find out. There were four of them and only the one of him and his weight was less than theirs. He'd tell his grandma that she was already dead and had left him alone long ago, that they left that woman and those kids alive to hate and love and become whoever they wanted to be after they left their town on fire.

If Massey were alive in that C-17, sitting next to him and not inside of a metal box, Shaw would finally be honest with himself and say yes. Yes, he did feel like a murderer sometimes, and before everything had happened he would've hoped that that realization alone would've made him stop. But sitting next to the caskets, he knew then that it wouldn't. He'd like to tell that little girl in the poppy fields he was sorry about her mother but not her father. So where does that leave him? He's killed far more than he murdered and there's no way of knowing how many attacks they prevented, or how many they caused. The squadrons will keep going back long after the conventional units and all the news cameras have pulled out. They'll outlast all the foreign aid. Not until long after the officeholders stop uttering the country's name in anything but political-poison whispers and schoolchildren no longer recognize the significance of its syllables in their classrooms will the squadrons leave. And then they'll just go to new places, different lands. Shaw knows there will always be Stag1s to chase until they killed them all, and they never will. Never could. So he can go on chasing them forever and they him until his ghosts have all left him. And they never will.

He'd rather charge among them than flee only to be overrun in the end.