One September Morning (12 page)

Iraq
Flint

“H
ello?” Flint calls through the empty warehouse, feeling like a dick because places like this scare the shit out of him.

As they should.

Although the soldier posted on watch outside told him that the building’s perimeters had been secured since the shooting, you could never be too sure. And frankly, a dark warehouse would be hazardous enough during peacetime, but in a war zone like this Flint knows it’s exponentially more dangerous.

Stepping forward tentatively, he shifts his protective eye-wear onto his helmet and waits while his eyes adjust to the interior darkness. Sunlight arches through two windows high on the wall, but the interior brick seems to swallow the light in the extreme contrast of dark and light. According to the report, which Flint had bamboozled his way into viewing, those windows were shuttered yesterday, making the warehouse dark inside—“dark as night,” one soldier claimed. Now the space reeks of overripe fruit, though the shelves are empty, supplies either depleted or looted in the instability that swept over this region with the invasion of U.S. forces.

Something scurries behind a wooden crate a few feet away. Some sort of vermin.

Why is he here?

Scene of the shooting. After the memorial ceremony, Flint started asking around, trying to get details of how John had been killed, and two guys from John’s platoon, Jump and Lassiter, had sent him this way. Although he can’t imagine this abandoned warehouse contains anything to assist Abby in the grieving process, his reporter’s instincts require that he return to the scene, the place where it happened.

Danger be damned.

Like it’s not already dangerous enough just being in Iraq. His eyes land on an unmoving shadow on the floor. Here the pungent scent of bleach cuts the air, and yet the stain remains on the porous floor.

A bloodstain. This, he suspects, is the sight where Spec. John Stanton went down.

He pauses, sensing a weird energy in the air. Not the sort of thing you could write into a piece, but real nonetheless.

“John…”
What happened here yesterday? How did it go down?

Flint lowers his head, makes the sign of the cross. He’s not a religious man, but every man’s got to possess a certain reverence for death, and he refuses to believe that a man’s energy just dries up when life leaves the body.

He is staring down at the maudlin stain of blood when something shifts, disrupting the silence of the warehouse. Flint’s shoulders rise as he braces himself and steps back, looking to take cover as something falls from above.

Something heavy and round. It lands a few feet in front of him, bouncing on the hard-packed floor before Flint loses sight of it in his frantic scramble to take cover.

His heart races, his pulse pounding in his ears as he flattens himself against a wall and covers his head. The explosion he is waiting for does not come, and he lets out a whimpering gasp of relief, daring to open his eyes.

Holy Christ. It’s a helmet.

Braced against the wall, Flint looks up in the darkness and sees a flurry of movement high up, thirty or forty feet, atop a wooden pallet. His jaw clenches and he pulls back, ready to retreat. It looks like one of our guys, a U.S. soldier, stretched out on his belly.

“Sorry, man.” The soldier, an African-American man, now without a helmet, pushes himself up and shifts so that his legs dangle over the side.

“You scared the shit out of me,” Flint shouts up at him, though in this hollow space it’s not necessary to raise his voice. “What the hell are you doing up there? The guard outside told me this place was secure.”

“This is a dangerous place to be, sir,” the soldier answers. “If I were you, I’d leave.”

Flint’s been trying to do that since he arrived in Iraq, greeted by an IED as he traveled the five-mile stretch along the Route Irish from the airport to the goddamned hotel. He tries to get a bead on the soldier dangling from the scaffold. “You on guard duty, soldier?”

“No, sir.”

“So what the hell are you doing hanging up there?”

“It’s a personal matter, sir. You should leave.”

Which makes Flint suddenly want to stay. “You okay, buddy?”

The soldier’s hesitation is heavy with desperation. Flint takes a moment to reassess the man clinging to the edge, and now he gets it.

A jumper.

Flint knows the signs. As a rookie reporter in San Francisco, he covered the Golden Gate Bridge, where a suicide occurred just about every two weeks. This guy is a classic jumper, on the verge of pushing off and cutting it all off.

“You hold on up there, ’cuz I got a question for you.” Flint points a finger toward the man, as if to hold him in place there. He knows he needs to engage this man, get him to talk. “You’re going to wait right there till we have a chance to talk, okay?” All caution fades as he circles the tall platform, looking for a way up. “How the hell did you get up there?”

“You don’t need to come up, sir.”

“Cut the ‘sir’ crap,” Flint tells him, though he knows that in the military community that’s easier said than done. “I’m not in the army. How do I get up?”

“Over by the door. Climb the pegs.”

Easier said than done, Flint thinks when he sees the worn, splintered pieces of wood nailed into the structure. He reaches for a handhold and hoists himself up, feeling the weight of his flak jacket and equipment. By the time he reaches the top, Flint is sweating like a pig and trying to remember how he’s supposed to approach a person in this state of mind. He was trained to talk to people in crisis, but he’s no shrink. Aren’t you supposed to keep them talking? Engaged? Frankly, it’s the last thing he feels like doing when he should be getting his information, getting the hell out of here, getting home, but he can’t just walk out of here and leave this guy hanging, both literally and figuratively.

“That’s some climb,” Flint says, his breath ragged as he pulls himself onto the platform at the top. The soldier remains sitting at the edge of the precipice, his eyes wide and impossibly white against his dark skin. “I told my editor I’m too old for an assignment like this.” Flint starts to stand, but his legs feel too wobbly and he doesn’t want to be a high target, so he falls back to his hands and knees and moves forward in a crab crawl.

“Yes, sir,” the man answers.

“Dave Flint. I’m a journalist, an embed with the 121st Airborne.”

The soldier turns to study him, and Flint notes the hollow expression in his eyes, as if he’s staring off at a bitterly sad sight in the distance.

“You came here by choice?” The soldier seems astounded.

“Sort of. It was either this or finish off my career covering city council meetings and the crime beat.”

The soldier shakes his head. “Bad choice.”

Flint sees the name “Brown” on the man’s uniform. “So what the hell are you doing in here, Brown? Did you know a man was shot in here yesterday?”

“Name’s Emjay, and I know all that. I was here.”

Flint takes all this in with a deep breath. He heard the name earlier when he was asking around about John. Although John was a friend to every man in his platoon, people thought he and Emjay were close. “You knew John Stanton.”

Emjay nods.

“Want to tell me what happened yesterday? How it all went down?”

“Nah.” Emjay glances down, and Flint follows his gaze to the dark stain below. The view from here gives him the shakes, a mild vertigo. How the hell is he going to get down from here?

“Tell me a story,” Emjay says quietly.

“I was hoping you would tell me one,” Flint says.

“Nah.” Emjay Brown lowers his head, as if it’s too heavy to hold up anymore. “I need to hear something that isn’t about this place. A good distraction. You’re a writer; why don’t you spin something for me.”

“A story? Hell, you’re going to make me work?” Flint leans back on his elbows and tries to take some comfort from the rays of sunlight squeezing through an opening in the decrepit brick wall. He wants to keep things light with Emjay Brown, but it seems they both crossed that line months ago. Maybe they crossed it the minute they both arrived in Iraq.

“You ever been to San Francisco?” Flint asks. When the soldier doesn’t respond, Flint takes that as a no. “You’ve heard of the Golden Gate Bridge? In San Francisco? I used to live there. Anyway, the Golden Gate has a strange claim to fame. It’s a destination for jumpers. Easy access, great view. A suicide magnet. Hundreds of people have jumped from there. Something like twelve hundred altogether. But only three people have jumped off that bridge and survived, and you know what all three say?”

Emjay rocks forward over his folded arms, as if there’s an ache deep in his belly.

“The minute they jumped, they wished they hadn’t. All the unfixable things in their lives that made them jump suddenly seemed fixable once they went over the edge—all except the fact that they had jumped. They wished they could take it back. They wanted to live.”

“They weren’t deployed in Iraq.”

Flint lets out a breath. “No, I’ll give you that. But deployments end. When are you scheduled to head home?”

Emjay shrugs, a gesture heavy with hopelessness and ennui.

“Come on, man. Everybody knows their exit date.”

Emjay brings his knees to his chest and pushes back, away from the edge of the platform.

A move toward safety, no longer on the verge of plummeting off the edge.

Flint allows himself a modicum of relief. “So you like it so much here you want to stay?”

Warily, Emjay shifts his eyes toward Flint. “December. They say we’re out in December, but that means shit. This is our second deployment. We were in Baghdad in 2004, then home again. There’s a good chance they’ll redeploy us back here. Hell, they’d do it in a heartbeat.”

Flint nods, familiar with the schedule of deployments, which had only accelerated in the past few years, but right now his main goal is to keep this guy talking. Emjay Brown is in a state of shock. Flint is no shrink, but he’d guess post-traumatic stress disorder. Hell, Emjay should probably be in the hospital for the next forty-eight hours until his psyche found some sort of normalcy. But then, even then, Brown would be returning to the same tortured world, the same battered country stripped to the bone by Americans, loaded with danger.

“You know,” Flint says, “I knew John. Went to college with his wife, Abby. I was even at their wedding.”

Emjay cups his chin in one hand, squeezing his jaw, as if to clamp down all pain and emotion.

“I hear you and John were a team,” Flint says.

“Yes, sir. We were partners, so to speak. I was beside him when he took that first bullet.”

“You were with him?” Flint turns away from Emjay Brown, not wanting the soldier to feel his scrutiny.

“I was right beside him when he went down.” He eases his grip on his rifle and scratches at the ruff of shorn hair over his forehead. “I was there. I saw it all. I tried to save him. I applied pressure to the wound…to where I thought he was bleeding from. I tried, but then he came at us and fired again and I…” His voice is thick with emotion. “I had to back off or he was going to shoot me, too.”

“You saw the shooter?” Flint says softly, belying the acceleration of his pulse. “But I heard that the building was shuttered, that it was dark—”

“I saw enough. My NOD wasn’t working right and I was messing with it when the first round whirred over my head and John went down, told me he’d been hit. I was beside him, on my knees, trying to put pressure on his chest, stop the blood. But John was so angry, screaming and yelling at the shooter. ‘You fucking shot me!’ he kept yelling, over and over.”

“Like he knew the shooter?” Flint adds. He’d read as much in the report, but Emjay’s take suggested a new dimension.

Emjay nods. “It was so crazy and dark, I couldn’t see right then, but John had his night-vision device, and I think he was looking right at the sniper. And he was goddamned pissed.”

“Because it was someone he knew?”

Emjay scratches at the stubble over his forehead, blinking back tears. “Like it’s not bad enough these Iraqis try to blow us up? You got to defend yourself from your own guys, too?” He squeezes his eyes shut. “Someone on our team.”

“Are you sure of that?” Flint presses. “I mean, in all the commotion—”

“I saw him,” Flint interrupts. “At least, I saw that it was a soldier, one of our guys. The second shot hit John in the neck, and as I was scrambling I grabbed his helmet, thinking at least I’d be able to see and help him. His night-vision device worked, and I saw him, the shooter. One of our guys. Someone in Bravo Company, heading right out that door.”

The silence in the decrepit building swells between them as Flint tries to process this new information, none of which was in the report he’d read. “Did you tell your platoon leader about this?” he asks quietly. “Does Lieutenant Chenowith know?”

“Chenowith, there’s a piece of work. He’s threatening to court-martial me because I went on a maneuver with a piece of broken equipment. Like we have a choice out here, when the army gives us shit for vehicles. Flak jackets from World War Two.” Emjay lifts one shoulder, sinking into himself. “Chenowith would like to see me hang. He doesn’t want to hear that someone in his platoon is a rat.”