Empire City

by Matt Gallagher

  Tran blinked once, hard. “I’m a nobody here, Ms. Tucker. Certainly you’ve gathered that. My title is ‘Strategic Executive Advisor for Military, Privateer, and Warfighter Partnerships.’ Two years in, I still don’t know what that means.”

  Mia did admire the candor.

  He apologized for his brusqueness, saying General Collins often accused him of “letting my infantry show.” Then he continued in the same manner. What other fund-raising possibilities could Mia think of? He made Mia anxious, and not just because their time together began to feel like an interview more than an initial brainstorm. Tran wanted details while she offered generalities, and sought assurances when she gave prospects. And still she felt like she was being watched, and not just by Tran.

  “Where were you on Palm Sunday?” he asked, veering suddenly away from the near future. Something faraway seemed to be rolling behind his eyes, like he was hearing an old song. Mia understood her answer wasn’t the point to his question.

  “Driver’s ed,” she said. “First time on a freeway that morning.”

  Tran nodded, straightening his back. The old music in his eyes slowed down. “Federal City itself,” he said. “Assigned to the War Department. A dream gig after battalion command in the Legion. Time to reconnect with my family, to decompress. Moved there ten days before the attacks.”

  “Oh my God.”

  Tran nodded again. “We were home, thankfully. I bring it up because I saw what happened there. After, I mean. All that fear, all that anger—it turned everything in the capital rancid. Now that’s seeped out, spread across the country. If you consider—well, if you consider it in a certain way, Abu Abdallah won.”

  Mia didn’t know what to do with that idea. She knew she didn’t like it. She held to the quiet, as she’d learned to do as a Tucker and then as an army officer. It forced others to their intentions.

  “General Collins can save this country from itself,” Tran continued. “My job is to ensure she’s granted the shot.”

  That was heavy talk for a small-party senatorial run, Mia thought. But that’s why I’m here. To be part of something again that’s grand. To be part of something bigger than myself.

  “I hear you,” she finally offered. “I can get it. The Lehman chair. Might only be five minutes, might be a shared taxi ride, but it’ll be something.”

  Tran nodded and his lips thinned out into a smile. “All any of us can ask for,” he said. “Opportunity.”

  * * *

  Mia was walking home as the explosion rumbled through the day, soft as a prayer. Strangers told her where but she knew already, nothing else in the area made sense, so she went there, pushing against the crowd to Vietnam Victory Square, and found saws of black smoke ambling into the sky. They came from where the white spire had been cleaved from its base. The monument now bent into the square, felled over like a giant clutching at its heart.

  An accident, Mia hoped. A terrible mistake.

  She felt the truth, though, and forced herself to it as she rushed into the square. To help the survivors, or to at least try.

  Terrorism had come to Empire City.

  CHAPTER 6

  TERRORISM HAD COME to Empire City.

  A cloudless day had ceded to a cloudless dusk. The parade of sirens had ended hours earlier, but a pall of disquiet remained. War monuments across the city had been blown apart with pipe bombs and homemade explosive. A rostral column in midtown dedicated to the USS Maine. The doughboy statue at the Hell Gate. A large, gilded eagle along the river celebrating the Greatest Generation. The spire at Vietnam Victory Square. The crossed-pistols gate that arched over Broadway, built in remembrance of those who fell seizing Beirut. Even a rock with a plaque honoring a forgotten sergeant from the Boxer Rebellion had been turned to pebbles. Thirty war memorials, small and colossal, famous and otherwise, exploding within minutes of one another.

  Only foreign wars, though. Jean-Jacques had noticed that. Only columns and plaques and bird statues for foreign wars had gotten the treatment. Not that it mattered to a city in shock. Terror was terror was terror.

  Jean-Jacques stood on a loft rooftop deep in the district of Gypsy Town, watching and thinking. Little black monitor drones thrummed the sky. Down the block, the memorial with the forgotten sergeant’s plaque had been secured with barricade tape. The parties would go on, he knew. The indy shows and poetry slams, too. Boho existence would persist with or without one long-dead soldier’s rock. The tyranny of life would endure.

  Smoke wisps rose from across the river, scattered and pale. Jean-Jacques thought they looked like objects glimpsed in the background of an old photograph, distant and a little vague, but impossible to unsee once found. Were there any war monuments in Little Haiti? Jean-Jacques couldn’t recall one. There was the bronze of Toussaint, but that was different. The fuckers best have left it be.

  “Yo! Dash.”

  The others were waiting. He kept his back to them.

  Which wisp was the spire? Which the pistols gate? Which the mausoleum for the general who’d led the Veracruz landing way back when? He wanted a map.

  Everything will return to normal soon enough, Jean-Jacques thought. If ever there was a place that could get up quick from an attack, it was Empire City. Still, he thought. This isn’t right. Peace abroad wasn’t our goal. Calm back here was.

  “Hey, bro.”

  He ignored another voice. He kept watching and kept thinking, rubbing at the teardrop pendant under his shirt. After taking it from the pine box his cousin had given him, he’d pierced a small hole through its casing and affixed it to a dog-tag chain. His mother’s last remnant stayed on him now.

  He turned his attention to the slab under his feet. The Saint-Germain lofts were a set of opposing five-story buildings, split by a side street of the same name. They’d been living there three weeks. He’d agreed to the room for its price (free) and convenience. (Pete’s sister had promised the landlord an opening set for putting them up in empty rooms.) It still felt like a walk-in petri dish to Jean-Jacques. The lack of ventilation during summer’s peak was wearing on him. So too were the bedbug bites found in the mornings. And the drunk-people piss in the hallway found after that, on his way to the communal shower.

  “Earth to Dash.”

  He’d slept in some disagreeable places over the years—a damp medieval fortress in the Caucasus pass, the animal-shit ditch outside Aleppo. A rocking skiff in the Gulf of Aden while he retched dehydrated chicken into the night ocean. But those had been on the job, part of the life. Jean-Jacques knew squalor. He had no regard for a bohemian imitation of it. Especially on leave, or whatever this was.

  “Jean-Jacques.”

  In Hollywood, they’d lived in hotel suites. Paid for by the War Department. With room service. And those foam pillows that adjusted to the shape of your skull. We got soft, Jean-Jacques thought yet again.

  “Corporal Saint-Preux. We need you.”

  The rank did it. He turned around.

  “There he is,” Flowers said, holding a metallic disc in the palm of his hand like he was cupping water. “Welcome back, bud.”

  Jean-Jacques pointed to the disc.

  “All good. Ain’t no ears up in here.”

  They’d been supposed to turn in their equipment, but Flowers hadn’t obliged. What else did that goon smuggle back? Jean-Jacques wondered. And how?

  The other Volunteers, plus Britt Swenson and Sebastian Rios, had joined Jean-Jacques on the roof, among a feral urban garden decorated with wooden signs bearing local poetry. Jean-Jacques didn’t like the poetry and he didn’t like having the other two with them. Meetings like this weren’t for citizens. But Pete had insisted.

  “They know more about home than we do,” he’d said.

  Pete decided it was his turn to take in the Empire City skyline, moving to the edge of the rooftop. His clothes still carried the remnants of the day’s rescue work, streaked with soot and blood, the bottom of his shirt severed into flaps by an upturned metal spike. His han
ds, cartoonishly large even on his arms, were patchworks of red pus and torn-up skin. He hadn’t worn gloves, no small lapse for a man who’d spent the morning pulling open train carriages.

  He looked at the group with a hard grimace, flexing his hands into balls.

  “Got lucky,” he said. His eyes, one hyper-black and one hyper-green, churned. “Motherfuckers were more interested in style points than a body count.”

  “Latest reports have eighteen dead,” Flowers said, dutifully. “Fifty or so hurt. Mostly tourists hit by debris.”

  Pete nodded the way military leaders did when learning something they wanted to feign already knowing. “Lucky,” he said again. “Won’t be so clean next time.”

  His command voice set in again, terse, a pitch lower than normal, sticking his bloody hands into his pockets because he never knew what to do with them during a brief. Jean-Jacques heard slivers of excitement, too. He knew why. He was, too. They were in that long, dirty pause before clarity. When anything was possible.

  “No one has the experience we do at hunting down terror wogs. I’ve reached out to some folks in the three-letter agencies. Homeland marshals, too. They’re going to need our help. They’re going to need our skills.” Pete stopped to wet his throat. “This could happen again.”

  Skills? Jean-Jacques thought. What skills of ours could possibly benefit anyone right now? Even at the Old Navy Yard he’d felt like they were getting in the way more than anything. But he kept that to himself. Maybe Pete knew something they didn’t.

  Maybe.

  “Copycat effect.” Sebastian spoke, looking surprised at the sound of his own voice. Pete raised an eyebrow and gestured for him to go on. “Well. Like with serial killers.” He was talking quickly, stumbling through the words, as if he wanted to start his sentences over halfway through them. Jean-Jacques still hadn’t acknowledged him. He’s the hostage, he thought. Nothing more.

  “Media coverage helps shape it, make it seem attractive,” Sebastian continued. “Like that old jihadist manifesto. Management of Savagery. Some Western separatist translated it last year, remixed it. Changed Allah to Jesus, infidels to feds, that sort of thing. No one read it. No one cared. Then Empire News picked it up for a piece. The manifesto spread like wildfire. Cyber command couldn’t get rid of it once it reached the dark net.”

  “Your point?” Britt asked. She shared her brother’s face, Jean-Jacques thought, sharp and angular and green eyes like minerals that bored through the twilight. There was something more withdrawn about her, though. Jean-Jacques couldn’t decide if she was shy or stuck up.

  “The middle-schooler who shot up Spokane last month,” Sebastian answered, “was inspired by the new Management of Savagery. A book written thirty years ago to oppose our military occupation of Lebanon got a loner American teenager to kill his science class. The point, I guess, is that extremism translates well. Just have to change the nouns.”

  Long, fraught seconds passed. No one said anything. Someone coughed.

  “We never heard of that,” Jean-Jacques finally said. Who was this guy? He’d never even been a soldier, let alone a Ranger. And why was he always wearing those sunglasses? Jean-Jacques wanted to snatch them from his stupid, smug face. “Hundreds of raids. Hundreds of enemies killed and captured. We’d know.”

  “Would we, though?” Something cold swept over Pete’s face. “We bag and tag. Drop ’em at work camps or the morgue. Not much follow-up after that.”

  “Yeah, Dash, not everything’s like the gook horde,” Flowers said, using the insult the rest of the military had fastened on the International Legion. The original Legionnaires had mostly come from somewhere in Asia, promised a green card and monthly pay in return for occupying Vietnam. The nickname had stuck, even for later enlistees like Dash. “It’s important to ask the locals questions, not just blow up everything. Help them help themselves.”

  Flowers was attempting to impress Pete’s sister, Jean-Jacques could tell, and he’d cut down that effort in short order. First, though, he wanted to figure out what Pete had planned for them. So he asked, direct.

  “Close with and destroy the enemy,” Pete said. His words were straight, but flaring nostrils suggested irritation. He never liked being questioned in front of others. “Same as always.”

  Big man doesn’t know anything more or anything else, Jean-Jacques realized. Just wants us to think he does. He tilted his head and frowned, trying to square this Pete with the sergeant he’d met in the Rangers. Not many ex-Legionnaires made it all the way to the Rangers, so he’d pulled Jean-Jacques aside on day one to tell him he belonged there, had earned his way there the same as anyone, and if anyone said different, to let him know and he’d handle it. That had meant something to Private First Class Saint-Preux, being told that. Pete had brimmed with the same raw energy then, but it’d been sharper, more concentrated. Always about the next business trip, the next round with the wogs, how to get better, stronger, more lethal. Which C-list actress in Hollywood changed him? Which talent agent had chirped into his ear? Though blaming someone else was cheap, Jean-Jacques thought. And too easy. Pete hadn’t chosen to become a Volunteer, not exactly. But he had chosen what to do with it.

  They all had.

  “I was wondering.” It was the hostage again, pointing to the smoke across the river. “This has got to be about the Abu Abdallah trial. Right?”

  That made some sense. Jean-Jacques hadn’t been following the trial closely but what he knew suggested clusterfuck. The terror cleric’s group had splintered into a dozen factions since they declared jackpot on the old man with the piss bag on the little island-crag north of the Barbary Coast. All the foreign policy experts agreed: jihadism could not survive without its leader. The terror wogs needed him and so did the ideology. Jean-Jacques looked again across the river. He figured the big smoke must be coming from Vietnam Victory Square. Where they’d toppled the spire.

  The fucking hostage is right on this, he decided. Goddamn it.

  He looked around the group, registering what the others thought. Abu Abdallah was a name that carried meaning for them all. Flowers seemed to be glowering at something else across the river, beyond the smoke. The hostage kept twitching his leg, like a dog who couldn’t find the right spot to scratch. And the Swensons? They’d both gone sullen and white-hot mute.

  Oh yeah, Jean-Jacques thought. Their papa.

  Abu Abdallah had evaded capture for years, but his deputies hadn’t. The Swenson children realized during those trials how different they were. Pete had shared that once with the other Volunteers, along some dusty battle fringe. His sister didn’t find forgiveness, precisely, but vengeance proved too much. She let go to live. Not Pete. He found himself in that vengeance, watching men who’d helped kill his father get sentenced to death themselves. It gave a boy something beyond grief. It gave a boy purpose.

  That boy had become a superman, and the superman looked up again on the rooftop, one eye pulsing through the dim light, the other fading into it. He spoke yet again.

  “All the more reason,” he said, “to put ourselves to use.”

  What caused Jean-Jacques to snap wasn’t what Pete said, but how. He’d said it like he was speaking with strangers, with a rapt audience of grateful citizens. He’d said it like the acting coach in Hollywood had taught him to, exaggerated and slow. When did a man’s power and confidence in himself become too much? When did a man’s need for more, ever more, always more, become pathetic?

  “This is nonsense, Pete.” Jean-Jacques spoke fast, liquid kreyol in his head, heat on his tongue. “We should be getting ready for deployment, not caring about this. Not trying to be anything more than we are.

  “You think this is pretend, some adventure? Supers aren’t solutions. They’re not gifts. We got them because some asshole dropped a bomb on us when we was going after Abu Abdallah’s wife and infant. Remember? How we had to justify it by pretending to be saving this idiot?” He pointed to Sebastian. “Tripoli was a bullshit mission. Bullshit missio
ns get bullshit results. Thirty-seven of our brothers died there. Remember them? This Justice stuff has jammed your brain. We are not special. We are soldiers.”

  Jean-Jacques expected Pete to yell back. So did the others; he could tell by the way they began admiring the ground. But instead the large man sighed and looked over at the falling summer sun. Against the horizon his profile seemed to swell, and he stepped into the half-shine. This delicate change in angles and atmosphere shot out jagged shadows and arrows of light, causing everyone else to step back or lift an arm to ward off the glare. Pete noticed none of it.

  “How?” he asked, just loud enough for the others to hear. “How’d it get like this?”

  It was the question of their time. How had it gotten like this? Where had it all gone so wrong?

  Maybe everything had gone awry after World War II, Sebastian offered, when America decided it would be responsible for protecting the free world while also deciding what counted as “free.” Or maybe it’d been Vietnam, and the decision to fight a ground war over an independence movement with heavy communist flavorings. Maybe Nixon’s Grand Bargain had turned it all, his secret plan with Mao that ended China’s support for the north in exchange for Taiwan. Without that, things might’ve been okay.

  “Ancient history,” Britt said. She pointed to Beirut. Dawn of the Mediterranean Wars. A fatwa from that spoiled young cleric soon to self-brand as Abu Abdallah. Once American warfighters crossed that seawall and stayed, it changed the whole Near East. No Beirut—well, no Shi’a Awakening. None of the coups. No need to chase ghosts in turbans all the way into the Balkans.

  “And no Palm Sunday, maybe.” Britt remembered low, weary. She found the words this time. About how they couldn’t get ahold of their father. They’d tried, for so long. Pete nodded. He started to say something but whatever it was got stuck. He nodded again.

  Jean-Jacques gave the moment a few seconds, then cut in. The adrenaline from his rant was still juicing his veins. And there was only so much wrongness a man could take.