by Owen Sheers
―
In the other corner of the bath, opposite Lucy’s toys, a collection of bottles, three deep, vied for space. Many of them were hotel samples—shampoos, conditioners, bath gels—collected, Michael guessed, from Josh’s business travels, family holidays, or Samantha’s spa weekends with Martha. As he stood in the doorway, it was these bottles that drew Michael’s attention. His unconscious must have detected the scent long before his sensory mind, for it was only now, as he walked towards the bath and this crowd of sample-sized containers, that Michael could smell it for sure. A fragrance of amber, a smell and a memory in one. A subtle genie held in one of the bottles of bath oil, the same as Caroline had used that night she’d waited for him in Hammersmith. The night he’d found her up there, her knees to her chest, the undulations of her spine melting into the nape of her neck. She must have brought it with her to his flat that night. A hotel bottle, packed into her bag in any number of the countries in which she’d worked.
As Michael neared the bath, he closed in on that memory again, until, without any disturbance of translation, he was no longer alone and Caroline was there too, naked in the bath, looking up at him. And he was looking down at her, into her brown-and-gold eyes and her fine-featured face breaking, as he watched, into a smile full of promises.
He tried to breathe, but the air had been pressed out of him. The room was dimming, fading to a set of tea lights guttering in the steam. He reached out, for her, but also to find the bottle. The one among those many that had summoned her like this. He had to know which one it was.
He leant forward, his hand outstretched. But as he did Caroline began to haze. She was fading, leaving him already. It was like a second death, watching her go. He heard himself say “no,” like a condemned man against the certainty of his sentence. But it was no use. There was no change in her expression, her smile holding as she left him, as if he, not she, had been the ghost.
Michael dropped to his knees, reaching to touch her disappearing shoulder. But it was more than the vision could carry, and as his hand fell through empty air, so the room returned to him: the sunlight through the window, the enamel tub, the miniature bottles, and beyond the door at his back, a noise.
At first Michael thought the sound was part of the apparition. But when all trace of Caroline had gone, he heard it again. A movement, something brushing against carpet. He froze, still on his knees beside the bath, straining to listen. A knock against wood. A floorboard giving under weight.
The air came rushing back to his lungs, and with it a sudden clarity. He was on his knees in his neighbours’ bathroom, sweat prickling his neck, between his shoulder blades, on his brow. It had all been so quick. Time, with that scent and with her, had evaporated. It had ceased to mean anything. But now, he knew, it meant everything. He was not alone. He must leave.
Leaning his arms against the edge of the bath, he pushed himself up and rose to his feet. He listened again. There was nothing. Perhaps he’d been wrong. Perhaps it was the wind, blowing through an open window. But there was no wind. The day was becalmed. Had someone broken in before him after all? Or what if it wasn’t an intruder, and Josh was still in the house? Whichever, he should take his chance while he could. He could be out of the bathroom, down the stairs, and through the kitchen in seconds. Within half a minute he could be in his garden. Within a few more in his flat. But he would have to go now, quickly and quietly. Otherwise it would be too late.
In two strides Michael was out of the bathroom door and onto the landing. Which is when he saw Lucy, standing at the head of the stairs, looking back at him.
She was wearing her pyjamas: pink bottoms with a pink-and-white striped top, a boat in full sail across her stomach. Her hair was flattened on one side, like hay under wind, her one cheek still scored by the creases of her pillow. For a split second her eyes were heavy with sleep. But now, starting at the sight of him, they were instantly alert, alive with panic at the cross-wiring of seeing Michael, his face wet with tears and his hands muddied, bursting from the bathroom where only her parents should be.
Her whole body flinched with the shock. At the same moment she stepped back, one bare foot reaching for purchase behind her where none was to be found. Michael lunged towards her, but it was too late. She was already falling, so suddenly her hands remained by her sides as she tipped backwards, her eyes still on Michael as once again he grabbed at nothing but air.
The force of his lunge sent him sprawling across the landing as Lucy’s torso, legs, and feet slipped out of sight below the top of the stairs. He saw nothing else, but he heard everything. The terrible thudding and knocking of her body and head, sudden and loud in the stilled house. And then, just as suddenly, nothing again.
Clutching at the carpet and calling her name, Michael dragged himself forward. But it was pointless. He looked over the top of the stairway and saw Lucy lying below him, head down in the crook of its turn. Her right arm was behind her back and her left leg was twisted awkwardly under her. Her eyes were closed. The striped pyjama top had ridden up in the fall, furling the boat’s sail and exposing her pale belly. From his prone position at the top of the stairs Michael stared down at that strip of plump flesh, the dimpled belly button, willing it to rise and fall with a breath. But it remained motionless, and so did Lucy.
CHAPTER TWELVE
FOR THE FIRST three days after he left Las Vegas, Daniel drove the Sonoma coastline, sleeping in his car and eating at roadside diners or crab shacks on the cliffs. Cathy hadn’t asked him to leave. But she hadn’t tried to stop him, either. Even if she had, Daniel would still have gone. He knew he had to.
As he’d driven 95 north and then west, past Creech and on towards Reno and Sacramento, Daniel had told himself this was no more than what he’d done when he used to go on tour: to Bosnia, Iraq, Afghanistan. Back then he’d left his family to keep them safe, and it was the same now. He hadn’t been sleeping, or when he did he dreamt in infrared, or night-vision black and green. He was becoming more erratic. He’d been drinking during the day. Twice in the last month the girls had found him crying on the decking out back. The dreams were getting worse. More frequent, but more varied, too. The motorcyclist had been joined by the two boys on the bicycle, by an old man walking along the other side of a wall, by a young marine straying from his patrol onto a mine. And now by her, too. No more than a blur of white in the back of the van, a brushstroke of silk. But enough.
They’d told him and Maria the following day. When they’d arrived at Creech for their evening shift, instead of going straight to the briefing room as usual, they’d been requested to go to another part of the base. The hut they were directed towards was on the far side of Creech from the ground control stations. Daniel had never been there before, and as a guard escorted them across the airfield, its yellow guidelines curving towards the runways, he knew something wasn’t right. Maria, too, looked uncomfortable. Neither of them spoke.
As they neared a long hut with no windows, Daniel looked through one of the hangars to their right. It was open at either end, silhouetting the domed heads and rotor blades of three Predators parked up at their stands. It was in one of those hangars Daniel had seen his first UAV, a Reaper Mark II. It had been on his first day at Creech, when he was still training. Their civilian instructor, an ex–fighter pilot called Riley, had stood before them, patting the Reaper’s flank. Daniel had been surprised at how large it was, twenty-seven feet from nose to tail. And how blind. No windows, no cockpit. Just a grey ball slung beneath its head, housing a Multi-Spectral Targeting System of cameras, sensors, lenses, and lasers. “Think of it as a giant bee, gentlemen,” Riley told them, pointing to the missile mounts under each wing. “A giant bee with one hell of a sting.”
The wing commander, Colonel Ellis, was waiting for them inside the hut. A civilian in a suit sat beside him. “This is Agent Munroe, CIA,” the colonel said. Agent Munroe nodded to them as Ellis, dismissing the guard, gestured for Daniel and Maria to sit down. Both men had open man
ila files before them. The colonel looked down at his sheaf of pages, lifting their corners to read.
The reports, Agent Munroe told them, were still coming in. But from what they knew so far, when the Intel patrol went in last night they’d found evidence of foreign nationals killed in the strike. “We also know,” he said with a small sigh, “that a British film crew, with a Swedish cameraman, have been missing from their accommodation in Islamabad for over twenty-four hours.” He spoke slowly, clearly, like a tired teacher.
He leant forward on the table between them. “Now, fuck knows how they got there, how the Pakistanis missed them, or what they were doing there. And fuck knows how we didn’t know about ’em either, but as you can see, Major McCullen, Senior Airman Rodriguez, from where we’re sitting, it doesn’t look too good. Not good at all.”
Agent Munroe questioned them for twenty minutes about the mission, flight conditions, the kill chain procedure, the weapons confirmations. Daniel knew he’d have already heard the mission tapes, and, no doubt, seen the chat-room conversations, too. As they’d answered his questions the colonel had looked on with a half-hidden expression of disgust. Not for them or for Agent Munroe, Daniel felt, but for the process as a whole.
At the end of his questions, Agent Munroe closed his file and reminded them both of mission confidentiality. He leant back in his chair. “I should tell you now,” he said, in a less formal tone. “That if this is what it seems, it’s going to get out there, at some point. We can exercise damage limitation to a degree, but only so far.” He looked at them both, one at a time. “So my advice,” he said, slipping the file into his briefcase, “is get ready for some turbulence.”
The colonel, taking his cue, gave them a curt nod. “That’ll be all for now,” he said. “Thank you, Major, Senior Airman.”
Maria and Daniel stood, saluted, and turned for the door. Before they reached it, Ellis spoke again. “Congratulations,” he said from behind them. “You did a good job yesterday.”
They turned to face him. He was standing, his shoulders square. “This is unfortunate,” he said, gesturing to Munroe. The colonel had close-cropped grey hair, the traces of a strong jaw beneath his jowls. “But you took out an important terrorist,” he continued, looking at them hard. “You upheld the American Airman’s Creed, and you should be damn proud of that. Don’t forget it.”
“Yessir,” they said in unison. “Thank you, sir.”
There was no guard outside the hut, so they walked back to the ground control stations alone. Daniel’s head was light. Maria was silent beside him. Eventually she spoke.
“There was no way to tell,” she said.
“I saw her,” Daniel replied. “In the van.”
“You saw something,” Maria corrected him. “You don’t know what it was.”
Daniel didn’t reply. The sun was setting, casting a pink light across the bare ranges of the surrounding hills.
“The screeners confirmed everything,” Maria said, as they approached the control station trailers. Her voice was hardening, as if in response to a silent accuser. “And the OB-4, too,” she added. “One of Munroe’s, I bet.”
―
Daniel told Cathy that night. He hadn’t wanted to, but he knew this time he had no choice. Agent Munroe was right. The story would break, and Daniel wanted Cathy to hear it from him before she saw it on CNN.
“A woman?” She’d looked away from him immediately, shaking her head, her mouth open. “A woman?” she’d asked again, as if willing his answer to change.
Daniel waited for her to say something else, or to look back at him, but she did neither. “Yes,” he said.
He wanted to say more. A woman, a child, a man. What difference did it make? They were innocent and they died, that was the horror of it. But it was a war. She knew it happened.
Cathy’s eyes were already welling.
“It’s not the first time,” he heard himself saying. “I mean, journalists. They get caught in the crossfire. They get killed.”
Cathy dropped her head. Why wouldn’t she look at him?
“But not by you, Daniel,” she whispered. “Not by you.”
―
When the story broke, it was worse than he’d thought. Somehow, they got to publish their names. Her name. Caroline Marshall. She was thirty-four years old, just recently married. They ran footage of her news reports. Cathy told him not to watch them, but he did, and he knew she did too. She’d been everywhere he had. Bosnia, Iraq, Afghanistan. She was pretty. Dark blonde hair pulled back in a ponytail or cut into a bob. Her features were delicate, birdlike. She was energetic on camera, as if she cared.
Munro and his team managed to keep Daniel’s name out of it, and Maria’s. “A U.S. drone strike.” That was all the press release said. No mention of Creech, screeners, Intel coordinator, an operator, a pilot. It was as if the Predator had been genuinely unmanned. As if there had been no hand behind its flight, no eye behind its cameras.
The internal inquiry began the following week. Just a month later Daniel was medically discharged, diagnosed with post-traumatic stress syndrome by an air force psychologist, his case rushed through the usual procedures. On Daniel’s final day at Creech, Colonel Ellis presented him with a file. It was several pages thick, detailing every mission to which he’d contributed while serving at Creech. Surveillance, house raids, buddy lasing, patrols, intelligence support, command control, search-and-destroy, targeted killings. “You can be proud, Major,” Ellis told him, as he shook his hand. “You’ve done your duty. And we thank you for it.”
Sitting in the car park at the wheel of his Camry, Highway 95 humming with traffic on the other side of the fence, Daniel opened the file and looked through its pages. On the first, at the bottom of a spreadsheet, a single number was printed in bold—1,263, the total number of enemy combatants killed as a result of the missions listed in the file. There was no other figure on the page. No other total, as if this, as far as the air force was concerned, was the entirety of his scorecard and any other reckoning would remain his, and his alone.
The next morning Daniel woke with a desire for the ocean. He’d been brought up in the Midwest. Among fields of wheat and dirt tracks leading to hills. The coast had never been his environment. And yet he woke feeling certain it was the ocean that could settle him. Only the ocean seemed vast enough to smother the harrowing of his anxieties. Simple enough to cleanse his eyes.
And so he’d left. Cathy had told him she understood, but he doubted she did. Despite sharing the house in Centennial Hills, over the last year they’d drifted further from each other every day, drawn apart by their different realities. She’d tell the girls he was working away for a few weeks. No, she didn’t think he should see them to say good-bye. Reluctantly, Daniel had agreed, and a few hours later he’d left, throwing his rucksack onto the back seat of the Camry and reversing out their driveway to leave his home.
He drove for twelve hours straight, stopping only twice for gas and to go to the bathroom. Skirting San Francisco to his south, he’d seen the city’s lights come on in the dark of his rearview mirror. Eventually, running out of land, he’d pulled up at a parking bay overlooking the mouth of the Russian River, his headlights swinging through a thickening of sea mist and spray. When he cut the engine the silence fell like a final breath.
He got out of the car. His legs and back ached. His throat was dry. There were stars above him and the sliver of a new moon. It was dark, and yet he could still make out the breakers on the rocks below, long ruffs of white pulsing along the shore. An oncoming breeze brought salt to his face, over his skin. He closed his eyes and let the wind blow his fringe from his forehead. He could feel, in its passing, the hairs moving on his arms.
And it was then, as he stood before the Pacific Ocean that night, with the river at his back, that Daniel decided what he should do. He would find her husband. He would find the man Caroline Marshall had married and write to him. He would tell him what had happened. Not because he should, but
because he had to. Because he knew it was the only way he would ever be able to go on. He was tired of being unseen. Of being dislocated from his actions. Of witnessing but never being witnessed. He wanted to own his life, and he knew that meant owning all of it. If he’d thought he could find the others—the motorcyclist’s wife, the boys’ parents, the old man’s son—then he would have. And perhaps one day he would try. But for now, he’d start with her husband. This is what he promised himself as the breakers hushed below him. He already knew his name, and what he did. The newspapers had told him that. He would not be hard to find. But not yet. First, before he found him, he must find the words. It would take time. But they would come. All of it would come. This is what Daniel told himself as looked over the ocean that night. Because in the end, everything does.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
“DISTANCE! DISTANCE MICHAEL! It’s your best defence!” Istvan hooked a thumb under the padded lining of his mask and slipped it up over his forehead. “You know this,” he said. “If you are so close, how can you riposte? Come on.” He rapped Michael’s coquille with his blade. “Again.”
With a tap on the top of his mask, Istvan knocked it back down over his face and took up en garde. He wore loose tracksuit bottoms, trainers, a T-shirt. A padded brown suede coaching sleeve protected his sword arm. His glove was coming apart at the seams. Two faded Hungarian flags were still stuck on either side of the mask’s wire mesh.
