“We had a pact.”
“Can’t we just agree to disagree?”
“Not about this.”
“I’m trying to make Max feel good about himself.”
“Nobody’s perfect, Rose. You’re setting the bar way too high.”
“I don’t want him to think he’s sick. He’ll just manifest more sickness.”
“Here we go again.”
“Now what?”
“Blaming the victim. It’s cruel, Rose.”
“No one’s blaming anybody.”
“You’re blaming Max for manifesting autism. Whatever the fuck manifesting means.”
“Nobody said that.”
“Logic says it, Rose. There’s no getting around it.”
She tried to remember how the Source reconciled disease and the law of attraction. There was no doubt it could be done. If Tashi could account for the karmic cause of the Holocaust without blaming its millions of victims, surely she could account for the autism of one little boy. It all seemed crystal clear when Tashi was on the phone with her. The voice itself clarified everything.
“If you weren’t so negative all the time, you might understand what I mean.”
“That’s right, Pollyanna. Blame me just like you blame Max.”
“I asked you not to call me that.”
“I asked you to quit telling Max he’s perfect.”
“What’s the big deal? Not enough rain on your parade?”
As far as Todd was concerned the argument was over. He had made his point. Further discussion was unnecessary, if not counterproductive. Rose always accused him of not being willing to work things through. She liked to explore issues from every angle, which really meant saying the same thing over and over. The fact was, there were really only two angles. His and hers. Compromise was an action, not a bunch of words spoken in anger. Todd had learned from experience that the best way to resolve a disagreement was to stop disagreeing. He retrieved the remote to signal the end of the conversation. Then he had a better idea. He folded back the covers on her side of the bed.
“What’s that supposed to mean?” Rose said.
“Misery loves company.”
“What’s that got to do with the price of beans?”
“When it rains it pours.”
Todd liked to tease Rose about lapsing into clichés when she got upset. Nine times out of ten she took the bait. As Rose herself often said, they couldn’t fight their way out of a paper bag. Truth be told, sparring aroused them both. Todd draped the sheet ceremoniously across his thighs. Rose looked at his lap and then looked away.
“You’re a real asshole, you know that?”
“Takes one to know one.”
“Go to hell.”
Her tone of voice was still bitchy as hell. But something in her eyes wavered. Todd took a chance. He lunged across the bed and grabbed her arm. She was already laughing by the time she tumbled into bed next to him. It was the kind of laugh a gangster’s moll might let loose, archly acquiescent rather than mirthful.
“At last,” Todd said. “A genuine emotion. Now maybe we can really talk.”
“You want to talk, do you?” she said.
“It’s been awhile since we’ve had a real heart-to-heart.”
He ripped off her pants without bothering with her blouse. Neither of them was proud of the fact that fighting elicited some of their hottest sex. It wasn’t even make-up sex. It was part of the fight itself. The nuances of making love went out the window, leaving them both free to do what they damn well pleased. They weren’t so much rough as inconsiderate. Todd would be hammering away, getting into a rhythm, and Rose would keep pivoting this way and that, angling for her optimum pace and position without regard for his. It took him twice as long to come and she’d come twice as often. By the time they were both satiated, the fight was usually over.
Todd always fell asleep instantaneously. Even when they didn’t have sex, he conked out and didn’t budge until the alarm went off. Rose extricated herself from their tangled limbs and watched him sleep, sprawled on his back with both arms flung wide. The expression on his face had convinced her to marry him. For all his tough guy swagger during the day, he looked perfectly peaceful when his eyes closed for the night. No matter what, there would always be this tranquil place in bed next to him. She relied on it more than she liked to admit, especially lately. Something neither of them was willing to acknowledge was getting more and more difficult to ignore. She nestled against him, breathing when he breathed, going through the motions of sleep.
The fact that Todd never suffered from insomnia had served him well over the years, especially in combat mode. He was either callous or remarkably well-adjusted. He never thought he’d confront an emotional adversary he couldn’t fend off with sleep. But he had finally met his match. In isolation, he could handle his son’s autism and his wife’s cosmic consciousness. But the combination of the two, cosmic autism, was enough to unhinge even his heroic equilibrium. He kept breathing deeply, steadily, simulating sleep. One false move and Rose would be at him again, trying to work things through. Even when he was sure she had dozed off, he didn’t dare move. He felt trapped, arms flung wide in a pantomime of repose, his blood still boiling with rage. It turned out Rose had been pretending, too.
“Todd, are you awake?”
“Unfortunately.”
“Are you still mad at me?”
“Are you still communing with your guru?”
“How about giving me a little credit?”
“For what?”
“Thinking for myself.”
“You mean to tell me you came up with that prophet crap all on your own?”
“Fuck you.”
“We tried that.”
“I guess it didn’t work.”
* * *
Farley’s old couple was at it again. The wife came home early from visiting her sister and caught her husband smoking on the porch. His accomplices, mostly traveling salesmen, retreated into their hotel rooms. The couple fought for a while outside, taking turns storming off the porch into the garden. At one point the wife actually grabbed a butternut squash to throw at her husband. She missed and it exploded against a window frame. Pulp and seeds showered the porch. He retaliated with a tomato, a bull’s-eye that left a drippy splotch of red on her dress. Judging from the expression on his face, he realized he had gone too far. He ducked into the hotel and they took the fight inside.
Thousands of miles away, Todd’s squad was placing bets on who would win the fight. Farley was the only one sitting this one out, in spite of the fact that it was his couple duking it out on his watch. Presumably, it would have taken World War III to blast him out of his vegetative state. Franklin and Kucher backed the husband. They weren’t allowed to bet money so they wagered a vacation day. To make it interesting, as they say in Las Vegas. Everyone else except Brown went with the wife. Nine vacation days were on the table when Brown doubled the wager and played a wild card. As far as he was concerned, taking the fight inside could only mean one thing.
“It’s going to be a draw, gentlemen,” Brown said. “Never underestimate the bedroom factor.”
Kucher and Poindexter folded. The others anted up and waited for the hand to play out. The stakes were high. They gambled with the abandon of Diamondback Jack without once looking at Farley’s monitor. Everyone’s eyes were fixed on their own surveillance sectors. House rules, which were nominally dictated by Major Barron, allowed them to yip yap all they wanted as long as their attention never wavered from their own monitors. Farley’s sensor operator, Senior Airman Walker, provided a running commentary on what was happening on the ground, every gesture proffered in anger, every expletive the couple mimed with their mouths. Walker was an ace lip reader. For him, the drama unfolding at the hotel was like a silent movie. For the rest of them, it was like a good old-fashioned radio show. But instead of gathering around a single stereo console they were isolated in cubicles, watching dozens of computer monitor
s while they listened. Good old-fashioned multitasking.
Franklin was tracking the movements of rogue militia in the foothills of the Hindu Kush, providing intelligence to three companies of marines on the verge of staging an attack. Kucher was hovering over a target in Khost, his finger at the ready to bomb a Taliban stronghold. Brown and Gomez were stuck riding shotgun for troop withdrawals out of Iraq. The official word was that combat operations were nearing completion. Whether the mission was accomplished or not, the end of the protracted occupation was in sight. Classified information sources told another story. A substantial number of Special Forces were arriving to take the place of battalions crossing the border into Kuwait. Though technically serving in an advisory capacity, they were armed to the teeth. Semantics were playing an increasingly important role in the so-called war on terror.
Todd had his game face on. He pretended to be as oblivious as Farley to the squad’s incessant patter, the whistles and catcalls and chronically vulgar language they relished with such gusto. They sounded like bleacher creatures rallying the home team. Commanders were required to hover above the fray, gauging what was really going on underneath the devilmay-care veneer, which disguised but never dulled their deadly resolve. Todd knew there was nothing wrong with horsing around per se. It actually served a purpose if it loosened them up. Like ballplayers, they were prone to making mistakes when they were on edge. But the stakes were even higher. With all due respect to the mythic dimensions of the great American pastime, the repercussions of striking out paled in comparison with launching an ill-advised air strike. The boredom factor figured into both scenarios. It was easy to sit back on your heels when pitch after pitch, mile after desert mile, produced nothing but statistics and video feeds. Then suddenly, out of nowhere, a rocket was launched in your direction, a line drive or a Hellfire missile. If banter kept you on your toes, it was an integral part of the war game. Good commanding officers knew this. Most of them, including Todd, had learned it the hard way.
“Where are they now?”
“The bedroom light is on,” Walker said.
“Which means jack shit.”
“It means they’re still going at it.”
“Fucking?”
“Fighting. They never fuck with the lights on, remember?”
“You wouldn’t either if you were eighty-five, going on a hundred.”
Ordinarily, Todd just turned up his headset to drown out all their nonsense. With a flip of a switch he could surf up to sixteen channels, including direct audio contact with Central Intelligence, CIA Crisis Operations Liaison Teams, Joint Special Operations, Task Force 714, and ground troops relying on the aerial support of the drones in his squad. The further up the intelligence ladder, the less interesting the channel. Mind-numbing amounts of information had transformed Central Command into a data processing hub, a high-tech hybrid of man and machine disseminating computer-generated tactical maneuvers in digital code. Increasingly, war was a spectator sport, something that unfolded on screens rather than on battlefields. Whenever possible, Todd tuned into the lowest level in the chain of command, boots on the ground still engaging in actual combat. He liked to listen to the urgency of their voices, the rough, raspy radio connections that faded in and out as terrain, or worse, interrupted reception. He lived vicariously through them, if having one ear tuned to actual combat really constituted living.
For some reason, Farley’s old couple also piqued Todd’s interest. He had grown very fond of them, which didn’t bode well. They might be blown to bits any day now. He kept his cards close to his chest, never letting on that he was joining the peanut gallery. When the squad tuned into Walker’s radio show, he tuned in along with them. If he’d been a betting man, he would have thrown in his lot with Brown. Nine times out of ten, the bedroom factor won the day. Perhaps this was why Todd was drawn to the couple. He found himself envying them, a man in his prime coveting the passionate intensity of an elderly husband and his wizened wife. And with this pathetic realization, the whole house of cards came tumbling down.
Todd saw himself as he really was, a man in theory but not in practice, living a life he no longer recognized as his own. He watched himself watching his squad watch events unfolding halfway around the planet, all of which seemed more real than what was happening here and now, either at work or at home. He might have characterized his spectral epiphany as an out-of-body experience, if this notion didn’t coincide with Rose’s New Age claptrap. He spied a virtual bald spot developing on the crown of his head, a harbinger of things to come. It scared him back into himself.
Todd was surprised he hadn’t thought of it before, the kind of simple, elegant solution the military had always offered up to him. He would request redeployment with the next surge in Afghanistan. Problem solved. The better part of him was already there, the part of him that was still vital and intact. Redeployment wasn’t so much an escape, like Rose’s journey to the Source. It was a way to recover the real Todd Barron.
* * *
Rose almost never called Todd at work. For one thing, it took forever to get through security. Checkpoint operators recognized her voice, and caller ID verified she was phoning from Todd’s residence. The likelihood that a telephone call could threaten national security seemed remote. But the United States Air Force wasn’t about to take chances. Not that terrorists stood much of a chance, given the demographics of the godforsaken stretches of land between Las Vegas and the various national missile ranges dotting the desert. There were more military personnel per capita than anywhere else on the planet, with the notable exception of the Green Zone in Baghdad. Creech was just one of many arrows in Nevada’s quiver.
It took Rose almost half an hour to negotiate her way through a series of questions designed to confirm her identity. Higher security clearance demanded enhanced interrogation techniques. Above all, the process confirmed that military intelligence was alarmingly familiar with the domestic details of her life with Major Barron. Apparently, knowledge of his mother’s maiden name wasn’t proof enough of Mrs. Todd Barron’s marital status. She had to identify what he ate for breakfast, where he stored his toolbox, and whether he wore boxers or briefs. They finally put her call through when she told them that budgetary constraints had forced him to switch from Jockey to Hanes.
Todd was supervising the aerial component of an assassination mission. An unprecedented three of his squad’s drones had been ordered to surveil the movements of a senior al Qaeda and Taliban military commander. To the best of their knowledge, he routinely returned home to Bangi Dar for religious festivities. It was Eid al-Fitr, and his compound was filled with friends and family. The CIA was hoping to pull off a raid to avoid excessive civilian casualties. If all went well, Navy SEALs would helicopter in and out, conducting what was officially classified as a targeted assassination. But if Plan A failed, Brown and Poindexter were poised and ready to pull the trigger. Plan B, bombing the entire compound, still qualified as a targeted assassination. Critics of the drone program argued that it was overkill. The commander was a large man, six foot four in stocking feet, but not large enough to warrant a Hellfire missile. Or two. Or three. Collateral damage was a drone’s worst enemy, in the media if not in fact. But this particular warlord was too big a fish to avoid frying, one way or the other.
Todd had his hands full and then some, juggling audio information from several command centers, including Joint Special Operations Command, and video feeds on dozens of monitors in his squad. But he never refused to field one of Rose’s phone calls. He knew she would only call in an emergency. It was hard to imagine how a domestic emergency, no matter how dire, could compete with the magnitude of taking out an al Qaeda commander. God forbid one of the kids had been maimed or killed. Checkpoint operators tried to assess the threat level, but Rose kept insisting she needed to speak directly with Todd. They had been trained in a full battery of interrogation techniques, highly effective on terrorists, useless on mothers. At length, without managing to determine whethe
r the crisis warranted an orange or red alert, they finally authorized the call.
“I hope I’m not interrupting anything important,” Rose said.
“Same old, same old,” Todd said. “Are you okay?”
“I can’t find Max.”
“Did you check the closet?”
“Of course.”
“The hamper?”
“I looked everywhere, Todd. He’s gone.”
The first of two helicopters landed in a driveway between the main compound and a garden shed, effectively blocking access in and out of the compound. It was a tight fit, given the number of cars parked inside the gate. The second chopper hovered over the garden itself, using propeller wind to flatten vegetation before descending. No one, armed or otherwise, was flushed out of the garden. Brown surveilled the rooftops which were, inexplicably, free of snipers. The attack plan ignored the fact that it was Eid al-Fitr. If anything, religious holidays were considered strategic rather than sacred, a kind of camouflage obscuring the clear and present danger of Taliban forces.
A squad of Navy SEALs leapt out of the first helicopter. Under cover of gunners in the second bird, still hovering at a strategic remove from the ground, they rushed the compound. A white flag poked out of a ground-floor window. Brown and Poindexter’s sensor operators zoomed in, and the flag came into focus from thirteen angles on thirteen separate monitors in the trailer alone. Elsewhere, in command centers around the world, thousands of white flags waved on thousands of computer screens, generating a flurry of assessment but no change in the actual op plan. More often than not, white flags were decoys in Afghanistan. This one was actually a dish towel tied to a broom stick. Or was it a pillowcase? Whoever was inside the compound was probably on the brink of staging a counterattack.
Todd adjusted his headset. In one ear, JSOC was collating real-time intelligence and monitoring the progress of the offensive. The voice never wavered, even when the second helicopter careened and almost crashed. In the other ear, Rose was in a panic. Todd turned down the volume in his left ear so he could still hear both channels loud and clear.
The Home Front Page 10
