by David Poyer
All this can be known, calculated in advance; corrected for barometric pressure, altitude, humidity, temperature, the rotation of the earth. But as it arches outward the wind sways its unwinding trajectory through space and time and moving air first this way, then that. Pushes it half an inch to the left at a hundred yards, two inches at two hundred, twenty-two inches back to the right between two hundred and six hundred.
From moment to moment the wind shifts and folds on itself in a thousand whirls and pleatings, like sheer cloth dropped fluttering through the air. There’s no way to predict density, speed, direction ten seconds from now. Each molecule batters the flying metal with its own will, each impact infinitesimal, but numbered in the trillions.
There’s no way to predict the wind. Or even to measure it, until the present’s passed into history.
By the time the tapered slug reaches the hilltop it’s dropped 158 inches below a line drawn level from the muzzle. The wind has drifted it 50 inches off its original course. As it reaches its target, one and a quarter seconds after it was fired, it’s still moving three hundred feet per second faster than the speed of sound.
GHEDI watches the sky, the moving specks up there, as his finger works at a loose bicuspid. Crows were messengers of waaq, of an evil death. That was the old way, the old belief. Like the wadaaddo some said inhabited Juulheed. The way of the clans. Not the new way.
He’s offered the foreigners peace. Now God will determine whether they accept. If not, there’ll be more war. Whatever He decides, he will accept. The wind cracks and snaps in the flag above him.
He’s looking up at it when someone shouts. It’s Juulheed. Ghedi shades his eyes. What’s he yelling? He’s pointing, calling out about hearing something. Another voice joins in. His sister. What’s she saying? But if there are helicopters . . . he starts to turn, to see what’s wrong.
The bullet comes out of the sun and explodes through his head.
The superheavy metal barely slows as it traverses the eight inches that hold his dreams and terrors, and wipe them away. All memories evaporate in the instant liquefaction of fat and brain tissue. His skull flies apart. His body still stands, shaking with sudden palsy, but he no longer exists.
The bullet drills on, barely slowed by bone and flesh. But that resistance alters its course. It spins off to one side and downward in a spray of blood and fluid that creates for a fraction of a second a halo of pink spray, all around the shattered head it has just emerged from.
. . .
“SHOT one, TI, good hit. Head,” Cooper said from the scope. No longer murmuring. Just a normal everyday business voice. “But he’s still standing. Refire, same dope.”
Teddy was surprised. He’d expected that wind shift to push him off target. And he’d been aiming center mass, not head. He put in one click down and tripped the bolt release.
AN obliterating white flashed behind her sealed lids. Something heavy and hard struck her so hard in the back her body went numb. Gráinne heard a hollow, abrupt sound, like a slab of oak being chopped in two.
THE bullet enters her lungs and tumbles, slowed by the transition from air to solid. It exits, blowing blood and tissue out onto the sand.
HER knees buckled and she sank, the old man clinging bewildered to her arm, trying to hold her up. No time even to wonder what had hit her. But she grasped with that instinctive wisdom of the body that it was something very bad. Just when she’d thought they were safe.
Then she was down, the sand hot against her face. The old man was cradling her head in his lap. He was crying, asking why someone had shot her.
So I was shot, she thought drowsily. Starting to go.
Then she remembered. She forced her eyes open to see his grizzled chin above her face, between her and the sky, which was very bright. She opened her mouth and tried to force her throat to speak, but there was no air. When she tried to breathe nothing happened.
She tried to form words with her lips. Had to say it. He could tell New York. No one knew but her. It didn’t come out, though.
She tried again. Just a sentence? No. Then, one word. Just one.
Her lips were still parted when the black birds flew in from all the edges of the world, faster than any bullet, rushing in on her more rapidly than she could ever have believed anything could move.
AISHA turned at a muffled clap, like the sound you hear when one car backs into another, not hard enough to crunch metal, but an impact.
“What the fuck,” Erculiano said.
Her mouth opened but nothing entered her mind except what her eyes drank in. Rooted to the ground, she stared as the pink mist bloomed and faded, as the still-living but headless body stood jerking. A second clap sounded and it folded and fell. A few yards away one of the hostages, a woman, trailing the others in the company of a bent little man, sagged to her knees, holding her chest. The old man howled.
THE bolt release snapped forward, feeding the second round. Teddy settled back into position, left elbow in the same cup of sand, biceps dead in the tight sling. Inhale. Exhale. Align sights. Slow pressure.
Slam and recoil and dust. Could they miss seeing that dust? He didn’t think so.
“Shot two, center hit, TI down. Call the cleanup crew. Shift to secondary target.”
Teddy shifted but they were running now, ducking or hitting the ground. Were those distant screams? He tracked another bad guy, a white turban this time. Fired, but was pretty sure he missed.
But he’d gotten the principal. The asshole who’d blown up the Cosmo, started a war, killed a hell of a lot of marines. No reason to waste tears on him.
“That’s it,” he grunted, looking around for any trace they might’ve left. Brass sparkled in the sand. As the first return fire cracked out from the hilltop he scooped up empty shells. One, two, three. They burned his palm. He slid along the ground, crawfishing back into cover.
“Let’s haul ass.”
Above them, above the men who stood firing downhill, the others who hustled shivering hostages into vehicles, above a wailing woman in black who crouched by a motionless body, the crows circled. They called harshly to each other, as if denying what they’d just witnessed.
THE AFTERIMAGE
John F. Kennedy International
Airport, New York City
THE admissions area was hot, crowded, a Babel in a hundred tongues. Aisha cradled the warm bundle in her left arm, maneuvering her carry-on with her right and wishing her purse weren’t so heavy. She felt both not herself and as if she were only now commencing real life. In only three weeks her existence had realigned itself as radically as if the force of gravity had suddenly shifted ninety degrees.
She jiggled her new burden, looking down.
Dark eyes met hers with a welding that made her heart stop. A button nose needed wiping again. A dimpled cheek. Warmth gushed again, a fountain of sheer selfless pleasure. Better than sex. Better than anything she’d ever felt. A tiny hand rose, waved about, then fastened to the satin border of the pink blanket. The sweet scents of formula and powder enfolded her. Each time she picked her up it seemed more natural.
Peyster had leaned back in his chair when Aisha said she needed a special favor. Quirked his eyebrows, pursed mouth reluctant. Until she’d pointed out how much she knew—or rather, how she’d helped score a major success against the insurgency. Al-Maahdi was dead, shot in a fracas among his bodyguards during the hostage exchange. A huge thorn in the side of U.S. policy in the region plucked out, and all the hostages safely returned. Except for the Irish geologist, of course. A tragedy. Hit by a stray bullet, dying before a medic could stabilize her.
“All right,” he’d said. “Let’s hear it. What do you want? Job with the Agency? Letter of commendation? You’re right, we couldn’t have done it without you. He’d never have trusted us enough to turn up.”
That hadn’t felt so good, the intimation she’d betrayed a trust. But she’d stuffed that and simply said, evenly as she could, “There’s someone I want to take
back with me, Terry.”
. . .
AN old Jewish woman smiled at her, cooed at the baby, who regarded her with startled eyes. The woman gestured Aisha ahead of her in line. With her red official passport and federal ID, Aisha could have bypassed this line altogether. But she wanted this on the record. She wanted a paper trail.
Finally she was face-to-face with a heavyset, skeptical-looking woman with a Customs and Immigration badge on her blouse. Aisha laid her blue passport on the counter and shoved it under the glass. It was brand-new, uncreased, just issued by embassy staff in Ashaara City. The photo showed her and Tashaara. Trying to look bored, she slid the CROBA through too. The woman glanced at it, then up at her.
All bureaucratic, not very exciting. Not nearly as dramatic as smuggling Nuura’s baby home in a duffel, her fallback plan. But like a magician, Peyster had angled his lopsided smile and all difficulties had fallen away. “You have gained some poundage lately,” he’d said. “And those awful tents you wear—let’s just say this won’t be too hard for anybody around here to believe.”
The Consular Report of Birth Abroad, which the woman behind the glass was now examining, documented the out-of-wedlock birth of one female child, Tashaara Ar-Rahim, to one Aisha Ar-Rahim, U.S. federal employee and citizen on duty abroad. The legal equivalent of a birth certificate, it entitled the child to U.S. citizenship based on her mother’s nationality.
Tashaara began fussing, as if sensing how much was at stake. Aisha hugged and kissed her, inhaling the sweet clean smell from the crown of her little head. Would the woman object? Sense something unusual, wrong? Her uninterested gaze as she held up the passport, comparing it to their faces, said she didn’t much care. She was a light-skinned sister, a bit heavy herself, cheeks dotted with large freckles. Maybe even a Muslim, to judge by her close-cropped hair. Aisha smiled at her. “Salaam,” she said, on the off chance.
“You shouldn’t be in this line,” the immigration officer said. “Next time, just go through the U.S. Citizen line. With your daughter.”
“I’m sorry. I wasn’t sure.”
“That’s all right. By the way, I love your scarf. Is that from Africa?”
“Yes, from Ashaara. Thank you.”
Aisha almost offered it to her, then remembered: officials here didn’t require gifts. Two thumps of a rubber stamp and her new daughter was legally in America. She crammed the paperwork awkwardly into her purse, turning away so the woman wouldn’t pick up on her welling eyes. She’d never found out, might never know, what’d happened to Tashaara’s mother. Vanished, like so many others. But Nuura’s little girl had a future now.
And a family. Aisha’s sisters and mother stood waiting outside the barrier. She walked toward them heavily, feeling new weight on her hips, in her arms. Feeling her new gravity, a different, slower sway to her walk. There’d be questions. Reproaches, no doubt. But the excitement in her mother’s eyes told her none of it would be vented on the baby.
Yeah, Maryam would go crazy pampering her new granddaughter. What would be hard—much harder, now, than she’d anticipated—would be leaving the baby with her mom in Harlem while she went back to Washington. Still, she could ask for leave. Maternity leave? That might be pushing it. Keep it under the official radar. At least for a couple of years, till everyone was used to the picture on her desk, a smiling little girl in pigtails, and how her daughter was living with her mother in New York.
“We couldn’t save them all,” she whispered to the tiny face that stared up with frightening intensity. “But I saved you, my sweetest and dearest. You’ll never be hungry, or afraid. And now you’re home.”
“Aisha! Aisha! Over here!”
“Is that her? Is that the baby?”
She lifted her head, and smiled through the tears.
ESKAN VILLAGE, SAUDI ARABIA
Teddy came so hard his head felt like it was about to explode. It lasted and lasted, which didn’t surprise him. It’d been forever since he’d gotten any.
“Did you come already? Did you?”
The captain’s voice was concerned. He grunted and rolled off, hoping she didn’t reach for another cigarette. Since he’d called and said he was back, to get somebody to cover for her at the site and come to his room, she’d been dewy-eyed and acquiescent. Not even any complaints about how often he had to rush for the can.
Like right now. “Back in a minute,” he muttered, and rolled out and padded across the floor.
The diagnosis had been worms, all right, but the cure was almost as bad as the disease. Resting on the throne, looking around the unadorned bathroom, he let himself sag until he was resting against the wall.
HE came to with barely knitted collarbone aching and the wall slamming beside his ear in a rhythmic syncopation. He must’ve zonked out right there on the shitter.
He and Kowacki had adjoining rooms. The other SEAL had picked up an Army nurse at the PX. A little butt-heavy, but perfectly serviceable for field use. Sounded like Whacker was catching up on his missing pussy time too.
Good for him—they’d earned it. Since they’d pulled out of Ashaara the team had been in Park, assigned to Centcom but without anything to do. It did seem like things were quieting down in the Mideast, though.
He got up reluctantly, washed his hands, hawked phlegm into the sink, a slick tan wad of coughed-up sand.
When he went into the darkened bedroom she was snoring. Turned on her side, legs drawn up, dark bush sticking out like a little tail. He looked down, feeling nothing. She was getting clingy. They did that. First outraged, then all lovey, and finally, into full barnacle mode. You enjoyed it while you could, and let go when it got to be too much.
A clang outside. He dropped into a combat crouch, heart suddenly slamming, head up. Listening.
The pistol was in the drawer with his skivvies. Cradling the weight in his right hand, safety off, he waited.
Was that breathing, outside his door?
He covered it, picking up the night sight, until he half reluctantly concluded it wasn’t breathing. Just his own pulse slamming away in his ears. He straightened and padded to the window. Standing out of the line of fire, he twitched the drapes back. The street was empty. He couldn’t see whatever had made the noise. The lights buzzed with a coral glow on naked asphalt, the cookie-cutter roofs. Beyond them the sky hung dark.
Out of nowhere, he was back in that house. Trapped in the kill zone, flashes of gunfire above. Then the grenade had come arcing down—
His hands shook. He took deep slow breaths, staring at his reflection in the dark glass. Pale eyes gazed back, filled with things he didn’t want to remember. The air force officer had brought some Johnnie Walker. It was in the kitchen nook.
The grenade arced down from the flashing darkness. Hit the ground, and bounced—
No. He didn’t want to get like the old warhorses back at Dam Neck, running on ethanol like a Brazilian bus. Smelling of Jack Daniel’s at 1500, backing their pickups into the younger guys’ cars in the lot, crashing in the empty barracks at the National Guard base up the road instead of going home.
Maybe he should reconsider getting out, making that movie. But even as he thought it he knew he wouldn’t. Acting, directing, were just illusion. Dreams. Make-believe. He’d grown up in that fantasy world, and as soon as he was old enough, run as far as he could. What good were fantasies, when you could live the adventure? Be a fucking SEAL, ripped, cool under fire, better than 007, the man every woman wanted to get creamy with, the man every man you met wanted to be?
But in the movies, only the bad guys died.
He gripped the curtain rod and pressed his forehead against the glass. Even at night, it was hot. He didn’t like air-conditioning.
A small green spheroid. His peripheral vision identified it as a grenade.
And Kaulukukui gave him that look.
“War’s a motherfucker, ain’t it?”
Yeah, Sumo. Yeah. It’s a motherfucker, all right.
But we were supposed
to be the meanest motherfuckers in the valley.
“You bastard,” he muttered. “You fat bastard.”
What had Sumo died for? To put another Idi Amin, another Mugabe, in power? Teddy didn’t like what he was hearing about this new boy, the black one with the white face. He and his men had sweated, bled, risked their lives to take down Assad, then Al-Maahdi. But what was different? What had changed?
That wasn’t what Sumo Kaulukukui had died for. Not freedom, or democracy, or any of the gratuitous bullshit the Navy chaplain had drizzled over his grave. Teddy had stood there in his dress uniform, facing the family as the squad fired the traditional three blanks into the air. They’d flown him back for the funeral. All the way to Hawaii, if you could believe it, with a twenty-four-hour turnaround. The SEALs took care of their own.
Sumo had died for him.
“What’d you say?”
When he turned she was awake, drowsy, dark hair masking her face like a burka, peering up through it. “What’re you doing?” she said, smoothing it back.
“Nothing.”
Her eyes widened. “Is that your gun?”
“Thought I heard something.”
“What?”
“Nothing. Dog in a garbage can, probably.”
When he slid it back into the drawer and turned she’d rolled over on her back and pulled up the T-shirt she wore to bed. A green one, one of his. “Come to mama,” she murmured, lifting her knees, reaching down to spread herself with her fingers. “She’s got something you like. Right here. I can see you’re interested.”
Teddy blinked and looked away. The resemblance to the torn, swollen flesh of an infected wound was too disturbing. He stared out into the darkness again.
The grenade arcs down—
He shoved it away, reeling back to the bed. His gut cramped, but he didn’t let that stop him. Fuck you, ghosts, fuck you, memories. She didn’t ask for preparation, and he didn’t feel like waiting. Ramming away, slamming the headboard against the wall in raucous countercrescendo to the rising storm from the other room, he battered his way past her panting, then her screams, toward a bursting lightless self-obliteration as complete as it would be momentary.
