The Towers

by David Poyer

“You can do this,” her dad murmured. “Come on. Where’s my brave soldier?”

  She took a deep breath and forced herself into motion. Her hip stabbed at each step. Too late, she realized she’d forgotten the arm crutch. Checkie was striding ahead, though, over the wet-gleaming asphalt, as if daring her to race.

  The air inside was stuffy-warm with central heating. She sank to a bench, dizzy, overwhelmed, and asked her father to go back for the crutch. As she waited, head down, white dunes seemed to roll beneath the floor. Colors swam, voices echoed from the immense atrium arched overhead like a glass basilica. Stores climbed like cliff dwellings toward the distant white radiance of skylights.

  She sat feeling washed-out, watching shoppers stroll. There certainly seemed to be a great many obese folks at this mall. Or maybe she shouldn’t point fingers; she’d gained ten pounds lying in bed. At least the cutting was over. Although the therapy, as her mother had warned, was even more painful. Still, she was going a little longer between the oxycodone tablets every day.

  “Got to be strong,” her dad said, handing her the crutch. “Easy enough to be weak. I know you went through a lot. But you can’t crawl into a hole. Can’t just stay home. We’d like you to, but I know you. You’d be miserable. Take it out on your mom and me.”

  She smiled, though it hurt. “I don’t plan to do any crawling, thank you.”

  “That’s good to hear. But what about it?” he said, not looking at her. “What are you going to do? Going to get back in the ring?”

  “Politically, you mean?”

  He nodded, still looking away, as if it didn’t matter. “It’d be easy in District Five. This guy’s voting for everything the administration wants. In eleven months, they’ll be looking to expand their majority in the House and get control of the Senate. They’ll use the war to do that.”

  “Not everything’s politics, Checkie. There are real enemies out there.”

  He wheeled on her, frowning. “Then say that! Show ’em you’re a fighter. You look like one, now.”

  He looked frightened then, as if he might have said the wrong thing, but she only chuckled. “Yeah. One who’s been pounding the canvas with her face.”

  He shrugged. “As long as you get back up again.”

  “Now you sound like Dan.” She felt her strength returning and lurched to her feet. Fitted the padded aluminum tube to her arm. Hating it. Hating the weakness, the pain, but, yes, feeling stronger every day. It was worth thinking about. Maybe she could even do some good. Put some steel into a party that all too often seemed to lack it. Find some payback, though it seemed that was happening without her help. If the news coverage of the great battle in the faraway mountains was any guide.

  “Feeling better now?” her father said, taking her good arm.

  She shook his grip off, setting her teeth, ignoring the pain. And, taking one slow step after another, set her course.

  New York City

  Walking the street in hijab, Aisha felt the stares from the passersby. Some, openly hostile. Well, who could blame them? The great towers had been cast down, a proud city wounded. But the moment she stepped from the gray concrete sidewalk onto the green, she smiled to herself.

  Even as a child she’d suddenly felt happy, just stepping onto that then-bright grass color. Like making it home playing tag. Loiterers had jeered at her mother, who’d held her and her sisters’ hands tightly. A few even shambled drunkenly after them. But when they got to the green paint, they always stopped. As if sin itself halted here, unable to cross onto that holy color. (Though it might also have been thanks to the burly young men who’d guard stood outside the mosque.) This whole neighborhood had been crack city back then. It seemed to be doing better these days.

  “Mommy, why is the sidewalk here green?” Bright chocolate eyes sought hers. Tashaara danced as they walked, skirts whirling. Aisha started to tell her to smooth them down, to be modest, but stopped herself. Let the child enjoy her innocence. How she’d grown, just in the year Aisha had been in Yemen! Nothing like the emaciated, dying infant she’d illegally rescued from a land descending into chaos. Behind the two of them hobbled her mother, using a cane, and two of Aisha’s sisters.

  She squeezed her child’s hand. Someday she’d tell her about that. But not for many years. “It means we’re where we belong, honey. Where we’ll always be safe.”

  Inside, her mother was greeted with hugs by the women from the clinic, where she’d worked for many years. Everyone wanted to shake Aisha’s hand and ask where she’d been. When they got free at last, she helped her mother up the painted steel stairs, smelling the familiar smells, to the second-floor mezzanine.

  She fell in prostration before Allah with the other women, the worn, wooly-smelling carpets soft beneath her, mother on one side, daughter on the other. It was the same. But she slowly realized it was also different. No one gossiped. She caught side glances. Then she looked down, to where the men sat cross-legged on carpet, to where the imam was beginning to speak.

  She stiffened. Two strangers stood against the wall, sides to her as she looked down from above. One was white and the other black, but both men wore identical dark suits and ties. They stood with relaxed insolence, arms crossed, listening as the imam, somewhat hesitantly, began to speak about what jihad really meant. How it did not mean a literal holy war, or at any rate, not primarily that. How it came from the Arabic word for “striving,” or “effort.” Other words derived from the root meant “to labor” and “to become tired, from work.” The men listened intently, one writing occasionally in a notebook. She wondered for a moment what the FBI was doing here, then understood.

  She wasn’t home now just because she wanted to be. It was the letter she’d written to the director, detailing her suspicions about the Yemenis and the reliability of information yielded by enhanced interrogation. Maybe not a wise career move. But she’d had to speak the truth, even against her best interests. That too was in the Quran.

  The deputy director himself had sat her down to explain why she was being pulled off counterterrorism. “This is to protect you,” he’d said, so earnestly she knew he was lying. “Protect you from targeting by ALQ. And your family’s in New York too, aren’t they? Your daughter.” But the grapevine worked both ways. One of the other female agents had told her the real reason.

  It had made her bitter. And why not? When all she’d done was her best.

  Below her the imam was reaching the end of the sermon. Saying to them all, the listening men, the women, even the agents, that what jihad really meant was each soul’s struggle with evil. The labor of perfecting self in the face not only of one’s own laziness and sinful desires, but of outside rejection and misunderstanding—something their community had been familiar with from their very founding. But others—the Irish, the Germans, Jews, Italians, Japanese—had faced and overcome the same persecution. “It will take time to convince America we are as much Americans as those who came before. Who were persecuted and suspected because of their faiths too, each in their turn.”

  No bitterness, she thought, quieting her fidgeting daughter with a gentle hand. That did not belong here. All things were connected, and all directed by a wise Creator. As she murmured the words of the concluding du’a, asking for forgiveness and divine guidance, peace floated back into her heart. He was with her and in her.

  With her, Allah.

  Always and everywhere, and forever.

  Amin.

  Landstuhl Regional Medical Center Ramstein Air Base, Germany

  The man in the darkened room breathed slowly. An external fixator covered his face like a crouching stainless spider. Tubes hung from him, and shining metal rods extended through purpled, puffy skin, screwed into holes tapped into bone and skull. The machines had been rolled back a few hours before, to another bed in another room. He murmured and twitched.

  Then his eyes opened.

  Teddy Oberg stared up for a while, not really thinking. Then a cold terror shook itself awake and crawled al
ong his bones like hungry worms.

  It was coming back. Not where he was, or how he’d gotten there. These things he did not know. But he remembered the mountain. The cold. An old man frozen rigid where he sat. He scratched the sheets with nails that seemed excessively long. The bed seemed to be tilted to port, as if he were on a listing ship. A ship? He listened, tried to sense motion, but couldn’t. Still felt that queer leftward cant in the surface he lay on, though. A hard object was nestled into his right hand. The button. He recognized that, somehow. Press the button if it starts to hurt. It wasn’t hurting now, though. Maybe he’d pressed it already?

  He cleared his throat. Rolled his head.

  A silent figure sat in shadow by his bedside. He tensed, squinting, trying to make out who it could be. But he couldn’t distinguish features. Maybe just the silhouette of a piece of equipment.

  Then a man sniffed, and Teddy caught through the hospital smell something strange yet familiar; a minty tang with a whiff of acetone.

  “Who the hell,” Teddy suggested.

  “Back with us?” The voice was low, confiding. When Teddy only grunted, it went on, “Chief Petty Officer Theodore Harlett Oberg? US Navy?”

  “Uh … yeah.”

  “You’re in a Level Four treatment facility in Germany. Landstuhl, if you know where that is. You damn near died. But you’ll be headed home soon. Back to the States. To Bethesda, probably. Any questions for me?”

  “… d’ I get here?”

  “I don’t have all the details. But one of your men brought you down from the mountains. You ordered him to get your wounded down to the LZ. He did that. Then went back up after you. Found you freezing to death. Got a line on you and lowered you down the ridge. Got you down and medevaced you out.”

  Teddy lay contemplating this. Fucking hard to believe. Skinny, limp-dicked Swager had come back up, in the dark, and found him? Manhandled him single-handed all the way down that bitch of a mountain, fifteen hundred fucking feet to the extract LZ?

  Eventually he found he could manage that. He’d underestimated the newbie, the guy they’d called the Baby SEAL. He was a Team guy, after all.

  What he couldn’t understand was Sumo being there too. It hadn’t been a hallucination. You couldn’t hallucinate a three-hundred-pound Hawaiian. “Sumo?” he croaked, then immediately thought, that was a mistake.

  “Sorry, what?”

  “Nothing. Nothing … ’n’ who’re you?”

  “Just a guy with a couple of questions. About the mission. If you got the time.”

  “I don’t discuss missions.”

  “You’ll discuss this one,” the man said. “In the Safed Koh, over the Pak border, to get bin Laden. The back way, the Ghilzai route to the Parachinar. Where you lost Dusty Palladino and most of Echo Two. We on the same page now, Chief?”

  “… Guess so.”

  “Actually I really only have one question. And since you were the only dude on the scene, you’re the only one can answer it. Here it is. Did you get him?”

  Teddy closed his eyes. Tried to replay it, and only got part. He heard another sniff and smelled menthol and eucalyptus. “My guys. Moogie. Mud Cat. They make it?”

  “Some of ’em. Not all. But you already know that.”

  “Who? Which—”

  “I’m not privy to that level of detail. We can have someone get you that info, though. But my question. Did you nail him?”

  Teddy thought for a while. Trying to be exact. But the endless wind, the snow-smoke, the sparkling green murk, seemed to have blown across his memory too. Finally he said, “Don’t know.”

  “You don’t know.”

  “I … might have. Last round. Too dark. Scope was … fucked.”

  “Well, if you don’t know, I do,” the shadow said. A faint sound, as if he were spitting out a bit of tobacco, though the guy didn’t seem to be smoking. “You missed.”

  “… How?”

  “Intercepted radio transmission. Well into the Parachinar, into the Tribal Territories.”

  “So it was—?”

  “It was him, all right. Confirmed by one of his aides we captured.”

  “… See if he’s…”

  “We checked. Sent in two operators. Found your overwatch point. Where you ambushed him. Nothing else, though. Hell of a mission, from what I hear. You can be proud of yourself, and your team. Just shitty luck there at the end.”

  Teddy lay drifting, contemplating it. He wanted to squeeze the button now, but forced himself not to.

  “I’ll get back on my feet,” he said. “Build myself up. Then go after him again.”

  “That’s a great attitude. I like that. But unfortunately, there are certain things you won’t find so easy anymore. Accepting that, they tell me, is the first step back.”

  “What … talking about?”

  For answer the shadowman leaned over him. Took Teddy’s hand and guided it down his side. He tried to resist, but didn’t have the strength. His fingers slid down his leg. Then met cold steel, tubes, wires. The pain flared. He caught his lip in his teeth.

  “Tissue damage. Frostbite,” the man said. “They can’t tell me if you’ll keep the leg or not.” He set Teddy’s hand back on his chest. Patted it, then stood. “We’ll carry on. Don’t worry about that. This war’s in good hands. But if you got anything else you always wanted to do, start thinking about that.

  “So, I’ll leave you to it. But I will say this. You’re a hell of an operator.”

  The shadow touched its forehead. When Teddy grasped it was a salute, he lifted his left hand and wiggled the fingers, like a toddler saying good-bye.

  And with his right, pressed the button.

  * * *

  WHEN he opened his eyes again, the chair was empty. Maybe it’d been empty all along? Like with Sumo, he’d imagined the guy? His head swam. His mouth was puckered dry. What had they been talking about. Oh, yeah. Fuck yeah. That he’d missed, there at the end. Fuck.

  He felt for his leg again, hoping like hell it had been a bad dream.

  Nope.

  He lay there in the dark, feeling by turns bitter and relieved. Then angry. But pretty soon, instead of himself, he started thinking about the guys he’d lost.

  He probably wouldn’t be able to make the funerals. Like a chief should. But he could meet the families, at least. Tell them just how brave their sons and fathers and husbands had been. When it counted.

  Maybe he could do something else, too.

  If you got anything else you always wanted to do, start thinking about that.

  Was there? Maybe a stocky, cocky brunette in the San Diego Sheriff’s Department? Yeah. Maybe. But something else too. Something much more important.

  He couldn’t bring them back. Dusty and Moogie and Harley, Doc and Vaseline. The L-T, Dollard, blown into bits so small they hadn’t even looked human. And so many others. So very many others.

  But he could stay on mission.

  He stretched out an arm and dropped the button over the side of the bed. It hit the floor with the crack of breaking thermoplastic. He took a few breaths, pumping himself up. Doubled his fists. Then pushed himself to a sitting position.

  Rested for a few minutes, panting as if in high, thin air. Then fought like hell and finally got his foot on the floor. He rested again, pulse pounding, almost fainting from the pain, but enduring it. Forcing himself to take it.

  Yeah. There was something he wanted.

  To get strong. Recover. Join the Teams again.

  And finish the job so many had died trying to do. Call it payback. Call it deterrence, if you wanted. Or justice. Even just, revenge. It wasn’t only that, but why not. He didn’t have a problem with vengeance.

  It might take years. But one thing was sure. America would never forget. Never turn back. And never, ever forgive. He belonged out there, at the pointy end of the spear. Someday, somewhere, on some mountainside or in a crowded souk or some isolated compound, in Africa or Afghanistan or Pakistan or at the fucking ass en
d of the earth, he’d get another chance. And the next time he or some other SEAL or Special Forces or Marine got in range, it would be a different story.

  He owed them all that. At the very least.

  Washington, DC

  Washington (Navy News Service)—The results of last year’s active-duty captain line promotion selection board were voided on Feb. 21 after it was discovered that certain procedural safeguards required by the Secretary of the Navy had not been fully followed by board members.

  “Our Sailors must have complete confidence in the absolute integrity of the selection process. We must not hesitate to protect that process in order to provide the best possible leadership for the Fleet,” said Vice-Admiral Barry N. Niles, who will be in charge of instructing the reconvened board.

  The new board, with new members, will begin meeting next week to begin what Vice-Admiral Niles called “full and fair reconsideration” of all eligible officers. The new promotion list will be available by the first of May.

  Also by David Poyer

  Tales of the Modern Navy

  The Crisis

  The Weapon

  Korea Strait

  The Threat

  The Command

  Black Storm

  China Sea

  Tomahawk

  The Passage

  The Circle

  The Gulf

  The Med

  Tiller Galloway

  Down to a Sunless Sea

  Louisiana Blue

  Bahamas Blue

  Hatteras Blue

  The Civil War at Sea

  That Anvil of Our Souls

  A Country of Our Own

  Fire on the Waters

  Hemlock County

  Thunder on the Mountain

  As the Wolf Loves Winter

  Winter in the Heart

  The Dead of Winter

  Other Novels

  Ghosting

  The Only Thing to Fear

  Stepfather Bank

  The Return of Philo T. McGiffin

  Star Seed

  The Shiloh Project

  White Continent

  This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.