by Tom DeLonge
Or sacrificial offerings.
I saw the tools, scattered on the concrete close by, and my heart skipped back into life: wire cutters. I snatched them up and turned to face the fence and the woods beyond, so close but still so far away.
“What’s happening?” asked Ishmael as if he were on the brink of sleep.
For a moment there was an eerie stillness under the concrete henge, and then with a thunderous roar, the great guns opened up, raining down from all four watchtowers at the perimeter.
I didn’t wait to watch them fall. I loped the few yards to the fence, expecting to feel the bullets tearing into my back, threw myself down and set to work with the wire cutters.
“Ishmael!” I called over my shoulder. “Ishmael!”
I didn’t dare look around. Any second, the guns would find us too. I sheared away and pulled at the wire. As I did, I saw a bit of exposed metal on the ground on the other side, half covered by snow and pine straw.
Mines.
But to remain inside the fence was certain death. I would take my chances in the minefield. I snipped again, bending the wire back. The ground around me suddenly kicked up dirt as the gunners homed in on me. The hole in the fence was, perhaps, big enough.
“Ishmael!” I called, turning back, extending a hand to him.
But Ishmael was lying on his belly, facing me. He was fading. Blood pooled beneath him where he’d been hit.
“No!” I shouted. But when I moved towards him, his face changed, focused.
“Go, little brother!” he said.
And then the machine gun rounds were flashing around us, thudding into his prone, broken body, and he was gone.
10
ANDY
Kofu, Japan 1989
ANDY BICYCLED THROUGH THE THICK JUNE EVENING, wishing—not for the first time that day—that he could stop and shower. A Northern Englishman, only a year out of university, whose world traveling had been limited to Greek and Italian beach holidays, he was unprepared for the hot, humid summers in Japan. A few weeks into his stay, he’d awoken to the sound of something moving in the kitchen and found, to his horror, a three-inch-long black cockroach scuttling around in the stainless steel sink. Insects big enough that you could hear them from the next room were not a feature of the Lancashire life he’d known.
The roaches weren’t the only problem. The loud cicadas in the trees, the giant locusts in the grass, the stag beetles in the pet shops, even the sweet and salty crickets served in place of nuts in the bars, all gave him the willies. Bicycling at night was particularly awful because you were moving too fast to see what might fly into your face. Two nights ago, he’d hit a moth so big he thought it was a bird, and almost lost control of the bike in his panic.
Still, bicycling was how he got around, when he wasn’t taking the train. The Japanese driving test was famously—some said deliberately—punishing on foreigners, containing a lengthy written section that demanded language skills no one could achieve with only a year or two of college Japanese. Not that Andy had even that. He’d been an English major, and had landed a position with the fledgling JET program, which placed native English speakers in Japanese high schools, largely because so few people from the UK had any real experience with Japanese. Andy had known next to nothing about Japan when he arrived. As a result, the whole experience had been a bit of a trial by ordeal, and one that concerned more than just bugs.
He had one foreign friend, a Mexican-American named Jesús, the son of migrant field laborers now settled in northern California. Jesús was a big, thoughtful guy Andy’s age, a skilled visual artist, a thinker and a wit. Andy suspected he might also be gay, but they didn’t talk about that.
The community of foreigners in the little town of Kofu, a little over a hundred kilometers west of Tokyo, was almost entirely comprised of JET employees, a few Mormon missionaries who kept to themselves, and a few other Americans who taught classes at the YMCA. Andy had met an older Canadian man who had settled in Kofu years ago, married a Japanese woman and had a pair of teenaged daughters, but the others were here for no more than a year or two. The word was that the JET program was going to send its Australian members home at the end of their contract, whether they wanted to renew or not, because of tax treaty issues, so the pool of English speakers would get smaller still.
Circumstances had thrown people together, united by the fact that they all spoke English and were all a long way from home, in a place that was alien and strange, and though Andy liked most of them well enough, Jesús was the only one he could see being friends with elsewhere. The Japanese were generally welcoming, and some of them seemed to idolize every foreigner they saw, but they were also different, and for all their apparent friendliness, tended to keep their distance. When you were separated by language from even the TV and the billboards, Japan could be a very lonely place. Andy had never been especially social in university, but he couldn’t get enough of it now, both the gatherings at the local bars with their red paper lanterns, and the quiet evenings with Jesús, where they would sit and chat and drink until they were comfortable enough to just be quiet and think their own thoughts.
Andy lived up on the Kofu bypass, which arrowed along the northern rim of the town, while Jesús lived down in the basin, separated from the urban center by one of the craggy mountainous outcrops that typified the area this side of Mt. Fuji. By Japanese standards, Kofu was a smallish city, a couple of hundred thousand people clustered together in one of the country’s only land-locked prefectures, two hours from Tokyo. Parts of it felt ancient and strange, elegant tiled rooftops and tiny, immaculate gardens, while other parts were clean and modern, but distinctly Japanese in ways that made them a bit unreal.
Andy pedaled on, bracing himself for the long tunnel through the mountainside. It was generally hot and poorly ventilated inside, the air bitter with exhaust fumes that made him feel lightheaded. There were never any pedestrians on the elevated sidewalk. Andy pedaled hard, keen to get through and out. Even so, it took several minutes to reach the end, and he emerged into the warm night air coughing, his head thick with poisonous smog.
The other side of the tunnel, where the red neon letters of the TDK building marked the only significant structure, was an entirely different world. The road down into the basin was steep and narrow, a series of hard switchbacks that zigzagged down to the quiet suburbs of the town, marked by vineyards and ancient Buddhist temples sprouting unexpectedly from the crisscrossed interlacing of little streets lined with tidy houses. In daylight, you might see uniformed schoolchildren or grannies bent over double, their backs loaded with bales of rice straw, as if the town couldn’t figure out which century it was in.
As Andy came round the corner, riding his brakes and not needing to pedal, he looked up and saw an object in the sky. He stopped, amazed. It was long and roughly cigar shaped, and dark, with no lights at all, and if it hadn’t been silhouetted against a moon that was nearly full, he wouldn’t have seen it.
It hung motionless in the sky, slightly tilted up at what Andy took to be the nose, though the shape was featureless, and both ends looked the same. It was stationary, slimmer and more rigid-looking than a blimp or those old dirigibles he’d seen in pictures, the R101 or the Hindenburg. He marveled at how those names came back to him.
He got off his bike and stood watching it. In daylight, he would have had with him his camera, a Canon T70, his pride and joy, which he took everywhere, knowing that in Japan, every day was a photo opportunity. But he didn’t have it with him now.
He waited for ten minutes, hoping someone would come by to corroborate what he was seeing, but the road was deserted. The object did not move, nor did its appearance change. After a while, as the strangeness wore off, he grew frustrated and decided to ride down to Jesús’ place as fast as he could. His friend would have his camera. He would confirm what he was looking at.
Andy set off, watching the sky for anything that might suggest how big the object was, or at what altitude. He coul
d not get an accurate sense of proportion. If he had to guess, he’d say it was the size of a small commercial airliner, and no more than a few thousand feet up. But as he cycled, the road cutting back and forth as it angled down into the basin, the object’s position in relation to the moon changed, and he lost sight of it. By the time he reached Jesús’ apartment, there was no sign of it.
They went looking for it, camera in hand, but it was a hard slog back up to the Heiwa Dori, and they didn’t see anything unusual in the sky.
The following day, he shared his story with his fellow teachers at school. Everyone nodded and smiled and said no, there had been no reports of anything on the television news or in the paper. One teacher told him that Kofu was well known for its UFO sighting. Others just shrugged and smiled, and said it was perhaps some kind of balloon, though why such a thing would be up there at night, no one could say.
Andy lived in Japan for another year. During that time, he saw nothing like the strange cigar-shaped object. He returned to the UK, then moved on to graduate school and work in the US, first in Boston, then in Atlanta. He married. He built a career for himself. In all that time, he never saw anything like the object he had watched in the sky over Kofu.
Andy also stayed in touch with Jesús, at first by letters, then by phone calls, and then through social media, though they saw each other rarely and never discussed that particular night. There was, after all, nothing to talk about. Andy had seen something strange, something he couldn’t explain, but it had been an undramatic occurrence without a climax or obvious significance. It had no narrative arc. He had seen it, and then he had lost it. He hadn’t even witnessed it moving away. As such, it was both event and non-event, something he never forgot, but didn’t know what to do with.
He supposed that was the way it was for most people who see strange things in the sky. They carry the memory with them, and a residual uncertainty about the nature of the universe, which they keep private for fear of looking foolish, hoping that someday there will be some simple, ordinary explanation that will, once understood, render the whole thing ordinary. But until that happens, he thought, you have to keep a door open to the possibility that something strange had occurred, something that could turn reality on its head and make the world foreign, even alien.
11
ALAN
Camp Leatherneck Marine, Helmund Province, Afghanistan, September 2014
US FORCES IN AFGHANISTAN, UNLIKE SOME COALITION troops, were not permitted access to alcohol for fear of disciplinary issues resulting from drunkenness. Alcohol also diminished an individual’s capacity for good judgment and restraint. Alan understood the rule and agreed with it, particularly after a murderous attack on local civilians by a drunken sergeant, several years prior. Even if he hadn’t agreed with it, Major Alan Young did not break such rules, though on this Afghan night, after hours of grueling interrogation and the resultant sense of paranoia and failure, he might have made an exception.
He was still a Major in the Marine Corps, though the clock was ticking.
Hatcher, the CIA man, in response to Alan’s reluctance to sign away his career, had given him the night to think it over, though there really wasn’t a choice to be made. Either he resigned voluntarily, or he was dishonorably discharged, and while the loss of pension and benefits would certainly cause all manner of hardships, it was the dishonorable part that really stung. He had taken the matter to his commanding officer, asked as formally as he could how it was possible that the CIA could interfere in a Marines matter like this, and though he could sense his CO’s fury at being thus pushed around by another government agency, there was apparently nothing he could do to stop it. Whatever happened next, Alan had flown his last mission as a Marine pilot. Life as he had known it, as he had built it, brick by careful brick, was over.
The base was no place for privacy. The place teemed with US, NATO and local personnel at all hours of the day and night, in spite of President Obama’s much-touted draw down, particularly since the extension of the runway they shared with the Brits at Camp Bastion. Would he miss it? Thirty-six hours ago, he would have laughed at the idea, but now … If only he’d kept his mouth shut and never mentioned the bogey—if he’d just claimed an unexplained system malfunction, he might have talked his way out of it.
He walked the streets and hangars of the airport complex, avoiding people’s eyes, showing his ID when necessary, trying to think of nothing, trying to just wear out his body so that he might get a few hours of unbroken sleep. Things had changed a lot over the last few months as the troops had gradually been pulled out of combat operations. There was a sense that everyone was killing time, waiting to go home. As personnel redeployed stateside, some of the features of what had been a small city were vanishing. It had never been like Kandahar, with its TGI Fridays and KFCs, but Leatherneck had a decent PX, the base chow hall had been expanded, and there were now four gyms. But none of them were to stay in the Marines’ control. In the course of the next month they would all be withdrawn and the base handed over to the Afghan army.
Alan didn’t mind. It had always felt odd to him, this curious, insulated sense of American normalcy in a war zone, separated from the indigenous population by concrete and wire, so that the only Afghans some of the soldiers ever saw were the ones bussed in daily to operate the Hadji shops.
There was still the rec center, with its gym and video games, and the Green Bean coffee shop (“Honor first, coffee second”) where they compensated for the base’s lack of alcohol with massive doses of caffeine, and there were soldiers, shopping and wandering around the tents and shipping containers in regulation T-shirts and combat fatigues, but it wouldn’t go on much longer. If he had lasted another thirty days or so, Alan would have gone home with the rest of his squadron, his reputation—and his career—intact.
Alan passed through the gap between a tan communications building and a concrete shelter and was waiting for a pair of white vans and a sand-colored Humvee to pass when he saw four men coming round a massive pallet of plastic water bottles. One of them, the one with the bull’s shoulders, was Master Sgt. Barry Regis, code named Rattlesnake, Alan’s hometown friend and former high school football teammate who had, the last time he had seen him, looked almost ready to kill him. Alan had a hunch his companions were members of the MARSOC team. Alan’s step faltered, but it was too late. They had seen him. Regis lowered his head, his face dark and tense with suppressed emotion as he came purposefully on.
Alan waited for him, hands by his side, ready for Regis, and for his steam hammer punch, should he decide to toss his career away in the fury of the moment. The base bristled with security. Any serious altercation would be broken up quickly and with serious consequences. He stood there because a part of him felt if the big man laid him out, it was no more than what he deserved.
“Taking a stroll, Major?” Regis asked. It wasn’t just a challenge. It was heavy with feeling. “Thought you’d be in detention.”
Alan nodded. “They want my resignation first,” he said.
“You get a choice?” Regis replied. “Well, that’s nice. My team didn’t get a choice.”
The two men flanking him were staring him down, and for a second Alan thought one of them might kill him. The idea did not distress him much. His life, as he had just been reflecting, was already over.
“I tried,” he said, not to calm them but because he had to say it. They had to at least hear him say that he was no traitor. “My weapons wouldn’t fire.”
“Yeah,” said Regis. “You said. I guess things malfunction sometimes.”
It was a kind of concession earned by years of friendship, and something of Regis’ anger seemed to wilt so that he looked merely sad, but when Alan made a move to extend his hand, the big man flinched and looked away. A dozen troops bound for the PX circled around them, oblivious. Alan shook his head and tried again.
“Didn’t you see something up there with me?” he asked, trying to keep the pleading out of his tone. �
��Apart from the helicopters, I mean.”
“Apart from the helicopters?” Regis echoed, his face hardening again. “The ones that shot up my unit, you mean?”
“There was something in the sky,” Alan said, his voice lowering a fraction. “It might have looked like a flare from the ground.”
“We were busy dodging missiles, sir,” said one of the others, evidently a member of the MARSOC team.
Alan started to raise his hands in some gesture of surrender, or apology.
“I saw a flare,” said a dark-haired man. “Hanging in the sky like a beacon. Right?” His voice was smooth, strangely neutral, and though Alan doubted he was from the States, he couldn’t identify the foreign accent.
Alan nodded.
“I’m sure our intel people will sort it out,” said the dark-haired man. “I am sorry that the mission proved so costly. I’ve been trying to show the team here my gratitude. My name is CIA Senior Officer Jean-Christophe Morat.”
The asset the team was sent to recover. And he was CIA, which explained why Alan’s case was no longer in the hands of the Marines.
“Would you be prepared to testify to what you saw?” asked Alan. It was the slimmest of hopes, but it was worth pursuing.
“If necessary,” said Morat.
Alan nodded.
“I’m sorry too,” he said, looking at Morat but speaking to the others. “If there was anything I could have done …”
“Sometimes,” said Morat in a voice loaded with resignation and a touch of sadness, “there is nothing that can be done. We find ourselves at the end of a sequence of events set in motion long ago. We can only do our best and live with the consequences.”
Alan stared at him, almost entranced, then nodded once more. There was a scent in the dry air, a hint of spice, mixed with gasoline. The fire had gone out of Regis’ face. The second man’s rigid posture had softened and relaxed.
