Dead of Night

by Brendan DuBois

  ‘And your father? He was in your army, was he not?’

  ‘Yep.’

  She said, ‘You don’t speak much of him, Samuel. I guess you don’t like him.’

  ‘You guessed right.’

  ‘Why?’

  Good question. I really didn’t have too many hours to explain to Miriam all the miserable ins and outs of my relationship with my father so I said, ‘Another reason I’m out here is because of him.’

  ‘How is that?’

  ‘I’m afraid of the dark. Have been since I was quite young. Maybe eight or nine.’

  ‘Bad dreams?’

  ‘Oh, yes—bad dreams. Night after night. Waking up screaming. Not sure why I got them. Just happened. But my father ... he thought he could cure me. So one night he forced me outside in the rear yard, with a pillow and a couple of blankets, and locked the door. Said that once I saw there was nothing out there that could hurt me, then I’d be fine.’

  ‘What happened?’

  ‘Sat frozen, near a cellar doorway, and practically screamed every time a branch broke or a bird called. Didn’t sleep a bit all through that long night. Next night I was back in the house, but I still had nightmares. But I learned to stay quiet. And that’s that. And years later I’m still afraid of the dark—and I don’t like my father very much.’

  ‘I can see why. He doesn’t sound very likable.’

  I tried to lighten the mood. ‘Which, of course, is our proudest Canadian trait. Likability.’

  Miriam laughed and moved even closer to me. ‘See, I knew there was a reason I still have affection for you Canadians.’

  I turned to her, seeing her very well, even in the darkness. ‘And I’ve always had affection for the Dutch.’

  ‘Really? For how long?’

  ‘For a month or so, that’s how long,’ I said.

  She laughed again and I leaned forward and we kissed, and that was that. No fireworks, no tingling expressions, no grappling on the ground. Just a soft, almost chaste kiss. I could sense her smile and she said, ‘Sleep well, Samuel.’

  ‘I’ll try,’ I said.

  ~ * ~

  But I couldn’t, not yet, so I went back to my laptop as Miriam rolled over. I checked the battery power and found that I had at least four hours left before a recharge would be needed and I was almost finished for the night. I checked the news headlines and felt depressed at what was going on in the rest of the world. As I flipped through the different screens on my browser, the screen would sometimes go black for an instant and then recover. I thought that maybe something was wrong with the machine but a quick diagnostics test showed that everything was fine. Which in turn made me wonder if the militias were out there again, jamming incoming signals from the satellite traffic that the UN had leased for this particular mission. I remembered reading somewhere that this type of jamming was impossible, but some of the militia units were smart, had lots of money, and probably derived a great deal from pleasure from making our mission difficult, so I guessed it was possible after all.

  I checked my personal e-mail account—empty, save for a travel agency that wanted to send me on a trip to Bermuda — and then my UN account. There, lined up in little blue icons, were the e-mail receipts from Geneva, stating that all the files I had sent earlier from the farmhouse had been retrieved and documented. Good. At least something was working right.

  Still... I went back and checked the timestamps for my outgoing messages and then the receipts. Less than ten minutes’ gap between the two. Yet there were no receipts from the messages that Jean-Paul had sent for me, the ones containing the photographs of those suspected paramilitaries who had come up the dirt driveway, until they’d spotted Charlie.

  Not a one, though plenty of time had passed.

  Odd.

  Of course, maybe all the receipts had gone straight to Jean-Paul on his own account, since he had sent them on to Geneva on his own laptop. That must have been what had happened. I had made sure that I had cc’d the receipt tool, to make sure I got copies of any receipts sent back, but maybe Jean-Paul had an encryption system on his machine that had stripped my receipt request away even before the files arrived in Geneva.

  I powered down the machine and closed the lid. Whatever. Too little battery time and sleep time to worry about it any more.

  I crawled deeper into my sleeping bag, hearing the soft wheezing from Miriam next to me. I tried to get comfortable, found it hard to do, out on this hilltop. Miriam was slumbering and I thought about Charlie, out there on watch, and that managed to calm me down enough so that eventually I did fall asleep. But not before I gently touched my tongue to my lips and imagined I could taste Miriam there.

  ~ * ~

  The sound of footsteps woke me and I rolled over and sat up as Charlie leaned down next to me. ‘You awake, Samuel?’

  ‘Yep.’

  ‘Good,’ he said, a large bulk in the darkness. ‘Come along with me—watch your step.’

  I threw the sleeping bag open, sat up, and immediately started shivering. I put my boots on, wincing as the cold material snapped against my feet. Charlie stood there by the Land Cruiser, patient and waiting. I got up, remembering to grab my helmet, and staggered some. I yawned. It felt like I’d had a glorious ten or fifteen minutes of sleep.

  ‘Let’s go, OK?’

  Charlie moved out of the triangle of parked vehicles and I followed him as closely as possible as we went up the hill some, to an outcropping of rock that sat on a little knoll. There was a picnic table there and we both sat down on top of it.

  I rubbed at my face and listened to Charlie. ‘OK, you’ve got a good three-sixty up here. I’ll be down there in that little group of trees. Anything goes on, anybody comes up this way, you just quietly come down and get me. All right? And don’t come up close and shake me awake. You might get hurt. Just come down and gently tap me on the foot.’

  ‘OK,’ I said, still shivering.

  ‘Here,’ he said, handing something over. ‘Night-vision scope. It’s got a nice long battery life, so I’ve left it on for you. Doesn’t make sense for you to try to learn it all in one night. Hold it up to your eyes, give it a shot.’

  The scopes were lightweight, with a foam eyepiece. I blinked and looked across the landscape, now illuminated in a ghostly shade of green. I could make out the hill and the rocks and the saplings, the distant road we’d driven up and even the small buildings of the nearby village.

  ‘Pretty slick,’ I said.

  ‘That it is,’ Charlie said. ‘But don’t spend the whole night with the scope up against your eyes. It’s good but it has lousy peripheral vision. You could be staring down at the road, watching something move, while a dozen guys sneak up behind you and take you down. So just pop it up every now and then, keep a view on.’

  I let the night-vision scope drop away from my face. ‘Ask you a question?’

  ‘Sure.’

  ‘These guys who might come up and take me down ... just who the hell are they?’

  Charlie grunted. ‘You serious? Thought you had all those briefings and shit.’

  ‘Of course, but I want to hear it from you. Who are those guys?’

  Charlie seemed to hesitate, as though he really wanted to get to sleep instead of yapping to his young charge, and he said, ‘They’re just guys, really. I mean . . . well, look. Towns and cities, they have peace ‘cause the cops are around. Right? But lots of cops . . . they’re in the Guard or Reserve, and they’ve been called up for Iraq and other places. So the cops are stretched tight, and if there’s widespread problems they can’t do their jobs. So, thing is, if the cops get into too much trouble, then the governors, they can call up the National Guard to keep order. But suppose your National Guard unit, instead of being home, is out in Kirkuk or Tehran? What do you do then when the troubles start?’

  ‘I don’t know. Keep your head down?’

  ‘Maybe, but this little country of ours... guys with guns know other guys with guns. And if there’s trouble, they�
��re gonna fight. Maybe they’ll do it singly, maybe in a little group, maybe in a county organization they call a militia. And if they think all the local troubles are due to a bunch of refugees rolling in from the big bad cities, then they’re gonna kill ‘em.’

  ‘Sounds cold.’

  ‘It is cold, and the problem is that these militia types have always been underestimated. Always. Lots of people forgot, bunch of years ago, it was just a couple of militiamen who took down a government building in Oklahoma City and killed nearly two hundred. Some forgot. Others didn’t.’

  I put the night-vision scope back up to my eyes. Nothing. I brought it down and said, ‘If you don’t mind ... Charlie, where were you during the attacks last spring?’

  ‘Me?’ he said quietly. ‘At home in South Carolina. Camp Lejeune. Doing some work—checking pallets of ammunition, make sure they were stacked right. Funny, huh? Something as boring and as simple as that. Then we got word of the Manhattan strike ... and, hate to tell you, that wasn’t much of a surprise. Poor old New York City has always been target number one. And then the balloon strikes ...Jesus, what a mess. Lucky we had pretty secure communications and back-up power supplies. Didn’t affect us too much, in the beginning.’

  ‘Bet the balloon strikes were a surprise, then.’

  And then the surprise was on me when Charlie shook his head and said, ‘No, sir. Not at all... Oh, the delivery system was a surprise, using modified weather balloons to raise up the suitcase nukes to a high enough altitude to cause damage with the EMPs. Simple and imaginative delivery system. Everybody thought the suitcase nukes would be placed in the cities but, except for Manhattan, they weren’t. Still, that’s the lessons of war. Always surprises. Pearl Harbor. Tet. Second World Trade Center attack. But you wanna know what the real surprise was?’

  ‘Sure.’

  Charlie leaned in a bit. ‘Surprise was—we still don’t know who did it. We got the usual and customary blowhards. Islamic Sword of Justice, the Sword of Justice from Islam, neo-Nazi creeps—standard crap like that. But no, none of ‘em. Oh, we know where the suitcase nukes came from. Our smart boys can actually analyze the fissile materials and determine their source—like a DNA analysis — and those bad boys came from an old Soviet Union storage facility that secretly got raided years ago. By using the right contacts and the right amount of money, almost anybody could have bought them on the black market.’

  ‘Yeah,’ I said, not knowing much more what to say.

  ‘And that created another problem,’ he said. ‘After the balloon strikes, you had all that death, all that destruction, all the cellphones, computers and even car engines fried, airliners crashing in your backyard, so people are pissed. They’re angry. They want to strike back. And if you can’t strike back at who did this to you, well, you strike back at whatever’s convenient. And if that happens to be refugees who roll into your village or town from some urban center and demand food and shelter and whatnot, well, there you go. A better recipe for disaster you probably couldn’t come up with.’

  We stood there then, a bit quiet, and I said, ‘One more thing? To change the subject?’

  ‘Yeah?’ Charlie asked.

  ‘Do you want to leave a weapon with me? A gun or something?’

  He chuckled. ‘When’s the last time you fired a weapon, young man?’

  It felt cooler. ‘Couple of years ago. Did a story about the RCMP, the new weapons they were being issued. Ten-millimeter Glocks, I think. I got to fire off a few rounds at a firing range. Before that, some rifle shooting with my dad. That’s it.’

  Charlie tapped me on the shoulder. ‘Well, you’re ahead of everybody else in the crew ‘cept for me and maybe Peter, and I’m still not letting you have anything you can shoot. You’re doing well up here with the scope. Just keep an eye on things and come get me if you see anything. All right?’

  ‘You’ve got it,’ I said. ‘You go catch up on some sleep. When do you want to get up?’

  ‘You let me decide that, if you don’t mind.’

  ‘Sure,’ I said.

  Charlie started to move down the hill. Then he stopped. ‘Oh. And one more thing.’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘We’re depending on you,’ he said. ‘Don’t fall asleep on the job.’

  I shivered again, hugged myself, felt like the whole world was out there, watching me.

  ‘No problem of that,’ I said.

  ‘OK,’ Charlie said, and in a few seconds I was alone up on top of the hill.

  And pretty much scared shitless.

  ~ * ~

  CHAPTER NINE

  For the first few minutes I kept myself occupied, sitting on the table, checking out the scenery, looking for any movement, anything at all. But soon I got a feeling for our surroundings, out there beyond our little sanctuary. The parked Land Cruisers were behind me, hidden by tree cover, and I could see fairly well over the tops of the trees. All around the hill the slopes fell away either to a treeline or to the road. I did as Charlie instructed, raising the scope to my eyes every few minutes, feeling a bit of power in my grasp as the nightscape came alive in the green glow of the instrument.

  But after a while the novelty of using the night-vision scope began to wear off, and I became conscious of how cold and hard the picnic table felt against my butt, and I felt the breeze that chilled my arms and legs. I wished that I had thought earlier of bringing up a blanket to keep myself warm, but that might have made me sleepy and I had promised Charlie that I would stay awake. No falling asleep on the job. But something else in the nether regions below my waist was demanding my attention so I got up from the table and walked down the far slope for a minute or two until I came to a low clump of bushes. I undid my pants and let loose, the stream of water arcing out into the foliage, and I felt such a sense of relief.

  As I did my pants up I heard the low roar of jets flying overhead, and I looked up and saw nothing but blackness. No stars, no moon, nothing but the cloud level that prevented an extraction by helicopter. We’d been warned when we’d started that we would have few friends or allies out here in the countryside; nobody had told us that the weather would be against us as well.

  I started back up the hill, walking carefully, feeling the darkness all around me, and I wished I had brought the night-vision scope with me. But soon enough I banged my knee against the table and got back up on top. The scope came up, my hands grew colder—and then I saw movement, down there in the field, about a hundred meters or so from where I had been relieving myself.

  I moved to get off the table and to go get Charlie, but hesitated. Movement, all right, there was movement. But what kind of movement?

  I put the scope back up, saw shapes down there, moving around. I felt along the side of the scope and found a little knob, and by experimenting with it I learned that it was a zoom-feature control. I moved it slowly, focusing in on the group of shapes, and let out a breath as I saw it was a pack of dogs, running and chasing around. I watched them as they played, as they fought each other over something, and then the lead dog ran away with something in its jaws. It looked like a tree branch. I hoped it was a tree branch. In my neighborhood in Toronto, dogs were cheerful little critters, kept under control by their human masters. In this particular bleak district, these dogs were out on their own. And I tried to shake off the image of that dog, with something large in its jaws, remembering a story that Karen had told about her service in Rwanda, where packs of dogs would haunt the roadways and alleyways of destroyed villages, devouring and gnawing at the human bodies heaped up in bloody piles.

  I dropped the night-vision scope in my lap, rubbed my hands. Another flight of jets went overhead, and I envied the pilots up there, warm and safe and secure, far away from the ground and the animals that feasted on the dead.

  ~ * ~

  Once again during the night I went into the bushes for relief, knowing it was the stress of being up here, responsible for everyone, that had made my bladder overactive. The sounds kept me jumpy too—the
few insects out there, the sound of night birds on the prowl—and other things as well: the growl of jets overhead, another engine of some sort—an APC? a truck?—from beyond the line of trees, and once, the far-off thump of an explosion. In some ways I was flashing back to when I was eight, not believing that my own father had forced me outside and had locked the door after me.

  I checked my watch, saw that nearly three hours had passed. I was tempted to go down and wake up Charlie but he’d said he would get me when it was time. And I should let the poor guy sleep. He was right: he wasn’t some robotic Rambo, out here protecting us with only an oil change and a dusting-off every three thousand kilometers or so. I could sleep during the day, maybe, if we did get back to the motel by a different route. And Charlie? He’d been on the job, like he was all the time.