by Myke Cole
“I can’t complain.” Chang shrugged.
“Well you could, but then you’d be a pussy. You want a beer?”
“I’m good. Chief said you wanted to talk to me.”
“I do. What’s this shit about a rating change? You want to go back to A-School for . . .” A pause while he sifted through the mountain of paper on his desk. “Intel? The fuck you know about intel?”
“I’ve read some reports. They use little words mostly.”
“You’re gonna ride a desk for the rest of your career?”
“I’ve already got the clearance. Good prospects after I get out.”
“You’re not getting out.”
“I am after this enlistment.”
Biggs shook his head. “This pity pot only flushes up, bro. Lots of guys roll back in SQT. You earned the pin. You’re in the club. You want me to kiss your asshole?”
“It’s not that.”
“Lots of guys get hurt.”
“It’s not that either, I . . .”
Biggs cut him off, something he almost never did. It meant he was trying to keep Chang from saying anything stupid. “And you can’t work this job for long without losing someone. That’s what this is. It gets better.”
“Bullshit.”
Biggs looked at his desk, sighed. “Yeah, that is bullshit. It doesn’t ever get better. But that doesn’t mean there isn’t another way forward. You don’t have to do this.”
“That mean you’re going to hold my paperwork up, sir?”
“Hell, no, Steve. You’re a grown-up. I’m not going to stand in your way if this is what you really want. I just don’t think it is. You need to take some more time and think this through. It’s not a little thing. You can’t unpush the button.”
Chang was quiet at that. Biggs leaned forward, seizing the advantage. “I’ll level with you. There are a lot of guys I wouldn’t argue like this over. I’d just punch their ticket the moment they handed it in. You’re not one of them, Steve. You can stick.”
Steve shook his head. He could stick all right, and that meant cutting through this lovefest and getting done what he came here to do.
“I don’t want to talk about that.”
“Well what the fuck do you want to talk about? Your lousy football team? The stellar cut of my jib?”
“Jim’s ashes.”
Biggs’s face fell. “What?”
“The can Chief gave me for Sarah. It’s not Jim.”
“Dude. Are you high?”
“She’s hurting real bad, sir. She went a little crazy. Had the stuff DNA tested. Came back as pig.”
“Like . . . the thing made out of bacon?”
Chang’s anger rose into his face, and he pushed it down. Biggs was still his lieutenant, and he was, for now, still a petty officer. “This is off the charts for a fuckup, sir. Sarah’s suffering, and this has really put her over the edge. How the hell is it possible to have mixed up his ashes with a pig’s?”
“It’s got to be some kind of mistake.” Biggs had gone pale. “The people at the testing place must have messed up the samples.”
“Do we even cremate the pigs we use in TCCC?”
“I don’t fucking know!” Biggs’s eyes moved quickly from his computer screen to his desk and back to Chang. A sinking feeling lodged in Chang’s stomach, churned there. “You’d have to ask the Senior Chief Aning.”
“Who oversaw the cremation, sir? I’d rather track this straight from the source.”
“No idea on that either. Chief took care of it.”
Chang’s mouth felt dry. “I’ll go check with her, then. I might need some officer muscle if people stonewall me.”
Biggs looked up at him, eyes narrowing.
“I mean, nobody likes to admit it when they fuck up is all.” Chang added, “Might help to hide behind your leg.”
“Sure,” Biggs said, already turning back to his computer screen. “Whatever you need.”
“Okay, thanks, El-tee. I’ll go chat with Chief.”
Biggs grunted, pecking away at the keyboard again, eyes firmly in front.
Chang stepped back out of the trailer, his gut doing loops. What the hell just happened? One second he’s all baby-please-don’t-walk-out-that-door, then he’s too busy to talk. He’d gotten basic field-interrogation training. It was bullshit, and everyone in the class knew it, but like all other bullshit, there was a grain of truth at the bottom of the steaming pile. It had taught him to look at a baseline in a subject’s behavior. The deviations were the hint of the lie. He’d spent years running and gunning with Biggs, knew his baseline like he knew his way around his sidearm. Something was off.
He paused outside the trailer, looking into the shadows of the repair bay where Ahmad waited for him. The darkness was suddenly sinister, her inscrutability now full of secrets.
Sweat trickled down his spine, his consciousness dropping down into the zone where the warfighter lived. His peripheral vision expanded, his limbs relaxing even as the adrenaline began to pump. He calmed, ready to run, fight, whatever needed to be done.
Make sure you talk to me before you head out.
No, Chief. No, I don’t think I’m going to do that.
Chang turned and made for the gate, walking quickly, but not so quickly as to tip anyone off to his haste. The gate loomed before him, and for a moment he had an image in his mind of its refusing to open, of him turning while Ahmad led other sailors to grapple him.
But it did open, the wheels squeaking as the barrier drew aside. Chang breathed a sigh of relief, walked slowly through.
“Chang!”
He froze, Ahmad was jogging up behind him. “Dude. I thought you were going to check in with me before you split.” She could have been hurt, she could have been angry, she could have been about to ask to borrow five bucks. There was no way to tell.
“Sorry, Chief. I’ve gotta get back.”
“Okay,” she said. He turned to go.
“Oh, hey,” she said. “The ashes. I don’t know what’s up with that. That DNA place must have shit the bed. No way that’s pig ashes.”
“How’d you know?” he asked.
“Biggs called me on the shop phone.”
“Right. Thanks.”
“He didn’t talk you out of the rating change, huh.”
“Nope.”
“Well, don’t do anything tomorrow. Give me another week to change your mind.”
“Sure, Chief. Talk to you soon.”
Interrogation techniques were 90 percent bullshit. But there was something deeper stirring as the gate shut between him and Ahmad, her eyes boring into his back.
He didn’t think she really wanted another week to change his mind. He didn’t think she wanted that at all.
CHAPTER XVII
INBOUND
Eldredge and Jawid accompanied Schweitzer and Ninip all the way to the Globemaster. The ramp was already down, exposing a cavernous interior, Ninip’s twisted vision turning the shadows into crawling ghosts bent on murder. The plane grew as they approached, the cargo bay a giant dragon’s maw, its horns the long, sloped wings, stretching out into the distance.
A soldier waited for them beside the aircraft, what looked like a fighter pilot’s helmet tucked under his arm. He passed it to Eldredge, then walked off into the darkness without a word.
Eldredge raised it up, approached Schweitzer. “May I?”
What’s this? Schweitzer asked Jawid through their link. It was easier than doing the heavy lifting of forcing their dead lungs and larynx to work. It looks like it’s made of cardboard.
“He wants to know . . .” Jawid began.
“It’s not for protection,” Eldredge cut him off. “There will be personnel on-site who aren’t privy to the specifics of this program, and we’d prefer to keep your identity hidden.”
You don’t care if they know who I am. You care if they know what I am, Schweitzer passed to Jawid.
Eldredge smiled. “You really are extraordinary. Yes, that’s right. The lure of media exposure is too much for many. Do you remember when Bin Laden was killed, and the SEAL who shot him wrote an unauthorized tell-all?”
Schweitzer remembered, the cold anger it kindled in him alerted Ninip, and the jinn began his usual dig into Schweitzer’s memories to bring himself up to speed on the subject.
“The Gemini Cell operates as well as it does because of strict secrecy. We can’t risk that sort of thing here.” Eldredge tapped the helmet. “You keep this on the entire time you’re there. They can speculate as much as much as they like, but there’s no need to give them evidence.”
What if people talk to me?
Jawid’s translation drew another smile from Eldredge. “You can manage monosyllables. Leave the rest to us.”
Schweitzer nodded and slipped the helmet on. Eldredge reached in and snapped connecting tabs from the helmet’s lower edge into the collar of his armor. The visor was tinted one-way: Schweitzer could see out easily, but the surface would show only darkness to anyone looking in.
Eldredge stood back, hands on his hips, surveying his work.
Does it make me look fat? Schweitzer sent to Jawid.
Eldredge laughed out loud at that. “It makes you look terrifying, which is the desired effect.” He leaned in, slapping a patch against the Velcro surface on Schweitzer’s shoulder. Schweitzer looked down, seeing a subdued American flag shrouded in the gloom.
“That should at least take the edge off,” Eldredge said. “Let’s get you to work.”
Schweitzer was surprised when Jawid and Eldredge headed up the ramp along with them. You’re coming with me?
This time Jawid answered. “Of course. You are our most independent subject. We need to be on hand to help you.”
Eldredge nodded, gesturing to a huge steel cage in the center of the enormous and empty interior. Ten men surrounded it, fire axes held casually over shoulders or head down on the deck plates. No flamethrowers. They don’t want to risk fire while we’re in the air. They were decked out in the armor that looked straight out of a documentary on the Middle Ages: thick leather riveted under steel plates.
Ninip looked at them eagerly, Schweitzer could feel his sense of recognition. Warriors with hand-to-hand weapons and metal armor? This was the world the jinn knew.
Only ten? the jinn asked. That is no challenge.
Schweitzer agreed. Even if they’d filled the hold with guards, Schweitzer would have given himself and Ninip even odds of taking them apart.
Jawid stiffened as he felt Ninip’s mood, nodded to Eldredge, who smiled at Schweitzer. “I’d keep Ninip in check,” he said. “The pilots of this aircraft have orders to scuttle it the moment they get word of a struggle back here. There are no parachutes on board. None of us want to die, Jim. But we are every bit as willing to give our lives for our country as you were when you lived. Remember that.”
Jawid looked pale, but the axemen’s and Eldredge’s faces were utterly committed. Schweitzer projected an image to Ninip of the plane slamming into the earth and exploding into flame, or their shared body vaporizing, the storm of souls opening up to receive them.
The jinn growled in frustration but receded.
Eldredge gestured to the cage. “Now, for your own safety. Please.”
As Schweitzer and Ninip approached the back of the cage, Schweitzer saw a small wooden stool piled high with books. At the top of the stack was a thick volume with a frayed dust jacket showing a group of women in hoop skirts gathered around a piano.
Oh, Ninip, Schweitzer said, have I got a treat for you.
—
Ninip was howling before Schweitzer had finished the first chapter. The jinn leapt at their shared hands for the third time, trying to force them to drop the book, but Schweitzer managed to hold on, limbs trembling, text remaining firmly in place.
Tedium, the jinn cried, they are women without money. Their parents should have sold them to the priests. They could have served the fertility goddess. Instead they bemoan . . . Christ . . .
Christmas presents, Schweitzer finished for him. They want to buy Christmas presents for their mother.
Why would anyone want to hear about peasant women? Your people are mad.
This is widely considered one of the great American novels. You should be more respectful. Schweitzer could barely keep the laughter out of his tone.
Ninip blinked at him incredulously. You should take care. I am a lord.
Yeah, you keep saying that. Schweitzer went on reading, Ninip’s howling gradually receding as he found his rhythm in the prose. The truth was that he didn’t like the book much more than Ninip did, but his mother had forced him to read it before she agreed to let him join the navy. He still remembered her face over her morning coffee, cigarette dangling from one lip, the cancer slowly consuming her lungs. You have to read it because I will not have you grow into some pig-headed macho dickhead. That book created the concept we know as “the American girl,” and every woman you meet has been influenced by it whether she knows it or not.
It had been agony, but he loved his mother, and in retrospect, a part of him knew that she was dying, so he read it cover to cover. He remembered Sarah’s expression changing when he told her he’d read it, the dawning interest behind her eyes. Thanks, Mom.
I know you were a king and a god or whatever, Schweitzer said, but you had a family of your own. Why can’t you even begin to wrap your head around this stuff? Didn’t you have a wife?
Several.
Oh, right. Well, what about a favorite?
Ninip quieted at that. When the jinn did speak, his voice was soft. Yes, there was one.
Schweitzer thought of the woman in the braided wig, bending over Ninip as his son fed him the poisoned fig. What happened to her?
She would have married my son, the jinn said. Or he would have killed her.
Schweitzer paused, searching for something to say.
It doesn’t matter. Ninip beat him to the punch. That is all beyond us now.
Schweitzer thought of the jinn’s animal bloodlust, tried to square that with the grief he sensed from Ninip now. You were a man once. What happened to you?
He could feel the presence fixing its eyes on him. You have no idea how long I drifted in the soul storm. You cannot fathom the weight of all those years. It stripped everything. It is coldness, blackness, it is isolation. It is endless death, without even the shadow of life.
There were men in my time who became enamored of the Plant of Joy, the jinn went on, smoking the dried pods to the exclusion of all else, choosing delirium and dreams over their wives and children, over their lords and oaths. They became the husks of men, little more than animals.
We call it heroin, Schweitzer said.
Whatever you call it, it steals men’s hearts, drives them like cattle. Blood is the pulse of life, Ninip said. You do not realize that it drives you with an even greater force than this heroin. In life, you never think on it, it is not until death, and the freezing darkness of the void that you realize how much you cherished it.
And that’s why you kill? Because you want blood?
I told you. Killing is still life. But it is more than that. Remember your . . . what is that story about the steppe count who drinks blood?
Dracula. You’re saying you’re a vampire?
No, not like in that story. But I can understand. When you cannot have a thing, sometimes you hunger for it anyway. The closeness of it, the taste of it, the feel of its heat. It is a pale reflection of the truth, but a reflection is better than darkness.
That’s not all, is it? Schweitzer asked.
There is vengeance, Ninip said.
Vengeance? For what?<
br />
I do not live. Why should they?
Schweitzer thought about that for a long time, understanding the answer, even as he was horrified by it. You can’t kill everyone, Ninip.
Not now, the jinn answered slowly. Not yet.
—
Schweitzer took a break from the book when he finally felt the plane descending, and the axemen began to strip off their armor, stowing it and their weapons in Pelican cases to reveal army combat uniforms beneath.
A moment later, Schweitzer felt the dull thud and bounce that indicated the plane had landed, heard the roar of the backing engines as it taxied to a stop. Hydraulics hissed as the ramp dropped, bright, hot sun flooding the bay, chasing the shadows into the corners before extinguishing them utterly.
Schweitzer felt the heat hit him, could see the soldiers sweating. He smelled the familiar odor of diesel fuel and burning trash. He was in the Middle East, probably at a transit point to refuel before making the final push into Afghanistan. Qatar, probably. Otherwise, Bahrain or Kuwait.
Eldredge walked over to the cage and punched a code into a keypad. A soft click, and the door swung open.
“Out you come, now,” he said.
He led Schweitzer and Ninip up through a passageway that led to the cockpit, but turned off at an open hatch in the fuselage. Schweitzer and Ninip stepped out to see a Blackhawk spinning up on the tarmac. The cabin was empty, save for a single crewman waving them in. Eldredge and Jawid strapped on rigger’s belts and clipped them into the ring on the helo’s floor. Schweitzer and Ninip sat on the edge, feet dangling over as before, the inhuman strength in their abdomen keeping their shared body braced more tightly than if they’d been belted in.
They flew dark, the pilots relying on their night-vision goggles. The ground below was invisible to Eldredge and Jawid, but Schweitzer’s enchanted eyes saw clearly. The ground rushed by them, veiled in shadow. They quickly cleared the airbase’s edge, marked by tall, concrete barricade walls and plywood guard towers ringed with barbed wire, and soon found themselves moving over the kind of dense, quickly constructed village that sprang up around any US military installation in a foreign country. It was a hodgepodge of scavenged building materials thrown together around dusty, narrow tracks that could scarcely be called a road. Dogs and livestock prowled the quiet alleys while their owners slept.
