by James Phelan
“Top five basketball players…” Fox said, knowing that his best friend liked sports.
“Jordan. Just him, he’d beat the next four,” Gammaldi said. “Also Bryant—he’d slay ’em, he’s got something they ain’t.”
“More air time?”
“Bigger stones.”
Fox smiled at his mate, who swayed in the bright sun.
“How about,” Fox said, “top five Australian bands…”
Fox stopped walking. Guards were there, right next to him—four of them, wooden clubs in hands.
“You will come with us,” one said.
Fox took a step towards them, then Gammaldi took a couple, unsteadily, and muttered something at them. One of the guards unleashed a blow to the side of Gammaldi’s chest, and he doubled over, out of breath, clutching his side in pain. As Fox went to him, the guard unleashed another blow at Gammaldi’s back—Fox caught it mid-air. It felt as if it broke something in his hand but he held it, slowly lifted it up; he had easily twenty kilos and plenty of muscle over the Pakistani. Fox stood between the guard and his fallen mate, let go of the club, looked the guard in the eye. If it came to it, he could probably mess these four guys up as much as they could him; use the kind of final violence you didn’t walk away from.
“We’re coming,” Fox said.
The guy’s angry eyes searched Fox’s face—then he backed down, and motioned for the others to help get Gammaldi to his feet. They were herded into the command building through a steel door set in the old brick wall.
“So,” their familiar friend, the commandant, said. He was smoking, and a steaming cup of tea sat in front of him on his battered timber desk. The guards hung back by the door. Fox stayed standing, but Gammaldi was still catching his breath and was partly doubled over—tough as he was, he couldn’t take much more of this.
“So…” he repeated. He had Fox’s laptop out, and his iPhone’s screen was glowing like it had just been used. “Ready to tell me the truth? Hmm? You are American spies, yes?”
61
GEORGIA (EASTERN EUROPE)
“He’s kinda gone into his shell,” Top said.
“What, you Dr Phil now?”
“Started off angry, now he’s withdrawn,” Top said. “About as much energy as a recruit after first-week training at Benning.”
Nix nodded—confinement would do that to a soldier, especially when he knew he hadn’t done anything wrong. Pete McAllister would pull through, Nix was about to see to that—the Army needed good young men like him, even if politicians and the media thought otherwise. Only those who served knew what it was really like; he hadn’t until he’d graduated West Point and had his first operational deployment to the Balkans.
“And he wants to know why we can’t just blame the shooting on the White Tights,” said Top.
Nix laughed. It was a Russian urban myth that female sniper mercenaries participated in combat against Russian forces in various armed conflicts from the late eighties.
“At least he’s still got his sense of humour,” Nix said. “I’ll go sort out Mac, get him moving in the right direction. Is that his M4?”
“Yep,” Top replied, handing it to Nix.
“Go give him his one-ten once I’m done talking to him,” Nix ordered. “He needs to stay ready to get out there again ASAP.”
“Hooah.”
Nix walked down the hall to Mac’s room. Mac was the only soldier ever, in his command, to be confined to barracks, not counting medical reasons. He rapped on the door and entered. Mac was lying on his bed, reading a paperback.
“Sir,” he said, not bothering to get up or turn his attention away from his book.
Nix sat on the wooden chair next to the trooper and handed him the M4. “This is yours,” Nix said. “I know what it’s like when carrying a weapon has become second nature and it’s not there.”
“Yeah,” Mac said, the M4 nestled by his side, a hand clasped around the forward grip. “It’s a piece of me now. You know, since I turned in my one-ten, I’ve been looking for it all the time.”
“I’m doing everything I can for you, Specialist,” Nix said. “You should be back out in a day or two, all going well.”
Mac looked to Nix, put his book down and sat up on the bed.
“You shitting me, sir?”
“I wouldn’t do that.”
“I heard I was going to be kicked out of the Army.”
“Who told you that?”
Mac looked at the door, didn’t answer. Nix assumed it was one of his buddies who’d brought him his meals the past couple of days.
The Army had transformed the way it trained soldiers. Gone was a lot of the spit and polish that had been a staple of basic training for decades: marching, standing at attention, pressing uniforms. Instead, the focus had shifted to the skills that recruits needed to stay alive in places like Iraq and Afghanistan: how to spot a roadside bomb, how to defend a convoy against an ambush, how to save a wounded comrade. Mac was a product of this new era, and it made him itchy to be so cut off from all he’d been taught.
“Don’t believe everything you hear, unless it comes from my or Top’s mouth, understand?”
“Hooah, sir,” he replied. “I thought maybe things might get, you know … things might be different … I mean, it’s not like we got McCain as Commander-in-Chief. That would have been good for us, right?”
“It’s hard to know, Mac,” Nix said. “And with Bible Spice as VP, who knows what it would have been like. McCain’d feel our cause, no doubt, but we serve no matter who’s sitting in the House. Like them or not, agree with them or not; they represent the people we protect.”
A nod.
“Your dad served, right?”
“Eighty-second Airborne. My uncle was in ’Nam, sixty-eight.”
“Third brigade?”
Mac nodded. Nix knew they’d seen some serious fighting, right at the start of the conflict to boot, before any of the serious horrors started circulating back home and into the minds of fresh soldiers.
“He was out fighting while Hillary was at Woodstock.”
“A ‘cultural and pharmaceutical event,’ McCain called it,” Mac said.
“And he was ‘tied up at the time’…”
“You know it, Captain,” he said, picking up a tennis ball he had been playing with earlier. “They never got this kind of scrutiny back then, not for this.”
He launched the ball at the wall. Nix caught it mid-flight.
“Good men. Different times. So different.” Nix bounced the tennis ball off the wall and caught it. “Look Mac, you’ve got a lot more soldiering to do, then I expect you to make Sergeant real quick so you can go back and be a drill sergeant and make sure our next boys are trained right, just like Top did. Hooah?”
“Hooah.”
Nix nodded. He was among the fraternity of Iraq veterans who worried about the kind of recruits the Army was now accepting: older guys, plenty without high-school diplomas, who had received waivers for crimes or medical conditions, or had scored lower on the military’s aptitude test than was needed in the past. Times had changed, and he was left with some guys not up to the task. But this young man was none of that; he would be a top soldier in anyone’s army, and to peg him back for doing his job—hell, for obeying orders—was not going to happen, not in Nix’s Army, especially since he was making Major when they rotated back to Fort Drum in a couple of months.
“You’ve got some special skills, son, and I need them to stay sharp.”
“Thanks, Captain.”
“What have you been doing all this time, reading?”
Nix picked up the book—a well-thumbed copy of Sean Naylor’s Not a Good Day to Die.
“I spent some time in that place myself,” Nix said, referring to the Shahi-Kot Valley in Afghanistan and the cluster fuck that was Operation Anaconda. “It’s good you’re reading this; it should be required reading for all the brass.” Nix stood
to leave.
“Hooah, sir.”
“Get your shit together, get your mind on the job, Mac. When I need you, I want you to do exactly what you did the other day. Every shot.”
“In the shadows, sir,” Mac said, referring to the recon unit’s motto. “One shot, one kill.”
“Our American heritage is greater than any one of us,” Nix said. “It can express itself in very homely truths; in the end it can lift up our eyes beyond the glow in the sunset skies.”
“Where’s that from sir?”
“Think it was some graffiti I read on on a toilet wall at Al Salem.” Nix smiled, thinking of the well-decorated bathroom wall at the Air Force Base in Kuwait, a major traffic point for US troops. “It’s from the early fifties, a Civil War historian called Bruce Catton—guy wrote some of the best books on that war. Read some of ’em after that book.”
62
JAIL, PAKISTAN
“Top five books of all time?”
Gammaldi shook his head.
“Okay. Albums, then.”
They had been shuffling around in the prison chamber for hours. It was sometime in the day; there was light coming through the opening in the roof. Their interrogation had lasted only ten minutes, passing much like the day’s before, and the commandant had not bothered to spring them out for another session since—he evidently figured that he had time on his side.
“I’m sick of this Top Five game,” Gammaldi replied, clutching his ribs as he moved. Fox kept close; a hand on his mate’s shoulder. “Besides, yours would be all Radiohead albums.”
“All right. Five hottest chicks in Hollywood.”
Al looked at him, interested. “All-time hottest,” he asked, “or present day bombs?”
“All-time and present day,” Fox concurred.
“All-time … Sofia Loren.”
“Nice. Ingrid Bergman.”
“Who?”
“Casablanca?”
“Oh,” Gammaldi said. “Really?”
“Damn straight. Who else?”
“Marilyn?”
“Nah … Grace Kelly.”
“Yeah.”
“And Elizabeth Taylor!”
“No way.”
“Back in the day, Al, when she was young, like Cat on a Hot Tin Roof young, she was premium.”
“I don’t know…”
“Yeah, Al, you really don’t,” Fox said, half-dragging him through a group that had stalled. “Come on, who’s hot these days?”
“Monica Bellucci.”
“Boom! You’ve just redeemed yourself … And Natalie Portman.”
“Maybe…”
“Fuck you, ‘maybe.’ Her, Bellucci, and Minka Kelly are my picks.”
“Scarlett Johansson. And Jessica Simpson.”
“There’s a trend going on with your picks, Al. Badonkadonk much?”
“Huh?”
“You’re so white, Al…” He could see his friend’s spirit slowly lifting, but it was a fragile thing.
They laughed, and then fell silent for a while as they moved in time with the other detainees and listened to the ongoing murmur of hungry, tired men. They almost tripped over a body on the floor, but there was no way to stop to check for vitals as the momentum pushed them forward.
“Lach,” Gammaldi said, close to his ear, his voice weary. “Has there been anyone you could have seen yourself with?”
“Kate.”
He nodded that he understood.
“Could be worse, Al.”
“How you figure that?”
“Well, let’s see … Imagine it’s Saturday and Barney’s are having their once-a-year sale, or Ikea.”
Gammaldi gave a small smile. He and Fox bumped in close together, part of the unending tussle to keep together among the moving sea.
“It’d be as packed as this place, only it’s women with prams, elbows everywhere, weapons of mass consumption. And there’s only one route through the store, and you know that even if you get the chance to overtake a few of them, it’ll take hours to get out of there…”
Half a laugh.
“… And that’s not even counting the cost of your girlfriend’s shopping…”
Gammaldi’s laugh petered out to a cough and he clutched his side where his ribs were broken. “Okay,” he said, wincing. “It could be worse.”
Fox helped him forward, pushing back at a wall of bodies, light and skeletal to the touch.
“Emma—she’s going to have a baby,” Gammaldi whispered.
“What?” Fox said, pulling his mate in closer. “A baby?”
“Yeah.”
“Jesus…”
“Yeah.”
“I mean, that’s great, good on you, Al. Shit—that’s awesome, we’ve got to celebrate.” Fox looked around for a place to pull up against the wall for a few minutes, but they were near the centre of the room. The dim glow of the skylight meant they could at least see around them, the floor dusty under their socks, worn smooth by countless years of thousands of feet.
“Hey, my friend’s going to be a dad!” Fox yelled into the room. “Your finest bottle thanks, barkeep!”
“Couple of beers!”
“And some beers for my mate!”
“And bourbon!”
“You get that order?”
Faces around them lit up—a few cracked smiles, a few amused looks; some kind of stimulus against the mundane.
“I’m going to get us out of here, Al, no matter what. I’ll figure it out in the yard,” Fox said, squeezing his mate in a friendly headlock. “In the meantime, let’s bring the house down!”
Gammaldi let out a scream, then a big “Yee-ha!”
“Come on, you beauties!” Fox yelled. “Let’s celebrate. Raah!”
Fox leaned forward, pushing the men ahead of him, moving the room faster, the swirling hurricane picking up a few paces, the mass of weary men transformed into a swarm of energy.
63
INDIA
“Hutchinson’s guys are in Pakistan,” Faith said.
“Have they got a location, or are they driving around aimlessly?” Wallace asked, concern all over him.
“They’ve met up with—”
“I mean, the Pakistanis don’t exactly have the greatest record-keeping system in the world,” Wallace said. “Nothing integrated, they’ll be names handwritten into a ledger at some remote prison—if that.”
“They’re working through all diplomatic channels, working military to military—”
“Damn it!” Wallace pounded his fist on the map of Pakistan on his desk.
Faith let him cool down in silence.
“They’re going to try all the prisons in the region,” Faith said. “And try the army unit in that area; they must have helped bring them in.”
Wallace’s secretary put Bill McCorkell through on speakerphone. Faith stayed silent as Wallace explained the situation to McCorkell.
“They better be trying everything,” Wallace finished.
“We will try everything,” McCorkell said. “We owe these men and it’s payback time. Let me check in with Hutchinson.”
“I thought you were going to keep me in the loop on this,” McCorkell said.
The Bureau man paused on the line. “It was just a time thing. I’ve got this, we’ll find them,” Hutchinson said. “GSR provided last-known details, we’re working assets on the ground.”
“Well, I just checked in with Defence—they’ve got a squadron of Predators at Shamsi airfield—”
“Yeah, we’ve done a fly-over of their last known location,” Hutchinson replied. “I’ve got a team on the ground there now, being met by a local military intel General who’s taking this on as his pet project.”
“Sounds like a nice guy.”
“He’s very pro-American, part of the new breed coming through who realise we’re better to side with than the alternatives.”
“Do
es he know where Fox could be?”
“He’s narrowed it down significantly,” Hutchinson replied. “Couple of Army guys involved with the pick-up and transport of Fox and Gammaldi—they’re loyal to their area commander, but they’re currently in a nice little room as guests of the General. He’ll get the locale.”
“Let’s hope you’re right,” McCorkell said. “And let’s hope that when we find them there’s enough of them left to bring home.”
“There will be,” Hutchinson said. “Besides, I’m close to finding someone else who may help us out.”
Hutchinson hung up his phone, stared at it for a while.
“We’re here,” his driver said.
“Wait, I won’t be long,” he said, leaving the junior agent behind as he entered the National Open Source Intelligence Centre.
Duhamel and his team were ripping it up across Pakistan. GPS coordinates of the last-known location had amounted to nothing—but they were working human intelligence assets, HUMINT, which looked like it would come through soon. Guys from the embassy in Islamabad were squeezing everything they could out of those who played in their sandbox. Duhamel was with the General, out on the road in a convoy hammering down the highway. They’d get results.
Hutchinson cleared through security and headed to where his subordinate team was set up, a group of government super geeks tracking open-source communications. They had cracked one of the World of Warcraft gamers, and he wanted to see and hear about it in person.
Then, and only then, would he spoon some information to McCorkell. He wasn’t prepared to give him everything, but just enough …
Duhamel and his team were waved through the security gates behind the General’s vehicle. The General had been talking himself up big-time, as if these guys could somehow prop him up like Musharraf. He was convinced the country needed men like him, big and good for America, their ally in the Muslim world. He hated the Taliban—half the northern country, half the big cities, were sympathisers, but he would educate these people, give them a better life so they wouldn’t need to turn to these terrorists for cash and support. That was what the government was for. And his military was good at one thing—killing people, the same as any military. That’s what he would do if he were President, he’d told them excitedly. Clearly he’d convinced himself, long ago, that he’d fix his nation’s problems with brute force.
