by Weston Ochse
Hi, this is Cal. If you’re hearing this, I’m off surfing. Hang tight while I hang ten. I’ll talk back when I’m done. Laters.
He toggled the phone off and pounded his fist into his thigh. He held his breath and counted to ten, then made the call he should have made yesterday. The ringing on the other end sounded like it was coming through a long pipe. He stared at the picture of his mother on the screen. It had been taken at the beach north of Oceanside. Behind his mother’s tanned and smiling face and windswept black hair stood the twin reactors of the San Onofre Nuclear Generating Plant. His father liked to call them Les Moyennes Tetons, French for medium-sized breasts, only because his favorite geological formation in the world was The Grand Tetons on the western edge of Wyoming. His father had been such the kid at heart. Nathan could still hear the conversation.
“Why not call them Les Petite Tetons, Harold?” his mom had asked, the first time his father had proclaimed them.
“Because those are on your chest dear,” he’d said matter-of-factly.
Nathan and Cal had laughed uproariously at this, but now, what seemed like a million years later, he remembered his mother’s reaction, and her smile held a twist of embarrassment at the comment. Maybe that it was in front of her children. Maybe because she wasn’t endowed like some other women.
“Hello?”
The sound of her voice brought back a rush of memories. He hadn’t spoken with her since he’d left five months ago. It wasn’t that he hadn’t wanted to, it was just that time passed differently in the war.
“Hello?” she said again.
He should have called her right away. First the death of their father last year, now Cal.
“Nathan? Is that you?”
“Yes, Mom.” He paused, not knowing what to say. He searched the inside of the porta-potty for inspiration. The forefinger of his right hand traced a carving in the plastic of a man stroking his penis. “I heard about Cal.”
Now it was her turn to pause. She sobbed once, then they talked in hushed whispers for a while, as only survivors can, their words recreating the lives of a dead son, brother, father and husband, and what they’d meant to them, what they might come to mean to them, and how they’d been changed by it.
– 5 –
THE CONVOY DROPPED them off at the corner of Mansour and 14th of Ramadan Street. Everyone was on edge. The Washington Post last night had delivered a warning better than any ten people could give. Army Maj. Gen. James D. Thurman, commander of the Multinational Division Baghdad, said two weeks ago that attacks against U.S.-led coalition forces in Baghdad had reached an average of forty-two a day – with about six causing casualties or equipment damage – up from thirty-six or thirty-eight attacks.
It wasn’t a matter of if they’d be attacked during their patrol. It was when. Their mission was nothing more than to patrol the streets to try and lure those who were doing the shooting to shoot at them. The never-ending cycle of reprise killings between Sunnis and Shiites was increasing to the point they were spilling over. Innocent men, women and children, who wanted nothing more than to get back the lives they once had, were finding themselves victimized by their own kind, as ancient wrongs were reinvented to fuel the current feud.
The moon stood full in a bright blue sky. These day moons were Cal’s favorite time to surf. He thought the waves had more action and the water was fiercer.
At ten in the morning, traffic was still pretty heavy. A mixture of battered sedans and trucks moved in two lanes each way, divided by a broken strip of raised concrete. Nathan and his men kept up a wary eye on the street, as they did the windows and doorways. If anyone were to fire, they’d be hit before they could react. One reason for the heavy body armor.
Skinny went first, his two-hundred pounds on a six foot five frame busting out of the largest size body armor in inventory. He carried a SAW, a squad automatic weapon, which looked more like it should have been mounted on the hood of a HWMVEE instead of carried. The squad could hear his breathing through their headsets. Like the rest of them, he was terrified. But also like the rest of them, he was doing what he was told to do.
Next came Frisbee and Boots. Both kids from Los Angeles, they couldn’t have been any different. While Frisbee, or Private Irving Wasserman, was the image of blond-haired, cool breeze Southern California, Boots, or Brendan Buttifinski, was the image of dark gothic miserableness. Boots wore nothing but black beneath his uniform and was even known to wear eyeliner when off duty. One joker made the mistake of calling him a fag. No one else made that mistake after Boots gave the ass hat seventeen stitches across his left cheek and a scar to remember his vulgarity. They each carried M4s.
Nathan was next, his head on a constant swivel. He also carried an M4. He deployed Smittie, Petey and Watkins across the street, to mirror their patrol. Grouping together was just too dangerous. This way, each part of the squad could cover the other if necessary.
The bullet-scarred concrete buildings were a mix of apartments and businesses. Half of them were abandoned, or closed with metal doors. Here and there men sat on metal chairs drinking tea, while women shopped for vegetables.
They’d gone about a block before Watkins ordered them to halt.
“Report,” Nathan ordered.
“Got a strange mound on the ground about fifty feet down.”
“Anyone near it?”
“Not even a beggar.”
It was common knowledge that in most cases the locals knew when something was out of place. They knew the bomb, if it was a bomb, wasn’t there to target them, so they just avoided it. Smart soldiers watched the locals, reading their behavior like a Nebraska farmer could read the weather.
“Wait one,” Nathan said. He switched bands and reported to headquarters. They commanded him to cordon the area and wait for the bomb team. While he was happy Watkins had spied what was probably going to be an improvised explosive device, or IED, having to babysit it was going to make them a sitting duck. They had two choices. They could do a quiet cordon and keep people away, or they could block off the entire street, causing pure chaos and getting everyone pissed at them. While the latter would be the safest thing to do for the locals, it would put his men at the center of attention, which was the last thing he wanted to do.
He deployed his men in a radius around the suspect IED.
Each of them knelt and scanned their sector.
The locals knew something was going on. They began to move inside and away from possible action. Soon, the street was empty, lending an eerie flavor to the scene.
Nathan felt his phone buzz. He shouldn’t have taken it on mission, but after his conversation with his mother, there were more questions than he had answers. Like for instance, why was his brother still calling him? She had the phone. It had been returned to her as part of her son’s belongings by the police and still sat in the thick plastic bag.
Nathan reached for the phone to take a glance at it, and as he did, a bullet passed where his head had just been.
He slammed himself to the ground.
“Sniper!” he shouted.
All eyes went to the windows and roofs.
He searched around and pulled himself into a doorway.
A piece of concrete exploded near the door frame as another round tried to find him.
“Ten O’Clock. Third floor. Orange building,” Watkin’s shouted.
No sooner had he said the words, Skinny rained a hail of bullets into the window. Petey and Smittie hit the door to the building and began making their way to the third floor. Nathan followed their movements through the headset. When they reached the door to the suspected room, Skinny fired again, then they broke it down. What followed was a chaotic concerto of Arab screams, yelling and M4s firing in controlled bursts.
“Got ‘em, chief,” Petey said in his Kansas drawl. “Two men, both down. One had an initiator, I think for the IED.”<
br />
“Must have got trigger happy,” Watkins said. “Should have waited for the bomb team.”
Nathan reported the development to HQ, well aware he’d somehow been saved by his brother. First the ring, then the moon. Was it a coincidence? And who the hell was it texting him?
– 6 –
THAT EVENING, AFTER he’d completed his mission debrief and after action report, he found himself on his cot inside the squad hooch. He’d changed into PT gear, which was their only other authorized uniform, consisting of black shorts and a grey shirt. His knees were pulled up as he held his phone, staring at the screen.
The other members of the squad were either reading, listening to music, or watching movies on laptops. Vietnam War scenes of men drinking, smoking pot and carousing to Marvin Gaye music were an impossibility in a country whose very religion forbade having a good time. Such were the soldiers of the new century.
“Any of you know how to hack a phone?” he asked.
Smittie, Frisbee and Petey turned his way.
“What you planning on doing?” Petey asked.
“You gonna hack an old girlfriend?” Frisbee asked.
“Or maybe plant some naked gay pictures on the commander’s phone, maybe?” Smittie offered.
Petey, Frisbee and Nathan turned their heads to stare at Smittie, who gave then a weak smile in return.
“No, none of that,” Nathan said slowly. “We’ll be leaving the commander’s phone alone. But I think my phone has been hacked.”
Frisbee and Petey got up and came over to Nathan’s cot. Watkins and Boots, who’d been listening to music, noticed the movement, removed his headphones, and came over as well. Skinny remained oblivious, his headphones blocking out any sound as he watched Southpark reruns on his laptop.
“What’s up?” Watkins asked.
“Sarge says his phone has been hacked,” Petey said.
“Not definitely. Just wondering, is all,” Nathan said.
“Why do you think it may be hacked, Sarge?” Boots asked.
Nathan paused, wondering if he should tell them. Fuck it. “I keep getting text messages from my brother,” he said flatly.
The room was silent for a moment.
“That’s fucked up,” Petey said.
“Absolutely.” Watkins shook his head. “Who’d do something like that?”
Nathan shook his head too.
“Could it be one of his friends?” Frisbee asked. “I mean, as fucked up as it sounds, do you think maybe one of them is messing with you?”
“I thought about that. I called and talked to my mom. She says she has my brother’s phone at her house.”
“Ghost in the machine,” Boots said in the quiet space between guesswork.
Nathan’s head snapped in his direction. “What’d you say?”
“Ghost in the machine.” He glanced quickly at the others. “Not a ghost, I mean not THE ghost, but like an echo… a memory of what had previously occurred.”
“Like internet cookies or things stuck in a cache,” Frisbee offered, nodding.
Nathan looked from one soldier to the other. What they were saying wasn’t supernatural, but technological. He vaguely understood about what a computer cache was and how it stored what a person recently did. He also knew about cookies, which enabled a quicker loading of page data if previously installed. But he wasn’t quite getting how these two things could result in him getting texts from his brother’s phone, which was turned off and ten thousand miles away.
“Think of it like this,” Boots began, looking a little self-conscious that he was the center of attention. “Your brother texted you over and over and over, establishing a pattern. This frequency of contacts was not only stored on your phones, and not only at your service providers, but, depending on the size of the node, it could be stored there as historical tracking data showing the source and the destination of each contact.”
“What makes it echo?” Nathan asked.
Boots spread his hands. “Could be a purge. Could be spillage, sort of like a burp or hiccup of information that leaks out because some techie isn’t doing proper server maintenance.” He shook his head. “This is all a theory, Sarge. For all I know, someone is fucking with you.”
“No,” Nathan said, licking his lips as he thought about what Boots had said. “This sounds right. I can buy it. The rest of it has got to be pure coincidence.”
“What’s that you say?” Watkins asked.
Nathan winced. He hadn’t wanted to bring this up, but he had little choice now. To shut down the conversation would lose him credibility with them. “I just thought… I mean, I figured there might be something strange going on because I got a text right when the sniper shot at me. Had I not reached down to get the phone, I would have eaten a bullet.”
From somewhere far away, they could hear the whoomf of a mortar, then an impact. Sirens went up. Still, no one spoke. It wasn’t until the second mortar that everyone began scrambling for their gear. Even as they did, they kept glancing at Nathan, who was well aware he’d just spooked the hell out of them.
The mortar attack had been short lived. A Blackhawk spied the truck with the tubes in the back and took it out with a missile. Then it was back to normal for those living at Camp Victory.
Nathan had to give personnel accountability report to HQ, so was the last back in the hooch. When he arrived, the others were standing, waiting for him. Even Skinny was paying attention, his open jaw making it clear that the others had told him.
“What’s this, The Spooky Club?” Nathan asked, lowering his voice and waggling his fingers dramatically.
“You know the deal, Sarge.”
“We wanted to talk about your coincidence.”
It was time for Nathan to halt this line of questioning. “Listen. What I said was true, but it has to be coincidence. Plain and simple.” He began removing his gear. “I’m not going to buy anything else. Now, enough with the third degree. You all need to get some shuteye. We got another patrol in the morning and I don’t want anyone falling asleep on the job.”
All but Watkins headed reluctantly back to their cots.
“What is it?”
“Will you tell us if it happens again?” he asked.
“This is ridiculous, you know that, right?”
Watkins smiled. “Sure. Ridiculous. Coincidence. Whatever. But you’ll tell us, right?”
Nathan rolled his eyes. “Yeah. I’ll tell you.” He pointed across the room. “Now get your ass to bed.”
– 7 –
THE NEXT DAY, they were patrolling the same length of 14th of Ramadan Street. Within fifteen minutes, Nathan knew he had a problem. Instead of watching the street and the buildings, the eyes of his men were upon him. They were waiting for a magical text from his dead brother. Nathan wasn’t sure how it worked, but he was pretty sure it didn’t work that way.
“Come on, guys. Focus on the mission.”
But no matter how much he told them, some part of them always wanted to know if his dead brother was texting them. Part of him was amazed they even believed the idea; then again, this was war. After six months in Iraq, he’d never ever disregard a soldier’s ability to believe in the power of a trinket, no matter how apparently inconsequential it might be. He’d once heard of a soldier who’d had his baby blanket stitched into the inside of his body armor. Since he’d felt safest when he was a baby, he believed the blanket imbued him with supernatural protection no layers of body armor could ever provide. Sadly, the blanket didn’t protect him from an IED.
No, that they believed so easily wasn’t the problem.
That they disbelieved in their own ability was the problem.
After six nail-biting hours of patrol, they were picked up and returned to Victory.
Once in the team hooch, he sat his men down for a meeting. They weren’t goin
g to like what he had to say.
“Listen, boys. This shit has to stop. We could have been killed out there because of this damned phone.” He held it up and watched as all eyes went to it. “It was fucking coincidence. It was a ghost in the machine. Boots was right. It was just some echo, some left over spillage. As of this moment, I’m leaving the phone when we go on mission.”
Everyone groaned. Petey and Skinny stood like they didn’t know what to do but they were going to do something. Everyone began talking at once.
“Come on, Sarge!”
“You can’t do this.”
“We need that phone.”
“Please, Sarge!”
Nathan shook his head as he turned off the phone and jammed it into the bottom of his footlocker. “This is the shit I’m talking about. Hope in miracles is like crack on the battlefield. You guys barely got a glimpse of the shit and now you can’t say no.”
Watkins stepped close. “I know it’s not a good idea, but the men have been talking about how they think it saved them too.”
Nathan stared for a moment, then barked out a laugh. “Are you kidding?” He turned to engage the squad. “Do you hear yourselves? You’re a victim of the power of possibility. This shit isn’t real,” he said, grabbing the phone from the depths of the footlocker and holding it up for everyone to see. “It’s nothing.” He shook his head as he saw the disbelief hold fast in their eyes. He knew what he had to do. “Fuck me,’ he said, as he hurled the phone to the ground. It hit and bounced. He tracked it and brought a boot down on top of it, before Watkins and Skinny grabbed him.
“Sarge, what are you doing?”
“Let me the fuck go or I’ll have all your asses locked up.”
He tried to stomp on the phone again, but he was jerked back.
Boots picked it up, along with several plastic pieces. He backed away with them to his cot and spread them on the green wool blanket. Frisbee kneeled beside him as they compared whispered ideas.
Nathan finally managed to break free, knocking Watkins to the ground and shoving Skinny aside. This time they didn’t try to stop him.
