Then, deep in the regimen’s warrior-zone and not welcoming the interlude, in August he was summoned once again by the Friends of Golf for another walk-and-talk, this time to Virginia.
International Town and Country Club, August, 1996
They were on the back nine, Eville Burnette patrolling the sloped shore of a small green lake pressed down glassy smooth against the contours of the rising Piedmont, the fairway behind him flanked by magnificent groves of old-growth hardwoods, oaks and ashes and maples, hickory and walnut, the greenery wilted by the heat and muggy air that carried the mouldering cut-grass smell of deep summer sweetened by honeysuckle. With lazy futility he waved at the cloud of gnats in front of his face and scanned the shallows of the jade-colored water, wishing for his fly rod. The lake looked clean and came fresh and slightly cool into his nostrils and, suspended out over the drop-off, Eville could discern the long tapered shadows of a pair of dinner-sized fish.
He had lived in Carolina long enough to foster an appreciation for the pleasure of a large-mouth bass rising to the fight, a true satisfaction but nothing like the thrashing good fight of the native cutthroats or ten-pound rainbows that launched up out of the depths of his parents’ lost world, his mother and father out on the crystal flow of those Montana rivers in his father’s homemade wooden dory, the three bare-chested little kids, the brothers, high-siding in the bow. A wild brand of happiness only available in the West, uncensored and unregulated. His mother had taught her boys how to fly-cast but Dawson himself had been a meat fisherman, a man who preferred a baited hook held fast to the pebbled bottom by a wad of lead, and as an angler and as a soldier, he scorned the modern and so-called enlightened practice of catch and release. Whatever you beat needs to stay beaten, he liked to tell his sons.
He was developing some kind of dreamy feeling for this course, its swaths of antebellum forests, rolling vistas of the confederacy, Manassas just up the road, Winchester not far to the west, the old battlefields echoing in his imagination with the thunder of cannonades and the fearless charge of cavalry, sabers clanging like blacksmith hammers. Everything absorbed by his senses, here under the hazy white sun of Fairfax County, every mote of scent, every pitch of sound, reminded him of a beautiful pain within his rib cage, the tender hurt that was always there inside, mostly quiet, when you loved your country as much as Eville Burnette loved America. It wasn’t a matter of being raised a certain way, although he was. It was a matter of gratitude, the thing that you were called upon to feel if you ever hoped to be a decent man, or a soldier.
Off at the end of the lake he watched Ben set his stance for his second shot and swing and he had to admit he was growing to love this moment as well, watching the liftoff of the balls soaring to their apogee, something in his spirit flying up with them. Then, coming toward him down the bank, he heard the crunching approach of footsteps on the patchy red clay and an exasperated release of breath. The undersecretary seemed unusually agitated today, excited but prickly.
What’s the verdict, Ev? Did it roll in?
No, sir, said Burnette, unshouldering the bag of clubs. Calling his daughter Jackie was one thing but he could not bring himself around to the winking assininity of addressing Steven Chambers as Arnie. It just felt awkward, and the operational logic wasn’t justified, at least when Burnette had been on the scene.
I mean, yes, sir, he corrected himself. It’s in the water, but I don’t think it rolled. See, he pointed as Chambers stopped next to him. It’s there about four feet out.
Okay. Fuck.
What would you like me to do?
Ev, I want you to be open to your own potential.
You’re talking Haiti, sir?
I’m talking your potential. Forget about Haiti. Haiti made you unhappy.
Yes, sir. I don’t much like being on the wrong side of things.
Don’t overthink it, Ev. Sometimes the right side of things doesn’t feel much better. Let that second-guessing go. I’m going to put you in a stronger position for fixing what ails you. Something hands-on and out front. You ready for that?
Yes, sir. Thank you.
Now, would you mind terribly? Can I ask you to wade out there and get my ball?
Burnette bent over to untie his running shoes. Above them on the knoll of the fairway, the thwack and the shout—not Fore! but some foreign word clearly meant as a warning—arrived a second before the ball cleared Eville’s head by inches, whistling past to splash twenty yards out into the lake. The golfer, today’s exotic rotating fourth, flapped his arms in a dismissive manner that seemed to say, Calm down, children, and barked out an apology in broken English. His name was Drako or Draco something and he had been there waiting for them after the first nine holes, sitting in a black SUV with USG tags parked in front of the pro shop. All Burnette knew about the guy after a couple holes was that he was an officer in the Croatian army, some updated version of hypermuscled Ostrogoth from the Balkans, dressed in black paratrooper pants and jump boots and a taut black T-shirt that made his chest look like a gorilla’s. Beetle-browed, shaven-skulled, small ears, blunt nose, frosty blue eyes, he could have been a prototype for the chain mail and broadsword crusader, not the prince but one of the lesser-born knights, in a video game popular with the troops down at Bragg, and, despite his intimidating brawn, or perhaps precisely because of his ridiculous strength, the worst duffer imaginable. Burnette had him sighted as a special forces nut job from a part of the planet that excelled in nut jobs, and it was anybody’s guess, exempting the three gentlemen out here who knew everything there was to know, what he was doing in Virginia.
Now there’s a fucking maniac, said the undersecretary, gazing up the hill at this fellow. Ev, I think you’re going to find working with this guy interesting.
Draco Vasich was a colonel in the intelligence division of the Croatian military and apparently an associate or asset or perhaps just a friend of Steven Chambers. Their familiarity, their chummy interaction, had made Burnette begin to ponder the undersecretary’s thought process and decision making, his impulse toward matchups. Maybe he was only imagining it, but he thought he could discern an emergent pattern—Dawson’s son Eville, Chambers’s own daughter, this guy Vasich—in the way the undersecretary chose his minions, built his secret family, his inner circle of Knights Templar, as if he nursed an intention to influence events by personalizing them, a determination to shorten the distance, the degrees of separation, between the action and his control of the action, the better to move the world in a direction he believed to be preordained. There was something cultish about it, something in the air that smacked of the royal point of view or, conversely, the mob boss, something that both engendered genuine loyalty and corrupted it with an inflexible form of obligation. But Burnette didn’t know enough yet to be able to visualize FOG’s extended family portrait, whether only a chosen few fit in the frame or the edges of its ranks blurred into infinity.
Everyone waited for Colonel Vasich to reach the green. Ev, tending the pin, heard Ben asking the colonel as he walked up if he had seen the latest fatwa from the sheik.
Hey, it was pretty good, I thought, quipped Sammy. Did our people consult on the language?
War declared. All over the front page.
Chambers smiled. I missed it. Remember that peacenik slogan back in the sixties? What if they gave a war and nobody came? Was that a poster or a song?
What’s it going to take? First Iranians, now ragheads.
Bah, said Draco Vasich. Dogs barking. One by one, we shoot.
Life can be funny, can’t it, said Chambers. You know, in 1984 I met this trust fund mujo at one of the guest houses he was running in Peshawar. He came from a family of contractors, builders. Khan introduced us—he wasn’t a colonel in those days. The three of us had tea, the drink of mujo bullshit. This contractor sheik wasn’t a warrior, he was never a warrior, his Afghan A
rabs were clowns, the real mujahideen laughed at them. He was nothing more than a tour operator, this sheik, for all the punks across the Muslim world whose own countries couldn’t get rid of them fast enough. But what I want to say is this, the pretender and I shared a vision, we were brothers in this respect. We converged, biblically speaking. We could see the future, and we did not see it differently. How many years ago was that? It’s taken more time than I expected, but in the interim they have not been idle, have they? In the fatwa he said, There is nothing between us that needs to be explained. He’s right about that, isn’t he?
Ben said, They’re opening the door for Christ.
Look at Bosnia, said Sammy. Am I right, Colonel? You try to be generous, be reasonable, be humane, overlook the negatives, and what happens? In pour the caliphaters from every corner of the globe.
Burnette’s epiphany that day seemed, in retrospect, to be as lackluster as any platitude, its truth bleached out by the overwashing of its own consistency, that sometimes the interconnected spin of humanity revealed the axis of its rotation in the most pedestrian scenes, the fate of societies left in the hands of a few men playing a round of golf, a few men drinking chai in caves, hatching both sides of the same eternal plot, reversible good versus reversible evil, and God’s way both ways, which was why, he had to suppose, God was a fucking mystery floating out there far beyond the binary.
Cowboys and Muslims, gentlemen, said Ben, grinning at Burnette and Vasich. Mount up.
CHAPTER FORTY-THREE
Camp Dawson, West Virginia
One rainy morning at the beginning of September, as a tropical depression scoured the Outer Banks and pushed inland to wring itself out on the Piedmont, he packed his full combat kit and his rucksack and stuffed everything in the cab of the truck and was on the road north by early afternoon to Camp Dawson in the mountains of West Virginia. Now came his chance and probably the only one he would ever get to prove himself in the crucible of ultimate manhood, born into a new life where you would be forever known for being unknown, defined by silence and exalted for the mystical self-restraint that made killing an honorable, even noble, profession, an almost spiritual task never to be confused with the chaos and random slaughter of a battlefield. A Jedi knight, tier-one warrior, like the hammerheads on Seal Team Six, Delta’s waterborne counterparts, or Israel’s Sayeret Matkal, France’s GIGN, the British SAS, the neurosurgeons of state-sanctioned death.
Staring through the rain, though, Burnette began to brood, and as he drove he searched his heart for the answer he didn’t have—How much do I want this?—and his heart kept referring him to his father and his grandfathers. As the miles accumulated in his rearview mirror and the sun broke through the overcast right on time for setting, he tried to command his brain into the zone but the effort only increased his anxiety.
The scuttlebutt had been anything but reassuring. Two guys he knew from Seventh Group, both triathletes and Iron Man contenders, had crashed and burned somewhere near the end of last season’s selection during their loaded-up forty-mile march through hellish terrain. Equally unsettling were the rumors Burnette had heard about the psych evaluations and follow-up interviews. Although you didn’t have to submit yourself, as did Agency recruits, to a lifestyles polygraph, also known as the when-was-last-the-time-you-sucked-dick detector test, you were made to endure the excavation of all the emotional crap inside that you never wanted to mess with, as you underwent the Wonderlic Personnel (how close to knuckle-dragging is your IQ), the Jackson Personality Test, and the Minnesota Multifacet Personality Inventory (an in-depth personality battery, every question a variation on the theme of bed-wetting), the soft-science dicing of your id and ego then handed over to a series of personal interviews where bad things regularly happened to pretty good people if you somehow managed to piss off a member of the interviewing board. On the menu of self-inflicted wounds, the number one culprit was often described to Burnette as arrogance, one of those things visible to everyone but the arrogant themselves. Burnette had heard an anecdote from a captain friend of his, who had inadvertently expressed his hubris and a sergeant major from the unit showed him the door, just like that. I don’t like his attitude, the sergeant major explained to the other taut-faced members of the board. He’s finished, and he was, because if you’re that fucking outstanding, keep it to yourself.
For Eville, that finished feeling, absolute and undeniable, came a few hours before his completion of the physical assessment’s final exam when, in the starless deep-woods void before dawn he tripped over some root or vine at the top of a ravine and tumbled thirty feet down ass-backward until his rucksack snagged in an outcropping, his sudden arrest remarked upon by a vertebrae’s dull pop in his lower back. And still, even though he knew he was out, crossing the finish line a half-dead and defeated man and immediately sent to the clinic for an IV and a gulping handful of ibuprofen tablets, none of the instructors seemed in a terrible hurry to cut him loose. Instead, they sent him trotting to another building to be tortured for a week straight by a humorless tribe of shrinkoids. What’s your favorite flavor of ice cream? How does it make you feel? Rate your anger on a scale of one to five, five being a raging white-hot desire to kill a homo.
The first 3 a.m. session started off on sound footing, despite his grogginess and fatigue and a spasm like a wooden stake pounded into the base of his spine, the three-man board lobbing softball questions about operating procedures and techniques, quizzing him on the culture of operational security and his temperament for anonymity—Consider yourself exhumed from the tomb of nameless souls at Arlington, and nameless you shall remain. And then one of the D-boy evaluators said, Tell us about Haiti, and Burnette hesitated perhaps a second too long, tangled up by his two very disparate deployments, until his interrogator straightened his back and his face grew pinched and inquisitorial—You have nothing to say?—and Burnette began talking about the mission with as much tonal upbeat as he could fake, until another guy on the panel interrupted.
We’re not interested in winning hearts and minds, said the panelist. For our guys, hearts and minds are targets. We shoot hearts and minds. Without notification. Any reason you can think of why we shouldn’t do that, or why you couldn’t do that? A religious reason? Are you squeamish? Are you walking around with a guilty conscience for blowing away your first squirrel? Do you think it’s evil to assassinate someone who wants to destroy America, slay our children? You have two brothers, correct? Suppose one of them hijacks a jetliner full of passengers and threatens to blow it up? Could you take your brother down?
Five nos and one, I don’t know.
For the record, nobody’s going to ask you to shoot your brother. I’d shoot your brother. But suppose you were the only one there standing between the death of every innocent person on that plane and whacking your brother?
Okay, I’d whack my brother.
But you’d feel bad about it, right?
Yes.
All right, psycho-killer. Your brother’s dead, you took him out. Then what?
Honestly, at that point I think I would say I had done enough and it was time to go fishing.
More than most people would get off their ass to do for their country, right?
I can’t speak for most people, sir.
But you’d hold it against them, right? That’s natural. They might just hold it against you too. Fratricide. Summary execution.
Yes. Maybe. Not the passengers and not the crew. Not their families. No, sir.
The evaluator who had yet to speak now chose to speak. Why are you here, Sergeant Burnette? he asked, his voice artificially genial, nonthreatening, obviously meant to conceal the bait, the trap, the coup de grâce.
Sir?
Your presence here puzzles me. There’s the cart-before-the-horse factor—for the last three months, you’re down there inside the Wall. Are you the prom queen or so
mething, training behind the fence before selection? Some new brand of hot shit? You seem to have friends in high places.
Honestly, my friends mostly stick to the low places, sir.
I hear your father served in Vietnam, is that correct?
Yes, sir.
Was your father one of these crybaby ’Nam vets? Nobody appreciates us, nobody understands us?
The interview was meant to push him over the edge, he was aware of that, on guard for that, but the master sergeant had, with malice, fully awakened the one sure emotion in Burnette with the power to render him a murderous animal. He struggled for self-control, the muscles in his jaw flexing and his metabolism, strangely, appropriately, absorbing the sniper training leaked into his circulatory system. His heart rate and breathing slowed to a rhythm that became a coiling focus. The countenance of the other panelists made clear that they knew exactly what they were seeing, had seen this throughout their lives in uniform, this facedown between two modern-day triceratops at the prehistoric watering hole. The tension seemed to flashburn the oxygen out of the windowless room and the silence began to build until it roared like a tornado.
Stay cool, warned one of the board members but two words alone, regardless of their worthiness, were not enough to break the spell. The panelist tried again. Burnette, he said levelly, I want to hear you.
Yes, sir, said Burnette. His voice was barely audible and he was finished, he knew it. Speaking, interviewing—finished, done, toast.
Burnette, talk to me.
Sir. What would you like me to say? There’s nothing to say.
That might be true. Let’s work this out, the interviewer said, yet nobody volunteered another word and he began gathering up the documents he had removed from Burnette’s dossier. Overcome by the futility, Eville found himself willing to forfeit everything he had not already lost for the sake of his father’s honor.
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