The Warriors

by Paul Batista

  Like all the other helicopters arriving at Lesbos, Hayes’ helicopter had touched ground in a cordoned-off landing zone. Armed Greek soldiers stood at intervals of five feet in the heat along the ropes and yellow tape that defined the landing zones. Hayes waited, in awe and fear, as his team of producers, camera crews, writers, and the ubiquitous caterers stepped out of the helicopter. Loosely assembled around Hayes were his guards, all military veterans who had once worked for the defunct Blackwater mercenary organization. One was a woman; she had the hard-bitten expression of an Ozark waitress, but she was big, lissome, powerful. The guards were large men in civilian clothes; most had blond, buzzed crewcuts. Some of the crew cuts had zigzag areas cut down to the scalp two inches above the men’s left ears. Hayes had no idea what the “Z” markings symbolized. All of the guards, including the woman, carried heavy black pistols.

  Waves of migrants moved toward the helicopter, just as they did toward every helicopter that landed in the cordoned-off zone. Since food and other supplies all came in helicopters, Hayes’ helicopter could have carried relief supplies rather than reporters. The Greek soldiers lining the perimeter became visibly more tense and attentive. No one from the masses of refugees breached the perimeter, which consisted of chain-link fences mounted by razor wire. Word seemed to pass quickly among the refugees that Hayes’ helicopter carried only reporters. The refugees had long ago lost interest in reporters: they came, they filmed, and they soon left, and they never brought food or water. They never made a difference. They might as well have been demented tourists.

  * * *

  Just three hours later, in the unbelievably hot midafternoon, Hayes’ crew was filming him as he stood near the perimeter’s chain-link razor-wire fences. Just to his left, with their backs turned to him, were several of the Greek soldiers facing the crowd. The soldiers all wore surgical masks, obviously in an effort to filter out at least some of the stench of human waste and unwashed bodies that intensified in the escalating heat of the afternoon. Hayes had gagged many times, but believed that by now he could get through the taping without wearing a mask or choking on the stench.

  Dressed in the khakis and the phony safari-style gear NBC had purchased for him at the Beretta store on Madison Avenue, Hayes faced the cameras. Behind him in the television frame were not only the Greek soldiers but a view of the thousands of dour imprisoned men and women, many with their fingers gripping the small rectangular chinks in the fence.

  For an hour, Hayes, his writers, and his producers had worked out the substance of what he would broadcast. They wrote at first on traditional, small, wire-edged reporters’ notebooks. Then they compared notes before deciding on the essence of what Hayes would say. Once that hour-long work conference ended, an old-fashioned set of three blackboards came out of one of the equipment bags. On the blackboards his crew wrote out not a script but a series of key points to display, out of sight of the cameras, to keep Hayes’ broadcast on track. He was a smart man, spontaneous, able to talk seamlessly, but in a place like this and a time like this, he didn’t want to speak completely extemporaneously. He needed what were in effect large cue cards.

  During the time Hayes and his crew were working, they didn’t notice the ominous escalation of the noise of voices, even chants, in the masses of migrants and refugees. But the Greek guards had noticed, slightly raising the slant of their black assault rifles.

  So, too, the ten private guards accompanying Hayes and the members of his crew became more concentrated and vigilant, gradually drawing closer to him. The guards were all grim. Hayes had taken his broadcast position at a slight elevation, with his back to the masses. The chants from the refugees continued to rise rapidly, almost the sound of crowds at a wild soccer match.

  Even though he sensed the dangerous shift in sound and mood, Hayes calmly continued to follow the careful, telegraphic cues on the row of blackboards. Later, members of his crew, as well as other journalists and broadcasters around the world, commented on how he “kept his cool” as the din of voices rose dramatically and violently together with the mounting sound of sporadic gunfire. Even when five or six oil barrels in the camp exploded like unexpected fireworks, he continued the broadcast, turning almost casually to the places where the barrels flew to pieces in enflamed fragments.

  Hayes did go to his knees when the tense Greek soldiers, reinforced by dozens of others he had not seen before, began a steady fusillade of shooting over the crowd. Hayes, standing and still being filmed, said, “The Greeks are obviously trying to control the sudden unrest by firing, apparently randomly, into the air above the crowds.”

  At that moment, a young Greek soldier staggered backward, dropping his rifle, and falling. All of his dying movements from the moment of impact were recorded in the scene behind Hayes. The bullet that killed him came from some place, some utterly unidentifiable place, in the masses of people in the internment camp. Almost immediately, dozens of other Greek soldiers at the perimeter went either to their knees in military firing position or to their chests and stomachs, also in firing position.

  Although he had never been in a war zone—had never heard shots fired or bombs exploding—Hayes spoke calmly into the two cameras that continued to record him. He was nervous but not visibly so. The cameramen showed no apparent fear: they had been filming battles in the midst of weapons fire since the Balkan Wars in the 1990s. In contrast, Hayes’ writers and producers, most of them in their twenties and thirties, were on the ground, gripping the dry earth; this was all new to them, and it was terrifying. One of them, a young man, was crying, a wail.

  Hayes’ security guards formed circles around him. Each of them was on one knee, balancing weapons in combat-style positions, scanning everything around them. They all had TEC-DC9 automatic pistols. They were the weapons of choice for these people; the exotic guns were overpowering, utterly reliable, and rare. Closest to Hayes was the only woman guard.

  In an instant—an instant captured vividly by the cameras—a black hole in Hayes’ right temple opened as he stopped speaking in mid-sentence. Blood spurted upward out of his head like an obscene surge of water from a pierced bag. He collapsed to his side, making no sound. Two of the crew-cut guards turned him over. One pressed on his chest. The other put his mouth to Hayes’ mouth, blowing his breath into Hayes’ open mouth before sucking his own breath back and wiping away with the back of his hand the drool and blood he had just extracted from Hayes’ mouth. The guard was well trained for this. Just above his left ear, vaguely visible as one of the cameras drew closer and closer, was his “Z” mark. After a minute, his effort stopped.

  One of the men could be heard saying, “Forget it, the fucker’s wasted.”

  Hayes was dead. Every second of the killing was on film. The cameramen never flinched. They turned off their cameras only after dwelling for ten further seconds on one of the most familiar faces in the world.

  CHAPTER 21

  IT WAS SIX in the morning when the iPhone on the nightstand next to Hayes’ bed vibrated, a throbbing loud enough almost to shake the bed’s iron frame. After the two hours of effort she spent putting her apartment into a semblance of its usual order, she decided she would be far more comfortable in the familiar environs of Hayes’ apartment on Central Park South even in his absence on Lesbos. She had arrived in a taxi well before dawn; it was still black night. She hoped she could rest because, for some unexplained reason, Naomi Goldstein had announced at the end of the Wednesday session that the trial was adjourned for Thursday and would resume on Friday. Raquel didn’t care what the reason was. As a federal judge, Naomi Goldstein had complete control of her schedule and by extension of the schedule of everyone else in the courtroom. It often struck Raquel as the irrational, arbitrary power of ancient royalty or of modern-day dictators.

  Aroused from her sleep, Raquel groped for her cell phone and immediately saw on the screen not a person’s name or telephone number but the letters CBS. This meant to her that the network, which had her under a loosely def
ined contract to provide commentary on cases during the morning shows, must have learned that she had the day off from the Senator Angelina Baldesteri trial and wanted her in the studio to give live commentary on some other high-profile, ongoing case. Although focused on her own trial, she knew, for example, that in Oregon, a jury the day before had announced the acquittal of a white supremacist accused of killing an FBI agent. In an hour she could be dressed, driven to CBS’s studio, given a briefing by a producer while she was in the makeup room, and then ushered into the studio for a live interview. Raquel made no secret to herself that she loved to be called suddenly and frequently for these cameo appearances. They brightened her day.

  Yet, on this morning, she was too exhausted and too unsettled by the ransacking of her home to want to make any appearance on television. She pressed the Decline frame on the iPhone screen, not even wanting to talk with one of the pleasant booker-producers. CBS had a reservoir of at least five other celebrity lawyers to call on.

  Fewer than ten seconds later, as she was struggling with the vexing issue of whether to go to the bathroom or just roll over and let sleep overtake her if it could, the cell phone vibrated again. What she saw on the caller box were the letters CNN. This time she touched the Accept frame on the screen because CNN usually scheduled her for late afternoon or early evening appearances.

  “Is this Raquel Rematti?” It was a male voice that she didn’t recognize. Ordinarily the bookers’ and producers’ voices were as familiar to her as those of friends; most of the bookers were young women.

  “It is,” she said. Her voice was soft. “Who is this?”

  “Norman Van Zandt.”

  She recognized the name. They had briefly been introduced three months before when she was a guest commentator on Anderson Cooper’s show and Van Zandt was a young and newly hired reporter from a station in Chicago. He was a big, self-confident man, a rising star in national broadcasting.

  “I’m sorry for your loss,” Van Zandt said.

  What loss? Raquel wondered. Exhausted and bewildered, she thought only that she had at that time six other cases on appeal awaiting decisions and that she hadn’t been aware that she had lost one of the appeals.

  “Loss,” she repeated groggily. “What loss?” In her sleep-impaired state of mind, the words Sorry for your loss were a trite expression of phoniness, one that could encompass the death of a pet gerbil or a venomous one-hundred-year-old grandmother.

  “Hayes,” he answered, after hesitating. “Hayes Smith.”

  She sat up in the bed, crossing her legs under her. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.” But Raquel innately knew, in every tingling cell of her body, that Hayes was dead. He was the “loss.”

  In the several months Van Zandt had spent at CNN, he had picked up a reputation as a person who was cold, hardworking, and ambitious. Yet his voice now was surprisingly quiet and respectful. “I’m so sorry, Ms. Rematti. I just assumed you already knew that Hayes Smith was killed an hour or two ago on Lesbos. I never would have wanted to be the first to tell you.”

  She took several shallow breaths, as though she were about to drown and gasping for air. “What happened?”

  “Mr. Smith was recording a segment near a huge refugee encampment on the island. I was there, on Lesbos, last week. It was scary. The Greek Army has no idea what to do. The island is almost overwhelmed. New refugees land every day.”

  “But what happened to Hayes?”

  “I’m not sure, Ms. Rematti, that I should be the one to tell you.”

  “Tell me.”

  “The video has gone viral, as they say. It shows that, just as he was taping a broadcast, gunfire rang out. You can all of a sudden hear it on the tape as he’s speaking into the camera. The shots first came from the refugee camp, and it’s not clear who the targets were. The Greek soldiers started scattering warning shots in the air above the crowds. All of this is on the tape, Ms. Rematti. The screen position where Hayes stood was wide and panoramic. You can see the Greeks begin to lose control behind him. Some old oil barrels in the camp explode. One of the Greek soldiers is killed, possibly even by friendly fire. The whole act of his dying is on the film behind Hayes. Chaos.

  “The cameramen in Hayes’ crew are combat veterans. They kept filming steadily. Hayes gets on his knees, still facing the cameras. In the meantime, all hell is breaking loose, but Hayes, incredibly calmly, keeps broadcasting.”

  “What else?”

  “Honestly, Ms. Rematti, I’m really uncomfortable to be the one to tell you all this.” He hesitated, sounding genuinely anxious, almost like a small boy withholding a big secret. “It’s all over the news. It’s on YouTube, Instagram, Facebook, all those instant social media devices. Maybe you can see it for yourself.”

  “What happened?” she insisted.

  “A bullet hit him in the temple. The cameramen kept filming. Two big American guys tried CPR. There was no way to save him.” He paused again. “I’m so sorry.”

  “He had ten former Blackwater guards with him. Where were they?”

  “That’s news to me. I’ve watched the whole awful tape many times. The two big blond guys who did the CPR looked like they might once have been Navy SEALS or Army Special Forces people. They knew what they were doing. They certainly were not members of any kind of broadcast crew I ever saw.”

  “I appreciate your telling me all this.” It was difficult for Raquel to control her tears. “How does the tape end?”

  “That’s a bridge too far for me, Ms. Rematti. The camera crew, those unflinching guys, kept filming for at least another ten, fifteen seconds.”

  “What were they filming?”

  “Not the chaos or battle or the refugee camp or the confused, stumble-down Greek soldiers.”

  “So they were filming Hayes’ body as he bled to death?”

  “They were.”

  “You people are in an awful business.”

  Quietly, in an effort to soothe her, he said, “I know.”

  “It’s not your fault,” she said. “But please, Norman, just say I had no comment.”

  “Agreed, agreed,” he answered.

  The call ended. She fell backward onto the bed, the place where they had so often in the past made love and laughed, watched television, and read books. Nothing in the world could have stopped her wailing cry.

  * * *

  More sleep, Raquel knew, was impossible despite her exhaustion and crying.

  On a nightstand next to his bed, Hayes had one of those relics from what seemed like an antique era, a bulky answering machine connected by a wire to an old-fashioned landline. She noticed that the answering machine’s small red dot was blinking. It was the only time in all the months she had lived there that a message had been left on the answering machine. She pressed the play button.

  And there, in all of its richness and understated wryness, was Hayes’ voice, preserved during the last three hours of his life. “Hey, baby, your cell must be dead or locked up with the guards at the courthouse. Hope you get this message. We just landed in Athens. The powers that be at the network must want instantaneous service since there’s a helicopter for my writers and producers and crew and guards waiting for us. We don’t even get to go into the terminal, much less visit the Parthenon. It’s straight to the copter. Lesbos is not far from here. Orders are that we start broadcasting as soon as we can. Which is great, really. A quick in and a quick out.” He laughed. “That means I get back on your beautiful ass very soon. Enough for now. These old tapes run out quickly. As Edward R. Murrow used to say, ‘Good night and good luck.’”

  She rewound the tape and replayed it three times, worried each time that she would hit the nearby delete button.

  She popped the old fashioned microcassette tape out of the bulky answering machine, wondering if she would even be able to find an old device on which to play the tape in the future. But, as word on the street had it, you could find anything in New York.

  The tape was, she realized, the o
nly memento she would ever have of him and that loving phase of her life, now over forever.

  CHAPTER 22

  EVERYONE IN THE world knew Hayes Smith, or so it seemed to Raquel, and everyone also seemed to know that she and Hayes had been with each other as lovers for months. Her office phone was flooded with messages from reporters. The inbox of her iPhone was far beyond its capacity. But instead of returning calls—she returned none—her main obsession was to gather up the things, mainly clothes and shoes and books—that had gradually migrated from her apartment to his. One of the porters in Hayes’ building had a small van in the underground garage. Quickly and for one thousand in cash to pay him and another off-duty porter as their shift ended, she gathered up her belongings—dresses, slacks, and jackets on hangers, books, and her shoes and other loose objects, all traces of herself—in black plastic bags, and within three hours had them all transported to her apartment on Riverside Drive. Just as she at last stood at the door to Hayes’ light-filled apartment, knowing that it would be the last time she saw it, Raquel said, aloud to herself, “Why did you leave me, Hayes? I loved you so much.”

  No one heard her.

  Reporters waiting for her thronged both the sidewalk in front of the lobby to Hayes’ building on Central Park South and the sidewalk in front of her building’s lobby on Riverside Drive. She ignored all of them. What in the world, other than complete inanities, could she possibly say to them? Her private life was for her and her alone.

  Once she settled in her home after the porters delivered all of her clothes and shoes, she opened her iPhone’s inbox. There were text messages, she knew, that she would have to return.