New York Minute

by Bob Mayer

  Kane went deeper into the illicit abyss. A light flared in the distant darkness, a blaze in the goggles, someone lighting up a cig or joint. Kane thought of a sniper waiting in the dark for that brief illumination and squeezing off a bullet directly into the spot, putting an exclamation point on the Surgeon General’s warning.

  An odd, snapping sound caught his attention. There was a glow coming through a gap in the interior wall. Kane turned the NVG’s off and pushed them up on his head. Through the hole he saw several candles flickering in a circle. In the center, a naked man was tiptoed on a two-foot high wood crate. A rope was cinched around his neck and went over a ceiling strut, terminating at a small winch that was snap-linked to one of the metal supports. The man’s hands were on the rope, grasping it above his head, keeping himself steady. His legs were shaking on his precarious perch. Blood and sweat dripped down bare skin and his cock was erect. Another man, wearing black leather pants and vest, head covered with a black leather hood stood behind him, whip in hand. A half-dozen silhouettes surrounded the spectacle in rapt audience. None wore suits and unfortunately the naked man wasn’t Delgado.

  Kane slipped through the gap and gave the group a wide berth.

  There was movement to the right, along the outer wall, partially hidden by a stanchion.

  The whip struck flesh.

  A suit had his back against the outer wall, pants down, two people kneeling in front of him. Kane slid the .45 into the holster and retrieved the camera from the map case. Oriented the camera toward the subjects and squeezed his eyes shut.

  The flash went off, then once more.

  “Motherfucker!” Alfonso Delgado screamed as he scrambled to pull up trousers.

  Kane opened his eyes. He shoved the camera in the bag, drew the .45, and retraced his steps, surer of the way, avoiding the whipping and other debauchery. He removed the goggles as he left the pier, walked underneath the Highway, and re-entered what passed for civilization in lower Manhattan. He skirted the hulk of a burnt-out car sitting on blocks in a vacant lot. Kane holstered the pistol, levering the safety into its slot on the modified slide as he did so.

  He proceeded along West 10th. Few people were about this late. He paused on the corner of Washington, which ran north-south. To his right, rising above the brownstones, vacant lots filled with debris and the run-down tenements and businesses of Greenwich Village, were the brilliantly lit, shiny, twin pillars of the World Trade Center. The ground had been broken for them the year Kane graduated West Point, 1966, and both towers had topped out in 1970. Four years of construction mirroring the four years of deconstruction in Kane’s life. From proud West Point graduate parading on the Plain to abject military prisoner. Red aircraft warning lights were flashing on what had been the world’s tallest buildings until three years ago when the Sears Tower in Chicago bested them, another chunk of pride bitten out of the Big Apple.

  Kane felt the ghost of something, combat past or threat present or dismal future, tingle his spine.

  He peered at his back trail but the street was clear.

  Headlights cut the darkness as a bulky yellow cab rumbled by on cobblestones.

  He remained still, waiting. Nothing.

  Kane proceeded north on Washington, a main artery of Greenwich Village. A scattering of pedestrians, wary of each other, some crossing the street to avoid close passage. It wasn’t just the usual native caution; there was the specter of Son of Sam, still out there almost a year since his first attack. Kane continually checked for anyone following, zigzagging the street four times, with the occasional pause.

  When he reached Jane Street he cornered right, remaining on the south side until mid-block. The street was cobblestone with trees arcing overhead along both sidewalks. A few streetlights struggled against the night.

  Kane crossed over. Swung open the gate in a waist-high black wrought iron fence leading to the lowest level of an old three-story brownstone. The oiled hinges were silent. After shutting the gate, he knelt on the steps and faced back the way he’d come, hand hovering over the .45. No one on the street. Waited twenty heartbeats. Rose and took the four steps. The entrance for the basement apartment was to the left, underneath the steps leading to the main floor. There was a small arched alcove in front of the door.

  Kane checked the matchstick stuck in the door jamb a foot above the ground insuring it was undisturbed, then unlocked and entered, putting the matchstick on the small table inside. Turned the light on. Out the entry, he was in a small sitting area with a horizontal, narrow, street-level window under the low ceiling. Down the short hall was a bedroom with no window, bathroom to the left side crammed beneath the upstairs hallway and finally a tiny kitchen and a door leading to steps to the small courtyard in back where the owner kept a struggling garden surrounded by buildings fore and aft and wood fences left and right.

  The furniture was cheap second-hand, suitable to an equally inexpensive rental from the owner residing on the top two floors. The walls were lined with cinderblocks supporting bowed boards loaded with books. Hardcovers and paperbacks were stacked upright, sideways, there seemed to be no pattern to the placement. Above the door frame leading to the bathroom was a four-foot-long board with holes every three inches in it. Two long pegs were inserted. The bathroom doubled as a field expedient dark room and Kane carried the camera inside, then stepped back to the frame, gave a slight jump, grabbing a peg in each hand. He did several pullups, then moved the left peg one hole further out, a few more pullups, extended another hole and several more. When his arms were vibrating from effort, he dropped and got to work developing the film.

  Propped against any available wall space not covered by books were framed prints of maps, primarily of New York City in various phases of its evolution from the Cortelyou Map of New Amsterdam in 1660 through a Michelin map from 1962, Kane’s senior year in high school. The glass and frames were covered in dust. None had been hung.

  As Kane mixed chemicals in the old sink to develop the film, he reflected on another shit job completed and nobody dead. A decent evening. Especially given the last and most significant time Kane was involved in a killing it ended up on the cover of Life Magazine.

  Perhaps that wasn’t the best thought for Kane to have. With the photos hanging and developing, he dragged his poncho liner and sleeping pad under the kitchen table and settled down. As he drifted off, crossing the threshold of his tight conscious control, the junkie in the pizza joint wormed out of his subconscious.

  The 173rd and Ted had been the last thing he needed to be reminded of.

  Monday, 24 October 1966

  AUXILIARY FIELD SEVEN,

  EGLIN AIR FORCE BASE RESERVATION, FLORIDA

  “Previous class said he’s crazy,” Ted Marcelle whispers to Kane as they ride in the open back of a deuce and a half truck through the flat Florida panhandle wasteland. Endless scrub, palmettos, stinking water, gators, mud and, of course, snakes, await.

  According to the scuttlebutt from the last Ranger class to pass through, there is worse in human form.

  Ted looks like hell. The left side of his face is blistered and swollen from poison ivy brushed against in the mountains of Georgia. It’s covered in white Calamine lotion, but the medicine hasn’t been helping.

  “Doolittle trained his crews for the Tokyo mission here.” Kane points at the cracking and weed infested long stretch of concrete: Auxiliary Field Seven.

  Ted doesn’t care about history. He’s looking ahead. Literally. “You don’t think he killed them?” Ted asks, indicating the bodies.

  Fires flicker in barrels. An old truck burns. Soldiers wearing American uniforms are strewn about. The trucks carrying Ted, Kane and the rest of their Ranger Class roll through the ambush. A man wearing black pajamas stands in the far treeline, an AK-47 in his hands. As quickly as he’s seen, he disappears into the scrub.

  The Ranger students have all lost weight over the past six weeks of training at Fort Benning and in the mountains around Dahlonega, Georgia. They’re
battered, bruised, exhausted and despite a brief 24 hours respite before this phase, starving. Six weeks of one c-ration a day takes everyone down a step on the evolutionary scale. Many are regretting the steaks they’d gorged on during that short break, as it reignited the hunger. They’d reached the point by the end of the mountain phase where hunger is such a constant it’s the norm. A partly deranged Ranger student trying to put imaginary coins into a tree believing it’s a vending machine is viewed with little notice.

  The same with exhaustion. They’re surviving at the first, base level of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs: lacking food, water, warmth, rest, and shelter. Ranger School is breaking them down to see how they act and react under stress. War is chaos, war is confusion, war is exhaustion, war is man at his most primitive. Ranger School is the Army’s attempt to get as close to that as possible without killing them, although students occasionally do die in the swamps, usually from hypothermia.

  Kane had not been able to see his newly born son during the abbreviated break before this phase, because Taryn had gone to her parents in New York, rather than sit alone with Joseph in a squalid apartment in Columbus, Georgia for two months amongst all the rednecks. He’d talked briefly with her on the phone. Listened to Lil’ Joe cry in the background. Felt the distance. The absence.

  With a squeal of brakes, the truck abruptly stops. The Ranger students tumble in the cargo bay. It’s deliberate, as the other trucks halt the same way.

  “Get out!” A Ranger Instructor, RI, screams. “Get out!”

  The students don’t wait for the cargo strap in the back to be unhooked or the gate dropped. They’ve been in this situation before. They pour over the sides of the trucks, falling to the ground with their gear.

  Kane hits hard, his rucksack twisting his back, his rifle almost impaling him. He scrambles to his feet. Ted is upright, weapon at the ready.

  “Fall in!” the RI orders.

  The Ranger Students assemble. Their numbers are less than the 212 who started six weeks ago. Injury has taken the unlucky, although most will be recycled, once they heal, and go through it again. Some have quit, an unthinkable and career-ending decision for an Infantry officer. Kane and Ted had watched a couple of classmates they’d thought competent simply give up.

  This isn’t West Point. This is finishing school for Infantry officers and the training for enlisted who are members of elite Ranger units. The newly installed commander of this phase, Charlie Beckwith has taken it to another level: this is preparation for the real war raging on the other side of the globe; no longer just a career ticket punch.

  “Ground your rucks.”

  They shrug off their rucksacks and deposit them at their feet.

  “In the bleachers!”

  The students rush the bleachers. Nothing is done at a walk.

  One small blessing is the decent weather. Not the brutal heat of the Florida summer. Not the chilling, wet cold of the winter to come where graduates sewed their tab on with white thread ever after. They are in the sweet spot for Florida Ranger.

  The hard, wooden bleachers are uncomfortable. Kane barely notices. He’s in a timeless zone inside his head.

  There’s a faux tombstone propped against a tree:

  Here lies the bones

  Of Ranger Jones

  A graduate of this institution.

  He died last night

  In his first fire fight

  Using the school solution

  Be flexible!

  It’s counter to the West Point culture of tradition. Indeed, contrary to the US Army’s attitude toward warfare. A fact that is causing turmoil as a regular army fights an irregular enemy on the other side of the world in a place few have ever heard of. The Army is trying to unlearn the lessons of World War II and Korea and relearn what their own predecessors had successfully implemented against the British two hundred years ago. It isn’t going well.

  “I think the n in Ranger stands for knowledge,” Ted whispers to Kane.

  Unlike many around him, the burst of automatic weapon firing from the swamp doesn’t startle Kane.

  “Listen carefully!” An RI dramatically holds a hand to his ear.

  Another burst.

  “That,” the RI intones, “is the weapon of choice of your enemy. The AK-47. It sounds different than an M-14 or M-16. Get to know the sound. You WILL hear it again. We’re going to make sure it isn’t the last sound you ever hear.”

  The man in black pajamas appears out of the swamp. He’s covered in mud. As is the AK in his hands. He fires a burst, a testament to the Russian weapon’s functionality. The students duck. The crack of the rounds going overhead is the first time most have experienced bullets coming their way.

  “Listen up, you fucking pussies!” Major ‘Charging’ Charlie Beckwith strides forward, owning the ground and their minds and bodies for the next three weeks. Commander of this, the final phase of Ranger School. They’d lucked out with the weather, but that luck hadn’t held with running into Beckwith’s taking over here a few months ago. He’d transformed this phase from tough, but regular army under the previous commander, into his version of hell on Earth and the reality of unconventional warfare.

  “Your enemy wants you dead.” Beckwith’s voice is a southern growl. Born in Atlanta he’d played for the Georgia Bulldogs and been drafted by the Green Bay Packers. He’d turned down the pro contract in favor of the Army and the Korean War.

  “They tried killing me,” Beckwith informs them. He rips the mud encrusted black shirt open, revealing a nasty scar running diagonally across his torso from pelvis to clavicle. This is the result of a large .51 caliber bullet hitting Beckwith while he was riding in a helicopter over Vietnam. He should have died and before the next weeks will be over, everyone in the bleachers will wish he had.

  The scar gets everyone’s attention.

  “They will kill you!” Beckwith is at the bleachers, stalking back and forth, staring students in the eye. “Each one of you. Every one of you. Unless you kill him first. We’re going to teach you how to do that. If you listen to us, if you learn, if you get the shit out of your ears, and all the useless bullshit you’ve brought with you, your mother won’t get a telegram saying your son died because he was fucking stupid! It will just say your son died.”

  Three weeks later, on 12 November, it’s over. A surprise cold snap added unexpected misery to the ordeal, producing hypothermia casualties and wiping away the ‘fortune’ of arriving between summer and winter Ranger. But Kane and Ted and most of the others endure.

  The last mission, a seaborne assault in small rubber boats across a stretch of the Gulf of Mexico to the objective on Santa Rosa Island is a success, culminating after midnight. The head RI for the exercise actually congratulates the students, ordering them onto deuce-and-a-halves to ride back to Field Seven for graduation at 10 am later that day. He promises a warm, full breakfast, as appealing as the black and gold Ranger tab to the starved students.

  “We did it,” Ted whispers to Kane, as if afraid being overheard will puncture this bubble of success. “We did it.”

  “We did,” Kane agrees, also not quite believing it. He extends his hand to his friend. “Ranger Marcelle.”

  “Ranger Kane.” Ted pulls Kane to him and they exchange a rancid, exhausted, proud hug.

  Ted’s face is a disaster, the poison ivy much worse. His left eye is swollen shut. He’s fought the RI’s who want to medically recycle him, insisting he can do the mission.

  And he has.

  It’s as satisfying a moment as tossing their hats into the air a few months earlier at West Point. But Ted isn’t the same and it isn’t just the Ranger School regime. A shadow hangs over him. Eight days earlier during a mission he cracked one smart-ass comment too many. The leader of the ambushers, a staff sergeant RI, had not been impressed, and ordered his men to take Ted prisoner.

  Ted was gone for 24 hours before returning to the patrol. He refused to tell Kane what had happened. But he was different, withdrawn, hi
s sense of humor gone. He just muttered something about ‘these motherfuckers’.

  But that was all in the past now.

  Kane and Ted, along with the other students, collapse in the beds of the trucks, bodies piling on top of each other. Fall into what an observer might consider sleep, but is the unconsciousness of utter exhaustion. A tangle of sweaty, dirty, muddy bodies, rucksacks and weapons. The trucks roll through the darkness toward food and graduation.

  Not long after, the slamming of brakes shifts the bodies, but most do not rise to consciousness.

  RIs go down the line of trucks, banging on the metal sides with pipes. “Everyone out! Get your asses out of the trucks. ASAP! Move it! Move it!”

  “You gotta be shitting me,” Ted mutters. “These motherfuckers.”

  Kane sits up.

  A flashlight is dancing about as an RI drops the gate and shines it into the cargo bay. He grabs the closest student’s LBE and pulls him out. “Form up!”

  Ted sits. “This isn’t Field Seven.”

  “Maybe they brought chow to us?” one student wonders.

  “Ha!” Ted snaps.

  Kane pushes along the metal floor toward the edge. Slides to the ground before he can be pulled out. Ted tumbles next to him. Grumbling, cursing, the survivors of the Ranger Class form ranks in a gravel parking lit by a single, sputtering light high on a telephone pole. Crickets chirp. No one has a clue where they are, except it’s not where they were told they were going. There’s no smell of cooking food or hot coffee. Just the chill dampness of a dark Panhandle night.

  A jeep skids to a halt in front of the scraggly formation. Beckwith jumps on the hood as several RIs direct their flashlights at him. He hovers otherworldly in the halo of light.