“Ma’am?” he said, laying down his spoon.
“Yes.”
“Maybe this isn’t my place, but did Mr. Town ever tell you what went down in Afghanistan?”
“With the man who was captured by the Taliban?”
“Yeah.”
“Just that he helped to get him freed.”
“What did he say?”
“That he'd given them something they wanted more than the man.”
“He say what that was?”
“No.”
He nodded. “Figures.”
She looked at him. “What was it?”
“Not what. Who.”
“Who then?” Ann asked.
“Himself.”
“Pete?”
“Yes. He offered himself in exchange for the prisoner. He was way more valuable, knew way, way more.”
“That was crazy.”
“Crazy brave, yeah.”
“What happened?”
“Long story short, he went in knowing that a team would go in after him, once the injured man had been freed and airlifted out. But there were just so many ways it could’ve gone sideways.”
“But it didn’t, of course.”
“No, it didn’t. He was successfully extracted.”
Ann set her spoon down with a clank. “Why are you telling me this?”
“I don’t know,” he said, shrugging.
“Yes, you do. And don’t get all fucking aw shucks and disingenuous on me.”
His eyes narrowed. “Maybe I should apologize.”
“Are you married?”
“I was.”
“Makes sense.”
“Ma’am?”
“You fucking men. It’s all about the guy code, isn’t it? About being brave and true? About the grand gesture? And fuck who you leave behind weeping over your pressboard coffins.”
He lifted his hands in mock surrender. “I’m sorry.”
She stood and bumped her chair back. “Do me a favor, Jim.”
“Sure, ma’am.”
“Keep your goddamn war stories to yourself.”
Ann walked out and went up the stairs and back into the room and lay on the mattress and not a fuck would she cry.
THIRTEEN
Kirby Chance sat up front in the Toyota Land Cruiser, sandwiched between Pete Town and the big, bearded man who drove too fast along a rutted track that looked as if it had been scratched into the hard dirt.
Rocks hammered the underside of the truck, and every time he shifted gear the man’s hairy, muscled arm, brushed against her. He smelled of sweat and something acrid that took her back to Fourth of July fireworks as a kid. Gunpowder, she guessed.
The six gunmen and the Syrian boy were in the flatbed of the Toyota. Hunkered down against the dust, faces covered by scarves, their caps pulled low, weapons pointing skyward like antennae.
They were traversing an endless plain, broken occasionally by a scattering of mud dwellings that squatted close to the earth. The only vegetation stunted, wind-twisted olive trees fighting their way out of the rock and sand.
All around were the signs of war. Burnt out tanks. A truck reduced to a shell. In the far distance the sun caught the tail of a jet fighter that lay in broken pieces across the stony ground.
Nobody spoke, the only sounds the rattle of the truck, the whine of its engine and the unintelligible mutters and pops from a radio inside a sweat-stained khaki backpack propped up between Kirby and the driver.
She felt spaced, on the verge of panic. What they’d just done had terrified and nauseated her. She’d seen dead bodies before—glimpsed the victims of traffic accidents and, of course, she’d laid out her mother on her deathbed—but when the two corpses had been carried into the mud house by the bearded Americans who wore a mix of civilian clothes and military gear, she had felt an awful dizziness and a tightness in her throat. The young Arab men had died of gunshot wounds, and what a heavy caliber rifle does to the human body was not something she had ever imagined, let alone witnessed.
Pete Town had taken her arm and led her into the dark, stinking little room with the rancid mattress and the tiny window covered by a torn cloth.
“I’m sorry,” he’d said, “there was no need for you to see that.”
He’d left her alone in the room and somehow that was worse, her mind replaying the distorted features, the dried blood, the shattered bones and the exit wounds like overripe fruit burst in the sun. It had been a relief when he’d returned and briefed her on what to do and the grim charade had begun.
Bouncing in the truck across the forbidding moonscape she wondered how you came back from something like this, how you returned to normal life. How you fretted about your coffee being too milky or missing your bus or struggling to make the rent.
She glanced at Pete Town who sat staring out at the harsh landscape, his eyes hidden by Wayfarers. He would know. After all, he had spent years in this world before he’d retired. Or had he ever quit? If he had, what was he doing here in this truck beside her?
Then these existential anxieties were shifted aside by a fear more immediate and visceral when another pickup truck, heavy with armed men, appeared over a low, jagged rise and bucked toward them, pursued by a plume of yellow dust.
- - -
Town had a thing that he did when he was stressed: he took himself back into the memory of a sweeter time, conjuring as much detail as he could.
So he was no longer sweating in the front seat of the Toyota somewhere in godforsaken Syria, he was in the Park Slope kitchen on a Sunday last spring, listening to “Witchcraft” as he cooked spaghetti carbonara for lunch, the pasta bubbling in a pot, pancetta crisping in a skillet. He looked out the window and saw Ann in the garden, sitting on the swing that hung from a crabapple tree, her eyes closed, her face lifted to the sun. He could hear birdsong under the Sinatra. He was happy.
“Who is that?” Ann said, but it wasn’t Ann, it was Kirby Chance and she was grabbing his arm and pointing out the Toyota’s cracked windshield at the truck barreling toward them across the plain.
“Our escort,” Town said.
“To the border?”
“Yes, to the border.”
He watched as the truck neared. It was an old Ford F-250, crudely camouflaged, paintwork resembling the coat of a mangy dog. He spotted beards, bandanas and rifle barrels, and an RPG rose like a witch’s hat from amidst the press of bodies in the flatbed.
He looked back and saw that the men behind him were holding their weapons ready. There was no tension, just alertness. One of them stood and Town could see only his legs through the barred window as he leaned on the roof sighting down the barrel of his FN assault rifle at the approaching vehicle.
The big man freed his right hand from the wheel and his thick fingers dancing nimbly on the controls of the radio as he checked the GPS coordinates on the display panel.
“Okay?” Town said.
“Right place, right time,” the man said and slowed the Toyota.
The Ford braked hard and skidded to a dusty stop ten yards from them. Town felt the Toyota list as the Syrian kid jumped down and walked over to the camouflaged truck.
Two men in ragged fatigues and worn-out boots, AK-47s slung from their shoulders, emerged through the dust spoke to the kid. There was laughter and white teeth flashed in bearded faces. The kid turned toward the Toyota and raised his thumb. He laughed once more and jogged back and the truck shook again as he hopped up into the rear.
The big man looked at Town and nodded and Town wanted to pretend he hadn’t seen the slight inclination of the head, wanted to continue sitting staring out at the dust that was slowly settling back onto the rocky ground like a shroud. But he grabbed the lever and opened the door and stepped down, feeling his ridiculous city shoes crunch on the hard gravel.
“You need to get out,” he said to Kirby.
“Why?” she said.
“From here we travel with them,” he said, nodding toward the Ford.
>
She looked at him. “Is something wrong?”
“Wrong how?”
“With you. You look ill.”
“No. Just jetlag. Come.”
She slid across the seat and he helped her down, slamming the door after her.
The two uniformed men gestured to Town and he took Kirby’s arm and walked her toward them. The younger one said something to his comrade and then he unslung his rifle and hurried across, grabbing Kirby by the arm, shouting in Arabic.
She looked at Town in terror, but he stepped away from her, edging closer to the Ford.
The soldier kicked Kirby’s feet from under her and she fell to the earth, hard. She shouted, “Pete!” but he just kept on walking.
The Syrian put the barrel of his AK to Kirby’s head and racked the weapon and as Town followed his dark shadow toward the Ford he heard her sob.
Then, in a rapid movement, the gunman lifted his rifle away from the woman’s head and leveled it at the Toyota and fired a burst on automatic. Simultaneously the other man fired from the hip. The rest of the men on the Ford opened up and the glass of the Toyota shattered. There was the sound of a steel band as rounds struck the body of the truck, the men on the back shouting in rage and pain. One of the dying Americans returned fire, his bullets stitching the sand of the verge uselessly.
A man on the flatbed of the Ford unleashed the RPG and it struck the Toyota, causing it to spring from the earth and then settle again, before its gas tank blew.
The kid came pelting out of the flames, ablaze. The soldier who had dropped Kirby to the sand killed him with a short burst from his rifle.
The Syrians reloaded and raked the burning vehicle until their magazines were empty.
Town stood watching the flames, hearing the hammer of the weapons, and felt sick.
The Syrian soldier stopped firing and reached down and pulled Kirby to her feet. He said “Go” and pushed her toward Town.
She was sobbing and gasping, nothing coherent coming from her lips. Town put his arm around her shoulders and walked her past the Ford to where another vehicle, and aged Mitsubishi SUV, crested the ridge and wallowed slowly down to where they stood.
The Mitsubishi whined to a halt and the rear door opened and a man stepped down onto the sand, holding the frame of the door for support.
Even after all he had done and seen in the last hours, Town still found himself shocked by the man’s appearance, by his bloodless, fissured face the color of the dusty earth.
Town left the girl sobbing and gagging and walked across to him.
“Arkady,” he said.
“Peter.”
Still gripping the door Arkady Andropov leaned in and kissed Town three times on each cheek in the old Soviet way.
FOURTEEN
Kip Littlefield stepped down from the helicopter with a Zero Halliburton carbon fiber attaché case handcuffed to his left wrist. He hunched and covered his eyes, blinking away grit as the chopper rose, banked and clattered away.
He was alone, standing somewhere northwest of Aleppo, in a wasteland biblical in its desolation, with ten million dollars appended to his wrist.
“You’re bloody bonkers,” Colonel Freddy al-Dahabi had said in the back of the SUV as they’d cruised through downtown Amman a few hours after their first meeting. “Send an intermediary, for heaven’s sake.”
“What? And my money disappears like jizz on a prayer rug and I don’t get the woman?”
“It wouldn’t be in their interest to double-cross us.”
“I’m going,” Littlefield had said, not quite as gung-ho as he’d sounded “Set it up.”
He’d signaled his driver to stop the car.
“It’s your funeral, old man,” the colonel had said and stepped out of the SUV, seeming to dissolve into the liquid glare.
Within hours Littlefield had secured the funds (he had accounts in all the Levantine countries, aslosh with blood money) and was aboard the helicopter with a satellite phone in his hip pocket.
Once the chopper had disappeared all he could hear was the wind, a nagging moan. It flapped the bottoms of his pants and swirled eddies of dirt around him in a dusty little dervish dance. He was sweating, beads breaking free of his hair and ramping his eyebrows.
Littlefield lifted his sunglasses and rubbed his eyes.
He became aware of the whine of an engine and saw a pickup truck approaching. A ramshackle thing that shook and thumped and belched a cloud of black smoke that was tugged away by the nagging wind.
Littlefield wasn’t unused to visiting warzones, but he’d always been in armored SUVs, the stink of death and disease neutralized by the Freon in the air conditioners.
And a he’d always been surrounded by close protectors.
But here he was, alone.
Bonkers, as Freddy al-Dahabi had said.
Watching the truck crab toward him, Littlefield felt a puckering of his anus, and was taken by an urgent desire to empty his bowels.
He pinched this back and stood upright, the case gripped in his hand, his chin lifted, his free hand casually docked in his pocket. He fancied that he looked like David Beckham. A younger, more boyish Beckham.
The truck, an ancient Nissan, lurched and grunted to a halt and stalled with a death rattle that made him doubt that its engine would ever fire again. There were two men upfront and three in the rear. An AK-47 poked at him through the side window, and three more were trained on him from the flatbed.
A bearded man dressed in a camouflage jacket, gray sweat pants and unlaced boots, hopped down from the rear and approached, his rifle leveled.
“As-salaam 'alaykum,” Littlefield said.
“Can it, shitheel,” the man said and Littlefield thought he had misheard, that he was mistaking some obscure Syriac dialect for deepest Canarsie.
“You speak English?” Littlefield said.
“What’s it fuckin sound like to you, asshole?”
Littlefield was stunned to silence.
“Gimme the briefcase,” the man said.
Littlefield shook his head. “Not until I see Catherine Finch.”
Canarsie laughed. “Whatcha think this is? A negotiation?”
Littlefield clutched the case to his chest.
The American turned toward the truck and shouted something in Arabic. One of the rifles in the rear was lowered and a man jumped down to the sand. He reached back into the flatbed and emerged with a chainsaw and as he walked toward Littlefield he cranked it to life, a murderous bawl in the silence.
Littlefield, his eyes on that screaming blade, almost lost control of his sphincter. He’d seen the videos on the internet: bloodthirsty Syrian militia invading villages and dismembering and decapitating the populace with chainsaws.
The handcuff was opened with a keypad and he lifted his wrist and fumbled the first attempt, his sweating finger skidding over the recessed keys. The chainsaw-wielding lunatic was getting ever closer and Littlefield muttered a makeshift prayer to his God and tried again. This time the jaws of the handcuff opened and he held the attaché case out to the gunman, the dangling cuff left rattling.
“Open the case,” Canarsie said.
Littlefield hunkered down on the sand and set to work on the console lock that concealed a triple-digit combination, taking the precaution to wipe his fingers first on his shirt. The lock clicked and he lifted the lid and the wind rifled the stacks of dollars wadded inside.
The American poked the snout of his AK into the pile, then nodded to his cohort who stilled the chainsaw.
“Okay, pencil dick, stand,” the man said, leveling the rifle at Littlefield.
Littlefield stood, wondering if the weapon that would take his life was one that he had trafficked.
But Canarsie said: “Listen up, this is how it’s gonna go. You gonna empty your pockets. Then I’m gonna do a cavity search. If you’re clean we’re gonna get in the truck and we gonna go get your girlfriend. Yeah?”
“Yes,” Littlefield said, swallowing a sob.
“Okay, empty your pockets.”
Littlefield removed the satphone, a linen handkerchief, a slim billfold and a roll of Pep O Mint Life Savers.
“Toss them.”
He opened his fingers and they fell to the sand.
“Lose the watch.”
Littlefield almost protested. The Rolex had been a gift from his mentor, Bradshaw Bingham. But he sighed and unclasped it and let it fall to the dust beside the mints.
“Okay, now drop trou and grab some dirt,” Canarsie said.
Littlefield stared at him.
“Drop fuckin trou, man.”
With shaking hands Littlefield loosened his leather slide belt and he dropped trou.
FIFTEEN
Pete Town had not betrayed his country for money, or, like his wife, for some youthful ideal, for some naïve belief in the transformative miracle of socialism.
If you had to shoot him full of sodium thiopental or yank his fingernails with a pair of chain-nosed pliers he’d hold fast to his conviction that he had not betrayed his country at all. That the covenant he had made with Arkady Andropov, born out of their first meeting on that long ago afternoon in Monrovia, had been about protecting America, that it had, in fact, been an act of patriotism.
In April 1980, Town, only a few years after he’d been recruited at Yale but already admired by his seniors for his keen ambition and the suppleness of his intellect, had been sent to Liberia. His orders were to lend covert aid to Master Sergeant Samuel Doe the leader of a violent coup against President William Tolbert Jnr. who’d fallen from favor in Washington when he’d invited representatives of the Soviet Union, People's Republic of China, Cuba, and several Eastern Bloc countries to tea dances at the executive mansion in Monrovia’s Capitol Hill.
Town had been set up with the cover of an import-exporter of John Deere agricultural equipment, and was staying at the lavish Hotel Africa, then just a year old. It was on the coast, near the near the mouth of the river that feeds into the swamp around which Monrovia is built.
One sweltering afternoon, ten days after the coup, Town had returned from watching hordes of drunken soldiers parading a group of thirteen deposed cabinet ministers half-naked through the streets of the city to be jeered at and pelted with missiles by the darker-skinned indigenous populace. The prisoners were mostly “Congoes”, the minority Americo-Liberian elite, descended from freed American slaves, who had wielded power for over a century. They had then been led down to the beach where they were tied to posts and sprayed with machine gun fire, while onlookers—including the usual gaggle of ragamuffin children—had yelled and whooped.
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