The Nylon Hand of God

by Steven Hartov

  She looked at her watch, the surge of her heart seeming to race the second hand. Just one miscalculation? She begged the question silently as her chest constricted. Just this one, and I am finished?

  “I am sorry, Leila.”

  Iyad’s whisper seemed to drift above her head, yet she appeared utterly calm, unmoved. Her hands had fallen to her sides. She raised some fingers and dropped them again. Could this be forgiveness? the men wondered as they watched her. She glanced up at Muhammed, who had descended the stairs halfway and stood watching from behind the banister, like a child cowering while his parents fight.

  She walked slowly to Nabil’s worktable, where a large bottle of Gatorade sat open and nearly empty. She lifted it and looked through the plastic, then raised it to her mouth and finished off the green liquid.

  She turned and walked back toward Iyad, the empty bottle swinging from her fingertips, the eyes of her men following her like swimmers wary of a shark. Yet a smile had returned to her mouth, something like a sympathetic squint to her eyes.

  “I am sorry,” Iyad said again, somehow more relaxed now that Martina had not in fact exploded. “But a human head?” He actually snickered. “It is just not so easy.”

  “It’s all right,” said Martina as she raised her right hand. “It’s all right.”

  She stopped a meter from him, smiling still while he shrugged and looked down at his feet. Then she reached into her waistband, pulled out her P-38, inserted the barrel deep into the mouth of the Gatorade bottle, placed the plastic rump against his chest, and fired.

  The report was not as loud as the stamping of her men’s feet as they jumped back in shock. Iyad’s body arched and planed through the air, his cigarette spun away like a pinwheel, and his arms windmilled for a second before he impacted with the wooden floor of the foyer. A surge of air rushed from his lungs, his legs twitched a few times, and then he was still.

  “It’s all right,” Martina whispered once more as she tucked the pistol back into her trousers. She waved the small cloud of smoke aside with her hand.

  “Yours will do nicely.”

  A deceptive winter sun dusted the Potomac with muted white light, bringing to Prince Georges County a false spring warmth that nearly fooled a few Maryland warblers into prematurely opening their throats. The early-morning sky framed the black river trees in blue, offering the illusion that somehow three more months of cold had been skipped, like scuffed tracks on an old gramophone record. Yet the southern oaks showed no buds, the breaths of grazing horses rose into the air like locomotive plumes, and no Marine on duty at the Naval Surface Weapons Center at Indian Head was beguiled into discarding woolen underwear in favor of summer issue.

  Like most military dawns on the Maryland peninsula, this one was cold enough, and it kept the balance of NSWC personnel caressing coffee mugs inside their white wooden barracks. The center was not a typical naval base, being inhabited for the most part by scientists, engineers, and officers with armada combat ribbons. They lived a civilized existence, passing a modest workday in their laboratories, and at this hour the garden lanes and parking lots were silent. The sole breach of peace was committed by that branch of the populace whose job it was to keep the secrets secure. As always, the Marines were the first ones up.

  Two vehicles, their engines coughing softly, rumbled slowly out through the triangular park that formed the gateway to the center. The transfer of a secret prototype from Indian Head to the proving launch near Dahlgren was supposed to be executed without fanfare, and the appearance of the lead vehicle certainly denuded the mission of its glamour. The Hum-Vee, a light armored all-purpose utility truck, still retained the sandy colors of its brief stint in Desert Storm. The Hummer had a penchant for barrel-rolling, and this one had done so off a high dune in Kuwait, its bumps and bruises giving it the air of a competitor in a military stock car race.

  The squat Hum-Vee was followed by a more conventional deuce-and-a-half, a six-wheel, canvas-covered truck in woodland camouflage. The vehicles were occupied by six men of a rifle security company, plus one laboratory technician from the center. The lab man dozed in the Hum-Vee’s cab, while the Marine escorts remained erect on their seats, drifting like dormant guard dogs, lids half closed, fingers twitching over their M-16s.

  Lance Corporal Mark Milliken kept the boxy vehicle in second as he passed the large NSWC welcome sign, a bronze silhouette of a feathered tribal chief. He rolled to a stop next to the brick guardhouse, where a barrel-chested black sergeant of the Charles County Sheriff’s Department slid the booth’s door open. Milliken tilted back his fatigue cap, showing bristles of corn-blond hair. He handed the sergeant a travel order.

  “Nice morning, huh?” the cop offered as he reached for a steaming mug and brought it to his lips.

  “Better’n driving in snow,” Milliken commented. Some of the Marines resented the decision to have the center’s gate guarded by civilians in Smoky hats. But not Milliken. The cops were sharply creased and polite in the extreme, but he had once seen a pair of them handle an intruder with the swift violence of an urban drug bust.

  “What’s your destination?” the sergeant asked.

  “The center at Dahlgren.”

  “ETA?”

  “Hour at the outside. I’m gonna take Route 210, then 225, then 425, then 6, then 301. Piece of cake if we beat the bridge traffic.”

  “Uh huh.” The sergeant checked the orders now to verify the route. “Whatch-yuh carrying?”

  Milliken grinned. Although this transport was routine, the nature of his mission was not up for discussion, and the cop knew it. He looked over at the lab man snoring in the passenger seat, then back at the sergeant.

  “One geek, six leathernecks, and a large dildo.”

  The sergeant laughed. “Roger that.” He tapped a small transceiver console. “Have your people give me a shout when you make port.” Everyone who worked around the center picked up navalese.

  “Will do,” said Milliken as he put the Hum-Vee in gear. Standard procedure was to maintain radio contact with the Marine net, but he always kept the cops in the loop. If there was trouble on the road, the Charles County cherry tops could be there long before the MPs got their shit together.

  Milliken signaled a “wagons ho” with his left arm, and the deuce followed him as they picked up speed, heading northeast on Route 210. The morning wind began to whip into the Hum-Vee, and he closed his window and settled back to enjoy a sunny ride through the Maryland countryside.

  Detail at the NSWC was basically a bore, and after the first few security hops hauling supersecret weapons around, the missions quickly lost their glamour. The lieutenant tried to keep the men on their toes with NIS reports about terror threats and attempts made against U.S. military cargoes. Yet all of those events took place in Europe, Central America, or the Philippines. In these parts you were more likely to impact with a stray cow than be assaulted with harmful intent.

  Milliken had had his war. True, most of it had been spent sweating in a tin can off the beaches of Kuwait, but in the end the Marines had finally gone ashore. There were a couple of noisy firefights, although Milliken’s company spent a lot of time getting sunburned while guarding enemy PWs. Still, there would be plenty to tell his kids about, when he had them.

  By comparison, Maryland was R&R, without much recreation to speak of. It did not take long to see the sameness of each mile—the litter-free roads lined with red-brick strip malls, Pizza Huts, Mickey D’s, liquor stores, and video arcades. The only solace here was that the high school girls were abundant, bored, and precocious enough to appreciate the body of a man who could do sixty push-ups in as many seconds. Marines never tired, and neither did Susie Upham. Milliken now smiled through his workdays, anticipating the Saturday nights with his leggy senior. He was a short-timer with thirty-two days to go, and he and Susie had some plans that included a motorcycle.

  He slowed for the right turn onto 225, making sure the deuce was close, passing the Lone Star Café, where
he and Susie spent many nights swaying near the jukebox and mingling scents and sweat.

  In the rear section of the deuce, there was not much protection from the wind. Although the heavy canvas roof was tied down firmly to the steel bed, the chill knifed up through the hems and whipped around the cargo compartment. The rear flap was secured with loops of 220 parachute cord, the corners untied so the escorts could periodically check the road.

  A very tall black Marine sat on the corner of the starboard slat bench, bending his head through the small triangle of light. As the small convoy turned off 210 onto 225, he watched a black limousine and a hearse, coming from the opposite direction, follow them into the turn. He closed the flap, turned up the collar of his field jacket, then sat back and gripped the butt of his M-16, which was jammed between his legs, barrel down to the steel floor.

  “Nice day for a funeral,” he muttered.

  “Come again?” A second Marine, short, wide, and muscular, sat on the opposite bench.

  “Limo and a meat wagon with running lights.” The black Marine raised his voice above the rumble of the undercarriage.

  “You always cheer me up, Humason,” the shorter man sneered.

  “My job, Del Ray, my man.”

  The Marine called Del Ray smiled. “Security threat? Should we take ’em out?”

  “They already dead.”

  Del Ray nodded. Then he pointed to the peculiar manner in which Humason held his weapon. “And you can flip that thing around, Hum. This ain’t no chopper. You ain’t gonna shoot no rotors off.”

  Humason looked at his rifle. “I know it. I was thinkin’ ’bout shooting myself in the foot.” He lifted a large boot, placing it on the canister that was secured between them on the truck bed: a wide olive fiberglass tube about a yard and a half long. The “business” end had a closed clamshell nose, while the rear portion had a circular vented blast skirt. Jutting off from the middle of the launch cocoon was some sort of optical tracker sealed in flexible black plastic, and below the device a compressed rubber skirt hugged the tube like a hot dog roll. The entire unit was clamped to a wooden cradle with steel straps.

  “Come on, this life ain’t that bad,” Del Ray admonished. Then he pointed at Humason’s boot. “And get your damned foot off the government property. Skipper finds cleat marks on ’at thing, he’ll have your ass and mine.”

  Humason reluctantly slipped his boot from the tube, then reached out to smooth away the scuffs. He raised his bass voice, simulating their lieutenant’s nasal Yalie tones.

  “Deliver the fish, gentlemen,” Humason whined. “Do not sell it. Do not lose it.”

  Del Ray laughed and clapped his gloves together. “Pretty good,” he said. “Pretty good.”

  “Little fucker’s an asshole,” said Humason.

  “He’s an officer. Watchyah want?”

  “An’ what the fuck’s this thing anyway?” Humason wondered, waving a hand at the yellow stencil on the tube: UNITED STATES NAVY—RESTRICTED PROTO.

  “Don’t know.” Del Ray shrugged. “Looks like a Dragon,” he said, referring to the widely issued infantry antitank weapon.

  “Look like my daddy’s dick.”

  “You wish,” Del Ray sneered.

  “Yeah?” Humason challenged, pointing at his own crotch. “You wanna see this prototype?”

  Del Ray ignored him, leaning toward the canvas back flap and peering out. They flashed past a sign on the far side of the road: North Maryland 425—Snow Route. The two-lane blacktop wound between stacks of sleek pines. About a hundred yards back, the dull headlights of the limousine and the hearse danced over a crest and then disappeared as they cruised into a curve. Del Ray closed the flap.

  “We’re on four-two-five,” he said. “Halfway home.”

  “Six more months,” said Humason, “and I am home.”

  “Three more, I’m in Norfolk,” said Del Ray. He also wanted out of the Corps, but he wanted in to a more elite outfit.

  “Yeah.” Humason snorted bitterly. “You’ll make SEALs, and I’ll be a college professor.”

  “Hey. Corps’s been good to you, Hum. Might even get you a job.”

  “Like what? A fireman?”

  “Wear the colors, my man,” Del Ray advised. “Don’t diss the Corps. You See Gee See,” he sang the Code. UCGC—Unit, Corps, God, Country.

  “See this.” Humason made a masturbatory motion, closed his eyes, and rested his head against a rattling support. . . .

  Up ahead in the Hum-Vee, Milliken held his speed down along 425, though he was tempted to run flat out along the curving dry blacktop. The road surfed gracefully over rolling crests, but the following deuce had a high center of gravity, and causing it to hustle and maybe spill its lethal cargo would mean brig time, no Susie, and maybe no post-Corps erotic rides on a throaty bike. He glanced in the rearview and saw that Chuck Norman, the deuce driver, was trying to match him tread for tread, so he slowed some more and reached for the handset of a PRC-104 mounted between him and his passenger.

  “Bravo Two, don’t kiss me.” Milliken smiled into the transceiver. “One round’ll get us both.”

  “Roger, One.” Norman’s voice crackled back over the PRC’s speaker, and the deuce dropped back.

  They passed six more miles of wide-open fields, winter grass flattened into rows of black mud, stubborn patches of snow clinging to split-rail fences beneath the clement sun. Stained and warped clapboard houses sported tire swings in their front yards and fleets of old cars up on cinder blocks.

  They descended a long shallow stretch, approaching an intersection and a two-way stop. The NSWC lab man, perhaps sensing a crossroads through his slumber, stirred and lifted his head. He was a fully bearded man wearing a ridiculous white coat that pegged him for his profession. He turned his knuckles in his eye sockets.

  “Where are we?” he muttered.

  “Ironsides,” said Milliken as he stopped and idled the Hum-Vee. Before him, Route 6 passed from west to east. At the southwest corner of the intersection, a short post was affixed with a painted portrait of a country steeple, an arrow pointing toward Nanjemoy Baptist Church. On the southeast corner, a ramshackle white house looked as if it should have been condemned, yet fireplace smoke leaked from its crumbling chimney and heavy sheets whipped from a line in the yard.

  “This dump has a name?” the lab man asked.

  “All God’s chillun,” Milliken commented.

  He hesitated, for a yellow Ryder rental truck was approaching the intersection from the west; although the truck had the right-of-way, the driver chose to let the military vehicles make their turn. Milliken waved in thanks, noting the camouflaged sleeve that returned the courtesy.

  “Guy’s a jarhead,” he said as he put the Hum-Vee in gear.

  “Probably moving his family,” said the lab man.

  “To better parts, if he’s lucky,” the corporal sneered.

  He looked at his watch as he took the left turn and decided to make up some time. The deuce was close enough, and he gunned the powerful Hum-Vee as the road through Ironsides began to slope. There was not much here: a silent white volunteer firehouse set back off the road to the left, one low flat garage with rusty gas pumps that was clearly out of business. Not a soul in sight, probably no more life than when the place was a sharecroppers’ haunt over a hundred years before.

  “How much farther?” the lab man asked as they entered the tiny village.

  “Hilltop, Welcome, then we’ll be on 301,” Milliken answered as he struggled with the gearshift.

  “Coffee?”

  “We’ll hit a joint in Port Tobacco on the way back.”

  He was just getting up some speed and passing a small gray roadside barn on the right, when he yelled.

  “Holy shit!”

  A woman suddenly appeared from behind the barn. She was cloaked from neck to ankles in a long black coat, her head wrapped in a purple kerchief, a pair of black sunglasses and her white nose the only facial features exposed. This incongruou
s apparition marching out in front of Milliken’s Hum-Vee would have been enough to shock him into fibrillation, but she was also pushing a large blue baby carriage, coming right on as if she was blind, deaf, and deranged.

  Milliken stamped the clutch and jumped on the brake at the same time, leaning hard to the left as he swung the wheel. The nose of the Hum-Vee dipped hard, and the rear wheels sprayed a patch of wet sand as the steel body skidded to the right. The lab man’s hands shot up to the roof, and the lone Marine in the cargo compartment tumbled to the floor.

  “Mother fucker,” Milliken yelled as his tires friction-burned on the blacktop. The woman’s image flashed just ten feet forward of the right fender, and even though the vehicle came to a rocking halt, she went down. He saw her topple to her right, as if the wind of his near impact had tackled her, and the baby carriage went with her.

  More tires screeched, and Milliken twisted his head around, expecting the deuce to rear-end him. But the six-by had stopped a few lengths back, with the high yellow body of the Ryder behind it, and he realized that the sound had come from in front.

  A green military staff car had come barreling over the hill at him from the east and careened to a halt. As Milliken gripped his steering wheel and tried to catch his breath, the driver’s door of the car opened and a navy lieutenant in full dress stepped into the road. He was carrying an attaché case, and he looked extremely outraged as he marched straight for the corporal’s cab.

  “Oh, am I fucked,” Milliken whispered as he stared at the approaching officer. “Susie, you can visit me in the can.”

  He suddenly realized that he had to make an effort to help the fallen woman, or they would add dereliction of duty to the court-martial charges. He unsnapped his seat belt, reached for the door handle, and popped it open.

  “Stay where you are, Marine.” The naval officer had a hand out like a traffic cop as he reached Milliken’s cab. He yanked on the door, nearly pulling the corporal with it, and he roughly swung the briefcase up and pushed it into Milliken’s chest. “Hold this and don’t move.”