by Brandon Webb
Which meant it wasn’t at all physically possible.
Which would be the case, for example, if the whole platoon were back out in the field somewhere on some op or other, on comms lockdown. But that seemed unlikely. They’d been back from Mukalla for only a few days and were expected to be there at the base in Bahrain for at least another week, probably more.
Or which would also be the case if…
If what?
Finn couldn’t come up with a plausible second scenario, and he didn’t like that. Kennedy was the platoon’s OIC. Officer in charge. As platoon chief, Finn was their top enlisted man, second in charge. He was not a natural born leader, not like Kennedy, and he knew that. But these were his guys. His responsibility. They were counting on him.
Why wasn’t he hearing from them?
He set up three brand-new email boxes, none identifying him in any way. Gmail wasn’t like sending a letter sealed in an envelope. More like sending a postcard. You might as well spray paint your message on the subway wall. Would his emails be read by someone on board? Forwarded to some functionary up the chain of command? No doubt.
From each of the new accounts he sent a series of three messages, covering a total of nine teammates. Each email was the same: no subject line, just a two-word message:
I’m here.
He closed the PC’s browser window. Glanced around. Same couple in the back again, warming up to perpetuate the species. He looked back at the blank screen.
Finn didn’t care for the web. He didn’t like putting himself out into cyberspace where his thoughts and movements could be tracked and stored. But he needed to know what was out there.
He opened a fresh window in the PC’s browser, put the cursor in the search window, and typed:
mukalla incident
Hit the NEWS tab, waited for the PC’s snail’s-pace bandwidth to respond. Then scrolled through the search results. Nothing pertinent. To focus the search he inserted the relevant date:
mukalla July 29 incident
Wait. Scroll. Nothing. He backspaced over “incident” and typed in a new phrase:
mukalla July 29 terror attack
No results, none that meant anything.
Finn glanced around the space. He was sitting in a corner of a crowded compartment—but it felt like he was alone out on a ridgeline, standing silhouetted against the open sky, the easiest target in the world. He didn’t like being this exposed.
He deleted “terror attack,” hesitated for a moment, then added one last word to the search string:
mukalla July 29 massacre
Looked at the blinking cursor for a moment. Hit RETURN. Waited.
And got nothing.
He cleared his search history, deleted the browser’s cookies. Restarted the computer. He would swing by every few days to check for replies. Like walking the woods to check a string of traps.
His expectations were not high, though he could not have explained why.
15
Ship’s pay phone. Another wait. Once he reached the front of the line and inserted his Navy Cash card, he was surprised how accessible it was. AT&T Direct Ocean Service. Another change since his tour on the Shitty Kitty.
He placed a call to Naval Support Activity Bahrain, the air base where he’d been stationed. Asked to be put through to his unit. A long pause. “They’re back out in the field,” he was told.
Unexpected.
He tried to press for more information, was unsurprised when he got none. Asked to be put through to supply, checking on a package that was supposed to be on its way to him. They put him on hold for two expensive minutes, then came back on. “We’ll have to check on that. Try back later.”
Which he wouldn’t. He knew this military dialect and what it meant. Stonewalling. Nothing unusual there. Standard operating procedure. No reason to be concerned.
Still. In his experience, by the time you worked out a reason to be concerned it was already too late.
He looked at the phone.
It was thirteen hours later in Dam Neck, Virginia. Not ideal but still on the far edge of prime time. They’d all be up.
He tried calling the wives of four platoon mates, one after the other. Every one went to voicemail. He left no messages. On the fifth try he finally got through. A woman’s voice said, “Hello?”
“It’s me. Finn.”
Silence.
“Jean? You there?”
The voice said quietly, “Don’t call back.” And broke the connection.
* * *
—
He spent the rest of the day walking the passageways, mostly circling the centers of power clustered at the foot of the island on the gallery deck: captain’s suite, admiral’s suite, air traffic control, intel offices, battle command, and so on. Didn’t bother with lunch. Or dinner.
Don’t call back.
When the light started to change he went down to the hangar deck and climbed out onto the big Gatling gun mount again, where he spent the next few hours with his charcoal pencils capturing frame after frame of darkening shades of gray.
The scene with the shattered door did not put in an appearance.
That night he crept up onto the flight deck catwalk, slipped on a pair of ear protectors, and poked his head a few inches above the deck to watch the flight crew in operation. Impressive, yet he sensed a kind of brittle fatigue. After nearly eight months at sea, the six thousand–odd people on board the ship were nearly worn out. Even the jets looked worn out, their paint fading, stenciled pilot call signs missing pieces of letters.
He reached out and felt the flight deck’s surface. It was losing its gritty edge and would soon need a resurfacing. Hell of a metaphor.
A Hornet shot off the prow and screamed into the night.
Don’t call back.
The Dam Neck wives had never liked him, never trusted him, no matter how much the guys protested. It never bothered him. But the voice on the other end of that phone had been outright hostile.
If you hear anything, don’t believe it.
What had they heard?
16
Papa Doc was flying with Monica again tonight, and he was driving her nuts. There was nothing to do on plane guard but keep the bird in the air and fly in endless D-loops, yet he was on her constantly, fussing and micromanaging as if this were her first time in a cockpit. By the end of the three hours, Monica’s nerves were shot.
As they set down on the ship’s port side, toward the stern, Monica noticed the SEAL on the catwalk. It was disquieting how he popped up everywhere, silently watching, observing everything.
No, not just observing. Like he was memorizing everything.
Marsupials. She’d looked it up. Born underdeveloped, with features that never quite caught up. The marsupial family included koalas, possums, and Tasmanian devils. Which, she wondered, was he?
When she stepped out of the Knighthawk and looked over toward the edge of the deck, he was gone.
Ten minutes later she was in her stateroom, undressed and lying back in her rack, talking quietly back and forth with Kris, her best friend, in the bunk below. It was past midnight and their roommate, Anne, lay fast asleep on the other bottom bunk a few yards away. The empty fourth rack, above Anne’s, had belonged to Micaela, the co-pilot on the helo that went down. It was the loudest thing in the cabin.
“So how was Papa Doc?” Kris’s hushed voice drifted up from below. It was Kris who’d coined the nickname, and she was the only soul on board who dared voice it out loud.
Monica replied with a groan.
“That good, huh?”
“Gracious as ever.”
“Turd.”
“Why does he so push my buttons?” Monica wondered aloud, not for the first time.
“Um, I don’t know,”
replied Kristine, “maybe because he’s your classic male chauvinist, a fucking racist, and unreconstructed homophobe asshole?”
“Jesus, Kris! Keep your voice down!” Slanderous words spoken against a superior officer could be held as insubordination and earn grave punishment. Court-martial, even.
“I tell you I caught him staring at me a few nights ago at midrats?” Kris commented.
“Ugh. You’re kidding.”
“And not in an arrogant-CO way, either, more like a pervy-peeper way. Like when a guy’s trying to look down your blouse without looking like he’s doing it?”
“Eww. What did you do?”
“Walked over and asked him if he needed help finding anything. Like his dignity. Or his dick.”
“Kris!”
“Okay, not really. I did what any Tennessee girl would, stared back at him and batted my eyelashes till he turned red and looked away.”
“Seriously? Jesus, Kris, why would you do that!”
“Because fuck him, that’s why.”
Kris was a natural target for men’s attention, but she typically had no problem handling herself. Last few days, though, she’d been distracted. Jumpy. She’d even skipped breakfast that morning, which for her was practically unheard of.
She hid it well. The rest of the squadron saw only the top-gun swagger and Tennessee ballsiness, and they loved her for it. (A girl so gutsy she went by the call sign “Biker”!) Only Monica understood how fragile she was. She’d tried to bring it up a few times, but even as close as the two were, Kris held her feelings awfully close to her vest.
In the silence Monica felt the presence of Micaela’s empty rack. Remembering how harshly Papa Doc had treated her, how she and Kris had found her weeping in her rack on more than one occasion after an especially brutal tongue-lashing.
“Quite a show you gave out there tonight,” she said to change the subject.
Kris had made one of her signature night landings, smacking the deck like a meteor strike. Monica had flown more than a hundred missions and there’d been a few tense moments—but nothing in the Knighthawk came close to the experience of flying solo in an F/A-18, let alone landing the freaking thing. “Like setting a bucking bronco down on a postage stamp floating in a shark-infested pool…at night” was how her brother had described it.
“How you can pull that off is beyond me. I’d be terrified of crashing the damn thing.”
“It’s not the idea of crashing,” said Kris. “I mean, what the hell, we’re all gonna crash and burn at some point, right? But ejecting and ending up in the water? Ugh. I don’t know if I’d make it.”
This was something the two shared: an unmitigated aversion to the open water. Monica grew up around horses and ranches, Kris around motorcycles and urban blight. Naturally, as part of their pilot training, they’d both learned to swim at an expert level. But only Monica knew how terrified her friend was of ending up alone in the ocean.
“ ’Course you’d make it,” said Monica. “You’d just float and let your strobe flash. We’d be on you in minutes.” But she knew what Kris meant.
They went quiet again, both thinking about the downed helo crew. Ever since flight 204 went down their stateroom had felt haunted.
Hell, the whole ship had felt haunted.
It was Kris who broke the silence. “Do you feel…safe here?”
“What do you mean?” said Monica. “In the Gulf? Totally. And anyway, we’re done here. We’ll be heading home any day now.”
“No, I mean here. On the ship.”
“Shit, Kris—are you okay? Is anyone hassling you?”
“No, no, it’s— Forget it.”
She seemed almost…paranoid. Monica had caught her glancing over her shoulder a few times, as if there were someone following her.
“Hey,” she whispered. “Have you noticed that creepy SEAL skulking the passageways?” She leaned over to look down at Kris—but her friend had already dropped off. Kris fell asleep the way she landed her jet. Like a mutt taking a dump on the street.
Monica gave a quiet laugh and settled back on her pillow. Let Kris sleep; she’d earned it. Her best friend was a fierce worker, not only in the grueling business of flying her Hornet but also in her “day job” as assistant ordnance officer for her squadron. Always made Monica smile to think about that. As Maintenance O, her own job was to make sure things didn’t fall apart. Kris’s was to make sure things blew up.
Staring at the overhead, she listened to the sounds of the last cycle of flight ops playing out just yards above, nothing separating them but a few inches of steel deck plating. Their stateroom was located directly under the 3 wire, the one all the pilots aimed to catch. The massive machinery that controlled it was housed right next door, and each time another jet crashed onto the deck it made an ear-shattering whine as the cable played out, followed by a shriek as it scraped back across the deck to rewind for the next trap. Earplugs helped a little, but nothing could block out that unearthly din.
Monica closed her eyes. Another long day starting just hours from now, but she was too stirred up to sleep.
She said a prayer, for Kris, for her squadron. For Diego and Micaela and the rest of the drowned helo crew. Nothing quieted her mind.
Do you feel…safe here?
She slipped off her rack, padded to the door, and cracked it open. Looked up and down the red-lit passageway.
Empty as a ghost town.
Back to bed. Curled on her side, eyes closed, searching for sleep.
She went through her “boldface,” the emergency procedures you had to be ready to follow instantly and automatically, without stopping to check a list or search your memory banks, in the event of an emergency. Boldface if the steering quit. If a rotor blade snapped. If comms went out.
Helicopter pilots are brooders, introspective anticipators of trouble. They know if something bad has not happened, it is about to.
She finally drifted off into strange dreams of pushing her commanding officer out of their craft and watching him drown in the black water below.
17
Half-past midnight. Finn poked his head in the door at general mess. Not much was happening at midrats tonight. People were eating, staring at the TV, hardly talking. Everyone seemed to be in when-the-fuck-do-we-get-out-of-here mode. By now a good number of ship’s company had figured out what Finn knew that afternoon: they were in a holding pattern. For how long? Who knew.
He headed above to walk the upper decks again. Through the ladders and passageways, noticing and cataloging the different ranks and ratings and body types and personalities. Unrated E-1s and E-2s, swabbing and polishing in their endless cleaning missions. Air traffic and intel crew clomping down to their berths after a long day on the island or in the cluster of offices at the island’s foot. Flight deck crew and mechanics heading above to the flight deck or below to the hangar deck to service their various aircraft.
All at once, Finn felt a hot prickling up the back of his neck.
He stopped. Closed his eyes.
Mukalla outskirts, dead of night. Their platoon had silently surrounded the tiny compound. It was a classic SEAL op, the thing they did best: breach charge, flash bangs, zip ties, hoods over heads, and they’d be out of there, prisoners in tow. In and out. The moment their breacher blasted the door they would flow through that compound like high tide through a sandcastle. If everything went according to plan. Though of course most plans went to hell the moment the first shot was fired.
Finn opened his eyes.
Remembering those last moments in the dark, waiting for the signal in his ear.
You never knew what you were running into in the seconds after that breach charge went off. A wall of steel-jacketed AK gunfire. The boiling hot flash of an IED. Crazy-eyed men wielding razor-sharp daggers, screaming women coming at you with their fingernails and teeth. Or
just a crowd of disoriented, terrified people jarred from sleep. You never knew.
It all depended on the quality of the intel.
In Mukalla they’d had bad intel.
Finn continued walking, clocking the various species of nighttime personnel. A pair of yellow shirts laughing quietly over some private joke, making their way below to wash up and hit the rack. There went Schofield striding purposefully past in the direction of the fantail. Another handler in his green jersey and goggles, heading the same general direction. Dozens of faceless individuals all going their separate ways yet all swimming to the same rhythm, the endless pulse of the ship’s vast metabolism: operating it, feeding it, cleaning it, maintaining it, servicing it.
He stopped again.
Now he remembered what it was that had stirred that particular memory.
Those last few moments, waiting for the signal to breach that compound in Mukalla, he’d felt something.
A hot prickling up the back of his neck.
So why was he feeling it again now?
18
Sam Schofield had had enough. It was time to end this thing.
The navy’s “Rules to Live By” notwithstanding, there was a good deal of latitude and tolerance on board the Lincoln, but if you pushed the boundaries too far they would eventually push back, and when they did they’d push back hard. You could find your whole career flushed down the toilet. Bennett just didn’t seem to grasp this simple truth.
Schofield strode purposefully past a pair of chuckling yellow shirts and on toward the fantail.
Life in the ATO shack was good, his best assignment yet. But this relationship with Lieutenant Bennett, this had gotten out of hand. Bennett was needy, persistent, and increasingly demanding, and Schofield was tired of it.
He still had the note in his pocket, ripped from the envelope sitting on the pillow on his rack. Typed, on plain white paper. (Typed, for heaven’s sake!)