Empire City

by Matt Gallagher

  “The Legion won Vietnam,” he said. “Don’t get it twisted. It knew how to fight guerrillas. It knew what it took. Praise to the Victors, sure. But ‘Spill blood for America’ got it done.”

  No one argued with that. How could they? Jean-Jacques thought. It’s the fucking truth.

  “Beirut,” Pete said, first to himself before repeating it to the group. He was trying to get the subject to something they could agree on. “Yeah. That’s the lynchpin, I think.”

  “But the wars didn’t ratchet up until Palm Sunday.” Flowers sounded unbowed. “And it sort of worked! New Beirut is amazing. Only peacemongers don’t like it being a state. My lesbian aunts went there last year. Had a great time. Got me a snow globe. If we did more of what we did there?” He puckered his lips and whistled. “Who knows.”

  “Sometimes things work. Sometimes they don’t.” There was nothing practical about talk like this. Jean-Jacques felt an instinctive need to crush it. “Big ideas up here.”

  The others looked at Jean-Jacques, faces ashen and drawn, unsure of what to say, and he realized he was being pissy for the sake of being pissy. What did he know, really? He was just a trigger puller. He was just a soldier. All that mattered to him was duty. It was up to others to figure out where and why. Jean-Jacques wanted to press the turbo button and get away from everyone to clear his head. But there was no place in the city to run like that.

  “Well.” As if just noticing the gory state of his hands, Pete rubbed his palms across the bottom of his shirt, trying to force a wince into a toothy smile. “At least no one said oil.”

  Even Jean-Jacques laughed at that.

  “I ask because it’s easy to forget how we got here. Even for those of us devoted to the fight.” Pete stopped to look at both Jean-Jacques and Flowers. “No small thing. What you said is right. And more, too.

  “It’s easy to be against something these days,” Pete continued. Now, he looked straight at his sister. She looked back with razors in her eyes. “Anti this. Counter that. It’s much harder to be for something.”

  Pete Swenson, true believer, was already back. And giving a homeland version of his Do Something! Speech, heard by operators, soldiers, and Legionnaires across the globe. “The risks of inaction are greater than the risks of action.” “The only thing badder than a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with one.” Et cetera. He didn’t hear me at all, Jean-Jacques thought. He’s still convinced they want us. He’s still convinced they need us.

  He’s still convinced we’re always part of the solution.

  Whatever he’s conjuring, Jean-Jacques decided, I’m out. Damn out. While I still can: I’m gonna do me.

  “What’s hell to you, Sebastian?” Pete asked, the first Volunteer to use the hostage’s name. The hostage sputtered out something about other people.

  “On your last day on earth, the person you became will meet the person you could have been,” Pete said. “That’s hell.” His coral eye moved from person to person in slow consideration, his black one remaining pinned on Sebastian. Jean-Jacques knew what came next. Words about glory and grief, an ode to heroism and service in an age when such ideas were supposed to be dust. Jean-Jacques had seen it work on cynics and fools, wild men and dreamers, too, anyone and everyone in between. Not me, though, he thought. Not anymore.

  “Only three percent of Americans serve in the military. Only three percent love America enough to fight for it. Our country needs help. Here, now. Everyone knows it. Everyone feels it. We can help. We can—”

  Jean-Jacques’s phone buzzed. He pulled it out to find a text from his cousin asking, again, to meet up. In succession, Britt pulled out her phone, too.

  “Uhh, guys,” she said.

  “In the middle of something,” Pete said, his aggravation flashing like silver.

  “Okay,” Britt said. “Just thought you’d want to know who blew up the city.”

  The entire group turned to her, expectedly. “It’s okay for me to talk now?”

  “Brittany,” Pete said. “Go on.”

  “Of course, Peter.” She faked a yawn and then half-smiled at her brother. “So. Jonah Gray. Age forty-six. From Ohio.”

  “Be serious.”

  “I am, Peter. This is a state alert. He’s an army vet.”

  Something in the air seemed to curdle. Flowers swore. Pete shook his head and closed his eyes, turning away, into the dusk.

  “Jonah Gray.” Jean-Jacques sounded out the name. He couldn’t help himself. The vet thing was bad. But opportunities to rattle Pete like this didn’t happen often. “What you think, man? Sunni or Shi’a?”

  Coming next year to a movie theater near you…

  AMERICAN LIONS. An unprecedented blend of real-life heroism and original filmmaking. AMERICAN LIONS stars a group of active-duty military heroes in a film like no other in history. A fictionalized account of the real-life raid by the Volunteers to capture infamous terror chieftain Abu Abdallah in the Mediterranean, AMERICAN LIONS features a spellbinding story that takes audiences on an adrenaline-fueled, edge-of-their-seat journey. Thanks to an extraordinary collaboration between the War Department and Hollywood, the Volunteers play themselves, bringing raw, thrilling authenticity to their roles and to the film. Abu Abdallah is played by Christian Bale. AMERICAN LIONS combines stunning combat sequences, state-of-the-art battlefield technology, and heart-pumping emotion for the ultimate action-adventure film, showcasing the skills, training, and tenacity of the greatest action heroes of them all: real American soldiers.

  CHAPTER 7

  SEBASTIAN STARED AT his plate of spring rolls and tried to make sense of what Pete had told him. They sat at a corner table along the port, watching the afternoon go by. The sky was sick with heat and a police motorboat drifted in the water behind them. Different thoughts kept coming to Sebastian but he didn’t know how to express them. He’d taken days to find the courage to ask his question. Now that he had an answer, understanding was slow to come. He tried again.

  “So you weren’t there to get me.”

  “We weren’t there to not get you,” Pete offered. “But the primary objective was Abu Abdallah’s wife. And the baby. Higher thought detaining them would draw him out.”

  “Huh.”

  Sebastian hadn’t known he’d been held in the same Tripoli compound as the great terror chieftain’s family. He hadn’t seen a woman or a child his whole time there. But that didn’t mean anything. He’d been kept in a basement.

  “You don’t look great. Another brew? Yo! My man here needs a refill.”

  It’d been six days since Jonah Gray had been announced as a suspect in the war memorial bombings. Had he acted alone? No one believed that. The security state loomed over everything, out and open as it could be only after disaster. Beat cops held the corners, SWAT commandos ghosted the rooftops. The mechanized hum of police helos and large black monitor drones layered the skies. “Presence patrols,” the mayor had said. Nothing else had been revealed to the public.

  A waitress brought another beer. She was a teenager, pretty, maybe seventeen. Sebastian felt certain she wasn’t old enough to be serving alcohol. She smiled, trying to get Pete’s attention. Pete didn’t notice or pretended not to, taking a large bite from his pulled pork sandwich, nodding in approval. The teenager walked away. She was the first young woman Pete had ignored in their time together, much of which had been spent partying across the city.

  Restraint or fatigue? Sebastian hoped for the former.

  The Volunteers had tried to help. They’d wanted to. The homeland marshals passed. So had the three-letter agencies. The War Department sent an email telling them to enjoy their leave, the war abroad needed to be their focus. They’d reacted in different ways. Jean-Jacques had “family stuff.” Flowers was following around Britt, carrying her band’s equipment from gig to gig. Pete drank. And drank. And then drank some more. Sebastian was in awe and enduring pain from trying to keep up. He’d taken the week off from work, something that bothered his boss but he didn’t
care. He owed his life to Pete. The least he could do was listen to some war stories.

  A kind of coherence arrived for Sebastian. “But—why lie?”

  “About the Hero Project?”

  Sebastian shrugged.

  “I don’t know, hostage,” Pete said, breaking from his sandwich to drink down one of his beers. His skin had reddened under the sun, further carving out his jawline and deepening the slope of his forehead. A perma-scruff had settled across his face, something Sebastian envied. He’d never been able to grow more than fuzz.

  “No one knows how this happened to us. Not really. Just theories. Us Rangers in Tripoli, the pilots, too, we all had cythrax vaccines. Dropping the bomb wasn’t even the plan. Only if things went off the rails. What they told us was, if the bomb drops, it evaporates everyone without the vaccine. Poof. Old Testament shit. But we’d be fine. Breakthrough tech, they said. No one had a fucking clue.

  “People need control, though. People need belief. If it came out this was a freak accident instead of a top-secret plan? Citizens would be dying every weekend trying to create cythrax in their bathtubs. We barely made it and we got the best hospital care in the world. Order over chaos, brother.”

  The best hospital care in the world. Those memories from Germany had gapped from the onset for Sebastian, and with time lost much of their shape. It was why he kept to the basics. Telling the full truth would’ve been a certain way to end up in a Guantanamo work camp, for one, and besides, no one would’ve believed him. There were three ways to tell war stories to twenty-first-century America: brave, sad, violent. All needed to be clean as bone. Anything else was too much. So the Rangers had saved him in a daring raid that took a great many of their own (true), and the Volunteers’ powers came from a top-secret government project (untrue).

  But they hadn’t come for him.

  “What about—me?” It’s what Sebastian had been asking about before. “Why lie about me?”

  Pete forced a laugh. “Same reason, dude! Hey, America, a bunch of Rangers tried to apprehend a terror wife and terror baby but whoops, almost everyone got killed by a new bomb made from space rocks? No way. That don’t play. But: hey, America, a bunch of Rangers died saving this nice young man with dimples who got lost?” Pete whistled. “That plays.

  “Little lies for the greater good. Helps keep everything…” Pete looked around the patio, toward the river and the police boat, then up at the sky toward the monitor drones. “Comfortable.”

  Sebastian looked around at all those things, too, and at his spring rolls and lunch beer. He hadn’t grown up thinking like this. He’d been raised to trust the government. He and Pete were part of the generation born at freedom’s peak. They were Found. Rockefeller had said so. When everything seemed possible, everything and more.

  “You never got the vaccine, right?” Pete asked. Sebastian hadn’t. “Be glad and let the rest go, hostage. You’re the luckiest man in the world.”

  He winked at Sebastian, and clinked his beer with his own. Sebastian forced a smirk.

  “Like the kids say,” Pete said. “Abide to Thrive.”

  Their table looked over the murky gray river, parallel to a bunch of wooden ships that doubled as museums. The Old Gothic Bridge, all postcard charm, shot straight into the marrows of the city. This part of Gypsy Town once had been an industrial wasteland, a space between empire and empire’s suburbs. Nothing but abandoned plants and smokestacks and rock junkies, forbidden zones for urban explorers to venture into if they dared. Then came the settlers, piecemeal at first, then in sudden waves: the gays and musicians. The freelancers and grad students. The young professionals. The baby strollers and dog parks. Corporate overlords with a vision followed, armed with boutique retail consulting firms and luxury condominium developers. The abandoned plants were demolished or restored, any remaining junkies pushed out to other lost districts. Gypsy Town had begun as a whisper, a place where stories happened. Then it became a story itself. Sometime after came Gypsy Town the band and Gypsy Town the pejorative. Now, it just was. A space between empire and empire’s suburbs, again, where youngish, modish people with shopping-center faces could order weed through a bicycle delivery service.

  “Since we’re walking memory lane, here”—Sebastian lowered his voice even though they had the sunny part of the patio to themselves—“what do you remember from Tripoli? Detailwise.”

  “Supposed to be a simple mission.” Pete’s eyes flared like they always did when he was thinking, green eye softening, the black one turning to ember. It was always the second thing people commented on, Sebastian had learned. They’d survived the same bomb, both had their vision altered by looking into the blast, but he’d been the one left with extreme light sensitivity instead of a divine gaze. He adjusted his sunglasses and asked Justice to continue.

  “Go in, get the wife. Get the infant. Turn any wog with a weapon to pink mist.” Pete shrugged. “We’d heard they might have you, too. No offense, we hoped you’d still be breathing, but over there, it’s not like kidnapped journos are rare. Soon as we hit the ground, way more resistance than intel expected.”

  Realizing his hands were thrashing through air, Pete reached for condiments. Rangers became coasters, insurgents, mustard packets. A little ketchup bottle assumed the role of Sebastian.

  “I’m here, with the front assault team. We cleared the four rooms upstairs but took some casualties. Huge difference between being shot at and being shot toward, you know? We were getting shot at.”

  Pete’s words cut through the summer daze like a blade. He reached for more mustard packets. “Wogs just kept coming, pouring in from that basement. We managed to breach the door, right as a helo got clipped by an RPG. Crashed quick, like an earthquake. Had Flowers in it, on the gun. And Mia, of course. She was the pilot.”

  Pete’s jaw and temples strained when he said Mia’s name. Sebastian noticed. A pepper shaker became the downed helicopter.

  “Then… I don’t know, man. I remember radioing in the breach. Then a long, dull humming sound from outside. Then the smell of ice? Then white fire. Tried to push into a pantry door with my shoulder but it wouldn’t budge. No time then but say goodbye.” He blew a kiss to the sky and turned all the coasters but one, tipping over the ketchup. “Then—nothing. Germany comes next.”

  Sebastian shook his head. “That’s what I mean, though. Who ordered the bomb dropped? And why’d we live when everyone else…” He was going to say “burned to ash,” but stopped himself. They’d been strangers to him. They’d been brothers in arms to Pete.

  Pete stared out at the river and swirled the beer in his hand. “Chance or fate,” he finally said. “The soldier’s great question.”

  Sebastian thought that was an interesting idea even if it didn’t answer anything. Pete kept speaking.

  “You should talk to Dash. He’s the one who came to first. Found you and me on the stairs. He got us home.”

  “Yeah.” Sebastian had tried to speak with Jean-Jacques a few times, to little avail. The other man had made it clear he wanted nothing to do with him. “I’ll do that.”

  Sebastian looked up and let the sun warm his face. He was still trying to unravel the knots in their saga, but couldn’t quite figure out how. He’d left it alone for years, thinking it for the best. And it had been, for a while. Be thankful you’re alive, his mom had said, quoting Corinthians: “For who hath known the mind of the Lord?”

  Sometimes that was enough. Sometimes it needed to be.

  Was it still?

  “I feel old,” Pete said. He’d finished his beers. “Too much waiting around.”

  “You’re… twenty-seven?” Sebastian knew that already but wanted to appear uncertain. “The rock star age. Jim Morrison, Hendrix, all those maniacs.”

  “Rupert Brooke, too.” Pete’s voice softened a beat. “If I should die, think only this of me: That there’s some corner of a foreign field, That is for ever England.”

  Who thinks like that? Sebastian thought. Who quotes
Rupert freaking Brooke anymore? He found it strange and odd but also endearing. Then he listened as Pete recounted when and where he’d given his youth. Eighteen—a baby-faced private patrolling the Balkans. Nineteen—a baby-faced Ranger going on clandestine raids into Persia. Twenty-one—a not-so-baby-faced Ranger helping put down the Syrian uprising, gifted a local belly dancer by a superior to mark his entry into manhood. He’d talked with the dancer about her studies, he said. She’d reminded him of his sister too much. On and on, through his formative years and the cythrax bomb, direct-action tours and long-range reconnaissance missions, from mountain caves to desert hideouts to dense, jumbled megacities. He likened the work of counterinsurgency to that of a politician, always currying favor and seeking buy-in. The work of a counterterrorist, though, that was the work of a monk. Autonomous, as reliant on routine as it was on belief. He liked those missions the best. They were pure.

  “Squeezing the trigger on a man who deserves it?” he said. “That’s victory. Or the closest thing we have these days.”

  Then, as if his batteries went out, Pete was done. He looked down at his lap. Sebastian just nodded and kept quiet. Any words would’ve spoiled it all.

  Some time passed. “Excuse me,” Pete said, pulling out a phone Sebastian hadn’t seen before. “Need to make a call.”

  Pete walked to the far side of the patio, yelling out a big “Yo! It’s Swenson. What you got for me?” then turning his back away from the table and speaking more subdued.

  Sebastian took a bite from a now-stale spring roll. What a weirdo, he thought. Heroes! They really are just like us.

  More time passed. Sebastian moved his chair into the shade. Pete’s phone call with someone who knew him as “Swenson” continued to absorb him. Sebastian wasn’t sure what to make of his continued efforts to get involved with the manhunt for Jonah Gray. On one hand, he was Justice. Of course he should be involved. On the other—he was a walking, talking titan with a magical burning eye. It wasn’t like he could go undercover.