Partly that was because of the odds. You can only go through so many gunfights and not get shot. That was one thing. The odds said it was my turn to get shot. But partly too it was because I was number one in the stack. The lead guy’s the one who sets off the IEDs or gets shot. Someone’s got to be the lead, though, and plenty of times I had volunteered for it. But that day my Spidey-sense told me something was going to go wrong, so I didn’t volunteer—and got chosen all the same.
Over the course of the evening, while we waited for zero hundred hours, we all tried to decompress in our different ways.
Some of us worked out. Most of us hung out in our barracks. Some guys played online games; some listened to music. You often used to hear a 3 Doors Down song playing, “When I’m Gone” (“Love me when I’m gone, when I’m gone”). Merlin did Sudoku, super-advanced, black-belt stuff.
Some guys put on headphones and blasted music so loud you could hear it clearly in the barracks. A lot of the guys Skyped with their families, just to say hi. You weren’t allowed to tell them that in a few hours you were going on a hazardous mission in which you might be killed. Instead, you were “just checking in.” It was always the dangerous missions that inspired people to make one last phone call. Sean called Patty, and she immediately figured out something was looming, but that was just Patty.
Everyone was nervous. Your stomach gets tight. The adrenaline is pumping. I checked the fit of my helmet, made sure it was on right. Did a comms check to make sure my handheld communications device was working. I found if I spent some time before a mission doing all my pre-op checks, it kept my anxiety at a manageable level.
I read a book by Lee Child. I like the Jack Reacher stories. And I waited. I thought a lot. We didn’t know how many guys were in the house or what kind of arms they had. Nor could we tell how many might be lying in wait in neighboring houses. It had occurred to me—and I’d told the entire team my theory—that the Taliban had kidnapped Khalid as a way to lure us into an ambush.
Any of us could be shot or KIA that night.
There were too many unknowns.
* * *
• • •
At just before midnight, we gathered on the airfield near the two Black Hawks. It was our detachment of twelve, plus Abdul Rahim, the other interpreter, and what’s called a JTAC, an Air Force special tactics airman. That made fourteen of us. Seven in each chopper.
We checked our communications devices, the MBITRs. We checked and checked again: Did we have our tear gas grenades? Protective eyewear? Fragmentation grenades? It’s always the little things that go wrong, so you obsessively look at every detail. We examined our M9 Beretta pistols, our M4s, the magazine pouches for the M4s. Put on our earmuffs that plugged into our MBITRs, which protected our hearing but also let us all stay in communication. Made sure we had the gloves to avoid burns. Checked our NODs, our night observation devices—that’s night-vision goggles to you. One of our slogans used to be “We Own the Night.” In part, that’s because the enemy didn’t have night-vision equipment. We could see in the darkness, and they, at that time, could not. Maybe by now that’s changed.
We were all wearing body armor plates front and back. Hanging from the plate carrier was a bunch of equipment, including the medical kit.
That one you didn’t want to forget.
We all strapped into our harnesses in the helicopter and took off quickly. The doors remained open, despite the cold night. It wasn’t a long trip, maybe thirty klicks. On our headphones “When I’m Gone” was playing, like a soundtrack to our infiltration. It was intended to pump everyone up, get everyone hyped up and ready. To me, that night, it sounded a little morbid.
We landed in a small river valley, pulled off our seatbelt harnesses, and jumped out of the chopper. I could feel the icy river water through my boots. We were completely exposed.
We made our stealthy approach into the village, clutching our M4 rifles, and over to an observation point where we could see the compound where Khalid was being held. Sure enough, through our NODs, we could see there was one sentry on the roof, as the drone had spotted. One of our team members was watching the drone’s feed on a small screen and confirmed that the house was exactly as anticipated.
No one was standing guard outside. Earlier in the day someone had been there. Now, nobody. I didn’t like that.
Our four-man stack quietly moved in closer. A team sniper/observer found a position from which he could see the back of the house. Ready to shoot any squirter, which is what we called someone who sneaks out the back door or window, running away from the attack.
The front door wasn’t terribly substantial, so we rammed it in instead of breaching it with an explosive charge. As we four entered the house, we tossed flash-bangs. There was dust everywhere, the smell of gunpowder.
And through our NODs we could see that the house was swarming with enemy soldiers. Were they expecting us? Had we just stepped into the middle of an ambush? Maybe we’d been betrayed by one of the Afghan soldiers we’d been training. Maybe one of them had placed a call on their mobile phone.
Or maybe it was something much simpler. Maybe they had simply heard the sound of the choppers and grabbed their weapons.
The air exploded with gunfire. Everyone, it seemed, was firing at us at once.
As the first one in, I was the first one shot. A couple of times. It felt like my left leg had been pierced by a flaming arrow. An explosion of pain. I crumpled to the floor. Later, I learned that the first round had broken my femur. The second one had pierced my femoral artery. It’s hard to describe the magnitude of the pain, but it took over my body, disoriented me. I saw blood spewing from my leg. I thought about the very real possibility that I might die in a matter of minutes. I struggled to get up but suddenly didn’t have the strength. This, I thought, was my time. It had finally come.
Suddenly I was being dragged across the room and out of the house. Sean, who was the fourth guy in the stack, had run into the house, exposing himself to the enemy, in order to grab me by a shoulder strap of my body armor. He pulled me across the floor, out the door, and then outside along the ground until he got me safely behind a high stone wall.
I managed to croak out, “Thank you.”
“Not done yet,” I heard Sean say as if from a distance.
Meanwhile, George Devlin, our communications sergeant, was on the radio, calling in a 9 line for a medevac helicopter. Sean got a tourniquet off my kit and applied it to my leg to stop the bleeding. He also put gauze and a bandage on the wounds.
Blood was everywhere. I was in shock, so my memory of everything afterward is hazy. I heard Sean muttering, and I asked him to repeat it.
“You know, there’s an ancient Chinese proverb,” he said. “If you save a man’s life, you’re responsible for it.”
My brain was operating just barely enough to allow me to rasp, “Having second thoughts?”
A Black Hawk medevac bird arrived moments later, and I was lifted into it on a stretcher. A medic on the chopper checked my airway, assessed me for shock, took my blood pressure, looked worried, and gave me a fentanyl lollipop. I licked it a few times. I don’t remember much beyond that until I woke up hours later in a surgical tent in Jalalabad.
I muttered, “How’s Khalid?”
Silence around me. A little louder, I said, “The hostage? How is he?”
“The hostage didn’t make it,” someone said.
Khalid had been executed minutes before we got there.
We never figured out whether we were betrayed by one of the kandak or if they were just alerted by the chopper sound.
Sometimes you just don’t know. Combat is iffy. Sometimes it just goes bad.
26
Around nine I found myself awake and a little annoyed that Maggie was taking so long photographing the “destroy upon my death” files. Why hadn’t she come by yet?
I
took a shower, brushed my teeth, got dressed, and went in search of Sukie’s room. I knocked, but there was no answer. She was probably already downstairs.
By the time I got to the staircase I could hear voices and laughter coming from below. Maybe Maggie was down there and had some reason why she hadn’t been able to return the files yet. Hildy, I reminded myself. I descended the stairs, and as I drew closer the voices became more distinct.
I passed through the entry foyer to the swinging door that led to the kitchen. But instead of entering, I stood outside and listened for a moment. There are all sorts of devices you can use to amplify distant conversations, including “bionic ears” and such, which let you hear a whisper from three hundred feet away. But I didn’t have any with me, and I wouldn’t have used them if I did. Too unsubtle. I didn’t want to be caught with any incriminating equipment.
I stood there against the wall, smelling coffee and bacon frying.
A male voice was saying, “. . . but once she gets keys to the car, she’ll drive it off a bridge and screw us out of everything.”
“Dad wouldn’t make that mistake,” a woman said.
“He’s changed. We can’t be sure of anything. And she’s got a leash on Cameron like he’s her puppy.”
“The kind that’s never quite house-trained.”
A few laughs. Who was the “she” they were talking about—Natalya, the Russian fiancée? One of the sisters? Obviously Cameron wasn’t in the kitchen. They were talking about him. Probably Maggie wasn’t either. So the male voice had to be Paul, the older brother.
Paul’s voice from inside the kitchen said, “. . . see what she was wearing?”
A mumble.
A woman: “Surgically augmented figure.” Who was speaking? Sukie? Hayden? Megan was gone, and there were two women in the room, who had to be Sukie and Hayden.
A second woman, maybe Sukie: “She was a flight attendant, I swear.”
“Definitely mail order,” Paul said. “Or whatever the internet equivalent of mail order is.”
The first woman again, maybe Hayden, said, “Why don’t you just ask him?”
“Where’s the fun in that?”
“I did ask him, ‘What do you like about her?’ and he said, ‘I enjoy having a conversation with an intellectual equal,’” Sukie, I was now sure it was Sukie, said.
The three roared with laughter.
The longer I waited outside the kitchen, the greater the chance someone would walk by, or come out the swinging doors, and discover me. So I stood there poised to move at any moment.
Maybe Hayden was saying, “. . . changed his will a thousand times.” But the next few lines were obscured by a clatter of pots or pans.
Then a man said, “He’s gonna screw over Barb and your mom too for this bimbo, and I’m not going to put up with it.”
A murmur and then a female voice: “. . . controls him now. He does whatever Natalya wants.”
I decided then it was risky to stay out here any longer, eavesdropping, so I pushed open the kitchen door and entered.
Three of the adult Kimball kids were sitting around a long metal-topped worktable on stools, mugs of coffee in their hands. No Maggie.
“You remember her at all?” Paul was saying. “She was the nightmare nanny.”
“The Irish one?” said Sukie.
“Maureen, the bad-tempered one from Dublin,” said Paul. “I eventually got her fired. I was quite proud of that. Well, hello there. I forgot your name.” He looked uncomfortable, like he was wondering how much I’d heard.
“Nick. Good morning.” I leaned over and gave Sukie a kiss on the lips. Somewhere a dishwasher was going. The air was warm and humid.
“Morning,” she said. She was in gym shorts and a T-shirt. “Coffee?” She waved at a glass carafe of coffee in the middle of the dented metal tabletop.
“Sure. Black, thanks.”
She retrieved a big white mug from the counter behind her. Pouring a full mug of coffee from the glass carafe, she handed it to me, and as she did, she looked me straight in the eye. Arched her brow. As if asking, Well? How’d it go?
I just nodded, once, and said, “Thanks.”
27
You’re the first of the guests to come down,” Paul said. “You’re all late sleepers. Layla is still trying to adjust from Hong Kong time. She should be down in an hour or so. And Cameron—”
“Cameron is Cameron,” said Hayden, like an old joke. A rueful laugh.
“And I imagine his girlfriend got just as pissed as he did,” said Paul. “They seemed compatible. What was her name again?”
“Hildy,” said Hayden, in sweatpants and Wesleyan sweatshirt.
“Pissed?” said Sukie. “In the British sense?”
“Of course. Blotted. Legless.” Paul shook his head. He was wearing blue striped pajamas and looked, with his gray cowlick, like an overgrown child. He was sitting at the head of the table as if he’d called a meeting. He had a sad little potbelly.
I looked around for a moment. This was a huge commercial-grade kitchen, with a couple of ten-burner stainless-steel Vulcan gas ranges and ovens, steel hoods, two huge True refrigerators. Exposed brick walls, brown tile floors. Nothing fancy in here. This wasn’t a kitchen built for show. It was used mostly by professional cooks, who could prepare a lot of meals here; it looked recently updated. Pot racks mounted on the ceiling. A giant KitchenAid mixer. A Bunn commercial coffeemaker.
“Your dad a late sleeper?” I asked.
“Not him. He’s having his morning massage.”
“You know, Rosa’s dying,” said Hayden. “We all have to visit her. She’s still in Queens.”
“I’d heard she wasn’t well, but I had no idea she was dying,” said Sukie.
“Stage-four cancer,” said Hayden.
“Rosa took care of us younger kids,” Sukie explained. “We all loved her.”
The kitchen door swung open, and I turned around to see if it was Maggie.
But it was Conrad Kimball, wearing jeans and a plaid flannel shirt with an unbuttoned gray cardigan over it, reading glasses on a chain around his neck. He was smiling.
I could feel the mood shift. Everyone was suddenly less relaxed.
“Morning, Dad,” they called out, nearly in unison. “Morning.”
“Good morning,” he proclaimed. “Where is my beloved? She’s not back yet?”
“Natalya?” said Sukie. “She’s not catching up on her beauty sleep?” She said it in an innocent way, but I knew it was a jab.
“No, she’s an early riser,” Conrad replied. “Ever since Young Pioneer camp. She went for a walk in the woods. On the trails. She said it reminds her of the forests outside of Moscow. Well, she’s bound to get hungry sometime soon.”
“Wasn’t it raining earlier?” asked Hayden.
“It cleared up nicely,” said Paul.
Sukie poured her father a mug of coffee and handed it to him. “You’re in a good mood this morning,” she said to him.
“A good massage always puts me in a good frame of mind. Almost makes me forget the call I got yesterday from the director of the Whitney.”
“Let me guess,” said Paul. “They want you to give another gallery.”
“He was asking, in the most delicate way possible, whether I’d be agreeable to changing the name of the Kimball Gallery.”
“Changing it to what?” said Hayden.
“Just . . . taking down the name. They’ve had a lot of protests against us. All those crazies out there, the nutjobs, the sob sisters.”
“What did you tell him?” asked Sukie. She pulled out a chair for him, not a stool.
“I said, ‘What do you think Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney would say if you asked her the same thing?’”
“Daddy, there’s a lot of anger out there,” Sukie said.
; “And you’re not helping,” he said. “Going to all these funerals. Only a matter of time before the Wall Street Journal does a story about you, and it’s the rats are deserting the sinking ship. It’s goddamn disloyal to the family.” He said it like a slap.
“People are OD’ing by the thousands every year, Daddy. They’re snorting Oxydone like cocaine. Hundreds of—”
“You know what mistake I made with you?” Conrad said, raising a stubby index finger. “Letting you go to Oberlin.”
“What’s wrong with Oberlin?” said Hayden.
“Oberlin was great,” Sukie said.
“It’s where she got indoctrinated with all her high ideals,” said Conrad. Then he smiled, as if to brush it off.
“Did you tell Dad about Sundance?” said Hayden.
“What’s this?” said Conrad.
“Her new documentary just got accepted to Sundance. Isn’t that fantastic?”
“Hey, congrats, Sukie,” said Paul.
“Yeah, isn’t that great?” Sukie said.
“Sundance,” said Conrad. “That’s one of those little festivals in some cutesy town where people go to watch documentaries like yours, right?”
“Well, yeah,” said Sukie.
He shook his head, smiled in amusement. “Like a drug that never makes it out of trials. How’s your book?” Now he was talking to Paul.
“So I’ve got a bit of good news too,” Paul replied. “Finally.”
“Oh, yeah, what’s that?” said Hayden.
“So an editor at Dodd Merriwether really loves my book proposal, and I think they’re going to make an offer.”
“What’s your book?” I asked. Someone nearby was knocking on a door.
“It’s a social history. A cultural history. Basically, it’s about how we got to be so ass-backward and upside down. As a culture, right?”
“Uh-huh,” I said. I could see his sisters’ eyes starting to glaze over.
“At first it was going to start with the sixties. But then I realized the fifties are really the sixties, you know? Ginsberg, the Beats, Transcendental Meditation, all that shit.”
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