Tory drove up their way a lot, past Yorktown and across the bridge. Especially in winter. Especially on gray Sundays when shadows fell long and thin around Fort Eustis, and it seemed the only souls alive were trainee privates grubbing for leaves and trash on the roadside in fresh-from-basic, unstarched uniforms. Especially on those Sundays when she’d wake up in her hard, mean little box of a barracks room with the sheets next to her long cold and Junior Davis nowhere to be found, his boots and jeans gone from the floor, his lighter and keys gone from the TV. She’d run a few miles through the frosty morning, forcing the hangover from her temples, then shower in the green-tile latrine down the hall, dressing then making coffee with the drip pot she kept on top of her mini-fridge. She’d get out to Dick Wags and Alicia’s bungalow around two or three, cheese and bread and beer in a paper bag from Food Lion, letting herself in the front door to the wood-paneled hall. It always smelled of something good cooking on the stove, always the sound of a football game on TV, and there was never once when Tory got to their house without feeling she’d just interrupted them in the bedroom. Once she actually did; peeling off her boots then padding down the long hall to the kitchen, past their open bedroom door and the two of them on the high bed with the white comforter in the bright room. They hadn’t heard her ring the bell and come in; Dick Wags oblivious, his back to the hall, tan body buried deep between Alicia’s endless outstretched white legs, her head back on the thick, green pillow, eyes closed. Tory had stopped, stock still. Soft and low mammal sounds came from the back of Alicia’s throat. Breathing quiet, fast, she raised her head then, eyes opening, right at Tory. Alicia’s expression never changed, and they looked at each other, then Alicia closed her eyes again and Tory breathed and crept away to the living room and the TV and fifteen minutes later Dick Wags came in, freshly showered, wearing running shorts and a Waterborne T-shirt and saw her on the couch and said, “Roomdog! When’d you get here?”
Tory smoked quietly now in the ship’s cabin, listening to her friend Dick Wags smoke in the bunk above her. She hadn’t thought of that day in a long time. She tried to remember when it had been. Tail end of winter, she thought. March, maybe.
On those heels came another, much more recent memory—tonight; Marc Hall’s hand coming to rest on her shoulder in the helicopter, his palm and fingers gripping, curling down, just the slightest pressure. The phantom feeling was so strong her own hand went involuntarily to her shoulder to cap his, but all she found was the thin cotton of her brown Army T-shirt.
Pétionville
Chapter
9
The infantry sergeant’s name was Lamas. Head down, exhausted, hunched in the back of the chopper with his captain, this guy Hall. His captain right now, anyway. Hall was really S2, from battalion intelligence, standing in for their broke-dick of a company CO. Something about a sprained ankle, the week before they deployed. As if. The man rode health profiles like a fat tick rode a dog, the fucker. Some CO. Sergeant Lamas knew Marc Hall, though. From a couple years before, when the guy was platoon leader in a different battalion. He was black and bald and young as shit—couldn’t be more than a year or two older than Lamas—and you just don’t forget guys like that, especially officers. Especially lieutenants who maybe burn paperwork on a promotable corporal’s surprise piss test after a long weekend. Word spreads. You don’t forget officers like that.
The sky passed completely to night by the time the chopper spun over the port. Lamas watched carefully from the back as Captain Hall tried to help the chick sergeant out the door. And wasn’t that something. Lamas held on as they lifted clear the warehouse area, arcing over the long pier and black waters beyond.
“S’fucking hot,” Lamas yelled over the chopper noise as Hall crawled back and squatted next to him. Hall nodded, but Lamas could barely see the man’s face.
Hall opened his mouth to yell something, then changed his mind. It was too loud in the chopper, and it didn’t matter anyway. He sat, hunched, very still, staring under the brim of his helmet at the nothing out the open door.Watch, he thought, and meant himself.
As a rule, Marc Hall went out of his way to pay zero attention to female soldiers. Just SMs they were, service members, like any man. First and foremost, Hall was still married, and the Army doesn’t use words like “still,” “barely,” or “sort of” in context of an officer’s marriage. But, as an officer, enlisted females were off-limits to him anyway. And most enlisted females had grown up poorer even than he had, in broken parts of the country that made him nervous.
And yet this small, tough woman—the airport had made no sense to him. In the shadows of the warehouse, rain drumming the tin roof and his gear off, alone in the back room he’d wanted to pick her up, pick her straight up, crush her body into his, this woman he didn’t know, it made no sense.
It threw him more than he’d let on, the way she’d mentioned his mother, even in such an offhand way.I’ll bet she doesn’t like Marcel shortened to Marc. No, she hadn’t liked it one bit; his father’s laugh rolling down the hallway to his bedtime ears: “Cass, the boy ain’t some French pastry.” His mother, whose tone never seemed to go up or down, replying simply: “He is what he is, and he is Marcel.”
He is what he is, and here he was. In her land. For her people.
That’s what the president said. And the ex-president. And General Powell, ramrod straight in his new civilian suit. The predeployment briefings were one thing: dry, military, tactical; but he’d watched on TV, saw what the president said. They were to take down this criminal Cedras, and bring home the priest. Aristide. Jean-Bertrand, the little priest, elected by the people. Lavalas to lead Haiti to democracy, true democracy.Liberté. And eventually prosperity. Food.Humanity.
Here he was. One small man in a big plan, but he felt his place in it. Knew there was a place in it, a way to lead.
“Cass,” he said aloud, and it was muttering under his breath in the loud helicopter, and he was talking to his dead mother, sure she knew he was here.
Maybe that was it, with this woman sergeant. Tory Harris. Marc Hall wasn’tVodoun, but he was Haitian, yes? Half Haitian. Could Haiti feel him? Something so strong, so powerful, sopositive, on his arrival here. It meant something. She meant something, this sharp, tiny woman sergeant. He remembered again, her watching him argue with the colonel in the park, watching to see what he did.
Maybe,he thought,she’s here to keep me honest. That’s how he would take it.
Too dark to see, but the helicopter was over the suburb Pétionville in five minutes, up the mountainside—to little rich Haiti. Land of the casinos, once. Hotel resorts. A view of Port-au-Prince bay without too close a view of Port-au-Prince. Papa Doc’s inherited playground, except he hadn’t played much; more, Pétionville was his private fishbowl, and he’d emerge—Baron Samedi,thin-tie suit and horn-rimmed glasses—deep from his palace cellars and plunge a hand in, emerging with a wriggling, gasping fistful. The Duvalier boy after him, the Baby Doc, he’d played in Pétionville. Land ofbourgeois. The leaders and lenders. Cedras’s family now, those not in the palace. And the American reporters and camera crews, of course. All the best bars were here. The power didn’t go out as much, so the ice cubes were harder. Less than twenty-four hours and Pétionville was already secure, the tightest, safest place in Haiti after the port and airport compounds. The tightest public place.
This was all very unofficial, of course; no one in the U.S. Army at colonel’s rank or below ever got a phone call saying “Secure Pétionville.” In a country of miserable poverty and epidemics of AIDS and TB it would be, well, uncouth to make a priority of thebourgeois neighborhood. No one in Washington or on the aircraft carrierEisenhower or here on the ground ever signed a directive, or passed a written order. But there it was, anyway. Someone sent a company of reinforced Humvees up the hill along 101A and onward to Place St. Pierre. Someone else put a couple Bradleys across Route de Dalmas. Coincidence, certainly. It was all very accidental; form finding way from chaos, perhaps. It c
ould be argued. Or defended. Regardless, by sunset you couldn’t enter or exit Pétionville without passing an American checkpoint. If there were riots, if there was to be looting—if there were lynchings, whoever it was to be lynched—it wouldn’t be in Pétionville.
The chopper set down in the parking lot of a pink hotel. The load was mostly captains and higher sergeants, up for a briefing, and they cleared instantly.
“We couldn’t do this at the airport?” Sergeant Lamas muttered, hand on helmet top, running hunched over clear of the rotor wash as the chopper lifted again and was gone. He looked around as he stood, and whistled through his teeth. It was some place, all right. A torchlit pool behind the rose bush he was next to, cabanas in a row, hotel rising above them.
“This all ours now?” he said.
Hall shook his head, and it wasn’t clear which way.
“ ‘Uphold Democracy’ means ‘secure the banks,’ I think,” Lamas said.
Hall was blinking, looking around. He’d been to Haiti four times in his life, three of them with his mother, but never to Pétionville. Small red stones crunched under his jungle boots as he turned around, taking it in. This he’d never seen. He was willing to wager he learned better Creole in the Bronx, from his mother, than anyone who grew up in this neighborhood.
The gathering of captains and sergeants had pulled apart, each in their own groups, waiting for the briefing. Sergeant Lamas walked ten or so feet down the length of the roses, discreetly lighting a cigarette. Sergeants get nervous smoking with officers around. Captain Hall followed him, pulling his ruck off his back and laying it gently on the ground.
“Land of your people, Sir,” Lamas said, smoking.
“Yeah,” Hall said. “Other side of the mountain,” he pointed, up, “but yeah.Oui, Rodrigo Lamas. ” He trilled the Rs off his tongue, making the sergeant laugh.
“Hey, that chick sergeant kept a cool head, today,” Lamas said.
“Yeah?”
“Cool as ice, Sir.” He reached under his flak jacket and fished another cigarette from his breast pocket, then lit it off the first. “I dunno. I about pissed myself.”
Hall smiled at that.
“I sent that round to the dirt, then look up, y’know, to my line. And damned she ain’t right there on my three, ready to smoke something.” Lamas held his cigarette in his teeth. “She was probably pissin’ herself too, but damn she looked tough.”
“I think she is pretty tough,” Hall said.
“She got an eye for you, too,” Lamas said. Then added, “Sir.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about, Sergeant.”
“Yeah. Me neither.”
Lamas pushed his boot around in the red stones, watching the gathering officers and NCOs. No one seemed to be doing anything.
“Why’d they hang that guy?” he said.
“Lavalas,” Hall whispered. “Aristide supporter.” He didn’t know why he’d whispered.
“I gotta tell you, Sir. I think that colonel was bullshit. I think we should have taken them down. Those cops or soldiers or whatever the fuck they were.”
Hall didn’t say anything right away. He looked at Lamas, though, holding his gaze. Finally, he said, “You’re right, Sergeant. We should have taken them down. And then”—he put his hands around his neck—” we should have takenhim down.”
“I didn’t like that. Leaving him there. Swinging.”
“We left them all swinging.”
“Who’s that, Captain? Who’d we leave swinging?”
It was another soldier, behind them and quiet in the dark, Hall doing an audible about-face in the crushed stone.
It was Baric. The old colonel who’d ridden with their convoy this morning. He of the rules of engagement.
“Sir,” Marc said.
“I believe the briefing is beginning, Captain,” Baric said, and Lamas could have sworn he winked. He stepped past them, toward the pink hotel. His feet seemed not to make any noise, even in the stone.
The buck sergeants and staff sergeants all hung outside, smoking and laughing as the officers and higher NCOs got reamed inside for various and varied shortcomings and failures during the day’s operations. When they emerged, Hall found Lamas and the two went to retrieve their rucks. The energy was gone from Hall’s face.
“Your XO is taking over the company tomorrow,” he said. “I’m going back to battalion staff.”
“But the XO is just—”
“It’s not my call.”
Lamas thought about that a moment.
“This was only temporary anyway,” Hall said. But Lamas knew it wasn’t entirely true.
The meeting had been held in the hotel’s garage and went badly. Before clearing the door completely, a one-star Hall had never even seen was in his face, chest to chest, helmet-tip to helmet-tip.
“What in the fuck did you think you were doing, Captain Hall?” the general yelled. Hall took a step back and clinked helmets that way, too; Baric, the old-man colonel, directly behind him.
“Sir—” he said, but the general cut him off, waving a piece of paper in his hand. Hall recognized the rules of engagement.
“What part of ‘Do not interfere with the fucking locals’ did you not understand, Captain?”
What part of “They’re hanging people in the street”—
Hall was aware everything could go to shit right here. He measured his words.
“Sir, as convoy commander it was my best judgment at the time to—”
The general spun on his heels, yelling at the assembling officers. “When exactly did we start paying captains to use judgment?” The room came to an immediate hush. “Is the word ‘judgment’ on any of your commissions?”
“Sir, I—” Hall started, but the general had already moved on, to another captain and another fuckup, Hall’s FADH conflict and lost convoy just one of eight or nine fuckups to be dealt with tonight.
They were by the rose bushes again, waiting for the chopper to take them out.
“You were right to stop the convoy,” Lamas said. “You did the right thing, Sir.”
Hall put his right index finger to his lips—quiet. He stood there a moment, smelling the warm night and Lamas’s cigarette smoke and then he said, “I’m going to Jacmel. In the south. With a relief operation. Maybe I’ll check in with you fellows when I get back.”
“You do that, Sir,” Lamas said. “You come check in with us.”
Marc Hall nodded, but in the end they never did see each other again.
Port-au-Prince
Chapter
10
One in the morning. Zero dark early. Again. Almost two turns of the clock from their battlestations wake-up yesterday. An hour of sleep, then fifteen minutes for a quick plate of midnight chow with Dick Wags and the Steward in the crew’s mess. Three sergeants, two cups of black coffee; Dick Wags and the Steward with a cheese omelet each, Jersey plain scrambled and one of the deep-fried rectangles the Army calls hash browns. On shore five thousand American grunts ate cold MREs, but on USAVGilman skinny Private Cain was throwing eggs on the grill for midrats. “Keep those goddamn exhaust fans off, Sarge,” the Skipper had ordered the Steward, “or we’ll have all of 10th Mountain over looking for a meal.” The three sergeants ate quickly, throwing plates and forks in the galley dishwasher on their way out. Roy was off to find his rack; he hadn’t slept since wake-up yesterday. Dick Wags headed down toward the engine room. Tory went up the center stairs two flights, straight to the bridge. One in the morning; middle of the dark night, but a new Army day.
The ship was tied pierside, but the bridge remained blacked out as if under way; just the smallest, soft glow of orange and green from the instruments and radios. Victor Charlie sat deep down in the skipper’s chair, barely visible from top of the stairs. Tory knew it was Victor Charlie from the Metallica way low on the CD player by the coffee pot. He was the ship’s second mate, a newly minted warrant officer. His real name was Welsh, William Welsh, but Tory had never heard h
im called anything but Victor Charlie. He liked to say the day last year he’d hung up his staff sergeant stripes and been pinned the silver warrant officer bar he’d become Mister Charlie. He was a surfer, like Temple, and worked out as religiously. Raised in southern California, he was Vietnamese from refugee parents and claimed specifically North Vietnamese. “I’ma tricky chink spy,” he’d say when drunk, which was often. “I’ma slit all your throats one night, you fat American fucks.” He drove a Chevy truck painted red, white, and blue and was the only ship’s officer who lived on the boat full-time, like a private, even when they were home at Fort Eustis. He was twenty-nine and had been married and divorced three times.
Tory crested the stairs, entering the unlit bridge.
“SergeantHarrisrequestspermissiontoenterthebridge,” she mumbled.
Victor Charlie said something low and equally unintelligible in response, shuffling a pile of papers in his lap.
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