Deception Cove

by Owen Laukkanen

  “Yeah, and how’d that work out for you?”

  He shrugged. The wind howled through the trees, and he laid out a mat of spare clothes on the dry rock beneath the overhang, and laughed as Lucy promptly curled up in the middle of it.

  “‘Rescue the drowning and tie your shoestrings,’” he said.

  She made a face. “What is this stuff, Burke, the Bible? You found God?”

  “That one is Thoreau,” he said. He shrugged, feeling sheepish. “I had a lot of time to read these last few years.”

  “Yeah? And what’s it supposed to mean, ‘rescue the drowning’?”

  “I guess it means you’re supposed to help anybody who really needs it, but otherwise mind your own business,” he said. “At least, that’s how I read it.”

  Jess didn’t say anything, so after a beat he continued. “Like, I didn’t come out this far because I wanted to meet a marine or see the ocean. I came because that dog needed help. I stayed because I could see that you needed help. But once all this is over, hell, I expect there’s a good chance I’ll spend the next forty years swamping toilets or maybe hammering nails, and that’ll be fine. Better minding my business than causing more trouble.”

  Jess remained silent. She nudged Lucy deeper under the rock, stretched out on the clothes, and killed the light.

  “All right, so that’s what you believe is most likely to happen,” she said once she was all comfortable. “But you mean to tell me there’s nothing in the world you want to do with your life?”

  Mason sat at the edge of the cave, resting his back against the wall and looking out into the bleak night. He hadn’t spoken this much about anything to anyone, not in over fifteen years, and maybe not ever.

  “I’ve thought about helping out,” he said, every word feeling clumsy and heavy. “Guys like me, you know, how I was as a kid.”

  “What,” Jess said, “like teenagers?”

  “Sure, yeah, teenagers,” he agreed. “Guys who got on the wrong path, maybe need someone to talk to. Someone to make sure they don’t end up like I did.”

  Jess didn’t say anything. Mason felt the moment stretch, wished he’d never said anything at all.

  “That’s what you should do,” she said finally. “Forget swamping toilets, working construction. You can do better than that.”

  He laughed, derisive, looked across the cave toward her, though he couldn’t see her at all. “You really believe that?”

  “I believe you have something to say,” she said, and he heard her clothes rustle and knew she’d sat up. He knew if he could see her, she’d be looking at him, her eyes earnest. “You did a bad thing, Burke, but you’ve got forty, fifty years left to live to make up for it. You’re not meant to waste them as a janitor.”

  He didn’t know what to say. “Assuming we even get off this island,” he said. “We could both die tomorrow and that would be it.”

  “You let me handle that,” she replied. “You do what I tell you, and we’ll get out just fine.”

  “Yeah,” he said. “All right.”

  He believed her, about that part, anyway. Wasn’t sure what to make of the rest of it, her faith in his broader purpose, but he figured that wasn’t a question that would need answering for a good long time. In the meanwhile, they had more pressing concerns.

  He set his head back and looked out at the night, and felt the first raindrops on his face, blown into the cave by the ever-building wind. The storm was coming; it was almost here. He wondered how they’d be able to sleep through it.

  Jess’s voice in the darkness: “Mason?”

  He looked toward her. “Yeah?”

  “Are you just going to sit there all night?”

  He tried to find her in the dark, but he couldn’t, and he couldn’t see the forest outside the cave, either. The wind blew harder, and the rain came faster. His muscles ached from sitting like he was, and he realized suddenly he was tired, very tired.

  No,” he said, shifting his weight, crawling to where he’d last heard her voice. “No, I guess not.”

  He found the dry clothes and felt her warmth beside him, and he lay close to her and felt her move closer, heard the dog snoring somewhere deeper in the cave, and he closed his eyes and tried to forget the storm for a short while, tried to rest.

  Fifty-Three

  Later, after the rain had come on in earnest, blowing into the cave and through the shot-up, ruined skiff Mason and Jess had mounted at the entrance in a vain attempt to make a weather door, after Mason had lain awake, dog tired, on the rock beside Jess, the darkness the same whether his eyes were open or closed, his thoughts refusing to quit even though his body was about finished; later, after what might have been minutes, or it might have been hours, Jess rolled over onto her back beside him and spoke like she knew he was awake, like she couldn’t sleep either.

  “Her name was Afia,” she said. He didn’t say anything, and she continued. “My interpreter, in the valley. Afia; she was a young widow who’d learned English after her husband died. The marines hired her to work as an interpreter, and they placed her with me.”

  “Afia,” Mason said, thinking it was a pretty name, knowing from the way Jess struggled to keep her voice matter-of-fact that Afia was at the heart of what it was Jess was wrestling with.

  “She was pretty well my best friend over there,” Jess continued. “We were about the same age, in an outpost full of men, so we had to stick together. She practiced her English reading old Archie comics; she told me I was Betty and she was Jughead.”

  “Jughead.” Mason smiled. “The guy who ate all the hamburgers?”

  “She liked food more than she liked falling in love, she said.” He could tell Jess was smiling too. “But that didn’t stop her from asking about me and Ty, or pointing out the hot guys at the outpost, to tease me. Me and Ty were already having trouble, and Afia didn’t think so highly of him, based on the stories I told.”

  “Sounds like a good judge of character,” Mason said.

  “Yeah, well.” Jess was quiet for a bit. “Anyway, we were friends, good friends, and we worked well together too. She was tough when she had to be; she could bully her way into a room full of women who didn’t want to talk to an American, even a female, and by the time she was done yelling at them and giving them shit, they’d be offering me piraki and a place to spend the night. Plus all the intel they could muster.”

  “Perfect,” Mason said.

  Jess didn’t say anything for a couple of beats, and when she did, the smile was gone from her voice.

  “She was too good at her job,” she said. “That’s what it comes down to. She was too good, and we didn’t protect her.”

  Mason let it sit.

  “We went on a big winning streak,” Jess said. “Thanks to Afia, we got advance word the Taliban was moving guys in for a raid on our forward outpost, nipped that in the bud. Then she got us word one of their big guys was passing through the valley on his way to Pakistan, and this guy was a big freaking get. We sent in a strike force and a couple of Apaches, took him out and three or four of his lieutenants. Really messed up their day.”

  “And the other side didn’t like that.”

  Jess shifted beside him. “No,” she said. “They didn’t. They found out it was a woman who was screwing them up—and a Pashtun woman besides—and you can imagine how mad it made them.”

  “Sure,” Mason said. He figured the kind of guys Jess was fighting weren’t exactly on board with feminism.

  Jess went quiet again. Rain lashed the ruined skiff and dripped into the cave. Lucy shifted position and stretched out and grumbled. And Mason could hear how Jess’s breathing had changed, quickened pace a little bit, and he knew she was going away again.

  “You don’t have to,” he said, finding her hand in the darkness and squeezing. “It’s okay if you—”

  “We were ambushed,” she said, cutting him off. “We were ambushed, and they knew she’d be with us, knew I’d be there. Someone in the villages sold u
s out; we were supposed to check up on some intel about enemy movements. But hell, Burke, it was a setup from the start.”

  Mason said nothing, kept hold of her hand. And he squeezed again, and she squeezed back, weakly, but he could already tell she was slipping away.

  * * *

  And then she was back in the valley again. The air still and silent, the sun beating down. The village rose like a citadel in front of her, the village woman, Panra, waiting at the narrow stairs, gesturing forward to Jess, to Afia.

  The rest of the patrol had spread out behind low walls for cover, only the barrels of their M4s and the tops of their helmets visible, the glint off of their sunglasses as they watched the women. Somewhere on the western wall of the valley, high above the patrol, Jess knew there were more eyes watching her, friendly eyes with .50-caliber machine guns and mortars. But she knew that if she followed Panra up those stairs, all the rifles and .50 cals and Apache helicopters in the world wouldn’t do her much good, not if Haji was planning an ambush, not there.

  Jess thought of the young child, Selab, at the village entrance, how he’d ducked away when she’d waved to him. She wondered why Panra couldn’t bring the elders somewhere out in the open if they wanted to talk.

  She wondered if she was climbing to her own death.

  You’re a marine, aren’t you? Sack up.

  Panra gestured again to the stairs, Come.

  Get it done, Winslow.

  Hoo-rah.

  Afia went first, following Panra up the narrow stairway. Later Jess would wonder why she’d let her friend take the lead, why she hadn’t cut in ahead with her rifle. But Afia always led; the locals responded better when they saw one of their own before the marine with the big gun. It worked just fine when the locals were inclined to be friendly. In this instance, though, it left Jess neutralized at the back of the line, that rifle of hers worth exactly shit.

  Panra climbed. Afia climbed after her, and Jess after Afia. The sun bore down. Jess felt hot and dirty, her skin gritty. Her heart pounded. The stairs were steep and uneven, and she couldn’t see much but the walls beside her, and Afia’s backside. She couldn’t see where they were going. Even turning around would have been precarious.

  Panra said nothing as she climbed. Nor did Afia. Jess couldn’t see where the stairs ended, couldn’t see what waited for them. Couldn’t see how much farther to the top.

  They reached the end, maybe twenty feet from ground level, and the houses backed away into a small courtyard. Panra waited at the top for Afia and Jess to join her. She gestured across the courtyard to an open doorway. Said something to Afia and gestured again.

  “She wants us to go in there,” Afia said. “That’s where the elders are, she says.”

  Jess looked at Afia, then back at the doorway. Nothing moved inside. “Why isn’t she going first?” she asked. “Tell her lead the way, make the introductions.”

  Afia relayed this. Panra shook her head.

  “She says there’s no need. The elders are in there,” Afia said.

  The doorway was dark. Still nothing moving. Jess looked at Panra, who met her eyes and nodded quickly. Gestured again and spoke Pashto to Jess, rapid, urgent.

  The woman was shaking, Jess realized. And that about sealed the deal. “Bullshit,” she told Afia. “This is fucked up. We’re leaving.”

  It was right about then that the shooting began.

  “There was nowhere to go,” Jess said as she lay in the dark, listening to the rain fall. “It was a targeted hit, and we were the targets. Panra, too, though she must have planned on getting out of there clean.”

  She wondered if Burke had fallen asleep on her, but then he squeezed her hand and she knew he was there.

  “They were on top of the houses,” she continued. “Maybe a dozen of them. They cut Panra down first, as she tried to run. Afia just bolted; I think she panicked. She ran to the first open door, but I think she got shot at least once. I heard her cry out.”

  “What about you?” Burke asked.

  “I was shooting,” Jess said. “I was trying to grab Afia, drag her back down the stairs, returning fire at the same time.” She slowed again, remembering how it happened. “I caught a round in my chest, right square in my armor, and it knocked me over the edge of those steep stairs and out of the kill zone. I guess that armor saved my life, but I’ve never felt grateful.”

  Burke didn’t say anything. She was grateful for that, anyway.

  “Yeah, so, my guys were already halfway up the stairs when I came tumbling down. They got past me, and I heard them open fire, but there wasn’t much they could do, not with Haji all lined up on those rooftops like that. Grieves gave the order to fall back, and the guys hustled me back downstairs, and they called in the Apaches.”

  “And Afia?”

  Jess swallowed. “She survived. The insurgents cleared out real quick as soon as we dropped back. We tried to chase them up the mountainside, but it wasn’t any use. They knew the terrain better, knew the shortcuts. And they took Afia with them.”

  She knew she could leave it at that and Burke wouldn’t press her, knew he would get the point or as much as he needed. But she’d been over there too much in the last couple of days, and she needed Burke to know what she knew. She needed to believe he would understand.

  So she told Burke how Grieves had been forced to call off the hunt, how she’d cussed him out and fought her guys all the way back to the OP. They’d left without Afia, left her to die, and though Jess could see Grieves was distraught about it, she knew he would never have abandoned any of his marines.

  But Afia wasn’t a marine. She wasn’t even American. Her life simply wasn’t worth sacrificing marines for. That’s how the brass saw things, anyway.

  Jess told Burke how she’d cried, lain in her bunk and tried not to look at Afia’s stack of Archie comics, tried not to think too hard about going out beyond the wire herself, going AWOL, back into the village and beyond to try to find Afia and bring her back, whatever was left of her.

  She’d been pretty close to doing it too, and then Afia had turned up again, tortured and brutalized, struggling to walk the last hundred yards to the wire.

  She told Burke about the shot, and how Afia had died, and how her men had dragged her back to the wire and left Afia dead on the road, her blood in the dust. She told Burke how she hadn’t cried after that, not once.

  “It fucked me up,” she said. “After that, I couldn’t have cared less why we were put in that valley. My purpose was one thing: kill Haji. And that’s what I fucking did, Burke.”

  He didn’t say anything. He was still holding her hand.

  “I finished my tour and I came home to Deception, and I realized pretty quick that I had no reason to be there. My marriage was going to shit, there weren’t any jobs, and I wasn’t done killing insurgents yet, not by a mile.”

  “So you went back.”

  “I reenlisted. I pushed hard to get back to the valley. I got lucky; they needed more women for the engagement teams, and I had experience. I had a rapport with the women in the villages.”

  She snorted.

  “I didn’t give a shit about engagement, not at that point. I said the right things to my COs, and I acted the part, but all I really cared about was getting those bastards back for what they did to Afia.”

  “And did you?”

  “Not enough of them. And then Ty went and got himself killed, and they sent me back home, and somewhere along the way some doctor had a look at me and pronounced me fucked in the head. They gave me some meds and hooked me up with Lucy, and it was right about that time that Kirby and his homeboys started sniffing around after their lost package. And that about gets us to the part where you showed up.”

  Burke hesitated. “Do the meds help at all?”

  “The meds make me even number than I am without. I don’t like being numb, Burke. I stopped taking them.”

  “All right,” he said.

  She let out a long breath of air. “Honest
ly, I’ve spent a long time wondering why I didn’t have the good sense to die over there with Afia. Everything that came after has been absolute shit.”

  He started to talk. She squeezed his hand to shut him up.

  “But on the plus side,” she said, “I sure learned how to kill people pretty good over there. And that’s going to come in real handy tomorrow.”

  He tried speaking again, and she knew whatever he tried to say would be heartfelt and sweet and utterly useless. She leaned over and kissed him. “Don’t try and fix me, Burke,” she said. “Just try and get some sleep, if you can.”

  Fifty-Four

  Mason and Jess woke in the predawn, when the darkness outside began to fade, and the forest and rocks appeared as vague silhouettes beyond the cave entrance. The rain had stopped falling, but the wind was still blowing, and the ground was wet where they lay inside the cave. Lucy had weaseled her way between them, but she stirred when Mason did, grumbled and moved back toward the rear of the cave again.

  Mason propped himself up, looked outside, watched the light grow, inexorable. He heard Jess rustling beside him, and then she sat up too and rested her head on his shoulder.

  “Burke?” she said.

  He glanced at her.

  “I don’t really want to die today,” she said. “Not anymore.”

  Now he really looked at her, and she was watching him, and he leaned in and kissed her, took her in his arms and held on to her.

  This time was different from the first times, on the troller. This was something more intimate still, like they both of them knew to hold on to this, savor it, before the violence to come.

  They moved slowly, wanting it to last, drawing warmth from each other, and strength. The cave seemed to shrink around them, as if time had slowed or even stopped altogether—but of course it hadn’t; the gray daylight seeping into their cave was proof, and soon enough the tides would turn and Kirby Harwood and the others would be here. And anyway, Lucy groaned from the back of the cave, like she couldn’t believe they were going to make her endure this again, and that was enough to break the spell and send Jess into fits of laughter, and Mason had to laugh too, and when the laughter died away, Jess wrapped her arms around him and pulled him deeper into her, her hands on his back, urging him faster, and she laughed again as she came, and then he was coming too, driving down into her and seeing stars behind his closed eyes.