The Keeper

by George C. Chesbro

The three other men at the table looked around sharply, and there was a faint note of disbelief in Hubert Roberts’ voice as he said, “What?”

  “I’ve heard enough of this bullshit, Admiral,” the man in the brown suit said in an even tone as he looked directly at Jade. “I can assure you that the President won’t want to hear about any court martial of Captain Aden, because he most assuredly will not want the public to hear anything about this whole sorry episode.”

  The bald, sweating man in the dark suit abruptly stood up and pounded his fist on the table as he glared at the man sitting to the other side of Roberts. “You’re exceeding your authority!” he shouted. “You can’t just hush this up! The Army has a right to -!”

  “Be quiet and sit down, Stanley,” the other man said in the same calm tone. “The Army should count its blessings, since there’ll be no court martial of Sergeant Bolo either, and it sounds to me like he damn well deserved to get his balls shot off.” He paused to wait for the man he had addressed as Stanley to sink back into his chair. Then he turned to Roberts and continued, “The Navy is getting to be a real pain in the ass, Admiral, and this administration is getting more than a little tired of being embarrassed by you people. You’ve just gone through three years of the most incredibly stupid foul-ups where servicemen lost their lives, and then you complicated the foul-ups by even more inane attempts at covering them up, blaming homosexuals, and then you top it all off with that shit at Tailgate. Within the past seventy-two hours our nation has achieved a spectacular military victory in this part of the world, perhaps in part due to the intelligence Captain Aden gathered during her remarkable run across the desert. The Secretary of Defense will not risk having reports of that victory supplanted in newspaper headlines by the story of a beautiful and heroic servicewoman demanning some damn fool of an Army sergeant who raped her. This administration does not want the Navy to make a laughingstock of itself again, Admiral. Now, you’ll offer Captain Aden the option we discussed earlier. Considering her personal situation, I have no doubt she’ll find your proposal both generous and acceptable. Good day to you, gentlemen, and good luck to you, Captain.”

  Jade watched as the man in the brown suit with blue eyes and a deep tan rose unhurriedly from his chair and saluted her. She nodded in reply, and then he stepped down from the platform and walked toward the open end of the hangar, his footsteps echoing in the vast, empty space. The two men in dark suits, their faces grim, rose together and walked quickly after him, leaving Jade alone with her commanding officer. Vice Admiral Hubert Roberts looked slightly stunned and decidedly uncomfortable.

  Jade wondered if the emotions this man she had once so admired was now feeling were akin to the humiliation she had felt when she was raped. She wished it were so, but she doubted it. She had long ago grown accustomed to the curiously adolescent behavior and attitudes of the U.S. Navy toward the women in its ranks, and so she would not be surprised if Roberts blamed her for what had happened, and his embarrassment at the hands of the political operative. What did surprise her was the depth of anger and resentment reflected in his eyes as he glared at her. His jaw was tightly clenched, and white lines had appeared at the corners of his mouth.

  Jade suppressed a sigh, and she struggled to keep her face impassive as she stared back at the lone man sitting behind the table on the platform before her. Now she felt emotionally spent and empty. She knew that the most extreme measures available to the admiral would not be taken against her; she would not be deliberately exposed to unnecessary danger on some future assignment, she would not face a court martial and possible imprisonment, and she would not even be officially reprimanded.

  But her military career was at an end.

  CAIRN-ON-THE-HUDSON, NEW YORK

  Two Years Later

  Chapter One

  i

  It stank, this bizarre fish-and-metal catch of the day, and after unloading the shad and separating them from the worthless, PCB-tainted bass, catfish and carp, Jack Trex moved off downwind, sat down on a piling and stared at the thing left tangled and dangling in his nets.

  The stump of the left leg he had lost in Vietnam ached, and he absently loosened the straps of his wood, steel and plastic prosthesis as he continued to study the rotting carcass suspended over the stern of his trawler. The creature’s head and much of its hindquarters were gone, and what was left was so decomposed as to make certain identification of the species impossible, but Trex knew that the only fish of that size native to the Hudson was sturgeon, and so he assumed that was what it was. If all he had snagged in his nets was a dead sturgeon, he would have unceremoniously dumped it back in the water and gone about his business of harvesting shad, the only commercial fish left in the river, as they made their annual spring run from the Atlantic up the Hudson River to spawn. But this creature had been caught once before, and tampered with; strapped to its back was a stainless steel box the size of a briefcase. As President of the Cairn Fishermen’s Association Jack Trex considered it his responsibility, before disposing of the carcass, first to find out exactly what the creature was, and then why it had been tethered to a metal box and released into the river.

  Trex was an educated man, but like most fishermen who worked the planet’s waters he believed in omens, and he had a very bad feeling about this day’s mysterious catch of flesh and steel, an irrational but persistent feeling that it could change his life forever, and he was going to be very careful how he handled the situation.

  He had lived in Cairn, one of several small riverfront communities between New York City to the south and Haverstraw to the north, all his life. He lived with his wife in the same house on the banks of the Hudson where his parents and grandparents had lived. Like his father and grandfather before him, he was a fisherman, but, unlike his forebears, he was unable to make a living solely from fishing, and after the run of shad in the spring he worked the rest of the year as a carpenter and mechanic here at the Cairn Marina and in other boatyards. He had an almost mystical attachment to the river. Once, before the General Electric plant to the north had dumped into the river tons of poisonous PCBs that permeated the fatty tissue of fish and before the industries and towns that had sprung up along its banks had begun using the great waterway as a sewer and waste dump, it had been possible to harvest and legally sell dozens of the species of fish that lived in the waters. Although the problem with the PCBs remained, after more than twenty-five years of strenuous efforts by environmental groups like Clearwater and the Cairn Fishermen’s Association, the river was reasonably clean again. Jack Trex was determined to keep it that way, which was why he had more than a passing interest in the remains of the large, unidentified creature he had netted and the strange, ominous device that had been attached to it.

  But the bad feeling remained. He was not certain to whom he should report his catch, or what questions he should ask. He decided he needed advice, and he strapped on the prosthesis that was his left leg and walked up the dock to a pay phone that was mounted on the outside wall of the marina’s office and clubhouse. He would ask the opinion of the only person he had ever met who seemed as at home on the water in all sorts of weather as he did, and who could handle sail as well as power boats, which he could not. He would call the association’s newly hired riverkeeper.

  ii

  Jahli Aden, called “Jade” by her friends as much for the brilliant green color of her eyes as the play on her name, was spending the late Saturday morning helping her son, Max Jr., with his homework when the call came from Jack Trex. Jade told her boss she would be at the marina in fifteen minutes, then hung up and went back into the kitchen where the seventeen-year-old sat at the table with his book in front of him, staring out the window as he waited for his mother to resume helping him. Jade went over to where the boy was sitting and gently caressed the purplish patch under his left eye where the swelling from a blow he had received at school two days before was just starting to go down.

  “Mom’s got things to do, my big barrel of baked be
ans,” Jade said, kissing her son on the cheek. “I’ll be back in a little while.”

  The tall, muscular boy with the blond hair, brown eyes and broad shoulders who reminded Jade so much of his father, looked up at her and grinned. “All right, my little wagon of … warbling warthogs.”

  “Keep working on that math by yourself for a while.”

  “It’s hard, Mom.”

  “Hey, kiddo, if God had wanted everything to be easy, she wouldn’t have invented schools and homework. Now, study.”

  On her way out of the house Jade paused at the open door of her small office and study, where her daughter Fatima had been intently studying her Torah and Hebrew texts ever since returning from schul earlier in the morning. The girl was hunched over the rolltop desk in the office underlining passages in one of the three books she had open before her. Not wanting to disturb her daughter, Jade blew Fatima a silent kiss before leaving the house and climbing into the Jeep Cherokee parked in the driveway.

  During her drive to the marina on the river road, with the blue of the Hudson on her right and rows of restaurants, art galleries, boutiques and craft shops on her left, Jade found herself reflecting on her good fortune of late, and how much she owed to the one-legged Vietnam veteran and fisherman she was on her way to meet.

  She knew things could have turned out very differently, and decidedly worse.

  The Navy’s offer had indeed been generous and acceptable; in fact, it had been impossible to refuse. It had been made clear to her that her military career was over, but the Navy, in light of the multiple scandals it had endured in recent years, had not wanted to pursue any course of formal disciplinary action against her that might have resulted in yet more bad publicity, or more charges of rampant sexism that could conceivably have led to the forced disclosure or leaking of very sensitive and highly classified information, including the fact that for years Jade had been a covert intelligence operative spying on friend as well as foe in the Middle East. In return for her total silence concerning not only the incident with Sergeant Henry Bolo but also virtually everything about her military career, she would be honorably discharged and receive a full pension. She would also receive her dead husband’s pension, to which she was entitled in any case, and she and her children would continue to receive all of the medical and other benefits to which a veteran with her years of service would normally be entitled.

  Jade glanced out the passenger side window to watch as a trio of sailboats glided majestically through the water on the vast expanse of river between Haverstraw and the Tappan Zee Bridge that the first Dutch settlers had dubbed the Tappan Sea. Behind them, on the opposite side of the river, a huge tanker was ploughing north in the deep channel.

  Oddly enough, she thought, despite what she still felt were betrayal and injustice in its aftermath, the consequences of Henry Bolo’s attack on her had turned out to be a blessing in disguise. Had the incident not occurred, she would have remained in the Navy indefinitely, probably retiring as she neared sixty only to find that her children had become complete strangers and were lost to her forever. Instead, she had returned to civilian life upwards of two decades ahead of schedule to find her children not yet total strangers and lost to her, but definitely in need of her time, love and help.

  She had returned from Saudi Arabia to be mustered out from her home base in Connecticut. From there she had gone back with Max Jr. and Fatima to New York City, where she had been born and raised in a Moslem enclave in Brooklyn, where her parents still lived. Only then had she begun to realize the enormity of the personal problems her teenage children faced.

  Max Jr. had been born developmentally disabled, but it was not his mild mental retardation that bothered Jade, for she considered him not much slower than many of the men she had served with in the Navy or with whom she’d dealt in civilian life. In Jade’s view it was not life in general that Max Jr. had to survive, only high school. Jade considered Max Jr.’s most severe handicap to be not retardation but a chronic passivity that was the polar opposite of the aggressiveness and competitive spirit characteristic of his father, a Naval test pilot and instructor she had met and with whom she had fallen in love at Annapolis. They had married at her graduation, and he had died eight years later when an experimental fighter he had been testing had crashed at sea. Max Jr. had his father’s height, solid, lithe build and good looks, but apparently not his heart, and this greatly saddened Jade.

  At school Max Jr. allowed other boys, some of them considerably smaller and younger, to effectively use him as a punching bag, attacking not only his body but also his soul with impunity, making him the butt of countless cruel jokes. Jade, who could maim or kill an opponent with her hands or feet in a fraction of a second, had cautiously tried to teach her son a few fundamental techniques of self-defense, but the boy had seemed embarrassed by the fact that his mother possessed such skills, and he had resisted instruction.

  Considering his other disabilities, Jade felt her son would never be able to live independently and with dignity unless he could somehow learn to handle the bullies he would meet in every walk of life, stalkers of the spirit who were attracted to the weak and helpless like maggots to dead flesh. He had to somehow learn to create and defend a space, however small, that was uniquely his and inviolable, and Jade had not yet found a way to teach him to do that. She desperately hoped that his passivity was the result of childhood trauma connected to the untimely death of his father and that he would one day grow out of it, but she was not optimistic.

  Neither she nor her husband had spent much time with their children during their earliest, formative years; because of the nature of her assignment, she had not even been able to join with them to grieve until weeks after their father had died. There was no question in her mind but that both of her children had suffered severe emotional damage as a result of their parent’s blind dedication to their military careers. This was a fact, but it was not something Jade mindlessly feared, for she was determined to eventually repair much, if not all, of that damage. What she feared most, what cramped her heart, was the possibility that her son was simply a coward.

  Fatima’s problems were altogether different. The proud and self-reliant fifteen-year-old was blessed with the piercing intelligence of her father. Jade loved both her children fiercely, yet despite the fact that she saw herself each time she looked at Fatima’s raven-black hair, olive skin and brilliant green eyes, she felt closer to Max Jr. Fatima, although lacking the maternal link considered vital by orthodoxy, was drawn to Judaism and Jewish mysticism in a way her Jewish father had never been. Indeed, Jade suspected that the girl’s ardent devotion to her faith could be as much a mechanism for maintaining an emotional connection to her dead father as it was a means for meeting her spiritual needs, but she was not sure. Jade had never been able to understand religious faith, and now this same disbelief and alienation from religion that had partly caused the schism between her and her devoutly Moslem parents was a wedge between her and her devoutly Jewish daughter. Jade felt that Fatima was constantly pushing her away, or at least keeping her at a distance, preferring the companionship of her Jewish friends and their parents, and their rabbi.

  Jade found it sadly ironic that her Jewish daughter had, in fact, much less in common spiritually with her dead father than had the girl’s Arab mother. For all intents and purposes Max had been an atheist, a fact that had deeply upset his devout parents, who lived in an Israeli kibbutz only a few kilometers from the site where Jade’s grandparents had been evicted from their home thirty years before to make room for a Jewish settlement.

  The fact that Max was Jewish and she was Palestinian had meant nothing to either of them, and they had married over the bitter objections of both their respective sets of parents. They had never regretted their decision; with their demanding, dual careers in the military often keeping them apart for months at a time, they had savored each moment together. They had completely met each other’s needs. But Fatima was different; Fatima’s needs, it
seemed, transcended love, as they apparently transcended everything else to be found in the company of people who did not share her extreme beliefs in the powers of things not of this world and a Jew’s obligations to those things.

  Jade did not care that Fatima was deeply religious, and she was likewise indifferent to the fact that Fatima had chosen her father’s cultural heritage over her own. These things were not important to her. What disturbed Jade was her daughter’s outright rejection of all things not Jewish, including her mother, and the girl’s anti-intellectual approach to the world and the people in it. Jade detested zealotry, and Fatima was most certainly a zealot. During her career she’d been forced to deal with zealots of all persuasions. She’d been tortured by zealots, and she’d borne witness to the deaths of thousands of men, women and children as a result of their thundering, mindless machinations. Now it seemed her daughter wore the emotional war paint of her enemies, and there was nothing she could do about it.

  These were the deep fault lines Jade had found in her children when her military career had come to an end and she had been forced to spend sufficient time with Max Jr. and Fatima to really look at and listen to them.

  She had not believed that the city environment would heal her children’s wounds or bring them closer to her. She had wanted to work, but in the two years that had passed since her separation from the Navy she had found nothing in New York that suited her. Then she had heard of a job upriver in Cairn she thought she would like; if she got it, they would be able to move from the city to live in a small, riverfront town that boasted good schools and a racially mixed population that included many artists, actors and writers. She wanted to work on the water, and Cairn seemed a place that would promote the three of them coming together as a family, and so she had applied for the position.

  The job of riverkeeper for the Cairn Fishermen’s Association primarily entailed patrolling the Hudson from Palisades, New Jersey, north to West Point, monitoring the activities not only of recreational boaters and commercial shipping traffic but also of industries on the shores along that stretch of the river, reporting on and collecting evidence of illegal waste dumping which she would give to the group’s attorney, who would then take the polluters to court. In her resume she had included everything about her Naval career except for the fact that she had been a covert intelligence operative. She’d suspected that the fact she was a woman might mitigate against her, but she had been hired. She’d learned later that she’d been selected from two dozen applicants. All of the other applicants had been men, many of them local residents who thought it would be nice to be paid for motoring around on the river all day. She’d been offered the job by the association’s board of directors largely at the insistence of Jack Trex, who had argued successfully that the job required someone with professional qualifications, and Jade’s were by far the best.