Then Sergeant Rodriguez stood for the final act, roll call. One by one he read the names of the platoon’s soldiers. “Private Acosta—”
“Present.” Acosta stood.
“Specialist Alexander—”
“Present.”
Until Rodriguez reached Fowler’s name. “Private Fowler.” Silence. “Private Fowler.” Silence.
“Priv-ate Fow-ler!” Angry this time, almost desperate. Rodriguez let the silence hang, giving Fowler one last chance to return to his buddies. And when the truth of his absence could no longer be ignored—
“Sergeant Gentry—”
“Present.”
The man, gone. The platoon, alive.
When Rodriguez finished calling roll, Weston connected his iPod to speakers beside the podium and played the long, mournful notes of Taps. The soldiers of 3rd Platoon shuffled their feet and stared at the boots and rifle and helmet and waited. Finally the song ended and the men drifted away in ones and twos, murmuring to one another.
Weston turned to Rodriguez. “Thank you for that roll call, Sergeant. Well done.”
“Your speech, too, sir.”
“I’d like to speak to you in private.”
SOLDIERS CALLED the northeast corner of the base Zombieland. Here, maintenance units dumped vehicles that couldn’t be salvaged and garbage too toxic to burn. A blown-out Stryker and three Humvees sat together, their wheels missing. The vehicles were less than two years old, but already they looked prehistoric, their paint flecking off, bits of rust creeping in.
Weston peeked inside the trucks, making sure they were alone. Most soldiers considered Zombieland bad luck and avoided it, but some guys came here to smoke hash. “You know, a couple years, we’re gone, these’ll still be here,” Weston said. “Hajj kids playing jungle gym on them. We should get rid of ’em. They’re bad for morale.”
“You know what’s bad for morale, Lieutenant?”
“What’s that, First Sergeant?”
“Shooting your own fucking men.”
“You see an alternative? Or did you want him to come back here and narc?”
“I would have handled it.”
“How? Told him that buying smack by the kilo was the new COIN program? How did this even happen, Rodriguez? That pickup should take five minutes. Even if you’re testing the stuff. You guys get a circle jerk going?”
“All of a sudden, out of nowhere, he got some balls, decided to snoop. Improving as a soldier, Lieutenant? I had to bite my lip so I didn’t laugh when you said that. As a soldier, he sucked. Truth is the unit’s safer without him. Puta.”
“Rodriguez—”
“Tell me I’m wrong.”
“Enough, Sergeant.”
“Don’t make like you care about him any more than I do, Lieutenant. You’re even colder than me, only you’re better at hiding it.”
“It’s not about whether I feel sorry for him, Sergeant. It’s a problem. Don’t you get it? A KIA means my after-action report gets read all the way up to brigade. Losing a man on a routine patrol looks bad. Worst case, somebody decides the whole thing sounds weird, sends a couple guys to ask the squad what really happened. Maybe even goes over to the village, starts trying to figure out how a shooter just vanished into thin air. It’s unlikely, but it’s possible. You want that?”
“I’m not the one who shot him, Lieutenant.”
“Thanks for that insight. Long as nobody talks, we should be fine. I used an AK, so even if there’s an autopsy nothing’s going to show up.”
“Nobody’s going to talk. Not when we’re out there every day.”
“All right then.” Truth was that neither Fowler’s family nor anyone else had any reason to suspect what had happened. Guys died over here every day. A standard two-paragraph press release marked their deaths.
The Department of Defense announced today the death of a soldier who was supporting Operation Enduring Freedom.
Pfc. Richard Edward Fowler, 20, of Midland, Tex., died in Zabul province, Afghanistan, of wounds suffered when enemy forces attacked his unit with small arms fire. He was assigned to the 1st Battalion, 17th Regiment, 7th Stryker Brigade Combat Team, 2nd Infantry Division, Ft. Lewis-McChord, Tacoma, Wash.
Fowler’s hometown newspaper back in Texas would add a few paragraphs, throw in quotes from Fowler’s parents, maybe a buddy or two. Not a girlfriend. Fowler didn’t have one. The guy might even have died without breaking his cherry. Too bad for him. His friends would update his Facebook page for a few weeks. Then Ricky Fowler would be forgotten. One day his name would wind up on a memorial somewhere.
“You’re right,” Weston said. “Fowler shouldn’t be a problem. You sure nobody’s going to talk.”
“Coleman’s the only one who might, and I’ll keep an eye on him.”
“Good. What about the stuff?”
“I’m no chemist, but it looks good. When’s your high-speed buddy coming?”
Weston shrugged.
“Sooner we get rid of it, the better.”
“Agreed.”
“Kinda weird, isn’t it, Lieutenant?”
“What?”
“We’re partners now. Blood brothers. White boy from Florida and a gangbanger from Chula Vista. Might as well get each other’s names tattooed on our asses, because there’s no going back.”
Rodriguez was right, Weston realized. Together they’d committed crimes that could land them in jail for life. Whether they liked each other was irrelevant. “You sorry we did this, Rodriguez? Got involved in this shit?”
Rodriguez shook his head.
“Not even after this, you know, hiccup?”
“Nope.”
“Me neither.”
COLEMAN YOUNG SAT on his bunk in the back left corner of 1st Squad’s hutch. He put in his earbuds and turned up his music. Didn’t help much, but at least it gave him a chance to think. The bunk above him, Fowler’s bunk, was empty now. His stuff had been inventoried and bundled into a green footlocker. Soon enough, Weston would come by with Fowler’s helmet and tags and boots. He’d wrap them up, put them in the footlocker. They’d ship it back to Texas, and Fowler would be gone for good.
Young opened the footlocker. Fowler didn’t have much in the way of personal effects: The Stand by Stephen King, DVDs of The Office, a cheap laptop, last year’s Cowboys cheerleaders calendar. And a packet of letters from his folks. Fowler had saved them neatly in a Ziploc bag. He’d been a mama’s boy, no doubt. The letters were written in a cheery red scrawl on sheets of pink paper. Fowler had told Young that his mom was a teacher. For sure she had teacher’s handwriting, that I believe in you, you can do better if you just apply yourself handwriting. Must have been fifty letters. Young didn’t think anybody could have that much to write about, much less Ricky Fowler’s moms from Nowhere, Texas, but the letters kept on coming. One had come yesterday. Posted weeks ago. Posted before Fowler died.
Before Fowler got murdered.
Maybe Fowler hadn’t been cut out for soldiering, but he’d been a decent enough guy. The whole thing put a knot in Young’s stomach. He didn’t believe for a second that Fowler’s death was a coincidence. He’d wondered for a while whether Rodriguez was buying drugs. But he’d figured on a few ounces of hash. What Fowler had said was kilos of heroin. Industrial-strength. Young was from Oak Cliff, a tough part of southwestern Dallas. He knew guys who dealt. But nothing like this. You had to be seriously connected even to think about that kind of weight. Otherwise the dudes on the other end took it from you and put a bullet in you so you didn’t come back on them.
Young was sure that Rodriguez wasn’t keeping the stuff at FOB Jackson for long. Too risky. Some of the minesweeping dogs around here had been drug sniffers back home before they got retrained. What was he doing with it? Had to be a bigger gang involved. Or maybe helo pilots. They could go from base to base easy enough.
Young wished he could bust Rodriguez, and whoever was working with him. But Young had nothing but smoke for evidence, and not the
good kind. Sure, he could protect himself better than Fowler. But outside the wire, anything could happen. He didn’t know whether he could afford to have Rodriguez on his back.
He looked once more through the footlocker, Ricky Fowler’s sad legacy, and snapped its top closed. Coward, he whispered to himself. Maybe he was. But unless he could be sure that an investigation wouldn’t come back to bite him, he was keeping his mouth shut as tight as that locker.
6
C-17 GLOBEMASTER, ONE HUNDRED MILES WEST OF BAGRAM AIR BASE, AFGHANISTAN
The Globemaster was a four-engine Air Force jet built for carrying capacity, not for comfort. Two hundred fifty soldiers sat packed like a tin of well-armed sardines in rows five across and benches on either side.
Wells was on the right aisle eight rows back. He’d come to Afghanistan on a flight like this years before, but the mood had been different. Better, to be precise. Back then, the war had been younger. Wells had landed with a unit arriving at Bagram for the first time. On this flight, the soldiers were heading back from their two-week midtour leaves. The ones who’d had good trips home missed their families and friends already. The ones who hadn’t were upset they’d blown their shot at freedom. All of them knew that they wouldn’t be leaving again until their tours were finished.
Mostly they wanted to catch up on sleep. Before takeoff, the soldier next to Wells tapped three tiny white pills from a bottle of generic drugstore ibuprofen. He had a teenager’s mustache, wispy and brown, and a teenager’s faith in the power of chemically induced happiness.
“Ativan,” he said, when he noticed Wells looking. “Girlfriend get ’em to me. Knock you right out. You don’t even dream.” He offered Wells the bottle.
“No, thanks.”
“Your loss. Wake me when it’s over. And if I slobber on you, don’t be afraid to stick an elbow out.”
The soldier dry-swallowed the pills and closed his eyes as the engines spooled up. Ten minutes later, as they leveled off, he grunted, “What,” to no one and fell into a head-forward trance. Every so often, his thick pink tongue edged out of his mouth.
Wells closed his eyes. His years in Afghanistan and Pakistan had taught him patience, how to escape the world around him. As the jet winged east and the voices around him wound down, he thought about Anne.
They’d had mostly good months since his mission to Saudi Arabia. One night in late March, he’d made himself tell her what happened over there. They were walking their dog, Tonka, in the woods north of her house, first-growth New Hampshire forest that had never faced an ax. After months of cold, the night was unseasonably warm, shirtsleeve weather. Thick chunks of snow slid down the firs as the forest crackled awake from the winter. Wells spoke slowly, wanting to get every detail right. He even told Anne about the jihadi he’d shot in the back in Jeddah, probably the lowest moment in all his years in the field. She wrapped her arm in his and didn’t interrupt.
“Feels good to open your mouth, doesn’t it?” she said when he was finished. “And the world didn’t end.”
“I’m sticking you with something you don’t deserve.”
“I’m glad to have it.”
“Do you think I should go after them?”
“Saeed and Mansour?” The Saudi princes who had created the terrorist cell responsible for the mayhem Wells had tried to stop. They were near the top of the royal family, untouchable and living in luxury in Riyadh. “If you think you can get them and get away with it? Eight ball says yes.”
Wells hadn’t expected that answer. Anne worked as a cop in North Conway. She was even-keeled and not inclined to vengeance. Unlike him.
“What about the rule of law, all that good stuff?”
“Yes. All that. Under normal circumstances. This time, it’s you or nothing.”
They walked for a while, listening to branches crack under the snow.
“No one’s going to touch those guys for years,” Wells said eventually. “They’ve got too much protection. But eventually they’ll relax. Everyone does.”
She looked at him. “Almost everyone.”
THEY WENT HOME and made love, and life fell into the best kind of groove for a while. Wells spent his days volunteering at an animal shelter in Conway. The shelter workers put down any dogs judged as a threat. Wells worked with the ones who had escaped the first culling, dogs who let themselves be petted even as they pulled back their lips to show their big yellow teeth. He soothed them in a low, reassuring voice and knelt beside them in their pens, waiting for them to relax.
A lot of them couldn’t be saved. There was Nick, a black pit bull with cigarette burns cratered across his belly, docile with men but uncontrollable around women. Jimmy, a one-eyed German shepherd who cowered hopelessly in a corner of his cage. Rabbit, a slobbery husky who seemed ready for adoption until he attacked a pug, tearing off half her ear before Wells pulled him away. As much cruelty as Wells had seen, he couldn’t understand the sheer wickedness of people who tortured animals for sport.
Even so, working with the dogs soothed him. He saw that the most vicious were the most frightened. He learned to retreat from their attacks without even raising his voice. And he saved a few.
“I’m going soft in my old age,” he said to Anne one night, back from the shelter.
“I don’t think so.” She stretched her legs over his lap as they sat on the couch watching Jersey Shore. On-screen, orange-tinted women tore at one another’s shirts. An addiction to reality television might have been her greatest flaw. “We should go down there next summer,” she said, nodding at the television. “You could beat some sense into those morons.”
“Probably the worst idea you’ve ever had.”
“Actually my ex reminds me of the Situation. My first husband. Though he’s considerably less charming than Sitch.”
“Which one is the Situation again?”
“Like you don’t know. And did you notice the hint I dropped? My first husband, John. Like maybe it’s time for a second.”
“Very subtle. I’m not sure I got it. Now that you’ve explained.” Wells turned off the television. “Would you believe me if I said I’m worried you might get hurt? I don’t mean emotionally either.”
“I’m a big girl. And a licensed peace officer in the state of New Hampshire.”
“I’ve always liked that expression.”
“Big girl?”
“Peace officer. Like you were hired by the city of peace. The opposite of a police officer is a criminal. So would the opposite of a peace officer be a war officer?”
“You’re avoiding the topic at hand, John.”
“Not avoiding it. Outrunning it with wit and wisdom.”
“You should know better than to rely on those.”
“And you know what happened to you-know-who.” Years before, Wells’s former fiancée, Jennifer Exley, had been wounded in an attempt on his life. “These guys, when they decide to come at you, they don’t care about collateral damage. Up here, it seems like a long way from that, but it’s not.”
Anne was silent. Wells stood, looked out the window. The warm months were almost gone. The easy months. The oaks and maples had shed their leaves and were waiting for winter.
“I believe you when you say you’re worried about my safety,” she said. “But it’s my choice, too.”
“Yes and no.”
“Sooner or later, the excuses won’t matter. Even if they’re true. Why don’t you go see Evan, at least? You’ve got a lot to sort out and that’s a good place to start.”
The next day, Wells called Heather, told her he wanted to see his son. A week after that, he headed west to Montana. Now the wheel had swung again, and he was on this jet, bound for the war zone where he’d spent half his adult life.
He wondered if the job — not necessarily this job, but the job — would cost him Anne. Experience said yes. It had cost him everyone else. Though she was still cutting him slack, for now. When Wells told her what Duto wanted, her first words were, “When do you go?
”
He’d gone up from Washington to visit her for a night before flying out. In the morning she gave him a present, a neatly wrapped box about the size of a hardcover book. “Should I open it now or later?”
“Now. I want to be sure you’ll like it.”
“I’ll like it.”
In fact, Wells wasn’t very good at getting gifts. He was so self-contained that he wanted very little. Not that he insisted on living like a monk. He’d given away most of his money, but he still had plenty saved. And if he found something that he thought he would use, like a new motorcycle, he would buy it. But he had no interest in accumulating possessions for their own sake. Brand names and new clothes meant nothing to him. He didn’t want much, and what he wanted, he had.
In other words, buying presents for him was a nightmare.
Anne spun her finger, Stop stalling and open it. Inside, Wells found a pair of aviator sunglasses, gold Ray-Bans. “They’re vintage. That means they’re old.”
“They’re great. Thank you.” Wells put them on, went into the bathroom, and checked himself out. “Nice,” he said. “I look like the sidekick in an eighties action movie. The guy who gets killed a half hour in.”
“I think they’re very Dirty Harry. You really like them?”
“I do.” He came back into the bedroom and picked her up.
“They’re sexy.”
“You’re sexy.” He kissed her, chastely at first and then openmouthed. He laid her on the bed as Tonka grumbled and jumped off. She was wearing only a T-shirt and sweatpants.
She smirked. “I want you to leave them on.”
“That’s kinda creepy.”
She ran her tongue across her upper lip, intentionally lewd. “Remember I’m from the generation that grew up with Internet porn.”
“I thought nice girls didn’t watch porn.”
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