Freebird

by John Raymond

  The Jeep looked like a rental, even doused in dust. The windshield was all beige, barring the double swipe of the wipers. The plates were California. He didn’t see a driver anywhere, and for a moment he wondered if someone already had a high-power scope on him. Were the crosshairs on his forehead, probing for entry points? But no, he thought. What self-respecting shooter would park his Jeep right out in the open like that?

  Creeping ahead, eyes on the vehicle, Ben was bothered even by the angle of its placement. It was parked so arrogantly at his front steps, as though someone had just cruised in and carelessly jammed on the brakes. The front tires were torqued, and he could see the smeary skid marks behind the rear tires where the vehicle had slid into place on the dust pack. Quietly, he unholstered the Beretta M9 he’d taken with him on the morning’s hike to Comprehensible Bowl and gently laid his backpack on the ground, freeing his shoulder. Stepping lightly the last few yards into his base camp, he made for the cliff wall and hugged the rock as soon as he was within touch. His main arsenal was in the RV, but his M9 was sufficient for his current purposes.

  It took only a few seconds to spot the intruders. They were over on the far edge of his yard, near the cliff, tucked into the coolest midday shadow, sleeping. Two men, arms flung over their faces. Both powerfully built. One white, one black. The white guy’s arms had some shitty, amateur tattoos, possibly resembling a dragon or an eagle. The black guy’s arms were unmarked. But already Ben didn’t need any more clues. He knew exactly who these guys were. Those arms belonged to Doobie and Slick, his brothers from SEAL Team 7.

  He holstered his gun, his cells still tingling with concern. What the fuck were Doobie and Slick doing out here? They’d never come uninvited, although maybe they would; it was hard to say. But most likely they wouldn’t, and that meant there had to be some official reason for this invasion, some ulterior, bureaucratic motive. A dark thought blew into his mind: What if Command knew what he’d been doing the past few weeks? What if Doobie and Slick were here to arrest him? It made him sick to contemplate. Or was it possible they had some other terrible news to deliver? The only thing to do was stomp over to their shadow and find out.

  “Trespassers,” Ben grumbled, approaching the supine bodies. “Just my goddamn luck.”

  “The hermit returns,” said Slick, opening one eye. “About fucking time, dude.”

  “Moses down from the mountain,” said Doobie, not bothering to remove his burly arm from his face. “Where’s your tablets, dickweed? You lost your fucking tablets already? God’s gonna be real pissed if you lost his tablets.”

  “No stone tablets anymore,” said Slick. “Tablets are old-school, man. God just beams all his shit into your brain these days. Isn’t that right, Mac?” Mac was short for Maccabee, or the Last Maccabee, the most enduring of his team nicknames, slapped on him almost two decades ago. Among all his nicknames, he disliked it the least.

  “Wireless communication,” Slick went on. “God don’t use no tablets anymore. God upgraded.”

  “We don’t get signals out here, anyway,” Ben said, joining the banter. He was still concerned about their motives and watched them closely for any sudden movements, but if they’d come to ambush him, they were following a strange protocol. He didn’t sense any imminent threat to his person. “This air is too clean for signals.”

  “No fucking shit, the air is clean,” Doobie said, finally sitting up and planting his feet on the ground. He pulled his phone from his pocket and tapped the glass. “Dead air, more like it. I can’t get shit out here. Can’t get my scores. No idea if my boys are up or what.”

  “Braves today?” Slick said.

  “Braves by three. You know it.”

  “Ha! Good luck, son. You never learn.”

  And with that, Doobie and Slick wandered off into baseball esoterica, leaving Ben on the sidelines, as usual. He followed the jock talk more than he normally would, seeking subtexts in the names and numbers, but he couldn’t find any.

  And what about the Moses stuff? Was there some undercurrent to that he didn’t understand? He didn’t think so, not from these guys. Doobie was always talking Old Testament in Ben’s presence. He was a giant, ginger-skinned guy from Georgia, raised by Evangelicals, and he’d never met a Jew until his first day in BUD/S with Ben. To this day, Jews remained a great novelty in his life, objects of major historical significance. He enjoyed nothing more than reminding Ben of his Chosen status.

  “God must’ve told you to get your boys a beer by now, ” said Doobie, interrupting his own rant about the Braves’ batting order. “What kind of God you got out here, anyway? I heard your desert God is a jealous God, but this is just inhospitable.”

  “So I guess you guys are staying awhile,” Ben said. “That’s cool. Make yourselves at home. Bathroom’s over there.” He pointed at a rock. “I’ll see what I got in the fridge.”

  “Don’t knock yourself out, bro.”

  Ben left his old friends talking in the shade, knowing they would reveal their purpose only when they were good and ready. These guys had driven for hours, they hadn’t seen him for months, they wanted to bust his balls for a while before they got down to business. They wanted to feel him first.

  Walking to the RV, he reassured himself that the signals were normal, as far as he could tell. On the other hand, though, the guys knew that normal was exactly how they’d normally be expected to act. So it was possible the very normality of their behavior was just a disguise for their true, abnormal agenda, which was what? The thought chilled him. Were Slick and Doobie here to bring him in? Was it possible they were perpetrating an elaborate trick of normality, acting exactly as they would have acted if they had no suspicion at all? His paranoia jumped, hit a wall, and jumped again. There was no way to know and no way not to wonder.

  Inside his RV, the questions continued to attack his mind: What did Slick and Doobie know? What were they hiding? What were they unable to hide? He cracked the mini-fridge and pulled out three Hamm’s, wondering, wondering. As much as people had ridiculed Rumsfeld and his gnomic formulation about known unknowns and unknown unknowns, the sentiment made perfect sense to him. Some things you knew you didn’t know, and some things you didn’t even know you didn’t know. Both had the power to kill you.

  He set the three beers down and took his LR-308 from the closet in the bedroom. The nerves in his body were mildly spazzing. All the doubts and worries and speculation he’d been keeping under control in the desert were now flowing back through the gates. His silent peace was once again disturbed.

  In the two weeks since completing the Mission, he’d been doing pretty well, all told, although much had transpired. The event had gone off more or less as planned, but the aftermath had been harder to predict. If the goal had been something surgical and discreet, he hadn’t succeeded. The news of Michael Holmes’s death had gotten out quickly and been judged significant, and had become widely commented upon.

  The story had achieved a low to medium level of infamy. It wasn’t a huge story. It didn’t open a hole in the very fabric of the mass media, as Ben had momentarily feared it might. It was no O.J. trial, no 2000 recount, no octuplets. It wasn’t one of those black holes sucking the nation’s head into its own asshole. And because it was not all-engulfing, Ben found it was hard to gauge its size at all. To him, a person with a vested interest, the story obviously seemed pretty big. He spotted it on TV in the bar, on magazines at the grocery store. But to most people, the event probably registered as a mere curiosity, a minor tag among the thousands of tags that flowed over their screens and crawled out of their phones. Michael Holmes, a powerful corporate leader, had been shot. So what? Among the elite who were the event’s true audience, he had no way to gauge the reception at all. His one conduit to that world was gone.

  A few days into the story, he’d posted a brief, anonymous message to the New Orleans Times-Picayune (Why not let a little guy break the story? was his thinking). The message was succinct, including certain salient details v
erifying his authority, and linked Michael Holmes to the metastasizing cancer of American imperialism and American digital totalitarianism. It ended with a threat: Let Holmes and his fellow fascist oligarchs beware. We will hunt you down if provoked.

  His note had stoked another round of media hyperventilation, and the black hole had momentarily dilated but never achieved terminal suck. The note had been read and discussed, but never on the merits of its arguments, only as the ramblings of a madman. Even the people who might have secretly agreed with him were appalled by his tactics. The note mainly became an object of ridicule. Most everyone agreed, Holmes was a good guy, a consistent supporter of the arts, a great dad.

  Ben had been taking daily refuge at Comprehensible Bowl, awaiting the final death rattles of the news cycle and thinking about next moves. And now these guys were sitting outside in the shade of the bluff. He had to wonder what wheels had been turning outside his view. What unknown unknowns were already on his trail?

  He pulled back the curtain and watched them. No guns were visible. No gestures or eye movements to make him suspect hidden schemes. He’d known these guys a long time; he could read them. He and Doobie had parachuted into Costa Rica back in BUD/S together. They’d fought off a whole bar full of frat guys over a ping-pong game the first day they met. He knew Doobie’s wife, Tiffany, and the whole insanity with her breast cancer when she was pregnant. He’d known Slick almost as long. He’d once stitched a gash along Slick’s inner thigh that led practically to his ball sack. He might have saved Slick’s balls that day. That was a bond you couldn’t easily break.

  And yet, what did the past mean at this moment? What did any of the time he’d spent with these guys tell him about why they were here right now? He might well walk out the door and find them standing there with their .45s drawn, yelling him down, pushing his face into the dirt, all the cute little banter nothing more than a ruse. The smell of his RV was musty and hot. The window needed fixing. Maybe the best move he could make would be to walk out the door with his own Beretta in hand, hog-tying them and getting the hell out of town. If it came to it, he could probably smoke both of them before they made it to the car.

  The sudden inside-out world he’d dropped into was dizzying and terrifying. To kill his brothers? To think that might possibly become the only course? No, no. He wasn’t going there, not yet.

  He pulled three beers from his mini-fridge and realized he already had three beers on the counter and put the first beers away. One thing he knew—he wasn’t climbing into any cars with them, no matter what.

  He plucked his LR-308 off the counter and placed it just behind the front door on his way out, and left the door ajar for easy access. His Beretta was still in the back of his waistband. If the guys pulled anything on him, he might be able to roll inside and get hold of the major firepower.

  Their guns weren’t out when he got back into their shadow. Doobie and Slick were still lying on their rocks. He set their beers near their heads and took a place in the sun, near his tools.

  “Thanks, Moses,” Doobie said, draining half his beer in one draw. “This beer is nice and cold. That’s the sign I’ve been waiting for.”

  “We owe you one, God,” Slick said, toasting the sky. “You did us a solid this time.”

  “Make ’em last,” Ben said. “These are about the only beers for fifty miles in any direction.”

  “Oh, we brought some,” Slick said. “We just wanted one of yours.”

  “Glad you still remember your old friend, beer,” Doobie said. “Thought you were just eating dirt out here.”

  “Yeah, how come you hate the city so much, man?” said Slick. “How far out you need to get, bro?” Slick was from New Jersey, a true loudmouth son of Bayonne. He couldn’t believe that Ben was a Jew at all. Ben resembled none of the Jews of his childhood, with their forelocks and coats, bawling out some contractor on their cell phones at the edge of a construction site.

  “I love the city,” Ben said. “I love all you city people, eating and shitting on top of each other. Sitting in your cars all day. Turns out I just love all of you a lot more when you aren’t around.”

  “Moses is a sensitive dude,” said Doobie.

  “He’s not gonna like what we have to tell him,” said Slick.

  Ben’s nervous system flashed with fireworks, but he kept himself still.

  “We hate to interrupt your precious alone time and all,” Doobie said, “but it couldn’t be helped. There are some powerful men who want to talk to you, dig? Even more powerful than God.”

  Ben’s inner fireworks exploded. His blood shivered with adrenaline. Still, though, he played it calm. A minefield was opening in front of him, and he had yet to understand its geography, let alone map a way through. He needed to stay put, that was all.

  “So this isn’t just a social visit?” he said, and pulled on his beer to cover up his gulping throat.

  “Oh, it’s social,” Doobie said, laughing. “We miss you and everything, if that’s what you’re worried about. We still cry every night since you left, if that’s what you need to hear. That’s the main reason we’re here.”

  “That’s right, queer,” added Slick.

  “But as long as we were driving all the way out here to lay sweet eyes on you, Command wanted us to deliver you a little message, too. They’ve got a little freelance job, if you’re interested.”

  “They couldn’t just call?”

  “Would’ve just called, but you don’t make it real easy, Mac. And then there’s that beautiful face of yours. I need to refresh my memory for, you know, my nightly scrolling.” He mimed a few slow, loving strokes of an invisible, giant, curvaceous dick, adding some ball play at the end for extra comedy. “Had to deliver the message in person.”

  “I didn’t know I was up for any jobs,” Ben said.

  “And yet you filled out the application by being alive. So that’s the first question. Are you open to a job? There’s only one answer.”

  “Just tell me the fucking job.” Ben said. He hoped he was hitting the right tone between nonchalance and prickly amusement so as to maintain the illusion that all was normal on his end, too. Doobie’s next words rattled him even further, though.

  “You watching this whole Michael Holmes thing?” Doobie said.

  Ben gagged and tried to contain the look of shock and dismay on his face. The shrieking insect sound of fear was rising in his ears, and the fight-or-flight fork in the road was fast approaching. The only thought that kept his gun in his pants was one that said: If these guys are trying to take me in, they are coming at it all wrong. Why would they bring up Holmes unless they had absolutely no idea what was really going on?

  “The world is fascinated,” Ben said. “Big news story.”

  “World’s fascinated ’cause it’s fascinating,” Doobie said.

  “I’m fascinated,” Slick agreed. “Celebrity death is fascinating by its nature.”

  “Weird, isn’t it,” Doobie said, “how famous death means more than normal death. I still remember the day the Challenger blew up. Everyone was so fucked up about it. Boo-hoo. These famous people are dead. My uncle died that week, too. No headlines about him.”

  “Dude, you’re fucked,” said Slick. “Those people were heroes. You can’t compare your uncle to them. They were American astronauts.”

  “I’m just saying, death is death. Everyone is special.”

  “Takes a special dude to say that.”

  “Okay, okay,” Ben cut in before the conversation could go too pear shaped. “What’s the job? Jesus Christ.”

  “We just got briefed,” Doobie said. “Here’s the deal. Whoever it was that smoked Holmes was a pro gunslinger. Very efficient, very knowledgeable. The FBI went over all the forensics with us. This wasn’t some amateur job. Dude had training.”

  “And? So?”

  “And so, it changes who they’re looking for, bro. And it changes how they want to go about the looking. This isn’t just a search for some fuck-up psyc
ho out there anymore. They figure they’re looking for a real soldier. Someone with medals. That’s how good the kill was. And for once, they seem like they’re thinking, because they think it might take a soldier to find a soldier. That’s why we’re here. You knew him.”

  Ben’s skin jangled, and he felt sweat streaming on his back. It was incredible that they’d gotten this deep into the conversation and he still wasn’t sure where it was going. Were Doobie and Slick the hunters here, and was he the prey? Or was he the hunter, about to be hired to hunt himself? The conversation could still break in multiple directions. He hoped to God this whole stupid back-and-forth wasn’t just a prelude to the guns coming out. But a SEAL knew when to creep quietly and when to sprint, guns blazing. He was still in the creeping-quietly phase of the operation, if barely.

  “They want your help,” Doobie said. “You’re an intellectual. You might be able to see something we’re missing here.”

  “‘A sniper with brains.’ That’s what they want. For some reason, Stack said you fit the description.”

  “Maybe he felt Mac’s brains with his dick when Mac was deep-throating him that time,” Slick said to Doobie.

  “Nice, hot, wet brains,” Doobie riffed. “Oh yeah. Feel those brains with my big head-shed dick.”

  This went on for a while, a long digression on the mechanics of mind fucking, Ben’s pussy brain, the proper use of contraception while brain fucking, brain dental dams, all of which allowed Ben to squint patiently into the sun, hiding his explosive sense of relief. This was simply too absurd. They would never present such a ludicrously, aggressively coincidental cover story just to bring him in quietly. Of course, there was still the slightest chance they were triple-fucking with him, but he didn’t rate their skills that high. There were just SEALs, after all, not spies, not actors. They weren’t capable of thinking that many steps ahead. The SEALs and Rangers, they were generally pretty stupid guys with extremely high pain thresholds and usually some kind of brutalizing childhood experience goading them to action. They were physical specimens, killing machines. They weren’t spooks.