Music for Love or War

by Martyn Burke

  Being a sniper is one of the more bizarre professions. But definitely a growth industry in this, the crumbling of certainties on one side and the firestorm of certainty on the other. Where men of one side are required to lie in wait for hours so that they can put a bullet into a man from the other side who is too far away to be seen by the naked eye, usually hurling him backwards like he’s been hit by a baseball bat. Or sometimes the target just slumps and vanishes below whatever cover he had thought was impregnable.

  One sniper can spook no end of fighters on the other side. Think of it as the Great White of our fears: unknown, unseen, and striking when least expected. It makes you afraid of the whole damn ocean. Snipers tap into fears that can’t be contained because there’s nothing to contain, to see, to fight against, until that mind-altering moment when someone in a group simply explodes for no apparent reason. It sends fear rocketing through the bravest.

  From what I saw there were two basic types of snipers. A lot of them I could imagine as farm boys who grew up popping gophers from two hundred feet and somehow evolved into staring through a 16x Leupold scope at bigger targets farther away. They usually were the strangely silent ones, weirdly mystical in their reverence for life even as they took it like so many gophers. The other type were the Finger-of-God guys, the ones juiced on adrenaline and channeling whatever furies had been bequeathed them as they feathered that trigger, just knowing it was their duty to implement a verdict from the Almighty.

  Danny didn’t fit into either category. He was all about finding the woman he loved.

  For him, all of it—the sniping, the army, Afghanistan—was all just a means to an end that had nothing to do with any battlefield. Without even a helmet, with only his floppy hat, he would weave amid the fighting, hauling that drag bag of weapons, looking for a hide, sometimes for the hours and hours it would take for that one devastating shot that would wipe out some Ninjas who had been wreaking death from a machine gun nest or a mortar position. Hides could be rooftops, tall grass, dunes, whatever it took to conceal them as they waited.

  Up in that clear, frozen altitude, Danny was like some disheveled kid who never learned to dress properly. His shirt, all the non-regulation yards of it, was billowing so much he sometimes looked like a displaced manta ray wafting its way across the mountain—the exact opposite of everything they taught in sniper school, where they learned to dress up like a Sasquatch in weird camouflage suits or use big rubber bands to tie twigs and long grass onto themselves so they could lie there for hours itching and sweltering, faces painted and bladders bursting while grim instructors watched approvingly.

  Danny was none of that. He was Mr. Hide-in-Plain-Sight and the breaker of all the rules. Even his trigger finger was non-regulation. It looked broken, like part of a pretzel, zigzagging in ways no finger should ever be required to zig or zag.

  Right when you thought Danny had all the invisibility of a circus elephant, he’d suddenly vanish. He’d go utterly invisible sometimes only from a few feet away, blending in with the terrain without even so much as a shadow to show that he was there. On that morning, I looked around and couldn’t find him until I heard a whisper: “So, you actually met Zadran?”

  I saw the dull glint of the big McMillan 50-caliber rifle barely visible through a goat-eaten tangle of juniper twigs on top of a little ridge. “Yeah. I just told you I did.”

  “Did Zadran ever mention me?”

  “No. Why would he?”

  “Just asking.”

  Then silence. “Glass that mountain,” he whispered. “Near those trees. Tell me what you see.” I trained my optics on the mountainside, scanning slowly until I stopped at the same thing Danny was watching through the 16x.

  “See it?” Still whispering. It was an outcropping of granite under what looked like the mouth of a cave somewhere up around eleven thousand feet elevation. And in the linear compression of those scopes that flattened what was a mile away so it looked like it was a hundred yards from you, a looming, heavy machine gun appeared, one of the old Russian Dishkas, lethal enough to bring down a plane. It was manned by a Black Hat, which is what Danny called the Taliban, Zadran, and anyone else who wore black turbans. A black turban on a MAM—a military-aged male—and automatically the guy was a possible candidate for the crosshairs-on-the-chest award.

  This particular Black Hat darted out to fire down at our guys and then ducked back behind the rocks. I didn’t get a good look at him. But Danny did.

  “Aw, shit,” Danny whispered.

  “What’s wrong?”

  “Too complicated to explain.” Danny took out some green range cards and studied his scrawled writing. Then he put his right eye back to the scope and adjusted the focus ring. For several minutes he carried out a ritual of adjustments to his kneepads and then the scope, and then he muttered calculations of wind velocity, air density, and trajectory.

  He painted the outcropping with a laser range finder. “One thousand five hundred and forty meters.”

  “A mile.”

  “No problem. I’m zeroed for one thousand five hundred.” Then a silence that went on forever. And then: “Why are you in this?”

  “In what?”

  “The war. The army. All of it.”

  “What kind of question is that? We’re at ten thousand feet waiting to blow away the local machine gunner and you—”

  “Personal reason? I’ll bet.”

  “It’s all personal.”

  “A woman?”

  “Why the hell would you ask that?”

  “Just a feeling,” he said. Silence. More scope dialing. “I apologize.”

  “Apologize for what?”

  “For getting you into my own personal war. I need someone who’s seen Zadran. And when I heard you guys had got shelled near Khost I knew it had to be Zadran who did it.”

  “Why don’t we concentrate on taking out this machine gun?”

  More silence. Neither of us had looked at the other for over an hour. We were both staring straight ahead, whispering, even though no one was near enough to hear us. Overhead, an Apache gunship flashed past, low and zigzagging like some cosmic elastic band of evasive action was at the controls.

  “You got any more of those honey roasted peanuts?” Danny was whispering even though there was no one anywhere near us.

  “Two bags. You want one?”

  “Not while I’m working. Later.”

  From about a mile away there was a flurry of motion at the cave and the Black Hat reappeared behind the Dishka. He was young and behind him were older men in turbans pointing and giving him instructions.

  “Oh, shit.”

  “What now?”

  “He’s probably only twenty. Twenty-three, tops.”

  “So?”

  “I don’t want to be Charles Whitman,” whispered Danny.

  “Just fire the fucking weapon. Before he wipes out our guys.”

  “But he’s only a kid.”

  “What’s with this Charles Whitman?”

  “The coward in the Texas Tower. Back in the sixties. He started it all. The decline of our whole fucking civilization.” Danny was whispering louder because that same Apache helicopter had circled back and came streaking in, heading toward a ridgeline. Suddenly a rocket-propelled grenade screamed into the air, blowing a hole in the Apache, leaving it rocking and spinning in the air like some giant insect doused with bug spray banned by the EPA.

  “That RPG came from the cave!” I was yelling. No more whispering.

  “Charles Whitman, nice blue-eyed boy, crewcut, early twenties, ex-Marine or something. Climbed all the way up to the top of a clock tower at the University of Texas with a bunch of sniper rifles and started blowing people away. Nineteen-sixty-six. He was the start of it all. The whole decline.”

  From the outcropping in front of the cave, the Black Hat had settled in behind the Dishka, his face emerging over the top of its distinctive round snout that spat flashes of fire. Urged on by the older men behind him, he was ra
ining fire down onto the valley like an excited kid zapping a video screen. They all were laughing and pointing and jeering into the valley.

  “Forget about it! We got a job to do.”

  “Laxatives have gotten slipped into the moral code,” says Danny. The Black Hat guy was laughing now with a slight mirage effect through the scope, from left to right. “Technology has given cowards the edge. Cavemen just had their clubs. One on one. Now any whacked-out Charles Whitman can wipe out hundreds of people in an afternoon.”

  “Wind moving from left to right. Probably three to five miles an hour.”

  “Already compensated for it.” Silence. “I worry about being Charles Whitman.”

  “Worry about getting us killed.”

  “Only reason I’m here is to find Ariana. Her brother had her kidnapped and given to Zadran.”

  The Black Hat fired off a sudden burst from the machine gun and way below, one of our M-Gators, those little all-terrain resupply vehicles that look like golf carts on speed, flipped over. Parts of it pinwheeled in different directions like it was cut into pieces. Along with the kid driving it, who was thrown out into a gully.

  “I’ve never loved anyone like I loved her.”

  I didn’t think I heard him right. “I’m on to other things right now, if that’s okay with you.”

  “We were perfect together.”

  “You’re in a fucking combat zone, for your information.”

  “Most people go through their whole lives looking for someone to love. They don’t get to have what Ariana and I had.”

  “For christsakes you’re a goddamn sniper in some sorry-ass army that hasn’t been in a war since your grandma was knitting socks for the troops. Don’t fuck this up.”

  “Have you ever known what it’s like to meet someone whose soul shared yours as if they were one—and you were destined for each other?” It was as if he was stoned on his own memories. I was frantically looking from the scope to Danny and back again trying to figure out what the hell was going on. Down below us the M-Gator driver was rolling away from the jitterbug of 107mm Dishka rounds pulverizing the rock all around him.

  This time Danny saw it. All of a sudden it seemed like the lights had come on again. He stunned me, firing once—crack!—then pulling the bolt back, ejecting the cartridge, chambering a new round all in a split second, breathing slow . . . slow . . . like he was in a trance, and then crack! Again crack! and again. One Black Hat after another exploded in a fine red mist, never knowing what or who had hit them from a mile away. It happened so fast that I actually looked up from the scope to see if perhaps what I had seen was a mirage of some kind.

  Danny was waiting for any other signs of movement, feathering that trigger with that strangely crooked index finger. It looked as if it had been broken and then badly reset, curving slightly upward. He fired again and then, a mile away, all went quiet.

  “Oh, God, I am so sorry,” said Danny, looking at the dead guy so far away. Then he rolled onto his back and stared at the sky.

  Toronto and the Mountains

  6

  This is what I know about Danny:

  He grew up roaming High Park, which stretched for miles across hills, wooded areas, and a tiny lake on the western end of the old part of Toronto. From its highest hills he could see the vastness of Lake Ontario a mile away and beyond that, America, which lay below the horizon about thirty miles away. In ninth grade, right before Easter, he found himself sitting beside a nervous, silent boy who was introduced to the class as Omar, who had just arrived from Pakistan. And, it was announced to the class by Mr. Holmes, the teacher who often wore a silver earring after school, Omar spoke not one word of English. But he was just like us, Mr. Holmes said so many times that the class began to watch Omar even more closely to see if it was true. For the three days until he vanished into the English as a Second Language class, Omar would show up in the morning and sit all day, his wide, brown eyes scanning the class, his face a mask that hid whatever was going on inside him. Danny felt it was as if Omar was being turned into a zoo creature, silent and stared at by the others. He tried not to stare himself but he was fascinated by the way this tall boy with the shiny black hair and tawny-colored skin could remain so isolated, so still and silent, yet give off a sense of utter vulnerability. His hands, Danny noticed, trembled whenever Mr. Holmes directed questions to the class. Sitting beside him at the back of the class, Danny motioned to Omar on the third day. “Me,” he whispered, pointing to himself. “You,” he said, pointing to Omar and then repeating it several times. Finally Omar pointed at Danny and whispered, “Me.”

  It was winter before they saw each other again. On the shores of the tiny frozen lake in High Park, known as Grenadier Pond, Danny saw two boys and a girl watching. Both boys were wearing flat, round wool caps that Danny had never seen before, and the girl was sheathed in silks that flowed from her head, tucked into a heavy lamb’s-wool coat. Danny and several friends were on skates, engaged in the ritual of testing the ice to see if it was thick enough to support a hockey game, gliding slowly across the sheer surface, listening for telltale cracking noises. All of them had heard the legend of the pond since they were old enough to walk—about how, back when the country was a colony, British Grenadiers had fallen through the ice one winter in the early 1800s and their bodies were never found. Generations of schoolboys debated the depths of the pond, rumored to be deeper than any ocean.

  Danny circled past the three onlookers and heard, “You!” The taller of the two boys was pointing at him. “You!” he called out again, his breath tumbling out in clouds of mist in the cold air. And then he pointed to himself and said, “Me.” Danny circled back on his skates.

  “Omar?”

  Omar grinned. “Yes, me. Now, English okay. Soon, good.”

  Danny had never seen Omar smile before. “Good now,” he said, looking from Omar to the other boy and the girl.

  “My brother. Ahmed.” Omar was motioning to the boy with a long, thin face that registered nothing. Ahmed did not smile and at first Danny thought he was not looking at him when he nodded a curt hello. Only later did Danny figure out that one of Ahmed’s eyes looked off to the side while the other one stared straight ahead. Omar made no move to introduce the girl they were with and instead pointed to the hockey stick Danny was holding. “Me?”

  “You,” said Danny, giving him the stick.

  By the time the other thirteen- and fourteen-year-old boys had decided the ice was safe, Omar was running and sliding across the ice, using the hockey stick as a kind of balance pole. And when the puck appeared, he charged after it, even though he was the only one not wearing skates. “Me! Maple Leaf!” he yelled, laughing, before his legs went out from under him.

  “You. Boston Bruin,” said Danny, flashing past him. As he was skating, Danny found his attention drawn to Ahmed and the girl on the shore, standing there like those statues he’d read about on that island in the Pacific. Neither of them seemed to be moving at all, but each gave off a different kind of silence. Danny circled away from the play, skating over toward them as Ahmed’s wandering eye tried to focus on him. “Would you like to try?” he said, holding the stick out to Ahmed.

  “No. Not try.” Ahmed was looking even smaller and more frail than Danny’s initial appraisal.

  “Then how about you?” Danny said on impulse, holding the stick out to the silent girl.

  Instantly Ahmed’s hand shot up in front of the girl. “No. Not for her.”

  Danny wondered if he was imagining anger from the one eye that was able to focus on him. But suddenly the eye flashed to something past him, drawn there by frantic cries of panic. It came from the churning hole in the ice where Omar had fallen through, surrounded by yelling boys, scrambling back from the hole as the cracking noises beneath their skates sounded like gunfire. Danny raced toward the hole where Omar was churning the freezing water, crying out in sounds from some other language. “I’m coming! I’m coming!” Danny yelled, diving the last severa
l yards, sliding on his stomach, and throwing his hockey stick to Omar. “Use the stick!” he screamed. “Use it against the ice! Hold yourself up with it.”

  “Cold!” screamed Omar.

  Danny shouted at the others to organize a daisy chain of boys, all lying flat on the ice, holding the ankles of the one in front of them so if the one closest to the hole went through the weakened ice, the others would pull him back. Or so the theory went. No one had ever seen it put into practice. Danny was the one closest to the hole. On his stomach, with his neighbor, fat Freddie Trumbull, who was trying to get his chubby hands around the top of Danny’s skates, Danny edged toward the terrified Omar. But the ice beneath him began to bow in a dangerous, groaning indentation.

  “I’m coming back,” Danny screamed, pushing himself backward to more solid ice, feeling the freezing water seeping through his clothing. He scrambled back on his skates, racing toward the shore, straight toward the trembling Ahmed, who felt like a bundle of twigs when Danny grabbed his arms, pulling him onto the ice. “You’re the lightest. We need someone light at the end of the chain.” But Ahmed somehow came unglued, shaking with panic, and before Danny could drag him even a few feet from the shoreline, he sunk to the ice, trembling and shouting in that same unintelligible language.

  It was nothing conscious that made Danny reach out for the silent girl beside Ahmed, taking her by the arm, towing her onto the ice. She flashed an instant of confusion. Or was it anger? Or fear? From those wide, dark eyes Danny couldn’t tell and, whatever it was, it didn’t matter as his skates dug into the ice for traction. She felt lighter than Ahmed. Within a few strides, she was moving almost as fast as he was. “You. On ice. Flat!” he yelled in the stilted English he had used for Omar and Ahmed.

  “I know,” she replied in breathlessly perfect English that for some reason startled Danny. “I understand what you’re doing.”

  They arrived at the churning hole as Omar was still yelling and grappling with the edges of the ice that kept breaking off in his hands. Without a word, the girl dropped to her knees and crawled closer to her flailing brother. The ice held beneath her.