Bring Out the Dog

by Will Mackin

  “I’m gonna leave a squad here to search and take the rest to intercept,” Digger radioed back.

  I was relieved when Digger put me on the intercept. The river was dizzying, even with my back to it. I wanted to distance myself. I wanted to make it a thing I could look back on.

  Digger called Lex, whom he was leaving in charge of the rescue effort. Lex looked at Digger like he used to look at Hal. Like he didn’t know what came next.

  “Let me know,” Digger said.

  Then we walked away from the river, northbound. The sounds of the rescue, already quiet, fell away, and the heat signatures of the rescuers dimmed. Soon enough, behind us was no different from in front of us. The clouds refused to break. Rain wired the air in bright filaments.

  The Taliban appeared in the east, at first, as a low cluster of stars. Then as phantoms. Then as men with heat rising off their backs like creeping flames. They walked in a shapeless formation, bunching up and stretching out, because they couldn’t see one another. They couldn’t see themselves.

  All we had to do was stand perfectly still, in a line parallel to their direction of movement, at a range of no more than thirty yards, and wait for them to walk right in front of us. Then wait for Digger’s sparkle, which would be our signal to open fire.

  This wasn’t our first time running an intercept on a Taliban patrol across a muddy field at night. In fact, it was our seventh. During the course of our previous six intercepts, we’d developed and refined this tactic. The enemy would walk right in front of us, and Hal would choose one man. Not the leader, he had explained, whose mind had been made up. And not the dumbass in the back, either, who’d never know any better. But a man in the middle. A man who understood what was happening well enough to have doubts. A man who, having walked this far through darkness, cold, and rain, was no longer sure where he ended and the night began.

  Such confusion registered on night vision. When Hal found this man, he’d light him up with sparkle. The man wouldn’t know, because sparkle was infrared; it operated on a frequency that the naked eye couldn’t detect. So, as far as Hal’s chosen man or any of the other Taliban knew, they were still walking in the dark. They were still on their way to their destination. Meanwhile, Hal’s sparkle would reflect off the man’s wide-open eyes and shine back out like some special knowledge.

  That would be the man we’d spare. And that would be the man who’d drop to his knees in the mud and, in a cloud of gun smoke, raise his hands in surrender. That would be the man who’d tell us who he was, where he’d come from, and why.

  I parked in front of the microwave antenna at the top of Craner Peak. A cold wind blew from the east. The warm sun floated overhead. Reed dropped the tailgate. We pulled the hard cases from the bed of the pickup. We shouldered our packs. We’d been home from Afghanistan just two months and already the pack that I’d worn there—the one that had become an extension of me—now felt like somebody else’s. Puffy white clouds dragged across the sky. Smooth rocks studded the domelike crest of the mountain. Reed and I carried the equipment over that crest, toward a footpath that wound down the mountain’s eastern face.

  The snowcapped Wasatch Range came into view first, followed by Salt Lake City and the Great Salt Lake. The bombing range was in the sand between the western shore of the lake and the base of Craner Peak. The observation point, or OP, from which we’d control the jets that would drop the bombs, was a stone outcropping at the top of a steep draw.

  Arriving at the OP, Reed and I lowered the hard cases. We slid out of our backpacks. I stepped to the edge of the outcropping and looked down upon the live impact zone.

  A thousand feet below, atop a smooth field of sand, was a bright red fire truck.

  “That doesn’t look right,” I said.

  Actually, it looked like the fire truck had been trying to reach the center of the impact zone. As if, perhaps, there’d been a fire there, and in their haste to save the day, the firemen had driven off the hardened access road and gotten bogged down in the sand. They’d need a crane to lift it out.

  “Anybody down there?” Reed asked.

  Through the binoculars, I saw a set of boot tracks walking from the driver’s-side door back toward the access road.

  “No,” I said.

  Reed stuck his fingers in his mouth and whistled the way one might to hail a passing cab, or to turn a wayward dog. It was a bright, clean sound that seemed to penetrate everything and pull it slightly apart. Thus, the shadowed crags in the rocky draw, the silver horns on the white roof of the fire truck’s cab, the deep jade swirl at the center of the Great Salt Lake, all seemed to waver. I felt this instability in my heart, even, like it was foaming. If anybody was down on the impact zone, they would’ve felt it, too. They would’ve emerged from wherever they were hiding and raised their blank faces toward the OP.

  Reed stopped whistling and the world stabilized. The fissure in my heart sealed. Nobody appeared on the impact zone.

  “Maybe we should call Oasis,” Reed said.

  “Worth a try,” I said.

  Oasis was the radio call sign of the Utah Test and Training Range’s security force, whose primary responsibility was to protect the top secret laboratory located somewhere in the vast desert west of Craner. That lab was rumored to house extraterrestrials. Therefore, I imagined it to be a town like any other, with parades, baseball games, and fireworks on the Fourth of July, where extraterrestrials and human beings lived as one. Where the aliens taught us how to conquer entropy, and we taught them how to love. Such a place would require the strictest protection, which didn’t leave Oasis much time to manage the bombing ranges.

  Reed removed the radio from his pack, powered it up, and tuned it to the proper frequency. “Oasis, this is Bulldog,” Reed broadcast.

  Ten watts emanated off the radio’s omnidirectional antenna. Some of that energy descended into the draw, tumbled off the rocks, and spilled out over the lake. Some of it shot up into the sky, wormed its way through the ozone, and forged a path to infinity. Still more hopped Craner Peak, behind us, carrying Reed’s transmission over fields of warm sagebrush to a cinder-block waystation, where, en route to the range earlier that day, Reed and I had stopped to register with Oasis.

  A counter spanned the linoleum width of that waystation. A guard wearing a stiff comb-over rested his elbows on it. Behind the guard were racks of shotguns, computers, radios, and closed-circuit televisions. Though the guard hadn’t looked busy, Reed and I had waited behind the sign that said, WAIT HERE. The guard had watched us as if through a one-way mirror.

  Having received no reply to his first transmission, Reed keyed the mike again. His voice must’ve emanated from one of the radios behind the waystation guard. “Oasis, this is Bulldog. How do you hear?”

  “Go ahead, Bulldog,” the guard replied.

  “I’m standing on the OP, looking down at a fire truck on the impact zone. I’m wondering if it’s supposed to be there.”

  “If it’s on the impact zone, then it’s a target,” the guard said.

  “This doesn’t look like a target, is all. It’s got its windshield, still, and hoses. And it looks like it drove out there under its own power.”

  The guard must’ve looked over his shoulder at the closed-circuit TV labeled CRANER. He must’ve seen the wave of sand piled up in front of the fire truck’s chrome bumper.

  “Let me make a phone call.”

  Radio static hissed as a tall white cloud passed by. Fossils cast in the stone outcropping resembled harpsichords and brains.

  “They’re telling me that the fire truck is a target,” the guard said.

  “Who’s telling you that?” Reed said.

  “My supervisor, Bill.”

  Maybe Bill was the type to understand how at any given moment a thing could be both target and nontarget. How the more you tried to nail it down one way or the o
ther, the less known it would become. But chances were slim.

  “I can have Bill call you if you want,” the guard offered.

  “That’s okay,” Reed said.

  “All right, then.”

  Reed and I went through our setup routine. Opening the hard cases released the smell of ozone. We removed each piece of equipment from its foam rubber bed. We warmed the lasers, synced the clocks. We stabilized the coordinate generators. Ready, the equipment clicked and whirred. The radios whispered, Hush. Down on the sand, the fire truck shone in the sun. We waited for the jets.

  I lay back on the outcropping. The stone was warm, the breeze refreshing. Sunshine penetrated my eyelids, soaking through my retinas and into my mind, where it turned all my memories blue.

  The voice of the lead pilot over the radio snapped me out of it: “Bulldog, Widow One Five.”

  The air base from which the jets launched was north of Salt Lake City. Searching the sky in that direction, I detected a slip of vertical motion. Then the jet came out of afterburner, leaving a tall column of black smoke. I watched the jet climb up and over the city. The sun flashed off its canopy as it rolled inverted and pulled toward the range. A second jet rose from the shimmering air base, then a third. Each jet carried four five-hundred-pound laser-guided bombs.

  I manned the laser designator. Searching through the scope, I found the levers of the fire truck’s pump control station, and the dials above the levers with their needles all at zero. I found an axe, hanging below a pike, hanging below a section of hard hose. I saw Craner’s rocky base reflected in the fire truck’s windshield before I found the three silver horns on the roof of the cab. Reed manned the radio.

  “Say when ready for talk-on,” Reed transmitted.

  “Go ahead,” the pilot answered.

  A talk-on oriented the pilot to the target environment. It began by identifying something large and obvious, then proceeded in a narrowing line toward the target. The pilot would follow along either by looking outside, with the naked eye, or by looking through a camera that was mounted to a targeting pod that hung on a wing.

  Reed began his talk-on with the Great Salt Lake and its dark green center. Next, he described a spot along the lake’s western shore where sand and water twisted into a yin-yang.

  “What’s a yin-yang?” the pilot asked.

  From there, Reed moved west again, focusing the pilot’s attention onto the sand at the bottom of the draw, where the shadows of two clouds combined to form what looked like a devil’s head.

  “Got it,” the pilot said.

  Reed asked, “What do you see between the devil’s horns?”

  “A fire truck,” the pilot answered.

  “That’s your target,” Reed said.

  Reed stacked the jets in a counterclockwise orbit out over the lake. The first jet rolled wings level and dove toward the target. Reed cleared him to drop. I triggered the laser. The air horns created a nice refraction, which the bomb steered toward by means of adjustable fins. The fins banged up and down against their stops, causing the bomb to fall through the air like a shuttle through a loom, also causing it to chatter. Looking through the designator’s scope at the silver horns, I listened to the falling bomb. I watched the fireball silently blossom, right over the horns. The bang rolled up the draw to reach me with torn edges. The heat warmed my face.

  The fire truck steamed as if it had been broiled. A blue halo of shattered glass surrounded it. Levers on the pump control station that had been up were down, and vice versa. Otherwise it looked fine.

  More jets arrived to circle high in the stack, as others corkscrewed down into the chute. There was a long period of direct hits in which nothing seemed to change. Where some core thing held together, blast after blast. Which made me wonder if I should stop the bombing, call in a crane, and tow the fire truck to the laboratory, and down Main Street to the center of town, where the fire station would’ve been had they still needed one. Meaning, had the aliens not yet taught the humans how to inoculate themselves against pyromania, or other acts of god. I thought maybe the aliens and humans could work together to restore the fire truck back to its original condition, so they could drive it down the street during their parade. Then something vital broke open down on the live impact zone. Oily smoke poured from a deep fissure in the fire truck’s hull. The cab tore open, the doors blew off, the seats ejected, the front axle collapsed. Chrome boiled, and the red finish melted. I shone the laser on whatever I could find through the billowing smoke: intake cowling, engine block, drive train. It wasn’t long before all that remained was the pump.

  The iron pump looked like two elbows locked together. I shot the laser into one open flange, and the refraction bloomed out another. The pump gonged under the weight of two, three, and four bombs. It cracked under the weight of a fifth. The last bomb tore it open. A brass impeller paddle-wheeled out of the fireball, pulling flames with it. The impeller’s blades separated in midair, sailing off to leave deep maroon scars in the sand.

  Coming off target, the jet flew right over Reed and me on the OP. It was such a strange sight: the jet, knife-edged, maybe thirty feet off the ground. It was so close I saw every panel in the fuselage, and every rivet in every panel. The pilot looked right at me. It was like she stood on one side of a bottomless crevasse, and I on the other. But she was weightless. I saw her eyes behind her dark visor. I saw her pencil, dummy-corded to her kneeboard, floating in mid-cockpit. I saw her French braid rising off her shoulder toward her canopy. Then she was gone, and the mountain shook in her wake.

  Hit glowed blue under the new moon. We walked toward it from the south—across the rocky desert, over railroad tracks and a four-lane highway, then down a dirt road that ran perpendicular to the silver Euphrates. We took our third left onto a paved street. Our target building had sliding windows and a muddy garden out front. J.J. darkened the flickering streetlight across from it with one suppressed round—thhp, dink—and pieces of glass tumbled to the earth. We took positions for the raid—security in the back alley; blocking stations on the intersections to the east and west; assaulters on both sides of the front door—and waited for Spot.

  If Spot had thought everything was cool, he would’ve given J.J. a thumbs-up. Instead, Spot hurried over to the assaulters on the door. He grabbed Mike by the sleeve and swapped him with Tull. He grabbed Tull and swapped him with Zsa-Zsa. He sent Bobby to the back alley to link up with Lou. Spot had never done so much shuffling around, but this was the night after Qa’im, and we were all still a little uneasy. Spot stepped back from the door—if not satisfied with the changes he’d made, then at least willing to give this new configuration a try. He looked at me, standing off the corner of the building, where I always stood.

  I wanted to make eye contact with Spot so he could see that I was okay. I knew how to look okay. I knew how to make it seem like I wasn’t bothered by what had happened at Qa’im—or, for that matter, at Habbaniyah or Ramadi. The funny thing was, nothing had happened at any of those places. Nothing bad, at least. At Qa’im, we’d been ambushed, caught with our pants down. But we’d managed to fight our way out. And we’d killed a lot of insurgents along the way. Insurgents who were ex–Republican Guard, or Saddam’s version of us. Yet no one in our troop was even hurt—unless you count Lou, who either didn’t feel pain or did an excellent job fooling himself. No one could argue, however, that bad nights didn’t happen, and that we weren’t due for one.

  Standing outside that building in Hit, I tried not to think about it. I tried to act like everything was fine, and I wanted to see myself reflected in Spot’s gaze.

  The problem was, Spot had a lazy eye, and I always mixed up which one. After figuring it out, I’d tell myself “left is right” or “right is wrong,” to improve my chances of remembering the next time. Inevitably, though, I’d look directly into Spot’s bad eye. That night, his misalignment skewed toward the Pleiades
, or that part of the sky where Zeus had transformed the seven daughters of Atlas into doves, then those doves into stars. Before I could correct myself, Spot turned toward the street and gave J.J. a thumbs-up.

  J.J., standing under the darkened streetlight, was an ex-smoker who would’ve lapsed during times like this but for a cigarette’s telltale glow. Still, he eased his nerves pretending. By his pantomime I knew that he’d held his cigarette between his ring and middle fingers, flicking the ash with a card-trick action of his thumb. His whole hand had covered his mouth as he’d brought the filter to his lips and inhaled. That night, in late March, his exhalation was warm enough, or the air cold enough, to create what appeared to be smoke.

  J.J. gave the signal, Mike kicked open the door, and the assaulters funneled in. I remained outside, watching the alley between the target building and its eastern neighbor, while Spot kept an eye on the western alley. A trickle of sewage ran out of my alley and into the street. Or was it gasoline? Our target building in Qa’im had been booby-trapped with gas cans duct-taped with nails. Former members of Saddam’s Republican Guard had waited for the assaulters to get far enough inside before triggering the explosions via remote control. But this smelled more like shit. Or did it? As the assaulters ran though the building, I debated whether or not to break radio silence to warn them about something that might turn out to be nothing. Zsa-Zsa beat me to it.

  “The refrigerator is padlocked,” he broadcast over troop common from the kitchen.

  Tull chimed in from a bedroom on the second deck: “The walls and ceiling are mirrored.”

  Then Bobby, from the back alley: “I got a car up on blocks.” These observations tended to snowball.

  “Shut your fucking traps,” Spot told everyone on that frequency.

  The remainder of the assault passed in silence, and the search for intelligence began. Spot sent me in. I ran through the front door and into the living room, where I flipped cushions off the couch. As a tech, I was looking for phones, SIM cards, flash drives, and those same things disguised as, or hidden within, something else. I worked by the red light of my headlamp. The TV remote was just that; the clock radio on the kitchen counter flashed midnight or noon; the refrigerator was indeed padlocked. I opened it with bolt cutters and dipped my hand into every cold pail of cream. Moving on, I lifted the lid on every dented teapot. I dug my knife into the flour jar, the sugar bowl. I climbed the stairs to the second floor. There I found Tull staring at a Big Wheel parked in the hall. I continued up the stairs to the third floor. Mike stood in a doorway.