by Myke Cole
Bullshit.
I know . . . I know your family is your purpose, but you must believe me. My helmet bearer served me since I became a man. When we fought the barbarians from the swamps, he took one of their poisoned arrows through his knee. The wound soured.
So you killed him.
He was a warrior and my friend. Ninip sounded hurt. The priests took his leg from the knee down. They made him a harness to go around the stump, holding a bit of wood there, so he could walk in a broken fashion, like a camel gone lame. He was no longer able to fight, to be sure, but I made him my master of granaries, and he served me faithfully until his death.
Is there a point here?
He swore to his dying day that, though he could look plainly and see that the leg was gone, he felt it as it were not. He felt himself stretching his calf, moving his toes. Phantoms. Illusions conjured by a desire so deep it can bend our seeing the world for what it is. I felt the same when I first came into the storm. That I could hear the voices, or feel the warmth of my people, my concubines, my sons. Phantoms, I tell you.
Schweitzer’s joy curdled so rapidly that he could feel himself deflate. That can’t be it, he said, even as he realized it was.
I am sorry, Ninip said. Even if they were alive, even if we could go to them, what would you do?
Schweitzer ran the scenario through his mind. His corpse-gray skin, the silver flames of his eyes, the Frankenstein scars. The broken remnants of his face, scraped over a steel frame until he could neither smile nor kiss.
Sarah would never recognize him. Patrick would be terrified. For the first time since his death, he looked down at their cock, limp and gray, trailing along the inside of one thigh. He remembered desire, caught echoes of it in Ninip’s lust, but the root of it was lost to him.
Ninip laughed at that. Is that what you want? A woman?
Schweitzer’s sudden anger burned so hot that even the jinn was taken aback.
I am sorry, Ninip said. That is likewise beyond us. We are an engine of war, nothing less than that. There are no more wives, nor children. The touch of a woman is yet another phantom from the life you have been cut from. You do not truly desire it. It is only an echo that will fade as you begin to see it for what it is.
He was right. Schweitzer couldn’t make love. He couldn’t come home at night and chat about a day at work. He didn’t truly inhabit the world of living, just a twilit corner of it, a shadow of life, forever cut off from the interactions that made the true living world worth enduring.
That’s what his love was. A phantom limb.
He lifted the dog tags, looking at the image of Sarah and Patrick. The lines seemed clearer now, the rust scraped away in the jostling of his breaking through the transparent panel to his cell. But it meant nothing. They were shadows. Memories. They were gone.
The realization struck Schweitzer so deeply that he didn’t realize he’d sunk into a reverie until Jawid’s voice snapped him out of it.
Step into the cage, please.
Why? Schweitzer asked. Ninip coiled beside him, ready to spring. Without reaching for them, Schweitzer could see the images flashing through the jinn’s mind as he recalled staring down the nozzle of the flamethrower, pilot light flickering beneath.
For your own safety, Jawid said. Dr. Eldredge wishes to speak with you.
Schweitzer could hear a dull hissing as the gate’s bars sank into the floor. The long, slow slide told Schweitzer he had been right in his guess of how deeply they were anchored. He met Ninip’s spiritual gaze in the darkness. The jinn’s eyes seemed serpentine in his mind, golden orbs, split by a black chevron of a pupil. They dipped as the jinn nodded. If the world of the living was where Schweitzer’s heart lay, then Eldredge was his connection to it, and Jawid the man who’d given him a chance to remain in it a bit longer. That counted for something.
As soon as he stepped into the center of the dotted square left by the retracting poles, they shot upward until they slid into the depressions in the ceiling and slammed home with a dull clank.
Thank you, Jawid said.
The door hissed open, and Eldredge stepped into the room, hand wrapped around a small plastic cylinder capped with a shiny, red button. Schweitzer guessed depressing it would trigger the burn nozzles, freeing him and Ninip both to chase their respective phantom limbs in the chaos beyond.
“Jim,” Eldredge said, “I’m sorry about this.” He gestured at the bars.
Schweitzer raised their shoulders a fraction of an inch, dropped them.
“How is . . . your companion doing?”
Schweitzer did the miniscule shrug again. Inside their shared body, Ninip crouched beside him impatiently, waiting for Eldredge to get on with it.
“It was a good thing you did, Jim,” Eldredge said. “That would have gone ugly if you hadn’t popped in. Thanks for that.”
Schweitzer gave him nothing. He could hear the but in Eldredge’s voice, see it in the set of his mouth.
Sure enough, “But there are . . . people higher up in the chain of command here who are . . . concerned about what they’re seeing as an outburst. They’re worried about the safety of their personnel. They don’t see you the way I do, Jim. Unfortunately, they’re in charge.”
Will he destroy us? Ninip hissed.
Relax, Schweitzer said. If they wanted to destroy us, we’d be destroyed already. He’s here for a reason.
“Fortunately, we’ve got our first lead on a Body Farm supplier, and they happen to be OCONUS. This kills two birds with one stone, Jim. It gets you out of the country, which will settle the nerves of my superiors, and it puts you on the track of whoever did this to you.”
Schweitzer’s heart leapt. The defeat and sadness of Ninip’s revelation reversed course, suddenly fanned to a blaze. He couldn’t be back with Sarah and Patrick again, but he could avenge them. For a brief moment, his own bloodlust matched Ninip’s, and he could feel the jinn exulting, fanning the flames until Schweitzer shivered. He fought down the impulse, knowing it would do no good, but he found their shared body pressed up against the bars, Eldredge taking a fearful step back, thumb hovering over the button in his hand.
Schweitzer fought through the flood of eagerness that drowned him, took control of their lungs, throat, and mouth, managed to squeeze out a single word. “Intel.”
“You’ll get it with your targeting package once you’re on the ground.”
“Where?”
Eldredge paused. At last, he shrugged. “Waziristan. It’s a . . .”
Schweitzer was already tuning him out. He’d run three ops in the lawless Federally Administrated Tribal Areas that composed a mountainous no-man’s-land claimed by both Pakistan and Afghanistan. It was a broken sprawl of shattered mountains, stunted trees, and people mired in the dark ages in every respect save their access to modern weapons.
He began flashing the imagery to Ninip before the jinn could reach into his memories, Talebs with kohled eyes, rouged cheeks, and bad teeth, helicopter dustoffs from rocky outcroppings held together by the tough roots of stunted trees, hanging out over hundreds of feet of empty space. Crevasses, deadfalls, box canyons, a landscape that seemed full of its own malevolent life force, dedicated to making interlopers pay for their trespass.
The jinn’s slow grin was so predictable, it made Schweitzer tired.
“We’ll be staging you out of COP Garcia.” Eldredge paused, searching Schweitzer’s face.
The look confirmed that he knew Schweitzer had been there. The Combat Outpost was deep in the lawless semiautonomous tribal regions and highly secret, technically a Pakistani “regulatory authority office” that was frequently used to stage US Special Forces teams on specific missions. Schweitzer shuddered to speculate on what it had cost the US to get it in place, but the government wanted a free hand to move ground troops around inside what was technically Pakistan. Garcia was the means t
o that end. Schweitzer had staged a single op out of there, his beard dyed black and his skin covered in makeup until he could be mistaken for a Pakistani provided nobody got too close. They’d run the op in Pakistani uniforms, using specially modified AK-47s.
“I take it you’re familiar with it,” Eldredge said.
Hill people. Ninip smiled. I have fought them before.
Did you win?
Not in the way you think. They paid tribute and served in my army, and continued to kill my tax collectors whenever they went unescorted. That is as much of a victory as even a living god can have.
But we’re not a living being anymore.
No. The jinn’s smile grew. We are not.
CHAPTER XVI
ANSWERS
It felt wrong from the moment Chang’s boot touched the asphalt outside the gate. He’d never truly felt like he belonged here even when he did, and the time convalescing had only intensified that sense. The sign hanging over the guard shack had once made him proud, the eagle and anchor surrounded by the words NAVAL AMPHIBIOUS BASE LITTLE CREEK. The red, white, and blue road beneath had always been the path he imagined himself on, the ideas of where it would lead never factoring in fragments of bone in his lung, letting his best friend die, failing to convince his best friend’s widow to love him.
You’re not a SEAL, Master Chief Green’s voice echoed again. No, he wasn’t. Not anymore. For a moment, he’d occupied a terrifying space where the man he’d known himself to be had vanished, leaving him suspended over a void of questions, with no clue where to go next. In times past, he’d run off that anxiety, pounding the pavement until he’d sweat himself dry, his stomach rebelled, and sheer exhaustion chased the demons away. But with his wound, that hadn’t been an option.
But then there’d been the night with Sarah, the culmination of a fantasy he’d never allowed himself to admit to having, and with it, light in the darkness. He had something to live for. He had a woman, and he had a child.
He loved Schweitzer, missed him, but this had been his problem all along. Schweitzer’s priorities had been screwed up, loving the job more than his own family. You couldn’t keep a woman as amazing as Sarah that way. They were doomed from the start, and they’d both known it. His death had just brought the inevitable to a head more quickly and made him a martyr that confused matters more than they needed to be. Schweitzer had never been there; Chang knew he would be.
He wasn’t a SEAL, but he could be a husband and a father. That was a thing to live for. Sarah herself had admitted that Patrick only broke out of his fog when Chang came around. That boy needed him. In the quiet hours before he drifted off to sleep, Chang admitted that he needed Patrick just as much, maybe more. And wasn’t that what made a family?
Sarah would come around, she just needed closure. He couldn’t believe they’d managed to fuck up the ashes, but it was good in the end. It had forced him to come back on post, to confront Biggs and Ahmad, to look them in the eye and hear what they had to say.
Sarah wasn’t the only one who needed closure.
He flashed his ID to the guard and walked on without slowing. The man just nodded, used by now to the nonchalance and protocol skirting that the men and women who worked here regularly engaged in. Chang loved the teams, but he didn’t envy those regular navy sailors who had to work with them.
The setting sun washed the road in dull orange as the base scrolled by. He acknowledged it tangentially. He hadn’t had much use for it during his time here. People in the teams usually lived off post and on the economy, kept their own counsel. The last time he’d visited the PX was to get a good deal on a flat-screen TV that he’d broken a week later with a half-full beer can after the 49ers lost in the playoffs. He still hadn’t bothered to replace it, the jagged crack reminding him of the cost of being drunk and stupid.
His attention zeroed as he approached the second gate, bearing a similar circular sign as the front gate. But this sign bore the arms that he’d always considered the crowning achievement of his life: the eagle, flintlock, and trident in the center of a ring of words: US NAVAL SPECIAL WARFARE GROUP FOUR.
There was no guard shack this time, no evidence of anyone, but Chang knew where the cameras were mounted, knew they were watching him as he waited, hands in his pockets, outside the gate. A moment later, there was a click, and the gate slid open, scattering a small cloud of midges who’d been resting on the wheel mechanism.
An intensely nondescript corrugated steel garage bay stood just beyond the gate. No posters adorned the walls, no flags flew, no music played. There was only a row of Humvees in a perennial state of repair, packed tightly together to obscure whatever work went on behind them.
Ahmad was in civvies, what they all wore when they weren’t specifically on an op or in the final stages of prepping for one. She leaned against one of the Humvees, arms folded across her chest. Her ex-husband had gotten out a rumor that her rack used to be huge, but that she got a reduction once she found out she’d been selected for BUD/S. She’d wanted it that badly. For her ex, it was proof that she had no business being in a marriage, but to Chang it spoke of a level of dedication needed for true greatness. In retrospect, it was likely a lie told by a man hurting from the loss of the most important relationship in his life, but it was Ahmad in a nutshell. She got the job done, whatever it took. That was the person a SEAL needed to be, the reason why Chang couldn’t be one anymore.
“There he is.” Her tone was flat; her expression told him nothing.
He thrust his hands deeper into his pockets, looked at his feet. Silence was a bad thing out in the world, and most folks would say stupid things just to keep it away. But it wasn’t that way with the teams. Sometimes that bugged him. He was grateful for it now.
“You’ve got another two weeks on your chit,” she added. “Surprised to see you back now.”
“Yeah,” he said.
“YN1 told me you put in to lateral.”
The hard part was coming sooner than he expected, that was fine. Better to rip the Band-Aid off. “Yup.”
“I’ve been calling you.”
“I know, Chief. I got the messages. I just needed time to be alone and think.”
“Yeah, well, I could have helped with that. That’s my job.”
“Respectfully, Chief, I didn’t want help. That would have just muddied the water.”
“Maybe I just wanted to talk for myself. Maybe I needed someone to lean on. We all lost Jim. Not just you.”
“I know that . . .” The truth was that he hadn’t thought much about it, had been so consumed by his own grief that he hadn’t made room for anyone else, even for these people who’d risked death with him, for him. I’m sorry, he thought, but he didn’t say it. At this point, it wouldn’t have made a difference.
“We can talk about it now,” Ahmad said. “Chilly brought in a case of Coronas two days ago. Got ’em on ice in the BMF. Let me grab four, and we can go down to the water and chew it over.”
He’d known that she’d do this. It was her job to do this. But that didn’t mean it hit any less hard. He fought against a part of himself that yearned to take her up on that offer, to leave Sarah and Patrick to themselves, to throw himself back into the training and bonded comfort of the brotherhood, to forge a new path back to the bleeding edge that had made him a god of war so long ago. He met Ahmad’s eyes, dark and hard as ever, caught the slightest tremor in the sclera.
“Steve,” she said. “I’m not asking as a favor to you. I’m not blowing sunshine, and this ain’t pity. You’re a good SEAL. Nobody wants to lose you.”
Chang felt himself teetering on an edge. All he had to do was nod, grab a beer, and listen. Easy day.
“You’re not the first operator to get fucked up,” she said. “We can rehab you, requalify you. You can come back.”
And then what? A few more years running and gunning through shitholes aga
inst shitheads until he was too banged up to go on? And after? Back to San Francisco to take care of his mom? To chase after his niece while his sister looked on disapprovingly?
The SEALs were his job. Sarah and Patrick were his family. He had to put them first.
“I can’t.” The words sounded lame, childish.
Ahmad’s expression showed she agreed. “El-tee is going to want to talk to you then,” she said, “and don’t expect him to be all nicey-nice about it. He’s not a softy like your old chief.”
Chang smiled at that. “Yeah.”
“He’s in the head-shed,” she said. “I’ll be in the armory once he’s done with you. Make sure you talk to me before you head out.”
“I will, Chief,” Chang said. “Thanks.”
He made his way around the side of the repair bay to the long trailer that served as an office for Biggs and the senior enlisted. It was as painfully neutral as everything else in view of the gate. They’d even gone so far as to leave the sign of the rental company in place. Chang was told that there’d been a permanent office before he’d first reported to Little Creek, but they hadn’t bothered to build it back after the third time a hurricane flattened it.
Biggs’s huge frame was shoehorned into a fancy, swivel-backed chair. He looked comically large at the best of times, and the way the plastic armrests forced him to hunch his shoulders didn’t help matters. He was in his khakis, which meant that there was a meeting either recently in his past or in his immediate future. He typed frantically with his index fingers, tongue jutting out of the corner of his mouth. Chang’s heart swelled at the sight.
“Sit,” Biggs said.
Chang didn’t, crossing his arms and leaning against the doorframe. “Paperwork, huh.”
“The root word of ‘officer’ is ‘office.’” It wasn’t true for Biggs. Chang had watched him take apart a room with seven dug-in narcoterrorists when they’d cut off his team’s egress. He led by example. “How’re you holding up?”