Twelve Days

by Steven Barnes

  “One of my teachers worshipped her. I think I may have a book she wrote. Critique of a mystic named…” He waved his hand, unable to summon the rest of the information. “A long time ago. She must be getting up there.”

  She ventured a smile. “I can bring a guest. Was wondering if…” He got it, and was reminded of why he liked her.

  “I appreciate that. Really. O, I…” He could feel that something soft and shy was trying to wiggle its way out of him, and wanted no part of it. Damn it, this was no time to be vulnerable. Or to be calling Olympia “O.” That felt a little too chummy, considering what they had been to each other, and where they were today.

  “It’s all right, Terry,” she said, cutting off his thought.

  He was sure she was telling the truth. Damn it, she didn’t have to make it so easy. She didn’t have to make him feel that he wasn’t the bastard he damned well knew himself to be. “Yeah, well … thanks for the invite. What time?”

  “Seven. See you there?”

  Hannibal performed a few more enthusiastic kicks and punches, giving a crackling good Junior Bruce Lee impression as he did. The display was followed by a shy moment of side-eye contact.

  “Hey,” Terry said. “That’s pretty good.”

  “You still do karate, don’t you?” Olympia asked.

  He laughed. “You don’t ‘do karate,’” he said. “If anything, karate ‘does’ you.” He realized they’d been gazing into each other’s eyes a little too long. She looked away. “I’m kind of a dojo bum,” he said, trying to lower the tension.

  “What does that even mean?”

  He shook his head ruefully. “I’ve bopped around through every style and system you can name.”

  “Which one is best? Karate? Kung fu? This mixed martial arts stuff?”

  He laughed. No, actually he didn’t. He wanted to laugh, wished he’d laughed. In actuality, he was warmed that she was interested. And that warmth was uncomfortably localized. “No such thing as ‘best.’ Depends on who you are, what you want, why you want it, how long you’ve got … too many different variables. The best art is the one you enjoy. If you dig it, you’ll stick with it. And … probably figure out how to get what you need.”

  “That makes sense,” she said, followed by another uncomfortable silence.

  Peripheral vision caught a massive human shape moving toward them. Mark Shavers had shambled out of their condo, noted the conversation, and wandered over. Olympia seemed to see him for the first time, her eyes widening with some private, happy thought.

  “Terry,” Mark yelled. “Phone.” The big man grinned amiably then headed back across the street in that sleepy, bearlike, harmless ambling way he typically affected. And it was most assuredly mere affectation. Terry had seen Mark in close-quarters action, and there were few human beings more aggressively coordinated than his XO.

  She laughed shyly. Hannibal grinned at him. There was something too familial about the scene. Terry knew this was not his place in the world.

  “Well,” Olympia said, “I have to…”

  “Yeah,” Terry said. “Me, too.” He turned away.

  “Terry?”

  “Yeah?”

  “I just wanted to say thank you for being so nice to Hannibal.”

  “He’s a world-class kid.”

  “Yeah, well … usually it goes the other way. Most guys want me, and ignore Hannibal. You’re different.”

  Shit. This wasn’t the time for this discussion. Maybe there was no good time for a discussion like this. “Maybe one day we’ll talk about it.”

  “Maybe one day. Yeah.” She paused again, and dug into her purse, extracting a slip of paper. “Here’s the invite. Seven o’clock tomorrow night.”

  “I’ll be there.”

  She backed away, smiling shyly. “Okay.” Then she stopped. “Oh. There’s one other thing before you go…” She glanced at Mark’s retreating back, and told him.

  * * *

  Terry hummed happily as he closed the door behind himself. Mark was leaning against the wall, smoking one of his thin cigars, a snake of blue smoke curling up to the ceiling. He exhaled a series of rings and gave Terry the fish eye. “Are we forgetting we’re here on business?”

  “All work and no play…”

  “Keeps Jack out of Guantanamo. One wrong word and it’s shut the fuck up, Carl.”

  Shut up, Carl. Military humor for a clusterfuck. Something they sure as hell couldn’t afford in this case.

  Clunk. The sound of ugly reality slapping him upside the head, yet again.

  “Oh, and one other thing,” Terry said, happy to throw a tomato at Mark’s Voice of Doom act. “She said that their usual Santa dropped out of the Foothill Village Christmas party. She wants to know if you’d be willing to play Saint Nick.”

  That, finally, widened Mark’s eyes. “Me? Why me?”

  “She says you’re jolly. And about the right size.”

  “Fuck you.” He thumped his gut. “This is muscle.”

  “Increasingly well marbled.”

  Mark wagged his head, more amused than insulted. “I’ve missed every Christmas for twenty years. What the hell do I know about Santa Claus?”

  Mark’s door was open, and through it Terry could see his bed and dresser. The dresser top held at least a dozen prescription bottles, medications Mark took by the fistful, to stave off the injuries and diseases and stresses from a lifetime of hard service in exotic lands. The number of Christmases ahead for his XO was far smaller than the number behind. Single digit, in all probability.

  Come on, Mark. Come in out of the cold. Join the rest of us … for just a little while.

  Terry kept his voice as light as he could. “He knows when you’re sleeping. He knows when you’re awake. He gets into everybody’s house without a hitch … guy’s SpecOps.”

  * * *

  Terry had been thinking mischief as he crossed the street. Too busy ruminating to notice the van parked on the street feeding into Foothill Village from Meadow Lane. Or to determine that it contained two men. Its interior walls were crowded with television monitors, currently displaying angles of the exterior of Olympia’s house. On the screen, Olympia was ushering her children through the door, and then closing it behind her.

  One of the men wrote a notation in his book. He noted the time, and wrote something else in the margins, and then folded the book and slid it into a cubbyhole, and went back to watching.

  CHAPTER 8

  Terry sat at the edge of his bed. It might have been queen sized with a soft, comfortable mattress, but when he sat on it, leaning with his feet on the ground and elbows resting his torso’s weight on his knees, it no longer existed. He had returned to a special mental place, a place in which he had often found refuge over the last twenty years of service, when often the only furniture he had was a cot or crappy locally purchased bed.

  Hard decisions were nothing new. Even when given orders, Terry took the time to go over them, before and afterward. There is no such defense as “I was following orders” for an officer. An enlisted man could avoid court-martial simply by proving he’d been given a direct order. But even then, they were expected to use their heads and hearts. He had taught that over and over to the younger soldiers who entered Special Forces after 9–11 when the Special Operations world expanded and needed more and more troops to operate away from journalists and social media, cloaked behind top-secret classifications.

  The hairier the operation, the more time he took to make sure he and his Pirates (even from basic, he had always thought of his guys, whoever they were, as his Pirates) were on the “right path,” obeyed the rules of engagement. Now he was looking at armed robbery and possible murder. Every one of them knew what they would do if ambushed, so they expected nothing less of those they were targeting.

  And that opened an entire world of questions that had first been raised, for him, by his first group commander, Colonel Drinkwater.

  There were colonels like O’Shay, assholes who
merely wore the rank. Men like O’Shay made careers out of being on all the right missions and getting the right spotlight. The ones who avoided the daily grind of “bug hunts,” seeking terrorists the old-fashioned way of lots of walking and talking to locals. All posture and politics.

  Col. Drinkwater was the other kind. His first group commander when he finished the Q-course and made it to his first A-team. Drinkwater had been enlisted SF before commissioning through ROTC. He did a lot of mentoring over beers and cigars at the fire pit behind his headquarter building at Fort Bragg. Drinkwater had earned three Purple Hearts, a Silver Star, and a raft of other awards before he pinned on his bars so that all the young troops listened to him. This night had been mandatory fun for everyone who hadn’t been in combat yet as well as all the team commanders. Many of the older soldiers were there, too.

  And that was where he’d schooled Terry.

  “The Geneva Conventions were not made for lawyers, they were made for grunts,” the colonel said one night. They were getting ready to go to the Balkans and some of the younger soldiers were eager to “pop their cherries.”

  “In a regular war, gentlemen, the military are just the fashion police. We kill you for wearing the wrong clothes. You may have volunteered, you may be drafted, you may have been forced into the military at gunpoint—we don’t care. We will shoot you, bomb you, set you on fire, nuke you until you glow, and shoot you in the dark—and it is legal all because you are wearing the wrong uniform.”

  Everyone laughed, some making the barking and grunting sounds that troops everywhere made among their own. Drinkwater wasn’t laughing. He was staring off in the distance, not noticing the ash growing on his stogie.

  “Special Forces, though, are on the edges. Some days we are training others. Other days we are doing unto others. We don’t operate in the open. We do what needs to be done, but we still need to do it right.”

  Someone sounded off with “Kill them all, sir! No prisoners, no mercy!” The younger troops were raising beers.

  The older troops looked to Drinkwater. Somehow, without saying anything, the commander brought everyone to an expectant silence. He looked up from the fire pit and scanned his troops. Terry still remembered it vividly, feeling like those fire-reflected eyes were locked onto him and him alone. Finally, he broke the silence.

  “You are operators. You made it through regular training, made sergeant, then made it through the Q-course. The selection process to be an operator is not about pulling triggers, but about being able to adapt and overcome and still be soldiers. You won’t have a chain of command out where you work, and what you do won’t fit into easy boxes. You have to stay professional.

  “We are not going against conventional forces or even insurgents,” he said. “We are hunting terrorists.” And now, despite the calmness of his words, a lupine quality, a predator energy had shone in his eyes. He was the alpha wolf, running at the head of the pack. “As long as you stay within the lines, you can kill as many legitimate targets as you want and can’t be called a murderer, at least not legally. Uniform Code of Military Justice exists because what we do is not civilized and does not fit in with civilian law. The North Vietnamese would put our prisoners on trial for doing their job and then sentence them as criminals. It’s why the conventions state only the military can try military, and military tribunals are used to determine whether or not you’re a legal combatant.

  “I’m telling you this because we’re going to a place that has not seen law in a long time. It doesn’t change the standards for you. Any of you.”

  He stared back into the fire. “And if you’re in it long enough, you’ll fail. You’ll cut corners. You’ll break the rules. You’ll convince yourself it was necessary, or they deserved it, or it saved lives of whoever we are calling the ‘good guys’ that day.”

  “In Escape and Evasion training you heard, ‘If you ain’t cheatin’, you ain’t tryin’.’” A wave of laughter in response. “Gentlemen, that was training, and it was training to teach you to not get caught and to be capable of outthinking an opponent on his home turf. At no point, however, did we say it was okay to slit civilian throats, to rape, to torture. That is what terrorists do … and sometimes, it’s what soldiers do.”

  No one spoke. Under other circumstances, there may have been jokes. Troops can joke about anything. There was nothing joking in their commander’s eyes.

  “Given enough time, you will fail. You will fail yourself, whether you are caught or not. You will fail your teammates by making them deal with your stupidity, or you will fail them by not acting when you should have. You will have every justification in the world. Everyone does. Saying ‘the other guy did it first’ is the first one you’ll hear, and it is as wrong now as it was back in kindergarten.

  “The trick, gentlemen, is to know where the line is. You need to know where the line is both on paper and inside yourself. Sometimes you do break the rules to do what is right. Sometimes you’re given bad orders. You were selected because you are professionals and can think for yourself. At some point, if you are doing this long enough, you will cross the line. If you pull yourself back, that’s one thing. If you move the line to convince yourself you’re okay, that’s another.

  “Some of you will find you have no problems killing people. By ‘people,’ I mean legitimate targets. That does not make you a monster. Everyone dies. Sometimes they need to die sooner.” More laughter, deep, like smoke wafting out of a bed of coals. “Since we first organized as clans and tribes, someone had to protect the rest. That meant killing. Just don’t forget there are bastards like you out there with the same opinion about making you die sooner. That’s being a soldier.

  “Some of you will have a problem killing people. That doesn’t make you weak. I know you don’t think you have a problem right now. It’s another thing when you hear them screaming, smell the blood and shit, and realize at the gut level that is a person just like you. Not a ‘gook,’ ‘jap,’ ‘chink,’ ‘raghead,’ ‘nigger,’ ‘kike,’ ‘cracker,’ ‘peckerwood,’ or any other bullshit label you may have used when shooting paper targets. Make no mistake, they are people. You may have to kill women, since a woman with an AK can kill you just as dead.

  “Most of you will be able to find a balance with this and the mission. My job as your commander is to make sure you have a legitimate target and a legitimate mission. I promise you, you will find few things as satisfying as going into the valley of death, being that meanest, baddest son of a bitch, and carrying out a righteous mission that few on the planet would be able to pull off.”

  All around the pit, men nodded, sipped. Spines straightened.

  “That is fighting with honor. That is my promise to you, as your leader, that I will not only give you those righteous missions, no matter how messy it looks from the sidelines, I will give you and your commanders the information you need to not only do your job, but know why you are doing it and why it was given to you instead of regular military or some jet jock dropping bombs while sipping his coffee.”

  Drinkwater raised his beer with the rest of the group raising theirs as troops sounded off with “De Opproso Liber,” “Sic Semper Tyrannis,” and other cheers. After a long pull on the can, he tapped the ash off his stogie and stared back into the fire.

  After the noise died down, he said, “Some of you won’t be coming home.”

  The smiles slid off their faces. Many of the newer troops still believed dying was for “that other guy.” The older soldiers knew it could be them. Death was joked about a lot. This was no joke.

  “Some of you won’t be coming home because you died in combat,” Drinkwater said. “That is the job. No matter how much you train, how much I plan, no matter what high-tech gear we give you, some farmer with an AK can fill you full of holes. Then you’ll be the guy on the ground, screaming for his momma even as your buddies grease that sumbitch and your blood drains out into some godawful shit-filled patch of worthless fucking dirt. Doc will tie off the bleeders, pump you
full of drugs, squeeze bags into you, and you’ll still die. Then your buddies will split up your gear, arrange for your body to be picked up, then Charlie Mike and finish the job.”

  Drinkwater was looking through them at this point, perhaps reliving a past event. He puffed his cigar and shrugged. “I can live with that. As your commander, as your comrade, I can live with that. I won’t blow sunshine up your ass and tell you that this will never happen, and that anyone who lets a soldier die on their watch is a failure. This is the large print of the job. I hope this doesn’t happen, but if it does, we will deal with it with honor.

  “Some of you, though, won’t come back because you died inside. You lost your way. You forgot how to be a soldier and became just another asshole with a weapon. When I got back into group I looked up my buddies from when I was enlisted. Some were still in. A few of them are with us tonight.” A few senior NCOs tipped their beers toward their commander. “Don’t believe half the stories they tell, and I won’t tell you which half that is.” A few laughs, but they didn’t break the somber mood.

  “Some got out and are upstanding citizens back home. We have given you the tools to succeed at anything you try. Never forget it.”

  He looked back at the fire. “Some went to Rhodesia. Some went to the Congo. Some went other places. Some were still professionals, just looking for work. They still did it right. Many, though, were just assholes with weapons. The worst ones have files in intel. If you can imagine it, it’s in those files. All of that and worse.

  “The fucked-up thing—I wasn’t surprised who was who. They were slipping when we were out in the bush. And I didn’t stop them. We justified … no, I justified it, by saying we were not as bad as the bastards we faced, or that is the only thing the enemy understood. Even if I didn’t slip, I let those others around me do it.

  “I’m not talking some nitnoid rule some pogue in the rear thought would sound good. As you sweep through the kill zone I expect you to tap every swinging dick that had carried a weapon. It’s a kill zone, not a play-nice-with-others zone. Be fast, lethal, and be professional. Sometimes people are in the wrong place and get dead. It sucks. Own up to it.