All great love affairs are tragic, her mother told her, trying to justify the less than dramatic fraud of her own marriage. I’m sorry about your friend, that boy who got himself mixed up with the wrong crowd, her mother had said the night of their unhappy reunion. But you know, your father tried to warn you, didn’t he, and you wouldn’t listen.
But Dottie found her mother’s voluble insights unworthy of love and despicable and whining. I’ll never understand, said her mother, why some people just can’t let other people go. People shouldn’t always have to live with their mistakes. And she breezily explained her child-rearing philosophy—I didn’t pamper you for a reason, and it took everything I had to keep your father from spoiling you. Unlike your brother, you were quite a headstrong child. Disobedient, self-centered—beyond my comprehension, honestly. Show weakness? Not a chance. Ask for help? No, ma’am. And later, slurring and loose-lipped, the bottle empty, the cadence deliberate: As a woman, well, let’s just say I allowed myself to be made a mother.
And then as she guided her daughter to her room: When are you going to stop being mad at me? Goddamn it, Dorothy, what is the point of this shunning? Dottie paused, hollow-eyed as a prisoner being led to her cell, absorbing the soulless chill of her new bedroom, peaches and cream, ivory-colored trimmings and good-girl tidiness, before she turned around to look at her mother without any discernible emotion and said, I think I have syphilis or the clap or something, I don’t really know.
Hate me if you want, said her mother. You’re still my daughter, no matter what.
In late September she was admitted to Fairfax Hospital for observation, nourished through a tube, and the nurse who came to monitor her IV drip talked about how it looked as though Virginia’s Indian summer was a goner and then went away. In the opinion of the so-called experts she was anorexic but she wasn’t. Eating seemed irrelevant at the moment and could not hold her interest beyond a bite of this and a sip of that. She was definitely not trying to kill herself—quite the opposite; she was determined to get on with her life, if she could only resolve the question of which self would end up being the lucky person who walked out of there. The competition was not fixed, the winner not a given. On her only weekend there her brother Christopher came and brought her flowers and they played a game of backgammon and she apologized for being so weird and when he began to talk about their life in Africa she foolishly dared to confide her biggest secret, how everything had started back then in Kenya. You know, touching and stuff, she tried to explain but Christopher cut her off. Dad? he said, owl-eyed, stunned, offended.
I don’t believe you.
She contemplated the riddle of love, creating a dissonance in her thoughts that she found ferociously appealing, a mental form of self-scarring that seemed to validate the high cost of her experience and the exhausting struggle to understand. However you go about explaining it, she thought, love was what diminished you when it was not there.
In October she watched the maple tree outside her window in Vienna release its leaves with each fresh gust of winter-laden wind, like flocks of red birds scattering away to the gray horizon to become gray themselves and then nothing.
In mid-December she rode with her mother and Christopher to Dulles to meet her father’s flight from Europe. The shuttle brought him from the plane to the terminal and there he was and she was staring at him, abject, lovelorn, and he waited, with hopeful eyes, for his daughter to take the first step forward, back into his arms.
Book Four
The Friends of Golf
I’m pleading with you, with tears in my eyes: If you fuck with me, I’ll kill you all.
—General James Mattis, US Marine Corps
CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE
They slipped Eville away from his unit in Haiti and brought him up to Miami for a few hours to caddy for Steven Chambers, the first of numerous occasions in the following years. Something Chambers said to him that first time put everything in perspective afterward. We don’t fly under the radar, son, he said. We are the radar. We’re not operating with situational values here.
True leaders did not look at a fire and ask, What should I do? True leaders were those men who know what to do and how to do it and, with or without policy, do it, and so it gets done, and it was to them that Master Sergeant Burnette had always owed his allegiance.
You could find them some days between temperate equinoxes on the links outside the District, convened on the first tee in these final years of the millennium, chins tucked and heads bowed and testicles snug, smacking their drives two hundred and fifty yards and beyond toward the middle of the fairway. They made the game look easy and natural and powered by grace, dialed in to the sweet and the straight, their balls nested in a little egglike cluster out at the edge of your vision. It was the kind of perfect placement you get from guidance systems orbiting the planet and that tempted you to think they had the course wired up, had punched the coordinates.
What they called themselves with wry half-smiles was the Friends of Golf, FOG, perhaps an advertent self-parody—a permanent threesome with a rotating fourth, selected guests invited on some other basis than handicaps or dead-eye putting, although they would not abide hackers given the tightness of their game. Hackers would be told to pick up their ball at some point along the front nine, or they would pick it up themselves when the scorn became too much to bear, and heaven help you if they caught you cheating, an inevitable reminder of the commander in chief’s sleazy penchant for mulligans. They could not forgive the ineptitude of arrogance, the cavalier stupidity of players who voluntarily exposed their weaknesses and their commensurate need for forgiveness and let themselves be caught.
Eville Burnette saw the humor in that, a round-robin contest of the unscrupulous, the sly and the underhanded, the touts and the rogues, fox versus fox. Whatever anybody thought he was, Burnette was not a dumb-ass, although it took him an extra beat to sniff out what the chefs from FOG had cooking on their collective burners.
The course they preferred was west out on Highway 50 toward Front Royal and the Blue Ridge Mountains, a club called International Town and Country on a post-revolutionary estate known as Chantilly, far enough beyond the beltway to allow for the secure privacy they would never find at the metropolitan courses like Burning Tree or Congressional, where every golfer had ears. With the earth tilting against them around Halloween and the harvest moon, they would migrate south with the snowbirds to their fair-weather favorites—Pinehurst and then Augusta and then the Doral, their midwinter haunt in Miami. When the Friends of Golf dreamed of the game they dreamed of the balmy January morning they would dance on Castro’s grave and tee up on the course Rockefeller had built in the glory days along Varadero Beach. You’re in fine company, Chambers liked to joke with Eville Burnette. Che Guevara was a caddy down in Argentina, before he bought a motorcycle.
The three regulars had nicknamed themselves after some of the legends of the sport—Undersecretary Chambers was Arnie, Undersecretary Milliken from DOD was Ben (Hogan, of course) and Sammy, after Sam Snead, was the alter ego for the player formally attached to the Agency, whose real name and title Master Sergeant Burnette was never told and never troubled himself to know, but titles were often misleading in the league where these men played. Their fourth might be anybody with a useful skill set—lawyers, bankers, congressmen, arms dealers, patriotic celebrities, psychics, moguls from the media or defense industries, lobbyists, syndicate capos, cyber-engineers, oil men, narcotraffickers, professors, contractors or their subs, collectors, retainers, cowboys, or call girls—whoever you were, if they needed you they found a way to work you into the picture, foregrounds and backgrounds cropped and bleached and classified far beyond mortality, the image simple proof of their existence and nothing more. Anybody who came to them bearing a simplistic back-channel mentality only earned FOG’s derision, since they operated quite a few levels beyond or be
low or behind that, in an endless hallway of locked and unidentified doors that opened into nothing until one door in fact opened into everything, but you were never going to have access to that door.
Burnette would learn a few things, though—Arnie was Roman Catholic, Ben a Southern Baptist, Sammy a Jew for Jesus who had accepted Christ as the Messiah and been saved. Eventually Burnette would come to understand the importance of their faith. They were graduates of Yale. He could see how that was important too, their vanities starched and pressed just so. They were not grizzled, not brawny or physically intimidating—Chambers was like a silvery elm and the other two short and sinuous with cabled sheaths of muscle like rock climbers, spider monkeys, trapeze artists—little guys immune to both weight gain and criticism. Little guys with big dicks, or at least big-dick syndrome. Phallocrats. The three of them together cast a glinting aura of sunny optimism, come to conquer, the self-confidence of men accustomed to the winner’s circle.
The world, the Friends of Golf were fond of saying, is not run from a house on Pennsylvania Avenue. They were the architects of the unseen, the fabrication of interlocking subterranean networks and processes that formed the human infrastructure of what are known as deep events—multigenerational efforts routed together into a fusion that seemed to hold together everything in the cosmos of power, the continuum of power, the throb of ancient algorithms, an almost mystic coming together of forces converging across a grid of specialties. Deep events evolved in deep time and produced tectonic shifts in human affairs. Something happens, something obviously cataclysmic, where even the unexpected was not to be mistaken for a coincidence. There are no coincidences, and everything counts.
It all depended on the science of applied pressure and counterpressure, making sure that when things break—nations, ideologies, economies, atoms—they break to your advantage. And break they will.
In the final years of the twentieth century, the Friends of Golf were the Shakespeares of two events, the first in 1989—to which they had devoted every ounce of their energy and intellect and merciless ingenuity throughout their careers—and it turned out pretty well, in Kabul, and then, before the year was out, Berlin. The end of the wall begat what some happy fools had called the end of history and served as a vindication of more than just their methodology—it was a validation of their most sacred beliefs, a validation of their souls, yet an incomplete redemption for Steven Chambers until Croatia declared its independence in 1991, fulfilling the lifelong dream of Stjepan Kovacevic. There were anxious thinkers in the family who fretted that the end of communism left a void in the West, which would require the development of a new enemy—UFOs and aliens were being tossed around as candidates—but the Friends of Golf knew otherwise, and they were obsessed now with the second event, the eternal one ascending out of the twilight of the centuries—what the Muslims would come to call the Narrative, the hatred awakening into the bigger abomination under the eyes of God, not the end of ideology but the reanimation of the conflict between ultimate good and ultimate evil. The Friends of Golf believed themselves to be the true playwrights and producers of the Narrative, adapted for a new generation of bloody thespians. The old firestorm the same as the new firestorm, the sky opening to disgorge flumes of liquid death down upon God’s enemies. Funding it, steering it, smashing it headlong through the bureaucratic clog into the wall of illusions and cowardice otherwise known to them as diplomacy, a waste product of gutless politicians, the short-term thinking of moral invertebrates.
What Eville Burnette did not know—but what he would come to know—was that they were all hands of the Company, the commissars and satraps and water carriers of the Deep State, a familial nexus of assets and adjuncts, overt and covert and beyond into a netherworld of unidentifiable phantoms, daylighters and midnighters and cave dwellers. In any combination spread they constituted the dark matter of the world of intelligence. They lived in two realms at once, like a certain kind of particle in quantum physics, simultaneously occupying the moral antipodes of a universe looking back at itself in a mirror, the entire world a shell company for another world, one reality a parallel for still another reality.
They had been poised for war since they were kids shagging balls at the practice range for a nickel a bucket, listening to the veterans back from Europe or the Pacific or North Africa, who’d warn the boys of the unfinished nature of the job of freedom. The poison was out there still, shape-shifting, flowing through the cracks in civilization. It’s in your hands now, boys, which is not unwanted news to a gung-ho kid, an inspiration to grow up fast and be the future. That, in any case, was how it was for Eville Burnette, when his father returned from Southeast Asia.
Not many people ever knew that a generation of Montana smoke jumpers had been snatched up by CIA recruiters like Paperlegs Peterson and Big Andy Anderson in the sixties and sent to Indochina. The rationale was obvious enough—young men this far out on the edge of sane behavior, willing to dive out of the sky into a flaming forest, were an ideal resource for the clandestine death-match rodeo the Agency was running in the jungles of Laos. Crazy winged wranglers with nothing exciting to do in the off-season but keep the cattle fed or go to college. You could not train people to be fearless nuts like the Missoula smoke jumpers were—by Western birth and inclination. Not to mention the money—the Agency stuffed their saddlebags with tax-free cash. And they made the best kickers in the world, pushing cargo out of C-130s and C-46s and C-47s for Air America, payloads of weapons and food meticulously weighed and rigged to chutes and rolled out the doors over a drop zone in a matter of arduous seconds, hosed with adrenaline. A bad drop was worse than no drop at all, a gift to the enemy, and they didn’t make mistakes.
Dawson Burnette had been hired as a C-130 kicker in 1960 with ten other smoke jumpers from the Missoula and McCall base camps for a mission called Operation Barnum. Barnum was about a place Eville Burnette’s father had never heard or dreamed of—a Himalayan kingdom called Tibet, invaded by the Red Chinese, where the Agency was running an insurgency with Tibetan fighters known as Khampas. Dawson flew the Himalayas that winter in an unbroken fever of joyous wonder, kicking men and supplies out onto the ice-walled plateaus north of Annapurna, and then he returned to Missoula for the fire season. By the time the snows were blanketing the Bitterroots in the fall, the Agency asked him to report to Guatemala, where he joined a pair of other jumpers training parachutists and riggers for what they were told would be an invasion of Cuba. That was 1961, the year the US Army created the Golden Knights, an elite team of showcase jumpers designed to battle the Soviet pioneers in the clouds, the Reds a step ahead in world domination thanks to parachuting genius.
By 1962, Dawson Burnette was in Thailand, resupplying General Vang Pao’s guerilla army across the border in Laos, but he made it home in time for that summer’s wildfires and stayed put for the next two years to finish his university degree in forestry and start a family, marrying the sister of a smoke jumper from over near Bozeman, a ranch-raised girl named Paige who loved books and fly-casting and training Appaloosa barrel racers to turn on a dime.
Eville, the first of three sons, was born in 1965, the same month his father landed in Thailand, back in the Agency’s fold, a branded maverick, part of a crew of smoke jumpers sent there to train PARUs, Parachute Aerial Reinforcement Units, and build helo landing pads and STOL airstrips on the ridgelines overlooking the Plain of Jars. For the next three years he’d pogo back and forth between his off-season secret war in Laos and the mountains of the Northwest, making babies and fighting blowups in Montana and Idaho, disappearing to Fort Carson in Colorado or Marana Airpark outside of Tucson for days and sometimes weeks to test R and D projects for special operations—a remote-control para-wing, a chute with a guidance system hooked to a frequency from a ground-to-air beacon, a Parachute Impact System that allowed pilots to stay out of the range of small-arms fire—then back on the weekends for barbecues on the ancestral ranch, home now to hi
s own wife and his own children and most everybody else in Montana who proudly shared the worthy name Burnette.
Then for two years the family held its breath, waiting for Dawson to return. He claimed it was all about jumping, and probably it was, when he decided to join the Fifth Group Special Forces in 1968, a unit that had taken so many casualties that the qualification protocol to wear a Green Beret had been sidelined in favor of the expediency of warm bodies, jailbirds welcome, we’ll redefine crazy ass for you, and the missions were the same ones he had been doing all along, the faces were the same, civilian and military, except now instead of training commandos to jump he was one of the warriors stepping out into the air fifteen hundred feet above the drop zone, nursing a desire to kill somebody to even the score for the friends he had been unable to haul back up into the air alive or unmaimed.
Eville knew the story of how they met, his father and Steve Chambers—both of them aboard a C-130 headed for the Laotian city of Long Tieng, one of the busiest airports on the planet at the time, operating the largest CIA field headquarters in the world, when the plane was shot down. For some negligent reason the new guy going up-country from the embassy in Saigon was wearing a rucksack instead of a chute, too green for words, and in the chaos of the moment Dawson cross-clipped the ruck’s front straps onto his own harness and they rolled nose-to-nose out the door and away through the flak-peppered blue. How is it, buddy? Where abouts you from? They each sprained an ankle in the spastic dance of their hard landing. A Huey picked them up, along with the others who made it out of the 130 before the Pathet Lao could get there, and that night at the base in Long Tieng, drowning themselves from an ice-filled tub of canned stateside beer, they agreed that Steve Chambers’s first jump had gone smoothly, all things considered. Guys would come up to Dawson saying, You did what?!
The Woman Who Lost Her Soul Hardcover Page 53