Year after year, the story was always the same—a nation of families, dying for one another, one way or another, bleeding into every benighted landscape across the planet. Not the arbiters of destiny, but its servants, entitled to the cemetery’s solemn honors, the stars on the wall, the flags on the graves, wreaths redolent with sacrifice.
That was Burnette’s America. Free the oppressed, oppress the barbarians. He turned in circles and looked around for some other way but was never able to see it any differently, and he submitted himself to FOG’s game and the vast scale of its culpability and thought sooner or later it would be the death of him. Another Burnette hurling himself into the action, doing Lord knows what for his country.
On and on it goes.
On and on it goes.
Blood, dirt, death, horror.
On a tape recovered during a raid on a Salafist safe house in Sarajevo, Eville would hear the jihadis singing this song, and agree that he, too, saw the world in the same way.
CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX
The Doral, February 1996
They stood there like arresting marshals on the first tee of the Blue Monster, eighteen beautiful holes of ankle-sucking bunkers and watery death, watching the colonel grind his cleats into the manicured pad of turf. His white leather shoes ripped into the greenness, some paw technique he seemed to have studied from Rottweilers and yet there was the effeminate counterpoint of his plaid buttocks, the incongruent wiggle, a little hula dance as he dug himself into place over the ball and addressed it like an ax murderer in a grass skirt. Swing, swoop, and a whistling slice into the oleander. The Friends of Golf stood in judgment, a tribunal of raptor-eyed old berserkers observing a terrible sin in progress, some kind of appalling character flaw in one of their minions, an overconfident sap with a bad knee and a miraculous God-mended arm once cracked in two by a .50-caliber round in Panama. They could attest to a little-known fact about military service—it wasted whatever style might have been there in your game before you buttoned on a uniform. The army, for instance, played like tank commanders. The navy, in the habit of letting fly, whacking balls off aircraft carriers into the waves, had developed a chronic shank.
Master Sergeant Eville Burnette fired off a perfunctory burst of praise, Nice shot, sir! because what was he supposed to say? Colonel Hicks, niched somewhere in Burnette’s chain of command, was the notorious lunatic Christian running the Combat Applications Group back at Fort Bragg, the unit that didn’t exist, a ghost troop afloat in the martial ether with a name that wasn’t meant to be a name, SOD-D, D as in Delta and Divine Intervention, and no one had yet bothered to explain to Eville why he had been teleported out of Port-au-Prince that morning to a freaking golf course in Miami. He figured the colonel had something to do with it, although that alone could not account for the surprise of Steven Chambers. The sadist echelon in the military went to a lot of trouble and expense to make an example of scapegoats, and Eville supposed he was about to be publicly chastised and stripped of rank as a proxy for all the hapless renegades who had screwed up the Haiti mission in a dozen goat-fucking ways.
The colonel bent over with a grimace of disgust and plucked his tee out of the grass. The überspook who called himself Sammy took his place, loosening up with slowed practice swings that were as butter-smooth as a tai chi routine and Undersecretary Chambers turned to the master sergeant with the diamond-blue-eyed smile Burnette had known most of his life and asked after his mother. She was fine, sir, off the ranch for a couple of months wintering in Santa Fe with her widow friends and the undersecretary said, Ev, when was the last time you called me uncle, and Burnette told him not since he was a boy. Sir. Right, said the undersecretary, and when was the last time you called me Steve?
Not since I joined up, sir.
How do you like the name Arnie? Let’s go with that. Cocksucker.
Sir?
Wow, said Undersecretary Chambers, following the parabolic rise and fall of Sammy’s drive with grudging admiration. That cocksucking son of a bitch Sam.
He’s out there, sir.
Arnie, Ev. Tell you what. How about you caddy for me today?
Yes, sir.
And the next time you’re up north let’s drop over to Arlington Cemetery and pay our respects to your old man. Maybe I can get you out to Vienna so Joyce can treat you to one of her lousy home-cooked meals. Sound okay?
Thank you, sir. I’d like that.
Arnie. Try it out in this sentence: Arnie, what in fuck’s sake am I doing here at the Doral?
Ben and Sammy plopped themselves onto the vinyl cushions of an electric cart and purred off toward the center of the fairway, the colonel headed off in a cold-blooded hobble toward the oleander hinterlands, and Eville shouldered the undersecretary’s heavy red leather bag and followed a step behind his erstwhile Uncle Steve, listening to him tell war stories about the master sergeant’s father. Your dad, your dad, this and that. Laos. The Secret War. Once virtuous youth wolfing down a lifetime of bloody unspeakable adventures.
About two hundred yards from the pin, Ben and Sam calculated wind direction and speed, sprinkling blades of grass into the breeze rattling inland off the ocean through the fronded palms. Chambers was to the side, about thirty feet behind them, his jaw grinding a pellet of nicotine gum. He turned to look at Eville standing back a respectful distance, a comic figure among the sherbet pastels of the gentry, his dusty black boots and blue jeans and T-shirt not quite the sartorial standard for the pretensions of the Doral, the golf bag slung like a big TOW rocket launcher over his collarbone. Chambers smiled warmly and asked for his advice—a lazy wood or an easy two iron or a full three?—and Burnette confessed he didn’t know a damn thing about the game and Chambers said he had eighteen holes to learn, unless he was in a hurry.
You in a hurry, Ev? No, sir. You sure? No, sir, I don’t know what I am.
The four of them waited for the colonel to profane his way out through the rough, chopping a shot that dribbled fifty feet beyond the pod, and then one after another the three Friends slapped their second shots onto the skirt of the kidney-shaped green. Burnette stoically readjusted the bag across his spine and they walked ahead and the undersecretary continued his tale of two young Americans ensnared in the dirty work of survival against an unlikely but all too familiar and persistent enemy—their own guys.
Your dad came out of the bush one day and showed up in my office in Saigon, said Chambers, and man was he pissed off. Ev, you’ve been around enough black ops by now to know a few things, am I right? Just because Dawson joined Fifth Group and put on a uniform doesn’t necessarily mean he ever really left the Agency. That’s easy to understand, you have to utilize talent, especially when you have covert business like MACV-SOG going on and you’re drawing personnel from all over the place to put together missions and no one’s ever going to get their hands on a paper trail or follow the money and you’re running projects with a mix of soldiers and agents and paramilitaries that are so black and deep you think you’re living in the Mariana Trench and you forget that there’s something called sunshine back in the world.
So your father comes in and starts shouting at me, You’ve got to fix this thing, Steve, pronto, goddamn it, and I said, Absolutely, I said, Of course. I said, You can always count on me—but look, what the hell are you talking about? What happened? Well, what happened was just one of those things, right, but boy did it cause a stink among the ladies. Fifth Group, with the help of its best friends, was training and infiltrating South Vietnamese agents into the north and they sniffed out a double who was passing intel to the NVA. Time to take the guy aside for a heart-to-heart, but the conversation does not go well, and the agent expires.
Maybe the gook had a medical condition, I say to your dad. So what’s the problem?
Well, some toff lawyer in the JAG’s office started an internal investigation and
was preparing to arrest Fifth Group’s command staff, top to bottom plus two NCO bystanders, and charge them with murder. You father was one of those noncoms, and he believed his command was scrambling together a cover-up that would have made the two noncommissioned officers the fall guys. Essentially I’m describing a situation where the conventionals in the Big Army wanted to administer a spanking to the Special Forces, whom they loathed for all the reasons you’re familiar with, I suspect. And maybe they would have gotten away with it if Fifth Group alone owned the project, but they didn’t, which is why Dawson came to me. I’ll get on it, I assured him, and I did, but I was under wraps myself, you understand. I had to be careful, and couldn’t work it fast enough to keep all these guys from being arrested. Two months later we have the happy ending. All charges dropped by the secretary of the army. Lo and behold, the Agency told the JAG, in the interests of national security, go fuck yourself sideways on a barbwire fence. We refused to make our guys available as witnesses, and that was that. The war never blinked but kept flaming on, whether we were right or wrong or dead or alive.
Now, Ev, you’re an intelligent man, just like your father. Why did I tell you this story?
I’m not sure, sir. Am I in trouble?
Why are you asking?
I kinda feel like I’m in trouble.
Not at all. Not in the least. You’re the prize stud at an auction. Sound good to you?
Honestly, I don’t know, sir.
But if you were, in fact, in trouble, I’m there. I can do that. Ben and Sam can do that. The colonel imagines he can but beyond a certain point he can’t. That’s why I told you the story.
Yes, sir.
Never a question. And I mean always, and I mean forever. I will stick you on the moon in an Airstream trailer to keep you away from the bastards.
Thank you, sir.
Ev, said the undersecretary, you remember my daughter, don’t you? She must have been what, thirteen? The last time you saw her.
I think it was after that. She might have been fifteen.
I want you to do me a favor. The favor means I claim half of you, and the colonel owns half of you. Agreed?
All right, sir.
I want you to keep an eye on Dottie for a while. She’s down there on that island waiting for you to get back.
You’re shitting me.
I shit you not, son.
They reached the green and Chambers slid his putter from the bag and gave Burnette instructions on how to properly attend to the pin. Ev, said the undersecretary, squatting to eyeball the track of his shot. After we putt out, walk with the colonel to the next tee.
Can I request a heads-up, sir?
I believe he means to take you away from the easy life you’re living.
Burnette groaned and said he guessed he was still living on the getting-fucked side of the tracks and the undersecretary said it’s not what you think, Ev, remember what I told you. Now go stand by the pin.
Ben birdied the hole and Sammy and Arnie two-putted into pars. The colonel two-putted for a triple bogey and promptly claimed victory for his creed, spreading his arms toward the throne of heaven to declare, Look at me, Jesus. I’ve been in the battle. I’ve been fighting for you. Amen to that, Colonel, said the Friends of Golf, and Burnette couldn’t fail to notice they were like some Latin ballplayers, their religion worn on their sleeves, blessing themselves before strokes, eyes upraised, pointing at God with a tip of their sun visors, Thanks, God.
Coming off the first green, Colonel Hicks marched prune-mouthed and unseeing right past the approaching master sergeant and Burnette thought, Yeah, what’s new, a typical case of brass myopia, nothing personal, never a reason for an officer to pay attention to an enlisted joe unless he wants his ass licked or is experiencing some Zulu impulse to ram a spear through your chest. Yet after several more steps the colonel paused and waited for the caddy and then unnerved Burnette by pretending to be human, always a shocking transformation in a tyrant, his Tidewater features—preacher’s face, southern lawman—moonbeaming brotherly love to the newest member of the flock. He spoke to the noncom like a confidant while Burnette suffered the earnest lock of gunpowder gray eyes, thinking the cleft in the colonel’s chin sank deep enough to hold a candle.
He wanted to know if the master sergeant had read Auden, the twentieth century’s most influential Christian poet, English majors in the army, not many of them, not many of us, am I right, Top. Burnette, nonplussed, wondered if he should mention Eliot or the eccentric religious impulses of J. D. Salinger, but instead mumbled the only line he could recall from Auden’s work, We must love one another or die.
Bingo, said the colonel. Son of a bitch had the wrong conjunction.
They sauntered side by side toward the second tee, behind the Friends of Golf, the master sergeant wary of the colonel’s outpouring of fellowship, the lion and lamb camaraderie, wishing the man would stop blowing sweetheart bubbles up his backside and just make his point, which Burnette had to assume was considerable, given the trappings of its preamble. And here it was, but he couldn’t decipher the colonel’s tone, reason nuanced with prickish humor.
Now, Top, said the colonel, I want to know how you would assess our mission in Haiti.
Burnette said, We did our best, sir, and the colonel’s mouth hung open, mildly stupefied, while he reflected upon this and then his lips clamshelled back together into a don’t-bullshit-me smile. Our best, he chortled. Now, Top Sergeant, what the fuck does that mean? You did your best? I suppose I should give you a medal then.
No, sir.
Yeah, come over here, he said, stepping ahead, mounting the platform of the tee to join the other players with a wink. Come up here, soldier, and stand at attention. We’re going to have us a little ceremony.
Burnette resigned himself to the order, placed his heels together, and straightened his spine perpendicular to the sod, eyes straight ahead, posted like a dry turd held upright on a skewer. His vision focused on the oily sheen of the colonel’s cap of aluminum-colored hair and beyond that an honor guard of royal palms casting down a ribbed overlay of sunbeam and shade upon the deadpan expressions of the Friends. The colonel’s hand noodled in a trouser pocket and reemerged with some sort of unidentifiable medal hanging off a wad of blue ribbon. He pinned the mystery award on Eville’s T-shirt and back-stepped to cock an exaggerated salute, which the master sergeant returned, halfhearted and chagrined.
Thank you, sir. Permission to speak. What’s this medal for?
Damn, you’re an impertinent shit, the colonel snarled, feigning offense. I don’t fucking know, Top Sergeant Burnette. Distinguished Zoo Keeper. The Kabuki Cross. What would you like it to be? A Purple Heart?
No, sir.
No, sir?
I haven’t earned a Purple Heart, sir.
You are correct, Top Sergeant. But you will, isn’t that right?
I have mixed feelings about being shot, sir.
You want this medal or not?
No, sir.
Correct answer. Top, let me tell you why you don’t want this medal.
The colonel’s rawboned fingers unpinned the clasp and removed the medal from the soldier’s breast and sailed it out toward a duck pond behind the tee and explained that unless a man wore the uniform of his country, medals were a useless foppery.
How do you feel about that, Top? Being a man without a uniform?
Bewildered and uncomprehending, sir.
That it? That’s your state of mind?
Aggravated, said Burnette, unclenching his teeth just enough to eject the single word from the herd of expletives stampeding his tongue, but apparently it was the funniest word he ever uttered, triggering a wheezing explosion of laughter from the Friends of Golf, the colonel himself rubescent with mirth, hee-heeing the bra
y of a fat lady. A reliably enjoyable moment, good fun, fucking with a subordinate’s mind. Okay, I get it, said Burnette, restraining a smile. This had been a jest, a type of court amusement, and he cheered up, allowing himself to imagine being tasked to babysit Steven Chambers’s daughter would prove to be still another one of their pranks.
Okay, at ease, said the colonel, extending his hand for a congratulatory shake. Burnette, welcome to Delta.
Sir? Is that possible?
Anything’s possible, Top. You want in, you’re in.
The colonel never bothered to tee off on the second hole but walked with Undersecretary Chambers and Burnette down the fairway, briefing the soldier on the blackened peculiarities of his new mission, which would not switch on without sweeping up one more day’s manure from the old mission, some mysterious crisis with a freighter and its crew held hostage in Gonaïves. The State Department and the DEA were interested in getting this thing resolved, said the colonel. Fucking nonsense but take care of it tomorrow and then I want you on this other thing, this Jacques Lecoeur thing, and keep in mind you work for us, just the undersecretary and me and not that goddamn godless Pakistani colonel down there, one more blue-cap pissant crawled out from the sewer of his own country, looking to put some notches in his belt. Another thing, the colonel said, start growing your hair out now. How about a mustache? Beards I can live without. And stop at Walmart or one of those places on your way back to Homestead and buy yourself some civvies.
Ev, the undersecretary told him as they all gathered again at the second green for a farewell, you can give me my bag back now.
The colonel requisitioned the electric cart from Ben and Sammy and chauffeured his newest recruit back to the clubhouse, explaining the protocol Burnette needed to follow subsequent to his special assignment in Haiti. I want to see you at Bragg, he said, parking the cart in the driveway near the main entrance next to a town car with government plates, where an army major sat waiting for him with the engine running. We bring you inside the fence, said the colonel, do an official selection, run you through some indoctrination courses, cut you with knives, upgrade your killer’s license.
The Woman Who Lost Her Soul Hardcover Page 54