You ever killed anybody, Top?
No, sir. Well, maybe. It was the Gulf War. The gooks were too far away to confirm kills.
What are your languages?
Spanish. Creole . . . well, some.
Worthless shit, said the colonel. We’ll get you speaking some sand nigger —Dari, Arabic, Pashto. You’re going to need those before this is all over.
I look forward to it, sir, said Burnette, wondering what the man was talking about.
They have a spa in there, the colonel said, pointing at the clubhouse as he got out of the cart. You ever been to a spa, Top? You ought to try it sometime—get yourself a facial, pedicure, hot stones on your spine, get one of those herbal rubdowns. And listen, between you and me, the colonel said, keep a tight leash on the undersecretary’s daughter. She was a rookie just off the Farm at Fort Lee, he confided, where she had managed to gain a reputation as a bit of a wildcat.
Yes, sir, Burnette said, watching the colonel disappear into the Doral. He tried not to think about how this day had become a watermark for strange in his life, the elevation to Delta Force delivered to him in the guise of a practical joke. He opened the passenger door to a blast of air-conditioned relief and sat down sighing, addled with elation. The major behind the wheel tossed a clipboard of paperwork onto his lap, reached over to give him a ballpoint pen, and said, Sign. Burnette scanned the first document and sucked in oxygen and looked at the major.
Hold the phone, I’m a captain now?
Looks like it, said the major, retrieving the signed paperwork and issuing Burnette a federal concealed-weapons permit, a corporate credit card—Omega Systems—from a bank in the Cayman Islands, and an envelope nine-months pregnant with twenty-dollar bills.
The next thing Master Sergeant Eville Burnette knows he’s back in Haiti getting his forehead split by some coked-up banshee in Gonaïves and then he’s Mister Burnette with UN press credentials hanging off his sweaty neck, up in the mountains with the girl and Tom Harrington, who was not so bad for a do-gooder, one of the few so-called humanitarians he befriended in Haiti who reserved a dram of their flooding compassion for the boots on the ground. How much the lawyer understood he had been cultivated as a pawn in other people’s schemes, Burnette did not know, but it made him ache to see Harrington at this moment of dark enlightenment, crushed by his own naïveté, realizing his role in the northern mountains was to sow betrayal and be himself betrayed, and then the girl is a whirling tigress with eyes sealed shut in pain and he hits her and she crumples to the ground. It’s Harrington who kneels over her while she gags and chokes and Eville Burnette punctures the trachea of the strangling Haitian and he’s swearing to himself, It should never go beyond this, meaning his deal with the undersecretary and his daughter, and yet it does.
CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN
In the twilight, the Blackhawk became consumed by a cloud of rancid dust as the pilot put the helicopter down as close as he could to the medical tent inside the UN base in Cap-Haïtien. Jackie was first out the door and Burnette would not see her again until the following morning. Then the operation’s tardy air support, a Chinook and a second Blackhawk, returned after their sweep through the mountains with their ignominious haul—the dead (three, including Jacques Lecoeur), the wounded (four, one of them an eight-year-old girl), the detainees, twenty-three in all, men, women, and children. Not a single blue cap with so much as a scratch. Lucky man, the twenty-fourth detainee was Lecoeur’s second-in-command, Ti Phillipe, in surgery at that very moment to repair and close Burnette’s hasty field tracheotomy. Seeing the dead rolled out in zippered body bags, it occurred to Eville that the undersecretary’s daughter had, in all likelihood, saved Phillipe’s life when she almost killed him with a gullet full of pepper spray.
Burnette had then made the mistake of trotting after the Pakistani colonel and grabbing his upper arm as he exited the chopper and swaggered toward a Humvee waiting to return him across the strip to quarters. What happened up there, colonel? he demanded, trying to control his breathing, which was how he controlled his anger, which was why he wasn’t behind bars somewhere. What the hell did you do?
Digging out his yellow earplugs, Khan spun around into his face, enraged. To whom am I speaking, sir? he demanded, bellowing at first before dropping his voice into a lower but more sinister range of sarcasm. A journalist? A soldier? To the first I answer, the United Nations Pakistani attachment has successfully engaged and quelled the activities of a murderous band of reactionaries threatening the stability of the host nation. To the second I answer, you are insubordinate, my friend. You are impudent. And, should I say, a hypocrite? If you have an objection to my command, the colonel jeered, I want it written and submitted, and I trust it will include an explanation of your own role—and allow me to express my gratitude here and now—in our mission.
Look, sir, I’d just like to know. These people? They stayed in the forest, hiding. They were rabbits. Sir.
Excuse me, it was my understanding you were provided to us by your army as a field advisor. For reasons you perhaps know better than I. The operation was a success, Captain. Wouldn’t you agree?
No, he would not, but he backed off the open confrontation, the impossibility of anything being resolved beyond his duty to obey. Colonel Rashid Khan, his ego inflated with carnage, killing, and murder, the mastermind and hero of the bushwhack in the mountains, saluted and Eville returned the salute and the colonel took his seat in the Humvee, leaning out to call Eville back over to issue further orders. After the International Police Monitors from Caricom had sorted out the detainees, the colonel told him, he expected the captain to monitor their interrogations.
Out on the helipad the next morning, Burnette noticed a taxi stopped at the chain-link gates to the restricted area and groaned and cursed to himself as he watched Jackie Scott flash her identification and be allowed through on foot and come toward the choppers, fiddling with her badass camera before she fixed it to her right eye and started shooting. He started to walk away, back to base headquarters to update the situational report he had cyber-filed last night with his chain of command at Bragg, still not understanding that there was very little chain left in the matter of whom he was obliged to answer to these days, when she dropped the camera and called to him.
Eville, wait, she said in a neutral voice, neither demanding nor upset by the obvious bloody consequence of their deceit. What happened?
He kept pounding on for several more steps but found he couldn’t ignore her and stopped and stomped back until he was in her face. Why don’t you tell me? he said.
I left the mountains when you did, she said. You forced me onto the helicopter, remember? Otherwise, I’d know, wouldn’t I?
You know what, he said. Right about now I’m doing the best I can not to smack you again.
Hey, I knew what you knew, okay, she said, self-contained and formidable, stepping brazenly forward into his threat. So, go fuck yourself, man.
Their hostility enclosed them in a sickening bubble of mutual contempt that prevented either of them from being aware of the SUV speeding their way until it had slammed its brakes, honking superfluously for their attention, and Tom Harrington, almost in tears, was flying out the door on the driver’s side, taking in the scene, the dead, the wounded, the flex-cuffed huddle of ragged prisoners left to sit in the dirt throughout the night. Then Harrington, wheeling on the two of them with a fire hose of accusations, was eviscerated by Jackie’s calm autopsy of Tom’s innocence. She pointed at his vehicle, the smashed windows, the bent front bumper and dented fender, and asked him where the huge splatter of blood had gone that she had seen in the parking lot as she left the hotel that morning. I hit a dog, okay, Harrington yelled back, flustered and unconvincing. Yeah, you hit something, Jackie agreed. Eville stole a sidelong glance at the vehicle and had to admit it was pretty messed up. In a faintly heckling ma
nner, she reminded Tom that his own freely confided purpose in interviewing Jacques Lecoeur had been to determine, at the behest of unknown benefactors, if Lecoeur and his men were still operating on yesterday’s agenda, the good guys versus bad guys program that was counterproductive to a liberated Haiti, or, just as bad, were freedom fighters who had dissembled into a gang of bandits. Am I right? she taunted. Did I get it wrong? Watching her performance, Eville found her undue confidence breathtaking, her implied assertion that she was disconnected from events and blameless. She wanted to make it clear to Harrington that she didn’t really give much of a shit about any of these issues as long as she could continue to do her job, which meant take her pictures without the interference of self-appointed censors. When she paused for a breath, perhaps for Round Two, Harrington exploded.
Master Sergeant Burnette, Tom Harrington’s rant spewed on, I don’t know what the fuck you’re doing up here out of uniform with this psycho cunt—and everything the guy said Eville felt he had coming and it pained and discouraged him, having someone he honestly liked and respected, a civilian no less, vilify him and question his honor, but Harrington’s tirade began to spiral and break apart in midair when he returned his outrage to the girl, readjusting his aim to her career, her sorry-ass future as a member of the press, making threats that he had no possible idea were ineffectual and quickly tiresome. In Eville’s recollection of the scene, she had looked right at him with a dispassionate self-knowledge that was heartless and without mercy and asked, with what he could only describe as supernatural blitheness, Where do you go around here to report a rape?
Harrington lunged at her and Eville was compelled to intercept him, although he would have taken an immoderate pleasure in stepping aside and letting the two of them have at it, the primal male thing sunk in his brain stem curious to see how far Harrington would go. But he grabbed Tom, not roughly but with enough force to edge him back from the disaster of assaulting Jackie, who stood there with her hips cocked and arms folded, mocking both of them, All the big bad men who get off hitting women, and he jockeyed Tom back to his battered SUV while Tom pleaded with him, Who is she, man? Who the fuck is she? I thought you were one of the guys in the white hats, Eville, and what other option did he have but to lie to Harrington and swear he didn’t know her. Eville nudged and persuaded him back into the SUV, where Tom’s hands trembled on the steering wheel and he dropped his head as tears skipped down his face and he confessed he thought he had hit someone on the road that night at a barricade, coming out of the mountains. I couldn’t stop, man. It would have been suicide. He drove off, wiping his eyes with the back of his hand. Eville heard he had gone over to headquarters to have it out with Colonel Khan, who refused to see him, and had left the north soon afterward, and soon after that had withdrawn altogether from the never-ending travails and tribulations of Haiti.
Burnette went back to speak with Jackie before heading to his assigned cubicle on the base where he could hook up his encrypted laptop and try to make sense of things to anybody in the States who might be listening. She had volleyed the first words, dismissing the drama in its entirety by defining Tom Harrington. He thinks he’s so much better than us, she said. He thinks he’s Mister Clean. The go-to guy for moral intervention. The halo’s a bit much, don’t you think?
But it had been easy to read her face when she garroted the lawyer’s conscience—she was bluffing—and it had not been difficult either to read the wretched expression of Harrington’s reaction—something had happened between her and Tom, and she had emerged from the encounter with aces to play for leverage.
So, he said, you’re saying he raped you?
Did I say that? she said, unaffected by his curtness. For the first time that morning looking at her face he registered the fact that she had attempted to apply makeup to camouflage the bruise he had telegrammed her the day before. Did you hear me say that? She smiled with a sparking trace of wickedness in her captivating blue eyes, a bratty chime to her words, and Eville imagined that as for the fate of the undersecretary’s daughter, he was beyond caring. There was nothing he found fundamentally right with her, nothing trustworthy or exculpatory—she was, instead, a human isotope. Every reproach earned the lash of her ridicule, every attempt to advise or help was rejected with juvenile recalcitrance, if not fury. At the same time, there was something too methodic about her intensity, a practiced sense of routine, as if she had been taught, or self-taught, to escalate the psychodrama, which of course was nonsense, because any training in black tradecraft taught you to cool down, not heat up. There seemed to be a fault line at her core, two different plates of the self, slammed together in perpetual grating that he could fairly guess would one day crack and heave and devastate.
And yet. That morning when her attitude morphed and reassembled in a transparent zone of seduction, his mind was disgusted while his body seemed to muster the minimal amount of forgiveness necessary to agree, tentatively, if he could make it—yeah, right—to meet her for dinner that night. Maybe, she said, they could get back into their own groove, like the other night on the veranda at the Oloffson. What he found so hard to parse though was that nobody, as far as Eville could determine, was exploiting Jackie; her behavior was unilateral—there was no one she had to defend herself against. On the contrary, he would continue to see, she was snatching up anybody who wandered into her orbit, which was A-plus behavior for the sneaky-Pete lot, but he generally had trouble thinking of her as an agency spook, and second generation, for Chrissakes, carrying forth some scary family tradition into the Darwinian future. True, there was nothing fragile about her, certainly an eye-catching trait for recruiters and trainers; undoubtedly she could and would launch herself like a wolverine into the fray, but then, he was learning too slowly, count on Jackie to throw an inner switch and reverse direction, her caprice jerking you around in your seat with a sort of highly engineered, clutch-burning torque of bipolar whiplash. She did not court his allegiance, not at all, although she summoned it cat-and-mouse-style, only to bat it away. There was nothing she seemed to desperately need except to screw with everybody, her game always the superior game.
It was an awakening of sorts for Captain Burnette, an acidic epiphany that seemed long overdue and willfully delayed—his complicity in the deaths and injury of innocent people, the casualties by no means collateral damage in what was by no stretch of the imagination a war or its attendant fog. And nobody cared. Poor and starving and nobody cared made more sense than gunned down and nobody cared, not counting Tom Harrington, for the little that was worth. The detainees themselves beseeching in their misery toward the shabby men, their captors, who considered themselves no more exalted than herders and therefore, logically, considered these pathetic specimens of humanity no more human than goats. He thought at first it was Haiti but he would come to know otherwise—the planet was chock full of expendable people, overflowing with targets, and genocide an organic event, as common as a wheat harvest. That day on the base his afternoon had not improved, helping a contingent of Jamaican police sort out the prisoners and stumble through a series of basic interrogations before they were locked up for the night, simply trying to identify who these people were, the base translator’s English not up to the job, Eville himself not up to the chaos and caterwauling, and he had arrived for dinner deeply distracted and brooding, in a dark state of mind that she put up with mostly not at all.
What is with this resentment? Jackie said within seconds of his ordering a bottle of beer. What did I do to you exactly? He could have said but didn’t, Hey, get over it, not everything’s about you, because in a way so far everything had been about her, not directly, of course, yet her involvement seemed difficult to separate from every jump in a situation from standard to calamitous. But after a couple beers, he leveled out and could see how his shitty mood was exaggerating her influence, her negative force field.
How did you get so tough?
She reached acro
ss the table without asking and her bitten fingers crabbed away his pack of cigarettes and box of matches and she lit up and said if she were a man, he wouldn’t be wasting his time with such a fatuous question, would he?
Look, he said, my mother’s tough. She had to be, the way she grew up, all right? But you grew up considerably more sheltered—
It might have looked that way to you, she said.
—more innocent maybe, and I know you’ve seen a lot of the world but the world you’ve seen and lived in has been basically good. If you were a guy, the question I’d ask you is how you got such a king-sized chip on your shoulder. If you’re trying to prove you’re as badass as a guy, you proved it, okay, so, like, stand down already.
By the time they ordered, the only dish still available on the menu was fried chicken legs with a side of black beans and rice, and when the waiter left their table Eville made the mistake of commenting on her seemingly overnight fluency in restaurant Creole.
Americans have a problem with this, don’t they, she said, but it wasn’t clear to Eville if she meant specifically a woman’s intelligence or multilingualism in general. Cleopatra spoke nine languages, Jackie informed him with a distinctly peevish rise to her voice for what she obviously considered a set series of infinitely tiresome challenges to the perception of her specialness, the unfair excesses of her drop-dead good looks or intellect or courage or God knows, her very birth, as if she had somehow stolen these laudable parts of herself from someone else, an imaginary deprived person. My father the polyglot speaks seven or eight. So? Anybody who wants makes an effort and does it.
The Woman Who Lost Her Soul Hardcover Page 55