Meditation? she snorted. Now there you have two things that don’t go together—meditation and killing.
I don’t know, he said. The longer I had to sit still, the more I wanted to shoot the instructor.
She could feel the bigness of his coyote grin before she turned to admire it and be uplifted, the harmony of the alcohol and the stimulant, the cigarettes and music, the flirty patter and the mellow springtime air and the lunar gleaming and the motion, all the fine small things in the world simulating a sense of romantic buoyancy that she hadn’t experienced, or granted herself, in ages, without pretending.
It took an hour for the station to fade and by then they were deep into the Tidewater, past Roseboro and Clinton and out into the farmscape of old plantations where America first practiced being America, the moon-lit antebellum mansions now timeworn anomalies between the more regular intervals of less-old sharecroppers’ shacks and lesser old trailer homes and featureless brick houses, the big estates parceled among the many, this field of new corn and this field of cotton and this field of tobacco and this pasture fallow, overgrown with abandonment or dispute, the land sandy and honeysuckled, wrapped in kudzu and flat as a lake encompassing a vast archipelago of pines, stray covens of fog along the bottoms where the sluggish rivers and creeks lay like serpents. Without asking, she turned off the radio and the middle of the night pressed into them and made them contemplative, smoking and nursing their beers, and after a long silence she said, Is it all right if I ask you about killing?
At first she thought the answer was no because he didn’t answer her and the abrupt torque of his nerves was so tangible she felt it ratcheting into her own neck and shoulders. She said, Is that a weird question—knowing full well it was, even for people like them, the cause of chronic moral indigestion. I don’t mean to sound depraved, she said. I just want to know what you know. Maybe you can’t tell me. Maybe there’s nothing to say, and she gasped as he swerved suddenly and pulled off the road, mad at her, she could only surmise, but he waited for the headlights far behind them to float past and got out to take a leak and climbed back into the driver’s seat with another cold beer for each of them. I’m just trying to figure out how to begin, he said, and she nodded gratefully, her attention there for him as if it were something much more than just ears and listening. I guess the first thing I want to say, he said, hesitating, and they were on the road again, the truck accelerating through its gears through the countryside.
The first thing I want to say is SF black, if that’s who you were, meant the stories were taken away from you, Eville said. Even without instructions and oaths he had little desire to talk about his missions anyway. Speaking would diminish them, shit begins to sound all B-movie, speaking would merely dilute the narratives into sensational tales that everybody loved and nobody understood.
Outside of the Wall, he told her, you’re probably the one person on earth I can tell.
He had no desire to kill anybody, except sometimes he really did. In Haiti when they told him to get out there and train the detainees to be cops and the other cops to be better cops, some guys were ancien régime, some were guerillas, and they all hated each other and he tried not to hate them, but it wasn’t difficult to come to terms with the feeling that the day might arrive when he would have to shoot one of them, somebody turning against him in an unacceptable and absolute way, the most likely candidate for a bullet being Ti Phillipe. The recruits seemed consumed by a shifting array of little moods, pinned to imagined slights, and it made him more combative, more volatile, more prone to petty aggression, until he began to see how it was he might become a person no one who thought they knew him well would ever recognize or accept.
When he was younger, before the military, he told her, my imagination, my tough-guy schemes, were about protecting every girl and woman from the man he himself might be without an imagination. That sense of vigilance, of being poised to step into the middle of something, never disappeared, it just expanded outward to the nation, but in Haiti I could see how easy it would be to shrink the whole trip down to an enraged redneck walking around purifying the earth of its infestations.
But here’s what I want to tell you, he said. How many years have I been in uniform now? Since I was twenty-one. And I never killed anybody, at least as far as I know, until my command—your father was in on this—sent me to the Balkans last year to work on a hunter-killer team with a Croatian counterpart, a colonel named Vasich. I don’t know why you asked about killing—okay, I suppose I do—but this is the only story I have. That’s funny, right? Trained to kill for years and just one story. So we’re in Sarajevo, okay. We have a list, some names, and we’re tracking people. Terrorists.
Before they could get to the Palestinian with American blood on his hands, the Mossad got to him first. Then Vasich and Burnette sat shivering their asses off for two days in an urban hide, staring through their scopes at the windows of an eighth-floor apartment in a concrete building across and down a bullet-pocked block. Late on the second afternoon the Iranian appeared in the apartment and they watched him sit down on a couch in the small living room. Me the spotter (a legality issue), Vasich the shooter, and I’m the American talking through the steps with this guy—range confirmed, wind speed negligible, identity confirmed. Fire when ready—Wait. A woman dressed in cosmopolitan clothes entered the frame of Burnette’s scope and sat down next to the target on the couch and then in the next instant her blouse and face darkened with a heavy splatter of her companion’s brains and she appeared not screaming but stunned, her hands swiping at the pieces of flesh in her eyes while Vasich already had the rifle broken down and back in its case. You didn’t wait, said Burnette as they walked to the stairwell at the rear of the hide. Wait for what, said Vasich. For them to make mujo babies?
The assassination of the Iranian exhausted the only target list Burnette was aware of but Colonel Vasich had no intention of ending their partnership, and Burnette soon understood why. In Bosnia, Vasich was a target himself, his presence as a foreign combatant unacceptable to the NATO command, which was still trying to separate the ethnic groups from one another and sort out the wholesalers, the bona fide war criminals, from the run-of-the-mill retail killers. I need your help, the colonel announced. It will be a good thing for your country, I promise. Burnette’s encrypted e-mail bounced back an answer from Fort Bragg in less than an hour. Stick with Vasich until told otherwise. We need transport, said the colonel, and they took a taxi to the NATO motor pool at the airport and several hours later Burnette had persuaded the officer in charge to call a number at the allied headquarters in Brussels for clearance and they drove off in an armored SUV, back to the safe house to pick up their rucks and weapons and then up into the mountains and its still-smoldering patchwork of battlefields, staying that night with an American Special Forces A-team billeted in a ruined village, everything destroyed except the eternal hatreds.
In the morning, they headed higher and deeper into a zone of fluctuating hostility, a ravaged world haunted by its starving survivors, plunging along the slushy ruts. Do you have a wife? the colonel asked Burnette. Do you have a son? Vasich had traded with a Russian kill team—a clandestine cell of Chechens for the Bosnian Serb militia leader who had raped his wife and murdered his twelve-year-old boy. You fall on your knees thanking God, said Vasich, when God lets you bargain with the devil for revenge. For two hours they drove on back roads through the mountains, almost impassable tracks sometimes barricaded by snow drifts where they were forced to dig their way through, high into the subalpine wilderness, Burnette feeling strangely back home in the evergreens of Montana, until shortly before dawn the colonel said pull over by this stream and they stopped near a brook tumbling in white cascades down the mountainside and washed their faces with the freezing water. Vasich clawed through his ruck and emerged with bread and cheese and, already in his mouth, a bottle of slivovitz, which he passed to Burnette. Back and forth it we
nt, the bottle emptied as the sun rose behind the eastern slope of the peaks and the colonel passed out in the backseat and Burnette was swirling in the front of the SUV, his eyes closed but his mind clamoring, much too jazzed to connect with sleep, thinking about something Scarecrow had told him, the Crow a Ranger during the Panama op and then deep behind the Iraqi lines with his A-team chasing scuds during Desert Storm. War, Scarecrow had said, it’s just like pussy. You don’t know why you want it but you gotta have it. And then afterward, you’re looking at yourself asking yourself, Why the hell did I want that? And where can I get some more? and Burnette stared out the window at the serenity of spruce trees and their frosted needles and thought, A little more would be all right.
Vasich leapt awake looking ten years older saying, Let’s go. They drove west, somewhere in the mountains three hours later crossing an unmarked border between Bosnia and Croatia, then driving south until they reached a Croatian town and Colonel Vasich announced, Now we are home. They drove to the scarred center, masonry spewed out into the streets as if the city’s walls had vomited out their guts, and parked at a municipal building while Vasich went inside to find a working telephone. Good, he said returning a half hour later, we have now our appointment, and they drove on into a neighborhood of houses traumatized by shelling and close-quarter combat, chimneys vanished, facades herniated and bulging or slumped into rubble, stubborn flower gardens decorated with a glitter of glass shards, stucco cratered and blackened by scorch, families gathered under bright blue tarps, cooking their midday meals. Here, turn in here, gestured Vasich eagerly, and Burnette pulled into the yard of a cottage with half its roof of red tiles blown off and away.
His wife was named Dajana, a blonde-haired overweight woman with a pugilist’s broken nose and dentures that caused her to lisp. She was wearing camouflage pants and a black flannel shirt and she sat on a decrepit water-stained couch, petting a sickly little white dog curled like a festering hairy fetus in her lap, cigarette butts crushed under her military boots on the concrete floor, her bowed head jerking up to register the presence of her husband and his companion. Vasich, physically effusive with his affection, sauntered forward to bend himself into an embrace and kiss her on the forehead, stroking her limp hair, and when he stepped back she remained as she was, vacant-eyed and unmoved, even as he introduced her to his friend the American. He spoke to her for a minute in their language and she pushed the dog away and raised herself with a wet sigh and went into the kitchen and Vasich went to the side table filled with family photographs in tin frames and picked one up to hand to Burnette—My son—first his son, a tow-headed, hawk-faced lanky kid in a soccer uniform, then his wedding portrait—Look how beautiful my Dajana was—although she clearly was never attractive, even as a bride, and then the third picture he wanted Burnette to see was Dajana in uniform, a guard at a detention camp operated by the Croatian army during the war, two knives strapped to her service belt and one protruding from her left boot. She did her duty, said the colonel, and now they want to charge her. Who? said Burnette. The Hague, those bastards, said her husband. She had been gang-raped by the Muslims, had lost a kidney to a bomb blast, and had shrapnel in her skull. Yes, of course, she killed the mujos in the war, he said. What do you expect? Sometimes hand to hand, and I am proud. Later, back in Sarajevo, Burnette would hear the stories of the colonel’s wife in the detention camp, accused of multiple atrocities—carving crosses into prisoners’ foreheads, slitting a man’s throat and making his cellmates lap up his blood, forcing men to drink gasoline and then putting a match to their lips, cutting off the penis of a man she said she had witnessed rape and kill a teenage girl. She is a human being, said the colonel, she watched our son bleed to death before her eyes, she is guilty of being a mother and a woman, what do you expect?
On the kitchen table she had set out plates of cold sausage and hard-boiled eggs for the men and they ate while she stood at the stove, smoking an acrid-smelling cigarette while she waited for water to boil for coffee. Vasich spoke to Burnette in English with his mouth full. It was early in the war, the Yugoslavs were shelling Dubrovnik, and I was there with General Gotovina, organizing the resistance. During that time the Croatian Serbs attacked this town, do you understand, and I could not protect my family. His wife brought two demitasses of coffee to the table and the colonel talked to her and she left the kitchen and came back minutes later carrying the dog in one arm and a full gym bag in her free hand. Okay, said the colonel to Burnette. Finished? Let’s go.
They drove south through the hills of Dalmatia for hours, crossing the border back into Bosnia near a place called Imotski, arriving at their destination, the Serb-controlled western half of Mostar, at twilight. Okay, my friend, beware, said the colonel, as they entered the town. Everyone here is the devil, and he advised Burnette to place his pistol at the ready in his lap. He followed Vasich’s directions to a part of the old city until Vasich said, Okay, park here, please, engine running. Three doors down, you see there, we are going into that café. Count sixty, my friend, and then you must go. Go where? asked Burnette, and the colonel said, After sixty, leave. With us, please God, or without us, as God wishes, but you must go and find your way back to Sarajevo. As Vasich spoke Burnette’s eyes were on the rearview mirror, watching the woman remove a handgun from her gym bag. You will be fine, my friend, said the colonel, reaching across the seat to squeeze his shoulder, a gesture Burnette would remember more than any other. Thank you, Vasich said. Sixty, and then you must go.
They each made the sign of the cross and got out of the SUV and his wife carried the dog hugged to her bosom, using its body to conceal her pistol, the colonel’s own pistol—an HS2000, a Croatian-made polymer-framed semiautomatic—in the right pocket of his coat. Burnette began his count as they disappeared into the café, inching the vehicle forward, his left hand on the steering wheel and his right hand gripping his gun. By sixty, everything was as it had been at zero, and by ninety he was almost parallel to the entrance of the café when he heard the boom of a shot and then another and then the door flew open and a man with a pistol back-stepped out onto the sidewalk and began firing into the café and Burnette tapped the horn to draw his attention and when the man turned to face the street, Burnette waited a split second for the guy to aim at him and then lasered his breastbone and shot him. Even as he fell to the ground, it seemed, the colonel and his wife were leaping over his body and into the car. What is your count? said Vasich as they skidded away. Burnette said, One twenty, and Vasich said, My apologies, sorry to take so long.
Who did I just shoot? Burnette asked and the colonel told him, An asshole. Darkness cloaked the outskirts of town and they passed into the countryside without incident. The throttle of Burnette’s heartbeat idled down, his brain stuck in an absurd loop, thinking about the dog. What happened to the dog, he finally asked and Vasich said, The dog was old. Right, said Burnette, somehow released and assured by this nonsensical answer. In the rearview mirror he scanned the gloom of the backseat, able to just make out the silhouette of the woman, wiping her eyes with the cuffs of her jacket.
Self-defense, said Dottie. Her spine was nailed against the passenger door, her legs stretched out across the seat and the soles of her bare feet warm against his thigh as she watched him talk, examining Eville’s broad face, his gaze down the road, bluish in the moonlight.
You know, whatever, he said with a faint sneer in his voice, a hint of scorn. I’ve never worried about it.
Of course he spurned her facile offer of absolution. There would be no pardons or amnesty or exemption for someone like Eville. She had known this caste of man her entire life and they did not require expiation; perhaps they only needed this, the one thing different than a comrade or a priest—a woman to listen to them, at night on an untraveled road, with some truthful measure of sympathy, until the anger passed, and their doubts.
Right, she said.
Two men, both faced death. I lived, he didn
’t, and what more is there to say about it? You hear stories all the time, he said. Some you figure are sincere, there’s dignity, self-respect, or they’re rituals, you know, like penance; some sound plain phony, the hand wringing, the weepy confession, the self-justifying emotions. Guys whack somebody and afterward have a come-to-Jesus reckoning or something, they look at the dead guy and feel awful regret, they wake up in the middle of the night in a cold sweat, saying to themselves that miserable son of a bitch was my brother and I killed my brother. I never felt any of that. But what I told you really isn’t the story I think I should tell, he said, turning toward her with a grim, furrowed look, making a specious impression, she thought, that he had challenged her moral universe, a place he should know by now was impenetrable. You want to hear the rest, or have you had enough for one night?
I want to hear it, she said.
I’ll make this quick, Eville told Dottie, determined, it seemed to her, to unload and shut up and withdraw, his energy losing its boost in these early hours of their new day and its undefined togetherness, its potential for harmony not yet resolved and its pattern for volatility already established.
So, he continued. Got back to Sarajevo, checked in, and I find out my boys are there, my squad—Tilly, Spank, Scarecrow—tied in with some of your guys, SPECAT, Agency contractors, and a pair of investigators from the Bureau—man, that’s oil and water—and they’ve set up surveillance on some jihadi safe house, they’ve reconned the target and are intercepting message traffic and developing a plan to go kinetic and so I hook up with the op and we take the place down, this apartment in some fleabag hotel on the edge of town. The entry goes fairly well, we have to tape a cutting charge on the door and blast it off, start clearing rooms, there’s five gooks inside and one of them gets a round off at Tilly, who’s right in front of me, and he’s okay, it hits his body armor at an angle, cracks a lower rib and sends him sprawling but I don’t know that he’s okay and I’m a lightning strike on the shooter, I’m right there, I’m Cassius Clay in the jungle, man. Orders were we want them breathing or that guy was mailed to paradise. I swung the stock of my M4 into his face like a baseball bat and then kicked the shit out of him when he dropped to his knees. That should have been the end of it, right? I turned back to see about Tilly and he was huffing but struggling to his feet, and when I turned back to the shooter one of the SPECAT guys had already flex-cuffed him into a chair, he’s spitting out teeth and he’s bleeding from the nose and mouth, he’s bleeding from a dent in his forehead, and I walked over there and walloped him so hard I broke his fucking jaw and somebody pulled me off saying, Hey, cowboy, save something for the Egyptians.
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