And now Coop remembered.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
Coop lifted his head off the dashboard. The windshield was darkened with sand, and a blunt crack echoed through his skull. He heard a sputter of radio life, beeps and static.
RPG, RPG, RPG.
Everything outside his vehicle was fallout and smog. In front of him there was a fire—a burning humvee. Coop flinched as a hailstorm fell upon his truck, accompanied by the clatter of return gunfire.
Fire on the right, yelled the radio, and something punched into his windshield with great force, leaving a star-shaped fracture in the glass. Coop opened his door to peer out, but couldn’t see anything through the smoke. By the time he dropped into a crouch against the open door, the shooting was over.
The convoy had been following the road back to FOB Castello when the ambush started. Nobody was killed but one grunt had taken shrapnel to the cheek. Coop listened to him scream while the doc applied QuickClot, but the doc still couldn’t get the bleeding stopped and they had a long drive ahead. First Sergeant Walker opted to call in a nine-line medevac and the convoy waited on the road, everyone’s weapons aimed up at the canyon walls, until a wavering speck of black appeared in the afternoon sky. Cold grainy wind became rotor wash as the bird touched down. Meanwhile, it was up to Coop, the only engineer attached to the convoy, to strip comms from the destroyed humvee that lay in front of him. He used a pickax to pry the demolished radio from its console, choking on black gouts of diesel, then hucked a thermite grenade into the cab. Coop watched the skeleton of the vehicle vanish in fireworks and white smoke before returning to his own truck. By that time they’d dusted off the grunt with the face injury. Everyone was ready to get back to Castello.
The convoy returned through orange dusk, gunners whirling in their turrets, engines revving as the drivers muscled over every hill. Coop’s uniform smelled like truck smoke and cordite and there was a crust of red soot on the skin of his face and arms.
Corporal Paulikas from the infantry took over the driving. He was a freckled and forward-toothed National Guardsman, a stranger, and they both stayed quiet in the aftermath of the firefight. Coop sensed a mutual need to demonstrate their professionalism. Neither wanted to be the wide-eyed cherry, asking, “Can you believe what just fucking happened?” He appreciated the silence, it gave him time to make sense of the event. We were ambushed, he thought.
He was looking out the window when he saw a distant figure, unmistakably human, crouched among the clay teeth of a ruined temple. The convoy was crossing an older trail which sloped downhill, past the ancient rubble, and the last daylight brightened a patch of desert at just such an angle that Coop spotted the shadow, his shape framed by a half-collapsed archway.
“I see a guy,” Coop said.
“A guy,” Paulikas repeated, his eyes on the road.
“Stop, stop, stop,” Coop said. The truck slowed and Coop twisted in the cooling air to look back at the ruins. No figure could be seen in the red light.
First Sergeant Walker came loudly over the radio. “What the fuck, over?”
Paulikas clicked his mic. “Sapper said he saw someone.”
“Say again? We’re stopped because we saw someone?”
Coop had a Leupold in his kit bag. He blew sand off the lens and scoped the sun-drenched lower road. There was the man again, his shape gathering itself up into the light. Something in the man’s hand. A canister.
The radio crackled again. “Nobody out here sees shit,” First Sergeant Walker was saying.
“Possible mortar,” said Coop, and he dropped out of the humvee, lifted his M4, and through the sights hunted for a wavering silhouette.
In the days following Coop would reflect on this moment and wonder about his state of mind. Certainly he remembered the rage. He’d just been ambushed, and now here was someone aiming a fucking mortar in the direction of the convoy. It felt personal. And of course he’d been scared, trying to gauge the distance between himself and the enemy while a panicked part of his brain wondered about a mortar’s effective range. There was also the pressure of his colleagues, the electric silence of the convoy behind him. If he was wrong it was more than a fuck-up, it was dangerous. By halting the mission he’d put them all at risk. But if he was right, Coop had chanced his way into an opportunity of transcendent value. It was like those game shows where they stop a random pedestrian and give them trivia questions: one minute you’re walking down the road, the next you’re on television with a chance to win a million dollars. Except for Coop the reward was infinitely more valuable than money. With the release of a single bullet, his whole existence could be folded into a story of competence, heroism, performance under pressure. Everything before this would become prelude, a slow gathering of aptitudes leading up to the day he saved everyone’s life. If he could make the shot.
So in his head Coop was tamping down the greedy exhilaration of discovery, trying to put himself into range mentality. He snuggled the weapon into his shoulder, tried to stop his breathing, find that dead space; the void that would align the sunset phantasm with the barrel of his rifle. And then a moment of pure grace and geometry: the enemy giving up his center mass. Coop heard Paulikas begin to hiss. And ever so gently he squeezed the trigger.
The first sergeant ordered Coop, Paulikas, and three grunts from Second Squad to go down and identify the body. If there was one. Darkness was coming fast across the valley and they hustled in file down a gravel slope, toward the smashed temple. Now Coop could see the ruins more clearly. Clumps of rubble lay buried in a lake of purple shadows, a half-collapsed chimney protruding from the center. Coop wondered if it was Buddhist, Persian, maybe even Babylonian. On arrival in-country the sappers had received an abbreviated archeological survey from a public relations officer, the takeaway being: If it looks old and interesting, try not to blow it up.
“Gotta be over two hundred meters, that’s a choice shot,” said Paulikas, as they descended.
“Dumb luck, if I got him,” Coop muttered back. He recognized the strain in Paulikas’s tone. The grunts were clearly jazzed by the possibility of revenge, while also feeling a little sour that an engineer, a fucking combat support element, would be responsible for the kill.
Now the infantrymen were taking a knee and Coop joined them, crouching in the sand. They had come to the perimeter of the ruins and could see the temple up close, its stone flank pocked with old bullet wounds.
Corporal Paulikas called Coop over with a wave of his hand. He was studying the temple through night vision goggles.
“Gotta admit,” he said, “figured you were full of shit for sure.”
Paulikas offered the goggles and made a single chopping motion toward the open doorway. Coop peered through the field of green, scanning the battered shape of the structure, suddenly depthless. Aiming the NVGs along the path indicated by the corporal, Coop sighted an outturned branch of pixels. The splayed leg of a human corpse.
“Situation is, I don’t see how we get there to confirm the kill,” Paulikas continued, and he made more chopping motions. Coop saw the problem instantly: around the temple was a scattering of red-painted rocks.
Coop needed to see the body. He would see it. It was a question of respectful completion; there was something perverse, even cowardly in the idea of killing someone without laying eyes on the damage. He conferred with Paulikas and put together a quick plan, and for many weeks after, he’d wonder about how things might have gone if he’d just said “Fuck it” and headed up the slope toward a future of enviable unknowing.
Pushing up from the sand around the temple were larger chunks of rubble, columns and wall sections, half buried. A pathway through the minefield. Coop detached himself from the infantry squad and hopped onto the nearest island of stone. In the energy of the moment he was reminded of rock jumping back home, the stumbling dashes from big rock to big rock along the shore. The
idea was that pebbles were rivers of lava, so you had to stay on the rocks foot-sized or larger, but only for a moment before they sank into the molten bubbles.
And eerily, as he came through the arched doorway, Coop imagined he could actually hear the fizzle of melting rocks. No, it was something else; a hissing, venomous noise, a weird snake-prayer filling the ancient darkness. Coop flashed his light on the scene. And he stood there blinking, his brain forced to process a host of new details.
First off there was all the blood. Flung out in sharp jets and drizzles, splashing the stone around the fighter’s corpse, which was bent backward over a rocky protrusion on the temple floor, with his head turned sideways. Too much red, Coop thought, too much to be the blood from such a small body, smaller than Coop had been expecting. No, the red was vapor from a bullet-scored metal cylinder, one of a half dozen pitched around the temple floor. And combined with the smell of aerosol and the Arabic labels, Coop put together that these were cans of spray paint, which, sighted from a distance, distorted by light, and in perspective against a smaller body, had resembled to Coop’s trained eye the shape of a mortar round.
The red rocks had been spray-painted. Coop had a flash of respect for the primitive ingenuity, inventing a whole minefield to keep soldiers off your turf. And he’d begun to process that the man he’d shot was a kid. Barely a teenager. He knew it from the small body and the tiny sneakers, from the hesitant shadow of hair on his upper lip. And as Coop studied the broken face he saw a subtle motion in the kid’s chest. And heard it, as the hiss of the wounded spray can died. A quiet gulping of air. This last piece of information took the longest to fully register. Coop watched blood spilling steadily from the rupture that only minutes ago had been the kid’s mouth, his flashlight traveling over bare wriggling fingers, as if the kid were slowly but insistently trying to find purchase in the reddening sand, and his feet and legs were moving, now, too, heels scraping the ground, as if trying to swim away from Coop’s flashlight, or perhaps aimed to fix the imprint of his body into the temple floor, a bloody snow angel. The kid was still alive.
“Cooper, where we at?” said the radio. It was Paulikas.
Coop would never forgive himself for how quickly he came to a decision. He called back to Paulikas and informed him that the corpse indeed appeared to be a Taliban fighter, but the body had been booby-trapped. Then Coop had begun laying down packets from his demo bag, crowning the scene with crisp white blocks of C4, keeping his eyes aimed down at the ground as he paid out detonation cord from his spool, making his way back across the jigsaw path of rubble, back to where the other grunts were waiting.
“Bug out,” said Coop. “I’ve got it.” No one argued with him. He heard the scramble of boots as the fire team moved away from the temple. Coop huddled behind the nearest berm of rubble and sat with the detonator in his hand. Up on the road, the convoy had shrunk to a line of dim orange lights beneath the greater darkness of the mountain. The stars were coming out. He pressed the switch and the blast whooshed up through the old temple like fire traveling up a chimney, sweeping over the berm and through Coop’s body, sprawling him backward under the white light of a momentary sun.
And now, lost and freezing to death in the Bronx, sitting against a wall and staring upward at the black unforgiving sky, Coop swore through the brain-scrambling apocalypse of the explosion that he had actually seen the kid’s body lifted in flight: arms and legs spread out, disintegrating, a comet flying away from the earth.
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
Eva came out of the elevator into Three East, an ancient subdivision of St. Barbara’s Hospital. It was a dismal unit. Soot-encrusted windows ran along the exterior wall, casting the hallway in a polluted light, and the linoleum floor had been skinned down to the glue. Nearby, a coil of wires hung from an open panel in the ceiling, where it looked as if an electrical repair had been called off midproject. Eva shook her head, frowning at the hospital’s exposed innards. It was the kind of hazardous neglect that would have driven her grandfather into a fury. He’d worked construction after retiring from the Army, and in this second career had earned a reputation as a fierce advocate for onsite safety. Two years after his death, Eva still got holiday cards from his union brothers and sisters at Local 100.
Down the hall, Eva recognized a young Filipino man sitting alone behind a cubby of reinforced glass.
“Hey Geo,” she said.
Geo smiled and held up a finger to indicate he was on the phone.
“Yes, Doctor, I understand,” he was saying. “But I’m not seeing any of that in the EMR.”
Geo’s voice echoed spookily in the ward, and Eva found herself walking faster to his booth. According to hospital policy there was supposed to be a security guard on every level, but Eva knew they were often pulled from the floors to help with conflicts in the emergency room.
“Sure, sure,” Geo was saying into the phone, clearly mustering his patience. He looked at Eva and rolled his eyes.
There were no other chairs so Eva leaned against the wall, blinking to fend off exhaustion. For the last few days she’d been on Q2, pulling overnight shifts every other day, and meanwhile still trying to keep her hours at Next Start, which had descended into bureaucratic chaos ever since Presser went missing. Now it was almost 6 a.m., the end of her shift, but just as Eva had been finishing her sign-outs she’d gotten a page telling her she was needed here, on the third floor, for an urgent consult.
“Yes, Doctor,” Geo was saying. “I’ll make a call down to Records, but if it was never entered, I can’t…Okay, sure thing.”
Geo hung up and cocked his head at Eva.
“Lemme ask you something,” he said. “In medical school, why they don’t teach doctors how to use computers? I mean seriously.”
Eva managed a weak laugh. “If we could use computers, you wouldn’t have a job.”
“True,” said Geo. “Too true. So what’s up?”
“I got paged.”
“Yeah, lemme see,” said Geo, flipping through a stack of hand-written messages. “Here it is. They want you in Room 316.”
“Damn,” Eva muttered, and dropped her head. “The Tomb? You’re sure?”
“Hope you didn’t have breakfast plans,” said Geo, frowning sympathetically.
Eva let out a harsh sigh. She lifted herself from the wall and marched away, farther into the recesses of the derelict wing.
Among medical staff, Room 316 was popularly known as “the Tomb of the Unknown Patient,” a special ward for the unidentified and insane. The patients admitted here were people without papers, without families, without any discernible history. The city’s truest orphans. It seemed to Eva that such people were birthed by the city itself, miraculously conceived in dark places, a by-product of urban life. But of course there was always an explanation, usually a combination of mental disorders, poverty, and social isolation. No one counted on these folks anymore, no one expected them home. And in most cases, nobody would ever claim them. The hospital was required by law to provide them a measure of care, but management didn’t want them taking up beds that could be made available for patients with insurance. So they threw them in the Tomb with some poor resident stuck on the case, a junior physician who would inevitably spend hours bogged down in paperwork, trying to get them identified or at least transferred to another agency.
And this morning it’s me, thought Eva, as she came to Room 316. It was empty. There were two beds inside the room, both outfitted with restraints. The patient must still be in transport, she guessed. Eva took the interim to sit down on one of the beds. She eased off her orthopedic clogs and rubbed her ankles. A moment’s respite from the battle.
“This is a war, doctors…”
Something a city official had said during yesterday’s morning conference. The whole Psych department had been subjected to an exhaustive presentation detailing the post-9/11 mental health epidemi
c in New York City. A PowerPoint of grim statistics. Experts were projecting a half million new cases of PTSD among the citizens of the five boroughs, which constituted a 200 percent increase since before the attacks. Thousands upon thousands suffering from alienation, insomnia, and despair, all the modern disorders of urban life, but now jacked up by an animal fear of death. Meanwhile there had been some predictable trends in various indicators of poor mental hygiene, starting with record sales of alcohol, firearms, and sex toys.
Perhaps sensing the bone-dry morale of his audience, the city official had ended on the note of duty. “This is a war, doctors,” he told them. “And all of you are fighting on the front lines.”
And Eva had thought: No shit. Because for her there had always been a war. As a child it was Korea, her grandfather’s conflict, which had raged on for decades in the Okori household, a fact of life around which their days had been organized. And now with her grandfather gone, Eva had found her own battle against the Bronx itself, with its shootings and overdoses and infants thrown down three flights of stairs. People burned with chemicals, sick from toxic mold that spread in dark-spotted canopies over the leaking houses, choking on fumes from the Van Wyck Expressway, that gentle poisoning mist. And if that weren’t enough it was war with insurance companies, war with the hospital management. You fought your own body, its need for sleep, nutrition, and exercise, its soft susceptibility to MRSA and other bacteria. And finally, you were at war against your own mind. That official had it wrong. Madness wasn’t the enemy, it was the field of battle. And here comes another casualty, thought Eva, standing up from the cot as she heard the sound of a gurney being rattled down the hallway.
Into the room came one of the transporters, maneuvering a litter, and on it a young man, apparently unconscious. Escorted by Dr. Adjaye, a resident from the Emergency Medicine department.
Fire in the Blood Page 17