Cooch

by Robert Cook

  Alex had looked at him and smiled. “Colin, we know each other well enough by now for both to know that you are an accomplished master of understatement, and I am, in fact, the quintessence of caution.”

  Alistair had given an inelegant snort, and had said, “Yes, quite so. Your livelihood attests to that, of course.”

  Lebanon

  The Action Phase

  THEY flew to Athens on a C-141, and then unloaded their gear into a helicopter for the ride to the aircraft carrier USS Midway. The next morning a launch took them to a sub that had surfaced just minutes earlier. The mission was on.

  Late that evening they rode from the surfaced sub in inflatable Zodiacs with muffled outboard engines to a beach in the far outskirts north of Beirut near Halat, an uneventful trip. The main party had a two-hour wait, in defensive positions, as the specialty team members moved into place and midnight passed. Listening devices revealed that only four contiguous apartments in the target building were occupied. No one had yet matched Nidal’s voice with the voiceprints stored electronically in the devices. Several of his key lieutenants had been identified by voiceprint—which was all it took to make it a go. Killing the mission planning, the mission planners, and therefore the mission was paramount.

  At 0130, the telephone wires for the entire complex were cut, and they moved in quickly. Alex placed his explosives around the outside of the building in three or four minutes and fused them for remote detonation, with a half-hour automatic override in case he got hit. He was moving up the stairs past the rear Seal on guard when he heard the clacking of bolts moving on their slides on silenced Heckler and Koch MP5-SD3 9mm submachine guns and the distinctive coughing sounds of rounds being tapped out three at a time. He ran up and placed his inside charges, finishing just as he heard the distinctive sound of a burst from an AK-47, then several pistol shots, followed by more concentrated AK-47 fire.

  Cuchulain heard a voice yelling, “Charlie Forty-Seven. Back to the boat. There’s nobody here but bad guys and junior shooters. We got the plan papers. Blow the whole thing.”

  Since the validation code, Charlie 47, was right, Alex threw his nearly empty explosives sack under the stairs, near a charge he had set. There was no need to carry it out, since he was going to blow the whole building. Aesthetic considerations were pointless. He pulled his Beretta from its holster and began to run toward the boat, passing several groups of two men, each pair supporting or carrying a third wounded man.

  Cuchulain had activated the small infrared lights on the chest and back of his vest to keep from being dropped by the escape shooter, who was on his stomach seventy-five meters out. The shooter was equipped with a telescopic night sight and an accurized M-14 7.62mm rifle, loaded with mercury-tipped rounds that ensured no further resistance after a hit. As Cuchulain ran, he scattered small antipersonnel grenades fused for five minutes before activation; he could disarm them remotely but could not change their timing. Five minutes was usually more than enough.

  As soon as everyone had passed, the escape shooter would pick up and run back to the boat. Being last to clear was a dangerous job; Alex’s grenades would help slow the pursuit. Someone was on the roof of a second building with a machine gun, starting to fire wildly. Alex dropped beside the escape shooter and said, “Boomer,” to alert him he was the explosives man. He pulled the transmitter from his vest, and fused the building to blow in fifteen minutes, just in case he got hit.

  He waited, instinctively worming his way into the sand to get below the small mound in front of him to avoid fire. Alex wanted to blow the building as soon as possible after the Seals had cleared, to eliminate the hostile fire coming at them from at least that building, and also to shake up shooters from the other building.

  Men began to pour from the apartment building beside the target, the distinctive sound of their AK-47s loud as they ran, shooting wildly. A steady flow of fire from the escape shooter was dropping many of them as they emerged, the “snick, snick” of his magazine changes so fast that it seemed as one sound. Dirt kicked up in the mound in front of Cuchulain’s face, and he heard the Seal beside him grunt.

  “I’m hit, can’t shoot,” he groaned.

  “Damn!” Cuchulain said as he reached across the Seal and picked up the rifle, rolled left to tuck the stock into his shoulder, then rolled back right, put his cheekbone on the stock, and looked into the night scope. He picked some near targets and shot until they fell to give him a bit of a feel for the M-14, then started to shoot the bright green figures as they ran from the building. His magazine changes were slow as he dug fresh ammunition from the vest of the wounded shooter. He saw the last of the visible infrareds pass his sights, and yelled, “Wounded shooter!” as the man ran by.

  The Seal paused and yelled, “I’m hit too. I’ll send help,” then stumbled on.

  Alex flicked his transmitter and the building went up in two blasts, the first caving in the four walls to collapse the roof, the second raising the roof again and exploding it into jagged shards that ripped into those nearby. Men flew into the air at the second blast, and many others fell to the ground around it with the concussion. Cuchulain had mixed thermite into the charges to ensure that anything that could burn, would. The thermite sparkled in the dark sky.

  Cuchulain put six quick rounds into the machine gunners, then flipped the selector switch on the M-14 to full automatic and quickly emptied the magazine at the crowd. Some of them returned fire wildly as they dropped to the ground. Alex rolled over and grabbed six fragmentation grenades from his vest, two at a time from their pockets. He had fused them all, with timers designed to be set with a quarter, half, or full turn of the grenade top. He took two, gave them a full turn, and tossed them beside him onto the path. He quickly threw two, with a half turn, partway down the path and threw the quarter-turn pair as far as he could.

  He reached into his vest again, took a large flat parcel from it, and put it under the stock of the M-14, pressing it down and flicking a small switch. Cuchulain bent, picked up the Seal with a fireman’s carry, turned and started to run, leaving the weapon behind.

  The Seal was a heavy man, and Alex realized he had neglected to take the extra magazines from the Seal’s vest; he could feel the man’s blood pumping into his shirt. He was tiring fast as he cleared the underbrush and ran into the sand toward the Zodiacs. Again his father’s words came to him. Be in the best possible physical condition. Alex thanked him one more time for the advice. The wounded Seal who was to send the help was still stumbling along; Alex passed him.

  Two Seals were pushing a Zodiac into the surf while the others knelt with their weapons at their shoulders facing toward Alex when he yelled, “Hey! Charlie Forty-Seven. Wounded.”

  Four of the kneeling Seals broke toward him, running. Alex could hear the sound of their safeties being engaged as they swung their weapons over their shoulders. Two grabbed the Seal from his back, then ran back and dumped him into a Zodiac just before Cuchulain rolled in. The others carried the stumbling man back. A corpsman cut away the clothes of the wounded and started to work to stabilize them.

  As the hushed outboard kicked in and shot them over the surf, a ragged series of small explosions could be heard as the first of the antipersonnel explosives initiated. Two explosions came from the shore, followed by two, and a final two, each punctuated by screams of pain and fear and wild fire from AK-47s. A few moments later, there was a much larger explosion, and Cuchulain, lying heaving and exhausted in the bottom of the Zodiac, grinned. The big booby trap under the M-14 had been found.

  As he rested on a spare bunk on the sub, Cuchulain sensed someone walking up to him. He opened his eyes. A Seal, white bandages wrapped tightly around his right shoulder and back, stood watching him from a lined, pale, haggard face. Cuchulain grinned at him.

  “It looks like you’ll live. I would have been mightily pissed to carry a guy as big as you that far and find out that he was dead. You were bleeding like a stuck pig.”

  “My name is Bro
oks Elliot,” the Seal said, sticking out his left hand. “I owe you, big time. They nicked an artery, and you got me out fast enough that I didn’t bleed out.”

  Alex smiled and reached up to take his hand and shake it.

  “They call me Cooch. Buy me a San Miguel sometime, and we’re even. You’d have done the same for me.” He closed his eyes and heard the Seal walk slowly away, then his eyes popped open. “Hey, I saved a bunch of your loaded magazines for you for next time!”

  Elliot turned around, laughing. “Yeah, I heard. No wonder you’re tired. Our bozos weighed that damned vest. Thirteen pounds.”

  Later Cuchulain walked to the surgery and sat down beside it, waiting. After a few minutes, the surgeon walked out with arms bloodied to the elbow. He tore off his green cotton skullcap and threw it against the wall with a splat.

  “I hate those fucking AK-47s,” he screamed at no one.

  Alex looked up. “Who’d we lose, Doc?”

  “It was Morgan and that SAS captain.”

  “Alistair? Shit!” Alex said.

  London

  Whites Club

  LORD Alistair sat silent for several minutes as Alex sipped his coffee and waited.

  Finally, Alistair shifted in his chair and nodded. “Thank you. This is a great comfort to me. There are things worth dying for, even in the absence of personal threat. Unfortunately, our societies must deal violently with those who understand nothing else, or we would perish at the hands of barbarians. It has been forever so. Your studies of history should help bring it all into perspective for you. It may have been your George Santayana who said that ‘those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.’”

  He sat for several minutes, gazing off into space. Alex was silent, respecting the old man’s grief and rationalization.

  Lord Alistair shifted in his chair again and said, “You have much experience of violence, Mr. Cuchulain. Violence tends to corrode the soul. I am glad you are at Oxford. What you can learn is to put what you have done in perspective, and perhaps mitigate the corrosion. We English comfort ourselves with a veneer of civilization that masks and perhaps rationalizes a thousand years of war after war, where our best and brightest are killed to perpetuate our society.

  “You are, like it or not, Mr. Cuchulain, a warrior. Society values warriors greatly when they are required for the collective survival of the common good. When the conflict wanes and victory is won or perceived, society, particularly young societies such as yours in America, would like to put you away. They would like to treat you as a bloodhound, useful only if the madman gets out of his cage. They despise your skills, seeing only the ability to end life quickly and efficiently, rather than your protective ability to help the society adapt and innovate without barbaric interference.

  “Older societies, such as ours and those in Europe, have longer memories as a result of a thousand years of armed strife, and the brutal occupation of our countries by the victors, who by traditional right feel free to amuse themselves with our women and confiscate our property. You colonists have never been through this set of experiences, and think that they are a relic of the past. We in Europe see no reason to believe that ten thousand years of tradition have been obliterated as the result of the death of Hitler and Tojo. Only warriors have the quickness of action, the resoluteness of purpose, and the zeal to mobilize the populace in the face of great danger. For those reasons and many more, we in England quietly value our warriors, and honor them for the long term.”

  Lord Alistair studied Alex for signs of either boredom or interest. He found Alex watching him intently, waiting.

  Alistair smiled at Alex and said, “You are kind to indulge an old man’s ramblings. I would call you Alex, if I may.”

  Alex looked at him and smiled. “Of course, sir.”

  Early in his second year at Oxford, Alex ran into Brooks Elliot, the Seal he had carried away from the firefight in Lebanon several years earlier. Elliot was there on a Rhodes scholarship, having served his time in the navy before exercising the fellowship. They spent some time together, then more as the friendship deepened past the social reticence natural to them both.

  Mac’s friend had contacted Alex; he turned out to be a former SAS officer, now on the Oxford faculty. He invited Cuchulain to dinner several times. Later Alex introduced Brooks to him, and later still introduced the two of them to Lord Alistair. Over time an easy relationship developed among the four of them. Many evenings they would talk late over a glass or two of vintage port, their conversations wandering easily from philosophy to history to ancient or modern weapons and their impact on society. Usually the major’s wife, a concert pianist, rehearsed for her performances in the parlor behind them.

  On weekends sometimes they would go to Lord Alistair’s estate to shoot woodcock or pheasant, then talk over dinner long into the evening. Intellectual male camaraderie that was not framed in a background of violence was an entirely new experience for Alex. He found it stimulating as well as personally broadening, and resolved to figure out what else he was missing in life. He had long since come to the somewhat disturbing conclusion that he had never had the adolescence he had heard others describe with nostalgia many times; he had missed that period of questioning, of doing whatever seemed as if it would be fun or interesting, of casual flirting and dating, of arguing into the night about the existence of God.

  Alex bought a good camera and took a photography course in the town of Oxford; the university would not dream of offering such frivolity. On weekends he sometimes strolled through the streets and museums of London, observing and taking photographs. He sat in Hyde Park from time to time, listening to the speakers at the Corner. When the crazier ones stood up to speak, he tried to imagine himself in their shoes and occasionally joined them for a pint at the local pub as the day wore on, listening and asking questions.

  He tried to learn to paint and was hilariously unsuccessful by the measure of his friends’ reaction to his early efforts. Brooks Elliot taught him to play squash, and he learned to love the game. He was unsuccessful at golf, and not amused by the failure; it was on its surface such a simple game.

  When he finished at Oxford, he shouldered a pack and wandered through England and Wales for a few weeks, then crossed into Ireland. He thought about looking up his Cuchulain relatives, then decided to leave that for another time and flew to Paris from Dublin.

  He met a Danish woman while he stood studying a painting at the Louvre, and they were together for several weeks as they wandered through the South of France, sleeping at inexpensive pensions and walking among the vineyards. She teased him about being an exercise addict while he marveled at her ability to eat enormous quantities without gaining weight. She threw her entire concentration into every meal to the uniform delight of restaurant owners and chefs. She left him in Florence, her holiday time exhausted.

  It was time for Alex to go home. In the early fall, he enrolled at the graduate business school at New York University for the winter term. After a year of study at NYU, he had exhausted the courses that caught his interest, and found himself spending more time in the library than in class, so he dropped out. He began to devote full time to financial analysis of publicly owned companies and investigating the operation of hedge funds, at first in a training program at Merrill Lynch, then at several small funds as an analyst.

  New York City

  The Present Day

  IT was late on a blustery Friday afternoon. Pedestrians hunched against the wind as snowflakes rushed at grey buildings, twirling up at the last moment. The financial markets had closed for the day. Cuchulain was sitting in a tattered booth in Sam’s Deli, on the ground floor of the building that housed his office. The cracked, crimson, vinyl bench sagged with his weight. The ancient pattern on the tabletop had been rubbed nearly invisible by countless Clorox-soaked cleaning cloths. He was nursing a cup of coffee and chewing on a nearly perfectly toasted cinnamon raisin bagel. He smiled to himself, glad that Sam lacked interior-desig
n skills or ambition; he could always find his booth free at this time of day.

  Alex felt his cell phone begin to vibrate, and quickly plucked it from his jacket pocket to answer. “Cuchulain,” he said.

  “Alex, it’s Caitlin.”

  “Hey!” he answered. “All settled into sunny California and over your biker fantasy?”

  “More like a nightmare than a fantasy,” she snorted. “And how is the baddest motherfucker in the whole world? Kill anyone today?”

  “Nope, but the day is young, to paraphrase Jack Palance,” he said. “And this is New York. But it’s so cold here that I’m afraid to go out, so my chances are slim.”

  “Well, this is your big chance to better your weather. My date for a big charity dinner dance for the magnet schools here just flaked out on me. It’s next week. Any chance you’ll be out this way and willing to escort a jilted physicist, to help her save just a little face? I simply can’t miss this one.”

  “You tell me when and where, and I’ll be there.”

  “Super! I’ll e-mail you the details. Oh, shit! It’s black tie! I hope you have a fucking tuxedo.”

  “Relax, Caitlin,” he said. “I do own a tux. Send me the details and I’ll let you know when I arrive and where I’m staying. Where is the dance?”

  “It’s at the Menlo Circus Club in Menlo Park,” Caitlin said.

  “Great! I’ll probably stay at the Stanford Court in Palo Alto, but I’ll let you know.”

  “Okay. Gotta run,” she said. The phone went dead.

  As Alex looked quizzically at his cell phone, he saw Sam grinning at him from the doorway to the kitchen, with a damp dish towel draped over his scrawny shoulder.

  “It’s about time you found a woman, Cuchulain. I was getting concerned about your virility.”