by Naomi Niles
“And you want me to be the one to go over there?” I asked him.
“If you want to,” said Evan. He leaned back in his chair and studied my face, as if assessing my level of enthusiasm. There wasn’t much. “Frankly, I can’t think of anyone else on our team who would be better suited to a story like this one. Didn’t you say you grew up in East Africa?”
“I spent a few years there. My dad was a Marine stationed in Somalia. Me and my sister lived on the army base.”
“See? So you know all about it.”
I did. And I also knew I didn’t ever want to go back there, not for any reason.
But Evan was adamant about it. “Mohamed Armstrong is one of the bravest men I’ve ever met,” he said. “Not just in terms of the fighting he’s done, but the bigotry and hatred he faced on his way through the ranks is just incredible. You’ll have his full support, and he’ll make sure that you’re treated well while you’re there. The Bugle will cover the cost of your flight, and your meals and board while you’re there.”
I looked up at him in surprise. “Then everything’s been arranged?”
Evan shrugged mildly. “The only thing we’re waiting on is you. I’m not going to force you to go, but I also don’t know anyone on this team who will portray the SEALs with the same level of sensitivity and empathy that you have. Certainly not Karen, who thinks the military is an irredeemable tool of patriarchal oppression. Not Randy, whose understanding of warfare mostly comes from reading Game of Thrones . Frankly this job was made for you, and I would be disappointed if I had to hand it over to someone else.”
He rose from the table, slinging his satchel over his shoulders. “So, think it over, will you? And get back to me within a day or two. Your flight leaves for London on Saturday, whether you’re on it or not.”
He walked out and left me sitting there alone in the office. I had an enormous decision to make, and I wanted to text my sister and ask her what she thought of it, but I knew she would be in class for at least the next hour. My stomach rumbled loudly, and I began to wish I had accepted that granola bar when he offered it.
Evan was right about there being no one in the office better suited for this assignment. Not because I was especially brilliant, but because my own experience living with SEALS overseas had trained me to see the world through a SEAL’s eyes. Yet it was that same experience that made me wary of ever returning to Africa. I could still feel the acrid sting of burning smoke in my nostrils, could hear the loud rat-a-tat of machinegun fire. Sometimes I could still hear it in my sleep.
Renee had been younger than me when we lived there, and she hadn’t been affected by it in the same way that I had. She had managed to escape Africa with her bright spirits intact. I hadn’t been so lucky. Friends told me I had a warped and cynical view of humanity, but they had all grown up in America and none of them had seen the things I had seen. If they had, they would know the truth that I knew: that safety is an illusion and no one can be trusted, not even your best friend.
Chapter Three Zack
Morning PT was always the most grueling part of my day. Every morning as I lay out on the Grinder, a long strip of black asphalt, I experienced a moment where I wondered why I had signed up for this and whether there was any way to get out of it. After running a mile in full gear through the jungle, I could see why most recruits dropped out on their first day of training. Not one in a hundred people had the stamina to do this even once, let alone every day—the pull-ups, the sit-ups, the laps, the runs.
After spending half of the last month worrying about what I would do once I left the SEALs, here I was wishing I was back home again sipping orange juice in my mom’s kitchen. Half an hour into our training, sweat was oozing from every pore of my body. My bones ached so much I could hardly breathe.
This was what Sergeant Armstrong warned us on the first day of training. “The only thing that will get you through this,” he had said, and he looked at me as he said it, “is an iron will. You must make the commitment in your own heart that you are not giving up, no matter how hard it gets.”
Now as I staggered back to the mess hall in the scorching summer heat, the sergeant glowered at me disapprovingly. “You alright, Savery?” he asked. “You don’t look like you’re feeling too well.”
“I’ll feel a lot better once I get some food in me, believe me,” I replied.
The sergeant joined the back of the line and followed us into the relative cool of the dining room. “You know I always thought we let y’all go home for too long,” he said. “You get home, you kick off your boots, start to relax a little; then before you know it, you’ve been living off Coke and Five Guys, and you haven’t worked out in three weeks. You think I don’t know, but I do.”
My buddy Chuck Howell, a lean young man with a scruffy red beard and a tattoo of Lady Liberty on his left arm, muttered a few choice words under his breath. When we got back to the table with our lunch and the sergeant was out of earshot, he said to me in a low voice, “He acts like he had a camera pointed at our houses. Yeah, I went home for a month, but I certainly wasn’t eating Five Guys.”
Carson came over and pulled up a chair beside me. He’d gotten a turkey sandwich, a chicken salad with croutons, cranberries and balsamic vinaigrette, some salted crackers, and orange juice. “You guys been following the news for the last week?” he asked.
Chuck shook his head. “No, man, I had better things to do while I was home than to sit around watching TV. What’s up?”
Carson spoke as if he thought the whole thing was a joke. “Apparently the lamestream media’s throwing a hissy fit because a couple of ten-year-old girls got killed in Afghanistan. If they didn’t want to become missile fodder, they should’ve moved out of the way, or moved to a different country.”
A few of the guys laughed, but Chuck didn’t look amused. “Maybe it’s true the media shouldn’t be making hay about it,” he said gruffly, leveling his eyes at Carson. “But that doesn’t mean we should make sport of them girls’ deaths. Any civilian’s death is a tragedy, especially if they were just children. That doesn’t change just because we were the ones who killed them.”
Carson rolled his eyes, looking to the rest of the table for support. “Oh, go cry me a river,” he said. “War’s a dirty game, and we’re not going win it if we have to stop and inspect every goddamned, gutless terrorist who might be hiding some nine-year-old girl in their goddamn robes. And I guarantee you about half of them are,” he added, waving his fork in the air.
Carson was beginning to grate on my nerves. I wished he would shut up and keep eating. Sometimes I got the feeling he liked being flagrantly offensive because he knew it got a rise out of Chuck, or because he knew he could get away with saying things here he could never say back home. Either way, I tried to tell myself he didn’t really mean it, that he was just pulling our legs.
“What you think, Zack?” he asked me, swallowing a mouthful of turkey.
I carefully skirted the question. “All I can say,” I said quietly, “is that I’ve got a job to do here, and as long as I can, I’m going to do it to the best of my abilities and knowledge. Being a SEAL means sometimes you’ve got to make tough calls. I just hope if that ever happens, I have the wisdom to think in the moment and do what’s best for my country.”
A couple of the guys applauded, but Carson shook his head in disgust. “You sound like a damn boy scout,” he said. “This isn’t some Miss America pageant; you can say what you really think.”
“That’s what I really think, Cursin,” I replied, intentionally mispronouncing his name. Carson glowered in annoyance. I could sense he wasn’t going to let me put him off that easily, and as I was putting up my tray, he slunk over and put his hand on my shoulder.
“Hey, buddy,” he said. His breath smelled of cheap cigarettes; I wondered when he had found the time to smoke. “You know I appreciate as much as anyone how PC you can be when you need to be, but you don’t have to talk that way around me. We’re friends here.
”
“Thanks, Carson.” I shrugged his arm off. “I’m just not sure what sort of answer you’re looking for.”
Carson sputtered as if offended by the question. “I’m not looking for you to give me the correct answer. I just want to know what’s on your heart. What do you, Zack Savery, really think about what’s being said about us in the media?”
I drew a deep breath and shook my head. “You know, I haven’t been paying really close attention. I’d have to know more about it—”
“Oh, quit giving me that evasive B.S.,” Carson said impatiently. “I know you have an opinion. I can tell by the way you’re trying to hide it. You know what I said to Chuck just before we went on leave?”
“What did you say to Chuck?” I asked, knowing he was going to tell me anyway.
“You were on your way to bed. I pointed at you and said, ‘There goes a man who needs to have his own opinions.’ And it’s not that I don’t think you have them. Deep down, I know you’re a very opinionated person. But for whatever reason you always feel like you’ve got to be the peacemaker, so you never speak what’s on your mind.”
This was an oddly insightful analysis to come out of Carson’s mouth. I eyed him warily, as if suspecting he had been killed and replaced by an imposter. “You know what?” I told him. “That is the first time in our friendship I’ve felt truly understood by you.”
“Yeah?” he said loudly, flush with excitement. “It’s all true then, what I said?”
I shook my head slowly as I reached for a bottled water. “I’ll just say that sometimes I think it’s better to hold your peace than to throw logs on a fire. No matter what I say, it’s going to offend somebody at that table. And then they’ll be mad, and they’ll say something, and somebody else will say something, and then a fight will break out, and before we know it, we’ll all out there doing jingle jangles on the Grinder. I figured I would just save us all some trouble and keep my opinions to myself.”
To my surprise, Carson nodded, looking impressed. “Smart man,” he said, turning to address the rest of the mess hall. “Really smart guy here.”
I smiled with a sense of relief. That was a conversation that could’ve easily turned nasty. Sergeant Armstrong liked to say one of my gifts was as a peacemaker, and I was beginning to think maybe he was right. It helped that Carson was one of the less combative guys in our platoon. He wasn’t the sort of man who would deck you for having a different opinion. Matter of fact, he was about the only guy in the platoon with whom I felt comfortable sharing my true feelings.
We spent the afternoon out on the gun range, which I found somewhat relaxing after the ordeal of the morning. It went well, barring a few hiccups when my pistol jammed and I couldn’t get it to fire. I swore in frustration and had to take it apart to figure out what was wrong with it. Meanwhile, the other guys were looking at me and snickering behind their hands like we were in second grade. Ugh.
After we finished practice but before dinner, the sergeant called us into a meeting. I’d figured this was coming, given that it was our first day back, but I wasn’t at all prepared for what he had to say.
“K, listen up,” he said as he paced in front of the chalkboard. “Starting Monday, we’re going to have a visitor staying with us for the next couple weeks. They’re a reporter for a New York City website. Now before you freak out”—for the room had erupted into shocked, nervous, unhappy grumbles—“I just want to let you know that the editor of this website is a dear friend of mine from back home. We used to play basketball together back in the Windy City. And, while he is fairly liberal, he has promised me that his reporter will be objective and unbiased.”
Behind me, Bernie Kasdan groaned loudly. A lumbering, acne-faced man with a nose that was just slightly too large and slightly off-center, he had the most volatile temper of anyone in our platoon. Although he was an incredibly skilled sniper and climber, I sometimes got the uncomfortable feeling that he had only joined the SEALs because he liked to kill things.
“You know,” he said in his loud, nasally voice, “that when they say ‘objective and unbiased’ it’s always going to have a liberal bias. God, I hate those assholes.”
“Bernie, calm down,” said Chuck levelly. “The sergeant says they’re gonna do right by us, and I think we ought to give ‘em a chance.”
Sergeant Armstrong nodded in appreciation. “It’s a done deal,” he said. “They are already making plans to fly out here. This reporter will eat when we eat, will sleep when we sleep. He or she may want to interview some of you one on one. Do not be surprised or alarmed by this. You can trust this person. They will not misrepresent you.”
Bernie scoffed so hard I thought he was going to spit. Carson grinned and leaned back with his arms folded, evidently enjoying himself. “Just one question,” he said, with a nod to the sergeant. “This reporter, are they going to be a boy or a girl?”
Sergeant Armstrong grimaced. After a slight pause, he said, “That I do not know. But it shouldn’t matter either way. If it’s a woman, you will treat her with the same respect and dignity that you treat your male peers. You will be representing your country,” he added, looking hard at Carson, “the entire time she’s here, so if you embarrass yourself, you’re embarrassing this whole platoon and the country you claim to be protecting. Is that understood?”
“Yes, sir,” said the platoon, though some of the voices sounded bored and unconvincing.
As we were filing out on our way to dinner, Carson nudged me in the ribs. “You hear that, Zeke? There’s going to be a lady living with us. Looks like your little shindig at the airport might not have been the end after all.”
“Lordy, you’re getting my hopes up,” I replied, running one hand across the back of my neck. I could feel how much I wanted it to be a woman—lady reporters could be obnoxious, but they were usually cute and intelligent. “If that plane lands in Kinshasha and a man steps out, there’s no telling what I might do to you.”
Carson grinned and said softly, “What if it’s a she?”
“Well, in that case,” I replied, “there’s no telling what I might do to her.”
Chapter Four Kelli
In the end, I accepted the assignment reluctantly and knowing I was probably making a mistake and would come to regret it. In the end, I needed the money, and Evan was offering me twice my normal pay to spend two weeks in a foreign country. As my sister pointed out, I would have been a fool not to take him up on that offer.
“Besides,” she said as we sat on the couch drinking mochas the night before my flight, “I think it may end up being good for you.”
“Mmmm, what makes you say that?”
“It just seems like you’ve never quite forgiven Africa for what it did to you. This may be a chance for healing that the universe is setting in front of you.”
“Or a chance to get hurt again,” I said under my breath. I wasn’t looking forward to stepping off the plane in a strange place, in being surrounded by the sort of men I had sworn I would never go near again. But I was being lured ahead by the money and by something else I couldn’t quite put my finger on. A restless feeling, I guess you could call it. Life in New York was challenging, but I felt like maybe I had grown too comfortable here.
I thought about the impulses that must have driven Captain Scott and his team of explorers on their doomed journey to the South Pole. They could have so easily stayed home in their warm, well-furnished studies and not died. I wondered if they regretted it as they lay freezing to death in the howling Antarctic waste, or whether they were grateful to given their lives in pursuit of a great adventure. I told myself I would never have gone on such a foolhardy mission. And yet here I was in a plane flying over the Atlantic in the dead of night, eating my dinner out of a small box, my eyes rimmed red from lack of sleep.
***
When I stepped off the plane in Kinshasha a day later, my guide was already waiting for me. He was wearing a long, loose-fitting garment that came down to his ankles, a cerem
onial hat that reminded me of the bicorne, and a colorful assortment of necklaces and beads that jangled as he walked.
“Now that you’re here,” he said, “we have just one more trip to make.”
He motioned to the hangar where a small, two-seater plane was waiting for us. I clambered aboard with a nervous feeling, thinking I was going to be sick before we even left the ground. I had flown in planes like this more than once during my year in Kathmandu, but always in fear for my life.
Sensing my hesitation, my guide (whose name was Azzedine) smiled reassuringly. “Are you not used to flying in planes like this?” he asked.
“You never quite get used to it,” I replied.
“I wish there was some other way we could transport you. But there is only one road leading to the naval base, and it is a dirt road, and you would have thrown up your lunch several times over by the time we reached your destination. Besides which, there are bandits and militants roaming the jungles who would love nothing more than to ambush and kidnap a beautiful American woman like yourself. Most of them have never seen a white woman, and you would fetch a high price in the slave markets of Nigeria. Your SEALs may travel the road without fear of danger, but for the rest of us, it is too great a risk.”
So I would be risking my life either way we traveled. Fantastic. “Have you met Sergeant Armstrong?” I asked, trying to keep my mind off the dangers of the flight ahead of us.
Azzedine laughed lightly. “The sergeant and I have shared many drinks together. One often lacks for good company here in the heart of the jungle, and men like the sergeant are an oasis of water in a dry land.”
Everything I had heard or read about the sergeant suggested I would like him. “Do you think—” I began, but the words were ripped out of my throat by the roar of the plane’s engines. The plane wheeled slowly out of the hangar and onto the runway.
The ride was about as turbulent as I had expected, and I nearly threw up more than once. Crouched low in my seat with a terrible, twisted knot in my stomach that was half sickness, half worry, I took hardly any notice of the dense green canopy of forest over which we were flying, nor of the ramshackle industrial cities in the distance whose factories belched thick columns of black smoke into the air. Below us, the snaky folds of the Congo River curved their way through the jungle, emitting hot, steamy gusts of water into the air in clouds of mist.