by Mike Bond
Jack grinned at the memory of two scrawny boys like Indians hunting each other down. “If he was here we still would be.” He glanced down at the place in the corner where Thor’s bed had been.
“It’s out in the barn,” his mother said, following his gaze. “You’ll get another dog someday. You’ll need that bed then.”
“I had one,” he said, turned away.
“What, in Guam?”
“Yeah,” his voice thick. He wanted to tell her all, losing Gus, Loxley, all the people he’d killed, Bandit dying to save him, the shoulder screaming with pain as if the bullet had just hit.
And most of all, the pain that he could tell her nothing.
“You did right, son, what you did.”
“Jerry? I should’ve killed him.”
“And spent your life in jail. For a dog?” She made a sour face. “Sweetheart, we have to forgive.”
He knew what she meant: I had to forgive losing my husband. “Life’s a beautiful gift,” she said. “A magnificent mystery. When we get all tied up in revenge we forget how beautiful it is.”
“I’m tired, Mom.” He carried the dishes to the sink and began to scrub them one-handed. “Still on Guam time.”
IT WAS BOW SEASON FOR WHITETAILS, and next morning he took his recurve from the closet and strung it but could only draw it halfway. The shoulder pain brought tears to his eyes and he wondered could he ever use it again. He drove to Monmouth and sat on the front porch with Cole’s folks till the cold drove them inside. “Got a letter from him last week,” Cole’s mother said. “He says the folks in Lebanon are glad to have them and the food’s pretty good.”
“With Cole any food’s always good.”
“That’s true,” Cole’s father smiled.
“I still don’t understand,” she said, “why they sent them way over there –”
“Just peacekeeping,” Jack answered. “To stop a civil war between Muslims and Christians. The French paratroopers are there too. And the Italians... It’s a good thing.”
“That’s what you were doing, Jack?” Cole’s father said. “Where were you, anyway?”
“Guam. Just a translator listening to Soviet communications. No big deal.”
Barb came back from vet class, her belly huge as a basketball under her coat. “Hey,” Jack grinned, “what’d you ever do to get like that –”
“You should talk!” She pushed him. “All the girls you enticed into the back seat of that Camaro!”
“Now Barb,” Cole’s mother said. “He was always going with Susie...”
“This weather,” Cole’s father said. ”Coming on to snow.”
IT’S RISK I NEED, he decided, and drove up to the White Mountains. But with the shoulder he couldn’t climb and the peaks were puny after the Hindu Kush.
Finally he called Susie Franklin and they went to Augusta to see Nick Nolte in North Dallas Forty and drank Shipyards in Rocker’s overlooking the Kennebec River. In Afghanistan he’d often dreamed of this – a girl, a cozy bar, no one trying to kill you, a warm car to drive home in. Back then it had seemed a beautiful mirage but now felt meaningless. “I should’ve stuck by you, Jack.”
“Nah. Thrown out of the Point, a tough guy with no job, no future –”
“That wasn’t you.”
“I thought it was.”
“You should stay in Maine. They need teachers, Readfield needs a football coach.”
“They wouldn’t hire me.” He watched the silky Kennebec under the newly risen moon. Waning now, the moon that many months ago had been a sliver when he’d landed in the Hindu Kush. When Gus fell, and then when Loxley...
“They’d love to have you. People forgive...”
It annoyed him, her optimism, that she felt there was something to forgive, his buried antagonism from a separation that wouldn’t heal. “So you went off and married that asshole –”
“I was pregnant damn it.” She too looked out at the River, her dark hair like a curtain down the side of her face. “I was getting over you.”
“You could’ve fucking waited.”
“You told me you hated me, hated everybody. You were leaving, soon as you got out.”
“Yeah. And so I did.”
Driving home she slid next to him, her hand inside of his thigh. He turned on the Monmouth road and then on the fire road to her trailer on Lower Narrows. Where an old farmhouse had stood now were new manufactured homes on tiny plots. A shepherd chained to a doghouse came out barking.
“I was glad you’d come home,” she said, coming into his arms after the baby-sitter left. It was so easy to fall back in time, her urgent cries, the way all tension seemed to flow out of him but then built up again.
“You knew I was here?”
“Everybody knows,” she said, nestling her long nakedness against him.
In Afghanistan no one had known who or where he was, but in Maine everyone already knew. It bothered him, this lack of concealment.
“You’re all lean and mean.” She wiped sweat from his brow. “You need meat on your bones. And that shoulder’s real evil-looking.”
Through the frost-stippled window the moon glittered. Out in Cobbossee Woods a great horned owl hooted. The furnace kicked in with a great thump. In the next room the baby began to cry. She rose up on one elbow. “Let’s see if he quits.”
Jack listened to the baby crying and the north wind under the door. Damn shoulder was hurting. No matter where he moved it didn’t stop.
“I have to get him.” She slipped out of bed, a pale sylph through a crack of moonlight, came back with the baby. “Can you imagine what he feels? Not knowing anything, dropped into the dark, alone in the world?”
He slept late, a lazy Sunday morning, luxuriating in the warm covers, the lessening of pain, the relaxation of being with Suze, of being known and cared about. The smell of coffee and the tang of raisin bread toast, a faint mumble of TV. It was his fault, really, they’d broken up. He could come back, teach languages, coach football, let that other stuff go. Bandit’s right. I’ll tell Timothy forget about Beirut.
“Jack?” Her voice was strained. “Jack!”
“Take off that bathrobe and get in here.”
“Look at the TV!” Tears were running down her face. “The Marines in Lebanon. That’s where Cole is, right?”
He sat up, pain shooting through the shoulder. “Christ what is it?”
“Somebody just blew them up. Oh God they’re all dead. All our Marines. Hundreds of them.”
III
Lebanon
Beirut
October 1983
THROUGH THE SCRATCHED plexiglas of the Middle East Airlines 727 the whitecapped Mediterranean gleamed iridescent green. “Islamic Jihad did it,” Timothy had said. “Some insane kid in a garbage truck with a thousand pounds of plastique.”
“Then they hit the French paratroopers with another truck,” Bernie added. “We don’t understand...”
In his stomach the cold queasiness of fear, a prickling of little hairs along the wrist, the tense heart and weighted breath, a weakness in the limbs. They killed three hundred Marines and paras... How easy would he be to kill? Maybe he was just more afraid now, after Afghanistan, the painfilled weeks.
The plane dropped to ten thousand. He saw the ragged Lebanese coastline and tawny hills with raw mountains behind them. At five thousand feet humid air streamed across the plexiglas. There were cars and trucks on the coast highway, farms behind rock walls. Ochre roofs, dirt roads, rock-bordered fields, orchards of broken trees, a greasy black column that at first he took for a burning tank but was just a dump on fire.
“We’re sending you in on your own,” Timothy had added.
“You said there was backup.”
“You won’t need it –”
“You don’t have anybody left in Beirut, do you?”
If Islamic Jihad caught you, how would they kill you? A bullet in the back of the head, a wire garrote? Or more likely, slowly with the greatest possible
pain?
The plane banked over the crushed Marine barracks, the trucks of debris, the new American flag bravely flapping. He had been making love with Susie the moment Cole had died. Now he was here to kill Cole’s killers, revenge the 241 dead and 120 seriously injured Marines, the deadliest single Marine death toll since Iwo Jima. As if that would bring them back, bring Cole back. Or heal his parents’ hearts. Or fix Barb’s ruined life.
Kevlar-vested U.S. Marines with M-16s patrolled the airport, looking hard and angry, but he did not speak to them. The Lebanese customs inspector in a mildewed blue sweater glanced at his battered passport. “Ireland?” he said in French. “Why you come here, Mr. Flaherty?”
“Journalist.”
The man flipped through the visas of France, Germany, Denmark and other innocent places, found an empty space and stamped it. “You’ve come to tell the world what’s happening here? Go home. Nobody cares.”
“TAKE THE COAST ROAD,” Jack told the cab driver in French.
“The other way’s safer,” the driver said. “This goes too near the Palestinian camps.”
“Take it anyway.”
They drove along the sea past burnt-out buildings, blasted cars, donkey carts, overturned buses and shell-holed houses, around gaping cavities in the tarmac where mines had blown, past young bearded men in Palestinian headscarves with AK-47s. A bullet-pocked blue sign said Avenue du Général de Gaulle. “I don’t dare go further,” the driver said.
“What about the Hotel St. George –”
“Blown to bits, the world’s most beautiful hotel, by a bunch of gangsters. This was the Paris of the East before the Palestinians came...”
They took Avenue de Paris with clear white beaches on the left and the shattered walls of hotels and villas on the right. Then on the right a great ruin of gaping walls and concrete floors hanging down. He thought of the rotten bodies still under mashed concrete. “What was that?” he said off-handedly.
“You don’t know, eh? The U.S. Embassy.”
“I thought Americans were liked here? The American University, foreign aid, even the Marines came here to enforce the peace –”
The driver dropped the battered Peugeot into first gear to negotiate a shell hole in which a dead donkey lay placid as a bather in a tub. “American money goes for schools, modern ideas, for birth control that frees women from having so many babies. And peace? Do you think the madmen who plant these bombs want peace?”
The driver turned up a curving street. “Here’s Rue Kennedy... If we could have a Kennedy now in Beirut! And there’s American Hospital... Imagine, these Americans come here to cure people, so the Muslims kill them – when do Muslims ever go to help people in other countries, eh? Here’s Rue Hamra – all I go. Three blocks that way, at the corner of Rue Baalbek and Nehmé Yafet, the Hotel Commodore. Where all the journalists stay, eh? Those who don’t end up as guests of Hezbollah?”
At the Commodore they offered him a room on the second floor but there he was an easy target so insisted on the fifth floor where he could be shot from below only if he stood near the window. “Don’t worry,” the desk clerk told him. “Everything here just fine.”
A lurid sun was sinking beyond the steely bay when he went down to grab a quick dinner in a sad café near the hotel. Eyes gritty, he climbed the stairs, dragged his blankets and pillow into the iron bathtub and slept fitfully, grabbing the gun each time the elevator clattered in its shaft or shots erupted in the streets below.
The first days he walked the safer streets, talking with the few shopkeepers, with Palestinian militiamen, journalists, then the deputy head of Police for West Beirut. “You remember what the Christians did,” the deputy head said, “during the Crusades –”
He met with the senior French intelligence officer, Colonel Max Ricard. “President Reagan doesn’t dare fight the Muslims after they kill all his Marines, so what does he do? He attacks Grenada. What a farce!”
“I’d like to talk to some of these fundamentalists. Find out how they think.”
“Read the Koran. That’s how they think.”
“What about your fifty-eight dead paras?”
“We’re governed by apologists,” Ricard lit a new Gauloise from the butt of an old, “who believe any Muslim atrocity must be due to some prior injustice on our part.”
Late nights he talked in the Commodore’s bar with a chubby English journalist named Welkins who got drunk on Egyptian Scotch. “All these different fundamentalist groups, Flaherty,” Welkins said, “– they’re all Islamic Jihad, if you get my meaning. There’s twenty brands of soap powder in the market but they all do the same thing, don’t they?
“So why’d they hit the Marines?”
“You don’t know? In August, when Reagan had the USS New Jersey, Virginia and John Rogers shell the hills above Beirut for days? Supposedly in retribution for the bombing of the American Embassy last April... Whole villages destroyed. And so the Marine barracks bombing was retribution for that –” He peered at Jack sideways through watery eyes. “What was your paper d’you tell me?”
“Galway Times.”
“You must’ve run the story. Horrible thing, turned the whole Middle East against America. Terrorism’s best friend, Reagan is.”
“Maybe I should ask whoever runs Islamic Jihad about it?”
“Ismael al-Haji? You’ll never find him. Nor do you want to.”
A shell hit nearby, shaking the walls. Welkins cocked his head. “That one was down by the Grand Sérail, the Beaux Arts, by the sound of it.” He waved a chubby finger. “Don’t go near there... Shiite territory... Dangerous.”
“So who do I talk to?”
“Any of twenty different madmen running twenty different fanatic groups. Islamic Jihad’s just a front for Hezbollah, and Hezbollah’s just a front for Iran... Other nutty Islamic groups are backed by the Syrians or the Saudis... When they can’t kill Christians they kill each other.”
“I’d like to get some stories, present their view...”
“What you’re likely to get, my dear fellow, is kidnapped. Or out in Shatila with your throat cut. Remember your Old Testament: The violence of Lebanon shall cover thee –” Welkins downed his scotch, slid the glass across the bar. “Why do you suppose this crappy corner of the desert became the breeding ground for so many God-obsessed women-hating fanatics who’ve had such a tragic impact on the world? Christians, Muslims, Jews – all from one little cesspool?”
Jack shrugged. “Religion’s a collective neurosis.”
“Trouble is, we can convince ourselves of anything: that a biscuit from some cookie factory is the body of God, that dancing round the guts of an eviscerated goat will make it rain, or being decapitated by a 50-caliber bullet will send you straight to a paradise of willing virgins...” He sniffed. “Ah that it would – I’d be in the front lines myself.”
The bar was empty, damp and chill. “Ever meet this Ismael guy?”
“Heavens no. He’s up in the Beqaa Valley running his Hezbollah terrorist camps, living off Iran and Saudi and Qatari charities. Westerners can’t get there. Shot twenty times before one gets halfway.”
“So who wants his side reported?”
Welkins shrugged: I’ve warned you. If you insist, it’s not my fault. “You could talk to Khalil Yassin. He’s the good face they put on for the West.”
Mektoub
FIVE THOUSAND DEAD CIVILIANS. Sitting on the creaky bed in his hotel room Jack tried to imagine all those people dying, how each felt, the piles of bodies, the sorrow and the pain. If the Marine bombing was payback for that, then who really killed Cole and the Marines?
Had Reagan truly killed the five thousand people in retribution for the Embassy bombing? But had that just been payback for some earlier atrocity? Did the cycle of murder just keep growing? Wasn’t that what he’d learned the night he’d smoked khief with the teenage hooker in Rawalpindi? When he’d seen through to the core of the world?
He could go home now. He’d finished the
mission, learned why the Marines had been killed. And that the head of Islamic Jihad was Ismael al-Haji. Who could be found in Baalbek.
Suze, the little trailer, the owl calling in Cobbossee Woods, the bare trees of winter, all seemed too precious and what he was doing insane, and he had to stare a moment at the bright window to keep from choking.
Cole nonchalantly tossed him the football, the neck of his jersey black with sweat. “No, you turkey, you go deep.”
Find them. The ones who killed Cole. How could he go home till he’d done that?
HE FOUND KHALIL YASSIN in a bunker off Independence Avenue six blocks from the Green Line, the death zone separating Muslims and Christians. “You’ve got a bad image in the Western press.” Jack waited for the staggered thuds of incoming 155s to tail off. “What if you could tell your side of the story?”
“You’re not a journalist?” Yassin raised three fingers to his mouth, the sign for concupiscence. “Just a ‘mouthpiece’?”
Jack glanced at the disinterested young men with their guns and grenades, the sweating gray walls, the kerosene lantern dancing on its cord to the tune of falling shells. “Was it for retribution that Islamic Jihad bombed the Marines?”
“It was very stupid what Reagan did, killing all those people, no? We had to punish him... And he got the lesson – pulled out right away.”
“Perhaps Ismael al-Haji could give me details...”
“Mektoub.” With a long fingernail Yassin picked between two upper front teeth. It is written. There is no cause and no effect, no natural law, because God creates each instant anew... “I would be insane to send you to Ismael al-Haji.”
“Why?”
“He’d kill us both.”
IN THE PALESTINIAN markets he bought used clothes and leather sandals, two blankets, plastic bottles of cola and orange soda, goat cheese, dates, currants, and hard bread.
At the Commodore he poured the sodas down the drain, tore off the labels, rubbed the empty bottles on the tile floor to scratch them and filled them with tap water and two drops of iodine in each. He spread his map of Lebanon on the bed and memorized it again.