by Joshua Hood
“Care to elaborate, old man?”
“Open your eyes, son. We are at war, and right now, Miles and Carpenter think you are the enemy.”
“What else is new?”
“This time, they are not playing around. If I can’t get you to come in on your own, Carpenter will send a team to hunt you down, and if you are lucky, they will put a bullet in the back of your head.”
“Why the hell do they care?”
“Because you are a killer, son, and like it or not, that’s all they are ever going to let you be.”
“You got a pen?” Hayes asked.
“A pen? Yeah, I’ve got a pen,” Shaw frowned. “What for?”
“Because I’ve got a message for that dumb son of a bitch, and I want to make sure you get it right. You ready to copy?” Hayes asked.
“Yeah, go ahead.”
“Tell Carpenter that whoever comes after me better bring their own postage.”
“Postage . . . what for?”
“Because whoever he sends over here is coming back in a box.”
“Adam, for once in your life can you please listen to—”
“I’ll catch you later, Levi,” Hayes said, and then the line went dead.
* * *
—
Two hundred miles west, in West Virginia, Skyler Harris was at the tail end of a ten-hour shift when she cracked a fresh Red Bull in preparation for the task at hand.
“Freaking dailies, what a joke,” she muttered, before taking a long gulp.
Skyler had been working at Site Tango for three years and was tired of pulling the graveyard shift in the CIA’s Signals Intercept and Analysis Lab. She’d already put in three requests for transfer to the day shift, but each time her supervisor’s response was the same.
“You know how it works around here,” he patiently explained, “all moves are based off seniority, and since you’re just a GS-11 . . .”
“I’m stuck,” she finished for him.
“It sucks, but that’s the way it is,” he shrugged.
“C’mon, Carl, there has to be a way,” she’d pleaded.
“You can do it the old-fashioned way—mine the dailies, try to find something that will impress the bosses upstairs.”
“Be serious, Carl, nobody looks at the dailies,” she said. “They’re garbage.”
“You know what they say, one man’s trash—”
“Yeah, yeah.”
Back at her workstation, Skyler waited until she felt the flutter of the Red Bull taking effect, and after pulling on a pair of Bose headphones opened the task bar. She double-clicked the icon, typed today’s date into the search bar, and hit the enter key.
Here we go again.
The dailies were the slush pile of the intercept community—steaming piles of raw intel and uncategorized audio intercepts that the spy satellites dumped onto Site Tango’s servers every morning, where they sat until a system administrator decided they were taking up too much space and finally deleted them.
Skyler opened the most recent file, grabbed the half-filled legal pad and a pen from the holder, and hit the play button. The audio started with a rush of static; she was reaching for the volume knob when she heard a voice.
She closed her eyes, focused her attention on the voice, ready to record anything of note, but the audio was so distorted she couldn’t understand what the man was saying. Then it went silent.
Great start, she thought, hitting the delete button and moving on.
The next hour and fifty minutes was more of the same, and with ten minutes left on her shift, Skyler was tempted to call it a day.
Just one more.
She hit the play button and was about to close the pad and return to the pen to its holder when she heard it.
“Mike Carpenter?” he asked. “What the hell does the deputy director have to do with any of this?”
“Listen, son, things are happening around here. Things I can’t control . . .”
“Care to elaborate, old man?”
“Open your eyes, son. We are at war, and right now, Miles and Carpenter think you are the enemy.”
“Holy shit,” Skyler said, reaching for the phone.
16
ESSAOUIRA, MOROCCO
Hayes slammed the phone into the cradle and crossed to the plane where Vlad stood at the ramp, the red-and-black box of Prima cigarettes in his hand. He stuck one between his lips, scratched a match against the skin of the plane, and lit the smoke before looking up and hitting Hayes with a sardonic smile.
“Problems?” he asked.
Just one, Hayes thought, stopping in front of the man. “Do you ever buy cigarettes that don’t smell like a barrel of assholes?”
“That’s fine Russian tobacco you are talking about.”
“Why don’t you take your fine Russian tobacco up to the cockpit so we can get the hell out of here?” he demanded.
“Mudak,” Vlad muttered before turning on his heel and stomping off. Asshole.
Once he was gone, Hayes turned his attention back to the plane, and started his preflight checks. He methodically inspected the control surfaces, checking the tail rudder, flaps, ailerons. By the time he made it to the cockpit and dropped into the pilot’s chair, his mood had regulated—the morning’s aggravations fading beneath the smell of jet fuel, burnt oil, and canvas that permeated the cockpit.
He pulled the headset over his ears while his copilot sat stoically, a fresh smoke clutched between his lips, content to let Hayes handle the preflight.
Vlad tuned the radio to 118.25, waiting until Hayes stopped at the edge of the runway before contacting the tower in French.
“Mogador Tower, this is Pilgrim three-niner x-ray holding short of runway sixteen.”
“Pilgrim three-niner x-ray, you are cleared for takeoff runway sixteen at one-five-seven degrees.”
Hayes taxied to the end of the strip and went through the takeoff checklist in his head—locking the rear wheel straight and opening the cowl flaps.
He depressed the brakes, held them down while increasing the throttles, eyes glued to the RPM gauge. The plane inched forward, struggling against the brakes like a greyhound tugging at the leash, but he held her in place waiting for the RPMs to rise.
Here we go.
He let off the brakes and the C-123 lumbered down the runway, Hayes watching the airspeed indicator. He waited for the needle to pass ninety knots before pulling back on the yoke. And then they were airborne, the twin radials roaring like a swamp fan as the plane cut through the tendrils of clouds that hung like strips of cotton over the airfield.
Hayes retracted the landing gear, and after leveling out at ten thousand feet Vlad gave him his heading.
“Come south to one-six-one degrees.”
Hayes made the course correction and was about to ask Vlad what their flight time was but, not really wanting to hear the Russian’s mouth, decided to check it himself. He waited until he was at altitude, and, after activating the autopilot, glanced at the rack between the throttles where they kept the flight plan and navigation charts and found it empty.
“Where’s the chart?” he demanded.
“It’s in my bag,” Vlad answered, without looking at him.
“You think maybe you can get it out, you know, in case I want to do something stupid like know where in the hell I’m going?”
The Russian tsked his tongue against his teeth, and with an exaggerated sigh reached down and plucked the map from the flight bag on the ground.
“Happy now?” he asked, tossing it onto the dash.
This fucker.
He retrieved the chart and opened it to the correct quadrant, studying the route Vlad had penciled on the paper. The day’s flight consisted of three airdrops; the first two were straightforward—a new well pump for the camp at Damba and a resup
ply of fuel and water for Ouagadougou.
Hayes wasn’t worried about either of those because the fighting had died down in the north, but the medical drop to Bobo-D was a different story.
They flew in silence, the only words spoken a brusque “come south to heading one-six-eight degrees” when they crossed into Algeria, and a second course correction that put them on a heading to Damba.
At fifty miles Hayes saw the coffee stain of a camp on the horizon and keyed up the radio.
“Camp Two, this is Pilgrim Resupply, how copy?”
“Pilgrim, this is Camp Two, we have you in sight. Recommended you maintain your current heading, drop zone is being marked in purple smoke.”
“That’s a good copy,” Hayes said, watching to see if Vlad was going to get up and head back to the cargo area for the drop.
Guess him doing his job would be too much to ask.
Hayes turned the controls over to the Russian, unstrapped from the seat, and climbed down the steps into the cargo hold. He grabbed one of the parachutes from the bulkhead, a surplus T-10 Delta, the bite of the leg’s straps around his thighs combined with the burnt jet fuel smell that inundated the cargo hold sending his mind back to the Military Entrance Processing Station (or MEPS) in Tennessee and the day he decided to join the army.
* * *
—
Hayes was nineteen and in college on the morning of September 11, and unlike so many of the boys he’d grown up with in Tennessee, his decision to join the military wasn’t decided on that fateful day. In retrospect he wasn’t sure why he hadn’t been swept up in the patriotic fervor that followed the terrorist attacks—how he’d been able to see the names of the dead on the television, read about the casualties in the papers and not be stirred to do his part.
Perhaps it was the fact that he didn’t know anyone who died in the Towers or maybe it was that he was too selfish, too absorbed—by his relationship with Annabelle and the thought of getting a high-paying finance job when he graduated—to care.
But that changed when he came home for Christmas break and learned that two of the boys from the old neighborhood had been killed in Iraq and two more in Afghanistan. Hayes had gone out to the local veterans’ cemetery and spent an hour locating their graves. He was not sure why he was there, but there was no denying how he felt seeing those alabaster tombstones with the names of his friends etched on the marble.
Of course, Annabelle hadn’t been happy when graduation came and instead of the finance jobs Hayes had been offered, he told her he was joining the military.
“Why?” she asked.
Hayes tried to explain, but realized he only had pieces of the answer.
“There’s a war on.”
“So?”
“Doesn’t it bother you?” he asked.
“Is this about your friends?”
Hayes didn’t have an answer, but he instinctively knew that if he didn’t do his part, he would forever regret it.
Thanks to his degree, he had the opportunity to go in the military as an officer, but the day he showed up at MEPS to take the necessary tests, Hayes still didn’t know what branch he wanted to join. After being checked out by the doctors, he was sent into the lobby where recruiters from each branch of service had their own office and the first thing he saw was the poster of the Marine Corps officer in his dress blues—the same uniform Annabelle drooled over every time she saw it.
The thought of his girlfriend and how pissed she’d been when he told her that he’d decided to join the military made him sick to his stomach, and he wondered for the tenth time that day if he was screwing up.
He brushed it away and turned his attention back to the poster—wondering if the thought of him one day wearing those dress blues might make her cut him a little slack.
Probably not. But it couldn’t hurt.
But that was as close as he ever got, because on the way to the Marine recruiter’s door he glanced inside the Army office, paused when he saw the thick-necked captain sitting behind a battleship-gray desk, a stack of combat and special skills badges sewn above his US ARMY name tape.
“Can I help you, son?” he asked.
Usually Hayes would have kept walking, but there was something in the man’s eyes, the challenge in his voice, that held him there. Made him feel somehow inferior. He wasn’t sure if that was the right word, but whatever it was, it pissed Hayes off, and instead of telling him “No, thank you,” and continuing on, he heard himself asking, “Where’d you get that scar?”
“Which one?” the captain asked, leaning back in his chair.
Hayes nodded toward the angry red line that stretched from his ear down to his jaw before disappearing beneath his uniform top.
“On your face.”
“Little shithole called Fallujah.”
“What were you doing there?”
“What paratroopers are trained to do—put foot to ass for the US of A.”
In that moment he forgot all about the Marines.
Five months later, Hayes was walking out of the pack shed at Lawson Army Airfield in Fort Benning, Georgia, a freshly minted second lieutenant—the only thing standing between him and a posting at the 82nd Airborne five jumps from a high-performance aircraft.
“On your feet, chalk two,” one of the airborne instructors yelled.
Hayes got to his feet and shuffled toward the door, the straps from the T-10 Delta digging into his thighs, his stomach in knots at the sight of the C-130s idling on the tarmac.
He was almost to the door when a second instructor, sensing his apprehension, stepped into his face. “Just remember, young lieutenant,” the man yelled over the roar of the C-130’s engines, “paratroopers don’t die, we go to hell to regroup.”
These guys are fucking crazy.
But it was too late to turn back, too late to do anything but follow his chalk out the door and up the ramp of a C-130—the prop blast on his face hot as an oven.
* * *
—
But that felt like a lifetime ago. Now, inside the Provider’s cargo area, Hayes secured the chest harness and started aft, each step sure and measured despite the rise and fall of the plane beneath his feet. He unlocked the brakes of the first pallet and, using the rollers bolted to the floor, scooted it toward the ramp. Once in position, Hayes threw the brake and double-checked the webbing stretched tight over the pump motor and the deployment chute on the top. When he was sure that everything was secure, he snapped his static line into the metal cable that ran the length of the plane and reached up for the ramp control panel and pulled the lever down.
The latch disengaged with a metallic thunk and the hydraulics whined. A rectangle of blue sky appeared as the ramp yawned open. Hayes felt the humid rush of the African air fill the cargo hold, the humidity so thick he felt that he could take a bite of it.
He made sure the ramp was locked and the rollers clear before moving to the back side of the pallet, Vlad giving him the “one minute” call over the radio.
At the “thirty seconds” call, Hayes popped the brake and retrieved the orange drogue chute that was attached to the pallet by a yellow cord. He snapped the retaining band free from the beach ball–sized chute and, holding it closed in his hand, moved back to the edge of the ramp where he stood, wind clawing at his clothes, the roar of the engines deafening despite the headset over his ears—eyes locked on the amber light attached to the strut.
He waited as the light turned green and then he tossed the drogue chute from the plane.
The chute caught air and the yellow line jerked tight, pulling the main chute from the pack tray. The chute snaked free of the Provider and blossomed in the slipstream, the sudden resistance yanking the pallet from the back of the plane.
“Cargo away!” he shouted into the radio, staying on the ramp long enough to watch the pallet float gracefully toward the wait
ing trucks before slapping the plunger and heading forward.
The flight time to the second drop was less than fifteen minutes, so Hayes didn’t bother taking off the chute. He moved back to the cockpit and stood there, eyes locked on the map in its holder. There was something about Vlad’s flight plan that wasn’t sitting right, that kept itching at the back of his mind like a splinter beneath the skin.
But what the hell was it?
The resupply drop at Ouagadougou went off without a hitch, and Hayes was back in the cockpit, staring out the windscreen when Vlad banked toward Camp Four.
For the most part, northern Burkina Faso was arid and perfectly flat thanks to centuries of erosion, but as they flew south, the terrain began to shift, the scrubby lowlands giving way to sandstone massifs, brushy shea trees, and picturesque stretches of lime-green savannah.
From fifteen thousand feet it was beautiful country, but Hayes wasn’t fooled, because he’d been on the ground. He’d seen firsthand the hell on earth the rebels from Mali had created. How they’d load up in their dusty Toyota pickups and speed into a village, machine-gun the men before dismounting to rape the women. The thought of it made him sick with rage, but he forced himself to clear his mind and turn his attention to the task at hand.
Mainly getting Vlad’s head in the game.
Besides having to worry about getting shot out of the air, Hayes knew that if he dropped the bundle anywhere but inside the camp walls the sick and dying would never get it.
He wasn’t worried about getting the bundle on target, but what had him concerned was that the success or failure of the drop depended entirely on Vlad following his instructions, and while the moody Russian was difficult to predict in the best of times, the fact that he was still pissed off made it all but impossible to know what the man would do.
Just tell him you’re sorry, the voice suggested.
It was the last thing Hayes wanted to do. In fact, throughout most of the flight it had taken a considerable amount of willpower not to throw the man out of the plane. But after all Hayes had gone through to get this far, he couldn’t risk the Russian screwing things up just out of spite.