From the Ashes (3 page)

His story, his secret, a secret that even his superiors would kill for, was in a safe place, even if its caretaker was unaware of its importance and potential implications for the nation, for the world. All of his loose ends in this life were tied up. All of them save one.

Roger gripped the cable in his hands, drawing the noose tight around his neck like a businessman tying his tie in the morning before going off to work. He was already dead, he told himself. He was just finishing what the Division had already done to him. What he had done to so many others in the name of freedom.

He took a deep breath, raised his eyes skyward in a last-minute plea for redemption, and, gripping the cable around his neck with both hands, stepped from the girder into nothingness. Three seconds and thirty-two feet later, the cord drew tight around his neck, lacerating the skin and muscle but leaving the head attached to its body. The eyes rolled back as the head lolled forward. A left shoe plummeting to the dark waters below, the body danced its brief fandango, a lifeless marionette held aloft by one fatal string.

On display for the city to see, a man six years dead was just growing cold. The Division had claimed its latest victim. One of its own.

The broad mass of a nation will more easily fall victim to a big lie than to a small one.
~ Adolf Hitler

Repetition does not transform a lie into the truth.
~ Franklin Delano Roosevelt

Near Fallujah, Iraq
August 2010

Squinting into the late-morning sun, Sergeant Wayne Wilkins was doing his best to maintain his composure. The driver of the Humvee, Sergeant Price, was flying down the artillery-pocked road at a ridiculous speed, adeptly maneuvering the vehicle around potholes and debris as though he were playing a video game. But this was a real war zone, and there were no extra lives, no second chances here. And yet, despite all that, and despite the sweltering heat that had already claimed the day, the atmosphere in the vehicle was, for the most part, jovial.

“We’re goin’ home, baby!” Corporal Sedaris, a scruffy – at least by military standards – young soldier crooned from the front passenger seat. He had fashioned himself as somewhat of a bad boy, his longer-than-regulation hair and permanent three-days-growth beard mirroring his jocular and sometimes rebellious personality. It was his AC/DC mix CD that was playing on the boom box he’d brought along. He took a swig of illegal Iraqi moonshine from his non-regulation flask to celebrate.

“Dude, you’re gonna be out of the country in just a few hours and you can’t even wait that long to drink?” came the voice of Private Jenkins from behind him. The baby of the group at only twenty-two years of age, Jenkins’s congenial and caring nature had long endeared him to Wayne. Raised by his grandmother on the streets of downtown Detroit, Jenkins had found God at an early age, and, under the guiding hand of a church deacon with a heart for impoverished youths, he had grown into a man full of compassion, rather than of the drugs and desperation that filled many of his peers. In the bunks at night, Wayne would often see him reading his Bible or praying for his family back home, for his brothers-in-arms, for his country, and even for the souls of those who had died that day – allies, insurgents, and bystanders alike.

“You sure you don’t want some, bro?” Sedaris offered, dangling the flask just out of arm’s reach for Jenkins.

“Dude, leave him alone. And you’d better not have any of that on your breath when we get to the airstrip or I’m disowning your ass,” Price said. Price was the senior solider in the car, but even after fifteen years of service and eight tours of duty, his face still retained the boyish charm that had made him a hit with the ladies back in high school. A leader by example, Price had won Wayne’s admiration and respect within days of their first meeting. Price, Jenkins, and even good old Sedaris definitely deserved this vacation. Their tours were up, and, just a few klicks down the road, an airfield waited to fly them to Kuwait, then to Dubai, and finally back to the U.S. of A. via Atlanta. If only things were that simple.

“Eh, whatever,” Sedaris said. “We’re almost home free.” He took another swig, audibly relishing it for emphasis. “Mmm, mmm, mmm. Dee-lish.”

Price bounced the right side of the vehicle through a pothole, jarring Sedaris and Jenkins in their seats.

“Sorry ‘bout that, Jenkins,” Price said with a mischievous smile, glancing at Sedaris in his peripheral vision.

All but oblivious to the goings on around him, Wayne stared out the windshield, the rocks and road rolling by too fast, too fast. The faster they traveled, the sooner they arrived, and the closer they got to that moment, the more Wayne felt his resolve slipping away.

“Hey Wilkins, what’s eating you?”

The words barely registered, and he hadn’t the slightest idea who had said them. Wayne continued to look at the road ahead with distant eyes, his mind too wracked with guilt and doubt, with sorrow and confusion, for any one emotion to emerge dominant and betray itself in his countenance.

“You carsick, dude?” Jenkins asked.

Wayne thought a moment. “Yeah,” he said, only half-glancing at his compatriot, his friend. “Carsick.”

Price moved his foot from the accelerator to the brake, lifting his eyes to the reflection of Wayne in his rearview. “Sorry about the driving, Wilkins. You know, just excited and all.”

Wayne met his eyes in the mirror. “It’s alright,” he mumbled. His eyes drifted back to the road, the worst place for his eyes to be, carsick or not, but he just couldn’t keep from staring. The road being eaten up, the miles ticking away, the time vanishing before his eyes. The twisted shell of an old roadside car bomb – a blackened and rust-ravaged corpse that had claimed human lives, an automotive suicide bomber – lay to one side of the road. The road surface nearby was buckled and broken. The gray and yellow, the sand and dirt, the desolation of the desert and the horrors of war stretched out as an endless canvas around him. He wanted to scream. He wanted to shout for Price to stop, to turn around. To tell them the truth, to tell them that he couldn’t go through with it, that he needed to get out
now.
But it was too late for that. Powerful machinery was already turning, and he had passed the point of no return long ago.

It was too late.

“Aw, what the hell...” Price groaned from up front. A trio of Humvees – two of which were parked across the road – and four human figures appeared on the horizon. The markings indicated they were American vehicles, so they didn’t have to worry about insurgents, at least, but it was still a momentary hitch. He motioned for Sedaris to kill the music, the scruffy Corporal complying with a scowl.

“They’d better not be trying to rope us in for more time,” Sedaris said through his teeth. “I’ve got a flight to Vegas to catch.”

“They wouldn’t do that, would they?” Jenkins asked, his voice slightly less confident than he’d intended. “Grab us right as we’re going on leave?”

“Sure they would, kid,” Sedaris said. “Screw you over every chance they get.”

“Sedaris, cool it, already,” Price said. “It’s probably just a routine checkpoint. The airfield’s just a few klicks away. All they need is for some terrorists to get in there with a truck full of explosives and blow up the whole damn field.”

“Whatever,” Sedaris muttered, slumping down in his seat.

From the back seat, Wayne watched as the roadblock grew closer and closer, the vehicle decelerating as the men standing sentinel came into focus. Three of them brandished Ml 6s – one on each side of the road, and one in the middle, in front of the roadblock – their expressions blank despite the beads of sweat that trickled down their faces. The fourth man, older and with more decorations on his uniform, approached Price’s window with a clipboard in hand.

“Morning, soldier,” came the booming voice of the man outside, the insignia on his uniform marking him as a Colonel. “Brown” read the fatigue’s name tape. His face was red with sunburn, his hair graying at the temples. Yet, despite the man’s getting on in years, the way he held himself, the way he spoke, positively exuded power and confidence. If the three men standing at attention in the blistering heat were any indication, his leadership skills were impressive.

“Morning, Colonel,” Price said. Brown offered a tight-lipped smile in response, then pulled out a folded sheet of paper. In the rearview mirror, Wayne saw Price’s features tighten.
More orders,
Price must’ve been thinking. Sedaris scowled, keeping his eyes on the floorboards.

“I’m looking for a Sergeant Wayne Wilkins?” Six eyes turned toward Wayne, followed by the pair belonging to Colonel Brown. Wayne slowly turned his face to the Colonel, wishing he were somewhere, anywhere else but here.

“I’m Wilkins.”

“Glad we got you before you left the country. We got word that you’d be leaving by this route, so we had to close it off. Sorry about the trouble. I’ve got orders here for a special debriefing for you. You need to come with me.”

Wayne stared mournfully at his comrades, his motions trancelike, the look in his eyes even more distant than usual. He swallowed and slowly opened his door and climbed out of the vehicle, his feet sinking in the loose sand.

“You should be on the next plane out of here, Wilkins,” the Colonel added. “Just a few loose ends to tie up.”

Another soldier exited from the back of one of the Hum-vees and walked briskly toward Colonel Brown.

“Ah, I’d almost forgotten.” The Colonel motioned toward the approaching soldier. “This is Private Jameson. He has an emergency meeting at the airfield in about thirty minutes. Now that we’ve found Sergeant Wilkins, our team will be heading to the debriefing, in the direction you boys’ve just come from. And since you’ve got another seat open now, I need you to take Jameson to the airfield.” Price nodded in tacit consent. Sedaris remained silent, face forward, a guilty half-smile playing at the corners of his mouth. Jenkins looked at Wayne with genuine concern in his eyes. Wayne saw all of them but could not meet any of their eyes. Not anymore.

For a brief moment, as the Private moved to enter the Hum-vee, Jameson and Wayne stood next to each other. Jameson was about Wayne’s height. About his build. In fact, their bone structures were almost
identical.
But everyone in the vehicle, now including Jameson, seemed to have his thoughts occupied with what had just happened and failed to notice the similarity.

The similarity did not escape Wayne.

“Look us up when you get back, man,” Price offered out the window. “We’ll have to get a few beers together. Maybe catch a few Broncos games.”

“I’ll save you a spot at my table in Vegas, dude. Have a few cocktails... maybe a few cocktail waitresses,” Sedaris added with a coarse laugh, leaning toward Price’s open window.

“Take care of yourself, brother,” Jenkins said, looking solemnly at Wayne. Of all his compatriots, Wayne wanted to meet Jenkins’s eyes, to tell him everything, but he just couldn’t. He had crossed and burned his bridges. There was no going back.

One of the men with assault rifles raised his two-way radio to his lips, spoke into the receiver, and dropped it to his side again. The drivers of the two parked Humvees moved their vehicles to the side of the road, clearing the soldiers’ path to the airport. And with one final glance out the window at Wayne, standing alongside the Colonel, Price gunned the engine, Sedaris cranked the stereo, and the Humvee zoomed down the road, whoops of elation mixing with the strains of AC/DC, fading as they sped off into the distance.

Wayne kept his eyes trained on the vehicle as it entered a small valley between the rising hills on either side. Suddenly, from positions hidden amongst the war-torn landscape, four plumes of smoke converged from all angles upon the vehicle, followed by four deafening explosions, all traces of ‘80s metal dying away and being replaced with the screams of his former comrades, nearly drowned out by the concussions but echoing in Wayne’s ears nonetheless.

“Again,” came the voice at his side, a two-way raised to the Colonel’s lips.

Four more plumes. Four more explosions. No more screams.

Wayne wanted to look away, but he knew he couldn’t. He had seen some truly horrible things in his time in the military. Two tours in Afghanistan, two in Iraq, all of them in some of the thickest fighting the campaigns had to offer. He had seen enemy combatants die in explosions he had been responsible for. He had seen his fellow soldiers die before his eyes, gunned down, blown to pieces, burned alive. But never before had he been responsible for the deaths of his brothers-in-arms. And certainly never like this.

Images of the men came flooding back to him: Price’s calm leadership-by-example, his pictures of his twin five-year-old boys and their mother on vacation at the beach and waving to Daddy; Sedaris’s gruff but generally good-natured attitude, his ambition to some day – when he finally got out of the military – write for Saturday Night Live; Jenkins’s green innocence, his compassion that he bestowed upon all of his comrades, the prayers he said for the souls of those they’d had to kill in the name of freedom; and...

“Who was he?”

The Colonel looked at Wayne, wiping a grin off his face just a split-second too late for Wayne not to notice.

“Who?”

“Jameson,” Wayne said, trying to remain calm despite the cacophony of emotions that was playing ever louder in his mind, in his chest. “Or whatever his name really was.”

“Just a loyal soldier who was willing to die for his country.” The Colonel clapped his hand on Wayne’s shoulder and looked into his eyes in a not entirely successful attempt at reassurance. “As were they all.”

Wayne turned his gaze from the Colonel, back to the burning wreckage of the vehicle that had been his compatriots’ execution chamber. Despite the heat of the desert sun, growing warmer by the minute, and the raging heat of the flames that engulfed the Humvee, the look in Wayne’s eyes, if anything, grew colder.

“Well, it’s official,” the Colonel said, squinting at his watch, then extending his hand to Wayne. “Wayne Wilkins is dead.”