Ashley Bell: A Novel (11 page)

The head-shed—senior commander—planners called it Operation Firewalk. They had an endless supply of colorful names for special-ops missions, some of them literary, which proved they had gotten a well-rounded education at Annapolis. There would be no firewalk, no doves from scarves, no lady sawn in half, no other illusions that made magicians’ audiences applaud, just a street-level strike that should be, to the bad guys, as unexpected as an earthquake.

Paxton Thorpe and three guys on his team had come down from the cold hills in the night, having taken two days to make their way from the insertion point, where the helicopter left them, to the outskirts of the town. Had they been dropped closer, the helo noise would have been an announcement no less revealing than if they had been preceded by a bluegrass band on a flatbed truck draped with red-white-and-blue bunting. They wouldn’t have been able to cross the open ground and enter those streets without being cut down.

Surrounding the town were fields once tilled, now fallow. The last planting had never been harvested. Months of searing heat and stinging cold and skirling winds had threshed the crops and withered the remaining stems into finely chopped straw and dust, all of it so soft that it produced little sound underfoot. Depending on where he stepped, Pax caught a musty scent that reminded him of the feed bins and hayloft in the barn on the Texas ranch where he had been raised.

The moon had risen in daylight and had set behind the mountains before midnight. Under feeble starlight tens of thousands and even millions of years old, the four men relied on night-vision goggles.

As far as the world was concerned, this place ahead of them was a ghost town. If you believed in spirits, you would want to pass on by, because here the hauntings, if there were any, would surely be horrific. The remote town had been established above a rare aquifer in otherwise barren territory, and the citizens tapped the deeply stored water to transform the surrounding fields into productive farmland. For a few generations, people had lived here in rural peace, unschooled and mostly happy in their ignorance. And then the barbarians arrived in a fleet of stolen military vehicles, bearing rocket-propelled grenades and automatic carbines. Perhaps six hundred residents were killed in the taking of the town, half the population, and the flag of the conquerors—black with a red slash—flew on every street by the second day. After the prettier women endured gang rape and dismemberment, the remaining citizens—men, women, children—were executed in the following three days. Bodies were stacked by the hundreds in pyres, sprayed with gasoline, and set afire. On the sixth day after the invasion, the killers took down their flags and left. They had wanted nothing in that settlement, only its destruction.

Savages though they were, they nevertheless filmed the massacre and made a recruitment video that spoke to the souls of like-minded radicals everywhere. It had found an eager audience on the Internet.

Seventeen months after the massacre, Lead Petty Officer Paxton Thorpe and three warriors, three friends, three of the finest men he’d ever known—Danny, Gibb, and Perry—were on the hunt for big game where, only a week earlier, no targets were thought to exist. Some in the American media called their primary target the Ghost, which lent him an air of glamor—intentionally or not. Pax and his guys called their quarry Flaming Asshole, FA for short.

Back in the day, FA had led the assault on this village, but that was not the only crime for which he was currently sought. It seemed unlikely that he would return to such a place of slaughter, far from the comforts of civilization that terrorist leaders now felt to be their right, far from most of his multitude of admirers. But the head sheds had intel that they found convincing, and they were far more often right than wrong.

They were in a nation not worthy of that designation, but at least it was not currently an active supporter of terrorists or colluding with anyone against the United States. And its wrecked economy could not support a military adequate to regularly patrol most of its territory. Pax and his men had gotten in without an encounter, but now it might be fan-and-feces time.

The town contained more than two hundred buildings, mostly one and two stories, none higher than three, some of stone, many of mud bricks covered with stucco, crudely constructed, as if no engineer existed in this country with more than a medieval education. A third of the structures had been reduced to rubble in the assault, and the remaining were damaged to one degree or another. If FA and six of his most trusted allies were holed up here, they would most likely secret themselves in a central building, so that no matter from which point of the compass a hostile force might arrive, they would have plenty of warning that a search of the town had commenced.

Intel suggested that a three-story building at the northwest corner of the burg offered an ideal observation post. The team’s attention needed to be focused only east and south for some sound or sign of habitation. The roof had a parapet behind which they could remain hidden, conducting surveillance with two periscopic cameras.

As Paxton, Danny, Gibb, and Perry came quietly out of the fields to the back of the building, they passed the horned skeletons of what might have been three goats, which regarded them with hollow sockets as deep as caves. The savages who killed the people of the town had also shot the livestock, leaving the animals to rot where they fell.

The back door had long ago been broken down. They cleared the rooms as though they expected resistance, but found no one. The walls were bullet-pocked. Spent cartridges littered the floors; also chunks of plaster and broken crockery and what might have been bits of skull bones with streamers of human hair attached. Debris-strewn stairs led to the flat roof. The four-foot-high parapet was as described. In the liquid dark of the arid night, they dared to stand, surveying the ghost town to the south and east, looking for the smallest of lights, whether mundane or supernatural, finding neither.

Having arrived safely, they slept two at a time, the other two always alert and listening, watching. Every sound would travel far into the hush of the dead town, and therefore they said nothing to one another. They had been through so much together that none of them needed conversation to know what the others must be thinking.

They remained on the roof after sunrise, when the chill of night only half relented, though they stayed below the parapet. They would not execute a search on foot until they had given their quarry and his men twenty-four hours to inadvertently reveal their location. They had their periscopic cameras, their ears, and patience.

Nothing had happened by 4:00
P.M.
, when Pax raided his MREs for beef jerky, chicken-noodle slop, and a PowerBar. He ate sitting on the roof, his back against the parapet wall. He wore body armor, but his MOLLE-style web system with all the gear attached was a separate rig that could be taken off and set aside. His pistol lay on the roof a mere foot from him: a Sig Sauer P220 chambered for .45 caliber.

Abruptly Bibi came into his mind with such force that, startled, he almost bit his lip along with the half-eaten PowerBar. He thought of his singular girl often every day, but this unbidden image of her lovely face bloomed vividly in his mind’s eye, as no memory had ever pressed itself upon him before. He recognized the moment: he and Bibi stand-up paddleboarding side by side in Newport Harbor on a sunny summer day. She’d said something funny, and his comeback had cracked her up so much that she had almost fallen off her board.

The vision of her face, prettily contorted in laughter, so lifted his spirits that he tried to hold on to it, to freeze-frame the recollection in all its astonishingly sharp and poignant detail. But memory wanes even as it waxes; she faded and could be summoned back only in a less intense manifestation.

Paxton glanced at his G-Shock watch. 4:14
P.M.
local time. That would be 4:14
A.M.
where Bibi lived half a world away. She should be home in bed, sound asleep. Worry wound its way through him, not just the usual worries he sometimes had when he thought about Bibi, but a deep disquiet unique to this moment. He wondered if he had gone on a blackout operation at the worst possible time.

This time, stilting in silence, the robed and hooded bearers of the
dead convey the corpse along a hospital corridor where the roof and ceiling have been scalped away, allowing moonlight to bathe the scene. They enter Bibi’s room, and the face of one so shocks and horrifies, as always before, that she rebels against consideration of it and sits up in bed, sits up and wakes not from the dream, but from one dream scene to another. Gone are Death’s two henchmen, or whatever they might be. In one of the chairs by the window, in the red radiance of a sunset, sits the corpse cocooned in a white shroud glowing with the reflection of the burning sky. The fabric masking its face stretches, and a shallow concavity appears as its mouth opens. From it comes the voice that she knows well: “The forms…the forms…things unknown.” Frightened of hearing more, she sits up once again, but this time not in another dream scene, this time—

—in the real hospital room.

Morning had come with a difference in it.

The tingling in her left side had completely relented, head to foot. Not one prickle, tickle, shiver, no static in the nerve paths.

Sitting in bed, she flexed her left hand, which had at times seemed to be the instrument of another Bibi than her, some other self who wished to use it to her own—and different—purposes. Now she had full control of it once more. No weakness. She closed it into a fist, and though her fist was small, she liked the look of it.

No headache. No dizziness. No foul taste.

With an exhilarating quickness, she said, “Peter Piper picked a peck of pickled peppers. She sells seashells by the seashore.” Each word escaped her perfectly formed, without a slur or slip of tongue.

She put down one of the safety railings and sat on the edge of the bed, where for a moment she hesitated, warning herself that the cessation of symptoms didn’t mean that she was somehow cured. If she dared to cry out in wonder and celebration, her voice might trigger an abrupt collapse into her previous condition. But no. That was pure and foolish superstition. There were not three goddesses of destiny as the ancient Greeks had believed, no sisters spinning and measuring out and cutting the thread of each life, who might take offense at her delight in having escaped the fate of cancer. She got out of bed and into her slippers, walked the room, walked it and then did a silly little dance, and in each case her left foot, just like her right, performed as she demanded without a moment of stiffness or a misstep.

Through the doorway came a nurse, Petronella, whose hair was pulled tight and braided at the back. She’d been on duty the previous day and proved to be an efficient and confident woman who had seen everything that anyone in her career could expect to see and who seemed never to have been for a moment unsettled or caught unaware by any of it. Her chocolate-brown face warmed now with surprise and amusement as she stopped just inside the threshold and said, “Girl, what’s gotten into you this morning?”

“I can dance,” Bibi said as she performed a modest soft-shoe number.

“Maybe you can,” the nurse said, “but I’ll wait to see the evidence.”

Bibi laughed and clapped her hands three times quickly. “No funky left foot, no tingling head to toe, no nothing. Peter Piper picked a peck of pickled peppers—perfectly pronounced, Petronella. I’m not sick anymore.”

The nurse’s smile first froze and then melted. With pity in her eyes and sympathy in her voice, she said, “Things come and go, then they come again, child. It’s best to stay real with that.”

Bibi shook her head. “It’s true. It’s real. I don’t know what the hell just happened, but something sure did. I can feel it through and through. Clean. Healthy. I need to talk to Dr. Chandra. He needs to see me. We’ve got to take another look at this.”