Knife (9780698185623) (8 page)

Shaw looked at Massey's tray as they walked over to a table. Massey had four chocolate milks in a line along with a straw set on top of a napkin and a single piece of rye bread.

“What the hell are you eating?”

“I'm on a liquid diet,” Massey said. “You know that.”

“I remember,” Shaw said. “Liquids and peanut butter cups, sure. What the hell's that?” He pointed at the bread.

“That's rye bread that's about to be eaten. I'm expanding my horizons. Let me eat my rye bread in peace.”

Shaw sat down and poked a hole in the rye bread with his finger. “Fair. Eat.”

“You've tainted it now.”

“So that's why you won't like it? Okay. Enjoy.”

Massey shrugged and turned to the TVs. He ate like a child. He ate turkey with ice cream on top; bacon and pickles and Hershey's Kisses; peanut butter cups and whole milk. Four chocolate milks and rye bread. It wouldn't be fair to say he was on a particular diet, because he rarely ate anything at all, yet even the most proven gym rats were in awe of his physique. He was a scientific anomaly, a man ripped from marble after fueling himself with shit. More than one operator had joked that Massey simply wasn't human, had to be spit from the sack of Zeus. Trips to the cornfields of southern Illinois had been planned to test the water and corn.

Massey finished two of the milks and started pecking at his rye bread with his fingers like a bird on the street. He and Shaw were alone in the chow hall, watching the TVs and eating in silence. Reporters were commenting on the increasing violence and bombings in the country, and a male reporter with dark features and nervous eyes stood outside a mosque that had been blown apart. He held up the wheel of a shopping cart, said the bomb might have been wheeled outside the mosque and detonated after prayers let out. The headline stated that at least twenty-three were dead.

“That'll rise. The reporters always get there too fast.”

Shaw watched the video feeds intently, hadn't heard what Massey had said. Blood was spread over the streets like paint and Shaw was staring at a leg strewn among the rubble that the editing team forgot, or didn't care to blur out. Massey pointed at the screen, and Shaw broke his gaze from the TVs.

“What?”

“Did you see that?” Massey said. “The Mexican cartels are cutting off heads and just burying them. Leaving the bodies out on the street so no one knows who got killed.”

Shaw hadn't even noticed the stories had changed. He looked back at the TV and pictures of a Mexican field of red rock and police tape filled the screen. He still saw the streets outside the mosque covered in car parts and blood. The leg the camera had failed to blur out.

Massey picked up his bread and gestured around the room with it. The bread flopped loosely in his hand like a rag. Seeds fell on the table. “You think we'll get sent to Mexico soon—take a shot at all the cartels?”

“Probably not, Mass. The cartels don't come after us and I think we're busy enough here.”

“Man. Mexico. Colombia. Everywhere. World keeps churning, no matter how many guys get wasted.”

“This is the world, Mass.” Shaw stuck another finger in Massey's rye bread. “You know that.”

“Yeah. You're right. You know what else I know?”

“What's that?”

“I don't like rye bread.”

They laughed and got up, cleared their trays, and then walked out of the chow hall. Massey grabbed a couple brownies and put them in his cargo pockets on the way out. Outside, the moon made their shadows dance on the walls of the tents.

•   •   •

N
ight shoots were a colorful affair, a favorite among the men. The heat was kept at bay when the stars were out, and with the NODs down and lasers all fired up, the shooting was more like something out of
Star Wars
than zeroing and throwing rounds downrange. Green lasers swept the range, and orange and yellow fire bursts cracked the dark air. The
pop, pop, pop
of their weapons quickened and slowed like a rainstorm that couldn't make up its mind. Gunpowder, dirt, and lead ruled the air. It smelled good. Familiar and right. If townspeople had looked over the concrete barriers from the town surrounding the FOB, they wouldn't see a thing except for maybe a small glint of the rounds reflected in the moonlight from afar. They would hear only the slight puffs of air from the suppressors and the
thwack, thwack, thwack
of the rounds finding their targets and punching into the dirt mounds set behind them. It probably sounded like a whole army of housemaids had come outside in the middle of the night to beat their carpets clean at once. Among the spent casings and bottles of water stacked behind them, the CO walked slowly behind the teams, his hands clasped together at the small of his back.

“We're green in twenty-four,” he said. “Try to get some sleep.”

Nobody cheered or grabbed ass. They welcomed the news by finishing off the rounds they'd loaded up and then by stacking all their gear neatly in the war room and surgically cleaning their weapons.

•   •   •

S
haw didn't sleep much. He watched baseball with Massey because the latter was a diehard Cardinals fan and then he got up around 0600 hours after having gotten to bed a little after 0300. The tent was completely blacked out and the air was blasting when he woke. Massey and Hagan were both still sleeping in their bunks, snoring loud, legs kicked out of their blankets. Dalonna was on the phones talking with his wife, and Cooke had marked down that he was at the range. Shaw took a marker and checked off
War Room
next to his name.

He opened the door and light flooded inside the tent. Hagan and Massey started groaning, but Shaw shut the door before they could start swearing at him. It was warm out already, but bearable. He crossed the sternum wooden walkway from the tents to the shitters and let out a strong stream of piss. The bathroom smelled like stale, flat beer. He scratched his beard and mopped away the sweat already forming at the roots. Then he walked to the chow hall and ate a breakfast burrito and watched the TVs again. There were highlights of the Cardinals game he and Massey had watched just hours before and then updated coverage of the earlier mosque bombing. The death toll had risen to nearly forty. Shaw saw a little girl being carried through rubble-strewn, trash-littered streets by grown men shouting and pulling at their dark hair and yelling into the video cameras. The camera zoomed in on the girl's pale face and she looked a lot like Dalonna's girls, only instead of orange Cheetos powder on her lips she had blood streaking her face. His stomach knotted and tightened, so he got up and racked his tray and left the chow hall. The servers stood with their hands behind their backs, smiling at him. One of the servers tipped his white paper hat, said, “Thank you.”

Shaw walked outside and found a shaded section of wall by the war room and pulled up one of the empty ammo cans. He placed the can on the brown dirt that coated his boots and sat down. Then he took out his earphones and tobacco and set a chaw in his cheek. He turned on Pearl Jam and closed his eyes. A light breeze offset the heat nicely and the sun felt good. He enjoyed the smell of the dirt baking in the new day's sun and thought about baseballs hitting leather palms and how the blades of grass had shined so bright they looked wet under the lights of Busch Stadium the night before. He thought of playing baseball as a kid, the way the dirt felt like soft buttered clay or hard schoolyard blacktop, depending on the neighborhood they were in, and remembered getting raspberries on his thighs from rough slides. The bedsheet would stick to the open sores and he'd have to cut the sheet around the scabs in the morning to keep the sores from ripping open.

It was nice.

He tried not to think of dead little girls getting carried through the streets or live ones crying for their mothers. He felt at peace.

•   •   •

G
etting to your happy place, huh?”

Cooke nudged Shaw awake with his boot. Cooke's black beard shined in the sunlight. His gloves were streaked and dyed with gun oil and he had six empty mags in his kit.

Shaw nodded and raised his hand to shield the sun. “How was the shoot?”

“Good. I could clip with Hog again, that's for sure.”

Cooke's trigger finger was tracing along the trigger guard of his weapon. He looked down at his weapon and then around the FOB, over the concrete walls toward the neighborhood mosque's minaret.

“He's probably going to be rubbing crap on his ass for a while before he clips again with you,” Shaw said.

“Poor Hog.”

Cooke spat in the dirt and looked at Shaw. He nodded toward him.

“You okay? You look anxious.”

“Yeah,” Shaw said. “I'm good. Hate sitting around.”

“That's for sure. Need to get our hit list and start burning through it.” Cooke checked his watch. “Well, we're greened tonight. That's good.”

“Yeah, Cooke.” Shaw laughed. “It is.”

Cooke nodded and walked away.

Shaw watched him go. He moved light and airy, like a little kid.

•   •   •

T
he beeper lit up with their first 4 of the hop an hour after Cooke walked off. The beeper was crammed down deep in Shaw's pocket, so the vibration had woken him. The 4 meant that the teams could expect to be on the birds in four hours, so were expected in the briefing room within forty minutes. When Shaw got to the briefing room it was nearly full. Everyone sat at the tables closest to the whiteboard, their knees bouncing up and down. Taped to the board were printouts of an overhead view of the target house they'd visit in a couple hours.

Shaw looked at Hagan when he entered. He and Cooke were sitting next to each other, their faces turned inward, elbows on the table. Cooke was trying to teach Hagan how to get a dip the size of a golf ball into his lip to match the one he sported himself. It was a fruitless effort. Hagan's fingers were black from all the runoff and he had dip all over his pants. He saw Shaw and smiled, dip falling from his mouth.

“Listening to your suicide music?” Hagan asked.

“Suicide music?”

“Yeah, what were you listening to?”

“Pearl Jam,” Shaw said. “What's suicidal about that?”

“The lead singer killed himself. Right after they hit it big. He used a shotgun.”

Massey rolled his eyes and let out a deep breath. “Hog, that was Nirvana. Pearl Jam's still together.”

Hagan narrowed his eyebrows and let his fingertips rest on his thighs. “Nah, that's not right.”

“Yes, it is,” Massey said.

“All alive?” Hagan asked.

Shaw smiled. “All alive, Hog.”

“That's one of their songs,” Massey said.

Hagan looked at Massey. “We're all alive?”

“No,” Massey said. “‘Alive.'”

“Just ‘Alive'?”

“‘Alive.' That's it. One word.”

Hagan nodded, the dip still trickling out of his mouth. He stared at the ceiling, like he'd seen something small on one of the roofing tiles. “Whatever. You should be listening to Metallica or Pantera. Billy Joel.”

“Billy Joel?” Massey asked.

“Hell, yeah,” Hagan said. “Dude is badass. ‘It's the End of the World'? That's the shit.”

“That's also not Billy Joel,” Massey said.

“What?”

“That's R.E.M. Billy Joel is ‘Piano Man.'”

Hagan rolled his eyes. “Fine. Then R.E.M. is badass.”

Shaw sat down and patted Hagan on the back.

“Hog, you look like shit,” Dalonna said.

Hagan had dip spread all over his pants. It looked like he'd spilled a filter full of used coffee on his lap. He frowned and stuck his chin out. “Donna, I'm aware. Thank you.” He pointed at Cooke. “No one can get a dip the size of a golf ball into their lip. It's not possible. Cooke's a mutant.”

Cooke smiled.

“I bet Billy Joel could do it,” Massey said.

“Or R.E.M.” Dalonna laughed.

Their CO walked in and Hagan mumbled, “Thank God,” under his breath. The CO held up a copy of the printout hanging on the back of each seat in the room, and the guys stopped joking and quieted down. Small enough to fit once folded in a pocket, the printouts had a headshot of the HVT they were going after, along with personal information. Habits and likely movements. Known family members and acquaintances. Bodyguards liable to be with or around him. Aliases and possible cover stories. Intel's search during the previous squadron's hop had paid off. He was overweight and bearded, with glasses. He was also a bomb maker and reputedly had his nose broken at some point in his life by his own mother.

“He looks like Ron Jeremy,” Hagan whispered.

The CO told them the name of Tango1 and began the brief.

“Tango1's from Yemen. As you know, the outbound squadron had been tracking him. He's been operating with al-Ayeelaa
for the past year. He left AQAP after his father got hit in an airstrike along with his uncles and some other AQAP HVTs. He didn't like the new leadership, so he left.”

The CO nodded to himself and winced, ran a hand through his long hair. The room got real quiet.

“Tango1 has targeted unusual members for his bombing ranks. Apparently he breaks into homes and buildings known to house mentally handicapped folks. Then he sends them out into markets and crowded public places. He blows them up if they try to take off the vests or get back in the car, or, of course, once they've found a large group of people. Sources on the ground have verified the last three bombings in the area—two in bazaars and one at a police station—are his, implemented with these individuals. A guardian of a teenager identified the head of a recent suicide bomber found at a blast sight. He had Down's.”

The heads of bombers wearing suicide vests usually cleared the bodies from the pressure of the blast before the rest of the body was destroyed. Heads would pop off relatively intact, like the cork of a wine bottle. Heads could clear the roofs of neighborhood homes and fly through the air like a home run out of Fenway. Some of the men in the room had had heads roll in front of them after a bomber detonated a street or two over.