Operator - 01 (7 page)

The action Buddy Peterson asked me about took place in January of 2002, four months after the terrorist attacks. It was a raid on an Al Qaeda stronghold near Kandahar.

I was leading a squad of ten Special Forces operators from my A-Team from the front. Two squads had been designated to take down a target that looked like a single building from aerial surveillance photos. When we arrived there in the dead of night we found not one, but three separate buildings surrounding a courtyard full of gleaming new Toyota pickups filled with sleeping Taliban Mujahidin fighters wearing long dishdash cotton shirts. My squad was tasked with clearing the two structures to the right of the courtyard. The attack needed to be timed and coordinated with the first squad, so I divided my force. Half the squad took the smaller building while I led the other four men to the last building. On the signal from our team leader, a specialist breached the front door and we threw flash bang grenades in. Then I went in first, and all hell broke loose.

The moment I got through the front door, night-vision goggles peering right and left to re-create my peripheral vision, a hailstorm of coordinated fire came down on my guys from the second floor of the building. The man behind me never made it through the door. I moved through the building alone, trying to locate the source of the fire. I made it to the second floor and crept into a room where four men were lined up at blown-out windows, firing AK-47s at my guys. I was sighting in on them when a pipe hit my right shoulder, dislocating it. I pitched forward, hitting the floor hard, which popped my shoulder back into joint. But then the man who’d blindsided me with the pipe started beating me with it in earnest. I managed to bring the thin man down by scissoring his knees between my legs and rolling over, which flopped the terrorist directly onto his face.

Unfortunately, I trapped my right arm in the process. In desperation, I pulled my Beretta with my left hand from the mid-chest molded plastic Serpa holster secured to the molle system on my rig. It was a difficult draw with a dislocated shoulder. I brought the automatic up just in time to face the snout of an AK-47 as the men who had been targeting my guys heard the commotion and turned on me. I managed four kills left handed with my pupils still adjusting to the loss of illumination from the night vision goggles that had been knocked off my head when I’d fallen. Then the pipe wielder managed to twist around and knock the pistol from my hand. I could smell his sour breath as he stretched for my weapon. Before the Afghan could reach the pistol, I slipped a fixed-bladed SOG knife from its downward-facing sheath on my rig and buried it in the man’s carotid. He was dead in seconds.

I remember thinking that I’d screwed up, letting myself get cut off from my men. I was sure I’d pay for the mistake with my life, and the lives of the men I was responsible for. Then suddenly I was a hero. One of my guys didn’t make it. I was thinking about him when a general I’d never met handed me that medal.

It was my last official combat engagement. I was surprised to see an article saying that I had sustained “serious, debilitating injuries” during the action. I knew it would take some physical therapy to rehabilitate my shoulder after the dislocation, but I was otherwise unharmed. A few days later, Alpha called to congratulate me. He said that in light of my “serious injuries” I would be promoted to Master Sergeant and transferred to his clerical unit. Six weeks later I began Delta Force selection and training – the most difficult seven months of my life. Then Alpha finally welcomed me to the Activity, where I learned an entirely new set of skills.

* * *

Buddy eventually realizes he’ll get no grand stories from me and lapses into silence. Two hours pass, with neither of us stirring. Then Buddy places a hand on my shoulder and points to a clearing in the distance. A buck stands on the edge of the meadow, unmoving. I grab binoculars, searching the direction Buddy pointed.

“Son of a bitch, that’s a solid eight-pointer,” Buddy says, counting the number of tips on the end of the buck’s antlers.

“It’s also seven hundred yards with a fifteen knot cross-wind.” I pause for a second to let that sink in before adding, “That’s half a mile. You want to try that shot?”

“Nope – it’s all yours. I haven’t hit something that far away since Vietnam, and then it was a weather balloon,” Buddy replies, chuckling.

I shake my head and look through the sight at the buck. It’s small even in the high magnification Leupold VX-7 scope. Without my brother-in-law’s absurdly overpowered scope or the hot Holland & Holland load, the shot would be impossible. As it is, it’s merely foolhardy. Missing the buck entirely is not the worst possibility. If I tag the buck without bringing him down, I’m going to spend hours tracking a wounded animal. But there’s a challenge in Buddy’s voice, one that my younger self responds to. So I still myself and start doing calculations in my head. Buddy has an expensive Leica rangefinder, which confirms my visual estimate within a few yards. I calculate how much the bullet will drop in that distance and adjust the scope. Then I make a correction for the wind after spotting some leaves moving in a tree above the buck. And I make a final correction for the humidity. I’m half hoping the buck will have wandered off by this time, but he’s grazing away, unconcerned. I make myself absolutely still until I can hear my heartbeat in my ear. When I have the rhythm of my heart timed below fifty beats per minute I gently squeeze the trigger between beats. The recoil of the rifle pulls the telescopic sight off the buck, but a second later Buddy hollers, “Sonofabitch! You dropped him right in his tracks!”

* * *

It is late afternoon before I reach the motel room in Conestoga. I should have checked out in the morning, but the extra $40 buys me a shower and a quick nap before hitting the road. The showerhead has two settings: a fine mist that doesn’t feel like a shower at all or multiple thin jets that sting like needles. At least it’s hot. I scrub myself with harsh soap extracted from a thin plastic package on the countertop and ponder my lack of joy at bringing down the buck. It was a remarkable shot – probably the farthest distance from which anyone has hit a deer in the Adirondacks in years. If I’d done it when I was seventeen, I wouldn’t have slept for a week. Most of the hunting I did with my father was from a hundred yards or less – a fraction of the distance I managed this morning. I made much longer shots in the Army, only with better equipment. I don’t doubt that Jeff and the hunting community in Conestoga will be buzzing about the kill for years.

But the elation I would have felt as a child is gone. What would have been a miraculous shot has been reduced to physics and mathematics by my training. When I took a deer with my father, we would always kneel down in front of the animal before dressing it and repeat a ritual phrase:
I respect the sacrifice of this animal because it gave its life to sustain mine
. There was something noble about consummating a kill. Today, the kill felt coldly practical. Taking the long shot at the buck got me away from the hunt and from Buddy’s questions. It made my brother-in-law happy. I’d used the animal’s life to solve a personal problem. It’s something my younger self could never have done. Perhaps it’s a slight offense, almost inconsiderable next to the multitude of sins I’ll have to answer for one day, but it still eats at me as I attempt to scrub myself clean.

The vibration of my cell phone on the bathroom sink interrupts my thoughts. I slip from the shower and wrap a towel around my waist as I flip the phone open.

“It’s Veronica.”

“Hi.”

“Can you come meet me? I’m still in Conestoga.”

“I was about to head home to D.C.”

“I think you’re going to want to see this. I’m at Mel’s place. I…I don’t think she killed herself.”

“Give me the address,” I say, reaching for my clothing.

Mel’s place is the downstairs rental unit of a converted two-story Victorian on an anonymous block of Orchard Road just off of Route 9W, close to the New York State Thruway. The owner, a widower, lives in the upstairs unit. Veronica has charmed him out of the key after calling Mel’s parents, asking them if she can stop by to pick up a book she’d lent Mel and needed back. They’d offered to come over but Veronica had demurred, insisting she knew just where it was.

I pull the black GTO up to the curb in front of the place and listen for a second as the V-8 growls in protest when I shut it down. It’s almost dark at 5pm and the street is not the best, even for Conestoga. The houses look decrepit, like old bones scrubbed bare by the wind. Some of the yards are tended while others have gone to seed. Even the trees lining the road, planted on the grass between the sidewalk and the asphalt, look skeletal and dyspeptic. The door to the unit is ajar and I step in. The interior of Mel’s apartment is like an extension of her brain, one that I recognize even after all these years. There is a weird sort of order that would look like complete chaos to anyone who didn’t know her. Stacks of papers dot the living room like ferns in a primeval forest. The picture window that looks out onto the driveway is covered with a hand-embroidered lace curtain. A green sofa that looks like it has spent the first fifty years of its life wrapped in plastic is nested under the large window. A rocking chair sits opposite, a silent companion.

Veronica is standing in the middle of the living room with a stack full of papers in her arms and a puzzled expression on her face. She looks down at the piles of papers around her feet. “This is like playing solitaire with five decks of cards…” then she looks up and smiles at me. She looks different in casual clothing – jeans and a pale blue sweater made from something that looks to be softer than wool. The sweater is snug and I snap my eyes upwards to her face before I am officially staring.

“This kind of mess I remember,” I say, nodding. It was the source of endless fights between Mel and her mother as a teenager. “She always seemed to know where everything was.”

Veronica nods slowly. “Exactly. It looks like a mess but she’s got a system. That’s why this is odd. There are twelve stacks of papers on the floor. Every one is a different assignment from one of her four classes. The papers are all in alphabetical order, except for this stack here. It’s two different assignments from two different classes and the papers are all mixed together. Half of them are from the students with A-L last names from this stack over here. One of these papers is half graded – in fact, her pen trails off in the middle of this comment.” Veronica hands me the paper, which is an essay on bird feeders. I remember Mel’s distinctive handwriting, its loops and swirls.

“Okay. What’s your point?” I ask cautiously. If I’m short with Veronica, it’s because I’m not comfortable in Mel’s place. Being here with Veronica somehow makes it feel worse.

“She wouldn’t have left this paper half-graded. And if Mel was going to fling a bunch of papers down or something, why straighten them up and put them in some random order? Why wouldn’t she just leave them where they landed if she was that distraught?”

“Her parents could have cleaned this up.”

Veronica shakes her head. “They said they haven’t been over here yet. It sounds like they’re not looking forward to it. This place hasn’t been cleaned. There are still bloodstains in the bathroom.” Veronica stops herself from saying more and frowns, momentarily looking queasy. “The landlord, Harvey Kastriner, told me that nothing in here has been touched. The paramedics wouldn’t have cleaned up and I doubt the police would be straightening up piles of paper either.”

“There are a lot of possible explanations,” I protest, although I do see how the living room looks like a puzzle put back together by someone who never saw the picture on the box.

“On its own perhaps, but then you have this,” Veronica says as she takes three steps backwards into the kitchen area – really just a corner of the main living room with linoleum tiles instead of carpeting. She points to a portion of the countertop next to the fridge.

“What?” I ask. Aside from some clutter on the countertop, I don’t see anything significant.

Veronica rolls her eyes. “It’s sugar, flour, chocolate, butter, vanilla and eggs!”

“Meaning?” I ask, mystified.

“Men!” Veronica looks skyward. “She was obviously going to bake brownies. And she left the eggs out. I checked the fridge – other than milk that just expired yesterday, there’s nothing out of date. She wouldn’t have randomly pulled all this stuff out and left the eggs to rot right before she killed herself. That’s not how women work. We don’t decide to make brownies and finish grading papers and then get up and shoot ourselves in the head. We would think about what people would find here and we’d straighten up. Mel would have wanted her students to get their grades, for one thing.” Veronica sounds indignant.

“You’re assuming she was rational. People do weird things when they’re depressed. I’ve seen it before,” and here I’m thinking of some of the soldiers I knew afflicted by post-traumatic stress disorder after deployments. There was a string of suicides and homicide/suicides when I was posted at Fort Bragg in North Carolina.

“Maybe, maybe…” Veronica says, tapping a slim, manicured fingernail against her lower lip, “but there’s more.” She picks up the phone, a corded model that looks about a dozen years old and presses the redial button, turning the receiver up so we can both listen. Her hair glides across my neck as I lean in and I can smell the clean scent of her shampoo and a hint of something more complicated on her neck. It makes me uncomfortable.

“9-1-1, what is the nature of your emergency?” the female voice on the phone asks.

“I’m so sorry, my little boy dialed this number again by accident. I apologize, it won’t happen again,” Veronica says quickly, and the operator says it’s fine before disconnecting.

“Wait, don’t they have to respond to that? Are we going to have the fire department on the doorstep here in five minutes?” I ask.

“Maybe in some places, but not here. This phone doesn’t have a caller ID display, so I hit redial when I got here. I asked the woman who picked up the same question. She said no.”