SATURDAY, AUGUST 27
In her dream, Clare was flying. The radio crackled and spat with an endless flow of chatter, air-to-air, ground-to-air, reports from the AWACs flying miles above them.
Clare checked the airspeed, yawed the rooters another ten degrees so that they were looking at the ground through the windscreen. Drying fields. Irrigation pumps. And there, the narrow Nile green river that led to the town. She picked up speed. “Target coordinates in. Unlocking missiles.”
“Confirmed. Range five hundred,” her copilot said.
Clare tapped her mic. “Alpha Tango, this is Bravo Flight five two five, ranged three hundred meters from one-three Company Foxtrot. Do we have a confirm to go hot?”
Her helmet’s headset blared. “Bravo Flight five two five, you are confirmed to go hot.”
“Roger, Alpha Tango.” She flicked the switches. “Missiles on.”
The radio cracked again. “Bravo five two five, this is the one-three Foxtrot. Not to rush you or anything, but where the hell are you?”
“We’ll be on top of you in two minutes, one-three. Are you still under fire?”
“Hell, yes, we’re still under fire. We fell back to the house across the street. There ain’t no more place to go. We’ve got wounded. We need an extract, and we need it five minutes ago.”
“We have signal,” her copilot said, and she glanced at him and saw it was her SERE instructor, Master Sergeant Ashley “Hardball” Wright, his lanky frame taking up all the cockpit space and then some.
“Master Sergeant? I didn’t know you were flight-certified.”
“Pay attention, Fergusson. You might live longer.” The sun on the water flashed unbearably bright as they overflew the river. Then they were roaring over low buildings, dun and cement, and he said, “Target acquired,” and she said, “Fire,” and the Black Hawk’s frame shuddered as the AGM-114s launched out of their cradles, and they streaked away faster than the eye could follow and half the target building exploded into dust and fire and oily black smoke. They flew into the black roiling column, the sound of the explosion carrying over the rotors, through her helmet, and she rode up, up, up on the high hard thermal, rising out of the smoke as the remains of the building burned beneath them.
“One-three Foxtrot, I need an LZ,” she said into her mic. “Do you have enemy fire?”
“Negative, Bravo five two five. You smoked ’em. We’re establishing a perimeter now.”
She dropped the helo like an express elevator, leaving her stomach somewhere above the floating debris. The ambulatory of the one-three had cordoned off a dirty square flanked by burning rubble and mortar-pocked houses. She touched down and cut the engine. She looked around. There were bodies everywhere. Everywhere, circling her landing zone, heaped over the dirt and the cement, men, women, children, white shattered bones and black burned skin. “Oh my God,” she said.
Then they were standing outside. The stench was beyond bearing, shit and burned insulation and rotting meat. Hardball said, “The lawyer, testing Jesus, asked, ‘Who is my neighbor?’”
So many bodies. So many lives. So much death. The wounded of the one-three squad were lying on the broken concrete, body after bloody, blasted body, all in urban camo except for one. One was in khaki and brown. “We need extraction!” a sergeant yelled.
The helo was gone. Clare looked around, panicked.
“What does the Lord require of you,” Hardball asked, “but to do justice, love mercy, and walk humbly with your God?”
“Where’s the ship?” Clare cried. “Where’s the goddamn ship?” A pair of EMTs hoisted a gurney. The man in khaki and brown was on it, packed with blue emergency bandages that had bled through in ragged purple blotches. “Where are you going?” Clare screamed. “We’re extracting as soon as I find the ship! Bring him here!”
The EMTs passed her and she saw him in fragments: his sandy hair, the oxygen mask, one boot lolling off the stretcher. She saw his hand, tan, limp, still wearing his wedding ring. She lunged toward him and Hardball was in the way, soaking in blood, reeking of it, and he caught her and held her, saying, “This is my commandment to you; that you love one another as I have loved you.”
Then the EMTs threw Russ Van Alstyne’s dead body into the charnel house flames and she sat bolt upright, screaming and snot-faced in the darkness of her bedroom.
“Oh, God, help me!” Her heart was pounding so hard she thought she might stroke out. She half fell, half crawled out of her sweat-tangled sheets and staggered to the bathroom. She braced her hands on the cistern and vomited into the toilet, spasming over and over again until there was nothing left. She sank weeping onto the tile floor.
She sat there for a long time, tears smearing across her cheeks, her whole body shaking. She squeezed her eyes shut against the flashes of shattered and burned flesh, afterimages imprinted on her retinas. She tried to pray, but the vision of Russ, bloody, broken, dead, wiped all the words from her mind, and she was left with nothing but the most elemental plea. Help me, God. God, help me.
I don’t think I’m fine at all.
She had left her clutch on the shelf over the towel rack, emptied of the lipstick and compact she had carried earlier this evening. Yesterday. She pushed against the edge of the tub and listed to her feet. Reached for the clutch. Pulled out the creased brochure. There would be somebody at the community center starting at eight o’clock when the gym opened. Nine at the latest.
She looked out the bathroom’s small window. Venus blazed large and bright among the fading stars. She could see the silhouettes of rooftops and chimneys and trees against the sky, but she couldn’t make out any colors yet. She smoothed the brochure against her aching stomach, over and over again, and then sat down on the cool tiles to wait out the coming of the light.