Diamondhead (31 page)
Authors: Patrick Robinson
Tags: #Suspense, #Fiction, #Political, #Thrillers, #Weapons industry, #War & Military, #Assassination, #Iraq War; 2003-
A shoal of blues has a lot in common with a pack of wolves. They have been known to bite a line in half just to save a friend. There is no fish in all of North America’s coastal waters that is quite such a warrior as a threatened bluefish.
A bass is strong, but not like a blue. And Mack knew that last dive of the fish on his line had been, in a sense, the last attack. The fish was defeated. And Mack knew defeat when he stared at it. He’d seen it in the eyes of a hundred al-Qaeda warriors in the backstreets of Baghdad. And now he could see the fish, with its stark stripes along the silvery body. He’d reeled it into shallow water now, and he could see it was swimming on its side, but it was barely swimming, just flapping in the water. Slowly, the willpower of the fish drained away, and almost in slow motion it veered slowly from side to side, with the last of its strength, a sad, final reflex for survival, a reflex that echoed back for a million years. The tail became still, and Mack leaned over with his net and landed the fish. It was one of the biggest bass he’d ever caught.
“Now that,” he murmured, “is a high-quality sonofabitch.” He killed it with one swift crack on the head with his priest and then laid it out on a flat rock while he selected his filleting knife. Three minutes later he’d cut the two long, white bass steaks off the bone and thrown the remains of the fish back into the estuary. The gulls were already circling. “Little bastards don’t miss much,” said Mack to no one in particular. And then he packed the Bedford dinner into the cooler, loaded the car, and left.
His thoughts immediately turned to Tommy resting in his bedroom, so sick, so tragically sick. “I guess it’s a good thing he didn’t come today,” he muttered. “He would have loved it, but that big striper might have hauled him straight across the estuary, because Tommy wouldn’t let go. That’s the thing—Tom’s a Bedford through and through. He’d never let go.”
He arrived home, washed off his rod, dumped the ice onto the lawn, and took the fish into the kitchen, where Anne was making him iced coffee. A couple of miles away there was a spot on the coast road where she could see for a few yards. He knew she’d been watching, and he knew she’d seen the car coming home.
He took her in his arms, and only then did he notice she’d been crying. “We can’t give up,” he told her gently. “We just have to keep doing our best, and praying for Tommy.”
Anne did not answer for a couple of minutes, and then she asked him if he’d caught a fish.
“I caught one of the biggest bass I ever saw,” he said. “Must have been three feet long. We’ll only need around half of it this evening. Might as well freeze the rest.” But for the second time in a few minutes, Mack sensed she was not really listening. He’d seen this before in men who had been engaged in combat, and for whom fear was beginning to creep into their psyche. All combat troops have to fight this, but for a few of them the problem is more defined. And slowly the fear begins to dominate. These men were no longer attacking the enemy; they were just trying to survive.
Experienced commanders spot these battlefield subtleties and are usually sympathetic, moving such men to less onerous parts of the operation, possibly Intel or Strategic Planning. In World War I, they would have been shot for cowardice.
All of these thoughts ran through Mack’s mind as he gazed at his very lovely, very distracted wife. It was so unlike her to lose her focus. But Tommy’s illness was taking its toll after so many weeks of disappointment following disappointment.
Upstairs, Tommy yelled. Anne immediately left the kitchen, and Mack took his iced coffee out onto the porch, where he sat and stared out toward the coastline. It was curious, but in a way the battles in Iraq had shielded him from this other mental battle that was taking place in his own home: two people trying still to love each other, trying to hold it all together while their little boy was dying in front of their eyes. As colossal strains go, this one was right up there. Mack could never remember, even in his darkest hours along the Euphrates River, feeling this sad, this helpless, this melancholic.
He heard Tommy yell again, a yell of temper through the open upstairs window. He heard Anne raise her voice, the first time she had raised it since he had returned from Iraq. He decided to remain out of it, but he could not help but hear the raging tantrum Tommy was having and the difficulty Anne was having trying to get him under control. Finally, Tommy dissolved into crying, long, racking sobs of pure anguish.
“Jesus Christ,” thought Mack. “I just hope he doesn’t know.”
A half hour went by, and he stepped outside to prepare the grill for the bass. Tommy and Anne finally came downstairs, and he looked absolutely normal. Anne, on the other hand, was white-faced and very much within herself.
Tommy came over to see his dad and said, “Wanna play some ball after you fix the fire?” Mack grabbed him and managed to put a sooty handprint on Tommy’s clean T-shirt.
“Hell, Mom will think you’ve been hit by the Black Hand Gang.”
“No, she won’t. She’ll think it’s the Invasion of the Deadheads. They’ve got black hands.” And the little boy raced around the garden shouting, “Watch out, guys! Here come the Deadheads!”
Mack lit the fire and then took Tommy back inside to pick up the baseball gear. He returned to the kitchen and selected one of the bass fillets, prepared it with oil, salt, and pepper, and wrapped it in tinfoil. He decided to leave it in the fridge while he and Tommy played catch, but before he went outside he heard a crash from the porch, followed by a scream from Anne.
He moved swiftly out to the porch only to see that Anne had dropped and broken an empty milk jug, but she was crying hysterically—the kind of distraught sobbing that usually occurs when someone’s house has burned down.
Mack went over to her and again took her in his arms, saying, “Come on, Anne, it’s only a milk jug, and not even very big. Don’t get upset. Who cares? We’ll replace it tomorrow.” But Anne could not be consoled, and she cried for ten minutes. Even Tommy came in and said, “What’s up, Mom? Are you really crying because of the stupid milk jug?”
Mack ruffled his hair and whispered to him, “It’s not the jug, kid. Mum’s suffering from battle fatigue.”
“What’s that?”
“It’s what the Yanks had last night when the Red Sox beat ’em 15 to 1. Acute depression.”
“Well, what’s that got to do with the milk jug?”
“I think it belonged to Mom’s grandmother,” lied Mack. “It’s kinda sentimental.”
“Senti-what?”
“Shut up, Tommy, and get your glove on. I wanna see some power throwing from you.”
Tommy bounced down the steps, saying over and over, “Senti-menti. Senti-menti. Mom’s got senti-menti.” Even Anne laughed. She brought out the bass and supervised the cooking, which took twenty minutes, grill to table. The french fries were already in the warming oven.
The fish tasted about as good and fresh as any fish can ever taste. The french fries were pretty good, too. The meal seemed to energize Tommy, who announced that he wanted to go fishing right then, wanted to catch another bluefish like last time.
Mack was secretly thrilled that he remembered last time, because loss of memory was one of the known symptoms of adrenoleukodystrophy. But the thrill did not run to another fishing trip today. And anyway, the light was fading fast. “It’s too late, Tommy,” he said. “It’ll be dark in fifteen minutes.”
“But you said the early darkness is sometimes the best time of all to catch fish. Come on, Dad, you said we could go. You said we could.”
Without a word, the big SEAL commander walked around the table, hoisted Tommy clean out of his chair, put him up on his shoulders, and hanging onto both ankles ran out of the house with Tommy clinging onto his hair, laughing his head off. Mack raced around the garden, with Tommy perched on his shoulders, hanging on grimly and yelling, “You said we could go! You said we could go! You said we could go!”
Eventually, Mack stopped and pulled Tommy down into his arms, and already he could feel the little boy becoming tired and submissive.
“Come on, let’s go and find some ice cream,” said Mack. “Would you like that?”
Tommy opened his eyes, nodded, and muttered, “You said we could go,” laughing despite himself.
Tommy lasted about another hour, then wearily asked his mom if he could stay up and watch the baseball game with his dad. But his eyes were closing. The Red Sox had barely sent down three Yankee batters in order at the top of the first when Tommy fell fast asleep on the sofa. Mack carried him up to bed between innings.
It might have been the general elation of a 4-0 Red Sox lead, but Mack decided he must tell Anne about the bank’s rejection. They could not have secrets from each other, and he heard her come slowly down the stairs. “Is he okay?”
“For the moment. I’ve given him some of the new medicine, and hopefully he’ll sleep through the night.”
Mack stood up and suggested they have a glass of wine together, but he noticed she answered “okay” with the same enthusiasm she might have offered for a glass of strychnine. He poured two glasses from a new bottle of California red anyway, a four-year-old merlot from the Napa Valley, and offered one to his wife, who took it as if her mind were a thousand miles away.
“Anne,” he said, “it’s not the end of the world, but I did hear from the bank today.”
“They turned us down?”
“They did. And it was a computerized letter. They never had any intention of giving us a million.”
“I just wonder who these people are,” she said. “Here we are, faced with the most adorable little boy, who is dying of some incurable disease, and no one will lift a finger to help. The stupid doctors have been outwitted by a nation that basically makes cuckoo clocks, the insurance company won’t provide coverage the only time we have ever needed it, and the bank has better things to do with its money.”
“I know,” replied Mack. “It’s as if the whole darned world is indifferent to everything. Billions of dollars being made every day. And no one will do anything for us.”
Quite suddenly, Anne began to cry again, just sitting in an armchair making no attempt to hide her tears. But her voice was raised when she spoke. “It’s just so unfair!” she almost shouted. “And I don’t know how much more I can take. I do everything I can, all day, every day, and in the end nothing matters. Because in the end Tommy will die, and no one will give a damn, except us.”
Mack put down his glass and stood up. But he was too late. Anne literally screamed at him, “All I have is Tommy and you! And you can’t help! For years they’ve told me you were the best this, and the best that, and then they threw you out, and now you’re just helpless, like everyone else!”
This was the moment Mack had been dreading. The day when Anne blamed him for being unable to raise the money for Tommy to go to Switzerland. He understood he was her protector and provider, and now in the hour of her greatest need, he had somehow failed her. No one understood the cold truth better than Mack Bedford.
And Anne was not through. “I have nowhere to turn. Even your Mister High and Mighty Harry Remson can offer nothing. But most of all I come back to you, my husband, Tommy’s dad. Because if ever there was a moment in both our lives when you had to do something, it’s now. And the best you can do is advise prayer. I don’t need prayer. I need a million dollars to save my little boy’s life. And you can’t get it. You’re no different from the rest—
I HATE YOU! I CAN’T STAND THE SIGHT OF YOU! WHAT GOOD ARE YOU IF YOU CAN’T DO ANYTHING FOR TOMMY?”
She smashed her glass of wine off the side table next to her chair and ran out of the room. All the way up the stairs she never stopped raging: “If not you, WHO? If not now, WHEN? WHAT ELSE IS THERE?”
I HATE YOU! I CAN’T STAND THE SIGHT OF YOU! WHAT GOOD ARE YOU IF YOU CAN’T DO ANYTHING FOR TOMMY?”
She smashed her glass of wine off the side table next to her chair and ran out of the room. All the way up the stairs she never stopped raging: “If not you, WHO? If not now, WHEN? WHAT ELSE IS THERE?”
Mack did not for one moment think he was merely watching a highly strung woman at the end of her tether. He was watching the total mental breakdown of his own beautiful wife. And he had no idea what to do about it. He tried to think, to step back mentally from the problem, away from the heartrending emotion of Anne. But there was no stepping back. Tommy’s illness lived with them both, night and day. It had already torn his wife apart. He did not know if she could ever recover. And he thought it was entirely possible she did hate him for his inability to solve the problem of Switzerland.
Carefully, he took the glass off the floor and tipped a bottle of club soda over the red stain on the carpet. He tried to watch the Red Sox but could not concentrate, not with Anne upstairs, hating him. He poured himself a second glass of wine and turned off the television. Then he remembered the magazine Harry had given him, which he had promised to read. He went out to the hall closet, retrieved the publication from his jacket, and wandered back into the living room.
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