The Return: A Novel (9 page)

Stupid, of course, looking back on it, but he’d never seen a man killed in action and he was nineteen, and he knew in the depths of his soul, as sure as he was that he was breathing air, that nothing bad would happen to him, that he would come home to his mother. He knew it, she knew it, God knew it: it was a settled thing.

Bronco One was located next to a village called Hli Dlej, which sounded something like shleek-leh, with the first syllable hissed through the sides of the mouth and the second with a high falling tone. It meant Moon River, which the air force guys thought was pretty funny, because of that song. They found that none of the Americans ever called it anything else. This and other information was conveyed to them by their liaison NCO after they had put their gear away in a Hmong longhouse that had been reserved for the Americans. There were a dozen or so Special Forces troopers at the base, a lieutenant and the rest sergeants, who, as they soon learned, formed part of what the army coyly called the Studies and Observation Group. SOG ran operations for which the ordinary Special Forces were deemed too conventional: Iron Tuna was one of these. There was also a platoon of LLDB, who were South Vietnamese Special Forces, posted there for liaison and translation services and to pay the montagnards, which they often failed to do. Their unit initials stood for Luc Luong Dac Biet, but the Americans called them Lousy Little Dirty Bastards, and the montagnards felt the same, only with more reason. Marder picked this up during the first afternoon at the base and thought it was not a good sign.

Another unpleasantness occurred when they met their liaison NCO, Sergeant First Class P. F. Skelly. Marder immediately recognized him as the American from the lantern-lit bar, but Skelly didn’t recognize Marder, or pretended not to, and even later Marder never mentioned this earlier encounter. Maybe it hadn’t happened at all. Marder realized that he had any number of false memories rambling around in his head. He knew Skelly did too. It was one of the things about war, that war scrambled time and place, the intensity of it made the brain unhinge, and soldiers signified this unconsciously when they said of some colossal event they’d experienced in their very flesh: “It was just like the movies!” But it wasn’t.

During that first interview, or lecture, SFC Skelly made a number of salient points:

That since they were mere air force pukes, suited only for eating BX burgers and getting more lard on their desk-bound asses, they should not dare to think of themselves as actual soldiers;

That in their present form they constituted a danger not only to themselves, which he could not care less about, but to himself and to his Yards, the least pubic hair of the least of whom was worth more than the three of them put together;

That the foregoing pissed him off, and he intended to take it out on them, preferably by killing them during training or at the very least making them wish sincerely for death;

That they were undoubtedly going to die on this mission, being far too soft and stupid to live, and that they should put any and all thoughts of returning to the world and their loved ones aside;

That if they abused any montagnard, or messed with a montagnard woman, he would personally stake them out on an anthill, having reserved several cans of C-rat strawberry jam for purposes of smearing on naked sniveling air force pukes so staked out;

That training would commence at 0500 tomorrow.

He asked for questions. There were none. The three air force pukes retired to their hooch, ate their C-rats, and waited fearfully for the dawn.

SFC Skelly’s training consisted at first primarily of running. They ran over hills and through streams, through saw grass and vicious thornbushes, carrying the load they would carry on their missions, not only weapons, food, ammo, water, and bedding but also the pack frames holding the repeaters and the voodoos and the diagnostic equipment necessary to set up the data nets. Marder thought their loads could not have been less than eighty pounds each. Lascaglia and Hayden both collapsed several times in sobbing heaps, were screamed at by Skelly, prodded into motion by the short bamboo stake he always carried. Marder didn’t cry but fainted on two occasions. Skelly, who was smaller than any of them, carried the same load, plus more ammo, and ran literal circles around them, seeming to float above the trails, while they suffered the terrible pull of gravity, which wrenched their limbs and pressed their webbing cruelly into their flesh.

Those were the mornings. In the afternoon and into the evening, they had target practice. Of the three, only Hayden had ever fired a rifle before, so this was another imposed misery. They were using cut-down CAR-16s, carbines as they were called, or AK-47s captured from the enemy. The targets were playing cards that Skelly would affix to trees and bushes along a set course. (Skelly seemed to have an infinite supply of new playing cards, and they figured he had boosted them from some rear-area PX. Even this early they had understood that SOG supplied its needs largely by scamming the army or by naked theft.) During these exercises, they would walk along the trail, still burdened by their gear, sweat and gnats in their eyes, holding the unfamiliar weapons, and when they walked past a card without shooting it, Skelly, walking on their heels, would jab his stake into their short ribs and scream, “You’re dead, asshole!” in their ears.

After target practice they would play hide-and-seek. The air force men would walk off into the boonies and, after an interval, Sergeant Skelly would find them. When he found them, he would poke them with his stick and comment on their brain power and ancestry in vile language.

On one of these sessions, however, Marder snapped and said something to the effect that if the sergeant ever poked him with that stick again, he, Marder, would shoot him through both knees and laugh about it every day of his sojourn in Leavenworth.

A little staring after that, and then Skelly grinned and said, “Brooklyn, huh?”

Marder said, “Fuckin’ A, Sergeant!”

“And you think you’re a fucking wise guy. But understand this, Airman: I am a trained soldier and am superior to you in every military art, and besides that I am superior to you in every conceivable human activity, mental and physical. So don’t you even think about threatening me again, because if you do I will take that weapon from your shaking hand and ram it up your asshole.”

“I would beg to differ with you there, Sergeant,” Marder replied. “I can outshoot you with a pistol on any target over any range.”

After which, as Marder had expected, Sergeant Skelly had to demonstrate his superiority in this matter, and they organized the Moon River Invitational Shoot-Out, which later became legendary among the Special Forces and marked the time and place when his long friendship with Skelly had begun.

*   *   *

As soon as Skelly vanished, Marder went into the camper and poked around. He found Skelly’s sat phone and looked at it. He turned it on and the little yellow screen asked him for a password, so he turned it off. In the overhead storage, he found a thin magnesium/titanium suitcase and a plastic gun case. The gun case had a foam cutout that approximated the shape of a Sig P226 9-mm pistol. This was vacant, but the case also contained a box of hollow-point rounds, three magazines, a box of .410 #3 shotgun shells, and the matte-black cylinder of a Gemtech Tundra suppressor. He put the case back, and as he did so, he noticed another case, shoved deep within the compartment. It was long and extremely heavy. Marder dragged it out, found it was locked, and lifted it back into place. He figured it must contain a shotgun, or shotguns.

He did open the titanium suitcase, however. In this he found a Getac B300 ruggedized laptop and a Thrane satellite modem connected to the folded panels of its antenna, all neatly nested into the case’s foamed interior. He pulled out the laptop and turned it on. It, too, wanted a password. He typed in “Hli Dlej,” which was rejected. He thought for a moment and typed in “Joong Mang.”

The screen went dark for an instant and then a photograph appeared. It had the dark, grainy look of an enlarged cell-phone photograph, and its setting looked to be a cheap hotel room. There was the corner of a bed showing, and a washstand, and a bright triangle that meant a window. To one side a table supported what looked like a Getac B300, perhaps this very machine. In the center of the frame was a dark-skinned man in a white shirt, lying on the floor near an overturned chair. He was apparently dead from a bullet wound to his head, and his features were completely obscured by blood.

The picture had a caption: “This is the last guy who tried what you’re trying.” As Marder stared at it, blue letters started to dance across the screen, like a news crawl: “Marder, you asshole! Stay clear of my shit!”

Marder turned off the laptop and put everything back in the case. Apparently, whatever business Skelly was engaged in, he was continuing to run it via some cryptic subunit of the Internet, and unless the picture was a scam, it was the kind of business that got people killed. No surprise there, thought Marder. He took a beer from the refrigerator and sat in the truck, waiting for his friend to return.

4

“You’re looking good,” said the cop, Mick Kavanagh, when Statch got into his car, which was a 1974 powder-blue El Dorado convertible—not the best car for Boston, with gas running close to four bucks a gallon, but this politically incorrect impracticality was one of the things she liked about the man. She
did
look good too, having taken some pains with her appearance: leather biker jacket (with many pockets) over a red translucent shirt with tiny seed buttons, a clingy black calf-length skirt, and silver-toed elaborately tooled cowboy boots. She wore a jade-and-silver necklace, heavy and very old, that she’d inherited from her mother; also a silver-mounted belt, ditto. And round, heavy-framed spectacles, in red plastic. Her hair was gelled into a kind of friendly Medusa effect. As far as she knew, the nerd-punk-vaquero look was original with her. It tended to frighten off the men she didn’t care for and attract those she liked, thus achieving the only true engineering function of fashion. She didn’t much care what women thought.

Kavanagh put his car into gear and said, “So what would you like to do? There’s a pretty good card at the Fleet—you could cheer for the Mexican fighters and I could cheer for the Irish, if any. That’d be fun. Or we could catch a movie. The city lies before us.”

“No, let’s just go to Monahan’s and get tanked with your cop buddies and then go to your place and fool around.”

He ignored the traffic to give her a fast look. He could never tell when this one was being serious. But she was.

“Okay, you’re not going to get much of an argument on that one. Tell me, do all you college girls require this little wooing?”

“I wouldn’t know. I kind of always go for the optimal solution: maximized output with minimized inputs, frictionless as possible.”

“Meaning?”

“Oh, you know, get to the yield, the finished product, which in our case is mutually pleasurable sexual intercourse, with lots of orgasms.”

“And you don’t find that a bit, uh, cold?”

“You mean unromantic. No, I don’t. My parents were the most romantic people you can imagine. They had this wild affair down in Michoacán, had to escape from Mexico with gangsters on their heels, and they were always mooning at each other, exchanging love poetry and secret glances. They were literary types.” She hesitated, looking out the window. “And it didn’t end well. Or maybe it was just a reaction. Both my brother and I were lousy in English, great in math, and became engineers. I guess it’s inevitable; everyone’s embarrassed by their parents: your parents are hippies, you become a banker, and vice versa.”

“Not inevitable,” said Kavanagh. “My dad was a cop. I thought he was the greatest man in the world.”

“Whatever. Why are we talking about parents?” She looked out the window again. One of the problems with Kavanagh: everything became an interrogation, an unearthing of the past. She liked new stuff, not old stuff. They were crossing the Mass Avenue Bridge into Boston, sludgy with rush-hour traffic.

“Can’t you turn on your siren, flash some lights? It’ll be an hour before we can get a drink.”

“Not unless you know of a crime in progress. No? Then we’ll have to converse. How’s work?”

“Awful. I’m totally blocked, no ideas at all. How’s work?”

“Crime’s down. We sit around all day eating donuts and making sexist jokes and bad-mouthing liberals and the darker races.”

At this point Statch almost came out with what was on her mind, what had made her irritable and not entirely her usual sunny self, but she forbore. She thought he might be more amenable to a sort of nonkosher favor later on, after a few drinks and some of those orgasms. Although she understood that most people got the favors promised
before
the sex, she thought this dishonorable and corrupt.

*   *   *

Kavanagh had been around the block a few times with women, but this one was a bit outside his range. He was not exactly complaining, for she was unconstrained, almost violent, noisy, and enthusiastic in the throes of sex, insanely wonderful, a cornucopia of delight; besides which there was the erotic multiplier of being fucked by a national shrine. But afterward he always felt as if he’d been ridden, like a horse, urged on to do this, to do that, squeeze here, rub there, faster, slower, up a little, yeah, that’s it, but harder, harder! He always had blue bruises on him after an evening with La Marder. Kavanagh didn’t exactly mind being a horse, but he was somewhat more romantic than she was, or than he let on. Besides, he was a cop and used to figuring out people; he was drawing a blank here, and it made him uncomfortable.

Now they were entwined on his king-sized bed in the upstairs bedroom of the small house he owned in Dorchester Heights. The window was opened a crack, and evening air was cooling their lately steaming flesh.

“Kavanagh, could I ask you something? A cop question?”

“Ask away,” replied Kavanagh lightly, but inwardly he quailed. He did not think it would be a question about police procedure; no, it would be a someone’s-in-trouble question.