The Farther Shore Page 3

  Santiago took a five-dollar bill out of the little cover in which he carried his ID card. He walked over and bought six beers from a man as if he were simply a tourist. When he came back he handed one to each of us. I knew my stomach couldn’t handle it, so I put mine in my rucksack. The others sipped at theirs.

  I watched the kids walking around us. They looked us over closely, inspecting our faces, uniforms, patches, and weapons.

  When Santiago finished his beer he rolled the empty bottle toward a massive statue of a horse in the center of the fountain. The horse was the color of sand. Rearing back on its hind legs, it appeared to bite at the sky with its open mouth and menacing face.

  As we were leaving the plaza, we hid in a doorway as an old truck rattled past. It was ludicrous, a junker of a truck mounted with a giant Russian anti-aircraft gun. A pickup truck followed, with about fifteen people packed in the back and hanging from its sides. They were armed to the teeth, and appeared to be prodding the city for something.

  It took us several hours to jog from the plaza to the stadium. Once we’d arrived, we hid inside. Everyone breathed heavily as we sat in seats about halfway up from the field. The city roared dully behind us.

  “Are you sure no one followed us?” I asked Santiago. He’d been at the rear of the squad.

  “Give me the radio,” he said.

  He tried the radio, but it didn’t make a sound. He switched out the battery for a new one. Still nothing.

  “Is it broke?” asked Zeller. He already knew the answer. We all knew the answer.

  “You mean we only have our squad radios,” I said.

  We sat back in our seats. I put my feet up on the back in front of me, and dried my face briefly with a T-shirt from my rucksack. I took a sip of warm water and rinsed my mouth before spitting it out. I took another small sip and swallowed.

  Next to me, Cooper emptied his canteen with loud gulps. He breathed heavily, and when he exhaled sweat and spit fell onto his shirt and pants.

  Santiago took his Kevlar off and lit a cigarette. I wanted to remind him that a burning cigarette could be seen from miles away. It was a lesson Santiago himself had taught us before we left, illustrating it one night in an open field. “I am the light of this world,” he’d screamed at us from across a field, a cigarette held out in front of him to make the point. “This little light of mine,” he sang, “I’m gonna let it shine.” Everyone was stupid in Santiago’s world.

  “When they can’t get us on the radio,” I said, “they’ll come looking. They know to find us here.” It was true, this was our extraction point.

  “It’s just that it would have been nice to let them know that we started something,” Santiago said.

  “We smoked the fuck out of those kids,” Cooper said, staring at the field.

  “Yeah,” I said. He said smoke as if meaning to invoke the spirit world, as if it were an offering.

  “Yeah,” I said, “we smoked the fuck out of some kids.” It made it sound like a light show, a matter of smoke and mirrors. Almost as if it could be undone.

  “I was born here,” Cooper said out of nowhere.

  Two dead boys. I tried to picture their faces, but I couldn’t. It was the same with love, I’d once been told. When you are away from the person you love, a girl once told me, if you can’t see their face, that means it is love.

  The bombing seemed to be subsiding. I wondered whether the grand strategy would really work. Maybe you really could scare a city into submission. We’ll just wait here, I thought, and they’ll come for us soon enough. The night was giving way to daylight, to a full-fledged Sunday morning.

  My ears hummed and my head felt heavy. I leaned forward and rested my head in my hands. So this was what combat is like, to engage the enemy and fire your weapon. I felt renewed in the world, alive and well. The heat of my sickness was gone, replaced by a sensation of light and power. I leaned further forward, smiling.

  TWO

  THE CITY PACED PAST DAWN LIKE A WATCHFUL DOG, never returning to sleep. The bombing had stopped hours ago. We’d made our last radio check somewhere just after midnight, and now we were all wondering whether the Army would ever miss us.

  “They should be here by now,” Fizer said.

  As the sky filled with soft light we moved up toward the press box. Climbing the concrete steps, I had the sense that this day would be different, and I tried to understand what I had learned the night before. I felt as if I had been tempered somehow, as if I would now see everything differently.

  The door to the press box was gone and the room had been gutted. The windows were smashed and broken glass crunched beneath our boots. Sections of the window frame hung loose in the opening, and pieces of glass jutted out here and there. Looking out over the field and the stands, I felt like a man at the controls of a machine that had broken down. I remembered hearing in a briefing that they’d once held the Goodwill Games here. Whether it was true or not, the notion held me for a moment, the gathering of nations, the attempt at peace and camaraderie. All the flags displayed, crisp and colorful in the wind.

  The track and the soccer field below were in miserable condition. Football, I thought, they must have called it football. But then between the warlords, the desert, and an approaching army, the groundskeeper didn’t have the most desirable job. It was probably hard enough to get grass to grow in this place. The field had no shade, and so the grass had been burnt away. The dirt was yellow. I imagined the UN staging a match for the city, Italy versus Germany, or America versus some much smaller country. They’d pass the ball around and between us. They’d kill us in all that open space.

  “Where are they?” Heath asked, dropping his rucksack to the floor. He let out a loud sigh as he settled down to sit on it. He scratched at the red stubble that had grown since we arrived in the city.

  I thought about the boys, dead in the hallway. Someone would have found them by now. They were no longer among the missing.

  “Maybe they’re waiting for more light,” Fizer said, turning to Santiago for confirmation.

  Santiago nodded. “Probably. They know we’re here. They know where to find us.”

  Except for Santiago, we all dropped our rucksacks on the floor and used them as seats to avoid the glass. Santiago leaned over, looking out the broken window. Against the backdrop of sky and the shattered window, he looked too weak to be leading us. He looked altogether ordinary, not like a leader who inspired confidence. He finally put his rucksack on the floor. His back was wet with sweat and white patches of salt stained his uniform.

  “Jesus Christ,” Cooper whispered, a prayer forming on his lips, as if he’d just grasped what really happened in that building. Softly he whispered, rocking back and forth with his hands folded together and his head bowed.

  I turned to look out the window again, but Santiago was watching me. There was something frightening in his eyes. It was the recognition of something that he wasn’t about to share with the rest of us.

  After looking at me for a long time, he said, “What do you think?”

  “Sit here for a while,” I said. “We shouldn’t move around much during the day.” I looked at the floor and the broken glass. “You sure no one followed us?”

  “We’ll take our time,” he replied, “but we do need to figure something out. Just in case they haven’t dispatched any helicopters for us, or in case something happened to them.”

  “Why wouldn’t they dispatch the helicopters?” I asked. “They haven’t heard from us in hours, and they know this is the extraction point if anything goes wrong.”

  No one was talking or even looking at anyone else. I wondered if they were thinking that there was no way to go it alone if the Army didn’t come for us. Or maybe they were thinking that the only way to get out alive was to go it alone.

  I sat in the corner, leaning forward on my M-16. The hand guards were cool against my cheek. A morning breeze blew into the booth, and I felt myself drifting off. For a few minutes each day, just as da
wn broke, the earth cooled briefly before giving itself back over to the desperate heat.

  Santiago called for an ammunition and food check. Each of us still had at least seven full magazines of M-16 ammunition. Fizer had four belts of SAW ammo. Cooper, Santiago, Zeller, and I each had two MREs left. Heath had one, but Fizer didn’t have any because he’d eaten all three of his on the rooftop.

  “Think the clans are looking for us?” Cooper asked.

  “Two dead kids,” Santiago replied, “they’ll be looking for somebody.”

  “We left enough trash and brass behind that they’ll figure it out,” I said. “They’ll know we’re U.S. Army.”

  Santiago looked at me, “You don’t think we got all the trash?”

  “No way to be sure,” I said. “I guess we could dig through our stuff and get a rough idea.” I was thinking about the MRE I’d been eating in the stairwell. I had no idea what happened to it. Our safety and our good names, not to mention the integrity of the entire mission, could hinge on the importance of a few bits of trash.

  “I’m not worried about the casings,” he said. “That could be anybody. But if we left any trash behind we’re in a world of hurt.”

  “Why?” Fizer asked.

  “Our intentions were good,” said Cooper.

  “Maybe they won’t figure it out,” added Heath. “Maybe they won’t even find the kids, maybe they were just reacting to the gunfire.”

  “They’ll find them,” I said. “They always do.” Nobody cared much for this remark. They all turned away from me and looked vacantly out the empty windows.

  I wondered if the parents of the dead children could possibly forgive us. But I knew better. If you killed children, I thought, the world stirred in the end, and somewhere someone would be expecting justice. No one said it, but the real question looming over us was whether the city would discover us before the Army.

  Just as an awkward silence settled over us, I heard a UH-60 Black Hawk rotor beating faintly in the distance. I’d been in the cavalry long enough to distinguish the sounds of different helicopters. The UH-60 was heaven or hell, life or death, depending on who you were. We held our breath, but it turned and flew off in another direction. The slap and thump followed in its wake, a retreating wave.

  Then there was another one, a lone Cobra. They were gathering, several of them now, circling and moving toward us. We all stood, and we could just make them out as small dots on the horizon. Santiago told us to put our rucksacks on and to get ready to run down the steps to the field below. The helicopters were cutting in fast, flying low over the rooftops. It was gorgeous, beautiful, exactly what we’d been longing for.

  My rucksack was heavy, and it bounced around on my back and hips as I ran down the steps. We stopped at the bottom and crouched behind the low concrete wall that separated the field from the stands.

  Just as the first UH-60 began to descend into the stadium, an RPG sailed past it unexpectedly. The helicopter pulled up clumsily. Another Black Hawk tried to land and we started onto the field to meet it. But as it settled in the middle of the field, another RPG sailed out of one of the long tunnels that led onto it. We watched as the mouth of the tunnel slowly filled with a motley assortment of fighters. Then the .50 caliber and the minigun on the UH-60 started firing into the tunnel, and we all made a break for the helicopter.

  The enemy was fast and there were enough of them to cover the ground between us and the helicopter. Cooper was running a few feet in front of me when he took a bullet and doubled over to the ground. I grabbed his LBE strap and dragged him back to the low concrete wall where Santiago and Zeller had retreated. The stadium was filling with smoke. They had us pinned down.

  Cooper was bleeding profusely from a wound in his chest. The helicopters weren’t doing much good. Bullets hit the wall in front of us and cracked overhead. Cooper’s lips quivered, but I couldn’t tell whether he was trying to say something or simply to breathe. I put my head close to his lips, but I couldn’t hear a thing. I pushed a compound press down over the wound. I’d never touched another man’s blood before. I tried to imagine that it was something else.

  “We’ve got to get to that bird,” yelled Santiago.

  “We won’t make it across with him,” I said. “They’ll tear us up.” But I knew that we had to move.

  Santiago lifted Cooper into a fireman’s carry and we all took off for the helicopter, bullets flying around us. We didn’t get far before an RPG sailed close overhead and we hit the dirt, Santiago falling awkwardly beneath the weight of Cooper.

  Then another RPG flashed past the tail of the Black Hawk and into the stands behind us. The explosion seemed small and weak for a moment, then it was deafening and the world went silent. After a few confusing moments I could hear again, barely, through a high-pitched whistle in my ears.

  As if to join the small amount of smoke emanating from the stands, a puff of black exhaust kicked out of the engine of the UH-60, which seemed to shudder as it pulled back up above the field, the door gunner firing at the tunnel. I saw Heath and Fizer in the helicopter next to the door gunner, firing their weapons as well.

  The helicopter shook and sputtered. There was a hole in the tail of the aircraft, and more dark smoke coughed out of the engine. Then suddenly a large caliber gun opened up at the helicopters from another tunnel. It looked to be mounted on a light truck.

  “I can’t carry him alone,” Santiago said. There was blood on his cheek and shoulder.

  Zeller grabbed Cooper’s legs and the two of them carried him toward a tunnel.

  A Cobra helicopter set its nose at the truck and fired. A rocket crashed into the truck and that part of the stadium sagged with the weight of the explosion. Now rockets were flying from all directions. I could feel the dull chop of the blades as the helicopters turned and tried to land again. The air was thick with black smoke that tasted like burning metal.

  Then suddenly the helicopters turned away. I felt the thud of the rotors as they faded into the distance. They were leaving us there.

  After a brief pause, Santiago pointed toward a large opening across the field that looked like the main gate. Santiago and Zeller each grabbed one of Cooper’s LBE straps, I slung my weapon and grabbed his legs, and we made our way toward it. We went unnoticed through the smoke and stench of the wounded.

  As I ran, I gagged and spit to get the taste out of my mouth. We moved forward, surrounded by moans and unintelligible curses. Beyond the smoke, the world was all eyes. I tripped over a body and braced for a scream, but there was no response.

  As we made our way out of the stadium, I took a single look back and saw a woman trying to emerge from the smoke. She was dragging herself along the ground, wounded badly. I thought for an instant of shooting her out of pity. I remembered something I’d heard once: Never leave the dying alone long enough to remember what they’ll become.

  But then I felt the tug of Cooper’s weight as Santiago and Zeller resumed our rush toward the sunlight.

  THREE

  WE CARRIED COOPER FOR ABOUT AN HOUR BEFORE WE were overcome by exhaustion. We moved south from the stadium, through a maze of alleys, dead ends, and cul-de-sacs, which made it impossible to keep a pace count or to use landmarks for direction.

  We stumbled into the first hotel we came across, but the old man working the counter explained with hand gestures that it wasn’t actually a hotel. The doors all had numbers on them, and several were half-opened and full of watchful eyes, but the man insisted that it wasn’t a hotel. In any case, we would never understand him entirely without a conscious Cooper.

  Then a woman who appeared to be the man’s wife appeared, and the two of them began to argue about something incomprehensible. We looked over at a young man who appeared to work there lounging in the corner. He stared out at us from a set of mirrored sunglasses, wearing a smile pitted with the pink of gums and the dark of a few missing teeth.

  “Not a hotel,” Santiago said to no one in particular. “Fair enough.” There wa
s hate in his voice, real malice, and he was a horrible man when he lost his temper. The world was quickly slipping away from us. We nodded at the man and his wife and moved off in another direction.

  The sun was rising and with it the heat. There were people on the streets, nodding at us indifferently as we passed.

  We carried Cooper awkwardly. He stared up at the sky and mumbled vaguely every now and then. The sky was a lush blue, almost unbearable, and the scattered clouds were full and thick. Cooper was getting heavier by the minute, as if everything that was draining out of him was being replaced by something weightier.

  At the next hotel we pounded loudly on the door, shouting out for the owner. When he appeared it was obvious that we had woke him, although it was a little late and too hot for sleep. At first he looked at us as if we were figments of his imagination, or perhaps scraps of his dreams that could be shouted back into the street or some receptacle of sleep. Armed and wearing our desert BDUs with the American flags sewn on the right shoulder, we must have made quite a picture. But when he spoke it was in excellent English.

  He said cheerfully that he’d gone to Berkeley. Then his mood seemed to darken. He wanted to know how we’d pay. We gently set Cooper on the floor.

  “Is he okay?” the owner asked.

  “He’ll be fine,” I said. “Do you have a phone?”

  He shook his head. “Not for years.”

  “Just watch the door,” Santiago said.

  I trained my M-16 on the front door, irritated by his tone.

  Santiago leaned on the counter and stared at the man. The man smiled back without blinking. The whites of his eyes were yellow, his cheeks fat like a child’s.

  Still watching the door, I took a knee on the floor next to Cooper’s body. I told him in a low whisper how his girl and his mother would never forgive him if he died. I told him how he’d made it out before and that he’d make it out again.