“So what went wrong, David? You fuck up?”
David moved awkwardly in the bed and, pulling out his bedside table drawer with his good left hand, unscrewed a smoke-grenade-size vial and lifted it to his mouth, swallowing two more Oxycodone.
“That bad, eh?” said Freeman, taking the vial from him, screwing the top back on, dropping it into the drawer.
“It was a shoelace,” said David cryptically.
“Shoelace? You starting a quiz program? What the hell does that mean? You tripped, fired your weapon, is that what happened?” He paused. “Blue on blue? That what we’re talking about, David?”
“No, sir, I didn’t shoot my own men. Though I might as well have.”
“Hey!” snapped the general. “I don’t want any sniveling cry-baby, mea culpa, poor-me, self-pitying shit. What’d I tell you boys — all my boys? Look at it square on. You’ve always stood up. Taken full responsibility. Goddammit, I wrote you up for the gong. Saw the President pin it on your chest, remember? But taking responsibility isn’t the same as making a clear analysis. I haven’t read the goddamn AAR.” He meant the After Action report. “I’m retired, remember? Bastards don’t let me see anything ’cept the damn USO schedule — when some blond big tits is going to work up the boys so they spend the next week beating their meat ’stead of keeping their mind on the job. All I know is that seven of my boys went out and six didn’t come back. What went wrong? What’re the AAR’s ’Lessons Learned’? We’re gonna be in this godforsaken place for years, no matter what the White House says. Stuck here and in the other six Stans. Same in Iraq. What can we learn from your experience, Captain?”
David explained about the shoelace — the damn German tenor — how it was that Jamal got ahead of him as they’d run for the entrance.
“So that accounts for why this Jam got it instead of you. Nothing else.” Before David could reply, the general asked, “You think Li Kuan was there?”
“I don’t know, General. Light was pretty bad. Didn’t see any pockmarked guy.”
“But you think they were waiting for you?” the general pressed. “A trap?”
David shrugged, his legs relaxing, the Oxycodone giving him a buzz. “We spotted one sensor. Could’ve missed others, maybe tripped one.”
The general nodded, gazing out at the Hindu Kush. “Lost your confidence?”
David’s forehead creased. It made him look much older, puzzled. “I don’t know. Sometimes I think no. Other times—”
“At night?” said Freeman, turning around.
“Mostly,” replied David.
“Don’t think too much. Set an exercise goal — push yourself harder every day but don’t use it as penance. Channel it for Operation Payback.”
“Haven’t heard of that.”
“Neither have I,” said Freeman, “but it’ll come. You heard about the Chinese — going into Kazakhstan after the terrorist staging areas?”
“Saw a bit on CNN.”
Freeman pulled out a khaki handkerchief and began roughly polishing the goggles he habitually wore in the region. Wrapped around the old khaki Afrika Korps cap — a gift which, like the goggles, had been passed down from one of Rommel’s staff — the goggles made him look like the famed Desert Fox himself, especially when he rode in one of the open Afghanistan Humvees, standing up and using the.50 caliber machine gun as an armrest that vibrated noisily as the vehicle sped across the Afghan plain.
Freeman placed the goggles around the peaked cap. “I still maintain an extensive list of contacts in the forces,” he told David. “Keep tabs on what’s going on. Saw the report Beijing’s military attaché sent Washington. Said a young American girl was murdered because she overheard a couple of Li Kuan’s al Qaeda boys talking about making trouble in China’s Northwest — Xinjiang. Given what the President just said on the box, I take it Beijing figures we won’t object to whatever the PLA does because it’ll be fighting terrorists.”
“We’re all against terrorists,” said David.
“The Beijing attaché says this young woman, Riser — if I remember correctly, Amanda Riser — overheard these two creeps in a place called Barberry’s Pub Café in Suzhou.”
“Suzhou?” David couldn’t place it.
“About four hundred miles south of Beijing, on the Grand Canal,” said Freeman. “Point is that Barberry’s Pub Café is a bar.”
David was ensconced in the initial euphoria of the Oxycodone smothering the pain, finding it difficult not to close his eyes and luxuriate in the temporary escape. But he was far from what the unit’s pharmacist would call “Zombiefied.” “Uh-huh,” he responded, gazing out at ice cream clouds rising majestically in the endless blue of the Afghan sky. “Muslims, especially fanatical Muslims, don’t drink. They certainly don’t go to bars.”
“Right,” said the general, slapping on his cap and pulling out a business card from his load vest. “You need to talk, David, you can reach me at this number. It’s the USO.”
“I’d have thought Washington would have put you back on the active list.”
“They won’t even return my calls. Still pissed at me about the first Iraq war. Told ’em Bush Senior should’ve given Schwarzkopf the green light to roll on into Baghdad and kill the son of a bitch. Remember the old lube an’ oil change commercial, ’You pay me now or you pay me later’? Not going to Baghdad then meant we gave ’em twelve more years to build up their terrorist networks and finance al Qaeda.”
“You should call ’em about the bar,” David said, his gaze held captive by the majesty of the ice cream cumulonimbus rising and spreading into a line of bruising anvils. There was going to be, as Jamal would have said, “one mother of a storm” over the Hindu Kush. It would be an icy rain. He was thinking about the Barberry’s Pub Café again. “General?”
Freeman was pulling the goggles snugly below the Afrika Korps cap as the normally reserved Brentwood, in a painkiller-induced devil-may-care tone — one he’d normally use for a fellow Special Forces warrior and not a general — repeated forcefully, “Why don’t you call our military attaché in Beijing? About the bar?”
“I will.”
With that, the general collected his swagger stick. “Soon as I get back to USO HQ.”
“Where’s that?” asked David.
“Tora Bora,” replied Freeman, and gave a swashbuckling salute with the swagger stick, as Rommel might have done. Douglas Freeman despised what the SS and other Jew-hating Nazi scum had done, but in the Wehrmacht, the German army, there had been some soldiers of honor, and for Freeman, Rommel had been one of them.
David tried to write his weekly letter to his wife Melissa, but it was difficult — he told her he hoped he could handle an F2000 and convince them he was still battleworthy. For encouragement he drew on all the “impossible” diagnoses he knew and which were habitually cited by Special Forces as examples of grit overcoming extraordinary personal difficulties: Adolf Galland, Germany’s top air ace, had only one eye — cheated on the eye chart exam. How could he do that — fly a Messerschmidt 109 and later, in 1945, the Me 262, the worlds’ first jet fighter, with just one eye? He would have had no spatial perspective, no depth of field. And Douglas Bader, the Brit. Lost both legs in an air crash before the war. They said he could never fly again. “Not in a fighter, old chap!” He did, became an ace, was captured by the Germans, escaped so many times the commandant confiscated his tin legs.
But David’s all-time favorite was a man who had nothing to do with war, but with the combat of the souclass="underline" Lance Armstrong. Testicular cancer, lung cancer, brain cancer, and he fought back to win the toughest race in the world, the 2,160-mile-long Tour de France. Five times in a row! Most Americans, besotted by football, hockey, and basketball, didn’t comprehend the Herculean stamina and iron will that it took to be first among hundreds of the world’s elite cyclists. Some fool Frenchman complained, “But ’e is on chemicals.”