“Shit, I’m getting a woodie,” Van Dreeves said.
“Save it for the sheep, VD. Just order the strike,” Matt said. “General?”
“Do it.”
Five minutes later, the B-1 had repositioned and punched in the geo-location of the mine. He gave instructions as Matt had articulated.
A few minutes later, the front hillock that formed the mouth of the mine exploded, whiting out the screen until the dust settled and then the A-10s put 500 pound bombs a bit deeper into the mine.
“No need to waste the hellfire. Save it for squirters if there are any,” Matt said.
“Ain’t nothing squirting out of that,” Van Dreeves said.
“This is how we win,” Matt said and then walked out of the command center.
CHAPTER 53
Having completed the layout for the magazine, Amanda had rushed from the high school back to her home. As she pulled into her driveway, she saw Brianna Simpson through the windshield of her car standing on her front porch talking, rather arguing, with her mother. Amanda lowered her window to listen, but she was still too far away.
As they noticed her pulling in, Brianna raced from the porch through the front yard. She did not acknowledge Amanda as she climbed into her mother’s old VW bug.
Amanda jumped from her seat, only to watch Brianna speed away. She stood there for a moment, looking over the top of her Mercedes at the empty front porch. She was pretty sure it was her mother, but it could have been Nina, who had been talking to Brianna. Sometimes it was hard to tell them apart. She wasn’t certain if her grandmother looked young or her mother looked old.
Determining that she would catch up with Brianna later, she refocused, feeling energized now. She had taken Harlan’s Charlotte Observer and now she glanced at the article trashing her father, sitting face up in the passenger seat. Somehow, it motivated her. She had begun to crack the puzzle.
And she was juiced.
She bounded up the steps and plugged her charger into her cell phone, laying it on her nightstand. She stretched, raising her arms and bowing her back like a cat might.
She sat on her bed and thought for a moment. The best way she could describe what was happening was that two parallel universes were colliding with utter force. In the past, it had been no big deal. Her mother’s universe — which she now understood to be comprised of deception and lies — had always dwarfed whatever straightforward purpose her father would come bearing.
Those collisions often produced sparks and tension well beyond the average human interaction. And through all of her observations, Amanda was coming to the conclusion that both her mother and grandmother enjoyed the manipulations and the mind games. It was as if Lake Moultrie’s dirty secrets and poisonous ethos had found better packaging and marketing up here in Spartanburg. Thus, in Amanda’s young view, simple and straight-forward had always lost out to manipulative and ill-purposed. Hell, that had been the pattern of her life.
How could so many good memories just fade away, as if they had never existed at all? What secrets of power did her mother and Nina know that others did not? They always seemed to be getting their way. Were people really just means to whatever ends you sought, she wondered?
She pulled the thumb drive out of her backpack and plugged it into the computer. After a series of commands, she finished storing all of the digital media inside her computer and then looked at the thumb drive. It had a long lace that was intended to be used as a lanyard so she could carry the portable drive around her neck without fear of losing it.
She laced the cord around her neck, pulling her hair back to allow the necklace to rest against her skin. She opened the file on her computer and clicked on the “Grandmother Letters” file that her father had created. There were only a few documents in the file, all of which had been scanned. She opened the first one, marked, “The Beginning.”
“… instead of divorcing Zach right away, you should get pregnant first. A baby will provide you with a steady source of income and will be more influential with a judge when you finally do leave him. You’ll get child support for at least eighteen years and a kid will give you a better shot at getting alimony for life.”
Shaking her head slowly and whispering to herself, she skipped to the next letter labeled Divorce.
“… I’m not sure what you are waiting for. It’s about time you divorced Zach and moved back to South Carolina. I’m tired of you moving around and am ready for you to be home. When you file, make sure to be as aggressive as possible: kick him out of the house, antagonize him with the hopes that he hits you, try to get a neighbor to stand up for you. Your main thing should be to threaten his career. Once you do that, he will probably give you anything you want.
“Break your locks, hide some valuables and call the police. Make sure when you do this that he has no one who can account for his time. You will need to make four or five charges against him for one or two to stick. That has been my experience. If he doesn’t respond to that immediately, then think about how you can say he ‘does’ stuff to Amanda. She’s only three and is easily influenced to say whatever you want her to say, though she is very close with Zach, and you will need to be careful there. You may need to do some prep work yourself if you choose to use this scare method.
“Remember, Amanda is your ace in the hole; prepare to use it at the right time.
“Love, Nina.”
Amanda leaned back in her chair and sighed with such force that her breath blew her bangs up, separating them. Her grandmother, the Wizard of Oz, she thought to herself, pulling the levers behind the scenes. Had her mother ever stood a chance?
After a moment of thinking, she determined that her mother did have a choice. She could have decided to ignore the long reach of Nina Hastings’s icy fingers. Nina, it turned out, needed her mother and herself within her fold for her own selfish purposes. She figured that it wasn’t so much the money as it was the love, the attention, and the avoidance of loneliness.
She felt nauseous. She pushed away from the desk, descended the steps and pushed through the front door just as the UPS man was preparing to knock.
“Perfect timing,” he said. “Are you Amanda?”
“That’s me.”
“This box is for you. Just need you to sign right here.” Amanda grabbed the pen, scribbled something that looked like a signature and retrieved the small box from his outstretched hand.
The man stood there for a second, as if he had another package.
Preparing to continue her quest for oxygen, she looked up at him, a young man in his mid to late twenties.
“Is there something else?”
He shuffled his feet a second and then said, “I’m sorry about your father. I served with him in the Airborne. He was a great man.”
Amanda paused, then stepped toward him and wrapped her arms around his big shoulders. He hugged her back.
“Sorry,” he said. “We’ve lost so many. I just never thought he would be one of them, you know?”
“Thank you. I really appreciate it. Please, never forget him.”
“That, ma’am, would be impossible.” He turned and walked back to his boxy brown truck, backed away, and waved good-bye.
Amanda motioned back with a slight wave of her hand. She walked down the steps and then onto the bench in the garden toward the end of the porch. The bench was a wrought-iron flowered design painted totally white. Set against the azaleas and dogwoods, it was a peaceful respite. Using her good fingernail, she sliced open the package, which was about the size of a cigar box.