“What if there are men inside?”
“We didn’t see signs of any men, and the helmet is too far from the truck to have fallen. It seems like it was planted as part of the exercise. Hey, Robbins. Can you try the radio again?”
“Get Polly to go back around,” said Robbins.
Will nodded, but Polly was nonresponsive.
“Maybe the hawk got her,” said Nate.
Inside the Humvee, the radio crackled to life. Will couldn’t make out the words, but he heard Robbins say, “Roger that,” before calling out, “The vehicle was part of the exercise. They want us to bring it in.”
While the driver navigated between the boulders in the direction of the abandoned vehicle, Will marked the coordinates of Polly’s homing device. “She’s up there,” he said, pointing to the line of hills. “We can go after Polly while you all deal with the Humvee.”
“We’d better check with base,” said Robbins.
The signal was better now that they were higher, and a second later the captain’s voice came through, relaying instructions from the busy operations center: “Third squad found the helo, but do not leave that bird in the field. I repeat: do not abort.”
The homing device indicated that Polly was approximately one klick away from the stranded vehicle, which Will figured would take them just under the second ridge, about halfway to the road. “You heard the man,” he said to Nate, who cracked a grin and laughed a little, as if he had thought of something funny. Then Robbins said, “Go get that bird,” which was when Will realized he would miss Polly and the desert and the team.
The two men adjusted their goggles and patted their weapons. They made their way along a gully before climbing to the top of the first hill. The desert stretched around them, hazy and brown and kind of corrugated where the wind had made patterns in the dirt. Below them, Robbins and the others were attaching a tow bar to the stranded vehicle. Will pointed down the backside of the hill. “She’s somewhere down there,” he said.
The wind was howling now, the air gauzy with particulates — unless it was the ghosts Will was still imagining. “Do you believe in ghosts?” he asked.
“Hell, no,” said Nate, but he didn’t sound too sure.
Will could imagine the ghosts wailing and screeching and saying their prayers. He could imagine them telling their stories — as a warning, as a history lesson, as a way not to be forgotten, as a final comment on life and futility and all there was to be won and lost. He too would have stories to tell when he got back home. If he found the words for them and if they were worth telling. If people cared enough to listen. That morning, he had added a small notepad to his pocket just in case. Just in case he needed to write something down. Something final, he thought now, because it was his last mission before going home and because the shimmy was back and because he suddenly had a bad feeling about things. But then he countered the negativity by saying “Spider-Man” quietly, to himself, and the bad feeling peeled away, leaving his nerves steady and his senses stripped and sharp.
He tapped his pocket to make sure his knife was there, along with the two girlfriends. He thought about how he loved them both and how things that seemed crazy at home made perfect sense in Iraq — and vice versa. Anyway, he’d figure it out. He tried the launcher again, but Polly wasn’t responding. The wind was almost shrieking now, filled with fine dust and occasional larger particles, and even though it was hot, a deep chill ran from his stomach to his toes. “Something bad happened here,” he said. “I can feel it.”
“This is a war zone,” said Nate. “What did you expect?”
When the wind died down, it was hot under the heavy gear, and the rocky terrain made the going difficult, but still they put one foot in front of the other, three feet per step, 1,312 steps per klick. In the distance, Will thought he saw a cloud of thicker dust rising skyward, as if a vehicle was coming toward them, but then the wind picked up again and there was dust everywhere, and anyway, whatever he thought he’d seen was obscured by the brown crust on his goggles and also by the brow of the second hill.
“Nah,” said Nate when he mentioned it. “How would a vehicle get up here over all these rocks?”
“What is it, then?”
“Hell, I’m saying it’s third squad. The sergeant said they found the helo.”
Will worked the controller, hoping he could get the bird to launch itself if it was grounded, but Polly wasn’t moving. “I wonder what the deal with Polly is.”
“I hope she’s okay,” said Nate.
The cloud of dust was bigger now. There was something there, and it was getting closer. “Yeah, it’s got to be third squad,” said Nate. He raised his field glasses to his eyes. “I guess they’re coming to help us out.” And then he said, “Holy shit,” and then he started to run, which was difficult on the rocky terrain. And then, for some reason, he stopped running and fell face down in the dirt, and Will’s first thought was, It’s a sniper after all.
“Hey, man, you okay?” He dropped down beside Nate before looking up to see what Nate had seen. He focused and refocused — far out and then closer in — registering that Nate wasn’t breathing and that he had a hole in his face and that he wasn’t as heavy as Will had expected him to be, but otherwise not seeing anything he hadn’t seen before, only hearing a low, motorized hum and thinking it was Nate, whirring back to life. Or maybe it was Polly, finally responding to the controller and lifting off. Where was Polly when he needed her? Where was his extra set of eyes and ears? And then he did see what Nate had seen: the swivel gun mount of a Groundhog coming up and over the second ridge.
Will said his cue word and felt the power surge through him — inward from his hands and upward from his feet — accompanied by a blast of heat in his groin. He experienced the resonating moment and visualized success. His adrenaline kicked in, right on cue, making time slow down, which gave him a split second to decide whether to run or take cover behind a nearby pile of rocks. His legs were ready, muscles tensed. He took a lead and tried to pretend he was stealing home. He could make it. He knew he could make it in any test between him and the player with the ball. Unless it was only luck that counted. Unless everything was due to chance. He wondered if the other soldiers were right when they said that it had all been set in motion long ago. In that case, it didn’t matter what he did.
Out of the corner of his eye, the rock pile dissolved into light and shadow, solid and void, suggesting a depression in the earth or a recess or cave. He adjusted his hold on Nate and pressed his lead foot into the ground. He visualized his parents cheering from the stands. He heard the coach shouting at him to run like the devil was after him, and he thought it probably was. He remembered the drill sergeant who had smoked him in basic, and he remembered that can’t was not an option. He hoped Tula was right that a person could change things. “Spider-Man,” he said on the chance that he could defy whatever destiny was hurtling toward him. Maybe he couldn’t, but maybe he could.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Beyond the world of this novel is another world of people who helped bring it to life — writers and thinkers who opened my eyes or caused me to question, soldiers who shared their experiences, experts who took care of the details of publication, and editors and early readers who understood what I was trying to do — or didn’t, which was helpful too. My heartfelt thanks to you all, particularly to Reagan Arthur and David McCormick, who were there from the beginning; and to Ursula Doyle, Terry Adams, Heather Fain, Matt Carlini, Betsy Uhrig, Shannon Langone, Carrie Neill, Susan Hobson, Bridget McCarthy, Emma Borges-Scott, Ayad Akhtar, Kevin Shushtari, Jami Attenberg, Melissa Sterry, Syndi Allgood, Graham Pulliam, and others who prefer to remain unnamed.