The night in jail had scared Kelly. He had looked out through the bars at the dog-faced deputy and realized something about the world and also about his place in it. But then he had gone back to being angry, and after a couple more years of barely scraping by at school, he had given up and joined the army.
And then his mother called out again, “Joe, honey, I’ve saved two big ol’ pancakes just for you. That’s surely worth waking up for.”
Kelly thought about telling his parents that sleeping was something he hardly ever did these days, but then it seemed not to matter anymore, so he sank back down to the quiet place, the place where the frogs were buried in the silt and the tadpoles slid on their bellies across the stones, smooth as coins, turning inexorably into frogs, their slippery skin evolved through eons of living in water, which surged relentlessly over them, oblivious to all of the life that depended on it in its search for the lowest point.
4.7 Pig Eye
Just as Pig Eye was worrying he was out there alone, Hernandez started gunning the motor of the second Humvee, rocking it out of the ditch and repositioning it up the road, farther away from the insurgents’ hide position. Harraday got his.50-cal. going, and Betts joined in with his M4, holding the triggermen down and forcing them to fire mostly blind, which meant Pig Eye could move more freely. Now you’re talking, he thought. Now they had a fighting chance! He held his breath, fondling the grenade and thinking that if Harraday could keep the Iraqis occupied, he might be able to get close enough to lob it over the wall of the animal enclosure, which would fix the triggermen once and for all.
The plan he settled on was to move twenty or thirty yards back along the ditch before cutting away from the road and making a run to the east side of the enclosure, out of the line of fire. He stuffed some more brush into the loops of wire, hoping to blend in with the landscape and counting on the others to keep the Iraqis busy. Then he bellied along the ditch, cradling the grenade in his hands and every now and then raising his head slightly to check on Tishman, who had gotten Finch back inside the vehicle and was now wrestling with the.50-cal., which seemed to be jammed or broken.
How close should he get before he tossed the grenade? What if his aim was bad and he missed? What if his aim was good, and one of the hostiles caught the grenade and threw it back at him? As he pushed himself nose-first through the dust, Pig Eye thought about all the hours he had spent working through various scenarios, none of them remotely like the one in which he found himself. Danny had been right about the howitzer — that’s the thing he needed now — that or aerial support.
Thirty seconds more, and he’d leave the road. Once he pulled the pin and threw, the grenade’s handle would fly off, releasing a spring that would throw the striker against the percussion cap, igniting the fuse. The fuse would take about four seconds to burn — more or less depending on variables in the design of the device that Pig Eye had no way of assessing. Then the detonator would ignite, setting off the main explosive charge. He imagined the blast wave and the fragments of casing ripping through anything they encountered and, if he was lucky, slicing the hell out of whoever was hiding behind the wall.
Everything was set. The only thing left to do was to run and aim and toss — or it would have been the only thing if one of the triggermen hadn’t peered over the wall and pointed his weapon down the road at a distant puff of dust that signaled a vehicle approaching from the direction they had come. Through the binoculars, Pig Eye made out a small pickup truck, a Toyota HiLux, he guessed. It seemed to be riding low, which meant there were probably people in it, but he couldn’t see any people, only the driver, so there was no way of telling how many others might be hunkered down in the back of the truck and if whoever it was were insurgents or civilians. So far, Harraday and Betts had the triggermen mostly pinned, but a truck full of reinforcements would drastically lower their odds. He calculated the Toyota was three or four klicks away. If it was traveling at forty miles per hour, he would have between three and four minutes to do something that raised their chances of escape. If it was moving more slowly, he would have longer. He refocused the binoculars, which was when he noticed that, in addition to riding very low to the ground, the approaching truck was old and had black temporary plates — all signs that it was filled not with passengers but with explosives.
4.8 Pig Eye
Kelly’s pills worked even better than Hernandez’s time-slowing trick. They brought everything into sharp focus so that Pig Eye had a chance to appreciate the shimmer of the pebbles under his hands and the rustle of dry grass and the scratch of the spiny seed heads against his skin as his mind squeezed off a round of calculations: thirty miles per hour, he decided, but gaining speed, which meant that in approximately two minutes the pickup would reach the Humvee that contained Tishman and Kelly and Finch. It was a bomb and it was going to blow the Humvee to kingdom come, killing the men it contained and lowering the odds for the rest of them.
“Never change the plan at the last minute unless you have to,” the marine had told him, but what if he had to? He had to neutralize the truck.
Once he understood the situation, his indecision and doubts vanished. Unless it was the pills that chased them, for suddenly he wasn’t worried anymore. Suddenly he felt like Superman, drenched in a downpour of rightness and karma and luck. Above him, the sun was a hot lid on the day. The earth embraced him from below as if he were not quite separate from it, as if he were poised somewhere between what he had been and what he would become. Then he pulled the pin on the grenade, holding the handle tightly in place and tensing his muscles for a run.
He couldn’t slow time down, but he could speed it up. He could speed it up by running toward the truck, which floated soundlessly toward him on its cloud of dust like a low-flying desert-colored bird. He couldn’t stop the bomb, but he could detonate it prematurely, before it reached the Humvee. And he could improve his accuracy by tossing from close range into the truck bed, where he figured the explosives were packed. In his imagination, the vehicle would sail by, continuing on for another three or four seconds while the fuse burned and while he kept running another three or four seconds past it, putting him outside the primary blast zone if he was lucky and exploding the truck before it reached his buddies. It was the best he could do, given the situation and the fact that he didn’t have any more time to come up with a better plan. Time and opportunity were the two most important elements in any escape kit — he had them, he just didn’t have enough.
4.9 Danny Joiner
Danny spent a moment trying to find his binoculars, which would have been useful in assessing the situation, but they weren’t around his neck and they hadn’t fallen to the floor. He slid out of the truck and took cover behind it before shouldering his rifle and firing frantically at the wall before settling down and aiming, which helped to pin down whoever was there even if he didn’t hit them.
The seconds ticked by. Whenever one of the Iraqis showed himself, Harraday would pop off a round, or Danny would, but then Harraday’s big gun went silent — jammed or out of ammo — so now Harraday was crouching in the gun turret and blasting away with his M4, which is when Danny noticed a vehicle that looked like a pickup truck approaching from the east. Danny figured the truck would have to leave the road at some point to get around the debris, but it didn’t leave the road. And it didn’t slow down. It was then that he noticed how the truck was riding very low to the ground and how it was heading straight toward Tishman and Kelly’s Humvee. “Incoming!” yelled Danny, but his head was pounding and he couldn’t even hear himself.