Some of the hoop buildings have been slashed into long shreds of opaque plastic that hang limp in the breeze. Making a statement, Gale thinks.
He sees a man dead on his back near the entrance of the third grow house. Hands bound. Eyes wide. A bullet hole in his forehead. Flies all over him. He looks to be Laotian, known for their slave labor on these illegal marijuana farms, which are owned and run not by Laotians at all, but by competing American gangs and Mexican cartels.
Toeing their way through the grow, Gale and Carpenter find big canisters of fertilizer and pesticide. Hundreds of yards of PVC irrigation pipes, and electrical cable for water and power to be bootlegged in from distant landowners and public utility lines. Plastic cisterns. Hoses everywhere. Propane bottles slung into the brush. Bales of chicken wire and plastic sheets to protect young plants. Trash and more trash: small mountains of black plastic bags torn open and emptied by animals, the flies buzzing in the cans, crows watching from the trees.
In spite of the dank stink of the marijuana, there’s not much weed left. The processed and pressed bales are too valuable to leave behind. The floors of the cleaning and packing tents are sticky with cannabis scraps and oil. Everywhere are mounds of useless stalks and stems too risky to burn.
Then, another Laotian man apparently executed near a cache of new irrigation valves, timers, spaghetti drip line, and emitters. And another, gunned down while trying to run into the woods, now slumped between plastic canisters of fertilizer, still holding a baseball bat in one hand.
“When?” asks Carpenter.
“Two nights? No vultures yet.”
“Seems right.”
“These cannabis pirates are bad people,” says Gale.
“Savages,” says Carpenter. “It started with the cartels.”
Gale ponders this for a moment. The “savages” remark unintentionally pricks his Native Acjacheme spirit, the Acjacheme known as trusting people, even of the conquering Spanish. Back in those days, there were occasional Indian threats of violence against the soldiers, Gale knows, but what were spindly Indian arrows used to kill birds and rabbits against the booming blunderbusses of conquerors?
Gale’s mother, Sally, is one of the kindest, most deeply accepting people he knows.
His proudly Spanish father, Edward Gallego, has a temper that follows no racial nor cultural lines.
At age eighteen, the year his father left home, Luis Gallego changed his name to Lew Gale.
“The Laotians are poor and peaceful,” he says. “So they get ripped off badly.”
“I’d rather not be poor and peaceful, if this is what it gets you,” notes Carpenter.
Another jet leans into John Wayne Airport from above. Knight sleeps under an oak, in a slant of sunlight.
Lew Gale sits on a boulder down by the shaded creek, calls the crime in to Dispatch on his satellite phone.
Fifteen minutes later, he sees a sheriff’s helicopter lowering to the massacre site. Then another.
3
Late that night, long after Carpenter has brushed the burrs and stickers from Knight’s thick coat, and retired to his tent, Gale looks up at the stars and thinks about Bennet Tarlow. He seems to Gale to have been the perfect man: an upright, bipedal omnivore; intelligent; capable; hardworking; a prosperous survivor — and maker of necessary things. Homes and resorts. So, if there’s free will, how could Tarlow have possibly let himself be eaten in a park by a mountain lion? But if life is fated — authored by God or many gods or even just anonymously — what coldly detached architect had led Tarlow to the claws and fangs?
And Gale thinks of the old cat, out in this national forest doing the same thing that he’s doing — bedding down on a cool October night. Maybe thinking about Tarlow, too. Or more specifically, the taste of man, which was the cat’s first, most likely. Funny to eat a live human being without even a whisper of shame in you. “Funny” clearly not the right word. Neither is “shame.” The question in Lew Gale’s practical, law-enforcement mind is: Will he do it again?
A more pressing question in his human heart right now is: Who killed the Laotian men?
He thinks of Marilyn, his ex-wife, a bright young woman with tastes for the finer things far more developed and refined than his. A mismatch of ambitions and satisfactions. Not of attractions.
Just before sleep, Gale drifts into his darkest place, as he does most nights. Feels it gathering up his body and his mind, drawing him into a slow orbit. He looks down on the stark tan desert of Sangin Valley, the startling green poppy fields quivering with red blooms, the boulder-strewn Sangin River, the village with its dusty shops, the humble mosque, the school and the boys, only the boys, scurrying in and out. He sees the men he killed, some of them in bloodied traditional dresses and turbans and sandals, some in the somber gray-and-white tunics of the Taliban, some in baggy Western trousers, head wraps, and combat boots. Always bearded, their faces sun-darkened and deeply wrinkled, some with their eyes open, their expressions fierce and noble and resigned.
Tonight, as always, the last face Lew Gale sees is that of an old man, whom Gale had first noticed on a village patrol in the Sangin open-air market. He was buying vegetables. He looked directly at Gale. He had a fierce face, framed by a full white beard, and Gale guessed by his well-worn, white, high-top Cheetah sneakers that he must have walked some distance in them. Cheetahs were popular with the Taliban — and many Afghans who were not Taliban — for comfort and durability on the rocky roads and trails, and the fact that many Cheetahs were accented black, green, and red — colors of the Afghan flag. His gait and motions were slow and deliberate, befitting a man so old. Lieutenant Papini said that Cheetah Man was Taliban through and through, a local fucking hero, of course, a reputed sniper with at least ten Russian kills, and five British, and almost certainly one kill ten days ago — Private Chilcote — down by the abandoned village near the river.
The next evening, after clearing it with his sergeant, Gale sent up a surveillance drone to shadow Cheetah Man from a home behind a bakery, where smoke and men’s voices billowed from the security screen door. Gale watched the drone’s video on his satellite phone. When the old man was far ahead of him, Gale sent the drone back to the FOB and followed him on foot along a ridgeline, watching him through the powerful scope of his sniper rifle.
Five kilometers later, Cheetah Man disappeared into a dilapidated farmhouse far back from the trail. No screens on the windows, no door in the frame. The house was part of a small village that had been occupied by the British, and abandoned by them two years prior. The wind-blasted mud structures were roofless, the palm trees shrouded by brown fronds.
In the failing light, the old man walked briskly through the doorway and came out a few minutes later with a duffel over one shoulder and a rifle slung across the other. He disappeared into a mud-brick granary with a torn steel roof that overlooked a forking trail. Gale had circled this part of the trail and village on his drone printouts just last week, where Chilcote had been killed by an invisible sniper ten days prior. A village building? Gale had written in his impeccably neat hand. Rooftop but few roofs. Granary has elevation. A 3rd Battalion, 5th Marines fire squad had searched the village and found no one, no footprints, no evidence of a sniper having nested there.
The sun set and the cold crept up from the ground and Gale looked around for a place to call home. He was alone. He had a canteen of water, a couple of MREs, a survival blanket, and nineteen years of life in him. His basic training sergeant had quickly seen young Gale’s rifle skills and put Gale on a sniper’s track.