If it doesn’t move throw a coat of primer on it, Bosun First on a Coast Guard weather ship out of San Diego liked to tell his guys, and this was a moment to move. I was gone down the street of that invented town of Fort Meade at near quickstep, yet my own surveillance in the absence of the minicam somehow implanted so in the back of my head that I might have been jogging backwards as my own brother after graduation before he discovered golf had been seen to do on our high school track feeling the cinders fly up against his calf muscles keeping track where he’d been, I guess. In my confusion and fear at seeing some of the truth, I was putting distance between me and the men ushering, I gathered (as if I would never see him again), my Chaplain down to a simulation tank greater (it came to me) in area than the visible extent of the seemingly aboveboard of the brick building so long, so low that its structure pursued me which only now months later, my knees aching from my fall, my left arm sore and throbbing, came back to be understood, yet with a thought of building itself, hearing a voice so weak.
“Lift it up behind”: the voice so slight and near it might be little more, the memory of a throat and chest — voice, but left hanging in the burning damp dripping down and up if I could trust my eyes and skin, a gust came up from the rank current of the active well if you could read it. Thrown onto my hands and knees, sparks flowing outward from a dismal corner like welders who’d left work going. My left arm athrob with whatever was to be done, I reared up reaching for balance as the surface tilted back, a strip of interior shielding, ceiling become floor I realized and more to come down — was it my brain I was in? — posts angled adrift like the destroyed national bank I had been sent to shoot weeks since, yet in the twilight shambles singed, rumbling, stinking still, and tilting adrift on current here as well as below dealing errant blows by some pitch of afterblast from above and below, the voice fainter—“Leave me be”—a constant like a binnacle compass to balance amid the wreckage its own survival if more the words to vouchsafe than the speaker, so they were more my job than he — his “up behind” (my Bosun mentor’s command well remembered from a bad day south of Point Loma but instantly taking up slack for a couple of belaying pins made it better for me) and “team got out” (Chaplain groaned tellingly)—“c’mon, you’re the brawn I’m…,” again familiar from possibly the wreck of my life, where I must have said, “Hang on, I’ll get to you,” running like time between instants a driving force encountering isolated individuals — the snarling security guard who had hauled me back from the edge by my bloody sleeve; before that, the totally tanned, slight woman in almost nothing who gripped my bad arm when I rescued her from the edge; the soldier who struck me in the chest with her rifle; the Russian who would barely admit he’d found talent in Umo, as I had hoped my father would, while the intrepid wham of the music might be his doing lasering now and then down to some shredded rock rush like fit-to-be-tied mandolin; the quick little lance corporal whose rifle I had reached back unerringly to whack from one aim to another; and before that the late accountant telling me I’m bleeding, whose “Come in handy” meant the big blonde’s Chinese gun not at all that use of Umo my father had mysteriously meant so many months ago — what they figured Umo could do for them in a pinch now a photo op for his distracted friend Zach and a now repossessed Army camera; and further back, my powerful though almost imaginary escort down the dark, onyx-figured stairs, and Storm and my driver I could not now stop for, for in this double floor below the pool reeking of fire and toilets, metal welds, and probably skin, the speaker had become a pale face, but from the neck down a sheet or partition of steel or panel or plane, poor person, and he’s calling, Lift it up behind I honestly didn’t know why for honesty penciled into the plans of others was mine too, and the face’s words faint as memory Not dead yet became “Your job now,” for it was the man I had run into (and with) at Fort Meade months before, and “slab” was what he said, though how I would move it I…
A Chaplain I recalled who, about to complete underwater photography training preparatory to being sent to use it in this very desert, had said that I had given him “a lift”—I — and even now at death’s distracted door if not slammed by it offering terminal help more even than asking it, “Your old mole,” which meant God knows what, the creature working in the dark though his eyes were there above the neck-high steel sheet (or slab) wide open — and unseeing, I thought, though hearing why you should rush here like this, like a laugh somewhere between us.
Distant but breathing, soughing in his gullet like night tide at Chula Vista, telling me something, he was alive.
Of use, it came to me. Like me. Of use, as your employers like to think, even beyond being alive, and his face had not fallen apart.
“Team got out.” “The team?” I said. “Got out.” “Our team,” I said. “Got out.” “But not you?” Above us my name was shouted, shouted twice. “The only team,” said the man trapped before me. I got hold of a corner of the steel and was able to lift it an inch, this steel ceiling shield, if that. It wasn’t going anywhere. I tried again. “The only team here,” I said. “‘Zackly,” came the reply with breath alone. “Just add water.” Was he losing me? Mentioning his old yellow camera. Fenton, I think he said — he’d never fake a picture. The cannonballs were there and then they weren’t. Great photo… I could hardly hear him. “But the explosions,” I said with my whole body, and I slid the steel shield away from his neck.
“Teamwork,” said my mole as if he were smiling, the voice scarcely there; “like the…” “The Scrolls…” I began. “Zackly.” “Operation…” “Zackly.” “Scroll Down.” “Zackly,” the word’s breath only exhaled in the darkness, a will working across crippled membranes of stillness, yet against the imperiling sounds from above. “Bomb went off, guy came down like a shot.” That was the teamwork the voice, this partner of mine, had meant. And I realized with the surge of memorial sewer below us, the one we later learned had recently been named after our leader, that you may live beyond yourself in what may be heard still. “That was a diver,” I said.
“Feet first.” “Where did he hit?” “Hit me,” were the words. “Him?” I tried to follow.
“It.”
Was that it for the explosions? Was my man dying on me? I was smart, I see. Where Umo should have hit, had moved and hit this man instead. And Umo passed right through. “You know him,” he said. “I do.” “They’ll get him. It’s not your job.” Unthinking arms flung out, brought in — Umo, that series of instants I had hoped to grasp, was each one lessening but not truly interrupting the distance to entry, calculus of friend to friend? — who and what had I tried to postpone, my borderline-high-blood-pressure brother at age fifteen gone below into a mysterious pattern of horizontal wells or into a branch of a capital sewer composting anything at all, meaning or revenge, into the waste of Zach’s state.
Two ways out of here, I said: up, or down. But his words knew me.
Try again, I heard from my Chaplain witness photographer partner, fellow soldier. So I put my back and shoulder into it, my hands, my heart. But I couldn’t bypass my bad arm, which had grown a weight, a tight implant thing not pendulous but like a muscle uselessly on its own. How I slid the unthinkable steel sheet away — I had help from the floor or ground tilting under me and thought the palace was coming down, the job further mangled by the second explosion — what job? were they after the infidel Scrolls alone? — if a second explosion was what it’d been. You don’t need to compromise your own palace where bunkers, soundproof practice range, interrogation chambers, a major pool, multiple sound systems, a private mosque, and a rumored internal boating moat speak for themselves. I had to lower the steel plate again but couldn’t and, pivoting the damn thing like a plane to shift away from, stepped on the man’s ankle and was dizzy when space tilted I recall, my job or a new demanding plane finding me or some tide along the sewer, and I could see the rest of him now, he’d emerged from that stinking sandwich of a cave in the wet half-light subtle like him, and I think I heaved the steel all more-than-two-hundred-pounds of it against a stanchion-pillar beyond him bearing its fair share of the building’s structure now in question. He was almost a friend. I could hear him thinking, Seals…‘nterrogation, and then Like this…only opp-osite?