Ben whipped the knife out in an instant, its three remaining inches still razor sharp. He lunged, slashing the blade in a feint toward Ellis’s eyes. Ellis jerked back, started raising the shovel. Still moving, Ben beat it aside, wrapped his empty hand around the haft, pulled himself hard and fast straight at Ellis. With a twist, he cocked his right leg for a shattering side-kick at Ellis’s knee. He eschewed the fancy whirling aerial work of chopsaki movies. To blind, cripple, and kill, Ben kept it low, plain, explosive, and effective.
Ellis was not as quick, but he turned away just enough. Tried to save his knee by deflecting the kick off thigh muscle.
Just what Ben wanted. Ellis off balance. Instead of kicking, Ben stepped in tight behind Ellis on the foot he’d coiled, and hip-dropped the culler hard on the ground. The knife was at Ellis’s throat a split second later.
“Why’d you put us on that oyster rock? That particular one. Tell me!”
Ellis answered with deliberate care. “Because that’s where your father said we should be.”
Ben was shaken. Knew in his bones it was the truth. “You were expecting him. He tells you he’s coming in—” But not me.
Ben left the disturbing conclusion unspoken, but he could see Ellis understood. Worse than finding his father dead, was discovering that he’d been dead to his father. A cipher son. Hell of a thing, learning that the pit Ben had tumbled into that day had a trap door waiting at the bottom.
Knocker Ellis spoke again. Without fear, and with patience. His surprise at Ben’s blunt force attack was ebbing. “I got this from him. The mail. Couple weeks back. Now take it easy.”
Ellis slowly reached into his pocket, and pulled out a yellow handheld marine GPS. He pressed the start-up button. The screen came to life. Ellis pressed two more keys, turned it toward Ben.
“There. How he remembered that rock I don’t know, but that was the place. I suppose it was always lucky for us back in the day. Your pappy logged it in this GPS as a waypoint. When the storm kept everybody ashore, I thought sure he’d stay in port, too. No way anybody could make it through, but he did. He went out in that damn mess. He was always a stickler for time tables.”
For a moment, Ben’s grip on the knife faltered. “You should have told me. My God, we left him out there. We could have gone out and brought him home alive.”
Ellis suddenly wrenched himself around in a bruising blur of hands, elbows and knees. Now Ben’s knife lay three feet away. Ellis pinioned him. Immobilized him in a headlock.
Ellis hissed in Ben’s ear, “You want to shave a black man, you go with the grain or we bump-up something awful. Now listen to me, boy. Everything your father did was for you. Even the leaving. He’d earned the undivided attention of some very bad men. He was drawing heavy fire. He had to go. Staying would have put you all in danger.”
Ben’s world was turning gray with flares of red and green. Lack of oxygen from the choke hold was only half the trouble. He gasped, “He was protecting me. So why come back?”
Ellis released Ben, who rolled away massaging his throat. His vision cleared like the silted bay, and Ellis had more truth for him.
Standing, Ellis dusted grit and bird scat off his pants. “You just counted why he came back. A hundred fifty-some million reasons. And now you’re old enough to stand on your own two feet. To help. You were a kid when he went. A liability. Leaving you out of it until the last minute kept you safe. Now I’m betting you’re in deeper than you know. Happy?”
Ben reached over to retrieve his stub of a diving knife, and put it away. Ellis put his foot on it. “Not ’til we finish our friendly talk.”
Ben’s neck veins pounded. He was surprised and pissed at being bested by one old man, and abandoned by another. Kept in the dark by both until he’d nearly killed a friend. Ben quickly realized this wouldn’t work. The blood in their eyes nearly spilled on the ground with nothing to show for it. Their well-upholstered future, far surpassing the brightest hopes of ordinary men, would have been wiped out. Ben sat heavily on a hummock of grass.
Squatting loose-limbed like a man half his age, Knocker Ellis asked, “First, ’fess up. Why’d you join the Navy? And spare me all the stars and stripes stuff. Tell me the truth. You really wanted to be a sailor man?”
Ben wondered why he owed any explanation to Ellis in trade for news of his father. Not wanting another fight, he decided to cough up an answer. More than one bomb was still ticking in the hollow.
“No. Pap disappeared down a rabbit hole. For him, the mouth of that hole was a letter from the draft board. For me, it was a recruiting office. I had to follow him, even if I didn’t find him. I needed to figure out what became more important to him than being home.”
Ellis said, “Believe me when I say there was nothing more precious to him than that. Now tell me. First things first. What exactly did you do for Uncle Sam? You’ve kept mum about that since you got home.”
Ben’s mouth curled into a rueful grin. “What do you guess? Raised on the water. Raised a hunter. Stalking the mesh. S.E.A.L.s.”
Ellis nodded. “Sure. Makes sense. And I assume you did okay over there in Coronado? And afterward? Still did good?”
Ben tried to answer without picturing any of the faces of his targets. They were peering at him over that wall he had built in his mind. Now the wasted souls were reaching for him over the broken glass he had embedded in granite capstones. Suddenly, the faces of his own fallen comrades were mixing in with the enemy dead. How could they ever stand together, breathe the same air, dare to look at him with anything like reproach? There were two faces in particular that haunted Ben. On his final mission, he was detailed to eliminate a general in the Iraqi Republican Guard. The man was on leave at his home in Mosul. No problem. Ben made housecalls.
After a week of observing the target, Ben was ready. The moment had come to finish the mission. He aimed through a bathroom window and took the shot. The bullet flew true, snipping the general’s cervical spine between shoulder and the base of his skull. Should have been the end of it. The target was terminated. The bullet flew on.
Though deformed and fragmented, Al Jazeera reported that pieces of the spent round passed through an inner passage in the house, killing the target’s wife. She was pregnant. While the general’s death was old news after two days, Al Jazeera replayed footage of the wife’s funeral procession for weeks; big coffin, little coffin. An unending TV procession that never seemed to reach the cemetery.
That woman’s face was the most hate-filled visage among all the ghosts infecting Ben’s mind. The unborn child, both casualty of war and murder victim, had no face at all. Soon after, Ben bailed out of the military when his Expiration of Time and Service date came up. He hadn’t lifted a gun in anger since then. The tragedy consumed him every day. Was he worthy of a child of his own after what had happened?
It did not matter that later intel revealed the woman was executed after the fact on Saddam Hussein’s orders, just for the propaganda value. The damage was done. Ben was through as an American sniper.
Suddenly, the faces of fallen comrades and vanquished enemy who haunted Ben’s heart seemed to drift apart, making just enough room among their ranks for one more soul. Ben knew they were making room for him.
To mask his flayed emotions, Ben answered Ellis, sticking to the sniper’s motto. “How’d I do? One shot, one kill. Except for the last mission. The target. His wife got hit. She was pregnant. One shot, three kills.”