He stood, surprised at himself, a little embarrassed even, waiting for the minister to reassure him, to say something like: “Of course it’s right, justice must be done.”
It was the sort of thing that chaplains tended to say. But this one looked at him and said nothing for a moment.
“I don’t know. Honestly, I’m not sure,” said the reverent. “I struggle with it. To see someone die must be a horrible thing.”
“I’ve never actually seen anyone die,” said Hack. “But I have killed a man. Or probably. I shot down a MiG.”
“Does it weigh on your conscience?”
“No. It doesn’t,” he said honestly. “I hadn’t really thought of it. Not in that way. Not that I killed someone.”
How did he think of it? He thought of it as a contest, a game almost.
No, as a job. Like the one he’d had in high school, cutting grass. Something he had to do.
Surely the other pilot would have killed him if he had the chance. Did that make it right, or wise?
Why had he held back on the Splash mission?
But he hadn’t held back at all. Screw the Army briefer, screw Hawkins, screw anyone who suggested that. His guys saved two men’s lives and that was worth something. No matter what you measured it against.
“It is a struggle, deciding what is wise and what is folly,” agreed the minister. “Would you like to get a drink?”
“A drink?” Hack laughed. “No.”
“Ministers drink.”
“I know that,” Preston told him. “But I have a, uh, a kind of thing I have to do.” Splash was top secret and he couldn’t give any details. “I’m on standby.”
“Oh,” said the chaplain, clearly disappointed. “Coffee?”
“Nah,” said Hack. “Thanks anyway. Nice service.”
CHAPTER 26
BJ Dixon stared at the canvas ceiling of his tent, trying to remember what it felt like to fly. Wind rattled the fabric, a whispery hush that made it seem as if he’d fallen into a void. He couldn’t remember how to fly — he could barely remember how to walk. The yellow air of the tent pressed against his chest like Iraqi dirt; the rumbles in the distance were the groans of men dying, of the grenade exploding against the little boy’s stomach.
“BJ?”
He turned his head toward the door.
“Lieutenant?”
Dixon sat up and swung his bare feet off the cot. He had on dress uniform pants; they were the only pants clean enough to wear. Cold, he’d layered all four of his clean T-shirts on. “It’s okay,” he said.
Becky Rosen slid slowly inside, holding the door open only far enough to let her slender body through.
“I saw your light,” she said.
“Can’t sleep,” BJ told her.
“I…” She shrugged.
“What?”
“I was wondering how you were, after everything up there.”
“Okay. Cold.”
“I heard you were going home.”
“No.” He folded his arms around his chest, a wave of cold air hitting him. “They said I could. I don’t feel like it. I want to be here.”
She nodded. “Get back on the horse? Fly again?”
“It seems like it’s been forever since I flew, you know?”
“Those your dress pants?”
“Yeah.” He laughed — briefly, barely, but still, it was a laugh. “Nothing else is clean.”
“I know the feeling.”
They’d kissed once, in the dark, by accident really. Her lips had been warmer and deeper and softer than anything he’d ever felt. But it had been so long ago now, before he’d known anything, before going north, before the kid.
Rosen shifted her body, her head moving backward. Dixon realized he didn’t want her to leave, but could think of nothing to get her to stay.
“You were in Iraq?” he blurted out. Wong had told him about the mission she’d volunteered for.
Yes.” She laughed, a tiny little laugh. “I parachuted in with Captain Wong. He’s some sort of skydiving specialist. A regular James Bond.”
“Saved my life,” said Dixon.
“Thank God.” She flexed her fingers, rubbing them together. He’d never seen anyone so beautiful.
“Cold in here,” he said.
“Really? I feel warm.”
“Yeah.” He worked his tongue around his dry mouth, trying to work up some moisture. “It was so cold in Iraq, I’m still frozen.”
“You’re a hero.” She blurted the words out.
“Nah.”
“That helicopter you shot down.”
“That was luck.”
“Well, you saved that sergeant’s life. I saw that ridge and the quarry you were in. It must’ve been hell.”
“You saw that?”
“I was in one of the helicopters. The AH-6. Captain Wong didn’t tell you?
“No.”
“Yeah, I was.”
“Yeah,” he repeated. His head became hollow again; he remembered climbing along the rock face, the wind rushing around his body as he waited for his chance to kill a man — three men, as it turned out, one with his bare hands.
“They wouldn’t have, they wouldn’t have sent you to Iraq if they, they didn’t think you were — brave,” said Rosen.
Her words jerked him back to the present.
“I got tangled up with Delta on my own,” he said. “Ground FAC. I volunteered. I ended up working with Doberman and A-Bomb.”
“Captain Glenon saved us, our helicopter.”
“Good guy.”
Rosen’s cheeks turned red. She said nothing. Surprised, Dixon looked at her, waiting for her eyes to glance upwards from the floor. He hadn’t thought she liked Doberman, not that way at least.
He’d thought, in fact, that she liked him.
She must. Otherwise, why was she here?
“Was it bad?” she asked.
He wanted to tell her about the boy. He saw the boy and he saw the grenade as he began to speak. But instead of telling her about the kid, instead of talking about Iraq and the howl in his head and how much he’d forgotten and how bad his stomach hurt, his tongue found a different story altogether.
“My mother died about a year ago, a little more now,” said Dixon. His head seemed to pull back from the words, as if they were physical things filling the air between them. “I sat by her side for a long time, just waiting.”
The words stopped. Rosen nodded, then stared at him.
Nothing else had ever seemed so beautiful.
“I better go,” she said abruptly, turning for the door.
He caught her arm. The biceps was harder than he expected, a thick tree branch.
“Don’t,” he said.
The kiss was softer, way softer, than he expected, and way longer than he could have hoped.
CHAPTER 27
“The hangar roof makes positive identification difficult, admittedly,” Wong told Colonel Knowlington. “And the enhancement technique that has been applied to the simple infrared rendering has been known to distort images under similar circumstances. Nonetheless, the pitot head at the nose confirms the identification. It is a Mig-29. No other plan in the Iraqi inventory would cast such a shadow.”
Knowlington took the paper and held it less than an inch in front of his eyes, trying to distinguish the black shadow from the rest of the black shadows on the thermal-print paper. The image had started as an infrared videotape of the Splash airfield taken by the Tornado shortly before it had been shot down. British intelligence had analyzed and enhanced the image with a computer program that could separate objects of different primary heat characteristics — in other words, find objects hidden beneath tarps or, in this case, thinly roofed buildings. According to Wong, the aircraft had either been recently flown, or had been heated by the exposure of a day’s worth of sun before being moved into the relatively small hangar building at the Splash airfield. Since it definitely hadn’t been there yesterday, it must have recently arrived.