I spent a month searching for the true meaning of life at the bottom of bourbon bottles, debating whether to resign my commission. The airlines were hiring like crazy back then. Most were so desperate for pilots they didn’t care about something as trivial as a reconstructed anterior cruciate ligament. As long as you had a pulse and could more or less keep the dirty side of the airplane down, you were assured of a paycheck. For me, though, the notion of hauling software salesmen and colicky infants around in the back of a 737 held all the appeal of driving a Greyhound bus. I enjoyed being in the Air Force. I just needed a different career path. My superiors, as it turned out, were only too happy to accommodate me.
Soldiers and Marines are quick to point out that the Air Force is the most non-military of the military services. They call it the Air Farce. The Chair Farce. Civilians in Uniform. A country club with airplanes. Deservedly so. Most Air Force weenies can’t tell the difference between a handgun and a howitzer. I was somewhat unusual in that regard. When you bounce from ranch to ranch as a foster kid on the arid plains east of Denver, you quickly learn that: 1) much of Colorado bears little resemblance to a Coors commercial and 2) shooting firearms is about all there is to do recreationally in such places unless you count goat roping and getting loaded and/or laid. Goats give me the creeps; booze, I discovered early on, brings out the bad in me; and street narcotics always seemed to me a stupid thing to do to one’s physiology. But guns, ah, now those were another story altogether.
I loved the precision they demanded, their perfect utility. For my twelfth birthday, my foster parents du jour gave me an old single-shot, bolt-action .22 with a red cocking indicator and a battered walnut stock. It was the most animate inanimate object I’d ever seen, let alone owned. I worked every job I could get — digging irrigation ditches, shoveling snow, pulling weeds — to buy ammunition, and target practiced endlessly. Cans, bottles, rocks, birds on the wing, varmints on the run. After awhile, I could hit anything with consistency and at ranges that sounded more like bragging than marksmanship. Which helps explain why, after being admitted to the Air Force Academy, I consistently registered among the highest scores in school history with both pistol and M-16.
My performance on the firing range was not lost on my superiors when they sought to find me a suitable new job after clipping my wings. Such ability, they concluded, lent itself to the wonderful world of military informational gathering and assessment. What one’s shooting skills had to do with flying a desk as an intelligence analyst was beyond me, but I didn’t ask many questions. Most things in the military make no sense. And thus, with some initial reluctance, I accepted a series of ground-based assignments, first to the Air Intelligence Agency at Wright-Patterson, then to the National Air Intelligence Center at Lackland Air Force Base, until, finally, I ended up where I did, in the darkest shadows, on the blackest operations, a token zoomie in the land of snake eaters — among them a warrior of Mayan ancestry who one day would steal from me the only woman I’d ever truly loved.
I was lounging on a rope hammock in my landlady’s backyard, hoping the sun would bake away all thoughts of Savannah and her unannounced visit that morning. The plan wasn’t working. I thought about going inside, maybe catching up on my reading, but when it’s ninety-four degrees and your home is a converted two-car garage with a flat roof and no insulation or air conditioning, going inside isn’t something you do voluntarily until well after sundown. So I just lay there. Even my feline idiot of a roommate, Kiddiot, the world’s most worthless cat, was showing the effects of the heat. He was dozing in the oak tree above me with his tongue lolling lethargically out one corner of his mouth. His lanky orange and white limbs straddled the tree like some Bulgarian gymnast passed out on a balance beam. A mockingbird perched on the same branch not two feet away from him, singing every song in its vast repertoire, untroubled by the cat’s proximity. Kiddiot’s slothful reputation obviously had preceded him.
I slipped the photo of Echevarria and me out of my pocket and studied it for the umpteenth time. I’d lied to Savannah. The blood in the picture was as real as the dead Al-Qaeda operative who’d spilled it. He was a pharmacist from Damascus, mastermind of at least four jihadist bombings in Madrid and Islamabad. More than eighty innocents had met their end, courtesy of his handiwork. Any one of the attacks might’ve easily landed him atop Alpha’s tasking board. But the Syrian pharmacist was definitely three strikes and you’re out materiaclass="underline" it just so happened that he was related by marriage to a prominent Arab-American politico with personal ties to the White House. The President’s handlers were not keen on seeing that story above the fold in the Times. So telephone calls were placed on encrypted lines and options discussed — obliquely, to be sure, and always off-the-record. Make the evil pharmacist disappear.
Great patience and skill were needed to bag him — that and a $250,000 reward. In the end, his own daughter gave him up. He was not merely a crazy mad-dog bomber. As it turned out, he was also a member of the Disneyana Fan Club, an avid collector of all things Mickey. That alone was reason enough, the daughter would later insist, to drop a dime on Daddy. We helicoptered in on a moonless night and tracked him for almost a week before cornering him and two of his lieutenants in a wadi southeast of nowhere. When they tried to run, we shot all three with Kalashnikovs to make it look like the handiwork of local warlords. We photographed and fingerprinted the bodies to confirm their identities, then left them to rot in the sun.
The screen door swung open with a crash, disrupting my stroll down memory lane, as my landlady, Mrs. Schmulowitz, emerged from her modest 1920’s bungalow, shuffling backward, all eightyeight pounds of her, while struggling to balance an orange plastic tray with two glasses and what looked to be a pitcher of iced tea.
“Global warming, schmoble warming. This is nothing. Try August in Bensonhurst.”
“Here, let me get that for you, Mrs. Schmulowitz.”
I pocketed the photo as I bounded out of the hammock and steadied her by a bony elbow, commandeering the tray of drinks a half-second before she took a tumble.
“Always helpful Cordell, who never gives me trouble and pays his rent on time — and good-looking to boot,” the old lady said, beaming at me. “You are one handsome man, you know that? The most handsome man I ever saw.”
“You told me your first husband was the most handsome man you ever saw, Mrs. Schmulowitz.”
“Don’t get me started. My first husband, such a shmendrick, that man. A man more in love with a mirror you never saw in your life, may he rest in peace.”
Mrs. Schmulowitz was pushing ninety and crooked like a question mark. Her sun-baked skin was the color and approximate texture of an apricot fruit roll. A retired elementary school gym teacher, she was the only octogenarian I ever saw whose preference in warm weather attire was Lycra bicycle shorts and a fire-engine red sports bra. Her hair was Einstein frizzy and thinning at the crown, but the years, so far as I could ever tell, had done nothing to dim her mind. Rhodes Scholars and stand-up comics only wished they were half as sharp as Mrs. Schmulowitz.
I carried the tray of drinks and set it down on a rusting wrought-iron patio table that could’ve stood a new coat of paint.