He kept shooting, picking out targets around the downed Black Hawk until the barrel of the weapon was red hot. From the cockpit, Davis launched the Hellfire missiles mounted on the sides of the Yas’ur. They slammed into the Black Hawk and exploded. Within seconds the wreckage was engulfed in orange flames.
“Excellent!” Crocker shouted.
“Fuck ’em.”
“Now let’s hit the enemy position near the top of the hill.”
Relentless fire from the twin 7.62s and more Hellfire missiles silenced the enemy there. The helo circled once more; then Crocker instructed the pilot to set it down.
The heavy rotors turning and stirring up an enormous cloud of dust, Crocker and Davis jumped out. First, they found Cal, then loaded the bodies. Finally, they helped Akil aboard; he had been wounded in the arm by a piece of shrapnel from an enemy frag grenade.
They didn’t pause to recon the scene, ID the enemy, or count enemy dead. Instead, Crocker checked Cal’s vitals while the Israeli helicopter lifted off and a last enemy round zinged off his Kevlar helmet and crashed into the ceiling.
“Good thing you keep your bonnet on,” commented Mancini.
The bleeding from Cal’s wounded stomach seemed to have stopped, but his pulse was even weaker than before.
“Tell the pilot to radio ahead and have a medical team and ambulance ready,” Crocker said.
“Roger,” Davis responded.
Akil, seated with his back against the fuselage, his face covered with dirt and soot, his hands caked with dried blood, muttered, “Thanks.”
Crocker sat beside him and started to roll up his sleeve to see where he’d been nicked. “Good work,” he whispered.
But the big SEAL’s eyes were already shut, and he started snoring.
Crocker’s arms were weary and shaking from firing the big machine gun. He took a swig of Gatorade as the pilot announced that they had entered Israeli airspace.
No one responded.
To his right, Crocker saw Mancini looking down at Ritchie’s tarp-covered body on the floor. The recovered Hellfires were strapped to the floor beside him. Mancini’s lips moved as though he was saying a prayer, or a goodbye.
Feeling tears gather in his eyes, Crocker turned to the window and stared deep into the night sky. He was looking for a place to put his grief, which clung to him like a second skin. It wasn’t ready to be shed and wouldn’t be for a long time.
Chapter Four
Facing it, always facing it, that’s the way to get through.
– Joseph Conrad
She felt like she was moving and imagined her body spinning across a dance floor. Strong, sure hands guided her. And in her mind’s eye she saw men’s faces with dark hair slicked back and the color orange.
Lisa realized that she was sitting. But her head kept spinning, reminding her of all the things she had to do to prepare for her husband’s forty-fifth birthday, which was only six weeks away. Besides hiring the caterer and planning the meal, she had to order flowers and put together a guest list, which was always the hardest part of organizing any political gathering. Family and friends were easy. It was determining the people Clark couldn’t afford to offend that made the guest list difficult and required study and input from Clark’s legislative and administrative assistants.
Clark himself might spend more time considering who to invite or not to invite to his birthday party than how to vote on an upcoming military appropriation bill.
Politics were personal. And the longer Lisa lived in Washington, the more she appreciated that. Who got along with whom, which senators played poker together, or golf, or had an interest in antique cars. She reminded herself that friendships, feuds, rivalries, slights, prejudices, and dislikes defined everything from what bills could pass through the Senate, to which individuals were likely to be appointed to fill certain seats in the president’s cabinet.
It wasn’t ideal, or the way politics were described in textbooks. But it was the way they worked.
Realities were realities, she said to herself. One had to make tough compromises in order to lead a successful life. In the case of planning a successful birthday party for her husband, that meant drafting a guest list and e-mailing it to Clark’s legislative assistant. But when she tried to reach for her iPhone, she couldn’t move her arms. And when she tried to look at what was binding them, she couldn’t see, even though her eyes were open.
That was when the cold reality of her situation hit her and she remembered Sedona and the armed young men in her room. Instinctively, the muscles in her neck and her sphincter tightened, and she realized that she wasn’t coming out of a normal sleep, or even a dream. She’d been drugged and was being transported somewhere. Ripped away from her complex life.
She’d read a story recently about the hundreds of thousands of women who were captured every year and sold into sexual slavery. Was it possible that they had mistaken her for a much younger woman?
Struggling not to panic, she willed her mind to focus and slowly became aware that she was bound to a seat, and that a blindfold of some sort covered her eyes. When she turned her head to the right, an orange light filtered through.
The vehicle she was in was moving very fast, a seeming reflection of the rate at which Lisa felt herself losing control of her life.
Minutes later she was jolted by the wheels of the plane hitting a tarmac and the jet’s engines slamming into reverse. Her mind snapped back to the interrupted bath, the young woman pointing the pistol. And in that instant, she remembered the dark eyes and warm-colored skin and started to panic, because she realized that this was her reality and there was no escaping it.
Remembering her daughter and wondering what had happened to her, she attempted to rip herself out of the seat. She tried to open her mouth to scream and get someone’s attention, but her mouth was taped shut.
Crocker lay on the mattress on the cement floor of the six-by-eight cell looking up at the Israeli guard’s bald head and thinking back on how he had been arrested the night before, led away by armed Israel Defense Forces (IDF) soldiers while Mancini, Davis, and Akil were held back by more armed soldiers. With his wrists and ankles chained together, he had watched from the back of a truck as Cal was moved from the desert-camouflage-painted Yas’ur helicopter to a white-and-blue ambulance, and the bodies of Ritchie and the SOAR Black Hawk pilot and copilot were carried to a coroner’s black van. Even though he was angry and the muscles in his arms and legs were sore, it was a heavy sadness that dominated and wore him down.
Part of him seemed lifeless, switched off, even as he performed multiple sets of push-ups and sit-ups and picked through the gray, tasteless meat and couscous that were delivered on a tray through a slot at the bottom of the gray door. He drank the metallic-tasting water, stretched, and remembered the charges that had been read to him by the IDF officer the night before-disobeying orders, aggravated assault, attempted murder, and assault with a deadly weapon.
He had no argument with any of them. What had happened, had happened. Looking back, he wouldn’t have changed any of it. But if he could, he would alter the order he had given Ritchie and Cal to stay on the Black Hawk. He’d had his reasons then, which he repeated to himself now. But they seemed hollow and stupid in light of what had transpired. And he knew the decision would haunt him the rest of his life.
He pictured his teammate’s wide, smiling face with the wise-ass look he got just before he made some smart remark. It seemed impossible that Ritchie was dead, because the memory of him seemed so real.
Crocker sensed Ritchie’s presence in the cell with him and heard him comment on the shitty accommodations and tell Crocker that one of these days he had to learn how to treat himself better.