“You do realize there’s every chance McKindrey was bullshittin’ us, right?”
Finch nodded. “Of course, but if he was, you can’t help but feel respect for a guy who would get his nose smashed and toes shot off and then lie to you.”
“Not sure respect is the word I’d use.”
“Your friend Niles get back to you?” Finch asked, referring to the communications officer Beau had known in the Gulf and whom they had relied upon to track the signal from Claire’s cell phone to Danny’s. “Yeah, and that’s why I’m not too confident about McKindrey’s tip.”
“It didn’t come from down here?”
“Nope. If we were trying to track the signal in a city, it would have been a hell of a trick to get it, but out in the sticks there aren’t as many cell phone users, so fewer towers, which made our boy’s job easier. But Niles was able to triangulate the signal to within a ten mile radius, and Elkwood was sitting smack dab in the middle of it.”
Finch shrugged. “All that means is Danny’s cell phone is still in their house, or somewhere nearby. We didn’t exactly turn the place upside down. It doesn’t mean the Merrills themselves are still there.”
“Hope you’re right.”
While they drove, neither of them commented on the thick, ugly atmosphere that surrounded the car. Dark, stagnant pools resisted the caress of current or breeze and lay still beneath skins of yellow foam. They saw few animals other than an occasional coon or possum lying on its side on the road. Vultures circled overhead, seeking carrion a little more tantalizing, a little less rotten. On all sides of the road, stretched countless miles of boggy, swampy land, all of it seeming to emanate from the plant, a large sandy-colored building fronted by a tall white chimney which coughed billowing black clouds into the sky while ugly liquid vomited forth into a putrid lake from culverts at its base. The many windows in the building’s face were made of reflective glass, as if the laborers within felt more secure in their deeds if they went unseen. A chain link fence sealed off the perimeter. Behind the closed gate at the entrance stood a booth with the same reflective glass as the building’s windows. It was impossible to tell if it was manned.
A place of death, Finch thought, and was struck by the sudden, alarming notion that it might well be the place where he himself would die. It was a notion he resisted with everything in him.
He recalled something Beau had said when it became clear they had left the bustling cities far behind them, the nature-burnt leaves falling away to be replaced by spindly-limbed, skeletal trees, the air darker and less pure: “Know what’s funny?” he’d said, out of the blue. “You keep mentionin’ 9/11 and the World Trade Center, comparin’ this to that. Mostly I haven’t agreed with you, thought you were gettin’ carried away with yourself, to tell the truth, but you got me thinkin’ about it now.”
“And?” Finch had asked, wondering if his friend had finally come around to his way of thinking. It didn’t take long to realize he hadn’t.
“And I think those chickenshits flew planes into those towers and killed themselves because they knew they’d never beat us on our own soil. Like you said, if they’da been on the ground, we’d have messed their shit up. So they stuck to the sky where we couldn’t touch them. What they did though was set a trap, make the whole damn country so mad the president wouldn’t have no choice but to send our troops over there, into their crib, where the bad guys’d have the advantage. It was a trap, and we fell for it.”
“What’s your point?”
“My point is, bro, that you and I are doin’ the same goddamn thing. Walkin’ into a place we don’t know, to fight an enemy we know even less. And the advantage is all theirs.”
“It would be,” Finch told him. “If they were expecting us, and if we weren’t armed.”
“You puttin’ too much faith in that shit, man. Way too much. Our boys had plenty of guns in ’Nam too, but they didn’t know where to point ’em. Didn’t know the enemy could burrow like moles and have ’em killed before they could get a shot off. Always gonna be a strike against you if you ain’t familiar with where you’re fightin’.”
As long as he’d known him, Beau had liked to debate about matters of war, and apply his extensive knowledge of it to current events, military-related, or not. His clinically clean apartment was crowded with bookshelves, each one packed full of volumes about various historical conflicts. Ordinarily, listening to Beau ruminate about the Viet Cong, or Napoleon’s folly, or Custer’s ego, didn’t bother him, but it did now, because he had yet to compare their present situation to any battles in which the good guys had emerged victorious.
“This shouldn’t be a revelation to you, man,” he’d said. “You’ve been out of your element before. We both have.”
He was talking about the Gulf, a subject Finch preferred to avoid as much as possible. Unfortunately, given his love for such topics, Beau had no such reservations, but at least he had the tact not to mention the events at Sadr al-Qanat, events which had left Finch, for the first time in his life, contemplating suicide.
Still, in times of despair, when he kept his eyes shut for too long, he saw the woman in the black abaya—the traditional Islamic cloak—hustling toward him, arms held out, imploring. Her expression was one of pleading, of resignation, and of fear, for around her waist she wore an explosives belt. Finch had called a warning, not because he had seen the belt—which he hadn’t, that would come later—but because she wasn’t supposed to approach the soldiers. The previous weeks had seen a number of his comrades blown to pieces by seemingly innocuous locals, and they were now on their guard. Frequently he repainted the woman’s expression, gave it a devilish aspect, a demonic leer, but in reality there had been no such thing. Only fear, incubating beneath a veil of grim acceptance.
He’d punctuated his third warning with a gunshot, and watched as a fine red mist emerged from the back of the woman’s head. She was dead before she hit the ground, and later he had sat in his tent weeping and trembling, and ultimately tried to replicate what he had done to the woman, this time to himself.
Beau had walked in at that moment, a bottle of hooch in his hand, a wide smile on his face that had not lasted long.
“The fuck you doin’, man?” he’d asked, though surely the fact that Finch had a gun in his mouth had made it obvious.
Beau had talked him down that night, his “we were put here to do things that ain’t always pretty” speech penetrating the caul of misery and terror that had, without him sensing it, overwhelmed Finch. Beau had war stories of his own, tales of men and women murdered in the name of war. Few of them were pretty, but all, Beau contended, had been absolutely necessary.
“I see her every time I blink,” he told Beau. “She’s haunting me. Her eyes haunt me. I see them gleaming from the shadows, and I can’t make it stop. I see her from the corner of my eye, sitting in the dark.”