Tim rephrased the question. "You served with Walker Jameson."
"Yessir. I was enlisted. SAW-gunner Deron." Marcel raised his arm in a salute, though there was no forearm and hand to finish the job. No matter how many times Tim had seen it, the abbreviated movement of a stump was always shocking, always grotesque. Marcel continued, "Saw the world with Walkman." With pride he added, "The Corps's been there longer than anyone else. We were the first boots on the sand, you know. Year and a half I served in Iraq, till I caught a rocket-propelled grenade. Something comes at you like that, it's instinct." The blunt ends of his arms tapped together once, twice, Bill Buckner reliving the passed grounder. Marcel caught himself, mounting a carefree grin and a mouthy follow-up. "Oh, yeah, I stuck around Iraqtown. You got your duty extensions, your stop-loss programs. Six months, 'nuther six months, 'nuther six months. Shit, Rummy keep pluggin' quarters into this motherfucker. Game continued. Game continued. Game continued."
"The phrase 'the left side' mean anything to you? About Walker or anything else?"
Marcel shook his head. "What's a sniper like you doin' Dragnet for anyhow?" Raised voice: "How 'bout that, Mikey? The cops here are Rangers, but we got leathernecks playin' po-lice in Baghdad. Upside-down world. Go fuckin' figure."
"Can you tell me anything about Walker that we might not learn from his SRB?"
"Walkman? Uu-ee. Like they say in the NFL, he had good motor. You could cut off both legs and the boy'd keep on giving. Or one." He flung back the sheet and wormed a bandage-capped knee around, clearly enjoying Bear's discomfort. "He's a dangerous mofo, Walkman. Goju-Ryu karate or some shit. Knew every pressure point on the body, and that's a fact." His right arm shot out, catching Bear above the wrist, the nub jackknifing. Bear dropped his weight quickly, sitting on the floor before twisting his arm free of Marcel's elbow joint. Quickly finding his feet, Bear rubbed the meat of his forearm and scowled, clearly displeased at the prospect of retaliating against a triple amputee.
"Who says you can't teach a crippled-ass dog new tricks?" Marcel said.
"You pull that shit again," Bear said, "I'll nail you to the wall."
"I wish I had my old form back to make it a fair fight," Marcel said, without a hint of animosity. He warmed again to his story. "Walkman would sneak off when we'd put into port, come back bruised with wads of cash stuffed in his pockets. Finally I cornered him. Turns out he was tracking down underground street-fighting circuits. 'Keeping up skills,' he called it. Homeboy kicked ass in Phuket, Bahrain, Abu Dhabi…"
A coldness overtook Tim's stomach. His adversary's credentials-already more impressive than those of anyone Tim had tracked-continued to mount. Seven years younger than Tim, Walker was more fit physically and tactically, and practiced in the next generation of war toys and techniques. Tim pictured himself coming off Afghanistan-cocksure, skills honed from day-in, day-out soldiering-and figured he wouldn't want to meet his former self now in a mano a mano. For the first time in recent memory, he wondered how he'd fare against a fugitive, and he could tell from Bear's restless shifting that his partner felt the same way.
"And that was just extracurricular," Marcel continued. "Walkman killed hajjis by the bagful. Right up until he got the shaft. Dishonorable. Ouch ouch ouch. No pension, no health care, no fine VA benefits. Walkman got nu-thin'. He ain't here to enjoy the gour-met cooking. Orange roughy Sundays. None of it."
"Why'd he get court-martialed?"
"Well, as you may have read in your USA Today, they didn't send us over so well equipped."
A surprisingly smooth baritone issued through the curtain: "Dubya sent in 'Merica's trooops. Said he'd armor us head to booots. Family back home, ain't they the best? Mama done pass the hat for a bulletproof vess."
Mikey's chanting provided accompaniment as Marcel continued. "We rolled out in unarmored Humvees-thinskins. Patrolled in flimsy-ass flak jackets couldn't stop an AK round if someone threw it at you. We didn't like it, but we did it. Like most of us dumb-asses, Walkman thought the war was…What's that term, Mikey?"
The song abruptly stopped. "Boo-shit."
"That's right. And this one LT, Lieutenant Lefferts-I ever tell you about Lieutenant Lefferts, Mikey?"
"'I'm beset by the undisciplined and the foolish,'" quoth Mikey from the privacy of his bed.
"I had the privilege of speaking to Lefferts this afternoon," Tim said.
Marcel's grin widened. "So you know. Silver-spoon Academy family. Well, us enlisted swine, we'd do what we do for a few days, then LT would get it in his head to put his own special touch on our mission plans. He'd read up on base intel, mix in a bit of that classroom magic they taught him at Annapolis, and retrace our patrols, routing us through dead spots or hot spots, wherever the pencil drew. And when you're light on armor, you get tired playing bullet sponge for a legacy ring-knocker. Walkman let him know. Not directly, but he, you know, body-languaged his displeasure. One night Lefferts personalizes our patrol right through an urban ambush, we near get our asses shot off. We scatter, regroup, and limp in some twelve hours later, minus one. We pass LT just inside the base checkpoint, wearing his pressed garrison fatigues. Walkman don't salute. And LT's like, 'Didn't they teach you to salute in boot camp, Marine?' Still Walkman don't salute. LT get up in his face, saliva and shit flying, says, 'I'm talking to you, Marine.' Walkman still don't move. Not an inch. Starts to walk away. So LT grabs him by the equipment harness, spins him around so hard his helmet falls off, starts finger-pokin' him in the chest."
A dramatic pause. Mikey swept the curtain aside so he could take in Marcel's face.
"With just a single thumb, Walkman strikes him. Once. Like this." The stub of an arm corkscrewed up from the sheets. "Right up under the rib cage. LT went down, was sucking dirt for ten minutes. Shit hisself, even. Paramedics and all."
The SRB's tailored vagueness and Lefferts's defensiveness on the phone were all the clearer now, though Tim doubted that Walker had broken out of prison now to go after a shithead lieutenant. Tim considered the conviction that had landed Walker in TI-stockpiling frag grenades after being fired from a job. Maybe he'd been looking for a cause, and finally, in the prison chow hall, he'd found one. But what?
When Tim refocused, Mikey had again drawn his privacy curtain and Bear had just put another question to Marcel.
"What did we do?" Marcel repeated. "What didn't we do? We were an Advance Force Recon Team. When I was with Walkman, we spent a lot of time in the Anbar province and Sadr City, working in support of infantry operations. A lot of scouting, mountainous navigation, sure. But more night ops." His eyes took on a soulless gleam that Tim recognized immediately as the detachment required for routinized killing, so ingrained it emerged even in recollection. Marcel's voice had gone cold and humorless, and it was clear he wasn't going to stop talking anytime soon. "We broke off into hunter-killer teams. Sometimes we'd parachute in under cover of night to clear a landing zone. Pick off unfriendlies, secure the area for helicopters to unload the main body in the A.M. Sometimes it was urban settings-reconning enemy positions, sniping targets of opportunity. That was a different game. We'd take fixed positions at elevated sites so the rags couldn't determine the base of fire. We could knock 'em down from eighteen hundred yards. Symbolic shots, too, oh, yeah."
Tim, a former sniper with the Rangers who'd neutralized targets on three continents, was intimately familiar with the expression, but Bear asked, "Symbolic shots?"
"Through the spine." Marcel's truncated arm stabbed the air. He wore an unrecognizable smile. "Leave the target alive but in a location where rescue ain't gonna happen. Let his cries work on the opposition for an hour or two. Sometimes we'd go for a more immediate effect, like if we spotted an enemy mortar position. We'd snipe the Head Freds in command simultaneously. Three headshots, three towelheads hit the sand, one echo rolls back from the foothills. Get the cronies scared, get 'em running. Flush 'em onto open ground. Then Walkman would take target practice. No tremor in that trigger finger, I can tell you that." His onyx eyes met Tim's. "You wouldn't believe how good Walkman was unless you saw it. You just wouldn't believe it."