“Well then, I'll let you get back to work so you don't get stuck here too long. Have a good one, sir.”
“You too, George.”
The door shut and the guard spoke into his radio as he passed near Marcus and Mike's hiding place. The pair held stood completely still, not even letting a breath escape with the slightest sound as the man moved by.
“They’re going to be working all night, Farrah says. Just the twins, though. He’s leaving in a bit.”
“They’re cousins, not twins,” came the reply over the radio.
“Whatever. They look a lot alike, they talk the same, and I can’t understand a word either one of them says.”
“Anyway, get back over here. I need to take a break,” said the voice on the other end.
“I’m supposed to walk to the end of section seven on rounds.”
“Finish it later. I gotta take a crap.”
“Again?” said the guard with a voice that was half chuckle, half exasperation. “What did you eat, bro?”
“My wife is trying to make me healthy,” said the distant voice. “All these damned vegetables she keeps forcing down me, I think she plans for me to shit myself thin.”
“Sucks to be you, dude,” said the guard with a slight laugh. “All righty though, I'm on the way.”
The guard trotted away at a jog, his footsteps making a high-pitched rythmic scratch as he crossed the gravel lot. The sound of his steps faded until the ambient noise of the port was the only sound that rumbled in the distance. An excruciating silence hung around the building as Mike and Mojo waited till they were sure the coast was clear. They went back to the fallen tree and climbed out, returning the way they had come.
Chapter 8
Silence lay thick like a blanket around the warehouses at the end of the train depot. Pastel shades of pink colored the evening sky, sparkling across the tight cluster of glass high-rise hotels in the distant downtown center. It was after ten o'clock and the sun still hung above the horizon, lulling the city into a strange, half-awake feeling, an odd combination of the bright intensity of early evening and the quietness of late night. The angle of the light stretched shadows, creating dark crevasses between buildings and in low spots on the ground. In a few hours, sometime around midnight, the sun would descend just beneath the horizon, rendering the sky a flat, dull, not-quite-twilight for several hours as it circled the top of the globe and rising again before five a.m. to full brightness.
The clank and scrape of rail cars on tracks, the rumble of engines and the voices of workmen floated from the distance on the warm evening breeze that wafted through the open windows. Neither woman was a stranger to spending long hours in places just like this. Surveillance operations were usually little more than long periods of staying awake and waiting with the knowledge that what you were waiting for was not likely to happen while you were watching.
“So.” Hilde's voice broke the silence. “How did you and Marcus meet?”
“At a high school track meet in 1984.”
“Really? And you've been together since?”
“No.” Lonnie looked out the window, let out a sigh, and adjusted her position in a fruitless search to find a point both she and the baby agreed was comfortable. “We fell apart for a long time — nearly fifteen years.”
“Fifteen years?” Hilde’s eyes went wide as she turned to look at her. “What brought you back together?”
“Fate.” Lonnie put her hand on her belly, remembering. “Marcus proposed to me in 1989. He was stationed in Norway at the time, and had invited me to join him to watch the Berlin Wall come down. He had a ring and everything, and I wanted to marry him. But selfish me, I was not willing to share my husband with the Marines. I didn’t want a chaplain coming by to tell me how my husband was a great hero who gave his life for the glory of the Corps, saving some third-world village in a country I'd never heard of.”
“That’s not selfish.” Hilde turned to look back out her window toward the road. “That’s very understandable, actually.”
“I guess,” Lonnie said. “Marcus was a very good Marine. As I understand it, he and Mike worked together pretty frequently around that time. Anyway, we kind of broke up shortly after that. I mean, he still wrote to me and all, love letters, even poetry, trying to woo me to change my mind. And I kept waiting for him to come to his senses and get a normal job. Neither of us was willing to change, though, me especially. He was experiencing a pure adrenaline lifestyle in the Marines, jaunting around the world to wars that never made the evening news while I had my 'normal job' teaching math to bunch of hormone-crazed teenagers at my old high school in Fairbanks.”
“You were a high school teacher?”
“Yeah, nearly five years.”
“Me too,” Hilde said. “Not that long, though. After two years, I couldn’t stand it. The boys seemed to be unlike any kids I remembered from school — one half of them were stoned out of their minds all the time in class, and the other half seemed to think they had a chance of sleeping with me.”
“You should’ve learned the evil Korean Ajumma stare,” Lonnie said. She turned toward Hilde and froze her face into an expression that could make a grown man begin to stutter in fear. She only held it for moment before softening back up, her face brightening with a grin, a mischievous sparkle in her eyes. “The boys were all too terrified to flirt with me.”
Hilde let out a laugh. “That is one scary look! I’ll have to give that a try sometime, but to be honest, I’ve never been able to look mean, no matter how hard I work at it. That's why I never made it as a field agent.” She paused for a moment as the sound of a loud metallic clang echoed across the yard. She glanced out the back window toward the source of the sound, but saw nothing. As the stillness returned, she continued the small talk. “So what made you join the troopers?”
“One of my favorite students, a really good straight-A girl, died from a drug overdose at a rave party. That was the final thing that drove me to get more proactive.”
“Wow, that’s so sad.”
“Yeah, well, since then I saw a lot worse, sister, believe me.” Lonnie stretched her lower back and contemplated getting out of the car, but her feet were swelling and she didn’t want to stand. She relaxed as best she could and went on. “After I graduated from the state trooper academy and started on patrol, I began to understand the connection Marcus had with the Marines. It was too little too late, though. Just as we were starting to make up, Marcus’s whole unit was wiped out on a peace-keeping mission in Africa. He had been declared “missing in action and presumed dead.”
“Oh, my God,” Hilde said. “That’s awful. Obviously he survived, though, so it was okay, right?”
“He came out of the jungle two months later, ready to leave the Corps and marry me.” Lonnie looked toward the rows of warehouse buildings across the parking area, silent and contemplative. The sound of a large hammer repeatedly pounding metal drifted toward them like the ringing of a bell. “But I had given him up for dead. The chaplain had come like I feared, except to his mother instead of me since we weren’t married.”
Lonnie took a deep breath, then let it out with a resigned sigh.
“And I went out and got drunk and acted like a whore.”
Lonnie glanced over at Hilde, whose cheeks had reddened, a shocked expression on her face. Hilde blinked a few times and opened her mouth, but the words didn't seem to form.
“Sorry to burst your bubble, if you had one about me,” she said. “I was a month pregnant and newly married when I got a letter Marcus sent from New Guinea. I didn’t even have the guts to talk to him. Just left his letters unanswered until someone else told him what I’d done. We had no contact for more than ten years after that.”