I understood that a servicewoman’s duty to her crew doesn’t end after deployment. And that loyalty to friends will shape a life.
“So,” she said. “Up at zero dark thirty for this gal. And a long drive ahead.”
“We’ll take the Cessna.”
She dropped the dryer into the bag. Wiped a tear off her cheek with the cuff of her shirt. “Thank you. Really, truly, thank you. I’m scared, Roland.”
“We’ll beat this.”
After packing, I had a night of troubled sleep in which I dreamed of Justine’s face — faintly lit, but most certainly Justine’s — floating in a slow orbit around me. Then the face was Lindsey’s. Over and over. When I reached toward the face it would glide away, like an airborne balloon shying away in a puff of breeze, slowly, but just out of reach.
We were in the air at sunrise. Hall Pass 2 churned powerfully through the sky, so confident and capable and alive. I felt that way also. And somehow less bound by the laws of gravity and of men.
Two hours and four minutes later Lindsey and I descended toward the flat expanse of Bakersfield. Land of heat and oil pumps and Central Valley cotton. Land of Buck Owens and Merle Haggard and the Bakersfield sound, a style of music sometimes described as more country than country, much beloved by my combative grandparents — Dick and Liz Ford — tenants of casitas one and six, respectively, on Rancho de los Robles.
“Looks like Syria,” said Lindsey, looking down with a thousand-yard stare. “I’ve never been in Syria. But I’ve spent hours and hours hovering over it with my cameras. Watching insurgents and farmers and women and children. Dogs and camels and cattle. People’s homes. Daesh staged from schools and hospitals. So, hours hovering, and when we had the intel and clearance we’d laser-mark the targets for the fast movers. It’s called sparkling. Their infrareds would lock on and boom! Game over.
“But the biggest prize of all was to take out a target ourselves. Headhunters, baby, doing our deadly best. That usually meant a target in tight quarters. In a vehicle, maybe. Or a home. Something the F-16s were too fast for. We’d use Hellfire missiles or, even better, these two-footers we called the Small Smart Weapon. Those are something. We could take out a guy sleeping in bed but his wife in the kitchen would be fine. I took lives, Roland. I’m not ashamed and I’m not proud. Saved lives, too — American and others. But I’ve never actually set foot on Syrian soil. I’d like to, someday. To just stand in the middle of that desert with my own two boots planted in the sand. It would make me feel vested. To have the part of me that wasn’t there there. I sometimes think I owe it to them. The men I killed. I’ve always thought it’s a little rude to kill a man from halfway around the world. Isn’t that like saying, You, sir, are bad enough for me to kill, but I don’t want to set foot in your miserable country?”
“Rude,” I said. “I’ve never heard it put that way.”
“Mom drilled us kids on manners,” Lindsey said, eyes still locked on the flat tan country below us. “She was very strict. Very British. Mix that with conservative Muslim ideas of behavior and you get major manners. I’ve never asked her, but Mom would say it’s rude to kill a man from seven thousand miles away, then head home to your baby and hold him in the rocker in the morning sun and get that nice warm bottle up to his funny little face and think about the nice future he’s going to have, all safe and secure because Mommy pickled some guy in Aleppo an hour earlier. The Headhunters tried to be funny about things, to make them less horrible. Like, we invented three sought-after results when we fired on an enemy. If we got close enough to our target, we demolished him. If we hit him directly, we pulverized him. But if we hit him directly in the torso, we demulverized him. Demulverization — highest honors. And that’s what I’d think about when I’d be rocking Little John. That’s where the vodka came in. Just a way of adding even more distance to those seven-thousand-plus miles. Or sometimes it was the roulette wheels downtown. When I stepped into a casino, there was no Aleppo. No Iraq. No home, even, with Johnny crying and Brandon threatening to rat me out to Child Protective Services. None of that. Just the glide of that white marble ball around and around the wheel. And me with all my might focused on making it drop where I wanted it to. You can send a missile into a man’s chest from half the world away? Why not drop a little ball into black thirty-three or red forty-eight from just a few feet back? Easy. Simple. I’ve done it. Those are my lucky numbers.”
“But you broke that cycle, Lindsey,” I said. “You clawed your way to the other side.”
“Yeah, sure I did,” she said softly. She still hadn’t taken her eyes off the land below us.
“Baghdadi was the prize,” she said. “The next bin Laden. Every grunt on the ground, every Special Forces guy, every pilot and gunner in the sky wanted Baghdadi. We spent hours looking down on Aleppo and the villages around it. We knew he was moving because that’s how you stayed alive down there. Thousands of people that might be him. Thousands of vehicles that might be carrying him. Thousands of buildings and bunkers and tunnels. The Reaper can stay in the air for a whole day without refueling. The longest they’d let us work was twelve hours, then you had to head home. That meant two hours in the air, two hours off to do paperwork, eat, rest. Then back in the air for two more hours. So we flew three missions a day. Staring at that screen. On a lot of my missions it was night over there, so the infrared video was always murky. Six hours of that and your eyes ache. Get off shift and walk outside and it’s just starting to get dark in Las Vegas.”
I cleared our landing with the Meadows Field tower, got my approach and a standby.
“But you know about that kind of thing, from Fallujah,” said Lindsey. “You know about killing somebody and what it does to you. Even when it’s your job and you’re doing something good and the dead guy deserved it. It still takes something away from you. Or maybe you don’t see it that way.”
“I still think about it,” I said. “How to deal with it. How you decide to deal with it. How you deal with what you can’t decide.”
“The things that are bigger than your deciding.”
“Those exact things.”
She was watching me then, the earth widening below us, landing strip a distant black dash.
“Would you like to hear my story about killing Zkrya Gourmat someday?” she asked.
“You’ve never said a word about it.”
“Zkrya Gourmat was a high-value ISIL leader, back when we called it ISIL. Killing him wasn’t an Air Force assignment. It was for two of the acronyms. In this case, CTC and JSOC. They draw up the so-called ‘kill list.’ The formal name for that list is the ‘Disposition Matrix.’”
The CIA’s Counterterrorism Center and the Joint Special Operations Command, I thought — the odd couple from the feuding families of intelligence and the military. Often in bed but never married. I’d brushed up against both of them in my Marine days. And just last year I’d collided with some of them on my own property, with mortal results.