The General nods at the coms man who shivers up through wire-rimmed glasses at the suits surrounding him before pressing play. The reel to reel unit on the table spins, catching the amber light of the command tent. Rain pours sideways beyond the flapping doors. A dog barks in the distance.
Tinfoil and scratching fingernails punch through the speakers. A warbling. Like whalesong. More static, and then…
“Sarge … we need evac. Nothing works. Bullets. Mortars. The napalm turns backwards, like there’s some kind of wall. If we call an airstrike any closer, we’ll hit ourselves. Daniels walked right into it. Like he was in some kind of trance. We were screaming at him. Looked back over his shoulder and smiled at us before he dove in. We need evac. Now. The men are in pieces. Whatever Charlie’s got out here … they’re all gone. Every fucking one of em. No VC. No return fire. Whatever’s a half a click north, Sarge. I can’t explain it. There’s a sound. Big. Like thunder. But ... it’s moving. Wait. Everyone who’s left is standing up. What the fuck are you looking at? Take cover! Take Cover! I can’t see anything yet. But oh. Oh, wow. Sarge. Wow. The lights...”
The feedback that boomerangs catches everyone off guard and the coms man falls back in his chair. Two men reach for their sidearms in the commotion, and Colonel Renfrew lifts a steadying hand, his eyes flat and unimpressed.
The General inhales, glucocorticoids transforming the smell of modern man into something prehistoric. He has known now for months there is no way to win this conflict. This is a stall. A show of force. There are handshakes taking place with no officers in sight that have ceded these carcasses to the thresher. This is a banker’s conflict, what his old C.O. used to call a USCB Op: Uncle Sam’s Checkbook Balancer. Westpoint drilled into him that there is nothing worse than battle. Except now he understands there is. The meaninglessness for which it is waged. He has confessed this to no one, not even his wife. When he approaches the coms man to place a steadying hand on his shoulder, it is the reason his polished boots seem to sink into the earth. The General carries on his shoulders the collective weight of exploitation and duty. They are his iron wings.
“The time of transmission?”
“0-Three-Hundred, General, sir.”
The General nods. Checks his watch. “Seventeen hours.” He turns to Colonel Renfrew, a cut of Minnesota beef genetically unchanged from the hearty homesteaders of Scandinavia who settled its land. “At ease, all of you.” The room doesn’t change, its tenseness. “This is the same sinkhole that swallowed C company?”
Renfrew nods, stiff and calculated, then taps out a lucky strike and flicks an eye up for permission. This is a nicety--the cigarette is lit before the General reacts. “A range of small mountains and canyons north of Bien Hoa. It’s where the men bivouacked after Operation Crossfire. They call it Gooksylvania.”
“Why?”
Renfrew blows twin jets of smoke through his nostrils. “I believe they named it after Transylvania, sir.”
“Transylvania?”
“The place Dracula lives.”
The General walks to the tent entrance beyond which a torrent blurs the earth like smoke. So much mud. He has dreamt of that mud choking him, of flailing atop a great mud sea alive with meat and sinew. Maybe that mud has come alive to swallow him. “That’s five platoons, including the Aussies,” he says in his quiet way. “Five!”
“Not all of them, sir.”
The General turns.
Renfrew flicks the butt into the rain. “There’s a survivor.”
***
The General stares into the cell. “How long has he been doing this?”
“Since he woke up from his coma.” The MP smells of whiskey and missed an entire cheek shaving that morning. “He vandalised the entire wall of the MASH O.R.. Knocked a corporal out cold when he tried to stop him.”
A dog barks in the distance. Incessant. Attempting to ... warn them? The General grins a little at his foolishness and asks, “Do you know what we’re looking at?”
“Some kind of cypher, I’m guessin. But see there, that bit on the left. Dr. Kenley says that’s Latin. And that bit there is Greek. I couldn’t tell you what it says. I heard a couple suits say something about the Omega machine. Hell, I’ve got a GED. I’m just saying, General, Sir … I’m just, um, reporting what the doctor said.”
The General cannot blink his eyes. The complexity of the cipher is overwhelming. He’d been stronger in Korea. A kind of superstition has infected him since then. Power is heavy. Power requires strong hands. “Do you know him?”
“The Chief? Sure. He has somewhat of a reputation.”
“For?”
“Being bat-shit crazy. Or fearless. Same thing out here.”
The lights in the hospital stutter and the General feels again the cold passenger in his chest. “Is that the rain?”
The MP looks away. “Our gennies are built for moisture. That started about the time he got here.”
The General looks up. “Whose dog is that barking?”
“His, sir. The shepherd was standing guard over him when they found him. Going apeshit. A private almost shot it but his gun jammed.”
The General twists and steps forward and the MP shrinks under the full intensity of him. “I don’t need to remind you that dog is a soldier.” Quiet. A needle piercing meat.
“Sir, I understand. I had nothing to do with that.”
Shepherds were given to the tunnelers, boys with a deathwish who rooted out the vietcong from their viper holes with nothing but a head lamp and a pistol. Brave, godless work. “And that bandage on his hand?”
“In the Infirmary he got a hold of some grease pencils. Snuck one in there with him somehow. When we took it away, he … um, General, Sir, he bit off one of his fingers and started using it to write on the wall. So we gave the pencils back.”
***
Colonel Renfrew sits under a makeshift umbrella made of banana leaves. He cleans his nails with a K-Bar and thinks of Gooksylvania, the green like a living thing, mythic and starved, a fucking dragon. Over 300 men and their materiel have vanished. No radio signals. No tracks. He looks down at the photographs the spook handed him two hours before the General arrived, photos which he has not deigned to share quite yet. General Greeves is a good man but this is Renfrew’s jungle, his camp.
Renfrew looks at the photos from the field review that morning. Of everything, it is the muddy tracks that most fill his bowels with cold terror. The tire tracks, boot tracks, dog tracks, and tripod impressions are clearly defined in the mud. Most defined of all is where they end abruptly. A slightly convex line like the footprint of a circular dome. The vegetation scorched by napalm ends abruptly at that line. Trees that grow on the border are burnt symmetrically so that some of the photos reveal in their shape a kind of bubble beyond which the jungle is unmarred. It is on the other side of that barrier that The Chief was found, a half Apache by the name of Everett Weathervane. The Chief is what the men call him.
Called him, Renfrew reminds himself, because the men are dead.
All but Weathervane and his dog, Scout. The shepherd half-mad now. He can hear its barks punch needle-sharp through the low roar of rain. Locked in a crate. Probably doomed. Of all the atrocities the idea of killing an American war dog hurts his heart in a way the exposed intestines of young soldiers cannot. Men make choices. But dogs…
“You’re just a regular Buddha out here under your Bodhi tree, aren’t you?” A reedy voice says.
Renfrew looks up to see Andrews, staring down with his spooks aviators under a mess of wavy brown/blond hair. He is pole-thin, with the beard and rangy look of a flag-burner. The CIA is a yacht club of washed-up manipulators. The kind of shitbirds that used to serve the football players beer and work their unattended girlfriends into the bushes. Spooks always hit you from the side, from the back, from the sky. Spooks cannot look war in the eyes. “Eat shit.”
“I like it when you talk dirty and all, but let’s abate the friendly fire, shall we?”
“We can abate that when you tell me what the fuck took my men.”
Andrews pulls up a crate and parks under the ceaseless waterfall cascading from the palm awning. “That’s a delicate question.”
Renfrew stabs the K-Bar into the crate between Andrews’ legs, a Virginian inch from his baby maker. “Ten minutes alone with you and I’ll send your delicate pieces back in a coffee can.”
Andrew smiles with a little flare of his eyebrows, scoots back on the crate, and wipes the rain from his forehead. Under his glasses are eyes much colder than Renfrew expects. Smoked glass. “I’ve dropped a few delicacies into coffee cans myself. Four platoons is a fucking tragedy. I know that. But we need to be delicate for other reasons.”
Wood crackles as Renfrew twists the K-Bar free. “If you’ve got a point, I’d hear it now.”
“You’d take it away and stab me with it.” Andrew slicks his hair back with both hands and exhales. “Okay. Here goes. Seven months ago, there were reports of lights in the sky. Not foo fighter shit. Solar activity of some kind. Stumped NASA analysts and any NATO consultants we fed it to. Let’s call it an aurora borealis for lack of a better term. There’s just one problem. No solar winds were registered anywhere near here. The atmosphere is so charged with moisture we’re told it’s basically impossible. And yet. There it was. A fuckin’ light show.”
Renfrew hears the transmission whisper up his back. Oh, wow. Sarge. Wow. The lights.
“Next, five months ago,” Andrew goes on, “A company of rooskies backchanneling supplies to Ho Chi Minh tip their furry hats and step into a black hole. The facsimiles of recovered bills of lading were streaked with mud, but by our best estimation 85 men, 12 supply trucks, 800 AK-47s, 170 mortars, and box of what might or might not have been very sensitive enriched isotopes stepped off into thin air.”
“The same thing that happened to C company.”
Andrews cocks his eyes forward. “As you can see. Delicate.”
Renfrew turns into the rain to think. “Why didn’t we hear about Russia?”
“You think Washington wants its dick in two mousetraps? I mean, this one’s going so well. Technically, Russian boots on the ground is an act of war. But there aren’t any boots left.”
“I don’t understand.”
“Neither do we. Now comes the icing on the cake. The Dragon is dark.”
Renfrew rolls his eyes. “The Dragon is a folk legend.”
“The Dragon has a name I can’t fuckin pronounce but he’s real. Was head of the secret police cloak and dagger outfit that rounded up the buddhists. Apparently, he had all his pictures collected and burnt. Disappeared three journalists who didn’t get the memo. A real bring home to the folks kind of guy. Glass catheters and a blacksmith hammer were a specialty of his. VC scuttlebutt has it that they tried to kill him for insubordination. There might or might not have been a woman. He and his men went into the jungle to kill Minh in retaliation.”
“Descension?” Renfrew can hardly keep up. Russia. Schisms within a unified communist front. Lights in the fucking sky. Rain drums its fingers across the earth. The dog barks and barks. Not only is the Dragon--the warfront equivalent of the boogeyman--real, but he has turned on his masters. “When?”
“Roughly five months ago.”
“Same time as the Russians,” Renfrew says, “two months after the lights.”
“Bingo.” Andrews reaches into his pocket and fishes out a flask, swigs it mightily. “Right around the same time our borsch-eating fucktets exited stage left. So we have ourselves a slippery rendition of who done it.”
“If the Dragon hit the Russians and their supplies, we can assume they’d use them to avenge their vendetta.” Renfrew takes a swig when the flask is offered, then hands it back. “But if it wasn’t the Dragon, then the Russians were attacked by the same thing that attacked us.”
“Bingo.” Andrews leans in close, smiling in a way that makes Renfrew uncomfortable. “The Dragon is the VC’s Achilles. Do you really think Achilles would spend five months trading the government palace for the bush without using all that boom-boom on his target? He’s not exactly the kind of devil that bides his time.”
“You think it’s option two, then.”
Andrews shrugs. “I’m not sure. But there’s one man we should be talking to before I transmit any of this back up to shit mountain.”
Renfrew sees it clearly then, and understands what about the spook’s eyes makes him so uncomfortable. “He’s cracked. And so are you if that’s your plan.”
“Maybe I am. But we should talk to him anyway. He’s the only one who might know what we’re dealing with.”
***
The General is talking with Doctor Horatio Kenley when Renfrew steps into the brig with Andrews. They pause and both look back. Renfrew notes the brief scrutiny in the General’s eyes before it hides behind the mantle of melancholia. “Colonel, who’s your guest?”
“Our local spook.”
“Andrew Andrews, General, sir.” He offers a filthy mud-streaked hand to have it looked at before he shrugs and pulls it back.
Renfrew turns to him. “Andrew is your first name and your last name?”
“Harder to forget.”
“That seems counterintuitive for the Central Intelligence Agency,” The General says. “What’s your business in my camp?”
“My business is war, sir.”
“Is it?” The General leans all the weight in his eyes towards Renfrew. “I’ll be with you in a second, Colonel.”
“I actually came to speak to Shakespeare, General. Sorry, doctor Kenly is known as Shakespeare around these parts. But I’m happy to speak with you first, sir, if you need me.”
The General looks at the spook again. “Why is he here?”
“The Chief, sir.” The Colonel pulls the General’s eyes back to him. “We’d like to speak with him.”
“You’d have better luck talking to his door,” Dr. Kenly says. “He’s in a fugue state of sorts. Or one of hyperfocus. I can’t get him to stop doing what he’s doing. We’d sedate him but, well, I made the call that allowing him to continue what he’s doing might be in the best interest of figuring this out. Especially after what he did to his hand.”
The General turns abruptly in a way that tells Renfrew Shakespeare hasn’t shared this. “And you made this call why?”
Shakespeare looks at his feet, rubbing a hand through his greasy hair. “General, sir, I meant no disrespect. Permission to speak freely?”
“By all means.” The General sits on a chair near a coffee-rings table cluttered with papers and sighs. “Free speech for you and Doctor King and our good friends of the Central Intelligence Agency. Someone tell me what the hell is going on here.”
The Doctor looks at all of them in turn. He licks his lips and is about to speak when the lights stutter. He laughs, and the barking quality makes Renfrew’s skin curl up the small of his back until it feels as if his spine is adorned with scales. “That, for starters.”
Andrews tosses a well, this got interesting glance at Renfrew. “Electromagnetic disturbances?” And to everyone’s surprise Horatio Kenly looks at Andrews as if he has just saved him from delivering a pun too terrible to utter aloud. “Half my machines won’t work. I’ve lost three men on aspiration.” He looks back through the cell’s reinforced glass square. “I don’t want him here anymore. But what can I do?”
Renfrew taps out a lucky strike and lights it. “Any word on that code?”
“Do you need to smoke in here, Kirk?” Kenly asks.
“You should all be smoking, far as I’m concerned. The code, Doc.”
“I don’t know what they are,” says a flat gravel voice behind Kenly’s shoulder.
When all of them turn, the sweaty face of Everett “The Chief” Weathervane fills the smudged glass square. The bronze skin is moist and ageless. Eyes like barren moons.
Kenly recoils from the closeness of it before his civic duty takes hold. He shuffles forward with a tentative step, as the men crowd in behind him. “You’re awake.”
“I’ve been awake the whole time. I just couldn’t talk over the noise.”
“What noise?” Renfrew asks, thinking that of course he must mean the dog, his dog, barking bloody murder from its crate.
“The noise.” The Chief ticks his eyes back toward the three walls covered in script. “I think I caught all of it.”
“All of what, Chief?” Kenly asks.
“You’re looking at me awful funny, doc.”
“You did bite off your own finger.”
The Cheif concedes with a shrug. “It’s just a pinky. A pinky isn’t even a finger. I’m ready to come out now. I’m hungry.”
***
The men watch him eat. Three plates. Then four. The General recalls the way Terrance Chambers and Tony Defranco ate when they were rescued in Korea, like men who’d considered eating each other in the muddy hole they’d thought would become their grave. There is a simplicity to Everett Weathervane that General Greeves admires. The only betrayal that he has lost a digit and been writing with that same hand for 18 hours comes in the occasional roll of his wrist when he changes grips on the spoon. This is a man who has befriended pain.
After washing his face in a surgical receptacle filled with water, The Chief sits in the chair provided and smokes one of Renfrew’s lucky strikes while an 8-track recorder is wheeled in on a gurney by two men. The smoke collects in lazy spirals through the air.
“You hear that?” Andrews asks them.
The General looks up from his reverie. “No.”
“Exactly.”
It is then, in the moment they all realize the dog has stopped barking, that the Chief belches and squints his eyes. “I imagine you want to ask me questions now.”
“Now, sir,” Renfrew warns and the General waves it away.
“No disrespect. I’m--” He twitches so violently he snaps the cigarette between his fingers, “--not feeling myself at the moment.”
“Describe it for us,” The General says.
“The feeling?”
“The jungle, son.”
“The feeling and the jungle are the same thing … sir.” He picks up the smoking end of the broken cigarette and continues to smoke it with his bandaged hand. “It’s color and noise and … have any of you eaten peyote?”
Everyone but Andrews shakes an affirmative no.
“It’s everything at the same time. There’s a word for it. Sinisth… sina.”
“Synesthesia?” Doctor Kenly offers.
The Chief snaps his fingers and looks deadpan at the doc. “That.”
“What took the men?”
“They took themselves.”
“They went AWOL?”
“They went home.”
“To America?”
“No, no. The place we carry in us. The Gloaming.”
The General sighs heavily but doesn’t drop his eyes. “Is the point geographical?”
“The path is, yes. But not always.”
“And did they choose to go there?”
“Choice is an illusion. This conversation has already happened in that place. We’re ghosts sharing echoes.” He jerks again and this time the cigarette flies into the corner of the room. The duct of his left eye starts to bleed as Renfrew hands him another cigarette and lights it.
“Was there light in this place?”
“It is light. ”
“And the light made you write all that on the wall?”
“It didn’t make me. I had to if I wanted to speak again. It filled everything. It was drowning me.”
“So the light wanted to hurt you?”
“Yes.”
“Does it want to hurt us?”
“Yes. But it takes no pleasure in it.”
“Where did my men go?”
“Home.” His voice flatter. “I told you that.”
“What is the wall in the jungle?” Renfrew asks.
“Oh, that.” Weathervane cocks his single bleeding eye at the Colonel. “That is its nest.”
“The light’s nest?”
“The messenger. The light is its … vehicle.”
“Is it a weapon?” The General asks.
“It eats weapons.”
“How do you know this?”
The Chief points to the general area where he was celled.
“Can you tell us what you wrote?”
“It will eat everything.”
“What will?”
“The Messenger.”
“How do we stop it?”
A smile. “You can’t.”
“Are you sure?”
The Chief nods. “Can you stop your own hunger?”
“Do the VC know what it is?”
“It eats the VC. Their anguish has charge.”
“Charge?”
“Energy. Spin. We are electricity.”
“Where are the men now?”
“Lost to your ambitions.”
“What ambitions?”
“Dominion. Possession. Ape’s tools.”
“Is the Dragon helping them?” Renfrew interjects.
Weathervane looks at him, the ribbon of blood now at his lip, his cheek. A single drop plops onto the table between them as he hunches over it. “Perhaps.”
“Is he or isn’t he?” The General says, not knowing who The Dragon is.
“The Dragon serves the light.”
“Is the Messenger and Mihn allied?”
“The Messenger is served, not allied.”
“Where are the men?”
“The servants?”
“My men!” The General and Renfrew rise in the same moment.
Andrew raises a hand until the General sees it and begrudgingly concedes the floor. “It’s philosophical, isn’t it? This is a dialectic.” Something dark and sudden floods Andrews’ eyes. He tastes it in his mouth for a full five seconds before he speaks again. “Are you Everett Weathervane?”
The face smiles wide and wide and wider until the other eye duct starts to bleed.
***
This time when Weathervane jerks all the men jump back. The lights stutter so violently two of the bulbs pop in a cascade of sparks. For a moment there is total darkness, the scrape of chair legs, the pulsebeat of the General’s heart like the galloping of hooves. And he is back on the mattress of his Virginia ranch, all five acres of benighted earth rippling the way skin will tighten around the bones of a thing long dead. He is drowning in a sea of sheets that three seconds before, across the impossible distance of dreams, was a thrashing sea of mud. He feels this future at the center of that past, a dark foretelling. He knows now that moment and this moment were and are the same moment. That stepping from the dream sea like some stinking god was this man, this messenger, this--
When the remaining lights flicker on, the Chief’s face is the Chief’s again. He wipes the blood away and the robotic stillness of his former posture is replaced by something feral and mistrusting, the language of a body that has survived a war. “You can keep staring, or we can do something about it.”
“Sergeant Weathervane?”
“Sure as shit and twice as ugly,” he says. “Fuckin' parasite almost ate me alive.”
The men are still looking at each other when The Chief says, “Look. Ask me what you’re gonna ask, then send me back.”
“Back?” Renfrew asks, unable to keep up, to keep his eyes from searching the other faces for some inkling of what the fuck is happening here.
Weathervane reaches across the table and snatches a lucky strike from the open box. “How else will I kill it? Nothing fucks me that hard and lives.”
***
Colonel Renfrew shakes his head. “Absolutely not. It’s a liability. It’s irresponsible. It’s--”
“The only chance you’ve got to find out what the fuck is happening,” Andrews finishes.
They both stand at the end of the barracks, looking out the open door as the Chief hugs his shepherd to his body. The dog has stopped barking. And though Renfrew can’t explain the certainty he feels, he understands the dog must have known something was wrong. Must have been trying to tell them. Even the rain has ebbed, falling now across the earth in fine mists that smoke in great orbs of light around the halogen posts.
“Look,” Andrews says. “It’s simple. The Agency does it more than anyone will admit. A kid goes down in Moscow when, according to his paperwork, he should be stateside. We create an accident, fly the body, plant it, and fudge the paperwork. I shouldn’t tell you this but I think it might be the only way to convince you that this is the best option available with the lowest cost to your assets. Weathervane could already be dead. Weathervane could have died yesterday.”
“That MP was keeping watch. Not to mention Shakespeare. Say what you want about doctors, Kenly is as honest as they come.”
“Maybe he didn’t stop with those grease pens. Maybe the next thing he stole was a utility knife. A fork from when he was eating?” He pulls the fork that Weathervane had been using from his pocket and turns it in the light. “Maybe the Chief had just seen too much war.” Andrews takes a swig from his flask and, when Renfrew doesn’t return his gaze, swings it out toward the Indian and his dog. “It’s not pretty. But nothing about this place is.”
The Chief approaches with Scout in tow. He raises his hand and the dog plops into the mud without a sound. “Is this op a go?”
Colonel Renfrew flexes his jaw. “Who else is going?”
“No one. It wouldn’t be safe.”
“But it will be with you?”
The Chief shrugs. “I think I understand it. Not so much with language.”
“What the fuck does that mean?”
“Intuition,” Andrews pipes in cheerfully. “Sometimes when you know, you know.”
“Shut up.” Renfrew ticks his eyes back to the Chief, his somber woodcut face. “And what’s the plan once you get there?”
“I’ll bring a radio, my rifle, claymores and plastique.”
“Radios weigh too much.”
“A little more than a pack, which I won’t need.”
“What if there’s interference?”
“What if there isn’t?” The Chief’s smile is cold and joyless.
“And then what?”
“An airstrike would be a good start. I’ll call in the coordinates.” He bends down to scratch Scout’s ears. “Could someone rummage up two poles and some rope?”
Renfrew tilts his head. “For what?”
“A travoise.”
“What about VC?” Andrews’ asks. “That’s bound to make a lot of noise.”
The Chief shakes his head. “It got them, same as us.”
“I’ll go,” Renfrew says, surprising himself, the sudden thirst in him to see a thing unexplainable.
Andrews and the Chief say no in unison, though their reasons are very different.
“No one else would survive,” The Chief says. “It didn’t kill me the first time. Might be it won’t expect me the second time.”
“And how the fuck can you know that?”
“Small pox,” The Chief straightens and pulls the flask from Andrews’ hand without asking. “Spic blankets won the West.” He swigs. “I believe whatever it filled me with, it meant for that to spread. I don’t know how I beat it, but I did. And before it knows any better, I mean to repay its courtesy with interest.”
Renfrew feels the coldness then. Because it makes sense. It is the silent way to win a war against aggressive and unpredictable adversaries. There is an efficiency to it. His own gut speaks now. And in it he feels as a man standing on the lip of an abyss too complex to understand. He hears in all that hollow the soft popping of mankind, like the small bones of a sparrow underfoot.
“What should we do with Scout?” he asks, knowing then The Chief does not mean to return, that he too sees that same abyss, has lived through it once, and that all luck.
“Not a damn thing.” The Chief stares beyond the lights to the jungle. “The travoise is for him.”
***
An hour later the Chief crosses the disarmed perimeter alarms and sets off north into the bush, Scout beside him, trailing a pole travoise with 30lbs of plastique and charges wrapped in dull green company rain slickers. The dog is wiry but strong. The Chief carries a machete and his M-16 with the barrel pointing hellward like some broken finger. He doesn’t need to do much chopping. Every so often he checks his compass and marks his position on a small waxed paper pad. The rain has stopped and a westward wind has shredded the clouds to gauze; as if the sky was a wound, the bright moon its bullet. It is enough to see by, the trampled and hacked track of four lost platoons. He follows this procession of ghosts into the wilds from which a theremin hum warbles just beneath the rush of his blood.
Time slips off of him. He is again a child on the reservation, hatefilled and fearless, riding his grandfather’s paint across the hardpack, a tail of dust his only history in that land of hardship. His nose is being broken for kissing a white girl. He is screaming at the sky while his arm is broken next, and still screaming when he stands up and lays hold of a tire-iron leaned against the auto garage and follows the boys who have turned their backs to laugh at the beaten Indian. He is eating peyote with the hermit who lives on a cropless tract some miles into the reservation’s desolation, sweating in the reek of fat-smoke while the old man tells him he is of the Old Blood, the Land’s Blood, and will one day function as the brand that seals the Mother’s bleeding wound. He is in bootcamp, outtracking, outrunning, and out-drinking his brothers. And he the most surprised of all to call these enemies of his peaceable ancestors brother. To bleed beside them. To watch two opposing kinetic waves be bent and refolded into more forceful a wave than either alone. He is kissing that white girl now a white woman grown. He is promising loyalty through the cruelty of war. He is alone again in the jungle.
And the hum is louder.
He kneels, uncaps his canteen, and let’s Scout drink.
“Good boy.”
He sees it in the moonlight then. The convexity like some bubble made of shimmering glass. The air here is sour with meat. With char. It smells exactly like the massacre it is. He pulls the wax pad and checks his coordinates on the map, marking them expertly, his very heart now a kind of compass.
Scout trembles but doesn’t whine. A hero, that dog.
Together they push into the barrier. The Chief turns back to watch as a pale seam of light traces across their bodies, across the travoise. He tenses, pulls up his rifle, and drops to one knee. But there is nothing within the barrier. It’s as he suspected. Deeper they push into the jungle, the plants weakening, shrunken and malformed, like bananas overripe. Here ancient trees lean like hobbled effigies to some dark and lifeless void. The air is dry. The ground no longer squishes, but cracks. Something is beneath this place, sucking it like a leech.
Vegetable decay and human shit try to choke them. The smell is like gasoline, makes his eyes water. The hum, too, is louder, a deeper octave revealed, like great engines in the earth. His mind dances with numbers, unintelligible to him, for he has no training in binary. Small cramps plague his muscles, and he understands the atmosphere here is different, that the land is being repurposed.
“Poison,” he whispers to himself.
It is not like falling. It feels as if the earth reaches up to grab his knee and pull it violently to its breast. Scout whines as the Chief twists back and with one clean motion pulls his K-Bar from its sheath and hacks the fastening ropes of the travoise.
“Home!” he growls at the dog. “HOME NOW!”
The dog pads backwards unwillingly, panting in short, heavy chuffs, its smaller lungs already in labor.
The Chief picks up a rock and hurls it into Scout’s chest. “HOME GODDAMMIT!”
Scout bolts back across the bush, yelping.
“HOME!” he screams again, too loud.
It is then the earth begins to sing.
***
Colonel Renfrew is drunk. He shouldn’t be but cannot help himself. Words like traitor and court martial wheel through his mind like crows. Andrews sits on the other side of the table with his muddy boots kicked up on a second chair. He’s drunk too. Both men stare at the dead radio dial, willing it to move, or to never move.
The airstrike is prepped, the General’s verbal signature placed there by Renfrew’s lie. At any moment he expects the soft-spoken beanpole of a man to part the tent flap and point those gray eyes like turrets into the center of his military career. But it isn’t General Greeves who has destroyed anything. It isn’t even The Chief. It is Andrews’ limber methodology and Renfrew’s weakness that has edged this bolder to the cliff. And he understands then the danger of The Agency. How these bow-legged frat boys can waltz into the swirling chaos to affix strings to whoever they goddamn please.
“Do you sleep?” he asks.
Andrews lifts one drunken eyelid to be sure he heard right. “I’m human, yes.”
“Well, I mean. Do you sleep well?”
Andrews considers, looks at the radio dial again, and sips from the bottle. “I used to sleep worse than I do now. When I was in college … shit. My dad’s voice would keep me up from two-thousand miles away.”
“What happened to your dad?”
“He died. Greatest day of my life.” Another drink. “All men should live as if their Father is already dead.”
“Would he approve of all this ... meddling?”
“Meddling?” Andrews must hear something in the tone of Renfrew’s voice because he hunches up in the chair the way a cat will hunch when someone unfamiliar enters the room. “What’s your point here, Colonel?”
“I’m just trying to understand what kind of witchcraft they teach you bastards in Langley.”
“Human nature isn’t witchcraft, Colonel. Unless you fancy Carl Jung a warlock. Men are icebergs. The world sees the ugly crag. What hides in the deep is what makes icebergs capable of sinking ships.”
Colonel Renfrew swivels his thick neck like a cannon. “Are you calling me an iceberg?”
“I’m calling you a well-meaning ape. Just like me. Driven by imperatives, some purer than others. You want to understand what a man will do for you? Lay hold of his fears. Fear is our fundamental belief. We think fear is a shield, but fear is an engine.”
The air between them is dry enough to crackle.
“What are you afraid of?” The Colonel sits straighter, plants his heels and feels the satisfying ripple of his quads engage. “Are you afraid of me?”
“I am afraid of intimacy,” Andrews says, and laughs. He laughs so long and hard that he falls over in his chair.
Colonel Renfrew is already standing with his K-Bar drawn, mentally rehearsing exactly what he’ll say, exactly what he’ll tell them, when the needle on the radio spikes to the right.
***
The sound chews through his molecules, bends his light, until the smells and sounds of his holding cell return, all but his vantage, which is far away, suspended in a sea of blackness. He watches the scene as one year from now astronauts will watch the cold blue earth from across the void of space. His code along the cell walls is glowing, beginning to move, to breathe. Within that tight greased script is this moment, is every moment, and him suspended above the data like a cloud. Behold a land of men and all their folly, the script says. Behold sand shaped and cut and reshaped and recut for a virus of communicable ideals, as meaningless to its ancestry as one day it will be to its inheritors, the script says. Until this. A soft churning now in everything. A cocoon of turbulence. It grows. It consumes him.
And on its crest, a memory.
It plunges like a spear and air fills his lungs.
The bending light resolves and he is in his cell again, integrated, his nose to the wall, the nerves of his severed pinky screaming with each movement. He cannot stop the writing, but can feel other, deeper sensations. His skin is tightening in places, loosening in others. His eyes revolt as new spectrums flood in waves. There is a great tugging in his body, as if a thousand strands of spider silk pull him north. His blood has been magnetized.
You are changed.
The voice comes from behind him, where he cannot look. The fluorescent light takes no notice, throws no shadow, but the new spectrums register this monstrosity. A thing immense, suctioning itself to bridge dimensions. He feels its lifeforce boomerang into the matter surrounding them, sees the lights in the barracks shiver.
The Chief cannot stop his hand from writing.
You are my gift.
“What’s happening to me?”
What is a question but a chain? I offer freedom.
“Fuck you.”
It cannot laugh but The Chief senses the closest likeness it can mimic, which is a kind of wet grinding. It makes his teeth hurt, fills his joints with pain.
You will help them see. This is your purpose.
“Fuck you.”
And it inside him, becoming him, filling everything, a merging. And then nothing. The interview. The men staring. His nose bleeding. A cold table. A cigarette. A slow return, but looser in the places once full.
“It’s still in me,” he says to the memory, and watches it shred apart in a dandelion of lights to become the jungle of blackened trees. He breathes again, takes the poison into the places in him changed. Ground fog roils in thick patties, blue in the moonlight. He stands slowly until the singing in the earth retreats. Because it is not in the earth, but in him. A frequency.
The Chief grabs the ropes of the travoise and yanks it overshoulder, leaning into a forward march across a series of cracked rolling hills. His gun clatters against his hip.
“You will not stop me.”
He breathes the exhaust, the fungal powder that is now this hellscape’s soil.
“You will not break me.”
The ground before him arcs into a steep descent and he almost slips, but for the glow that breaks his trance. The crater before him is so vast he cannot see its end. The earth surrounding the crater has piled up, the way debris will pile around a burrowing insect. He looks back, sees the ridges for what they are. What size it must possess. What primacy.
He pulls the radio from his back. “Command, this is Alpha. Is that payload ready for coordinates?”
There is a long pause and he looks up at the barrier, wonders if maybe he’ll have to do this the old fashioned way. He reads the coordinates into the radio. Three times. “I think it’s blocking you. But maybe it’s not blocking me.” He reads it a fourth time before dropping the radio and lifting the travoise. He heaves himself into the crater and climbs down.
It is like hiking into a star.
***
The Colonel writes the coordinates and switches bands, reporting them and confirming with air team, before switching back. “Alpha, come in. What do you see?”
Static.
“Alpha, can you confirm visual?”
Static.
“Fuck.”
Renfrew considers. The Chief read them three times. But what if he’s wrong? What if he lost his mind in that cell and just convinced them of something that will not end his career, but cast it in a light of infamy. Renfrew switches back to the air team. “Air team, what’s your status?”
“What are you doing?” Andrews asks behind him.
“He can’t confirm visual. If he can’t confirm visual…”
“Shut it off.” Andrews says, closer. “Let those birds fly, Colonel.”
But his organs, his muscles, are in knots, making it hard to breathe. What if he’s wrong? What if--
“Birds are in flight,” says Air Team, before the panel goes dark.
Colonel Renfrew smacks it once, twice, before turning to see the plug in Andrews’ hand.
“The mission is live.”
Renfrew curls his lips. Looks down at the exact same time as Andrews to see the K-Bar still in his hand. There is a moment in which time stops, in which two animals possess the space of men.
“What were you planning to do with that, Colonel?”
***
The Chief is a half-mile in when the fog breaks above him into a ceiling. He pauses, runs his hand above him through its milky thickness. Some phenomenon of gas, of pressure. Here the air is hard to breathe, even for him. It’s darker here, hard to see. Sweat runs down his sides.
“What do you mean to do with all that?” the voice is so close that he raises his gun and fires. A nexus of piled mud and stone reveals itself in the muzzle flash. It is the accent of the voice that most disturbs him. Vietnamese, but polished. The voice of a diplomat.
He shines his light at eye level, watches it tremble in his hand over the piled rubble. The architected rubble, his mind corrects. There are uniforms shredded within the mud.
“Identify yourself.”
“I am like you. Given new shape.” There is something about the voice, its direction, that bothers him.
“Who are you?”
“I was once called the Dragon. But now? I am everything.”
He tilts his flashlight down and gasps at the face in the mud, which isn’t mud at all.
Rows of bodies half-meshed with root and stone terminate in all directions. Were he looking down from a great height, he might have seen the pattern of an intricate plexus, like so many nerves.
“We have been given purpose,” the face says, its teeth broken or missing, its neck flayed wide to melt with things vegetable and mineral, before connecting to other pieces, other men. “You are not where you should be. You were given a job.”
“Fuck your job!” The Chief pulls a claymore and shoves it in the Dragon’s mouth, driving it deeper with his heel.
The screams come from everywhere, the pleas and promises, as he runs with the travoise, unspooling the explosives along middens made of meat, impossibly severed, yet conscious, watching with a thousand eyes. He tries to plug his ears. Tries to understand why he is crying, why he is shrieking. Row by row, he lays his wares, until he stands at the terminus, washed in a womb of light.
He feels what once wore him unfold itself into the space between them, feels the loose pieces in him growing taut, filling up. The light is almost impossible to resist.
Almost.
He twists the switch in his hand just as the whipcrack of the sound barrier being broken by jets detonates across the jungle dark.
“Die.”
***
Andrews finally feels the Colonel’s body go limp. He relaxes the sleeper hold, hyperventilating with exhaustion, swimming from the concussion the ox dealt him with the handle of his K-Bar. His head bobbles on his neck as it swivels to behold the shattered radio and broken tables. Jesus, what a fight, is the last thought that burns through the atmosphere of drunkenness before he too passes out.
Both men cannot feel the concussion of force that sweeps through the camp, are not awake to hear the sounds of 623 men being ripped from slumber with the irresistible imperative of self-annihilation.
***
The General stands under the corpses the perimeter lights, now dark. The sound of gunfire doesn’t seem to bother him, a hundred single shots popping from every direction in the camp. So many ghosts, as he is a ghost to be. He wants to understand why, long ago, looking up into the black smoke of Korean shells filled him with a dejavu so powerful he dropped onto his much younger knees and wept. He wants to know why, after burying his son, and again his daughter, both to sicknesses too rare for doctors to cure, a resigned concession stood sentry at the center of his chest until this day. A fatalism not church, nor war, nor the love of an honest wife has done anything to resolve. He is a worm heaved across the loveless decades to hover now before the jungle’s bloody mouth. Those losses, those aches, were only preludes.
He looks up above the trees, into the roiling black nothing that pisses upon everything in this place. His pinched gray eyes relax. And in the wet convexity a glow begins to spread. Slow, so slow, but warm. Inviting. The General’s smile is a child’s smile.
He says nothing as he pulls his pistol and discharges it into his own skull.
***
When the choppers come the next afternoon, they are met by a smoldering ruin. Fires still burn at the clearing. The bodies, the buildings, all gone. A tower of black smoke has been scattered by the wind for a full three miles. It depends across the jungle like a dragon’s tail.
Two men stand amid the ashes with a dog. They wave and run for the chopper doors as soon as the bird is down. Colonel Renfrew and Andrew Andrews harness in Scout before sitting with visible relief.
“Where’s everyone else?” the pilot screams.
“Dead,” Renfrew yells back. “Ambushed.”
The pilot looks at the dog, then back at them. He doesn’t lift off. “What the fuck happened?”
“That’s above your paygrade,” Andrews says. “You can thank me later. Now fly.”
Leave a comment if you like it. Pass it around. Would love to hear from you. @novelistcarsonstandifer
-- A note: I've probably screwed the pooch with Vietnam lingo, geography, and maybe even the Military COC ... but I didn't want to let that stop me from telling the story that was keeping me up at night. Email me if you're a vet and want to help me straighten out the details. Thank you for your service.
You Standifer this one out again, haha? You are word-leashed beast unleashed! The suspense about the dragon and the paranormal weather and missing weapons had me hooked!!!
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