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“You thought what?” I rasp.
She blinks. A tear falls. “I don’t know.” She rubs her eyes. “I’m probably embarrassing myself. I think I did already.” She looks down at her—my—jacket. Her face reddens, and another tear falls. “This is how I’ve always been. I get so dumb and reckless. It’s been even worse with you.” She turns around, her back to me, her face lifting so I think her eyes are on the treetops.
“I’m sorry.”
I see her hands clutching her elbows. She’s hugging herself.
Before I have to choose—to go to her or not—she turns to face me. “I’m the kind of person who gets carried away. I think tonight I did that and I won’t do it again.”
She takes my jacket off, then pulls it to her chest.
“I’ll wash it,” she says, moving toward her door. She turns around and looks me in the eye when she gets on the top step. “Still friends?” she asks.
She gives me a tiny smile, her tongue sweeping over her lower lip as it begins to fade.
This is my out.
This is the moment that I close this door. I tell a lie. My girlfriend died—the Burka-wearing one. Now is the wrong time. I’m a mess. Not well enough to get entangled. Anything.
Words are clogging in my throat; the wrong words. I swallow them back. I nod, hoping my eyes don’t scream too loudly.
“Always.”
FOUR
BARRETT
September 20, 2011
Dove is at the highest point in our overwatch formation, on an outcropping above my head, when the call comes through the Porta Phone.
“Pack up shop and go back to the insert point,” McVay tells him.
“Uhh…what?”
“You heard me.” McVay is an asshole. “Get moving.”
Over the mountain peak. Back to the field we ID’d back at base as our entry and exit point.
Dove doesn’t tell McVay that the highest of all our high-value targets— a top-ranking al-Qaeda officer we’ve code named Ugly Fuck—has just shown up in the village down below us. Dove himself has not yet noticed this.
We’ve been waiting on Ugly Fuck for weeks up here in the barren Hindu Kush, a stark, 25,000-foot-elevation mountain range between central Afghanistan and northern Pakistan. Two of our team’s best assaulters have been on the ground for the last four days, but we got no warning about Ugly Fuck’s appearance, so they clearly didn’t have the intel for it.
Ugly Fuck is on a tall camel, fifth in a long caravan of rocket mortar and AK-bearing beasts that’s trickling into one of the most Taliban-friendly Pashtun villages.
During the thirty minutes I use to photograph Ugly Fuck’s bearded mug and document his location, Dove struggles to signal me. I don’t notice the pebbles he’s lobbing at my head because my mind is in the game.
I pull some pale, dry-looking faux grass from my pack and stuff it in my camo cloak, then start the slow scuttle to Breck, due west and a little lower down the barren mountain face.
I don’t want to risk electronic comm, not yet, and this is how we’ve planned things.
Dove is at the top left of our square, and I’m at the bottom left. Since Dove has comm on this mission, I’ll rendezvous with Breck at the bottom right point of our square. Breck and I will make a plan, which Breck will take up to the square’s top right corner—Bluebell—while I go up to Dove. Who, if things go correctly, will make a call to base to coordinate a backup plus withdrawal.
If we’re on our game, this should be achievable in less than twenty minutes.
About the time Breck is laughing silently at the big, awkward bush scuttling up to him, Dove, whose sole mission at this point is telling us we have to leave, is finding my spot empty.
After a couple minutes, Breck and I determine a course of action and part ways, me returning to my spot, from which I’ll head up to Dove, and Breck picking his way up a cliff face to inform Bluebell of our plans.
