Eleven Days (25 page)

“Is this meant to make me feel better?”

“Why not?” asked the godfather, leaning in. “Why didn’t anyone
stop to help him?” He was playing along as he considered this monologue a strategic choice on David’s part—a calculated strategy for keeping Sara from asking more questions before their arrival.

“Why not? Because Yoni’s orders had been that no man down should be attended to until all of the hostages were put back on the plane. And the men followed those orders. And they recovered all of the hostages. All but one, one had been taken earlier to a local hospital. Amin’s people murdered her later. But a nation could say after the fact that that mission was a perfect success, because its brightest mind was killed in action but the objective was still achieved. Peres delivered the eulogy.”

“Peres was—” the godfather starts.

“Minister of defense,” David says.

“What is your point, David?” Sara asked quietly.

“My point is that loss is …”

“Loss is?”

“My point is that … that our son was given a task in the service of his country and he rose to the task.”

“He is not dead.”

“I’m simply saying that loss is always part of the equation.”

“Equation of what?”

“Of war.”

“
Is
this a war?”

The plane makes another sharp and fast ascent, and David leans back in his chair. As they hit the cloud line, he starts to talk about what he knows of the last ten days.

But Sara doesn’t care for his history lessons—ancient, near-historical, or of the last week. She doesn’t care about the mission. She doesn’t care that a man that Americans went to kill has been killed, or if and to what extent there were other casualties. She
doesn’t care about the maps and the medals and the “framing” of the story for Fox News. She will not care, when she learns of it, that this mission has resulted in the recovery of an unprecedented cache of intelligence, intelligence that might save lives down the line or perhaps even bring about a nearer end to the current conflicts. She doesn’t care when David tells her that the president of the United States is going to call her. “I want to see my son,” she repeats softly while he carries on—just as he always did—with explanations and speculations. He was devout in his allegiance to fact and erudition: everything had a story, and everything could be explained. He did not seem shaken at all by the fact that a child had gone missing and was kept in God knows what conditions for almost ten days. He sees heroism. She sees mindless sacrifice. He has not seen a downside to the equation. Yet. It is at this point that she realized he is not there for her; he is there to welcome a great hero and to claim him as his own.

*

This is what Sara learns: her son had been flown, severely wounded, to a base hospital at Bagram. “That’s Afghanistan,” David adds when the godfather says the word, even though he’s just named the country, their destination, an hour ago. His inimitable instinct to footnote everything for everyone is still intact, she thinks; his always operating on the assumption others knew less than he did undeterred by the possibility that in these last decades Sara might have grown a little bit, read some books. In this, he had not changed.

He goes on: Jason had gone missing off of a mission, a very high-level mission but one whose details had not yet been released to the press in the hope that first their son would be recovered.
While the story of a missing American had been leaked, Washington claimed to know no more than this, whetting the press’s—and the people’s—appetites; another day in the life of the wars was immediately elevated to a “story.” Sara mentions the reporters at the end of her drive. She mentions that she had heard he had gone missing and that somewhere along the way he had been injured. She says she heard this not from the official channels but from another Team mother, who heard it from her son.

“He would have been leading the assault team,” David says. “His rank, his experience, the nature of the mission. It’s unclear where and when he was injured. And it’s unfathomable that they would leave someone behind so—we can’t speculate.” And then he speculates. “He was probably injured in the house.”

“What house?” asks Sara. And she immediately thinks,
Kill House
.

“They were clearing a house. Or several houses. They were clearing a large compound. They were looking for someone.”

“Who?”

“We don’t know. I don’t know.”

“Where?”

“I don’t know that either.”

“Could you speculate?” It’s hard not be sharp with him.

“Sara.”

“I want to know where he was. I want to picture it.”

“Actually, you don’t.”

“I do.”

“I’ve told you everything I know.”

She could not tell if he was lying. He had pulled his sunglasses back down.

“I do not know where they were,” he repeats, looking down at his hands, fingering his bracelets. He enunciates each word as if
English were a foreign language he had newly begun studying. “I swear to you. But I know that something went wrong, and when it did, the rest of his Team was unable to recover Jason in time. They had to extract the men they could. Jason either escaped or—or it’s possible he was taken in by someone. Locally. It’s possible someone took him in and cared for him. We do not know that yet either.”

“And how did they find him?”

“The intel guys found him. Someone gave him access to a communication device, and he used it. That’s all I know.”

“A communication device?”

“A phone.”

“That sounds alarmingly imprecise.”

“At this time we know very little. But they
found
him, and he was
alive
, and they brought him to the hospital. And as soon as I knew any of this, I set about getting you to him. I worked very hard to try to get you to him before the story was released in any way to the media.”

“How—how did you know all of this?”

David stays silent.

“How did you get me here? Why am I here?”

“I knew his condition was critical.”

“His condition is critical?”

“He is going to be all right, Sara.”

David explains that he had been following the progress of the mission and its aftermath thanks to an old friend in the Teams, now at JSOC. David had been among the very first to learn that Jason was the American who was missing. He had been the one to raise holy hell to be sure Sara was notified a.s.a.p., even before they had perfect information. They sit in silence for a while. Anita Ekberg brings plates of chocolates and bread. David asks for marmalade,
and a jar of marmalade appears. Sara wonders whether, if she asks for her son, they could pull him from the wood-paneled cupboard, too.

“David?”

“Yes?”

“Where have you been?”

“Pardon me,” he says. And he stands up. “Just give me a minute.” And goes to talk to the captain.

When he returns, he has an apple in his hand, and a knife. He hands it to her. He knows she can peel it, that it will give her something to do with her hands. Like an infant, he prefers his fruit without the skins. And she dutifully complies, noting that the knife is sharper than any one she has at home. He starts over again, artfully eliding her question.

“I saw him.”

“What?” she says, and looks up.

“Mind the knife,” David says. “I saw him three months ago.”

“Where?”

“Germany. His team was transitioning and I ran into him in the airport.”

Sara puts down the apple. “You ran into him?”

“Yes. And Sara, he—he doesn’t know it was me. I didn’t tell him who I was. I thought it was too much.”

“Well, that was an adult decision.”

“But I talked to him. He’s—God, he’s great, Sara.”

“I know my own son.”

“Sara, he was ready. He was ready for this.”

“How can you say that? Did he talk about himself, or did you just talk at him?”

“He talked a little bit. But I saw him with his guys. I know how to read that dynamic.”

“What does that mean?”

“It means he was ready.”

“He was ready to die?”

David swills the ice in his drink. He looks out the window. And without looking back at her he says, “Yes. He was ready to die for something he believed in.”

“How would you know anything about that?”
she wants to say. And then without saying anything, she can feel his disapproval shifting the space between them. How does he do it? How does he commit the crime, then make the victim feel like the criminal?

David takes his coat off. He rolls up his sleeves. He reaches across the table and takes Sara’s hands in his. And he talks about Mecca. He tells Sara why he loves this part of the world. He has become spiritual, an effect that—maddeningly—makes him more attractive as, having lacked it before, he was always a bit too hyperconcerned with the now.

He tells Sara about falling in love with the way of life he found “here,” and why he decided never to leave it. He tells her about lying in a Saudi hospital, having almost died. He says he began “for the first time in my life” to consider what “I really wanted.” He explains how this was made possible through the generosity of a few local, well-connected friends. He tells her that the lies he had to tell those years ago felt “Augustinian.”

“Pardon?” Sara says.

“You know, in the service of a higher purpose.”

“Right. ‘Make me chaste: but not yet,’ ” Sara says.

“Exactly,”
he says, as if she’s just aced an oral exam he was administering.

He talks about falling in love with someone with whom he had shared the last decade, and how she left him abruptly (“a taste of my medicine”). He talks about how this experience made him
think about the things he had left behind and made him miss his son.

“Miss your son,” Sara says.

“Yes!” he says, as if he’s divined the solution to a riddle, rather than stabbed at the center of her heart.

And he tells her how he got back in touch with the guys who subsequently gave him the tips that allowed him to happen to be at the airport in Germany that day, and about how the guys had told him how proud they were, already, of his son, the man his son had grown to be.

Sara is silent for a while until he says, “It’s not breaking any law.”

“Pardon me?” she says, firmly.

“It’s not breaking any law to change your life, Sara. To start again.”

But when he takes her hands and starts to talk about how faith will carry them through anything, Sara pulls them back, and shakes them in the air, like he’s made her dirty. She stops listening. He keeps talking. And although she feels betrayed and in shock, something in her is still deeply comforted not to be alone in this moment. Now this man is her only family. And like all the moments in life that defy the dictates of reason, this one morphs from the shocking to the scenic in the space of an hour, like a soap opera plotline.

*

“Thus endeth the lesson?” she asks, finally, when he pauses for air. His eloquent riffs on mourning rituals and the Hajj are wasted on her; she knows him too well and can only experience his speeches as variations on a theme, his only theme, cool proselytizing. Yet even given this, she still experiences a familiar pull, a movement
toward rather than away from him. She would go with him now if he asked her to.

David leans forward and lowers his voice so the godfather cannot hear him when he says, “You look exactly the same.”

And she doesn’t say anything, so he raises his voice and continues. And then he moves to sit with the godfather. She can hear them. “So. Their HC-130s flew low, so low, over Africa that night; they didn’t want to be detected.” He is making his hand into a plane, sliding it just an inch above the table, along the top of the mosaic. She sees now, sitting back, what it is: it’s a map. “That was part of the reason the mission was so high risk; they were flying into an ostensibly friendly nation, but that nation was harboring terrorists. Amin was a liar. A narcissistic, psychopathic liar—the worst kind. Alas, not a rare breed. So the Israelis made the decision not to tell Amin their plans. But they were cleverer than even that. They kept Amin on the phone throughout the planning of the mission and leading right up to its launch. They kept him on the line with one of their great—retired—generals, someone he knew, someone he trusted. They kept him under the impression that this general was negotiating for their government, without ever saying so, of course. They let him think he was in the position of power. They let him think that if things went well, he would be seen as a hero. They coddled him. They delayed him. They prevented him from imagining that they were simultaneously planning one of the most dangerous and high-risk operations in the country’s history.”

“Amin—” says the godfather.

“Amin believed he was engaging in a sophisticated back channel. He believed that these late-night conversations with the general were assurance that he had the Israelis lying down. But they had him exactly where they wanted him. Like a fish on a line.”

“And the team went in at night.”

“And it wasn’t until that general called him up—at his home—and woke him the morning after the raid that Amin knew something had happened.”

“What did he say. The general. To Amin.”

“He probably said, ‘Congratulations.’ ”

“Congratulations.”

“Yes, ‘Congratulations.’ And ‘Thank you. Thank you, General Amin. We are so grateful to you for your help.’ ”

“And Amin had no idea what he was talking about.”

“None.”

“Impressive,” says the godfather.

“Yes. The raid was carried out swiftly; they weren’t on the ground much more than an hour, I don’t think. Because once Amin had the sense something was happening, everything was over. A nation coupling power and psychosis is the thing we have most to fear.”

“I would think so,” Sara says. She has moved to stand over them.

“I know so,” says David.

As the men keep talking, Sara realizes she has not felt this much emotion since the day Jason left on his first deployment. Before that, it was the day of his decision to join the Teams. And before that, the day of his acceptance to the Academy. And before that, 9/11. Further back than that, her mind will not go.