Now and Again (51 page)

She wheeled the bicycle to the top of a low rise and looked around her at the green fields of wheat waving gracefully in the breeze. Please take care of Will, she thought again, but this time it wasn't so much a prayer to God as to the other people out there, people who might lend a hand to a stranger in time of need.

In the distance, a straight ribbon of highway stretched all the way to California. On either side of it, a flock of oil derricks bowed and preyed on the rich Carboniferous sludge deposited millions of years before, when Oklahoma was a steamy and suppurating swamp. Behind her, the double-domed Church of the New Incarnation had doubled again—it was sprawled on its back giving comfort to the sky and it was also flipped upside down, drowning in the reflecting pool. As she surveyed the familiar landscape, she wondered again if she had done any good at all, and if she had, had she done right? When she had started down this path all those months ago, she had assumed that things would be clearer than they were and that she would be able to look back on her choices and accomplishments with certainty and satisfaction. Partial knowledge, she thought. It was all anybody had. Overhead, a plane tipped its wings at her, filled with people who had other problems and other destinies awaiting them. As she watched it disappear into the distance, a hawk plummeted from the heavens and rocketed up again with a field mouse in its talons. She was sorry for the little creature, but there was nothing she could do for it. Even she knew that saving too many mice would doom the hawk. The world was paradoxical, and if there was a solution to the paradox, it wasn't for her to know.

T
he morning was still and hot, giving the desert a timeless, lacquered look. Will took out the controller and attached the joystick before lifting the Parakeet he called Polly out of its case. It weighed six ounces and only resembled a bird in the rounded fatness of its body and the beaklike sensors attached to its head. Instead of wings, it had four rigid appendages topped with rotors for vertical lift and a stabilizing rotor in the middle of its back. The payload port on its belly was fitted with a camera that relayed signals to the computer pack that Nate carried over his shoulder.

“I kinda wish I'd been issued one of those Groundhogs,” said Nate, nodding to where third team was climbing into the Humvee that would follow behind a robot that resembled a mini tank. “Those things are awesome.”

“I don't know,” said Will. “I think the Parakeet is cool.”

“It doesn't have a gun,” countered Nate. “That's a major negative right there.”

“But the Groundhog can't fly. Anyway, UAVs are where it's at if we want good jobs when we get home.”

Will's platoon had been training an incoming unit to take its place—first the training exercises of two days before and now the mission to find a downed helicopter—and then he'd be leaving Polly with Nate and going home. Not that going home was without its complications.

Nate hoisted the computer pack and strapped it on while Will flipped a switch to activate the camera, which he could toggle between wide-angle and high-resolution zoom. When Nate said he was ready, Will tossed the Parakeet into the air as Nate manipulated the joystick and nudged the throttle with his thumb. The bird took off and the two men watched until it was only a tiny, glittering speck.

“Let's roll,” said Will, climbing into a Humvee with the rest of his team.

He patted his thigh pocket. Through the heavy canvas fabric he could feel the flat photographs he carried with him along with a small jumble of other things. He had given the magnifying glass and Transformers robots to some local children, but he still had the razor blade in its paper wrapping. He still had the twist of sturdy wire, the extra paracord, and a tiny pair of pliers he had won off another soldier in a poker game.

“The girlfriends?” asked Nate.

Will smiled and said, “Yeah, man. They're my COG.” But now that he was going home, his center of gravity didn't feel quite so centered. For one thing, his parents had moved to California, and for another, he was feeling a little guilty about leading both Dylan and Tula on.

“I can't believe you have two,” said Nate. “Anyone with two should be required to share.”

“Very funny,” said Will. “But I'll let you look at the pictures later if you're good.”

As they drove, Nate told a story about a soldier whose girlfriend had dumped him and asked him to send her picture back. “He didn't want her to know how badly his feelings were hurt, so he collected all the pictures of women he could get his hands on from his friends—pictures of their girlfriends, of their wives and aunts and sisters—over fifty in all—and he sent them to his ex with a note that said, ‘I can't remember which one you are, so please take your picture out and send the rest back.'”

“Ha, ha,” said Will. And then he said, “You can see the pictures, but you can't have them.”

“My girlfriend didn't dump me,” said Nate.

“That's because you don't have one.”

“Technicality,” said Nate. “Anyway, I've got Polly now.”

Will focused his binoculars. “The wind's coming up,” he said. “That's one of the things you've got to be careful about.” As soon as he said it, the Parakeet was dive-bombed by a giant hawk. They watched helplessly for a few seconds, and then the hawk flew off. “Hawks are another thing,” said Will.

“That was a close call,” said Nate. He allowed the Parakeet to fly ahead while Will scanned the sky with his field glasses and took readings on the wind. Their search sector extended west to a series of low hills, and beyond the hills to a road. Early that morning a helicopter had gone down, and the mission was to find it. What looked like a stretch of flat terrain could be seen on the portable monitor to be riddled with rocks and fissures, making the going too tough for the Groundhog, which would drive around and enter the search area from the north. Twenty minutes in, the screen showed a one-lane track winding between some boulders, so they steered along that until Nate zoomed in on what appeared to be a vehicle that had fallen into a shallow fissure.

“Is it one of ours?” asked the leader of the new team, whose name was Robbins.

“I'm guessing it is,” replied Will. “Hey, Nate. Get Polly to circle back around so we can take a better look.”

Nate manipulated the controller, and ten seconds later the screen was filled with a close-up of the vehicle, which seemed to be abandoned. Except for a helmet lying on the ground and a second set of tire tracks, there was no evidence of the people who must have left it there.

“What do you think it means?” asked Nate.

“I'm guessing it was part of the training exercise,” said Robbins.

Will hadn't thought of this. “Yeah,” he said, “maybe it was.”

Together the team came up with reasons why the vehicle might be abandoned: (a) it was part of the training exercise; (b) it had broken down in the last few hours and been temporarily abandoned; (c) it was bait for unsuspecting soldiers who would approach to find it booby-trapped; and (d) it was bait and being covered by hostile snipers who were hidden somewhere nearby. Will remembered the answer elimination techniques. He remembered that sometimes there was only one correct answer and sometimes there was more than one. He remembered there was always one answer that seemed right but wasn't, and that was the one they called the sucker choice.

“If it's D,” said Nate, “Polly should be able to see the snipers.”

“Keep circling,” said Will. “She should be able to see the bomb too, if there is one.”

Nate worked the directional button and adjusted the resolution of the output. “If there's a bomb, it's hidden pretty well.”

“Could someone be hunkered down in that gully? Or hiding in those hills?”

“The hills are covered with boulders—someone could be hiding anywhere. But I guess we can confirm or eliminate answer A by radioing back to base,” said Robbins.

The radio operator spoke into his handset, but the line was filled with static and he couldn't get through.

“We're missing something,” said Will, aware of an unfamiliar shimmy in his belly. “It's the helmet that bothers me. What's that helmet doing there?”

“I'm thinking it was part of the training exercise,” said Robbins. “That's the only way the helmet makes sense.”

“Try the radio again.”

Will followed Nate out of the vehicle for a better look. The sky was the color of metal. For some reason, he could feel ghosts all around him, and he wondered if they were real ghosts or only figments of his imagination. It was probably just the wind, which was blowing in gusts and eddies. He took the controller from Nate and brought Polly in low, but a crosscurrent pushed her off course. “The wind is Polly's biggest thing,” he said. He struggled with the controls and was relieved when he got a visual—a bright spot against the ragged aluminum sky. “Okay, I see her now,” he said, but the wind was scuffing up dust, making visibility difficult, and he immediately lost sight of her again. “Hey, Nate,” he called out, “do you have a visual on Polly?”

The two men scanned the sky. Then they bent their heads over the computer screen to see what Polly was seeing, which would give them a clue to where she was. The feedback video bucked and whirled as Polly hit a trough and then settled as the stabilizing rotor took hold.

“Freeze that!” said Will when the output showed something moving in the distance, but the camera had already lost whatever it was.

“I sure wish we had one of those Groundhogs,” said Nate.

“Shit! Switch back to the wide-angle view.”

“No, wait,” said Nate. “Look at this.”

Now they could see the ravine on the screen, and the helmet, and the vehicle.

“Check the coordinates,” said Will, and Nate said, “It's about half a klick north of our current position.”

Will tried to circle the Parakeet back over the ravine, but the wind was blowing in circles and swirls of dust obscured the view. A minute passed and then another. “Nothing,” said Will. “I don't see a fucking thing.”

“Should we go and check out the vehicle ourselves?” asked Nate.

There were only two possible answers to the question. After the
Turn of the Screw
quiz, Mr. Quick had said the best answer was both, but that clearly wasn't an option here. “I don't know,” he said. “I wish the radio was working.”

“What if there are men inside?”

“We didn't see signs of any men, and the helmet is too far from the truck to have fallen. It seems like it was planted as part of the exercise. Hey, Robbins. Can you try the radio again?”

“Get Polly to go back around,” said Robbins.

Will nodded, but Polly was nonresponsive.

“Maybe the hawk got her,” said Nate.

Inside the Humvee, the radio crackled to life. Will couldn't make out the words, but he heard Robbins say, “Roger that,” before calling out, “The vehicle was part of the exercise. They want us to bring it in.”

While the driver navigated between the boulders in the direction of the abandoned vehicle, Will marked the coordinates of Polly's homing device. “She's up there,” he said, pointing to the line of hills. “We can go after Polly while you all deal with the Humvee.”

“We'd better check with base,” said Robbins.

The signal was better now that they were higher, and a second later the captain's voice came through, relaying instructions from the busy operations center: “Third squad found the helo, but do not leave that bird in the field. I repeat: do not abort.”

The homing device indicated that Polly was approximately one klick away from the stranded vehicle, which Will figured would take them just under the second ridge, about halfway to the road. “You heard the man,” he said to Nate, who cracked a grin and laughed a little, as if he had thought of something funny. Then Robbins said, “Go get that bird,” which was when Will realized he would miss Polly and the desert and the team.

The two men adjusted their goggles and patted their weapons. They made their way along a gully before climbing to the top of the first hill. The desert stretched around them, hazy and brown and kind of corrugated where the wind had made patterns in the dirt. Below them, Robbins and the others were attaching a tow bar to the stranded vehicle. Will pointed down the backside of the hill. “She's somewhere down there,” he said.

The wind was howling now, the air gauzy with particulates—unless it was the ghosts Will was still imagining. “Do you believe in ghosts?” he asked.

“Hell, no,” said Nate, but he didn't sound too sure.

Will could imagine the ghosts wailing and screeching and saying their prayers. He could imagine them telling their stories—as a warning, as a history lesson, as a way not to be forgotten, as a final comment on life and futility and all there was to be won and lost. He too would have stories to tell when he got back home. If he found the words for them and if they were worth telling. If people cared enough to listen. That morning, he had added a small notepad to his pocket just in case. Just in case he needed to write something down. Something final, he thought now, because it was his last mission before going home and because the shimmy was back and because he suddenly had a bad feeling about things. But then he countered the negativity by saying “Spider-Man” quietly, to himself, and the bad feeling peeled away, leaving his nerves steady and his senses stripped and sharp.

He tapped his pocket to make sure his knife was there, along with the two girlfriends. He thought about how he loved them both and how things that seemed crazy at home made perfect sense in Iraq—and vice versa. Anyway, he'd figure it out. He tried the launcher again, but Polly wasn't responding. The wind was almost shrieking now, filled with fine dust and occasional larger particles, and even though it was hot, a deep chill ran from his stomach to his toes. “Something bad happened here,” he said. “I can feel it.”

“This is a war zone,” said Nate. “What did you expect?”

When the wind died down, it was hot under the heavy gear, and the rocky terrain made the going difficult, but still they put one foot in front of the other, three feet per step, 1,312 steps per klick. In the distance, Will thought he saw a cloud of thicker dust rising skyward, as if a vehicle was coming toward them, but then the wind picked up again and there was dust everywhere, and anyway, whatever he thought he'd seen was obscured by the brown crust on his goggles and also by the brow of the second hill.

“Nah,” said Nate when he mentioned it. “How would a vehicle get up here over all these rocks?”

“What is it, then?”

“Hell, I'm saying it's third squad. The sergeant said they found the helo.”

Will worked the controller, hoping he could get the bird to launch itself if it was grounded, but Polly wasn't moving. “I wonder what the deal with Polly is.”

“I hope she's okay,” said Nate.

The cloud of dust was bigger now. There was something there, and it was getting closer. “Yeah, it's got to be third squad,” said Nate. He raised his field glasses to his eyes. “I guess they're coming to help us out.” And then he said, “Holy shit,” and then he started to run, which was difficult on the rocky terrain. And then, for some reason, he stopped running and fell face down in the dirt, and Will's first thought was, It's a sniper after all.

“Hey, man, you okay?” He dropped down beside Nate before looking up to see what Nate had seen. He focused and refocused—far out and then closer in—registering that Nate wasn't breathing and that he had a hole in his face and that he wasn't as heavy as Will had expected him to be, but otherwise not seeing anything he hadn't seen before, only hearing a low, motorized hum and thinking it was Nate, whirring back to life. Or maybe it was Polly, finally responding to the controller and lifting off. Where was Polly when he needed her? Where was his extra set of eyes and ears? And then he did see what Nate had seen: the swivel gun mount of a Groundhog coming up and over the second ridge.