“Your point?” Britt asked. She shared her brother’s face, Jean-Jacques thought, sharp and angular and green eyes like minerals that bored through the twilight. There was something more withdrawn about her, though. Jean-Jacques couldn’t decide if she was shy or stuck up.
“The middle-schooler who shot up Spokane last month,” Sebastian answered, “was inspired by the new Management of Savagery. A book written thirty years ago to oppose our military occupation of Lebanon got a loner American teenager to kill his science class. The point, I guess, is that extremism translates well. Just have to change the nouns.”
Long, fraught seconds passed. No one said anything. Someone coughed.
“We never heard of that,” Jean-Jacques finally said. Who was this guy? He’d never even been a soldier, let alone a Ranger. And why was he always wearing those sunglasses? Jean-Jacques wanted to snatch them from his stupid, smug face. “Hundreds of raids. Hundreds of enemies killed and captured. We’d know.”
“Would we, though?” Something cold swept over Pete’s face. “We bag and tag. Drop ’em at work camps or the morgue. Not much follow-up after that.”
“Yeah, Dash, not everything’s like the gook horde,” Flowers said, using the insult the rest of the military had fastened on the International Legion. The original Legionnaires had mostly come from somewhere in Asia, promised a green card and monthly pay in return for occupying Vietnam. The nickname had stuck, even for later enlistees like Dash. “It’s important to ask the locals questions, not just blow up everything. Help them help themselves.”
Flowers was attempting to impress Pete’s sister, Jean-Jacques could tell, and he’d cut down that effort in short order. First, though, he wanted to figure out what Pete had planned for them. So he asked, direct.
“Close with and destroy the enemy,” Pete said. His words were straight, but flaring nostrils suggested irritation. He never liked being questioned in front of others. “Same as always.”
Big man doesn’t know anything more or anything else, Jean-Jacques realized. Just wants us to think he does. He tilted his head and frowned, trying to square this Pete with the sergeant he’d met in the Rangers. Not many ex-Legionnaires made it all the way to the Rangers, so he’d pulled Jean-Jacques aside on day one to tell him he belonged there, had earned his way there the same as anyone, and if anyone said different, to let him know and he’d handle it. That had meant something to Private First Class Saint-Preux, being told that. Pete had brimmed with the same raw energy then, but it’d been sharper, more concentrated. Always about the next business trip, the next round with the wogs, how to get better, stronger, more lethal. Which C-list actress in Hollywood changed him? Which talent agent had chirped into his ear? Though blaming someone else was cheap, Jean-Jacques thought. And too easy. Pete hadn’t chosen to become a Volunteer, not exactly. But he had chosen what to do with it.
They all had.
“I was wondering.” It was the hostage again, pointing to the smoke across the river. “This has got to be about the Abu Abdallah trial. Right?”
That made some sense. Jean-Jacques hadn’t been following the trial closely but what he knew suggested clusterfuck. The terror cleric’s group had splintered into a dozen factions since they declared jackpot on the old man with the piss bag on the little island-crag north of the Barbary Coast. All the foreign policy experts agreed: jihadism could not survive without its leader. The terror wogs needed him and so did the ideology. Jean-Jacques looked again across the river. He figured the big smoke must be coming from Vietnam Victory Square. Where they’d toppled the spire.
The fucking hostage is right on this, he decided. Goddamn it.
He looked around the group, registering what the others thought. Abu Abdallah was a name that carried meaning for them all. Flowers seemed to be glowering at something else across the river, beyond the smoke. The hostage kept twitching his leg, like a dog who couldn’t find the right spot to scratch. And the Swensons? They’d both gone sullen and white-hot mute.
Oh yeah, Jean-Jacques thought. Their papa.
Abu Abdallah had evaded capture for years, but his deputies hadn’t. The Swenson children realized during those trials how different they were. Pete had shared that once with the other Volunteers, along some dusty battle fringe. His sister didn’t find forgiveness, precisely, but vengeance proved too much. She let go to live. Not Pete. He found himself in that vengeance, watching men who’d helped kill his father get sentenced to death themselves. It gave a boy something beyond grief. It gave a boy purpose.
That boy had become a superman, and the superman looked up again on the rooftop, one eye pulsing through the dim light, the other fading into it. He spoke yet again.
“All the more reason,” he said, “to put ourselves to use.”
What caused Jean-Jacques to snap wasn’t what Pete said, but how. He’d said it like he was speaking with strangers, with a rapt audience of grateful citizens. He’d said it like the acting coach in Hollywood had taught him to, exaggerated and slow. When did a man’s power and confidence in himself become too much? When did a man’s need for more, ever more, always more, become pathetic?
“This is nonsense, Pete.” Jean-Jacques spoke fast, liquid kreyol in his head, heat on his tongue. “We should be getting ready for deployment, not caring about this. Not trying to be anything more than we are.
“You think this is pretend, some adventure? Supers aren’t solutions. They’re not gifts. We got them because some asshole dropped a bomb on us when we was going after Abu Abdallah’s wife and infant. Remember? How we had to justify it by pretending to be saving this idiot?” He pointed to Sebastian. “Tripoli was a bullshit mission. Bullshit missions get bullshit results. Thirty-seven of our brothers died there. Remember them? This Justice stuff has jammed your brain. We are not special. We are soldiers.”
Jean-Jacques expected Pete to yell back. So did the others; he could tell by the way they began admiring the ground. But instead the large man sighed and looked over at the falling summer sun. Against the horizon his profile seemed to swell, and he stepped into the half-shine. This delicate change in angles and atmosphere shot out jagged shadows and arrows of light, causing everyone else to step back or lift an arm to ward off the glare. Pete noticed none of it.
“How?” he asked, just loud enough for the others to hear. “How’d it get like this?”
It was the question of their time. How had it gotten like this? Where had it all gone so wrong?
Maybe everything had gone awry after World War II, Sebastian offered, when America decided it would be responsible for protecting the free world while also deciding what counted as “free.” Or maybe it’d been Vietnam, and the decision to fight a ground war over an independence movement with heavy communist flavorings. Maybe Nixon’s Grand Bargain had turned it all, his secret plan with Mao that ended China’s support for the north in exchange for Taiwan. Without that, things might’ve been okay.
“Ancient history,” Britt said. She pointed to Beirut. Dawn of the Mediterranean Wars. A fatwa from that spoiled young cleric soon to self-brand as Abu Abdallah. Once American warfighters crossed that seawall and stayed, it changed the whole Near East. No Beirut—well, no Shi’a Awakening. None of the coups. No need to chase ghosts in turbans all the way into the Balkans.