The old wooden floorboard creaked faintly and Cooke winced. One of the soldiers on the veranda jerked to a halt, over-reacting, and a piece of hardware on his harness clinked. They all froze for a moment. It seemed so loud out here, but surely it would go unnoticed by the people inside. Seconds ticked by. Slowly, they resumed their approach. One soldier moved to either flank of the heavy wooden entrance. The Filipino sergeant approached to place small shaped charges at the hinge points.
It all unraveled in an instant. The sound of approaching voices and footsteps from inside the building triggered a push of adrenaline through Cooke’s body. He crouched, breathing deeply to focus his mind through the rush. He brought his rifle to bear on the door as it was flung open, throwing light across the crouching attack force. Cooke closed his eyes because the wash of light through his night goggles would be intense. A shout of alarm, and someone fired a quick burst. Then the door slammed shut. He couldn’t be sure who had fired, but Cooke heard a yelp of pain. He yanked his goggles up and alerted the other two teams. “We’re spotted.” Bantay was laying face up, his torso in the dirt and his legs on the veranda. Aguilar was calling for his medic and simultaneously ordering the blowing of the generator. The other troopers were poised, waiting.
Cooke knew combat viscerally, and everything in him urged movement. This is where lack of experience showed. Aguilar and his men were good, but they had been caught off-guard and now hesitated. Right now, every second that bled away meant that their enemy would be better prepared for the assault. Cooke’s nerves screamed with urgency. He had to get his men moving.
Cooke grabbed Bantay by his harness and hauled him out of the way. Aguilar was fumbling for the detonator, dropped somewhere in the dark. Cooke grabbed him by the shoulder. “No time!” he grunted, swinging his shotgun around and blowing the hinges off the door with two quick blasts.
The blast seemed to shock the troopers back into action. They rocketed through the door like a human torrent. Cooke heard the generator finally cut out and the assault force poured into the farmhouse, leading with their rifles and shouting for the occupants to get down.
The rule was simple: anyone inside holding a weapon was shot. Anyone not immediately compliant with a shouted order to lie down was shot. Muzzle blast was bright in the confines of the farmhouse. A man with an AK-47 screamed at them and loosed off a volley, turning to run even before he stopped firing. A trooper caught him with a tightly spaced pattern—three shots stitched up the side from hip to chest. The terrorists were stumbling over one another, some trying to escape, others lunging for cover. They were disoriented in the dark, and the room was cluttered with overturned chairs.
Good training made the difference. Despite the rocky start, the Filipinos recovered well. The soldiers worked the perimeters, moving quickly with a maximum of force to keep up the shock value. They swept through the three rooms with precision, progress punctuated by the crack and flash of rifle fire. They encountered some resistance toward the back of the building, and Cooke could hear the report of weapons toward the river. A few stray rounds whacked by his head, powder flying off the walls of the farmhouse, but by the time Cooke reached the back of the building, it was all over.
The words crackled over his headset as the other teams reported. “Alpha. Clear.” Cooke stepped out of the back of the house and approached a body that lay sprawled in the grass, his M-4 at the ready. “Bravo. Clear.” Cooke kicked a handgun away from an outstretched hand and nudged the body over. “Charlie. Clear.” Aguilar’s voice sounded both excited and relieved. The lights came back on in the house as someone restarted the generator. Cooke pushed up his night goggles. The man lay in the oblong patch of light that reached out from the back doorway. Dirt was smudged on the man’s face, caked on his lips and nostrils by the blood.
The dead man had been clutching something in one hand, as if protecting it in his last moments. Cooke squatted, picked the videocassette up, and wondered what it contained that was so important. Aguilar approached him.
“The trucks are here, Sergeant Cooke.” The American could see the spill of light from the vehicle-mounted flood lamps. The Filipino forces dragged the dead out of the farmhouse and lay them in rows. Specialists who had arrived with the trucks began to examine the building and its contents. Someone snapped a picture of the dead bodies. The prisoners lay face down while plastic cuffs were yanked tight around wrists. Their mouths were taped shut.
There’s my tape
, Cooke thought idly. The prisoners were hooded and manhandled into the trucks.
Aguilar gestured at the building. “All secured. We’re policing the building now. Our intel was good—there was a meeting of some sort here. They were watching something on a TV screen.”
Cooke held the black oblong videocassette gingerly and showed it to Aguilar. There was Arabic writing on the white label, but it had a dark smear across it. “Probably make some interesting viewing,” the American said. Aguilar nodded, but was more focused on policing the area and seeing to his men. Cooke scanned the area: sprawled bodies in the grass, the wet-eyed, hunched prisoners being trucked away. He smelled blood and cordite and his own sweat. Cooke wondered again what was on the videotape, what had been so important that his team had been rushed into action, but he was used to a world where not all his questions got answered. Most days, it was enough to get through an op in one piece
. Mission
accomplished
, he thought. He straightened up and turned the tape over to one of the specialists working the scene. Then Cooke put it out of his mind and went to see how the wounded sergeant was doing.
I sold my car when they did away with my job at Dorian University. With a life-long and inadvertent genius, I had managed to alienate both upper administration and the faculty there. The two groups were usually at each other’s throat, engaged in an academic blood feud whose mythic origins were by now irrelevant. The struggle gave meaning and shape to their lives, however. They would fight about anything—or nothing, for that matter. It was a refreshing change of pace for them to share a common object of contempt. Or it would have been if I hadn’t been that object.
Academia is an odd place. Stately buildings and ivy, wrought iron fences, and libraries fragrant with the smell of old books. Young people scurry to and from class, fresh, energetic, and naive. But in the long halls and narrow offices, those who work there fester in the dark like overeducated viral agents. Wet-eyed professors with obscure, irrelevant specialties and inferiority complexes browbeat students. Administrators, buffeted by faculty contempt and general inefficiency, sink into venal scheming. Any college campus is a circus, complete with color, entertainment, and the occasional glimpse of something really amazing. At Dorian University, the circus had a large number of clowns and a truly impressive freak show.
I’m bitter, of course. I had worked there as an adjunct for years, the lone specialist in East Asia teaching for a History Department that uncovered the past while vigorously trying to hide its own inadequacies. The individual members of the department had not aged well. They were choleric, flushed with self-importance, and obsessed with the onset of hypertension and other scary hints of mortality. It was possible that the spring of intellectual inquiry had, at one time, flowed in the History Department. I had only known it as the academic equivalent of a salt pan.
A friend had managed to get me an administrative position with the new Asian Studies Institute at Dorian, but it hadn’t lasted long. The faculty weren’t crazy about me. I worked dutifully at my desk all day, Monday through Friday. But my years with Yamashita have changed me. I used to think of myself as an academic pursuing a research interest in the Asian martial arts. I have come to realize instead that I am a martial artist with an advanced degree. It provided me with a sense of distance from my colleagues at Dorian. I couldn’t share the university-wide fascination with minutia and self-importance. The
dojo
has taught me that there are more vital things in the world than convoluted social science fads or the latest campus vendetta. People there found me utterly incomprehensible. And, ultimately, the mad dictator who was Dorian’s president decided to sacrifice me in some administrative gambit I still wasn’t too clear about. Not that it mattered. I was back to part-time teaching, cobbling together a living in a way that was depressingly familiar.
All of which helped to explain why I was late for Micky’s party. Long Island, where we both grew up and he still lived, was the Land of the Car. Those condemned to the netherworld of mass transit did not fare well. On that fish-shaped island, three railroad spines stretch from New York City to points east, but they are designed like pistons to ram huge numbers of commuters into and out of Manhattan during the workweek, nothing more. It makes other complex forms of travel difficult.
But I persevered. I got off the train and stood for a moment on the raised platform, looking down on suburbia. The South Shore of Long Island is flat. You can look out into the hazy distance and see row after row of rooftops, their shingles glittering through the trees. Water towers pop up at intervals in the landscape, pale blue towers standing watch over strip malls and playgrounds. I walked down the concrete steps and into the streets of Micky’s neighborhood.
It was familiar territory. We had grown up in a place much like this one: ranches and cape cods and split level homes lined up like so many dominoes in the developments that scrolled out along the flat, swampy terrain. Belts of scrubby woods separated the neighborhoods. Occasional shallow reservoirs that caught the runoff from the blacktopped streets were set like muddy blue jewels along the railroad line that linked the towns to Manhattan. As you rode the train east out of the city, the flash of green and blue in the window—patches of trees and water—lasted longer and longer as you traveled east through Nassau County. It created the illusion that the area hadn’t been overdeveloped. But it was just that: an illusion.
You could flee Metropolis by train and pass town after town where the details varied, but not by much. The differences were so subtle that more than one commuter who fell asleep on the way home and woke with a start somewhere along the line couldn’t tell from looking out the window which community was which. It was why the seasoned commuters had the litany of towns memorized, so that the call of Rockville Centre, Baldwin, Freeport, Merrick, Bellmore, and so on was a hypnotist’s instruction, a subliminal cadence count that prodded you awake when it was time to get off at your stop.
My walk was a step back into the past. Aboveground pools hulked in yards, sealed up for the winter with chemically aromatic blue plastic covers. Piles of leaves humped along the roadside and kids threw themselves into them, oblivious to dire parental warnings about what lay, wet and slimy, below the surface. I passed the local school, and way out on the playing fields red-faced kids were playing touch football on tired looking grass: I saw someone hook the runner’s coat and swing him to the ground. The sky was clear, and high up you could see the jet contrails leading into Kennedy airport. Some days, I miss it all.
Cars were parked along all the available curb space near Micky’s house. There were three or four in the driveway, packed in tight, with the last one jutting out onto the sidewalk. I walked up the path to the front door. It was a cold day, and the glass in the storm door was fogged up from all the people inside. I could hear the kids screaming in the backyard, despite the stockade fence Micky employed in a vain attempt at kid control.
Inside, there were people all over the place. I have two brothers and three sisters and they all seem bent on providing the world with as many young Burkes as is possible. I kissed my sisters Irene, Mary, and Kate hello and gave my mom a hug. My dad’s been dead for a while now, but I never come to these things and don’t imagine that I catch sight of him out of the corner of my eye. Sometimes I watch my mother sitting at gatherings like this and, in her unguarded moments, I imagine I see the brief light in her eyes, and I know she is feeling the same. Then there is a subtle sagging in her form as the illusion fades. I held on to her then, for a minute, feeling the bird-like fragility of her form.
But her eyes were clear and sharp, when she asked, “How have you been?” She worries.
I grinned and shrugged. “Good, Mom. It’s working out.” My mother has concerns about my career prospects. She was elated when I got the job at the university and was more upset than I was when I got canned. I think she worries that my youngest brother Jimmy will never leave her house and is terrified at the thought that I might return there as well.
I made reassuring small talk with her, letting her know I was keeping busy. I used to assure her I was staying out of trouble, but she talks to Micky and there’s no sense in lying to her. She’d find out anyway.
Deirdre was in the kitchen. She’s got high cheekbones and almond-shaped eyes, and it makes her seem as if she looks at the world with a great deal of skepticism. She married my brother Micky, so the appearance probably has some basis in reality. Dee is a product of the same Irish-American stew as the rest of us. She was smart enough to know life doesn’t always live up to our expectations, but deep down she was good enough never to entirely surrender the hope.
“Hey, Dee,” I said, giving her a peck on the cheek and a bouquet of flowers.
“Aww,” she said, “you didn’t have to do that. . . . ” She was pleased, but I could also see her eyes working. Dee worries about me, too. She’s convinced I’m living on the edge of destitution. I had no doubt that she and my mother would force a shopping bag of leftovers on me when I went home. I could see myself staggering down a train platform in Brooklyn, loaded down with excess rolls, meats, and other surprises. It was somewhat embarrassing. Connor Burke: scholar, martial artist, bagman.