The Race (2 page)

Corey counted down from ten, then pushed the button on their radar-guided missile.

In a split second the sliver was replaced by an enormous explosion, and General Al-Malik turned to particles of humanity above the Iranian border.

Corey spun the plane around.

It was a minute before Joe spoke again. "Four thousand pounds," he said softly. "For sure it's a leak. We're going to have to bail."

Corey grimaced. But there was no time for regrets. "You first," he ordered.

The cockpit opened, and Joe was gone.

Seconds later Corey bailed from the jet, plummeting headlong in a crazy free fall before the chute deployed. The parachute opened, catching air in its billows and slowing Corey's fall to a still-precipitous descent. Beneath him jagged rocks grew larger at daunting speed.

Corey jerked the wires. Too late, he realized. His feet hit rock, and then his right shoulder landed with a sickening crunch, shooting a jolt of nausea through his body. When his head hit rock, Corey blacked out.

He regained consciousness in a daze. Blinking, he saw that he was surrounded by a ragged contingent of Iraqi soldiers, and that the sun was slanted at the angle of late afternoon. Corey saw no officers—the soldier who stepped forward had a nonmilitary stubble, and his eyes betrayed a fatigue akin to madness.

Corey's broken shoulder throbbed. The man stood over him, holding a rifle with both hands.

"Speak English?" Corey rasped.

The man did not answer. With an odd detachment, he grasped his rifle by the barrel, raised it over his head, and brought it crashing down on Corey's left shoulder.

Writhing in pain, Corey asked through gritted teeth, "Where's my navigator?"

The man held out his right arm, silently pointing. "Suicide," the Iraqi said in English. "This black man had no courage."

On a flat rock lay the severed head of Corey's friend, the sole witness to his fatal error of judgment.

THE MONTH THAT followed changed Corey Grace forever.

His captors kept him somewhere underground, in a darkness so profound that he lost any sense of time or place. The only relief from blindness was when they fed or tortured him.

Their technique was primitive but effective: using ropes as a makeshift harness, then hanging him by his broken shoulders until he screamed with pain or passed out from torment and exhaustion. His clothes stank of urine and feces. If Corey could have killed himself, he would have.

At some point one of his faceless tormentors put something, a stool or box, beneath his feet. Later an unseen hand removed the stool and plunged Corey back into agony. The pattern repeated itself, and then again; Corey began to grasp that someone had chosen to perform this secret act of mercy.

But it was not enough. For hours his mind stopped reasoning, and sleeplessness exploded into madness and hallucinations. Desperately, he focused on his wife and daughter, faces in a snapshot imprinted on his brain. "Please," he mumbled, though whether to God or Janice or Kara he did not know, "I'll be better ..."

He began to lose all feeling in his shoulders and arms—and, perhaps, their function. With his last reserves, Corey steeled himself to resist whatever the Iraqis would demand—a taped confession, or information about a weapons system, or some other act of betrayal. Then an even more terrible fear seeped into his consciousness: perhaps his captors wanted nothing more from him than what they were already getting. Deprived of any purpose but survival, Corey felt insanity filling a darkness in which his only sensation was pain, its only relief the dubious act of mercy that was keeping him alive to become subhuman.

Instead, they freed him.

THE PRISONER EXCHANGE took place in a blur. His captors were a rogue element of a disintegrating army, Corey learned; the Iraqis who found and freed him offered vague apologies but otherwise told him nothing. His return to America occurred in a twilight of sleep and exhaustion until, at last, he felt a different Corey Grace occupying his shattered body.

The humor revived, but his careless élan was muted by a deep, unsparing self-appraisal. And the bleakest aspect of this honesty involved Joe Fitts.

In a moment of vainglory, he had traded his friend's life for the chance to kill an Iraqi general. Miserable, he wished he could have those split seconds back, even as he faced another bitter truth: the primal Corey who had survived would not have traded his own life for Joe's. But the pledge with which Corey tried to salve his conscience—that he would imbue the rest of his life with meaning—struck him as a pathetic, even narcissistic way of seeking redemption for the death of a better man.

He could say this to no one. As Corey convalesced at Walter Reed Hospital, Janice treated him with an unvarying kindness that felt to Corey like an act of will. For Corey's part, his penance to his wife lay not in professions of love, promises of change, or gratuitous confessions of infidelity, but a new resolve to see her with clarity and compassion. But what he glimpsed in her kept him from speaking of Joe Fitts: the impeccable consideration with which Janice treated him was not informed by love. She could not even speak the word.

Perhaps, Corey thought, time would heal them, just as it might transform the solemn five-year-old who stood by his bedside into a girl who adored her father. But time was the one thing he had too much of: though his arms and shoulders would function adequately, doctors assured him, Captain Corey Grace would never fly again.

Beyond his family, and self-reflection, Corey was a man without a purpose.

Joe Fitts never left him. Corey dictated letters to Joe's parents, his wife, and even to the five-year-old Maxwell, hoping that, as the boy grew older, Corey's words would bring his father to life. Each letter, an affectionate accounting of Joe and of his stories of their family, was as comprehensive as Corey could make it in all but one respect: the nature of Joe's death, and the reason for it. "All of you," he wrote, "helped make Joe the happiest person I ever expect to know."

Corey revealed his secret to no one. He wondered if that meant there was no one to say it to; or that the permutations of Joe's death were too profound to speak; or that he was simply afraid for anyone to know the truth. Life had given Corey a pass he could no longer give himself—and, it turned out, life kept on doing so.

The president gave him a medal.

THERE WAS ALSO a medal for Joe, of course.

Joe's parents came to the White House with Janie and Maxwell. When Janie met Corey, she embraced him fiercely, as though to reclaim some part of her husband. Gazing up at him, Janie's eyes were moist. "Joe loved you, you know."

Corey tried to smile. "And he loved you more than life. He talked about both of you so much that it was like I was living in your home." He glanced over at Maxwell and saw the boy holding his grandmother's hand—the only child of her only child. "Will he be all right?"

Pensive, Janie considered her son. "In time, I think—there's a lot of love in his life. Every night I read your letter to him." Facing Corey, she added quietly, "That was a kind thing you did for Maxwell, giving him a father who was both a hero and a man. Though the world of a five-year-old's a funny place: right now the hero is more important than the man. When he leaves here wearing Joe's medal, he may believe for a time that was worth the trade."

At this moment, and for every moment until the ceremony was over, Corey wished himself off the face of the earth.

Instead, he kissed Janie Fitts on the forehead and, despite the pain in his shoulders, scooped Maxwell up in his arms. Then, for once, Corey tried to take refuge in his family.

The three adults had come—his wife, mother, and father. And Clay was there, a slim, eager boy of fifteen whose reticence in their parents' presence was outshone by his worship of Corey and his wonder at finding himself in the White House. As the Grace family clustered together in the Map Room, Clay showed an instinctive touch with Kara, eliciting the smiles she seldom granted her father. But the others, Janice and Corey's parents, milled about like strangers awaiting a train that had somehow been delayed.

When the president appeared, he was accompanied by General Cortland Lane, the first African-American to become air force chief of staff.

A lanky patrician who was himself a decorated flier, the president was both gracious and very human. But Corey was just as taken with General Lane. His unmistakable air of command was leavened by a gaze that was penetrating but warm, and his understated manner seemed less military than spiritual—reflecting, perhaps, Lane's reputation for a religious devotion as deep as it was unostentatious. Whatever its elements, Lane's force of character drew Corey to him with a swiftness that was rare.

Drawing Corey aside, Lane congratulated him, speaking in a soft voice that was almost intimate. "I'm sorry about your injuries. And about Captain Fitts."

"So am I," Corey answered. "More about Joe. Sort of makes you wonder if getting Al-Malik was worth it."

Lane gave him a long look. "Never stop wondering. It's the cost of being human." Pausing, he added quietly, "A fuel leak, the report said."

"Yes, sir."

"You're lucky to be alive." Touching Corey's elbow, he said, "I should spend time with Joe's family—"

"Sir," Corey said impulsively, "there's something I need to tell you."

Lane nodded, watching Corey's eyes. "What is it, Captain?"

"I'm no hero. I was like some idiot kid who had to win a video game." Corey paused. "That fuel leak—Joe saw it before I shot down Al-Malik. He wanted me to turn around."

Lane showed no surprise. "I'd guessed as much," he said quietly. "But what do you think I should do with that fact? Or, more important, what would
you
like to do with it?"

Corey shook his head. "I don't know."

"Then let me suggest what you should do—and not do. What you should do is accept this medal, and then pay Joe Fitts as gracious a tribute as you can muster." Glancing toward Maxwell Fitts, Lane's voice was quieter yet. "And what you should
not
do is force his family to swap a hero for a bitter realization.

"You made a judgment in split seconds—that's what we ask pilots to do in war. Then we ask you to live with that. But no one else can tell you how."

Briefly, the general rested a hand on Corey's shoulder, and then turned to greet Joe's family.

OPENING THE CEREMONY, the president spoke with genuine appreciation, commemorating Joe, lauding Corey, and emphasizing their country's gratitude. When it was Corey's turn to speak, he gathered himself, and then expressed his thanks to the president, the military, and the parents, wife, and daughter to whom he had returned.

"I'm lucky for many reasons," he concluded simply. "But I was luckiest of all to know Joe Fitts—not just to have seen his courage, but to have felt the depth of his appreciation for the sacrifice of his mother and father, and for the gift of Janie and Maxwell." Turning to Joe's family, he said, "All of you made him the man that all of us will always love: a man who personifies all that makes our country—whatever its imperfections—worth loving."

Afterward, shrewdly eyeing Corey, the president murmured, "You may have a future in my business, Corey. You could even wind up living here."

Later, in the suite the air force had reserved for them, Corey repeated this to Janice. "Generous," he concluded. "And preposterous."

For a moment, she regarded him in silence. "Is it? I was watching you, too."

"It was all a blur, Janice. I'm not sure what you mean."

She gave him the faintest of smiles. "That's it, Corey. You don't ever appear to know, even when I suspect you do. Other people see you as someone who just
is
."

Corey clasped her shoulders, looking down at her intently. "What I care about is how
you
see me. I'm not the same, Janice. And one important difference is that I value you the way I always should have."

Janice's smile vanished. "Me?" she asked. "Or just the idea of me?"

Corey could not answer.

That night they made love slowly, as though trying to draw feeling from their every touch. Afterward, lying in the dark, Janice said quietly, "I can feel it coming, Corey. They're going to give you something else to care about."

Within a month, a delegation of Republicans came to ask whether Corey Grace, the hero, had any interest in running for the Senate from his home state of Ohio.

ON A CRISP SEPTEMBER DAY THIRTEEN YEARS LATER, WHEN SENATOR Corey Grace met Lexie Hart, the controversy he wished to avoid did not concern his romantic life.

"The actress?" he asked his scheduler that morning. "What's
this
about?"

Eve Stansky, a pert, droll-witted blonde, was amused by his perplexity. "Life and death," she said cheerfully. "Ms. Hart is lobbying senators to vote for stem-cell research."

Sitting back in his chair, Corey rolled his eyes. "Terrific," he said. "The bill's only sponsors are Democrats; it's a direct rebuke to a president of my own party, who dislikes me already; ditto the Christian conservatives, who like me even less. This is a real winner for me." His voice took on a teasing edge. "The election's next year, the nomination is wide open, and you schedule this. Don't you
want
me to be president, Eve? Or are you just indifferent to the fate of frozen embryos?"

"You have to vote anyway, Corey," Eve pointed out in her most unimpressed voice; like the rest of his staff, she called him by his first name. "Unless you're planning to hide that day. And everyone in the office wants to meet her. The least you can do is give the rest of us a little bit of excitement."

"Has life around here really been that dull? Or have you already decided how I should vote, and hope I'll be seduced?"

Eve grinned. "I definitely know how you should vote. And no—_you're_ certainly not dull. I'm just worn out from scheduling dates with girlfriends who've got the half-life of a fruit fly. Here at Fort Grace, we call whoever's the latest 'the incumbent'—except that their terms are shorter."