The Woman Who Lost Her Soul Hardcover (64 page)

Off at the end of the lake he watched Ben set his stance for his second shot and swing
and he had to admit he was growing to love this moment as well, watching the liftoff
of the balls soaring to their apogee, something in his spirit flying up with them.
Then, coming toward him down the bank, he heard the crunching approach of footsteps
on the patchy red clay and an exasperated release of breath. The undersecretary seemed
unusually agitated today, excited but prickly.

What’s the verdict, Ev? Did it roll in?

No, sir, said Burnette, unshouldering the bag of clubs. Calling his daughter Jackie
was one thing but he could not bring himself around to the winking assininity of addressing
Steven Chambers as Arnie. It just felt awkward, and the operational logic wasn’t justified,
at least when Burnette had been on the scene.

I mean, yes, sir, he corrected himself. It’s in the water, but I don’t think it rolled.
See, he pointed as Chambers stopped next to him. It’s there about four feet out.

Okay. Fuck.

What would you like me to do?

Ev, I want you to be open to your own potential.

You’re talking Haiti, sir?

I’m talking your potential. Forget about Haiti. Haiti made you unhappy.

Yes, sir. I don’t much like being on the wrong side of things.

Don’t overthink it, Ev. Sometimes the right side of things doesn’t feel much better.
Let that second-guessing go. I’m going to put you in a stronger position for fixing
what ails you. Something hands-on and out front. You ready for that?

Yes, sir. Thank you.

Now, would you mind terribly? Can I ask you to wade out there and get my ball?

Burnette bent over to untie his running shoes. Above them on the knoll of the fairway,
the thwack and the shout—not
Fore!
but some foreign word clearly meant as a warning—arrived a second before the ball
cleared Eville’s head by inches, whistling past to splash twenty yards out into the
lake. The golfer, today’s exotic rotating fourth, flapped his arms in a dismissive
manner that seemed to say,
Calm down
,
children,
and barked out an apology in broken English. His name was Drako or Draco something
and he had been there waiting for them after the first nine holes, sitting in a black
SUV with USG tags parked in front of the pro shop. All Burnette knew about the guy
after a couple holes was that he was an officer in the Croatian army, some updated
version of hypermuscled Ostrogoth from the Balkans, dressed in black paratrooper pants
and jump boots and a taut black T-shirt that made his chest look like a gorilla’s.
Beetle-browed, shaven-skulled, small ears, blunt nose, frosty blue eyes, he could
have been a prototype for the chain mail and broadsword crusader, not the prince but
one of the lesser-born knights, in a video game popular with the troops down at Bragg,
and, despite his intimidating brawn, or perhaps precisely because of his ridiculous
strength, the worst duffer imaginable. Burnette had him sighted as a special forces
nut job from a part of the planet that excelled in nut jobs
,
and it was anybody’s guess, exempting the three gentlemen out here who knew everything
there was to know, what he was doing in Virginia.

Now there’s a fucking maniac, said the undersecretary, gazing up the hill at this
fellow. Ev, I think you’re going to find working with this guy interesting.

Draco Vasich was a colonel in the intelligence division of the Croatian military and
apparently an associate or asset or perhaps just a friend of Steven Chambers. Their
familiarity, their chummy interaction, had made Burnette begin to ponder the undersecretary’s
thought process and decision making, his impulse toward matchups. Maybe he was only
imagining it, but he thought he could discern an emergent pattern—Dawson’s son Eville,
Chambers’s own daughter, this guy Vasich—in the way the undersecretary chose his minions,
built his secret family, his inner circle of Knights Templar, as if he nursed an intention
to influence events by personalizing them, a determination to shorten the distance,
the degrees of separation, between the action and his control of the action, the better
to move the world in a direction he believed to be preordained. There was something
cultish about it, something in the air that smacked of the royal point of view or,
conversely, the mob boss, something that both engendered genuine loyalty and corrupted
it with an inflexible form of obligation. But Burnette didn’t know enough yet to be
able to visualize FOG’s extended family portrait, whether only a chosen few fit in
the frame or the edges of its ranks blurred into infinity.

Everyone waited for Colonel Vasich to reach the green. Ev, tending the pin, heard
Ben asking the colonel as he walked up if he had seen the latest fatwa from the sheik.

Hey, it was pretty good, I thought, quipped Sammy. Did our people consult on the language?

War declared. All over the front page.

Chambers smiled. I missed it. Remember that peacenik slogan back in the sixties? What
if they gave a war and nobody came? Was that a poster or a song?

What’s it going to take? First Iranians, now ragheads.

Bah, said Draco Vasich. Dogs barking. One by one, we shoot.

Life can be funny, can’t it, said Chambers. You know, in 1984 I met this trust fund
mujo
at one of the guest houses he was running in Peshawar. He came from a family of contractors,
builders. Khan introduced us—he wasn’t a colonel in those days. The three of us had
tea, the drink of
mujo
bullshit. This contractor sheik wasn’t a warrior, he was never a warrior, his Afghan
Arabs were clowns, the real mujahideen laughed at them. He was nothing more than a
tour operator, this sheik, for all the punks across the Muslim world whose own countries
couldn’t get rid of them fast enough. But what I want to say is this, the pretender
and I shared a vision, we were brothers in this respect. We converged, biblically
speaking. We could see the future, and we did not see it differently. How many years
ago was that? It’s taken more time than I expected, but in the interim they have not
been idle, have they? In the fatwa he said,
There is nothing between us that needs to be explained.
He’s right about that, isn’t he?

Ben said, They’re opening the door for Christ.

Look at Bosnia, said Sammy. Am I right, Colonel? You try to be generous, be reasonable,
be humane, overlook the negatives, and what happens? In pour the caliphaters from
every corner of the globe.

Burnette’s epiphany that day seemed, in retrospect, to be as lackluster as any platitude,
its truth bleached out by the overwashing of its own consistency, that sometimes the
interconnected spin of humanity revealed the axis of its rotation in the most pedestrian
scenes, the fate of societies left in the hands of a few men playing a round of golf,
a few men drinking chai in caves, hatching both sides of the same eternal plot, reversible
good versus reversible evil, and God’s way both ways, which was why, he had to suppose,
God was a fucking mystery floating out there far beyond the binary.

Cowboys and Muslims, gentlemen, said Ben, grinning at Burnette and Vasich. Mount up.

CHAPTER FORTY-THREE

Camp Dawson, West Virginia

One rainy morning at the beginning of September, as a tropical depression scoured
the Outer Banks and pushed inland to wring itself out on the Piedmont, he packed his
full combat kit and his rucksack and stuffed everything in the cab of the truck and
was on the road north by early afternoon to Camp Dawson in the mountains of West Virginia.
Now came his chance and probably the only one he would ever get to prove himself in
the crucible of ultimate manhood, born into a new life where you would be forever
known for being unknown, defined by silence and exalted for the mystical self-restraint
that made killing an honorable, even noble, profession, an almost spiritual task never
to be confused with the chaos and random slaughter of a battlefield. A Jedi knight,
tier-one warrior, like the hammerheads on Seal Team Six, Delta’s waterborne counterparts,
or Israel’s Sayeret Matkal, France’s GIGN, the British SAS, the neurosurgeons of state-sanctioned
death.

Staring through the rain, though, Burnette began to brood, and as he drove he searched
his heart for the answer he didn’t have—How much do I want this?—and his heart kept
referring him to his father and his grandfathers. As the miles accumulated in his
rearview mirror and the sun broke through the overcast right on time for setting,
he tried to command his brain into the zone but the effort only increased his anxiety.

The scuttlebutt had been anything but reassuring. Two guys he knew from Seventh Group,
both triathletes and Iron Man contenders, had crashed and burned somewhere near the
end of last season’s selection during their loaded-up forty-mile march through hellish
terrain. Equally unsettling were the rumors Burnette had heard about the psych evaluations
and follow-up interviews. Although you didn’t have to submit yourself, as did Agency
recruits, to a lifestyles polygraph, also known as the when-was-last-the-time-you-sucked-dick
detector test, you were made to endure the excavation of all the emotional crap inside
that you never wanted to mess with, as you underwent the Wonderlic Personnel (how
close to knuckle-dragging is your IQ), the Jackson Personality Test, and the Minnesota
Multifacet Personality Inventory (an in-depth personality battery, every question
a variation on the theme of bed-wetting), the soft-science dicing of your id and ego
then handed over to a series of personal interviews where bad things regularly happened
to pretty good people if you somehow managed to piss off a member of the interviewing
board. On the menu of self-inflicted wounds, the number one culprit was often described
to Burnette as arrogance, one of those things visible to everyone but the arrogant
themselves. Burnette had heard an anecdote from a captain friend of his, who had inadvertently
expressed his hubris and a sergeant major from the unit showed him the door, just
like that. I don’t like his attitude, the sergeant major explained to the other taut-faced
members of the board. He’s finished, and he was, because if you’re that fucking outstanding,
keep it to yourself.

For Eville, that finished feeling, absolute and undeniable, came a few hours before
his completion of the physical assessment’s final exam when, in the starless deep-woods
void before dawn he tripped over some root or vine at the top of a ravine and tumbled
thirty feet down ass-backward until his rucksack snagged in an outcropping, his sudden
arrest remarked upon by a vertebrae’s dull pop in his lower back. And still, even
though he knew he was out, crossing the finish line a half-dead and defeated man and
immediately sent to the clinic for an IV and a gulping handful of ibuprofen tablets,
none of the instructors seemed in a terrible hurry to cut him loose. Instead, they
sent him trotting to another building to be tortured for a week straight by a humorless
tribe of shrinkoids.
What’s your favorite flavor of ice cream? How does it make you feel? Rate your anger
on a scale of one to five, five being a raging white-hot desire to kill a homo.

The first 3 a.m. session started off on sound footing, despite his grogginess and
fatigue and a spasm like a wooden stake pounded into the base of his spine, the three-man
board lobbing softball questions about operating procedures and techniques, quizzing
him on the culture of operational security and his temperament for anonymity—
Consider yourself exhumed from the tomb of nameless souls at Arlington, and nameless
you shall remain.
And then one of the D-boy evaluators said, Tell us about Haiti, and Burnette hesitated
perhaps a second too long, tangled up by his two very disparate deployments, until
his interrogator straightened his back and his face grew pinched and inquisitorial—You
have nothing to say?—and Burnette began talking about the mission with as much tonal
upbeat as he could fake, until another guy on the panel interrupted.

We’re not interested in winning hearts and minds, said the panelist. For our guys,
hearts and minds are targets. We shoot hearts and minds. Without notification. Any
reason you can think of why we shouldn’t do that, or why you couldn’t do that? A religious
reason? Are you squeamish? Are you walking around with a guilty conscience for blowing
away your first squirrel? Do you think it’s evil to assassinate someone who wants
to destroy America, slay our children? You have two brothers, correct? Suppose one
of them hijacks a jetliner full of passengers and threatens to blow it up? Could you
take your brother down?

Five
no
s and one,
I don’t know
.

For the record, nobody’s going to ask you to shoot your brother. I’d shoot your brother.
But suppose you were the only one there standing between the death of every innocent
person on that plane and whacking your brother?

Okay, I’d whack my brother.

But you’d feel bad about it, right?

Yes.

All right, psycho-killer. Your brother’s dead, you took him out. Then what?

Honestly, at that point I think I would say I had done enough and it was time to go
fishing.

More than most people would get off their ass to do for their country, right?

I can’t speak for most people, sir.

But you’d hold it against them, right? That’s natural. They might just hold it against
you too. Fratricide. Summary execution.

Yes. Maybe. Not the passengers and not the crew. Not their families. No, sir.

The evaluator who had yet to speak now chose to speak. Why are you here, Sergeant
Burnette? he asked, his voice artificially genial, nonthreatening, obviously meant
to conceal the bait, the trap, the coup de grâce.

Sir?

Your presence here puzzles me. There’s the cart-before-the-horse factor—for the last
three months, you’re down there inside the Wall. Are you the prom queen or something,
training behind the fence before selection? Some new brand of hot shit? You seem to
have friends in high places.

Honestly, my friends mostly stick to the low places, sir.

I hear your father served in Vietnam, is that correct?

Yes, sir.

Was your father one of these crybaby ’Nam vets? Nobody appreciates us, nobody understands
us?

The interview was meant to push him over the edge, he was aware of that, on guard
for that, but the master sergeant had, with malice, fully awakened the one sure emotion
in Burnette with the power to render him a murderous animal. He struggled for self-control,
the muscles in his jaw flexing and his metabolism, strangely, appropriately, absorbing
the sniper training leaked into his circulatory system. His heart rate and breathing
slowed to a rhythm that became a coiling focus. The countenance of the other panelists
made clear that they knew exactly what they were seeing, had seen this throughout
their lives in uniform, this facedown between two modern-day triceratops at the prehistoric
watering hole. The tension seemed to flashburn the oxygen out of the windowless room
and the silence began to build until it roared like a tornado.

Stay cool, warned one of the board members but two words alone, regardless of their
worthiness, were not enough to break the spell. The panelist tried again. Burnette,
he said levelly, I want to hear you.

Yes, sir, said Burnette. His voice was barely audible and he was finished, he knew
it. Speaking, interviewing—finished, done, toast.

Burnette, talk to me.

Sir. What would you like me to say? There’s nothing to say.

That might be true. Let’s work this out, the interviewer said, yet nobody volunteered
another word and he began gathering up the documents he had removed from Burnette’s
dossier. Overcome by the futility, Eville found himself willing to forfeit everything
he had not already lost for the sake of his father’s honor.

I only want to say, Burnette said. You need to tie me into this chair.

The master sergeant’s voice bristled. Excuse me?

You know what I’m saying.

Yeah, I know what you’re saying, said the board member who had been trying to settle
him down. I’d just like to know when you walk out of here, will you regret what you’re
saying.

No regrets, said Burnette, and that was that. The board members exited the room and
left him there to contemplate his fate, a castoff sitting alone on shore as his ship
sails away, struggling to remain upright under the awful downhearted weight of his
tremendous weariness, his eyelids one blinking iteration away from being out of commission,
and then the door swung open and Colonel Hicks was in the room, his evangelical joviality
as offensive as the master sergeant’s insinuations.

God led me into Delta Force, and He said to me, This is where you ought to be.