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  Sam thumbs the cigarette filter. “Just like that?”

  “Yeah, right after I debriefed the mission at Task Force Brown.”

  “Not our Battalion Intelligence shop?” Sam raises his eyebrows.

  “Brown. They said it was because an American civilian was involved, the one who got kidnapped out there,” Colbert says. Then he hands Sam a slip of paper. “Joe Davis is the code name I was carrying, contractor with the Iraqi cops, that’s his sat number. He wanted an update on Jesse’s status. Hold on to it.” Colbert takes a drag, then exhales. “Got a little strange, all this out-of-channels shit,” he says.

  “How strange?”

  Colbert shrugs. “This colonel over at Brown, he tells me there’s no need to discuss the incident with anybody in my unit. And, oh yeah, they pulled rank; they’ll file the after-action report, not us.”

  “Anything else?”

  “Well, the colonel expressed his condolences that three of our people were killed in the crash. I explained to him that Marge and Toby survived the crash and were shot to death on the ground. Fucker pats me on the shoulder and tells me I been under a lot of strain.” Disgusted, Colbert flips the cigarette away.

  “Tell me about it,” Sam says.

  Chapter Nineteen

  Jesse is trundled off an aircraft and into the army hospital in Germany wrapped like a mummy in a narcotic winding sheet. She takes a chance and opens her eyes. Just a peek. The light hitting her cornea ignites a hemorrhage of rapid breathing and accelerated heartbeat because the Bad Thing could be Right There waiting. All she sees is a glide of slow-motion people dressed in blue and burgundy scrubs. The walls are drab. The utensils are shiny. Exhausted by the effort, she pops back down into the comfort of her dark hole. Can’t move out there. Hurts. Her right knee and left shoulder are stiff and heavily bandaged. Her whole body aches. The skin on her face is stretched mask-tight, sutured down over what feels like the enlarged bones of her jaw and cheeks and forehead.

  She discovers that she has great difficulty forming the shape of simple words. Mouth hurts too much, full of abrasions. Not worth it. Stay down. It’s protected where she is, down in the dark.

  The Landstuhl hospital revolves slowly around her in a sedated blur of distorted faces and voices underwater. Words swirl like bubbles. Shiny, round, they float away to pop into sounds someplace else. Bedpans come and go. She’s spoon-fed like an infant.

  Then a shadow hovers near her bed in the dark, and something happens. First a stiffness, then this eruption inside her. The alarms on the bedside monitor shriek. Urine and feces gush into her hospital gown, and the funhouse-mirror faces and the bubbles gather, and then the bubbles burst:

  “She’s seizing. Put her on her side! Shit, man, she’s choking!”

  “Blood pressure 190 over 140!”

  “Gimme five mil Valium IV push!”

  “We need restraints here, people . . .”

  “What happened?”

  “She’s convulsing, got violent as hell. Tonic-clonic seizure. Peed and crapped herself.”

  “Five more Valium.”

  “She’s aspirating vomit. C’mon, let’s intubate and get her to ICU.”

  ***

  Sam’s on his fourth war: Nam, Desert Storm, Afghanistan, and this goddamn place. He doesn’t count pissant deployments like Grenada or Panama. He knows how to suck it up and find refuge in routine and count the days until he rotates home. And now the verdict’s finally in, and he will rotate early. They’re showing him the door for good this time—sixty and out. But not so old that the dissembling up the chain of command after the crash doesn’t gnaw at him; like now, as he props in bed, staring into the dark. He can’t sleep or stop thinking about the stark circumstances of Tumbleweed Six going down. Before they deployed they’d rehearsed for casualties, even staged a mock funeral for one of the pilots. The reality has hit the unit hard; a bird splashes, and now there’re four less people at breakfast.

  And one of them should have been me.

  From long practice, he does not allow himself to imagine Marge’s face or the sound of her voice. Or Laura’s or Toby’s. The kids in the unit think he and Marge were hooking up, but it wasn’t like that. Not yet. Marge was a circumspect divorcee who was mapping the dimensions of Sam’s widower world. Maybe when they got home . . .

  Change the subject, Sam. So Colbert is gone with his crew, and everybody is preoccupied with the daily work and soldiering through the trauma. There’s no one left to talk to who was out there that day. He tried to call the number Colbert gave him—the code-name guy, Davis—but the number was out of service. Which all brings him back to the strange timing of the anomalous soldier who wandered into Jesse’s holding ward with his Spec Four rank that didn’t match his face and his gold watch.

  So Sam rises, gets dressed, and goes to the company day room and signs out a Humvee. His destination is the base hospital. More specifically he locates the office that manages the building’s surveillance cameras. No one in the army pulls guard or KP anymore or mans the security apparatus on the base, so it’s no surprise he finds a stout, white-haired retired cop from Charleston sipping Diet Coke at 1 a.m. at the desk full of monitors. Sam keeps his investigator ID from the Grand Forks County Sheriff’s Department in his wallet for just such occasions. He bonds with Charleston around a few war stories, bullshits a little about the Entry PoE IP Camera System, and then floats a story about an asshole in his unit who might be pilfering medical supplies for sale on the black market. Soon Sam is seated at a monitor clicking through hallway and exit tapes for the afternoon of April 12.

  His guy, when he finds him entering the holding ward, is tricky and knows how to face away to confuse cameras, but finally Sam isolates a full frontal frame and transfers it to a thumb drive. He thanks Charleston and drives back to the company. Because he’s fixated on gold Rolexes and who wears them, he’s thought out the next step. Instead of attaching the file to an email he folds the thumb drive in a quick note:

  Need a quiet favor. Run this guy through facial ID and see if you get any hits in military files going back ten years. Could you also locate a Joe Davis who recently worked in some capacity with the Iraqi police? This is a Casper-type request. Mail response to my home address.

  Then Sam rummages in Chaplain Lundquist’s desk and finds an envelope with a personalized military APO return address. He seals the letter and drops it in the company snail mail. The addressee is a colonel in the Pentagon’s Criminal Investigative Division office. He and Sam go back a ways in the background-checks department, and the Casper reference will alert the colonel that the request is in the realm of “friendly ghosts” and identify Sam as the sender.

  Now, as Sam returns to his quarters and climbs into bed, he’s thinking it’s probably nothing, but just maybe he’ll have something to nose around in when he gets home.

  ***

  A nurse charts that she wakes up at 10:36 the morning following the seizure, but Jesse has now lost even that tenuous connection. Nothing in her psychic wiring prepares her for the distorted sensory eruption of hallucination. It burns through the distinction between the inside and the outside, and she doesn’t know she’s swaddled in diapers and curled in a fetal position. She doesn’t register that she’s pinned to the bed by restraints or that she spent half the night tossing in a delirious rage, fighting the restraints, and has torn the stitches in her knee. At one point they started to intubate her again.

  Worst of all, now the Bad Thing is not just lurking outside. Now it’s everywhere. Her hiding place has been invaded, and huge slimy shapes rear and coil and wiggle out of her deepest childhood fears. She not only sees them, she hears them and feels them and even can touch them and taste them.

  An exaggerated aversion of earthworms was a definite disadvantage for a farm kid whose family put in a large vegetable garden. And she was expected to weed that garden with her older brothers who delighted in finding fistfuls of the worms and chasing her, waving them.

  The o
utside world is gone, and she’s suffocating, buried up to her nose in the hot soil between rows of tomato plants that tower like triple-canopy jungle. The worms exude a ripe garbage scent as they sprawl and slither through the shadows all around her. They ooze right up to her face, soft and greasy and drippy red. Smaller spider worms dangle on silky threads in front of her eyes and squirm into different shapes—now a jellyfish, then a snake. But they always knot together in the form of a five-pointed star.

  So she must remain perfectly still, burrowed down in the dark. Even if she wanted to scream she can’t, because her mouth is stuffed with dirt.

  When anything touches her she lashes out with the exaggerated startle reflex reserved for snakes and spiders. In the grip of these seizures the questionable sanctuary of the garden is replaced by a sensation of tremendous pressure and heat and chaos; she’s inside a fire hose in a rapids rampaging through an erupting volcano. She’s plunging down on a burning collision course that never quite happens.

  In between intravenous injections of sedatives, the pressure lessens and she calls for help.“The star killed me!” she screams, but it comes out gibberish as she thrashes in her bed. They tighten the restraints. They up her meds and give her high marks in hostility, suspicion, hallucination, and grandiosity on the BPRS—the Brief Psychiatric Rating Scale.

  They rule out brain tumor.

  They keep testing for brain damage.

  A review of her medical history and proficiency reports shows no sign of mental illness.

  The details of “the incident” entered in the chart notes are positive for severe psychological stress and exposure to a traumatic event—surviving the crash and possibly witnessing the violent death of her crew.

  The kindest opinion ventured is that she’s experiencing a short-lived psychosis triggered by these traumatic events, complicated by a yet-to-be-determined degree of concussion. So they “snow her and ship her” on a regimen of Seroquel—a powerful antipsychotic—to get her through the white water. The notes to the medics at Walter Reed recommend they continue to monitor for traumatic brain injury with psychotic overtures. If and when the psychosis subsides she’ll be a classic candidate for PTSD protocol.

  ***

  The first few days at Reed are quieter, then she has another night visitor followed by a violent seizure, and they start the round of testing again. One step forward then a marathon of steps backward. They review her meds and continue to run the Seroquel drip into her veins. There is no ego in the combustible brew of sensations Jesse floats through; normal is mere fear. Above, below, and to the left and right of fear, the hallucinatory worms are waiting, as are the more aggressive spidery stars.

  But her muscles are starting to work, and so—zombie-fashion—she is hoisted behind a walker and, shepherded by an orderly with a lift belt, confronts physical therapy. Plodding behind the walker, dragging her feet and injured knee, she sleep-stumbles among a narcotic nightmare of faces and voices. Through the veil of sedation she sees but does not comprehend a universe of pain—burns, amputations, ghastly head injuries, and people suffering with what she has: a closed head injury caused by violent trauma that does not penetrate the skull. The staff appears not quite in focus. They ask her questions. The tongues in their mouths squirm like the worms.

  After a week passes without a seizure or an outburst, they schedule a session with the speech therapist that involves a trek down the hall to the elevator, trudging behind the walker with a hovering orderly. After the elevator ride there’s another hike to an office where, with the orderly’s help, Jesse winds up in a chair. A woman sits across a desk that is bare except for a yellow legal pad and a large Sharpie pen. The woman rotates the pad, and the worm in her mouth curls and forms sounds.

  “Hello, Captain Kraig, my name is Christine Morel, and I’m a speech therapist. We’re going to take a first step toward an intake RIPA—that’s a Ross Informational Processing Assessment.”

  Then she points to something on the pad, and briefly Jesse flashes on a memory of Miss Siple, her first-grade teacher at Langdon Elementary.

  “Lurs,” she mumbles. Letters. J-E-S-S-E K-R-A-I-G. But they could be Egyptian hieroglyphics, those letters . . .

  “Very good,” Morel says in a patient voice. Then she picks up the pen and hands it to Jesse. When Jesse doesn’t respond, the orderly gently takes Jesse’s hand and places the Sharpie in it, arranging her fingers in a writing grip.

  As the swollen stitches bunch in perplexity on Jesse’s forehead, Morel augments her helpful smile by licking her lips, and the worm jumps from her mouth and dances in the air. Then it twirls into the shape of the star. Jesse lurches back, then fumbles with the grip on the pen, clamps her fingers and thumb around it, and brandishes it over her head. Before the orderly can seize her hand, she stabs the Sharpie down on the pad with enough force to shatter it.

  The orderly swiftly strips the broken pen from Jesse’s hand but isn’t prepared for her coiling and erupting from the chair and throwing a stiff forearm into his neck, and he goes crashing back against the wall.

  Morel recoils from the snarl on Jesse’s face and seizes the flimsy pad and holds it up for protection. In shock she watches Jesse raise her right hand and bite through the tip of her index finger. The orderly is on his feet and moving, but he’s not fast enough to stop Jesse from tracing a sloppy but legible five-pointed star on the desktop in her own blood.

  After more orderlies arrive and Jesse is ushered back to her ward, Ms. Morel types into the chart:

  Captain Kraig demonstrates a complete breakdown in associations. The semantic content of her minimal speech is disconnected, disorganized, and incomprehensible to the point of being mere “word salad.” The session degenerated into a violent outburst, during which Kraig first threatened me with a pen and then bit her own finger and smeared blood on my desk.

  I can’t, at this point, attribute motive or ideation to the act. But she drew a definite shape, a star, like a kindergartener might make.

  After a consult, they up her meds.

  Chapter Twenty

  Joe Davis slouches against a pillar watching an empty baggage carousel go ’round and ’round in the Baltimore International Airport, waiting for his duffel to tumble down the chute. A lot has happened in the last two weeks, culminating in his being escorted to Baghdad International and put on a flight by the national police. Essentially they kicked him out of the country after his contractor license and Visa were revoked.

  Appert had been yanked several days previously and reassigned to a Counterterrorism desk at Quantico. They parted on a grumble. Appert didn’t come out and say it but, clearly, he blamed Davis for his demotion.

  His erstwhile comrade Colonel Nasir explained, perhaps sincerely, that Davis had become a liability. Suddenly there were too many rumors circulating that he had been skimming the very money and drugs he was supposed to be investigating. He didn’t blame Nasir who had to survive at crushing depths of political corruption.

  To Davis it felt like the bureaucracy reacting, in Iraq and back in the States. Some tender place had been tweaked, and the pushback had been swift. It started snowballing his way after he began asking questions about the incident at Turmar. Nothing heavy, just simple queries about the disappeared American, Noland. Like, what was he doing there that day? And who was he working for, and who owned the land? Why did a truck full of artillery shells blow up? And what about the atropine syrette that had popped up and since vanished?

  Davis is not surprised. He’s been working the dark side for years in and out of the military. So long that when he was wounded the last time he half expected to leak buckles and canvas straps and liquid vinyl. He understands how the system works: duty, honor, country, and Murphy’s Law. Not necessarily in that order.

  As a third-generation Marine he’d hewed to the old-time religion: you do not show emotion in uniform. That morning in Turmar it wasn’t a few more dead bodies that got to him. It was the simple image of witnessing the medic swab Kraig�
��s bare feet. When she took off that morning—on his mission—she probably thought the war was pretty much over.

  His chain mail just flat froze up and flaked off. And, dumb shit that he was, he just couldn’t get those blue toenails out of his mind, or the shapely foot they were attached to. He’d made some checks and discovered that the course he’d set for captain Jesse Kraig—in addition to killing her crew—had ultimately resulted in her being under observation on a regimen of antipsychotic drugs at a hospital in Germany. Wounded he could understand, along with the TBI diagnosis. But antipsychotics? Davis pretends not to be a sentimental guy, but Jesse Kraig’s condition spoils his sleep.

  So the usual perks of returning home in late April—mild weather, an abundance of green landscape, roads that don’t blow up, and the girls getting out their summer dresses—are lost on him as he collects his bag and walks out to the curb and hails a cab and gives the driver a destination up the Parkway: Frank’s Diner in Jessup, not far from Ft. Meade. He’s not hungry; he’s meeting somebody.

  His elusive boss, Maury Malone, convenes an informal insurgency that has emerged among civil servants who’ve finally decided to fight back against the galloping fraud, corruption, and abuse spiraling out of control in the name of national security. After watching several of his NSA colleagues prosecuted for blowing the whistle, Malone, a survivor, has opted for a clandestine approach. He picks his fights and intervenes in the most excessive abuses that have piggybacked on the terror-war gold rush. Basically he closets with old-fashioned cops, like Bobby Appert, who believe assholes are assholes, regardless of rank, and should be held accountable.

  Malone had recruited Davis into a unique niche where the shadows of NSA, FBI, and justice overlap under the increased candlepower of Homeland Security.