She dropped her shoulders and her chin, then looked at the far wall, the whiteboard with the cryptic writing. “I remember the codes,” she said. Before she could explain that, Cousins interrupted.
“There’s no escape, really,” Cousins said. The hollowness in his voice was startling. He sounded like a ghost. “Think about it. What can they force people to do? Anything. Who can they touch? Anybody, anywhere. Jesus, I’d like to make them know how it feels.” He lifted his fist and swung at empty air. “Smash them right in the fucking nose.”
The low-level noise—a harsh, distant whickering—was at first familiar and even welcome. My heart thumped in unison with the slicing blades, so like the rush of angels’ wings to an old jungle warrior. But that hope didn’t last for more than a couple of seconds.
I wasn’t in the bush.
“What is it?” Cousins asked.
I had been working over Marquez’s challenge some more. How would I breach his security, invade his fortress? Like most civilians, he had made the basic assumption that there are boundaries in life, that what you’ve never experienced and can’t imagine just won’t happen.
Marquez had neglected air superiority. I pointed my finger up. “Listen.”
Tammy cocked her head.
“It’s just a helicopter,” Cousins said. “Probably on its way to LAX.”
By then, the sound of two, maybe three choppers, blades laying down rhythm to a steady turbine roar, would have drowned out my voice anywhere but in the basement.
“They’re too close,” I said. “Flying formation.”
“Police?” Cousins said, but he didn’t believe it.
I opened the outside door. Cousins stood with me in the doorway in the early-morning coolness. Behind us, Tammy busied herself moving things around. I knew without looking what she was doing. She was piling up furniture and hiding.
Cousins and I started up the steps, me first. Without thinking, at the grind of a new and terrible noise, like Satan clearing his throat, I dropped into a crouch. Cousins nearly fell over me.
My body recognized that awesome roar. I hadn’t heard it in over thirty years, and it was still supreme: the air-ripping, saurian bawl of the gun that kills a village.
I lifted my head over the edge of the concrete retaining wall. Three AH-1 SuperCobras, Marine Corps jobs, little more than silhouettes in the deep gray dawn, snooted their floods down on the next house along the ridge. The first chopper’s thirty-millimeter cannon bawled again, followed by the second, then all three opened up on the house and the grounds. Braaaappp-Roarrr-hum-buzz-ROARRR and red tiles flew up in spinning fragments. Hundreds of shells per second carved away the roof. Walls flapped and curled like surgically sliced tissue. The swimming pool erupted in a thousand geysers.
A figure in a white nightgown ran over the grass and just turned red. She seemed to disappear, like a chicken leg down a garbage disposal.
I said something to Cousins, I don’t remember what. Even in Vietnam the damn gunships chopping up the paddies and hamlets had made me cry, and these were infinitely worse. Here I was, thirty years later, sobbing like a child.
The third Cobra pushed back a few dozen yards and went to work on the house below the cliff. I could not see the destruction but I could hear it.
The floodlights on our lawn went dark.
“Not now,” I said. Don’t let them know you’re here.
The guns stopped. Cousins poked his head up next to mine. We squatted in the well outside the door.
Marquez ran out on the grass in his pajamas, a gnomish shadow against the glow from the valley. “What the fuck?” I heard him shout.
The house on the next lot had caught fire. A flare of natural gas shot up like a giant Bic lighter.
Marquez straightened and held out his arms, mesmerized by the spectacle. Not good to live a life of movies. Everything is special effects, nothing seems real.
“It’s a mistake,” Cousins said. I knew what he meant. The pilots had screwed up.
Just as he spoke, all three of the gunships backed off, hesitated for a few long, loud seconds, as if checking their maps, Aw shit.
They yawed right like three toys on sticks, pitched their noses down, and flew right at us.
PART THREE
HAL COUSINS
30
IMPERIAL VALLEY • AUGUST 10
Lissa drove. We didn’t speak until we were on 5 heading south through the long valley.
“Don’t look at me that way,” she said. “He would have shot you.”
“Who in hell was he?”
“He had a gun.”
I was still in shock.
“I couldn’t stand seeing you both get shot,” Lissa said.
We stopped at the Spanish Baron’s Ranch House Inn to eat. We hadn’t had dinner and it was 10:00 p.m. Rain left big clean splatters on the windshield. The air smelled wet off the asphalt in the parking lot and I realized I was happy just to be alive.
“Thank you,” I said.
