Billy Summers

Taco asked what a Judas goat was. I could have told him but kept my mouth shut and let Foss do the honors. Then he turned to me and asked again if I could do it and I said sir yes sir. I asked where I was supposed to shoot from and he told me. We’d been there before, carrying goods from resupply helicopters. I asked if I could swap the optics on my rifle for one of the new Leupold scopes or if I would have to make do with what I had. Foss looked at Jamieson, and Jamieson said, ‘We’ll make that happen.’

Going back to our barracks – the patrol had left without us – Taco asked me how sure I was that I could make the shot. I said, ‘If I can’t make it, I’ll just blame my spotter.’

He thumped me on the shoulder. ‘Fucking dickweed. Why do you always play dumb?’

‘I don’t know what you’re talking about.’

‘There you go again.’

‘It’s safer. What they don’t know about you can’t hurt you. Or come back to haunt you.’

He chewed that over for awhile. Then he said, ‘Yeah, you can make the shot, okay, but that’s not what I meant. This is an actual guy we’re talking about. Are you sure you can do it? Shoot him stone-cold in the brainbox and take his life?’

I told Tac I was sure. I didn’t tell him that I knew I could take a life because I’d done it before. I shot Bob Raines in the chest. It was Sniper School that taught me to always take the head shot.

5

Billy saves what he’s written, gets up, and staggers a little because his feet feel like they’re in another dimension. How long has he been sitting? He looks at his watch and is astounded to see it’s been almost five hours. He feels like a man emerging from a vivid dream. He puts his hands in the small of his back and stretches, sending pins and needles down his legs. He walks from the living room to the kitchen to the bedroom, and finally back to the living room. He does it again, then a third time. The apartment seemed just the right size when he first saw it, the perfect place to hunker down in until things settled and he could drive his leased car north (or maybe west). Now it seems too small, like clothes that have been outgrown. He’d like to go out and walk, maybe even jog, but that would be a very bad idea even tricked out in his Dalton Smith gear. So he paces the apartment some more, and when that’s not good enough he does pushups on the living room floor.

Drop and give me twenty-five, he thinks of Sergeant Up Yours saying. And don’t mind my foot on your ass, you useless cumstain.

Billy has to smile. So much has come back to him. If he wrote it all, his story would be a thousand pages long.

The pushups make him feel calmer. He thinks about turning on the TV to see what’s going on with the investigation, or checking his phone for newspaper updates (newspapers may be failing, but Billy has found they still seem to get the salient facts first). He decides against doing either. He’s not ready to let the present back in. He thinks about getting something to eat, but he’s not hungry. He should be, but he isn’t. He settles for a cup of black coffee and drinks it standing up in the kitchen. Then he goes back to the laptop and picks up where he left off.

6

The next morning Lieutenant Colonel Jamieson himself drove me and Taco out to the intersection of Route 10 and the north–south road the Marines called Highway to Hell, after the AC/DC song. We went in the l-c’s Eagle station wagon, which was special to him. Painted on the back deck was a decal showing a black horse with red eyes. I didn’t like it, because I could imagine Iraqi spotters noting it, maybe even photographing it.

There was no sign of Foss. He had gone back to wherever those guys go after they set their plots in motion.

Parked out there on the hilltop in a dusty turnaround were two trucks from Iraqi Power & Light, or whatever was written in the pothooks on their sides. They looked just like American utility trucks, only smaller and painted apple green instead of yellow. The paint was much thicker on the sides, but even so it didn’t completely obscure the smiling face of Saddam Hussein, like a ghost too stubborn to go away. There was also a Genie articulated boom lift with a bucket platform.

Two power poles stood at the intersection of the roads, with big transformers on them to step down the power-load to the residential neighborhoods of Fallujah and the surrounding suburbs. Guys in keffiyehs were scurrying around, plus a couple in those kufi hats. They were all wearing orange workmen’s vests. No hardhats, though; I guess OSHA never made it to al-Anbar province. From across the river those men probably looked like any ragtag government work crew, but once you got closer than sixty yards, you could see they were all our guys. Albie Stark from our squad came over to me, flapping his headdress and singing that song about how you don’t step on Superman’s cape. Then he saw the l-c and saluted.