Decimate, p.11
Decimate, page 11
Ben breaks the silence first. “Randy, I wasn’t kidding about what I said at the meeting.”
“About it not being a bomb?”
“No. About our boss. I think you should talk to her.”
“It’s not as simple as just talking.”
“I know, but she needs to be brought in. We’ve never been this close to Clean Sweep before. Maybe she’s changed her mind about stuff.”
“I’ll take that under advisement,” Randy says.
Ben nods and pops the earbud back in. He knows better than to press the point.
He also probably knows that despite pretending otherwise, Randy’s about to do exactly what he suggested.
9
Thirteen Years Ago
The woman did such a good job of sneaking up on his cabin Randy Drummond didn’t notice her until she was a few paces from the front steps. The light rain that day made subtle music on the branches, and she walked with her head bowed and her slicker’s hood pulled up. But there was a strain to her steps that marked her as someone older even before she looked up at him, revealing her deeply lined face.
By then, he’d unholstered the SIG at his waist. Her eyes were as blue as a glacial lake; the mop of snow-white bangs plastered under her hood suggested she’d once been shockingly blonde.
“You shouldn’t sneak up on people, ma’am,” he said.
“You should get a gate and a buzzer, then,” she said, “and a phone.”
The speed of her response, the lack of fear in her expression, impressed him. The truth was, he kept a sat phone and a radio for emergencies, but if he needed the internet, he drove down to the Flathead County Library in Kalispell and ordered things sent to his PO box from there. But how would this woman know that? How did this woman even know where he lived?
“I’m not doing interviews,” he said.
“I’m not a reporter,” she said, “and besides, you made that clear to all the other reporters.” She did a slow survey of the cabin’s porch, as if she found its emptiness and cleanliness suspicious. “Is it because of your face?” she asked.
No pity, no condescension. The absence of both was refreshing. The surgeries were considered a success in the eyes of those who’d performed them, but in crowds, the subtle not-rightness of the bone structure around his right eye had proven in some ways to be worse than a bad burn. It drew out the whole process by which people gradually noticed, stared in search of the wrongness, then quickly looked away. If he’d looked like Freddy Krueger, they’d wince and recoil in three seconds flat.
“I mean, do you not want to be on camera because of your—”
“I know what you meant, lady. Where’s your vehicle?”
“Is that really a question you want to ask of a woman who came to visit you alone?”
“I’m asking if you came alone.”
“Yeah, I got that, son. Why not just ask me where I want to be buried on your property?”
“What if I just asked you to leave?”
“I got dropped off. By someone who’s expecting me. You know, in case you turned out to be nuts.”
“Direct answers keep me sane. Promise.”
“Sane? It’s why you’re living way the hell out here without a phone. So what’s the deal? You just hide out in the woods and wait to save families from burning houses?”
“I was driving by at the right time, that’s all.”
“Most people would have called the fire department.”
“They weren’t exactly a hop and a skip down the road.”
“You saved a mother and her two children and you’re not taking any credit for it.”
“And you’re sounding more like the reporter you said you weren’t,” Randy said.
“You a man with enemies, Mr. Drummond?”
“I’m a man who knows anyone can become one.”
“Says more about you than them.”
The old woman stepped up onto the first step so she could get out of the light rain, a reminder to Randy that he hadn’t invited her any closer, which would have felt rude if the woman had radiated anything that seemed like vulnerability. She reached into the flaps of her jacket and Randy stiffened, thought about raising his gun arm. But she was bending over, the top of her hood—and the crown of her skull under it—a soft target as she set a card on the porch.
She straightened and smiled. “I’m hiring. Humble heroes fit the bill.”
“I’m not a hero.”
“That family disagrees.”
“I did what I was trained to do.”
“You were a SEAL, not a fireman, Mr. Drummond. If you rise to every moment you were trained for, you’re never going to be able to sit down and enjoy a good meal.”
“I don’t do mercenary work. You got some rival rancher disrespecting your property line, take ’em out the old-fashioned way. In court.”
“It’s not that kind of work.”
Randy stared at her; she stared back. Eventually she’d get the idea that he wasn’t going to take the bait and ask what kind of work it was. But apparently it was going to take a while.
A long while. He was tempted to go back inside, but something about the woman’s fearlessness kept him from turning his back on her.
“I don’t need work.”
“You need something. Your dad left you with a ton of debt on this place. Might be nice to ensure one roof stays over your head, at least.”
“Who are you, lady?”
“I’ve been around here awhile. I know who to talk to when I want to know something.”
“I keep a low profile.”
“Not when you’ve got the itch for some pretty little tourist you can have with no strings attached. You do know people work in all those places, right? Even the motels.”
“I need you to leave, ma’am.”
The faint smile left her face, but what replaced it was flinty. Not wary, not disappointed. So he’d take more recruitment than she’d planned, her look seemed to say, but that was fine because she had all the time in the world to complete it.
After a while of them listening to the drip drip drip of the rain on the roof, she said, “My name’s Agatha Caldwell. And I know all about war too. In ways you don’t.”
Randy felt his eyebrows go up. Most people would be hard pressed to know war in all the ways he did. A Chinook crash in Afghanistan, thanks to a rocket-propelled grenade. Two members of his team dead, several of the others alive today because Randy had dragged them free. A host of capture-or-kill missions in Iraq to assist the so-called Anbar Awakening that was supposed to be a turning point in that raging, never-ending clusterfuck of a war, which ended for Randy when he took a bullet to his cheek that resulted in the rearrangement of part of his face. And if Agatha Caldwell was so damn smart, did she also know that a fair number of the pretty little tourists he tried to take home begged off as soon as they got a good look at his right eye in the sodium-vapor lights of the parking lot? Probably so.
She took a step back, pointed to the card, and said, “Talk to you soon, Mr. Drummond.”
Then she was walking back up the dirt road through the dripping brush.
He called her two days later, figuring he’d be able to sleep again if he did.
She gave him directions to what had to be ranchland. It was so far east on US 2 it was almost clear of the mountains and on the Blackfeet Reservation.
The place had no signage. So it wasn’t a resort, and probably wasn’t much of a working ranch either. The high electrified fencing was unobtrusive, concealed by brush, but he noticed it right before he entered the code she’d given him. The giant gate swung open and he nosed his truck through. The road took a series of turns around a dense stand of lodgepole pine that concealed the property from the road. Later, he’d learn the place had a name, Thunder Ranch, but like her own, the woman had made sure nobody discussed it much in town.
A two-story Victorian house came into view off to his left, then farther away and to the right, a horse pasture and a giant barn. Something about the barn struck him as off, and later he realized it was the doors; they didn’t look as scuffed or weathered as they should have been if they were being opened and closed every day in the course of regular ranch work. And the horses looked like they’d never been ridden hard. The place was a ranch, for sure, but he had no idea what she was ranching. By the time he’d parked and started for the house, he was worried he’d gotten himself into some bullshit security detail for some Hollywood celebrity he’d failed to recognize.
It was a clear big-sky day, the mountains sharply etched against a dome of blue. Agatha was waiting for him on the house’s front porch, standing next to a row of empty rocking chairs occasionally jostled by the strong gusts. She’d laid her long white ponytail over one shoulder, and her lean, fit frame was hugged by jeans and a plaid shirt. She didn’t bother with a formal greeting, just a small, satisfied smile and nod before she gestured for him to follow her inside.
Randy hesitated on the bottom step, told himself this was about more than curiosity. He had no choice but to find out all he could about a woman who’d gone to so much effort to learn so much about him. But maybe all this sparkly, clean, and seemingly unused land didn’t say Hollywood as much as it said human trafficking or drug running or some other backwoods criminal enterprise struggling to look legit.
Inside, she offered him a cup of tea. He rejected it. When she invited him to sit, he refused the chair she offered him. Instead, he took the one with a solid wall behind it and the best vantage point of the room’s two entrances.
“Why’d you quit?” she asked him.
“Quit putting you off, you mean?”
She smiled. “The SEALs.”
“Bullet in the face’ll do that to you.”
“Will it?” She sipped tea. “Your mobility looks right as rain. You didn’t have any trouble saving that family. Is your vision messed up?”
Nobody had been as direct with him about his injuries since the doctors at Bethesda, and he couldn’t decide if it was a tactic meant to throw him off balance or if she was a woman without the time for pleasantries. The latter didn’t seem right. There didn’t seem to be another soul on the ranch, and she’d certainly had time to decorate the place and keep it up. It was a riot of old western knickknacks and big puddling draperies the color of pine needles.
“My vision’s fine,” Randy said. “It was my skull under it that got messed up. But a couple surgeries and it was back together.”
And just like that, she had him selling his abilities as if this were a normal job interview.
“So what was it, then? Did you lose your nerve?”
“Nerve is what you need to clap back at the person at the dinner table talking politics you don’t like. Being a SEAL takes more than nerve.”
“OK, well, whatever it takes, did you lose it?”
“I didn’t come here to be insulted.”
“I’m interviewing you.”
“For what?” he asked.
“We had a retirement on my staff. The job is twofold. Security and containment.”
“Christ. How much are those horses worth?” Randy asked.
“It’s not the horses.”
“Well, what is it? They’re the only damn things here.”
When Agatha Caldwell met his eyes, he had trouble pinpointing the emotion in them—a sudden alertness, tinged with offense. But his offhand remark had struck her somehow; she seemed to be studying him now more intently than before.
“They are not the only things here,” she said.
Suddenly, Randy was at a loss for words. Her intensity sent chills down his body, chills that seemed to ferret out every scar and lingering battle wound and caress them with too much lascivious intention. And suddenly the quiet of this ranch, its placid surface, seemed threatening, like a still ocean surface beneath which sharks circled.
“I’m not down for anything criminal,” he said.
“Why’d you leave the SEALs?” she asked again.
“What’s that got to do with anything?”
“I assume you’ve seen things that other people never have and never will. But where has that left you, Randy Drummond? Has it opened your mind or worn it out? Because I need to know if you’re ready for an experience you might not understand.”
His first instinct was that the woman across from him knew exactly what she was hunting for, exactly why he’d left the teams. But that was damn near impossible, because he’d never really told anyone. Not in anything that could be described as specific detail.
“I had an experience.” It came out a little breathless, a little choked, the way he always sounded when he used somebody else’s words to describe a topic that made him uncomfortable. But he’d put just enough emphasis into the word experience to indicate he wasn’t just talking about the bullet and the surgeries that followed.
“When I got shot, I . . . I left my body.”
Agatha Caldwell didn’t flinch or raise her eyebrows or make any gesture of dismissal or disdain. He fell silent because he was trying to come up with a way to describe the color of the light that had embraced him during it, a blue unlike any shade he’d ever seen in nature. His first thought as he’d felt death’s embrace was that he’d floated up into the sky itself. But he’d quickly realized that wasn’t right. That it was as if whatever had given the sky its color had poured forth from some tear between this world and the next and enveloped him.
“You could see yourself,” Agatha said quietly, “as if you were looking down on yourself.”
“For a moment, yes. And then . . .”
What he’d seen next was something he’d never described to anyone, but it had looked just like the inside of the old revolving restaurant atop Reunion Tower in Dallas. He’d only eaten there once in his life, but his dad, who’d been from the area, had loved the place, and so they’d gone there for lunch one day when they were visiting his grandmother, and that was the lunch where he’d told his dad he was going for the SEALs. His father, who’d rung the bell twice on Coronado Island, who’d never made it past the first week and felt almost constant shame over it, had teared up with pride, and Randy had felt overwhelmed with gratitude, as if it had taken him that many years to realize he’d been blessed to have a dad who didn’t see him as competition or a threat, a dad who could be brought to tears of joy by the prospect of his offspring finishing something he could not. That lunch had been one of the happiest moments of Randy’s life, and so at first, he’d thought it was no surprise his brain would glom on to its memory as a comfort once death was near.
“You had an NDE.”
“A what?” he asked.
“A near-death experience. Go on. I’m sorry for interrupting.”
What he’d realized in that moment was that it was not a vision he was experiencing. He had gone somewhere; what he was seeing had substance, a reality that couldn’t be blinked away. And even though the sunlight beyond the windows had been brighter than it had been during that long-ago lunch, even though the tables all around him were occupied by ghostly silhouettes, he had known where he was. He hadn’t traveled through time. Rather, it felt as if he had traveled to a version of the memory that had always remained anchored somewhere in the universe.
“My father was there.”
“And what did he do?”
“He asked me if I wanted to . . . continue.”
“Into death?”
“That was one option.”
“He gave you a choice. To live or to . . . continue on.”
Maybe if she’d phrased it as a question, a quick, hot tear wouldn’t have slid down Randy’s right cheek. Or maybe it was the way she referred to death as continuing on. A road not taken. A road not taken because he had thought it meant quitting but which she’d just made sound like an opportunity, a new mission, a new world beyond this one. In the end, he decided it was her complete absence of skepticism, her complete understanding, that collapsed a wall inside himself he’d been holding up with both hands ever since he returned to his broken body on Iraqi soil. It was one thing to tell your truth; it was another to be so unreservedly believed by a stranger. Maybe that was the experience Agatha Caldwell thought he wouldn’t understand.
For a while, neither of them spoke, as if she were allowing him to remember the way his father had smiled proudly and retreated into the brightening blue-tinged sunlight after Randy made his choice. But when he finally looked at her, he saw something warm and open. He saw something else too.
Relief.
“You chose to come back,” she said. “To live.”
Randy nodded.
“Do you regret it?” she asked.
“On some days.”
“Is that why you left the military?”
“I left because I knew I wouldn’t see it as taking life anymore. That I’d just see it as nudging someone into whatever comes next. And that meant I’d lost the discernment required to be a good operator.”
“If death is just a doorway to something better, why think twice about mowing down anyone in your path?”
“That’s one way of putting it,” he said.
“Isn’t that what most people think already?”
“Believing and experiencing are two very different things.”
At these words, Agatha Caldwell’s stare became as steady and intense as any he’d ever been subjected to.
“I’d like to show you what’s in the barn,” she said.
They crossed the grass between the main house and the shiny unused structure in question. She donned a jacket first, which struck him as odd. It wasn’t cold out. She pulled both barn doors open without asking for his assistance, then shut them behind Randy once he stepped inside. Once they were enclosed by shadows and the smell of horse stalls, she dug into the pocket of her jacket and extended a pair of solid-black sunglasses that looked capable of shielding his eyes from a nuclear blast.
“Put these on. When we get down there, I mean.”
“No hazmat suit?” he asked.
“Not here,” she answered.
Which was not the answer he was expecting. Was there really a place on her ranch that required full-body protective gear? She stepped back, then kicked aside the dirt from a little metal plate set in the barn’s floor. Crouching down, she removed a putty knife from her jacket pocket and pried up a little metal square in the plate’s center, revealing a depressed door pull. Suddenly she was hoisting open a car-size metal door into the air. She walked it out until it flipped onto its top. Underneath was a set of double storm doors. While not as large, they looked twice as heavy as their protective covering. There was a keypad in the wood frame surrounding them.
