Whitley Strieber - The Grays

As the ceremony concluded, to her amazement a missing-man formation flew overhead, wheeling majestically away toward the gray horizon. Then, down at the end of the field, an honor guard she had no idea would be there fired twenty-one times. The highest salute. Taps were sounded.

He was being buried with the highest of honors, and she felt bitter because she did not know why.

The four men were walking away from the grave when she caught up with them. “Can you tell me anything?”

Nobody answered.

“Please, I’m his daughter. Tell me, at least, did he suffer?”

One of the men, tall, so blond that he might have been albino, dropped back. “Should I say no?”

“You know how he died?”

“I know, Lauren.”

He knew her name. But who was this man in his superbly tailored civilian suit, as gray as the autumn clouds, with his dusting of white hair and his eyes so pale that they were almost white as well?

“Who are you? Can you tell me what my dad did?”

“I want you to come to an office. Can you do that?”

“Now? Is this an order?”

“I’m so sorry. Are you up to it?”

This walk across this graveyard was the saddest thing she had ever done. She did not understand grief, it was a new landscape for her. Could you go to an office in grief? Talk there in grief? In grief, could you learn secrets? “I want to be at home,” she said.

He gave her an address on base. “You think about it, and I want you to bear in mind that we wouldn’t be asking this if—”

“I know it’s urgent. Obviously it’s urgent.”

“I’m Lewis Crew,” he said. “If you don’t mind, please do not mention the appointment to anybody, or my name.”

“Okay,” she said. “Will you tell me what happened to my dad?”

He gave her a long look, long enough to be disquieting. He was evaluating her. But why? She had no clearance, she was a lowly procurement officer, she had not cared to follow her dad into Air Force Intelligence.

“Will you?” she asked again.

“I’m so sorry to have to ask you to come in on a day like this.”

“So am I.” She walked away from him then, passing among the neat lines of identical military graves into which the Air Force had poured so many lives, in so many steel coffins, most of them too young, too innocent, too good to die the sorts of improbable and terrible deaths the Air Force had to offer.

It was duty that had taken them. Duty, always, her dad’s breath and blood. “The oath, Lauren, never forget the oath. It might take you to your death, and if it does, that’s where you have to go.”

She’d thought, If some stupid president sends me to some dumb country where we shouldn’t even be, is it my duty to die there?

She’d known the answer.

Had Dad died a useless death? She hoped not, she hoped that the missing-man formation was more than just a passing honor.

Her life with her dad had not been perfect. Eamon Glass could be demanding, and he had not been happy with the way her career was unfolding. “You need to push yourself, Lauren, Air-Force style. Be ready when it matters, be willing when it counts.”

Boy, was he out of it. He was part of another Air Force, as far as she was concerned. In her Air Force, the main issues were things like padded bills and missing laptops, not duty and dying amid huts and palm trees.

“Who were you, Dad? Why did this happen?”

Dad had nightmares. God, did he have nightmares, screaming cyclones of terror from which he could not awaken. And you couldn’t get near him. He’d belt you and then in the morning be so upset by what he had done that he’d be in a funk for days.

Often, he would ask if he’d said anything in his sleep. It worried him, obviously, worried him a lot.

She’d listened for some meaning in the screams, but never found any.

She got in her car and started it, eager for the heater to drive out the deep Canadian cold that was sweeping down the vast plains from the north, shivering the naked trees and the stubble-filled fields.

She drove home across the great, gray base to their apartment. She stood in the living room thinking how anonymous it all seemed, the inevitable landscape on the wall, the not-too-challenging books on the shelves, the oldish TV. And his chair, big and comfortable, and beside it the magazine rack filled with Time and the National Review and National Geographic .

All so ordinary, and yet so filled with him that every step deeper into the place was a step through more memory and greater loneliness.

She made coffee, and was drinking it when she realized that it was Dad’s mug in her hand. That did it: she cried again. These, she knew, were the anguished tears of the bereaved, that belong both to grief and defeat.

She had a last confession of love that must remain frozen in her forever. Most importantly, there was the conversation that had been their life together, that could never now be brought to rest.

A whole career, and there had only been five people at his funeral. But it hadn’t been announced in any way. So his unit was not large, obviously. A colonel, looked about fifty, with the name tag Wilkes. A younger one, Lieutenant Colonel Langford. Maybe thirty-eight. Then a civilian, dumpy, wearing an ill-fitting suit. He’d cried, the civilian had, silent tears that he had flicked away as if they had been gnats landing on his face. And then Mr. Crew, tall, no way to tell the age, looking a little like the Swedish actor Max von Sydow. Great suit, and those eyes. White-gray. Unique.

Dad’s people. His coworkers. She shook her head, considering the little collection of silent men.

She went into her bedroom and lay down, closing her eyes and contemplating what the voyage of her life would be like now.

Dad had had one of those stealth tempers that would boil up out of nowhere and, for a few minutes, rock the world. He had been bitter about never making general. “It’s the damn work I do, nobody else can do it and it’s not a general’s job.” He had hated it and loved it. He would drink at the kitchen table, lifting shots of vodka, and then he would be poetic, which was beautiful and awesome and scary, because he had such a huge memory for quotations, and because when he was like that, being with him was like looking into the darkest room in the world.

“When in disgrace with fortune and men’s eyes,” she could hear him reciting, “I all alone beweep my outcast state…” and then looking at her and adding, “pardon my bathos.”

“Oh, hell,” she said, “I’m going to miss you! I am going to miss you!”

How could he be dead? How in God’s name do you get KIAed in Indianapolis?

Well, hell. As far as he was concerned, the day she received her commission, she had been on her way to general. He would manage her career. “You can’t fly combat, so you need to get on a hot staff.”

He had stared at her orders to report to the supplies depot for a long time. Stood there and stared, so still she thought he might have gone to sleep on his feet. He put them down far too carefully, on the back of the couch. Then he had marched off into his office. She’d heard him yelling, and gone to his door, which was not right, she knew, but she was involved, for God’s sake. She’d only heard one thing, but it had been repeated a number of times, “put her on ice.” And he’d cursed the person at the other end of the line with a venom that was far beyond his worst tantrums, that had frightened her because it had implied that the hidden thing in his life somehow also involved her.

Thinking back, she closed her eyes for a moment. Fortune and men’s eyes…

There had also been another thing between her and Dad, that would come at moments of silence and his strange sorrow, a kind of bond that would seem to enter the air between them, almost as if they could somehow link their minds. Or so she imagined.