Will Mackin - Bring Out the Dog

I lay back on the outcropping. The stone was warm, the breeze refreshing. Sunshine penetrated my eyelids, soaking through my retinas and into my mind, where it turned all my memories blue.

The voice of the lead pilot over the radio snapped me out of it: “Bulldog, Widow One Five.”

The air base from which the jets launched was north of Salt Lake City. Searching the sky in that direction, I detected a slip of vertical motion. Then the jet came out of afterburner, leaving a tall column of black smoke. I watched the jet climb up and over the city. The sun flashed off its canopy as it rolled inverted and pulled toward the range. A second jet rose from the shimmering air base, then a third. Each jet carried four five-hundred-pound laser-guided bombs.

I manned the laser designator. Searching through the scope, I found the levers of the fire truck’s pump control station, and the dials above the levers with their needles all at zero. I found an axe, hanging below a pike, hanging below a section of hard hose. I saw Craner’s rocky base reflected in the fire truck’s windshield before I found the three silver horns on the roof of the cab. Reed manned the radio.

“Say when ready for talk-on,” Reed transmitted.

“Go ahead,” the pilot answered.

A talk-on oriented the pilot to the target environment. It began by identifying something large and obvious, then proceeded in a narrowing line toward the target. The pilot would follow along either by looking outside, with the naked eye, or by looking through a camera that was mounted to a targeting pod that hung on a wing.

Reed began his talk-on with the Great Salt Lake and its dark green center. Next, he described a spot along the lake’s western shore where sand and water twisted into a yin-yang.

“What’s a yin-yang?” the pilot asked.

From there, Reed moved west again, focusing the pilot’s attention onto the sand at the bottom of the draw, where the shadows of two clouds combined to form what looked like a devil’s head.

“Got it,” the pilot said.

Reed asked, “What do you see between the devil’s horns?”

“A fire truck,” the pilot answered.

“That’s your target,” Reed said.

Reed stacked the jets in a counterclockwise orbit out over the lake. The first jet rolled wings level and dove toward the target. Reed cleared him to drop. I triggered the laser. The air horns created a nice refraction, which the bomb steered toward by means of adjustable fins. The fins banged up and down against their stops, causing the bomb to fall through the air like a shuttle through a loom, also causing it to chatter. Looking through the designator’s scope at the silver horns, I listened to the falling bomb. I watched the fireball silently blossom, right over the horns. The bang rolled up the draw to reach me with torn edges. The heat warmed my face.

The fire truck steamed as if it had been broiled. A blue halo of shattered glass surrounded it. Levers on the pump control station that had been up were down, and vice versa. Otherwise it looked fine.

More jets arrived to circle high in the stack, as others corkscrewed down into the chute. There was a long period of direct hits in which nothing seemed to change. Where some core thing held together, blast after blast. Which made me wonder if I should stop the bombing, call in a crane, and tow the fire truck to the laboratory, and down Main Street to the center of town, where the fire station would’ve been had they still needed one. Meaning, had the aliens not yet taught the humans how to inoculate themselves against pyromania, or other acts of god. I thought maybe the aliens and humans could work together to restore the fire truck back to its original condition, so they could drive it down the street during their parade. Then something vital broke open down on the live impact zone. Oily smoke poured from a deep fissure in the fire truck’s hull. The cab tore open, the doors blew off, the seats ejected, the front axle collapsed. Chrome boiled, and the red finish melted. I shone the laser on whatever I could find through the billowing smoke: intake cowling, engine block, drive train. It wasn’t long before all that remained was the pump.

The iron pump looked like two elbows locked together. I shot the laser into one open flange, and the refraction bloomed out another. The pump gonged under the weight of two, three, and four bombs. It cracked under the weight of a fifth. The last bomb tore it open. A brass impeller paddle-wheeled out of the fireball, pulling flames with it. The impeller’s blades separated in midair, sailing off to leave deep maroon scars in the sand.

Coming off target, the jet flew right over Reed and me on the OP. It was such a strange sight: the jet, knife-edged, maybe thirty feet off the ground. It was so close I saw every panel in the fuselage, and every rivet in every panel. The pilot looked right at me. It was like she stood on one side of a bottomless crevasse, and I on the other. But she was weightless. I saw her eyes behind her dark visor. I saw her pencil, dummy-corded to her kneeboard, floating in mid-cockpit. I saw her French braid rising off her shoulder toward her canopy. Then she was gone, and the mountain shook in her wake.

Hit glowed blue under the new moon. We walked toward it from the south—across the rocky desert, over railroad tracks and a four-lane highway, then down a dirt road that ran perpendicular to the silver Euphrates. We took our third left onto a paved street. Our target building had sliding windows and a muddy garden out front. J.J. darkened the flickering streetlight across from it with one suppressed round— thhp, dink —and pieces of glass tumbled to the earth. We took positions for the raid—security in the back alley; blocking stations on the intersections to the east and west; assaulters on both sides of the front door—and waited for Spot.

If Spot had thought everything was cool, he would’ve given J.J. a thumbs-up. Instead, Spot hurried over to the assaulters on the door. He grabbed Mike by the sleeve and swapped him with Tull. He grabbed Tull and swapped him with Zsa-Zsa. He sent Bobby to the back alley to link up with Lou. Spot had never done so much shuffling around, but this was the night after Qa’im, and we were all still a little uneasy. Spot stepped back from the door—if not satisfied with the changes he’d made, then at least willing to give this new configuration a try. He looked at me, standing off the corner of the building, where I always stood.

I wanted to make eye contact with Spot so he could see that I was okay. I knew how to look okay. I knew how to make it seem like I wasn’t bothered by what had happened at Qa’im—or, for that matter, at Habbaniyah or Ramadi. The funny thing was, nothing had happened at any of those places. Nothing bad, at least. At Qa’im, we’d been ambushed, caught with our pants down. But we’d managed to fight our way out. And we’d killed a lot of insurgents along the way. Insurgents who were ex–Republican Guard, or Saddam’s version of us. Yet no one in our troop was even hurt—unless you count Lou, who either didn’t feel pain or did an excellent job fooling himself. No one could argue, however, that bad nights didn’t happen, and that we weren’t due for one.

Standing outside that building in Hit, I tried not to think about it. I tried to act like everything was fine, and I wanted to see myself reflected in Spot’s gaze.

The problem was, Spot had a lazy eye, and I always mixed up which one. After figuring it out, I’d tell myself “left is right” or “right is wrong,” to improve my chances of remembering the next time. Inevitably, though, I’d look directly into Spot’s bad eye. That night, his misalignment skewed toward the Pleiades, or that part of the sky where Zeus had transformed the seven daughters of Atlas into doves, then those doves into stars. Before I could correct myself, Spot turned toward the street and gave J.J. a thumbs-up.