Will Mackin - Bring Out the Dog

Hal nodded at Joe, and Joe raised his bullhorn.

“‘If you don’t eat your meat, you can’t have any pudding! How can you have any pudding if you don’t eat your meat!’”

Joe’s message echoed. A match flared inside the cabin, turning the windows orange. The teacher emerged in a nightcap, carrying a lit candle on a brass candlestick. He squinted at us standing in the darkness.

Digger slapped away the candle. Hal stepped on the flame. I zip-tied the old man’s wrists, and Joe forced him to kneel on the hard ground.

“What have I done?” he asked.

We didn’t answer. Rather, we left him, knees bleeding, to think about it. Then we burst into his cabin to see how he lived.

Rain soaked the flatbed. It drummed off the deuce-and-a-half’s rusty cab. It ran down the sides of the blue shipping container—half-sunk in the marsh, 150 meters south of our position—that was our target on that December evening in 2008. Moby was on the radio, running the control. Reed and I were both JTACs, or joint terminal attack controllers, or those who, from the ground, directed air attacks against the enemy. We were training Moby to be a JTAC too, but it wasn’t going well. Only one of the four jets that we’d scheduled had shown up. Then the storm had blown in. And now the sun had gone down, leaving the sky to the west—in which we searched for the jet—dark gray.

“Got him,” Reed said.

“Where?” Moby asked.

Reed pointed. “Right there, turning in.”

Moby shook his head.

“Out over the Alligator River,” I added.

“That doesn’t help,” Moby said.

The jet—a Hornet, call sign “Ripper”—appeared low over the trees, turning hard toward the range, its wings wrapped in a bright cloud of white vapor. Rolling out of the turn with its nose pointed at us, the jet became invisible.

“Ripper, inbound, heading one-zero-three,” the pilot radioed. I thought his voice sounded familiar.

“What do I tell him?” Moby asked.

“Do you have him in sight?” Reed asked.

“No.”

“Then say ‘Continue’ and keep looking.”

A gust of wind sharpened the rain at our backs. Moby held the radio’s hook like a phone as he keyed the mike. After five seconds of dead air, he said, “Continue.”

Navy Dare Bombing Range was at the center of a wide, brackish marsh. At the western end of that marsh, roughly three miles from the flatbed, stood a forest of tall pines. Beyond the pines was the Alligator River, so called because that’s what everyone thought it looked like from the air. But I’d flown over that river dozens of times, and I’d never seen the alligator.

Before becoming a JTAC, in 2004, I was a pilot, which was all I’d ever wanted to be. I’d joined the navy wanting to fly the F-14 Tomcat, like Maverick in Top Gun. I’d dreamed of speeding into dogfights at Mach 1. After flight school, however, I was assigned to fly a subsonic monstrosity known as the Queer. The Queer was a Vietnam-era bomber that had, as a bombsight, grease-pencil crosshairs on the windscreen. Every now and then I used to fly a Queer to Navy Dare, to work with SEAL JTACs. Approaching the range from the west, I’d look down on the river and try to see the alligator. Its jaws, I’d heard, opened north; its tail curved south; tributaries formed its legs. I didn’t see any of that. At the center of the river was a star-shaped island that was supposed to be the gator’s eye. I’d begin my target runs over that island, heading east-southeast toward a dead cypress that stood taller than all the pines.

I elbowed Moby and pointed at the cypress. “Ripper’s over that dead tree now,” I said.

“There’s, like, a million fucking dead trees,” Moby said.

Ripper approached the target at over five hundred knots. Vapes thick as whipped cream flashed on the backs of his wings.

“Okay, now I see him,” Moby said.

“Clear him hot,” Reed said.

“Ripper, two miles,” the pilot said. He could’ve been Biff, who I’d known in flight school.

“What the fuck’s he talking about, two miles?” Moby asked.

“He wants clearance,” I said.

Ripper disappeared into a thick, dark squall, the type I would’ve avoided at all costs because the Queer’s engines had a tendency to flame out in heavy precipitation. Something about the shape of the intakes allowed too much water to pass into the compressor, which then sprayed it all into the burner cans. But the Hornet had better intakes, apparently, along with better everything else. Ripper popped out of the squall unscathed.

“Clear him,” Reed told Moby.

Moby palmed the big green radio in his left hand while holding the hook to his ear with his right. He keyed the mike and froze. Sometimes, as soon as he remembered what to say, he’d unfreeze. But this time Moby remained frozen. He stared off the flatbed into a murky rush of sawgrass with his mouth hanging open and rain dripping off his chin. My hypothesis was that the ten watts radiating off the transmitter triggered a petit mal in Moby’s brain. I imagined the tight waves of radio energy penetrating Moby’s skull and short-circuiting his thoughts. Then again, it didn’t happen every time. Just often enough to cast doubt on his ability to control air strikes in a combat situation, which was more than enough to jeopardize the plan.

The plan was for Moby, a SEAL with Team Four, to replace Reed at the top secret unit to which Reed and I belonged. Moby wanted to leave Team Four because, according to him, they didn’t deploy enough. Reed wanted to leave our unit because we deployed all the time, and he was burned out. Over five years, in fact, Reed had made seven deployments, plus however many contingency ops—including that last one, in Yemen, that had gone sideways. In order for Reed to leave, though, he needed to find his own replacement, i.e. Moby, then train and qualify him as a JTAC. And he needed to do it before Christmas, because that’s when Reed’s troop was scheduled to deploy again.

Moby failed to transmit clearance. Ripper passed low over the shipping container without dropping any of its inert training bombs. The noise of the Hornet’s engines at full power sounded like everything in the world being torn apart. I followed Ripper’s ascent into the clouds via its anti-collision light, which made those clouds blink red. Reed followed, too. Moby turned up the volume on the radio to hear the pilot say, “Ripper’s off target, no drop, RTB.”

RTB meant “return to base.”

“I guess we’re done,” Moby said.

“Gimme that,” I said.

Moby passed me the hook. “Is this Biff?” I transmitted.

Last I’d heard, Biff was flying Hornets on the West Coast, though he could’ve been transferred.

“Negative. This is Keebler,” the pilot radioed back.

“Listen, Keebler. We need more passes.”

“No can do,” Keebler said. “There’s a large cell of convective activity moving in. If I were you, I’d seek immediate shelter.”

THE M35 TWO-AND-A-HALF-TON flatbed, a.k.a. the “deuce-and-a-half,” was, like the Queer, a piece of Cold War equipment that had been nursed along for decades. At some point, this one had been farmed out to Navy Dare, where all nursing stopped. Where everything eventually got sucked into the marsh to decompose. The deuce-and-a-half’s windshield was cracked, its clutch burned out. Its dim headlights surged whenever the worn-out alternator belt found purchase. A hole in the exhaust pipe pumped carbon monoxide into the cab. Reed rode shotgun with the window down. Moby rode bitch. I drove over washed-out dirt roads, through a thunderstorm, toward the control tower.