Charlotte Rogan - Now and Again

“Is it one of ours?” asked the leader of the new team, whose name was Robbins.

“I’m guessing it is,” replied Will. “Hey, Nate. Get Polly to circle back around so we can take a better look.”

Nate manipulated the controller, and ten seconds later the screen was filled with a close-up of the vehicle, which seemed to be abandoned. Except for a helmet lying on the ground and a second set of tire tracks, there was no evidence of the people who must have left it there.

“What do you think it means?” asked Nate.

“I’m guessing it was part of the training exercise,” said Robbins.

Will hadn’t thought of this. “Yeah,” he said, “maybe it was.”

Together the team came up with reasons why the vehicle might be abandoned: (a) it was part of the training exercise; (b) it had broken down in the last few hours and been temporarily abandoned; (c) it was bait for unsuspecting soldiers who would approach to find it booby-trapped; and (d) it was bait and being covered by hostile snipers who were hidden somewhere nearby. Will remembered the answer elimination techniques. He remembered that sometimes there was only one correct answer and sometimes there was more than one. He remembered there was always one answer that seemed right but wasn’t, and that was the one they called the sucker choice.

“If it’s D,” said Nate, “Polly should be able to see the snipers.”

“Keep circling,” said Will. “She should be able to see the bomb too, if there is one.”

Nate worked the directional button and adjusted the resolution of the output. “If there’s a bomb, it’s hidden pretty well.”

“Could someone be hunkered down in that gully? Or hiding in those hills?”

“The hills are covered with boulders — someone could be hiding anywhere. But I guess we can confirm or eliminate answer A by radioing back to base,” said Robbins.

The radio operator spoke into his handset, but the line was filled with static and he couldn’t get through.

“We’re missing something,” said Will, aware of an unfamiliar shimmy in his belly. “It’s the helmet that bothers me. What’s that helmet doing there?”

“I’m thinking it was part of the training exercise,” said Robbins. “That’s the only way the helmet makes sense.”

“Try the radio again.”

Will followed Nate out of the vehicle for a better look. The sky was the color of metal. For some reason, he could feel ghosts all around him, and he wondered if they were real ghosts or only figments of his imagination. It was probably just the wind, which was blowing in gusts and eddies. He took the controller from Nate and brought Polly in low, but a crosscurrent pushed her off course. “The wind is Polly’s biggest thing,” he said. He struggled with the controls and was relieved when he got a visual — a bright spot against the ragged aluminum sky. “Okay, I see her now,” he said, but the wind was scuffing up dust, making visibility difficult, and he immediately lost sight of her again. “Hey, Nate,” he called out, “do you have a visual on Polly?”

The two men scanned the sky. Then they bent their heads over the computer screen to see what Polly was seeing, which would give them a clue to where she was. The feedback video bucked and whirled as Polly hit a trough and then settled as the stabilizing rotor took hold.

“Freeze that!” said Will when the output showed something moving in the distance, but the camera had already lost whatever it was.

“I sure wish we had one of those Groundhogs,” said Nate.

“Shit! Switch back to the wide-angle view.”

“No, wait,” said Nate. “Look at this.”

Now they could see the ravine on the screen, and the helmet, and the vehicle.

“Check the coordinates,” said Will, and Nate said, “It’s about half a klick north of our current position.”

Will tried to circle the Parakeet back over the ravine, but the wind was blowing in circles and swirls of dust obscured the view. A minute passed and then another. “Nothing,” said Will. “I don’t see a fucking thing.”

“Should we go and check out the vehicle ourselves?” asked Nate.

There were only two possible answers to the question. After the Turn of the Screw quiz, Mr. Quick had said the best answer was both, but that clearly wasn’t an option here. “I don’t know,” he said. “I wish the radio was working.”

“What if there are men inside?”

“We didn’t see signs of any men, and the helmet is too far from the truck to have fallen. It seems like it was planted as part of the exercise. Hey, Robbins. Can you try the radio again?”

“Get Polly to go back around,” said Robbins.

Will nodded, but Polly was nonresponsive.

“Maybe the hawk got her,” said Nate.

Inside the Humvee, the radio crackled to life. Will couldn’t make out the words, but he heard Robbins say, “Roger that,” before calling out, “The vehicle was part of the exercise. They want us to bring it in.”

While the driver navigated between the boulders in the direction of the abandoned vehicle, Will marked the coordinates of Polly’s homing device. “She’s up there,” he said, pointing to the line of hills. “We can go after Polly while you all deal with the Humvee.”

“We’d better check with base,” said Robbins.

The signal was better now that they were higher, and a second later the captain’s voice came through, relaying instructions from the busy operations center: “Third squad found the helo, but do not leave that bird in the field. I repeat: do not abort.”

The homing device indicated that Polly was approximately one klick away from the stranded vehicle, which Will figured would take them just under the second ridge, about halfway to the road. “You heard the man,” he said to Nate, who cracked a grin and laughed a little, as if he had thought of something funny. Then Robbins said, “Go get that bird,” which was when Will realized he would miss Polly and the desert and the team.

The two men adjusted their goggles and patted their weapons. They made their way along a gully before climbing to the top of the first hill. The desert stretched around them, hazy and brown and kind of corrugated where the wind had made patterns in the dirt. Below them, Robbins and the others were attaching a tow bar to the stranded vehicle. Will pointed down the backside of the hill. “She’s somewhere down there,” he said.

The wind was howling now, the air gauzy with particulates — unless it was the ghosts Will was still imagining. “Do you believe in ghosts?” he asked.

“Hell, no,” said Nate, but he didn’t sound too sure.

Will could imagine the ghosts wailing and screeching and saying their prayers. He could imagine them telling their stories — as a warning, as a history lesson, as a way not to be forgotten, as a final comment on life and futility and all there was to be won and lost. He too would have stories to tell when he got back home. If he found the words for them and if they were worth telling. If people cared enough to listen. That morning, he had added a small notepad to his pocket just in case. Just in case he needed to write something down. Something final, he thought now, because it was his last mission before going home and because the shimmy was back and because he suddenly had a bad feeling about things. But then he countered the negativity by saying “Spider-Man” quietly, to himself, and the bad feeling peeled away, leaving his nerves steady and his senses stripped and sharp.

He tapped his pocket to make sure his knife was there, along with the two girlfriends. He thought about how he loved them both and how things that seemed crazy at home made perfect sense in Iraq — and vice versa. Anyway, he’d figure it out. He tried the launcher again, but Polly wasn’t responding. The wind was almost shrieking now, filled with fine dust and occasional larger particles, and even though it was hot, a deep chill ran from his stomach to his toes. “Something bad happened here,” he said. “I can feel it.”