“You’re trying to intimidate him into an honest result?”
“He’ll find it tough to lie if he thinks Michael Baden will be coming along behind him to repeat the post. And do it now. He might have already cut Buck. He could be dictating his findings as we speak.”
“What if I can’t get him on the phone?”
“Drive to the hospital. Push him hard, Ben.”
“Understood.”
As I end my call with Ben, my burner phone pings. I snatch it off the seat with a frantic motion. Jet’s texted reply reads: You’re right. Paul and I just had a fight. He’s suspicious. Focused on Josh but he did mention you. Don’t know where this is coming from. I’m still planning to come this aft but won’t if I’m not certain I’m clean. I love you. Stay calm and deny everything if confronted. If it all blows up, I know that’s not what we planned, but all we can do is deal with it. For the time being, deny. See you soon I hope!
I feel like that burner phone is wired to my limbic brain. My autonomic nervous system is firing nonstop, and it’s all I can do not to piss my pants. For three months we’ve been gliding under the radar, knowing there was danger yet somehow feeling invulnerable. That changed today.
Three o’clock is forty minutes away. I fight the urge to speed and force myself to pay attention to the traffic. The last thing I need is a fender bender to prevent me from seeing Jet in private during this crisis. Who knows when we’ll get another chance?
Her text made it clear that she has no more idea than I do about what triggered Paul’s sudden suspicion. We may never find out. The “six degrees of separation” principle applies on a global scale. In a town like Bienville, few people are even one degree removed from everyone else. A huge percentage of residents know each other directly, and not only by name, but by entire family histories. My mama went to school with her daddy, and my grandfather hunted with his, and I’ve heard tell that four generations back, we might even have come from the same Civil War colonel. The idea that two well-known citizens could carry on an illicit affair in this kind of matrix without being discovered is preposterous.
Yet people try it every day.
What strikes me as I drive out Highway 36 is that Paul and I have always been rivals for Jet’s affection. There’s no mystery about that. Even after he married her, he knew I still lived within her heart, the way she lived in mine after my marriage to Molly. But something has made him fear a physical manifestation of our feelings. A present-day resurrection of the sexual relationship that he knows far too much about to sleep easily. And if he truly fears that, then what will he do about it?
Paul Matheson is capable of extreme behavior. No one knows that better than I. I made him famous by writing about his courage, skill, and daring, but also by omitting the truth about his terrifying lack of restraint when under threat. Had I told the truth about all I have seen, Paul would be viewed as a different man today. Celebrated by some, surely, but reviled by others. Most of us are never tested the way Paul has been. A few unlucky civilians endure horrific experiences, violent crimes, or terrorist acts. But apart from survivors of sexual assault, almost no one faces the stress levels present in that soul-killing zone of conflict called war. And the relationship between Paul and me cannot be understood without knowing what we went through under fire together.
Not even Jet knows the truth.
Chapter 16
In January 2004, I left Washington to embed with a company of marines in Afghanistan. Before I left, I reached out to Paul to ask for tips on surviving in combat conditions. To my surprise, I got Jet instead. Newlywed Paul had left Mississippi at the age of thirty-one to begin working as a military contractor in Afghanistan. This shocked me, but Jet explained that 9/11 had tripped a sort of reflex patriotic fervor in Paul. He’d wanted to re-enlist in the Rangers, but this turned out to be more complicated than he’d hoped. Then he heard from some old Ranger buddies who’d been hired as private military contractors. They told him tales that sounded like a cross between the Old West of Hollywood and Lawrence of Arabia, complete with horse cavalry charges.
Paul boarded the next plane to Kabul.
After two ninety-day rotations in Afghanistan, he shifted to Iraq, where he quickly realized that military contracting was the new growth industry. All you needed to get a fat government contract was a couple of armored vehicles and a football team’s worth of vets who didn’t mind getting shot at. Paul already knew the veterans, and the Bienville Poker Club was happy to provide the capital to field an armored unit in Iraq. What better bragging rights could Mississippi businessmen have at every golf course, hunting club, and cocktail party in the South than being able to say they had their own Special Forces team slinging lead at the ragheads in America’s far-flung war zones? I wasn’t sure Paul would get his venture off the ground, but that was his problem.
I flew to Afghanistan and embedded with regular marines. I got to spend a little time with some private contractors, but I came to know only a couple well. They were former Delta operators—very different from the contractors I would come to know in Iraq. I learned a lot about war in eight weeks. Combat answered the questions I’d pondered while reading Hemingway and Conrad and le Carré and Michael Herr. The eternal male questions: Will my nerve hold when the bullets start hitting around me? When the guy next to me gets blasted into big wet pieces? If I’m asked to pick up a weapon and help, will I acquit myself competently? Honorably? The answers to the first two questions proved affirmative. But in Afghanistan I was never asked to pick up a weapon, not to fire in anger anyway. That would come later.
In Zabul Province I bonded with young men whom I would never have met back in the world. The America those boys had grown up in was far different from mine, though I was only ten or twelve years older than most of them. Their notions about war were alien to me—I who had been nursed on Paths of Glory and The Bridge on the River Kwai by my father. Those kids had a kind of nihilistic enthusiasm about combat, one bred from later war films and first-person shooter video games. They’d come to Afghanistan expecting an adrenaline-churning synthesis of Rambo and Apocalypse Now, but one fought behind an insulating layer of technology, as in Doom, Halo, and Call of Duty. They seemed to understand that they’d been posted to the graveyard of empires, but this awareness was hidden behind the ironic distance they wore like an extra layer of armor. They’d evolved this armor as children, to protect themselves from the pain of disintegrating families. They’d never been infused with the unified, idealized image of America that still lives within me. Nevertheless, they fought with remarkable bravery, and they made sure that I was as safe as possible under fire.
Iraq was different.