The sheik starts talking, and I’m only half-listening, but I perk up when he tells me he’s the city’s engineer. I don’t know why it hits me like it does, that even here, in this backward-ass country where men hold hands like schoolgirls and women dress like ghosts, there’s a man with the kind of brain it takes to build bridges—to build entire cities.
I’m still turning this over in my mind as he tells me how the Emir single-handedly turned a collection of mud huts into a city of the world. “And see what they’ve done,” he says, sweeping his hand in front of him. The wind catches the sleeve of his dishdasha, fills it like a balloon. I can’t tell if he’s talking about Saddam’s army or ours. I don’t reply—I never do when these guys jabber on—but he turns to look at me, his eyes wide, brown, as pretty as a girl’s. “Look!” he shouts. Then he’s grabbing me. “I want you to look, soldier!” My standard course of action when anyone lays hands on me is to pull my gun, but I don’t need a genius to tell me this guy is just another lost soul.
“The airport’s done for, and your wells are a mess,” I tell him. “But the rest ain’t too bad. Four years and you’re back in business.”
He hears this, but says nothing. He only drops the cigarette on the cement balcony and snuffs it out with one of his thousand-dollar shoes. He grinds it for too long, as if he thinks he can make it disappear. I find the oil fires again; I can’t stop looking, the way you can’t stop staring at a campfire. I’m still looking when, beside me, I feel the sheik walk to the other end of the balcony. I consider telling him that a river of money, courtesy of the United States taxpayers, is about to flood his city, that it’ll get fixed up good, even better than what it was. But you can’t talk to these guys. They’re too sentimental.
I turn in time to see the edge of his dishdasha as it fills up with wind. I hear him land on the broken glass on the street below, and then I hear people shouting. What I notice is his cigarette flattened against the concrete of the balcony—a little bit of smoke still floats up from it. I walk to the edge and look over. The Jawas and the recruits are hovering over the body, and the shavetail is on his way back into the hotel to make a call. The engineer is dead, kissing the street. I curse him. I must shout it out loud, because the boys on the ground look up, trying to figure out where the sound came from so I have to step back. There will be questions and paperwork and then more questions. I won’t be on the line for this. I ain’t a suicide hotline, and this wasn’t a mission fail. But the paperwork and the shrink—I’d rather pull my teeth out with pliers than deal with that shit again. I didn’t need their help after Erebus, and I won’t need it now.
I carefully set my supplies back in the tackle box and snap it shut. The girl’s eyes are big—scared-big—and I ask her what’s up. She says she left something out there, but she won’t tell me what it is.
“Old Bozer’ll get it for you,” I say, like she’s a baby. “Just say what I gotta look for.” She shakes her head at me. Even though she still looks like someone killed her puppy, her eyes can focus on my face now. She’s coming back. I see the shame is getting to her. She’s too embarrassed to talk much. Good. What happened to her on the Divide ain’t her fault, but this silly shit—going outside without ECW and playing in the snow—that is.
I got something to show her, so I take my old Palmer parka from the hook and help her into it. “Where are we going?” she asks while I pull her bandaged hand through the cuff.
“Just follow old Bozer.”
*
It’s colder in the Utilidors than it is under the Dome. No one comes to this door besides me. I drop my shoulder and lean it; it’s ice-encrusted and gets harder and harder to open each year. I got the flashlight in my armpit, and once I break the door open, I have to crouch down and sort of shuffle through. She’s not following me, though. She’s watching me from the Utilidor tunnel, like she’s scared of me. Denise wasn’t scared. She walked in like a champ, no hesitation. She went right up to where me and Floyd had him laid out, went right up to him and told me to take the plastic off his face. But then it was me hesitating. My brains told me that the Man Without Country would look as pretty as he did the day he died—hell, this continent’s got a whole baseball team of frozen explorers sleeping in the ice—but I wasn’t keen on it. Denise was, though—she was real keen. And by this time, I woulda done just about anything for the woman, so I did it. I blew on the plastic to get it to loosen a little, and after that it was easy enough. Denise held his head while I unwound the sheeting like I was taking off an Ace bandage. First to show was his beard. Next, his mouth, his white lips frosty. When I checked on Denise, making sure she wasn’t too upset, I seen something that surprised me. A smile. First one I’d seen since she’d come down. Something was happening here. Didn’t know what it was, but I wasn’t gonna try to stop it. Not if it’d help her. And it did. It did help her.
I’d gotten the call right after Halloween 1999, from the U.S. Coast Guard, asking if I had any interest in visiting Newport, Rhode Island. A Boeing 767 had gone deep-sea diving shortly after takeoff from JFK, and the head of the recovery team—one of the boys from the Erebus crash site, Gluck, now a twenty-year navy veteran—had asked for me specifically.
I was a month into the season at Pole but VIDS put me on a plane the next day, and I was on board the USS Grapple within forty-eight hours. I hadn’t done water rescue before, but I wasn’t there to rescue. I was there to recover. Gluck told me the Atlantic Strike Team was young—half of them were raw. He wanted me there to show the youngsters how a man handles himself when the bodies begin to appear, how to lay out the remains on the deck, how to catalog limbs, how to see without seeing.