THE PRICE
For what shall it profit a man if he shall gain the whole world,
and lose his own soul?—Mark 8:36
I was sitting in the kitchen when I heard a car pull into the drive. I opened the side door and saw a yellow taxi with a Fayetteville address on it. A very thin man in slacks and a checked sport shirt had gotten out and was paying off the driver. He picked up his blue gym bag and turned.
God he was thin!
“Jesse?” I said.
“All there is left of me, Ab,” he said as he walked to the steps. He still had the grin I remembered from when we were kids. “Gonna invite me in?”
“Come on in,” I said, holding the screen door open with my right arm. “The Army called and said you’d be released at eight a.m.”—the voice had actually said, “Oh-eight hundred,” but I’d translated it in my mind—“but that you’d be making your own way here.”
Jesse turned on the mat and we both watched the cab back up the driveway. I said, “I thought the Army’d send a car.”
Jesse’s smile seemed tired as he followed me into the kitchen. “They would’ve,” he said, “but they’d held me for another month after I got to Fort Bragg. I decided I didn’t want to spend any more time in Army Green than I had to. I picked up a cab right at the front gate and paid him for both directions.”
He’d have stopped in the kitchen but I walked him through to the living room and gestured him to the easy chair in the corner in front of the bookcase. It was where Dad had always sat.
I’d kept things like they were when Dad was alive. I’d have liked to keep everything like it was when we were kids. The world doesn’t work that way; but I could save a bit.
“Do you want a drink?” I said.
“Does a bear shit in the woods?” said Jesse.
I brought a bottle and two glasses from the kitchen cabinet. “Jim Beam all right?”
His smile again. “It always has been,” he said. “Mostly what we got in-country was Suntory. Which did the job.”
He took a big swallow from the glass I handed him. I put the bottle down on the end table and sat on the couch myself, turning to face Jesse. “Ah . . . ,” I said. “I saw you were limping a little, but you seem generally in good shape?”
“Generally, yeah,” Jesse said, raising his left arm and rotating it so that I could see the weal running from the edge of his hand and onward until it disappeared under his shirt sleeve. “It goes right on down to the heel of my foot. It’s not bad, but I’m glad it’s my left side and not my right.”
“Lightning?” I said. I swallowed. He looked and sounded like my kid brother, but he’d been flattened and bleached out somehow. His skin was very tan, but the irises of his eyes were barely visible as pale gray rings around his pupils.
“Yeah, sorta,” Jesse said, bending forward to refill his glass. There were more bottles in the kitchen if we needed them. “I don’t think they were holding me so much because of the burn but because they were worried about my attitude.”
He leaned back in his chair and added, “I was starting to wonder if we were really the good guys.”
“They thought you were pro-Red?” I said, trying to keep my voice calm.
“I don’t know what they thought!” Jesse said. “I just know that in the field it’s not always the way it goes into the reports. Guys find it hard to hide their thoughts from an interrogator when you’re toasting their fingers. Sometimes it’s even better if you toast their little girl’s fingers. I had a lot of downtime in hospitals and I did some thinking.”
I took a sip of my bourbon; I hadn’t drunk much, but my mouth was very dry. “Jesse,” I said, “it’s not just field expedients. Your own team brought the evidence back. What the Reds are playing with threatens not only our philosophy but life. All life. It threatens the world itself.”
He chuckled and poured more bourbon. He wasn’t meeting my eyes. Abruptly he looked up and said, “Ab, I know what we learned when we were tasked to check a Red site in Cambodia. But what if we’d been put on a US site in Mexico? What would we have found there?”
“You wouldn’t find that the US is working with demons,” I said deliberately. As I spoke, I felt a shudder of doubt that I didn’t let reach my face.
Jesse snorted, but he said, “Maybe we wouldn’t’ve. That’s above my pay grade anyhow.”
He looked down at the glass again. Then he said, “Look, Ab, I wanna talk. You must have clearances up the wazoo or you wouldn’t know about that last mission, so I guess I can talk to you.”
“I’ve got clearances, yes,” I said, “but I’m sure people would tell me that I don’t have a need to know.”
Jesse shrugged. “I don’t much care about that,” he said. “I got a need to tell. You and I are all the Cathcarts there are, Ab.”
“I’ll listen,” I said. I finished my glass of bourbon. There didn’t seem much reason I shouldn’t get shitfaced drunk if it seemed like that’d help me today.
He settled back in the chair. If I squinted, I could imagine that Dad had come back. Jesse looked a lot like Dad, but in personality he was Mom to the life: bright and sparkly, no way to pin down. And talent like heat lightning when he was on, lighting the sky up but out of nowhere.
“You know I’ve been in a patrol team,” Jesse said. “Mostly in Vietnam, but it’s not like there’s border posts in the regions where we operate. This last one was into Cambodia, and it was real different. We were really just transportation.”
“What do you mean?”
“‘There was a Red site in Cambodia that the suits wanted to know more about,” Jesse said. “It was shielded like you wouldn’t believe. It was supposed to be in a temple—that was from HUMINT, I suppose, though how you’d get a human asset close to anybody who knows anything about a project like this is beyond me. Well, like I say, it’s above my pay grade.”
“The Angkor Wat Incursion back in May,” I said. I hadn’t been part of the planning, but you hear things.
“Yeah, an Airborne brigade and God knows what all else,” Jesse said as he took another drink. “Somebody knows, I ought to say—I’m pretty sure it’s not God. There must’ve been fifty thousand troops when you counted in the Thais. They went over Angkor Wat stone by stone and they found fuck all. Whatever they were looking for, it wasn’t there.”
“Were you involved with that?” I said.
“Hell no, that’s not what they use us for,” Jesse said contemptuously. “I heard they were thinking about running an armored regiment in from the east, but they didn’t need to. They had enough already to protect their seers, really top-level people. They’d had to get them really close to be sure they weren’t being blocked by shielding.”
He shook his head in disgust. “They left a lot of people behind, too. The extraction was worse than the insertion, which it generally is if you try to go back the same way you came in. If you’re that far away from your base you don’t have a lot of choice.”
He lifted the Jim Beam but put it back down when he saw how little there was left in the bottle.
“Go ahead,” I said, starting to get up for another bottle. I was sure I had Scotch; less sure about bourbon.
“Naw, not unless you want it for yourself,” Jesse said. “I didn’t need the docs to tell me I was hitting it pretty hard even before the last operation. I knew they was right.”
I sat back down.
“Anyway, what the suits were looking for wasn’t at Angkor Wat,” Jesse said to his empty glass, “but they got a notion about a patch of Cambodian jungle that didn’t show any damned thing. Not on satellite or from a U-2, and not from their best remote viewers. But some clerk had found a temple on a French survey from 1887. The fact it couldn’t be found there anymore convinced the suits that the Reds were really shielding something. This time instead of sending a brigade, they sent us—like they should’ve done at the beginning. They didn’t have good enough coordinates to do the job mob-handed again or I swear that’s what they’d have done anyway.”
Jesse was right about that, though I didn’t say so. He knew I was doing something hush-hush. I knew he was doing long-range patrols. Neither of us had really understood how close the other was to the top of his particular pyramid, though.
“Anyway, they tasked us,” Jesse said. “The Dai-Uy, that’s Captain Howes, kept us on course, but for pathfinding we had Manford and his number two, Slick. Slick would be lead pathfinder in any other unit. To screen us from remote viewing we got Mitch and Elgy. And there’s me to see threats. You remember that.”
“I remember in a poker game you always knew where the dangerous cards were,” I said. “I watched you do it all the years we were kids. Sometimes I’d get a flash of it myself so I knew how it worked, but I don’t think another human being could be as good as you.”
Jesse grinned. “Yeah, I remember them card games,” he said. “It comes in real handy in the field too. I can’t read minds, but there’s a link there. I don’t think it’s exactly mental.”
“I’ve studied it,” I said. “I’m sure you’re right, but nobody yet has figured out what the other factor is.”
Actually, I’d spent my whole working life on the question and I probably understood it better than Jesse ever would. But what Jesse could do was beyond any kind of electronic enhancement.
“They set us down in a clearing about twenty klicks out,” Jesse said. “That’s a hell of a hump through the boonies, but they didn’t want to spook the Reds. The real problem was Doc, the seer we were taking along. That’s what I mean about us being transportation. If they inserted any closer they’d have to use a brigade again. We were just there to get Doc close to his target.”
“How much were you told about your goal?” I asked.
“Jack shit,” said Jesse. He grinned and added. “Which is par for the course.”
He didn’t sound bitter.
“Doc was a wispy guy I thought was fifty or so, but close up he might’ve been younger and just lived hard. He was dead game, I give him that, but he just didn’t have the strength for the job; the Dai-Uy next thing to carried him. I don’t know how he did it, but recon is the kinda job where you just go on till you drop. The six of us on the team hadn’t dropped yet and we didn’t now.”
I thought about the man across from me, the man I’d grown up with. I’d never thought Jesse was stupid, but he didn’t have the sort of mind I do and I suppose I always looked down on him. I was suddenly very ashamed.
“Once the Dai-Uy gave us our direction, he didn’t have an every-minute job like the rest of us, of course. One of the pathfinders led, with me behind him. Manford and Slick traded off on point; the other one took drag. Once—”
He touched the empty bottle again and grimaced. I started to get up but he waved me down again and continued, “Once we detoured around a Red picket. I was really on that day and felt ’em in plenty of time. The other time it was a three-man post and it was at the only gap in a band of bamboo. Nobody goes through bamboo, not even tanks. Elgy and I took ’em out. I had a CAR-15 and Elgy uses a revolver he picked up from the Air Force, a .357.”
“Wasn’t that awfully loud?” I said.
“It’s okay in the jungle,” Jesse said. “Anyway, we didn’t have a choice this time. They were Khmer, not Viets. A lot solider to look at.
“We mostly don’t talk in the field, but the Doc started whispering in the Dai-Uy’s ear and he signaled us to hold in place. I don’t know how long we’d been humping, and we’d never really known where we were going, so I figured we must be close enough for the Doc to work. Or anyway, he thought so.
“Me, I was just doing my job. Keeping my eyes and ears open, but mainly keeping my mind open. I wasn’t getting anything hostile unless you want to count—”
He chuckled.
“—a whole shitload of leeches off to the west maybe fifty yards where I guess there was a swale. That’s what I mean about not reading minds. There’s not a lot of mind in a leech to read.
“Mitch carried the Prick-25. The Dai-Uy took the handset from him and called base to arrange an extraction. Then Doc sat down and crossed his legs. He put his hands together just like he was praying. For a moment I watched from a corner of my eye, but then I got too busy for even that. I felt the Reds start swarming like hornets out of a hole in the ground. Whatever Doc was doing, the Reds heard it loud and clear.
“Doc jumped up and shouted, ‘Straight to Hell! They’ll let all the demons loose on Earth!’” Jesse shook his head. He had a rueful smile. “You gotta understand, Ab, you don’t talk on patrol. It’s like the President steps out at a news conference and takes a dump in front of the cameras. Looking back, I guess I can’t blame Doc much—he wasn’t one of us, after all—but right then I wanted to wring his neck like a chicken.
“I gave the signal to bug out, which we did. We weren’t going to make it, though, not with Doc; and if Doc didn’t make it back with his info, we may as well have stayed in Da Nang. I could feel them coming for us, and they must’ve known right where we were. Mitch and Elgy weren’t any use at all. We’d gotten Doc close enough to get through the best screening the Reds had, and when they’d been blown anyway, they brought out the best pathfinders they had.
“I told the Dai-Uy and he called it in. Base gave us a vector, but then they told us to hold in place. That was fucking crazy. The Reds were gonna be on top of us in half an hour. I figured the suits didn’t know their ass from a hole in the ground, like usual. I’d have just kept on humping, but the Dai-Uy said sit and so we did. I knew it wouldn’t make five minutes difference anyway.”
Jesse got up and walked to the piano, just to be moving. He opened the keyboard and closed it again. Neither of us had ever learned to play. Dad didn’t either, but he’d kept it around anyhow. Maybe he’d thought Mom was going to come back some day.
“There was the loudest goddam bang I ever hope to hear,” Jesse said. “I was squatting, trying to keep track of the Reds, and it knocked me over on my side when the ground rippled. It was a fucking Daisy Cutter so they must’ve laid the mission on at least twenty-four hours back. Loading a fifteen-thousand-pound bomb on a C-130 isn’t something you do without a lot of prep.
“The Dai-Uy stood up and pointed, then lifted Doc again with an arm over his shoulder. Slick was leading this time. I was back at the end with Manford, having a bitch of a time following the team while feeling the Reds closing in.
“We weren’t going to make it. I couldn’t see the sky but it was past time for the monsoon to hit today. We probably wouldn’t gain anything from that, but it might make it a little harder for the Reds to shoot up the bird extracting us. It’d probably make life harder for the pilots too, but I figured they’d prefer the trade-off. Not that any of us were getting a choice; and it wouldn’t matter to me regardless.
“I shouted to Manford, ‘Go on! I’ll hold ’em up!’” I dunno what he thought about it, but there was no time to argue.
“I put my back to one of the emergents, a big tree even for this place. There were twenty-three Reds strung out for a hundred yards—way too close together except they knew as well as we did that it was a race now. I figure they were getting orders, same as the Dai-Uy had. The Reds chasing us may not have even known what the Daisy Cutter had been, but they knew we were heading for it and that it can’t have been good for them.
“I could feel them holding back just short of where I’d be able to see them—but in this jungle that was about as far as I could spit. I threw my CAR-15 down on the ground—I didn’t want the Reds to shoot me.
“I couldn’t hear the Reds’ discussion but there must’ve been one. Two Khmers stood up. One kept his Kalashnikov aimed at me while the other stepped forward and turned his rifle for a butt-stroke. I stuck my right hand straight up like I was pointing at the sky somewhere above the tree canopy. Maybe the Reds thought I was gesturing to them. What I was doing was adding the storm clouds to the circuit that was me and the twenty-three Reds.
“I didn’t feel the lightning bolt, just a pool of white light that I was falling into.”
“That was how you got the burn?” I said, gesturing toward the scar running up his arm.
Jesse shrugged. “I guess,” he said. “I hadn’t had it that morning when I got up. The next thing I remember is an old guy—must’ve been about eighty—leaning over me and chanting. I couldn’t hear the words—I couldn’t hear anything. It was about three weeks before my ears really worked right. I couldn’t raise my hands either or I’d probably have grabbed him.
“I hadn’t been unconscious that I know about, it was just the white flash and me lying on my back watching this old guy chant or whatever. He was in some kinda camo fatigues. When they debriefed us, they figured the uniform was Russian but none of us were spending a lot of time looking.
“The old guy’s face splattered. Manford carries a twelve-gauge Ithaca he got his daddy to send him. He and Elgy had come back for me. They were damn fools to do it, but I’d have done the same thing if it was one a them. They carried me through the jungle, one by each arm. By the time we got to the clearing I could just about move my feet again but I was still a dead weight. I hadn’t paid much attention to my surroundings before they picked me up, but Manford tells me I was ten feet from the tree I’d been standing by. The lightning had blasted the undergrowth all to hell. He saw a half dozen bodies. I figure there must’ve been a lot more than that because nobody was shooting at us as we ran.”
Jesse threw himself back onto the easy chair. “We’d landed on LZs cleared by Daisy Cutters before but we’d never had ’em blow an LZ to extract us. I hope to God I’m never that close to another one when it goes off. It’s liquid explosive and it spreads out before they set it off. There’s no crater to speak of, just all the vegetation cleared away. There on the near edge of the clearing was one of them mother-huge Navy Sikorskys instead of a Huey like usual. I was surprised the bird had stuck around so long because Elgy and Manford weren’t exactly setting speed records carrying me there.”
He chuckled, a broken sound. “When they tossed me in the door, I saw the Dai-Uy was holding Doc but Mitch and Slick each had a gun against the back of a pilot’s helmet. Turned out the pilots had had orders to lift as soon as the seer was aboard, fuck the rest of us. The team didn’t see it that way.”
Jesse was breathing hard and staring at the empty bottle. This time I didn’t start to get up.
“Well, it was back to Da Nang for the first leg and right away onto a DC-8,” Jesse went on after a moment. “I don’t know if Doc was still with us or not. I don’t know much of anything at all about the flight. I know we touched down a couple times. They had me in a compartment with a medic. A doctor stuck in his head sometimes, and I saw the rest of the team too. I guess they had me gorked on some kinda dope.
“We landed back in the World at Travis, then it was one hospital after another for me. Finally, they told me they were letting me out.” Jesse gave me a smile. “They couldn’t find anything wrong with me, but they weren’t gonna let me go back in the field. By then I was ready to be shut of them too. I asked them to let me out at Fort Bragg, so here I am. I figure whatever they’ve had you doing, we’re still brothers.”
“We’re still brothers,” I said. I took a deep breath. “Look, I’m going to tell you what I’ve been doing, because you’re a big part of it. Growing up with you and seeing you spot threats showed me what was possible.”
Jesse frowned. “You could do it too, Ab,” he said. “I’ve seen you do it.”
“I had just enough talent to understand what you were doing, Jesse,” I said. “And to know that I’d never be that good myself. But it seemed to me that with the proper electronics, I or somebody with even less talent—and pretty much everybody has some—could get a lot better. And that’s been my working life.”
“Can a machine do it?” Jesse said.
I shrugged. “Better with some operators than others,” I said. “If you’re amplifying something, it matters where you start. And nobody ever is as good as Jesse Cathcart all by his lonesome. But at ports of entry and interrogation centers the machines work very well, or they did until last year. That’s what they’ve had me—well, my team—working on, figuring out how the Reds have started getting through the checks. It was your information that gave us the key.”
“You mean this last mission?” Jesse said.
“Yes,” I said. “We were assuming the infiltrators were human. We didn’t think the Reds could work with demons even if they were willing to take the risk. When we learned they could, we started on a completely different direction.”
“Did it work?” said Jesse, pursing his lips.
“This was the first real test,” I said.
Ferraro opened the door from the porch which Dad had closed off for a study. He was my chief deputy and had manned the equipment while I was talking to Jesse. “Yes, beyond doubt,” he said.
There were two men in the hallway to the bedrooms and three more coming from outside through the kitchen. They wore uniforms with no patches or insignia. Jesse started to change but he was still in human form when the bullets tore him to shreds.
The submachine guns were silenced, but the bolts slamming back and forth into the barrels sounded like a bell chorus. A bullet casing bounced off my cheek. I shouted in fright, though I doubt if anyone noticed. The air was gray with propellant smoke.
I stumbled into the kitchen. The gunmen moved out of my way, but my shoulder bounced off the doorjamb.
I made it outside and down the three concrete steps to the yard before I fell to my knees and vomited. I wretched several times until there was nothing more to come out.
When I finally raised my head and looked, at least a dozen cars had pulled into the yard or were parked on the asphalt out front. A couple were sheriff’s department with their blue lights on. I didn’t envy drivers who were going to have to turn around here. The ditch on my side is pretty shallow but anybody who goes off on the other side is going to be lucky if he doesn’t need a wrecker.
Schumacher was standing beside me. I didn’t know how long he’d been there. We don’t report to him exactly, but he’s our liaison with the political side.
“Are you all right?” he said. He didn’t look down at me.
“I guess,” I said. I stood up very carefully. “I will be.”
“I thought it might be fitting if the former members of your brother’s unit provided the support team,” Schumacher said, “since after all he was dead if they were called on to act. Their leader Captain Howes said I shouldn’t even mention the thought to the others, because some of them might not be as controlled as he was.”
“I’m sure he’s right,” I said.
“But Jesse Cathcart was already dead,” Schumacher said. “He died when a Siberian shaman replaced his soul with a demon!”
“He was all that was left of their friend, Jesse,” I said. “All that was left of my brother.”
Schumacher looked toward the ambulance. The red light was flashing, but it and the rest of the vehicles had arrived without sirens.
“Well,” he said. “I’m very glad we didn’t need that. You know I was against you taking this risk. You’re far too valuable to the country to chance losing you.”
I looked at him. I said, “You’ve lost me as sure as if something had chewed my head off. I’m done with you and I’m done with the project.”
I wondered if I could find Captain Howes to share a bottle with. A lot of bottles.