“Thank you for your service.”
“We live in the DC area. Where you from?”
“All over. Originally from Montana. Big Sky country.”
“Right. That would inspire you to become a pilot.”
“Yeah.”
“I’m from upstate New York. Farm family. My wife is from Tennessee. Moonshine family.”
Collins chuckled.
“Bird-watching is our hobby. Back in the States, we work for the federal government.” He added, “Nothing interesting. Department of the Interior. We’re geologists.”
Collins thought about that, maybe coming to the logical conclusion that Mr. and Mrs. Bowman were scoping out the terrain for possible oil deposits.
Brodie said to him, “That’s not for public consumption. We’re just bird-watchers.”
Collins nodded.
Brodie said, “I’m going to get some sleep. Unless you want me to take the controls so you can get some shut-eye.”
“You fly?”
“No. But I’ve been watching how you do it.”
Collins thought that was funny.
Brodie squeezed back into the cabin and took his seat next to Taylor.He watched her as she slept, her breasts rising and falling, a look of perfect peacefulness on her face. He hoped she was dreaming about waking up in bed next to Scott Brodie.
As he started to buckle in, her arm extended toward him, zombie-like, and in her hand was a scrap of notepaper. He took it and read,First Place for Bullshit goes to Scott Brodie.Then,P.S. Never made moonshine.
He smiled, tilted his seat back, and closed his eyes. His body needed sleep, but, as in Iraq, his mind was in survival mode and his thoughts were racing toward what lay ahead.
And what lay ahead would be partly determined by what lay behind. Meaning the shoot-out at the Hen House. And Carmen. If Carmen was grilled by the police or SEBIN, she might crack. And if she did, and if Mercer did in fact have contacts in the regime and the military, then Mercer could be waiting for them at the Kavak airstrip.
Brodie could have killed Carmen, of course, and also Luis, who had heard too much. And Carmen’s john, too, though he didn’t understand English. But you had to draw that line somewhere. Or, as Nietzsche said in Philo 101, “Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster.”
Good advice for whoever dreamed up Flagstaff. And good advice for Captain Mercer, who had apparently looked deep into the abyss and saw it was looking back at him. And good advice, too, for Scott Brodie, who had come too close to that abyss a few times. And this might become one of those times.
PART IV
CANAIMA NATIONAL PARK, VENEZUELA
AUGUST 2018
CHAPTER 36
The Marines hit the beach before dawn, and eleven-year-old Kyle Mercer was there to see it.
The sky was a deep purple, the water an inky black, and the sunlight was just beginning to bloom on the horizon. He saw the dark shapes breach the water, big, boxy amphibious assault vehicles on tank treads that rolled up the shore. Men with rifles and heavy gear poured out, sloshing through the breaking waves, running onto the beach, barking orders and fanning out along the shoreline, establishing a beachhead.
It was all a drill, but it was real to those men down on the beach, and so it was real to their small audience, too, watching from a distance through the chain-link fence at the freeway rest stop somewhere between Anaheim and San Diego.
Kyle Mercer remembered standing pressed against the fence, just off the I-5 freeway that ran along a stretch of off-limits coastline belonging to Camp Pendleton. It was by chance that he was there, on the way home from a family trip to Disneyland that was cut short by the sudden death of Kyle’s grandfather. Kyle barely knew the old man, who was estranged from the family, and he couldn’t even remember how the old bastard died.
But he did remember the fence, and the beach, and that they stopped because his mom had to use the restroom. His dad had bought him a Coke from the vending machine and they walked over to the fence where a group of mostly men and boys were hanging out watching.
