May 2011 Pt. I
The Gulfstream taxies in, heading his way across the tarmac. He waits, leaning against the car. The warm spring air swirls and gusts out here and stinks of jet exhaust fumes. He waits, his mask calm but his impatience betrayed by quickly finished cigarettes. His unquiet mind is louder than the boom of the 747s taking off in the distance. The plane slows, coming to a stop, the engines whining as they wind down.
On the day it all went down, he was crammed into a corner of the ops room, just about everyone else at Langley crammed in there, too, watching the distant, detached satellite feed, listening to the crackling comm transmissions. The no smoking sign on the wall taunted him.
It came over the line: "For God and country, Geronimo." The room erupted. Positive ID pending, UBL was dead. He was dead.
Someone produced a bottle of champagne and started spraying it all over the fucking room like they'd just won the World Series. Dan scowled from his corner, instinctively repulsed by the display. He wanted to be elated, but even at that moment he knew the truth - the wounds of the past ten years ran far too deep to be healed by the death of one man.
They were going to be waiting a while for the Black Hawks to get back to Jallalabad, so he left that scene, preferring to be alone. He lit up as soon as he stepped outside and tried to picture how Maya was taking it, so many thousands of miles away. If he knew her at all, if he knew anything at all, he knew she wasn't popping any fucking champagne, that was for goddamn sure.
When he got back to the pit, he could hear Admiral McRaven on the line and someone from the White House asking him for confirmation, for positive ID. "Is it Geronimo? Is it Geronimo?" They had to be one hundred percent.
"Sir, the agency expert gave a visual confirmation," McRaven said, his voice static over the air.
"The girl?" the White House asked. Dan bristled.
"Yes, sir, the girl," McRaven confirmed. "Hundred percent."
The girl. He imagined her standing over the body. He wished he'd gone back there with her after all.
Here, now, on the hot tarmac, waiting still, he remembers thinking that "the girl" wouldn't last a month when he first met her in Afghanistan. Ten years on, the Gulfstream's door swings open to let out its lone passenger. Only one. Maya. Her hair is a flag of red, skin so white and eyes so blue. She stands alone, her jihad over.
A grateful nation's nameless champion, she'll never be thanked, never be recognized. There should be legions here to salute her. But there's only him. He knows he's not enough.