Читать книгу Flashes of War - Katey Schultz - Страница 9

While the Rest of America’s at the Mall

It’s not quite sniper fire, but it isn’t random either. The hajis so much as hear me think, and they start gunning the water from their position on the bridge, bullets raining like a Carolina downpour. They can’t see me in the dark, so I toss a balled-up T-shirt far as I can toward enemy fire to mess with their thinking. They aim right for it, the shirt lurching like a live wire while I dip underwater and start swimming the opposite direction. By the time I’ve crawled up the banks of the Darya-ye Konar and radioed the airstrike on their exact location, the hajis are still standing there, shooting that shirt all the way to the Indus River.

Dark-swimming is my gig this tour. Navy SEALS. You’d never believe me, but the underwater night goggles make this place look like the tropics. Bullets glitter through the water in slow-mo, little Hershey’s Kisses moving in silver arcs the way I remember Savannah tossing them to me on her fourth birthday. “It’s raining kisses, Daddy,” she sang. She made up the tune and it’s almost a joke now, trying to think of the last time I made up a song for no particular reason.

Any second now, that bridge will sizzle, and Spalding will crack some joke about the Konar looking more like haji soup, then LT will pluck that damn tea tree toothpick out of his mouth and nod and say, “Good work, son.” So corny it could be from the movies, and I wish this was, all of us busting drug convoys 50 klicks north of Kabul, while the rest of America’s at the mall.