Scott Zagarino
2149 W Cascade Ave
Hood River, OR 90731
(541) 791-6801

DAYBREAK

by Scott Zagarino

Chapter One

It’s five a.m., and I’m awakened by a 10,000-watt searchlight pointing directly into my eyes. Check that, it’s just the searing pain behind my eyes reminding me that I’m obviously suffering from lime and salt poisoning. As the reality of my hangover and the break of dawn fight over my consciousness, I recognize that it’s morally incumbent upon me to find something under the sink that might possibly remove the small animal that has fallen asleep, or worse, died on top of my tongue. Apparently, AC/DC is staging a concert on my nightstand. Either that or the phone is ringing. I’ve definitely hit an eleven on the one-to-ten, oh-god-what-have-I-done-to-myself scale of self-immolation.

“What?” I growl in a voice that was once mine. A moment of silence and then the voice pouring through the wires sobers the part of my brain necessary for the production of shock. The last time I saw the face that went with that voice, it was disappearing into a hale of twisted metal and burning rubber that had once been an automobile. My job at the time was to prevent that very occurrence and as the slideshow in my head daily reminded me, I hadn’t done it very well.

I stared dumbstruck at the receiver, I realized time had passed and no one had spoken. “Kate?” was the best I could spit out as my mind fought a losing battle to catch up with my mouth.

“Ahh, Bobby, ever the silver tongued devil.”

Even now, after living thirty-eight years, the sound of my name in the diminutive set my molars to grinding. Kate Campbell, who hated being called Katherine only slightly less than I liked being called Bobby, was the only one person in the world who would knowingly call me by that name, and she was as dead as my dreams. Another long pause then I finally mustered a complete sentence.

“Kate, I saw the explosion. Hell, I was in a wheelchair at your funeral.”
When the voice returned it was as if someone were pressing down on her chest when she said, “Listen, I’m not dead but I will be pretty damn quick if you don’t do one thing for me right now. Have you got something to write with?”

The adrenaline surge that had begun with me picking up the phone peaked nicely as I pulled the junk drawer off of its track, scattering the contents across the room. Somehow I pulled a magic marker from the carnage and made myself speak into the receiver.

“Go.”

“Write this down. There’s a file storage account at www.istorage.com. The username is Spanky, password is 762461. Got that? Read it back.”

I repeated the words and numbers I had written across my palm and waited.

“I’ll call again in exactly three hours to make sure you’ve seen what’s there. If I don’t, do what you do and finish this.”

The phone went dead. Still in shock I somehow managed to transfer the name and password Kate had given me from my palm to paper.

Chapter Two

Trailer Park Alice is my “home.” Alice is a 1948 Airstream travel trailer purchased by my grandfather and namesake, Robert Sessions, new from the California factory. Alice was the product of a promise he’d made to himself while he was freezing his ass off in a small town in France on the edge of the Ardennes smack in the middle of World War II. Every night while the German tanks passed so close by that he was as much afraid of choking to death on the fumes as he was of being shot, he prayed and promised that if he got home safe he’d see with his own eyes the country that had claimed in its recruiting brochure to have been worth all of the misery and death.

By the time Alice found her way to the cinder blocks in my father’s backyard and my Grandpa had passed, she’d been from Anchorage to Key West and almost every point between. My grandfather just couldn’t part with her despite the noblest efforts of the building inspectors, sheriffs and petty bureaucrats who found their way slowly onto and quickly off of our property.

While Alice was the vehicle for my grandfather’s discovery of his country, finally she became my refuge from it. When I returned from the Gulf and other places I wasn’t supposed to be in, I spent almost a year in self imposed solitary sleeping on the floor of my departed grandfather’s house amongst the ghosts of a typical American family. For no reason I could fathom, I was drawn to the place of my childhood and Alice. I took what was left of me to the place where I grew up and set about the task of seeking absolution for my sins and enough distance from people to keep from committing them again.

I went to Alice and I put all of the things I did not understand and did not want to remember into bringing her back to life. Any forgiveness and peace I found then came from the hours spent bending metal, pulling wires and fitting the pieces of more than the trailer together. The months passed and almost imperceptibly she made the transition from my grandfather’s prized just-plain-Alice to Trailer Park Alice, the only home I’ve ever called my own.

There I sat, slumped in the middle of Alice’s floor, the pathetic nature of my situation brought into focus by the events and voices of the last few minutes. In the past ten months I had spoken to no living soul who was not serving me, delivering parts to me, or standing on the other side of a cash register waiting for me. I had no family left living and two people I could call friends, both of whom I assumed into a patience I had invented reasons for out of whole cloth. At that moment I knew I would be rejoining a world I neither fit into, nor understood.

CHAPTER THREE

I had three hours with no plans, plus I was hopelessly hung over and in no shape to do anything until that situation was addressed. I stripped off my shorts and t-shirt, padded into the tiny shower stall, ran the water cold and stood under it while I forced down two cans of Red Bull. I toweled off and began the ritual I knew from painful experience would restore me to some version of sanity. I put on run shorts, my outlet Nike’s, an old desert cammy t-shirt with the sleeves long gone, and walked out into the haze of the gloom of an early Southern California Autumn.

I jogged across an empty Pacific Coast Highway, which in an hour or so would be clogged with the imported SUV carnage necessitated by the two-income, hopelessly mired in appearances, thermonuclear family. I went south and warmed up at what I now prefer to call a stately pace. As my blood alcohol level began to slide into a non-lethal range, I picked up the pace gingerly so as not to injure anything vital, like a blood vessel in my head. About a half hour out I turned back for home and ran in earnest, feeling the sweat wash me clean, and the adrenaline restore some semblance of my right mind.

I loped slowly into the drive of the Palisades Mobile Home Community where TP Alice resides. When I crossed the imaginary line that concluded all runs I slowed to a walk. I had lost a little of my edge these past few months and my hamstrings and calves felt like they were making the ticking sounds an old V8 would make when it was turned off hot. One more thing not to care very much about…getting old. As I walked to the door I heard the phone ring. I felt the sweat running down my back get very cold. I took a deep breath, slowly let it out and picked up on the third ring.

“What?”

Silence.

“Kate?”

Breathing, a hand over the receiver and muffled voices and then a hushed, “Robert Sessions.” It wasn’t a question. The next sound was the click of the line being disconnected.

This can’t be good. Kate was alive an hour ago. The second call was probably trying to find out whom she’d called. Whoever has Kate now at least knows my name. Check the answering machine. One hang up. No help there. This is where logical assumption has to fill the gaps of things I don’t know. Those gaps almost always prove harmful to someone and what I knew right now made for a very short list. I knew where there was some information stored on a computer that might save Kate’s life. Since my computer skills were arguably non-existent, I dialed the number of a cell phone belonging to Miguel Diaz.

CHAPTER FOUR

Mig answered on the first ring. I knew he’d seen my number come up on his cell phone screen. God, I love technology. Before he got two words out, he lost his signal and I had to call him back. God, I hate technology.
“Yo’ what’s up with my Casper? Where you been?”

“Mig, I’ve got a problem and I need it solved, like yesterday.”

“Where you at, Casper? I just had a change in my calendar that can make me available for you about right now o’clock. Donde esta, bro?”

“Trailer Park Alice.”

“Half hour, hour in traffic. Leave the light on.”

I met Miguel when I knocked on his door after my first tour in Afghanistan. He was just ten years old on the day I came to deliver the personal effects of his brother Anthony. I had been with Anthony when his death came to him in small realizations. His first was that he was seriously hurt and would need air evacuation soon if he was going to survive. The second came when I whispered to him that there would be no air evac. Anthony had asked me for two things just before he died. He wanted me to deliver his last letter home, and he made me promise I would make sure that his Moms and baby brother could count on me no matter what. The last sound he heard was; “OK.”

By the time I “retired”, Miguel was 5’9”, 250 pounds and underneath the tattoos, a legitimate but ferocious computer and phone hacker. Miguel had been sent away when he was 15 for attempted murder while I was incommunicado. As the reigning head of the LES 13’s, he’d made for a big target. One evening in a fading light, a misguided homeboy tried to make his bones on Miguel while Mig sat by himself on a park bench. Homes walked up on Miguel, lifted his shirttail with his left hand and drew from his waistband with his right, then proceeded to pump two 9mm rounds into Mig’s chest. Miguel looked down at the two blossoming red spots on his chest, shook his head, calmly stood and faster than anyone his size had the right to, snatched the nine and emptied the remaining rounds into various parts and organs of his assailant. In an alternate universe where Miguel was Michael and his one tattoo read “Namaste” around an ankle instead of LES 13’s in ten-inch Celtic script on his neck he might have claimed self defense, but in this world Miguel got the whole seven years for a knocked down manslaughter charge.

When Mig processed into the system at San Quentin he was followed into the line-up by a kid who should have had “rape me right now” tattooed on his forehead. The 16 year-old kid, wearing thick rimmed, prsin issue glasses that screamed of too much time in front of a computer, had been tried as an adult for beating his step-father to death with a Louisville Slugger after his “dad” tried to play doctor once too often. He’d been sentenced to the mandatory, no discretion bitch, 25 to life, eligible for parole after 15 years. Mig took one look at the tall, slightly feminine Alex and silently bet himself the kid would be turned out before lights out. The kid didn’t even make it through processing before he was slid out the line up and into a storage area by a few of the Arayan Brotherhood frequent fliers whose invitation to join their ranks was predicated on Alex undergoing an immediate sexual preference change. While none of this was his business, if it happened and someone caught on it would slow processing by hours and Mig was hungry and tired.

Suddenly the inmate closest to Miguel dropped to his knees, his eyes rolled back and he tipped over without a sound as a small straight line of blood leaked from his nose. No one even saw Mig’s hands move from his pockets. As soon as the commotion started and the guards waded in, Mig had slipped through the door he had seen the kid pushed through. He walked in on two AB skinheads bending Alex over the utility sink with his pants already pulled down around his ankles.

Alex’s assailant turned to look over his shoulder and asked, “What you lookin’ at, Pedro?”

Mig slid a step closer, gaining a small angle on the group of three at the sink, and stepping imperceptibly closer to Mr. Wannabe Universe.

He answered softly, “You really want to walk away from this.”

Mr. Universe started to open his mouth before he realized that Mig had slipped up almost on top of him. Confused by how someone so big could move so quiet and quick he tried to respond but before the words left his lips a misshapen, brown fist the size of a small boulder rocketed from somewhere south and traveled north through teeth and jawbone like a wrecking ball going through drywall. Everything in its path shattered and Mr. Universe fell over right next to four of his teeth with no chance of getting up without professional help. The room emptied like a bell had been rung. Miguel grabbed Alex by the arm and slipped back in line just as the chipped beef plopped on the first piece of toast in the cafeteria.

From that day forward Miguel and Alex made time work for them. A willowy blonde computer genius and a 225-pound Latino Pit Bull might have made a strange pairing anywhere but San Quentin, but in there they were perfect for each other. Mig kept Alex from any more participation in the gay marriage debate and Alex taught Mig about personal computing and the not-so-personal ways of finding and retrieving anything about anybody from out of the ether. By the time Mig was released, he was almost as good as Alex and a whole lot less likely to be recognized as a computer genius.

Chapter Five

I straightened up the junk drawer, made the bed, did the dishes and took my second shower of the day. Cleanliness is next to Godliness! I diced some fresh tomatoes grown by one of my neighbors and recently left at my door, chopped an onion and heated a pan. I sawed off two slices of fresh black bread from the bakery in Malibu and oven toasted them. The pan warmed up on my two-burner, I dropped a little olive oil in and browned the onions then added the tomatoes. I scrambled in six eggs, a little mozzarella, folded my omelet, turned down the flame and set a place at the dinette. Alice had all of the conveniences, some of them were just on a small scale, which was fine with me. After I had eaten and poured my third cup of coffee, I picked the cell back up and called in my version of air support.

Duane needed a cell phone like a snake needs a jump rope, but I knew how to reach him if I needed him. I called Wee Willie’s Bail Bonds and asked for Willie, aptly named because he was the size of a Boeing hanger. I heard Willie come on the line and another line hanging up. Not good to listen in on Willie’s calls.

“Whatup, Casper? Finally coming to work to make an honest living?”

People of color loved me, that’s why they gave me nicknames, but I had to admit that “Casper” beat the shit out of “Bobby.”

“Willie, you wouldn’t know an honest living if it jumped out of your desk right this second and gave you a lap dance. I need to talk to Duane.”

“What do I look like, a goddamn cell phone/pager?”

“No, Willie, you look like something that should have tethers tied to it and brought down the middle of Main Street at Thanksgiving, but this isn’t about what you look like. Now what do you think will happen if Duane finds out I tried to reach him through you and something bad happened ‘cause I couldn’t?”

It got really quiet across the airwaves and Willie said, “Good point. Look for a call.” Click. Not much time for, “Hey, how’s the family?” once the wrath of Duane had been invoked.

Willie and Duane had an arrangement. Duane would occasionally show up and scare the bejeezus out of some recalcitrant employee or skip that Willie needed scared and Willie would always know how Duane could be reached. That was sometimes awkward and might involve crossing several time zones but if you needed Duane and you were on his very short list, you could get him 24/7 through Willie.

Chapter Six

During my first tour in Afghanistan I’d met a lot of three-letter operators who looked like accountants but whose body counts would have made some of the Afghan warlords blush. When I finished my second tour in the Green Berets one of those guys found me flirting with an alcoholic coma in a bar in Kanduhar and told me I could make thirty-thousand a month plus benefits pulling the same duty I had been pulling for my Uncle Sam for two-thousand a month and the right to die forgotten in a VA Hospital. Since I was already NKNK, which stood for No Known Next of Kin, I guess they figured me for an easy mark. They were right. I spent the two years making sure some people lived, and making sure others didn’t. Depended on the orders. By that time I’d crossed so far over a line of the relative Judeo-Christian concept of the morality of living and dying that I couldn’t even dream my way back, when I dreamed. For the entire two-year tour I worked, I drank and I slept. Just like the directions on my shampoo, lather, rinse, repeat.

My third day at “work” I had been assigned to a team ostensibly making sure a convoy of Afghani trucks with “supplies” got across the border into Pakistan without coming to harm. My team was made up of three other semi-retired operators and a bunch of rag tag Mujahideen. Two of these guys had served together and as far as I could see they were a couple of clowns who had been bent beyond repair if they weren’t already psychopaths at their induction. The first had a head like a cinder block and a body the size of a Japanese sedan and was so fair that light actually shown through him. His name was Arne and he was from one of those states where summer lasts one month and winter comes in two sizes, frigid and sub-zero. His buddy was a hick from the sticks to whom the service was a step up in accommodations with two first names I could never remember in order. The two of them together were like some pair of characters out of a bizarro WWII Audie Murphy movie. Their idea of a good start was to announce their presence with the major league bad idea of calling every native Afghani a “Rag Head”, asking where they kept the women and making constant reference to marital relations between the Afghanis and their livestock. The other member of our little soiree was a guy off in a corner apparently sleeping it off. Great, I was now more afraid of my own guys than I was of the Al-Qaeda.

The third guy turned out to be Duane Bue, which rhymed with blue. My original thought was that this guy was either half dead or depressed beyond all recognition. All he did was sleep, eat and look out at the world from under his “borrowed” PASGET, the appropriately over-complicated congressional moniker for Personal Armor System Ground Troops, otherwise known as a “helmet.”

It has been my observation that an unalterable truth is that any story that begins with, “And there we were, …” cannot have a good outcome.

And there we were, inching up some horse trail that was called out on Afghan maps as a “road”, winding up the side of a mountain at about two miles an hour, the trucks bunched up bumper-to-bumper exactly the way we told the Muj drivers not to, while concentrating on not falling half-a-mile off the crumbling dirt shoulder to our fiery deaths. What we should have been concentrating on was the fact that we had worked our way into a completely indefensible position. Low ground, no avenue of retreat and no idea that the cargo we were shepherding for our country was in fact about a million US dollars destined to make payroll for a bunch of tribal leaders, whose allegiance was leased in monthly increments. I wasn’t sure who would be more dangerous if they knew what was underneath a scrim of CARE labeled false box tops, my guys or the Muj.

Then all hell broke loose. The sound of AK assault rifles firing on full auto was instantly joined with the sight of the cab of the lead truck stitched from rubber to roof and the windshield imploding into the faces of the Muj drivers. To add to the chaos, US twenty dollar bills had begun to rain from the sky with truck parts. Never ask what else can go wrong. Billy Bob, Bobby Bill, or whatever his name was, dived out of the cab of the second truck just as an RPG ripped through the open window blowing the driver and his door over the hillside. Arne and two Muj began firing wildly at anything that moved including two of our faithful team who turned into rabbits at the sound of the first shot and headed up the hillside. Too bad for them. I had taken up a position about a hundred yards from the last truck behind some rocks perched precariously on the upside of the road. I was trying to identify the position of the shooters while figuring out how the hell I was going to get out of there without getting my ass shot off when I saw Arne and one of the few remaining Muj get their lights shut off by two very precisely placed head shots spaced seconds apart. Even better, now there’s not only a sniper, but he’s a good one.

While I was ruminating about the meaning of life and what it would be like to be without one, a new sound was added to the fray. A woomph came from behind me and to my right. All of a sudden the world turned red and brown when a 40mm grenade exploded fifty meters uphill and in front of me. As the smoke from the first grenade cleared there was another loud woomph, this one so close I thought I had lost an eardrum from the concussion. Then another explosion twenty meters to the right of the first. Either I had gone stone deaf or the AK fire had stopped. Suddenly there was a hand across my mouth and I was spun around to face a far more awakened version of Duane Bue. Once he saw the light of cognition in my eyes, he pointed to where the grenades had landed and I followed his finger to a point where bodies and parts were scattered like they had been poured out of a giant Tinkertoy box. He then showed me four fingers and pointed to a space between two rocks higher up the slope. I squinted into the sun using my hand for a visor and couldn’t see what he was pointing at through the glare until I caught the unmistakable flare of sun glinting off of glass. Somehow, Sleepy had brought the odds down to the point where, if there were no more bad guys in the sand pile, we might be able to survive our own foolishness. Just then I remembered something that had been attributed to Chesty Puller, the most highly decorated Marine in the history of the Corp, which is saying something with that bunch. During the fighting in the Pacific, in a particularly tight spot, he said, "We're surrounded...That simplifies our problems."

Simple problems. To kill us they needed to move or make us move. If they had anything heavier than a sniper rifle and some AK’s left they would have used them by now to move us out into the open. The open ground that prevented us from getting to them equally kept them from getting to us. They could wait us out but they had no idea how much food or water we had. They could try and sneak in and get us in the dark of night but it never got that dark here and sound carried, certainly the sound of someone moving down slope over loose, uneven terrain. That’s when I had my first and only good idea of the day. They had already taken far more casualties than they had probably planned for and they had no idea how heavily we were armed, yet they’d stayed. We needed to get out, they needed the cash. Apparently they needed the cash more than we needed to leave. I caught Duane’s attention and hand signaled him to cover me when I broke for the trucks. He nodded and smiled slightly as if I’d asked him to pick up some ice cream on the way home. Go figure.

I broke for the trucks that seemed like they’d drifted farther than the 20 or so meters away they’d originally been parked. Funny thing about moving in the open when you know someone is going to shoot at you. Your mind begins preparing your body for the hit before the first shot is fired. You can actually feel the bullets ripping into and through you as if somehow the preparation would help. The film speeded up all of a sudden as huge lead raindrops began splashing sand up in showers all around me. Everything in me wanted to stop, sit down and cry, but my reptilian brain didn’t think that would be too productive. All of the instincts so painstakingly constructed by friend and enemy alike over the years of combat and training took over and I ran a zig-zag pattern for the first 18 meters and dove. Almost made it too. Just as my feet left the ground, a slug tore through my calf and spun my body in mid-air onto my back. My momentum carried me to safety just behind the rear axle of truck number three, I rolled back to my stomach, clicked my M-4 to semi and brought the barrel to bear on the spot where I had last seen the position of my enemy. I looked over to motion Duane but he had started moving as soon as he saw me turn my head. I opened up, firing like I had been taught, spacing my shots far enough apart to conserve on ammunition but fast enough to keep my enemy from getting a shot. There wasn’t much cover from the truck, and what there was I guess I must have been hogging ‘cause Duane landed right on top of me. I hardly felt his weight as he rolled into a prone firing position next to me so fast it was as if he’d been able to edit out the wasted movements. He looked over at me and flashed the same small, sheepish grin. At that moment I got that he wasn’t smiling out of joy or amusement, it was a smile of utter contentment. His face was bathed in the light of the sense that this moment, this place, was what he had been put on the earth for. He was in his place and all was right with the world as wrong as it could be.

So far, so good. I grabbed the med kit out of my web gear, cleaned and field dressed the calf wound, while Duane drained his Camelbak bladder of its last drop of water. The calf still worked, although I could feel it swelling and starting to stiffen in ways that would make walking interesting in a couple of hours. That is if I didn’t get some bigger holes in me before that. I reached into the cargo pocket on my right leg and pulled out a small box of wooden kitchen matches and held them up where Duane could see them and pointed to the bottom of the truck. I motioned my intention to Duane and he recognized what I was about to try and he started crawling on his belly towards the rear wheels of truck number two before I finished presenting my master plan. I took out my little S&W knife and sawed a starter hole in the bottom third of my t-shirt. I ripped the rest all the way around and cut it off me. I used the S&W to punch a hole in the fuel tank, then used the point of the knife to stuff an edge of the t-shirt in. As soon as the t-shirt was soaked in fuel, I lit the end and crawled ahead to Duane as fast as I could get there. I was about to tell Duane where I thought he should set up so we could interlock our fire on the approach I thought the bad guys would have to take, but he was already in position, locked and loaded lying prone and motionless, as still as death itself. I hadn’t even heard him move, and I was very good at what I did.

Black smoke began to rise from the back of the truck and the bad guys caught on quick to the fact that we intended to send the entire cash crop up in smoke. It took them about three seconds to come up with the plan I had hoped they would. The sniper started laying down cover and two dark and swarthys dressed like Midwestern tourists at the Super Bowl complete with track suits, broke from behind the rocks and started running toward the trucks, firing at anything and everything. I immediately forgot about my calf and pushed off in a crouch to get into a position where my line of fire would compliment Duane’s. All for nought. Duane put one round in the center mass of the first runner, moved his barrel left about three inches, calmly squeezed off two more and just like that, there was no more second guy. Just a spray of red where he had been. That left the sniper. I turned to discuss the “what next” when I realized that Duane was gone. It occurred to me a lot more slowly than it did to Duane that there was nothing left for the sniper to fight for and even if there was he might be in way over his head. Before I’d even considered the possibilities, Duane had exposed himself to draw fire, figured the sniper was in full retreat and was moving to outflank him at full speed…and I used to think I was very good at this. Fully awakened to my own shortcomings I suddenly realized that I had started a fire. I ran for truck number one, got it started, moved it up the road from the now fully engulfed truck number three and repeated the process with number two.

I was climbing down from the cab looking back at the bodies and parts engulfed in smoke, when Duane came walking back up the road right through the middle of all of that carnage like he was walking down the beach in Malibu looking at a particularly beautiful sunset. He lifted his PASGET, wiped his forehead on his sleeve, then replaced it on his head as he stepped up beside me and spoke the first words I’d had heard him utter that day. “Damn.” With that he turned and went about the business of policing the bodies, looking for wounded. When he arrived at the lifeless bodies of Arne and Billy Bob, he squatted beside each, checked for a pulse, lingering over them with a sadness that I could feel like an arm around my throat from a hundred yards away. Then very gently, he closed their eyes.

In the telling, this seems like a day long battle, when in reality it was over in about ten minutes. As the world reoriented itself to non-combat time, I realized we were probably not going to be alone very long, and that I was going to need a medic sooner or later. I pulled the radio from truck number one and called in a helo for a new, more substantial crew to shift the cargo and get them where they were going, and to get the four of us out of there asap, like right now.

That’s how I met Duane, and there are two things I know for sure he hasn’t done in the three years I’ve known him: ever taken one step back from anyone or anything …or ever let me down.