SEALed Read online

  “We’d better make this quick, then.”

  “Don’t worry, I’ll make it worth your while.”

  ***

  When I returned to the lounge a few minutes later, my head was buzzing. The light seemed oddly bright, and my ears registered even the faintest sound. It felt like one of those lucid dreams I used to have as a boy where I would try to make my girlfriends appear in front of me so I could have sex with them. Only I had never quite managed to do it. I had much more success with that kind of thing in real life.

  Carson folded up the newspaper he was reading and gaped at me with an incredulous look as I sat down.

  “That was awful quick,” he said. I could tell he was dying to know what we had done together, but I figured it would be more fun for me to keep him guessing. I leaned back in my seat, both hands on the back of my head, and began to whistle. Carson went on gaping. As hard as he tried, he couldn’t conceal his jealousy, and somehow that made the experience all the sweeter.

  “Did you at least get her number?” he asked me, looking both impressed and resentful.

  I shook my head. “Nah, I don’t really have time for girls.”

  The announcer, the one who had been talking to Maddie earlier, called our seats. Together we grabbed our carry-ons and clambered onto the plane. I took a seat near a window looking out on the wing of the plane. Below me, men in orange vests sipped coffee and talked to each other. None of them knew what had just gone done in their closet; probably none of them would have cared. By the time we reached London, I’d probably have forgotten it myself.

  Chapter Two Kelli

  Renee woke me up that morning before the alarm did.

  I felt something crawling on top of me, and of course my first delirious thought was that I was being attacked. But when I opened my eyes, a wave of relief came over me, and I let myself breathe again.

  “Thank God it was just you,” I said.

  Renee grinned mischievously. She was sitting on top of my legs, wearing a pair of dark yoga pants and gold loop earrings, her hair done up in a top knot. As I raised myself into a sitting position, she reached over and stroked my arm as though in apology. But her eyes continued to shine with feline cunning.

  “Word of advice,” I said. “Don’t ever make me think I’m being attacked while I’m sleeping. I can’t be held legally responsible for what I might do to you.”

  Renee stood up and patted me on the legs. “You’d better hurry and get up, or you’re going to be late for class.”

  My sister was one of those irritating people who radiated joy and enthusiasm from the moment they spring out of bed. I’m not even functional until I’ve had my bagel and coffee, and even then it’s probably not wise to try to talk to me before noon. I’m not known for having a terrible temper, but my co-workers have learned to tread lightly around the office until then.

  We lived in a studio apartment with a magnificent skylight and a pair of French windows opening out onto a narrow side street. Since I was a girl, it had been my dream to live in New York and work for a big city paper like the Times or the Wall Street Journal . Last year, after about twenty rejections, I had accepted a position as a reporter for a website known as the Daily Bugler . It wasn’t the most prestigious job—the Bugler had a liberal slant and was known for printing stories like “CIA Planning Soft Coup! Shocking Insights from a Deep State Whistleblower.” But between this and the money that Renee brought in from teaching yoga, we were able to live reasonably comfortably in an Upper East Side apartment.

  “So let’s talk,” said Renee, seating herself at the table near the French windows and shoving a kale smoothie toward me. She must have made it while I was asleep. I groaned at the sight of it: no matter how many times I tried to tell her I hated her smoothies, she was always insisting on making them because they were “good for me.” I retaliated by playing “Heaven Knows I’m Miserable Now” by The Smiths on permanent loop. Can you tell that we loved each other?

  “What’s up?” I asked, sitting down across from her. “Did Adam Driver finally file that restraining order?”

  “No, but it’s just a matter of time,” said Renee. “What I actually wanted to tell you is that I’ve started seeing someone.”

  This was about the last thing I had been expecting, and for a moment I stared at her in shock. “Who?” I asked. “You never even bring any boys over. How long have you been seeing each other?”

  “For about two months.”

  I nearly spit out my smoothie, and not for the usual reasons. “What’s his name? Why haven’t you ever mentioned him?”

  Renee stared down at the table. I had known her long enough to know she was avoiding my gaze because she was embarrassed about something. “Well, it’s not something I’ve really wanted to talk about. I only decided to come clean now because we’re pretty serious about each other. I didn’t want you to find out I was engaged over Facebook.”

  “You’re ENGAGED?” I shouted, half-rising from the table.

  “No, no!” said Renee quickly. “But if it gets to that point, I thought I should at least let you know I was dating someone.”

  This whole conversation was mystifying. I studied her face carefully with a mixture of shock and suspicion, half-wondering if she was pulling my leg. It was plain from the way she was blushing and averting her eyes that there was still something she hadn’t told me. “Renee, I’ve always been the first person to know when you had a boyfriend. What gives?”

  Renee took a deep breath and gripped her mug tightly with both hands. “Well, that’s just the thing. I haven’t wanted to tell you because I wasn’t sure how you would react. See, Max is a former soldier. He spent five years in the military in Afghanistan.”

  Oh, of course. Now it all made sense. Renee knew better than anyone my aversion to men in uniform. She knew how badly I panicked during routine traffic stops, and how often I had walked out of the coffee shop at the sight of a man in uniform.

  “But if you would just give him a chance,” she pleaded, “I think you would really like him. I admit, I was a little wary at first when he told me he had enlisted straight out of high school after 9/11 to fight the Taliban. I think anyone who’s been through the things we’ve been through and seen the things we’ve seen would be nervous. But he’s retired from the military now, and it’s not like if we got married he would be dragging me back overseas. We wouldn’t be raising our kids in some hovel.”

  I raised my brows at the mention of kids. “Have you talked about starting a family?”

  “It’s…come up a few times.”

  “You must really like him.” Renee had never been the sort of person to make serious commitments. Her longest relationship to date had lasted about a month, and she had ended it when the guy broke down and confessed that he hated musicals.

  “I do,” said Renee. “That’s why I want you to meet him. You know I wouldn’t ask unless it was really important to me.”

  I took a last, foul-tasting sip of my drink and said in a quiet voice, “I’ll think about it.”

  Renee looked disappointed, but under the circumstances I suspected she knew that was the best she could hope for. “Thanks,” she said. “That’s all I ask.”

  We left the apartment and caught the train to 66th Street to the studio where Renee worked, navigating our way through traffic and around scaffolding. Construction workers in yellow hard hats seemed to outnumber pedestrians, standing under their blue tarps with coffee in hand to escape the summer heat. One of them whistled at us as we walked past, and I gave him the finger, but Renee merely smiled.

  “Amazing, isn’t it?” she said as we stepped through the door into the relative calm of the studio with its polished wood floors. “There are so many things to see and explore in the city on a summer morning. I’ve lived here for about two years, and I still don’t know the names of about half the things I see on our morning walks.” She motioned through the window to a bed of yellow flowers standing in a windowsill over the dumpster. “W
hat are those called? I still don’t know. And the bird that flew past us as we were coming out of the subway?”

  “That was a crow,” I replied.

  “Yes, but why did it have a knife in its beak?”

  I smiled in spite of myself. Though I loved to give Renee a hard time about her unquenchable enthusiasm for life in the city and her tireless curiosity, she was one of the only things keeping me from outright despair. During the few years we had lived apart after college, I had sunk into a deep depression, sitting naked on my bed eating Top Ramen as I stared out the window of my Cincinnati apartment. That might have gone on indefinitely if she hadn’t talked me into joining her in Manhattan. For that reason alone, I felt I owed it to her to give her new boyfriend a chance.

  As soon as yoga ended at 11:00am, I took a taxi down to the Bugle’s office. I found the team gathered around a table in the newsroom with a TV overhead turned to CNN, which was showing helicopter footage of the recent oil spill disaster in the Gulf.

  Evan, the news editor, stood watching the TV with a look of intense fascination. A passionate and charismatic young man with a scruffy beard and a thick head of dark hair, he had effectively taken control of the website shortly after graduating from Columbia a few years back.

  “The important thing about the disaster in Galveston,” he said, never taking his eyes off the screen even for a moment, “is the political angle. How is this affecting the president’s chances of reelection?”

  “It’s his Katrina,” said Karen, the features editor, peering sharply at him from behind her beetle-like black glasses.

  “Yes, let’s go with that,” said Evan, rubbing his hands together. “Just as importantly, how is this playing in the heartland? One of the quirks of our political system over the past twenty years is that a president can’t expect much support from Americans of the opposite party. They’ll say he’s doing a bad job no matter what he does. But in a highly polarized environment like ours, a president only faces real trouble if he starts losing the support of his own party. We’ll want to interview some of the men and women who voted for him and find out whether they’re having buyer’s remorse.”

  “My family back in Ohio voted for him,” I said. “Half of them support him passionately, and the other half aren’t too happy about it. My cousins think he should have been out there helping with the recovery weeks ago. It’s created a rift in the family.”

  “Any of them who would be willing to be interviewed on the record?” asked Evan. “I’m thinking of doing a major feature on the political fallout from the hurricane, in which case we could use an inset article reporting dissatisfaction among his base.”

  “I’ll call them,” I said. “It wouldn’t be too hard to dredge up some quotes.”

  “Fantastic.” Turning to Karen, he said, “And I would like you to be in charge of putting that feature together.”

  “Consider it done,” said Karen, setting down her pen and folding her hands together.

  On the screen above us, the news shifted to a report on Navy SEALs committing atrocities in the remote mountainous regions of Afghanistan. A middle-aged reporter stood in the desert with microphone in hand, his expression tense and sober.

  “Local villagers and Afghani officials allege that the SEAL team stationed here has shown a, quote, ‘complete and total disregard for human life,’ indiscriminately killing women and children,” he said. “During a recent firefight between Islamist radicals and members of SEAL Team 6 flying in Chinook attack helicopters, the Chinook reportedly fired a furious fusillade of bullets that killed up to a dozen children, who were then hastily buried by the military in an adjoining ravine.”

  The reporter then interviewed an elderly villager, who recounted in broken English what she had allegedly witnessed during the firefight. “Bullets were flying everywhere,” she said. “They made no effort to separate the good from the bad. If they were in the way, they just killed them.”

  My blood froze at what I was hearing, at the thought of all those dead children killed because they had been in the wrong place at the wrong time. We were supposed to be over there protecting the innocent, and yet every day brought new reports of weddings being bombed and parents having to bury their own daughters.

  “What are we even doing in Afghanistan?” I said aloud, rather more heatedly than I had intended. “It’s the longest war we’ve ever fought, and what do we have to show for it?”

  “Trillions of dollars wasted and thousands of dead soldiers and Afghanis,” said Karen, shaking her head.

  “This seems like it would be a pretty big deal,” said Evan. “Remember Abu Ghraib? If our boys are really committing atrocities in Afghanistan, then that’s something our readers are going to want to know about.”

  “But Abu Ghraib was different,” I replied. “Those were intentional atrocities approved at the highest levels of government. This sounds like it was more careless or accidental.”

  “Seems like there’s been a whole lot of carelessness since the inauguration, wouldn’t you say?” said Evan. He motioned back to the TV, which was once again showing footage of Galveston’s flooded streets.

  Evan had a way of drawing out the contrasts in our perspectives even when we were in general agreement. It wasn’t often that I found myself defending the U. S. government or military, but it seemed unfair to accuse them of deliberately killing civilians in this instance. Evan’s reflexive anti-Americanism had been a source of tension between us ever since I signed on to work at the Bugle ; he was forever trying to portray the country and its leaders in the worst possible light, when often the reality was more nuanced than that.

  The meeting ended, and the other reporters returned to their desks in the main office. By the time I reached my own desk, Karen was already seated and phoning our representative to schedule an interview. I had only just sat down when I heard Evan call my name.

  “Kelli,” he said, “come here for a sec. I need to talk to you.”

  Karen grimaced and made a slashing motion across her neck with one finger. I followed him back into the office with a feeling of worry and trepidation.

  “Look, I don’t want to argue,” he said, pulling up a swivel chair and sitting down across from me with his knuckles pressed against his chin. “I realize we have differences of opinion when it comes to United States foreign policy, and that’s fine.”

  “I don’t know if I’d call them differences,” I said. “I think we largely agree, though I like to leave the conversation open to perspectives that you might not hear in a typical newsroom. I spent my teen years in the Rust Belt, and I guess in some ways I still think like someone who lives there.”

  “You know I respect that about you,” Evan replied. “When we were discussing whether to hire you, that was probably the number one quality you had in your favor, was your willingness to play devil’s advocate and to voice perspectives that you might not even necessarily agree with, but that you knew we would be hearing from our critics. Not every newsroom in this city has a moderate-to-conservative journalist who’s willing to challenge the party line. I like it. It keeps things fresh.”

  “Thanks,” I said. “Though I’m not sure I would call myself a conservative…”

  “Dammit, Kelli, do you have to challenge everything I say?!” He laughed.

  Feeling a bit more reassured, I asked him, “What did you want to talk to me about?”

  Evan reached into his satchel. “Would you like a granola bar? It’s getting to be that time of day with me.” I shook my head. He unwrapped his granola bar and bit into it with a pensive expression. “So here’s what’s going on. I have a feeling this will be right in your wheelhouse. Last night, I spoke on the phone with an old buddy of mine from back home, Mohamed Armstrong. He’s mixed race, a practicing Muslim, and a decorated sergeant leading a team of SEALs in the Congo.”

  “Sounds like someone we should be writing a feature about,” I said, my brows raised. “Like I already have so many questions.”

 
“He’s a pretty fascinating guy, though I admit to being a little biased because we grew up together. His entire career has been a rebuke to the conventional wisdom of what a sergeant looks like and how the army operates. Maybe someday we’ll do a report on him, but that’s not what I called you in here to talk about.”

  I leaned forward with my chin in my hands. “I’m listening.”

  “We got to talking about the allegations of atrocities being committed by SEALs in Afghanistan, and he predicted that’s all we would see on the news for the next couple weeks. I don’t know about that—the Gulf hurricane is a pretty big deal—but he was right about how the media was going to portray it.”

  “It’s hard to portray kids being blown up in a positive light,” I pointed out.

  “I get that. But like you said a minute ago, this seems like a case of incompetence rather than malice. I realize that’s not much comfort to the parents of the kids who died…” He cast his eyes down reflectively as his voice trailed off.

  “And what was your friend’s take—what’s his name? Mohamed?”

  “Sergeant Mohamed Armstrong. He maintains that the situation isn’t as black-and-white as it’s being portrayed and that the Navy is in danger of being scapegoated when it was just trying to do its job. That’s where I saw an opportunity. Since every paper and website in this city, except maybe the Post , is going to be investigating these SEALs with the intention of digging up some dirt on them, I thought we could stand out by taking a different approach.”

  “How?” I asked.

  Evan stretched his arms and flexed his fingers bracingly. “Well, Mohamed suggested that we send one of our reporters to the Congo, embed them among the SEALs and spend a few weeks getting to know them. I think most Americans don’t have any clue what actually goes on in the Navy and military, beyond just a vague idea that they work out and blow things up real good. We have a chance to correct that with some in-depth reporting that will, hopefully, present a corrective to some of the angry things being written about them in other media.”