The Savage Wars of Peace

Kipling

Prologue

South-Western Afghanistan

It was very dark. There was no moon or horizon. The darkness was total, enveloping them as though they were underwater. Marine Capt. Jake Brabston was the aircraft commander, flying a CH-46 helicopter. Earlier that day another CH-46 had inadvertently left a wounded recon Marine on the ground. Now, Jake and his crew were headed out into the dark with a new recon team to get him out. As they flew to the east Jake listened to Here Comes the Sun playing in his head.

Normally the 46’s flew in pairs but Jake’s wingman had had some kind of maintenance hang-up, so Jake’s was a single bird flight. They were accompanied by two AH-1W Super Cobra gunships and had flown the 140 miles from the Marine Air Facility near Bost Airport, to Camp Myers, at Rudbar. Rudbar was just a wide spot on a road from somewhere to nowhere, surrounded by sand and barren rock. Camp Meyers was barely worth the name camp and was held by a small group of extremely fit, extremely capable, justifiably paranoid Recon Marines.

They were carrying an abbreviated team, four guys in war paint and loaded down with ammo for their M4A1 carbines and water. The team was supposed to go in and find their man. Once that was done, Jake would go back in and get them out.

Ahead, the two gunships were invisible in the darkness except for the faint glow from their exhausts. Jake was circling, letting the gunships check out the area when the gunship leader called and said they had the location. Jake’s co-pilot, 1/Lt Ted Marsh, checked the GPS read out against his map and confirmed the insert location: 30° 28’ 38.27 ’N, 63° 35’ 52.51" E, a very exact location in a very nasty and inexact part of the country. It was a rough canyon area along the edges of a pustule like remains of an ancient volcano. Jake wondered what the Recon guys had thought was important enough there to send in a team in the first place.

In the dark it was possible to make out the deep lava canyons surrounded by rock covered mountains and desert. It was an empty palette broken by cliffs which had been deeply carved by flowing water, but not in human memory. As they came over the edges of the lava flow, Jake could see that there were deep ravines leading to the 3500 foot summit. Because of the ravines and the uncertain terrain in the dark, the recon guys were using a SPIE rig, basically a series of ropes. The team was in harnesses, hooked up to the rig with a couple carabineers. The team had hooked up, deployed out the back, and was hanging from the helicopter like a string of fish.

Jake and his co-pilot and best friend, Ted Alexander, double checked the GPS and when they were certain they were where they were supposed to be, Jake brought them to a high hover, as the Crew Chief, Lance Corporal Boyd, tossed out a glow stick to give Jake some kind of ground reference. Jake could hold his altitude with the radar altimeter, but even at zero airspeed there was the chance of lateral movement without a reference of some kind. Jake watched the glow stick, held his airspeed at zero, and his altitude at 50 feet.

Boyd said, Looking good, the team’s..., when the first RPG hit the helicopter.

Chapter One

Every generation, at least every American generation, has its own war and Jake Brabston’s had been Afghanistan. He had never expected to survive it. There was something in him that figured he would have a short, exciting life and then it would be over. Consequently, much of his time after Afghanistan seemed like lagniappe, a bonus he had never expected to have to deal with. He had returned from the war and the years had passed too quickly for him to realize their passing.

He had been an itinerant whatever he was at the time. He worked at good jobs, in sales mostly, for a number of companies in a number of cities, but left them all, never staying long. If he had been a character in a western novel he would have been called a drifter. He had spent years like that, and couldn’t have said why. He made good money much of time, but left it all on the table.

While working as a commodity broker in Daytona Beach he had thrown a few personal things into a briefcase and walked out in the middle of the trading day, unconfirmed orders on his desk, a client on hold. He pinned a note the bulletin board: Gone flying.

He still had all his FAA certificates and loved to fly, but hadn’t since Afghanistan. He didn’t know why. That old passage of time thing again, years flitting by while he contemplated ends without considering the means to them. Why was that?

He kicked around in a number of low-end aviation jobs for a while, then moved up to larger aircraft, doing ferry flights, moving aircraft to the Bahamas and South America that he suspected would return filled with drugs. Eventually he got a call to move up to the big iron, Boeing 727s for Champion Airlines.

He flew the 727s, seven-twos to the cognoscenti, until he got an offer to be the personal pilot for the former president of Côte d’Ivoire, the Ivory Coast, for seven thousand dollars a month, cash.

He quickly resigned from Champion and was packed for the Ivory Coast when the former president was assassinated. Another bridge burned before he had crossed it.

With his 727 experience Jake arrived in New Orleans to fly for Mardi Gras Air, a three plane airline that ran flights to Las Vegas and San Francisco. He figured that would be his big chance, to grow with a company, like the guys who had started with Southwest or FedEx when those companies were small.

Mardi Gras Air was out of business within a year, but, Jake stayed in New Orleans. He liked the city, and liked living in the French Quarter. There was a decadent charm and sense of history about the place that appealed to him. And, New Orleans seemed to accept him; it had accepted far worse.

With consolidations and ever higher prices for jet fuel, aviation had gone into one of its slumps and there weren’t many flying jobs around. Jake missed airplanes. Like the memories of women he could have had but didn’t, his only airplane regrets were flying jobs he had passed up, or left too early.

He was getting by, bartending and looking for another flying gig, handling the late shift in a strip bar. He wondered what had happened to his life, but didn’t dwell on it. He drank too much, but not by French Quarter standards. He knew he didn’t want to be stuck in the bar-biz forever but didn’t know what else he could do, or wanted to do, other than fly airplanes.

There were other careers available, of course. He was smart and well educated. He interviewed well. Company VPs and HR people were impressed by him, but those careers meant sitting in a windowless cubicle, surrounded by twenty other drones, smiling into a phone. The thought of spending ten hours a day in an office again made his blood run cold. He had gotten into a routine, lowlife and alcohol laden though it was, and moved through it with neither enthusiasm nor passion. He knew he should be doing something else. He knew he was drinking too much. He knew he was miserable.

He wondered if bartending was his niche, and if so, how would he distinguish it from a rut. Hell, he thought, how does anyone distinguish a niche from a rut if they aren’t doing what they want to do? So he kept on doing and doing, what he was doing, waiting for the next lucky break. He felt he had always been lucky. In fact he had once been described by a girl as happy-go-lucky which wasn’t the same thing. But, she hadn’t been with him often or intimate enough to see him soak through his tee shirt with night sweats or wake up with the terror of knowing he had relived the nightmare but couldn’t remember anything other than the fact of it. He was a good actor and he kept his night sweats, nightmares, and terrors hidden from the outside world under a thin shell of an easy charm.

Chapter Two

At three that afternoon his alarm went off. He grabbed for it, jolted out of a trance-like near sleep in which he had been contemplating his life, yet again.

He rolled over to shut it off, stretched and flexed his legs, listening to the clicks in his knees, toes and ankles. He glanced around the small apartment, just one room deep with a balcony that ran the length of it. The St. Philip Street apartment had been made from what had once been the slave quarters to a large house and was now divided into apartments. Below his balcony was a small courtyard with a fountain, a couple tables that went mostly un-used, and some banana palms.

On the walls were some Crescent City Classic posters from back when he was running 10Ks. He wondered if he could run 10 blocks now. Over the past few years he had managed to discover and then embrace a world-class case of malaise, a lassitude that surprised him, even as he observed it in himself.

This wasn’t who he was, he thought. He had always thought that there were two people in everyone: there was the person they saw themselves to be, and the person they actually were. If the two were about the same, then they were happy. If there were huge gaps between those two, then they weren’t. But if who he was, was reflected by how he was living, then maybe it was who he was.

He got up and headed to the bathroom, limping slightly as the bones in his feet loosened up. The movement reminded him that he was alive and that no one had ever died of a hangover.

He noticed that there wasn’t any music in his head--none of the snatches of music of every kind that used to greet him in the morning. It occurred to him that it had been a long time since he had heard the music. Maybe the cranial musicians were too bummed to play.

In the corner was a Treadclimber exercise machine, covered with dust and about four layers of clothing. He dug through the pile, found his tux shirt, put it on, along with a pair of jeans, and a red brocade vest. He stuck a matching red bow tie in his pocket and walked down the outside staircase from the apartment into the courtyard, then along St. Philip to Bourbon.

The air was muggy and smelled like rain, but it usually smelled like that in New Orleans in the summer. There was a breeze off the river, breaking into but not really cooling the day’s heat. He could feel a sweat sheen forming over his skin, and his tee shirt was already beginning to stick to him under the tux shirt.

He walked into Lafitte’s Blacksmith Shop, a local bar housed in one of the few genuine French buildings in the French Quarter. The wooden structural timbers showed through the plastered walls and lent a nice, seedy, fallen-down feel to the place. The bartender knew him and had a cold beer in a go-cup waiting. Jake tossed five dollars on the bar and re-emerged into the early evening light.

He liked walking down Bourbon Street in the transition hours from day shift to night shift. The streets and the buildings had a kind of glow at that time of day. People used to walk all over the French Quarter, back when it was safe.

Drug gangs coming in from the projects had changed that, but Katrina had run many of them off. Others had returned to prey on the tourists, but Jake had never been mugged or even threatened. At 6’2" and 220 pounds he was a big guy but knew that he wouldn’t intimidate a kid with a gun and chemical courage. He felt that he had been lucky.

He sported a full beard which was a dark auburn on the sides and in his moustache, but turned to black around his chin. He kept both neatly trimmed, his one concession to grooming. His hairline was receding faster than he’d like but he seldom gave it much thought.

Bourbon Street was starting to crank up, the bars bracing for the evening. The Quarter never needs an occasion to justify a party. The gays dominated the balconies at Bourbon and Dumaine, laughing and yelling to friends and tourists. He waved to the bartenders in No Name and Hole in the Wall and continued his march to Foxy Lady’s.

The bar’s building had once been a large home, like most on Bourbon Street, and was built flush with the sidewalk. The door was recessed behind three marble steps, left over from more elegant times. Smooth, low indentations had been worn into the marble by thousands of feet, once the boots of the gentry, now the sneakers of frat boys and tasseled loafers of tourists.

A sign on the front said Foxy Lady’s, Voted Prettiest Girls in the South. Jake wondered who had voted, and when. He figured that most of the women in the photos, faded to a sepia tone, taped to stained red cardboard and propped in the front windows, were dead. He figured they must be, died of natural causes, surrounded by their grandchildren, or overdosed ten minutes after the picture was taken. Maybe they were the ones, pulling in the votes from beyond the grave, from that great runway and brass pole in the sky. Stranger things have happened in New Orleans.

In front of the bar beneath a pair of manikin legs on a swing, a short, stocky man with a crushed nose was calling to tourists as they passed.

Here it is, the famous Foxy Lady’s. No cover, no minimum. Com’on in and see the ‘neked’ ladies, he barked. He nodded at Jake. Jake waved, trotted up the three steps and went inside.

It was cold inside. The air conditioning was running continually to try to stay one step ahead of the heat and the collective temperature of sweaty bodies.

The interior lights were very specific, and there were dark areas off to the sides where little light ventured. A long bar with no stools ran along the left-hand wall, and at the end was a padded board held at an angle by a set of chains. Behind the board was a mirror so that, when a stripper was lying on the board, potential patrons outside could see her back and legs. The girls pulled their G-strings up between their butt cheeks so that to the passer-by, they indeed looked neked. On the stage, one of the dancers who was grinding up and down on a pole with little enthusiasm, waved to Jake. There were only a few people drinking, and they looked as bored as the stripper. Jake said hello to a couple of the waitresses and went to start setting up the bar for his shift. XX

He went into the back and loaded a large plastic trash can with ice. The walls in the back room were peeling and the floor was always damp from leaking pipes or spilled ice or wet places where an attempt had been made to clean up some pierced and tattooed young lovely’s vomit. The place stunk.

What am I doing here? Jake thought, not for the first time. Making two hundred bucks a night, he answered.

He carried the ice out to the bar and iced down the bin, arranging the mixers and juices along the edges. Then he went into the back office and picked up his register bank, counting it carefully, twice, before leaving the office. Behind the bar he checked the layout, the high end bottles filled with low end drug store booze, and rearranged them in the rail as he liked them. He made sure that the beer mugs were stacked within easy reach behind the taps. The waitress who had been doubling as the day bartender emptied her cash register drawer, grabbed her tips from the beer pitcher next to the register, and disappeared into the back.

Within an hour the place had come alive. All the seats around the main stage and most of the tables were filled by a variety of men who ranged from bikers to businessmen. One of the strippers was working the crowd, flirting and teasing, as another, stretched out on the ramp, was talking to a customer who couldn’t keep his eyes off the reflection of her rear. A disc jockey tried to keep a high level of excitement going. The bar and the waitresses were busy.

Behind the bar Jake had gotten into his rhythm, making drinks, collecting money, giving change. The drinks part was easy. Most French Quarter bars pour a shot and a half to two shots of booze in the glass and then add mixer. Foxy Lady’s filled the glass nearly to the brim with mixer, coke or whatever, and splashed a bit of booze on top so that the customer’s first sip would be all booze. For that splash he paid double the already inflated Bourbon Street price. The Hurricanes, Guaranteed to Have Four Shots of Premium Liquor, had four shots of cheap red wine per gallon of tropical punch mix and cost two bucks more than the real thing down the street at Pat Obrien’s. Jake hated not being able to pour a decent drink, but he was making enough to pay the rent and figured short-term he could put up with anything if he had to. Fuck ‘em, they’re just tourists.

A waitress came over and called to him. She was tall with long dyed blonde hair, a wonderful body, and a coke habit that could impoverish a Saudi prince. When Jake had first met her he asked her what she did other than work at Foxy’s. White powder, she had said, and Jake knew he couldn’t afford her.

Jake, I need three beers, two Jack and Coke and two Hurricanes.

Draw three, two Jack Coke, Hurry two. Fifty-six bucks, he answered as he assembled the order.

The waitress handed him the money and started to load her tray as he rang up the sale. Another waitress, Dawn, stepped up between the brass rails.

Draw six, how’s it going, Jake?

Behind them the DJ said, Alicia, Alicia to the stage, Raven to the ramp, Monica on deck!

I’m okay, Jake answered. You making any money tonight? He drew the six beers and set them, foaming, three in each hand, in front of her.

No, she said, but it’s still early. There’s some convention in town isn’t there?

Yeah, but it’s doctors or dentists or something. Give me thirty-six bucks.

Shit, those mother-fuckers never tip worth shit, Dawn answered.

The DJ said, Monica, Monica to the back stage, Crystal to the ramp!

Whoa, Jake said, laughing, Do you kiss your kids with that mouth?

No, she said. Then, smiling, said, I’d kiss you with it, but I don’t know where it’s been.

Jake laughed, remembering when she said she should take up stripping and bill herself as The Crack of Dawn. That was the night she took him home and showed him the angry red scars from her breast implants. She showed him some other things as well as he remembered that and wondered if the scars had faded.

Jake smiled to himself and turned to the patrons at the bar. Alright, who’s thirsty? he asked.

At the end of the bar one man waved in response and Jake walked down and spun a cocktail napkin on to the smooth wooden bar surface. Jake hadn’t noticed that the man hadn’t been watching the dancers. He was dressed in the southern preppy uniform of gray slacks, blue blazer and a striped tie over an oxford cloth shirt. He looked like thousands of others and Jake had paid no attention to him.

What’ll it be? he asked.

Beer, the man said. How’re you doing?

Jake drew the beer and answered automatically, Fine, never better. How you doing?

On the stage the DJ was saying, Alright guys, let’s hear it for Alicia and loosen up those billfolds, she’s strippin’ for the tippin’. This ain’t TV, it’s live pay-for-view!

Jake set the beer down in front of the man and looked at his face for the first time. He was shocked. It was Walt Macbeth.

Chapter Three

Walt Macbeth had been Jake’s squadron commanding officer when they were in Afghanistan. Macbeth was a good pilot and an outstanding leader. More importantly, he was one of the very few people Jake had admired without envy. He looked about the same, a little grayer maybe, the crew cut a bit longer, but all in all in good shape.

Macbeth had flown helicopters in Vietnam, and then OV-10s before he started up the chain of command, getting a master’s degree in Middle Eastern studies, going to the War College, serving as a general’s aide. He was known to be a bit overly aggressive and even though he had made bird colonel, he was never considered for general. He obviously had pissed someone off along the way.

Hey, Skipper! Been awhile. How ya doing? Jake said as he reached across the bar to shake hands.

Doing well, thanks. You can lay off the ‘Skipper.’ I’ve been ‘Walt’ for a while now. Macbeth looked around at the dancers. Working here you must feel like you died and went to heaven.

Ordering, called out a short, blonde waitress at the end of the bar. Jake waved her down.

It does have its moments. What brings you to New Orleans? Jake said.

Recruiting pilots. Looking for you, actually.

Yeah? Well, here I am.

I can see that. Look, when do you get off? I’d like to talk to you and that doesn’t seem possible in here.

Four AM. What’s up?

Nothing sinister. I just have a couple of ideas to bounce off you.

Well, alright. Look, let’s meet over at the Huddle, right across Saint Peter’s from Pat O’Brien’s.

I’ll be there.

Good, and be careful. New Orleans can be dangerous.

Hell, he laughed in an attempt at camaraderie, At least there’s nobody shooting at us anymore.

Don’t be so sure. I’ll see you around four.

The blonde waitress, obviously pissed, screamed down at Jake. Ordering!

Call! he responded.

Draw four, two scotch rocks, four Hurricanes.

As he mixed the drinks, Jake talked to the waitress, telling himself the story as much as he was telling her, just to hear it, to put it in the air and see how he felt about it.

That was my old CO from Afghanistan. I haven’t seen him in years. Give me eighty-eight dollars. I wonder what he’s up to.

Just another old geezer checking out the girls.

’Geezer?’ He’s not much older than me, Jake said.

Exactly, she said, grinning.

Thanks. Now I feel about a hundred, he said.

Oh come on, gramps. You don’t look a day over ninety-five, ninety-six tops.

Thank you again, so very, very much, Jake said as the waitress, still grinning, took the drinks and pushed her way towards the tables.

Walt Macbeth left Foxy Lady’s and walked idly down Bourbon Street. He had been there often over the years and always liked and appreciated the charm of the place, though he usually avoided Bourbon Street and never frequented strip bars. He continued down to St. Peter, walked half a block towards the river and stopped in front of Pat O’Brien’s. He leaned against the wall, letting the tourists flow around him as they entered to get their Hurricanes and beers.

Across the street was the Huddle, a bar like hundreds in New Orleans. Next door was Johnny White’s, a fixture in the Quarter for decades. Johnny’s never closed, not for fire, famine, rain or wind. It was still being run by the late Johnny’s daughters and had stayed open during all of Katrina.

Macbeth went into Pat O’Brien’s and stepped into the small bar on the left of the central passageway which funneled the tourists to the courtyard and the piano bar. The side bar was known as the locals bar. He ordered a beer and some oysters on the half-shell and settled in to wait.