The Terminals Read online

  “Didn’t realize it was a trade,” he replied, but I didn’t take the bait. Finally he spoke. “All right.” He swallowed and his eyes left mine to stare beyond me. “It started in World War II. You’ve heard of Nazi concentration camps using prisoners to forward the German war effort?”

  I had. The Nazis had committed atrocities in the name of science, using Jews and Roma among others as test subjects as if they were white mice. I didn’t get through West Point without learning how far down the path of wrong an ideological war can take you. It also reminded me what Charlie had said about the reincarnations of Seth and Theudas being Nazis.

  “In the final two years of the war,” he continued, “the Allies had unexplained breaches in security. Witch hunts turned up nothing. They couldn’t figure out who was leaking all of their secrets. It wasn’t until after the war that the Americans learned that the Nazis used a woman to seek information from the dead. SS Oberführer Oskar Dirlewanger had no qualms about killing his men to go after the information they required to win the war.”

  “The Nazis had their own Terminals group?” I asked, stunned.

  “The woman was Maria Liltay, and her daughter was placed in a death camp. Maria had to comply or her daughter would be gassed along with the other hundreds of thousands of Roma and Jews. Once each day, she was allowed to view her daughter out of a window to see that the Nazis kept their side of the bargain. When the Allies finally broke through, Maria was murdered by the Nazis to cover up the operation, but her daughter lived on and moved to America as a refugee.

  “Still, the Allies didn’t know what had happened. They knew nothing of Maria Liltay. It wasn’t until after the collapse of the Soviet bloc that the Polish government shared the results of Dirlewanger’s interrogation. They were initially dismissed by the Poles as the insane ramblings of a man near death, but a colonel in the U.S. Army had a suspicion that Dirlewanger wasn’t crazy. And when he started looking, he found documents detailing the dates of Dirlewanger’s experiments to send people into the afterlife that matched with known security leaks.

  “He traced the name of the woman, conducted a manhunt—or what he probably saw as a real witch hunt—and found the daughter living in New York City with another man and their son. The woman was tested, but she had no ability to understand the dead. The teenager, on the other hand, had already been the source of strange happenings.”

  Attila’s jaw flexed, teeth clenching as he considered the knife still in my hand.

  “You,” I said, and his lip twitched upward. “You were the teen.”

  “I was that boy.” He agreed. “Fearing that they would use me like they had my grandmother, my mother wouldn’t let me help Colonel Aaron.”

  “Shit.” I hadn’t caught the general’s involvement, but it made sense. This unit wasn’t just a place to die for him; it was his legacy, which was why he’d do what was required to ensure its survival. “So why—” I glanced to the door, although surely the general knew all of this. “Why do you help him?”

  “A couple years later, my mother got sick.” He stared at me with his so dark eyes, and I couldn’t look away. Somehow, I felt guilty. Perhaps it was because I was a part of the institution that coerced him. Or maybe I had already decided that something wasn’t quite straight here. “Her kidneys were ruined. She needs dialysis twice a week. Two grand a month. That’s a lot of fortunes to read. A lot of cappuccinos to pour.” He exhaled sharply. “So here I am.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “It’s not your fault. The Roma have told fortunes for centuries, though never to their own people, only outsiders. We believe in predestiny, so none of this—”

  Predestiny was a copout in my view, but I didn’t want a fight. A sudden thought caused my body to tense.

  “What?” He caught my suspicion “What is it?”

  “You wouldn’t help them until your mother fell ill,” I held up a thumb. “And Charlie was only diagnosed with cancer four days ago, two days before we needed someone.”

  Attila glanced at the door and back at me with a sour look on his face.

  “What about the Egyptologist?” I held up a third finger. “When was he diagnosed?”

  “What are you saying?” His tone sharpened.

  I regarded him before responding. The sudden intimacy between us was gone. Without him, the unit was nothing, so if something smelled, then perhaps he smelled of it too. I swallowed my concerns and shrugged.

  “Nothing, I guess.” My heart pounded. What if not all terminals were found? What if some were made? Could Siam’s file prove it?

  He was silent and I needed to be the one to say something.

  “Do the dead talk to you?” I smiled at his puzzlement, anger forgotten. “Can you shut them out?”

  “You mean, are they all stumbling around the room shouting at me to do things for them?” His eyes lit like the night sky in farm country, and I felt greater pleasure in the return of his closeness than I should have. “Nah. It takes a lot of work to hear anything from the dead. It’s why I usually need the doorknob and for them to be listening.” We sat in silence for a minute. “No kids then?”

  I shook my head. It was strange but I was enjoying the clumsiness of the conversation. “No one. Career military.”

  “No husband?”

  I flushed. “I was a colonel, Attila. A woman may be able to make stardom on a casting couch, but not in the military.”

  “Why the past tense? You said, I was a colonel.”

  “Yeah.” A spasm of coughing wracked me, hair tumbling before my eyes. “I’ve decided this isn’t the military anymore. It has new rules and I’m not sure I like where they’re coming from.”

  “I should let your voice rest.”

  “You’re doing the general a favor, making me talk,” I rasped. “No way can I yell at him now.”

  He smiled at my joke, and I noticed the gentle touch of his fingertips against my back. When he stood, I missed the heat of him and I shook my hair so that it fell across my burn.

  We crossed the hall and the silence hung awkward again. I felt like a teenager, uncertain as to our relationship, but sensing something. But nothing killed desire as quickly as confronting the general’s ravaged face.

  Chapter 18

  The general hunched behind his desk with Morph’s laptop open in front of him. The light gave his eyes a lurid cast. “Sure took your time.” He glanced up from his watch and grinned knowingly at Attila. “Didn’t think you gypsies dated outside your first cousins.”

  I coughed, raking the back of my throat so much that I cried out.

  “Becoming a pattern,” the general continued, shifting his attention to me. “How many men died this time?”

  Attila stepped forward to my side. But I was immune to the general’s attack. Little he could say would make me feel worse.

  “Charlie was duped,” I responded.

  “You were duped,” he said.

  “You were drunk at your desk.”

  Attila leaned over the desk to face the general, who stared at him with smug amazement. “Lay off,” Attila said.

  The general slowly leaned forward to meet his gaze, noses inches apart. In a fluid motion, the general hooked Attila’s arm behind his back and wrenched it upward driving his head into the desk with a crack.

  “And why should I lay off?”

  I started forward, but the general’s expression warned me that Attila faced more pain should I step in.

  Attila struggled, and the general tugged his arm so that the wrist reached the nape of his neck. When Attila spoke, his tone was nasal and muffled. “It was an accident, and you would have done the same thing.”

  “Would I have?” the general asked and released him. Attila rolled off the desk and held his bleeding nose. The general motioned to me. “You should tell your friend here what happened to you? What you did? Or did
n’t do.”

  I don’t like being cornered. “What’s all this passive-aggressive bullshit?”

  The general slowly stood. He wasn’t a tall man, but he was wide. His arms had the remembered strength of decades of calisthenics, the sort of power that isn’t lost in years of inactivity. I had no doubt that he could kill with his bare hands despite the oxygen tank.

  “There’s a rank order here, Colonel, and it’s not just military.” I held his gaze. “Guess where suicides rank?” I regretted my demand. “You’re throwing away everything we seek. You’re rejecting me … us.” He shook his head and seemed to gather himself. “You don’t believe in life or the afterlife. How can we all not hate you?”

  “Ah, so the more pitiable your situation, the higher your rank? Is that how you came by your stars?”

  “Service got me my stars, and as head of this unit, I dole out the esteem.”

  The general had a grin that told me he knew something I wouldn’t want to hear.

  “Then why recruit me?” I challenged.

  “I didn’t say you couldn’t be useful—a terminal who isn’t dying, that’s ammo without a shelf life. You don’t have to go quickly. Besides, you were a public relations disaster—a female colonel committing suicide?” He threw up his hands. “Everyone would assume big bad discrimination.”

  Nothing remained to be said; he’d only confirmed my suspicion regarding the PR issues, and I didn’t care. I could have explained that we’re all dying, that he was already dead in every way but the halting of his dark heart. But he wouldn’t have cared, or he would have agreed. When I failed to reply, his eyes read moral victory.

  “We need Morph to find another Euth before she kicks the bucket.” He reverted to business. “Might need one if Charlie-boy can’t come through.”

  “Another Euth?” I asked. So this was to be my punishment: Failure led to more death, and with it, more guilt.

  “Unless, of course, you possess a sudden hankering for gnosis.” The general stared until I looked away. His arguments held a sort of infallible logic. I wanted my knife, my gun. To go. “Didn’t think so. If being pitiable was the bar, you’d be leading this thing, not me.” He spoke the words slowly so that they hung in the air. “Real soldiers can handle the consequences of the difficult choices they make.”

  Attila lunged forward, but I had caught the general’s posture and knew a baiting when I saw one. I grabbed Attila by the scruff of his shirt and hauled him back toward Purgatory.

  “Hey, you gypped me,” the general called between bouts of laughter. “I wanted to rip those hoops out of his ears.”

  “Let it go,” I said to Attila, drawing him in from the hallway.

  Attila stared at me, his eyes difficult to read, but burning. I remembered the injustice of his being here. His mother’s illness. His grandmother’s deal with the devil. I could see the vast well of his rage.

  “Thanks for standing up for me,” I said. “But—”

  “But what?” He shoved my hand away. “What happened at the mill was no one’s and everyone’s fault. Us for sending in Charlie, Charlie for giving the wrong location, us again for believing it, the FBI for not being smart enough to figure out there might be a trap when he had already planted a bomb once …” He drew a deep breath before continuing. “But mostly it’s Hillar’s. This is his doing and I don’t like being used by a serial killer. It sure as hell isn’t your fault.”

  I realized that Attila cared far more than his callous pretense had suggested. From his bed in Purgatory, Charlie looked on, blind eyes staring.

  “Attila, the general’s right.”

  He peered at me. “If you’re so suicidal, then why do you worry about these people dying?”

  I looked down. “I’m not suicidal. Never was. At least not in the way you might think.” Confusion clouded his face. “I haven’t lost the will to live. I still see meaning in some things. The fact is … I deserve to die.”

  His lips thinned in disagreement. “No one deserves to die. Even here we make it a choice.”

  “Ostensibly,” I said.

  “No, more than that. I think it’s an easy trade. People commit suicide because they’ve lost hope. And they’re sick,” Attila said, face shining with a passion I hadn’t seen in him. Regardless of the moral ambiguity, he believed in the Terminals.

  “Did you know there’s an African tribe whose queen’s job it is to make it rain?” I licked my cracked lips. “Their reward is to choose when they die.” I held his gaze. “I think it’s one of the attractions to the Terminals, you see? You’re able to choose when you die. It’s about control.”

  “This isn’t Africa and you can’t make it rain.” Anger smoldered in his eyes. “So explain why you deserve to choose when you die.”

  He reminded me of the heat of the sun, the burn of the acid. And I saw how the stakes were so high. Everything here was life and death; a maze navigated by a fragile moral thread.

  “Did you know that the heat can reach as high as one hundred and thirty degrees in the sands?” I asked, and he stood watching me, waiting. “In full body armor and lugging fifty-pound packs. That’s hot.”

  He crossed his arms.

  “So whatever it is happened while you were on tour,” he said.

  “I shouldn’t have even been outside the perimeter. I commanded a thousand soldiers. But I liked to stay in touch with my men, right? As a woman I proved myself every day, so I needed to venture beyond the razor wire and blast walls. Putting myself in harm’s way was what earned me the Medal of Honor, too.”

  He gave a nod of understanding, but he couldn’t really do so. Finally, I told him.

  That day, the temperature was about one hundred and twenty, I explained, and my men were sweltering. We’d spent the morning on patrol. The local police were with us. A lot of our time was spent training them so that they could maintain the peace after we were gone. Boys mostly, but they were growing older the longer we stayed. We worked well with the locals, even without a translator, even with a female commander. When the heat became too much, the sun too high, we stopped. It was in a village of a few thousand. We’d never met any resistance. But resistance was in the eyes of an old man, a veiled woman, in the zeal of a brainwashed child … I trailed off with my eyes shut and then drew a breath before continuing.

  A small brick factory pumped oily smoke from a chimney. I remembered the cloying smell, and the nearby school, whose students waved through windows as we passed. I wondered now if it had been an Islamist madrassa. We’d driven our Humvees into the shade of a building and parked. An alley climbed deeper into the village, but the village was small, only encompassing a rugged hill.

  As my men made camp, I asked one of the police to help me find a place to pee. We went back into the village, and I recall how cool it felt in the shade of the brick walls. Often when we reached a village we’re met by children. This was a regular route, and these kids were pretty used to us. And maybe we were too used to them because on my way back, when I found the alley crowded with them, I sensed nothing wrong.

  And it was unusual; they weren’t making a sound. They moved in a large group down the broad steps toward my men. They were focused on the terrain before them and hadn’t seen or heard me. The policeman pointed at the back of the group and asked me a sharp question about a boy. The sun was in my eyes, and it placed the child in deeper shadow, but I could see the boy was bulkier, and when I ducked into the shade and my eyes adjusted, I saw the bricks strapped to him. They looked like the gray bricks of explosive.

  A girl cried alarm as the policeman shouted again. I pulled my weapon, but he was just a boy. Not a terrorist. But I knew these radicalized children were torn from their families and listened to twisted translations of the Qur’an for months until their only escape was to paradise, and the only route they were allowed through sacrifice. I knew all of this. Other children zigzagged i
n the path of my shot. I didn’t even call for my men to run and maybe I couldn’t spare the breath, that breach of concentration. Not if I was going to take that shot.

  But I didn’t take it.

  Not to kill a child whose only fault was to be poor.

  “Eleven soldiers died,” I told Attila. “With them, six police officers and nine children. And almost all of the survivors were burned like me or worse. In retrospect, the shot should have been automatic. Easy to take.

  “A few weeks later, after they’d decided they weren’t willing to court-martial me, after the report in which I announced my guilt was filed and accepted and buried, without stripping me of rank or command …” I clenched my eyes and squeezed out the tears hiding there. “On the day they returned me to duty, I committed suicide. Deep, sure cuts along my wrists. A bottle of Tylenol and aspirin. I was alone and it was night. I had arranged it to be sure no one would find me until the next morning. But when the shower ran long, someone investigated. They managed to save me. I wasn’t surprised when they sent a general to talk to me. I mean, I was a female lieutenant colonel in the Army. This was high profile.

  “He convinced me of the Terminals’ existence at least enough to give it a chance. It didn’t really matter. For those truly committed to it, death is never far away.” I shook my head and looked up at Attila again, meeting his gaze for the first time since I began the story. “I wonder; if I had pulled the trigger then, would those men and women in Iowa still live now? The consequences of our choices accumulate and my life is now a boulder rolling downhill.” I stretched my hands out in supplication. “You see? A month ago, my hesitation caused twenty-six deaths,” I said. The fire was gone from his eyes, but I would have preferred it to the piteous gaze that replaced it. “And now more …”