Not the response you would expect from a seasoned operative, is it? Not what I would have expected from myself, but there are somethings you can't ever un-see.
It was like something out of a bad movie: the stone-faced gunsel herding his fatally surprised victim into a clearing, the shovel thrown to the ground and the dreaded instructions to begin digging.
It's hard for me to understand just what leverage the gunsel has in this situation. As soon as the shovel comes into play then only one of this scene's two actors has anything close to an exit strategy.
What gets me is how many of them reach for the shovel and start digging.
You can't do this kind of work and not at least consider the possibilities. Sooner, or later, your number is going to come up. One day--probably much sooner than you would like--you will lose the ability, the opportunity, to walk away.
Me, I know how lucky I was that the worst thing to happen to me was that goddamned tasteless sheetcake. I got out, which is a much greater prize than the miserable excuse for a pension that was waiting for me. Barney was not so lucky....
He never liked cake, anyway.
For this poor, dumb, sonofabitch, this was supposed to be his last day. He had no way of knowing that we were there to pull him out. As far as he knew, he was going to die. Buried alive by some sociopath in a shiny suit.
Christ, we could see the sweat gushing down his fat, bald head like spring run-off over Niagara.
The shovel was thrown down in front of him like some sort of an insult. As though his soon-to-be-killer had challenged him to a duel.
And the guy just looks at it as though he had never seen one before. Judging from the size of him, he had not. Manual Labor was probably the name of his gardener.
He sounded as though he's already been punched in the stomach as he grunted and wheezed his way to the ground to pick it up.
As I watched, the horrific sight of this man trying to break into the hard-packed clay that was to be his final resting place while a bouillabaisse of sweat, snot and tears poured over his face, I couldn't help thinking that it was his own fault.
How could he not have been prepared for the shovel?
Right here, in front of us, was playing out the very scenario that operators talk about. It's not the kind of thing you will read about in the newspaper, or even in spy novels. You'll never see it, but when we are alone, we talk about how we would handle it when our name gets called, when we are picked out of a crowd, when we get handed the shovel.
For the longest time, I never got the question. So often, I'd have to drive while the others would pass around a flask and get all philosophical about how they would handle it when it was their time.
I remember carrying Phelps into his apartment one time because he was too drunk. A 14-hour flight from the other side of the world and he had spent the whole time collecting little one-shot bottles of bourbon. At different times, each of us had tried to get him to go to sleep, but he would not. He was too busy hitting on the stewardesses and trying to forget the glassy-eyed look of the asset that had died in his arms the day before.
All the way in from the airport, he was telling me the different things that he had planned for his big moment. At one point, he took hold of my hand and forced what I thought was a damp breath mint into it.
It wasn't a breath mint. He'd given me his Pill.
He wasn't going to hide when his time came. He was going to make them look him in the eye. He was going to make sure that he haunted them just like all of people who now haunted him.
Nobody ever asked me and, to be frank, I never really thought about it. Everytime we went out on a job, I was always too busy taking care of Barney to think about getting caught. We did some pretty risky shit, but I was always so far offstage that I never really thought about it like that.
That was until the time they had to send me home on a boat, by myself. There was nothing else to do, but think about the job we had done. And, stuck on a fishing boat with a bunch of drunken Albanians, you get pretty philosophical about all kinds of crazy shit.
The Engineer's Mate--it was always the Engineer's Mate--would spend all of his free time making the worst kind of rotgut bilgewater gin. Every boat I ever was on, the Engineer's Mate was always running a still and they all claimed that theirs was the best in whatever body of water we happened to be bobbing around in. And, without exception, they were horrible. It's because of that stuff that I still have to protect my right side, even today. It's because of too many late nights fueled by that stuff that I can no longer stand up straight.
I know, I know, I did it to myself. The Albanians like to talk and they can really put down their cocktails.
Perhaps it's because of the work they do, or the places they do it, but they love to talk about how they expect to die.
The beginners, the first-timers, the ones who are still working on getting their sea legs under them, are the ones who talk about going out in bed, surrounded by their loved ones like some sort of Hallmark card. The pros talk about getting pulled over the side, or crushed under any one of the thousand moving blocks of death that are the deck of a commercial operation.
To hear the old-timers talk, it's as though they expect to have to answer for the thousands and thousands of lives they have taken with their nets. To them, kharma is a fish and she's out there waiting for them.
I had a training sergeant once who told us that he wanted to be strapped to a bunch of dynamite and thrown out of a helicopter over Chicago. In was in this way, he felt, that he could reach the largest number of people.
He never did explain why it had to be Chicago.
I never had a good story when these conversations came up. It's probably why I drank so much of their shit.
It would have been great to have some sort of a Hemingway-type of exit all planned out, but then who would give a damn one way or the other? It's like the song says, "All My Exes...(Live in Hope for News of My Untimely and Painful Death)."
There was a time when I wanted to be the guy who took one for the team, who threw himself on the grenade, or, against all odds and single-handedly, took out the machine gun nest. There was a time when I wanted to be famous. Could never figure out what for, but I wanted everyone to know my name.
I remember Fairbairn at The Farm whose mantra was that the best operator was invisible and that the only satisfaction to be had in this work was for the opposition not to know that they had ever been operated against.
That idea sustained me for a while, at least until I started working for IMF. Don't know if this was the same in other compartments, maybe it was just Phelps and Briggs, but they took a certain satisfaction in making certain that the other side knew they had been taken. It's like they had to sign their work, or something.
I still don't know.
I think about it everyday. Everytime I recognize that I am half-a-step slower, a little bit deafer, another year older, I compensate by spending more time looking over my shoulder and waiting for my fish to come in.
The dumb fuck with the shovel had to be thinking about all this and more as he continued his pathetic scratching out his crypt. With each shovelful, his effort was less and his panic was more.
His executioner was clearly losing his patience.
At one point, he actually snatched the shovel away from the guy and, at great risk to his suit, finished the hole himself. Even then, with such a gift, the guy just sits there whining. He doesn't see that he has been given a chance to get away, so he just sits there crying about his wife and kids and how the gunman shouldn't kill him.
It's a good thing that I wasn't carrying, or I would have shot the guy myself just for being stupid.
In the end, all I could do was look away.
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