Slow Recoil - C.B. Forrest A Charlie McKelvey Mystery

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is not the fucking regulation army, boys. You are not protected by any international laws or conventions,” the Captain told them, standing on the tailgate of a black half-ton truck. He was the only one among them dressed in full camouflage, new trousers bloused over new black boots, his grey and black beard neatly trimmed. “But that hardly matters now. This is not a conventional war. We have only one mandate, and that is the mandate as declared by The Colonel. We are to take back as many of our villages and to kill as many of the enemy as we can before we ourselves are terminated. Any questions?”

      Kad looked out now across the parking lot of the fifty-dollar motel. The sun was rising, giving birth to his purpose in this life. The burden of his brothers and sisters squarely on his shoulders. The load was heavy, but he didn’t mind. He had no family now, no past, no future. He was invisible; in fact, he had never been born. He turned and slipped inside the glass patio door and surveyed the room: the ugly artwork on the wall, the red shag carpeting worn from a million footsteps, the brown water stains painted like a map of Africa on the stucco ceiling, the cheap plastic cups wrapped in more plastic, the bed with its sloping mattress, the floral-print comforter.

      This was Canada. The word made him think of the UN and the blue helmets and the white troop carriers shipped to a war that was none of their business, these fresh-faced boys sent halfway around the world to stand at roadblocks and witness murder. Canada. Smooth cigarettes that did not burn your throat, soft beer, soft women. The place where people apologized even when it was you who bumped into them. That was the word that came to mind: soft.

      Out on Airport Road, a car backfired, and Kad ducked low, hunching at the shoulders. The automatic reaction even after all these years. His mind worked to decipher the sound, incoming or outgoing, mortar or something worse, something larger—an American five-hundred pounder sent to level a street, a block.

      “We have to move,” Krupps says, kicking at Kad’s boots, waking him.

      “What about Ahmet? He’s too fucked up to move. He needs blood,” Kad said.

      Standing in the motel room and the fields of war all at once. Standing and seeing Krupps, seeing everything as it was, as it always will be. Outside the traffic of Toronto ebbed and flowed.

      “Leave him for the UN. Give them something to do for the morning, those bleeding heart blue helmets. Thirteen minutes, Kadro. Let’s move.”

      He took a final long haul of his cigarette, tossed the butt to the ground. He exhaled the tobacco and looked out across those fields. The places he had played as a boy, the small wonders of a boy’s imagination at work in those deep woods. The trees and hedgerows were forming now, coming to life, the fog burning away to reveal the true nature of the torn landscape.

      There was a knock at the door.

      Kadro opened his eyes and blinked. Here in the room. Here in Canada.

      The man with the guns had finally come for him.

      Now Kadro was at the wheel, and the man with the guns was in the passenger seat. Riding shotgun is what the Americans called it. From the days of the Wild West, the stagecoaches carrying payrolls across the bleak prairies. The driver had to keep his hands on the reins, so this required a second man with free hands and free eyes to shoot at Indians and bandits. Kadro had watched dozens of black and white westerns when he was a boy. John Wayne and Gary Cooper with their six-guns. Sitting around the TV at his uncle’s place, five or six cousins sprawled on the floor, their fathers getting drunk on plum brandy and filling the old farmhouse with choking cigarette smoke. How he and his cousins had fashioned sticks and branches for guns, playing in the woods and the barns, shooting each other out of trees, trying to squint like the American cowboys. If only they had known what their life was to hold, of the killing that was to come for their generation.

      The passenger was a Canadian, but he was a blood brother in this. He was fully vetted. His name, or at least his operational name, was Turner. He was to be Kadro’s primary contact after landing at Pearson International Airport, to get him the tools he would need for the job. Turner looked like an accountant or a government auditor, slim with brown hair parted on the left, a nondescript face save for one feature: a patch on his left eye. Like a damned pirate, Kad thought when he opened the door to see the man standing there. For two days he had sat in the motel listening to the flights take off and land, listening to couples on either side make love in hourly appointments, nothing to do but pace and smoke Canadian cigarettes, watch idiots on game shows, and scratch those lottery tickets he found at the Shell station down the road. That first night he had ventured from the room in search of air and perhaps a bag of potato chips. Beneath a plastic display at the cash register he had discovered the opportunity to win one million Canadian dollars. Two dollars a chance. Why not?

      “The vehicle is registered to a numbered company,” Turner said. “Try not to get into any accidents. Don’t speed. And whatever you do, don’t drive drunk. That’s generally frowned upon over here.”

      “I know how to drive,” Kadro said. “Since I was ten. Tractors, trucks.”

      “This isn’t a fucking tractor, and this isn’t a cow lane in Bosnia,” Turner said.

      Kad stopped himself, as he was trained to do—to swallow instinct, smother emotion, follow orders. In any other situation he would have addressed the profane insult with a hard flat-palmed chop to Turner’s throat, grabbed the back of his neck and driven his accountant’s face into the dash of the car. The man would be sucking for air through a broken windpipe before he had time to wet his pants.

      “Your ID is good enough to throw a beat cop off your scent,” Turner continued, “maybe buy a little time, but don’t screw around. Since nine-eleven, you can’t go to the bathroom without a note from your teacher. Follow the plan. Don’t deviate or you’ll bring us all down. You have the cellphone, you have my number. After today, it’s the only way you’ll reach me. The number will be de-activated in seven days. By that time you should be on your way out or…well, it won’t matter anyway.”

      Kadro found everything—the streets, the shops, the women on the sidewalk, the signs in the stores, the grass and the glass and the chrome and the sheer number of brand new vehicles on these city streets—it was more than he had imagined. This city was so new, so young, it looked as though it had been built a month ago, not at all like the cities of Sarajevo or Banja Luka, Visoko, Srebrenica, with their ghosts on every corner, their architecture from the earliest centuries. This place was a movie set, it was a shopping mall, it was a picture you saw in a magazine. The year he’d spent locked away on the farm waiting for the last trace of his identity to be erased, existing for this and only this, it had been the life of a monk. Five a.m. wake up, cold water wash and meal parade, exercise and studies—both the English language and overviews of maps and cultural explanations, the security rehearsals, sitting in a chair and reciting his new name and the details of his invented life until they became real. The handler had warned him of the dangers of over-elation, of too much excitement, of meandering in the great North American arcade. No drinking, no drugs, no sex, no chance to get in trouble. Get in, get out.

      “Take the next exit,” Turner said, “and merge to the right lane. Easy, easy.”

      Kad saw the sign for Highway 7. They were north of the downtown core now, the CN Tower reduced to a souvenir a few inches tall in the rear-view mirror. Turner gave him directions one at a time, feeding him only the necessary information, until finally they pulled up to a self-serve storage complex. It was a sprawl of low-rise warehouses with tin roofs and yellow garage doors separating each unit, the whole place circled with eight feet of chain link and topped with razor wire.

      Kad said, “Like the prison camps.”

      “This is where Canadians store all the shit that won’t fit in their houses,” Turner said. “Pull right up to that little stand there and swipe this across the transponder.”

      It was hard to believe, Kad thought, how people could need more space for their belongings. The things they owned.

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