‘Can I help you?’ he asked us, taking off his coat.
‘Yeah,’ Marino said, getting up from his chair. ‘What kind of car you got?’
14
THE FLATBED TRUCK was waiting when we arrived, the vinyl-shrouded camper on top of it gleaming an eerie translucent blue beneath the stars and moon and still hooked to a pickup truck. We were parking nearby on a dirt road at the edge of a field when a huge plane passed alarmingly low overhead, its roar louder than a commercial jet.
‘What the hell?’ Marino exclaimed, opening the door of the ranger’s Jeep.
‘I think that’s our ride to Utah,’ Lucy said from the back, where she and I were sitting.
The ranger was staring up through his windshield, incredulous, as if the rapture had come. ‘Holy shit. Oh my God. We’re being invaded!’
A HMMWV came down first, wrapped in corrugated cardboard, a heavy wooden platform underneath. It sounded like an explosion when it landed on the hard-packed dead grass of the field and was dragged by parachutes caught in the wind. Then green nylon wilted over the multiwheeled vehicle, and more rucksacks blossomed in the heavens as more cargo drifted down and tumbled to the ground. Paratroopers followed, oscillating two or three times before landing nimbly on their feet and running out of their harnesses. They gathered up billowing nylon as the sound of their C-17 receded beyond the moon.
The Air Force’s Combat Control Team out of Charleston, South Carolina, had arrived at precisely thirteen minutes past midnight. We sat in the jeep and watched, fascinated as airmen began double-checking the compactness of the field, for what was about to land on it weighed enough to demolish a normal landing strip or tarmac. Measurements were made, surveys taken, and the team set out sixteen ACR remote control landing lights, while a woman in camouflage unwrapped the HMMWV, started its loud diesel engine and drove it off its platform, out of the way.
‘I got to find some joint to stay around here,’ Marino said as he stared out at the spectacle. ‘How the hell can they land some big military plane on such a little field?’
‘Some of it I can tell you,’ said Lucy, who was never at a loss for technical explanation. ‘Apparently, the C-1Ts designed to land with cargo on unusually small, unapproved runways like this. Or a dry lake bed. In Korea, they’ve even used interstates.’
‘Here we go,’ Marino said with his usual sarcasm.
‘Only other thing that could squeeze into a tight place like this is a C-130,’ she went on. ‘The C-17 can back up, isn’t that cool?’
‘No way a cargo plane can do all that.’ Marino said.
‘Well, this baby can,’ she said as if she wanted to adopt it.
He began looking around. ‘I’m so hungry I could eat a tire, and I’d give up my paycheck for a beer. I’m gonna roll down this window here and smoke.’
I sensed the ranger did not want anyone smoking in his well-cared-for Jeep, but he was too intimidated to say so.
‘Marino, let’s go outside,’ I said. ‘Fresh air would do us good.’
We climbed out and he lit a Marlboro, sucking on it as if it were mother’s milk. Members of the USAMRIID team who were in charge of the flatbed truck and its creepy cargo were still in their protective suits and staying away from everyone. They were gathered on the rutted dirt road, watching airmen work on what looked like acres of flat land that in warmer months might be a playing field.
A dark unmarked Plymouth rolled up at almost two A.M., and Lucy trotted to it. I watched her talk to Janet through the open driver’s window. Then the car drove away.
‘I’m back,’ Lucy spoke quietly, touching my arm.
‘Everything okay?’ I asked, and I knew the life they lived together had to be hard.
‘Under control, so far,’ she said.
‘Double-O-Seven, it was nice of you to come out and help us today,’ Marino said to Lucy, smoking as if it were his last hour to enjoy it.
‘You know, it’s a federal violation to be disrespectful to federal agents,’ she said. ‘Especially minorities of Italian extraction.’