Tea. This fucking guy. And when Liz returned to the finca, her expression guarded, unsure of how they’d left things, he silently handed her a beer, stared out at the darkening view, and told her, “I asked around for you. Got a friend in MILGROUP at the embassy. Might have something interesting.” And she smiled, and sipped her beer with him, and they shared a comfortable silence.
Over the next couple of days he kept it safe. Made a show of playing tour guide—bringing out that weird Colombian fruit you eat by breaking a small hole in the shell and sucking out the insides. Pointing out the varieties of hummingbird that would flit down the mountainside. And in the evenings he’d read, and she’d read, and the space between them would fill with the warmth of their past. And then, Sunday evening, he went out to the Mall Indiana.
Since the coffee shops had already closed, he parked himself at an Italian restaurant, ordered a whiskey, and waited until Mason arrived and, true to his word, ordered tea.
At first, they just caught up. Diego talked about life as a contractor and Mason talked about his family, how the two-year accompanied tour was affecting his wife’s career, how his two daughters were doing. He even pulled up photos on his phone. Inez, the older one, was, holy shit, almost a teenager already. The younger one, Flor, a little black girl from Georgia they had adopted after the stillbirth, was now a very cute seven-year-old. Diego made the right noises as Mason flipped through the photos, and eventually Mason turned to talk of his career, the choices he’d made, and how his aversion to Middle East deployments had hurt his reputation.
“You know I’m not a coward,” Mason said. “I like a good fight as much as the next guy. But, man, I watched Ocho put two fucking tourniquets on his own bloody stumps in a war we both knew we weren’t winning. And I thought, what am I doing here? At least in Colombia, I feel like I can make a difference.”
Bingo.
“Still?” Diego asked. “There much left to do, after the peace treaty gets signed?”
“If anything,” he said, “the peace is only going to make us busier.” He stared at his tea. “Actually, I’m starting to worry the Colombians are going to repeat our mistakes.”
“What mistakes?”
Mason started talking about a raid he’d watched play out from an operations center in Tolemaida, where Colombian special forces had gone in and killed some drug dealer. Mason’s objections seemed to be the usual ones people had against high-value targeting—that it substituted a tactic for a strategy. You’d kill a bad guy and think you were making progress in the war when, as long as the underlying conditions on the ground remained the same, you hadn’t changed anything at all. Or maybe even made things worse by further destabilizing the area.
“I think the army wants to muscle in on a police operation against the Urabeños.”
“The drug gang?”
“Yeah.” This raid Mason had seen was, he now thought, a “proof of concept” to show how effective the army could be. But then, when Diego tried to get details, Mason got quiet and waved him off.
“What about you?” Mason asked. “How are you doing?”
Diego slugged back more of his whiskey, forcing the liquid down. He knew how to play this. “So listen,” he said, putting on a very serious, Mason-style face. “I think I may have betrayed the U.S. mission in Colombia.”
Mason slowly blinked once, then again.
“Two primary missions, every time we came here. Right? One, to train up Colombian troops. And two? You know what our other, probably even more important mission was.”
Mason didn’t say anything.
“To fuck as many Colombian women as humanly possible.”
Mason let out an exasperated sigh. Same old Diego, he was probably thinking. Underestimating Diego, as usual.
“But me, I’m fucking an American. Actually, it’s worse. I’m fucking a journalist.”
Mason didn’t react.
“Met her in Afghanistan, you know? But you know what? She was useful over there. You remember that leadership beef between Mansoor and Dadullah?”
This had been a struggle between two factions of the Taliban in 2015.
“We first get the rumors, and I’m like, I don’t know. Is this for real? What’s happening? But you know how it is in Afghanistan, we’re always stretched for resources. So I’m hanging with my girlfriend and I think, Hey. She’s smart. She’s learning the language. Why not get her to figure it out? So I tell her, Look, deep background only, but maybe you want to get your ass to Zabul. I hear there’s a civil war in the Taliban. She packs her bags and gets there right as the whole thing blows up for real, and pretty soon she’s putting shit out on the wire—”
“News stories? Open source?”
“Yeah. And we got nothing in Zabul except a little SigInt, but she IDs a Haqqani guy nobody even knew about who was trying to broker a truce, three days later we nail this guy by his cell phone . . . I forget whether it was a drone strike or . . . shit, no. A fucking SEAL team took him out. SEALs for sure. Fuckers killed civilians, too.”
“SEALs.” Mason grunted. Everybody hated SEALs. The joke when the DEVGRU guys killed bin Laden was, Oh wow, after ten years of shooting every unarmed civilian in the room, the SEALs finally got the right guy.
“Yep,” Diego agreed. “Fuckin’ SEALs.” Bitching about the SEALs was good. He could see Mason nodding in agreement. Mason was the kind of guy who thought he knew better than everybody else how things should be done. He was too fastidious, too disciplined, too much a believer in the nobility of the mission for what was too often an ugly war. It shouldn’t be a reach to
