'The tenor. On April eighteenth, 1906, after a riveting performance in Carmen, he retired to his suite in the Palace Hotel in San Francisco. The quake hit at five twelve in the morning, took the rear wall clean off the building. Well, Caruso was something of a superstitious guy.' Rex lowered his eyes from the stars finally, looking at Szabla. 'Italian,' he said. Szabla bit back a smile, and Rex continued. 'His conductor found him weeping in his room. To calm Caruso down and distract him from the aftershocks, he convinced him to look out on the devastation and sing. And Caruso did. Streets rent and broken, streetcars bent like toys, water mains shooting geysers, people sobbing and running and bleeding, and here's Caruso, singing at the top of his lungs, his voice ringing through the rubble, clear as a bell.' Rex paused, shaking his head.
'This all looks like a mess to you,' he continued. 'A big fucking mess. The quakes and the sun, falling rocks and dead animals. But it all has rules. Nature always follows definable rules.' He pointed at the crum-bled cliff wall in the distance, the mound of rock that formed Juan's makeshift grave. 'The principal shock must've been east- west, given the damage moved along a north-south vector. That means this rumble was a little gift from the East Pacific Rise.' He scratched the stubble on his chin, his eyes on the dark sky. 'The earth's movements can be regulated, sometimes predicted. That can save lives.'
He caught Szabla's eye again and stared her down. 'Getting these GPS units in place is my way of singing through the disasters, of trying to win something back for our side.' He laughed a short, dying laugh and ran his hand through his lanky black hair. 'I know you all think the military has better things to do right now. I know that I'm an arrogant, narcissistic bastard, and that doesn't help much either. But we have the opportunity to accomplish something here. So what do you say you all just back off a few steps and give me a hand?'
They sat in silence, listening to the sounds of the island. Rex cuffed his sleeves, revealing a deep scar on the back of his right forearm.
'What's that?' Cameron asked, indicating the scar with a flick of her head.
Rex glanced down at it, as if noticing it for the first time. 'Candle-stick, eighty-nine World Series. The Loma Prieta quake. I caught a flying hot dog vendor's box on the arm.' He laughed. 'Hardly heroic.'
Szabla dug a piece of dirt out from under a blunt fingernail. She sat up straight and pulled off her cammy shirt. Her skin was dark and smooth, the blocks of her stomach standing out like bricks beneath her jog bra. She turned around, revealing a knot of scar tissue just below her left shoulder blade.
Diego glanced over from his sprawl on the cruise boxes. He was tick-ling his face with a strand of beach morning glory. Clearly uninterested in their story telling, Savage began doing push-ups on the sand outside their circle, slow and methodical.
'Trying to help an old lady in Bosnia,' Szabla said, patting her scar. 'House caved in, she was stuck beneath some stones. Picked her up, threw her over a shoulder to clear her from the building. She pulled a knife on me.'
'That's a stab wound?' Rex asked.
Cameron smiled, knowing the story. Szabla hooked Justin's neck with her hand and yanked it roughly and affectionately. 'You think my buddy over here would let me meet my end from Mother-fucking Hubbard?'
Justin grinned. 'I hit her with a board.'
'And missed.'
'Well, Szabla tripped and dumped the old bitch-'
'And the board hit me instead, right on the shoulder.'
'A board left a scar like that?' Rex asked.
Szabla and Justin exchanged a glance, starting to laugh. Cameron smiled, looking down and shaking her head. 'It had a nail in it,' Justin said.
'So genius over here wallops me, I got a two-by-four stuck in my ass, and the cunt claws her way up and takes off down the street like Jesse fuckin' Owens.'
'You think that's bad? You want to talk stupid?' Cameron stood up, pulling down her pants and turning around to display a four-inch scar beneath her right buttock.
'Cam, Jesus,' Justin said.
She yanked her pants back up and zipped them, forgetting the top button. 'We're lifting out to Alaska of all places, for a block of winter warfare training. I have my blade out to get through a canvas strap on one of the supply bags and I catch a glimpse out the window of the sun setting over the tundra-just beautiful. So I put down the blade and lean forward, watch for a few seconds until it dips below the horizon. I sat back down, right on my knife.'
'She screamed so loud the pilot thought we were under attack,' Derek said. 'Thirteen stitches. Right on the helo, in fact.' Derek laughed. 'Cam bent over the corpsman's knee like a wayward school-girl.'
'And boy did she holler,' Tucker added.
'I did not. Not after I first sat down and the damn thing went up my ass.'
Szabla grinned. 'There was definitely some whimpering going on, girl.'
Justin shook his head. 'I should have married a teacher.' He looked at his wife. 'All right, baby. Button your pants.'
'What? Oh.' Cameron looked down and fixed her top button.
'Gotcha beat,' Tucker said with a wry smile. He held up his left hand and spread it before the light. His entire palm was scarred with dark burn tissue.
'Jesus, Tucker, when did that happen?' Cameron asked.
'About a year back. I was fucking around with my thermite grenade, spinning it around, watching a little tube. Well, the spoon flew and I didn't notice. So I keep spinning it, Duke's up four in the third quarter, and all of a sudden I look over, the thing's glowing that hard white flame. So I yell, try to dump it, it's stuck to my hand for a second and I shake it loose. It burns through the sofa, the floorboards, and down into the apartment under mine. I had to run down the stairs, bang on the door to warn them.' He ran the hardened flesh across his cheek. 'Went straight through their kitchen table.'
They all laughed, and Tucker lowered his eyes to the light of the hur-ricane lamp.
Diego pulled himself up from where he was lying and stood in the center. He faced the others, his features shadowed. 'There's a tiny cat-fish, a parasite that resides in the warm waters of the Amazon,' he said. 'Lives on blood. It normally slithers into the gills of larger fish and erects a sharp dorsal spine to lodge itself into place.' He held up a fin-ger, mock-teacherly. 'The problem is, it can mistake a stream of urine underwater for the small water currents passing through the gills of a fish. It swims up the urethra of the unfortunate skinny dipper and…' He made a popping sound, splaying his fingers wide to indicate the dor-sal spine erecting. Cameron bit her bottom lip. The others stared at him, wide-eyed. 'Has to be removed surgically,' he continued.
'The whole thing?' Szabla asked breathlessly.
'No,' Diego said. 'Just the fish.' He pulled his belt free, unbuttoned his pants, and pulled them down, his underwear along with them. He cradled his uncircumcised penis in his palm. Szabla stared at the elon-gated scar with a mix of horror and reluctant interest. Justin reached up with his hand and pushed his own jaw closed.
Diego raised his arms and slapped them to his sides, letting himself hang free in the night air. He pulled up his pants, shot Szabla a wink, and headed for his tent.
After washing his face in the cool, salty water, Savage returned to the ring of cruise boxes and the flickering hurricane lamp. The others had already retired to their tents. Justin had stopped to check on Tank, leaving Szabla alone in their tent. It was lit inside by a lamp, and Savage saw Szabla's shadow clearly defined against the green glow of the canvas. He froze outside the small circle of tents, transfixed by her silhouette.
Szabla pulled off her shirt and lifted her tags over her head, winding them around her hand. Probably hated sleeping with anything around her neck. Her undershirt was tight enough that Savage could make out the exact lines of her body. Szabla didn't have large breasts; hers were more like plates rising solidly off her chest. Cameron had the only real pair of knocks on the squad.
Voices murmured within Tank's tent. Cameron and Derek's lamp faded, then turned off. Savage watched Szabla bend to remove her shoes, then she took off her pants, wriggling as she pulled them over her hips. She tossed them in the corner where they landed silently on the sand. He adjusted himself in his pants, wondering if she knew he was watching her. He bet she did. He looked out across the ocean, trying to ignore the silhouette to his left. The waves rolled in, easing up the shore and fizzing as the foam smoothed over. When he looked back at Szabla's tent, the lamp was off.
He paced around the small ring of tents a few times, then walked back to the camp and straddled a cruise
