Sentry Duty

Forgetting, even for a moment, is dangerous.  This may be a haystack, but there is a needle somewhere.  You can’t ever forget the needle.

Marjorie focused her mind on the quiet ending of the summer rain just beyond the sill. She loved the sure quiet of the rain.  The way it hissed on the  soggy grass.  Every now and then, a large drop would connect with a puddle in the fold of a leaf or on the ground and syncopate the cadence with a kettledrum bass. 

            Tonight, her shift ran until four am.  Almost six more hours.  She bit from her Macintosh apple, and squinted at the horizon, scanning with the joystick from 0150 to 0210. 

            Marjorie’s station covered sixty degrees of horizontal, and twelve degrees of vertical.  Airborne bogies were someone else’s concern.   She’d manned this duty station for almost two months now.  If they kept true to form, she’d be off this one soon and on to another piece of real estate that had strategic interest elsewhere.   They did not want her to get too complacent about the scenery.

            The land was featureless, the horizon a line as straight as a ruler.  There was ground cover of a sort, but only up to several feet high.  It was land that didn’t support trees of any kind.  Too much constant wind, and poor soil, she supposed.   This area might have supported humans – if they could stomach New Jersey, they could live anywhere-  but this was border land.  The times required that it remain uncluttered.

            ‘The headset pinged, and she straightened up. 

            “Major Powell, here. You looking for the needle, Eagle One Five?” 

            Marjorie rolled her eyes, and reached for her cigarettes.  The needle indeed.  “That’s a Roger, Sir.  All quiet here. “

            “Good.  Just the way we like it.” The Major had about six sentences in his linguistic repertoire, which Marjorie had long since memorized.  She thought about suggesting to him that he number them. Then he could just say “Two?” When she responded, he could close with “Four.”  Or “five,” if the situation warranted.

            Thankfully, he was a man of few numbers.  He signed off without another word.  She knew she would hear from him again in about forty minutes. 

Marjorie had almost six years in field sentry service.  It was quiet work, and almost none of her friends at home knew very much about her duties.  But it was important work.  She also knew, with quiet pride, that she was good at it.  It was as routine as sawdust in a lumber mill.  But if it wasn’t done right, very bad people on the other side would slip in, and hell would rain down, all because of a crucial lapse. 

            When you’re looking for a needle in a haystack, most people start thinking, after a while, that there is no needle.  They don’t see they’ve lost faith in the existence of the needle.  They just see so many things that aren’t needles that after a while, they no longer expect to find one. 

Then they forget their primary mission.  They become friendly and chatty with all the pieces of hay.  They forget they’re here to stop the needle, to ask the needle to step out of line and come with them, or to destroy it. 

Her headset chimed the opening bars of Greensleeves.  Teresa’s incoming signature audio. 

“What ho!” Marjorie grinned, expectant.

“That better be Shakespeare, and not you jonin’ on your good buddy ten four.   I am, after all, covering your ample flank, as it were.”  Teresa and Marjorie had worked the same shift for several years, and on this assignment they were on adjacent sectors.  They both enjoyed the quiet, but it was also nice to have someone to talk to in the wee hours. 

“Romeo and Juliet, third act, if memory serves.  Or was it Amos –n- Andy? How’s Philip doing?”  Marjorie took another bite of the apple. 

When they’d first met, Teresa was in a happy, solid marriage, just back off of maternity leave.  Marjorie knew it had pained her friend to come back to the field after the precious weeks alone with her baby. 

Teresa’s life had tumbled badly though, after the baby.  Marjorie had sensed, long before it happened, that Teresa’s marriage was a ship headed for the rocks.   She had never voiced her fear.  What would have been the use?  She herself wasn’t married –never had been.  But she knew the service took a toll on relationships.  

The wreck of the marriage had damaged Teresa.  Through it all, her tiny, oblivious son kept her from falling over the edge.   She had been an eagle, soaring towards greatness in the service – she would have excelled at whatever she’d chosen.  Now, she was fortunate to be Watch Commander.  It was unspoken but understood by everyone that she had risen as high as she was going. 

Marjorie was amazed that Teresa had managed to keep it together at all.  But she was a resilient woman, bent in half but unbroken.  When she straightened, she had a different sense of the importance of things. 

“He is duh man.  You should hear the things that boy comes up with. ‘Momma, moon go night night?’ That’s what he says every morning.  Where does a two-year old come up with that stuff?”

Marjorie adjusted the night scope setting as the quarter moon peeked out from behind scattering clouds.  “Please tell Philip his Aunt Marge says hey.”

“I will, thank you.  Marge, do you get the feeling it’s been a little too quiet?” 

“That’s your sixth sense talking again, Teresa.   Maybe it’s quiet because the bad guys decided to cash in and become respectable citizens. “ 

“Right, sister.  Did it ever occur to you that the reason over seventy percent of border sentries are women is because not trusting men is as common for us as breathing?”

There was a time the agency was sure women would be too soft, too easily fooled by, or sympathetic with certain crossers.   Marjorie had been a victim herself.  The old, bent man on the side of the dusty ranch road carried a weathered can, which once had probably read Petrol.  He had grinned nervously through sporadic teeth, and mumbled his gracias’s right up to the moment he put a silenced bullet in Marjorie’s back, and spun to place a better shot through her partner’s shocked eyes. 

Turns out he really was low on gas.  He only had enough to burn her partner’s body.  Something had spooked him, and he’d stumbled off, leaving Marjorie for dead.   To this day she was vegetarian, and though Marjorie never offered an explanation, she always politely declined invitations to cook-outs. 

Marjorie noted the slight rise on the ambient heat sensor, and sat up, scanning the land before her.  “I’ve been feeling it too.  Like the train might come screeching out of the tunnel soon.”

“Between you and me, I am >so ready to blast a bad guy into yesterday.”

Marjorie smiled thinly.  She never considered firing her weapon out of anger.  “Over and out, Teresa.”  

The agency did studies, lots of them, about what why certain agents in customs, or border patrol, or airport screening, are vigilant constantly, while the majority who are hired lose their edge, and quick.   A small number of people never forgot about the needle.  This made them special.  The agency was fascinated by special breeds, friend or foe. 

            Brain fingerprinting was the key.  Government scientists had known about the Mermer brain-wave response for years.  It was a deadly accurate method to identify potential terrorists, as well as the innocent majority.   The agency used brain fingerprinting tests to target which applicants were likely to follow their strict protocols in the event of a potential breach. 

Marjorie remembered the first time she’d sat for the test.  It was unlike anything she’d ever experienced before. Unnerving, it was.  No questions, no talking, just a series of images that she viewed, while some contraption on her head recorded brainwaves.  Specifically, Mermer brainwaves.  That’s when the brain processes a piece of information it recognizes from a previous experience.   “You don’t have to worry about lying,” they told her.  “We are asking your brain, and your brain can’t lie about what it knows.”

Marjorie took the tests while she was still in physical therapy, and was accepted for the agency’s border integrity training program.  

Since the shooting, she felt angry all the time.  A low-grade, fuming rage, like fire smoldering deep in peat.  But despite herself, despite making up her mind to never feel joy about anything again, her resolve slipped the longer she was at the training academy. 

Because she was good.  For the special kind of quiet, unheralded work that went on night and day in remote edges of the country, she was suited well.   The agency was beginning to realize that the normal rules of combat had no place here.  It wasn’t the soldier who could slog fifty miles through the swamp with a Colonel on his back.  Border patrol called for something completely different.  People who remembered the needle, and what to do when they found it.

Rules at the edge were different than rules in the middle.  The people who made the rules had finally come to that no-brainer conclusion, and had voted in laws to discourage illegal crossings by sanctioning the most extreme expressions of disapproval.   That really didn’t matter much to Marjorie.  She believed in what she did, and she did it without animosity, or with any sense of being a cowboy.

Marjorie was more intelligent than they would have preferred.  When a soldier on the ground has a split second to snap into procedures mode, you don’t want somebody who’s been thinking about how to rewrite the manual.  You want somebody who thinks One: Identify.  Two: Acquire. Three: Punch ticket.  Four: Call it in.