overwatch. lchristopher.

excerpted from: Tow Man: The Glorious Seams of One Holy Year Spent In The City of Roses, Book V.

—author photo upon waking up somewhere, somehow, some when — to do something.

OH COME YE MERRY GENTLEMEN THIS IS THE CITY OF OUR DREAMS	

—Neon Sign overlooking 59th Street Columbus Circle, Manhattan Island, NYC.

Three months remain before the end of the world.

Ethan Holt looked out at his city from the tony apartment folded into the circumference of Trump’s 59th Street Columbus Circle.  There was a hybrid homemade modular FIM-92 Stinger rocket system broken down into its component parts under the doona where the pillows would be. He had brought it through on a C-130 gunship three days before. The bird tattooed half of Khandar Province so very casually on its way out of theatre. Like an afterthought. Or an afterbirth.

On the CNN tower facing the digs his father’s empire had bought him the Son of Screaming Jack Holt watched a Post Office burn. He threw his ALICE pack on the bed and checked the loads in his service issue Glock 19 and the backup throwaway G26. He put the Glock 19 aside. The G26 was strictly cold carry and was not registered anywhere in the databases of this world or any other.  A penitentiary offense if Bloomberg’s goons caught him within the city limits on the street. Three years in Rikers minimum. Doesn't matter what your name was. Plaxco Buress

blew up the post office and back to fort tryon park, uncle jack holt's answer to never-never land.  the factory washing the money and bringing the workers in.  with the stiff blue collar and the free 

	There was sand from Afghanistan tracked in onto the floor alongside his desert tan jump boots. Aftermarket so as not to break his goddamn ankles during static line night jumps. The gear [kit, he reminded himself for the millionth time, when you go full Delta it is kit, not gear; it is mates, not brothers at arms. the origins of the commando led straight back to Charlie Beckwith and his time spent with the SAS in Hereford, UK.

Toby lay in his ridiculous waterbed in his ridiculous gold-pink hotel robe and thought about the first time he had met Zazie Lenore.  Her halo in the deep-sea green wash of the night vision array clipped to his helmet.  His father had ribbed him about that.  Why the hell do you boys carry so much stuff?  In my day it was a knife, a parachute, and a week’s supply of Snickers chocolate bars.  His father had been SF – a Green Beret, if you liked, and most of the SFOD-D did not - in Project Greenlight, back in Indochina, right around the time the Legionaires got their asses handed to them at Dien Bien Phu. Pop had orders to sit there with a goddamn satchel nuke and watch and if the wind blew a certain way, to pull the pin.  The wind declined the dare, and Ethan Gad had done the Q Course twenty years later and was selected.  And the Kennedy family still sent them a Christmas Card every year.

	You see, the Kennedys knew that after they had finished bootlegging that there was another industry to be founded pre-prohbition, and that was the soda water and soft drink business. One hand washed the other. The Dorchester Soda Works was born.  

WOTN.  We Own The Night.  

It was South America.  They had scrambled the Little Birds right before dawn. The company men were still in Quito fucking up the transfer of power from Rafael Correa to his Number Two, so at least there were no triple-PhD Ivy League Chaperones on this op, for once. Whupwhupwhupwhup.  Sitting on the landing struts with his M-4 clipped to his shoulder.  They hadn’t switched to FNSCAR weapons systems yet.  Only for photo ops. Not for clandestine ops. Not for black mask jobs like this.

Holt cleared the reticle of what they were using for Starlight scopes these days, infared Leupold 7 x 1000. He could read the warnings on their cigarette packs with this fucking optic. A forty-thousand dollar piece of glass if it were one. The eye-relief was pure. Figures swam into being. And Ethan Tobias Holt nearly shit himself.

It's the same girl. Look at those dick sucking lips, those eyes like dark chocolate drops.
It can't be. It isn't. It's not possible. There are no coincidences in a world this shallow.
It is. 
This is the girl. The one Samuel has lit out after. It all comes together somehow.  His father  always wanted him to go officer. He did OCS on a lark - he didn't expect the Regiment to let him, but his CO said fine after he had stopped an attempt to scrag him in his sleep using an IED that they had drug all the way back from a road twenty miles out of Qatar. Kandahar Province, which was just a black goddamned inkspot on any political map Command thought to dress up to their A-Team.

They had lost one in the Peace Corps. What they didn't tell most of those candy-assing liberal college kids was that the PC was technically the military.  Even the forms were the same. The only one that was different was the pledge that you were disavowed from ever picking up a weapon during your time in grade or service or goodwill pattycake or whatever the fuck it was they did out there. 

He wasn't in the Peace Corps, however. He was a by-God Ranger, a Batt boy who met Colonel Watkins, and Watkins was like the next fucking Charlie Beckwith. He didn't give a fuck about the needs of the Army. He gave a fuck about taking his boys and putting them in the pole position like a bunch of stock cars, the best of the best, and halfway through turning the race into a demolition derby.  And when the smoke had cleared and the pit crews were running around with extinguishers filling the metal cages with  all the panels blown off with C02 and Halon, Watts took the two or three survivors and then gave  them two days off and then lined them up in the next race against everyone else who had survived the previous umpteen races. And that was what SFOD-D was. Or CAG. Or whatever the fuck they were calling the Unit these days. Morphing like a shifting antigen virus.   

Colonel Watkins picked the crush out of his green beret where a full silver bird sat proudly pinned  to the birthmark-red flash patch showing that he was one of the 8th Special Forces Group. Holt's  beret - the apex of so many Army grunts military careers, was already obsolete. He had actually  forgotten it in a cab in DC and when Watts heard THAT, he was flat on his face riding the forward rest position for eight long hours, piss running into his boots.  He did not drop his eyes the whole time from the Colonel, and Watts stood there and gave it back to him. For eight fucking hours. That was love. That was how you got men to fight and die for you.  When the Colonel finally gave the order to recover, Toby would have gone back to 207th Street, Inwood and killed his father if Watts had asked him to.

But not Samuel. He owed Samuel Noel too much.

At the top of his game - after Colonel, even full-bird Colonel, they pushed you behind a desk and you watched smart bombs eat up the white space on monitors until it was time to draw your pension check. He was a hard man. 

Ethan sat in his black mask chaps, the thin snake eating it's own tail dagger of the D-Boys, Delta Force, safety pinned through his flesh, piercing his right bicep. He had not blinked. The soldiers in his unit were resigned to their fates. They had a sixty percent mortality rate by age thirty five. Holt was already a Master Sergeant. That many people had bought it. There was a time where there was just two of them in the Western Hempisphere. They had a betting pool to see who would win it. The loser had to take his letter and deathbag back to his woman.  His girl went lez in college anyway. Said she didn't know him anymore.  Said she couldn't understand why he would want to be a killer like his father. That she thought he was different. Then called him up four days after she graduated saying she needed him. Tobias thought of her eating out some co-ed and wiping her mouth on her bra.  Told her: "I thought I knew you too" and was ashamed for two weeks after for giving her that much.

Join us.

The CIA spook tapped the ash on his cigarette, a Players Navy Cut.  Toby hated the fucking CIA. All a bunch of fatherless, motherless bastards with their IQ's pinned to the top of the CONUS parabola. 

They thought they were in fucking Impossible Mission Force. Their expense accounts were like departmental budgets.  Disavowing any and all knowledge of their people’s actions.  Leaving men behind until their consciences ought to be blushing like the motherfucking day. Stanford. Harvard. If bullshit were music they’d be a big brass band.

"Officer's Club is on the East Side of Midtown, boys."
"We're not in the service," said one of the sunglassed, grey flannel suited fruits.
"I never would have guessed," Ethan Holt said, and dropped his Spyderco Harpy from beneath his wristwatch into his palm while placing his drink back on the wet bar and signaling for another. Oldest misdirection piece of tradecraft in the book and College Boy one through six had missed it. Not saying much in terms of military intelligence. Two words combined that can't make sense. Oh Dave Mustaine, where are you tonight, he thought. The bartender brought him another whiskey, neat as you please.

"Not interested," Toby said, and blew on his Cutty and water. The barkeep was salting the Colonel's beer after beheading the foam with a practiced flick of the wrist. Toby thought that Colonel Watts was the last man on earth, hardass or not, who even did that anymore. The bulletproof window blew out of the Fort Bragg Officer's clubhouse with the first shot. The second caught Watts in the flash of his beret. The inside of the dead man’s skull looked like ambergris.  Tobias Holt backed up 

"Do we have your attention yet?"

The hell of it was, they did. They had just gunned down a full-bird colonel in the most secret and prestigious unit the US Army had. This was beyond the pale. Watty was a solider and soldiers died. That was their fucking job.  oby did his. He buried him.  But not before sliding off the barstool and getting right in the spooks face.  Knowing he could cut him open with his fingernails by the throat if he wanted.  Knowing that he would eventually lose in the end, when the Special Activities Division safehouse was hip to the scene, three dozen of his own – domestic doorkickers, probably retired SF on contract status – they wouldn’t use Rangers in-house for that sort of party, and they’d wind him to the floor in a shower curtain or down comforter, and pull him out by his chilblains to the street.  Days later broken by torture, his teeth and fingernails pulled out, an icepick in his balls and rough chawed divots in his side where they had sicced the dogs on him, dragged floppy timber sawblades across his chest, eardrums hooked to alligator clips and then slow-as-she-goes weeping, cooked black eyeballs blown out with tractor batteries, his penis taken with boltcutters early and tacked to the wall where he could see it as they hooked up the IV bag to keep his fluids steady, a vetted medic on hand with combat training to monitor pulse, blood loss, alpha waves.  While the Man asked “Why?” in seven languages, patiently, like there weren’t flies eating all the parts of you that could never grow back without a freezer and a surgery wing of a megahospice.  All the things he himself had done. 
 
          But then comes the pain. The real shit.  The IRS freezing your accounts.  Your credit rating disappearing. Men sent out to rape your wife, your dog left poisoned and shitting green foam across the living room carpet. There were worse things than dying. There was living in reset. Everything you worked a lifetime's worth of proud sweat for, gone. All the things that they forget to teach you and you just sort of pick up along the way. These skinny CIA fucks that looked like skinny indie rock losers that had gotten lost on their way to Seattle, with their perfectly capped teeth and their bossanova educations. Their PhD’s and their KUBARK manuals. He wanted to know what their game was.  
You interested yet?  
Toby leaned forward and gestured at his ear.  Hard of hearing, yanno?  Gunshots, close range, indoors, like ya do.
The two spooks leaned in like fucking sea bass hip to grind-and-shine of the spinner lure kicking.  Toby yanked his rod and reel.  Their heads were bushy in the back, gave him purchase to grip onto, tangling around the fingers he had broken in the drawer of some Iraqi General’s fuckhouse for shits and giggles in 05’.  He shattered their skulls against one another.  Caught them right in the sweet spot of the skull where everything kissed like eggshells.  Wham and splatter.  All that education just dripping off the back of the bar.  Felt like napalm, like victory, like an Academy Award. The Gandar district.  Ghazni.  All nothing to those men. Just leftist Hollywood, laying down the lie.  Started with Trumbo. Never quite stopped.

Another, he called, dropping the bodies and raising the dead whisky glass.  The barkeep hesitated only for a second, then left the bottle.

We'll find you, Delta. A voice behind him.  The man’s lungs and respiratory system couldn’t be more than 140 pounds soaking wet.  No weapon or direct orders not to use it.  He would have fired it already if he had.  Which meant that Toby was special.  They wanted him bad.
No one calls us that anymore.  Obsolete, yanno.
It’s immaterial.
Not on this base, little girl.  Go run home to your mama, peckerwood.  Before you get a pasting that makes this look like hot brekky on a cold spring morning.  Look up the Fan Dance.  Run it.  Come back to me when you’ave.  I’m done dancing with children, ken?  
The door, spinning on its hinge.   
Toby tipped the bottle at Watty’s potted skull and drank deeply, pouring some across the bar.  He imagined bagpipes, flowers, Arlington Cemetery.  Then went to find one of Manhattan’s last pay phones.  A Cleaner showed up forty minutes later – half the time it took to find the Bell kiosk.

By that point, his father had already called Manilow Bonn, the most dangerous man in the world.


	Toby woke drenched in sweat.
	I’ve seen this girl before.  Samuel, you red-headed stepchild with the jew-boy name.   Her halo.  Her halo of fireflies like a crown of peace caught in the sandstorm of FARC-swept Ecuador.
	Time on target.
	“Time,” Toby said, and thumbed back the relief switch on his Remington M-70.
	“Call the ball.”
	Shut the fuck up, Toby hissed into the mike, his thumb ground into the MUTE button.  He switched his helmet cam off.
	Rainbird, your optics are gone.  
	“Lost them on the jump.”   
	“Switch to reserve.”
	“Negative. Helmet dashed.”  Billy looked at him like he was crazy and mouthed the words COURT MARTIAL. Toby unsnapped the thumbbreak on his sidearm and gave Billy a look that could freeze a mammoth. Billy stopped mouthing intonations and looked away. They all were men with some rank on them. Some even had a little war on their chests, a CIB, some purple hearts, one Bronze Star that was more the commander’s generosity than any real valor on his part - but this was Tobias’s party and they damn well knew it. 
	Shoot. Shoot. Shoot.
	Tobias couldn’t.  In the scope the fireflies were blinding the green optics of the massive Leupold Starlight Scope. He broke the sight from the gun from the twistaway mount and went for his red dot laser iron sights.  That face.
	That face. He knew that face.  Too round to be in the jungle long on starvation rations, a nose too Roman to be Latin American.
	Zazie.
	“Can’t be,” he whispered, fouling the mike with his emotions.
	“Repeat, Rainbird, Unclear.”
	Toby yanked the radio system paid by US tax dollars that could have kept him in a hospital bed in New York City for two weeks at the finest care imaginable and dashed it against the rock he crept behind.
	Billy was staring at him.  “I can take her from here.”
	“Stay off of the rover,” Ethan Gad told him, and not kindly.  
	“I have the fucking shot, Ethan!” Billy had been raped in Afghanistan.  They didn’t just rape women over there.  It was camel jockey policy.  He had seen it in Mexico as well during Spec Ops training, where they practiced on the Sinaloa and Culican drug cartels. Who were they going to complain to? These were people that fed their babies Coca-Cola rather than formula. Billy got the rash end of the lash, and was pulled out by the PJ's about two days before they were going to decapitate him in the name of whatever. It was a sick business. Capture your enemy and fuck him until you got the order to kill him.
	“Fuck this noise, Ethan, I’m going.”  Bill Innes squatted over his weapon. He was capable. Very goddamn capable. Not a surgeon, but he could put meat in the freezer. And this girl was from the neighborhood.  The Kitchen.  Hell’s Kitchen before they gentrified it into Clinton and the rest of the Westies tore ass up to 207th Street and began breeding like guppies to hold back the niggers that threatened to spill over the thin concrete walkway into Highbridge Park and tell Irish Catholicism to go spit.

	Ethan left the rifle in its bipod and drew his baby Glock. The G26. The little one. The one not on any weapons logs that he had taken off a dead Haji. It was his throwaway piece and Bill Innes knew it.  “Not unless you want me to tell your wife about the raghead blowbang you gave in Qatar.”
	“Ethan.”
	“Is it cool?”
	“We’re cool,” he said. “I’m your brother, Ethan.”
	“Say it into the comm.”
	“I don’t have it.  Repeat, negative.  Dark cover.”
After a second the word came back, scratchy and scrambled.
        "Copy, Rainbird. I say again, Good Copy. Negative Double Zero. No shot. Exfil Path Alpha. O&O."
        "Rainbird out." Innes clicked off and gave him a face, began breaking down his gear. 
	Girl had gotten herself lost.  Operators get sent out on these missions.  It’s little known that the Peace Corps is protected by the Operators of the region.   She was lost.  Caught by the FARCs in the hills. But she was laughing and it carried.  She sounded as happy as any woman could sound.
	That was Zazie.  Zazie. Why did they say her name was Lina?  Fucking intelligence spooks. Couldn't find their own asses with both hands and a search warrant.
"What the fuck was that, Ethan? I mean, what the goddamn motherfucking nightfighting jesus come lately kind of rube shit was that? What are you, ten days out of the fucking Darby Queen all of a sudden?" Bill Innes turned to throw his ruck over his shoulder. It was a three hundred pound swing if it were one.
	Damn it.  He had to figure this out.  How to get his story straight.
"I mean it, Ethan. Command is going to hear about this. There's no-" he paused to swing his 338 Lapua over his other shoulder.  Ethan Holt waited for this, tipped off his brother's helmet as neat as you please and shot Billy Innes through the top his head. Canoed his ass. There was nothing left of his face to identify.
	"Sorry," he said. He changed the barrel out on his throwaway weapon to one of a dozen like barrels he had collected during his time in sandbox, in the mix, pick your pejorative. Because you never knew, did you? He would cut it up enroute.
You just never did know.

That grey section. He scored 320 on his AFPT.  Hungover and drunk.  The kid had a compass in his head. He could plot an azimuth using a wristwatch and a blade of grass.  Stoned out of his eyeballs watching the Journey of Natty Gann on the Wonderful World of Disney, ABC-TV, the subtitles dubbed in Farsi. Lots of guys passed their language quals this way.

Be very careful, Samuel said.  Zazie’s lover.  Before he got educated and fell in love and lost his mind.
This girl. 
You bet your ass he was interested.

***

Nathaniel Ladd was Portland's own and raised in 162 months of gray (18 years times 9 months/year).

The Ashlands of Mount St. Helens were stuffy with dust and the red four-wheel-drive had turned to the side of the road.  Samuel would get concerned and would need the truck time to rest. The underground pool.  These caves are everywhere she said.  The Cold War ended and caves were left in the dirt and the dust and the apartment buildings time immorium/al.  Some have couches and some dinette sets. 
Did you ever think this would happen, she said?  Yes, he said.  I knew I would see you again. I never thought this would happen, she said. So what, then?  The boy asked and the girl said I killed my monster, is what.  Do you promise, he said and she said nothing.  You never promise, he said.  It is one of the few things I don’t like about you, that waffling.  The girl Zazie said nothing.  You know my true name, she said.  Noa, he said, like the ark. You had two of everything. Two sides to every story. Two names.  Two lovers.  Don’t ask who the other man is she said I won’t tell you. I already know he said. It is Nathaniel Ladd.  How did you know that she said and he said I introduced you.  I changed his tire once.

How are your feet he said and she said Fine.  Shit he said.  That’s not good.  No, she said.  She slid into the water with her bathing suit from 1943, stodgy black one piece with the white ruffle along the bustline.  That’s some bust, he said appreciatively, adverbially.  You shut up, she said.  She does not see the Valium in his bag or the Adderall or the benzodiazapene or the oxycodone or the serotonin reuptake inhibitors and he feels he is home free and early in the morning when men feel the house is their own he is tiptoeing through the azalea of sleep without his contact lenses seated yet, feeling for the pills and hearing their telltale rattle, the smoking gun, even though he has stuffed the bottles with toilet paper and she says to him when he comes back to him “you take a lot of pills” and he says “I love you” to which she turns her ample back to him and he presses himself up hard against her body, her round body, her pearplum body, always schoolgirlish, always a woman who looks like she has those last three pounds of babyfat she is trying to shed, and it makes her young, and her skin glows like radium in those nights of morning where the cock crows from the window outside and she says shoot it, please, you are the violent man, the man with the blue collar swing, the tattered steamwhistle every five pm upbringing, you are my rough trade man, go out then, go on, go on and ring that birds craggy neck.  And he did it and she looked at him dumb and horrified.  He had stuck it in a pot, feathers and all, the legs still doing a compass circumscription like a second hand, those hardstick poultry feet just chasing the rim of the pot and she said Samuel you are a lunatic and the fringe all rolled into one and he said you are a sociopathic lover, a house with only one window and you open it once every ten years but I always find my way inside don’t I and they made love like actors without training and she wore ostrich feathers in her hair and he his glasses and he wrote valentine across her bare pubis with the invisible bikini line underwriting it all and she pulled him to her on his birthday and there was no condom and to him that meant trust and to her that meant lazy and it didn’t matter fuck all cos all the results were the same.  Some island, South Pacific.   83402384.234 latitude w091-34123-4- longitude. Pat pending.

The last time we did this it was the Galapagos cos you said if the world exploded from us meeting we wanted to be far and away.  There were sparrows eating off your chest and they would steal the sugar from the coffee which was thick and black and was brewed at exactly the right temperature.  They had a navy of three boats and not one of them had cannon of any sort.  There were restaurants made of nothing that served food that cost nothing in a city that no one could find without a seaplane and a whole lot of something in the bank.  

And the men by the side of the road with their shotguns out and their gold marshal’s badges. Seems we need that truck.  I guess you do. Are you gonna make us take it?  You’re going to have to, I expect.  

 How did you find this place he said and Zazie said in a book silly.  I am a librarian and my world is books.  
-Seems like that world’s changing.
-They’re all changing, Samuel Noel.  Yours, mine, all of it. For women and for men too.
-I guess I am a bit rough for you.
-You don’t know a fucking thing about what I know, Mr. Man.
-All right then.
-Last time I saw you would cook mustard in a vat of pork and beans and call it supper.
-Well, wasn’t it?
-It better not still be, is all I’m saying.  And I found it in a book.  To answer your question.  It was a book I had to take down to mark DISCARDED.  I save those for my favorite learners.  When you are teachers in the Pacific Northwest you call them learners but when you go International they go back to being students.  Isn’t that funny?  And he smiled and touched her leg and she smiled cos she let him and went on with her story, about how she was closing the library up one night and just finishing stamping out the last ragtag pile of discards to make room for the new wall of graphic novels they had coming in (space was such an issue when it came to the librarian trade, it rode her panties up damn near as high as the budget, and both of those things were total bores and made her feel super adult all in the same breath, so there it was, tell the truth and shame the devil).  It was in a book on building houses and Tesseracts.  A Wrinkle in Time.  Newbury Award Winner.

	I read it when I was small.

	All of my learners are small.  Not so small but small enough to where they are delightful, like puppies are delightful before they burst into their big dog selves and start breaking picture frames with their tails and trying to make ground chuck out of the mailman.

	And inside there was this map but it was a map like the government would draw, not like a child.  It was stenciled on onionskin paper and the salient parts were outlined in red.  CURTISS WRIGHT, was in one corner. 

	They made airplanes in the war.  

	They also made relative components to the atomic bomb.  Samuel had known that part too and did not have a chance to say.  They had a complex near his house that all the kids went to late at night.  It was like a challenge. A game. They would unscrew the yellow manhole and head down into the dark tunnels.


~FIN lchristopher, Friday, June 12th, 2026 12:18PM - Manhattan Island, Fort George, NYC.