Day 7 Afternoon

As far as Amelia was concerned, this waiting was unbearable. The women had been playing cards, switching up people, having tea or coffee, and still there was no news. Nobody revealed their nervousness, but Amelia couldn't get over the feeling that something was seriously wrong.

When the switch of her guard came again, she groaned and turned to look at the present company. "Somebody needs to go out there and confirm those guys are okay."

Sydney eyed her carefully. "Nobody is more capable of being out there than those guys."

Amelia swallowed and nodded. "I could go."

"You could go, but do what?" Sydney asked curiously. "It's not as if we can communicate with them. It's not as if we can tell them that you're out there or to watch out because you decided to go play hero," the doc pointed out. "It's not as if we can warn them, so they don't accidentally shoot you," she added, with a raised eyebrow.

Just enough logic had been presented by Sydney to totally piss off Amelia, yet she understood. "I still think something's wrong," she muttered, "and surely there's got to be some way to make it right." Then the door opened yet again, and she looked up to see Joe, a big grin on his face.

He looked over at Sydney. "Hey, I begged for this chance. I can stay with her, so you can go off and grab yourself a cup of coffee."

Sydney laughed. "Okay, I'm good with that." She looked back at Amelia. "Do you want something to eat?"

She winced at that. "As much as I don't really want to, I probably should."

"Yes, you probably should." And, with that, Sydney got up. "Let me go see if there are any groceries to be had." And. with that, she headed out.

As soon as she was gone, Amelia looked over at Joe. "Have you heard anything?"

He shook his head. "No, I haven't, but I'm not sure what's going on either," he admitted, "so you probably shouldn't ask me questions about it because I don't know anything. I've purposely kept to myself in the dog barn. I didn't want anything to do with the mess at this base."

"Right." She nodded. "It's all so frustrating."

"Of course it is, but you also have to trust in these men."

"I trust them. I'm just not sure I trust the asshole out there trying to ruin them."

He looked at her in surprise. "It seems I'm not privy to any current information."

She backed off at that and nodded lightly. "I am a little confused, though, about something else. Sandrine mentioned that you want to spend some time with your wife, but I thought your wife had passed away."

He looked at her for a long moment. "When did you hear that?"

She frowned and then thought about it. "I'm not exactly sure to be honest, but it was mentioned casually that you were looking forward to going back to spending time with her, and that surprised me because I'd understood that your wife was already gone. Of course that's a terrible thing to ask you about, and I'm sorry for that."

He shrugged. "Lots of people in my world are gone," he replied, with an odd smile, "and sometimes I think I'm better off if I go with them."

"Oh, that's not a good topic either."

He burst out laughing and nodded. "No, it probably isn't, but I don't have any secrets."

She looked at him carefully from the corner of her eye. "Don't you?"

Surprised, he stared at her for a long moment. "Aren't you a clever one."

"Not sure that clever is quite the right word," she replied, hating the direction her thoughts were going. "But what are the chances that they left me here, while they're out there trying to find the asshole who's killing people, and you're here right in front of me?"

He stared at her for a long moment, but she could glean absolutely nothing from the look in his eyes. He gave her a bright smile and chuckled lightly. "You're partially right.… I'm not killing anybody here, but neither have I done anything to stop it."

"The problem is, I don't understand any of this, so why don't we sit here, and you tell me what the hell's going on? At least the part that you do know."

He stared off in the distance and shrugged. "Not sure that's a good idea," he murmured.

"And yet, why not?" she asked. "You know it needs to end." His laugh, when it came, was half broken, and so much pain was attached to it that she didn't know how to help him.

He sat back, looked at her, and then slowly nodded. "It is probably time, and, of everybody, you deserve to know."

She let out a slow, deep breath, still not exactly sure what she'd triggered here. "So, tell me."

In a quiet voice, he sat back in his chair and stared off in the distance. "We'd been married many years," he began, "at least thirty-two. My wife was forever berating me because I could never quite remember the exact number," he said, with a soft smile.

"I think men all over the world have that problem," Amelia stated, with a gentle laugh.

"Yeah, and I was no different. We had a baby boy, the absolute love of our lives, the best thing to ever happen to us. He was…" He stopped for a moment and smiled. "He was perfect."

She smiled up at him. "That's how every parent should consider their child," she noted.

"We had such fun with him. We spent so much time up here in the north, my wife too, because she loved it as well. We spent all of our holidays with the dogs out in the snow, camping in ice caves, and generally loving everything about it. And, when he grew up,… he wanted to go into the military. I wasn't so sure. I'd done my stint, and I'd done a ton of contracts for them. Some of them were fine, but it was an admirable thing for him, and his heart was set on it, so there wasn't a whole lot that would dissuade him," Joe shared, with half a smile. "Of course you never know the next moment from this one." He fell silent for a long time.

"You've never mentioned him before," she stated. "What became of him?"

He looked at her with an odd smile. "He disappeared, went MIA, and we didn't have any answers forever. As a matter of fact,… we have no idea what happened to this day. I don't think there's any news that's worse than having no news," he shared. "You're forever waiting for that letter that tells you that he's on his way home or that phone call that says, Surprise, he's at the airport, but we never got any word. Not even the proverbial military-uniformed man confirming the death of our son. It broke my wife. She lasted a few more years, and then she finally gave up the hope of his return,… devastated and heartbroken. We only ever had the one child, you see? So, when you only have one, that child becomes everything. When he passed or disappeared," he said, "we had nothing left to go on, except hope."

"So, you kept going then, even after her passing?"

"I did. I kept hoping. I kept doing military contracts. I kept looking for him, hoping I would see his face, hoping I would see him out in the middle of somewhere, that he would be here, that he would be smiling and happy. Maybe he had a concussion. Maybe he had amnesia. Maybe he had all kinds of things," Joe suggested, "but there was always that hope that he was alive somewhere. After my wife died, I knew that the chance of getting answers was getting slimmer and slimmer. I had desperately wanted to get the one answer that would help me out, but it wasn't to be. She died without ever knowing what happened to him."

"So, both you and Elijah lost your sons," she said, with a nod.

He gave her a strange look. "Elijah was married to my wife's sister, and she died many years earlier. Breast cancer. I don't even remember when," he said, with an awkward laugh. "Honestly, we were dealing with our own heartaches and problems of another sort at that point in time." He gave a wave of his hand. "I don't even remember what it was. I think it was my in-laws passing."

Joe shook his head. "Anyway, yes, Elijah lost his son," Joe confirmed, with quiet emphasis, "and he stayed in and became a lifer. I think maybe partly because of that I did too. Obviously I'm not full military, but I do constant contracts with them," he noted. "And still, in the back of my mind, was this opportunity to see my son somewhere. Even if only to find his body lost somewhere, but it wasn't to be."

She watched him, as he tried to swallow the tears and not let them roll.

"It wasn't to be," he repeated. "And then I was here on this base, during this particular training session, and I was doing my usual thing with the dogs. One of the men, the day sergeant, came over," Joe said, with a smile. "We talked for a few minutes, and I found out his name was Chester. That was my son's name too. I was friendly.… When here for a survival training session, I try to be friendly to these guys, yet I like my solitude. Still, some of these guys don't have much for families, and some of these guys leave families behind. Sometimes you can have a distant relationship with some of them. As I got to talking with him,… he mentioned something that surprised me, and I didn't say more about it for a while, but then I asked him about it later. And he looked at me and lied point-blank to my face. I don't know what you're talking about, he said to me. I'm not sure what drink you've been drinking, but I didn't mention anything like that. He seemed so honest and sincere that I thought, well, maybe I didn't quite understand what he had said. However, his words wouldn't leave me alone."

"What was it that he said?"

"Doesn't matter, but finally, when I had an opportunity, and I had to be sneaky about that opportunity," Joe shared, with a nod, "I checked his full name, only to find that it was a play on words of my son's name. That hit me hard, you know? I mean, I'm sure people all over the world share an exact name with someone across the globe. Still, the similarities were hard to ignore. My son was Chester Fibke." Joe sighed. "This other guy, the day sergeant, was Chester Fibek, like the last name had been misspelled."

"That could be some mistake or coincidence, right?"

"Close, but not close enough. I don't know. I was so surprised by it. I didn't think anything of it at first, but it kept nagging and nagging at me, and finally it took a bit of time and some money to find out that his real name had been changed from Chester Fibke to Chester Fibek," he said, his voice breaking.

She stared at him for a long moment, not comprehending. "Sorry?"

He nodded. "Yeah, I'm not surprised that you're confused," he replied. "Believe me, I was too."

She didn't quite get it, but her mind was working its way through it. "So, your son changed his name?" she asked cautiously.

He shook his head. "No, my son didn't change his name because the man who had been using my son's name was not my son."

*

Mountain and Magnusraced toward the convergence of the two men, as several other shots rang out, but luckily the bullets weren't coming in their direction, or so it seemed. Out here, sounds were distorted. So just because gunshots didn't appear to be headed to you, they still could be. It added to the dangers up here. By the time they reached Barret, he was staring up at the sky above him, blinking hard.

"Did you take a hit?" Mountain asked Barret immediately, as the big man ducked down beside him. Magnus was right there with them, weapons ready, as he fired several warning shots.

Barret looked up at Mountain. "Yeah, I took a couple hits," he murmured, "but I think they're in my vest. I don't think they went through. Honest to God, I'm lying here trying to catch my breath," he admitted, with a constricted laugh. "It seemed the simplest thing to do."

"Yeah, you're not kidding," Mountain muttered, as relief washed over him when he checked out Barret. Then shout-outs came. He answered them, with the news of another one down. That left them with a total of two they had shot down, and quickly they were surrounded by Nikolai's and Rogan's and Egan's voices, all overlapping.

"Damn it, speak one at a time," Mountain snapped.

"We have another man down off to the side," Nikolai said.

Mountain nodded. "Dead?"

"Soon to be dead."

"Do we know who he is?"

"Yeah, we know who he is. At least one of the two. The other one?… Well, he's our mystery participant in this mess," Egan shared, as he looked down at Barret. "How are you doing, buddy?"

"I'm okay," he replied, with a smile. "I'm just not too anxious to move. I think I took one in the chest and one in the shoulder."

"Let's hope the bulletproof vest held you in good stead."

"I think it did, but it still hurts to take a hit. I don't want to move just yet," he said, with a snort.

They all looked in the direction of the second man.

"I'm still confused," Magnus said, staring at the nearest body. "This is the colonel, and over there is the day sergeant. How the hell are they connected?"

"He's the other partner we weren't sure about," Mountain explained, as he frowned at the injured colonel. Mountain would love to leave him to die in the cold but… "Now we need to get everybody back to the base and fast. This one is shot up pretty bad, but let's see if we can get any answers out of him before he dies on us."

"Both are pretty shot up," Nikolai confirmed, as he checked the second downed man. "As far as I'm concerned, he could rot up here, but we don't know if he's dead yet, do we? And, if he's alive, we need answers."

With that, Rogan and Egan ran to get the snowcat, while the rest of the men split up to carry the injured. Mountain walked over to the colonel, on his back in the snow, staring up at the sky. When Mountain crouched beside him, the colonel rolled his head to the side and looked at him, giving a gurgled laugh. "I figured you would get me."

"Yeah, we got you. I sure wish I understood why though," Mountain replied, as he lifted the colonel.

"Elijah can explain," he murmured. "If not, I'm pretty damn sure Joe would tell you all about it." Then he gave a heavy breath and died in Mountain's arms.

Mountain slowly straightened up, carrying the body, then called out to the others, "The colonel's gone, but he did say that Elijah and Joe could tell us what this is all about."

"Let's get everybody back to base then because this guy's still alive," Nikolai said, crouching over Chester to get his pulse.

Magnus was near Barret, telling him to rest until the snowcat arrived. "Guys, some of you will be on skis getting back to base, so we have room for three to be prone inside the cat, but let's all stick together."

Nikolai drove the snowcat, with Chester, Barret, and the colonel quickly loaded inside. Mountain handed out the skis from the snowcat to the others. With Egan bringing the sled and the dogs, Mountain, Magnus, Rogan, kept up a consistent pace with the cat, skiing as quickly as they could back to Sydney, hoping for whatever medical magic she might still have left to fix Barret and Chester. If they were lucky, they would keep this mystery participant alive long enough to at least get to the bottom of whatever the hell had been going on.

When they arrived back at base, Sydney stood nervously waiting for them. As soon as she saw who the victims were, and who were on their feet, she immediately turned all business and nodded. "Put them on the cots set up here in the clinic." She immediately checked over Barret, confirming that his vest caught both bullets, leaving him bruised and sore, but he would be fine. Then she moved over to the next one.

She stared down at him in shock. "Chester."

He stared up at her, rolled his head ever-so-slightly to the side and whispered, "Will I live, Doc?"

"Yes," she replied, "at least if I have any say in it."

Almost immediately he gripped her arm. "Then don't. Let me go. I'm supposed to be dead anyway."

She blinked as she stared down at him, then looked back over at the others. "I don't think it's quite so easy as that," she replied, "as there are an awful lot of questions."

He nodded. "I have some answers, but I don't have them all."

"How about starting with why the hell you don't want to live?"

"Because my life after this… will be a shit show." Slowly he gasped for breath and struggled to even speak. "It's time for this to be over."

"I would say it's definitely that time," Amelia stated from the doorway. Joe was beside her. "I think it's way past time, and I sure as hell think you owe this man an apology and an explanation."

Chester looked up at Joe and whispered, "I'm so sorry, man. I'm so sorry."

"Did you kill him?" he asked, his voice harsh. "Did you kill my son?"

Tears in his eyes, Chester slowly nodded. "I didn't mean to," he began. "It was an accident, an accident that I couldn't not take advantage of."

"What do you mean, an accident?"

"We were training in the middle East. We were training out in the fields, and, when he went down, and I realized that I'd killed him, I knew I was in trouble, so I changed identities with him. It had always been a plan that my father and I had talked about. I didn't want to be out there, facing the world in wartime," he explained. "I didn't want to see live action. I didn't want to be doing any of it, but I was there, and I couldn't get out of it."

He took a deep breath. "My father kept telling me to walk away, to find a life that I could live with, one that gave me peace instead of torment, but I couldn't. I was stuck in a loop. I was looking for another answer. And then the colonel suggested this. Not killing anybody obviously, but taking a dead man's name. Then the colonel could put me out of the line of fire, and that's what he did."

"So, you took my Chester's name?" Joe asked.

"I took your son's name, even after knowing that I'd killed him accidentally. I probably could have been cleared because Chester stood up when he shouldn't have. He broke cover to save a dog and dodged in front of bullets," he explained. "He had been desperate to save the dog, but, because of our training,… he wasn't supposed to get up, so he ended up getting shot. All kinds of chaos happened, and he got shot for it."

"So, where is my son?" Joe asked, his gaze frozen on Chester.

"It was determined in my briefing that he'd gone missing during that whole scuffle, when in truth I had buried him on the roadside where he died—an act that I have never forgiven myself for, and an act that never gave you any closure. I took his tags, and I left mine with his body," he said. "Then I buried him."

Joe swayed and was caught by Amelia, now both struggling forward, and Mountain rushed to them.

"And for that," Chester said, his tears falling heavily, "I'm so damn sorry. But that's not the worst of it. Then I had to make sure his body could not be identified. So I had to…" He couldn't say more, just wailed.

A shocked silence filled the room.

"I fired aimlessly, I didn't even think about it at the time," he whispered. "He was gone. I couldn't do anything about it, and I didn't want to go down because of it. Maybe it was a chance for me to get moved out," he explained, with a teary face. "He didn't have the rank that I did. He didn't have the pathway that I was on, and I stepped back into anonymity, somebody nobody knew, one who the colonel could then move around. He put me in a different position.… I am so ashamed of what I did, ashamed of walking away from what I was supposed to be doing, ashamed of walking away from what I did to your son, my cousin… and I can't get those visions out of my head. I didn't knowingly kill him, and he did die an honorable death out there but a stupid one." Chester's voice broke with the memories. "I didn't need to deal with it in that way."

Joe stared at him for a long moment. "That's not an honorable death. Nothing is honorable about being shot during training. I hope you rot in hell. His mother died without ever getting any answers. We never had his body to mourn," he bellowed and struggled to get to Chester, but Mountain held him back. "My son was missing in action for years. We got no news, nothing to have closure. We had NOTHING left of him."

Chester nodded. "I shot him and buried him to try and keep some of the buzzards and whatnot away, but I never could find him again.… And you're right. I didn't handle it properly. I didn't do anything that preserved his memory. I took his name and kept on going, and, as soon as I could, I created my new name, something that would be similar but not quite something that would give me trouble. I knew he had friends, people who cared for him."

"And, making it easier for you, paving the way for you, was Elijah and the colonel," Samson noted, with a shake of his head. "Chester, you should have reported the incident. It was friendly fire, with some culpability on the part of Joe's Chester. However, what you did afterward was where you committed various crimes."

Chester faced Joe and said, "I wish I could go back and fix it. I wish I had done the right things and not the rest of it. I'm sorry, Joe. I really am." Meanwhile Chester gasped in pain, as the blood flowed from his wounds onto the floor all around him. He wouldn't make it. Chester added, "While I'm making my death-bed confessions, everyone should know that Elijah is my father."

Joe stared at him for a long moment. "But you look nothing like the boy I remember."

Chester tried to chuckle, but it came out more as a blood-filled cough. "I grew up, Joe. I think keeping all these secrets inside aged me. I don't know. However, I am truly sorry I didn't do right by you or your son. I wish I could take it all back."

"What do you know about all the killings here?" Mountain asked.

Chester gave a half laugh. "The colonel had a few problems. I was always one of his favorites.… He kind of… held me over Dad all the time, making sure that Chef stayed with him, making sure that Chef followed him into every mission, every battle, every training session. With my father around, the colonel didn't kill anybody," Chester shared, gasping for breath.

"As long as my father continued to look after the colonel in the way that he wanted to be looked after and treated him the way he wanted to be treated, then he would stop killing, but then the brass sent him up here. He's had a ton of experience in places like this, but he did not want to be here. He knew he was on the way out, and it would be ugly, and he didn't want to go the way that they were trying to make him go, and he started to fall to pieces."

Mountain, Sydney, Magnus, Whalen, Nikolai, Egan, Rogan, and Barret all stared at Chester in dead silence.

"At one point in time, I asked my father about it." Chester heaved badly and coughed blood. "The colonel was bad news, and it needed to stop here, but Elijah didn't know how to make it stop. Because the colonel,… he'd gone off the rail, and he was killing indiscriminately." Chester shook his head. "They were bound by such ugly things, prior killings that I have no knowledge of," he admitted, with a sad smile, "but I had my own debt to pay to the colonel. My father tried hard… to stop him. He really did."

No one tried to interrupt the flow of information, and so Chester continued. "He gave Amelia supplies. He gave the villagers supplies. Anytime anybody needed anything,… he was right there for them because, like me,… Chef couldn't live with the guilt of what had happened. It broke him to know that it was his own nephew who had died in my place, yet… he would be forced to live without me. Neither one of us wanted to admit what I'd done. The colonel had taken many lives in wartime and in peace. So he didn't care about Elijah and me, doomed to be apart. Lives didn't matter to the colonel."

Joe sniffled, his tears flowing freely now.

"There was no getting away from it. Once you take that corner, you're done. And, with that, always in the back of my father's mind, he kept the colonel from doing more harm all these years, until he came up here, where he slowly unraveled, and there was nothing that could be done to stop it. He kept telling the colonel he had to stop, that this was enough, but the colonel said that I would end up being found out for what I'd done, and then the colonel would have the last laugh because, after all this time, he was the one who knew all about it. Nobody else did, but he was also the one who could pull the strings and who could make it all go away—or it not go away, and we would all go down together."

Chester sighed. "Dad… struggled with that, and I've never been able to call him Dad to his face ever since. Yet that betrayal kept us bonded, and we knew we were both alive, but we both knew that it shouldn't have been that way. Then I found out about Eric,… that he had somehow found out about the colonel's murders across the pond decades ago. It may have started with just one man, a single man, Nikolai's father, Peter, but it continued on for decades, from what I learned. The colonel was a green kid at the time,… newly recruited and so excited, and so… passionate that he lost control, and… people died."

Chester eyed Nikolai. "Under the guise of training, your father's death was hushed up, and they managed to get it all to go away somehow. Years later the colonel hushed up Joe's son's death and managed to get that to all go away too. I have no knowledge of what killing the colonel did in between those two events, but I'm sure he killed others. He was an unfeeling monster.… Sometimes it makes you wonder how someone can even do things like this, what kind of sickness within our souls allows it," Chester admitted, tears in his eyes. He gasped several more times.

Then the door opened, and Samson walked back in. Mountain hadn't even realized that Samson had left them. He'd gone to get Elijah.

Elijah walked over to the cot, sat down beside his son and grabbed his hand. "Go now, son, if it's time to go."

His son looked at him, sorrowful, as the life visibly drained from his face. "Why didn't you tell me that you had cancer, Dad? I wish we had more time, but we don't. So you need to tell them everything."

"I will," Elijah vowed, "and I'll pay the price for all this."

"No, no, not at all," Chester argued. "That wasn't you. I did this. And the colonel did the rest."

"But I knew," Elijah said, "and I didn't put a stop to it."

"I'm your son," Chester replied, with a small smile, "and I'm proud to have you as my father. You kept that asshole from killing more people."

"Did I? It seems to me that all I did was make things worse."

"Amelia is alive right now. Nikolai is alive."

"Eric isn't though," Elijah replied, his tears spilling out, "Jerry, Scott, Yegorahn, Ralph, Carl, Kaylan, and many more."

"Yes, we lost them, but Eric was blackmailing the colonel, so I'm not sure that we can give Eric a pass for any of this either," Chester noted. He looked at Sydney and added, "Please tell Helen that she was the love of my life, that she had me wanting to own my mistakes from way back when. And, Dad, I felt you were rebelling against the colonel with your kitchen supplies to those that needed them, which made me want to cut ties with him too. Little did I know that this last favor I would do for him would end my life.… I'm so sorry." Then he gasped several times and fell silent.

Elijah bowed his head and sobbed, as he held his son in his arms, until finally no sign of life was left at all. After a long moment, Elijah looked up and around at all of them. "I didn't have anything to do with any of it, but I knew. Once I found out, I didn't know what to do."

"Turn him in maybe…" Mountain suggested.

"Yes, I should have turned in the colonel. But my son? Was I supposed to turn him in? I couldn't do that, not and still protect the rest of the world from the colonel," he added. "I knew what the colonel had done too. I knew what he was capable of doing, but he wanted me with him, as he was stationed at various bases. We'd been best friends forever, and he couldn't stand the idea that I might turn him in. It was more than he could handle. He always held my son's actions against me. So, I stayed at the colonel's side, and, as long as I stayed, he stayed sane, sober, and controlled, until all three of us—me, my son, and Joe—ended up here at the same time as the colonel."

He took a deep breath and sighed. "Chester and Joe were both here. I knew from that moment on that things would blow up, and they would blow up in an ugly way. Either Joe would get to know Chester and end up digging to find his son or the colonel would pit Joe and Chester against one another, the way the colonel used my son against me. Part of me couldn't wait for the inevitable end, part of me was looking for the release from all these years of betrayal and worry. I tried to save as many as I could here, but the colonel continued to slowly unravel. If I had a good idea of who his target might be, I tried hard to warn them, but who is the one I tell when the colonel of the base is the bad guy?" he asked, with a sad look at the others here. "Given the circumstances, who was supposed to help us with that? There wasn't anybody I could call for help, except one."

"Who did you call, Elijah?" Mountain asked.

He turned and looked at Samson. "Mason."

Several people in the room were shocked, as they turned to look at the man they knew as Samson.

Mason smiled and nodded. "Yeah, I'm Mason. Most of you know of me but have never met me in person. I was originally behind the covert investigation, trying to get up here to help out on the ground," he explained. "However, this mission… was Mountain's. We started as soon as Teegan went missing, but only recently did Elijah contact me. And he left out a few telling details."

Elijah nodded. "Yeah, but now it doesn't matter because you got them all. It's truly over now," he declared, with a relief so profound that he looked at peace. "And me? I don't have enough life left to even give a damn anymore. Besides, just like my sister-in-law, I won't live long enough to see it."

Sydney looked over at him. "That's why you wouldn't come in to see me. You are dying."

"Yes," he confirmed with a finality. "I already had the diagnosis. I already knew that this would be my last trip. My mistake was telling the colonel. He went off the deep end after that. There was no controlling him. I didn't know how to handle the colonel, how to stop him, and I would be dead soon.… So I called Mason."

"Hence your need to call in the big guns, huh?" Mountain noted.

"Yeah, big guns. That's partly why I contacted Mason because this was a major problem, with no easy solution," Elijah shared, "because nobody in the military would believe me, even with prior complaints from others. The colonel was trained to kill the enemy in the military. But he took to it too easily, without remorse, without guilt, and it became a personal obsession with him, a side gig, a hobby. I don't know what a shrink would call him—a psychopath, a sociopath, whatever. I just know he was a serial killer who could not be stopped. Not to mention… the colonel would be all sour grapes and giving a million other excuses during any investigation, and he sure as hell wouldn't provide any support, wouldn't give any true answers, and I needed help to keep the colonel in line once I passed on," Elijah explained. He looked over at Mason. "So, thank you."

Mason nodded. "You're welcome, but you know it won't be easy from here on out either."

"No, it won't," Elijah agreed. "I would like to think I could just curl up in a corner and retire, but I doubt that'll happen. I deserve to be court-martialed, but I fear justice will come too late, after I'm gone."

Joe gave a harsh laugh. "How the hell should you be allowed to do that?" he asked, his voice breaking. "After everything,… after my boy is… shot to pieces in some unmarked desert corner… because your son put him there?"

"I know, Joe." Elijah nodded, looking at him sadly. "When was I supposed to tell you? How was I supposed to tell you?"

Mountain couldn't believe it, and yet so much truth had been told tonight that sadly it made way more sense than he ever could have anticipated. He looked over at Mason. "We had stolen drugs and food poisonings and love triangles and stupid bets and Eric's blackmail scheme and the faulty generator issues all the time at the scientists' camp—plus that dead scientist's coded notebook found taped under a chair, which I guess we'll never know what that was about. Still, there were too many suspicious deaths and missing persons, and that serial killer on base had to be found. Little did we know it was the colonel or how many years he had been killing people. Damn, not what we expected at all."

"No, not at all," Mason agreed, with a shrug.

Mountain nodded. "Yet we knew we couldn't go forward without more information. We needed to push this thing to make the killing come to an end." Mountain looked over at Elijah. "I presume you set up the colonel to go after Amelia?"

Elijah nodded. "I did exactly as you suggested. I told the colonel that Amelia was running and that she already knew, that she recognized him from one of his killing trips, and that's all it took. A few words and he immediately dressed and was gone. So, not only did I allow the military to make all this happen, I also betrayed him."

Mountain shook his head. "That man held you and your son as virtual prisoners, blackmailed you and your son into doing everything the colonel wanted over all these years," Mountain pointed out. "You should have come forward sooner."

"I have no idea what we'll do with any of this," Joe said, looking over at Chef. "Elijah, I'm not sure that I can… It's hard to forgive your part in this, yet… in a way it's also understandable. What your son did, what you did, all you wanted to do was protect him."

Elijah nodded. "I did some things that I'm not proud of, but I never killed anybody. I couldn't, plus that wasn't what I was here to do. If I could kill, if I'd had the stomach for it,… I always knew who deserved it most. I was here to protect people from the colonel, and that was not the easiest thing to do. I spent my life,… all these years,… trying to keep him from killing anybody else. Blackmailing me to keep my son's secret, at the same time the colonel was blackmailing me to keep his own secrets too," Elijah said, with a headshake. "We're a hell of a pair."

He stared down at his son's body, sorrow on his face. Then he got up and leaned over and kissed his boy on the forehead. "There are no easy answers to this one, and I'll be more than happy to join him." He looked over at Joe and added, "I know you'll have a hard time forgiving me for this, but this isn't how I wanted it to go. I didn't know how to get any of us out of it."

Joe sank into the seat beside him. "Jesus Christ, I can't even imagine." He gave a broken laugh. "I spent all this time thinking, hoping, my son was alive somewhere, but really knowing there was no way he could be. Still, I never would have imagined something so convoluted as this."

"That's what happens with just one lie," Elijah noted. "As soon as you lie, as soon as you try to cheat and deceive, the lies multiply and pile up, and you can't ever get out from under them. Once I realized that the colonel would keep killing if I didn't do something more, the only thing I could think to do was to try and stay with him, so that he left everybody alone, and that's what I did. It was my penance."

"At least you had your son."

"I rarely saw my son," Chef noted, "but I knew he was alive, and that was enough. So, yes, in a way, I had my son."

"Yeah, because yours was still breathing," Joe said bitterly. "My boy was killed by your son."

Chef nodded. "Exactly. Mine was alive. Yours wasn't, but I couldn't bring yours back. I won't ask you to forgive me, but maybe you'll understand that life is never easy.… Bad things do happen to good people. And your Chester?… I don't know that they'll ever recover his body, yet my boy did go out and make several attempts to find him, but the desert had… done what the desert does. Sand was everywhere, but the landscape had changed. I'm so sorry for that too." Elijah turned to Mason. "I'm really tired now. Could we possibly call this quits for the moment, and leave me alone for a few minutes to grieve?"

Mason nodded, and, together with the guard, led Elijah to where he had been held before.

Mountain looked over at Amelia, seeing the shock, the sorrow, and the pain on her face, and he nodded. "Not the ending any of us wanted," he murmured.

"No, definitely not," she replied, "but it's almost the ending that had to happen." She looked at Joe and whispered, "I'm so sorry for your loss."

He nodded. "And yet, in a way, this is freedom. This is an answer that I hadn't expected, really didn't want, but at least now I know. So, I'll take it."

Amelia nodded, then turned to Barret and groaned. "Thank you, Barret, for taking bullets for me tonight. I hope you feel better soon. I don't know about the rest of you, but I really need to collapse. I can't feel my legs."

Immediately Mountain was at her side and held her in his arms. "Come on. Let's get you back to your room." As they went out to the hallway, she looked up at him. "Are you okay? That was a lot to digest."

"Oh, I will be, but, yeah, a lot to process. There are still a lot of questions we would like to have answers to—like details regarding my brother—but that probably won't happen."

"No, and I do worry about that. But that is what we have,… and really do we ever get all the answers we want?"

"No, we sure don't," Mountain grumbled. "Sometimes we don't get any of them. As much as that might be seriously depressing to hear," he added, "it is reassuring that we got as much as we have."

"I was wondering that too," she noted. "When you think about it, we already have a lot of the answers. Maybe we can be okay with not having the rest."

As they got to his room, she muttered, "I really need to collapse."

"You lie down. I'll join you in a little bit." He stopped and looked at her closely. "Are you okay without a guard for the first time?"

She laughed. "I'm okay. Honestly I'll crash from the dump of adrenaline that just left me."

"Good enough." He closed the door and immediately headed back to join the pow-wow that would be happening right now. As he walked into the clinic, others were checking up on Mason. Mountain laughed at them. "I guess some people thought they should have recognized you, huh?"

Teegan snorted at that. "I kept telling you that something was wrong with him, damn it. Didn't I say that?"

Mason grinned. "Don't feel bad. Those of you who have met me before, you may have never seen me all shaggy and in winter gear," he explained, with a smirk. He grabbed Teegan by the shoulder. "I'm so damn glad you survived that, Teegan. You have no idea how bad I felt, after I was the one who recommended that you come here."

"You're sure as hell guilty for that," Teegan teased, still staring at him, shaking his head at Samson. "However, I did come, and this was where I wanted to be."

"Yeah, well, right about now," Sydney shared, as she looked at the group, "I'm thinking that the South Pacific sounds pretty damn good."

Many people seconded that suggestion.

"What do you think will happen now?" Sydney asked, looking over at Mason.

"I don't know," he admitted, with a shrug. "The base will get a new commanding officer and carry on, or, maybe given the mess that we've had these last three months or so, they'll close it down in a few months, whether permanently or part-time. So, you all might have to stay for a little bit longer, if you're willing," he suggested, one eyebrow raised. "I'm sure the brass will check into all the questionable deaths that occurred under the colonel's command over the last twenty or so years."

Sydney shrugged. "I guess that depends on whether anybody else is staying, but, yeah, I signed on for the entire time," she noted, "although I'm a little worried about Amelia."

"Amelia will be fine," Mountain declared. "She doesn't know it yet, but I'm taking her and her dogs down south pretty quick. She's been up here living out in the Arctic tundra for a very long time, and those dogs of hers want their mama back," he said, with a laugh.

"Yeah, I'm not surprised." Sydney smiled.

They looked over at Joe, who even now sat staring off into the distance. "Joe, are you okay?"

"I'm okay," he said, with a sorrowful look around. "I was already thinking it might be time to call it quits, long before all this, and now?… I know it's time to call it quits," he stated, with a headshake.

Magnus looked at him with a hopeful expression. "So does that mean… I can have the dogs, right?"

He laughed. "As if I had any chance of keeping them from you anyway," he said, with a smile. "Yes, you can have the two you asked for."

"Hang on a minute," Teegan stated. "He doesn't get any, if I don't get any."

"Every one of you has his favorite sled dog. Thankfully there is no overlap. So let's see who all really wants their dogs," Joe suggested, "and we'll talk about it some more later. Right now, I'll go have a shot of whiskey and commemorate my son's death," he stated, with a careless wave, "and relax, maybe for the first time in a very long time."

Teegan slapped his brother on the back. "Damn it, man, there's shit no matter where you travel."

Mountain looked at him and nodded. "Isn't that the truth?" Then he shook his head. "In this case though, it's been a whole lot more than I expected."

"Good. I would hate to think you have this shit happening all the time when you are on missions. Where will you take Amelia?"

He laughed. "She probably thinks about going home. I'm not sure how the sled dogs will acclimate, but I would say Australia or the South Pacific, but for now?… Maybe California.… The cabin would do."

At that, Teegan's eyebrows raised. "The cabin sounds like a great idea. Are you guys up for company?"

"Maybe, if you can behave for once," Mountain teased, with a smirk. "What the hell.… Damn right we are up for company. Hell, anybody can come. We all need a chance to celebrate life and not death,… for a change."