Chapter 2

CHAPTER 2

“What?” He blinked in surprise. “That’s ridiculous. You got a concussion, man. You took a bullet.” Then, he thought, What am I saying? Anyone as dinged up as Davila ought to think about bowing out. If he were any kind of doctor—any kind of man —he’d have insisted on this already.

But you’re scared. You’re chicken. You’re a coward, a piece of …

“Let’s see how you do.” His words came out hard, fast. Too loud. “You’re not dying.”

A corner of Davila’s mouth quirked in a sour grimace. “You forgot to say ‘yet.’”

“Even I know the difference between a bad joke and bad taste.” He was angry…and why, why ? At whom ? He shook his head. “I’m not leaving you behind to fend for yourself. That’s insane.”

“Okay, but then you tell me. Where do we go from here?” Davila’s expression was solemn. “We’re late. Every hour you stay with me is another hour when you’re not closer to the border, when you’ve not met up with our contact in Ishkashim. Having a new mascot along doesn’t help either. As you have implied, we can’t turn him loose nor can we take him. So, what do we do, John?”

“I don’t know, I don’t know , okay?” He flicked a look at Matvey, who was watching them both. Then, to Davila: “I found a knife on the kid. An out-the-front on a cord around his neck. That thing has seen some use, too.”

Davila’s eyebrows arched in surprise. “Protection?”

“I thought of that. But his owner might have been working a con on guys who want a taste of the kid.”

After a moment, Davila’s head moved in a slow nod. “I can see that. But we still can’t leave him in zip-ties forever.”

“Can’t we?”

“Since when did you become a cynic?”

Since that last day in Afghanistan, when everyone was so filled with noble intentions, and we got our asses kicked. “If I were to consider going on without you, which I’m not , leaving him here with you is a non-starter. You’d have to sleep with one eye open. So, what do you say, we table this? Let’s just deal with one disaster at a time, okay? All we got to decide right this second is what to eat after the soup.” Grabbing his pack, he upended the MREs he’d brought back. “There you go. Pick a card, any card.”

“You’re ducking the issue.”

You got that right. “Is this where I say I think I’ve heard this before?” Suddenly furious, he sorted through packs. “Lessee, gotcher Menu 2, shredded beef in barbecue sauce…the cinnamon bun in this one isn’t bad.” He picked up another packet. “Oh, Menu 1, that’s a real fan favorite…not only do you get chili with beans, but cornbread just like dear old grandma used to make…”

“John,” Davila said, “you can’t r-run from this.”

Oh, watch me. “ Oh-ho , and what do we have here?” He swiped up another packet with a theatrical flourish. “Here, folks, we’ve got the ever-popular Menu…” A sudden welling-up of emotion clogged his throat; the packet’s lettering shimmered and blurred. “Menu 10. ” He forced the words through clenched teeth. “Macaroni and chili, otherwise known as the Army’s v-version of chili mac and, lookity here, we gotcher…we got a pack of b-berry Sk-Skittles…”

And then he couldn’t go on because Roni’s voice boiled up from memory: “Skittles as bad luck? Probably the moral equivalent.”

“John.” When he looked, Davila’s face, pinched and pale and shiny with sweat, was suddenly swimmy. “Stop.”

“Stop what?” He willed his tears not to fall, though his voice was hoarse, raw. “What are you talking about? Oh, is it Menu 10? Not your cuppa? That’s okay.”

And then, before his mind caught up to his body was going to do next, he whirled on his heel and threw the packet with all his might: with all his pent-up fury and grief. With all his regrets and every ounce of self-loathing for himself and his failures because he had killed Roni; he had left her behind to save those kids and his own sorry ass.

An MRE might be designed to last forever, but its pouch whirring along at ninety-plus miles an hour is no match against a metal wall. The packet smacked metal with a loud bap and instantly burst, releasing a starburst of smaller packets of food and dehydrated drink powders.

For a long moment, there were no sounds save for the harsh, gasping rasp of his breath, the soft hiss of the heater, the burble of still simmering soup. When he finally turned away from the ruin, he saw Matvey’s dark eyes, his startled expression, his mouth open to a soundless little O over a mug of soup that hovered halfway to his mouth. Propped on the cot, a hand massaging his left shoulder, Davila only regarded him with eyes that seemed to peer from deep, black pits.

“John,” he said, “what’s done is done. You can’t change the past.”

He dragged his voice up from where it had fallen. “Yeah? Wife teach you that, too?” A sudden wave of fatigue coursed through his veins, and he swayed. Staggering over to the heater, he dropped to a sit and pulled the sleeping bag he’d left puddled there around his body. “Listen,” he said, his voice hoarse with weariness, “we have a couple of choices here but only one makes sense. The problem with going on is we have no idea when or how we get you decent medical care. Our contact will be in Afghanistan. I doubt there’s a state-of-the-art facility at the border crossing.”

“And we still have the problem of the kid.”

He nodded. God, his head was heavy. All he wanted was sleep, deep and dreamless. “Or we go back. We get you taken care of, get in touch with Patterson. He contacts the guy or team or whoever’s waiting in Afghanistan and then we postpone…”

“L-live to fight another day?”

“Yes, with an emphasis on living. Have you not been paying attention, Davila? I got you shot . You bashed in your skull because of me.”

“I’ve heard this song before.”

“Lyrics won’t change.”

“True,” Davila said, “but I’m not a quitter. Neither are you.”

Oh, you’d be surprised. Instead, he said, “Is that what you want me to tell Hannah? When I break it to her that she’s a widow, I mean. Yeah, boy, that Davila, he sure wasn’t a quitter.”

“There is another alternative. ”

“And just what, pray tell?”

“We go together as far as the border. I drop you off before the crossing, and you go over alone.”

He hacked a laugh. “And you drive back alone.”

“No, I drive back with the kid.”

“Same diff.” Then he reconsidered. “No, actually, it’s probably worse. Remember the knife, Davila? You have no idea what the kid’s capable of.”

“I’ll work out something.”

“Like what? Keep him in zip-ties? Put him on a leash when he needs to go potty?”

Davila ignored the jibe. “I get myself to Dushanbe. I go to the embassy. I get in touch with H-Hank. Meanwhile, you…” Davila paused, winced, then said, “You go with the other people on the team, whoever they are, and retrieve Captain Keller’s remains. You finish what we started.”

“I…” The pressure in his chest was unbearable. He wished he could pretend this was the only time he’d ever felt as if he were simply going to die from grief and guilt, but that would be a lie. If grief was a stone he was forced to hold as he treaded water, guilt was a ball and chain around his waist pulling, pulling, dragging him down—and how easy it would be to drown in that sea of remorse. When, shackled by guilt over actions he could not change, the taste of gunmetal seemed a viable alternative. Anything was better than this slow, inexorable tug of the past. That was what this was all about, wasn’t it? Returning to a nightmare from which he’d never truly awakened ?

Or have you made it one? The imp or his conscience…it didn’t matter because the words rang true. Have you sabotaged yourself so you don’t have to face your own culpability? That you survived and she didn’t?

“I…I should’ve told you,” he blurted. “About the Glock, I mean, and Parviz’s AK. I should have told you as soon as I figured it out. Might have saved us a world of grief. Might have kept you from getting hurt.”

“Might have, yeah.” Davila gave a slow nod. “You know why you didn’t?”

“Yes.” He kept his gaze fixed on his gloved hands. Funny, how all his anger had suddenly drained away. “Pride. I wanted to prove I was worth something. That I wasn’t just another used-up, traumatized soldier. I wanted to show you up, simple as that. You’re tough; you’re strong; you’ve got a woman who loves you. I bet seeing you is the best part of her day and yours, too. You’ve got a home, a reason for taking up space. Me…all I have are…” His throat tried to clog, and he had to clear it. “All I’ve got are bad memories and regrets.”

A sack of bones as the burden I’m too afraid to shoulder .

Davila let a beat go by and then another. “John, I would’ve d-done the same thing.”

He didn’t look up. “What do you mean?”

“What I said. I’m not sure I’d have told you either. Maybe not for the same reasons, but you know what they say about secrets.”

He did raise his eyes then. “I don’t believe you.”

“Suit yourself. I mean, if you enjoy beating yourself around the head and neck because you’re used to it…h-hey, be my guest.” Davila subsided a moment then said, “You need to get rid of that monkey on your back, John. You could’ve told Hank to take a hike, and you didn’t. You didn’t back down when Parviz pulled his weapon. You didn’t freak out. You didn’t go looking to someone else for a decision. You let the thing play out. That’s what’s important here and I don’t give a damn if you don’t believe me…but I might have done the same thing.”

“We’ll never know, will we?”

“There you go again.” Davila paused, pulled in a hitching breath, and said, “Listen, we’re close. If you’d told me earlier, we’d be somewhere on that pass or headed back to Du-Dushanbe.”

“We’d still have our bat phones. You wouldn’t be wounded.”

“Oh, bull.” Davila scrubbed his words away with an impatient gesture. “You don’t know. What happened, happened. What matters is what we do now with the cards we’ve been dealt. You’re as good as any soldier on any team I ever served with. We get to the border and you…” Davila sipped air, let it go, drew in another short breath. “You keep going.”

“In case you haven’t been read in, I’m neck-deep in a retrieval now because I did exactly that to Roni back then .”

“Not what I heard. Captain Keller was?—”

“And you heard wrong.” Shucking his sleeping bag, he stood. “Listen, can we not talk about this anymore? Let’s see how you are in the morning, okay? I’m going out. I want to search Parviz’s van again, anyway.”

“You can’t run from this. This is the end of the road for me, John. Just because you don’t want to listen…” Davila took another wincing inhale. “Doesn’t change anything.”

“Fine, then it doesn’t,” he said, taking the distance to the door in two long strides. He spared a quick glance at the boy, who only regarded him with a dark and unreadable gaze. “I don’t think Matvey will be a problem. Not much he can do with the zip-ties still on, but don’t fall asleep. In fact, get up and move a bit. Last thing we need is for you to get pneumonia from lying around.”

“Don’t worry about me,” Davila said. “But take a weapon, John.”

“For what, for what ?” A red-hot bolt of fury fired his chest, and he was reminded, all of a sudden, of the rage quaking in his father’s voice as he headed for the gun range: I want to see those damn ragheads try to take me on.

I am not my father. His hands balled, the skin white over his knuckles. I am not like him. My brother was, but I’m not, I never could be .

God, he needed to get out of here before he did something violent, before he tried bashing a hole through a metal wall with his fist.

“There’s no one here but us, Davila.” Snatching up a flashlight, he shrugged into an empty pack. “So, what do I need protection from, huh? Snowflakes ?”

Turning, he flung himself from their shelter and into the storm.