“It ain’t that simple, Wazzy.”
“What?” questioned the Seal. “You are obviously still in love with the woman. Any idiot could see that, the way you jacked up Tomer for his remark.”
“It’s that obvious?”
“Ummm…yeah. Kinda like, your hair is on fire, kind of obvious.”
Marcus stared out the windshield to the dark, empty highway ahead of the Jeep.
“So, she screwed up,” Wasner said. “Just take her back. Be the new daddy to her kid and live happily ever after. No more of this mighty warrior crap. Be a backwoods Alaskan redneck, or whatever it is you want to do, and enjoy life.”
“There is no kid.”
“What, the runaway husband took the kid?”
“She miscarried when she found out I was alive.”
“Oh, jeez.” Wasner scrunched up his eyes.
Marcus’s heart pounded in his chest. Images of Lonnie flashed through his mind’s eye.
“Look, Wazzy, how about you stick to being a Navy Seal and cut the Dr. Phil bit, okay?” “All right,” Wasner said. He turned to look out the passenger side window into the dark night beyond the edge of the highway. Power poles snapped by, reflected in the light of the vehicles behind them. The aurora had again appeared, much smaller than the earlier display. It swirled in the dark night sky above the trees.
“You still love her, don’t you?”
“Like the air that I breathe,” Marcus replied.
Wasner snapped his head around to Marcus. “Whoa…that was kind of poetic. I didn’t know you had it in you, Mojo.”
“There’s a lot of things you don’t know about me.”
“Oh, yeah?”
“Yeah.”
“I’ll tell you a secret if you tell me a secret.”
Wasner’s voice sounded like a chiding adolescent trying to coerce a younger sibling.
“What?” said Marcus.
“You go first,” Wasner said.
“Oh, man…this is crazy.”
“No, it isn’t. You go first. Tell me something about this relationship with the lovely Miss Lonnie Wyatt, and I will tell you a secret.”
Marcus felt like a little child trying to hide his attraction to a girl in grade school. If it hadn’t been so dark, Wasner would have noticed that his friend’s face had abruptly turned very red. For some reason, Marcus complied. “I write poetry.”
Wasner’s eyes widened in surprise. “That’s a good secret. USMC Master Sergeant Marcus ‘Mojo’ Johnson is a poet. What, like limericks, haiku, what?”
“Romantic prose.”
“Uh….what’s that?”
“A kind of poetry.”
“Give me sample.”
“No.”
“Come on, it’s me…Wazzy.” Wasner edged closer to Marcus and muttered, “Remember Jalalabad?”
“That’s not fair,” Marcus protested.
“Let me hear a shot of this ‘romantic prose’ you do.”
“I can’t believe I’m having this conversation.”
“I’m waiting,” Wasner said.
Marcus sighed and quickly recited,
“Oh Marcus,” Wasner replied in a falsetto voice, “I will marry you….”
“That is romantic prose, all right?” Marcus answered, grinning in embarrassment. “And back off, sailor…I’m not your type.”
“Okay, that’s actually pretty good. I might need to borrow that for a barmaid I met in Fairbanks last week.” Wasner said, “So, like, how much of this romantic prose have you written?”
“Over four hundred poems.”
Wasner looked at him incredulously. “You mean to tell me that all this time, Mr. Hardcore Poster Marine, few and proud, force recon warrior, is actually pulling a Shakespeare on us in the background?”
“Screw you, Wasner.”
“I thought you said you weren’t my type.”
“You’re too ugly.”
“You’re just jealous,” Wasner said. “You should publish the stuff and make some money or something at least.”
“No,” Marcus said quietly. “They are Lonnie’s.”
“Man, you are serious about this woman, aren’t you.”
Marcus changed the subject. “So what’s your secret?”
“Bannock’s a virgin.”
“What?”
“Yep, Charlie Bannock is a virgin.”
“That’s not your secret! As unbelievable as it is, that would be Charlie’s secret!”
“I never said I’d tell you my secret,” Wasner replied with a chuckle. “I just said I would tell you a secret.”
“You’re a jerk sometimes,” Marcus said bluntly. “Are you serious, though? Charlie’s a virgin?”
“Yep, forty-three years old and never entered the Hotel Silky in his life.”
“How can that be? He’s Green Beret. And I’ve seen him flirt with women all the time.”
“He tried to be with a hooker a couple of times when we went to Thailand on leave from the ‘Stan. Ol’ boy was so nervous about getting a disease, he nearly fainted. So he just walked out. He was so scared of having things growing out of or falling off of his Willie that he’d run the other direction from any of the good time girls. And every time that man gets within ten feet of a decent woman, he starts talking gibberish and she ends up walking away before she can even learn his name.”
“That’s still hard to believe,” Marcus said.
“What’s so hard about it? I never saw you with a woman.”
“Yeah, but I had a woman, even if she didn’t have me on her mind.”
“Well, have you two actually slept together? You do know what I mean, don’t you? Or do I need to get graphic?”
“You got your one secret. That’s all you get.”
“So you’re a virgin, too?”
“Wazzy,” Marcus looked at the chief. “Piss off.”
Wasner fell silent for a moment.
“I envy you guys. I have three ex-wives and have endured no small number of trips to the VD clinic over the past twenty-three years. If I could do it all over again, I think I’d choose yours and Charlie’s way. One woman, or no women.”
The night sky was clear above them and the stars sparkled as far as they could see. The aurora danced brightly on the northern horizon as they moved along down the highway.
Chapter 32
At half past midnight, Lieutenant Shin packed supplies in the Burgundy Ford Explorer in the garage. He’d waited long enough. His commander was not returning. His mind wandered back to the time and place where his career all began.
Shin Kwang Suk was a graduate of the Los Angeles school system, and earned a Bachelor’s of Science from Stanford University in 1999. He had spent his entire life in the shadows. By the age of eight, he understood the duality of his life when his parents enrolled him in a secret school administrated by a man known only as Tang-Gun, or the General. The school educated children in the ideologies of the North Korean Communist philosophy of Ju-Che, or self-reliance for the common good, while they were young and impressionable. The thorough brainwashing and training they received would have made Adolf Hitler jealous.
Shin, and dozens like him, were destined, designed, to be tools of espionage and war hidden among the hundreds of thousands of legitimate peace-minded immigrants from one of America’s strongest allies.
As a deep cover agent in Alaska, he spent nearly two years scouting routes and trails over which special operations teams would move to mount an insurgency against the US military bases to keep them occupied here, instead of sending their troops to aid power-hungry, imperialist South Korea. Posing as a research journalist writing a book in Korean on rural arctic life, he feigned friendship with many people and visited numerous homesteads on the road system and near the bases.