“Chris.” Wulf greeted him back with his own name, that word enough to identify himself.
“Man, oh man,” He could hear his former commander’s grin in the way he stretched his words, almost laughing. “I hoped you’d call someday...”
“Yeah, me too.” His throat felt tight.
“How’s it going? Wait, let me go in my office.”
Wulf closed his eyes to picture the space Deavers called an office in his one-story rambler near the post. Kid-size plastic three-wheelers, a washer and dryer and in the corner, two leather rolling chairs mended with duct tape set around his father’s old footlocker for a table. It was the only place in the house his wife allowed him to chew.
“Kristin gave me an office upgrade for Christmas, by the way.” As Deavers settled in, a chair creaked loudly enough to be heard over their connection. “You’ll wish you were here.”
“Not a new chair? You’re not a good enough husband to deserve that.”
“Hoo-ah, this bad boy’s better than a chair. A top-of-the-line mini-fridge.”
Wulf heard the suction of an opening door.
“She thinks I don’t know it’s her way of snagging more space by exiling my beer. Got one handy? I recall a promise to share a drink when we hit civilization.”
“I’m ahead of you.” Wulf looked at the empty bottles sitting on the shelf next to a box of European cellular phone SIM cards.
His friend’s noncommittal ah conveyed a world of understanding. “So, the doc. How’s that’s going? How is she?”
At the question, the tiny screwdriver he was using to open the back of a burner cell phone jumped out of its groove. Going upstairs after dinner, Theresa had looked over her shoulder and half smiled with her eyes lowered and her head tilted just so. It might have been an invitation, but what if he was wrong?
“If you give me some self-sacrificing bullshit, the team will hunt you down and kick your ass until we make it hurt, no matter how long that takes. Copy?”
“Roger that.” The problem with having friends who knew you this well was that they knew you this well.
“Did you go after her? That’s what you were supposed to do.”
“I did, but—” He’d have to hide the extra SIM cards in the phone later, when Deavers wasn’t throwing him curveballs. After a deep breath, he took the plunge. “Some Class 1-A problems followed me to Jersey City.”
“Wait—New Jersey? Not the torched house with the six—”
“Yeah. That was her family’s place. Different last name.” He didn’t know how Deavers had missed making the connection. Being home with two kids must have been rougher than Paktia Province, because wall-to-wall coverage had blanketed the media for three days. Cable and internet couldn’t trumpet loudly enough that both the senator’s house and the house of the soldier who’d been in the car with him had burned down on the same day. The FBI wasn’t talking, but reporters had dug up the organized-crime connection, and now the least sensational headlines began Ivy League-Mafia Princess-War Heroine.
“Doc and her parents are fine.” With Deavers he slipped back into his nickname for Theresa. “But her stepbrother and cousin were two of the six.”
Chris breathed a word that summed up the situation in four letters.
Wulf’s hands hovered over a row of airtight containers before he acknowledged that he didn’t have enough focus to pack a belt buckle with explosives. He’d have to leave that for tomorrow. “Six more casualties across the street, guards, but that’s not public. They were all ex-FBI or Special Ops.”
“Guess you’re not calling to ask me to be your best man, then?”
Maybe if Theresa’s idea worked, he’d have the opportunity to become a regular guy who made normal plans like that, but tonight he had a different request. “I need help.”
“We can be wheels up in four hours. Tell us where and what to bring.”
“SAS Flight 926 day after tomorrow, IAD to Copenhagen.” After seeing Ivar’s motivation, he wasn’t going to delay getting started with the antiviral research. Having a goal might help his brother recover. “I need someone to watch my back while I find a Viking relic.”
“We’ll leave a few homebodies to cover the fort, but who do you want?”
“Cruz and Bama Boy. Nobody else.” This was the part he’d known would be hardest.
“Negative on that request. Bama busted his knee waterskiing—”
“In February?”
“Went to Mexico with his sister’s nanny. At least that’s what he says, so you get me.”
“Sir, you’re not invited to this party. Nobody with kids.”
Deavers continued as if Wulf hadn’t spoken. “And if the Big Kahuna finds out you called and I didn’t tell him, he’ll cut off my nuts. Your panty knots aren’t worth impairing my love life, so Kahananui’s in too.”
“Don’t you understand six guys with our training were taken out like factory chickens across the street from Doc’s? This is a bachelor party. Not you, not Big K, no one with—”
“No, you need to understand.” Deavers went into his rarely used pit bull growl. Rarely used because the team generally worked as an egalitarian unit, so he didn’t emphasize rank. “Do the math. I wouldn’t have kids without you, brother, just the dirt bed. Kristin got pregnant after our Fallujah vacation, where you saved my ass at least three times. If you need me, I’m in.”
“Talk about a fucking martyr complex!” Wulf stopped short of pounding the wall, but he couldn’t staunch his regrets over reaching out to his friend. “The people I need backup to watch out for aren’t Scandinavian nannies or piece-of-shit terrorists, or even other Special Ops. There could be three of them just like me. Get that? Like me.”
“Oh. Wow.” On the other end of the line, Chris took a deep breath. His chair creaked back and forth while Wulf hung on to his side of the call. “Well. That’ll make it harder to cover the spread, but it also leaves me with a sling load of unanswered questions.”
Wulf couldn’t, wouldn’t, satisfy his former commander’s curiosity over the telephone, but he had to persuade him to stay in Kentucky. “It’s not a game. It should fucking scare you.”
“Hell yes. It’s a ball shrinker, but you know me. I puke before HALO jumps, and I’ve never missed one yet.”
Deavers wasn’t the only one who found parachuting from above 25,000 feet and free falling at over a hundred miles per hour to be stressful. Wulf had never wanted to test whether his condition could overcome a big splatter. “If you’re trying to distract me, no dice. You’re not invited. Your regular work’s hard enough on Kristin. Don’t go off-roading.”
“All right, already.” Deavers made a disgusted sound.
“Promise you’re not coming, or I won’t be on the flight. I’m not under your command anymore.”
“Promise,” Deavers agreed.
Without looking in his friend’s eyes, Wulf couldn’t tell if he was lying. “Tell Cruz to bring a black work passport. It’s that kind of trip.”
“His favorite kind.”
After the call ended, Wulf assessed his packing. He was close enough to being finished with stowing the cash and gear he planned to smuggle into Denmark that he could go upstairs. At the least, he’d be able to watch Theresa for one more night. But maybe—he remembered that half smile from above him on the stairs—he wouldn’t have to spend it in the chair.
Other evenings, Theresa had folded her clothes and put them away, but if she wanted to entice Wulf to the bed, she probably had to leave obvious hints. She dropped the pink turtleneck sweater she’d worn to dinner inside the doorway, where it couldn’t be overlooked, and left her long black skirt puddled two steps farther into the room. She aligned the cups and straps of her bra until she’d made an arrow pointing to the bed, but that looked weird, so she nudged it into a pile. She chickened out before removing her panties and instead donned a pair of Wulf’s soft flannel pajamas. The bottom hung low around her waist, and the top button of the matching shirt fell between her breasts.