“I’m Moms,” the woman said.
Moms? Carter was trying to take it all in.
“I was just telling him to listen carefully to Ms. Jones,” Nada informed her.
Moms nodded. “Listen to her offer. Then you get to say yes or you get to say no. There’s no shame, no blemish on your record for saying no.”
“No is the easy way,” Eagle yelled from across the room.
“No is back to the world,” Mac added.
“Hush,” Roland scolded the other two. “Moms is talking.”
Moms put a hand on Carter’s shoulder. “You understand?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
Mac laughed. “He ain’t got a fucking clue.”
Moms nodded at Nada. He rapped on the flimsy door, rattling it on the hinges. Then he swung it open and indicated for Carter to go in. “Take the seat in front of the desk. Do not get out of the seat until dismissed, then come straight back out here. Anything else and I’ll kill you.”
He said it so matter-of-factly that Carter only realized he was serious after taking three steps into the room. A hard plastic chair faced a massive wooden desk. The smooth surface of the desk was unmarred by any phone, computer, or knick-knack. Behind the desk was a huge wing-backed chair, the occupant completely in the shadow cast by the large lights pointed directly at the plastic chair.
Carter sat down, hands on his knees, feeling like he’d been called into the principal’s office and he’d done something really bad — like burn down the school.
The voice startled him, not only with the accent, but the suddenness. “You do know, of course, that someone has to man the walls in the middle of the night? The walls between all those innocents out there who lay their heads down on their pillows every evening, troubled by thoughts of such things as mortgages, or their pet is sick, or their child is failing in school? The normal things people should worry about. There are even those who have grave, serious worries, such as just being diagnosed with pancreatic cancer and given weeks to live. But the things we, here, worry about, they are far graver than any of those worries.”
Carter didn’t know if she was really asking or if it was a test, so he followed Uncle Ray’s advice and said nothing.
Ms. Jones continued. “Someone has to worry about those things that go bump in the night, and let me assure you, young man, there are things that go bump in the night.”
Like Pads going after Dee, Carter thought. He knew there were bad things in the night.
As if reading his mind she continued. “Of course you sort of do, given your background. You did very well in the test with Colonel Orlando. You did very well in the Ranger Battalion and in your combat tours. You did very well in Ranger School. Surprisingly well, considering everyone thought you had been flunked after speaking back to that Ranger instructor. You were a washout. A recycle. Yet somehow when they printed out the roster for graduation, there was your name on it. Everyone was quite surprised. Including the graders who had flunked you.”
Carter sat straighter in the chair. He’d known someone would come after him about that sooner or later. “I earned my Ranger Tab,” he said defensively, throwing aside all the advice he’d grown up with, just like he’d done that hot day in the Florida swamp with the asshole RI. “I earned my combat patch in the Ranger Regiment. There’s many who wear the tab who never served with the Regiment.”
“Oh, yes,” Ms. Jones said. “You earned the tab. The computer said so. The interesting question is how the computer could have said so when the data the — I believe they are called RIs? — put into it flunked you.”
Silence fell over the room as Ms. Jones waited. Carter fidgeted, not sure which way to go, just knowing he was at a critical juncture not only in his career but in the rest of his life.
“Truth doesn’t set you free,” Ms. Jones said. “It just keeps you alive in the Nightstalkers.”
Carter blinked in surprise. “Task Force 160? I thought they were at Campbell and—”
“Not those Nightstalkers,” Ms. Jones said with a hint of frost. “When Task Force 160 was formed in 1981, we switched our name to Nightstalkers also, because it’s always best to have a cover behind some other classified unit. As you just indicated, it works for misdirection. We prefer to be a shadow inside of a shadow.”
“What were you called before that?” Carter asked.
“That is not important,” Ms. Jones said. “And, as a bonus, Nightstalkers was appropriate. As I told you, we’re the ones who man the walls against the things that go bump in the night. Do not make me repeat myself. How did you pass Ranger School when you should have flunked?”
“I cheated, ma’am.”
“Very good,” Ms. Jones said. “How?”
“I knew they were gonna flunk me for sassing back at that RI. But he made a comment about my sister, and he didn’t even know I had a sister. Got two actually. So I snuck out the night before graduation. Everyone else was wiped out. The last night, after the last patrol, after the entire course, everyone reaches their limits and just collapses.”
“But not you.”
“I knew they were gonna flunk me.” Carter flushed as he realized he’d repeated himself. “I couldn’t flunk. I needed to graduate.”
“For the tab?” This time it was a question.
Carter swallowed, but he was too far down the alley of truth and the walls were closing in. “No, ma’am. I needed the pay bonus.”
She didn’t ask what for, which surprised him. “How did you cheat?”
“I snuck out. Went to the command shed. Stole a smartphone they use for commo. Hacked into the system. Changed my grade.”
Ms. Jones waited.
“Then I got all the score sheets. Took them over to the admin shed. Scanned every one on me. Photoshopped all of them and changed mine to passing. Took them all out into the swamp. Roughed them up and stained them like the originals. That took a while, as I had to dry them off afterward to make them look real. Put them back.”
“They knew you cheated.”
Carter remembered the uproar, the RIs swearing the forms with their signatures weren’t right, that the computer was wrong. The sheets were wrong. “Yes, ma’am.”
“But they graduated you because the computer said so and they were afraid you would appeal and lawyers would get involved and it would be a mess. Easier to move you on.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“What a sad state the army is in when an RI just can’t flunk a student with his word as a soldier and that a computer can overrule him. It’s a recipe for disaster. I predict you’ll see a similar disaster like that if you say yes to my question. Which, of course, is why you’re here.”
Then Ms. Jones gave the why we are here speech. When she was done, she simply asked: “Can you live with that?”
Carter hesitated, which he knew was bad, but he had to ask. “Ma’am, I reenlisted for Special Forces. And—”
“For the bonus, not because you particularly wanted to be a Green Beret, correct?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
Ms. Jones remained silent and Carter was tempted to tell her why he needed the bonuses, but he knew Dee would have told him a man doesn’t beg. He only gets that which is his due.
Finally Ms. Jones broke the silence and there was, strangely enough, approval in her voice. “You send all your money to your family. To your older sister, Dee. Correct?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“To look after your younger siblings.”
That was not a question.
“Your father blew himself up recently cooking methamphetamine, correct?” Ms. Jones did not wait for an answer. “And the county is going to seize the family house and land for back taxes. You need not worry, young man. Your land and house will not be seized by the government. The exact amount of money that you should have gotten in your reenlistment bonus for Special Forces will be sent to your sister. Understand, though, that unlike our Support, who are contractors — a move I was completely against but was overruled on — we are not mercenaries in the Nightstalkers. We are soldiers. You have sworn an oath.”