“Does he still have vision in the eye?” Ms. Jones asked.
“Yes.”
Ms. Jones: “Mister Nada?”
Nada went into a long (more than two sentences) explanation of combat fatigue and how it happened occasionally that a guy lost it on a mission. And might even want out.
The last part caused each of the listening men to look into their own psyche for a moment. They had all been special before coming to Nightstalkers: Green Berets, Rangers, CIA, Black Ops — it ran the gamut. The fact that Ms. Jones picked them meant they had something that went beyond special, into unique. The thing was, none of them were exactly sure what made each one unique.
Ms. Jones: “You believe Mister Burns should be separated, Mister Nada?”
Nada: “I never really trusted him.”
Mac snickered because they all knew Nada wouldn’t trust a Girl Scout leading a nun across the road. He’d figure there was an angle to it, and it wasn’t a good one. In Nada’s world, the Girl Scout would throw the nun under the bus, then steal her rosary beads and hock them, using that — along with the money from her cookie sales — to feed her gambling addiction. But Roland frowned at both the snicker and the comment. He knew Nada meant something deeper, something real. Because the funny thing was, no one on the team had ever really trusted Burns. Well, they had at first. You had to. But something had been brewing between Burns and the rest of the team for a while.
Ms. Jones: “Mister Burns was an experiment on my part. I was trying something different and I take responsibility for the decision and the result.”
Mac choked down another snicker because Ms. Jones always took responsibility for everything on the team and even Mac couldn’t laugh at that. They all knew she had their backs.
A record-setting second sigh came from Ms. Jones.
Ms. Jones: “Mister Burns will be out-processed.”
Moms and Nada were silent; the decision had been made.
Ms. Jones: “It could have been worse.”
All three men in the outer room — even Mac, who hadn’t been there — were nodding, because they all implicitly knew Ms. Jones knew what “worse” was.
Then Ms. Jones began speaking, almost like Moms, except she wasn’t detailing a mission, she was talking about the Mission. It was pretty close to what she’d told each of them individually when they in-processed and it was similar to what they’d all heard when they’d volunteered and made it into whatever high-speed unit they’d come from. It had a catch phrase in those elite organizations: Why We Are Here.
That’s why Roland and Eagle and Nada, and even Moms — though she wouldn’t admit it — had known Burns was done when he’d been screaming with an ass full of spikes: “Why am I here? Why the hell am I doing this crazy shit?”
They all knew why they were here and they all knew Ms. Jones was repeating it as much to them as to Nada and Moms.
Ms. Jones: “We are here because the best of intentions can go horribly awry and the worst of intentions can achieve exactly what it sets out to do. It is often the noblest scientific inquiry that can produce the end of us all. We are here because we are the last line of defense when the desire to do right turns into a wrong. We are here because mankind advances through trial and error. Because nothing man does is ever perfect. And we are ultimately here because there are things out there, beyond mankind’s current knowledge level, that man must be guarded against until man can understand those things. We must remember this.”
During the in-brief, she’d then ask each prospective team member: “Can you live with that?”
And they’d all said yes. But every once in a while that yes turned into a big NO, like it had with Burns.
Roland, Eagle, and Mac jumped to their feet as the flimsy door to Ms. Jones’s office opened and Moms and Nada walked out.
“You get all that?” Moms asked as she shut the door behind her.
The three nodded.
Nada went over to Mac. Nada was a short, muscular fireplug of a man. He was of Colombian heritage, the dark skin on his face pocked from a childhood sickness. Short gray hair rose straight out of his head as if even his own hair was afraid of the dark thoughts that ran through his brain.
He tapped Mac on the shoulder. “Don’t laugh when we’re talking with Ms. Jones, okay?”
Mac nodded. It had just occurred to Roland, upon hearing that speech again through the door, that Ms. Jones not only had their backs, she also listened to them over their shoulders to see which way they were facing.
Then Moms and Nada went into the team CP and their door slammed with a solid thud. Whatever they discussed between them stayed in that room.
CHAPTER 3
On the other side of the world, Staff Sergeant Winthrop Carter was not at all where he wanted to be. The officer had lied. For reenlisting, Carter had been promised a slot into Special Forces Assessment and Selection at Fort Bragg, and after passing that — and passing it as he knew he could — he’d be in the year-long Special Forces Qualification Course. And after passing that — and he knew he would — he’d be assigned to the Tenth Special Forces Group (Airborne) and then he should have ended up back here in Afghanistan. And in between graduating and deploying he’d have been paid the bonus that had been the entire purpose of reenlisting for SF in the first place.
It wasn’t that Carter didn’t want to be in a combat zone. This was his fourth tour, having already done one with the First Cav Division and the last two with the Ranger Battalion, but this assignment was bullshit. Besides the fact he hadn’t been given his Q-Course slot yet.
What was the point of being a soldier if you didn’t serve in combat? But as a Green Beret, not as a glorified taxi driver, carting about some burned-out, drunk-ass lieutenant colonel in a Humvee, visiting outposts manned by joint US — Afghan forces, filling out paperwork so some guy in Washington could brief some other guy in Washington so that they could dump all the real data anyway, and make up data to give to the people who made the decisions so they would make the decisions they had wanted to make in the first place.
At least that’s what Colonel Orlando had groused to Carter on the second day of their journeys together; after several sips from his CamelBak, which Carter knew held something other than water, since the colonel had the same smell Uncle Ray had back home in Parthenon. That’s Parthenon, Arkansas, zip code 72666, the last three numbers a dark, unintentional joke by the United States Postal Service that so aptly applied to the place. Parthenon was just an intersection along crumbling Route 327, which ran from nowhere to nowhere. So people only got on it when they got lost looking for somewhere else. Or they came for the meth. Uncle Ray drank to stay off the meth, so it seemed a reasonable deal in Carter’s mind. To Carter, Colonel Orlando drank because he was doing a job that could get him killed, which in the long run mattered not in the least in the strategic picture. But pretty much everyone in the ’Stan was doing a job that could get them killed, and drinking in a combat zone wasn’t something Carter thought highly of, not that a staff sergeant got to tell a colonel that.
Carter drove cross-country, paralleling the dirt road ten meters to their right, sustaining the jolts and slams of the rough terrain in exchange for avoiding the possibility of an IED ripping their armored Humvee to shreds. Several times he came upon wadis too steep to negotiate and he’d go farther into the countryside searching for a way across. Orlando took these detours with a roll of his eyes and another sip from his CamelBak.
“Geez, son!” Orlando yelled as Carter slithered the vehicle down a particularly treacherous slope, then gunned it up the far side with teeth-rattling jolts. “We can get killed as easy rolling over as getting blown up.”