Nate hung up.
‘What is it?’ Lydia asked.
‘I don’t know. Terrorists. Get the boys and let’s go.’
Lost in thought he heard, ‘Nate?’
He turned to her. ‘It’s just a precaution,’ he said. ‘Someone may have broken into the Secretary of Defense’s home. That’s all.’
Lydia headed for the family room in a daze. ‘Oh,’ Nate called out to her, ‘and send Jeff back.’
Jeffrey appeared just as Nate pulled a 9-mm Beretta from the locked drawer. The seventeen-year-old’s eyes widened. Nate slapped a magazine into the butt and pulled the slide, chambering a bullet. He carefully lowered the hammer and slipped the pistol into his waistband, but Jeffrey’s eyes followed his father’s hands. Nate put three full magazines into his blue jeans pockets.
‘Come on, son,’ he said as he headed for the hall closet. He reached up and took the dark green canvas bag from the top shelf. He extracted the engraved silver shotgun in two pieces. In seconds, he had it together and loaded two shells into the side-by-side double-barrel twelve gauge.
‘Be careful with this,’ he told Jeffrey — catching his eye to confirm the boy understood. Nate closed and safed the shotgun and held it out to his first-born. The boy looked at the gun respectfully for a moment before he gingerly took it from his father.
They joined Lydia and Paul at the garage door. ‘Lydia, you drive. Jeff, in the front seat.’ Nate turned and headed for the back door, grabbing a cordless phone from the kitchen counter.
‘What about me?’ Paul asked — his fourteen-year-old’s voice breaking.
‘Get in the back and keep your head down.’ He turned to Lydia. ‘I’m gonna go around the side of the house to check out the drive. I’ll call if the coast is clear and climb in with you out on the driveway. Don’t open the garage until I say so.’
Nate slipped out the side door. It was dark and hot outside. Crickets chirped from the nearby pasture. The sound of the pistol’s hammer locking back seemed overly loud.
He felt a surge of alertness — an unpleasant rush of hyper-attentiveness. It caused a flutter in his chest that left him drawing shallow breaths. The pistol was at eye level, its butt and the heel of his right hand supported by the palm of his left. He forced himself to blink. Calm down, he told himself. He took deep, slow breaths. It had been a long time, but he remembered the physical sensations all too well. The sickening anxiety just when you most needed calm.
With his eyes now adjusted to the dim light and his heart pounding, Nate headed up the walk with the pistol leading the way. The pebbles crunched under his first step, and he suddenly felt exposed. He had to fight the urge to drop and crawl. Jesus, Nate! he thought, swallowing and forcing himself to stand more erect. To calm himself. His shoulder muscles already ached, and he unclenched his cramping stomach. He stepped off the gravel walk and onto the grass.
There were too many dark places. The bushes, the garbage cans, the treeline. The treeline worried him most. He checked his rear, turning his entire body in order to keep his right eye in line with the pistol’s sights.
He shouldn’t have done it that way! Blind. He should be covered. Riflemen on the bushes and trash cans. A machine-gun on the treeline. He forced himself to concentrate. At the side of the garage, he felt a jab of pain in his left side. The sensation was so sharp he had to drop a hand from the pistol to probe the spot. Only when he didn’t feel any moisture was he convinced there was no wound. At least, not a new wound. It was there that the bullet had entered. In the decades since, he’d felt the pain return in random jolts. It was as if the nerve endings retained some memory of the agony they’d transmitted that day.
By the time he’d inched his way down the hedge that bordered the drive all the way to the quiet street and then back again to the house — checking for wires across the narrow strip of pavement the whole way — Nate was exhausted. He pulled the cordless phone from his pocket and dialed his Range Rover.
The faint hiss of static as he waited for the ring brought back the crystalline image of a single moment in his life, long, long ago. Lying on the dirt, the pain was so great that all he felt was varying degrees of it. It was at once icy cold and searing heat. All he recalled was the tug on his skin of the suture… and the steady hiss of white noise on the radio. Clark had clung to the sound of the static. His life had depended on it.
He heard the ring over the phone and from the garage. Lydia picked up the car phone immediately. ‘Come on out,’ Nate said, then he sagged against the wall. The garage door opened slowly, noisily.
He hadn’t only been wounded on that patrol, he’d lost four men. Five, in fact, only one didn’t die until he was on the operating table. Nate had held his hand out and touched the boy on the flight back to the aid station. Sky-high on morphine by then, Nate remembered the warmth of the boy’s chest which slowly grew cold as air whipped through the open doors of the helicopter and life bled from his body more quickly than the IV could replenish it.
The car appeared. Nate carefully lowered the hammer on the pistol and climbed in the back with Paul. Lydia wasted no time backing down the driveway.
‘What’s wrong, dad?’ Paul asked.
‘Nothing,’ he said. ‘Let’s just… just drive.’
Lydia headed off as Jeffrey manually searched the radio for the fast-breaking news stories.
Nate had lain in the dirt all day long. Then night had offered a respite from the heat. But when darkness fell, the North Vietnamese had poured it on. Bullets cut through the dry grass just inches over Nate’s face. The casualties streamed in, dragged for the most part by men who were wounded but returned to the fighting.
Everyone was pressed low. He had been so thirsty… so thirsty.
‘You’re sweating, dad,’ Paul said in a quiet voice. Lydia looked at Nate through the rear view mirror.
‘Leave your dad alone, Paul,’ Lydia said softly.
The static in between radio stations cut through Nate’s fog. ‘Romeo India Two Three, I read you, over,’ the distant voice had said just after a burst of static. Nate felt moisture fill his eyes. All day long he’d waited for those words. But all he’d heard was the crack of rifles. The smacking sound of bullets through the brush. The whimpers of men with bloody bandages pressed to their ravaged bodies. All day long he’d listened to the static. Waiting. Hoping. Praying. Thinking only of his life and how much it meant to him now that it seemed to be slipping away at age twenty-two.
‘It’s okay, dad,’ Paul said. He put his arm out to pat Nate’s back awkwardly.
Lt General Nate Clark reached out and pulled the boy into his arms, hugging him. Hiding his face in the boy’s hair. Why me? he thought for the thousandth time. Why did I live, and the others die?
Chapter Two
Colonel Pyotr Andreev, commander of the Russian Presidential Guard, climbed the last metal rungs of the bomb shelter’s air shaft. His dozen surviving security troops trailed just behind. Andreev’s arms, shoulders, back and lungs burned from the thirty minutes of strenuous ascent. But the broad, slatted vents that would close on the flash of a nuclear burst were now within reach. Andreev and two of his men began to pry open with bayonets the screen that prevented birds from entering the shaft. It was painstaking effort, for any noise would mean certain death.