Just a few short weeks ago he had been in the Philippines chasing Predators and finding Japanese troops and ships. The text he had sent from his Blackberry on that incident had cued Meredith to convince the National Security Advisor to have the ship interdicted. It turned out that all of his reports had either been received by Rathburn or Lantini, and discarded. Thankfully, the United States Navy had corralled the rogue vessel with a carrier battle group, F-18s circled the sky like buzzards spying road kill. The SEALs had boarded the Shimpu and found the skipper on the floor of the captain’s ward with a fresh bullet wound in his head.
He skipped another stone upstream, the current causing the stone to flip wildly. Not a good toss. Each time he tried to throw, the stitches in his abdomen screamed at him, pulling at healing skin.
Would the wounds that mattered ever heal?
Zachary was dead, and he wondered if he would ever be able to accept that fact. Life was never what it seemed, he understood, but the unfairness of his brother’s death in that remote corner of the world might weigh on him forever. At least he hoped so. Zachary was too great a man simply to be gone. His contributions were too substantial just to be forgotten. No, Matt would earn Zachary’s sacrifice. Once healed, he would be back in the field taking the fight to the enemy. In the meantime, he would serve in his new capacity as a special advisor to the director of the CIA … until his physical wounds healed.
He would go back to Afghanistan or Iraq and fight there. That was his mission.
On that thought, he wondered exactly what was happening in the world. How could Diamond and Fox be so manipulative and callous? How could Stone not see what they were doing? How could Lantini betray him?
What was in store for the world? Nine-eleven, Islamic fundamentalism, and rogue nationalism were supposedly exploiting the seams of a fractured universe. But what was real and what was manu-factured?
The ivory-tower conspiracies of the elite clouded the true heroism of the young men and women fighting so hard, who, in the eyes of the likes of Fox and Diamond, were truly nothing but cannon fodder.
He turned, carefully stepping along the rock, placing the stream to his back.
“Hi, handsome,” Meredith said. She was standing on the bank, her arms crossed, perhaps warding off the spring chill. She was wearing a dark blue Northface jacket over lighter dungarees. Her hiking boots were crossed one over the other as she leaned against a small poplar tree. New growth.
Matt nodded at her and stepped off the rock. He approached Meredith and took her in his good arm without saying a word.
“It’s okay,” she whispered, hugging him back.
Matt rested his head on her hair, the sling causing his arm to press awkwardly between them as he looked west into the churning river and the moun-tains whence it had come.
“Don’t leave me,” he caught himself saying. Why, he wasn’t sure. Maybe with Zachary’s loss he needed to fill the empty space quickly. Perhaps it would be less painful that way.
“I’m not going anywhere you’re not going,” she said softly.
He pulled away and kissed her on the lips, then said, “I’m just going to refuse to believe that he’s dead.”
Matt’s words of disbelief floated like an autumn leaf into the wind, fluttered up the hill toward the house, circled the fresh-tilled grave, and bolted skyward toward the heavens.