The man who had emerged from the helicopter behind Traeger, handsome in his own way, but with the ability to blend into the background when needed, quailed at the sound. Traeger, however, merely raised his head as if sniffing the air, then replaced his aviator sunglasses, apparently unperturbed. Beckoning his aide toward him, he said, “I want the passenger. I want the pod. If it ain’t from here—”
Traeger’s aide, whose name was Sapir, finished his sentence for him. “You want it.”
Traeger nodded, the jungle reflected in the lenses over his eyes. “I want it.”
2
When he saw the battered, bullet-pocked sign, McKenna thought he might actually get home alive. Or whatever passed for home these days. He didn’t live with Emily anymore, didn’t see his boy Rory nearly as much as he ought to. Part of that had to do with serving in the field, but part had to do with him never having a goddamn clue how to be the husband Emily needed or the father Rory deserved.
McKenna knew his own faults. He just didn’t whine about them.
He staggered, breath rasping, legs shaking. He felt like he’d run twenty miles, and maybe he had, but he damn well didn’t have two hundred more in him. He shifted the pack on his back and stared at the run-down Mexican town splayed out ahead of him. Calling it a town was being charitable—the place looked more like a row of horse stables in the middle of nowhere—but he spotted one structure with a faded Coca-Cola sign and the words Cantina Rojo.
Bingo.
With a nervous glance over his shoulder, he dry-washed as much of the camo paint off his face as he could manage. He didn’t have time to make himself pretty. Truth was, he didn’t know how much time he had. There were going to be a lot of questions waiting for him, a lot of people who wanted to know what he’d seen—and maybe didn’t want him to have seen it in the first place—people who would want to assign blame. When soldiers died—
Damn it. My brothers.
When soldiers died, everyone wanted to assign blame, to make sure the fingers were pointing at anyone but themselves.
But this? This was a whole different brand of FUBAR.
Still catching his breath, McKenna ran across what passed for a street and entered the cantina. Overhead, a ceiling fan rotated so lazily it might have been nothing more than the breeze making it turn. If it accomplished anything other than redistributing the heat, he couldn’t tell. Sweat trickled down the small of his back. Fucking Mexico, he thought. McKenna had always known he’d die dirty and sweaty.
He reconned the room. A handful of customers, moving slow with the heat, happy to be in the shade. No one in the cantina set off his interior alarm bells, no cops, no military.
“Fuera,” he said to the room, as he made a beeline to the bar.
The bartender came out from behind the bar, his gaze shifting past McKenna. Although his face stayed impassive, it was a studied sort of impassive, and McKenna didn’t have to ask why. He heard the creak of a floorboard and knew at least one of the customers—probably more than one, since courage usually came in groups—had taken exception to his presence.
The corner of his mouth lifted in something like a smirk. He stared at the bartender.
“Want to know my favorite cereal?” he asked.
The bartender frowned. “Que?”
McKenna spun, spotted the two assholes coming for him. He moved with intuition that had been trained into him, smashed into him, burned into him. It felt good, after what he’d seen, to fall back into the rhythm of a simple bar fight, to glide into the motion of fists and kicks, to strike hard, to break bone.
“Snap,” he said.
A thrust. “Crackle.”
A kick. “Pop.”
He knew the line was lost on the bartender and didn’t care. “That’s a hint,” he said.
On the floor, the two men who’d attacked him groaned, but they were done. McKenna slammed his backpack down on top of the bar, then unzipped a pouch and pulled out a greasy wad of Mexican currency. The bartender arched an eyebrow as McKenna held out the cash.
“I need you to mail this from the embassy. El consulado, sí? Muy importante. Go!”
The bartender stared into McKenna’s eyes, then gave an abrupt nod, grabbed the backpack and turned to go. As he did so, McKenna said, “Buddy?”
The bartender looked back.
“If you don’t do what I ask, I’ll find you. You don’t want me to do that.”
Without another word, the bartender vanished through the door behind the bar. McKenna tried not to think about the odds on whether he’d scared the guy too much, not enough, or just the right amount. Fear could be a weapon and a great motivator, but like any weapon, you had to know precisely how to use it.
Alone in the bar now (the guys he’d vanquished had crawled away at some point during his exchange with the bartender), McKenna leaned forward, grabbed himself a glass and a bottle of tequila, and poured himself a shot. Neither the glass nor the bottle was particularly clean, but what the hell? He raised his glass to the flies buzzing lazily around the ceiling fan, and was about to knock it back when he heard sirens, approaching fast.
He sighed. He wasn’t surprised they’d found him, but he wondered how they’d done it so quickly.
As the sirens reached a crescendo and were accompanied by the sounds of several vehicles screeching to a halt outside, he reached into the right-hand pocket of his grimy combats and extracted a tiny, silvery sphere—the alien cloaking device. He held it between his thumb and forefinger as he rolled his head back on his shoulders, hearing his neck muscles crackle, then dropped it almost absently into his tequila.
He picked up the glass and upended it over his mouth, swallowing its entire contents in one gulp, as the door to the bar crashed open behind him.
3
Lawrence A. Gordon Middle School might have been the Home of the Warriors, like the sign out front said (a new, albeit temporary sign beneath bore the legend HALLOWEEN HAUNT 10/25—WELCOME PARENTS & STDS), but Rory didn’t care much for the school’s sports teams. At twelve years old, he was a scholastic warrior. A classroom warrior.
Not at lunchtime, though.
At lunchtime, Rory was a warrior of the chessboard.
Mr. Moore, his science teacher, ate lunch at his desk. The room stayed quiet, because Chess Club was in session. There were five games going on simultaneously, all of them taking place on the lab tables. Rory could have played—could have beaten any of the kids in the club—but instead he threaded through the room with his crust-free peanut butter sandwich in one hand while he studied each of the ongoing games in turn. In his mind, he worked both ends of all five games, had a strategy for each of the ten players that would have guaranteed them victory.
Only nobody ever asked.
Mr. Moore glanced up at him and sighed. A lot of times, the science teacher seemed like he wanted to talk to Rory, as if some great, weighty question burned at the tip of his tongue—or maybe some piece of wisdom that would reveal Mr. Moore as a more thoughtful, more intelligent, more sympathetic teacher than Rory’s experience had thus far led him to believe. The man studied him sometimes, not in a creepy way, but more like one of the Chess Club kids on the losing side of a game, as if Mr. Moore looked at Rory and saw a puzzle that he thought he could solve if he could just find that one missing piece.
That was one of the oddest things about being on the autism spectrum. Rory didn’t feel like he was missing a piece of anything, didn’t feel like his puzzle hadn’t been solved. He felt whole. He just felt like Rory.