A young soldier appeared next to him. “Lieutenant Mack?” he asked, wringing his hands.
“That’s me,” John replied, hardly taking his eyes off the checklist he was working his way down.
“The name’s Senior Airman Holland. I’m gonna be your new JTAC.”
Then John did look up. A veritable child stared back at him. Red hair, freckles. Only thing he was missing was an English private-school uniform.
“How old are you?” John asked him.
“Nineteen, sir.”
“Where’s my other JTAC, Lewis?”
“I believe he’s in medical, sir.”
“Medical? How was he hurt?”
“I’m not sure I should say.”
Grimacing, John handed Holland the clipboard and stomped off. To his knowledge, Lewis hadn’t been on another mission since Nasiriyah, which left John wondering whether some of his fellow soldiers had taken matters into their own hands and punished the JTAC for the friendly fire incident.
John entered the Combat Support Hospital, a sprawling series of tan-colored tents—some still being erected—and went to a nurse sitting behind a desk. The place was cool compared to the grinding heat outside and smelled vaguely of bleach.
“May I help you, sir?”
“Yes, I understand you have a Christopher Lewis admitted.”
She typed something into the computer and the expression on her face changed at once. “Hmm.”
“What is it?”
“My apologies, sir, but I’m not at liberty to say.”
John sighed, drumming his fingers. “Fine. Can I at least see him briefly then?”
“You’ll need to check with one of the doctors at intensive care. Down the corridor,” she said, pointing. “Then take your third left.”
John followed her directions and entered the intensive care unit. Laid out before him were a number of beds separated by wraparound curtains. Paper name tags hung from the fabric. When he came to one reading Lewis, Christopher, John glanced around, waiting for a doctor to stop him and, finding none, pushed his way inside.
Lewis lay before him, hooked up to machines that pinged and beeped. He had two black eyes and a deep red mark around his neck.
The young JTAC’s eyes peeled open. There was no breathing tube in his mouth which meant he should be able to speak, at least theoretically.
“I just heard you were here,” John said, trying to piece together what had happened from the little bits he’d already seen. “How you feeling?”
Lewis’ eyes dropped to his feet. “Not much of anything, lately. But maybe that’s not such a bad thing.”
John looked at his legs, which were positioned at a strange, lifeless angle. It didn’t look comfortable. “Can you tell me what happened?”
“I couldn’t take it anymore, sir.”
A flashbulb went off in John’s head. The friction mark around his neck, the paralysis. Lewis had tried to hang himself and only managed to paralyse himself.
For a moment, John didn’t know what to say. “The friendly fire incident. Is that what led to this?”
Lewis didn’t answer, but he didn’t need to.
“You shouldn’t have taken that all on yourself,” John told him in vain. “The fog of war, Lewis, that’s the nature of the beast. We made the best call we could under the worst kind of circumstances.”
“Pulling the trigger’s the easy part,” Lewis said, struggling for breath. “Learning to live with it, that’s another thing entirely.”
John’s head fell into his hands. “I wish you’d come and talked to me first before you did something rash. If anyone was to blame it was me.”
“I just couldn’t take it anymore,” Lewis repeated. “I kept seeing their faces and how their loved ones would look when they got the news.”
There was nothing pretty about fratricide and it was even more horrible when the chain of causation led directly back to faulty technology. The failing radios along with Charlie Company’s disappearance from Blue Force Tracking had played a major part in the tragedy. Not to mention the fact that they’d repositioned further north than they were meant to be, disobeying orders. Of course, those were merely words and would do little to ease the waves of guilt and sorrow Lewis was no doubt feeling. This was also a perfect example of how the human mind could make a bad situation so much worse. In some cases, there was still a tough-guy culture in the armed forces which stigmatized soldiers who went for grief counselling.
John studied the marks on Lewis’ neck. Normally when a soldier decided to take his own life, finding the means to do the job wasn’t difficult. A pistol was usually the weapon of choice. For Lewis to choose hanging made John wonder if it wasn’t an attempt to cry out for help that he was too afraid to ask for directly. Emerging from the fog of war, Lewis had likely entered another kind of fog which made critical thinking nearly impossible. John only wished he could have done more.
He laid a hand on Lewis’ arm. “If there’s anything I can do, please let me know.”
The pain in Lewis’ eyes was nearly overwhelming. “There is something, John,” he said. “But they’d arrest you for murder and I wouldn’t want to destroy someone else’s life.”
The implication was clear enough. Lewis wanted someone to finish off what he had started and the realization hit John like a boot heel to the gut.
That was when a noise began tugging for his attention. Was it a patient going into cardiac arrest a few beds over? No, the sound was staticky. A formless voice blaring intermittently.
John’s eyes snapped open to the dim awareness that he was back in Oneida, lying next to Diane. Down the hall, the sound came again. It was emanating from the radio room. Someone with a heavy accent was trying to contact them in Chinese and then Russian. He didn’t know enough of either language to understand what they were after, but one thing was clear. The enemy had arrived.
Chapter 42
Henry was asleep at the console when John rushed in.
The message came through again.
“Wake up,” John shouted to his comms officer.
Henry twitched in his chair and then sat bolt upright, rubbing his eyes. He and Rodriguez had been doing shifts of twelve hours each and exhaustion had clearly gotten the better of him. “Oh, I’m sorry, sir. It won’t happen—”
“The radio transmission. What are they saying?”
Diane came in, pulling a robe around her. Soon Emma appeared, followed by Captain Bishop, who had fallen asleep in the conference room across the hall. They all stood in silence, assessing the situation.
The message blared over the radio again.
Henry listened. “I don’t speak a lick of Chinese and my Russian’s almost nonexistent. But I believe they’re asking for the Chairman.”
Jacob Golosenko was his real name, one of many Russian fifth columnists sent to suppress local populations and hold key strategic locations. The advancing Chinese likely wanted to make contact to ensure the town was still in their control. Unfortunately for them, the Chairman’s body was currently rotting in a pit on the outskirts of town.
“What should we say?” Henry asked.
“How much Russian can you speak?” John asked him.
“Not nearly enough to be convincing, I’m afraid.”
“Heck, it’s worth a shot,” Captain Bishop shot from the doorway, still rubbing his puffy eyes.