Cole: The Wounded Sons

by Leah Sharelle

  “Did you hear Wren is expecting again?” Dane’s voice came through the radio set on my ears.

  “Like Ammo needs another reason to brag about his super sperm,” I muttered, but with no heat. I was happy for my cousin and fellow Sons member and for his beautiful wife, whom I loved like a sister.

  “Apparently, it has Shiloh all clucky again. Zander threatened to keep his cock in his pants until Shiloh comes to her senses. Our brother is having nightmares about Jewel growing up and being a carbon copy of her mother,” Dane shared, chuckling.

  Poor Zander, not only did my oldest brother have his hands full with his wife, but also his little girl—my niece—was six going on twenty-six.

  “Zander knew what he was getting into,” I threw back, “his obsession with Shy-Shy has had him by the balls since he was ten.”

  “Good times, hey, Ghost?” Dane said, looking over his shoulder at me.

  “The best,” I agreed with a hint of a smile. Those days I didn’t close my eyes and see men dying in front of me, didn’t hear the screams of women and children being slaughtered by their own people. Back then, I wasn’t haunted by the images of men dying by my hand, their eyes rolling back in their heads as their life spilled from them. Lives I took because that was my job.

  Now, I was exactly what the army trained me to be.

  A cold-hearted killer.

  By my hand or someone else’s, I had seen far too much death—in war and at home, there had to be a limit a man could reach before the taste of death became the only meal he ate? Just recently, the death of my own cousin, Justin, came to mind. Crazed and deranged, Justin took it upon himself to take on the Wounded Souls; his vendetta against what he thought was favouritism by Booth nearly took the life of Rafe’s woman, Peyton. My own father had been the one to point his weapon at Justin, the first time in many years he was forced to pick it up. Not to kill, but as it turned out, fate took charge and Justin died by his own hand. My heart broke for his parents, my uncle and aunt, not by blood but just as important.

  Sighing, I rubbed my palms against my eyes as if the harsh rubbing would take away the memory of seeing all that I have witnessed.

  Maybe this time, when I go home, I might spend time with the family rather than take off on my bike like I normally did. I missed out on a lot being in a Special Ops Tier 1 team, and my need to be alone meant I missed seeing my nephew come into the world and see Zander get his VP patch. Chase took off for Alaska while I was traipsing around in a jungle and my baby sister Willow chewed my arse out for missing her twenty-first birthday earlier in the year.

  Maybe Willow and I could take off for a week up in Queensland, go visit some theme parks and have some fun. Willow and I were really close, being the only girl in the family other than our mum, she had a hard time getting time away from the watchful eyes of the men in our family, not to mention the rest of the Club we grew up in.

  Settling on making some plans to do exactly that, I sat back in my seat, removed the coms, and let myself breathe easy. I didn’t want to think about what Gabe was going to say to me when I finally arrived back in the country. I could only imagine how pissed off he was going to be at me for going back in alone, not letting him in on the major’s orders. And, not that I would blame him for being shitty, him being the captain of the team, and his high sense of responsibility to his job as the commanding officer, he had every right to question the order.

  Deke, too, was going to cop a mouthful not only from Tank but from all the boys as well. I was still to have my say about his erratic behaviour on this mission, and he was going to hear it, just not yet. The poor bastard had enough to deal with, being taken and brutalised, the details not yet known, except what I have surmised by the injuries I was able to get a look at so far.

  I worried that Deke was not going to come back from that; not many soldiers did. But Deke was strong, he could regroup and compartmentalise what happened to him. After all, he was a Son; every member of Team FIVE was a strong and capable man.

  We had to be.

  There was no other choice.

  Suddenly, Dan let out an ear-piercing whistle, the noise dragging me from my head.

  “We’ve got a problem, Ghost,” he yelled, dropping to his knees to lean over Deke’s battered body. “Paddles!” he ordered, shouting out to the other medic who I wasn’t familiar with yet.

  Paddles?

  Sitting on the edge of my chair, I silently watched as Dan snatched the defibrillator off his colleague, pressing buttons on the machine.

  “No pulse Dan, charge it up to full!” the medic yelled with his ear to Deke’s chest, his shirt was torn down the middle, and I got a good look at what looked like a dark blue/black dinner plate-sized bruise that stemmed from his abdomen to his pecs.

  Dropping to my knees, I shuffled quickly to my mate.

  “Deke!”

  Grabbing him by the shoulders, I shook him hard, jolting him off the rescue board forcefully.

  “Open your fucking eyes, soldier!” I ordered panic setting in when I received no response from him at all.

  “Charged!” Dan called out. “Back up, Cole!”

  It took three seconds for me to compute that Dan was about to hit my mate with a powerful blast of electrical charge to his heart. A heart that didn’t seem to be beating.

  I felt hands push at my chest, moving me from Deke’s body.

  Falling to my arse, my eyes widened when Dan put the paddles to Deke’s battered chest.

  “Clear! Shocking!”

  Deke’s lifeless body jumped off the board, then slumped back.

  “Nothing! Charging.” The voice I didn’t know yelled, fingers on Deke’s throat checking for a pulse.

  “CPR while we charge, Cole,” Dan ordered, throwing a resuscitator bag at me.

  Jumping into action, I fitted the mask to Deke’s mouth and started pumping oxygen into his lungs, Dan taking the job of pumping on Deke’s chest.

  “Two breaths when I say, Cole,” Dan instructed me. “Go!”

  I quickly squeezed the bag two times, then watched as Dan did compressions, fast hard pumps on Deke’s breast bone.

  We did this for what seemed like hours but was literally only twenty seconds while we waited for the defib to charge back up again.

  “Clear, no one touch him.” Over and over, Dan shouted out commands, going back to CPR in between charges.

  “Come on, Deke, fuck you, breathe!” I growled, tossing away the plastic bag and taking the breathing over myself. Pinching Deke’s nose, I tilted his head back and began to administer my own breath to my mate.

  “Come on, Deke, don’t do this, mate,” I urged desperately, my eyes glued to his throat where his pulse should be.

  Twice more, Deke received electric shocks, and twice more, I breathed for him, but nothing was happening.

  “Fuck, his sternum just broke,” Dan shouted, his hands laying on Deke’s unmoving chest.

  “Don’t stop, Dan, for fuck’s sake, keep going!” I ordered frantically, shoving his hands off Deke and replaced them with mine.

  “Breathe, you fucker. Breathe!” Pressing down on Deke, the awful sound of bones crushing had bile rising in my throat.

  Fuck no!

  “Cole, stop mate,” Dan’s voice came loud and close, almost as if he was shouting in my ear. Arms wrapped around my shoulders, dragging me away from Deke.

  “No, no, no, he isn’t dead. Let me go, I gotta save him!” I cried out pitifully, wrestling to get out of the hold Dan had on me.

  “He is gone, mate. There is nothing more we can do, Cole.” Pity and sympathy coming from Dan, but I wasn’t listening to him. I didn’t want to believe that Deke was gone.

  “He can’t be; I got him out, I saved him, carried him so he could rest,” I heaved out, “he was joking with me, he can’t be gone.” My voice breaking with each word.

  The sound of a long, dull beep filled the cabin, the sound of a heart monitor letting us know that the person it was connected to was no longe
r breathing.

  “Coming in for landing,” Dane shouted out over the noise I hated and would hate forever.

  Shaking Dan off me, I dropped to my hands, my head on Deke’s lifeless chest, tears falling from my eyes and onto my mate.

  “You stupid bastard, why didn’t you wait for back-up?” Sobbing for the first time in my memory, I stayed like that until the helicopter landed and until my brother pulled me into his arms and held me back as Deke was taken away by the medical officers.

  “Stupid bastard,” I wailed again, fisting Dane’s shirt and held onto him crying.

  How the fuck was the team going to survive this?

  I’d sat in the same spot in the C-17 since leaving the base in the Middle East. I had not left my fallen comrade, not taken my hand off the top of the flag-draped coffin, had not slept or eaten. I just sat on the chair I’d pulled up and sat close to Deke the whole flight on the C-17, not leaving him once.

  Three days ago, I watched the life fade out of Deke, his death unfathomable to me even now days later. Days that were filled with briefings, reports and phone calls. Calls home to my captain and team, to my dad and mum. To Deke’s mother and sister.

  I stayed with Deke, insisting that he would never leave me had the roles been reversed. With me as his only team member with him, it was the least I could do to respect his memory until I got him home and reunited with the rest of the Sons.

  All the soldiers at the base helped honour Deke by taking turns to watch over his coffin, keeping the flame burning we lit for him when we returned in the helicopter with his body. Not just Australian soldiers, regular army and Special Ops, but also New Zealand and American soldiers from all branches of the military. Everyone stayed to show their respect for Deke’s service to his country.

  Dane, too, had not gone far from me. I got the impression my younger brother was worried about me after my meltdown in the back of the Black Hawk when Dan pronounced Deke was gone. I had seen soldiers die in battle, seen horrific injuries inflicted, some by the enemy and some I inflicted myself. Deke, however, was the first close mate and fellow member to lose his life during my time as a commando.

  And fuck was it messing with me. For hours, while sitting beside my brother in arms, I went over and over the mission, the raid and the rescue to make any sense of what happened. Trying to figure out if it was something I did that caused Deke’s death, but all I could come up with was Deke fucked up.

  He went rogue and lost all sense of his training.

  Why? What the fuck had he been thinking splitting off from the team? The ammo had been low, Gabe was getting the run around as usual from command, everyone too preoccupied with political protocol and not enough focus on the task of keeping our men alive.

  When were they going to learn that war and politics, while they went hand in hand to cause the problems in the first place—it wasn’t the answer to go about fighting it. These smaller countries we got sent to resented our presence ninety-nine percent of the time. They didn’t want or ask for our help, believing we were making the unrest worse.

  Maybe we were, I didn’t fucking know. What I did know was the life of a good man was over way too soon. Deke was not going to become a father; he wasn’t going to finish fixing up his beloved 1980 Mazda and wasn’t going to get laid tonight after we arrived back at the base.

  Deke was dead and I couldn’t help but hate the world just a little bit because of it.

  The phone call to Gabe came back to me, telling my captain and cousin what happened was probably the hardest thing I have ever had to do.

  “Fuck, Ghost, you better have a good reason for taking that order from the major,” Gabe shouted down the phone at me, his voice pissed off, but I detected his relief that I was calling him.

  Fuck! That was not going to last long.

  “Tank, brother, it’s Deke,” I croaked out. In the background, I could hear my team’s familiar voices, happy, playful bickering, with taunts of kicking Deke’s and my arse when we got back.

  A shrill whistle from Gabe broke the banter up and I suddenly found myself being put on speakerphone.

  “Cole, what is it? Where are you? Where is Deke? Did you find him?” Gabe peppered questions at me, one after the other. His voice tight and full of foreboding.

  I requested I be the one to tell the boys about Deke, breaking with tradition. It was usually down to the commanding officer to ring the head ranking officer of a team, but I knew Gabe and the boys would want to hear it from me.

  “I got him, Gabe, found him. We … walked … I carried him out, got him to the … HLZ.” My throat closed up, the words choking me. How the fuck did I tell them?

  “Cole? Where is Deke?” Kodah demanded, his voice tight and rasped. Kodah and Deke were best mates, and they spent time together when we weren’t active, both of them sharing a love of working on rotary engines, hence Deke’s Mazda project. Kodah had been helping him fix up the car so they could enter drag races during their time off.

  “They … the rebels, they tortured him. Fucked him up pretty bad, I didn’t know how bad until we got on the helicopter and Dan took a look at him.”

  That scene played on a reel in my head still, the compressions, his fucking bones breaking. I couldn’t get it to go away. The image of my brother dying in front of me added to the graphic horror I carried with me every day.

  With a heaving sob, I gripped the phone and said the words I had been dreading to say to my friends. My team, my family.

  “He is gone boys, he didn’t make it. We lost him.”

  A light turned on in the belly of the C-17 indicating the plane was close to landing. Hours and hours of watching over Deke’s body about to come to an end. I knew that Gabe, Bastian, Grill, Kodah and Rafe were waiting on the tarmac for us, no doubt Deke’s mum and sister too. As well as five of the most important men in my life other than the ones I fought alongside in battle. I knew without confirmation that the original Team Five would be waiting when the ramp of the aircraft lowered, waiting to honour Deke with their presence.

  “Nearly home, mate,” I whispered, running a hand over the flag Deke died serving. “Soon, the boys will be with you again,” I soothed Deke reassuringly. He would not like being in that box in the dark all alone. For all his bravery on the battlefield, Signal was not one for spending time with just himself. He wasn’t like me, he didn’t need quiet after a deployment or mission. He preferred to round up a pose and go out and get pissed, find a ring fight and talk Bastian into fighting for money. Always ending the night with a pretty lady on his arm.

  Deke loved women, all kinds. He didn’t see only outside beauty, he thought all women were worthy of loving, and he proved it. Grill used to joke his mission name should have been Casanova, not something as boring as Signal. His easy way, talking to ladies was almost legendary in some circles. His boy next door pretty boy looks rivalled that of Kodah, both blonde, both polite and oozing charm for the fairer sex.

  What a fucking waste that he was never going to get the chance to sweep that one special lady off her feet. That she would never get the honour of calling him her man.

  “You ready, Cole?” Dane asked me, standing at the end of the coffin, his face guarded and stoic. Dane put in for leave the minute he landed the Black Hawk, I don’t know how he received permission so soon after arriving for his deployment, and frankly, I didn’t give a shit. I was glad to have my brother with me, sitting quietly behind me, not saying anything, just there for me.

  Raising my head, I looked up at Dane and nodded.

  “Yeah mate, I’m ready,” I sighed, slowly getting to my feet. I was not ready, not by a long shot. I did not want to see what Deke’s death was doing to the rest of my team. I didn’t want to see the stress and strain of the wait they’d had to endure after my call to them. Team FIVE had a bond stronger than blood, deeper than any DNA could ever offer. This loss was going to change all of us, and my only hope was we all survived it.

  I stood facing the tail of the plane, the no
ises of landing replaced with the sound of the huge back door opening, slowly until it fell with a metallic thud to the ground to reveal five soldiers, dressed in camo gear, standing at attention.

  The sight of my mates hit me like a tone of bricks. The hell of doing this alone all of a sudden overwhelming me, my knees nearly buckling under me.

  “They are here, mate,” I murmured to Deke, still talking to him as if he could hear me. “Team FIVE is together again.”

  I watched in silence as Gabe led the way into the belly of the plane, his posture stiff, his face tight and full of emotion. One by one, the men I trusted with my life filed onto the plane, each one taking their place around the coffin of our fallen brother. Each one laying a hand on the top.

  Lifting my chin, I looked at each of my mates, seeing tears in all of their eyes.

  Gabe reached over the coffin and laid his hand over mine. His jaw ticking, his eyes red and wet with unshed tears.

  “You okay, Cole?”

  “Not even a little bit,” I rasped, hating my weakness as the tears fell down my cheeks.

  Fisting my hand, Gabe squeezed hard.

  “Thank you for bringing him home, brother,” Gabe said, his voice thick and sounding just as clogged as mine.

  Nodding once, I cleared my throat, unable to say anything but a rasped yeah.

  “Welcome home, Private Deke Williams,” Gabe pronounced reverently, letting go of my hand to grab hold of the coffin handle.

  With a nod from my captain, I got into position on the other side of him, and without any words needed, no commands necessary, Team FIVE lifted the coffin of our mate to our shoulders and proceeded down the ramp for Deke’s final journey as a member of Team Five.

  CHAPTER THREE

  COLE