In the restored quiet, Theresa’s mother sank to a chair beside the bed.
The only part of Carl that looked gentle was his hand on his wife’s shoulder. “You never answered me. Who are you?”
Wulf recognized the impotent rage in the other man’s voice. He shared it. “Her escort.” He’d used that line around the hospital. “I flew in with her.”
Carl lowered his unibrow and patted his wife’s back before he slipped around the end of the bed—without, Wulf noted, showing his back. His eyes fastened on the identifying patches on Wulf’s uniform. “I spent 1966 with the 173rd Airborne in Cu Chi.” He lowered his voice. “Don’t shit me they put a guy from your unit on escort duty. Tell me. What’re you doing here?”
When Wulf didn’t answer, Carl continued. “I may sound like a goombah from Jersey, but I read the papers and listen to NPR like the smart guys.” With an Italian’s regard for personal space, he crowded Wulf’s chest.
Wulf stood his ground.
“I was listening to radio talk about the deceased senator when the phone rang, and then I heard my wife scream.” He grabbed Wulf’s arm with a grip that would have made a butcher proud. “I got that chest pain when you know, you just know, and I prayed I wouldn’t have a heart attack right then because Jeanne was gonna need me.”
Wulf let Carl steer him to the room’s farthest corner.
“My girl told her ma it was no big deal that she went back to Afghanistan early.” His whisper dropped so low that Wulf had to lean in to hear. “I was part of a shitty war too, and only guy I ever knew went back to ’Nam early had offed a hooker in Manila. So I’m putting that together with a guy like you standing at her door, and I want to know—” Carl was so close that Wulf could smell coffee on his breath, “—whadda-fuck is going on? You some sort of guard?”
The email he’d read meant maybe he was. But as drained as he felt, he’d be useless if needed. He realized he hadn’t eaten in over a day. Damn. No wonder his vision blurred when he looked at Theresa.
“Waiting for an answer.” Carl jibed him back to reality.
“Too many ears.” Wulf flicked his eyes at Theresa’s mother.
“Fine. Where and when?”
“Two hours.” Now that he’d seen Theresa, he had to recharge. He also had to call Deavers. “I’ll find you at Fisher House.”
“I got one take-away for you.” Not an ounce of the big man looked friendly. “Anybody messes with my girl, their gene pool gets drained, got it? I take care of my business.”
“So do I.” Wulf allowed his control to loosen for a moment, showing the other man how fifteen centuries of fighting could whet a man’s soul to a knife-edge.
“Our ways might be pretty similar, heh.” Carl half squinted. “You look like you got some coglioni. Maybe I could like you.”
Maybe he could like Carl too, and maybe he had a new ally for whatever lay ahead. Because sure as generals expected their shit shined, if the rest of that convoy had disappeared, something sucked.
* * *
When Wulf shifted the rental car to first gear in front of the free lodging for families of injured soldiers, a cigarette glow beside the porch marked where to stop for Carl.
“I don’t usually ride with drivers who don’t have references.” Carl lifted the papers and small flashlight off the passenger seat before sitting. “My group life insurance has strict rules.”
“Read that.” He had no idea how Deavers had acquired the FBI’s preliminary findings, but he owed his boss for emailing a copy. Wulf’s anger choked him to the point where he knew if he tried to speak, he’d scream.
Minutes later, Carl stopped reading. “I don’t get it. This says—” he licked his thumb to turn back a page, “—blast point of origin twenty-two to twenty-four inches above road surface.”
Wulf kept the car rolling while he fought for enough self-control to answer.
“I don’t understand.” But Carl’s tone said he did. His voice had the slow beat of a man whose world has capsized, like when he finds out his wife had an affair with his brother or his broker stole millions. Or his country fucked with his kid.
“The bomb was fixed to the SUV’s undercarriage, not buried in the road.” Speaking the words made them real, meant he could no longer believe this was a Taliban bomb. “It was professional. Almost surgical. Little collateral damage.” Hearing the words hammered home the message: Theresa’s injury was his fault.
Carl let loose and smashed his fist on the dashboard. German engineering could handle it, so Wulf let him pound and swear until he shuddered to a halt. “Gotta keep it together. For Jeanne.”
Several seconds later, his passenger’s breathing was closer to normal. “She’s got me doing yoga shit with her to help with my blood pressure.”
“You’ll need it.” He squeezed the steering wheel. If he let go, he’d pound the dash too, and they’d end up in the ditch. “There’s more.”
“Wait a sec.” Carl pulled something out of his jacket pocket. “Antacid?”
The pain of remembering Theresa and her Tic Tac box robbed him of speech. Nothing Carl offered could ease the boiling in his stomach when his soul whispered, This was Unferth. This was your fault.
His passenger crunched loudly. “Go on.”
“A photographer at the scene recalled a Black and Swan employee directing Theresa to the senator’s vehicle.” He’d stood in that parking lot as well, angry and frustrated as he’d watched, but he hadn’t stopped them. “Maybe that wasn’t a coincidence.”
“Why would an outfit like Black and Swan care about my girl? I don’t do business with them. I got no defense contracts, nothing international.” He floundered into silence.
“I don’t believe this has to do with your business.”
“She tell you what I do?” Carl’s voice had a sharper edge.
“No.” The moment of truth had arrived. More than once, Ivar had made his opinion about privacy clear, but Wulf no longer gave a bucket of camel shit. “My brother did.”
“Who’s he?”
“Beo Holdings.” Revealing the connection to his brother’s hedge fund was a gamble, but Carl deserved honesty.
“Shiiiit.” Carl’s reverence for money showed in that drawn out vowel. “And you’re a noncomm dirt pounder?”
“I like it that way.”
“So does my girl. Won’t take nothing from us except clothes from her mother. Always has—had—has, dammit—to do it herself.”
Wulf suspected his passenger’s raspy voice owed more to tears than cigarettes. Like anger, grief could be contagious, and his eyes prickled. The headlights revealed the vestiges of a downsized army post, nothing to distract him from his guilt while Carl composed himself.
Finally Wulf felt able to ask another question. “You handle drugs?”
“You got more explaining to do before I answer that.”
In the corner of the closed military-exchange lot, Wulf parked away from the pools of light illuminating empty spaces. Telling Carl what he’d involved Theresa in was the hardest thing he could imagine right now, but he took a deep breath and started.
“Theresa and I were in Italy together. It was...” Words couldn’t capture the dinners and laughter. “Wonderful. Perfect.” He didn’t want to continue. “Then there was trouble.” He wasn’t articulate enough to describe the carnage. “My Special Forces team is investigating heroin smuggling by Black and Swan. Thought it was only an army problem, and I could handle everything. But it was about more than drugs.”
“Yeah? What?”
If Carl swung at him, he’d take the hit. He deserved worse punishment for his arrogance.
“There’s an old feud between my brother and the man who controls Black and Swan, but I didn’t know who ran the company when we were in Italy.” Maybe because he’d barely slep
t in two days, opening up was too easy. If he wasn’t careful he’d start mentioning names. “They connected Theresa to me and my brother. Not sending her back sooner was a mistake.”
For a long minute Carl breathed loud and hard in his seat, as if struggling to control his reactions, until finally he said, “No one can send her anywhere. If she don’t want to go, you can’t make her. If she wants to go, you can’t stop her. She’s like that.”
Across the parking lot, a stream of happy couples exited a movie theater. At this distance, he couldn’t see their ages or dress or races. They were silhouettes drifting through pools of light and voids of dark, starting cars and driving away to their lives. Normal lives. Regular people. And here he was. And Theresa wasn’t.
“I had to cut her seat belt to get her out.” Where had that come from? He rested his forehead on the wheel and closed his eyes to block the lucky people. “The SUV was burning.”
“You saved her.”
“The convoy wasn’t following security procedures. No armor, no gunners. I told her not to go, but she wanted to give the hospital tour. Show how much more the Afghans need.” He tasted salt on his lips. “I didn’t stop her. I didn’t try hard enough.”
“Hell, I can’t stop Jeanne from nothing even though I pay the credit card bill.” He stuffed another handful of antacids in his mouth. “So’s you know, fringe benefit of seniority and being a true Italian, I don’t have to do everything. I limit myself to real garbage and let the young wannabes handle the other shit.”
“Good. Because I will destroy the man behind this, and Black and Swan, and their drug network.” A molten core of vengeance filled his emptiness, but to be free to take down Unferth, he had to know that Theresa was safe. “I can’t guard her. The army won’t believe she needs security. Can you protect her?”
“She’s family.”
He could predict Carl’s next answer but still offered. “You could all disappear quietly. We’ll find private doctors in Switzerland. A beach, if you prefer. Anything you want, my brother and I will pay.”
Carl blew through his lips like a horse. “First, I pay for my family. Second, Jeanne can’t be quiet. Third, I got a business to run. I won’t hide. Anyway, Theresa wouldn’t do it.”
“I had to ask.”
“Understood. I forgive the insult.”
“Then we’ll send men, across the street from your house, 24/7.” Ivar would be furious at both the promise and its revelation, but he always paid blood debts.
“I’ll take care of inside. My boy Raymond lives at home and I’ll set my nephew above the garage. Jeanne loves feeding him.”
“You understand the risks.” Wulf put the car in gear to return to Fisher House. “Black and Swan planted a bomb on a vehicle inside a secure army compound. They killed the head of the Senate Armed Services Committee. They won’t think twice about some people in suburban New Jersey.”
“I got security.”
“So did the army.”
Chapter Twenty-One
The fifth arrondissement of Paris eddied around Draycott. The knowledge of how much Jane would have enjoyed the bistro across the Boulevard Saint-Michel made him hunch his shoulders and stare at the pavement. He knew what he looked like: a solitary vieillard, wearing his only suit of clothes, beat thin by living. For the first time in forty years, what he looked like mirrored the truth.
As he stepped to the curb, a chic university student, the type who might have been friends with his stepdaughter in other circumstances, swerved from his path. Her tilted head and gently curved mouth showed pity before she glanced away, embarrassed by the inadvertent eye contact.
The white business envelope contrasted with his dark glove, then momentarily with the bright-yellow postbox until it disappeared through the slot and became one of millions of letters in the French postal system. After flying over the Atlantic, it would be routed to the U.S. Armed Forces mail-processing center on Long Island, where it would mix with thousands of cards and packages returning across the ocean to Afghanistan. Once there, it would reach the hands of a soldier surely seeking vengeance identical to his own. All the information Draycott could offer Wardsen was in that letter.
The first missile had flown. Now he needed to plan the next salvo against the Director.
* * *
“Cave-in?” Wulf offered Deavers another death scenario.
“Recovery ops might fly in an excavator.” His captain handed Wulf a nonalcoholic beer, the only piss allowed on deployments, then tilted on two chair legs.
In the weeks since the senator’s death, the high-level attention dumped on Camp Caddie had alerted pencil necks outside Special Operations Command to Wulf’s unauthorized forays into Pakistan, Italy and Germany. The memo front and center on Deavers’s desk demanded copies of orders, expense vouchers, supply requisitions and flight requests pertaining to Staff Sergeant Wulf Wardsen. The list of recipients filled twelve lines.
Wulf wouldn’t be going home with the team.
The near beer tasted like fizzy metal.
“Walk away. Load and go.” The can in Deavers’s fist crinkled. “Tonight. I don’t want freaky-acronym spooks snagging you—”
“We’ve been over that.” They’d located the mother ship of the opium processing facilities, and he refused to disappear before finishing Black and Swan. With his chest feeling like a squeezed-out meal pouch every time he thought of Theresa, he didn’t really care about the details of his pending death, but he played the game. “What about an explosion?”
“You know IEDs.” Deavers focused on his empty can as if it was a picture of his baby son. In the years he’d known Wulf, he hadn’t broken the team’s unspoken command: Don’t ask about Wulf’s difference. But lately the edges of that rule had started to fray. “They always recover some DNA.”
“Can’t.” Other eras, other battlefields, he’d left remains to be identified, but simplicity was a casualty of modern science. No DNA left behind.
Theresa left hers. He ached to take her pain and give her his healing ability, but he couldn’t. Yesterday he’d broken down and phoned Carl, who’d told him she was up on crutches and might be an outpatient by September—if she avoided infections, if she didn’t develop bone spurs, if, if, if. Although the agony of fitting and learning to use a prosthetic remained and her swelling wasn’t fully controlled, her progress seemed miraculous.
After six years, his friend read his mind. “She’ll pull through. She’s tough.”
They returned to the satellite images of the heroin facility. On the surface it looked like ordinary mud-and-concrete buildings, a blip of nothing two klicks along the road to nowhere. But ground-penetrating radar scans revealed tunnels connecting several underground spaces, including one room large enough to house a basketball court. A thermal scan showed a glowing generator that pumped power to the hidden complex. This was no simple farm spread.
“Two Westerners have visited since surveillance began.” Deavers pushed more photos across the desk. “Face recognition IDs this one as a Black and Swan guy, but this one’s unmatched.”
“CIA?” They hadn’t yet linked anyone in theater to that call from the disposable phone in Italy.
“Cruz is still looking.” The medic had the best computer skills on the team.
“So we hit while the contractor’s there.” In older photos a dry streambed marked the south edge of the compound, but in recent ones it had morphed into a churning brown mess. Wulf tapped the spot. “This can’t be snowmelt.”
“Tail of the Pakistan monsoon’s reaching here too. Probably a lively stream through September.” While Deavers talked, he hunted for his can of chew. “Maybe farmers will grow some fucking wheat next spring instead of poppies. Feed their kids instead of Russian junkies.”
“Skip the explosions and shoot me. I’ll fall in the water and be swe
pt downriver.”
The captain snorted around the wad in his lip. “I won’t call you a wet pussy. Cruz will.”
“You want to go in that river wearing fifty pounds of equipment, be my guest.”
“Last time we practiced self-rescues with full gear, I crushed you by what, nine seconds getting out?” Wulf’s boss smirked at the usual team gripe about extra pool training. The competition between Deavers and the navy officers across the post in SEAL Team 6 wasn’t always friendly.
“Only a loser remembers how much he wins by, sir, and this water’s balls colder than Gardner Pool.” He had one last issue to tackle. “What about bringing an embed photographer? The pics can stand in for a body.” Laura would play nice for a story like this.
“No press.” Deavers spit into his empty can. “Too much can go wrong.”
“With outside documentation, the Pentagon can’t bury this in a secret award citation.” Leaning across the desk, he prepared to convince his commander to go big as Beowulf’s words from fifteen centuries ago filled him: Better to avenge than to mourn. “The chief, the doc, the senator—” his finger stabbed the plywood three times, “—I don’t want to destroy a shipment or a lab. They can make more opium. I want to sink Black and Swan’s whole fucking boat, cancel their cushy deals, sever the world logistics contract and stop every shipment.” Pens rattled when his fist hit the desk, but it didn’t begin to release the anger that had built in him. “The army pays their damn mileage! I want to hack until they bleed.” Like their victims—
“Nothing like a personal cage fight, huh?” Deavers lifted his palms to surrender to Wulf. “You vouch for this snapper?”
“Absolutely.” Pulling himself back, Wulf sank into his seat. “She’s an old friend.”
Deavers raised his eyebrows, as if questioning Wulf’s sanity. “Another woman?”
“I’m her godfather. I taught her how to ride a bike.” And drive. And shoot. And mock Ivar.
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