The Wild One

by Nick Petrie

  The dog whined under the table. Adults held forgotten forks or coffee cups halfway to their mouths. Children looked up from their books or drawings. He searched their faces but didn’t see the boy from the picture. They stared back at him, a wild, one-eyed monster, bruised and swaying in their home.

  Then Karina pushed back her chair and spoke softly to them. She wore an elaborately knit sweater over dark pants, her hair in an elaborate plait that made her look like Xena, Warrior Princess. Peter thought of June Cassidy with an ache that went bone-deep.

  On the left, past couches and overstuffed chairs, he saw a wide wall of windows and a sliding door with a view of a blizzard. He got the door open and one bare foot in the snow before a hand caught his arm and pulled him back. An ancient man with a hawk nose, his face a map of wrinkles. Thorvaldur, Óskar’s great-great-grandfather, who had stabbed his neighbor with a hay fork.

  Peter struggled, but Thorvaldur was still tall and sturdy despite his years. With little effort, he moved Peter back to his small room and put him in a wingback chair while Karina made the bed. With the sheets in order, she turned on the small television in the corner. “For company,” she said.

  The screen showed a crippled tanker, smoke rising from the crumpled hull, then the embassy with blackened holes in its rust-colored walls. Then the famous American newscaster, silver-haired and patrician, asked the American president, “Don’t you feel that America must answer this unprovoked act of aggression?” Icelandic subtitles scrolled across the bottom.

  Karina made a face and changed the channel, but the interview was on the next channel, and the channel after that. The president looked gravely self-important. “As you know, America does not seek war, but this regime has behaved badly for decades—”

  “Ugh.” She turned off the television, then put a hand under his overheated arm. “Now. Sleep.”

  “Wait.” The static bloomed electric up his spine. He was afraid of the dead. “No!”

  On his feet again, he shook off her hand and pushed Thorvaldur aside. Karina called out and the uncles met him in the hall and picked him up by the armpits and carried him to bed.

  They held him there while he shouted. The walls crackled with lightning and the dark ceiling dropped like the lid of a coffin. He roared and thrashed in his fever. Ingo and Axel clutched his arms and Bjarni straddled his legs, but Peter threw them around like children. Faces grim, the Icelanders held tight as if each limb was a lifeline and Peter was the raging sea.

  Finally he lay spent and splayed across the bed. Thorvaldur watched thoughtfully from the doorway while Karina poured Bjarni’s little plastic packets into a tall glass of water, lifted Peter’s head, and poured the bitter brew down his thirsty gullet.

  Thorvaldur said something in rasping Icelandic. Karina snorted.

  “What.” Peter could only whisper.

  “He thinks you are like Odin with his one eye. He wonders if you plucked it out for wisdom, as Odin did.” Odin was the old Norse god of battle, death, and healing.

  “No,” Peter said. “Someone kicked me in the face.”

  Thorvaldur spoke again.

  “He says you look like you are still tied to Yggdrasil, the World-Tree. As Odin was when he sacrificed himself.”

  Peter had nothing to say to that.

  When the storm regained strength and the lightning forked once more, Thorvaldur called over his shoulder. The uncles held him down until sleep dragged him under.

  The weight of his tactical vest, the grit under his boots. The family from the Toyota, the fat man with the antique rifle, the girl with her clothes on fire, all those dead by his orders, they kept coming. He retreated toward his Marines, but Big Jimmy was dead, too, and Paul Watson and Sean Quinn, the men under his charge were bleeding all around him, reaching out with wet, red hands. They clutched at his arms, his clothes, his neck. It was suffocating, his knees buckling under their weight.

  He cried out and jerked awake, unable to catch his breath. He lurched upright in bed and saw Thorvaldur beside him in the wingback chair. The old man poured water from a pitcher into a tumbler and put it in Peter’s hand.

  Breathe in, he told himself. Breathe out. Finally he drank and held out the glass for more.

  “You were in war.” Thorvaldur’s accent was very thick. Outside the room, Peter heard children playing some game, and the clink of dishes.

  “Yes.” Peter felt strange, like a windowpane. “Iraq and Afghanistan. How do you know?”

  Thorvaldur held up a slim computer tablet. “I read news. You killed American in Reykjavík.”

  “No,” Peter said. “Not me.” He remembered that Brunelli’s people would come for Óskar, but he also felt Bjarni’s drugs working, medical-grade chemicals calming the static. “Do you have any weapons? Any guns?”

  “No guns. Just farm tools.”

  Peter knew the raid would come in the deepest hours of night. “What time is it?”

  “Before dinner,” Thorvaldur said. “I was in war also. Many years past.”

  And in halting words, with a voice like an old recording, crackling but strong, Throvaldur told the history of his war. How, at fifteen, he had crossed the ocean to Edinburgh with his three brothers in an open fishing boat to enlist in the British Army. They had volunteered to parachute into France ahead of the American invasion. Later, he had been at the Ardennes, a brutal winter fight, the last major German offensive.

  “We were children,” Thorvaldur said. “We thought it would be an adventure, a saga to tell our families. But my brothers, they all died. I tell their story because I dream of them still.” Eighty years past, and still the war lived inside him. “You dream also, I think,” Thorvaldur said. “Terrible dreams, yes?”

  Peter nodded.

  “Tell me.”

  Peter shook his head. He didn’t want to talk about the dead who walked through his dreams. He wanted to push away that wildness that grew inside him, push it down before it ate him up. He wanted to walk out into the winter mountains until the wind blew through his bones.

  Thorvaldur grabbed Peter’s bare shoulder with a gnarled hand, surprising him with its warmth. Something in the old man’s face, a kinship. “Come. Tell me.”

  So Peter did. He told about that dusty Baghdad street and the blue Toyota with bad brakes, the Sunni family just trying to escape their own neighbors, and three hundred rounds fired on his orders. He told about the drone strike on the wrong building, the woman blown from a window with her clothes on fire. He told about collecting the body of Paul Watson, killed by an RPG, his lower half still in the Humvee’s gun turret, his upper half blown thirty feet away. Sean Quinn, shot in the groin, his torn femoral artery draining his blood into the dirt. Big Jimmy, wounded in Iraq but killed by it nonetheless, long after he made it home. He told about all of them. He talked about Memphis. He talked until he fell into a fitful sleep.

  The dream came again, the Sunni family, the girl with her clothes on fire, his ruined Marines, the bloody grasping dead. The restless souls sought him out and held him tight and his lungs were squeezed empty of air.

  He woke, frantic, suffocating. He would not sleep. He lay awake in the dark wash of emotion and Bjarni’s drugs, listening to the noise of the house, wondering what time it might be.

  The dream returned. He ran but could not hide.

  He woke and couldn’t catch his breath. He lurched from the bed, or tried to.

  Again, he dreamed. And woke. And dreamed again. Bjarni’s drugs saturated his blood. The dead chased him. He felt their souls more strongly than ever.

  How many times he woke and slept in that fevered night, he didn’t know. Ten times or ten thousand. Until finally he stood at the edge of sanity, strength all but gone, and thought to speak to the dead. You want me? His voice stronger than expected, a bright clarion, a trumpet call. Then come get me. I’m a goddamn United States Marine and I’m
all yours, motherfuckers.

  This time, instead of sheltering behind the Humvee or running down a side road, he stepped into the open to make room for them. He planted his feet and lifted his arms toward the sky. The Sunni family, the woman with her clothes on fire, Watson and Quinn and Big Jimmy, they crowded in and reached out with desperate hands as if to bear him to the ground with their dead weight.

  But they did not.

  They wrapped their arms tight around him, they packed themselves closer and closer, the static filled him like a rising flood, but still he did not fight. He breathed in the stink of their ruined flesh, heard the buzz of flies around their wounds. He looked into their desperate lifeless eyes and spoke to them, one by one. He stood in their hungry embrace and took a deep breath, then let it out, again and again and again.

  When at last he woke in the small room, he felt lighter. He found a glass by the bed and took a long drink of water. Then he lay back again and closed his eyes.

  Okay, he told the dead. Come on back. I’m ready.

  * * *

  —

  When he woke again, the lamps shone plain yellow light. The swelling in his eye had gone down enough that he had binocular vision again. He still felt the static, but in the background, like the idling motor of a high-performance car. He wondered what time it was. The house was silent except for the sound of his own breathing.

  What had woken him? Something he’d heard in his sleep, a noise he couldn’t identify. His mind had been AWOL, but his ears had been listening regardless. He knew the living sounds of the house, the children playing, the adults talking and cooking and washing up, the dog’s nails ticking across the tile.

  But he didn’t know this soft rasp.

  His door was closed for the first time. Maybe Yrsa had made a decision.

  His stomach growled. He wondered again what time it was. He pushed himself out of bed, still naked. He wrapped himself in a blanket and went to the door.

  The knob wouldn’t turn. The Icelanders had locked him in.

  He adjusted his hand and tightened his wide, knuckly grip, then gave the hollow knob a short, sharp twist. There was a thin metallic snap, then the knob turned freely.

  The hallway was dark. The big room was empty of people. To the left, snow shone through the wall of tall windows. Ahead, past sagging couches and overstuffed chairs, a wall of bookshelves and an opening that would lead to more bedrooms. To the right, an orderly row of coats on hooks, then the long dining table and the kitchen. A clock told him it was three a.m. He saw no source of the unfamiliar noise.

  He reversed course. Past his sickroom was the white-tiled bathroom, its high-sided tub still holding the half-melted remains of the snow that had kept the fever from cooking his brain. At the end of the hall was a laundry room, its window showing the empty side yard and sheep barn. The snow had stopped but the clouds were low and dark. Beside the washer and dryer was a long table with neatly folded clothes. On the labels, someone had written Bjarni in black pen, as if the big man had gone off to Viking summer camp. Did Bjarni’s grandmother still do his laundry?

  Peter drew the line at wearing another man’s underwear, but he found a pair of soft black gym pants that fit well enough, and a dark-blue long-sleeved T-shirt that felt strange pulled over his shaved scalp. Almost like having his jarhead haircut again.

  Then he heard it, more faintly in the laundry room. The softest of rasps. No, not a rasp. A slow, soft crunch. Then another. And another.

  Peter needed boots.

  He grabbed wool socks and a hooded sweatshirt and floated back to the main room. Under the line of coats stood a row of boots. He didn’t see his own, but one of these pairs would do. He tossed the sweatshirt on the dining table and stood on one foot to pull on a sock.

  The sound stopped him. Slightly louder this time, the slow crunch that he now recognized as a cautious footstep in the snow. He turned to the wall of windows as a shadow came into view, silhouetted against the winter landscape. As it advanced toward the glass sliding door, another shadow followed silently, tracing in its footsteps. Behind that shadow, two more.

  Shit, shit, shit.

  They were here.

  61

  Tom Wetzel’s stomach lurched as the Valkyrja heaved over the top of the wind-torn wave, then fell into its trough and buried its nose in the sea. The forward windows showed only ocean for a long moment, until the little tour boat rebounded skyward and water streamed from its high, rounded bow.

  The Valkyrja’s captain, an elderly Icelander named Einar, grumbled to himself as he goosed the throttle and turned the wheel to angle up the side of the next giant swell, which crested well above the boat’s pilothouse. Fitzsimmons had to break the man’s jaw before he’d agreed to leave the shelter of his home fjord. Fist tight on the grab-rail, Wetzel suspected Einar was giving them a deliberately rough ride.

  Cassie and Thad, in tactical black, whooped with every wave, while Fitzsimmons stared silently at the darkness. Seamus just grinned at Wetzel, looking entirely at home. “You won’t die at sea, lad. I’m almost certain of it.”

  Wetzel clenched his jaws and swallowed hot acidic bile. Winners did not puke. It wasn’t the waves, but the fear, rising. Fear of drowning, yes, but also fear of failure. He needed to finish this thing. If Ash got access to Brunelli’s data, Wetzel’s life would go to hell in a hurry.

  Wetzel wasn’t physically afraid of Brunelli. But he was in awe of the man’s strategic skills, his ability to game out every contingency, to make all possible threads converge into a single desired outcome. Most of all, Brunelli was utterly ruthless in application of that strategy. He made Machiavelli look like a teenage girl.

  Brunelli would have multiple contingencies for Wetzel’s failure. Brunelli had more than enough money to retain the best lawyers and buy the congressmen with the most prestigious committee appointments. And if those plans didn’t come to fruition, he could flee to his oceanside home in Cabo Verde, whose lack of extradition and excellent exchange rate would allow him to live like a king.

  But Wetzel couldn’t afford that kind of parachute. His own risk was actually higher than Brunelli’s. As the man had reminded him several times already, Wetzel was in this up to his eyeballs, and he’d better get it done.

  No, Wetzel did not feel like a winner right now. But he knew who to blame. Peter Ash would die slowly and painfully. Wetzel permitted himself a cold, tight smile.

  Time to dish out his revenge and get paid.

  Unfortunately, his team had lost several days in the hunt. The accidental dose of date-rape tranquilizer was big enough to relax a rhinoceros, and after Wetzel talked with Brunelli, the side effects got ugly. The Jeep’s dark cargo compartment was no place for vivid hallucinations of ravenous monsters chasing him into a bottomless cave. Although Ash had managed to slip the roadblock, Wetzel hadn’t been able to keep it together long enough to face the police himself, so Seamus had turned the team back to Akureyri to regroup.

  Wetzel was glad he was the unit paymaster. Otherwise they might have dumped him drooling in the snow and gone on without him.

  The next morning, with Wetzel fighting a crippling hangover, they’d made a second try at the highway. But the snow was worse and the roadblock hadn’t gone away—if anything, there were more cops, and it looked like they were searching every car and checking identification.

  Wetzel knew the police were mainly looking for Ash, but apparently the fight at the hotel bar had been caught on camera, and the stepped-up scrutiny was a problem. Wetzel was the only one there on his real name. While the others could make it through passport control just fine, their papers wouldn’t withstand the scrutiny of an actual Interpol investigation. None of the team had wanted to see the inside of an Icelandic detention cell, so again they headed back to Akureyri.

  It took Wetzel most of the day to locate a charter captain who was available for a quick sightsee
ing cruise, and Fitzsimmons’s fists convinced Einar to take them into the open ocean. A December trip across the north coast of Iceland in the aftermath of a hurricane was a shitty idea in every way, but time was short. None of it would have been necessary if Ash hadn’t fucked up their plans at every turn.

  But Wetzel was more than motivated to follow through and get it done. Although Brunelli’s best-case was for the kid to be dead in that blizzard the year before, Wetzel wanted the kid to be alive and well with his memory intact. Kids were easy to scare. A little pain and blood worked wonders.

  Because Wetzel wanted that passcode for himself. He needed access to that server. Brunelli’s little motivational speech had made clear that, despite all his bullshit about loyalty, Brunelli wasn’t going to take care of Wetzel. So Wetzel needed to take care of himself. The passcode would give him the leverage to extract a financial parachute of his own.

  Because that’s how Washington worked now, or maybe how it had always worked. People didn’t care about ideology, policy, or making things work. They only wanted the power and influence to fill their bank accounts. Nobody cared if they broke the world or ten thousand people died, as long as they got paid.

  Wetzel just wanted to get his share, too, before the whole thing collapsed. More than his share, really. If he worked it right, maybe he could get Brunelli’s share, too.

  If Wetzel had enough money, maybe the fear would finally leave him alone.

  * * *

  —

  Captain Einar turned the tour boat into the waves, using the engine to hold them in place offshore. Seamus dropped the six-man Zodiac down on its davits and pulled the bow close. “Off you go, then.”

  “I’m staying aboard,” Wetzel said. “The rest of you can finally go earn your pay.”

  “You’re trained on this North Sea boat, then?” Seamus asked, pale face pleasant under the dark beard. “You can read the navs, manage the heavy seas, bring her home to Akureyri? Because I came up fishing off Strangford in a boat much like this one. Or are we trusting wee Einar to keep his bloody mouth shut?”