“President Puchkov, leaders from NATO, I call on you to join me in this promise. Together, let’s commit to securing the world for all people in every land. Allies, I call on your continued support and your friendship, and thank you for your continued backing thus far.”
Looking up, Jack closed his eyes as he stared at the stars. Somewhere, Ethan’s soul was in a better place, a place free of the horrors that had gripped the final moments of his life. An old quote came back to him, drifting up from his memories. “What if the stars above are simply holes in the sky where our loved ones look down on us from above?”
He had two stars in the heavens now. The pain from Leslie had faded, and what was left was a scar on his heart. He’d thought that scar meant the end, but Ethan had showed him a brand new life, a new side of himself, and he’d felt more alive than he’d ever remembered being. What was next, after Ethan?
It was too new to consider. For now, he’d fill his life with this purpose. With destroying those who took Ethan from him. With ridding the world of monsters and men who wielded evil and shocking malice as weapons.
Love had been ripped from his life. Let vengeance take its place.
* * * * *
It took hours to pull themselves free of the rubble in the tunnel.
Collard worked with Cooper’s team, but one man sat with Ethan at all times. They rotated through, counting Ethan’s shallow breaths and checking his pulse every fifteen minutes. The team doc did what he could, pumping a bag of fluids into Ethan and palpating his injuries. He set Ethan’s dislocated shoulder while Ethan was unconscious, and Ethan didn’t stir as his bone popped back into place. Collard frowned at that.
When they neared the tunnel entrance, Cooper slowed his men down and quieted everyone. They listened for ten minutes, straining their ears. They were listening for sounds of helicopters, or soldiers on the ground, or anything that spelled danger.
After their own helos fired on them, they didn’t know what danger meant anymore. Who could they trust?
What had happened?
Finally, the team pushed through the broken stone and the collapsed brick of the bunker entrance and escaped to the arid desolation of the Ethiopian highlands. Night had fallen, and in the hills, the darkness seemed palpably thick, an almost visceral smothering that covered the team. Discovering the burned bodies of two of their teammates didn’t help.
“What now, L-T?”
Cooper glared into the idle distance. He seemed to be a study in stillness, a portrait of calm, but Collard spotted his surging pulse just above his collar.
“We need to get this man to a hospital,” Doc said, crouching next to Ethan. “He’s not doing well.”
“There’s a village ten klicks to the west. We passed it when we came in.” Cooper drew a quick map in the dust, shining his red-tinted flashlight on the ground. “You two, hike in, find a vehicle, get it started, and get back here. Get all the fuel you can.”
The two men he pointed to nodded and took off, jogging into the night.
“When they get back, we head north. We make for Massawa in Eritrea. There’s a port there, and lots of smugglers. We get a boat over to Jazan, in South Saudi Arabia.”
“Saudi Arabia?” Doc spun in the dirt, staring at his L-T like he’d grown a second head. “Why not head for our base in Djibouti?”
“Those chopper pilots came from our base, and they fired on us. Heading back isn’t the right move. Not now.”
“But Saudi?” Collard joined in, questioning Cooper. “How does that help Ethan?”
“We drive all night, and we’ll be across the Red Sea by morning. I have a contact in Saudi. Someone who I’ve used before. We share intelligence.” Cooper’s eyes flashed. “Are you done questioning my orders?”
Doc raised his hands and turned back to Ethan silently. Collard nodded, and he stretched out on the dry dirt, lying against his pack next to Ethan and listening to his wet, shallow breaths. Doc hummed as he worked on Ethan, checking over his whole body before checking him again.
Above, the stars sprayed out across the sky, brighter than Collard had ever seen. The whole arm of the Milky Way was glowing, almost as if the galaxy was falling to the ground. He thought he could see from horizon to horizon, and every star in between, gleaming and glittering in the sky. It was beautiful, more beautiful than any sky before.
Cooper’s dark silhouette pacing against the spray of stars and Ethan’s labored, short breaths took away the majesty of the night. Collard squeezed his eyes shut and tried to block it all out.
* * * * *
Cooper’s men came back with a beater truck. The top of the cab had been sawed off and the interior was open to the sky. Collard and Doc piled in the back with Ethan and the others while Cooper rode up front, packed in with two other Marines. It was cramped in the truck bed, and Collard rode with Ethan’s head in his lap and his arms around his friend’s shoulders. His hand rested on Ethan’s chest, and he counted the fast rise and fall of his shallow breaths.
They drove through the night, cutting through dry washes and traveling across arid landscapes gone long empty. Desolate, lonely winds blew around the truck, whipping through their clothes and under their helmets. Mountain goats grazed in fields they blazed through, scattering in the night with angry bleats and the rumble of rusted cowbells. They didn’t stay to see if there was a shepherd nearby.
The truck petered out of gas after they blew across the Eritrean border, but with fifty klicks still to go. Dawn’s first light crept over the horizon, fingers of peach and aubergine staining the night sky like spilled watercolors. Collard hefted Ethan onto his back again, wincing at the load. Ethan wasn’t a small man and carrying him so many times—and leaping, running, and throwing him when they’d had to escape back into the bunker—had done a number to his back and shoulders. Still, he carried on. He couldn’t leave Ethan behind. Again.
They stayed to the backroads and the mountains of Eritrea until they neared the coast. In the brush, they stripped down, shedding their uniform insignia and burning everything, then moving ahead in just black combat fatigues, boots, their packs, and helmets. They looked like any ragged group of mercenaries plying their trade in the wilds of East Africa, assault rifles and all.
Ethan slung across Collard’s back may have raised an eyebrow anywhere else, but in Eritrea, no one cared.
They made it to the port in Massawa after the sun had fully risen above the horizon. Roosters crowed in the dusty streets, strutting after chickens and dogs, all scrabbling for scraps of food in the filth-strewn gutters. Massawa seemed like the dumping ground time forgot, a smash house of decrepit buildings and rotten structures from every era. Medieval Muslim palaces shared weeds and dust with clapboard shacks and rusted corrugated tin roofs. Minarets crowded alongside pirated satellite dishes, and bare, rusted rebar stuck straight out of squat mud-brick buildings, a builder’s ambitions for a second story thwarted sometime in the last two hundred years.
They moved down the main street, choking on dust and passing bored Eritreans watching them with dead eyes. No one lifted a finger at the men moving through town. No one bothered to stand from their stoops. Women and men slouched against ramshackle tin shacks as they tried to sell rotten vegetables, and shirtless children ran in the street kicking a deflated soccer ball, wearing sandals made from used car tires.
The port was nothing more than a crumbling section of concrete and a line of pylons stretching along the wharf. In the fifties, it might have been new. A sunken yacht was still moored at the pier, some Gulf elite’s toy that went down and was never retrieved. Simple wooden dhows were tied up together, handmade fishing nets folded with care and homemade fishing poles lined up in the bottom of each boat.
Cooper found someone who spoke Arabic, and then they were led to a single-masted dhow with a sail that was more patches than original canvas. Doc gave Cooper a dubious stare before helping Collard and Ethan into the boat.
The crossing was windy, and waves splashed over the side of the dhow and soaked the men. Collard tried to shield Ethan as best he could, but the salty water splashed over his face, and Ethan sputtered, coughing, but didn’t wake. That, more than anything else, worried Collard, and he kicked at Doc until the Marine stopped clinging to the side of the dhow and came to their side.
Doc was a sickly shade of green, but he checked Ethan over. After, he shook his head and leaned against Collard, shouting over the wind and the waves that there wasn’t anything he could do, not right now. Ethan’s injuries were internal, and unless they found a hospital and figured out what was going on, they’d never know what to do. He slapped Collard on the back, though, and offered up some grim Marine humor. “He’s stayed alive this far,” Doc shouted. “He’s got that going for him!”
The port at Jazan, Saudi Arabia, was worse than Massawa. Fifty yards out from the fishing pier, the rusted hulk of an oil tanker run aground lay on its side, half in the water and half exposed to the air. Sullen faces stared out from a rotten hole in the hull, sitting on the rocks poking through the iron belly of the tanker. Fishing lines stretched out from their poles, but the baskets beside the men were empty.
The dhow dropped the men off at the end of the fishing pier, a slanted pile of wooden boards that bobbed in the waves. Boulders and rocks ringed the edge of the wharf, and fishing boats were tied to ragged wooden stakes pushed in between the rocks.
Cooper paid the boater in MREs gathered from the men, his flares, and a canteen of water.
Then they were standing on the empty wharf in Jazan, Saudi Arabia, gazing up and down empty streets and listening to the silent morning. Not a soul seemed to stir.
“Now I need a phone.” Cooper squinted behind his shades. Ahead there was a gas station, maybe two hundred yards off. Collard shifted Ethan’s body, hiking him high on his back. He’d moved to the fireman’s carry, and though his shoulders were getting a break, his lower back was spasming.
One of Cooper’s men pulled out his cell from his back pocket and handed it to Cooper.
“No. Keep your cell phones off. We’re still on radio silence.” Cooper jerked his head toward the gas station. The advertisement for petrol was 0.48 Saudi riyals. “Move out to the gas station.”
With a sigh, Collard hiked after the Marines, gritting his teeth with every step. Ethan started mumbling, groaning with each of Collard’s steps. “Hang in there, big guy,” Collard grunted.
“Jack…” Ethan groaned. “Jack…”
“Not yet, buddy.” He rolled his shoulder, trying to stop the burning in his back. “Just me.”
Doc hung back with Collard, walking with him and Ethan instead of ahead with the Marines. By the time they arrived at the gas station, Cooper was already on the phone, speaking fast Arabic and wearing a heavy frown.
* * * * *
Faisal ordered his pilot to make the two-hour flight from Riyadh to Jazan in half the time. They screamed out of Riyadh’s airport ahead of a long line of commercial planes, citing royal business and playing the privilege card.
In the air, Faisal pulled out his cell phone and dialed the number Colonel Song had left him. The phone didn’t ring, but still, Colonel Song answered after only a few moments of dead silence.
“How can I help you, your Highness?
“Colonel.” Faisal picked at his robes and crossed his legs. He uncrossed them a moment later. “Colonel, I have some surprise guests coming for a visit.”
Silence.
“Guests I think you’ll be very interested in.” He hesitated. Inhaled. “I think you should come visit as well.”
“Who are these guests?” Colonel Song’s voice dripped with heavy scorn and serious suspicion.
Faisal swallowed. “American ghosts from Ethiopia.”
* * * * *
From the
USS Truman
, Jack was flown to Aviano Air Base in Northern Italy. The Air Force base doctor wanted to check him over again, but Jack refused, asking instead for a room at the BOQ where he could take another shower and lie down while the base prepped Air Force One for his flight back to the States. After Ethiopia, and after Jack had been evacuated out of country by the Marines, Air Force One took off with Secretary Wall, Directors Irwin and Luntz, Gottschalk, and the rest of the presidential motorcade that had escaped back to the airport. CAT Team Two fought their way out of the down chopper back to the airport and rescued Welby, bleeding out in the abandoned Somalian embassy. Welby clung to life all the way back to Air Force One, and the president’s Navy physician saved his life on the conference room table. The Ethiopian Federal Police fought the jihadis until the fighters dispersed and ran for the highlands.
Jack was alone—finally—in the BOQ room they’d found for him. The rest of the studio apartments had been emptied, the occupants told to go be busy elsewhere while the president rested for a few hours. He tried to feel bad about that, but it was difficult to feel anything at all.
The world seemed to not exist, or to only half exist, like seeing through the curved edge of a glass, or flipped around in a mirror. Since that moment in the Ward Room on the
Arleigh Burke
, when he’d lost everything, the world and everything in it had seemed to be nothing more than a series of scenes cut from a movie and assembled the wrong way. Actions in isolation. People spoke to him, but he couldn’t make out their words. Everything was hazy, garbled. It was all he could do to draw in breath after breath.
Aching loneliness clutched at his soul, but he pushed that away. No, there was no time for loneliness. He had work to do. He had to exterminate Ethan’s killers.
President Puchkov had phoned, and the call had been routed to Jack’s cell from Washington, DC. For the first time, he sounded something other than flippant and arrogant, and his deep Russian brogue had lingered on the heavy consonants as he gave Jack his condolences. “I will raise toast to your fallen men tonight,” he growled. “And count on Russia to help you bring vengeance for this attack.”
Jack slumped forward, leaning against the bathroom counter in the studio apartment, and tried to clear his mind. He kept his eyes down, not looking at his reflection in the mirror.