Shockwave (3 page)

The only thing we were good at doing wasn’t anything a civilized society would allow us to do. Not openly, anyway.

“Civilized”—that’s another word for countries that have laws, or rulers who
are
the law. When we were paid to attack such rulers, we were “rebels.” If we were successful, we instantly became “freedom fighters.” But we were never invited to stay and share that freedom. We were respected for our skills, but never trusted; who would trust a man whose loyalty was to his paymaster?

“Citizenship,” that we had—what we never became was citizens. We might be welcomed, even invited to march in triumphant parades.

And then be told to leave.

No matter—there was always another job waiting.

T
he deepest areas of any jungle will always be free-fire zones.

For a mercenary, “jungle” is just a word. It doesn’t have to be tropical. It could be a desert, or a mountain range. Any place that has value—under its ground or off its shores—qualifies.

But even the most arid ground could be valued purely for its strategic location. Portugal didn’t give a damn about those who called the territory they occupied “Biafra” when it broke from Nigeria. But it backed the new country anyway.

Of course, not for the humanitarian reason it so piously proclaimed. Portugal couldn’t launch its jets from Lisbon all the way to Angola to strafe and return without refueling, so a much closer air base would have been a prize. Thus, the tiny island of São Tomé—a Portuguese slave colony just off the coast of Nigeria—became the staging area for planes carrying “relief supplies” to the breakaway country.

But when Biafra disappeared under the tribal-religious slaughter that was never called “genocide” by world leaders, Portugal lost the last of its colonies.

Before that, after that, always … every new area teaches the same lesson. Don’t trust. Know when to look closer, when to look away, and when it’s time to go.

You never sign on when part of the inducement is an opportunity to loot. Even if the paymaster isn’t lying about that, nobody mourns a dead merc. Looting isn’t a safe thing to do, not even when the enemy has abandoned the area. If the temptation is strong enough, your backup can become your murderer in less time than it takes the thought to occur.

Some signed on to market the only skills they’d ever learned. Some wanted a lawless place to practice their perversions.

Some left their homeland to forget a betrayal that could never be avenged. Others left because they had already taken that vengeance—some so excessively that they could never return.

I could understand most of the reasons, but the addicts always puzzled me. They followed wars like fans followed their favorite soccer team. Hard-core fans, the kind that attend all the games in person, even when they have to travel some
serious distance. They never miss a match. And they don’t know what to do with themselves when the season ends. All they can do is wait for it to come around again.

It always has. It always will.

A
mercenary is a paid soldier.

He doesn’t wear a uniform; he never gets exchanged for a prisoner taken by the other side. International law says a mercenary is anyone “fighting under a foreign flag.” But international law doesn’t matter in places where no flags fly.

Mercenaries are paid, but that pay isn’t what drives them all. I served with men who already had more money than they could spend. Family money that had withstood everything from currency fluctuations to global conflicts. I don’t mean the long-distance men, the ones who could launch an assault with a sat-phone conversation. I mean the men who had to be on the killing ground to feel—I don’t know—just whatever it was that they felt once the fighting started.

I was done with that. All that. I had never chosen that life—it had been the only “choice” my life had offered. A boy who is freezing to death will enter the first door that opens. Even if the devil is standing behind that door, at least it’s warm in there.

The only man who had ever called me “son” had promised that, if I could be strong enough to walk past that devil’s door, the time would come when another would open. And
that
door would be the passage to the only thing I had ever truly wanted. If I survived five years in that furnace, I could be a person.
Become
a person.

“La Légion Étrangère is the only way for you, my son. Listen very carefully, now. You know where their recruiting office is, that place I showed you. I don’t know how old you are, and
they won’t, either. You are a good size, you shave, you tell them you are eighteen, they will not argue.

“But they will ask questions, and you must know the answers. So! Why do you want to enlist? Because you want to be a professional soldier.
‘Parlez-vous français?’
You answer
en anglais:
‘Only a little bit.’ Where are your parents? You are an orphan. And you didn’t want to stay with the caravan. They will understand from this that you are at least part
gitan
, a Gypsy. Probably a runaway, but that will not concern them.

“Then they will test you. How far can you run before you collapse? Will you get up and run some more if they order it? Physical pain will be your daily diet.

“But the hardest test will be the strength of your mind. That, they will test again and again. You will go without sleep for days at a time. For them, ‘adaptability’ is all. When they see how easily you can accomplish this, they will not ask where you learned, or who taught you—a stolen knife cuts as sharply as any you buy in a store.

“Whatever name you give them cannot be the truth. For you, this is natural—you don’t know your real name. But this you must never admit. So, to the recruiter, your name is Luca Adrian. It is the only version of my name that I can give to you—mine might still call in the hounds.”

Like everything else Luc had told me, that had proved true. But it was only part of the truth. What he never told me was that being a person doesn’t lead you to a place where you belong. What can a man who knows nothing but war do with the rest of his life once he leaves the battleground?

I didn’t blame Luc. How could he tell me? Luc had abandoned the search for that answer long before he found me.

From the moment I stepped past that first door, I never allowed my thoughts to wander beyond the next step. That’s how your mind works when you’re paid to walk trails to find
those you’ve been paid to kill. They know you’re coming, so your
next
step is all that matters. Congratulating yourself for slipping past a land mine can occupy your attention long enough to make you walk into a no-escape ambush.

When Luc first found me, I was afraid all the time. But from the moment he sent me away, I never knew fear.

I don’t mean I was brave. Or even reckless. But fear doesn’t take the high ground when you know the worst thing you might encounter would be better than what you had already escaped. When you already know how the story ends, there’s no suspense. I always knew there was only one way a life like mine could end—the only mystery was its timing. The skills we were trained in were useful only for delaying that ending.

For some of us, those skills were vastly overvalued.

T
hat was my life, never to fear death, and never to be unwilling to kill.

But I had seen too many become addicted to that life, and I was terrified of becoming like them. So, when I put together enough money to last me the rest of my bare-bones life, I stopped.

What goals did I have? Companionship? Who would want me? I carried so much weight that I couldn’t add another’s to mine and still keep walking. Friendship? I’d had friends. I’d watched Luc walk away. I’d carried the shredded body of Patrice back to base. Not back to his home—that was a journey he’d never make.

A mercenary might have comrades. But friends? Never. For me, that was never
again
—I knew that the loss of a true friend would be another slice off my ever-diminishing heart. And expecting every man in my unit to come back would be insane.

One reason I had so much money was that I had nothing to
spend it on. Nothing I’d ever wanted cost more than an hour of a whore’s time. But even if I’d saved every penny I’d ever earned, I would not possess the ridiculous wealth I had accumulated. That money had come from simply following the instructions of a man I’d never met.

He may have found me when I took a job that came over the wire. How he found out that my “team” was only myself, I don’t know.

I don’t know what drove such a man—I’d never met him—but it wasn’t any force I knew about. He was the one who told me when to put all my paper money into gold, when to change the gold back into cash. Time and time again. He was never wrong.

I liked to think he had been a comrade of Luc’s in the Resistance—he would be a very old man by now, but he wouldn’t need youthful strength to do what he did. The only thing I knew for sure was that I would never know his identity.

What I did know was that he could ghost past coding barriers the way I could a sleeping sentry—he’d proved that often enough. All I knew was how to access the encrypted line. Whoever was at the other end could waft through info-banks at will. A soundless breeze, too gentle to flutter a single leaf, never touching ground long enough to leave tracks. He’d helped me before. I wasn’t sure why, and never asked.

I guessed he
could
have been connected to Luc, somehow—I
wanted
that to be true. And I reasoned that this was logical—perhaps the cyber-invader’s father had passed his skills to his son as Luc had passed his to me.

I often told myself I had no need of either money or friends. But when that ghost asked me to do one last job—the one in that hospital—there was no way to refuse.

The job had been paid for in advance, by people who couldn’t bring themselves to do what their dear friend wanted them to do so terribly.

Their dear friend, dying. Kept alive because experimenting on humans wasn’t allowed in America, and nobody had yet decoded HIV.

That’s when I found Dolly, but finding her didn’t push either of us off our paths, not right away. She left for some place where they were treating advanced cancer patients with blackmarket stem cells. I stayed to finish my job.

I could have told her a bunch of lies. But considering what I’d been doing when we met, that would have been stupid. Not stupid because she would have seen through them, but stupid because I didn’t want her to think I would lie to her. Ever.

Just because I couldn’t explain any of that to myself didn’t mean it wasn’t true. I somehow knew I needed her to trust me if there was ever to be a chance for … for things I couldn’t allow myself to think about.

A
few months passed.

She never called the number I’d left with her, and I tried to make myself stop wishing she would.

Even though I now knew that Dolly was real, I had been trained never to wallow in hope—such feelings would only drip acid on my heart.
Je ne regrette rien
.

But I
did
hope. Not despite my will, but because of it. And every time that acid rained, I welcomed its burn. If my heart would only be strong enough, maybe that acid would etch in an image I might never again see with my eyes.

It was as if trying so hard not to wish for something
made
it happen. When she called, I didn’t waste the chance. I asked her if she would sit with me long enough for me to say what I wanted to say. She didn’t bother with a bunch of questions, not even “Why?” She just told me where she was.

I didn’t tell her a story. I told her the truth. Not just about what I’d been, but what I wanted to be.

We had plenty of time then. Almost a week. Mostly, I listened. I found out that Dolly had seen too much war—too much pain, suffering, death. The worst had been right in Switzerland, in a place where they treated torture victims. She told me she’d had to get out before she became like one of them. I didn’t understand what she meant, not then.

Dolly’s dream was to live somewhere on the Oregon coast. She loved the idea of being so near the ocean. One day, she was going to buy a little cottage there. She had scouted around for a long time before coming to that decision. But now she was sure—all she wanted was to be in a place where she could live in peace.

Only the last part of what she said I felt inside myself, as well. True North. That had always been my dream, too.

I’d had only one reason to live—it was second nature to me to avoid death. But, afterward, I had two more: to make Dolly’s dream come true, and to be part of it.

I
found the place Dolly wanted—it
had
to be, I told myself; it was just as she’d described it.

I asked her to come and see it. Just
look
at it for herself—see if I hadn’t truly been listening.

And to look at me—look at the man I
could
be. She had to know what I’d been doing in that jungle. So much blood had leached into that ground that even the most beautiful blossoms were poisonous. But I told her the whole truth of my life anyway, pushing all my chips into the middle of the table. Everything I had. Even the heart I thought had finally died with my last friend, Patrice.

I had to start from the beginning. The beginning as I knew it—the first years of my life were gone forever. That “clinic” in Belgium told me—in English, not in French—that I had “retrograde amnesia,” as if that explained everything. But they wouldn’t tell me anything else. Not even who put me there, or who was paying the bills.

All I knew for sure was that English—American English—was my mother tongue. That was as close to “mother” as I was ever to get.

No visitor ever came for me. I wasn’t envious—nobody in that antiseptically clean, soulless place ever got a visitor.

I think I was somewhere around nine or ten years old when I escaped. It was so easy, as if moving in the dark had always been part of whoever I was.

I got as far as the gutters of Paris. Always hungry, always afraid, always cold—until Luc took me home with him.