by Ben English
Jack and Alonzo kept her around to ask the Golden Questions, to maintain the team’s strengths, and keep them capable of acting. This last part was the trickiest.
Most psychologists and psychiatrists never see combat, and struggle to understand the particular needs of the warrior. They have no professional or personal frame of reference for healing humans who have other humans doing their best to kill them. As a lifelong student of the mental side of elite combat performance, Nicole intimately grasped that the warrior ethic was different than the Judeo-Christian ethic. She understood the human dimension of fighting and the capability of men and women in survival situations.
Soldiers, for example, typically burn through several doctors upon returning home after combat. Post-traumatic stress disorder was a reality, and each branch of the military had recently begun mental fitness programs aimed to help veterans deal with it before they re-enter civilian life. Nicole helped design and run the first such successful program for the U.S. Navy.
Elite warriors, however, didn’t usually suffer from PTSD. A separate set of mental tools allowed them to deal with the horrifying realities of combat in a manner for which the average civilian (and the average doctor, unfortunately) simply had no frame of reference. It was the same mentality Nicole had seen in others who thrived in situations of unbelievable stress—emergency room medical teams, paramedics, firemen, Olympic athletes, and survivors of horrific accidents. And assassins.
She understood Jack Flynn and Alonzo Noel better than most; could judge when their readiness and mental fitness met the requirements for whatever version of present circumstances they found themselves in. They counted on her to tell them when to pull the team back—not always, but often.
They trusted her version of their present readiness because she strove so hard to understand their past. Men like Jack and Alonzo didn’t appear miraculously after a weekend survival school, an Eagle Scout board of review, or even a few years in the military. Whatever vector of circumstances caused the world to produce men like Jack and Alonzo stretched back to their shared childhood.
This idea led her to the theory that the two men could only be understood when studied together. It was the nature of their friendship. Their personal world, the version of reality kept solid between the two of them, was governed by loyalty, character, and honor—much more so than the world around them. As long as Jack and Alonzo held each other with such integrity and regard, both men were able to reconcile any measure of chaos in the external world, and act with terrifying effectiveness.
It was rare such friendships survive past childhood, but there you have it. This was one of the operating principles behind the team, a sociable resonance which bound them to each other.
Really too bad that Irene Archer wouldn’t join the team; the resonance between Jack and Alonzo included her as well. Nicole observed her joke and play with the two men all the way to the airport, laughing through her fatigue. Irene snapped picture after picture from the front passenger seat.
Jack drove, playing straight man to his friend. Nicole sometimes wondered if they’d ever really grown up at all—then she remembered that Irene was from Forge as well.
She waited for the conversation to lull. This proved impossible, so she waited for Alonzo to pause for breath, and asked, “Did you three know each other growing up?”
“Oh yeah,” Alonzo said. “Irene was a few years younger—”
“Still am,” she shot back. To Nicole, she added, “It was a small town.”
“Still is,” said Jack.
“It was a great place to be from.” Alonzo said.
“Still is,” the three of them said together. Nicole found herself smiling. Resonance.
Irene took a picture through the window with her phone. “I got to know Jack the day I fell in the river.”
“I remember that,” said Alonzo.
Jack stopped the car so she could take a second photo. “I remember I pulled you out on the opposite side of the river than you wanted, and you made me drag you back across.”
“What were you doing that day?” asked Alonzo. “Not fishing. Looking for gold from the old Wells Fargo shootout near Greer, wasn’t it? Was that your first crime scene?”
“She was hoping to see the ghosts.” A smile played at the corner of Jack’s mouth.
“Hey, that reminds me,” said Irene. “I’m going back to Idaho again this August, you guys should come. Big family reunion. The Senator’s even coming to town.”
Neither man responded immediately, and Nicole noticed the subtle stutter in their body language as each of them paused to discard their first response. Interesting. She wasn’t surprised to notice hesitation from Alonzo, but from Jack?
Children are vulnerable. Mentally walking through his memories of childhood, Jack was less than bulletproof.
She was struck again by the idea that something happened in their shared past, some event whether extraordinary or mundane, which had set the trajectory of their friendship just so that they would enter each other’s orbit again as three exceedingly peculiar adults.
Jack met her gaze in the rearview mirror. His eyes were red-rimmed from lack of sleep, but clear. “What’s on your mind, Nicole? You’ve had a question for me ever since we got back. Let’s have it.”
Alonzo tilted his head, curious.
Very well. With the forthright calm she knew both men valued, Nicole said, “Exactly who is Mercedes Adams and what does she have to do with Alex Raines?”
Before either Jack or Alonzo could answer, Irene turned around in her seat. “Why do you want to know?”
Surprised at the abrupt note in the other woman’s voice, Nicole found herself nonplussed. “If she presents a threat or a distraction to the team’s resources or ability to focus, I need to understand—”
“And there’s no room for personal space on the team, is that right? So you can pry right into any intimate—”
“Irene.” Alonzo reached forward and touched her shoulder. “It’s alright. She’s doing her job.”
The atmosphere in the car darkled. Nicole leaned back into the seat, baffled at Irene’s defensiveness. The timing of the question was off, by a long shot. Alonzo drummed his fingers on his knee, but that could have been all the coffee. Only Jack seemed calm.
“It’s like this, Irene,” he said. “Nicole keeps track of our medical issues, including psych evaluation. She’s got the right to pull any of us off a mission if she thinks we’re not ready.” He found Nicole’s eyes again in the mirror. “If she decides I’m not fit for this mission, if there’s some kind of conflict of interest, I’m off.”
Irene looked at him with a measure of curiosity. “Then what happens?”
“Then my role on the team changes, or we turn all our case files over to one of the official government intelligence agencies. It’s happened before.”
“Seems like a decent idea.”
“Well, of course,” said Alonzo. “We’re remarkably smart.”
Irene smirked. “You cribbed it from Star Trek. Ship’s doctor can pull the captain off a mission.”
“Damn, Jack, nothing gets past her.”
“She’s on to us.”
This little exchange almost but not quite earned a smile from Irene. She looked at Nicole again. “You’d really do it? Pull one of these big, tough guys off-mission for an emotional reason?”
“It wasn’t my idea.” Nicole thought a moment. “You knew Jack’s wife, right? Victoria? She was the best at judging someone’s emotional involvement and intellectual control. She knew that survival depends on balancing the two.”
It really wasn’t much more complicated than that. Nicole found it ironic that if a person distilled all the psychology, cognitive science, neuroscience, and organizational behavior of the last hundred and fifty years, they’d find that the front page of every Cosmopolitan magazine is essentially dead-on correct. People are emotional. Always homo but most times not all that sapiens. Prone to do all kinds of crazy things for
reasons they aren’t consciously aware of, and one of the main jobs of the conscious mind is to keep life tied together into a coherent story, a self-concept.
She wondered how far Jack would go, consciously or not, to tie the loose ends of his life together.
He winked at her. Jack’s eyes were focused, he was present and aware, but she knew a part of him roamed the past, sifted it like an acre of diamonds. “Victoria understood how memory works, and how memory and emotion can be an asset or a problem.”
The airport loomed. With nearly an hour before the plane was ready, they filed a flight plan and then decided it was lunchtime. Alonzo wanted to eat onboard the QSST, but Jack was adamant they not take advantage of the flight attendants. He suggested Irene play tourist as long as she was able, so she found them a shaded open-air café with a view of the ocean. Found Alonzo a mojito while she was at it.
“No one’s going to believe you were in Cuba,” Jack told her. “You’re less tan than when you got here.”
“I need an island,” Alonzo announced. “When I have my own island, you can all visit. Just needs a long enough runway for the QSST.” He was quickly mellowing. Nicole wondered if it was the day’s first mojito.
“So. Mercedes.” Alonzo set his sunglasses on the table. His Spanish eyelids vanished under the warm noon, and the bright air didn’t seem to bother him. “The team’s official records only go back to about a year before you joined, Nicole. There won’t be anything written down about Mercedes because we knew her a long time before—well, even before I met you in Annapolis. We were just kids.” He gave her a quick sketch of the summer he and Jack were seventeen. Bare bones, nothing embellished, almost military in its crispness.
With two exceptions. He made a rather elaborate effort to describe Merrick and Kyle Dremel and their pack of cohorts as venal yet comically malevolent yokels, drawing direct literary parallels from both Deliverance and The Apple Dumplin’ Gang.
This level of detail was only superseded whenever Alonzo circled back to describe Mercedes in her black bikini. Clearly, this was his favorite part of the story. Nicole looked up at one point to discover both waiters and the cook himself finding reasons to linger at the adjoining table.
They took the opportunity to order food. Irene requested a drink of her own and made an attempt at hijacking Alonzo’s story.
“By the time Jack got back from his last swim meet,” she said, “Mercedes was gone. None of the doctors in Forge could figure out why she collapsed, and our grandparents decided that rather than find an emergency internist in Idaho they should send her home to California. This was right at the same time her father passed away. They were both in Stanford Medical.”
Alonzo finished his mojito. “Nobody knew where Jack was. The day before school was going to start, I had to register him for classes, get him a locker, the works.”
“We found Jack in the city library. He was sleeping overnight there, when he was sleeping.”
Jack gave a tiny shrug. “The pool was closed, and the librarians liked me. My overdue fines covered their salaries.”
Irene continued. “He’d read every medical book in the library—”
“He even started doing research on the ‘Net. That’s how we really knew he was serious. Before that day, Jack didn’t even have an email address.” Alonzo fixed Jack with a careful, sad grin. A question hung between them.
Coldest Winter of His Life
Forge, Idaho
“Is she worth it?” The stacks of books swallowed Alonzo’s voice into a whisper.
Jack thought a long moment. “It’s so easy with her, Al. It’s just so easy.
“It’s not black, it’s not white.
“It’s not hot, it’s not cold.
“It’s just so easy.”
Irene at age fifteen was prone to despair with remarkably little effort. “She doesn’t even know I told you about her operation at the hospital. It’s tomorrow afternoon! Even if you drive all night, you’ll never make it.”
“Even if we took turns driving,” Alonzo said. He came to a decision: “You’ll fly. The last plane leaves Spokane in two hours, we can make it if we leave right now.”
“An airplane? And I pay for this how?”
Alonzo shrugged. “My mom gave me eight hundred bucks for clothes this fall, but I’m covered. Got a bunch of clothes in Australia before I came home. Damned if I’m going to have you moping around like this our whole senior year.
“Come on, Jack. Move your ass. Might not be this easy again.”
*
“You want to go where? Palo Alto?” The red-haired woman filling the seat next to Jack giggled, not unkindly, setting her layers ajiggle. “Why on earth are you flying into the Oakland airport?”
Her overlapping clothing formed another concern for Jack, especially as he compared her knit scarf and thick, woolen hat with the fog and cloudrack outside the plane. In his pool shorts and summer shirt, he was cold for the first time in months. If the pilot’s weather report was correct, there was a forty-degree difference between Forge and the Bay Area.
But it was August, he insisted to himself.
Ever read Mark Twain, genius?
He vaguely remembered something about the coldest winter of the writer’s life being a summer in San Francisco, then shrugged. He’d find a way through. Even if he did start out at the wrong airport.
He found it hard to believe they needed more than one. “You mean there’s two airports?” he asked his companion.
She looked at him like he’d suggested something indecent and acrobatic. “Boy. There’s three international airports in the Bay Area. You had any brains at all, you’d have flown into San Jose. Here, look at this. I’m Kathleen Nutt, by the way.”
Mrs. Nutt flipped through the tourist magazine from the pouch in the back of the seat (the one with the illustrated, neatly-folded safety instructions. As a lifeguard, Jack thought this was a brilliant idea. But what was the tiny white bag in there for? Did they expect him to keep his wallet and other valuables in there? There were so many rules. Jack felt like a fish far, far out of water. No one else seemed to be putting anything in the little white bag, so he kept his wallet to himself). Eventually she found a stylized map of the Bay Area, and walked him around the San Francisco Bay, clockwise. “Oakland, Fremont, San Jose, (Palo Alto,) San Francisco. And that’s not mentioning the North Bay. San Pablo Bay’s bigger than the San Francisco Bay, of course.”
Of course. Jack hadn’t only picked the wrong airport, he’d picked the wrong side and wrong end of the bay. One of the Bays.
Mrs. Nutt fidgeted. “My husband’s sister lives in Woodside. We haven’t seen her in awhile.” She patted his hand. “When we land, I’ll call Bart. We’ll see what he says.”
Okay, finally, here was something Jack understood, thanks to the Forge public library. BART (Bay Area Rapid Something-something) was San Francisco’s low-cost, mass transit system, some kind of subway. He didn’t understand how that worked with all the water (clear glass tubes, obviously), but perhaps he could ride it to Palo Alto.
Jack felt instantly better. He was on an adventure, and he’d figure things out as he went along. At least he was traveling simply, without luggage of any kind. There was something to be said for only carrying cash, even if none of it was your own.
He took a good long look at the map, wishing it showed more detail. On the other hand, if the mapmaker decided that this was all the level of detail he’d require to find his way between cities, he should trust the mapmaker. Jack would figure this place out; it couldn’t be that difficult.
Then the plane slipped down underneath the clouds and he saw one continuous, contiguous city, ribbons of freeway and curling urban streets grown in on themselves, subdivisions of homes sectioned like the shell of a nautilus, almost all of them roofed like a McDonalds. The paved world below was only interrupted by a vast, wide expanse of water reflecting the blunt clouds. He first took this to be the ocean, then Jack saw hills on the other side of the
bay at the edge of his vision, decorated even more thickly with humanity.
Lacking a better plan, he followed the mass of human cargo off the plane and down to the baggage claim. Advertisements for jewelry and computer network components screamed silently at him from the walls. It was one vast, glassed room, and it made him think he was inside an aquarium. Tightly-packed schools of brightly-colored people flitted here and there in the cavernous fish tank. He was hungry until he saw the price of a hamburger. At this rate he’d exhaust the remainder of Alonzo’s cash before breakfast.
He tried Mercedes’ phone number as he had in Spokane, again with no luck. She didn’t know he was coming—had no idea he even knew about her surgery—would she even stay at home the night before her procedure?
The baggage claim area quickly emptied out, leaving Jack alone once again with the monumental Mrs. Nutt. “They tell me such disturbing things,” she said gaily. “Apparently, there was a mistake with someone’s luggage yesterday. It stayed in Spokane.” She crept closer. “So they sent yesterday’s luggage in place of my luggage today. My suitcase will get here tomorrow. Now, the canned steelhead doesn’t worry me, but the frozen elk burger is something else altogether.”
Just as Jack gathered himself to run for his life, the outer doors slid open. A gout of possibly arctic air around a long, flapping coat announced the presence of one of the largest men Jack had ever seen, shedding fistfuls of rain from a thick mustache and full white beard. His hair, still mostly dark, was gathered into ponytails. “Katie!” he said, “Katie-girl, where are you? The hog is double-parked!”
His eyes fixed on Jack. “This him? This the kid who should have flown into San Jose?”
He stepped forward to clasp hands, and Jack was struck by how easily he moved. His oilskin jacket glistened under the wet lights, and strength rolled through his shoulders and flowed through his entire body and down into Jack as they shook hands, though his grip was gentle. The skin around his eyes and forehead were unlined, and Jack couldn’t guess at his age. He reminded Jack a bit of Mercedes’ grandfather.