“It’s my job to give a fuck about the odds.”
“Lee,” Sam snapped, surprised at his own anger. “You told me, outside of that fucking gas station when I thought everything was going to shit because I’d lost my squad, you told me that this is what leaders do. They worry about the people under them. But they understand that some of them are gonna die in the process. That’s the nature of war, you said. You told me that you couldn’t obsess about it. You couldn’t let it break you. Don’t ever let it break you! So was that all fucking bullshit? Have you let it break you, Lee? Because you can’t. You fucking can’t! I didn’t let it break me, and now it’s time for you to take your own goddamned advice!”
“Alright, shut the fuck up,” Lee growled, but it lacked the heat that Sam had expected in response to his mutinous tone.
Breath rushing in and out of his throat. Heart beating in his ears.
“You said you could hold out for another twenty four hours,” Lee said. “Is that still true?”
Sam looked out the open office door, through the atrium, where Marie and Jones stood quietly, watching him, backlit by the daylight pouring in through the front of the building. Greeley hadn’t given up on finding them. The search parties were getting closer.
Sam had no idea if he could actually make it twenty-four hours. But he realized that everything hung on his answer. He’d leveled the charges on Lee, and now Lee was levelling them back. Just as Lee needed to take his own advice, so did Sam. He had to remain unbreakable. And sometimes, in the face of seemingly impossible odds, you just had to believe that you’d see the other side of it.
“Yeah,” Sam said. “We can hold out.”
A long sigh. “Alright, Sam. There might still be a chance. I’ve got to go out on a limb and do some shit I am highly fucking uncomfortable doing, but I don’t think we have an option right now. If you can hold out for another twenty-four hours, I will try to get a team of operatives into Greeley to support you. They won’t be from our people. And I can’t even guarantee you that they’re coming. I have to talk it over with some folks. But…I’ll try.”
“So you’re coming?”
Please don’t make a liar out of me, Lee.
“Yes, for fuck’s sake. I’m coming. We’re coming. Hell or high water, Sam, we’re gonna get you out of there are we’re gonna die trying.”
***
What is your core? What is this thing at the center of you?
Lee stalked back to the gathering at the rear of the Humvee. The Marines on guard had inched closer, and the four envoys were huddled tight with Brinly, Angela, and Abe. Their voices were urgent, but not loud.
Lee figured they were talking about how to knock some sense into him.
Brinly was the first to spot him approaching and fixed him with a gaze that Lee could read all too well: Does he have his head on straight or is he still off the rails?
Lee didn’t even have the inclination to be miffed by this. He had his reasons for struggling with this decision—good reasons, reasons that were bathed in the blood of his memories, reasons that had the evidence of so many catastrophic betrayals to back them.
But it didn’t matter anymore. They might be good reasons, but there was one thing that everyone in that little worried huddle had right, and Lee had wrong: There wasn’t another option.
As Abby had so aptly pointed out, “maybe” was always better than flat out “no.”
Why did he do the things he did? Why did he keep going, in the face of seemingly insurmountable odds? What was it that moved him, animated his actions, made him into who he was?
And he thought he knew. He was close enough now to it that he could see a glimpse of it, like the answer to that riddle, the way it just fits, and you know it only at the moment when you realize it, that it connects all those disparate, seemingly-contradictory things.
Yes, he was violent. Yes, he killed people. Yes, he was vengeful.
But that wasn’t the whole story. Those were just the manifestations of the same thing that kept him fighting. The same thing that made him punch that kid back in grade school. The same thing that made him join the military. The same thing that made him join Project Hometown, and violate protocols, and wage war against a man who claimed to be the president.
It was all the same thing. All branches of the same tree, that was connected to a central tap root that went deep down into the center of Lee.
This world is broken. It’s off-kilter. It always has been. Maybe it always will be.
But sometimes, in flashes, between sleep and waking, Lee could see the pieces. He knew how they fit together, because he’d seen how they fell apart.
The world needed people that were willing to try, were willing to die, were willing to do violence, to put it back together.
I want to fix it. That’s what lays at the center of me. That is the core of me. That is what animates my actions. That is the source of my anger, of my willingness to do violence. I want to put the pieces back together—I need to put them back together so that something out of all of this makes sense again.
I need to fix it.
They all turned and looked at Lee as he stopped at the edge of their circle, the air between them all as taut as a steel cable threatening to snap.
Lee had no time for anything but plain language and clear commands.
“Worley,” Lee said, looking at the Canadian. “Do you have a way to get into contact with Donahue?”
Worley nodded at once. “I still have our satphone.”
“Call him. I don’t give a shit what you have to say or what you have to promise, get him to commit whatever he can, however he can manage it. I need his people inside Greeley by tonight.” Nothing else to be said about it. Lee looked to the others. “Brinly. Abe. Angela. I need every squad leader rounded up so we can lay out our plan of attack. We might not have what we wanted to have, but we’re going to adapt and overcome. Strategy meeting in thirty minutes. I want to be on the road north in two hours.”
Everyone stared, as though waiting for the other shoe to drop.
Lee raised his eyebrows. “Questions?”
All seven heads shook.
“Then let’s get to it.”
***
Thirty minutes later, as a ragtag jumble of rebels gathered for a strategy meeting in the middle of Colorado, hundreds of miles to the north, Colonel Donahue had a meeting of his own. Much smaller. And much more secretive.
He stood in the center of a command tent, half plywood walls, half camouflage netting. A few rows of folding tables and folding chairs. Computers and communications equipment left abandoned because he’d ordered everyone out.
The only people in the command tent with him now were four uniformed men with very curious faces. Two captains, one lieutenant, and a master sergeant. They were the leaders of the four special forces units that Donahue had under his command. And they were the only four people that Donahue truly trusted.
They knew about opsec. They could keep their mouths shut.
Donahue decided not to stand. The four operatives were already sitting, leaning forward, their faces intense. And Donahue’s legs suddenly felt tired, like he’d just finished a nightmare ruck up a mountain.
He grabbed a folding chair from the table behind him and sat down with a sigh. Propped his elbows on his knees, and leaned in, just like the men across from him.
“I’m gonna ask you to do some shit,” he said, his voice steady, but quiet. “There’s no way around the fact that it’s an absolute crap shoot. And you know what I mean when I say that.”
They knew what he meant.
Dangerous. Some of them would not be coming back.
“You can’t breathe a word of it to anyone outside of your teams and the people in this room. And you have to get to it the second we’re done with this meeting. Also, you cannot be identified as CAF, and if anyone asks me, I’ll deny that this fucking meeting ever happened.” Donahue laced his fingers together, meeting each of his operatives’ eye
s. “I’d ask you if you were willing, but that’s probably a dumb question.”
One of the men, a chunk of dip bulging in his lower lip, spat into the dirt between his boots. “We driving or flying, and how much ordnance do we need to pack?”
Donahue smirked. “Flying. And lots.”
THIRTY-SIX
─▬▬▬─
GUILT AND JUSTICE
Everything was hazy. Indeterminate. Alien.
Griffin moved through the world like a man in a bubble, as though nothing could touch him, and none of it was real. Of course, he held no such illusions of invincibility, or that the people that he ordered killed would indeed be dead, human lives gone up in smoke.
No, it was simply the sensation of completely breaking with any emotion that was, in every other time in his life, a touchstone for the moments that he had lived.
As he walked through the field of tire tracks, right outside the high school in La Junta, he wondered if he would even remember any of this with any particular clarity. Death, destruction, burning, screaming. All just special effects, it seemed like. All the universe a big fakery, and he the lone conscious being, the sole audience.
Oh, he would remember it. But it would all be colorless and bland. Snapshots in his mind, rather than full clear memories with real people and real feeling. The images just thumbnail sketches. The moments just footnotes to a larger objective.
Where’d you go, Lee? Why are you making me do this?
If he could have one wish, it would be that Lee would stop hurling himself northward at Greeley, and turn and duke it out with him for all the marbles, and then all of this could end, and Griffin could get his life back.
But until that happened, Griffin was sequestered in this strange mental place of lifelessness.
A defensive mechanism, to be sure. But he’d long ago stopped trying to question his brain’s inner workings. It was best to let the brain block what it found too offensive to hold onto.
He scuffed the toe of his boot along the tread pattern of a tire left in the dirt. Smudging it out. Erasing it like it had never been there, though all the tracks still converged on a single point, and from there, Griffin was sure, led northward.
“So,” Griffin said, flat and quiet. “What to do about you?”
He heard the intake of breath behind him. A decidedly feminine quality to it. When he turned and looked, it was the man named Jonathan Reeves, and his wife, Tammy. She clung to him, distressed. He stood there, resolute, trying his damndest to not look terrified, and failing miserably.
Reeves swallowed hard. Took a step away from his wife—her fingertips clinging to his shirt sleeve until they were plucked from her grasp. “Do what you will with me. But leave the people alone. They weren’t a part of this. I made the decision to allow Lee Harden to stay here. Everyone else didn’t want it. Including my wife—”
“Jon…” she uttered.
“—so if you’re going to punish anyone, punish me.”
Griffin stared at him, eyes half-lidded. “That’s very heroic of you.”
Another dry-looking swallow. “No, sir. Just the truth. I swear it.”
“That’s fucking bullshit,” the devil’s voice said from beside Griffin.
Griffin closed his eyes—a painful wince, like the voice was the sound of metal squealing. That teeth-rattling noise that a metal filing cabinet made when you pushed it across smooth concrete.
He turned. Opened his eyes.
Now. Here was some emotion. Dim, like the heat of a fire you’re standing several feet away from: Repugnance. Disgust.
Mr. Smith stood there, all eager bloodlust. He was looking at Jonathan Reeves, not Griffin. Was that the tiniest smirk at the corner of his mouth? A greasy, sweaty hunger written all over him. God, but he actually got off on this shit. He liked to see people terrified.
Griffin had a flash of imagination: Mr. Smith in a black, leather trench coat, hunting for Jews hiding under floorboards. He would have made a top gestapo agent.
“It’s not bullshit,” Reeves answered, hollowly. Unconvincing.
Mr. Smith glared, acting affronted, when in fact, this was the game he loved playing the best. “That’s not what my operatives tell me. In fact, my operatives tell me that you damn near threw Lee Harden a ticker tape parade when he came in. People lining the streets. Waving. Cheering. They wanted him here.”
“He’s gone,” Reeves tried. “We kicked him out. What more evidence do you need? We’re lucky he didn’t turn on us when we told him to leave.”
“Oh, yes,” Mr. Smith nodded. “He’s a dangerous animal, that one. And when you play with dangerous animals, sometimes you get bit.”
“He’s gone,” Reeves repeated.
Griffin took in a long breath through his nose, his eyes straying from Mr. Smith and Reeves, to the soldiers all around them. Army. Marines. A lot of Cornerstone operatives. All of them—or at least most of them—with the same hollow expressions that Griffin knew was on his own face.
“It’s too late for all that,” Mr. Smith said, his voice low and seething. “You should have done the right thing when he arrived in the first place. You want me to give you credit because you begged him to leave when you found out that you might have to face consequences for your actions? Well, that boat don’t float, my friend. You provided assistance to an enemy of the state. That makes you an enemy of the state. And do you know what we do with people like you?”
Reeves nodded. “I know. And I accept it. Do what you’re gonna do. But leave the people out of it.”
Mr. Smith laughed. “You’re not in a position to make demands.”
Griffin listened, placidly. His eyes hopping from one face to another—a soldier here, a Cornerstone operative there. Some of them caught Griffin’s eyes, and they couldn’t hold his gaze. Guilty. Every last one of them guilty as sin.
Guilty as Griffin was.
Ah, well. War is hell. I’m sure General Sherman felt the same way. Probably why he said that.
Mr. Smith was going on again. He was really on a roll. Feeling his oats. Reveling in the misery he caused. Feeding off it like a vampire. Griffin didn’t really hear his words, just his feigned, self-righteous indignation.
Mr. Smith was fake too. Fake to his core. Nothing real about him at all.
Back beyond the Reeves, and the soldiers and operatives that surrounded them; more people, and more soldiers. The citizens of La Junta. Not all of them, but a good chunk, come to see what was happening. Some of them had come willingly, others—the ones that seemed squirrelly—had been rounded up and disarmed. Not a shot had been fired. Yet.
All around those civilians, guntrucks with their turrets trained on unarmed people. Soldiers standing around with their rifles at a low ready. In the backs of pickup beds. Striding slowly about the perimeter.
“Captain Griffin!”
He winced again at the voice. That disgust a little stronger now. “What?” he snapped.
Mr. Smith was looking at him. “I said something to you.”
“Oh, you did?”
Mr. Smith squared himself to Griffin. “Yes, I did.”
“I didn’t hear.”
“I said—”
“And also, I don’t take orders from you.”
Narrowed eyes, just dark little glints of malice through the thin slits of his eyelids. “Yes. You’ve made that abundantly clear. But that doesn’t change the fact that justice needs to be done here. President Briggs expects you to do your fucking job.”
Griffin’s mouth stretched in a mirthless smile that didn’t even get in the same hemisphere as his eyes. “Justice?”
“Yes, justice! You may not take orders from me, but you do take orders from your command-in-chief. And I will ensure that President Briggs’s orders are carried out. The guilty parties need to be punished.”
Griffin sighed. “Yes. Of course.”
He faced Reeves, hand slipping to his pistol. His eyes weren’t on Reeves, though. They were still scouring the faces of
the soldiers and operatives. As he drew his sidearm, they watched. Brief flashes of discomfort. Disappointment. They looked away.
Griffin had one job, and that was to command this army.
The guilt on the faces of his men—yes, even the Cornerstone men—told him all that he needed to know. He’d already made his decision, but now he was much more comfortable with it.
He met Reeves’ eyes.
“Guilty parties have to die,” Griffin said, almost apologetically—Hey, I don’t make the rules; I just enforce them.
Then he lifted his pistol.
And blew the back of Mr. Smith’s head out.
Every single person jerked in unison. Reeves jolted backwards. His wife made a tiny cry. The soldiers gaped. The Cornerstone operatives lifted their rifles—but only a little bit. And then they stopped.
By the time Mr. Smith’s body hit the ground, all was still again.
Griffin watched the Cornerstone operatives carefully.
They wrestled with it. He could see that. And he could also appreciate it. When you spend your whole life as a part of the system, you shudder to see it trip and fall. You think, maybe I should do something about this, maybe I should prove my loyalty to the system…
But then you realize that you’re relieved.
And that’s what Griffin saw on the operatives’ faces.
Relief.
Not a single one of them pointed their rifle at Griffin, or moved towards him, or even shouted out with incredulity. If they were being honest, they weren’t even surprised. Hell, they’d probably been hoping for it.
They were a whole pack of assholes, those Cornerstone boys. But there’s only so long you can walk down a dark road before you either let it swallow you whole or you become desperate for a chance to turn around.
Guilty, every damn one of them. But not too far gone, Griffin thought. Otherwise, he figured he’d have been shot.
Lee Harden Series | Book 5 | Unbowed Page 39