by Peter Nealen
“Something I think you’d be interested in, Roger,” Brannigan said. “Somewhere we can talk for a minute?”
“Sure,” Hancock said, motioning up the beach. “Let’s go up by my truck. I was done for this morning, anyway.”
The two men, Branningan standing almost a head taller than Hancock, headed up the sandy strand to where Hancock’s big dually was parked. Hancock slid his board into the open bed, then grabbed a towel off the back seat and started rubbing the saltwater off of himself as he unzipped his wetsuit. “So, give me the rundown,” he said.
Brannigan explained the mission briefly, making sure to stress the fact that, as far as he knew, it was an entirely off-the-books, unofficial op. He wanted Hancock, but he wanted the man to go in with both eyes open.
Roger listened without comment, nodding once or twice. “Who else is on board?” he asked.
“Santelli, so far,” Brannigan said.
“Well, I’m in,” Hancock said. “And I know another guy who would be perfect, if we can find him.”
“What about Tammy?” Brannigan asked. “Don’t you need to discuss this with her?”
“Tammy will understand,” Hancock replied. “Honestly, she’s been worried about me for a while. She doesn’t talk about it very often, but I’m bored, and she can tell. Did you talk to her already?”
“Only to ask where you were,” Brannigan answered.
“Then she already knows something’s up,” Hancock said. “She’s no dummy. And I know she knows you just well enough to be reassured that I’ll have a good chance of coming back in one piece.”
Brannigan eyed his old subordinate skeptically, then shrugged. “You know her better than I do, so I’ll take your word for it. Make sure you do what you can to put her mind at ease, though. It’s never easy to go back to deploying, once you’ve gotten comfortable at home.”
“I will, but she’ll be fine,” Hancock said. “I’m assuming you drove here?”
“Yeah,” Brannigan said, jerking a thumb at the rental sedan. Hancock looked at it, looked at Brannigan’s towering frame, and grinned.
“Really? How do you fit in that thing?”
“With difficulty,” Brannigan growled. “Are you done?”
Hancock laughed. “Come on, follow me to the house. I’ve got to get changed and make a couple of calls if we’re going to go raise hell in the Persian Gulf for a few weeks. And you can help ease Tammy’s mind while I do.”
***
Sam Childress got out of his truck and trudged toward the temp office. He paused in front of the glass doors. “I hate my life,” he muttered, then pulled the door open and went into the lobby.
“Over here, Sam,” Julie Keating called. She was at her desk in the corner, apparently waiting specifically for him, since there were several other people there ahead of him, sitting and waiting to be called, while the other three receptionists were busy. Trying to ignore the looks he was getting from the other temp workers, he walked over and sank into the chair across from Keating’s desk. His too-long arms and legs dangled from the chair, and his dark, flyaway hair looked like it hadn’t seen a comb in a month, even though he’d tried to smooth it just before he’d come through the door.
“Sam, you have got to learn to go along to get along,” Julie said. She was a pretty woman, either around Childress’ age or a little younger, with shiny blond hair pulled back in a ponytail and an enormous diamond on her left ring finger. Sam had looked rather wistfully at that rock a few times, rather envying whoever had his shit together enough to have afforded that ring, to give to that woman. His own last girlfriend had suddenly wanted nothing to do with him as soon as he’d gotten fired from his first civilian job.
“He was going to get people hurt, Julie!” Sam protested. “I had to say something!”
Keating sighed. “Look, Sam, nobody’s telling you not to say something if you see something wrong,” she said, a note of exasperation working into her voice. “But there are polite ways of saying these things, that won’t get you a black mark from one of our client companies. This is the second client who’s told us not to send you back! If you get a third, we won’t be able to find work for you anymore!” She put a hand to her forehead. “You’ve got to work on a better filter between your brain and your mouth, Sam.”
“Childress with a filter?” a voice with a heavy Boston accent said from behind him. “That’ll be the day.”
Sam twisted around in surprise. He knew that voice. “Sergeant Major Santelli?” He instinctively scrambled to his feet. “What are you doing here?”
“Looking for you,” the short, stocky Italian replied. “Can I borrow Sam for a few minutes, Ma’am?” he asked Keating.
“I’m trying to get him some work for today,” she said.
“Well,” Santelli replied, as he put a meaty hand on Childress’ shoulder and started to steer him toward the door, “I might just have a solution to that problem. If not, I promise I’ll send him back.” Without waiting for Keating to answer, he kept propelling Childress toward the door.
“I’m sorry, Julie,” Childress called over his shoulder, giving her an apologetic look. “I’ll be back in a minute.”
Once they were out in the parking lot, Santelli turned and folded his arms, shaking his head as he looked Childress over. “It’s been a merry chase, tracking you down, Childress,” he said disapprovingly. “At least six former employers, that I’ve had to follow like breadcrumbs ever since I went looking for you at the job your mother thinks you’re still working at. Still haven’t learned to keep your mouth under control, have you?”
Childress stared at the horizon past Santelli’s shoulder, remembering more than one previous such conversation happening in the Sergeant Major’s office, on a couple of occasions that had gone past the First Sergeant’s office. Neither man was still in uniform, but when it came to Sergeant Major Santelli, some habits died hard, even for Childress.
“I guess not, Sergeant Major,” was all he said.
“Well, it’s a good thing for you that I really don’t have to give a damn about your mind-to-mouth filter, or lack thereof, anymore,” Santelli said. “I only care about your abilities and your loyalty. The latter I already know is more than sufficient. You look like you’ve kept in shape. How soon do you think you could knock the rust off your combat skills?”
Childress snapped his eyes down to meet the former Sergeant Major’s. “You mean…?”
The shorter man nodded. “Colonel Brannigan’s got a job. High-risk, combat zone sort of stuff. Strictly off the books. I thought of you first thing. Are you in?”
Childress never thought he’d feel so grateful to Sergeant Major Santelli, the man who had signed off on not one but two Battalion-level Non-Judicial Punishments for insubordination that had busted him back down a rank. But the man had just offered him a lifeline.
“Fucking A right, I’m in, Sergeant Major,” he said. “When do we leave?”
***
Doctor Juan Villareal was taking a much-needed break, sitting down for the first time in six hours. He had just lifted the coffee cup to his lips when there was a knock at the break room door.
“The door’s open,” he called out, frowning slightly. None of the other doctors or nurses would have hesitated to just walk in the door; the break room was for everybody in the ER. But when the door swung open, he suddenly understood the reason for the knock. He put the coffee cup on the table and stood up, holding out his hand to the towering, broad-shouldered man in the doorway.
“Holy hell, John,” he said, shaking Brannigan’s hand. “What are you doing here, half an hour after midnight?”
“Looking for you, Doc,” Brannigan said, shutting the door behind him and waving Villareal back to his seat. He grabbed another one of the metal and plastic chairs, flipped it around, and sat down, his forearms resting on the back. “I’ve got a proposition for you.”
Villareal gave him a sharp glance. The young MD was thinner than most of his colleagues, still
just as rangy as he had been as a young Navy Corpsman, almost ten years before. His hawk-like features were starting to show a few lines, though they paled in comparison to the deeper look of weariness that only a few who knew him could ever see in his eyes. His hair was as black as it ever had been. “What kind of proposition?” he asked warily.
Brannigan looked him in the eye. “I need a medic for a job,” he said levelly. “A rescue mission.”
Villareal’s black eyes narrowed. “What kind of a rescue mission?”
Brannigan glanced meaningfully at the ceiling. “There’s CCTV over just about every inch of this hospital,” Villareal said, a deeper feeling of dread forming in the pit of his stomach. “But there’s no audio. You can talk.”
Brannigan laid out the mission that Chavez had told him about. Villareal’s face got drawn, and the old, haunted expression came into his eyes. He shook his head.
“I swore off all of that when I went to med school, John,” he said. “And you know damned well why.”
“And I also know damned well that none of that was your fault, Doc,” Brannigan retorted. “As do you, if you’d disengage your damned emotions from it for a moment and looked at it clearly.”
“Clearly?” Villareal demanded, leaning forward and clenching a fist on the tabletop. “It was clear enough, John. ‘The best medicine is lead downrange,’ wasn’t that the line we all parroted? But it turned out that it wasn’t all bad guys downrange, was it?”
“And you had no way of knowing that, Doc,” Brannigan replied, with a weariness that suggested that both of them were simply repeating a conversation they had had before. Which they were. “We all saw the fire coming from that reed line.”
“Doesn’t matter,” Villareal said, as he slumped back in his chair. “The fact remains that I pulled the trigger, and afterward there were three dead kids in the ditch, and none of them had weapons.”
“They didn’t have weapons when we found ‘em,” Brannigan replied tiredly. “But you know as well as I do that the bad guys regularly took the weapons after an engagement.”
Villareal shook his head. “They were kids, John. That’s all that matters to me. That’s why I haven’t touched a gun since I got out, and why I went to med school and took the Hippocratic Oath. I won’t carry a weapon again. You need someone else.” Someone who doesn’t have a problem with spilling blood went unspoken.
“I need a doctor,” Brannigan replied, a hard edge in his voice. “And you were the best field medic I ever had, before or since. If you can’t carry a weapon in good conscience, fine. I can work around that. Medics didn’t carry for a long time. But I need you. The boys I’m going to be taking in there need you. Hell, in all likelihood, those hostages are going to need you.”
Villareal looked Brannigan in the eye, and felt his resolve weakening. Brannigan had been one of the best combat leaders he’d ever served under, and despite his own doubts, misgivings, and the demons that visited him at night, he suddenly felt a powerful urge to say yes. Not because of some mystical leadership ability of Brannigan’s, that magically inspired men to follow him. He didn’t believe in any such thing, any more than Brannigan did. No, this was simply because, despite his own bitterness, Brannigan had won his loyalty a long time before the incident that had scarred his soul for life, and, his own ghosts notwithstanding, it felt like turning the man down, especially when he sincerely said he was needed, would feel like a betrayal.
Juan Villareal, MD, was a fundamentally moral man. He had become even more so ever since the fight in Afghanistan that had nearly broken him. Betrayal wasn’t in him.
He looked down at the table, his lips thinned, a frown creasing his brow. When he looked up at Brannigan again, there was a pained look in his eyes. “It would be a lot easier to say, ‘No,’ if I could convince myself that you were being manipulative,” he said. He sighed. “Unfortunately, I know you too well, John, even if it has been nine years. Why can’t you be as cynical and hollow as all the other officers I knew?”
“It’s not in my nature, Doc,” Brannigan said. “And I won’t apologize for that fact working in my favor now. Are you in?”
“I’ve got patients here,” Villareal protested, trying one last tack. “I’ve got a work schedule, people who are counting on me.”
Brannigan chuckled darkly. “Do you really think I came in here without doing my homework, Doc?” he asked. “I know you’ve got two months’ worth of leave that you’re about to lose if you don’t take it.”
Defeated, Villareal nodded. “When and where?” he asked.
Brannigan pulled a card with a set of directions out of his pocket and shoved it across the table before standing. “Here, in two days,” he said.
Villareal shoved the card in his pocket and reached for his coffee. He didn’t look up again as Brannigan left the room.
***
Joe Flanagan easily whipped the fly in a big figure eight above his head, then, with a practiced swing, expertly dropped the nymph just upstream of the bank. The brightly-colored bit of thread and feather drifted downstream, then suddenly vanished. Flanagan lifted the rod tip upward, setting the hook before the trout could figure out that the fly wasn’t nearly as edible as it looked. In a moment, he was working the fish in toward shore, pulling it in with a side-to-side give-and-take, slowly reeling the fish in as it tired. Finally, he reached down and scooped a good-sized German Brown up out of the water.
“You’ve gotten good at this,” Roger Hancock said, farther up the bank. Flanagan looked up at his old Platoon Sergeant and cracked a lopsided smile, but said nothing as he removed the hook from the fish’s mouth and laid it in his creel.
Hancock looked around at the surrounding cottonwoods and the slow-moving river as he descended the bank. “I’ve got to hand it to you though, Joe. You sure can find some good spots.”
“It’s quiet, and not too many of the tourists know about this stretch of river,” Flanagan said, as he climbed up to meet Hancock. The two men shook hands, turning it into a one-armed bear hug. “If this gets into some ‘fly fishing guide,’ I’m going to have to find somewhere else.” He set his rod down. “So, what brings you so far inland, that you couldn’t talk about over the phone?”
“Brannigan’s coming out of retirement,” Hancock said. “He’s got a job; a hostage rescue mission on an island in the Persian Gulf. Officially unknown adversary, but suspected to be Iranian. He’s putting a small team together. You were the first one I thought of.”
Flanagan cocked an eyebrow. Middling height, broad-shouldered, and dark-haired, his green eyes were bright in a deeply tanned face above a beard so black it almost looked blue. “I’ve been out of the game for a bit,” he pointed out.
“We all have,” Hancock replied. “And I know you. How many days a week are you still PTing?”
“Five or six,” Flanagan admitted.
“You’ve got a good mind for tactics, Joe, and I know you too well to think that you’ve lost your edge,” Hancock continued. “Come on. You’re itching for this. Don’t try to bullshit me.”
Flanagan just smiled slightly, shrugged, and dug a phone out of his pack. He punched a contact and held it to his ear. Hancock just shook his head and smiled. He’d won. Flanagan didn’t often say much, and a lot of people could be somewhat weirded out by it. But Hancock had gotten close enough to the quiet man to understand what he was thinking, even when he didn’t say anything at all.
“Iggy?” Flanagan said. “It’s Joe. Yeah. Don’t know. Maybe a couple weeks, maybe a couple months. Good deal. Thanks, Iggy. Later.” He hung up the phone. “Okay. I’m free for a while,” he said.
“That’s how you tell your boss that you’re leaving?” Hancock asked with a laugh.
Flanagan shrugged again. “He’s an old vet, himself. We’ve talked about it. He’s cool.”
As they gathered up Flanagan’s fishing gear and headed up the bank toward Flanagan’s Jeep and Hancock’s rental car, Hancock asked, “Are you going to call Mary and tell h
er you’re leaving for a while, too? Or do we need to stop by?”
“Mary and I broke up about a month ago,” Flanagan replied. “Didn’t work out. It’s fine. It was amicable.”
“I’m sure Kev has read you the riot act over that,” Hancock observed as he opened his car door. “Or does he know yet?”
“You think I’d tell him?” Flanagan retorted. “He wouldn’t leave me alone for months.”
Hancock laughed. “So, where is he?”
“It’ll be a few hours,” Flanagan said as he climbed behind the wheel. “Let’s go drop that rental off. I’ll drive.”
***
Santelli was just reaching for the doorknob when the door swung open. He hastily stepped out of the way as the thin, dark-haired woman with dark-rimmed glasses stormed out of the office in a huff, pausing just long enough to shoot the short, stocky retired Sergeant Major a somewhat imperious glare before stalking away down the hallway, managing to radiate pure, self-righteous fury with every stomping step.
Santelli watched her go for a moment, unsure if that was a good sign or a warning.
When he stepped through the door and closed it behind him, he asked, “What was that all about?”
The slender, hatchet-faced man with a small patch of beard on the tip of his chin looked up from his desk. “Who wants to know?” he demanded. His accent was decidedly Midwestern, though he looked like he’d be right at home on the streets of Baghdad or Amman.
“You David Aziz?” Santelli asked, dropping into the chair across the desk from the younger man.
“Professor Aziz,” was the reply. “Who are you? I don’t have any appointments, and don’t take this the wrong way, but at this hour of the day, I’d only be accepting appointments with hot coeds, anyway.”
Santelli laughed. “Is that why that chick was so pissed off?” he asked. “If that’s your definition of ‘hot coed,’ I might have to doubt your credentials a bit.”
Aziz snorted derisively. “Shannon? No, she’s another professor. And just like the rest of the dipshits running around this place with PhDs, she doesn’t like to hear the truth about the real world, outside the ivory tower bubble.”