The Last Good Man

by Linda Nagata

  It doesn’t matter what they say; Abu Khamani just insists that every man say something. Ryan sits up, inching backward on his ass to put himself a little farther from the door.

  “Fuckin’ lovely evening,” he says, eyeing the whip in Abu Khamani’s right hand.

  A second man, a stone-faced guard, stands behind Abu Khamani, holding an automatic rifle. The muzzle is trained on the floor, but it would take him only a heartbeat to raise his weapon and gun down everyone in the cell. Abu Khamani pays no attention to him, gesturing instead to the boy beside him who is carrying an allotment of MREs. The boy—he is maybe eight years old and Miles suspects he’s one of Hussam’s many children—drops the packaged meals on the floor. There are only three.

  The four prisoners trade uneasy looks. Abu Khamani laughs. “You! Poulin!” He points at the missionary. “You lucky this night. You get to go home.”

  Noël shrinks deeper into his corner.

  “Home,” Abu Khamani repeats as if Noël is an idiot. “Your ransom is paid.” He grabs Noël’s arm, hauls him to his feet. Terror is inscribed on Noël’s pale face. Miles understands that fear; he shares it. Once before, Abu Khamani promised a hostage that he could go home, but that man was executed, sent home to God.

  Noël weeps as Abu Khamani drags him from the room. The door closes. Darkness returns.

  There is a rustling noise as Ryan gropes for the MREs. He tosses one to Dano, one to Miles.

  “Don’t eat yet,” he advises them. “You don’t want to risk puking it all up when the screaming starts.”

  Assemble in Thirty

  “Roach is only stage one of Tamara’s devious plan,” Rohan is saying when True returns to the conference room just before the next scheduled meeting, due to start at 1300. “It’s the beginning of the end for us, because she’s going to automate us out of a job.”

  He’s sprawled in a chair, his long legs stretched out under the table and a steaming mug of coffee in one hand, expounding his theory for the amusement of Felice, who sits two chairs away, arms crossed, eyeing him with a cynical smirk. Tamara herself is sedately arranging her cardigan on the back of a chair.

  Rohan gives True a wink as he continues: “You heard it from me first. In a few more years, Tamara’s going to field a bulletproof bot that can bound over walls, do backflips through firefights, sniff out IEDs, see the terrain in an expanded spectrum.” He puts the mug down so he can gesture with both hands. “It’ll have two legs that never get tired. Six arms—four of them configured as guns—and instead of blood and guts under the skin, it’ll be loaded with ammo—enough to melt its fucking carapace if it ever goes postal.”

  “Don’t worry, dawg,” Felice tells him. “You gonna be retired by then.”

  True pours coffee, side-eyeing Tamara as she settles into a chair. True can feel the coming counterpunch like a static charge on the air.

  “Rohan, dear,” Tamara says, sounding like a disappointed preschool teacher—a tone that causes Felice to snicker again. “You’ve got it wrong. I’m not planning to replace you with a humanoid robot. Why bother? An aggressive, diverse swarm is more dangerous than any traditional soldier and easy to print up.”

  “Give it up, Rohan,” True advises. “Tamara’s going to retire all of us.”

  Any argument he might have made is precluded by the arrival of Lincoln and Chris, the rest of the QRF coming in behind them.

  Chris is the field commander. He goes over the mission plan, including a review of vehicles and surveillance devices they’ll be leasing from a partner company. “Like everything else,” he says, “this is time-critical. I’ve got a twelve-hour hold on the equipment, but we’ll need to make a fat payment to reserve it beyond that.” He turns to True. “We really need to hear from State on whether or not we’re looking at a closed area.”

  “I’m on it. I’ve been promised a call back by end of day.”

  By 1400, True is back in her office—and she’s getting worried. On the east coast, the end of the workday is imminent and she still hasn’t heard back from her contact at the State Department. Brooke Kanegawa is a good friend and reliable. That she hasn’t called yet tells True that there is a conflicting mission, and it’s taking Brooke time to get the specifics and the authorization to speak.

  True scowls at a framed map of the world hanging on her office wall—and decides to check in. If nothing else, she can find out how late Brooke intends to be in the office. “Heads up, Ripley,” she says, addressing her digital assistant, “call Brooke.”

  Ripley responds through her TINSL: “Calling Brooke Kanegawa. Please stand by.” Thirty seconds pass. Then: “I’m sorry. There is no answer.”

  True starts to get up but sits down again when the soft chime that announces an incoming call sounds in her ear. “Answer it,” she says, not waiting for Ripley to announce the caller’s name. Then: “Brooke?”

  Instead, she hears a low, old-man’s voice edged with criticism: “You need to ID your calls before you pick up, True. Thought you knew that.”

  Colonel Colt Brighton, retired. True’s mouth quirks in a bitter smile. The old man still has a knack for getting under her skin. “Hey, Dad,” she says in what she hopes is a neutral voice.

  “Waiting on an important call?” he asks.

  “Need to know,” she tells him.

  “Huh. Not everyone’s so circumspect. Word’s out that Defense just awarded a billion-dollar contract to one of your competitors. You tell Lincoln he needs to show face in DC if he wants in on that kind of pork.”

  “We’re a small company, Dad.”

  “Get a contract like that and you won’t have to be.”

  “I’ll tell him you said so.” The call chime sounds again. Ripley whispers in the background, “Caller is Brooke Kanegawa.”

  “Got to go, Dad,” True says. “Talk to you soon.”

  “Stay out of trouble,” he warns her.

  “You too, old man.” She shifts to the new call. “Hey.”

  Brooke’s voice sounds clipped, tense as she says, “I finally got your answer. Short version: stay the hell away from Mosul.”

  True is surprised. Mosul is nowhere near their intended target. She strives to keep the excitement out of her voice as she asks, “What’s the long version?”

  “You know I can’t provide details, but I am to communicate to you in no uncertain terms that you will not operate in Mosul or surrounding areas. I’ll email you the coordinates of the closed zone.”

  “I’d appreciate it.”

  Brooke continues in a formal voice. “Within that designated area you will undertake no offensive action. Not until a general clearance is issued. Should Requisite Operations defy this mandate, you will lose your license.” Brooke draws a quick breath. “Hey, True,” she says apologetically. “You know it’s nothing personal.”

  “No worries. I appreciate it.” Brooke is a good friend, but they are both constrained in what they can share. True has told her only that ReqOps is planning an offensive operation in the TEZ, providing no details on their objective. Lincoln has the option to file a notification, but he probably won’t do it, because the risk of data leakage is too great.

  “Any estimate on how long Mosul will be closed?” True asks, hoping to get a feel for when the State Department’s operation might launch. If they’re after Hussam, they’re looking in the wrong place—but she can’t tell Brooke that.

  “No estimate at this time,” Brooke says.

  Maybe State is still prospecting. Maybe they won’t go at all.

  “Thanks, Brooke.”

  “You be careful.”

  “You know it.”

  True messages Chris, and a few minutes later they meet in Lincoln’s office. In hurried words, she relates what she’s learned, concluding by saying, “The field is clear. The risk at this point is that Hussam could decide to move on tomorrow and be gone before we get there.”

  “We’ll have eyes on him,” Chris says. “Once we’re in the region, we can amend the pl
an. Hit him on the road if we have to, or follow him to his new hole.”

  Chris makes it sound easy, but True knows that a change of venue will present new dangers and that any delay will drive up costs—but Lincoln knows this too and it’s his decision. So she resists the urge to play devil’s advocate. She wants the mission to go. Her heart hammers in anticipation.

  Lincoln doesn’t leave them in suspense. “Let’s do it,” he says. “And the sooner we’re on site, the more options we’ll have. So alert the team. I’ll notify the flight crew. We assemble in thirty at the loading docks for transportation to the airfield. Clear?”

  “Roger that,” True responds.

  Chris answers, “You got it, boss.” He turns his head, looking away as he speaks to his digital assistant. “Hey Charlie, set up a group text, QRF.” True can’t hear the acknowledgment, but almost immediately, Chris is repeating Lincoln’s order. “We are a go. Assemble with gear, 1435, loading docks.” Three seconds pass—the time it takes the assistant to read back the message—then Chris says, “Send it.”

  The text goes to everyone in the QRF. True hears a chime as her copy arrives. The adrenaline is pumping. She bumps fists with Chris. “See you in thirty.”

  ~~~

  True’s identity is tracked by the house AI, Friday. That, matched with a swipe of her finger, releases the biometric lock on her office door. Her gear is ready and waiting inside.

  She’s got a slim, body-hugging pack stuffed with a selection of mini-robotics, spare button batteries, spare TINSLs, recharging units, RF-shielded collection bags, medical supplies, food, water, and ammo.

  In a larger duffel she has more food and water, an armored vest, and an assortment of clothes—regionally appropriate civilian attire to wear in-country, the unmarked uniform she’ll use on the mission, and an extra set of civvies, western-style, to wear on the way home.

  A case holds her MARC visor—MARC being a compression of “Mission Arcana”—an augmented reality and audio communications headset. It’s a lightweight half-visor worn like oversized eyeglasses, with a top bar housing most of the electronics and a magnetic dock for her ear TINSL.

  True picks it up, slips it on. It boots automatically in a couple of seconds, projecting a default date/time display and brightening the shadows under the desk. The MARC is too big, awkward, intrusive, and costly to be popular with the consumer market, but it’s a hell of an enhancement on missions. She slips on a black data glove that lets her select menu options with minimal hand movements. Voice input works too, but that can be problematic in a combat zone where commands may need to be issued in perfect silence or during the clamor of a firefight.

  She twitches her index finger, running through a brief calibration sequence. Then she undertakes a short checklist, making sure the mission plan and supporting documents are up to date, and that the personnel list is complete. Right now everyone shows as offline, but that’s expected.

  She powers down, packs the MARC back into its case, and shoves it into the duffel. Minimal gear with minimal weight for what is intended to be a short, fast-moving mission.

  Next she opens a closet and pulls out a light jacket with ReqOps’ logo on the breast: a tan rectangle bordered in black, containing the company’s chiseled initials, ROI, the full name written out beneath.

  She takes a second to check her reflection in a mirror on the inside of the door, smoothing a few stray silver strands of hair. Her fair skin shows the evidence of years, but she can still run five miles in under forty-five minutes, so fuck it.

  She shrugs the jacket on, then turns to the gun safe, swiping its biometric lock. Yesterday afternoon she spent an hour on the indoor range with her Kieffer-Obermark assault rifle. Her KO is modified with an underslung shotgun. That makes it heavy, but she wants the option of clearing drone swarms at close range, so she’ll suffer the extra weight. She pulls out the hard plastic case that holds the weapon, sets it on her desk, and opens it, just to reassure herself that all is ready. She takes a 9 mm pistol too, wrapped up in a chest holster.

  Only one more step and she can go.

  She slips her tablet out of her thigh pocket, flips the cover open, and slips on her reading glasses. “Heads up, Ripley,” she says. “Video call to Alex.”

  ~~~

  When the call comes through, Alex Delgado is heading out the door, due to start his shift as a county paramedic. He is fifty-one years old, two years older than True, though they share the same birthday—a coincidence that brought them together on the night they met, thirty-two years ago.

  Back then, Alex was a newly minted army medic who’d enlisted for the GI Bill. He left the service four years later when his contract was up, using the education benefits he’d earned—generous in those days—to complete his paramedic’s certification. Since then, he’s worked in nine different US municipalities and even once in England, as True’s army career took the family to new postings across the country and around the world.

  In Japan he was a stay-at-home dad, looking after the kids—Diego, Treasure, and Connor. In the US, his mother lived with them off and on, helping with childcare. It was a chaotic life, and there were days soaked through with debilitating fear when True was deployed and didn’t call home and he didn’t know why.

  She was a woman, and in those early years she wasn’t supposed to be frontline combat—but she’d been frontline anyway. More often, he suspected, than she ever admitted to him. When the services technically opened all positions to women, she just kept doing what she’d been doing. It didn’t make a difference to her. He would complain: How do you think it feels to sit here and wonder if I’m ever going to see you again? And they’d talk it out. But in the end it came down to the same thing every time: Alex, this is what I was born to do.

  Maybe that was true.

  When she retired at forty-five, he let himself believe that part of her life was over. When she went to work for Lincoln she said she was going to be a trainer, that’s all. But within a year she was deploying again, overseas, on security operations, and this past year she’d participated in combat missions.

  He taps his phone to accept the call. Video. She’s wearing her reading glasses. Her head is canted as she gazes down at the tablet she’s holding, a posture that enhances the lines in her cheeks—something he’s sure she doesn’t realize, or she’d hold the tablet higher. It’s a portrait view, but he doesn’t need help visualizing her figure. She’s taller than most women, and determinedly lean, her well-defined muscles honed by hours in the gym, refurbished after every pregnancy. She is forty-nine years old, the mother of three adult children, and she is still the only one he wants.

  “Alex,” she says.

  “You’re on, aren’t you?” Ghosts of old arguments lurk in his tone, making it sharper than he intended.

  “It shouldn’t be more than a few days.”

  She’d warned him a mission was possible. Another hostage rescue, this time on the other side of the world.

  Now it’s real. He knows the risks, the grim possibilities. He would keep her at home if he could but that’s not an option she’ll allow.

  He says, “I need you back, True.”

  “I’ll be back,” she promises. “Don’t worry. I got to go.”

  She isn’t one to prolong goodbyes. She ends the call, leaving him with that last admonition echoing in his mind: Don’t worry.

  Their oldest son, Diego, said the same thing. I’ll be back, Dad. Don’t worry. That was eight years ago. Sergeant Diego Delgado, twenty-four years old. He was shot up in a firefight in Burma, and then captured, and executed—slowly—the ordeal recorded on video and released to the world.

  But Alex is not to worry.

  Not to wish ill on anyone, but as he opens the kitchen door and steps out into the garage, he hopes things aren’t too quiet tonight. Better to keep busy and not think too hard about where True might be and what she might be going through.

  ~~~

  True climbs into the backseat of a passenger
van, still feeling the weight of Alex’s disapproval. He objected to her frontline service when she was in the army, and he doesn’t like her participation in the QRF now. The pressure has been worse in the years since Diego’s death. She understands where it’s coming from. But this is what she does. It’s who she is.

  For now.

  She’s still strong, still agile, but no denying reality. Sooner rather than later, age will put an end to her deployments. She won’t be able to pass the physical qualifications and she’ll have to stand down.

  Until then, she doesn’t plan to stop.

  She slides across the bench seat to the window.

  Experience has taught her that the best way to handle goodbyes is to keep them short, then put the guilt and the doubt away so that she can focus on the mission and what is required of her and of her teammates to meet their goals and come home safe.

  Chris and Rohan slide into the seat in front of her. Chris hasn’t trimmed his beard since the interview with Yusri Atwan, and he’s looking scruffy. Rohan always wears a full beard, and he always looks scruffy. They both turn around to trade fist bumps with True.

  “Right action,” Chris says quietly.

  “Right action,” she echoes.

  Rohan treats them to a wolfish grin. “Gotta love Lincoln. We are going to lose so much money on this operation.”

  “Truth,” Chris mutters, shaking his head at the profligacy of it all, as if to shore up his reputation for fiscal prudence.

  Hypocrite, True thinks wryly. He is just as eager to undertake this venture as any of them.

  As Chris turns to face forward, Juliet Holliday climbs into the van. She takes the seat beside True and they trade the traditional fist bump—“Right action.”

  Juliet is only thirty-five, married just two years to a game developer whose only experience with the military is through first-person shooters. She leans in close, whispers in True’s ear, “I lied to him. I told him this is a training mission.”

  True rolls her eyes. From the seat in front, Rohan says, “A fucking live-fire training mission.”

  Rohan lost most of his natural hearing during an extended firefight in Ukraine. Now he uses cybernetic enhancements wired into his auditory nerve, giving him a range of hearing far greater than the human norm, and with components that can be easily swapped out if his ears ever get blown again. Juliet punches him lightly in the shoulder. “Stop eavesdropping,” she warns while Lincoln opens the driver’s door and slides behind the wheel. Jameson takes shotgun.