by Sarah Black
And Juan? What if John and Gabriel were thrown in jail? Juan would not be left with a single man to respect and look up to. He would grow up with his mother’s bitter words in his ears and no men to love, and his masculine soul would be trampled. It would be drugs, maybe. No, he would avoid the drugs, join the Marine Corps, just so he could be around men who would not disappoint him. And the Marines would send Gabriel’s baby off to war.
How could he keep them all safe if he was thrown into the brig, disgraced? Was he going to end up a fucking jailbird? They couldn’t take his degrees away. He still had a PhD, an engineering degree. Would they let him teach? Somehow he didn’t think leadership seminars would go over in prison. Or he might be training the Aryan Nations to take over the government. Not what he had planned for his retirement career.
John sat up, took a long pull from the bottle of tequila. Screw it, the IG could think what they wanted. Other than the tequila, there was nothing in his stomach besides Pepto-Bismol. He lay back down on the bed, stared up at the ceiling, carefully checked from corner to corner. No cobwebs. Oh, God. He was Out. Of. Control. “Help.”
Gabriel stuck his head into the bedroom. He had a towel around his waist, was wiping the last of the shaving cream from his smooth brown cheeks. He looked carefully at John, splayed out on the bed, the bottle of tequila in his fist. Gabriel started grinning. “I know what you need.”
He started humming, a stupidly addictive tune, dancing a little in his towel.
“Oh, no. Not that.”
“She’s a very kinky girl, the kind you don’t take home to mama.”
“No. Not ‘Super Freak’. That’s gonna push me right over the edge.”
Gabriel was swinging his ass, and he hit the play button on the CD player by the bed. “Come on, baby. Let’s get the blood moving.” He danced his way to the end of the bed, pulled John up by the hands, and wrapped him up in his big arms. He smelled like Gabriel, warm and spicy, cedarwood and orange and male skin. “Why do we need these towels?”
He pulled his off, tossed it to the end of the bed, then slid his fingers into the top of John’s towel. John was already dancing to the music, unable to stop himself. “I’m starting to hate this song,” he said, and did a tricky little spin. When he spun away, Gabriel pulled his towel off, threw it on the bed.
Gabriel reached out for his hand, spun him again. They were singing, Gabriel with evident enjoyment, John because he couldn’t stop himself. Gabriel pulled him in close, and they were dancing belly to belly, hips swinging to a rhythm that could only have come out of 1981. “‘She’s a super freak, she’s super freaky….’”
Kim came through the door, stumbled to a stop so suddenly that Billy piled into him from behind. Their mouths dropped open in unison, then Billy covered his mouth, started to giggle.
John pointed toward the door. “Out.”
Kim blinked, turned around, and pushed Billy out the door. John heard him whisper, “Billy, quick! Get the cameras!”
John walked like an Egyptian over to the bedroom door, reached down, and turned the lock. “We may need to get a dead bolt.”
Gabriel reached for the bottle of tequila. The next song was playing. He took a long swig. “‘Might as well face it, you’re addicted to love.’”
JOHN was back to himself by the time they took a taxi to the lawyer’s office. Some dancing, some laughing, some love, and then lunch with his boys, listening to Kim’s plan to get a fiber-optic scope with a camera to slip under his bedroom door. His wonderful life, full to overflowing.
Gabriel called the lawyer a shark with a grudge, and agreed with Mike they didn’t have to like him. John felt weirdly dislocated driving onto the base, the airmen at the gate saluting him, standing at attention, then walking into the IG’s office, with everyone snapping to attention when he passed. He felt like he was back home, but strangers were living in his house.
Gabriel leaned over his shoulder. “You can’t go home again. Are any of these kids even legal drinking age? I don’t think so.” John looked back at him. His face was sorrowful, just a little angry. This was as hard for him as it was for John. Gabriel had joined the army when he was eighteen.
A young airman escorted them to a conference room. The table was set with water, and there was a coffee mess in the corner. The airman fixed their coffee, giving John admiring looks from under her lashes. She handed him a cup, smiling. “I hope I can take your graduate seminar in leadership next semester, General. I’m nearly finished with my master’s in history at UNM.” He wondered how Johnny Cash had felt when he’d been thrown into the clink, and the deputies had asked him for an autograph.
He took his coffee, sat down next to Gabriel at the table. Gabriel had overheard. “I wonder if you’re going to have time to teach a graduate seminar? In between watching the basil grow?”
“I’ve been wondering about that myself.”
Gabriel gave his knee a squeeze under the table.
The young woman who came into the room caused the lawyer-shark to sit up and take notice. She was a beauty, dark hair cut in a bob and big dark eyes; an elegant figure in her service dress blues. John thought she looked vaguely familiar, wondered if he’d come across her in his last years in service, when she must have been a baby lieutenant. She was wearing captain’s stripes now. She put down the folders she was carrying, made her way to their side of the long table, and shook hands. “General Mitchel, I’m Captain Curtis.” She turned to Gabriel, studied him for a long moment. She glanced back at John for a moment, smiling, her dark eyes wide with appreciation. Gabriel was a very handsome man in his dress uniform.
You have no idea, John thought. You haven’t seen him in a flight suit. John looked at Gabriel’s glum face. The shark had told them it would be a bad sign if the IG gave them a woman or a junior officer. And Curtis was both. She was still standing. “General, gentlemen, I wonder if you would indulge me for a moment?”
The shark was already shaking his head.
She touched John briefly on the sleeve. “Sir, I have an old friend in my office who would like to say hello to you and CW-5 Sanchez before we begin. Would you mind?”
John could use all the old friends he could get. Something about her dark eyes, the shape of her face. Who did she remind him of? “Yes, of course.” He looked at Gabriel. He was studying her as well, his bottom lip caught between his teeth.
They walked down the hall, and she pushed open the door to a typical military office: green metal desk, computers with a wild tangle of electrical cords underneath, standard-issue metal venetian blinds on the windows. She had a small pot of African violets on the window sill, and the violets were trying hard to bloom, one tiny purple flower reaching for the sun. The man sitting next to the desk stood when they walked in. He had dark hair and eyes, like her, and a smile that lit up the room. He was dressed in jeans and a white button-down oxford hanging loose. He looked at them both, and John remembered a small, dusty boy, lips cracked from the heat, feet bleeding in his sandals, handing him a letter. Begging him to help his father. “Abdullah!”
He was laughing now, and crying, and his sister ducked out of the office to give them some privacy. He went into Gabriel’s arms first, hugged him, and then John held him and stroked the dark hair. “You look so much like your father when I first knew him. Tell me how he is. I haven’t spoken to him since Thanksgiving.”
“He’s okay. Some pain, you know. Arthritis where the bones were broken. He says the pain is just to remind him he’s still alive. He’s hot on the trail of some papyrus fragments that are alleged to have parts of an unknown Egyptian-Greek story. He says to tell you to come visit him, see if you can help him translate the demotic.”
Gabriel pulled up chairs, reached out for his hand. “Why are you so tall? Did you grow up while we weren’t looking? I thought your dad was joking when he said you were at Julliard. I didn’t think they let little boys play those big cellos.”
“I’m in San Francisco now, at the Conservatory. I ha
d to leave New York. It wasn’t safe. It… it’s been hard for us. Since 9/11.”
John studied his beautiful Arabic face. “Abdullah al-Salim. You have a home with me, anytime you want one. I hope you know that. How is San Francisco?”
“Weird. Cool. When I first arrived, the other guys in the strings section of the orchestra gave me a tee shirt that said ‘I Only Look Like A Terrorist’. San Francisco humor. I knew I had found my place. Some parts of the country, wearing that tee shirt would get me shot.”
Captain Curtis stuck her head back into the room. “Your lawyer is rumbling like a volcano about to blow. Do you want to get our business done, and then maybe we can all go out to dinner?”
John sighed, nodded. Gabriel gave Abdullah another hug. Told him to not disappear while they were being grilled by the lawyers. Abdullah pulled out his phone. “I’ll find us someplace to eat. Someplace with green chili.”
“Every restaurant in New Mexico serves green chili.”
“Good. I’ll start there.” He looked up for a moment. “General? How’s Kim? Is he around?” John noted with interest that Abdullah’s cheeks were flushing with beautiful color.
Captain Curtis shook her head. “We can talk later. We’re going to the Officer’s Club. Surf and turf tonight. They grill a decent steak.” She pointed at her brother’s shirt. “Can you tuck that in? Just a little?” Abdullah just grinned at her. The sight of his happy face, all grown up, and John felt something in his chest that reminded him of the way Christmas morning used to feel when he’d been a kid. And he remembered Kuwait, in 1990.
He reached for Gabriel’s sleeve when they were out of the office. “Thank you,” he said.
“For what?”
“For always having my back. I was just remembering.”
“Me too. That was a close one, my God. Let’s not do that again, okay? I’m getting too old.” He bent over, gave John a little nudge. “Hey, when did Kim and Abdullah meet? Was it that Christmas Kim was seventeen? You were in Cambridge that year, right?”
John shook his head. “I don’t remember. I have a feeling there’s a story I haven’t heard. Do I want to hear it? We’ll get Abdullah to spill the beans tonight. If we’re, you know… not incarcerated.”
Gabriel bent over and whispered in his ear. “If you ask one more lost boy to move into the house, I’m going to start building a barracks in the back yard.”
John felt the color creep up his neck.
They followed Captain Curtis down the hall to the conference room. Which daughter was she? Omar had three, and if he remembered correctly, one was in London, married. Was this the little one, the baby his wife had carried in her arms out of Kuwait? No, couldn’t be. He tried to do some math in his head, but gave it up, too stressed to carry a linear thought. She must be married, since she had a different last name than her father.
She turned to stop them before they went into the room. “Can I ask you something, General Mitchel? This is just for my own curiosity. Stories become legends, and then over time the facts get blurred. You’re a legend in my family. Abdullah, he was never in the military, so I don’t think he ever understood what he said you did, what my father said you did. But I’m in the army. I want to know the truth, not the legend. You were a general officer. Did you really go into enemy-controlled territory with an Apache helicopter and a couple of rifles and one pilot as backup? In the first days of a war, to rescue a civilian?” She studied their faces. “What were you thinking? What were you planning to do if you’d been captured?” She narrowed her eyes, looking carefully into both of their faces. “Okay, that’s what I thought. That’s exactly what you did.” She grinned at him, then, shaking her head. “Unbelievable. General, they should have court-martialed you!”
She opened the door to the conference room, waited for them to be seated before she pulled out the chair at the head of the table. “Would anyone like more coffee?” John shook his head. Could this day get any stranger? “Gentlemen, are you familiar with the quote ‘revenge is a confession of pain’? I believe that is the case with this deposition. The allegations were presented without foundation in factual evidence, and this deposition appears to constitute nothing more than hearsay and a cry of pain. The office of the inspector general is not able to use scant resources looking for that evidence, nor do we have any desire to do so. We have no evidence of a crime, and the allegations of behavior unbecoming an officer are, in the case of General John Mitchel and CW-5 Gabriel Sanchez, without basis in fact. We will not pursue any legal or administrative action based on the allegations in this deposition, now or in the future.” She looked at Gabriel. “Sir, you have a plan for the care of your family?”
“Yes, I do.”
“Your word will suffice. I am very sorry for the pain your family, and you both, have suffered. But as far as the army is concerned, your honor and your reputations are intact.” She turned to the lawyer, who was studying her with a bemused look on his face. “A pleasure,” she said, holding out a hand. “Thank you for coming.”
When he’d left the room, she held out her hand to John, and he took it, feeling her firm grip. He thought she might work out boxing in the base gym. “I’m Amira,” she said, taking pity on him. Could she tell he was still trying to calculate her age? “The middle daughter. I took my husband’s name last year after we got married. Safer, that way, though the army is probably the safest place in the country for an Arab-American woman.” She looked back at Gabriel, then smiled at him. “The IG looked for an advocate who had reason to admire and respect General John Mitchel to handle this matter. And they found me.”
“They must have had to search long and hard.”
“Not really.” She squeezed his hand and let it go. “The way I heard it, we were lining up for the job. Your fans are legion, General. Sabers were rattling on your behalf all the way up Pennsylvania Avenue.”
She held out an arm for Gabriel, and he escorted her back down the hall. “So, tell me all about that weird-ass law firm you work for. I heard you’re doing 30 percent pro bono, but I know that’s not true.”
“Fifty percent,” he admitted. “Sometimes more. Immigration, hate crimes, housing discrimination, mostly. We’re lucky if we can cover the rent and the electric bill.”
“I interned with the ACLU after law school. But I had those student loans to pay off.”
“How close are you to paying them off?”
“It’s done. I need to start looking around for my post-army career. I only have six months left at my current duty station.”
“Where are you stationed?”
“Germany.” She grinned at John’s stunned look. “I was happy to have a quick trip home, to check on Father. And I haven’t seen Abdullah since he went to San Francisco. Dinner is on me.”
Epilogue
JOHN leaned over the side of the basket, saw the ground fall away as swiftly as a bird’s flight. It didn’t feel like they were moving at all; there was just a soft warm breeze against his face and the earth falling beneath them. He looked up. Gabriel was wearing his flight suit, reaching over his head to make an adjustment to the airflow to the balloon. The fire made a soft, whooshing sound, but otherwise it was quiet, the movement of the basket so gentle it didn’t feel like flight at all.
“What do you think?”
John smiled at him, leaned back against the basket. “After all this time you can still surprise me.”
“I’m starting to crave the quiet,” Gabriel said. “Maybe time changes us. I used to love the speed. Now I long for the peace of this kind of flight. The way I’ve always longed for you, from somewhere deep in my soul.”
“Gabriel….”
“Only one thing hasn’t changed, not in all this time.”
John looked up at the balloon over his head. “I can’t see it from here.”
“Kim was supposed to take a picture and send it to my phone when we inflated.” Gabriel pulled the phone out of his pocket, scrolled down with his thumb. “Is he really spendi
ng the day with Mike Adams, learning how to trim bonsai? Do you think Mike understands how wildly enthusiastic he gets?”
“Mike’s the same way. He says he has over three hundred bonsai now, plus another hundred babies in plastic pots, ready to start training. He’s talking about growing trees from seeds. I mean, that’s a long-term project for your retirement years.”
“The backyard is going to be overrun. I’m going to have to build something to hold them all. Kim was talking about a bonsai quince. I don’t even know what a quince is. What’s the matter with him, he doesn’t want to fly in a balloon? And Billy claims to be afraid of heights? Couple of pansy-asses. Oh, look. Here it is.” He turned the phone to John, and a golden horse rose from the side of their balloon, fierce, tangled black mane, wild black eyes.
“That looks like Genghis Khan’s horse. I remember when you had that horse on the nose of your chopper.”
John studied him from his side of the basket. Gabriel leaned back, grinned at him. They might tip over if they didn’t keep their weight balanced. It would be a long way down to the ground. But Gabriel in a flight suit was nearly impossible to resist. John took a step forward, and Gabriel reached for his hand.
“Thank you for flying with me.”
“Always. Thank you for watching my back.”
“It has been my pleasure, General. Are you ready? For whatever comes next?”