by Callie Hart
Jamie’s eyes are grief-filled, his entire body tense with worry. “Tell me you’ll consider that, Sophia. Because I’m fucking worried out of my mind over you, over this whole fucking situation, and I feel like everything is about to spiral out of control.”
His dark hair, normally buzzed close to his head, is a little long at the moment. Jamie runs a hand through it, pulling on it as he leans one elbow against the bar. He really does look like he’s worried out of his mind.
I take a second to really think about what I would do in his place, and it dawns on me that I wouldn’t react in any other way. I’ve been so overtaken by my own vim and vinegar, pissed off about my civil rights being infringed upon, that I haven’t seen what this is doing to him. It’s absolutely killing him.
I step into him, wrapping my arms around his neck, and I hold onto him as tightly as I can. “I’m sorry,” I whisper. “I shouldn’t be, but I am. Things would be so much easier for you if you’d never met me. You’d have dealt with Hector a long time ago. He probably wouldn’t have come to New Mexico at all. If I weren’t in your life, everything would be easier.”
Jamie’s arms find their way around my waist, and his lips find their way to the sensitive skin of my neck. He kisses me, and then sighs, leaning his head against mine. “If you weren’t in my life, sugar, I’d only be half a man. I wouldn’t trade knowing you, caring for you, loving you, for anything in the world.”
CHAPTER EIGHT
REBEL
AFGHANISTAN
I can smell smoke. I can smell something else on the night’s breeze as well, something heavy and acrid, organic almost, and a knot forms in the pit of my stomach. There are no alarms going off to signal something significant is happening, but I’m gripped with foreboding. Something is fucking going down, I know it is. I prop myself up on one elbow, squinting into the darkness, and Cade is already sitting up in his bed on the other side of the room, a mirror image of me, concern etched deeply into his face.
“You smell that?” he whispers.
“Yeah. Yeah, I do.”
“You know what it is?”
I shake my head, no, though I have a worrying suspicion that I actually do know and I just don’t want to admit it to myself. “Better check it out,” I say.
Cade flings his legs out of his cot, shoving his socked feet straight into his polished boots that are sitting next to his bed. I do the same. We’re both already dressed, t-shirts tucked into our pants, ready to rock and roll. In the army you learn pretty fucking quickly that you have to go to sleep fully geared up. Too many times we’ve been called out in the middle of the night and needed to move quickly. Takes too long to wrestle into your clothes when there are people screaming at you and sirens wailing in your goddamn ears.
I don’t wake the rest of the unit yet. Since we haven’t officially been called to duty, it would be a mistake to drag everyone out of their cots when we might not be needed. Cade and I are hardly quiet as we exit the tent we’ve called home for the past eighteen months, but the other ten men we bunk with don’t even stir as we head outside into the darkness.
Immediately, we see the source of the burning smell. On the far side of the base, a tall column of smoke is rising in a great billowing cloud up toward the sky. The base’s fire trucks are already positioned by the high chain link fence that borders the encampment, and their hoses are jetting arcs of water over the fence onto the small tents and shanti buildings on the other side.
Normally we would have been told to move along the Afghan locals who chose to set up camp right next to the base. Too dangerous to have potential insurgents sleeping on our doorstep, maybe building bombs in their shelters, strapping themselves up with C4, ready to make martyrs of themselves, but these people were all old women and children. Put out of their homes by bombings, they had no one to protect them and nowhere else to go. The Colonel decided it was permissible for them to stay alongside the base for a week until troops could be spared to relocate them somewhere safer, away from the open gunfire and the burning cars in the streets. Right now, it doesn’t look like anyone is going to require relocating, though.
“Holy shit,” Cade says under his breath. “What the fuck?”
What the fuck is right. There were maybe two hundred people here when we went to sleep, at least seventy tents and make shift shelters pitched up twenty feet away from the fence. Now every single one of those tents and shelters are on fire, and there are women dashing around, jaws hanging open, low wailing coming from their mouths as they try to find their friends and loved ones.
“Fuck. You think those assholes came down here and set fire to their own people’s tents? Why the fuck would they do that?” Cade covers his mouth with his hand, frowning at the scene unfolding before his eyes.
A woman stumbles out from a tent close by, howling in pain. She’s on fire, the long material of her clothing engulfed in flames that lick at her body, rising upward as she runs in the direction of the fire trucks. The guys douse her with water, putting the flames out, but she doesn’t stop howling. It’s the most ungodly, terrible thing I’ve ever heard. I won’t be able to free myself of the sights, sounds, and smells of this night for a very, very long time.
The radio I carry on my hip emits a burst of static, which I barely notice. Cade has to take it off my belt and place it in my hand before I realize that Richter, our platoon leader, is barking out orders to me and I haven’t answered him yet.
“—can see your ass from where I’m standing, Squad Leader. Answer your damn radio!”
I hold the radio up to my mouth, still blinking at the fire. At the tents that are on fire. At the people that are on fire. “Yes, sir. Sorry, I hear you. Just a little shocked that the base isn’t in full meltdown right now.”
“That’s what they want. They’re up on the hillside. Patrol saw three or four men up on the ridgeline watching through sniper scopes. They want chaos, and we don’t aim on giving it to them. Go wake up your men.”
“Yes, sir.”
“I want those fuckers’ heads on sticks, Duke. Go get ‘em for me.”
“Sir, yes, sir. They’ll never see us coming.”
“That’s what I like to hear.”
The radio falls silent, and Cade and I run back to our tent, less dazed now that we have a purpose. I’m whooping and hollering by the time I tug the flap back and duck inside our billet. “All right, assholes, on your feet! On your feet! On your feet! We got work to do.” Ten bleary-eyed men are suddenly sitting upright in their bunks, moving automatically as they reach for their boots and their gear. They don’t gripe or complain. They’re all so used to this that their bodies function instantaneously, performing rote mechanical movements that were drilled into them back in basic training.
By the time everyone has their kit on and the straps of their M4s slung over their necks, my men are wide away and ready to fuck shit up. They live for this stuff. More often than not, they’re sitting around, trying not to cook in the Afghan heat. Being called out on a mission is the most exciting thing that can happen any day of the week. Being called out on a mission in the middle of the night is even better.
Normally we’d load up into transports and burn rubber out of base, speeding toward the location of our targets, but this time we’re on foot. The hillside that flanks the base was considered a major security risk by the higher ups when they were considering where to plant our three-thousand-strong camp, but in the end their concerns were overruled by General Lockwood, who felt the location—close to four hotspots in the near by vicinity, along with the fact that it is only a ninety minute drive to Camp Leatherneck—out weighed the risk that it would be on lower ground and subject to an increased chance of attack.
The knife-edge sharp ridgeline to the west rises up into the night. It’s clear, no cloud cover, and neither the light coming from the base behind us or the fire beyond can dampen the blanket of stars suspended over our heads, shining bright. Cade’s a reasonably tall guy, is only a couple inches sho
rter than me, and he’s a broad motherfucker, yet as we navigate our way around the back of the ridge, ducked low to the ground, trying to stay out of sight, the guy doesn’t make a goddamn sound. None of my men do. For a brief, twisted moment I’m proud that they’re such well trained killing machines.
The slog up the four hundred meter slope shouldn’t take us as long as it does, but our cover will be blown if we don’t tread carefully at this point. When we come close to topping the hill, I send the newest, youngest recruit, Atherton, up ahead to scope out the situation. The rest of us crouch in the dark, breathing quietly, the warmed metal of our guns pressed against our chests, listening to the sound of our hearts slamming in our chests as we wait for him to return and tell us what he’s seen.
Three minutes pass by. Below us, a loud splintering, cracking sound rips through the night, and a ball of fire boils up toward the sky, casting long shadows behind us as it flares. “The fuck was that?” Cade hisses.
I stare down at the camp, narrowing my eyes, trying to figure that out for myself. The swell of flames from the initial explosion dies back, and it’s clear to see it originated on the other side of the camp’s fencing, where the Afghani women and children were camped out. Not our fuel supplies then. But whoever sparked that thing must have had access to a huge quantity of accelerant. How the fuck did they manage to get that through the checkpoint? And was it meant to blow inside the refugee camp, or inside our camp?
Cade shakes his head, chewing on something between his front teeth. “This is absolute bullshit. Those people came to us for help. They were camped right next to us, for fuck’s sake. How could this happen?”
I keep my mouth shut. I’m about to tell him to do the same but Atherton emerges out of the darkness, face as white as a sheet, and my focus turns to him. “Well? Who’s up there?”
Atherton shakes his head. “No one. Well, four men, but they’re all dead. Their hands…” He shivers. “Their hands have been glued to their rifles. Their eyelids are glued open too. They’ve all been shot in the head. They’re…they’re ours.”
“Ours?” My stomach dips, like I’m on a rollercoaster and I’ve just been rocketed down a steep drop. “US soldiers?”
Atherton nods. He looks like he’s about to pass the fuck out. “I don’t recognize them. I haven’t been here long, though. Could be they’re from our platoon. Could be they’re from another camp.”
“We have to get up there,” Cade snaps. A rumble of agreement goes around the other men.
“We can’t.”
Cade looks horrified. “What do you mean, we can’t? They’re our men. Our brothers. We can’t just leave them there.”
“Why would they leave them up on the ridgeline with their hands glued to their weapons and their eyes glued open, Cade? There’s only one reason: they left them there for us to find. They know we patrol this hillside religiously. Daily. Hourly sometimes. I have no idea why they want us up there at the top of the hill, but they’re trying to draw us there.”
“If it were a trap, why wouldn’t they have killed me when I just went up there to recon the area?” Atherton asks.
Cade answers on my behalf. He looks like he’s seen the truth in my logic now. “Because you’re one guy. If they pick you off, then the rest of us head back down and report what’s happened. If you come back here, tell us what you’ve seen, rile us all up and we go charging up there to get our men, they can pull the trigger and kill twelve of us. They’re playing it smart.”
This reasoning isn’t enough to stop my men from wanting to barrel up there to get our guys back, even though they know it’s the truth. Most of them develop hard, stony-faced expressions as I order them to march back down to camp. Halfway there, I radio back to Richter and tell him what we found. I can hear the rage coloring his voice. He tells me fifty-three of the Afghani women are dead, along with thirteen of the kids. As we approach the camp, we can see their lifeless bodies lined up in rows along the fence line. Worse, we can smell their bodies.
In the morning, the sun, white and cold somehow, peeks over distant mountains much steeper and foreboding than our little hill. A team of marines from Leatherneck report four of their men are missing, and at oh eight hundred hours, an IED blows the top of the ridgeline, creating a crater sixty meters across, sending rocks and boulders raining down on the camp and into the valley.
They obviously grew tired of waiting for us to go up there.
CHAPTER NINE
REBEL
I wake up in the night, sweating. Sophia is already awake, staring at the ceiling, worrying her bottom lip between her teeth. I’m hardly surprised. She’s so wound up right now that I’d be shocked if she’s slept at all. I don’t know if she’s realized I’m conscious yet. She just lies there, staring up at the ceiling, not fidgeting or moving an inch. I blow out a deep breath, shifting over onto my side.
“You were having a bad dream,” she whispers.
“Yeah,” I whisper back.
She says nothing more about the fact that I must have been tossing and turning, which I love her for. I don’t really feel like talking about Afghanistan. I especially don’t want to talk about that night, when it seemed like the whole world was enveloped in death.
“Cade was in prison,” she says.
I’m mildly shocked by this statement. “He was. For nine months.”
“Nine months isn’t very long. What did he do?”
“Nothing.” The word is heavy on my tongue, weighty and painful, and also true. Cade didn’t do anything to land himself in Chino, but he took the time and did it without complaining. I will always owe him a debt for that. “This isn’t the first time the club’s been watched by a federal agency. The ATF were interested in us once before, a couple of years back, but they couldn’t pin anything on us so they picked up Cade for possession of an unlicensed weapon. It was stupid. I was the one carrying the gun. We were in a car, and they pulled us over. Cade grabbed the thing from me before I could stop him. We were on our way to meet an informant who claimed they had information about Laura, and Cade told me I had to go. I had to make the meeting, otherwise the guy would be in the wind and we’d never find out if his information was legit. So they arrested him, took him in, and I couldn’t do a fucking thing about it. Took my uncle nine months to get him out of that place. The wardens were trying to make him talk on the inside. They locked away in the SHU for months on end. Refused to let him have visitors or talk to his lawyers. Eventually they couldn’t keep hold of him, though. They let him go, and Cade came home.”
Those were hard months. Knowing that he was shut away because of me was fucking shitty, but knowing that the information had lead to a dead end and he was serving time for no reason was a bitter pill to swallow. Next to me, Sophia cups her hands over something on her stomach, something round and shiny—one of my snow globes. I don’t need to ask which one it is; I already know it’s the one from Chicago. Has to be. I reach out, skimming my fingers over the cool surface of the glass globe. Sophia’s never asked me about my snow globes—this one in particular—though I know it plays on her mind. She’s too smart; she knows there’s a story there, given the fact that I keep it separate on its own on my desk. I’m not ready to offer that story up voluntarily yet, however, so I take the plastic and glass from her and set it down on the bedside table next to her. Tiny flakes of white swirl inside the globe, falling silently on the Willis Tower, 900 North Michigan and the Lake Point Tower, barely visible in the thick darkness of the room.
After a while, she asks, “Who’s Zeth Mayfair?”
In all honesty, I haven’t thought about that name in a long time. Cade’s mentioned him a number of times since he got out of jail, but he’s been a peripheral player, someone who hasn’t affected our daily lives here in New Mexico. “He’s a friend of Cade’s. Kind of. He works for a guy in Seattle, a guy we suspect has started to trade in women.”
“You think he might know something about Laura? The guy he works for?”
&nbs
p; “No. Charlie Holsan’s only just starting to dip his toes into that shit. Cade thinks it might be a good idea to talk to his friend, though, see if we can convince him to question his boss about any girls he might have heard about going missing a few years back.”
“And you don’t think it’s a good idea?”
I shake my head. “My cousin works for this guy, too. It’s messy. We went to see Michael a while back and stormed over there to Charlie’s place but he managed to talk us down. We didn’t end up seeing him. Since then I’ve had time to look into Holsan. He’s fucking crazy, a real nasty piece of work. It would be a mistake to confront him about selling girls. And this Zeth guy doesn’t seem to have anything to do with that side of Holsan’s business, so it’s unlikely he can get information from him anyway. Better to just watch and wait, see what happens.”
Sophia makes a soft, mmhhhing sound. “Cade obviously feels differently. That’s why he has a whole dossier on the guy in your office?”
“Yeah. Maybe.” I could explain to her that Cade’s just going through the motions now, but it’s too painful to admit out loud, even to myself. Laura’s been gone for so long that the possibility of ever finding her and bringing her home seems remote. I’m nearly positive that Cade thinks his sister is dead. It’s easier for him to believe that. If she’s dead, she’s not being raped repeatedly, over and over again. She’s not being abused and tortured. She’s not in pain and suffering because we can’t fucking find her anywhere on the surface of this godforsaken planet.
Sophia rolls onto her side, facing me. “I’ve been lying here for the past few hours, trying to decide if I should call the cops,” she says quietly. “If the police got involved, if they knew Ramirez has my father, they could storm the farmhouse and get him out of there before they could do anything to harm him.”