But he’d been there, too, from the bloody, screaming hell of Normandy to the frozen hell of Bastogne—“Nuts! ”—to those god-awful concentration camps they’d liberated that truly were hell on earth. He’d seen an ocean of blood spilled and had added to it himself in more than one battle. He’d been just a raw, eighteen-year-old recruit on June 6, 1944, when he went ashore on Omaha Beach, and a seasoned veteran of nineteen when the war in Europe ended less than a year later.
By then, his eyes were a lot older than that when you looked into them. A thousand years older.
But when it was over, he’d come home and got on with his life, like most of the guys who had been overseas with him. He had worked, married, raised a family, seen his kids move away, buried his wife, married again, buried that wife as well, and kept on keepin’ on until the stroke meant that he couldn’t anymore.
These days, sure, he was just playing out the hand he’d been dealt and waiting for the game to be over. He knew that, but even so, he was damned if he was going to let some punk bust into his place and steal his stuff and maybe try to kill him.
Life might not be what it once was, but anybody who tried to take it from him was gonna get a fight.
His thoughts had wandered off. They did that a lot these days. Sister Angela was talking again. He forced his attention back onto her and heard her say, “. . . guest room, all right, Peter?”
“What? I’m sorry.”
She smiled, never losing her patience with him.
“I said I’d stay in the guest room tonight, so you won’t be here alone.”
“I’m used to . . . bein’ alone.”
“Yes, but we won’t be able to get that door repaired until tomorrow, and you don’t need to be here by yourself.”
Yeah, like a twenty-six-year-old nun who weighed maybe 110 pounds was gonna be much help in a fight, he thought.
He shook his head stubbornly and said, “No, you . . . go on home. I’ll be . . . fine.”
“You’re sure?”
“I’m . . . positive.” He tried to make his tone firm enough that she’d know there was no use arguing with him.
“Well . . . all right. I might be able to fix the doorknob enough to keep the door shut for tonight,” she went on, “and we can prop a chair under it for added security. Then tomorrow morning I’ll call someone to repair it and the gate.”
“It’ll be . . . expensive.”
“Don’t worry about that. I can take care of it if I need to.”
“I thought nuns were . . . poor.”
“Well, it’s true that I’m not rich in anything except faith and friendship, but we’re not as poverty-stricken as people always think we are.”
“I guess . . . I appreciate it, then, Sister . . . everything you’re doin’ for me.”
“I’m happy to do it. Will you be all right while I try to fix up the door?”
“Yeah. I guess I’ll . . . watch some TV . . . or something.”
“All right.” As he started out of the kitchen, she added, “You know, I was planning on doing some shopping tomorrow. Would you feel up to going with me? I know you enjoy a little outing now and then.”
“Yeah, I suppose . . . I could do that.”
“It’s settled, then . . . depending on when someone can come to work on the door, of course.” Impulsively, she came over to him, bent down, and kissed him on top of the head. “Don’t worry about a thing, Peter. I’ll take good care of you.”
“Thanks,” he rasped. This was the first time a pretty girl had kissed him in, Lord, he couldn’t remember when. Nun or no nun, he wasn’t going to complain.
She was wrong about one thing, though, he thought. He got hold of the knob on the chair’s left arm and pushed it forward, then to the left so that the slowly rolling chair went into the hall instead of the living room. He went back to his bedroom and stopped the chair beside the dresser.
With his good arm and hand, he opened the top drawer and reached into it, sliding his hand under the pile of underwear until his fingers closed around cool metal. The side of his mouth that still worked curved upward in a grin.
That damn cop might have taken the Ruger with him, but Pete still had the Browning Hi-Power. Sister Angela’s heart might be in the right place, but if there was ever any real trouble to be dealt with, a few well-placed 9mm rounds would be a hell of a lot more effective.
“Heh,” Pete said happily as he looked at the semi-automatic pistol. They would just see who was gonna take care of who.
Chapter 7
Charles Lockhart looked at the turkey dinner he had just nuked in the microwave of his apartment kitchen. What a sad, pathetic thing dinner for one was. For a second he considered picking it up from the counter and dumping it in the trash . . . but he was hungry. And public schoolteachers didn’t make enough money to afford such extravagant gestures as throwing away perfectly good food.
Charles’s father had always accused him of having his head in the clouds, but he had a practical side, too. He carried the previously frozen dinner from the counter to the table and set it down, then got himself a bottle of non-alcoholic beer from the refrigerator.
Happy Thanksgiving, he told himself as he sat down to eat. He recognized the bitterness in the thought, but there wasn’t anything he could do about it right now.
Besides, there was a part of him accustomed to the bitterness, almost like it was an old friend.
The hour was fairly late for Thanksgiving dinner because he’d slept in, then watched what was left of the parade, followed by the dog show that was on every year. Charles liked dogs, and if he’d had a house, he would go to one of the shelters and adopt a rescue dog. Maybe two. It would have been all right for him to have one pet here in the apartment, but that didn’t really seem fair to him. He was saving up for a down payment on a house with a nice backyard, so one of these days . . .
Yeah, just like one of these days he’d be married and have a family and be a respected educator. People would actually listen to him.
The day before, when the bell rang for early dismissal, he had tried to tell the juniors and sophomores in his English II class good-bye and wish them a happy Thanksgiving break, but nearly all of them dashed out the door before he could say a word. They might not be little kids anymore, but sometimes they still acted like they were, and one of those occasions was when school was dismissed early for a break.
In this case, that break was only four days. They’d been bitching all week because they had to go to school on Wednesday. None of the other districts in the area did. In fact, some of them were out all week and called it Fall Break.
The calendar in the district where Charles taught was a little fluky, though. He’d tried to explain to them that they would get out a day or more earlier than those other districts at the end of the school year, but that was months off and didn’t mean anything to the kids. Not much did other than the here and now.
Probably it never occurred to any of them that he wanted out of there just as much as they did. The kids all thought that teachers liked school, and Charles knew that some did.
He wasn’t one of them. He didn’t dislike it. There were lots worse jobs in the world, and he was well aware of that. And there were those rare times when one of the kids actually understood what he was trying to get across, and that was gratifying.
For the most part, though, he was doing the same thing they were: putting in the time.
As he started to eat, he picked up the book lying on the table, a paperback edition of The Great Gatsby. It was one of his favorite novels. The curriculum allowed him only a few authors of his picking each year, and, he usually opted for Hemingway or Fitzgerald, as they were accessible. Sometimes Faulkner or Henry James, if he was feeling in a particularly perverse mood and wanted to torture the kids.
Today he just read the ending of Gatsby while he ate. He knew it pretty well by heart but always enjoyed letting his eyes travel over the words anyway. There was something so poignant about being
a boat beating against the current. He suspected that was a good description of him as well.
When he was finished, he set the book aside, went into the living room, and turned the TV on again.
The first thing that came on was a commercial for a local gun store. They were having a big Black Friday sale, like every other business in town. Charles had never fired a gun in his life and hadn’t even held one in his hand, nor did he have any interest in them.
He flipped through the channels. Football game. Football game. Football game. Commercial for a huge, daylong sale at the American Way Mall, with new specials every hour.
That was a little interesting, he decided. At some point, he would need to buy Christmas presents for his family, so he might as well get started on that. Sure, it would be crowded, but he didn’t mind parking at the edge of the mall lot. The walk would do him good.
He spent enough time alone here in his apartment. Being around a lot of people might be just the thing he needed to perk him up and bring him out of this gloomy mood.
A little excitement would be a welcome thing, he told himself.
* * *
The SAM arced up from the brown, gray, and tan landscape below, trailing smoke as it tore through the hot air toward the chopper.
Jamie Vasquez’s co-pilot yelled, “Incoming!” but Jamie was already leaning on the controls, sending the helicopter veering sharply down and to the left. Startled cries came from the troops she was ferrying.
Jamie wasn’t surprised, though. Intel said that the Taliban wasn’t active in this area right now, but she was in her third tour in Afghanistan and had learned a long time ago that intel could be trusted only so far.
She kept the chopper swooping hard to the left, hoping the surface-to-air missile wasn’t a heat-seeker. Most of them weren’t. In large part, the Taliban forces were still using weapons left over from the ill-fated Russian invasion more than thirty years earlier. Many of them weren’t very advanced.
This missile didn’t appear to be changing course in response to her actions. In the pair of heartbeats Jamie had to spare as the SAM streaked toward the chopper, she recognized that and heaved a mental sigh of relief. Her reflexes had been fast enough to get them out of harm’s way.
Then the missile barely clipped the chopper’s tail and detonated.
The explosion jolted the helicopter as if a giant hand had tried to swat it out of the air. Men yelled curses as the aircraft began to spin crazily.
Jamie fought the controls as they tried to tear themselves out of her hands, using all the skill and strength she had developed during thousands of hours in the air. In the other seat, the co-pilot shouted readings from the instruments.
The sandy, rocky ground was coming up fast.
The chopper was still level, though, which was good. If Jamie could stop the spin and get just a little forward momentum, she could set them down without a catastrophic crash. She hoped. There would at least be a chance . . .
Of course, even if they got on the ground, Taliban fighters would probably be waiting for them.
She lowered her chin to key the mike strapped to her throat and called in the Mayday, giving headquarters their position. A few fighter planes might be able to keep the enemy off of them long enough for another chopper to get here for an evac.
If they didn’t . . .
Well, those soldiers back there had signed up to fight. Looked like they might get their chance a little sooner than they’d expected.
The spinning slowed. Servomotors whined as they responded to Jamie’s skillful touch. She coaxed a little more stability out of the controls.
The chopper lurched forward, clearing a pile of jagged rocks by no more than twenty feet. A gentle, sandy slope loomed ahead of the aircraft. Jamie thought she might be able to set it down without too much damage . . .
Then it tilted with no warning and rammed starboard side first into the ground.
* * *
She came up gasping for air, as if she were fighting against a literal tide that threatened to drown her.
“Whoa, honey, take it easy,” her husband Tom told her. “You just dozed off.” He frowned. “Were you dreaming that you were back there again?”
She sat up in bed. The light on Tom’s side was still on. He’d been reading a paperback Western that he must have set aside when she startled awake. It was sitting facedown on the covers, open to a page about halfway through the book.
Jamie glanced at the clock. 10:50, it read. She had gone to sleep almost immediately when her head hit the pillow at 10:30, exhausted after a long day of kids and Thanksgiving festivities.
That meant she had been asleep for twenty minutes. How in the hell could she have had such a detailed dream—or nightmare, to give it its rightful name—in only twenty minutes? In real life the incident hadn’t taken as long as that. Among the ones who had been killed was Master Sergeant Benjamin Farley. He had saved Jamie’s life at least twice, then lost his defending the makeshift stronghold from the enemy. In addition to Jamie, only four soldiers had lived through that fight.
Various medals had been passed out, some of them posthumously. Jamie had gone home and taken the medical discharge they offered her. She had been on her third tour when she was wounded, so nobody pressed her to stay in.
Besides, she had a husband and four kids between the ages of eight and seventeen, and she had been away from them long enough already. Somebody else could handle the fighting from here on out.
That didn’t mean it was easy to leave the past behind, though. A couple of times a month, on average, she had these painfully vivid dreams where she relived that day in the desert. Those rocks were on the other side of the world from her suburban Springfield home, but to her they might as well have been just down the street.
She pushed the covers back on her side of the bed and said, “I’m taking something.”
“Are you sure that’s a good idea?” Tom asked.
She swung her legs off the bed and was struck by the asymmetry of them. The right one ended just below the knee. She had assumed she would be used to that by now, but sometimes she wondered if she ever would be.
The doctors had done a top-notch job all the way around, from the amputation to the rehab to the prosthesis to the therapy that taught her how to get around on it. People who only saw her in jeans might not even realize she was missing part of her leg.
She would always know it, though.
She didn’t bother putting on the prosthesis just to go to the bathroom and open the medicine cabinet. The crutch she kept by the bed was good enough for that. She shook a pill from the prescription bottle into the palm of her other hand and closed the cabinet, then swallowed the pill dry and looked at herself in the mirror.
Her sandy blond hair was still cut short to fit in a flight helmet, even though she wouldn’t be taking the controls ever again. There weren’t any more lines around her eyes and the corners of her mouth than you’d find on the faces of most women in their late thirties.
Once she had overheard one of her oldest son Andrew’s friends telling Andrew how hot she was, which had embarrassed Andy, of course and almost started a fight.
Where the image broke down was her eyes. They had seen too much
Luckily, she had come home to a loving husband, good kids, and a peaceful life. She had figured she would put everything else behind her.
She was trying, but so far the results had been mixed.
Tom was pretending to read again when she got back to bed, but she saw the way his eyes cut toward her now and then in a sideward glance.
“I know I’ve probably been taking a few too many pills,” she said as she climbed into bed. “I’ll cut back on them. I really need to get some decent sleep tonight, though. I’ve got Christmas shopping tomorrow.”
“You don’t have to go shopping the day after Thanksgiving, you know,” he said. “It’ll be all right if you wait until next week when the crowds aren’t so bad.”
“No, you and
the kids had to celebrate Christmas without me for too many years already.”
“Hey, we always Skyped.”
“It’s not the same thing and you know it,” Jamie said. “I promised myself that the first Christmas I was back, I’d go out the day after Thanksgiving and buy presents for all of you. You know how it is when you set a goal for yourself.”
“Sure,” he said. Tom Vasquez knew about goals. He was the vice president of a corporation that made machine parts for the U.S. Air Force through various Department of Defense contracts, so he had to be goal oriented and diligent. Jamie was the same way. She’d always thought that was one reason they got along as well as they did.
He went on, “But if you get up in the morning and don’t feel like it, you don’t have to go. Hey, you can always buy stuff online. You can get almost anything that way now.”
“No,” Jamie said, shaking her head stubbornly. She felt the pill beginning to take effect already, so she slid down in the bed and pulled the covers over her again. Drowsily, she said, “I’m going to the mall tomorrow, just like I promised myself. I did three tours in Afghanistan . . . after all . . . How bad . . . can a shopping mall . . . be?”
Chapter 8
Habib and Assouri went into the apartment house lobby. No one was around. One of the lights in the small lobby was burned out, so it was only dimly illuminated. Habib could see well enough to make out the names on the labels under the buttons. He pushed the button marked REED.
The voice that came scratchily from the intercom speaker sounded annoyed as it asked, “Who’s there?”
“Habib and Mahmoud,” the younger man answered.
“Oh. Come on up, then.”
The buzzer sounded, signaling that the inner door was unlocked. Mahmoud pulled it open and held it for Habib.
Donald Reed lived on the third floor. The two men were in good shape, so the climb didn’t bother them. When they reached the hallway, they walked quietly down it to the door of 307, Reed’s apartment. He was waiting for them with the door open a couple of inches. He swung it back as they approached and smiled.
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