“What, Stace?” CJ said. “Funderburk’s right. She told us to keep our distance. What else can we do?”
She felt her face growing warmer, redder, until she couldn’t hold it in any longer. “What the hell kind of friend are you?” she demanded, now standing away from the table, her chair clattering on the floor behind her. “She did that to keep us safe. You know that. Maybe Funderburk and the rest of them don’t have to admit it. But you should.”
“Keep you safe from what?” Funderburk asked. “From an NCIS inquiry? Because if that’s what she had in mind, then to do otherwise, to get in the way of the inquiry would be a violation of the Honor Code.”
“Is that what you think?” she shrieked. “After what happened at Quantico, and… and,” she sputtered, “and on that bridge, do you really think it’s just about not running afoul of NCIS?”
“What is it about, then?” Funderburk asked. “If you know something, spill it.”
“All I know is she’s in real danger. That guy stuck a knife in her face. He was gonna kill her right there, in front of a hundred Marines. And nobody did a damn thing about it. We’re doing the same thing now. She pushed us all away to keep us safe. But we’re just going along with it to cover our asses, and we’re not doing anything to help her.”
“Stace,” CJ called to her in an urgent whisper.
“Has it occurred to you, Miss Carnot,” Funderburk said, now adopting a formal tone, “that Tenno’s troubles may be of her own making? She’s good with pugil sticks—she certainly proved that at Sea Trials—and apparently with a knife, too. Yeah, we probably wouldn’t have won last year without her. But that doesn’t mean we should pull her coals out of every fire, especially if she’s the one holding the matches.”
Before Stacie could unleash another fusillade at her superior, CJ rushed around the table, carrying Zaki and McDonough in her train, and pulled her friend away.
“You’ve said enough, Stace,” she said. “Maybe we all need to take a breath… outside.” She glanced at Funderburk, who nodded his approval as she said this, and Zaki and McDonough hustled Stacie out the doors that led to Gate One.
“Let me go,” she said, kicking and flailing her arms at McDonough, who by that point held her in a bear hug from behind. When he dropped her, she stumbled a few steps away and turned to glower at the three of them. “I don’t need your help.”
“No, Stace,” CJ said. “We’re her friends… and yours. We need to talk about this. If we’re gonna help her, we’re doing it together. But flying off the handle in the galley won’t accomplish anything.”
“I’m still hungry,” McDonough said.
“Me, too,” Zaki said. “We just left dinner on the table in there.”
The three of them had her moving toward downtown before she managed to get her opinion heard. At the corner of Randall and Prince George Streets, she dug in her heels and brought the whole group to a stop. Looking at their blank expressions, and remembering the last time she and CJ and Em were together, enjoying themselves with no sense of foreboding to spoil their fun, she said, “McGinty’s. Let’s go to the Raw Bar.”
At that hour, they had their pick of tables, and the open floor made it easy to see the pattern of tiles on the floor. Tiny, white octagons, interrupted by even smaller black squares, it looked enough like what you might find in a Roman villa to suggest baths more than a bathroom. McDonough ordered for everyone: little necks, oysters, and an assortment of fried creatures.
“Can we add a couple of salads,” CJ said before the waiter departed.
“Well,” Stacie, said expectantly. “What’s your idea for helping her? Don’t tell me there’s nothing we can do.”
“You need to take a step back,” McDonough said. “Yelling at everyone in the company won’t help her.”
“Fine. Enough telling me what won’t help. Now tell me what will. What exactly are you guys prepared to do?”
Of course, no suggestions were forthcoming, and Stacie saw in their faces what she suspected all along, that they only thought of deflecting her resolve, calming her and ultimately letting all their feelings about Em recede into oblivion. The suspicion wasn’t really fair, even she had to admit to herself; still, something about Em touched her more than the others.
Stacie came to the Academy looking for adventure, for action, and her roommates were hardly impressive specimens, a coltish blonde from Philadelphia and a reclusive Asian girl from rural Virginia, both utterly unprepossessing. Sure, Em showed flashes of toughness, and she occasionally came to karate team workouts, but she remained aloof no matter how much coaxing Coach Parker did. Even though she did more morning PT than anyone, she didn’t lift, and she had no ‘guns’ to speak of.
A fan massaged the lazy air above their heads, and Stacie gazed at Zaki’s broad shoulders. He and McDonough had launched Em to the top of Herndon at the end of their Plebe year—that caught Stacie’s attention. In their Youngster year, an impromptu sparring session with the women on the team before the Quantico tournament opened Stacie’s eyes. Em sparred with everyone, one after another and never even broke a sweat. When Stacie’s turn came around, she couldn’t even touch her, no matter how hard she tried, as if Em could read her mind, or her body, or something. The magnitude of her skills was on display that day, but at Sea Trials, Stacie saw the full intensity of her spirit as she dominated in the pugil sticks, even taking on several opponents at a time, intimidating everyone with the fire in her eyes. This was who Stacie wanted to be, what she’d come to the Academy to become, and yet she saw clear as day that Em had arrived fully formed as a warrior.
The waiter brought over two salads and the first of the fried platters McDonough had ordered. An ice cube slipped down in her glass and the others filled the now vacant space. Zaki said something about not making matters worse for Em by creating a disturbance, and she pictured once more the incident on the bridge, and her heart raced. CJ’s reluctance to discuss it at the time only stoked her envy, and even resentment. She should have been there, having Em’s back, facing danger and risking it all with another warrior spirit. At the time, there was no way she could hear what CJ had tried to tell her, that their friend was not exactly what they’d thought, that the terrible fire in her eyes could hardly be reconciled with the warmth of her friendship. But when she attended the next tournament at Quantico, and saw her friend in mortal peril, she began to appreciate the isolation of the warrior. When Em turned the tables on her assailant and stripped his life away in a shower of blood, leaving a hundred Marines stunned and speechless, she recognized for the first time just how horrendous the life she’d fantasized about really was.
Looking across the table at her friends, she began to be willing to understand them again. CJ was no warrior. She joined up for a career in administration, and yet she’d protected their friend on the bridge. Sure, Zaki and McDonough lifted with her, but they weren’t warriors either and they’d never appreciate her spirit, much less Em’s. Even if CJ was right about Em—and she’d begun to lean in that direction—it only hardened her resolve to be of use to her.
“What do you think, Stace?” CJ asked, nudging her foot under the table. She hadn’t been following the conversation and stared blankly across the table. The light outside seemed to shift—streetlights flickered on, and the sky darkened suddenly. Perhaps the sun had just dipped below the horizon.
“Earth to Stacie,” McDonough said.
She opened her mouth to snark back at him, and maybe demonstrate that she’d recovered her good humor, when she spied Kathy Gunderson watching them through the front window of the restaurant. “I’m gonna hit the head,” she said, and pushed back from the table.”
“You want company?” CJ asked.
“Nah, I’ll just be a minute.”
McDonough buried his face in a plate of fried clams, and Zaki leaned over one of the salads. With a glance over her shoulder to check that CJ wasn’t following, Stacie turned right instead of left at the end of the bar and headed straig
ht out the front door.
“What are you looking at?” Gunderson growled in the falling darkness.
Stacie wanted to hurl some contempt at an enemy—that’s why she’d slipped out of McGinty’s. But as noxious a person as she’d been, Stacie couldn’t help seeing that Gunderson had lost something, too.
“You’re all the same,” Gunderson said. “You and Tenno and Tanahill, you think you’re so superior. But now you’re finally getting what you deserve. All of you.”
“We had nothing to do with what happened to Casey. You know it as well as I do, and you still made that stupid scene for the benefit of NCIS.”
Gunderson stared at her, lower lip trembling, and opened her mouth… but nothing came out. She turned and ran away turning up Cornhill Street, and Stacie ran after her, though she didn’t quite know why. She’d left McGinty’s to confront a nemesis, maybe spit abuse into her face, but now she felt something more like concern for her well-being.
On Cornhill, she saw Gunderson in the dim distance stop and look back, then duck into an alley. When she heard what sounded like a muffled shriek, she sprinted after her, and turned into the alley, where she saw several large men struggling to put a dark hood over Gunderson’s head. A woman’s voice hissed out some sort of command in a language she did not understand.
“Hey,” she yelled. “Get off her!”
The words had barely passed her lips before she felt a heavy, dull pain radiate along the side of her head and ring through her ear… and then the scene tilted into a desperate angle and spun out of her control, until it went completely dark.
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Chapter Twenty Four
AWOL
“How on earth do you get that?” Zaki asked, still rubbing his eyes, and unused to being summoned from his bunk in the middle of the night. Maybe something about the manner of the two NCIS agents interrogating him just rubbed him wrong. “Is everything automatically Tenno’s doing now?”
“Look, Midshipman Talib, you were seen with Carnot last night just before Gunderson disappeared,” Agent Everett said. “Where was Tenno at the time? We already know she had it in for Gunderson. Now’s your chance to show that you aren’t involved.”
“I already told you, Tenno wasn’t with us. She hasn’t shared a liberty with any of us in weeks. What makes you think Stacie had anything to do with it?”
“We’ll ask the questions. When did you last see Carnot?”
“She went to the head around twenty-hundred hours, I guess, and we got curious maybe ten or fifteen minutes later, and CJ, I mean Miss Tanahill, went to look for her. I still don’t see why you think Stacie’s got something to do with it. We didn’t see Gunderson all evening.”
Agent Horton started a video on the tablet in his hand and showed it to Zaki. On it he saw grainy images of two midshipmen, and there was no mistaking Stacie, and the other one could easily have been Gunderson. Judging from the second girl's hand gestures, it looked to be a heated discussion, and then suddenly she ran out of the screen on the left, and Stacie took off after her. The feed from a different camera showed the girl running along the Market Space in front of several other restaurant windows, and then turn up a side street, followed closely by Stacie, before the camera lost its angle on both of them. The final timestamp read nineteen-fifty-eight hours. Zaki's shoulders slumped.
“But that doesn’t mean anything,” he said a moment later. “There's nothing in that video to suggest Tenno was even there.”
“If you know anything about Midshipman Tenno’s whereabouts last night and don’t tell us now, you may be treated as an accessory to whatever crimes have already been committed or may be about to be committed,” Agent Everett said.
“I don’t know anything, and I’m confident there’s nothing to know.”
On the way back to his bunk, with the sky too light already to suggest that he would get any further shut-eye, Zaki wondered how McDonough and CJ had responded. McDonough knew nothing about Em, just as he didn’t. But that didn’t mean he couldn’t get flustered and say something he didn’t mean. Even McDonough would admit words weren’t his element. CJ, on the other hand, could be counted on to hold the line. Whatever had spooked her about Em in recent weeks, and however much other people thought she was a lightweight, he knew different, and he also knew she was the only mid in the Brigade—other than Em herself—who’d actually experienced battlefield conditions.
Ninety minutes later, all he heard in the chatter making the rounds of King Hall was how NCIS had arrested Em, how she’d killed again, and how her friends were all under suspicion, too. He knew none of this was true, or at least that some of it was absolutely false, and he hoped that the rest was, too. When Em walked in and took her seat among the plebes, he breathed a heavy sigh of relief.
When he saw Trowbridge walk over to her table and whisper something to her, he had to do something. Maybe he wasn’t as bad as Bauer’s other friends, but Zaki didn’t want to see her mocked openly in the galley by a member of the Seventeenth, and whatever he had to say to her, it could wait for a less showy moment.
By the time he managed to put his hand on Trowbridge’s shoulder, somehow the scene had changed into something Zaki hadn’t anticipated. When he yanked him around, the expression he saw wasn’t one of contempt or surprise. Trowbridge appeared to be offering her some sort of sympathy. They stared at each other for a brief moment, until Em stood up and pushed them apart.
“Nothing’s changed,” she said. “This isn’t your fight, either of you, so stay out of it.”
Of course, her tone of voice was unanswerable, as always, but this time the edge on it seemed much sharper. The expression in her eyes as she pushed them away, well, it was truly daunting. Zaki couldn’t remember ever experiencing anything like it before, and judging from Trowbridge’s face, neither had he.
“We’ve got to do something,” Trowbridge said.
“You heard her,” Zaki said, no longer even questioning why he seemed prepared to trust him. “She wants us to steer clear.”
“I don’t mean about NCIS. We can’t do anything there. But these rumors, they’re just inflaming the situation. Maybe we can do something about that.”
“Like what? Rumor is like the wind, if you try to resist it, either you fall on your face or you’re blown over. All you can do is wait for it to blow on by.”
“Is that a Bedouin saying?” Trowbridge asked, and Zaki couldn’t suppress a smile, since he was right. “Because in a sandstorm, the wind leaves scars everywhere, and maybe we can do something to minimize that,” he said, glancing across the galley to the tables occupied by the Seventeenth.
“I’m all ears,” Zaki said.
“I think I know one or two people who might be working the bellows, and maybe we can have a friendly word with them.”
“Who are you thinking of?”
“Meet me by the east entrance when my company exits and I’ll show you. See if you can persuade McDonough to come, too, you know, for effect.”
Sure enough, twenty minutes later, Zaki and McDonough found Trowbridge standing just inside the glass doors of the east entrance to King Hall. The three of them stood and looked out for a moment as a stream of mids squeezed by them to exit onto the east patio. Off to one side of the brickwork, under the shadow of the portico, in a sort of eddy produced by the current, a small but growing pool of plebes and youngsters stood listening to someone whose face was obscured by the crowd. Trowbridge stepped outside and pushed through the bodies, who gave way as soon as they recognized him. Zaki and McDonough followed closely behind.
“Make a hole,” he barked, and their passage became much easier. At the center of the mischief they found Caspar and Martens, glaring back at them defiantly.
“What the hell are you looking at?” Caspar brayed, and Martens leaned closer, perhaps hoping to intimidate Trowbridge, who seemed physically slighter than either of them.
“What bilge are you two spewing out here?” he demanded, undaunted.
“Nothing that isn’t true,” Martens said, as Caspar placed a hand on Trowbridge’s chest.
“You don’t even belong here,” he said, pushing Trowbridge away. “Maybe it’s time for you to find another company. Maybe the Twenty Eighth will take you. They seem to like traitors.”
At these words, Zaki and McDonough stepped forward, and pressed Caspar and Martens back, against the wall.
“If you’ve got something to say about the Twenty Eighth, say it now,” Zaki said, looming over Caspar. McDonough grunted some wordless, but menacing support.
“Yes,” Trowbridge said. “Tell us all what you think is wrong with the Twenty Eighth.”
Martens stammered haplessly in front of the much larger men, and Caspar stared defiantly at Trowbridge.
“I don’t know what side you think you’re on, but it sure doesn’t look like our side,” he said.
“If you’ve got something to say, say it.”
“It’s all her fault, Tenno. She’s behind all the violence. Everybody knows it. Now one of our own is dead and another’s missing.”
“NCIS doesn’t seem to think so,” Trowbridge retorted. “There she was at breakfast, eating with the rest of us. If there was any evidence against her, they’d have arrested her already.”
“Just because NCIS can’t find the evidence doesn’t mean she didn’t do it,” Caspar said.
Zaki grabbed Caspar by the front of his shirt and yanked him away from the wall.
“If you know something you’re not telling,” Zaki bellowed, “let’s go over to NCIS right now and fill ’em in.” McDonough did the same to Martens.
“Let me go, you big ape,” Caspar squealed.
“A Midshipman makes the truth known,” Zaki said. “That’s the Honor Code.”
“He’s got a point, Caspar,” Trowbridge said. “Anything you can whisper in dark corners, you can say to NCIS. You shouldn’t have any objections to living up to the code.” When neither of them had anything to say, Trowbridge continued. “I thought so. Just the usual lies spread in private, but nothing you’d dare own up to.”
Girl Takes The Oath Page 24