The Rising(70)

“What about your desire for vengeance?”

“Never went away. I hoped he’d get better, go back to being the big strong man he used to be so it would mean something when I took him down. The cancer denied me that. It didn’t seem fair, left a hole inside me I’ve never been able to fill completely.”

Marsh was nodding. “Then you know how I feel. This boy, those things … Fate is granting me the opportunity it denied you. I’m going to get my shot at my father’s killers.” He started forward, leaving the plane wreckage behind him and seeming to step back into the present. “Tell me about these men you’re assembling who are up to that task.”

“I was only interested in the ones groomed in the special ops world.”

“Your world, in other words, Colonel.”

“The kind of men we need. The fees you’re offering will definitely get their attention.”

“How many?”

“Five hundred, give or take a few, and that’s only the ones I share a personal connection with, normally through their commanding officers.”

“When can they be on site?”

“Several are already en route.”

“I thought it would take longer than that.”

“These kind of men are used to rapid deployments, sir.”

“What about the enemy they’re going up against, Colonel?”

“Need-to-know basis, sir.”

“And what do they need to know?”

“What to shoot at and when.”

Marsh turned back toward the wreckage. In that moment, its remnants were replaced by the old de Havilland Hornet, and his father was beckoning him forward, ready to hoist him up into the seat that was waiting for him. He thought if he reached out, the jagged husks of scorched, ruined metal would be replaced by the smooth, freshly painted steel his father had lovingly restored to full working condition. But then the illusion passed and Marsh was again left with only the iron corpse in which his father had died, his body never recovered.

Marsh canted his body sideways, almost perfectly centered between Rathman and the wreckage. “Take a look, Colonel, take a good, hard look. They did this the last time they tried to take our world and would have, if brave men like my father hadn’t taken the fight to them. Now they’ve come back, with the same end no doubt in mind. Only this time we’re going to wipe them out, leave none behind to fight another day. You hear what I’m saying, Colonel?”

Rathman nodded. “I do, sir.”

“You were in Iraq and Afghanistan.”

“Saw the worst of things in both. Not so much the front lines, as places where the lines don’t exist.”

Marsh nodded, liking what he heard. “Men like my father saved the world once, Colonel. Now it’s left to us to do the same.”





71

ON THE ROAD

“HAVE YOU EVER HITCHHIKED before?” Sam asked Alex, as they started down the road.

“Nope.”

“I have,” she told him.

“You’re kidding,” Alex said, eyeing her incredulously.

“No, I’m serious. I was with my mom. Her Volvo, the one she had since I was born, overheated and neither of us had our phones. I remembered we passed a gas station a few miles back and started walking. A trucker who saw the Volvo pulled over and gave me a ride.”

“That’s not hitchhiking.”

“I was walking and somebody gave me a ride. What would you call it?”

“Did you have your thumb out?”

“No.”

“Like I said.”

“It smelled like the drone things,” Sam said suddenly, her thoughts veering. “When the car overheated, that burned smell. Like the drone things.”

Her gaze tightened on him, just as the sun caught his face, revealing the thin streaks of grime on his cheeks that seemed dragged down by tears. Alex’s hair was stringy and mussed, the way it looked when he took his helmet off during a game. She remembered stealing sight of his perfect butt framed by the contours of his form-fitting uniform, leaving pretty much nothing to the imagination, and hoping nobody caught her.

How dumb that felt right now after all that had happened, like her old life was really the dream set against an entirely new reality.

“You were a gymnast once,” Alex said out of nowhere. “What happened? Why’d you quit?”

“I got tall,” she told him.

“That’s not a reason.”

Sam hesitated. Why had she quit? She’d been good. Maybe not the best—but good.

“Time,” she said. “Time and priorities. I wanted to be a gymnast, but I realized I wanted to be something else more.”

“What’s that?”

“Promise not to laugh.”

“Okay, promise.”

“An astronaut.”

Alex laughed.

“Hey, you promised!” she said, smacking him in a shoulder that felt like molded steel.

“Couldn’t help myself. It’s funny.”

“What’s so funny about it?”

“I’m just trying to picture you in one of those outfits.”

Like I picture your butt in your football pants, Sam thought.

“You know how much you love football?”