Under the Knife(104)

He pointed to her chest. “Those dog tags around your neck. Whose are they?”

She looked at him quizzically. “My father’s.”

“What’d he do?” His research on her hadn’t included that.

“Flew planes. In the Navy.”

“What’d he fly?”

“The P3, mostly.”

“The Orion.” Sebastian nodded. “Sub hunter.”

“Yeah.” She tilted her head to one side. “Were you Navy?”

Sebastian hesitated, then said, “Let’s just say we were a … mixed-branch unit.”

“I didn’t know there was such a thing.”

“It’s not something my bosses advertised. Why are you wearing his tags?”

“Why are you asking me about my father?”

“Why not?”

“What are you going to do to me?”

“I don’t know.” Which was a half-truth.

“Are you going to kill me?”

“I don’t know.” Another half-truth.

She shifted position on the wall, and said, “Do you expect me to cry, or something? Because I won’t. I won’t give you the satisfaction.”

I know you won’t.

“No. I don’t expect you to cry.”

When did I become one of the bad guys?

But for the sound of the rainwater, there was silence.

“He died,” she said finally.

“What?”

“My father. His plane went down in the desert, east of San Diego. Catastrophic mechanical failure.” She shrugged. “They gave us a flag, and his tags. The flag is in a box, somewhere, in storage. The tags, well—I like to wear them.”

“Wearing them makes you feel like, what—he’s still with you?”

She shook her head, in a way that a woman does when a man’s stupidity has left her speechless, and shot him a look brimming with vinegar. “Something like that. But when you say it, it makes it sound … cheap.”

Sebastian reached inside his open collar and pulled out Alfonso’s tags. They clinked together, like wind chimes, as he dropped them down the front of his shirt.

Rita’s eyes traveled over them. “If you’re out, why do you still wear yours?”

“I don’t. These are—were—a friend of mine’s.”

“He’s dead?”

“Yes.”

“How?”

Since the mission debriefs, he’d never told the story to anyone. No reason to. It wasn’t his way, or the way of the men beside whom he’d fought. Not in their code. It was also in violation of federal law, he supposed. But when lately had he been concerned about lawbreaking?

When did I become one of the bad guys?

“We were on a mission,” he said. “Even if I could tell you where, it doesn’t matter.” Does it ever, really? “The intel we’d been given was that the, ah, target was in a particular location.” A safe house. For psychopathic jihadist terrorists.

“Problem was, the intel was incomplete. There were a lot of houses around the target, and they all looked the same. And they were all packed. Families. Babies. Old people. Things went all to hell. Lots of firefights. House-to-house, room-to-room. In-close shit—stuff. In-close stuff, ma’am.” She deserved respect, so he tried to tone down the swearing. “One of those times you couldn’t tell the good guys from the bad.”

“Sounds complicated.”

“Yes.” One big, complicated clusterfuck. His hand squeezed and relaxed, squeezed and relaxed, around Alfonso’s tags. “It was.” He chewed on his lower lip. “Did you know that we invaded Russia once? The U.S.?”

“No.”

“Yeah. Most people don’t. In 1918, near the end of World War I. Eight thousand red-blooded American soldiers running around Siberia. The Russians had already gotten their asses out of the war back in 1917, after the Bolsheviks had lined the tsar and the royal family up against a wall. Remember the Bolsheviks?”

She looked at him stonily.

“You know. The Commies. Like Lenin. Anyway. The Bolsheviks started a civil war. The English and French were scared shitless—pardon me, Doc—were disturbed by the prospect of a Communist Russia, and they dragged President Woodrow Wilson kicking and screaming into the whole damn mess. So Wilson sends these Army pukes over there. Ships them right the hell over, and they spend the next three years squatting in the mud, freezing their butts off, getting shot at by Bolshevik guerillas.

“The real kicker of it was those poor bastards didn’t even know who they were supposed to fight. The smiling peasants who sold them vodka during the day were the same rebels taking potshots at them in the middle of the night. Sound familiar, ma’am? Vietnam. Iraq. Afghanistan.” He chuckled humorously and shook his head. “Siberia.”

He sucked in a deep breath. “Anyway. It was this kid who killed Alfonso. This little kid. No older than my nephew is now. I never blamed him. The kid. I mean, what kind of an asshole puts an AK in the hands of a twelve-year-old? What the hell does a twelve-year-old know about anything?”

He held the tags tight in his fist. “Alfonso was dead by the time I got to him. A head shot. Never had a chance.” Or much of a head left. “Neither did the kid. By the time we sorted things out, the rest of us had already—well … Not sure it would have mattered if we’d known who’d been firing at us.”