The Globemaster was a four-engine Air Force jet built for carrying capacity, not for comfort. Two hundred fifty soldiers sat packed like a tin of well-armed sardines in rows five across and benches on either side.
Wells was on the right aisle eight rows back. He’d come to Afghanistan on a flight like this years before, but the mood had been different. Better, to be precise. Back then, the war had been younger. Wells had landed with a unit arriving at Bagram for the first time. On this flight, the soldiers were heading back from their two-week midtour leaves. The ones who’d had good trips home missed their families and friends already. The ones who hadn’t were upset they’d blown their shot at freedom. All of them knew that they wouldn’t be leaving again until their tours were finished.
Mostly they wanted to catch up on sleep. Before takeoff, the soldier next to Wells tapped three tiny white pills from a bottle of generic drugstore ibuprofen. He had a teenager’s mustache, wispy and brown, and a teenager’s faith in the power of chemically induced happiness.
“Ativan,” he said, when he noticed Wells looking. “Girlfriend get ’em to me. Knock you right out. You don’t even dream.” He offered Wells the bottle.
“No, thanks.”
“Your loss. Wake me when it’s over. And if I slobber on you, don’t be afraid to stick an elbow out.”
The soldier dry-swallowed the pills and closed his eyes as the engines spooled up. Ten minutes later, as they leveled off, he grunted, “What,” to no one and fell into a head-forward trance. Every so often, his thick pink tongue edged out of his mouth.
Wells closed his eyes. His years in Afghanistan and Pakistan had taught him patience, how to escape the world around him. As the jet winged east and the voices around him wound down, he thought about Anne.
They’d had mostly good months since his mission to Saudi Arabia. One night in late March, he’d made himself tell her what happened over there. They were walking their dog, Tonka, in the woods north of her house, first-growth New Hampshire forest that had never faced an ax. After months of cold, the night was unseasonably warm, shirtsleeve weather. Thick chunks of snow slid down the firs as the forest crackled awake from the winter. Wells spoke slowly, wanting to get every detail right. He even told Anne about the jihadi he’d shot in the back in Jeddah, probably the lowest moment in all his years in the field. She wrapped her arm in his and didn’t interrupt.
“Feels good to open your mouth, doesn’t it?” she said when he was finished. “And the world didn’t end.”
“I’m sticking you with something you don’t deserve.”
“I’m glad to have it.”
“Do you think I should go after them?”
“Saeed and Mansour?” The Saudi princes who had created the terrorist cell responsible for the mayhem Wells had tried to stop. They were near the top of the royal family, untouchable and living in luxury in Riyadh. “If you think you can get them and get away with it? Eight ball says yes.”
Wells hadn’t expected that answer. Anne worked as a cop in North Conway. She was even-keeled and not inclined to vengeance. Unlike him.
“What about the rule of law, all that good stuff?”
“Yes. All that. Under normal circumstances. This time, it’s you or nothing.”
They walked for a while, listening to branches crack under the snow.
“No one’s going to touch those guys for years,” Wells said eventually. “They’ve got too much protection. But eventually they’ll relax. Everyone does.”
She looked at him. “Almost everyone.”
THEY WENT HOME and made love, and life fell into the best kind of groove for a while. Wells spent his days volunteering at an animal shelter in Conway. The shelter workers put down any dogs judged as a threat. Wells worked with the ones who had escaped the first culling, dogs who let themselves be petted even as they pulled back their lips to show their big yellow teeth. He soothed them in a low, reassuring voice and knelt beside them in their pens, waiting for them to relax.
A lot of them couldn’t be saved. There was Nick, a black pit bull with cigarette burns cratered across his belly, docile with men but uncontrollable around women. Jimmy, a one-eyed German shepherd who cowered hopelessly in a corner of his cage. Rabbit, a slobbery husky who seemed ready for adoption until he attacked a pug, tearing off half her ear before Wells pulled him away. As much cruelty as Wells had seen, he couldn’t understand the sheer wickedness of people who tortured animals for sport.
Even so, working with the dogs soothed him. He saw that the most vicious were the most frightened. He learned to retreat from their attacks without even raising his voice. And he saved a few.
“I’m going soft in my old age,” he said to Anne one night, back from the shelter.
“I don’t think so.” She stretched her legs over his lap as they sat on the couch watching
“Probably the worst idea you’ve ever had.”
“Actually my ex reminds me of the Situation. My first husband. Though he’s considerably less charming than Sitch.”
“Which one is the Situation again?”
“Like you don’t know. And did you notice the hint I dropped? My
“Very subtle. I’m not sure I got it. Now that you’ve explained.” Wells turned off the television. “Would you believe me if I said I’m worried you might get hurt? I don’t mean emotionally either.”
“I’m a big girl. And a licensed peace officer in the state of New Hampshire.”
“I’ve always liked that expression.”
“Big girl?”
“Peace officer. Like you were hired by the city of peace. The opposite of a police officer is a criminal. So would the opposite of a peace officer be a war officer?”
“You’re avoiding the topic at hand, John.”
“Not avoiding it. Outrunning it with wit and wisdom.”
“You should know better than to rely on those.”
“And you know what happened to you-know-who.” Years before, Wells’s former fiancee, Jennifer Exley, had been wounded in an attempt on his life. “These guys, when they decide to come at you, they don’t care about collateral damage. Up here, it seems like a long way from that, but it’s not.”
Anne was silent. Wells stood, looked out the window. The warm months were almost gone. The easy months. The oaks and maples had shed their leaves and were waiting for winter.
“I believe you when you say you’re worried about my safety,” she said. “But it’s my choice, too.”
“Yes and no.”
“Sooner or later, the excuses won’t matter. Even if they’re true. Why don’t you go see Evan, at least? You’ve got a lot to sort out and that’s a good place to start.”
The next day, Wells called Heather, told her he wanted to see his son. A week after that, he headed west to Montana. Now the wheel had swung again, and he was on this jet, bound for the war zone where he’d spent half his adult life.
He wondered if the job — not necessarily this job, but
He’d gone up from Washington to visit her for a night before flying out. In the morning she gave him a present, a neatly wrapped box about the size of a hardcover book. “Should I open it now or later?”
“Now. I want to be sure you’ll like it.”
“I’ll like it.”
In fact, Wells wasn’t very good at getting gifts. He was so self-contained that he wanted very little. Not that
