Homefront

She puffed on the cigarette. The soldier’s friend. As long as you had a smoke, you were never alone. Civilians pulled mere smoke into their lungs. Soldiers sucked in their fear. She clutched her cigarette, managed a tiny grin at how she’d wound up more of a fraidy-cat than she’d been as a five-year-old sitting on her grandpa’s knee.

Christ. At five, I wasn’t afraid of the dark.

Chapter Fifteen

Four-thirty in the morning. Broker and Kit were sound asleep, Kit in her bed, Broker curled on the living room couch. The TV was silent. Nina had tightly shut the kitchen door and now sat, elbow on the kitchen table, arm wrestling with a fifteen-pound barbell. By the light of the solitary lamp next to the indestructible snake plant, she studied the weight in her right hand, removed the cigarette from her lips, put it in the ashtray on the table. Took a deep breath. Then, methodically, she raised the compact hunk of iron. At between fifteen and twenty degrees of arc, she made a face. Not quite pain, more frustration.

Son of a bitch.

The warning light popped on the fifth repetition. A huge drag of fatigue. Then she raised the weight over her head, and the shoulder failed between 80 and 120 degrees; the classic painful arc.

She pictured the architecture of her rotator cuff; in her case, a train wreck where the coracoacromial ligament mashed into the acromion. The wear and tear of the life she’d lived had reduced the cushioning bursa to a blown-out tire. Useless.

What the doctors called a type 2 impingement; irreversibly damaged tissue.

She’d faked it for years out of denial, ignoring pain. She eeked out a few more years with concealed cortisone injections, gobbling anti-inflammatory drugs. On leave, when Kit was born, she’d slipped into a hospital in Duluth, Minnesota, for outpatient orthoscopic decompression surgery to trim back the ligament and bone. The tattoo on her shoulder concealed the scars, like it hid the cortisone needle marks. Didn’t even tell Broker. That bought a few more years.

To prepare for her last Army PT test, she’d gone out on the street to score Oxycontin to blur the pain…

Christ. If it binds like this at fifteen, how’ll I ever get to twenty-five…

Head snapping around, alert.

Something…

A tremble at the corner of her eye. And a low moaning sound that she couldn’t place. Then, looking out the windows, she saw a faint wrinkle tug at the darkness. She dropped the weight, got to her feet, and switched off the single light. As her eyes adjusted to the darkness, the ragged black fringe of tree line across the lake sharpened and-moved? No. The motion was above the trees, in the sky.

Squinting, she made out the tall pliant silver-green towers, an electric Stonehenge swaying in a tapestry of constellations.

She was drawn to the eerie light. Anything that pushed back the darkness.

She pulled on her jacket, opened the patio door, and stepped out on the back deck. The sheer visual power of the northern lights commanded her to tilt up her head, and she almost forgot herself as the icy wind sucked the heat from her lungs in a frosty plume.

So cold she could feel the water snap. Little arrowheads of windowpane stuck in the crannies of the granite boulders along the shore.

Then the wind, honed on a million pine needles, ripped open an acoustic tunnel in the night, and straight down that tunnel raced the baying of the wolves who owned that creepy forest up north. Eyes pinned on the sky, ears ringing with the howls, she had an impression of an utterly hostile beauty.

In which she had no permanent place.

Time and isolation for a cure. Up in Glacier County. Right as usual, Broker, honey.

Wolves. The sky dripping icy midnight fire. The thrill of atavistic fear and dumb wonder almost spooked her out of the heavy inertia.

She shivered.

Christ, she wondered as she hugged herself. Which was colder, the thing that wouldn’t stop turning in her mind, or the frigid wind? But even the pull of the dancing sky lights and the howling wolves could not slow her own personal flickering images…

…the pictures that played over and over in her head.

So she darted back into the kitchen and turned on all the lights. Then the TV. Poured a cup of coffee and lit another Spirit.

Broker had called it exactly. She was stuck in those three seconds, eight months ago. What Broker did not comprehend was that she was doing it to herself.

Northern Route had been a pure seat-of-the-pants operation. A batch of misfits willing to go off the reservation. They’d exceeded their orders on an unsanctioned high-stakes gamble to stop what they thought was a tactical nuke coming into the country. Intel suggested that Al Qaeda was using an American smuggling operation to bring it in across the North Dakota border.

They picked Nina because she’d played a few undercover games for Seal Team Six in Bosnia- Herzegovina. A novelty. The guys in special ops called them “Swallows,” the extreme military gals attached to them, like Nina and Jane Singer, in lurid appreciation of how far they might have to go to get close to a target.

What the hell. At the time her marriage was on the rocks; she and Broker were separated. So she rolled the dice. Even used Kit in the play, and drew in Broker for added backup.

Her job was to get close to North Dakota bar owner Ace Shuster, who turned out to be a likable, handsome drunk with a chivalrous streak. Nina had spent several nights in Shuster’s bed. But he had slept on the couch.

She had been totally unprepared to be courted.

And when they descended on him and his load of contraband, it turned out to be Cuban cigars.

The maverick operation was called off. Homeland Security was pissed. The Joint Special Ops Command at Bragg was furious at the spectacle of a Blackhawk helicopter and elements of a Delta troop being diverted into the North Dakota wheat fields. It looked like a career ender.

These facts affected her mood that next morning when she impulsively decided to drop by the bar and say something to Ace. Her second lapse of judgment was leaving her personal weapon behind.

Because when she and Janey walked into the bar, the real bad guys in the smuggling operation were waiting.

In the end it all came down to that moment in the Missile Park bar.

She played it over and over, like a tape on a loop. And she had the remote in her hand. Just wouldn’t stop thumbing the controls. Hit play: there’s Joe Reed coming through the back door, holding the pistol in a two-handed grip. She watched herself yell, reaching for her pistol. Saw her hand coming up empty. Janey swinging around, bringing up her nine. Ace Shuster in motion. Janey taking the first bullet in her chest. Stop. Rewind. Play the stunned expression on Janey’s youthful face. Reed efficiently shooting Janey a second and third time as she went down. Then Reed swung the gun on Nina. She played this part a thousand times. Never did get to see Ace’s face.

When he put his body in front of the fourth and fifth shots.

And saved her life.

Then that asshole, Dale-Ace’s loony brother-stabbed her with the syringe of ketamine.

Stop. Rewind. Play. Janey’s stunned expression again. The protest in her eyes. Hey! Wait a sec, this is way more tomboy shit than I bargained for…

Janey gone.

Ace gone.