I opened my eyes but everything was a pale and uniform white. No details at all.
My neck didn’t hurt as much, but I couldn’t move it. I couldn’t move anything. When I was able to separate the painful things that were my ankles and wrists from the bigger painful thing that was my body, I realized that they were held fast.
I was tied down. I could feel bindings across my chest, my waist, my thighs.
Panic surged in my chest.
Who had me? The Iranians?
The Red Knights?
My mind hit a wall going eighty miles an hour.
The Red Knights. What about them? Why was I afraid of them?
Sure, there was the goon back at the hotel, but he was dead. Had I met another Red Knight? If so… where? Everything was so-detached. I fumbled for pieces of my mind but they were slippery and they rolled away.
Where had I been? If I could remember that maybe I could figure out where I was now.
I told myself not to move. My inner voices echoed this.
Don’t let them see that you’re awake, cautioned the Warrior.
Remember your training, whispered the Cop. Observe first, gather intel. Process it, evaluate it. Assess the situation and determine your tactical position.
Position? Up shit creek without a paddle.
Then I felt a presence near me. It wasn’t exactly a sound; more of a sensation of awareness, as if someone was watching me and noticed that I was awake.
A voice said, “Cap’n?”
I had to concentrate to identify the voice. “Top…?” I whispered.
“Yeah,” he said and squeezed my shoulder very gently.
My eyesight came back slowly, slowly. It was dim and blurry, but I could see Top sitting beside me in the back of the truck.
“Where’s the team? Is everyone okay?”
“We got out,” was all he said. A few moments later he added, “Got a stealth helo coming for us. Be here any minute.”
I licked my lips, and Top put a straw to my lips and let me drink.
“Top…?”
“Yeah?”
“What’s wrong with me? Why can’t I move?”
There was a pause.
“Come on, First Sergeant… tell me.”
Top said, “You’re all messed up. You took a lot of-”
“Christ! Is my back broken? Is that why I can’t move?”
“No,” he soothed. “No. It’s your head. Lydia thinks you might have a skull fracture. Definitely a concussion, and a mother of one.”
“What does Khalid say, goddamn it? He’s the frigging doctor.”
Top’s face was filled with pain. “Khalid’s gone, Cap’n. You know that. You were there.”
But I didn’t remember.
“Gone? Christ, what happened at the refinery?”
“We got the scrambler. You did, you and Khalid. But…”
“But what? Stop screwing around and tell me.”
“Those knights. They killed some of the staff and took their places. They were rigging the whole place. C-4 charges on wellheads, charges all over. Looks like once the nuke was active they wanted to bury it under a couple million tons of flaming debris. Wouldn’t stop the nuke down there in the subbasement, but if we were an hour later we’d never have gotten to it. Not unless we knew the tunnel system, and we didn’t.”
“We stopped it, though, right?”
“The nuke? Yeah. Nobody’s going to set it off. Not now.”
I didn’t like the way he said that. “What’s wrong? What are you not telling me?”
Top sighed. He nodded to someone, and I slowly turned to see Bunny sitting at the back corner of the truck. There were tear tracks on his cheeks.
“Good to see you awake, Boss,” he said, but there was no life in his voice.
Top said, “Open the door.”
Bunny cut a worried look at me and back to Top. “Sure you want to do that?”
“Open it, Farmboy.”
With a heavy sigh, Bunny pushed the door open so that I could see the bright noonday sun.
Except that it was early morning and the sun was still behind the mountains.
The big smiling face of the sun was not that at all. It was the leering demon face of a mushroom cloud. Many miles distant but massive, and it seemed frozen against the darkness, like a brand burned onto the flesh of night. Not a nuclear blast, which is a mercy, I suppose. This was the entire Aghajari oil refinery curling upward in a fireball five hundred feet high.
I said the word that I didn’t want to say, asking it as a question.
“Violin?”
Top sighed.
“She and the Arklight team tried to stop the knights from setting off the charges. She… never made it out, Cap’n.”
I could feel all of the horror and outrage and fear of the last couple of days sear that image onto my soul. I knew that I would never forget it. I would never be able to forget it.
We had won, but we had also lost.
Epilogue
(1)
I was out of it for a long time.
Church was there when I opened my eyes. He looked haggard and old.
“Christ,” I said. “If you look that bad, I must be a frigging mess.”
He didn’t smile.
“What do you remember?” he asked.
I had to think about it, and I fell asleep a couple of times.
When I opened my eyes again it was morning and there was sunlight slanting in through the windows. Rudy was gone. Instead it was Mr. Church in the chair beside my bed.
“Where am I?” I asked.
“The trauma center at Columbia Presbyterian Hospital.”
“In?”
“New York.”
I thought about that. My body was swathed in bandages and, although there was pain, it was buried under a heavy layer of something. Morphine. My head felt like it was stuffed with bubble wrap.
“What do you remember?” he asked,
“Rudy asked the same question.”
“When?”
I couldn’t answer that, and I realized that this wasn’t the same room. “I don’t know.”
“Do you remember the raid on the refinery?”
It took me a long time, and the memories were sluggish and reluctant. “Some of it. Maybe. Did we… did we win?”
Church nodded. “You had the code scrambler. All eight of the devices have been secured.”
