“Come with me, Mrs. Gander,” the MP suggested. “I’m sure we can sort this out in a little while.”
“Cuff her,” Boyd Fletcher snarled. He called Megan several unkind words, struggling against the man who held him and against the handcuffs that held him. “Cuff her. She did something with my son. Find out what she did with him.”
Megan opened her palm and gazed at the tiny silver cross. She prayed. She prayed harder than she had prayed in years. Without another word, the big MP guided her toward the security Jeep. The flashing lights whirled through Megan’s vision. She felt like she was in a terrible nightmare and she couldn’t get free.
The Mediterranean Sea
USS Wasp
Local Time 0821 Hours
Only minutes after the last of the aircraft had lifted from Wasp’s deck, Delroy Harte had returned to his private quarters to watch the unfolding development of the engagement along the Turkish-Syrian border. The combat information center had been reduced to using long-range satellite images because the carefully orchestrated Syrian attacks had taken out the primary communications lines with the first wave of SCUDs. Glitter City, with all its media personalities and support crews, had become a casualty less than three minutes after that.
Captain Falkirk and his intelligence teams had been reduced to tapping into the video feeds being pumped out of Glitter City. Those hadn’t lasted long either. With the second wave of SCUDs, the feeds from Glitter City had been lost as well.
Delroy had barely switched on the television in his private quarters and started flipping through the news channels before those services were lost, too. He had sat quietly for several minutes, trying to take solace in the growl and thunder that was Wasp twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. The ship had been the major portion of his world for years.
Sailors green to Wasp hated the constant barrage of noise. Old hands took comfort in the sounds, knowing them all individually.
Within minutes, though, Delroy had known he couldn’t stay in his quarters. He had taken his portable television set and returned to the medical department to try and attack the letter once more. His prayers to God weren’t going very well either. Thinking about the young warriors in the field dying so far from home reminded the chaplain too much of Terrence.
The loss of his son was never far from Delroy’s mind, nor was the fact that the loss and his own inability to deal with it had shattered his marriage after twenty-seven years. Actually, he was still married. He had never filed for divorce, and Glenda had never pressed him for one. He had simply stopped going home. He’d effectively cut off his ties to his family, though they still sent cards and letters.
But it was Glenda’s ability to believe that their son was taken from them for a reason approved of by God’s will that mocked his own belief. And yet, tattered and broken as that belief was, it was all Delroy had to cling to. He had put on a good face and made the best he could of his career and his life, but Glenda knew him as no one else ever had.
Except for my father, Delroy thought. Josiah Harte would have known what I’m thinking at a glance.
Glenda’s own belief had shamed Delroy. And her ability to deal with his own decision to effectively end the marriage three years ago, two years after Terrence’s death, had shamed him further. He still sent money home to help with the bills, but less than a year after he had stopped going home, Glenda had opened an account at the bank and put the money there. She rented the house out to make the mortgage payment and moved into a small apartment. She continued teaching and worked at Carl Bynum’s produce market during the summers.
Seated again at the stainless steel table with the blank paper that was supposed to be the letter he was going to write to Dwight Mellencamp’s family, Delroy stared at the television. Wasp had satellite hookups for television throughout the ship. The crew traveled in relative comfort.
Only moments ago, some of the news feeds in Turkey had come back on line. There had been a bit about a U.S. Army Ranger outfit that had helped evacuate Glitter City, then that feed had gone off-line when Syrian troops had arrived and started shooting. The cameraman had evidently been one of the first fatalities.
Now the television channels were full of late-breaking stories. Some of those stories centered on first-person accounts by reporters concerning the evacuation of Glitter City, the horrifying convoy back to Sanliurfa, and the attacks that had gone on within Sanliurfa. Some came directly from the border where reporters were pinned down by enemy fire just as the domestic troops, the U.N. peacekeepers, and the U.S. Army Rangers were.
Delroy glanced at the body bag that contained his dead friend. The chaplain couldn’t help feeling that in a way Dwight Mellencamp was lucky he hadn’t lived to see this day. It was certain that several of the Marines the chief had known and loved like sons wouldn’t be coming back. By the time what was left of their people got back, Wasp would feel like a ghost town.
The body bag suddenly sagged, collapsing in on itself.
Goose bumps prickled across the back of Delroy’s neck. His breath caught at the back of his throat. At first he thought he’d imagined the sagging, but as he looked at the body bag, he knew that he hadn’t. Dwight had been a big man. There was no way he could fit in the body bag in the shape it was in now.
For a moment, Delroy was back in his grandfather’s house, listening to the old man tell stories to his grandchildren that triggered fussy arguments from his wife. Grandpa Smith, on Delroy’s mother’s side, had
