Slumping back into the front seat, feeling torn and worn completely out, shamed on several fronts, Goose returned his knife to his LCE.
Icarus massaged his wrists. “What are you doing?”
“Letting you go.”
“Why?”
“Because I believe Cody and his people will kill you if I turn you over to them.” Goose breathed out his pain and bored through his feelings to the dead center of himself—the part he sought when he needed to be cut off from all things mortal and weak. That dead space, without even a will to survive or hope for a tomorrow, was the most dangerous part of a professional soldier on a battlefield. Death became an abstract; losing, an illusion. Nothing touched him.
Icarus sat up. “Are you all right?”
“No. Go.” Goose leaned his head back and closed his eyes. Sleep, he commanded himself. You need it. Just sleep and do whatever you need to do next.
“What do you think happened to your son?” Icarus asked.
“I don’t want to talk about this,” Goose said in a flat voice.
“I think you need to.”
Slowly, feeling the distant nudge of irritation at the man’s callous stupidity or death wish, Goose lifted his head and looked at Icarus. Goose lifted the M9 and pointed it at the man’s face.
Icarus held his hands up.
The pistol felt like an anvil at the end of Goose’s arm. Memories of Chris tangled in the roiling violence that demanded release from within him.
“Your son,” Icarus said in a quiet voice, “is safe.”
Goose willed himself to pull the trigger. He wanted to feel the buck of the pistol against his palm. A line would be crossed if he did, and he knew it. But something had to be done. He was stuck. He couldn’t go on. He couldn’t accept.
“Chris felt no pain,” Icarus said. “God came and took your son up as He took all the other children.”
“Go. Away.” Goose kept the pistol centered.
“First Sergeant, I know there are people in your group who have talked about this. About the Rapture. I’ve heard Corporal Baker talk about it in his tent church.”
Goose thought about the way Baker’s little church had grown over the past few days. A lot of soldiers from the Rangers, the marines, the U.N., and the Turks had ended up there. When he wasn’t on duty, Baker preached there constantly, offering guidance, support, and understanding of everything that had happened.
Icarus has been hiding out there, Goose realized. He knew the tent would have been a perfect spot. No one checked the soldiers gathered there. The sheer numbers and desperation of those who went there offered anonymity.
“Don’t you believe in God?” Icarus said.
The question pushed at Goose on a physical level he’d never before experienced. He kept the pistol leveled. “I believe in God. And I hope you do, too, because you’re four pounds of pressure away from becoming a footnote in history,” Goose said. “Get away from me.”
Icarus was quiet for a moment. “I can’t.”
“Then you’re going to die.”
“I was drawn to you, First Sergeant,” Icarus said, “by something greater than myself. I know that now. There’s a reason we’ve been put in each other’s path.”
“No.”
“You found me today. When no one else has been able to. When I least expected it.”
“Luck,” Goose said. “All of it bad.”
“You’re not turning me in.”
“I know. I already regret it. You’re just lucky that I don’t have it in me to care any more than I do.” Goose knew that was true. He felt empty, totally bereft due to his pain over the loss of Chris. And now the absence of any hope he’d had of getting his son returned to him. “Get away from me or I swear I’m going to kill you.”
“You’re no killer. Not in cold blood.”
“Maybe I am today.”
“Then shoot me,” Icarus invited.
For a long moment, Goose held the pistol on the other man. Then he dropped his arm, opened the door, and slid out of the Hummer into the merciless heat of the afternoon sun. He leathered the M9 and pulled the M-4A1 over his shoulder.
“First Sergeant,” Icarus called after him.
Goose started walking, feeling the pain in his bad knee snap at him as if he’d stepped into a bear trap. He kept his eyes forward, willing himself not to think about anything. But he remembered in spite of himself.
He remembered feeling Chris’s heart beat against his chest as his son slept with him in bed on lazy mornings, in a sleeping bag during camping trips, or on the couch when they’d both inadvertently caught a nap while watching superhero cartoons.
“First Sergeant.”
Goose ignored Icarus. He wasn’t going to think. He wasn’t going to allow himself to care.
“You can’t just walk away from this.”
I can, Goose thought. Then he heard footsteps moving up rapidly behind him. Icarus’s shadow joined his on the ground, squashed small by the midafternoon sun. In his peripheral vision Goose caught sight of the man’s arm lifting; then he felt the weight of Icarus’s hand on his shoulder.
The anger and pain Goose had tried to lock away burst loose. He turned on his left foot, felt his knee protest, and snapped his right hand out in a jab that caught Icarus on the side of the jaw.
Icarus staggered and nearly fell. Then, with a cry of inarticulate rage, the man threw himself at Goose.
Goose lifted his left arm and blocked Icarus’s initial blow, set himself, feinted with a left, and followed up with a hard right that he’d intended to put squarely between Icarus’s eyes.
Instead, Icarus stepped quickly to the left, brushed Goose’s right arm away and down, and drove a roundhouse kick to Goose’s ribs. Goose’s breath left his lungs in a rush, and white-hot pain ignited within him. He stumbled back
