“Coming in for landing,” Dane shouted out over the noise I hated and would hate forever.
Shaking Dan off me, I dropped to my hands, my head on Deke’s lifeless chest, tears falling from my eyes and onto my mate.
“You stupid bastard, why didn’t you wait for back-up?” Sobbing for the first time in my memory, I stayed like that until the helicopter landed and until my brother pulled me into his arms and held me back as Deke was taken away by the medical officers.
“Stupid bastard,” I wailed again, fisting Dane’s shirt and held onto him crying.
How the fuck was the team going to survive this?
I’d sat in the same spot in the C-17 since leaving the base in the Middle East. I had not left my fallen comrade, not taken my hand off the top of the flag-draped coffin, had not slept or eaten. I just sat on the chair I’d pulled up and sat close to Deke the whole flight on the C-17, not leaving him once.
Three days ago, I watched the life fade out of Deke, his death unfathomable to me even now days later. Days that were filled with briefings, reports and phone calls. Calls home to my captain and team, to my dad and mum. To Deke’s mother and sister.
I stayed with Deke, insisting that he would never leave me had the roles been reversed. With me as his only team member with him, it was the least I could do to respect his memory until I got him home and reunited with the rest of the Sons.
All the soldiers at the base helped honour Deke by taking turns to watch over his coffin, keeping the flame burning we lit for him when we returned in the helicopter with his body. Not just Australian soldiers, regular army and Special Ops, but also New Zealand and American soldiers from all branches of the military. Everyone stayed to show their respect for Deke’s service to his country.
Dane, too, had not gone far from me. I got the impression my younger brother was worried about me after my meltdown in the back of the Black Hawk when Dan pronounced Deke was gone. I had seen soldiers die in battle, seen horrific injuries inflicted, some by the enemy and some I inflicted myself. Deke, however, was the first close mate and fellow member to lose his life during my time as a commando.
And fuck was it messing with me. For hours, while sitting beside my brother in arms, I went over and over the mission, the raid and the rescue to make any sense of what happened. Trying to figure out if it was something I did that caused Deke’s death, but all I could come up with was Deke fucked up.
He went rogue and lost all sense of his training.
Why? What the fuck had he been thinking splitting off from the team? The ammo had been low, Gabe was getting the run around as usual from command, everyone too preoccupied with political protocol and not enough focus on the task of keeping our men alive.
When were they going to learn that war and politics, while they went hand in hand to cause the problems in the first place—it wasn’t the answer to go about fighting it. These smaller countries we got sent to resented our presence ninety-nine percent of the time. They didn’t want or ask for our help, believing we were making the unrest worse.
Maybe we were, I didn’t fucking know. What I did know was the life of a good man was over way too soon. Deke was not going to become a father; he wasn’t going to finish fixing up his beloved 1980 Mazda and wasn’t going to get laid tonight after we arrived back at the base.
Deke was dead and I couldn’t help but hate the world just a little bit because of it.
The phone call to Gabe came back to me, telling my captain and cousin what happened was probably the hardest thing I have ever had to do.
“Fuck, Ghost, you better have a good reason for taking that order from the major,” Gabe shouted down the phone at me, his voice pissed off, but I detected his relief that I was calling him.
Fuck! That was not going to last long.
“Tank, brother, it’s Deke,” I croaked out. In the background, I could hear my team’s familiar voices, happy, playful bickering, with taunts of kicking Deke’s and my arse when we got back.
A shrill whistle from Gabe broke the banter up and I suddenly found myself being put on speakerphone.
“Cole, what is it? Where are you? Where is Deke? Did you find him?” Gabe peppered questions at me, one after the other. His voice tight and full of foreboding.
I requested I be the one to tell the boys about Deke, breaking with tradition. It was usually down to the commanding officer to ring the head ranking officer of a team, but I knew Gabe and the boys would want to hear it from me.
“I got him, Gabe, found him. We … walked … I carried him out, got him to the … HLZ.” My throat closed up, the words choking me. How the fuck did I tell them?
“Cole? Where is Deke?” Kodah demanded, his voice tight and rasped. Kodah and Deke were best mates, and they spent time together when we weren’t active, both of them sharing a love of working on rotary engines, hence Deke’s Mazda project. Kodah had been helping him fix up the car so they could enter drag races during their time off.
“They … the rebels, they tortured him. Fucked him up pretty bad, I didn’t know how bad until we got on the helicopter and Dan took a look at him.”
That scene played on a reel in my head still, the compressions, his fucking bones
