Primary Target

The man breathed his last right into Luke’s face.

Luke’s hands roamed the man’s body. The fresh corpse had a grenade in its breast pocket. Luke took it, pulled it, and tossed it over the rampart into the oncoming hordes.

He hit the deck.

BOOOM.

The explosion was right there, spraying dirt and rock and blood and bone. The sandbagged wall half collapsed on top of him.

Luke clawed his way to his feet, deaf now, his ears ringing. He checked the AK. Empty. But he still had the bayonet.

“Come on, you bastards!” he screamed. “Come on!”

More men came over the wall, and he stabbed them in a frenzy. He ripped and tore at them with his bare hands. He shot them with their own guns.

A man came over what was left of the wall. He wasn’t a man—he was a boy. He had no beard. He had no need of a razor. His skin was smooth and dark. His brown eyes were round in terror. He clutched his hands to his chest.

Luke faced off with this child—the kid was maybe fourteen. There were more coming behind him. They slid and crashed over the barrier. The passageway was choked with corpses.

Why are his hands like that?

Luke knew why. He was a suicide bomber.

“Grenade!” Luke shouted, even if no one was alive to hear him.

He dove backward, digging under one body, then another. There were so many, he crawled and crawled, burrowing toward the center of the Earth, putting a blanket of dead men between him and the boy.

BOOOM!

He heard the explosion, muffled by the bodies, and he felt the heat wave. He heard the shrieks of the next wave of dying. But then another explosion came, and another.

And another.

Luke was fading from the concussions. Maybe he was hit. Maybe he was dying. If this was to die, it wasn’t so bad. There was no pain.

He thought of the kid—skinny teenager, wide around the middle like a barrel-chested man. The kid was wearing a suicide vest.

He thought of Rebecca, round with child.

Darkness took him.

* * *

At some point, the sun had risen, but there was no warmth in it. The fighting had stopped somehow—he couldn’t remember when, or how, it had ended. The ground was rugged and hard. There were dead bodies everywhere. Skinny, bearded men lay all over the ground, with eyes wide and staring.

Luke. His name was Luke.

He was sitting on a pile of bodies. He had awakened beneath them, and he had crawled out from under them like a snake.

They were piled here like cordwood. He didn’t like sitting on them, but it was convenient. It was high enough that it gave him a view down the hillside through the remains of the sandbag wall, but it kept him low enough that no one but a very good sniper could probably get a shot at him.

The Taliban didn’t have a lot of very good snipers. Some, but not many, and most of the Taliban around here appeared to be dead now.

Nearby, he spotted one crawling back down the hill, trailing a line of blood like the trail of slime that follows a snail. He should really go out there and kill that guy, but he didn’t want to risk being in the open.

Luke glanced down at himself. He didn’t look good. His chest was painted red. He was soaked in the blood of dead men. His body trembled from hunger, and from exhaustion. He stared out at the surrounding mountains, just coming into view as the day brightened. It was really a pretty day. This was beautiful country.

How many more were out there? How long before they came?

He shook his head. He didn’t know. It didn’t really matter. Any at all would probably be too many.

Martinez was sprawled on his back nearby, low in the trench. He was crying. He couldn’t move his legs. He’d had enough. He wanted to die. Luke realized he had been tuning out Martinez for a while now.

“Stone,” he said. “Hey, Stone. Hey! Kill me, man. Just kill me. Hey, Stone! Listen to me, man!”

Luke was numb.

“I’m not going to kill you, Martinez. You’re gonna be all right. We’re going to get out of here, and the docs are gonna patch you up. So give it a rest… okay?”

Nearby, Murphy was sitting on an outcropping of rock, staring into space. He wasn’t even trying to take cover.

“Murph! Get down here. You want a sniper to put a bullet in your head?”

Murphy turned and looked at Luke. His eyes were just… gone. He shook his head. An exhalation of air escaped from him. It sounded almost like laughter. He stayed right where he was.

As Luke watched, Murphy took out a pistol. It was incredible that he still had a gun on him. Luke had been fighting with his bare hands, rocks, and sharp objects for…

He didn’t know how long.

Murphy put the barrel of the gun to the side of his head, eyes on Luke the entire time. He pulled the trigger.

Click.

He pulled the trigger several more times.

Click, click, click, click… click.

“Out,” he said.

He threw the gun away. It clattered down the hillside.

Luke watched the gun bounce away. It seemed to go on for longer than he would ever expect. Eventually, it slid to a stop in a scree of loose rocks. He looked at Murphy again. Murphy just sat there, looking at nothing.

If more Taliban came, they were done. Neither one of these guys had much fight left in them, and the only weapon Stone still had was the bent bayonet in his hand. For a moment, he thought idly about picking through some of these dead guys for weapons. He didn’t know if he had the strength left to stand. He might have to crawl instead.

A line of black insects appeared in the sky far away. He knew what they were in an instant. Helicopters. United States military helicopters, probably Black Hawks. The cavalry was coming. Luke didn’t feel good about that, or bad.

He felt nothing at all.

CHAPTER THREE

March 19

Night

An airplane over Europe

“Are you men comfortable?”

“Yes, sir,” Luke said.

Murphy didn’t respond. He sat in a recliner across the narrow aisle from Luke, staring out the window at blank darkness. They were in a small jet that was set up almost like someone’s living room. Luke and Murphy sat at the back, facing forward. In the front were three men, including a Delta Force colonel and a three-star general from the Pentagon. There was also a man in civilian clothes.

Behind the men were two green berets, standing at attention.

“Specialist Murphy?” the general said. “Are you comfortable?”

Murphy slid the window shade down. “Yeah. I’m fine.”

“Murphy, do you know how to address a superior officer?” the colonel said.

Murphy turned away from the window. He looked directly at the men for the first time.

“I’m not in your army anymore.”

“Why are you on this plane, in that case?”

Murphy shrugged. “Someone offered me a ride. There aren’t a lot of commercial flights out of Afghanistan these days. So I figured I’d better take this one.”

The man in civilian clothes glanced at the cabin door.

“If you’re not in the military, I suppose we could always ask you to leave. Of course, it’s a long way to the ground.”

Murphy followed the man’s eyes.

“Do it. I promise you’ll come with me.”

Luke shook his head. If this were a playground, he would almost smile. But this wasn’t a playground, and these men were deadly serious.

“Okay, Murph,” he said. “Take it down a notch. I was on that hill with you. Nobody on this plane put us there.”

Murphy shrugged. “All right, Stone.” He looked at the general. “Yes, I’m comfortable, sir. Very comfortable. Thank you.”

The general glanced down at some paperwork in front of him.

“Thank you, gentlemen, for your service. Specialist Murphy, if you are interested in being discharged early from your obligations, I suggest you take that up with your commanding officer when you return to Fort Bragg.”

“Okay,” Murphy said.

The general looked up. “As you know, this was a difficult mission which did not go exactly as planned. I’d like to take the opportunity to familiarize myself with the facts of the situation. I have the records from the mission debrief when you both returned to Bagram. I gather from the testimony, and the photographic evidence, that the overall mission was a success. Would you agree with that, Sergeant Stone?”

“Uh… if by the overall mission, you mean to find and assassinate Abu Mustafa Faraj, then yes sir. I suppose it was a success.”

“That is what I meant, Sergeant. Faraj was a dangerous terrorist, and the world is a better place now that he’s gone. Specialist Murphy?”

Murphy stared at the general. It was clear to Luke that Murphy was no longer all there. He was better than he was the morning after the battle, but not by much.

“Yes?” he said.

The general gritted his teeth. He glanced at the men to his left and his right.

“What is your assessment of the mission, please?”

Murphy nodded. “Oh. The one we just did?”

“Yes, Specialist Murphy.”

Murphy didn’t answer for several seconds. He seemed to be thinking about it.

“Well, we lost nine Delta guys and two chopper pilots. Martinez is alive, but he’s scrambled eggs. Also, we killed a bunch of children, so I’m told, and at least a few women. There were piles of dead guys on the ground. I mean hundreds of dead guys. And I guess there was a famous terrorist there too, but I never saw him. So… about par for the course, I guess you’d say. It’s kind of how these things go. This wasn’t my first rodeo, if you know what I mean.”

He looked across the aisle at Luke.

“Stone looks okay. And speaking just for myself, I didn’t get a scratch on me. So sure, I’d say it went fine.”

The officers stared at Murphy.

“Sir,” Luke said. “I think what Specialist Murphy is trying to say, and you’ll see from my testimony that I agree, is the mission was poorly conceived and probably ill advised. Lieutenant Colonel Heath was a brave man, sir, but maybe not a very good strategist or tactician. After the first chopper crashed, I requested that he abort the mission, and he refused. He was also personally responsible for the deaths of a number of civilians, and likely for the death of Corporal Wayne Hendricks.”

Absurdly, saying the name of his friend nearly brought Luke to tears. He choked them back. This wasn’t the time or the place.

The general glanced down at his paperwork again. “And yet you do agree that the mission was a success? The object of the mission was achieved?”

Luke thought about that for a long moment. In the narrowest military sense, they had achieved the mission goal. That was true. They had killed a wanted terrorist, and perhaps somewhere down the line, that was going to save lives. It might even save many more lives than were lost.

That was how these men wanted to define success.

“Sergeant Stone?”

“Yes, sir. I do agree.”

The general nodded. So did the colonel. The man in civilian clothes made no response at all.

The general gathered his papers together and handed them to the colonel.

“Good,” he said. “We’re going to be landing in Germany soon, gentlemen, and then I’ll take my leave of you. Before I do, I want to impress upon you that I believe you’ve done a great thing, and you should be very proud. You’re obviously courageous men, and very skilled at your jobs. Your country owes you a debt of gratitude, one that will never be repaid adequately. It will also never be acknowledged publicly.”

He paused.

“Please recognize that the mission to kill Abu Mustafa Faraj al-Jihadi, while successful, did not take place. It does not exist in any recordkeeping, nor will it ever exist. The men who lost their lives as part of this mission died in a training accident during a sandstorm.”

He looked at them, his eyes hard now.

“Is that understood?”

“Yes sir,” Luke said, without hesitation. The fact that they were disappearing this mission didn’t surprise him in the least. He would disappear it too, if he could.

“Specialist Murphy?”

Murphy raised a hand and shrugged. “It’s your deal, man. I don’t think I’ve ever been on a mission that did exist.”

CHAPTER FOUR

March 23

4:35 p.m.

United States Army Special Operations Command

Fort Bragg

Fayetteville, North Carolina

“Can I bring you a cup of tea?”

Luke nodded. “Thank you.”

Wayne’s wife, Katie, was a pretty blonde, small, quite a bit younger than Wayne. Luke thought she was maybe twenty-four. She was pregnant with their daughter—eight months—and she was huge.

She was living in base housing, half a mile from Luke and Becca. The house was a tiny, three-room bungalow in a neighborhood of exactly identical houses. Wayne was dead. She was there because she had nowhere else to go.

She brought Luke his tea in a small ornate cup, the adult version of the cups little girls use when they have imaginary tea parties. She sat down across from him. The living room was spare. The couch was a futon that could fold out into a double bed for guests.

Luke had met Katie twice before, both times for five minutes or less. He hadn’t seen her since before she was pregnant.

“You were Wayne’s good friend,” she said.

“Yes. I was.”

She stared into her teacup, as if maybe Wayne was floating at the bottom.

“And you were on the mission where he died.” It wasn’t a question.

“Yes.”

“Did you see it? Did you see him die?”

Already, Luke didn’t like where these questions were headed. How to answer a question like that? Luke had missed the shots that killed Wayne, but he had seen him die, all right. He would give almost anything to unsee it.

“Yes.”

“How did he die?” she said.

“He died like a man. Like a soldier.”

She nodded, but said nothing. Maybe that wasn’t the answer she was looking for. But Luke didn’t want to go any further.

“Was he in pain?” she said.

Luke shook his head. “No.”

She looked into his eyes. Her eyes were red and rimmed with tears. There was a terrible sadness there. “How can you know that?”

“I spoke to him. He told me to tell you that he loved you.”

It was a lie, of course. Wayne hadn’t managed to utter a complete sentence. But it was a white lie. Luke believed that Wayne would have said it, if he could have.

“Is that why you came here, Sergeant Stone?” she said. “To tell me that?”

Luke took a breath.

“Before he died, Wayne asked me to be your daughter’s godfather,” Luke said. “I agreed, and I’m here to honor that commitment. Your daughter will be born soon, and I want to help you through this situation in any way I can.”

There was a long, silent pause between them. It stretched longer and longer.

Finally, Katie shook her head, just a tiny amount. She spoke softly.

“I could never have a man like you be my daughter’s godfather. Wayne is dead because of men like you. My girl will never have a father because of men like you. Do you understand? I’m here because I still have the healthcare, and so my baby will be born here. But after that? I’m going to run as far away from the Army, and from people like you, as I can. Wayne was stupid to be involved in this, and I was stupid to go along with it. You don’t have to worry, Sergeant Stone. You have no responsibility to me. You’re not my baby’s godfather.”

Luke couldn’t think of a single thing to say. He looked in his cup and saw that he had already finished his tea. He put the teacup down on the table. She picked it up and moved her bulk to the door of the tiny house. She opened the door and held it open.

“Good day, Sergeant Stone.”

He stared at her.

She began to cry. Her voice was as soft as ever.

“Please. Get out of my house. Get out of my life.”

* * *

Dinner was dreary and sad.

They sat across the table from each other, not speaking. She had made stuffed chicken and asparagus, and it was good. She had opened a beer for him and poured it into a glass. She had done nice things.

They were eating quietly, almost as though things were normal.

But he couldn’t bring himself to look at her.

There was a black matte Glock nine-millimeter on the table near his right hand. It was loaded.

“Luke, are you okay?”

He nodded. “Yeah. I’m fine.” He took a sip of his beer.

“Why is your gun on the table?”

Finally, he looked up at her. She was beautiful, of course, and he loved her. She was pregnant with his child, and she wore a flower-print maternity blouse. He could almost cry at her beauty, and at the power of his love for her. He felt it intensely, like a wave crashing against the rocks.

“Uh, it’s just there in case I need it, babe.”

“Why would you need it? We’re just eating dinner. We’re on the base. We’re safe here. No one can…”

“Does it bother you?” he said.

She shrugged. She slid a small forkful of chicken into her mouth. Becca was a slow and careful eater. She ate little bites, and it often took her a long time to finish her dinner. She didn’t strap the ol’ feedbag on like some people did. Luke loved that about her. It was one of their differences. He tended to inhale his food.

He watched her chew her food in slow motion. Her teeth were large. She had bunny teeth. It was cute. It was endearing.

“Yeah, a little,” she said. “You’ve never done that before. Are you afraid that…”

Luke shook his head. “I’m not afraid of anything. We have a child on the way, all right? It’s important that we keep our child safe from harm. It’s our responsibility. It’s a dangerous world, Becca, in case you didn’t know that.”

Luke nodded at the truth of what he was saying. More and more, he was beginning to notice hazards all around them. There were sharp dinner knives in the kitchen drawer. There were carving knives and a big meat cleaver in a wooden block on the counter. There were scissors in the cabinet behind the bathroom mirror.

The car had brakes, and someone could easily cut the brake lines. If Luke knew how to do it, then a lot of people knew. And there were a lot of people out there who might want to settle a score with Luke Stone.

It almost seemed like…

Becca was crying. She pushed her chair away from the table and stood up. Her face had turned crimson in the past ten seconds.

“Babe? What’s wrong?”

“You,” she said, the tears streaming down her face. “There’s something wrong with you. You’ve never come home like this before. You’ve barely said hello to me. You haven’t touched me at all. I feel like I’m invisible. You stay up all night. You don’t seem like you’ve slept at all since you got here. Now you’ve got a gun on the dinner table. I’m a little bit afraid, Luke. I’m afraid there’s something very, very wrong.”

He stood, and she took a step back. Her eyes went wide.

That look. It was the look of a woman who was afraid of a man. And he was that man. It horrified him. It was if he had snapped suddenly awake. He never imagined she would ever look at him that way. He never wanted her to look that way again, not at him, not at anyone, not for any reason.

He glanced at the table. He had placed a loaded gun there during dinner. Now why would he do that? Suddenly, he was ashamed of that gun. It was square and squat and ugly. He wanted to cover it with a napkin, but it was too late. She had already seen it.

He looked at her again.

She stood across from, abject, like a child, her shoulders hunched, her face crinkled up, the tears streaming down her cheeks.

“I love you,” she said. “But I’m so worried right now.”

Luke nodded. The next thing he said surprised him.

“I think I might need to go away for a little while.”

CHAPTER FIVE

April 14

9:45 a.m. Eastern Daylight Time

Fayetteville Department of Veteran Affairs (VA) Health Care Center

Fayetteville, North Carolina

“Why are you here, Stone?”

The voice shook Luke from whatever reverie he had become lost in. He often wandered alone through his thoughts and his memories these days, and afterward he couldn’t remember what he had been thinking about.

He glanced up.

He was sitting in a folding chair among a group of eight men. Most of the men sat in folding chairs. Two were in wheelchairs. The group took up a corner of a large but dreary open room. Windows against the far wall showed that it was a sunny, early spring day. Somehow the light from outside didn’t seem to reach into the room.

The group was positioned in a semicircle, facing a middle-aged bearded man with a large stomach. The man wore corduroy pants and a red flannel shirt. The stomach protruded outward almost like a beach ball was hiding under the shirt, except the face of it was flat, like air was leaking out. Luke suspected that if he punched that stomach, it would be as hard as an iron skillet. The man was tall, and he leaned way back in his chair, his thin legs out in a straight line in front of him.

“Excuse me?” Luke said.

The man smiled, but there was no humor in it.

“Why… are… you… here?” he said again. He said it slowly this time, as if talking to a small child, or an imbecile.

Luke looked around at the men. This was group therapy for war veterans.

It was a fair question. Luke didn’t belong here. These guys were wrecked. Physically disabled. Traumatized.

A few of them didn’t seem like they were ever coming back. The guy named Chambers was probably the worst. He had lost an arm and both his legs. His face was disfigured. The left half was covered by bandages, a large metal plate protruding from under there, stabilizing what was left of the facial bones on that side. He had lost his left eye, and they hadn’t replaced it yet. At some point, after they finished rebuilding his orbital socket, they were going to give him a nice new fake eye.

Chambers had been riding in a Humvee that ran over an IED in Iraq. The device was a surprise innovation—a shaped charge that penetrated straight up through the undercarriage of the vehicle, and then straight through Chambers, taking him apart from the bottom up. The military was retrofitting the old Humvees with heavy underside armor, and redesigning the new ones, to guard against these sorts of attacks in the future. But that wasn’t going to help Chambers.

Luke didn’t like to look at Chambers.

“Why are you here?” the leader said yet again.

Luke shrugged. “I don’t know, Riggs. Why are you here?”

“I’m trying to help men get their lives back,” Riggs said. He said it without missing a beat. Either it was a canned answer he kept for when people confronted him, or he actually believed it. “How about you?”

Luke said nothing, but everyone was staring at him now. He rarely said anything in this group. He would just as soon not attend. He didn’t think it was helping him. Truth be told, he thought the whole thing was a waste of time.

“Are you afraid?” Riggs said. “Is that why you’re here?”

“Riggs, if you think that, then you don’t know me very well.”

“Ah,” Riggs said, and raised his meaty hands just a bit. “Now we’re getting somewhere. You’re a hardcase. We know that already. So do it. Step up. Tell us all about Sergeant First Class Luke Stone of the United States Army Special Forces. Delta, am I right? Neck deep in the shit, right? One of the guys who went on that botched mission to kill the Al Qaeda guy, the guy who supposedly did the USS Sarasota bombing?”

“Riggs, I wouldn’t know anything about any mission like that. A mission like that would be classified information, which would mean that if either of us knew anything about it, we wouldn’t be at liberty…”

Riggs smiled and made a spinning wheel motion with his hand. “To discuss such a high-level and crucial targeted assassination that never existed in the first place. Yeah, yeah, yeah. We all know the talk. We’ve heard it before. Believe me, Stone, you’re not that important. Every man in this group has seen combat. Every man in this group is intimately aware of the—”

“What kind of combat have you seen, Riggs?” Luke said. “You were in the Navy. On a destroyer. In the middle of the ocean. You’ve been riding a desk in this hospital for the past fifteen years.”

“This isn’t about me, Stone. It’s about you. You’re in a VA hospital, in the psych ward. Right? I’m not in the psych ward. You are. I work in the psych ward, and you live there. But you’re not committed. You’re voluntary. You can walk out of here any time you want. Right in the middle of this session, if you like. Fort Bragg is five or six miles from here. All your old buddies are over there, waiting for you. Don’t you want to get back together with them? They’re waiting for you, man. Rock and roll. There’s always another classified FUBAR mission to go on.”