Chuck Logan - Homefront

Several of his old drawings had been enlarged and framed: a gaunt haunted depiction of Christ could have been a comical self-portrait. The Cartoon Christ trudged under his crown of thorns and a huge picket sign that bore the caption: “Don’t Trust Anyone Over 30 Who Hasn’t Been Crucified.”

Another, a favorite of the old East Metro Drug Task Force, showed two hippie dopers looking up from lighting their weed as a ten-foot-tall tit smashed through the door. One of them said, “Cool it, man, it’s a bust.”

A talented, conflicted man who had loved and hated their war, Griffin had always rebelled against his true nature. Broker wasn’t fooled; he had seen Griffin in the field.

He’d assessed instantly what Griffin spent his life denying.

Harry Griffin was a natural killer. Broker had always approached this perception with caution. Acknowledging the fact that looking too closely at Griffin was like peering into a mirror…

He shook his head and turned his attention to Griffin’s latest Peter Pan fixation. The barbell on the floor, a leg press, an overhead draw-down lift, triceps pulls, a set of fly cables, and the crunch chair.

After Korean karate, yoga, and Transcendental Meditation, Griffin, looking sixty dead in the eye, had discovered high-intensity weight lifting.

So Broker tossed off his coat and actually laughed. “Christ, remember the time you tried to teach me to stand on my head?”

Griffin snorted and pointed to the barbell on the floor. It was fitted with two forty-fives and a twenty-five on each end. “Classic deads,” he said. “You first.”

Broker rotated his shoulders, loosened up, took the lift straps off the floor, inserted his wrists, looped the straps around the bar, snugged them up, and stooped.

“Remember, keep your shoulder blades tight and your butt back. Push down with your feet,” Griffin said.

“Yeah, yeah.” Broker took a breath, held it, and lifted the bar slowly. Ten-second count going up and then back down. By his third slow repetition, Broker was sweating and panting for breath.

“One more,” Griffin admonished with glee as he slapped half a ton of iron on the leg press, getting the next station in the torture ready.

Less than half an hour later they were through the five stations. Broker was covered with sweat and out of breath. Griffin, barely breathing hard, the eternal contradiction, lit a Lucky Strike. “Half an hour a week, it’s the cat’s ass, huh?” Griffin winked.

Shaky on his feet, Broker followed Griffin upstairs, where they poured coffee and took their cups out on the deck. The morning was mild, with a tickle of greening in the air.

Broker sipped his coffee, squinted out over the lake. “Think it’s finally going to be spring?”

Griffin shook his head. “Looked at the Weather Channel this morning. We might have another clipper on the way. Big rumpus kicking around in Manitoba.” He shrugged. “But you could be on your way south before it hits.”

“Maybe,” Broker said.

“You pulled it off.”

“She pulled it off. I just held her coat,” Broker said.

Griffin decided it was time to pop the big question. “So now what? She going back into that good old spooky shit?”

Broker studied Griffin’s face as he said that, always the lilt of the road not taken in his voice. “It’s all changed, Griffin; you wouldn’t recognize special ops anymore. The people are different, the gear, the thinking. Hell, they even have a different map of the world.”

“Yeah,” Griffin said wistfully, slouching back, drawing his neck into his shoulders as a gust of cool breeze blew over them. “I saw that snappy consultant guy, Barnett, give his briefing on C-SPAN. There’s the globally connected core. In the middle you got Africa, the Middle East, Southeast Asia; all the ragheads in the nonintegrated gap.”

“Face it, man. We’re dinosaurs,” Broker said.

Griffin held up his cup in a toast. “To the old neighborhood, where we grew up,” he said as they clicked rims. “Northern Quang Tri Province.” He settled back. “Guess the only thing I got to look forward to now is whether I’m going to wind up a geezer, a codger, or a coot.”

“Buck up. We got in our licks.”

“Yep. Killed our Communists.” Griffin grinned. “And George W’s and Dick Cheney’s too.” He studied the bottom of his coffee cup for a moment, then looked up frankly. “You never really told me. One month Nina’s an MP captain in Bosnia; the next she’s mobbed up with Delta Force. How’d that go down?”

Broker listened to the wind toy in the trees like a palpable sigh of desire. Decided he owed Griffin that much. “She embodies a concept,” he said finally.

“Say again?”

“She took a course on tactical decision-making at Bragg before she deployed to Bosnia. The Boyd thing. The OODA Loop.”

Griffin nodded. “I read the book. Not sure you can teach that. You got it or you don’t.”

“Well, she aced out all the guys in the course. One of them was a Delta colonel who was into thinking outside the box-” Broker’s voice stuck briefly. “Holly, Colonel Holland Wood,” he said.

“There was a Delta colonel with you at Prairie Island,” Griffin said directly.

“The same.” He paused, closed his eyes briefly, and continued. “Any rate. He ran into her in Bosnia, remembered her, and invited her in for an interview. I only know snatches. After 9/11 she disappeared into the black side. Thing that still pisses me off is, she took Kit with her last time out. Used our kid to set up her cover in that North Dakota thing.”

“Kit,” Griffin said simply. “You want her to turn out like you, or Nina? She’s headed in that direction, you know. Unless you guys change.”

Broker listened to the soft breeze rise and fall, drawing silky through the pines.

“Think about it all the time,” he said.

Griffin backed off. Figured it was as close as Broker would get to answering the question about what Nina would do next.

Broker’s prediction turned out to be inaccurate. When Nina and Kit left Dawn’s Salon, Nina’s reddish amber hair was cleaned up but styled longer than it had been since her undergraduate days. Kit sported a matching cut; the snarl of her cowlick bangs resolved under Mom’s watchful eye. Nina tossed her new do and looked up and down Main Street.

“We’re going out tonight, so let’s splurge a little, maybe get new outfits,” she said. Her eyes prowled the storefronts. Stopped on a funky hand-painted sign across the street, next to the redbrick courthouse: “Big Lake Threads.” “There,” she said. She took Kit’s hand, and they started across the street.

The door jingled when they entered, and Nina scanned a display of hats, gloves, and scarfs that tended more toward fashion than the practical; accessories for women who didn’t worry about getting cold. So it was a boutique that catered to the high-end summer crowd. Probably kept open as a labor of love through the winter. The lady sitting behind the counter looked up, smiled, then went back to reading her book. The store was empty except for one other shopper, a slim, striking woman with long black hair who stood among the racks, holding a blouse at arm’s length, staring at it with a tangible longing.

“Mom,” Kit said urgently, tugging at Nina’s hand. “Let’s go.”

Nina tracked Kit’s sudden alarm, found its source when she saw a stout little boy peek around the dark-haired woman.

“That’s Teddy Klumpe, you know; the boy at school,” Kit whispered.

Their tense conversation was mirrored down the aisle between the woman and her son. Nina saw surprise on the woman’s face and instinctively decided to move before her dazed expression focused into something harder. With Kit in tow, she walked up the aisle and extended her hand.