Alex Berenson - The Shadow Patrol

“No?”

“It feels like I’m putting my finger in a dike.”

“John Wells, the little Dutch boy.”

“More like a plumber. With a very specialized skill set.”

Evan walked into the kitchen, basketball under his arm.

“Hi, Mom.” He gave Wells a big fake grin. “Hi, Dad .”

“Take a shower and lose the stink,” Heather said. “And not just how you smell. John came a long way to see you.”

“Good for him.”

“And no girl showers today. Keep it short.”

“I thought you wanted me to get clean.”

“No need to wear out the plumbing. John probably gets himself clean in twenty-two seconds with a Brillo pad.”

“I’m in the field, I find a clean patch of stone and strip down and just scrape myself across it,” Wells said.

“And he waxes. Less hair to get dirty.”

“Every inch. Little-known Special Forces trick.”

“You two are gross ,” Evan said. He backed out of the kitchen.

“Thank you for that,” Wells said, after Evan’s footsteps had disappeared upstairs.

“For what?”

“Getting him to smile. He may have agreed to this, but it doesn’t look like he’s aching to bond.”

“You need to understand, John. All you can hope for at this point is to be a friend. Someone maybe he’ll call if he’s back east. And that’s the absolute best.”

“I get it.”

“What were you expecting, John? You’d sail in and five minutes later everything would be cool?”

“I told you I get it.”

Upstairs, a shower kicked on. While they waited, Heather filled him in on Evan’s life, his difficulties with AP Biology, his love of basketball, his dream college — the University of California at San Diego. “I don’t know if he has the grades for it.”

“What about girls?” Wells said.

“Nothing serious. These kids don’t really date. They text one another and sneak over to one another’s houses and we can’t do much about it unless we want to lock him in his bedroom all the time. Which would only make it worse. And I don’t want to be a hypocrite either. Not like I was a nun in high school. So I told him to be careful, not to get anyone pregnant, and he looked at me like, ‘I’m not an idiot. I know.’”

Evan reappeared freshly scrubbed fifteen minutes later. “Ready, Pops?”

“Where to?”

“I figured you could take me into the backcountry, show me how to blow stuff up. Survival training. Make a man out of me, know what I’m saying?”

Wells looked at Heather. “Please tell me he’s joking.”

“Of course he’s joking.”

“Of course I’m joking. We’re going to this coffeehouse downtown. By the U. It’s kind of a cliché, but the coffee’s good.” Evan kissed his mother on the cheek. “You were right. He doesn’t have a great sense of humor.”

“I warned you.”

“I’m in the room,” Wells said. “I can hear you. Both of you.”

GRIZZLY COFFEE had overstuffed couches and grainy black-and-white photos of car accidents on the walls and a community corkboard with offers of rides to Seattle. The guy behind the counter had an ornate zombie tattooed across his right arm, its red-and-yellow eyes iridescent in the late-day sun.

Wells ordered a large coffee, skim milk. He was obscurely pleased to see Evan do the same. The tables in the back were empty.

“Here we are, father and son, together at last,” Evan said.

“I want to thank you for seeing me, Evan. From everything your mom’s said, you’re an amazing young man.”

“I’m here because I figured you wanted to give me the key to a secret bank account with, like, a hundred million dollars.”

“If I had it, it would be yours. I just thought maybe we could get to know each other.” As soon as Wells said the words, he wished he hadn’t. Get to know each other. Like this was a first date. A bad one, with no chemistry.

“I just threw up in my mouth.”

Wells sipped his coffee and waited for Evan to talk. To distract himself, he watched the barista make drinks, working the knobs and handles of the machines behind the counter as expertly as a nineteenth-century trainman running a steam engine.

“You’re just going to stare into space until I start talking,” Evan said after a few minutes.

“Waiting is one thing I’m good at.”

“Fine. You win. Ve have vays of making you talk . So let’s talk.”

“I just wanted to tell you face-to-face, I thought about you all these years. Wondered how you were, what your life was like.”

“You had a weird way of showing it. I know you were gone a long time. But you’ve been back five years now, more, and you never tried to see me.”

“Your mom didn’t want me to, and I respected her wishes.”

“Yeah. You seem like the kind of guy who does what other people tell you.”

“I look at you, I don’t see a stranger. I see how we’re connected. And I know how you’re feeling.”

“Of course you do, Dad . You know me so well—”

“Okay, maybe that wasn’t the best way to phrase it—”

“Can we stop talking now?”

Wells played what he hoped would be his winning card. “Is there anything you want to know about me? What I’ve been doing?”

“I know. You’ve been saving the world. Call of Duty: John Wells Edition. Only problem is, I don’t see how the world’s been saved. Looks like a mess to me.”

“Wait till you’re my age.”

“Have you ever killed anyone?”

Wells was ready for this question, at least. He’d decided years before that Evan deserved the truth. “Yes.”

“How many?”

“More than one.”

“More than one. What kind of answer is that? More than ten?”

Wells hesitated. “Yes.”

“In self-defense?”

“That’s not really a yes-or-no question.”

“I think it is.”

“What if Chinese cops are chasing you, and if they catch you, they’ll turn you over to someone who’s going to kill you? So you shoot them even though they’re just doing their jobs? Or say it’s 2001, after September eleventh, and you’re undercover with some Talibs and you have to make contact with your side, the American side. But the only way to do that is to kill the guys you’re with. So you do.”

“How come you put it in the second person? You mean I . ‘So I do. I killed them.’”

“That’s right. I killed them.” He’d executed them, no warning. Men he’d known for years. Their skulls breaking and exposing the gray fruit inside.

“Doesn’t sound like self-defense.”

“It was necessary.” Wells leaned across the table, fighting the urge to grab his son by the shoulders. “Evan. I’ll tell you about what I’ve done. Everything I can, except the stuff that’s classified and might get you in trouble. But I’m not going to argue the morality. Some things you can’t understand unless you’ve been there.”

“That’s what guys like you always say. That nobody else gets it.”

“These people we fight, they target civilians . Innocents.” Wells was arguing now, contradicting what he’d said just a few seconds before, but he couldn’t help himself. “They strap bombs to kids your age, and blow themselves up in crowded markets.”

“When we fire missiles and blow up houses in Pakistan, what’s that?”

“I am telling you, I’ve seen this up close, and we make mistakes, but these guys are not our moral equivalents.” Wells wondered whether he should explain that he personally was certain that he’d saved more lives than he’d taken. But they weren’t talking about him. They were talking about Iraq, and Afghanistan, and Vietnam. Those long, inconclusive conflicts that ground to a close without parades or treaties. Wars where the United States had a hundred different goals and the enemy had none, except to send American soldiers home in body bags.