Mike Maden: Drone Threat

“Tea?”

“Green as grass and steeping in the pot.” She gently touched the nasty bruise on the side of his head. “You sure you’re all right?”

“Shower and some caffeine and I’ll be right as rain.”

“Did you get to the doctor?”

Pearce shrugged his wide shoulders. “I’m fine.”

Myers caught herself admiring his bare, broad chest and powerful arms. He’d spent more than half of his life throwing punches — or worse. A myriad of minor scars bore witness on his skin to his years in combat.

“Call him today, please.”

His face darkened. He let her go. “Will do, Madam President.”

Meyers turned around and picked up an already cooked plate of bacon, his favorite. “The bacon is a strictly volunteer mission, should you decide to accept it.”

He stared at the bacon and then her fake-scowly face. She deserves better , he thought. A slight smile stole across his face. She knew how to make him laugh at himself. He picked up a piece of bacon in his fingers and crammed the whole thing into his mouth, caveman style.

“Verdict?”

“Perfecto,” he said, still chewing.

He snatched another piece and plopped it into mouth. “Back in a flash.” He dashed back upstairs, his mood lightened.

She watched him jog up the stair treads, then pulled the eggs back onto the burner to finish them up, still worried.

A quick glance in the bathroom mirror told the story. He examined his stubbled face closely. His exhausted blue eyes were shadowed by dark circles. The place above his ear where the pistol had struck him was swollen and still hurt like hell. His head hadn’t stopped pounding since the Turk hit him, but two days of heavy drinking didn’t help, either. Maybe she was right. Maybe it was time to see a doctor.

He didn’t have any of his things at her place, but she had been thoughtful enough to buy a couple of disposables and some shave gel and leave them in the all-glass shower enclosure. She was old-fashioned in a funny way. They were in love, for sure, but he hadn’t asked her to marry him and she wasn’t going to shack up. “Not my style,” she’d said with a smile. Not his, either, actually. They were serious but taking it slowly. They’d been friends for a few years now but only recently had become lovers.

Pearce’s blood pressure suddenly dropped.

When, exactly, was their anniversary? Sometime soon, he knew. Not the kind of thing he should be forgetting, but it had been more than a decade since he had to worry about such things, and if he missed it, well, Margaret wasn’t the kind of woman to lord it over him. But then again, she was a woman, and something told him it might be a good idea to figure that out before she called him on it.

The plan had been to land back in D.C. after the mission and lay over for a day in order to give her a status report and reconnect, then fly on to California to check up on Tariq and his family while Margaret attended to business in Denver.

But Tariq was dead. No reason to head out.

He decided to stay in town at his hotel, but Myers saw his heavy fatigue and insisted he crash at her place for a few days and recover. What she really wanted to do, he knew, was take care of him, at least that first night.

He took her up on the offer. His company suite was sterile and he wasn’t big on room service.

It was the call to Tariq’s wife the next day when Myers was out of town that finally set Pearce off on a bender. He hadn’t boozed like that in years. At least he had the sense to do it here and not get hammered in some crosstown bar like he used to do in the old days.

He flipped on the shower and let it run good and cold. Nothing like a blast of freezing water to sober a guy up and get the blood flowing. A small mirror suction-cupped to the slate tiles helped him slather on the gel and shave pretty close with the triple blade without cutting any parts off, and a quick splash of shampoo and liquid soap rinsed off the mess of the last few days. He wished he could rinse out the image of Tariq’s truck lighting up the night or the ghost-white images of the women getting gunned down on that mountain slope so far away now.

He pushed open the glass door and toweled off briskly, pushing all of the negative thoughts out of his mind and crowding it with images of the breakfast he was about to consume. He learned on the long, hard marches in the mountains of Afghanistan that the only way he could make a steep climb was to focus on just the next step. The cold shower even managed to push away the queasy feeling in his gut. He dragged a brush through his longish hair, then pulled open the one dresser drawer that held a few of the things he’d left here before and pulled them on: boxers, Levis, and a Denver Broncos T-shirt Margaret bought him to remind him where his new football loyalties belonged. The thought made him smile a little.

He was a lucky bastard, for sure.

By the time he made it back downstairs she’d already set the breakfast bar in the all-glass nook overlooking the busy street below. As he sat down, she placed a thick Navy mug of steaming hot green tea in front of him and he took a big slurp.

“Bless you,” he said. His plate was heaped with fried home-style potatoes, bacon, and scrambled eggs. His absolute all-time favorite breakfast.

“Dig in,” she said with a hopeful smile. She didn’t cook this kind of fare often.

He glanced at her plate as he splashed spicy Tapatío sauce on his eggs. She had just one piece of bacon, a small mound of egg whites, and a few cut strawberries — low-glycemic fruit. She knew her bionic pancreas would compensate for whatever she ate with automated dosing of glucogen and insulin. But she wanted to maintain as much control as she could over her own body and preferred to eat sensibly rather than allow the machine to correct her bad choices.

They ate in silence for a few moments.

“Is it okay?” she asked.

He grinned, his mouth stuffed with food. He swallowed. “Yeah, that’s why I’m not saying anything. It’s great. Thanks so much.”

“By the way you’re wolfing that down, I’m guessing the liquid diet you were on wasn’t quite doing the trick.”

Ouch. He deserved that. “Yeah, well, a bad habit from the bad old days. It won’t happen again.”

She laid her hand on top of his. “I’m not judging you. I’m just worried, that’s all. You said you’d been fighting this battle for a while now. I hate to see you give in to it.”

She was right, of course, he reminded himself. He half blamed the booze for a friend’s death in Mozambique, and the bender he went on afterward nearly got another friend killed in the Elephant Bar down by the docks. He went clean and sober after that and hadn’t touched a drop until yesterday. Even after what happened at Fukushima.

“I’m no teetotaler, you know that,” she said. “But the drinking is a symptom.”

Troy felt the heat on the back of his neck. He dropped the fork. “What’s that supposed to mean?” The words came out harsher than he intended.

Myers set her fork down and wiped her mouth neatly with her napkin, gathering her carefully selected words.

“I know things went sideways on this mission and I’m deeply sorry. I know you did everything you could, but—”

“But shit happens. That’s all. Shit happens. Not my first fucking rodeo.” He picked up his cup and took another sip of tea, trying to tamp down his rising anger.

“You told me this had been a pattern in your life and that you were determined to change it. I just want to help you, that’s all.”

“I appreciate it, but I’ve got it under control. It won’t happen again. I just needed to blow off some steam.” He set his empty cup down. She filled it back up.