Джек Марс - Primary Target

“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.”

Luke said nothing. He just stared at Riggs. The man was out of his mind. He was the crazy one. He wasn’t even slowing down.

“Stone, I see you Delta guys come through here from time to time. You never have a scratch on you. You guys are like, supernatural. The bullets always miss you somehow. But you’re freaked out. You’re burnt out. You’ve seen too much. You’ve killed too many people. You’ve got their blood all over you. It’s invisible, but it’s there.”

Riggs nodded to himself.

“We had a Delta guy come through here back in oh-three, about your age, insisted he was fine. He had just come back from a top secret mission in Afghanistan. It was a slaughterhouse. Of course it was. But he didn’t need all this talk. Sound like anybody we know? When he left here, he went home, killed his wife, his three-year-old daughter, and then put a bullet in his own brain.”

A pause drew out between Luke and Riggs. None of the other men said a word. The guy was a button pusher. For some reason, he saw that as his job. It was important that Luke stay cool and not let Riggs get under his skin. But Luke didn’t like this kind of thing. He felt a surge building inside him. Riggs was moving into dangerous territory.

“Is that what you’re scared of?” Riggs said. “You’re worried you’re gonna go home and blow your wife’s brains all over the—”

Luke was up from his chair and across the space between him and Riggs in less than a second. Before he knew what had happened, he had grabbed Riggs, kicked his chair out from under him, and thrown him to the floor like a rag doll. Riggs’s head banged off the stone tile.

Luke crouched over him and reared back his fist.

Riggs’s eyes were wide, and for a split second fear flashed across his face. Then his calm demeanor returned.

“That’s what I like to see,” he said. “A little enthusiasm.”

Luke took a deep breath and let his fist relax. He looked around at the other men. None of them had made a move. They just stared dispassionately as if a patient attacking his therapist was a normal part of their day.

No. That wasn’t it. They stared like they didn’t care what happened, like they were beyond caring.

“I know what you’re trying to do,” Luke said.

“I’m trying to break you out of your shell, Stone. And it looks like it’s finally starting to work.”

“I don’t want you here,” Martinez said.

Luke sat in a wooden chair next to Martinez’s bed. The chair was surprisingly uncomfortable, as if it had been designed to discourage loitering.

Luke was doing the thing he had avoided for weeks—he was visiting Martinez. The man was in a different building of the hospital, yes. But it was all of a twelve-minute walk from Luke’s own room. Luke hadn’t been able to face that walk until now.