Ilona Andrews: White Hot

Yep. Sounded just like something college kids would do. I knew exactly where this story was going.

“The pig guy charged Martin, and Martin took the knife away from him and hit him. He didn’t just hit him once. He went for the knife hand first, dislocated the guy’s shoulder, and then punched him four times in the head in less than two seconds. It took three people to pull him off. I asked him about it. He said something just snapped inside him. He saw a threat and reacted. He isn’t a violent kid. Never been in a civilian fight before. He felt terrible about it. He apologized. The college expelled him and there were serious charges, until Rogan’s lawyers moved in and had it dropped down to a misdemeanor. Still, it will be on his record forever. He’s going to a private university in January.”

“Piggy should’ve played dead,” I said. “If he stopped moving, Martin would’ve stopped hitting.”

“Probably,” she said. “The kid who had the bright idea to scare people with his knife didn’t expect to be hospitalized, because civilians typically don’t try to kill you when you scare them.”

“It was irresponsible either way.”

Daniela sighed. “We have rules in our society. Don’t steal. Don’t hurt others. Don’t kill. That’s the big one. We take these kids, some of them barely eighteen years old, tell them that rules no longer apply and then we drop them into the war zone. Fight or flight is a constellation response, a perfect storm within your body. It makes you faster, stronger, hyperaware, but all of it comes at a cost. Soldiers in combat are running a biochemical sprint, except for them it’s a marathon that doesn’t end. It wears the body down and it carves new neurological pathways through your brain. It changes you. Permanently. Then you finally come home and people expect you to set all that aside and immediately remember what it’s like to be a normal person.”

Daniela leaned back.

“My nephew, Martin, is a relatively well-adjusted veteran. He simply needs time and a little help to re-attune himself to the civilian world. The switch that moderates the severity of his response needs to be recalibrated. Some people don’t understand that.”

I understood it. I knew all the statistics and I’d seen the hysteria firsthand. When Mom snapped, the assistant DA assigned to her case called her a ticking bomb and waved around the PTSD flag, which Mom didn’t have. He made it sound like she would go on a shooting rampage any minute. In reality, most veterans were a danger to themselves rather than others. The suicide rate among vets was 50 percent higher than in the rest of the population.

“Like I said,” Daniela continued. “Martin was a sweet kid. You know who else was a sweet kid before the army got a hold of him? Connor Rogan. I knew him at the very start of his service. He was so young. Full of himself, a little cocky, and idealistic. The brass realized early on what they had, so they guarded him like the Hope Diamond and controlled everything he saw. We used to call him BL—Bubble Lieutenant. They built this bubble of patriotism around him. Everyone he interacted with told him he was a hero, that he was serving his country, saving lives, and doing the right thing. They would bring him out, tell him how many thousands of lives would be saved if he did what they ordered, then he’d crush a city, and they’d whisk him away before we combed through the ruins. He knew there were casualties, but he never saw the dead bodies. He was an officer in name only. When they promoted him to captain, we had a good laugh.”

Daniela’s voice broke. She held her hand up for a moment, then continued.

“After about two years of this, he became their ultimate weapon. Just a rumor of his presence in an area changed the conditions of engagement. During that summer the command received reports of a superweapon being built in the Maya Forest, thirteen million acres of jungle that stretch all across Belize into the Yucatan. It was some sort of superbomb that could level a city and then poison everything around it with radiation, and the Mexican military was desperate enough to use it. I never got all the details—above my clearance—but whatever it was had to be convincing, because our command got together a strike team and attached Rogan to it. The plan was to covertly paradrop into Campeche, get Rogan to target, and once the facility was destroyed, get picked up. Ten seconds into the paradrop we knew we were fucked, because they were shooting at us while we were still in the air.”

She paused. Her eyes turned haunted.

“Captain Gregory died before his boots ever hit the ground. Top, our master sergeant, died after Rogan started mowing down the jungle and they dumped napalm on us. Once we got clear, we ran across a Cazador tower.”

Everyone knew what Cazadores meant. A special forces unit of Mexican military, Cazadores hunted mages. They were elite troops—scary, efficient, and lethal.

“It was a trap,” I guessed.

“Mhm. They wanted Rogan so badly they built a fake factory in the jungle hoping to lure him in, and we served our greatest weapon to them on a silver platter.” Daniela’s face was grim. “They flooded the jungle with Cazadores and their hounds. Except they weren’t really hounds. They were these things they pulled out of the astral realm.”

“I saw them in Rogan’s memories.” I fought a shiver.

“Then you understand. You see one, it will give you nightmares for a lifetime. We learned the rules fast. Cazadores had sniffers, mages sensitive to magic. Any use of it by us brought another air strike. Any attempt at radio communication brought an air strike. Any sighting of one of us brought dozens of troops. There would be no pickup. If we called for help, we’d die.

“Rogan had a choice. He could radio in, and if he used his full power, he’d survive within his null field long enough to be rescued. But he would be the only one who got out. Or he could try to walk out of the jungle with us. He chose to walk out. He became the senior officer after Gregory’s death, and Heart, our staff sergeant, became the senior NCO. You haven’t met Heart yet, have you?”

“I don’t think so.”

“Trust me, you would remember if you did. We were supposed to have been out in forty-eight hours. We had food for five days. People think the jungle is paradise, filled with fruit and game. Let me tell you, the jungle is hell. There is nothing to eat, there is nothing to kill, especially when you can’t shoot. Insects come at night, relentless, draining you dry. Howler monkeys follow you and scream and scream and scream every day and night. There is no clean water. We ate snakes. We ate worms.”

The dark cave flashed before me. “Rats,” I said.

“Yes. Some nights the Cazadores were so close, there was no fire, no light, just the jungle and the hounds, always near, always listening and waiting. Rogan could’ve pulled the plug anytime. Instead he stayed and he took care of us. When Hayashi went down with infection, there was no way to get the stretcher through the growth, so we built a frame out of wood and strapped it to Rogan. He carried Hayashi for two days on his back.”

It didn’t surprise me. Not even a little.

“To get off the mountain we had to clear a Cazador camp, and we couldn’t walk around it. Rogan walked into it and let them take him so they would send a scout team out in the direction he came and we could sneak past. We went around the camp and had to wait until the next night to come back for him. They had him for fourteen hours. We heard him screaming.”

She swallowed.

“They only had prewar images of Rogan and by that point, after five weeks in the jungle, he looked a decade older. He gave them Gregory’s name and so they tortured him for a while, until Jimenez, the man in charge, decided that if Rogan were a Prime playing soldier, he would’ve broken by then. Jimenez finally ordered him shot. You probably saw Rogan’s dog tags. They’re not his. He killed Jimenez when they cut him down off the torture rack and took his tags. It’s his reminder that he survived.”