Anna Richland - First to Burn

“Look, I convinced her to drop the medical records request.”

“Hardship duty, huh?” Kahananui flashed a shaka hand sign at Wulf, thumb and little finger sticking out from his fist. “Capital H-A-R-D—”

“Enough already. She’s an officer. And a doctor.” Noise buried his last words as the engineering NCO lifted his palms across the table for high fives. Wulf sank his face in his second glass of milk. Fine. Better they think he was flirting with the doctor, which he wasn’t, than that he’d asked her to help the commander.

Glad that her legs had brought her to the table without buckling, Theresa slipped into the seat across from her roommate.

Jennifer looked up from her phone. “What took you so long?”

“You didn’t see?” How could Miss Nosy have missed this? Sergeant Wardsen had stalked her through the chow line in full view of the entire room.

“Text from my sister.” Her friend leaned across the table. “What’d I miss?”

“One of the special ops guys.” For the rest of this deployment, she’d savor the way that phrase froze the other doctor in her chair.

“What?” Jennifer’s eyes bugged as if she needed a Heimlich.

“Sergeant Wardsen, he of the missing papers, wanted to talk.”

“One of those ginormous mystery men spoke to you? Actual words? Wait—he exists?” She pointed her empty fork at Theresa. “You’re shamming me.”

“Am not.” As she cut into her chicken, a rivulet of melted cheese pooled on the plastic plate, the way she liked it. A damn fine Tuesday. “He stopped me in line to apologize for his commander’s rudeness in the gym. He said, and I’m quoting, ‘I’m sorry. The team’s sorry.’”

Jennifer’s mouth dropped open for a long moment until she put a fork full of pasta in it and chewed. “So, was he cute?” She started to turn in her seat.

“Stop!” Theresa pinned her friend with a glare. Talking about men in the abstract, in the what-will-I-look-for-after-I-leave-the-army way, passed the time. But she drew the line at staring at real men. “Don’t you dare look.”

“Why not? A guy chatted with you. You’re blushing. I want to check him out.”

Theresa rolled her eyes. “He’s a sergeant, Jen.”

“That’s not an answer.”

“It is for me. It is for the army.” They both knew the fraternization rules.

“And you’re a short-timer, so why not? Human catnip, huh?”

“I’m not answering that.” His pants had fit noticeably well, and when he smiled his bottom lip had curved with invitation, but she couldn’t RSVP yes. Men were off-limits out here, and once she was back in civilization, she’d be so close to her final separation date, she wouldn’t have time to think about dating until she was settled in the next stage of her life.

“And he speaks in full sentences?”

“Please, thank you, the works.” Sergeant Wardsen’s eyes had warmed as they talked, as if she’d thawed something inside him. She speared a tomato to stop the flutter in her stomach.

Jennifer sighed. “A sensitive warrior.”

“Skip the melodrama.” She’d never admit that Sergeant Wardsen’s struggle to describe his commander’s problem made her agree, so she ignored her roommate and ate another bite.

“You exchanged what? Three sentences?”

“More like...” Theresa replayed the conversation while she crunched the chicken’s thyme-seasoned crust. “At least a dozen.”

“With that much chitchat I’m surprised you don’t know his Social Security number.”

“I asked if he was—” A crumb stuck in her throat, and she had to gulp water to stop coughing. “Married.”

“I couldn’t possibly have heard that correctly.”

She covered her forehead and eyes with one hand. “You did.”

“No effing way.” Through her fingers, she saw Jennifer’s shirt front droop into leftover red sauce as her friend leaned halfway across the table. “Is he?”

“Nooo.” The single stretched sound might have been an answer to the question or a plea to drop the subject or even good advice to herself. She couldn’t decode her emotions.

Jen whistled without a sound and shook her head. “When you go for it, you don’t mess around. And a sergeant. ”

How did her friend know exactly the tone her grandmother had used when good Italian girls dated outside the faith? “That’s why we forget it.” Her gaze drifted to the special ops table where guys were high-fiving each other while Sergeant Wardsen sat with a stiff spine at the end of the row. “He’ll never talk to me again.”

“Oh, I don’t think those dudes give up easily.” Jennifer gulped her cola. “If you won’t let me stare from here then I need a refill.”

“Please be subtle. Please. ” That was like asking a surgeon to thank you when you provided a clamp, so she slipped lower in her seat as Jennifer marched to the drink bar.

Claiming a seat by the door usually improved John Draycott’s odds of a pleasant dinner, since none of the thugs currently working for Black and Swan wanted their backs exposed with every entrance or exit. A decade of Afghan operations had weeded the decent guys out of the organization, leaving men who increasingly resembled the manager of Bagram Airfield. Efficient and ruthless, to be sure, but not men with whom Draycott wanted to dine, so in addition to choosing a bad seat, he always read a book as a barrier to company.

Tonight the printed page didn’t hold his gaze. Only forty years of clandestine training kept him from blatantly studying the soldier who sat across the mess hall with the Special Forces. He was the spitting image of another man, one Draycott had met in Mogadishu in 1968.

Despite Draycott’s attention, America’s finest didn’t show a flicker of return interest. Soldiers barely glanced at civilians unless they were the Dallas Cowboy cheerleaders or surrounded by a security detail. Since he had neither tits nor an entourage, merely extra chins and a comb-over, he chewed—and occasionally glanced at a certain table—unnoticed.

Although his vision had degenerated along with his waistline, it didn’t matter that he couldn’t make out a name on the staff sergeant’s shirt. A professional never forgot the face responsible for a failure, and certainly not the face responsible for his first failure.

While he cut his meat, he remembered Somalia. Beautiful place in ’68, when the station chief had sent him into the capital’s slums to find a Belgian gun for hire. His agency boss had wanted a photo that allegedly linked a local mercenary and a World Bank official. The days of simple photos and film negatives . He’d assumed he was on a haze-the-new-guy snipe hunt to acquire an envelope full of Asian porn or Monopoly money. Assumed, that is, until he’d returned from the jakes to find his Belgian and a stone-faced blond stranger pointing guns at each other. One breath later, all assumptions had died as his contact choked on a knife.

The assassin had retrieved the blade, picked a bloody envelope from the dead man’s shirt pocket—indeed, there’d been a picture—and stalked out of the shack that doubled as a bar. And so on the first day of his first job, Draycott had vomited next to his first body. Four decades later, he appreciated the killer’s polite half salute as he’d exited. Opponents who understood limits had become less common over the years, and those with flair had evaporated with the Cold War. The man in Mogadishu had left him alive, and thus able to sit in a chow hall in Afghanistan, one donkey ride past the end of the Earth, and stare at the assassin’s identical twin.

Except that was absurd. The soldier sitting across the mess had the same profile, but the sergeant couldn’t be a twin, or the same mercenary. Every joint in Draycott’s body attested to the years since 1968. Although Draycott knew three men who seemed eerily unaging, this soldier couldn’t be like them. He might be the son of the man from Mogadishu, but not the same man.