Consequences of Love and War: Chapter 38

A/N: I'm leaving ridiculously early tomorrow morning for a week of Army summer camp in the Texas desert. Should be fun, but I will be without internet access for awhile, so don't expect another chapter until I get back to the real world. Sorry.

Tony tried unsuccessfully to keep the smirk off his face as a snippet of Ziva's phone conversation went by. He was pretty sure that the guys at the switchboard had some twisted sense of humor—or a death wish—because almost as soon as McGee made his big reveal, Ziva's desk phone rang, with Specialist Jenkins' wife on the other end. If there was one thing she had made abundantly clear over the years, it was that she didn't like talking to the sobbing wife/girlfriend/mother/daughter/random other female connection. Still, as serious as the situation was, it was amusing to watch. And he was pretty sure he'd be paying for thinking that for the next week or so.

"Thank you, Mrs. Jenkins," Ziva said into the phone. "Yes, yes, we will keep you informed… Thank you. Good-bye." She hung up the receiver quickly before the other woman could say anything further and shot Tony an evil look before rising from her desk. Yeah, he was going to be paying. He was already calculating how many days it would be before he was welcomed into her apartment again, much less her bed, when she began speaking. "Kirstin Jenkins saw the story of Dr. Aachen's abduction on the news. She did not want to say anything, but the guilt became too much, like a wasp in the ear that did not stop. It was just buzz, buzz—"

"Ziva," Gibbs interrupted.

"Sorry, Gibbs. She was just very… annoying."

"She's worried that her husband kidnapped a naval officer," the supervisory special agent replied. "The point, Ziva?"

"It is pretty much as McGee explained," she said, getting back to business. "Their daughter, Amelia, was born five weeks before Specialist Jenkins left for Afghanistan. She was diagnosed with cystic fibrosis shortly thereafter. Mrs. Jenkins tried to reassure him that everything would be taken care of while he was gone and that he should concentrate on remaining safe in Afghanistan. She enrolled Amelia in Tricare's Exceptional Family Member Program and established with a pediatric pulmonologist in Fargo, which is near where they grew up and where she is staying through her husband's deployment. However—"

"He wasn't so easily reassured," Tony guessed.

"No," Ziva stated flatly, giving him a short glare that caused McGee to let out a poorly-contained snort. Both turned their glares on him before Ziva continued. "He continued to obsess about the diagnosis, spending much of his free time reading information about the disorder on-line and talking to a pediatrician at the Army's Combat Support Hospital. He seemed very concerned about the financial implications, despite her assurances that it was taken care of."

"Explains why he's interested in part of a five million dollar ransom," DiNozzo said dryly. "Probie! I want to—"

"Know everything about Jenkins from the day he was born to what he ate for breakfast this morning," McGee finished dryly. He glanced up to see Tony staring at him with an almost astonished expression. "Been working with you for seven years now, Tony. I've heard it all before."

"Am I really—"

"Yes," both Ziva and McGee said simultaneously. She grinned over at him, an expression that became slightly confused when he offered her only a weak smile. Seeing that look on her face instantly made him feel bad, and he made a mental note to explain everything to her after the case was over.

"He's probably working with someone else," DiNozzo continued, the look between the other two either not noticed or ignored. "For one, a guy who grew up in North Dakota isn't going to have a southern accent. Ziva—"

"The people Specialist Jenkins spends his time with," she interrupted. He blinked and shook his head slightly.

"All been working together too long," he muttered as he returned to his seat.

"And what are you working on, Tony?" McGee asked. The senior field agent reached for the phone.

"Calling Burley," he replied. "He's been to Camp Phoenix. If Jenkins and whoever he's working with are holding her on base, he probably knows where."

---

Peter Kirkan smiled thinly as he stood from the conference room table and shook the hand of the reporter from People, mentally cursing Lyndi for her manipulative ways that forced him into doing such interviews. Based on the questions asked, he had no idea how the article would turn out or even what it would focus on—the man asked everything from how he met Alyse to the subject of his next novel to what his own deployment to the Middle East was like (and that question remained adamantly unanswered)—and he got an all-new reminder of why he had consciously decided years ago that he wanted nothing to do with the limelight.

The NCIS security guard who had been standing watch outside the conference room—Gibbs, sensing his former Marine's discomfort with the idea of doing interviews, put on the stipulation that they had to be done at NCIS, under guard—escorted the magazine reporter from the building, and Kirkan collapsed back down into the chair, cradling his head in his hands as he wondered exactly when his life stopped making sense.

After a few minutes of sitting like that, unmoving, he lifted his head and reached for the iPhone he had pulled out and placed on the table during the interview. The other reporter had wanted some pictures to include in the story, prompting Kirkan to check which ones he had on him. After unlocking the screen, he saw one that the magazine reporter apparently decided to use, one from their wedding. He couldn't help but smile at the memory. Before Drew Aachen had flown them away in his plane, he and their friends had surprised them with a sword arch; at some point during the reception, they had snuck off and changed into the dress uniforms, complete with officer's swords, that neither Alyse nor he realized they brought—except for the best man, Master Sergeant Mitch Lindholm, still a few months before his retirement from the Corps. As a noncommissioned officer, he wasn't authorized to carry a sword. Instead, he had brandished a sniper rifle, stating that if an officer ever challenged him to a dual, he'd prefer to be several hundred meters away, where a shiny and unsharpened sword would be completely useless. Seeing him with that rifle had made both he and Alyse burst out in laughter. Mitch had grinned and said that that's what Kirkan got for marrying an officer.

He thumbed through some of the other pictures—Alyse and Ellie Reynolds in their bright purple University of Washington sweatshirts at a football tailgate; Alyse in the summer whites she hated wearing; Kirkan, Alyse, Jess, Bryan, Colleen O'Conner, Wyatt, and Ellie waiting for the Marine Corps Marathon to start the year before last; Alyse leaning over a counter in teal-colored scrubs and a long white doctor's coat that fell down to mid-shin, her hair in a quick bun low on her head, one hand fiddling with the stethoscope that hung around her neck and the other writing something on an EKG during an evening on-call.

Alyse in her camouflage field uniform and a large camouflage backpack, looking over her shoulder and grinning as she headed down the terminal toward the plane that would take her to Kuwait.

He angrily shut the slim device off as he again rose from his chair, this time heading out of the conference room and down the stairs, where he knew he would find the NCIS team. He had nothing to offer them, but just hearing them work somehow made him feel better about the whole thing. He resolved then that his next novel would be dedicated to Gibbs and the rest of the MCRT.

Assuming there would be another novel, of course.

He found Tony DiNozzo and Ziva David in the break area, breaking off pieces of a chocolate bar as they discussed something in low and serious tones in a language Kirkan didn't understand. He was about to ask them what he had missed when DiNozzo glanced up to see him, his serious expression instantly replaced by a grin that didn't look sincere at all. "Interview over?" he asked.

"Yeah," Kirkan replied, not bothering with the fact that there were no fewer than five other interviews scheduled for the next few days. "Anything new?"

"It is the middle of the night in Bahrain," Ziva answered. "We are waiting for Agent Burley to return to the office so we can decide how to proceed."

"You guys staying here until then?" he asked with a frown. DiNozzo chuckled slightly.

"Wouldn't be the first time," he said cheekily. "You should try working for Gibbs sometime. Sleep becomes a luxury."

Now it was Kirkan's turn to laugh as he pulled out a chair to join them. "Been there and done that, and not interested in the sequel."

DiNozzo brightened slightly. "I forgot you deployed with him. What was that like? What was Gibbs like? Was he always such a bastard, or is that a more recent development? Did he always have those rules? I always thought it was a Marine thing, but—"

"Tony," Ziva interrupted. "You do not have to answer him," she told Kirkan.

He didn't say anything for a moment as he thought about the questions. "You ever see the movie Jarhead?" he finally asked. Ziva rolled her eyes and DiNozzo grinned.

"If it is a movie, he has seen it," Ziva replied. Kirkan chuckled.

"It was something like that," he said, "but imagine Gunnery Sergeant Gibbs in Jamie Foxx's role."

"So which were you?" DiNozzo asked. "The often-immature Lance Corporal Anthony Swofford? The quiet and historically criminal Corporal Alan Troy? The—"

"None, really," Kirkan interrupted, his voice somewhat distant as he remembered. "I had Corporal Troy's role—I was the spotter—but Mitch and I weren't anything like Swoff and Troy. I was…" His voice trailed off as his memory went places he rarely allowed it to. "I was usually pretty quiet," he finally continued. "I was young and not really that sure of everything that was going on around me. Mitch was loud and always cracking jokes, finding humor in even the most gruesome circumstances, but I think that was good. Kept me from thinking… I actually met Swofford once," he said, abruptly changing the subject. "We talked for a couple minutes, but didn't really have anything in common. He tried writing fiction and it didn't work out; I can't manage to get pen to paper, so to speak, about my real life. There's something reliving past events that never appealed to me at all."

"War is hard," Ziva said softly. He shook his head, his eyes still fixed to a moment of time somewhere in the past.

"Yeah," he answered. "But that's never been the problem. I can write war. I can write the feeling of looking around at your friends and wondering if everyone was going to make it to the end of the day. I can write what it's like to follow orders you don't understand. I've written Vietnam, World War II, the Hundred Year's War, and have served as a war correspondent in both Operation Iraqi Freedom and Operation Enduring Freedom. Maybe someday I'll write a book centered around the Afghanistan conflict. I just can't write my war." He looked DiNozzo straight in the eye. "I watched my mentor get blown up shortly after he heard that his wife and daughter were murdered at Camp Pendleton while he was off fighting a war. So to answer your question, no, Gunnery Sergeant Leroy Jethro Gibbs is not the same man as your boss. Gunny looked out for his men, making sure that we were trained for any circumstance, because we never knew what we were going to face. He was a family man, a husband and a father, who I think wrote a letter to his daughter every day. Every night before he went to bed, he listened to a tape recording of a piano being played by an eight-year-old girl, and no matter how many times he heard it and no matter what kind of shit we faced that day, it never failed to make him smile." He swallowed, his voice thick with the words he had never said aloud. "I asked him once why he did that, and he told me that it's how he stays connected, how he reminds himself of why he's doing what he's doing, and he said that if I didn't understand, that there was no way that he could explain. And I didn't get it then, but I do now." He gave a tight smile as he stood. "I'm sorry. I didn't mean to…I'll let you get back to work. Uh, should I talk to one of the guards about a ride home?"

"I'll drive you." He turned to face the former gunnery sergeant, whose face was completely blank of any expression as he leaned against the wall. Kirkan had no idea how long he had been standing there, but he was pretty sure that that was the first time Gibbs had ever heard someone describe him in such a manner. For the first time in twenty years, he understood why Gibbs had had no contact with anyone from the unit after he was medically evacuated from theater—they were just reminders of everything he had lost and the man he no longer was. He had no illusions that the older man would actually speak during the drive, but sometimes all it took was the company of someone who had some idea what you were going through and what you had gone through before.

Kirkan nodded slowly. "I'd like that, Gunny. Thanks."