Consequences of Love and War: Chapter 10

A/N: In the search for Dr. Alyse Aachen, many avenues are being explored; unfortunately, most of them are actually dead-ends. Abby is still trying to get something out of the video of the abduction; Gibbs has spoken to a physician who used to work with Dr. Aachen; and Tony and Ziva have spoken to a Mossad officer in Afghanistan who hadn't heard anything about any of the terrorist cells in the area wanting Dr. Aachen specifically or a physician in general. She did promise to assist in their investigation, if NCIS helped her find her captured operative. Ziva proposed the plan to everyone capable of making such decisions; they're waiting for them to decide. On a more personal front, Director Vance has hinted to Ziva that if they are successful in finding Dr. Aachen and Mossad operative Ezra Hardoon, it could go a long way in getting Tony his own team (somewhere that may or not be his top choice of Bahrain) and Ziva going with him, something that she has already told them she would do.

And now, onto Peter Kirkan, who is going through his correspondence with his wife, trying to find any clues.

"You know what I miss most about DC?"

"Spending time with your loving husband?"

She gave him a sheepish smile, and he chuckled. "Well, other than the obvious, of course."

"Of course."

This time, she laughed outright. "What I was going to say, before you decided to send me on a guilt trip with no return, was champagne brunches at Ardeo."

"Ah. I keep meaning to go there sometime."

She grinned again. "You know that Sunday brunch is just the girls. I also miss half priced bottles of wine at Olazzo on Mondays, though, and you can't whine about being left out of that one." She paused. "No pun intended."

"Of course not." She grinned. "I've never really figured it out, Allie. How does a Navy internist become 'one of the girls' with a Navy surgeon, an Army surgeon, and an Army preventive medicine doc?"

"I've told you before, Pete. It was Ellie's fault." She rolled her eyes, her smile still on her face. "We roomed together at UW before going our separate ways—and into our separate services—for med school. Then she matches at Walter Reed and I end up at Bethesda, and she drags me into her group of Army friends. I brought Colleen along to even things out a bit. And as life and residency obligations started interfering with hanging out with the girls, our group gradually dwindled to me, Colleen, Jess, and Ellie."

He nodded. "You hear anything new from any of them, by the way?"

"Colleen is still happily cutting up children for 'eighty hours a week' in her pediatric surgery fellowship at Washington Children's and staying busy enough that she hasn't majorly sabotaged her personal life in at least a month. Jess' program is six years, so she's in her last year—chief resident of general surgery at Walter Reed. You heard that she'll be at Baltimore Shock/Trauma for a trauma fellowship next year, right?" She didn't wait for a response before continuing. "And I just got an email from Ellie the other day. She said that she and Wyatt are staying busy, but enjoying being in the Philippines on their humanitarian deployment, doing good things and all that crap. At least, that's what Ellie is doing. She was kinda vague about what Wyatt is doing, which makes me think that he's probably wandering the jungles of the Philippines, being some macho surgeon with some SF unit in support of OEF-P." She sighed. "Operation Enduring Freedom-Philippines aside, how did Ellie get the Philippines and I get Afghanistan? It's really not fair. Just because she's a tropical medicine specialist and I'm a general internist…" She shrugged and grinned. "She'll probably end up here at some point, with the 10th Mountain. That seems to be where Army preventive medicine docs get sent."

"We won't still be in Afghanistan when her turn for deployment comes up again, will we?"

She rolled her eyes. "We'll be here forever, Pete. Hell, just look at Iraq; you were sent there, and you left the Corps a hundred years ago."

"I may be old, babe, but I'm not that old."

Peter Kirkan sighed and paused the video at Alyse's wide grin at that last comment. He had been working backwards through the recordings of their conversations, trying to find any hint that there was someone—or a group of someones—who wanted her out of that camp, but so far, all he had discovered was that she had been running even more than he realized—three times in six months, she had requested that he send her another pair of running shoes, which she wore for five hundred miles prior to getting a replacement pair—and that she was doing a better job of staying in touch with their friends from her hut in Afghanistan than he was from a few miles away from them.

His notes, like those of most reporters he knew, were written in a short-hand that he invented and only he could read—even Alyse threw her hands in the air in frustration when trying to decipher his words, and that was just the grocery list. He now had three pages of notes, representing the last month of their conversations, and all he had learned—in addition to the fact that she was now running an average of forty to sixty miles a week—was that Captain Nichole Stover, the lone Marine captain sharing a hut with five female Navy lieutenants, was terrible at cutting hair; Marines don't like to take their anti-malarial medications; nobody minded if you took a second serving at the dining hall; and Dr. Jayashri Ting—Jess—was having relationship issues with her long-time boyfriend. Not exactly things worth kidnapping a physician for, and in the case of Jess and Bryan, he would have been a lot more surprised—not to mention concerned about the possibility of an international conspiracy—if Alyse had reported that they in agreement and moving forward in their relationship.

He got up and paced the condo, trying to figure out what he was missing. He knew that after the sleepless night he had the night before that he should get some sleep, but he knew that if he closed his eyes, all he would see was the fear in his wife's blue eyes the instant before that hood descended over her face, cutting her off from him with a finality he couldn't help but worry was permanent.

---

Even hours after the normal working day ended, the NCIS building was still far from silent, but the sounds that surrounded Gibbs as he remained rooted at the desk were much different than those during the day. There were no junior agents buzzing around him, no ringing telephones, no chiming of the elevators. Instead, there was a floor buffer running somewhere a few floors below him, a vacuum on the other side of the squad room, and the endless monologue of his thoughts running through Gibbs' head.

"Because it's about my wife." His thoughts kept coming back to Kirkan's simple words and the matter-of-fact way he spoke them, and he couldn't help remember the events that prompted that statement. He could still see and feel everything about that moment; the intense desert sun beating down on him, the endless glare of the sand through his Oakley sunglasses, the feeling that no amount of water will ever rehydrate him, the small targets hundreds of yards away that he was trying to keep himself focused on, the harsh crack of the line of sniper rifles to his left. He had pulled his eyes from the scope to correct one of the snipers, only to see that that shooter's spotter was already doing so, his voice too low for Gibbs to hear as he murmured commands into the sniper's ear, gesturing toward his own scope and speaking of the calculations he had been taught to do in head his within seconds. The young Marine behind the sniper rifle had nodded and made corrections, and the spotter had glanced up and locked eyes with Gibbs before the gunny had nodded his silent approval at the actions.

Prior to 0100 that morning, that was the last he had seen or heard from Corporal Peter Kirkan.

It was barely two minutes after that that their CO had approached, a grave expression on his face as he asked to speak to Gibbs privately, away from the line of young Marines shooting at nothing to keep from getting bored while waiting to fight a war most didn't understand. Gibbs had barked at them to carry on before following the colonel away. He figured from the way the man he considered a friend was hesitating and trying to find the words that this would be news he wouldn't want to hear, but he never imagined that it could be the words that eventually came out of the colonel's mouth. "They're dead, Gunny. Both of them."

The emergency leave paperwork had already been filed, maybe because the colonel really was a friend, or maybe because a grieving and angry scout sniper didn't do anybody any good, but again, life seemed determined to kick him while he was down. The next thing he knew, he was waking up in a Navy hospital in Kuwait with a tube down his throat and a neurologist telling him to calm down. As if that would be possible. Even now, twenty years later, he could see blue eyes filling with tears that didn't want to spill over, could hear a small voice begging him not to go, could hear his own promises that everything would be okay.

He was glad he told her that he loved her right before he stepped onto the plane. He would hate to think that his last words to Kelly were a lie.

He took a deep breath and closed his eyes for a moment, and when he opened them, he could again hear the floor buffer and the vacuum cleaner and the chatter of the late-night cleaning crew in their Somalian or Ethiopian or whatever language that was as they did their work, his own thoughts banished to the back of his mind. He returned his attention to his computer screen and clicked on his email, opening a new attachment and clicking to print the pages.

He had felt a little guilty when he called downstairs to NCIS Intelligence, asking them to run a background check, but that feeling of guilt barely lasted a second after he reminded himself of why he needed it. He promised Kirkan that he would do everything he could and look into every possibility in order to find the former corporal's wife, and failing to do that wouldn't do anybody any good.

He gathered the pile of papers from the printer before returning to his desk. Slipping on his reading glasses, he leaned back in his chair and began reading the file.

Kirkan, Cpl (Ret) Peter R., United States Marine Corps.