an. I'll forewarn that this is a heavier character-driven chapter. I hope that doesn't make it a slog to get through! Also, nothing too referential in this one.
Guest review response: Thank you, as always, for your reviews; I so enjoy reading them. I do so love a good chat between Sasha and Tom where they manage to say everything without actually saying it, lol. All will be revealed in time about Danny and what Takehaya is up to! Once we get there I'm excited to hear your thoughts on it. Sasha's line about the dock is one of my favorites that I have written for her! I'm so glad it made you laugh. It seemed like the perfectly sarcastic thing she would say at objectively the worst time, LOL. I'm optimistically feeling in a writing rhythm again, so I hope to continue this more frequent pace to wrap this universe up and then fix the others I have lagging out there! P.S. There's a moment in here that I'd already written when I read your comment about dropping a rocket, and that's what made me laugh so hard. I'm sure you'll know it when you get to it.
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Can't See The Sun The Way I Live
choices i made kept on haunting me
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USS Nathan James, South China Sea
For most of Tom's life, he'd been saying goodbye.
As a little boy with chestnut hair, a flashing smile, and an unconditional adoration for his father. The hero who'd fought in Vietnam. Then, a young man, to his mother and siblings, and the father whose luster wore off—an example of everything Tom avowed not to become—and then after. As a broken one; no longer blinded by arrogant naïveté, to the woman who'd fixed his soul. He'd weathered those goodbyes. Survived them. Learned how to continue their tradition as a family man every time he deployed. Next, a widower. Single parent to two kids who needed him now more than ever, and yet this was the goodbye he'd refused.
Why?
As he stared at the bulkhead, answers eluded.
He hadn't sought her in the wardroom, didn't corner her after the mission brief in CIC. Refused to linger on the deck when the team was lowered into RHIBs . . .
But she hadn't come to him either.
He guessed because there was nothing left to say.
All the words Sasha cared to share were written on a paper, and only after it beckoned again did Tom notice that he'd failed to return Darien's picture after the storm. The only items on his nightstand were the alarm and bottle of sleeping pills. He'd solicited those four hours after Takehaya's men took the bait, but the pills remained untouched, and he couldn't tolerate this room any longer.
Apart from reducing eye fatigue, the red lights produced the favorable effect of washing one's pallor into a single muted tone. Of course, hiding the deep circles beneath his eyes was only beneficial in pretending he'd gotten rest if he weren't surrounded by the same two hundred and thirty-four people who knew he'd arrived twenty-three hours ago and spent most of them in the wardroom, CIC or on the bridge.
In the exact place in which he'd taken refuge while Doctor Scott pursued the cure, Tom sat in the lookout chair. This time, pondering the galaxy as a measure of comfort was off-limits. It had been forty-three hours since he'd slept. Forty-nine since he'd pinned Sasha to a bed and sixty since she'd materialized from the void.
Formidable and black, the ocean stretched on. A beauty both loved and despised. The greyhound—that's what they called destroyers—the workhorse, Arleigh Burke. 505 feet of mechanical perfection carrying an armament of standard missiles, vertical launch rockets, Tomahawks, Mk-46 torpedoes, Sea Sparrows, CIWS, and a 5-inch Mk-45 gun. The first of its kind equipped with an Aegis Weapons System. It would be like dropping a mountain on an ant if he fired on that boat.
Russ was the one to brave his tumult this time, and Tom did little more than move his jaw in response.
"Forgive my speaking freely, sir—but a wise man once said: 'I know I'm not your mother, but you need to eat.'" Russ let the comment rest. "The same applies to sleep, Captain."
Tom couldn't help but grin. "Well I can assure you I'm not a vegetarian—but an insomniac?" He tipped his head, then fell neutral once more.
"In that case, I'd recommend a visit to the ship's doctor." The Master Chief came to parade rest at his side.
"I've already been." The admittance came not defensive but defeated, the notes rasping from deep in his chest.
"I see."
You'd be blind not to, and yet Russ never confronted the topic. There was no need when Mike hovered at his shoulder preaching caution, but in his absence, Tom debated if Russ would.
"You never did clarify the nature of your history, sir."
And there it was. Tom worked his wrist, rotating it until the joint cracked and the sigh traveled from tendon to elbow. "On or off the record?"
"Consider me nothing more than a friend tonight, Captain. No need to overcomplicate things."
Tom angled his profile in response and his gaze sleuthed right. "That's because I don't know how to explain it." He paused. "What do I call the woman I've wanted for a lifetime when she wasn't my wife?"
An answer came only seconds later.
"Deliverance."
Confusion furrowed Tom's brow.
"God never promised us that life would be fair—only that when we were called upon to face its suffering, that we wouldn't do so alone." A depth of understanding shone from the Master Chief's soulful eyes. "I was blessed when he spared my in-laws. Mike was blessed when he delivered his family. You've been blessed—with your children, your father . . . We may not all have felt his salvation yet, but I have faith that we will."
And now he'd sent her across river like El Torro.
Back to the ocean Tom went, his mind a black static. "I'm tired, Russ. Of having to make the choices that no one else can. Carrying those burdens. I thought—" he faltered "—I kept telling myself that as long as we found the cure, then it would all be worth it." Tom squinted. "I'm not sure that I still believe that."
"There's plenty of good left in this world, Captain." No syllable wavered. "And I don't blame you, nor do I judge you for questioning that. Lord knows we have been tried . . . but humanity is still worth fighting for. Deep down you know that, and that is what compels you to press on. You know right from wrong, Captain. Let it guide you."
Without Mike, he would have sentenced that girl—a daughter—to rape. On the river and back then, the bigger picture was all that mattered, and yet a month later, he'd preached that every decision made should remind them.
They hadn't lost who they were.
But maybe he had.
"In the end, it's only a passing thing, this shadow," Russ continued. "A new day will come. And when the sun shines again, it will shine out the clearer."
For a beat, Tom tried to place it. "The Bible?"
Russ smiled. "Tolkien."
o o o
Somewhere in the South China Sea
"Don't be a prick and go die on me."
Even now, hours later, Jesse's words helped quiet the thorns of fear.
One month shy of her thirty-first birthday, in 2006, Sasha had been captured. Eighty-four hours of interrogation and torture ensued, and afterward, she'd been declared a ghost. Officially. That time, her trainers used a firehose to strip her. Then she'd been left on a concrete floor for twenty hours while heavy metal screeched at a decibel piercing enough to throb in her teeth. Every so often, they came back to douse her. Unrelenting spikes of ice water jettisoned at such high pressure that it acted like sandpaper against flesh. At least this time around, Takehaya's men had permitted her the dignity of underwear, and so far, taking her clothes was all that they'd done. Almost a decade later, that brutal cold still got to her, and eventually, that's what had pushed Sasha back into the Navy's embrace. With the Office of Naval Intelligence, she still operated in the field but under a formal diplomatic cover. Should she be caught engaging in espionage, deportation and the disappointment of her superiors would mark the ramification. A fine glass of chardonnay compared to the alternatives. Turns out Colombia was the wake-up call, when in hindsight, Lebanon should have been. A finger poked at the internal bruise, but she banished Andrew from her thoughts and then walked right into Pablo. Paul.
"I get it, okay? You're a lone wolf, and that's what makes you one of the best. When you flip the switch, you're capable of anything, but the rest of us? I'm not built like you. I don't have anyone else! You and Jesse are it—and she was just an acquaintance."
Paul knew better than to believe he'd change her mind, but he was right to call her out. Fixated on finding Green, she'd overlooked his predicament, and that was an old habit to which she was prone.
For years, the only friends Sasha made were ones with security clearance and skills that she could exploit. Piece by piece, her life had become an elaborate chessboard until she'd been forced to accept that if it went on forever, there'd be nothing left.
As it was, spending another half decade functionally AWOL right after six with the Navy, she'd become a stranger; to her parents, most of all. Liliya, ever the critic, never missed an opportunity to point out that her daughter wandered in perpetuity from one humanitarian cause to the next, not because she had a bleeding heart or sense of purpose, but because she was lost.
That comment always cut closer than it should.
It echoed every time she inundated herself with a target—wielded the lore and cast of characters meticulously crafted in a government building ripe for her usage—and when the mission was satisfied and the alias she'd become, wiped, Lilya's words seemed true.
The agency took care of that part, and Sasha was trained not to think about the people she'd fooled. How they felt after coming to know a fabrication, only to wake up one day abandoned. They were not her concern. All that mattered was passing the post-deployment psychological evaluations and obtaining her arbitrary perfect score.
She was good at it. In fact, she excelled.
Jesse was the rare exception granted because of opportune timing—Sasha was on her way out, anyway, and Pablo's team was smart enough not to ask questions . . . but it was Andrew who'd made her want to stay. Build something real.
Knees to chest and arms around legs like a creature bawled into its shell, Sasha waited. Watched. When she'd been forced to divest her shirt, the man closest to the wire cage had stared at the scar; his eyes were a tongue secreting a trail of mucus down her torso that left her nauseous. These pirates didn't talk much, and the conversations she'd overheard contained zero value. They spoke Japanese, but in support of Tom's theory, she'd identified several who still succumbed to the regiment of military. It showed in the handling of their weapons. Their speech patterns. The straightness of their backs as they held watch.
Another shiver wracked through her, and goosebumps stung.
Tom.
She had yet to decide if detaching benefited her or him—both, her gut told her. Something long and drawn out would only corrupt the way of thinking essential to command. The decisions that she trusted him to make. Either way, she'd made no promises, and this was why. The universe didn't care about what she wanted. It was better to guarantee only what she could control . . .
And that was almost nothing.
o o o
Unknown Location
Nothing notable happened until after the sun had set. While his cell didn't contain a window, there was a small rectangular one at the end of the corridor. It was the only feature on the white cinderblock wall, and in the dead space beyond his bars and the next, Danny had watched the patch of light stretch and then disappear as the sun moved away. Around that time, a tray was pushed under the bars. He was surprised by how hearty the meal was. Meat. Looked like beef. Or at least, that's what Danny told himself it was. Vegetables. Rice. Bread that was fresh. He'd inhaled it, satiating the hollow ache in his stomach, and then dozed on the rickety cot; too on edge to let himself sleep deeply, but aware that his survival depended on preserving and rebuilding his strength. Until his shipmates found him, his body and mind were it.
Danny didn't know what had happened when someone was dragged through the corridor. There were no lanterns in this wing, and the moon wasn't bright. Murky shapes were all he could distinguish, and the images his mind conjured in response to the auditory stimuli. The hinge of a door screeched. There was a muted thud, like a sandbag. A man moaned in pain. Then footsteps reproached, a promise of dim light seeped down the hallway, and then everything was dark again.
No one here spoke.
Danny estimated there were at least fifty other people, and that moan was the first vocalization he'd heard.
It wasn't until sunrise, with his spine aching, the base of his skull throbbing, and his mouth shriveled like a digit left in water over long, that Danny could see across the way. The man was still curled in a fetal position on the floor, his rickety spine visible where the coverall rode up. Deep black hematoma was spread in an angry circle all along its base and his flanks, and as Danny squinted, he thought he saw holes. Puncture marks. Like the man had been ventilated by an ice pick as you would the plastic covering a microwave meal.
Sour adrenaline churned in Danny's gut.
What the hell was this place?
o o o
St. Louis, Missouri
Whoever owned this townhouse built a sun porch at the back. Screened it in. Sometimes Mike found himself down the crack, wondering about them. In the hallway, there was an imprint where a photograph used to hang. The paint had oxidized around it, leaving a rectangular carcass of miss-matched tones like the flash-burned imprints of Pompeii. Deployments to the Med were his favorite because of the port visits. Before the Navy, he'd merely sniffed at the border to Canada and never bothered to venture much south. Ironic for a member of the Coast Guard, but the brisk winds of the great Lake Michigan had been his frontier. That was a running joke in the department: Deputy Mike Slattery: the Coast Guard in charge of defending a lake.
Mike took it in jest.
Roasting the rookie was a universal rite of passage, and the Coast Guard had served its purpose. Satisfied the youthful pioneer searching for adventure and higher meaning, and paid for a degree. A lot of the time, Mike missed the beat. Maybe that's why he treated this house like a crime scene; compiling the relics to learn more about its ghosts.
So far, aside from the rectangular carcass, he'd found pieces of gnawed-at baseboard. Honey-colored fur would cling to anything black, brown, or navy if you sat on the sofa. One of the bedrooms was pink. The other, they didn't go into. Mike wondered if he went to the gridlock of warehouses on the other side of the Mississippi, if he'd be able to sense which of the thousands of portraits belonged in this foyer. After that, his next thought was always how long President Michener would store all those personal effects in some defunct hope that distant relatives would claim them.
In the end, that was always a fleeting question. There were other priorities to solve.
Like finding Daniel Green.
Mike hissed in a breath, the cool air soothing when it hit that oversensitive tooth and then bit down his lungs. He crossed one ankle over the other, extending his legs, and melded further into the patio chair. There was rustling somewhere out in the excuse for a garden. Probably a rodent. When he shifted and the canes creaked, the noise stopped.
Most of his Saturday had been spent at the White House and Christine had a shift, so he'd taken the kids to Jed. Tom was either going to see the benefit of extra space or hate that his father agreed to a stately historic. While Jed fussed with the boxwoods, it occurred to Mike that Cathy would have loved this house, and it was then that Mike began to suspect that blaming it all on the kids was a convenient excuse.
Tom had broached the topic up in the Arctic. According to his son, Jed regretted selling the home in Richmond after she'd passed. He wanted to be closer to the grandkids. It made sense to downsize. What was one man going to do with almost four thousand square feet, anyway? Even though Tom and Katie disagreed—passionately—the fire sale went through because Jed couldn't face the memories. Matthew, as ever, remained agreeable. That lit a fire up Tom's ass too.
The Arctic.
God, that felt like a lifetime ago. Coming up on a year now since he'd last seen his boy . . .
It was a saving grace that the patio door tinkled—another relic from the ghosts—there was a small bell draped from its handle with handwoven twine. Quicker than Jekyll to Hyde, Mike bucked up, expecting Lizzy or Hannah, but instead finding Christine.
No words had been exchanged since the kitchen. Over twenty-four hours of beating silence. Sad as the reflection was upon the state of their marriage—should he even call it that anymore?—for the first time in recent memory, apprehension wasn't the dominant response to encountering his wife. Instead, he was curious; perhaps bold as to say . . . optimistic? In her hands, Christine held two glasses and a tumbler filled with whiskey.
Not wanting to screw this up by committing an unknown faux pass, Mike eyed Christine with what he hoped was a neutrally inquisitive look. In the center of the patio seats arranged in a square U was a tired coffee table with cloudy, scratched glass and cracking wicker legs. He thought he'd seen the set at Costco. Or maybe Lowes. Perhaps Home Depot . . . Walmart? Christine would know. If he'd had the courage to ask her . . .
She put everything on the coffee table and sat on the sofa with her back to the townhouse, not parallel, but adjacent to him. Another sign that she wanted to talk. The tumbler-stop clinked when she removed it, and the glug of glutenous pouring filled the dead air. She stopped short of serving him but picked up her glass and settled back. Mike thought he should take the cue, so he did and then waited some more while her eyes stayed fixed on the screen windows, and he held his own drink tight so that his hands couldn't shake.
"I let him stay with Jordan that weekend. I dropped him off at the game . . . didn't stay to watch . . . I didn't even get out of the car. I had to take Lizzy to swim practice. And Hannah was at home."
His heart thumped hard, and he was glued. To the chair. Her.
"We got a call from the CDC on Saturday morning. Jeremy's wife had dinner with her sister that week. The sister had just gotten back from Europe, and that selfish bitch lied about her itinerary so she didn't have to pay to quarantine in a hotel. By the time they caught it, it was too late. Coach exposed everyone. They cleared out one of the hotels on base and quarantined everyone they were able to contact trace . . . and then we waited. He started a fever on day five." She began toying with the hem of her scrub blouse. "Our sweet little boy spent the last three weeks of his life alone in a room with strangers, and they wouldn't let me inside the tent." Gritting her teeth, she blinked several times. "They were running out of hazmat suits, and the staff needed them—" The sound of her choking back sorrow was deafening. "I begged." But so, too, the way she flatlined.
Devoid, Christine stared at nothing. All the lines of age, and stress and now grief, straight. She took a deep sip and swallowed without a flinch.
"He died at three fifteen on a Tuesday."