“Hey, hey. Come on, little lady. He’s going to be okay.” Art waited for the sobs to stop, then for the sniffling. “Here.” He pulled two folded pieces of tissue from a pocket.
“It’s like, I don’t know.” Her tear-streaked face pulled back slightly and looked up to the ceiling. “You always hear about this stuff when your husband’s a cop, but it’s just TV. It’s never really real. He goes away in the morning, and he comes home later, just like a regular job.” Her eyes began to fill again. “But people don’t shoot at other people in a regular job.”
Art guided her head down again, this time sideways to rest against his chest. He was a full twelve inches taller than her and could see clearly into the rest of the lobby. It was filled with agents and cops from everywhere. He caught Frankie’s glance and motioned for her to come over.
“Maria, this is Frankie. She works with Ed and me.”
The women looked alike, though Frankie was an even ten years younger than Maria. “Mrs. Toronassi, why don’t you come with me. We’ll get something to drink, and just talk. Okay?”
They walked off down the hall and disappeared to the right, a roomful of caring eyes looking at their backs.
Art turned away, looking the opposite direction. The flood of emotions was too much. He had ruined a marriage, his own life, and now…
His hand tensed up involuntarily. He looked down at it as it came up closer to his chest. Tears were in his eyes as he tried to open the hand, but couldn’t. Ed, I’m sorry. This didn’t have to happen.
A voice came from behind, but it sounded strange. Very loud, yet far away. He knew it. It was Jerry, but it was strange. The words were stretched out into almost unintelligible lengths, none making complete sense. One side of his body became very warm. Not hot, and not painful, but warm. A kind of moist warmth.
Art tried to turn to greet the voice, but his body became a corkscrew of sorts, spiraling down to the floor, where everything became very dark, and very quiet. Next, it was as black as a dream with no dreamer.
“Half an hour!” Blackjack announced.
Sean noted the time. They would do final checks first, then land. In Cuba. If someone had told him that, he’d have taken any odds against it. Strange was always able to outdo itself, though. Sean had learned that from experience.
The Delta captain leaned forward and scanned the hold from side to side, checking his squad. They were all quiet, spending the last few moments with themselves. Buxton was checking his backup SIG meticulously one final time. The sergeants were all eyes closed, except for Makowski — he had his pocket-size Bible open and was focused on one page. The only Delta member not in some kind of quiet reflective state was Antonelli, which was par for the course. One ear was covered by the headphones of his personal cassette player, his head moving from side to side as he paged through a newer edition Superman from his collection of comics.
Blackjack was semi-hidden in the shadows of the lead Humvee. His eyes were open, Sean could see, and staring ahead at nothing. It was his way.
Sean turned to Anderson, sitting one seat to his left. His upper body was contorting, bringing his neck down into his shoulders. Then his head would rotate halfway to the left, then back to center, then to the right. Graber watched the process repeated twice.
“Limbering exercises?”
Joe was in his own kind of trance, but snapped out instantly at the question, shaking his shoulders and arms loose. “You got it.” He still didn’t face the captain. “I can get into some tight spots sometimes, literally.”
“So you’ve got to wriggle in wherever, right?” Sean asked.
Joe nodded. “Wherever it is, whatever it takes.” He paused and got up, then sat one seat closer to the captain. “Listen, I don’t want you to take this wrong, but have you ever done this before? I don’t mean exactly what you’re going to do in a while, but anything similar?”
“Sure. A couple of times. One time I went in with the forces of another country on a ‘lend-lease’ kind of arrangement. The major did, too.”
“Can you say where?”
“Sure. It was in the papers and even in a few books since it happened. Thailand. There were a bunch of ‘separatist who-knows’. Communist guerrillas they later figured out. Three guys and one girl took over a 707 at the airport in Bangkok. The Thais asked us for assistance with the entry since we’d trained their commandos. Basically we just tossed the flash-bangs and brought up the rear. We nailed them all cold.” Sean’s words ended for a moment. “But we didn’t get there fast enough, at least not for the three folks the bad guys killed before we got in.”
Joe noted sincere regret in the captain’s voice, not the voice box utterings of an automaton he might have expected. “But you did your job?”
“Sure, that’s what the powers that be can claim. But to us any life lost is a loss. We can’t work on the assumption that there will be an acceptable number of casualties, simply because no one can give you a good, moral answer as to what that is. Is one percent okay? What about ten percent, or twenty percent? At what point does ‘success’ become failure? No, Mr. Anderson, we don’t go in thinking that we can lose one or two people. That just doesn’t work.”
“I see.” Joe understood a little better the troops’ motivation for doing what they did, and it wasn’t even close to his preconceived notion. Gung ho might be a description of their determination, but not of their motivation.
“This may be the first real shot we’ve ever had at doing our job,” Sean said. “It would be nice to earn our pay for once.”
Joe, you can be such a thick skull. The civilian felt somehow humbled. His mission was to defeat a machine. Theirs was to defeat men to save men. “What about Iran? Were you there?”
“Yes,” Sean answered, the memory coming back. It was manageable now. “I was a sergeant back then, a gun-toting rescuer of innocents.” The captain released a wistful sigh. “We all thought it was going to happen, that we were going to go in and snatch those folks out all safe and secure. When everything got fucked up, we cried. Every goddamn one of us whimpered like a baby. Except the major. He dealt with it his way. The rest of us, though, we were hurting. It’s not an easy thing to watch men die because of screwy-ass operational details, none of which we even knew about until after the fact. Hell, we set down at the desert rendezvous and the next thing we knew was we were going to be short choppers. The rest…”
“You know, back there in the States, it was Vietnam all over again. The military fucks up.” Joe leaned forward on his knees.
“Yeah. But you learn from it. We did.” The old memories were part of the past, but at times they still could sting. “What about your end of it, Anderson?”
“You mean have I done this before?”
“Or something similar.”
He was about to go into a tricky situation with some homemade nuclear reactors ready to melt down, but it wasn’t like anything he’d done before. It might turn out to be easier, and though most people would consider it unlikely, it bore less of a devastating potential than Joe’s shining moment. “Something like it, though not up here.”
“Need to know?” Sean asked, sensing the reluctance to discuss whatever it was.
“You know the game,” Joe responded. There were always those who ‘wanted’ to know some bit of restricted information, but very few who had a ‘need’ to know. It was the foundation of the government’s compartmentalized security policy toward information, and it worked. Still… “Let’s just say I’ve dealt with some of our own big guns when things went awry.”