There you go again being Captain Optimism, pal.
Next to him, Erin closed her eyes and leaned her head against the fiberglass helm. “You know what’s funny?”
“Johnny Carson?”
She ignored him, said, “Despite everything I know, I would have found a way to justify it — what’s happening out there, what we’re doing. It wouldn’t have been easy, and some days would be harder than others, but I think I would have pushed on anyway, lying to myself. And every day the lies would eat at me more and more. It was already bad even before I met you.”
“What would have happened then? When you couldn’t handle it anymore?”
“I don’t know. I guess I’ll never know now, but probably nothing good.”
“So you’re saying I was your savior?”
“Don’t flatter yourself.”
“Sounded like it…”
“What I’m saying is, I think I would have kept on going to the bitter end, and I wouldn’t have been the only one. When I see what Riley’s doing back at the Ocean Star, it just reminds me what cowards the rest of us are. At least he’s doing something.”
“From what I hear, his plans wouldn’t have gotten very far if Lara and the Trident hadn’t shown up.”
“Maybe, but he’s at least doing something. Unlike us. We would have kept telling ourselves about all the things Mercer did for us to justify our cowardice.” She paused for a brief moment before continuing. “Even though we saw the collaborators as enemies, we told ourselves we were doing it for their own good, that we were ultimately saving them. We knew all about the pregnancies, the daily bloodletting. We scouted them months in advance of the attacks.”
“James told me.”
“We knew what was going to happen. What the body count was going to look like. You don’t throw planes and tanks into the mix and not know.”
She went silent and stared forward, and Keo couldn’t tell what she was looking at — or maybe what she was looking for. For all he knew, she could have been staring past the open seas and into the past, wondering how things might have changed if she had acted.
So that’s what guilt looks like on someone else.
“I should have stopped him,” Erin said. “God, we had so many chances.”
“We?”
“Those of us who had doubts. When I think back, I know it wasn’t just me.”
“Like Riley.”
She nodded. “I always knew he wasn’t comfortable with the plan. I could see it on his face, in his eyes whenever we met with Mercer to discuss strategy. He was always so quiet, especially compared to the others.”
“Who else was in the inner circle with Mercer?”
“There was me, Riley, Benford, and Rhett. We were the first four. Later, he added others. Bellamy, Jerkins…”
“And you all had doubts?”
“Not all of us. But it wasn’t just Riley and me, I know that. I don’t know, maybe in some naïve way we—I—were hoping Mercer would move past it. He talked about it on and off, but it just never seemed real until a few months before R-Day officially started.” She sat back and sighed. “We’re civilians, Keo. We’re not like you, bred for this sort of thing. We trusted in Mercer. Trusted in him implicitly.”
“That’s what manipulators do,” Keo said. “They prey on your loyalty.”
“Maybe. I don’t know. I just know how hard it was on my own in the early days. When he found me, living became more than just surviving. It became living again.”
“Was that before or after he brought you to Black Tide?”
“Before.”
“How did he know about the island in the first place?”
“He never said, but he’s ex-Army, so that probably has something to do with it. I would never think to look for weapons at an Army base. I wouldn’t even know where to find one off the top of my head. Do you?”
“Ran across some guys who did the same thing in Louisiana.”
“Friend or foe?”
Keo pulled up his balaclava and tapped the scar that ran down the side of his face.
“So that’s what happened there,” Erin said. “What became of them?”
“There was shooting and bad words,” he said. “I don’t play well with ex-Army types. Wannabe joke-spouting ex-Army comedians are the exception.”
“Good to know.”
Keo pulled the mask back down over his face and stared at the nothingness in front of them. “Don’t take this the wrong way, but you sure we’re going in the right direction? Because it’s been a couple of hours, and I still don’t see anything that even looks like an island out there.”
“It’s a secret U.S. military base, Keo. They’re not going to make it easy to find. With an ocean this big, you’d have to be either super lucky — or unlucky, depending on how you want to look at it — to just stumble across Black Tide by accident.”
“So what you’re saying is, yes, we’re going in the right direction.”
“Yes, we’re going in the right direction.”
“Okay. Just wanted to make sure.”
“So I’ve been spilling my guts, and I noticed you haven’t reciprocated.”
“What were you hoping to hear?”
“What happened?”
“What happened what?” he asked, even though he knew damn well what she was referring to.
“You know what,” Erin said. “You’re not going there to stop this war by killing Mercer. It’s personal. I can see it on your face when you talk about him. So what happened? What did Mercer do to you?”
“One of your teams killed a friend of mine. I tracked them back to Lochlyn.”
“You thought he would be there?”
“I was hoping he’d be there.”
“What about Davis and Butch? The iPod?”
“I shot Butch and took Davis for questioning.”
“Is he dead? Davis?”
“I don’t know.”
She looked over at him. “Don’t lie to me, Keo.”
“I’m not lying to you. He was still alive when we parted company. I don’t know what happened to him after that. I had other things to worry about.”
“Is that the truth?”
“Yes.”
She turned away.
“You knew them?” Keo asked.
“Of course I knew them. They were part of my unit.”
“Davis?”
“He was a good friend,” she said, and didn’t say anything else.
“How does an island that small make it through all the tropical storms and hurricanes that whip across the Gulf of Mexico every year?” Keo asked.
“Simple but tough Army engineering would be my guess,” Erin said. “In all the time we’ve been here, we’ve survived over a dozen storms the likes of which I’ve never experienced before. It was terrifying the first few times, but after a while you get used to it, and now you just hunker down until it passes. The place is incredibly sound, and it’s been designed to be used and reused. That includes the airfield, the surrounding woods, and the beaches. I wouldn’t be surprised if braving storms was part of the curriculum.”
They sat on the same bench at the front of the twenty-footer, staring at the first light he had seen since they left the Ocean Star. It wasn’t even that bright, but against the vast emptiness of the sea and the night, it might as well be a lighthouse beacon. With the single engine that had been propelling them for the last few hours turned off, the world was once again dead silent, with just the sloshing of the currents under and around them.