“Yes.”
He didn’t tack on “sir.” He was fucking with me, and I was okay with that for now. He didn’t know me, didn’t really know how much shit he was in, or how deep a hole he’d dug for himself. All he knew was that his career in the Marines had hit a guard rail at seventy miles an hour, and now he was sitting across a small table from a guy wearing captain’s bars and no other military insignia. No medals or unit patch. No name tag. Harper had to be measuring that against the deferential way the colonel treated me. Like I outranked him, which I don’t. I’m not even in the military anymore. But in this particular matter I was able to throw more weight than the base commander. More weight than anyone else in or out of uniform on the continent. As far as Harper was concerned, when it came to throwing him a lifeline it was me and then God, and God was off the clock.
Harper couldn’t really know any of that, but he was smart enough and sly enough to know that I had some juice. On one hand, he rightly figured that I could drop him into a hole deeper than the one he’d dug for himself. On the other hand, he had information that I wanted, and he was stalling to see how best to play his only good card.
“How long are they going to keep me here?”
“To be determined, Sergeant. Do you feel you’re being inconvenienced?”
He didn’t rise to the bait.
“It’s been three days.”
“Not quite. Forty-seven hours and change.”
“Seems longer.” He didn’t even know that we’d already met. Not sure when I was going to spring that on him. It wouldn’t do anything to calm him down.
I opened my briefcase and took out a file folder.
“I’d like you to look at some photos,” I said and took two color eight-by-tens from my briefcase and laid them on the table. If I’d tossed a scorpion on the table he couldn’t have jerked back faster.
“Jesus Christ!”
I nodded at the print. “That’s her?”
“Fuck me,” muttered the sergeant. “Oh fuck me fuck me fuck me.”
Take that as a yes.
I sat back and waited him out. Sweat popped all along his forehead and leaked out from his hairline. He smelled like urine, cigarette smoke and testosterone, but I could smell fear, too. A whole lot of it. I used to think that was a myth, or something only dogs and horses could smell, but lately I’ve learned different. The kind of shit I deal with? I smell it a lot, and on myself, too. Like now, but I wasn’t going to let this asshole know it.
“Could…could you turn the pictures over? I don’t mean to be a *, but I don’t want her staring at me the whole time, y’know?”
“Sure,” I said, and did so. But I left them on the table. “Try to relax. Smoke one if you got any.”
He shook his head. “Never took it up. Jesus H. Christ. Wish I did.”
I opened my briefcase and took out two bottles of spring water, unscrewed one and handed it to him. He drank half of it down. Then I took some airline bottles of Jack Daniel’s and lined them up in front of him. One, two, three.
“If it helps,” I said.
He snatched one off the edge of the table, twisted off the cap and chugged it, then coughed. More bravado than brains.
“Tell me about the woman,” I said. “And what happened in the cave.”
He gave that some thought, drank half of the second bottle of Jack.
“Do you know my outfit? Second Marine Expeditionary Brigade, Light Armored Reconnaissance Battalion. We were part of Operation Khanjar, working that corner of Helmand Province, doing some recon stuff up in the hills,” he began. “Counterinsurgency work, and some fox hunts to flush the Taliban teams running opium through the area. That whole part of the province is nothing but dead rock riddled with a million caves. You could hide a hundred thousand people in there, camels and all, and it would take us fifty years to find half of them. That’s why this war was fucked from the snap. The Russians couldn’t do it twenty years ago, and we can’t do it now. Besides, nine out of ten people you meet are friendlies who look and dress just like the hostiles, so how you going to know?”
“Skip the politics, Sergeant. Talk about the woman.”
He shrugged. “It was weird out there because last week the whole place was lit up by some kind of underground explosion. We got word that some Taliban lab blew up, but the blast wasn’t nuclear. Something to do with geo-thermal chambers or shifting plates or some bullshit like that. A whole section of desert just fell into itself and there was this spike of fire that shot a couple hundred feet in the air.”
“No radiation?”
“No. Most of us still had TLD badges and the badges stayed neutral. The area was hot, though…not with radiation, but actually hot. Like a furnace. When we reached the outer perimeter of the event zone we could see a weird shimmer and I realized that big sections of the desert had been melted to glass. It looked like a lava flow, rippled and dark.”