“Well, my dick is obviously way bigger than his,” I said, laughing. “That’s how the girls at high school always told us apart, anyway.” In truth, Magda was the only girl who’d even seen my dick. And Ronan’s was probably exactly the same size as mine, down to the millimeter. Not that we’d compared, of course. That would have been weird. Our hands, our feet, our shoulders, our waists—everything else was exactly the same, though. Why would our cocks be any different?
The first lieutenant laughed. “Well, in any case, the other Captain Fletcher just left a briefing with the colonel. I heard Whitlock’s intelligence guy complaining about how long their meeting was. Your brother’s probably somewhere recovering from the ear chewing he just got served.”
Colonel Whitlock wore his eagle with pride. He was a concise, no-nonsense, efficient leader with a shitty attitude, but he got the job done. It wasn’t easy overseeing an operation like this, out in the middle of nowhere with limited resources and a whole city full of locals who all wanted you dead. The only time he ever kept the clock running in his office was when he was reprimanding someone. You fucked up and you knew you were spending the better part of a day inside Whitlock’s office with your pants around your ankles, receiving the hiding of your life.
“Shit. Okay. Thanks, man.” I cut through the base then, skirting around the infirmary and the shipping containers that had been set up as care package general stores, shelves stacked with tubes of toothpaste, toilet paper and Twizzlers, until I reached the other end of the base, where the officers’ Alaska tents were pitched. I caught Ronan just as he was about to head inside. He looked relieved when he saw me, though there were dark, ominous circles under his eyes, and he looked like he hadn’t been eating properly. If this carried on much longer, it would be all too easy for people to tell us apart. He’d be the one looking like he was about to fall face first into an early grave.
“Hey, man. You were meant to meet me after lunch. They fucked up and gave me your mail again. Whitlock kept you late, huh?” I grimaced, waiting to hear how bad it had been. From the look on Ronan’s face, it had been really fucking bad.
He swallowed, looking around, and then urged me inside the tent. Checking first to make sure we were alone, he walked the length of the billet and then back again, his hands clenching into fists and unclenching again every few seconds. He was acting weird, which was how he’d been acting for weeks now, ever since the incident with the woman and the little baby.
He’d seemed relieved when I’d told him he was mistaken, that there was no woman or baby, and yet as the days had passed, he’d started asking questions. What did the guy look like? Was he on any watch lists? What had he been wearing? How old had he looked? Ronan’s willingness to believe he was off the hook was obviously wearing off, and it wasn’t going to end well.
When he came to a stop in front of me, his shoulders were slumped, his head hanging low. “Whitlock’s a cunt, man. He called me in to talk about some missing tires from supply, but that turned out to be bullshit. He really wanted to talk to me about extension.”
“Extension?” The word was a bullet fired from a high-powered rifle, three miles away. You heard it, knew what was coming, but you didn’t feel the impact or the pain of it for a good five or six seconds, until the weight of it had time to sink in. “What the hell are you talking about, extension? Our tours are both up in nine weeks. We’re headed back to the States.”
The muscles in Ronan’s jaw tightened. He looked away, brows drawn low. I hadn’t seen my brother cry since our parents’ funeral, and that was such an old memory that the moths had gotten at it and turned it into dust.
“Doesn’t look like home’s on the cards for anyone at the base,” he told me. “Whitlock says they’re keeping all of the officers on as well as the enlisted guys. That’s me. That’s you. Everybody. The whole battalion. Intel projected increased Taliban activity in the area from now until the end of the year. So that’s it. All deployments are being extended.”
I felt cold, despite the heat. Was he right? No way he was right. They couldn’t just spring that kind of shit on us without any warning, especially coming up to two months before we were due to go home. “How long?” I asked. “How long are the extensions?”
Ronan’s breath came out shaky. “Six months. He said there was every chance that could be shortened if the intel turned out to be wrong, but he highly doubted that would be the case. He said he appreciated my dedication to the US Army, and that my sacrifice was for the greater good of our fine nation and the protection of her people. Blah, blah, blah. The end.”
“What did you say?”
Ronan looked at me sharply. “I said thank you very much, sir, for the opportunity. It’s an honor. What else could I say? Actually, sir, I had plans in April back in Maine, and I don’t really feel like cancelling? Or how about the plain old truth? Sir, I am done with this bullshit, and I don’t think I can take another day of it. I can’t sleep, and every second I spend out here is another second I step closer to insanity. How do you think that conversation would have gone, Sully? He would have had me court marshaled on the spot.”