Homefront. Part 10

Tenderly he patted the stuffed animal, then froze again when the movement caused Ditech's collar, carefully buckled around the bunny's neck, to jingle.

His experience dictated that he back off a s.p.a.ce, take inventory. He was a little awed at the bile that rose in his throat. He'd stalked and collared men for the state of Minnesota. And he'd killed enemy soldiers in combat-that was a certain type of work.

He'd descended to the bottom of the adrenaline fear tank and made all the stations coming up. Never felt quite like this...

Klumpe. Coming at my kid.

So this was hatred. Nothing clean about it. Just visceral dirty rage. A hunk of rotten meat stuck in his throat.

At my kid.

Training and experience fell away. f.u.c.ker had been in the house, had taken Kit's stuffed animal from her bed. He backtracked through the day. When we were on the ski trail. Could have been in the house when Nina was asleep. When I left the cat in the garage. He could have been there, hiding. s.n.a.t.c.hed her, went over the deck rail... When we were on the ski trail. Could have been in the house when Nina was asleep. When I left the cat in the garage. He could have been there, hiding. s.n.a.t.c.hed her, went over the deck rail...

Ambush alert now, he half crouched, shotgun at port arms, and listened carefully.

Slowly he rotated his head and scanned the surrounding darkness. Listened again. Nothing but the soft wind rubbing the dry branches together, the heave and murmur of the pines. After another ten minutes of listening, he decided he was out here all alone. He removed a tinfoil pouch of cigars from his pocket, selected one of the rough wraps, took out his lighter, and lit the cigar. Then he squatted, Vietnamese peasant fashion, by the side of the trail, smoked, and thought about it as it began to snow again.

Jimmy Klumpe's face, this morning in the cab of the garbage truck, on the sidewalk in front of the school yesterday morning-his nutty wife yelling from the truck. Striking back against him and Kit. Had to be.

Broker shifted his weight, drew on the cigar, and studied the pole stuck carefully in the snow. At the exact intersection of two trails.

Like a signal. A warning. Back off.

Because my kid hit their kid...

He flicked the coal from the cigar, shredded the rolled leaves, and tossed them aside. The snow sailed down like forgetfulness, blurring the edges of the tracks in the woods, filling them in. He took one more look at the vertical ski pole. Leave it undisturbed for now. Make sure Kit didn't come here. He turned and started back to the house. Had to think this through. Maybe call Griffin. Bring him out to see this.

But not tonight.

Broker came around the garage and saw Nina sitting on the back steps before she saw him. He quickly rerouted around the garage, went in the front door, entered the kitchen, went into the living room, and tucked the shotgun in the couch cushions, out of sight. Then he retraced his steps back around the garage and approached her. It was a giant step, her coming outside at night. She was layered in fleece, boots, and a parka. Smoking. Holding a cup of coffee. She had removed the tangled braids from her hair.

"I saw your light in the woods. Any luck?" she asked.

He shook his head. "If the cat isn't back by morning, then it doesn't look good." He nodded up toward the bedroom. "How's she doing?"

"Whatever else we did, we didn't make a neurotic kid. Nothing gets between her and her sleep." Nina shifted, making room for him on the deck cushion she was sitting on. He sat next to her. She produced a steaming thermal cup from her lap and pa.s.sed it.

The fresh hot coffee would keep him up. He only took a sip. He needed to sleep. See it fresh in the morning. He handed the cup back. Instinctively, they scooted closer together to keep warm. They watched the snow stream down. Every dizzy snowflake could have been a thought unsaid between them, building into a slow storm of unspoken words. She took out her American Spirits, cupped her hand, and thumbed her lighter. She inhaled, exhaled. He put his arm around her.

The snow came faster, no longer serene. Like confusion.

Finally Broker asked, "Where is it?"

Nina looked up to him with calm eyes. "In the woods. It stays mainly in the woods now."

They'd evolved a code to simplify the overwrought discussion; back in December, they'd talked it to death, and all the talk had just worn them out. So they settled on it it. The depression. Winston Churchill's black dog.

Progress. Two months ago, when he'd asked where it it was, she'd answer, walking on live grenades, "In the house." was, she'd answer, walking on live grenades, "In the house."

He tightened his arm around her shoulders, and stared into the woods where'd he'd just been. Once she'd had strong shoulders and they would be strong again. But right now they didn't need the extra weight.

Broker pulled his eyes away from everything that could be pacing back and forth in the woods tonight and said, "C'mon, let's go inside."

She c.o.c.ked her head, and he saw a flicker of her old smile; tough, smart, wry. "Nah, I'll sit awhile, finish my smoke."

His forehead bunched in concern, but also a ray of hope. "You sure?"

"Yeah, I'm sure. Take off."

He rose to his feet. "You'll stay right here on the porch, right?"

Nina shrugged, then turned back to her meditation on the woods. Going into the kitchen and shutting the door behind him, Broker glanced back, at her hunched hooded figure sitting alone on the deck.

First time in three months she'd stayed outside the house alone at night.

Nina Pryce tried to stare down the snow. It kept coming at her eyes, like pinwheeling hooks of panic. Pulling at her. Only a fragile connection with the solidity of the deck under her b.u.t.t kept her from launching weightless into the swirling night.

One step removed from the snare of deep s.p.a.ce...

She dragged on the Spirit, exhaled, and wished she'd taken a bullet on her last a.s.signment, with Delta Team Northern Route. She'd come back from a bullet before. Instead she'd dropped her guard for a moment and had lost two buddies, the use of her right arm...

And her mind.

Now, after eight months of unrestricted sick leave, she faced the dark woods without illusions.

When she was a little girl, she had sat on her grandfather's lap and listened while he tried to explain living through the Great Depression. How he had once stood in an unemployment line in Chicago, rubbing his last two dirty copper pennies together in his pocket.

I hear you, Grandpa.

All the energy she could muster came from the friction of rubbing her last two pennies together. Broker and Kit. Last two pennies.

Nina suffered alone, without G.o.d. She'd operated in some of the great s.h.i.tholes of the world and came away an unambiguous Hobbesian; man was a devious tool-making animal who was kept in line mainly through fear of his own violent death.

She had been part of a thin green line that made that fear palpable to Iraqis, Serbs, Filipino guerrillas, and Al Qaeda operatives.

Even in the depths of clinical depression, her mind was practical. It was all about energy. As a serious athlete in her youth, she understood that compet.i.tion was psychologically anch.o.r.ed, mind over matter. Her body had been the testing ground in which she learned to function through pain. In the Army she'd upped the ante and performed through fear and even dread. When it got rough, she'd always relied on an unmovable part of herself to brace on. She had always taken her mind for granted. She'd absolutely believed that her willpower would still be kicking an hour after she was dead.

But then, a week before last Christmas, the source of her will, her mind itself, had failed. At the first sign of panic, she reached down deep to brace and fight back. To her immense surprise, the solid baseline gave way, and she catapulted off into an internal void. With nowhere to plant the fulcrum of her will, there was no way to direct her energy. She lost gravity. She lost up and down.

Worst time of her life.

Worse than the confused sandstorm fight in the dunes during Desert Storm, when she became the first woman in the history of the U.S. Army to be awarded the Combat Infantry Badge. Worse even than the death struggle with George Khari last July, when she wrecked her shoulder.

Finally, she was feeling a little traction. Maybe it was finally getting out of her own head long enough to see Broker struggling alone, nursing her, trying to take care of Kit. Something.

She'd earned the Distinguished Service Cross, the Silver Star, two Bronze Stars, and three Purple Hearts. And on this chilly evening she was making the scariest night jump of her life by merely sitting alone and facing the dark.

She puffed on the cigarette. The soldier's friend. As long as you had a smoke, you were never alone. Civilians pulled mere smoke into their lungs. Soldiers sucked in their fear. She clutched her cigarette, managed a tiny grin at how she'd wound up more of a fraidy-cat than she'd been as a five-year-old sitting on her grandpa's knee.

Christ. At five, I wasn't afraid of the dark.

Chapter Fifteen.

Four-thirty in the morning. Broker and Kit were sound asleep, Kit in her bed, Broker curled on the living room couch. The TV was silent. Nina had tightly shut the kitchen door and now sat, elbow on the kitchen table, arm wrestling with a fifteen-pound barbell. By the light of the solitary lamp next to the indestructible snake plant, she studied the weight in her right hand, removed the cigarette from her lips, put it in the ashtray on the table. Took a deep breath. Then, methodically, she raised the compact hunk of iron. At between fifteen and twenty degrees of arc, she made a face. Not quite pain, more frustration. Broker and Kit were sound asleep, Kit in her bed, Broker curled on the living room couch. The TV was silent. Nina had tightly shut the kitchen door and now sat, elbow on the kitchen table, arm wrestling with a fifteen-pound barbell. By the light of the solitary lamp next to the indestructible snake plant, she studied the weight in her right hand, removed the cigarette from her lips, put it in the ashtray on the table. Took a deep breath. Then, methodically, she raised the compact hunk of iron. At between fifteen and twenty degrees of arc, she made a face. Not quite pain, more frustration.

Son of a b.i.t.c.h.

The warning light popped on the fifth repet.i.tion. A huge drag of fatigue. Then she raised the weight over her head, and the shoulder failed between 80 and 120 degrees; the cla.s.sic painful arc.

She pictured the architecture of her rotator cuff; in her case, a train wreck where the coracoacromial ligament mashed into the acromion. The wear and tear of the life she'd lived had reduced the cushioning bursa to a blown-out tire. Useless.

What the doctors called a type 2 impingement; irreversibly damaged tissue.

She'd faked it for years out of denial, ignoring pain. She eeked out a few more years with concealed cortisone injections, gobbling anti-inflammatory drugs. On leave, when Kit was born, she'd slipped into a hospital in Duluth, Minnesota, for outpatient orthoscopic decompression surgery to trim back the ligament and bone. The tattoo on her shoulder concealed the scars, like it hid the cortisone needle marks. Didn't even tell Broker. That bought a few more years.

To prepare for her last Army PT test, she'd gone out on the street to score Oxycontin to blur the pain...

Christ. If it binds like this at fifteen, how'll I ever get to twenty-five...

Head snapping around, alert.

Something...

A tremble at the corner of her eye. And a low moaning sound that she couldn't place. Then, looking out the windows, she saw a faint wrinkle tug at the darkness. She dropped the weight, got to her feet, and switched off the single light. As her eyes adjusted to the darkness, the ragged black fringe of tree line across the lake sharpened and-moved? No. The motion was above the trees, in the sky.

Squinting, she made out the tall pliant silver-green towers, an electric Stonehenge swaying in a tapestry of constellations.

She was drawn to the eerie light. Anything that pushed back the darkness.

She pulled on her jacket, opened the patio door, and stepped out on the back deck. The sheer visual power of the northern lights commanded her to tilt up her head, and she almost forgot herself as the icy wind sucked the heat from her lungs in a frosty plume.

So cold she could feel the water snap. Little arrowheads of windowpane stuck in the crannies of the granite boulders along the sh.o.r.e.

Then the wind, honed on a million pine needles, ripped open an acoustic tunnel in the night, and straight down that tunnel raced the baying of the wolves who owned that creepy forest up north. Eyes pinned on the sky, ears ringing with the howls, she had an impression of an utterly hostile beauty.

In which she had no permanent place.

Time and isolation for a cure. Up in Glacier County. Right as usual, Broker, honey.

Wolves. The sky dripping icy midnight fire. The thrill of atavistic fear and dumb wonder almost spooked her out of the heavy inertia.

She shivered.

Christ, she wondered as she hugged herself. Which was colder, the thing that wouldn't stop turning in her mind, or the frigid wind? But even the pull of the dancing sky lights and the howling wolves could not slow her own personal flickering images...

...the pictures that played over and over in her head.

So she darted back into the kitchen and turned on all the lights. Then the TV. Poured a cup of coffee and lit another Spirit.

Broker had called it exactly. She was stuck in those three seconds, eight months ago. What Broker did not comprehend was that she was doing it to herself.

Northern Route had been a pure seat-of-the-pants operation. A batch of misfits willing to go off the reservation. They'd exceeded their orders on an unsanctioned high-stakes gamble to stop what they thought was a tactical nuke coming into the country. Intel suggested that Al Qaeda was using an American smuggling operation to bring it in across the North Dakota border.They picked Nina because she'd played a few undercover games for Seal Team Six in Bosnia-Herzegovina. A novelty. The guys in special ops called them "Swallows," the extreme military gals attached to them, like Nina and Jane Singer, in lurid appreciation of how far they might have to go to get close to a target.What the h.e.l.l. At the time her marriage was on the rocks; she and Broker were separated. So she rolled the dice. Even used Kit in the play, and drew in Broker for added backup.Her job was to get close to North Dakota bar owner Ace Shuster, who turned out to be a likable, handsome drunk with a chivalrous streak. Nina had spent several nights in Shuster's bed. But he had slept on the couch.She had been totally unprepared to be courted.And when they descended on him and his load of contraband, it turned out to be Cuban cigars.The maverick operation was called off. Homeland Security was p.i.s.sed. The Joint Special Ops Command at Bragg was furious at the spectacle of a Blackhawk helicopter and elements of a Delta troop being diverted into the North Dakota wheat fields. It looked like a career ender. troop being diverted into the North Dakota wheat fields. It looked like a career ender.These facts affected her mood that next morning when she impulsively decided to drop by the bar and say something to Ace. Her second lapse of judgment was leaving her personal weapon behind.Because when she and Janey walked into the bar, the real bad guys in the smuggling operation were waiting.In the end it all came down to that moment in the Missile Park bar.She played it over and over, like a tape on a loop. And she had the remote in her hand. Just wouldn't stop thumbing the controls. Hit play: there's Joe Reed coming through the back door, holding the pistol in a two-handed grip. She watched herself yell, reaching for her pistol. Saw her hand coming up empty. Janey swinging around, bringing up her nine. Ace Shuster in motion. Janey taking the first bullet in her chest. Stop. Rewind. Play the stunned expression on Janey's youthful face. Reed efficiently shooting Janey a second and third time as she went down. Then Reed swung the gun on Nina. She played this part a thousand times. Never did get to see Ace's face.When he put his body in front of the fourth and fifth shots.And saved her life.Then that a.s.shole, Dale-Ace's loony brother-stabbed her with the syringe of ketamine.Stop. Rewind. Play. Janey's stunned expression again. The protest in her eyes. Hey! Wait a sec, this is way more tomboy s.h.i.t than I bargained for...Janey gone.Ace gone.The tape played endlessly, the same several seconds over and over. Because that was Nina's role that day. To watch.A witness to the death of Janey and Ace and by implication Colonel Wood-Holly-and the people who died at Prairie Island.And every day since, she watched the creases of worry etch deeper in Broker's face when he looked at her, at Kit. As he contemplated the radioactivity that might have slipped into his blood and bones sp.a.w.ning tiny milky scurries of cancer and leukemia... bones sp.a.w.ning tiny milky scurries of cancer and leukemia...So she fixated day and night on editing the tape. Make a new tape t.i.tled "If Only"...Rewind. Stop. Play Nina shouting, reaching for her pistol.If only...

She got up, eased open the door, padded into the living room, and stood over the couch where Broker lay sleeping. His face was obscure in the darkness but she knew his face; the way, even under all the strain, it relaxed into an unlined boyish reverie when he slept.

The first time she ever saw him, she was younger than Kit. Thirteen years separated them. Her dad had squired Broker through the bad fight in Quang Tri City. Brought him back, with his war twin, Griffin, to run the Ranger course at Benning. The two of them appeared in the cramped backyard of the tiny house where the Army billeted Major Ray Pryce and his family. The summer of '73.Even at seven, Nina understood you sorted men by what they wore on their chests. Dad said there were two kinds of soldiers: the kind that fight, and the other kind. Broker and Griffin were identically lean and blooded in spitshined jump boots, new Ranger tabs, CIB and jump wings over the two rows of ribbons above the left blouse pocket of their summer khakis. Even the individual ribbons were the same: Silver Star, Bronze Star, and Purple Heart on top.Her mom had called her to the kitchen and sent her back into the yard, carefully clutching three frosted bottles of Lone Star beer.She sat in her dad's lap, long used to the smell of beer and cigar, while he harangued against the Army, the war. The stupidity of taking the 101st off jump status, putting them in helicopters.She remembered every word he said. "See these two boys, Kit. They're American Praetorians. That's what the airborne and the marines divisions are, the volunteer backbone. This special operations c.r.a.p we're stuck in just goes on missions-h.e.l.l, airborne and marine divisions win wars..."But not that war, Daddy.She remembered his words because they were some of the last words she ever heard from his mouth. Two days later he took his two boys back to Vietnam. He left before dawn, coming into her room and kissing her gently on the forehead, whispering so as not to wake her, "I love you, Kit. I'll always love you." Softly his bluntfingers caressed her chest. "Remember, you have a Pryce heart in your chest. Don't quit, honey; don't cry."She had fought her way up through sleep and reached out her arms."Daddy?"But he was gone. And this time he didn't come back. Not even his body.

Nina bent over her sleeping husband and wanted to rea.s.sure him; she knew he feared the consequences of being exposed to radiation at Prairie Island. Feared that cancer was simmering in his blood, his bones. You won't get cancer, Broker. You're not the type. You won't get cancer, Broker. You're not the type. Her mother had died of breast cancer. But her mother had given in. Five years after her husband was taken off the missing list and presumed dead, she compromised and married a creep. She gave up. Her mother had died of breast cancer. But her mother had given in. Five years after her husband was taken off the missing list and presumed dead, she compromised and married a creep. She gave up.

Nina believed that Broker would never get cancer because he didn't know how to give up.

She backed out of the living room and pulled the door shut behind her. What Broker didn't understand was that the greatest fear and sense of loss she suffered was not for her dead comrades.

Of course she grieved. With her arm in a sling, she attended three funerals. Janey's in North Carolina. Ace Shuster's in Langdon, and Holly's-closed, mostly empty casket-in a military chapel in Arizona. They found about as much of Holly as they did of some 9/11 victims. Some tissue that fit in a DNA-coded envelope.

The point was, her arm in that f.u.c.king sling her arm in that f.u.c.king sling. She had lost the use of her right arm, and after eight months of rehab, it wasn't coming back. In the fight with George Khari last July, she had saved her life but destroyed her shoulder. She suspected that the doctors at Bragg had studied her MRIs, knew the problem, and were just giving her time to come to terms with it.

Patronizing her.

She backed away from the thought. Better to keep playing the tape over and over, backing it up, splicing into the seconds, trying to make it come out right. Because that was the real her going into that gunfight. Major Nina Pryce. D-Girl Nina Pryce.

Broker called it her Joan of Arc fantasy. Her uphill fight against the Army patriarchy. She'd soldiered through all the dumb jokes, sent two would-be military rapists staggering away clutching their genitals-you wanted me to touch it, a.s.shole, you didn't say how... She'd made up her mind: I She'd made up her mind: I will will be the first woman general to fight a brigade in combat. Gone now, all that headstrong bravado. be the first woman general to fight a brigade in combat. Gone now, all that headstrong bravado.

But if she gave up the drama of that moment, she had to face herself as she was right now: a woman, another mom, closer now to forty than to thirty, with a b.u.m shoulder...

Depression was just a waiting room where she paced in a circle until her name was called. She'd go into the doctor's office. The doctor would run her through a simple set of range-of-motion exercises, note that she couldn't remotely bend her elbow and reach up behind her back. Would write on a piece of paper: "Unfit for duty."

Nina shook her head, unwilling to look her demons in the eye: her pride, her arrogance, her willingness to let Broker and Kit follow in the wake of her career like baggage...

s.h.i.t.

She had always been an unusually gifted tactician. So she knew exactly what she had to do. Just hit the fast-forward b.u.t.ton. Accept her life in real time. The way it was now.

Uh-uh. Can't deal with that yet.

So she hit rewind. Then she hit play and watched that last moment: Nina, always getting the jump, ahead of the situation, a kinesthetic f.u.c.king intellectual calling the play, going for her gun. There was still that split second before her hand came up empty.

When she was still somebody...