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Chapter15

“We need to go back.”

Knuckles’ face was stone. No emotion. No crying or wailing. Just pure stone. But I knew that behind it was a lava of molten rage. We’d both lost friends in combat over the years, but rarely was it with either of us watching the execution. He felt responsible for Carly’s death, and I knew it was eating at him just like it was eating at me.

Jennifer flicked her eyes to me, and I saw the fear. She had seen me at my worst and knew the horrific violence both Knuckles and I were capable of. She knew where Knuckles was right now. I shook my head, telling her to keep going.

We had failed, but I needed to stay focused on the task at hand. It was terrible to say, but I couldn’t allow us to be compromised even with the disaster. Going back for her body was asking for compromise. We’d be questioned by any number of local forces. She had a backstop with the embassy, and, as much as it pained me, I’d let them handle it. We still had a mission. Jahn Azimi had been captured, and if Carly’s death would mean anything, I was going to bring him home. But I needed Knuckles to do that.

I said, “We can’t go back. We have no way to bring her off that hill and explain what we were doing there.”

I saw his eyes snap open, going wild. He jerked forward, his body rigid, and shouted with spittle coming from his lips like adrunk in Times Square. “You’re leaving one of our own on the battlefield! You want to do that? I’m not doing it!”

In a calm voice, I said, “I hear you, man. I hear you. But we have a mission. Think about the mission.”

Knuckles had been my second-in-command since I’dhada command in the Taskforce. I knew him like I knew myself. And Knuckles surprised me, showing how little I knew about myself. He attacked me.

He leapt up from the back and wrapped an arm around my neck, trapping it against the headrest of the passenger seat, shouting, “We’re going back! Turn around!”

It happened so fast, I reacted out of instinct. I sensed his arm drape over my face a split second before he could sink the hold, putting my hand in between his arm and my neck, then explosively leapt out of my seat, pushing through his control with my feet against the windshield, now parallel to the floor of the vehicle.

Jennifer shouted, the car swerved, and I launched into the back, hammering Knuckles in the face with my elbow. We fell into the well of the vehicle and started fighting, the only noise the grunting from the effort.

He landed two solid blows, which I took because I was going for a submission, and I got it, circling his head in my arms. But it had been too easy. He was letting me win. I almost didn’t want to follow through, but I did. I began to torque, going so far that I thought I’d been wrong and he wasn’t going to quit, wanting the punishment I was providing. A split second later, he tapped my arm, and I relaxed. Letting him sag into the seat next to me.

We both sat for a second, huffing. He said, “Is that what you felt when Heather died?”

I looked at him and said, “A small part. You now have some idea of the pain. But fighting me isn’t going to cleanse it.”

He nodded, his nose running with blood. He said, “Tell me we’re going to find them. Tell me we get some vengeance.”

I said, “Knuckles, we’re going to rescue that man and his niece.Thatis vengeance. If we get to smoke some guys along the way, then so be it. Carly was working to get him home, to us. That’s what we’re going to do. It’s what she would tell you right now. Given the choice between vengeance for her death or saving Jahn, you know what she would say. Can I count on you?”

He looked at me and I saw the pain I’d lived with for years, but had managed to survive. He was now leaning over the edge.

He said, “Yes, I can do that. But there is no mercy here. I’m going to kill all of them to free that man.”

I said, “Tilt your head back.” And put a wad of tissues to his nose.

In the front, Jennifer said, “We’re out of the park. Where am I going?”

I looked at her and saw her face ghost white. She was petrified at what had just happened. Had no ability to assimilate it.

I said, “Go back to the hotel. We need to regroup. We need to find that guy’s phone.”

Four hours later, Jennifer turned from the computer and said, “That’s it. First floor is a garage area for the complex, so the phone’s on the second. It’s an Airbnb apartment, but that’s all we know, because Creed can’t do anything from the Taskforce.”

I leaned into the screen and saw a narrow metal stairway leading up to a second-floor landing, a balcony trailing away down from the entrance to a sliding door, two chairs out front, and a small table.

I said, “Creed still can’t do anything more?”

“Not when I talked to him last.”

Shit.

We’d gone straight back to the hotel after Carly’s murder, and I’d pulled up our website VPN, contacting the Taskforce on a channel that was reserved for emergencies, and got the second shock of my night. The VPN failed to work. In fact, every link I had for the Taskforce failed.

I gave the Taskforce duty officer a call on an unencrypted sat phone, my last ability, knowing it was not the thing to do, but at least it went straight into space and didn’t touch the Tajik cell network. I wanted to get a lock on the number we had for Jahn sooner rather than later, because Knuckles was pacing around the room like a caged tiger, and every second we waited meant Jahn might be killed before we could get him.