Page 31 of Constantly Cotton
“What?” God, he was confused.
“I’ll explain later. Right now, what we know is this: Brigadier General Barney Talbot was the one who gave you the order not to return the kids to Sacramento. Douche move, yes, until you remember that you guys who make the big bucks operate off intel fed to them by people they trust. So let me ask you this—is Talbot usually a douche?”
Jason pondered a moment, thinking about those moments of knowing Talbot was in the hospital while two nurses snuck him and his young charges food and transportation and hope.
“He’s… unimaginative,” he said after a moment. “A hard-ass, yes, but not bright. He’s the guy who watchesCool Hand Lukefor pointers on how to make the prisoners behave.”
Burton squinted at him and mopped up the last of his eggs with the last of his toast. “Is that even possible?”
Jason shook his head. “I swear, Talbot told me that men on his watch wouldn’t be allowed entertainment. As far as he’s concerned, all the problems in the movie stemmed from too much freedom.”
Lee’s eyes grew really, really large, and for once, he seemed at a loss for words. “Uhm….”
Jason gave a laugh. “You were lucky,” he said. “You had a decent CO in the Marines, and then you had me.”
Burton shook his head. “Me lucky, yes. But the rest of the world, unfortunate, definitely. So he’s probably not our guy trading military weapons for mob money. Who lit a fire under his ass to make him so hot for yours?”
Jason bit his lip. “That’s where I think our bad guy made a mistake. Because if it’s not Talbot, we know it’s got to be somebodyattachedto Talbot, since he was the one hunting me. So we know it’s somebody who parties with the mobsters—”
“Probably Las Vegas style,” Burton added, “because that’s where the kids were headed and where the deals were going down.”
Jason agreed. “So whoever you have on this—”
“Huntington and Owens, sir.”
Jason nodded briskly, impressed as always by Burton’s spot-on instincts. “Perfect. Huntington is, for some reason, very loyal, and Owens too. And they’re both well-liked and in frequent contact with people off our base.” He sighed and shook his head. “Makes people think we’re a real unit and not a myth. Always helpful when you’re looking for aid from other quarters.”
“Why would they think you’re a myth?” Cotton asked, and Jason glanced at him, realizing he’d been following their conversation closely.
“Nobody wanted to know,” Burton murmured. “I worked undercover for months to bring down Karl Lacey and his buddy, Hamblin, the assassin broker. Once Lacey was dead, people would look at all my evidence and go, ‘Oh, so that was bad.’ But before anybody confronted him, they didn’t want to know he was using the US Covert Ops budget and using behavior mod to turn soldiers into killers. So Jason comes in and he’s part of the cleanup, and he’s got a Covert Ops unit with all sorts of specialists, and….” Burton gave Jason a look that, frankly, he was uncomfortable with. “I don’t know how you did it, sir. You saw the need, you co-opted the base, and you convinced us all that since we were the ones who saw the problem, we had to be the ones to go out and bring the renegade assassins back to ground.” He nodded at Cotton. “It’s dangerous. It made the other ops we used to take look like a cakewalk, because these are our soldiers, and they know our techniques and they know what to expect. And some of them have left bloody trails of dismembered corpses, and it is hard to see. But nobody else was going to do it. I sat in on some of those meetings. All these generals and shit, fiddlefucking around, trying to blame each other for how the guy responsible managed to con money from the budget to fuck with people’s heads. But Jason says, straight up, ‘We’ve got to take care of our own, even if that means taking them out. This is our mess. We need to clean it up.’ And all of his men followed him.”
Jason shuddered. “I tried to give you all a way out,” he admitted, remembering the weeks following Karl Lacey’s self-destruction. “I put a set of reassignment papers in front of every officer and enlisted man in my unit and told them where we would be situated and what we would be doing, and not one person turned those papers in.”
“Why not?” Cotton asked Burton, obviously figuring that Jason wasn’t a good reporter on his own self, which was probably true.
“Because of why he was doing it,” Burton told him. “Jason had a staff meeting with his unit and told us that policing ourselves was the price of a free world and the largesse of our military budget. We could not call ourselves a moral nation if we didn’t clean up our mistakes, and while the brass didn’t seem to know what needed to be done, we had been taken into covert operations because we had a moral code that looked at the spirit of the law and not the letter of it.Weknew what had to be done, and that was all we would need.”
Cotton was looking at Jason with slightly parted lips and such incredible faith. “He believed the best in you all, and you helped him clean up the worst.”
“It’s a shitty job,” Jason said gruffly, looking away from both of them. He was almost angrier at Burton, who should know better. “There’s a reason we call it Operation Dead Fish. It stinks. I shouldn’t have asked anybody to do it. It’s… they were going to just… ignore it. Cross that bridge when we came to it. But Rivers and Cramer almost died, both of them, going above and beyond their jobs to find Lacey, doing what was best for the rest of the world. You, Lee, you risked court-martial refusing to take that contract on Ernie, because you knew it wasn’t right. It would have been unconscionable to let an entire unit of killers loose on the world and not make an attempt to protect the civilians in danger.”
“Only unconscionable to good men,” Burton said pointedly.
But Jason shook his head, looking away, out the window, where the depths of the Tahoe National Forest beckoned to hide them all.
“You all—even Huntington—could have gone somewhere. Had a career. Climbed some ladders. I tried to warn you. Nobody in the government wants someone who’s been with us sin-eaters. We know their secrets, and we have no respect for the ones who were going to leave the world to rot, and we have no power to fix anything other than what our unit was exclusively designated for. I was doing what was best for my conscience, but not what was best for my men.”
“We made that decision,” Burton said. “And if Ernie was here, he’d tell you that was the currency that bought our loyalty. He was given no choice at all to be a part of Lacey’s unit. He knows what my life could have been. So no bullshit. Cotton, if somebody from the military tries to contact you and tell you Jason’s the devil, you’re free to say what you want, but—”
Cotton snorted, such an unlikely sound in the tension of the kitchen that Jason startled, turning to look at him.
“I know I’m not trained or educated,” he said in the silence, “but I know good men who don’t get credit. John Carey, my boss. You ask someone who doesn’t know him and you’ll hear ‘sleezy porn guy’ or ‘drug addict.’ But he gave us all a choice, and he gave us all respect, and we got to be in charge of our bodies and our lives in ways nobody had ever given us before. And hewasan addict, but he’s been doing the work to fix his life and atone for his sins, and even when he was using, he still didn’t take advantage of us. He’s not going to get any medals for that, but I think he’s a good man. I think his business partner, Dex, is a good man. So I get it, Burton. Jason isn’t going to be loved by the people who are supposedly in charge of him. But that doesn’t mean he’s not a better man than they are.”
Burton smiled at Cotton, a full-out smile that dimpled the apples in his cheeks and made Jason think of fresh-faced young recruits out on their first leave. “Kid,” he said, “You are all right. Jason, I think God was smiling down on you for once and you ended up with a guardian angel.”
Jason couldn’t help it. He looked at the lovely young man with the wide, sad eyes and the dimples that nobody got to see, and his heart broke a little, hope filling up the gaps.
“I thought that when I woke up,” Jason said, giving Cotton a personal little wink. What would it hurt, he thought? What would it hurt to get personal with him? He was a beautiful young man with a wide-open future, and Jason was used up, discarded, worn down by hard choices and a hard job. Would Cotton even know Jason was letting yearning color his vision?