Page 3 of What Remains (John Worthy #3)

Only a single Red Bull remained by the time Flowers stopped talking. A silence, not uncomfortable, settled between them.

Turning over what Flowers had said, John thought there might not be that much distance between these men and himself as he’d imagined. Like him, they had chosen the only possible course of action in an impossible situation, one where there were no winners and morality struggled with loyalty.

And then Mac shows up and offers to get them reinstated if they’ll go on a couple missions, help him out.

Flowers broke the silence first. “All that talking’s made my throat kinda dry. Hand me that last can, if you don’t mind. Oh, and check my pack. There’s a thermos in the pouch. Brought that along for you.”

After handing Flowers his drink, John unscrewed the thermos, sniffed at the curls of steam unfurling, then said, “This smells real. Where you’d get this?”

“I got my ways. Drink up, Doc. Hope you take it black.”

“I do.” The coffee was as strong as its aroma implied and he swallowed back a mouthful with something close to a groan. “Man, that tastes good. Thanks.” He let a few moments slip by then asked, “And no one ever found out? Other than Mac?”

“Nobody. But he’s not holding it over our heads, if that’s what you’re thinking. Me, I’ve always had the sneaking suspicion he was more than okay with what we did.”

“Or that what you did fit very conveniently with his work. Isn’t it a little too convenient that Shahida just happened to be working with the same guy who helped cover your collective asses? Command didn’t think it odd that the whole squad left the Raiders right after?”

“Not really. We were asked, nicely, if we didn’t think it was a better idea all the way around if we slipped out the exit with no one really noticing. Look at it from their perspective, man. If the truth ever got out, the press would have a field day. We did the right thing.”

“As orchestrated by Mac.”

“I’ll grant you that. But, man, he kept our collective asses out of a court-martial.”

“He did more than that,” John said. “He kept you guys from Death Row. He’s also your ticket to getting back in.”

Flowers was quiet for a few moments. Then: “I won’t deny that.

Because JSOC, DARPA, CIA, all those alphabet agencies and forces are tied together, operating under the radar and in the dark.

We’re the type of people Mac wants for this kind of work.

But I don’t get any thrill out of it. This isn’t my own personal Mission Impossible .

I’m also in this to, well, not atone for something, that’s not it.

I don’t feel bad about what we did or how Mac helped cover it up in exchange for working with Shahida.

I don’t know what the right word is, exactly, for what I’m after. ”

“Maybe what you’re after is redemption.” Lord knew, he understood how that felt.

He watched Flowers think about that. “Yeah,” the other man said, “that feels right. Every kid we get out of this place is a kind of redemption.”

“Meaning you want back in?”

“To the Raiders? I dunno, man. Things haven’t changed that much.

I don’t know if I can go back to a system where we’re told to look the other way because it’s in the best interests of the mission or we want to keep some asshole of a police chief on our side.

Not when you’re talking kids. So, there might not be a way to slot myself back in and pretend nothing ever happened. ”

“Are you sorry?”

Flowers shook his head. “There’s war, man, and then there’s a time and place where morality kicks in.

No matter what Command said, we couldn’t look the other way.

Don’t get me wrong. When you’re getting shot at all the time or even thinking you will be and you haven’t had a square meal in three weeks and you’re so dirty and stinking your clothes could keep on marching all by themselves, that’s when it’s hardest to stay, well, civilized .

Even that’s not quite it, though. There are lines you toe, that you come right up to jumping over, and then there are others that only some men cross.

” A pause. “You ever hear of The Kill Team?”

John thought for a second. “That’s almost ancient history, isn’t it? Well, at least when it comes to this war. Happened over ten years ago, I think. Bunch of Army guys, right?”

“Yup.” Flowers nodded. “And it was 2010, to be exact. Maywand District. These six Army guys killed a bunch of Afghan civilians just for kicks. Thrill kills. They admitted to three, but there were probably more. They took photos, staged things with the corpses. Even kept trophies. Finger bones, part of a skull, sick shit like that.”

Why was his mind jumping to scenes from Apocalypse Now? His Uncle Dare had never become that jaded from his service in Vietnam. On the other hand, Dare had been a sniper. Picking off the enemy was his job.

You become a sniper, Dare once said, you’re snuffing out a life. That person may not be an admirable man or even a good one, but that’s between that person and his god. You can’t do this job otherwise, son. You got to be ice, son. You got to be stone.

When he was fifteen, John had done exactly that. Doing what was right had cost him everything. The same was true for Driver and his men.

Pouring himself another cup of coffee, he said, “You’re drawing a parallel between that kill team and you?”

“No.” Flowers crushed his Bull in a fist and tossed it over a shoulder.

The can let out a faint metallic chik as it bounced against a side panel.

“I’m drawing a contrast. I’m painting a different picture.

There’s a difference between, say, kind of suspecting that a guy is beating his wife and knowing he is. ”

“You don’t take out an abusive husband.”

“No, you leave that up to his wife .” Flowers was getting hot. “That poor woman pulls the trigger, and she goes to jail. Go look up the stats, you don’t believe me.”

“Easy, man, take it easy,” John said. “I’m not judging. I’m trying to understand.”

“Okay, then how about this one? Is there a difference between a neighbor who gives candy to certain kids a little too often and the same guy saying to a kid that he’s got something to show him only the kid has to come inside or go down-cellar?”

John flashed to that movie he and Roni had watched on-call: the one about a murdered girl named Suzie who had worried about a lonely penguin in a snow-globe. “You know there is. But then you report the guy to the police.”

“Who might do diddly.”

“Can’t argue that.”

“What I’m saying is we weren’t acting on a hunch. What we did wasn’t for thrills. We did the only morally right thing we could.”

“That’s not true, and you know it,” John said, quietly. “You acted because you had no faith that the military would. You acted out of a sense of moral certainty.”

“And duty,” Flowers said, his tone grudging. “ We did our duty.”

“I hear you.” He waited a beat. “Listen, true story. Roni was once asked to evaluate this kid. Corporal, at the time, worked in long-range surveillance on an E-3 Sentry. You know what that is?”

“Yeah, AWACS, Airborne Warning and Control System, right? Tracking satellites and enemy aircraft and monitoring radio traffic. I thought that was Air Force.”

“It is.”

“So, how come they brought him to an army base?”

“Because of the nature of what he’d done. Had to keep an eval on the down-low. Seems that while he was on-duty, the corporal let a Chengdu J-20 do a pretty close flyby.”

“Whoa. Isn’t that China’s version of a stealth fighter?”

“Correct. So, there’s this Chinese stealth fighter in our airspace, but it was only when one of the other guys on the E-3 heard the Chinese chatter that people on the ground even knew how close that plane was.

Now, those planes are hard to see on radar, which is the whole point.

But, looking back over the flight data, Command figured that the plane was visible.

Just for thirty seconds, but it was there, and the kid should’ve caught it. ”

“And he didn’t?”

“No, see, that’s the thing. He did .”

“What? And he let that go by? Why?”

“Because he claimed he received instructions to allow that plane to pass by.”

“And there weren’t any instructions.”

“Nope.” John paused. “At least, not on Earth.”

Flowers was silent for ten seconds. Then: “You’re shitting me.”

“Cross my heart.” John drew an X over his left chest. “That boy said he’d gotten orders from his ‘superiors’,” he said, adding air-quotes, “and his orders were to ignore the plane. Problem with that was…the kid’s superiors were on a spaceship.”

Flowers was quiet a long moment. “Holy Mother of God.”

“Yup. Turned out that kid had been quietly psychotic for some time. I observed Roni’s interview through a one-way. That boy was so watchful and paranoid, he barely blinked. Face was really waxy, too. Practically no expression whatsoever.”

“So, what happened?”

“She admitted him. Loaded the kid with antipsychotics. He got better.” Swallowing the last of his coffee, John lowered a window and shook out the remaining drops.

“And then the powers-that-be returned him to duty. Not in the same job, but…” He screwed the cup back onto Flowers’s thermos.

“They did not board that kid out of the service.”

“What? They kept a psychotic kid on-duty? How could they do that?”

“Remember I said he was brought to our ER because of who he was? Turns out that the boy’s dad was a full-bird. So, you’ve got a kid with a boardable diagnosis for whom the rules were bent,” John said. “Just like you guys bent the rules, and they were, in turn, bent for you.”

Flowers was silent for so long that John thought their conversation was done. But then, Flowers drew in a long breath and let it out. “It’s not the same. Remember, we got separated.”

“But nicely. With the chance of return when you should have been court-martialed. An error of omission is still intentional.” Flowers opened his mouth, but John pushed on.

“I don’t blame you guys. Your lieutenant was poison.

There are some things you can’t forgive or look away from and pretend they never happened.

So, me, I think you did the right thing,” he said—and then thought, what am I saying?

“Even if we had to sell our collective souls to the devil?”

Yes. Hadn’t he, as a teenager, done exactly that? Much later, he saw a movie where a character talked about the needs of the many outweighing the needs of the few—or the one. Once upon a time, when John was fifteen, he’d weighed those needs—and then he had killed.

The one thing he also knew: he hadn’t needed to kill. He could’ve wounded. He was that good a shot. But he hadn’t.

Taking that kill shot made him a hero—until everyone decided he might be the next monster in their midst.

Aloud, he said, “Better the devil you know. Although the way I see it? What you and Mac and Shahida are doing? You’re on the side of the angels.”