Page 154 of Whisper

“Fuck!” the team fired back, striking the jihadi in the center of the chest, peppering him with shot after shot. He staggered, a puppet dancing on strings, and collapsed.

“Sir!” The camera shot to one of the soldiers, standing near a billowing cloud of smoke emanating from the trunk of a car. Someone had driven a small hatchback into the mosque and parked it. A tarp covered the front, and part of the mosque’s broken wall. A hidden access point.

The team leader crept toward the car, toward the smoke.

No, no, no, no, no. Burning tears cascaded down Kris’s cheeks, fell from the ends of his eyelashes. His heart was a black hole, sucking all of his hope into a terrible darkness. His wedding ring weighed a thousand pounds. David’s lips lingered on the back of his neck, on his shoulder, a ghost kiss, a prelude, a prophecy.No, no, no, no, no.

The camera attached to the team leader’s helmet angled down. A hand swept through the black smoke. White-hot flames rose from a fire raging inside the trunk. The ends of rockets, of dynamite, poked out of the conflagration.

And, a hand. A foot. Blackened and burned. But, recognizable.

A human body.

“Sir! The place is rigged to blow! We have to get out!” The panicked voice of another team member broke over the radio. The camera jerked away, the team leader panning the walls. Finding the wire. Tracing them to the explosives.

“Everybody out, now, now!”

“No!” Kris shrieked. “You have to get David! You have to save him! Pull him out! Pull him out!”

“Evac, now, move!” Boots running. The smoke fading. “Go! Now!”

“No!No!” Kris screamed. “Go back! Get David! Get him!”

Ryan’s arms grabbed him, held him in a bear hold from behind. “Kris, he’s gone. He’s already—”

“Sir—”

A rumble began, and then a burst of light erupted over the screen.

The radio went dead.

Chapter 23

Kabul, Afghanistan

Four Days After the Blast

A void in the shape of David’s smile hovered in the center of Kris.

The act of breathing took too much effort. Inhaling, letting his cells fill with life-giving oxygen, was agonizing. The pain of living, the anguish of carrying on.

He couldn’t see. His eyes were unfocused, his mind’s eye fixed on the memory of a burned-black body in the bottom of a trunk, silhouetted through billowing smoke.

He didn’t know how he was still living. Wasn’t it impossible to live without a heart? How then was he still walking, still breathing? Shouldn’t the freedom of death come for him? Shouldn’t he be gone already? Shouldn’t he be waking in David’s arms, somewhere where they could finally be together?

Why was he still living? He didn’t want to be alive, not now, not after that. Not after seeing what lay beneath the smoke.

He deserved to die. He deserved to die a thousand times. All the thousands of lives lost on September 11. And more. Add in the loss of life in Iraq. The civilians killed in Pakistan and Afghanistan.

And David.

He deserved to die for all of them, over and over again. Like Prometheus, he should be chained to a rock and devoured, day in and day out, for the foolish hubris of thinking he could change anything at all, make any difference in the world.

Everything he’d done, everything he’d tried to do, had only brought death. Death and ruin.

David…

He bowed his head. He couldn’t cry, not anymore. Every tear he’d ever cried in the length of his life had been wept already, spilled down his cheeks and into rivers that ran through his fingers. His wails had unset his broken ribs, his screams had made one of his bones puncture his lung. Ryan had to carry him out of the command center, restrain him, pin him against a wall as he shrieked like he’d been torn in two.