Page 16 of Whisper

Kris pulled his lips into a smile. Bared his teeth. Inside, he was screaming.

At the boot section, he saw Ryan nudge George and whisper in his ear, pointing first to Kris and then to the women’s boots. Some were knee high, somehow combining hiking and sex appeal. In a different time, different place, Kris would have bought them just to spite Ryan and George, and then worn them until they fell apart, rubbing their faces in their own joke.

Afghanistan seemed the wrong place to rub someone’s face in a joke, though. He tried to ignore their snorts and plucked a pair of ridiculously expensive tactical all-weather boots from the wall. They were heinously ugly, but they promised to keep his feet dry and warm, even in a foot of snow.

Phillip and Derek came back with tents and camp stoves, entrenching tools, compasses, tarps, camp twine, emergency field kits, water backpacks, day packs, and external frame rucks for everyone. The large rucks were wider than Kris was and came up to his chest. Empty, they were hard for him to hold. He felt Ryan’s eyes burning into him, felt the words hovering over his head:Caldera can’t make it. Look at him, he can’t even lift the empty backpack.

He'd practice that night, practice marching around his tiny apartment, if he had to. Anything to prove Ryan wrong.

Crates of weapons arrived, lining the hallways outside Williams’s conference room.

Ryan popped them open as everyone watched. He passed out AK-47s and 9mm handguns, handing them one by one to each member of the team. “We’re using AKs because they’re everywhere in the third world, especially in Afghanistan. We can pick up ammo easier for the AKs, if we need it.”

Ryan hesitated when he got to Kris. “Know how to use this?” He held out the rifle.

Kris snatched it, spun the weapon muzzle-down, checked and cleared the chamber, and then disassembled the rifle, breaking down the stock and the barrel and laying everything on top of the crate. He kept his eyes on Ryan’s the whole time.

Ryan smirked and passed him his handgun.

Holsters and ammo pouches followed, along with cleaning kits. They would each have a web belt and a drop-thigh holster, and a chest sling for their rifles. The rest of the crates were filled with bullets.

GPS units arrived that afternoon, along with the high-frequency encrypted radios for secured communications between the team once they were on the ground.

“We need to get all this—” George gestured to the gear piling up in the conference room and up and down the hallways. Food, weapons, survival gear, computers, radios, and more. “—packed and ready for shipping out. Remember, we only have one helo to get into Afghanistan.”

“And it’s not a magic helo,” Derek chimed in. “We have serious weight restrictions. Between twelve men and all this gear, we’re going to be scraping the mountaintops as it is.”

“Well, Kris is light.” Jim winked at Kris. Everyone laughed.

Everyone but Kris.

They spent hours breaking everything down, repacking it into the smallest spaces possible. Kris worked with Phillip, repackaging the comms gear and the computers. They worked in silence while the rest of the team cracked jokes and laughed.

It was almost midnight when they quit. George pulled them all together again, gathering them around the messy conference table. “We have two more days until we leave. Tomorrow, we’ll go over our mission step by step. The next day, we’ll stage everything for our departure and finalize our travel arrangements.” He sighed. “But tonight, and tomorrow morning, you all need to take some time to get your personal affairs in order. You’re going to be gone for at least six months, with no way to take care of things back home. Make sure your finances are in order. Your bills are set up to be paid. And...” He swallowed. “Everyone update your wills. Bring them in when they’re done. The CIA will hold on to them for you. You’ll get them back when you come home.” He nodded to them. “I’ll see you tomorrow. Take the morning to get your lives ready for this.”

Eleven in the morning, and George was already up to some kind of bullshit. Kris could feel it, the moment he walked into their workspace.

“Kris, follow me.”

Kris clutched his cup of coffee and followed George out of their crammed conference room. They wove through the halls stuffed with crates until they got to George’s office. George beckoned him in and shut the door.

Kris had exactly zero patience for what he knew was coming. His stomach clenched, and he wanted to throw up the latte he’d been drinking, fling the remnants at George’s face, topple his bookshelf and stomp on its files and folders. His fingernails scratched against his cardboard cup.

George wouldn’t look him in the eye.

He hadn’t gotten enough sleep for this bullshit. He’d cleaned his apartment until two in the morning, trying to put off George’s homework. At three thirty, he’d finally sat down at his laptop and typed seven words:Last Will & Testament of Kris Caldera.

What the hell did he have to give away? He was twenty-three. He had four grand in his bank account and a shitty car he’d managed to save up for in his last year in college. He had a closet that would make any self-respecting gay man weep, and enough hair product to open a salon. He didn’t have stocks or bonds, investments or a retirement account. He was just a kid.

But the CIA wanted his will, his last requests, and he was going off to someplace where, more than likely, what he typed would be the last anyone ever knew of him. Between their mission and the conditions on the ground, he would be lucky to survive. If it wasn’t the war, or the Taliban, then it would be a land mine. Hundreds of thousands had been buried across the country throughout the years of the Soviet invasion. And if it wasn’t the war, the Taliban, or a land mine, it would definitely be a traffic accident. Roads were a fantasy in Afghanistan. New vehicles hadn’t been imported since the Soviets pulled out.

Mamá, he tried to write. His eyes blurred.I wanted to do good. I wanted to make a difference. God, how spectacularly he’d failed at that. How he’d failed, so indelibly, so enduringly. He would never be free of that failure.I love you to the ends of the earth, Mamá.Thank you for loving me, and never trying to make me feel bad about myself.

They’d never spoken about him, about how obviously homosexual he was, especially in high school. His papi had shouted at her, loud enough to shake the walls of their apartment, screaming that his son was a sissy faggot and a fairy who jerked off to other boys. But his mamá had never said a word. Silence was, in a way, acceptance. Silence, and the way she’d still made him empanadas on Saturdays and lechon on Sundays, and had still wanted him to kiss her goodbye in the morning before school, before she left to clean office buildings in Lower Manhattan.

She’d flown to Puerto Rico, leaving his papi when he was a freshman at George Washington. When they talked on the phone twice a year, she sounded happy. He never called his papi. There was no reason to. His memories of Papi stank like beer and too many cigarettes, and the soundtrack was always shouting. Drunk shouting, sober shouting, it didn’t matter.

His happy memories were of his mamá, or of being a punk teenager in Manhattan in summertime. He’d had short shorts and a tank top, and his skinny arms had swung with as much attitude as he could put into them. How many summer days had he spent on the stoop with Mamá, listening to Spanish music and watching his old Dominican neighbor wash his ancient Plymouth with a hose? The neighborhood kids loved to splash and play in the runoff. Once, he’d been one of those little kids, stamping in puddles. In all of his memories, the Twin Towers stood like beacons, like fireworks, like screams that ripped backward and forward in time, reminders of his failure for the rest of his God-given days.