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  During the in-brief, she’d then ask each prospective team member: “Can you live with that?”

  And they’d all said yes. But every once in a while that yes turned into a big NO, like it had with Burns.

  Roland, Eagle, and Mac jumped to their feet as the flimsy door to Ms. Jones’s office opened and Moms and Nada walked out.

  “You get all that?” Moms asked as she shut the door behind her.

  The three nodded.

  Nada went over to Mac. Nada was a short, muscular fireplug of a man. He was of Colombian heritage, the dark skin on his face pocked from a childhood sickness. Short gray hair rose straight out of his head as if even his own hair was afraid of the dark thoughts that ran through his brain.

  He tapped Mac on the shoulder. “Don’t laugh when we’re talking with Ms. Jones, okay?”

  Mac nodded. It had just occurred to Roland, upon hearing that speech again through the door, that Ms. Jones not only had their backs, she also listened to them over their shoulders to see which way they were facing.

  Then Moms and Nada went into the team CP and their door slammed with a solid thud. Whatever they discussed between them stayed in that room.

  TWO WEEKS LATER

  On the other side of the world, Staff Sergeant Winthrop Carter was not at all where he wanted to be. The officer had lied. For reenlisting, Carter had been promised a slot into Special Forces Assessment and Selection at Fort Bragg, and after passing that—and passing it as he knew he could—he’d be in the year-long Special Forces Qualification Course. And after passing that—and he knew he would—he’d be assigned to the Tenth Special Forces Group (Airborne) and then he should have ended up back here in Afghanistan. And in between graduating and deploying he’d have been paid the bonus that had been the entire purpose of reenlisting for SF in the first place.

  It wasn’t that Carter didn’t want to be in a combat zone. This was his fourth tour, having already done one with the First Cav Division and the last two with the Ranger Battalion, but this assignment was bullshit. Besides the fact he hadn’t been given his Q-Course slot yet.

  What was the point of being a soldier if you didn’t serve in combat? But as a Green Beret, not as a glorified taxi driver, carting about some burned-out, drunk-ass lieutenant colonel in a Humvee, visiting outposts manned by joint US–Afghan forces, filling out paperwork so some guy in Washington could brief some other guy in Washington so that they could dump all the real data anyway, and make up data to give to the people who made the decisions so they would make the decisions they had wanted to make in the first place.

  At least that’s what Colonel Orlando had groused to Carter on the second day of their journeys together; after several sips from his CamelBak, which Carter knew held something other than water, since the colonel had the same smell Uncle Ray had back home in Parthenon. That’s Parthenon, Arkansas, zip code 72666, the last three numbers a dark, unintentional joke by the United States Postal Service that so aptly applied to the place. Parthenon was just an intersection along crumbling Route 327, which ran from nowhere to nowhere. So people only got on it when they got lost looking for somewhere else. Or they came for the meth. Uncle Ray drank to stay off the meth, so it seemed a reasonable deal in Carter’s mind. To Carter, Colonel Orlando drank because he was doing a job that could get him killed, which in the long run mattered not in the least in the strategic picture. But pretty much everyone in the ’Stan was doing a job that could get them killed, and drinking in a combat zone wasn’t something Carter thought highly of, not that a staff sergeant got to tell a colonel that.

  Carter drove cross-country, paralleling the dirt road ten meters to their right, sustaining the jolts and slams of the rough terrain in exchange for avoiding the possibility of an IED ripping their armored Humvee to shreds. Several times he came upon wadis too steep to negotiate and he’d go farther into the countryside searching for a way across. Orlando took these detours with a roll of his eyes and another sip from his CamelBak.

  “Geez, son!” Orlando yelled as Carter slithered the vehicle down a particularly treacherous slope, then gunned it up the far side with teeth-rattling jolts. “We can get killed as easy rolling over as getting blown up.”

  “Yes, sir,” Carter said. Yes, sir. Sorry, sir. He’d learned those long before the army. There was no such thing as No, sir. Not to Pads; his father had prepared Carter well for the army. Not intentionally.

  Orlando checked his watch. “Frequency switch. Two-four-seven.”

  Commo man. He’d been given the designation in the Ranger Battalion, even though his MOS, military occupation specialty, was 11B—infantry, the queen of battle. He’d been sent to all sorts of special schools for commo in the past year that he had never requested, but the one school he’d requested seemed further and further away. He switched the frequencies as the colonel called in to their next destination to let them know they were arriving and to kindly not shoot up the friendlies.

  Carter was of average height and lean, whipcord thin, the result of a childhood of hard work, not much food, and constant tension. His face was all angles, but he had the deepest blue eyes, as if there were something gentle deep inside all that exterior hardness.

  Carter spotted the brown walls of the next compound they were to inspect. Guard towers crowned each corner of the ancient outpost, the snout of a fifty-caliber machine gun poking over the top of each. Generations of soldiers had passed through the gate of the outpost. Americans. Taliban. Mujahedeen. Russians. British. And on through the extensive invasion roll of Afghanistan. Alexander the Great might have pissed on the place for all anyone knew.

  The square facility had twenty-foot-high mud and stone walls, each forty yards long and narrowing from ten feet wide at the base to four at the top. Inside, as per every other compound they’d visited, were headquartered a dozen American military advisers and a contingent of Afghan soldiers. The size of that native contingent varied depending on how bad the local economy was: the worse the economy, the more signed up. Some even stayed more than a few weeks. Most left, went to the next region over, and signed up again, taking the enlistment bonus. At least they got what they were promised, Carter thought.

  Like Vietnamization a generation before, Afghanization—or whatever they were calling it, the system of turning control of the country over to the locals to fight against locals—wasn’t going to work. The colonel knew it, his boss knew it, his boss’s boss knew it, they all knew it all the way to Washington, but the president was bringing the boys back, and one had to put a positive spin on it.

  “I used to do real work,” the colonel groused as Carter finally pulled them onto the dirt track, making a beeline for the gates.

  “Yes, sir.” I did, too.

  The colonel shot him a look. “Son, you’ve got no idea of some of the real shit that goes on.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “You know why you didn’t go to SFAS and got assigned to me?”

  That got Carter’s attention. “I do not, sir.”

  Colonel Orlando shook his head. “Forget it.” He laughed. “Nada would probably give very low odds on you.”

  “What are you talking about, sir? Who is Nada?”

  The colonel didn’t respond.

  “I needed that bonus, sir, for getting through SFAS. My family needed it.” Pads would have smacked him for speaking up like that, but Carter was hot, tired, and bored.

  The colonel shrugged. “Shit happens. Things never turn out like you think they’re going to, Sergeant. You would do well to remember that.”

  The wooden gates swung open on rusty hinges. Just before he drove through, Carter felt the hair on the back of his neck tingle. Just like it used to before Pads came in, stoked out of his mind on the meth, swinging whatever was handiest. Carter had always tried to stand in the way, but it was Dee—as the oldest—who always took the worst of it.

  Carter looked over his shoulder at the dusty landscape behind them but didn’t see anything to warrant the feeling. Then they were
through, the gates shutting closed.

  Waiting for them was a captain sporting the Green Beret that Carter had so desperately wanted. Behind the captain stood two dozen new Afghan recruits in the semblance of a formation, most of them picking their noses or spitting, whatever bored men did when forced to stand somewhere they really didn’t want to be.

  Carter stopped the Humvee and got out. The captain saluted Orlando and began to walk him around, giving the spiel given a hundred times by captains to colonels, which was everything was working just great. Most of the SF team was out on patrol with a bunch of the Afghan recruits, so only a handful of Afghan soldiers were maintaining security.

  Carter leaned against the front grille of the Humvee, feeling the heat from the engine matching the heat from the sun overhead. He still couldn’t shake the feeling of unease. He scanned the walls. A single Afghan lounged in each tower, supposedly manning the fifty cal, except they were nervously looking inside the compound rather than out.

  That wasn’t right. The veins in his neck pulsed as his heart surged. He readied his M-4 rifle.

  “Allahu Akbar!”

  Carter wheeled, bringing up his M-4. An Afghan soldier came dashing out of a dark doorway and was running toward Colonel Orlando and the captain and the recruits behind them. The pockets of his combat vest bulged with explosives, and he was crisscrossed with wires, a Christmas tree festooned with C-4 instead of lights. He had his right hand up in the air and a clacker in his hand, a dead man’s switch that would ignite the explosives as soon as he let it go. He was already close enough to take most of the recruits, Orlando, and the captain out if he set it off.

  Carter had the armored Humvee between him and the bomber. The sergeant dropped the weapon on its sling and sprinted around the protection, faster than the Afghan, faster than he’d ever run in his life. He wrapped his arms around the bomber, one hand clamping down on the Afghan’s hand and the dead man’s switch.

  The two tumbled to the ground, Carter on top. His hand was steel on the Afghan’s own and the dead man’s switch, and he pressed his other forearm across the man’s neck. The bomber was staring up at him, eyes losing focus as Carter choked him out.

  When the bomber was unconscious, Carter carefully peeled the man’s fingers from the clacker, keeping it depressed. He unscrewed the firing wire before tossing it aside. Then he stood, drawing his pistol, and pointed it down at the bomber, finger curling around the trigger.

  “Easy, son.” Colonel Orlando placed his hand over Carter’s gun.

  The Green Beret captain knelt next to the bomber. The Afghan recruits were nowhere to be seen. The guard towers were unmanned.

  “Might as well put a round in him, sir,” Carter said. “Once a man commits to that, he’s gone over.”

  Orlando smiled as Carter holstered his pistol. “Once a man commits, he commits. Why didn’t you just take the cover of the Humvee?”

  Carter shrugged as if the question made no sense. “Wouldn’t have been the right thing to do, sir.”

  The bomber blinked into consciousness and, surprisingly, the captain helped him to his feet.

  Carter whipped his pistol back out.

  “Easy,” Orlando said once more. “He’s on our side.”

  Carter blinked. “What?”

  “A test, son, a test.”

  “I could have killed him.”

  “I disabled your M-4,” Orlando said, “but not your pistol. Which is why I had to stop you.”

  “You disabled my weapon in a combat zone?” Carter’s face was red with anger.

  “Don’t worry,” Orlando said. “The SF team from here has a perimeter set up around us and everyone in here was vetted. You were perfectly safe. One of the parts of the test was to see whether you would try to shoot him with your rifle—in which case you were making a dumb decision and killing a bunch of other people—or if you’d simply save your ass by using the Humvee as a shield, in which case you were making a smart but self-centered decision. You picked door number three. Very few people pick that door.”

  Orlando reached into a pocket on his combat vest and pulled out a satellite phone. There was only one number it was programmed to call.

  It was answered on the first ring.

  “Yes?” the vaguely Russian voice answered.

  “He passed, Ms. Jones,” Orlando said.

  “I’ll have transportation waiting at Bagram. You get him there. You stay with him the whole way until you get him to the Ranch.”

  “Got it.”

  There was a moment of silence. “Good work, Orlando.”

  “Thanks, Ms. Jones.” And I’m fine too, you bitch, Orlando thought but didn’t say as he turned the phone off. A vein was bulging in Carter’s neck and Orlando knew he was going to have one angry man next to him for a journey around the world. A man to whom he could explain nothing.

  TWO DAYS LATER

  It started with the pretty postdoc who was the point of contact at the University of Colorado.

  The Courier had been up all night partying at one of the frat houses, only two years removed from college himself. Or, more accurately, two years removed from his single year of college. After being kicked out of college, he doubled down on that year sucking dirt in the Marines, including a year at Bagram Air Base on the perimeter guard post, shooting at a whole bunch of nothing and basically being bored to tears. The stories he’d told the wide-eyed rich kids at the party were true—that is, if the older grunts who’d told the stories to him in the first place had been telling the truth.

  So at the end of his year in ’Stan, when the contractor came calling with offers of big bucks and lots of time off for combat-experienced Marines (they considered a year in-country combat experience, so the boredom counted for something), the Courier had signed on the dotted line and kissed the Corps good-bye. The deal had turned out sweeter than he’d expected. They didn’t send him back to the ’Stan but rather to the Depot.

  Like any other gig, though, there were drawbacks. One was the implant. The gruff retired gunny sergeant who’d taken him through Depot processing at Area 51 had told him it was a minor physical procedure—he wouldn’t feel a thing—and the actual device only had to be worn during the time when he was working. During his two months off for every one on, why, no problem, he could leave it at the Depot. That was where guys like him, the Support for a bunch of high-speed people called the Nightstalkers, were stationed. Underground on the Area 51 military reservation in the middle of no-fucking-where, Nevada. It sounded a lot cooler than it was, both figuratively and literally.

  The gunny hadn’t been totally up front. The actual procedure was sticking some long, really thin wire into his chest. It left the tiniest of nubs sticking out just center and below his left nipple. That wasn’t coming out as long as he was in Support. Then when he came on duty they strapped a belt around his chest that had a matchbox—scratch that, he wasn’t old enough to have used matchboxes—an iPod Mini–sized device right over the nub and connected it to him.

  When he’d asked what the device was for, the old gunny had told him: “So we can track you and make sure you’re okay. We don’t want nothing to happen to you, sonny-boy.”

  So, okay, for one month’s work and two off, he could deal with it. And, of course, for the pay. That was ten large every month, even the ones he wasn’t working. The Tea Party would have a fit.

  They gave him some guns, a souped-up armored van, a thick binder full of what they called “protocols,” and a handheld device the gunny called an Invoicer (the way he said it indicated it was capitalized, like a lot of stuff around the place). It contained his deliveries for this tour of duty.

  “Like a FedEx driver?” the Courier had asked.

  The gunny had just glared at him for a moment, then shook his head. “Read the Protocols, sonny.” The gunny had looked about as if the walls had ears. “You do good on Support, there’s a chance you make the team out at the Ranch. They’re short one body on the ’Stalkers. Been short a while. Ms.
Jones is real picky about who makes the team.”

  What are we, back in high school? the Courier thought but did not say, having had experience with gunnies in the Corps.

  The key to being a Courier, the gunny explained, was to keep a low profile. A single panel truck, a single man, playing it cool, wouldn’t draw attention the way a clearly armored vehicle and escort convoy would.

  Whatever, the Courier thought.

  There were eight deliveries, all around Colorado, Utah, Idaho, and Nevada. Pick this up here, drop it there. Then the next, and the next.

  He’d gotten briefed, along with other new Support personnel, by some Nightstalker people with weird names: Moms and Nada and Doc. Moms told them to be very, very careful, and Nada told them to read the Protocols very, very carefully and then follow them exactly to the letter, and if they had any questions, any at all, there were no dumb questions, to call on the sat phone they were each issued.

  The Courier knew from high school there were dumb questions. Those were the nerds who never got laid.

  At least in high school. He wasn’t experienced enough to know the inverse of that formula as one got older.

  The last guy, Doc, had some really scary shit to say about bugs and viruses and nukes and stuff that would kill you, which the Courier wasn’t sure how to take. According to this Doc guy, looking the wrong way could cause you to get some disease and die a horrible death.

  At first he’d felt really cool, driving the van with all the guns and high-tech gear. After the seventh time, though—loading a sealed locker full of who the hell knew what in the vault in the back, driving 387 miles from some computer tech place in Boise, ID, to Dugway Proving Grounds in Utah (he knew the exact mileage because one of the Protocols required him to fill out all these little boxes on the electronic invoices and two of them were start and end mileage of each run, as if he were going to detour to Malibu or some such; plus he had no doubt the van GPS and the damn thing plugged into his chest were also recording everything)—it began to get boring.