Four-thirty in the morning. Broker and Kit were sound asleep, Kit in her bed, Broker curled on the living room couch. The TV was silent. Nina had tightly shut the kitchen door and now sat, elbow on the kitchen table, arm wrestling with a fifteen-pound barbell. By the light of the solitary lamp next to the indestructible snake plant, she studied the weight in her right hand, removed the cigarette from her lips, put it in the ashtray on the table. Took a deep breath. Then, methodically, she raised the compact hunk of iron. At between fifteen and twenty degrees of arc, she made a face. Not quite pain, more frustration.
Son of a bitch.
The warning light popped on the fifth repetition. A huge drag of fatigue. Then she raised the weight over her head, and the shoulder failed between 80 and 120 degrees; the classic painful arc.
She pictured the architecture of her rotator cuff; in her case, a train wreck where the coracoacromial ligament mashed into the acromion. The wear and tear of the life she’d lived had reduced the cushioning bursa to a blown-out tire. Useless.
What the doctors called a type 2 impingement; irreversibly damaged tissue.
She’d faked it for years out of denial, ignoring pain. She eeked out a few more years with concealed cortisone injections, gobbling anti-inflammatory drugs. On leave, when Kit was born, she’d slipped into a hospital in Duluth, Minnesota, for outpatient orthoscopic decompression surgery to trim back the ligament and bone. The tattoo on her shoulder concealed the scars, like it hid the cortisone needle marks. Didn’t even tell Broker. That bought a few more years.
To prepare for her last Army PT test, she’d gone out on the street to score Oxycontin to blur the pain…
Christ. If it binds like this at fifteen, how’ll I ever get to twenty-five…
Head snapping around, alert.
Something…
A tremble at the corner of her eye. And a low moaning sound that she couldn’t place. Then, looking out the windows, she saw a faint wrinkle tug at the darkness. She dropped the weight, got to her feet, and switched off the single light. As her eyes adjusted to the darkness, the ragged black fringe of tree line across the lake sharpened and-moved? No. The motion was above the trees, in the sky.
Squinting, she made out the tall pliant silver-green towers, an electric Stonehenge swaying in a tapestry of constellations.
She was drawn to the eerie light. Anything that pushed back the darkness.
She pulled on her jacket, opened the patio door, and stepped out on the back deck. The sheer visual power of the northern lights commanded her to tilt up her head, and she almost forgot herself as the icy wind sucked the heat from her lungs in a frosty plume.
So cold she could feel the water snap. Little arrowheads of windowpane stuck in the crannies of the granite boulders along the shore.
Then the wind, honed on a million pine needles, ripped open an acoustic tunnel in the night, and straight down that tunnel raced the baying of the wolves who owned that creepy forest up north. Eyes pinned on the sky, ears ringing with the howls, she had an impression of an utterly hostile beauty.
In which she had no permanent place.
Time and isolation for a cure. Up in Glacier County. Right as usual, Broker, honey.
Wolves. The sky dripping icy midnight fire. The thrill of atavistic fear and dumb wonder almost spooked her out of the heavy inertia.
She shivered.
Christ, she wondered as she hugged herself. Which was colder, the thing that wouldn’t stop turning in her mind, or the frigid wind? But even the pull of the dancing sky lights and the howling wolves could not slow her own personal flickering images…
…the pictures that played over and over in her head.
So she darted back into the kitchen and turned on all the lights. Then the TV. Poured a cup of coffee and lit another Spirit.
Broker had called it exactly. She was stuck in those three seconds, eight months ago. What Broker did not comprehend was that she was doing it to herself.
Northern Route had been a pure seat-of-the-pants operation. A batch of misfits willing to go off the reservation. They’d exceeded their orders on an unsanctioned high-stakes gamble to stop what they thought was a tactical nuke coming into the country. Intel suggested that Al Qaeda was using an American smuggling operation to bring it in across the North Dakota border.
They picked Nina because she’d played a few undercover games for Seal Team Six in Bosnia-Herzegovina. A novelty. The guys in special ops called them “Swallows,” the extreme military gals attached to them, like Nina and Jane Singer, in lurid appreciation of how far they might have to go to get close to a target.
What the hell. At the time her marriage was on the rocks; she and Broker were separated. So she rolled the dice. Even used Kit in the play, and drew in Broker for added backup.
Her job was to get close to North Dakota bar owner Ace Shuster, who turned out to be a likable, handsome drunk with a chivalrous streak. Nina had spent several nights in Shuster’s bed. But he had slept on the couch.
She had been totally unprepared to be courted.
And when they descended on him and his load of contraband, it turned out to be Cuban cigars.
The maverick operation was called off. Homeland Security was pissed. The Joint Special Ops Command at Bragg was furious at the spectacle of a Blackhawk helicopter and elements of a Delta troop being diverted into the North Dakota wheat fields. It looked like a career ender.
These facts affected her mood that next morning when she impulsively decided to drop by the bar and say something to Ace. Her second lapse of judgment was leaving her personal weapon behind.
Because when she and Janey walked into the bar, the real bad guys in the smuggling operation were waiting.
In the end it all came down to that moment in the Missile Park bar.
She played it over and over, like a tape on a loop. And she had the remote in her hand. Just wouldn’t stop thumbing the controls. Hit play: there’s Joe Reed coming through the back door, holding the pistol in a two-handed grip. She watched herself yell, reaching for her pistol. Saw her hand coming up empty. Janey swinging around, bringing up her nine. Ace Shuster in motion. Janey taking the first bullet in her chest. Stop. Rewind. Play the stunned expression on Janey’s youthful face. Reed efficiently shooting Janey a second and third time as she went down. Then Reed swung the gun on Nina. She played this part a thousand times. Never did get to see Ace’s face.
When he put his body in front of the fourth and fifth shots.
And saved her life.
Then that asshole, Dale-Ace’s loony brother-stabbed her with the syringe of ketamine.
Stop. Rewind. Play. Janey’s stunned expression again. The protest in her eyes. Hey! Wait a sec, this is way more tomboy shit than I bargained for…
Janey gone.
Ace gone.
The tape played endlessly, the same several seconds over and over. Because that was Nina’s role that day. To watch.
A witness to the death of Janey and Ace and by implication Colonel Wood-Holly-and the people who died at Prairie Island.
And every day since, she watched the creases of worry etch deeper in Broker’s face when he looked at her, at Kit. As he contemplated the radioactivity that might have slipped into his blood and bones spawning tiny milky scurries of cancer and leukemia…
So she fixated day and night on editing the tape. Make a new tape titled “If Only”…
Rewind. Stop. Play Nina shouting, reaching for her pistol.
If only…
She got up, eased open the door, padded into the living room, and stood over the couch where Broker lay sleeping. His face was obscure in the darkness but she knew his face; the way, even under all the strain, it relaxed into an unlined boyish reverie when he slept.
The first time she ever saw him, she was younger than Kit. Thirteen years separated them. Her dad had squired Broker through the bad fight in Quang Tri City. Brought him back, with his war twin, Griffin, to run the Ranger course at Benning. The two of them appeared in the cramped backyard of the tiny house where the Army billeted Major Ray Pryce and his family. The summer of ’73.
Even at seven, Nina understood you sorted men by what they wore on their chests. Dad said there were two kinds of soldiers: the kind that fight, and the other kind. Broker and Griffin were identically lean and blooded in spitshined jump boots, new Ranger tabs, CIB and jump wings over the two rows of ribbons above the left blouse pocket of their summer khakis. Even the individual ribbons were the same: Silver Star, Bronze Star, and Purple Heart on top.
Her mom had called her to the kitchen and sent her back into the yard, carefully clutching three frosted bottles of Lone Star beer.
She sat in her dad’s lap, long used to the smell of beer and cigar, while he harangued against the Army, the war. The stupidity of taking the 101st off jump status, putting them in helicopters.
She remembered every word he said. “See these two boys, Kit. They’re American Praetorians. That’s what the airborne and the marines divisions are, the volunteer backbone. This special operations crap we’re stuck in just goes on missions-hell, airborne and marine divisions win wars…”
But not that war, Daddy.
She remembered his words because they were some of the last words she ever heard from his mouth. Two days later he took his two boys back to Vietnam. He left before dawn, coming into her room and kissing her gently on the forehead, whispering so as not to wake her, “I love you, Kit. I’ll always love you.” Softly his blunt
fingers caressed her chest. “Remember, you have a Pryce heart in your chest. Don’t quit, honey; don’t cry.”
She had fought her way up through sleep and reached out her arms.
“Daddy?”
But he was gone. And this time he didn’t come back. Not even his body.
Nina bent over her sleeping husband and wanted to reassure him; she knew he feared the consequences of being exposed to radiation at Prairie Island. Feared that cancer was simmering in his blood, his bones. You won’t get cancer, Broker. You’re not the type. Her mother had died of breast cancer. But her mother had given in. Five years after her husband was taken off the missing list and presumed dead, she compromised and married a creep. She gave up.
Nina believed that Broker would never get cancer because he didn’t know how to give up.
She backed out of the living room and pulled the door shut behind her. What Broker didn’t understand was that the greatest fear and sense of loss she suffered was not for her dead comrades.
Of course she grieved. With her arm in a sling, she attended three funerals. Janey’s in North Carolina. Ace Shuster’s in Langdon, and Holly’s-closed, mostly empty casket-in a military chapel in Arizona. They found about as much of Holly as they did of some 9/11 victims. Some tissue that fit in a DNA-coded envelope.
The point was, her arm in that fucking sling. She had lost the use of her right arm, and after eight months of rehab, it wasn’t coming back. In the fight with George Khari last July, she had saved her life but destroyed her shoulder. She suspected that the doctors at Bragg had studied her MRIs, knew the problem, and were just giving her time to come to terms with it.
Patronizing her.
She backed away from the thought. Better to keep playing the tape over and over, backing it up, splicing into the seconds, trying to make it come out right. Because that was the real her going into that gunfight. Major Nina Pryce. D-Girl Nina Pryce.
Broker called it her Joan of Arc fantasy. Her uphill fight against the Army patriarchy. She’d soldiered through all the dumb jokes, sent two would-be military rapists staggering away clutching their genitals-you wanted me to touch it, asshole, you didn’t say how… She’d made up her mind: I will be the first woman general to fight a brigade in combat. Gone now, all that headstrong bravado.
But if she gave up the drama of that moment, she had to face herself as she was right now: a woman, another mom, closer now to forty than to thirty, with a bum shoulder…
Depression was just a waiting room where she paced in a circle until her name was called. She’d go into the doctor’s office. The doctor would run her through a simple set of range-of-motion exercises, note that she couldn’t remotely bend her elbow and reach up behind her back. Would write on a piece of paper: “Unfit for duty.”
Nina shook her head, unwilling to look her demons in the eye: her pride, her arrogance, her willingness to let Broker and Kit follow in the wake of her career like baggage…
Shit.
She had always been an unusually gifted tactician. So she knew exactly what she had to do. Just hit the fast-forward button. Accept her life in real time. The way it was now.
Uh-uh. Can’t deal with that yet.
So she hit rewind. Then she hit play and watched that last moment: Nina, always getting the jump, ahead of the situation, a kinesthetic fucking intellectual calling the play, going for her gun. There was still that split second before her hand came up empty.
When she was still somebody…