LIEUTENANT COMMANDER SHARI Towne spent a long time in the restroom preparing for the afternoon meeting of the National Security Council. She peered into the mirror and thought she looked horrible, but her magic bag of makeup, with careful application, helped hide the lines of worry and the darkness beneath her eyes. She put on a fresh white uniform and brushed her short hair one final time. Still horrible, but it would get her through the meeting. Through every source of effort she could summon, she donned the professional, no-nonsense mask of a neutral expert.
She just wanted this over with, and to go home to her little brick condo in Alexandria, pour a stiff shot of ice-cold Boodles gin with a lemon twist, follow that with a scalding shower, a warm cup of Celestial Seasonings Tension Tamer tea, and a little oval white tablet, 10 milligrams of Ambien. That combination cocktail would go a long way toward putting her down for the night, and at least allow her body to get some rest, but she did not expect much sleep. Her mind was still on Kyle, and tears were only a couple of blinks away.
Doing her duty, making automatic responses to familiar sights and sounds and questions, had propelled her through the personal sorrow so far, and she would be back on the job tomorrow, because what was happening in Syria was much bigger than any one individual, even bigger than two people in love. When it was all done, she intended to call Jeff and Pat and get back out on that yacht and forget everything, particularly this job. The damned Middle East was her desk, and bad things were always happening there. There would be another crisis next week, and the week after that, and the week after that, and plenty of work would always be coming her way. She knew from watching other people go through grief that the mind-numbing work would help her start getting over what had happened to Kyle, one day at a time, never forgetting the death, but learning to accept it. She already missed his crooked grin, and longed to be able to go home tonight and find shelter in his strong arms.
Shari made a final mirror check and grimaced at what she saw, and five minutes later she entered the Situation Room to take her seat along the wall behind Gerald Buchanan, beside Sam Shafer.
She neither liked nor trusted Shafer, who was smart, slim, and handsome, with thick black hair slicked straight back. He was nothing more than Buchanan’s slavish go-to guy for shortcuts on things that might stray over the foul line. Shafer was always flirting with her, eyeing her with open desire and working sexual innuendoes into almost every conversation.
He turned as she sat down and handed her a brown folder with a red stripe running diagonally across the front. “Here’s a new file on the helo crash. Crazy stuff. Turns out that Gates Global had a couple of operators near the village, looking for the general on their own. They made it to the crash site and brought back these images of the victims.”
Shari looked at him. “Gates Global? The private security company? What were they doing there?”
“God knows how they did it. It’s really making us look bad-not only did the rescue mission fail, but a PSC team infiltrated and got these photos. Buchanan received the file from Gates himself. Now the boss wants somebody in this meeting to explain how a private company could do something we could not.”
“Good question.” Shari hesitated before accepting the folder. If these were the dead Marines, then she surely would see Kyle’s body. But she wanted to do it, for maybe photographic proof would finally erase any lingering hope that somehow the man she loved actually had survived.
“I’ve got to back up Buchanan during the meeting, so could you take a look at it and let us know if everything is in order? Brace yourself, because it’s awfully graphic, Shari, but you have the best eyes for detail of anyone at this table. We need to match up the Gates Global data with the names of those actually on the mission. The roster is in there.”
She nodded and put the folder in her lap, then looked around the table. So much power. The Vice-President. The Attorney General, the Secretary of State and several cabinet members, the American representative to the United Nations, and military leaders. Buchanan, quiet and arrogant, sat directly across the table from the President. Many considered him a peculiar hybrid of Henry Kissinger’s showboating, Colin Powell’s confident manner, and John Poindexter’s sneakiness, a man who placed himself above his position and somehow got other powerful people to recognize that self-created authority. Shari was part of his staff, but she wouldn’t trust Gerald Buchanan to paint a fencepost. It was impossible to ever determine what the man really wanted.
She tuned one ear to the conversation and reluctantly opened the folder, then snapped it closed again, her heart beating hard. The first photo was of a charred corpse, the skin of a blackened skull dried out and pulled back so tight by the heat that it was set into a horrible grin. Shari felt a nudge from Shafer, who whispered, “You okay?”
She nodded again, and listened for a few minutes to comments of the NSC principals. Buchanan railed about the Gates Global identifications, letting unspoken accusations of Pentagon incompetence hang in the air like invisible vultures. The Syrian government was outraged, but there had been no major troop movements. U.N. and SecState both believed the biggest danger now was a possible Syrian or Hezbollah missile strike against Israel for allowing the Americans to fly through Israeli airspace. The Israelis were saying they would respond to any rocket attack. Shari tuned them out. The eternal Middle East waltz. So what’s new?
With a deep breath, she turned her attention to the folder again and steeled herself against the ghastly images. The names of the dead Marines were on a separate page that she removed, and found “Swanson, Kyle M., Gunnery Sergeant” listed close to the alphabetical bottom. An asterisk beside the name of “McDowell, Harold H., Lance Corporal,” indicated that he was missing.
She turned the pages slowly, one by one. Each photo had the matching dog tag image superimposed in the lower left-hand corner. Shari mentally checked off the names against the complete flight manifest. The names were seared into her brain. Three-quarters of the way through, she paused, knowing the next photo in alphabetical order would be that of Kyle. She bit her lower lip and turned to the picture, keeping her mental defenses firm and letting her analyst training guide her eyes and thoughts.
Her fingers grew white with a tight grip at the sight of the broken and burned body. No facial identification was possible because of the fire, but the size and shape of the torso seemed about right for Kyle’s dimensions. She felt wetness at the edges of her eyes as she studied the picture, read the dog tag, and examined the photo in detail. Something isn’t right. The dog tags were authentic and accurate, but an anomaly she could not pinpoint chewed at her. Instead of looking at the grisly picture as an entirety, she studied it a square inch at a time. Left to right. Top to bottom. Shadows and light. Pixels. Uniform and flesh. A dead Marine. A destroyed human body. There! She stared in disbelief, trying to persuade herself that she was wrong while knowing she was not.
“Oh my God!” she whispered loud enough for Shafer to hear. The folder spilled from her lap and onto the carpeted floor of the Situation Room as she grabbed the single picture with both hands and stared at it. Buchanan spun in his chair and gave her an angry stare as the most powerful people in the United States government turned to watch her gather the papers.
“Sorry,” she said, shuffling the papers and photos back into the folder. Using every ounce of her considerable willpower, she sat motionless through the rest of the meeting, letting her mind work the problem. A slight smile played over her lips and a new brightness shone in her eyes.