Strong at the Break Read online

  “I’m afraid Dylan’s missed too much time to legitimately make up all his work,” Principal Garcia was saying. “His grades have slipped badly and his teachers are at wit’s end in dealing with missed classes and assignments.” Garcia took in a deep breath, as if he was considering something he’d already decided. “I see no way we can promote him to senior under the circumstances.”

  Cort Wesley glanced over at his son, Dylan’s dark eyes aimed downward now. He was wearing a long-sleeved shirt he’d picked up at some mall store filled with blown-up pictures of half-naked boys showing off their torsos. He’d bought a pair of hundred-dollar jeans there that were already fraying at the bottoms where they hugged the lip of the boots Caitlin Strong had bought him for his fifteenth birthday a year back when he still seemed like a kid.

  Garcia looked like he was reluctant to lean forward, nothing to bring himself any closer to Cort Wesley than was absolutely necessary. “I wanted to have this meeting now while there’s still time to place him in a Catholic or private school situation that can better accommodate his needs.”

  “The hell with th—” Dylan started to say until a stare snapped his way by his father froze the words.

  “You mind giving me a minute with Mr. Garcia alone, son?” Cort Wesley asked him, trying to sound as if Dylan had a choice.

  The boy stood up, shifting his jeans so the boot heals wouldn’t snare the cuffs. “Don’t call me that,” he said and stormed out the door.

  8

  SHAVANO PARK; THE PRESENT

  Cort Wesley listened to Dylan’s boots clacking out of the room, waiting for the sound to drift off before resuming. “How much you know about me, Mr. Garcia?”

  Garcia looked trapped between breaths and thoughts. “I read the papers, watch the news,” he said, like a man drawing his words in longhand before letting them out.

  “Then you know my family’s been through an awful lot and my son through more than most men see in their lifetime. I’m hoping that warrants an exception here.”

  “If I could, Mr. Masters,” Garcia said, his remark ending in a shrug.

  “I used to be a soldier, Mr. Garcia, and one thing the army taught me was the man in charge can do whatever he wants. You know, chain of command, and you, sir, are the head of that chain here. Sure, I know you got the school board and superintendents to answer to, but this being a purely academic matter makes me figure you can make any decision you see fit.”

  Something changed in Garcia’s expression, his face flattening and squaring as if the view before him had changed in an instant. Almost made Cort Wesley turn to see if someone else had entered the room.

  “You fought in the Gulf War,” he said finally.

  “Yes, sir, I did.”

  Garcia looked like a driver realizing he’s going the wrong way, looking for a spot to make a U-turn. “I lost my wife three years ago in Iraq.”

  “I’m sorry, sir.”

  “She insisted on reenlisting. See, she was in the Gulf War too. I-Corps, the intelligence branch.”

  Cort Wesley nodded, wondering where Garcia was going with this.

  “When my wife got back, she told me things I guess she wasn’t supposed to. Some of it was about something she called Team Bravo, an elite Special Forces group that was in Baghdad quite a ways before that first war started. My wife told me Team Bravo’s job was to turn as many of the Iraqi army’s elite cadre as they could and assassinate the ones they couldn’t. A kind of reinvention of the Phoenix Project from Vietnam.”

  Cort Wesley just looked at him, Garcia holding his stare now.

  “Everything I’ve heard about you, Mr. Masters, tells me you were part of this Team Bravo.”

  “There a reason why you’re bringing this up?” Cort Wesley asked him, not bothering to deny it.

  “Because, if you don’t mind me saying, a man who can handle that can surely handle a sixteen-year-old boy with his hormones bursting out of his pants who’s lost his way for a time.”

  “Lemme tell you, Mr. Garcia, compared to raising boys, my war experience was a walk in the park. You got kids yourself, sir?”

  The principal shrugged, then shook his head regretfully. “My wife and I kept putting it off. Always thought there’d be more time until there wasn’t. Something always came up, got in the way. You know, Mr. Masters.”

  “I suppose I do.”

  “You got yourself a fine boy there and you have my sympathies over this rough patch he’s going through. If he turns things around, I’ll find a way to keep him at Clark and get him promoted, make it work somehow.”

  “Thank you, sir. Truly.”

  “It’s my wife you should be thanking, Mr. Masters. I’m making the offer out of respect to her and her service. And yours.”

  “I appreciate that more than I can tell you,” Cort Wesley said, but he could see the principal’s expression was twisted in something between pain and uncertainty. The same way he’d looked when talking about his wife moments before. “Something else, sir?”

  “My wife said the members of Team Bravo didn’t leave after the Gulf War ended.”

  Cort Wesley met Garcia’s stare, saw the longing and emptiness that had taken root there. Ordinarily he never talked about his war experiences with anyone, not even Caitlin Strong. But he figured he owed something to this man for going out of his way to help Dylan.

  “Folks in Washington wanted to make sure they didn’t have to go back and finish the job with Saddam, so they wanted it finished for them with a bunch of help on the down low,” Cort Wesley told Garcia. “Trouble being they backed out after the wheels had already been set in motion, leaving a lot of brave Iraqis concentrated in the south hung out to dry. That was the end of things far as I was concerned, Saddam’s Republican Guards slaughtering people we’d lit a fire under, kind of like the Bay of Pigs all over again. I came home disgusted, sir, and the taste of it still lingers.”

  Garcia’s features relaxed.

  “I’ll tell you something else, Mr. Garcia. Our contact in intel was a woman who was as smart and loyal as they come. Never did get her name; she was just a voice at the end of a comm line. But I know she was as disgusted as I was by how things turned out. I can’t say it was your wife for sure, but in all my years of service I never did deal with any other woman in I-Corps.”

  A placid look fell over Garcia’s expression. He looked like a man who’d just let out a long, easy breath as he stood up slowly and extended his hand across the table. “Thank you, Mr. Masters. Thank you.”

  Cort Wesley rose to take it. The principal’s grasp felt weak, his expression gone dour as if he doubted his own wisdom. “Like I said, sir, it’s me who should be doing the thanking.”

  “Mr. Masters?”

  Garcia’s call turned him back around halfway to the door. Cort Wesley watched the principal start a hard swallow, then not quite finish it.

  “When she got back, there were nights my wife couldn’t sleep. The good ones she’d read a book. The bad ones she’d lay there sobbing and I felt weak and worthless because I couldn’t do anything.”

  Cort Wesley shrugged. “Sounds like the way I feel about being a parent sometimes.”

  This time Garcia finished his swallow, a man searching not for words but answers no one had been able to provide him. “Least your boy’s alive, Mr. Masters. You can take comfort in that.”

  9

  SAN ANTONIO, THE PRESENT

  “Thanks for coming, Ranger,” Mark John Serles said to Caitlin from his wheelchair in the snack room on the second floor of the Intrepid Center for Heroes at Fort Sam Houston, currently unoccupied except for them.

  There was a clock on the wall, its second hand sputtering through its circle with a loud ticking sound Caitlin thought for a moment might be Serles’s heart hammering. That’s how anxious he looked, as if his nerves were held together by baling wire that bit down every time they tried to relax. He kept fidgeting in his wheelchair, his head cocked to the side as if he were hearing other voices.
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br />   Serles squeezed the arms of his wheelchair. Caitlin noticed he was rocking slightly back and forth, making her feel almost woozy from following him. She’d worked with enough wounded veterans, amputees included, to not let her stare drift to his stumps, the kid’s legs ending just above the knee.

  The Intrepid Center for Heroes sat adjacent to Brooke Army Medical Center on the grounds of Fort Sam Houston. Built entirely with privately raised money, much of it by the radio host Don Imus, the center was likely the most advanced rehabilitation center in the world for amputees and burn victims. Its modern, four-story structure contained every amenity imaginable including state-of-the-art equipment, lap pool, physical therapy centers and some of the best counselors and therapists America’s wounded had ever known. Living facilities adjacent to Intrepid were available for families, along with transitional housing for recovering vets returning to the world with their disabilities.

  “I’m from right here in San Antonio myself,” Serles resumed after a long pause. “I wasn’t sure if you knew that.”

  “No, I didn’t.”

  “No reason why you should with this place counting broken troops from every state in the good ole US of A inside its halls.”

  Serles tried to finish his remark with a smile but barely got his lips to move. An uneasy silence fell between them, the small talk waning, and Mark John Serles took to rolling his wheelchair back and forth instead of just rocking it. Information D. W. Tepper had been able to gather put it that the kid had been a medic in Iraq working at a field hospital, a bunker-rich world encased in concrete. Kid had been all of twenty when he deployed and just past twenty-one when an IED blew his legs off.

  “I asked for you specifically, you know,” Serles resumed.

  “Didn’t know that either, no,” Caitlin said.

  Serles was drumming the chair’s arms nervously now, jittery eyes cheating toward the doorway. Caitlin watched him squeeze the chair’s arms every time someone in uniform walked by.

  “Is there another place you’d rather talk?” she asked him.

  “No place’s safe for me. Not here, not anywhere. Being from Texas, I’ve heard of you—everybody has.” Serles’s eyes grew distant, then quickly regained their focus. “You worked here for a time, right?”

  “Across the way, actually, at Brooke Army Medical Center.”

  “With folks like me?”

  “Somewhat. That was back a few years after my husband went over.”

  “What unit?”

  “Civilian consultant.”

  Serles pondered that briefly. “How’s he doing?”

  “He died.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “Had nothing to do with the army, not the war even.”

  “Ma’am?”

  “Long story, Mark,” Caitlin said, taking easily to calling the kid by his first name.

  “I used to go by M.J. until it started making me feel twelve years old all the time.”

  He started rocking again, lapsing into silence with eyes aimed downward. The fact that he’d lost his legs above the knees made fitting effective prosthetics harder with a less certain result. Mark John Serles still wore his hair military style with the sides trimmed tight to the scalp. Other than that, though, the kid could have passed for sixteen easier than twenty-one. He had dark puppy dog eyes big enough to hold hope, sadness, and fear at the same time.

  It was the fear that interested Caitlin the most. It seemed to make him hold his eyes wide and virtually unblinking, shifting suddenly toward a sound as simple as the refrigerator kicking back on or a sudden rush of footsteps past the lounge’s open door. His fingers she’d noticed drumming on the arms of his wheelchair now clenched the padding, as if to tear it back.

  “This building was being constructed when I was at Brooke,” she said, breaking the tension that had settled between them. “Can’t believe the progress they’ve made with prosthetics in just those years.”

  It was true. Entering the building today, Caitlin had seen kids not much older than Mark John Serles walking on two prosthetic limbs as well as she did with flesh and bone. If they’d been wearing slacks instead of shorts, she never would’ve even known.

  “I got a couple more surgeries scheduled before I get mine,” said Serles. “But they’ve already started the fitting process. I just want them to give me my life back.”

  “And they will.”

  “Not if somebody else takes it away first, Ranger,” Serles said, the fear plain in his eyes again. A pair of uniforms stopped just beyond the doorway and the breath seemed to clog up in his throat.

  Caitlin slid her chair farther under the table to be closer to him. He seemed about to continue when a trio of therapists entered the room and moved to the coffee station. Once again, she could see Serles’s features seize up, torso tightening and hands squeezing the arms of his chair hard enough to make the veins rise from the surface.

  The therapists mixed cream and sugar into their cups and took their leave, smiling at both Caitlin and Serles on their way out the door. But this time Serles didn’t seem to relax, his lower lips trembling when he resumed.

  “I’m scared, Ranger. I try not to sleep at night because it’s the only time I’m alone. Stay up reading or watching TV. Because I figure that’s when they’ll come.”

  “Who?”

  “Army, government—I’m really not sure. Missed their chance at me in Iraq, so they’ll be back for sure.”

  Caitlin felt something like needles pricking at the back of her neck. “They came at you after you drove over that IED?”

  Serles’s gaze froze on hers, as he shook his head. “Was them that set it.”

  10

  BAGHDAD; FOUR MONTHS EARLIER

  The man was drenched in blood. Shot by a sniper through the throat, it was a wonder he was alive and being prepped for surgery. Had it been one of those busy times at the concrete-encased hospital, when the wounded came in droves after a bombing, firefight, or mortar attack, he would’ve likely been triaged into a pool of those unlikely to make it and thus treated last. This was a slow day by those standards, though, and the man was the only active patient waiting beneath the harsh glare of the fluorescent lights overhead. A recent mortar attack had loosened the housings on several of them, the bulbs now cocked at odd angles that left some of the room cloaked in shadows and the rest bathed in a dayglow brilliance that actually burned Mark John Serles’s eyes.

  The field medics had done a marvelous job of stanching the blood flow and keeping the victim alive this long. He wore dark fatigues, more stylish than functional, and no dog tags. Civilian, then, though Serles knew he could just as easily been CIA, since the city was still swimming with spies. Or even a journalist.

  “Who is he?” Serles asked the field medics who’d brought him in and were finishing up their paperwork.

  “We don’t know,” the one holding the clipboard replied. “Wasn’t carrying any ID.”

  Serles could see the man’s pockets had been turned inside out. “Wasn’t carrying anything?”

  “He was cut down just outside the Bafra Market—”

  “Green Zone?”

  “Last time I checked. Anyway, a hundred people could’ve passed him before we arrived.” The field medic scrawled out his signature and lowered the clipboard to his hip. “Iraqis like souvenirs.”

  The field medic handed him the clipboard and Serles signed it, formally taking possession of the victim. The hospital treated civilians as well, most of whom were Iraqis caught in cross fires or wounded by terrorist bombs. Those were the toughest days in Serles’s mind. What a bullet did to a body was nothing compared to the ball bearings or ground glass stuffed in those homemade bombs or suicide belts. Once ignited the debris and fragments reached supersonic speeds that could cut a body in half or render it utterly unrecognizable, little more than a steaming pile of flesh and gore. Sometimes the civilians brought here were somewhere between the two, something Serles’s medic training program back stateside hadn’t
exactly covered.

  He’d been in country for nine months now, the experience much worse and entirely different from what he’d been expecting. He was prepared well enough for the operating room, and the prospect of helping to save lives made the terrible sights, sounds, and smells tolerable. In the OR, working amid harried, overburdened, and overstressed doctors, his contribution was vital. Often the literal difference between life and death.

  It was the rest of the time that was seldom anything but bad and often much worse. Serles’s first supervisor was incompetent, played favorites, and couldn’t make out a simple shift schedule worth a lick. There were times when he worked sixteen hours straight, had four off, and came back for sixteen more. Got to the point where he had to chew gum in the OR during surgery just to keep himself awake, the docs figuring he was a slacker when his head kept bobbing up and down.

  Serles learned quickly about the army chain of command and what happens when you disregard it. The procedure was to complain to the superior officer fucking up and wait for him to punitively punish you for complaining, which of course made things worse. Wait another three weeks for things to get no better, then tell the regular inspection team about it so they could dress the obstinate asshole down. Him making them promises he had every intention of disregarding and then punishing you again. In the army nobody got fired, almost nobody got demoted or reassigned, and superiors or supervisors were seldom disciplined.

  The training never covered that either.