“I did,” I said and smacked my empty glass down on the bar. The bartender poured me another glass of bourbon. “There’s no recovering from this.”
Casey sighed. “Do you really like this woman? I mean really like her. Not does your dick like her. I mean you, Beckett. The man. Would you like a relationship with her?”
“I’m crazy about her,” I said, totally honest. “If I could, I’d see her every day.”
“Then, tell her the whole truth and take it like a man,” Casey said, her brow furrowed. “Let the chips fall where they may. If she forgives you, you win. If she smacks you upside your head, you deserved it. If she doesn’t smack you, I will.” She grinned at that, but I didn’t respond.
I stared into my glass somberly. “So I just walk up and ask her to listen to me while I tell her how I deceived her for days and fucked her in spite of who I am? I was there when her husband died. I know what happened. I could answer questions.”
“Yep,” she said. “Be a man, Marine,” she said, growling like Master Sergeant Fillmore. I knew she was trying to lighten the mood, but it wasn’t working.
I said nothing for a moment, wondering how I would do it. If I did it.
“Call her. If she won’t answer the phone, leave a message or text her. Tell her you fell in love with her and let your heart guide you instead of your conscience. Ask for her forgiveness and then leave it up to her. If she can forgive you, maybe something more will happen. If not, end of story.”
I nodded. “I will.”
“Good,” she said and drank down her own bourbon. “Now, that’s enough about Miranda until you can tell me you came clean. Understood?”
“Understood.”
Thursday came, and I woke up with a bad feeling in my gut. I sat up in bed and ran a hand through my hair, trying to clear my head and figure out why I was feeling so negative. Then I remembered the memorial service being held at Arlington on Friday. The one-year anniversary of the crash, Dan’s death and nearly my own. There would be several memorial services held that day for the other fallen Marines. I never had the chance to attend the burial services, since I was recovering in a hospital in Germany and then in New York, but my uncle Colm told me about them, attending on my behalf.
Attending the one-year anniversary memorials would give me the chance to pay my respects to the families. If I couldn’t face Dan’s parents, I could at least attend the two other Marine’s graves, pay my respects anonymously. My plan was to arrive early, visit the graves, then leave. Miranda said they would be arriving at noon, so I planned on going and leaving before 11:30 so I wouldn’t bump into them.
I packed my uniform and dressed in my suit and tie, then drove my car down the coast to Arlington, Virginia, stopping along the way for a lunch break. I had a hotel reservation in Arlington, and intended to arrive in town, hit the rack early, and then get up early to get dressed in my uniform before making it over to the Arlington National Cemetery. I wanted to pay my respects to the fallen Marines and other soldiers I knew who died while on active duty or when they retired. There were a lot of names to see to, including those fallen who were buried in the main cemetery or in the Columbarium or Niche Wall for those who were cremated.
I spent a long time lying in my hotel room in the darkness, thinking back to when I was in Afghanistan and the vague details I could recall of the accident that injured me and took Lewis’s life. My memory was pretty spotty on the actual event, but I remembered Afghanistan vividly. Hot dry days, the sand gritting between your teeth, the incessant sun burning your skin, the crunch of dirt under your boots. At night, the desert climate became cold. The desert air was clear at night and the sky was magnificent, the stars so incredibly bright you felt like you could reach up and touch them. How I longed to return with a telescope and spend time taking photos.
I could also remember a sense of accomplishment to our mission, when my Special Activities Division contact and I were going out on exercises with a team of Marines Special Operations Forces to test out the new coms Brimstone had developed under my DARPA contract.
When it came to the crash, I had only brief images of the IED aftermath and then the rescue and crash. The day it happened was like any other day in Afghanistan – cold at night, hot during the day, the heat and dust and sun making me long to get back to Manhattan and the familiar humidity. We were embedded with the Marines and were living in the same conditions with the same experiences, sleeping in tents, doing exercises night and day to test the equipment.
The day of the accident, we drove through new territory which was past a small settlement we’d already been through earlier in the day. A dust storm was brewing, and the first grains of sand gritted between my teeth. The first clue that we were in danger came when we found the main road blocked off by a broken down truck, the hood up like someone was working on the engine, and the doors wide open.
The Marines we were embedded with were familiar with all the tactics of the local insurgents and so we were on our guard, but this was supposed to be friendly territory. The driver at the head of our small convoy radioed back that the main road through the settlement was blocked so we would have to either go back or take a side road. I glanced at John and he shrugged. We’d been through several similar villages with no issues, and so we took the side road and that was our first mistake.
When our GPS malfunctioned, we should have turned back and retraced our route, but we didn’t. We proceeded, taking a road the driver thought led back to civilization.
That was when all hell broke loose.
The ground underneath our MRAP exploded into a mountain of dirt and debris, the metal shrapnel flying, the concussion knocking me out.
After that, all I had were vague memories of a medic wearing goggles looking in my eyes, the thwop-thwop-thwop of the choppers that came to rescue us, then the crash, being thrown to the ground still strapped to a gurney, black smoke and cries of agony from other injured. The torn and bloody body of the medic on the dirt beside me. My next memory was waking up in a field hospital while I was wheeled into an OR for emergency surgery to remove the shrapnel that embedded itself in my neck.
Then, nothing until I woke up in a hospital in Germany, more overhead lights and more surgery, and then nothing again, until I was on the transport plane back to America for my long and uneventful rehab.
I didn’t even know how close to death I was until I was back in the US in my local VA hospital in New York. It was all a blur to me.
What I did learn, a couple of weeks later, was that a member of our Marine recon team was killed in the initial blast and then two others, one on our team and one Navy Hospital Corpsman who came to rescue us were killed when our chopper went down in the dust storm that overtook us.
It was fully twelve weeks later that I was able to leave the rehab hospital, having learned to walk again after being in a drug-induced coma to relieve swelling on my brain. I’d been lucky that I had no lasting brain damage. Others in our group were not so lucky. Besides the dead, we’d had several members of the team suffering limb amputations and traumatic brain injuries in the chopper crash. My contact with SAD suffered some minor injuries and left the CIA soon after.
We’d strayed into Iranian territory, and had driven over an IED buried on the side road that we were forced to take in order to return to our Forward Operating Base. We’d had no issues in that area of Afghanistan, and so the roadside IED was unexpected. Our accident proved just how critical navigational and communications tech was to ground forces.
When I had mostly recovered, I returned to work, glad to be back into my normal life, but suffering from survivor’s guilt. I had problems sleeping, of course, and had nightmares on a regular basis, but focusing on the business was a godsend. I spent some time reading what I could about the incident, but there wasn’t much published because we were on a classified mission, since SAD was involved.
My name wasn’t mentioned in what little press existed on the event. All that was mentioned was that two Marines and a Navy Hospital Corpsman were killed with several others injured. That was it.