Carla tsked gently. “I had a feeling you might say that. Sit your ass back down. I want to check your blood sugar.”
Really?Jed sighed, but obeyed. Anemia and chronic low blood sugar were both symptoms of gastroparesis Jed lived with every day. Who cared about the damned numbers? Carla pricked his finger with a small device and waited for the result to come up.
“Dr. Howarth came to see me this morning. He told me to tell you if you don’t make an appointment soon, he’s going to make an impromptu house call.” The blood sugar machine beeped. Carla let out a low whistle. “That’s low. When did you last eat?”
“This morning?”
“Skipping lunch is not cool,” Carla said sternly. “You need to get your iron levels checked too, and don’t discount Dr. Howarth. Hewillcome looking for you.”
Jed didn’t doubt it, but he wasn’t in a hurry to hook up with the good doctor. Max’s vegetable garden was keeping him in as much iron as he could handle.
He left Carla, promising to take better care of himself and remind Max to return her call, and made his way back to the truck. Max remained on his mind as he drove the short journey from Portland to Ashton. He’d been distracted most of the day, but with time on his hands and the freeway for company, he couldn’t help brooding over his vibrant young roommate.
Max had been avoiding Jed since he’d given him an eyeful of his burned shoulder, and Jed hadn’t made much effort to seek him out. He understood the horror in Max’s face—it was a reflection of his own disgust—but he missed him. It had felt strange to slip away from the cabin at the crack of dawn without his daily dose of Max’s infectious grin.
Through the haze of PT-induced exhaustion, Jed suddenly found he couldn’t wait to be home.
Chapter Ten
November 2002
Central Africa
GLENNTHREWthe syringe into the plastic container and wiped his brow. Jed caught his eye, and the medic offered him a weary grin. Glenn looked exhausted and ready to drop. Jed cast his gaze over the long line of waiting villagers and their children, and couldn’t help but feel the same.
He sighed and discarded his own empty syringe. This jungle shit was getting old. His crew had sweated their balls off in the tiny village camp for months, and for what? The atrocities continued around them regardless. Aside from providing too little aid and not enough medical care, their presence had become meaningless. A day didn’t pass without Jed wondering why they were even there.
The young boy in front of Jed smiled, and for a brief moment, his cynicism evaporated. This whole area was like that. The quiet, resigned suffering of its people was soul destroying, but every child had a smile that lit up the world. In a place where time seemed to stop, those smiles alone were enough to keep Jed in motion.
The kid left, clutching his mother’s robe and a baby as she carried his two siblings. Jed called the next child forward and tried not to speculate how far they had to walk home.
A few hours later, Jed helped Glenn pack up his makeshift clinic, and they headed back to base camp. Tired and grimy, Glenn disappeared to clean up, but Jed lingered in the dying evening sun to catch a smoke. He was running low on cigarettes—he’d limited himself to one a day to conserve supplies—but the quiet moment he set aside for himself at dusk each day was a moment he often needed after a long day in the village.
When he was done, he strolled across a patch of earth that constituted a road to search out the rest of his team. He found Luke first, asleep under a tree, a sight that made him grin. The lazy motherfucker was always asleep. Amused, Jed kicked him, once… twice, until he opened one eye. “Where are the others?”
Luke inclined his head to the right, the motion slight and idle. “Pretending they know how to play soccer.”
Jed followed the sound of raucous laughter as Luke’s eyes slid closed. Across the camp, Paul, Raffi, and Kip were playing soccer with the village kids and roughhousing with each other. Jed laughed aloud as Raffi put Paul on his ass. Raffi was the smallest guy on the team, and Paul the biggest, but Raffi had taught them all they knew about hand-to-hand combat. Only Jed had ever put him down.
A vehicle approached the camp. Jed glanced behind him and spotted the bright red logo of the aid charity they were assisting. Shit. He ducked into the radio tent, ignoring Luke’s deep chuckle. The French nurses were nice enough, but one of them had taken to following Jed around with such tenacity Jed suspected Paul’s hand.
Still, as he began the arduous task of auditing his crew’s dwindling supplies, he mused that life could be worse. It could always be worse….
FASTFORWARDthree years and Jed felt like his perception of hell had been spun on its axis and redefined in a way he never thought possible. The sticky heat of Africa had given way to the sandstorms of the Arabian desert, and with it had come the oppressive chaos of a city that, long after the conflict was officially over, was still waging a brutal war.
Mosul. The third largest city in Iraq, and a city that Jed had fought to take and retake three separate times. In the early days, way before TV cameras came, Jed’s crew had parachuted blind into the desert just north of the city. The repressed Kurdish community welcomed them then, but times had changed since. The invasion was over, but the conflict remained. With no infrastructure to the city—no government, public services, or civil police—rival religious factions had turned on each other in a melting pot of violent tension.
One sweltering summer evening, Jed led his crew through the busy streets of one of the poorest neighborhoods in the city. There were eight of them in total, nine if you counted the dog, and eight young recruits from the newly formed Iraqi Army.
Jed picked his way along the dusty road, ignoring the radio on his shoulder. Its tinny chatter was his constant and irritating companion, and he had little patience for it tonight. His fingers itched to hurl it against one of the dilapidated buildings that surrounded him. That would give the suspicious, hollow eyes of the locals something to gawk at.
But the eyes he couldn’t see were the worst. Twitching curtains and faceless shadows. The prickling sensation of being watched danced on every inch of his skin. He tightened his grip on his weapon, and his knuckles turned white.
They came to the end of the dusty street, a crossroads of sorts. Three children stood on the corner, watching them. The oldest child smiled, and Jed smiled back. It was the first friendly face he’d seen in days. He called a greeting, beckoned the children over, and talked to them while the others gave out candy. They were nice kids, polite and friendly, and it didn’t take much to get them talking—a handful of sweets and some friendly words. He didn’t ask them anything important; he’d be back for that another day.
The patrol moved on and continued its sweep of the city. They retraced their steps at dawn. The streets were deserted this time around, save the bodies of the three children lying in the dirt just yards away from where Jed had left them. Their throats had been cut, punishment for talking to the enemy and a message for all, crumpled in the dust of the city streets.
The silence of death was loud and enveloping, broken only by Paul’s hand on his shoulder, Glenn cursing, and the frantic bark of his team’s specialist combat dog….