Page 4 of What Remains

“He did more than that,” John said. “He kept you guys from Death Row. He’s also your ticket to getting back in.”

Flowers was quiet for a few moments. Then: “I won’t deny that. Because JSOC, DARPA, CIA, all those alphabet agencies and forces are tied together, operating under the radar and in the dark. We’re the type of people Mac wants for this kind of work. But I don’t get any thrill out of it. This isn’t my own personalMission Impossible. I’m also in this to, well, notatonefor something, that’s not it. I don’t feel bad about what we did or how Mac helped cover it up in exchange for working with Shahida. I don’t know what the right word is, exactly, for what I’m after.”

“Maybe what you’re after is redemption.” Lord knew, he understood howthatfelt.

He watched Flowers think about that. “Yeah,” the other man said, “that feels right. Every kid we get out of this place is a kind of redemption.”

“Meaning you want back in?”

“To the Raiders? I dunno, man. Things haven’t changed that much. I don’t know if Icango back to a system where we’re told to look the other way because it’s in the best interests of the mission or we want to keep some asshole of a police chief on our side. Not when you’re talking kids. So, there might not be a way to slot myself back in and pretend nothing ever happened.”

“Are you sorry?”

Flowers shook his head. “There’s war, man, and then there’s a time and place where morality kicks in. No matter what Command said, we couldn’t look the other way. Don’t get me wrong. When you’re getting shot at all the time or eventhinkingyou will be and you haven’t had a square meal in three weeks and you’re so dirty and stinking your clothes could keep on marching all by themselves, that’s when it’s hardest to stay, well,civilized. Even that’s not quite it, though. There are lines you toe, that you come right up to jumping over, and then there are others that onlysomemen cross.” A pause. “You ever hear of The Kill Team?”

John thought for a second. “That’s almost ancient history, isn’t it? Well, at least when it comes tothiswar. Happened over ten years ago, I think. Bunch of Army guys, right?”

“Yup.” Flowers nodded. “And it was 2010, to be exact. Maywand District. These six Army guys killed a bunch of Afghan civilians just for kicks. Thrill kills. They admitted to three, but there were probably more. They took photos, staged things with the corpses. Even kept trophies. Finger bones, part of a skull, sick shit like that.”

Why was his mind jumping to scenes fromApocalypse Now?His Uncle Dare had never become that jaded from his service in Vietnam. On the other hand, Dare had been a sniper. Picking off the enemy was his job.

You become a sniper,Dare once said,you’re snuffing out a life. That person may not be an admirable man or even a good one, but that’s between that person and his god. You can’t do this job otherwise, son. You got to be ice, son. You got to be stone.

When he was fifteen, John had done exactly that. Doing what wasrighthad cost him everything. The same was true for Driver and his men.

Pouring himself another cup of coffee, he said, “You’re drawing a parallel between that kill team and you?”

“No.” Flowers crushed his Bull in a fist and tossed it over a shoulder. The can let out a faint metallicchikas it bounced against a side panel. “I’m drawing a contrast. I’m painting a different picture. There’s a difference between, say, kind of suspecting that a guy is beating his wife andknowinghe is.”

“You don’t take out an abusive husband.”

“No, you leave that up to hiswife.” Flowers was getting hot. “That poor woman pulls the trigger, andshegoes to jail. Go look up the stats, you don’t believe me.”

“Easy, man, take it easy,” John said. “I’m not judging. I’m trying to understand.”

“Okay, then how about this one? Is there a difference between a neighbor who gives candy to certain kids a little too often and thesameguy saying to a kid that he’s got something to show him only the kid has to come inside or go down-cellar?”

John flashed to that movie he and Roni had watched on-call: the one about a murdered girl named Suzie who had worried about a lonely penguin in a snow-globe. “You know there is. But then you report the guy to the police.”

“Who might do diddly.”

“Can’t argue that.”

“What I’m saying is we weren’t acting on a hunch. What we did wasn’t for thrills. We did the only morally right thing we could.”

“That’s not true, and you know it,” John said, quietly. “You acted because you had no faith that the military would. You acted out of a sense of moral certainty.”

“And duty,” Flowers said, his tone grudging. “Wedid our duty.”

“I hear you.” He waited a beat. “Listen, true story. Roni was once asked to evaluate this kid. Corporal, at the time, worked in long-range surveillance on an E-3 Sentry. You know what that is?”

“Yeah, AWACS, Airborne Warning and Control System, right? Tracking satellites and enemy aircraft and monitoring radio traffic. I thought that was Air Force.”

“It is.”

“So, how come they brought him to an army base?”

“Because of the nature of what he’d done. Had to keep an eval on the down-low. Seems that while he was on-duty, the corporal let a Chengdu J-20 do a pretty close flyby.”

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