Page 51 of Between Here and the Horizon
I laughed, imagining who might have told him such a thing. Some poor, heartbroken local? Some young, doe-eyed tourist, hoping to turn a holiday romance into something a little more concrete? Sully was the kind of man to ruin a vacation, and all vacations for the rest of time, the moment you laid eyes on him.
“I guess the question is, do youwantanyone to see you clearly, Sully?” I made sure my tone was light, the question clearly rhetorical. Keeping my head down, I ate while Sully sat next to me, stewing. I could feel him struggling to figure out what he wanted to say. I half expected him to snap and tell me to mind my own damn business, but he didn’t. After a long, long dip in the conversation, Sully finally picked up his fork and considered it. Quietly, under his breath, he spoke. “You said just now that I must have loved Magda very much. It took me a long time to realize it, but I never loved her. You can’t love something that isn’t real. Someone that exists only in your head. She was beautiful, and she was kind in her own way, but she floated along, being whatever she thought everyone else needed her to be. And in the end, she didn’t have a personality of her own. She was a mirror, reflecting back at you what you wanted to see. That’s it. That’s all. An empty, sad shell of a person, waiting to be filled up by someone else. So, no,I didn’t love her very much. I loved the idea of her. The reality was grossly underwhelming.” He stabbed at his shells, spiking the pasta onto the tines, scooping up the meat, and he ate. He didn’t say another word on the matter.
I cleaned up the plates and I left, telling him I’d be back again the same time tomorrow. Hours later, in bed, too tired to sleep and too awake to dream, my cell phone buzzed on my nightstand, lighting up the room.
It was from Sully. Or, as he’d apparently named himself in my phone, the hottest guy in the world.
Such an asshole.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
Afghanistan
2009
Sully
The Italians were dropping mortars again. They were meant to send an envoy to the base at least three hours ahead of any assault planned on suburban areas of the city, a common courtesy to let us know as and when we should be relocating our troops away of hot zones, however no one had shown up with intel the last few times, and tensions between camps were running high. Even radioing across would have done the trick, but the Euro guys were all sick of the double standard (we never told them when we were planning a strike, either), and so they’d made it plain they were done playing nicey-nicey with us. Fucking ridiculous that we were all here for the same reason, and we still couldn’t get along.
I loved having the Italians around, though. They were the only ones who could sneak hard liquor in-country, and they were always happy to trade for cigarettes and whatever porn files were stored on the unit’s shared drive at the time. That was a lot of porn.
I ran across the base, flinching every time the high-pitched whine of a mortar whistled overhead, cursing their names today, however. I ran past one of the first lieutenants from C company heading in the opposite direction, some maverick kid from Alabama who’d probably be running this whole show some day. He slowed, saluting me. “They’re buzzing the fences today, Captain. That’s a hell of a lot of flack from the hills over there, too. Whitlock’s gonna be out, looking to spank some asses tonight!”
I laughed, turning to run backward. “You seen my brother, Lieutenant? Can’t seem to find him anywhere.”
The lieutenant rocked his head to one side, studying me. “Begging your pardon for asking, sir, but which one are you again? I’ll be damned, but I can never tell.”
“Sully,” I replied, grinning to show there was no harm done.
“Ahh. You got any tips for differentiating you two, huh, Captain? Might make life a little easier for the rest of us out here.”
I shrugged. “Sorry, man. There’s only one way to tell us apart, and I don’t think it’s gonna be much help to you.”
“Try me.”
“Well, my dick is obviously way bigger than his,” I said, laughing. “That’s how the girls at high school always told us apart, anyway.” In truth, Magda was the only girl who’d even seen my dick. And Ronan’s was probably exactly the same size as mine, down to the millimeter. Not that we’d compared, of course. That would have been weird. Our hands, our feet, our shoulders, our waists—everything else was exactly the same, though. Why would our cocks be any different?
The first lieutenant laughed. “Well, in any case, theotherCaptain Fletcher just left a briefing with the colonel. I heard Whitlock’s intelligence guy complaining about how long their meeting was. Your brother’s probably somewhere recovering from the ear chewing he just got served.”
Colonel Whitlock wore his eagle with pride. He was a concise, no-nonsense, efficient leader with a shitty attitude, but he got the job done. It wasn’t easy overseeing an operation like this, out in the middle of nowhere with limited resources and a whole city full of locals who all wanted you dead. The only time he ever kept the clock running in his office was when he was reprimanding someone. You fucked up and you knew you were spending the better part of a day inside Whitlock’s office with your pants around your ankles, receiving the hiding of your life.
“Shit. Okay. Thanks, man.” I cut through the base then, skirting around the infirmary and the shipping containers that had been set up as care package general stores, shelves stacked with tubes of toothpaste, toilet paper and Twizzlers, until I reached the other end of the base, where the officers’ Alaska tents were pitched. I caught Ronan just as he was about to head inside. He looked relieved when he saw me, though there were dark, ominous circles under his eyes, and he looked like he hadn’t been eating properly. If this carried on much longer, it would be all too easy for people to tell us apart. He’d be the one looking like he was about to fall face first into an early grave.
“Hey, man. You were meant to meet me after lunch. They fucked up and gave me your mail again. Whitlock kept you late, huh?” I grimaced, waiting to hear how bad it had been. From the look on Ronan’s face, it had been really fucking bad.
He swallowed, looking around, and then urged me inside the tent. Checking first to make sure we were alone, he walked the length of the billet and then back again, his hands clenching into fists and unclenching again every few seconds. He was acting weird, which was how he’d been acting for weeks now, ever since the incident with the woman and the little baby.
He’d seemed relieved when I’d told him he was mistaken, that there was no woman or baby, and yet as the days had passed, he’d started asking questions. What did the guy look like? Was he on any watch lists? What had he been wearing? How old had he looked? Ronan’s willingness to believe he was off the hook was obviously wearing off, and it wasn’t going to end well.
When he came to a stop in front of me, his shoulders were slumped, his head hanging low. “Whitlock’s a cunt, man. He called me in to talk about some missing tires from supply, but that turned out to be bullshit. He really wanted to talk to me about extension.”
“Extension?” The word was a bullet fired from a high-powered rifle, three miles away. You heard it, knew what was coming, but you didn’t feel the impact or the pain of it for a good five or six seconds, until the weight of it had time to sink in. “What the hell are you talking about,extension? Our tours are both up in nine weeks. We’re headed back to the States.”
The muscles in Ronan’s jaw tightened. He looked away, brows drawn low. I hadn’t seen my brother cry since our parents’ funeral, and that was such an old memory that the moths had gotten at it and turned it into dust.
“Doesn’t look like home’s on the cards for anyone at the base,” he told me. “Whitlock says they’re keeping all of the officers on as well as the enlisted guys. That’s me. That’s you.Everybody. The whole battalion. Intel projected increased Taliban activity in the area from now until the end of the year. So that’s it. All deployments are being extended.”
I felt cold, despite the heat. Was he right? No way he was right. They couldn’t just spring that kind of shit on us without any warning, especially coming up to two months before we were due to go home. “How long?” I asked. “How long are the extensions?”
