“What are you doing here? No one is allowed!”

  He was my height but twice as wide. I stared at him for a moment. He looked worried, eyes flitting to his right. He was holding a tablet of some sort, not an iPad but something that used an Android operating system.

  “I could make the argument that this trailer belongs to me, Rogerson. What is it that has you so concerned? And who just slipped out the back, Jack?”

  “What, now you’re General Paul Simon? Never took you for a music guy,” Rogerson said, avoiding my question.

  “What is the status of the man we brought to you, and what kind of chem did we find?”

  “He’s quarantined at the clinic, and we are still studying the samples your team retrieved.”

  Ever since the COVID-19 outbreak, every FOB was required to have a quarantine area to house confirmed or suspected cases of individuals with the virus.

  “That’s not what I heard.”

  “I’m unconcerned with what you hear, General, and I don’t work for you,” Rogerson said.

  I looked over my shoulder to make sure we were alone, save the imprisoned subjects. This was not a detention center; rather, it seemed to be an experimentation lab. I considered my options. It was probably not a good idea to beat Rogerson into submission, though I was sure paratrooper Boone would vouch for me. I could, of course, accept his defiance and depart, as I was sure he wished for me to do. But my preferred course of action was to engage him, get him talking enough to make a mistake.

  “That’s a poor attitude for an interloper in this war,” I said.

  “My attitude is irrelevant. My job is to identify threats that no one else can,” he said. “I helped break the COVID-19 viral code, and now I’m going to figure out if there’s anything to what you may or may not have found. I’m good at my job.”

  “I’m decent at mine, as well. My job is to defeat those threats and protect my team, so how about a little teamwork here?”

  “General, my security level is Q. I’m not sure what yours is, but I know everyone who is cleared for the compartmented program that I run. You provided me information I need. Now I simply ask that you let me do my job.”

  Rogerson’s eyes narrowed, and sweat ran down his neck into his space suit. He was speaking louder than he needed to, and I had the impression he was mostly talking to some unseen person.

  The man in the cell behind me started shouting again. “Oh my God. It’s true. It’s true!”

  Rogerson’s eyes darted to his left. He wanted to get rid of me but probably realized he had used up the bulk of his bravado. The man in the cell reminded me of the long-haired men and women in those 1960s films with their flowing shirts and bell-bottom pants, tripping on acid and saying, “Far out, man.”

  “Do not mistake my calm demeanor for weakness, Rogerson,” I said. “My men just risked their lives to gather the intelligence we provided you so we can do more missions to protect our country. Besides your captives, it’s just you and me in here, and if I’m cleared to gather the intel, I’m damn well cleared to know what the hell we are dealing with.”

  Something in him broke, and he said, “You do have a certain reputation for coloring outside the lines.”

  “A euphemism if I’ve ever heard one. I think a better one might be ‘Shoot first, ask questions later.’” I rested my hand on my pistol.

  He nodded and spoke rapidly. “You’re not supposed to know this, but it’s an aerosolized synthetic quinuclidine benzilate, known as BZ, with LSD in a mix we call Demon Rain. There are sarin properties, also, but I suspect Admiral Rountree already gave you a heads-up.”

  “Purpose?” I was thinking of the bodies crawling over one another. Perhaps they were climbing away from the gas, trying to escape out the opposite end of the cave, which we didn’t have time to inspect. Van Dreeves had taken some pictures, but I doubted any of them would prove useful in identifying what the people might have been moving toward. If Rogerson was telling the truth about some type of supergas, with a comic book moniker of Demon Rain, then maybe they were going crazy, feeling claustrophobic, needing oxygen. But still, the dead bodies didn’t support what Rogerson was telling me.

  “Purpose?” he asked.

  “What does it do? How does it kill?”

  He paused, considering his answer. “The best we can tell is that it opens the mind to visual manipulation while impacting the nervous system in some way. Think kids staring at their phones all the time. Content is a kind of mind control. Demon Rain stimulates dopamine to crave a particular type of image or content. The subject is seeking direction or is at least open to it. Whoever inhales the gas becomes a single sheep in a flock seeking some kind of guidance, image, or content. You ever play any of those brick breaker or word games on your phone?”

  “No,” I said.

  “It’s like that. Addictive, but we don’t know what it is that they are addicted to, and that’s all you’re getting from me, General.”

  I stared at him for a long moment, trying to understand the connection between a mind control drug and the gruesome scene we had just witnessed. Were they convinced they were sick and the cure was in the far corner to which they were climbing? A thought hung in my mind, something to do with the COVID-19 outbreak and how much of the world’s entire population obeyed their governments’ directives to shelter in place. Was it really that hard to control minds?

  I logged the thought away. Never wanting to create a bureaucratic rival where I didn’t need to, I asked him, “Do I need to sign a waiver?”

  He hesitated. “I’m going to trust you not to repeat anything. If you do, I’ll just deny it or say you pulled rank on me.”

  “You’d know if I did that, Rogerson. One last question, though. Are you FBI … or CIA?”

  Rogerson regained his composure a bit, smiled, and said, “Ever think if what you’re doing is worth it, General? The risks you take? All your time over here? Away from your family, friends?”

  I deflected and set up my exit by saying, “As a friend of mine once said, ‘I’d rather die a hero than grow old.’” One of my operators, Jake Mahegan, was a Native American who had that Croatan proverb quote taped on the inside of his locker in a team room.

  He nodded, most likely not understanding the sentiment of my response. I exited, patted Boone on the shoulder, and took my time finding my way to my bunk, where I grabbed my gear and met my team at the airfield. Jackson, Brown, Hobart, and Van Dreeves were standing with their kit slung over their shoulders looking like a band of mercenaries ready for their next mission. I stepped around the hangar as the C-17 was taxiing toward us. As we boarded, McCool and Rogers were tending to the Beast with its blades already folded and shoved into the C-17 cargo hold.

  “What’s up with the REMFs?” Hobart asked. Rear echelon motherfuckers. It wasn’t an official acronym.

  Up toward the nose of the airplane was a gaggle of soldiers, most of whom were probably headed back to the United States for discharge or other administrative reasons. Some were in civilian clothes, and some were in uniforms.

  “You’re spoiled,” I said. We normally had our own transport to avoid operational security issues. “Just keep the team here near the ramp.”

  “Roger that,” he said.

  My team laid out sleeping bags and immediately took advantage of the opportunity to catch some rack while I tried to focus on whatever the next mission might be. I couldn’t shake Rogerson’s question, though.

  Ever think if what you’re doing is worth it, General? The risks you take? All your time over here? Away from your family, friends?

  Until fifteen months ago, I had never questioned my mission or my family, but now it was a daily struggle to see the purpose. Melissa’s death took something from me, and as the wheels clunked into the chassis of the Globemaster cargo airplane, I laid my head against the red webbing of the seat, wondering about the trade-offs. The killed-in-action soldiers, missed birthdays and baseball games, dead civilians, and not being able to make it to my wife’s side before she passed from cancer.

  We had been at a remote Turkish airbase in the middle of the mission to kill Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi when Fillmore had called me and told me that Melissa didn’t have long and that I should return immediately. Because he was one of my closest friends, I wrongly suspected he was being overly cautious. The rotors had been spinning on the helicopters. I’d stood on the runway, jet fuel burning my nostrils. Missions such as these were what I’d lived and fought for. I had been surprised by Fillmore’s urgent call, and I kicked myself now for not giving him more credit. But only hours before, I had spoken with Melissa and was convinced there had been more time, that there was even some glimmer of light that she would beat the disease.

  “Roger,” I had said to Fillmore. I hung up and boarded my command-and-control Pave Hawk helicopter. The mission was going to take three hours, max, and it would take an hour or two for the air force to get an airplane to Incirlik Air Base in Turkey with a crew prepared to fly to Washington, D.C., so I was trading maybe an hour of travel time. The mission was a complete success. Three hours later, I was on the C-17 out of Incirlik, twelve hours away from Bethesda’s Walter Reed National Military Medical Center, where Melissa had been admitted to the executive wing.

  Upon landing, a driver picked me up with the chief of army chaplains in the back seat of the sedan. He informed me that Melissa had passed an hour before I landed.

  After twenty-nine years of marriage, I never got to say goodbye.

  Killing al-Baghdadi was no consolation.

  4

  I MET MELISSA BROWNLEE Sinclair when I was at E. E. Smith High School in Fayetteville, North Carolina. She was the daughter of a paratrooper command sergeant major and elementary school teacher. We met at church, where she was working as a Sunday school teacher while still in high school.

  We both called home the historic Haymount neighborhood of Fayetteville, adjacent to the U.S. Army’s Fort Bragg. As much as anyone in the military can call anyplace home, we both were essentially raised there. My father was the commanding general of XVIII Airborne Corps, and my grandfather before him had commanded a special airborne task force under General James Gavin in World War II. They were West Point grads like I was, and so it was a minor miracle that I’d actually lived in one place long enough to label it “home.”

  Melissa, on the other hand, had been born and raised in Fayetteville. Her father was an enlisted man who had risen from private to sergeant major in the Eighty-Second Airborne Division with a few intermittent tours in Korea as an infantryman and Fort Benning as a drill instructor. A decorated war veteran of Vietnam, Grenada, Panama, and Iraq, Command Sergeant Major Brownlee was a legend on Fort Bragg and in Cumberland County until he passed away three years ago. Melissa’s hard-nosed mother, my mother-in-law, had kept their children firmly planted in the neighborhood, church, and school system while their father fulfilled his military duty away from Fort Bragg when necessary. It was a talent and ethos she’d passed to her daughter.

  Melissa was tall, five foot ten, and had auburn hair and green eyes. She was the only woman that I ever truly loved and probably the only one I would, which was fine. By my assessment, few people enjoyed the type of relationship Melissa and I had, despite the fact that it was cut woefully short. I had looked forward to retirement with her, maybe somewhere along the North Carolina coast that we enjoyed so much. Wrightsville Beach, Topsail Island, and Cape Hatteras were all options we had been considering. We had saved as well as possible when raising two children on an officer’s salary, which was to say that we lived sparingly but had most of the things a family could want.

  One day while we were still in high school, I caught up with Melissa after my long conversation with the preacher about going to West Point. I was being recruited by NC State and UNC–Chapel Hill to play baseball, along with a few other colleges in Virginia and South Carolina. The pressure from my mostly absent father to attend West Point was enormous but didn’t compare to the expectations of my mother. The traditional officer’s wife, my mother was beautiful, regal, and conniving. Her motives were pure—her methods less so. And so I turned to our pastor for advice. My baseball coach had already tossed his hands in the air, not wanting to face the wrath of my mother.

  There was a lot of appeal to attending a school in North Carolina and playing shortstop for a Division I contender. Coach Jernigan, the West Point baseball coach, was putting the soft sell on me knowing that my mother was the closer throwing ninety-five-mile-per-hour fastballs at me every night. I loved my mother, no doubt. Fiercely loyal to everyone that returned the favor, she ruled the family with a white-gloved iron fist. My sister, Katherine, had run away to the Peace Corps for fear that my parents were going to send her to West Point, also. Kat appeared every now and then seemingly out of nowhere, announcing she was working for a new, different nonprofit to save some aspect of the planet. She rebelled enough for both of us, I presumed.

  After a long conversation with Pastor Paul, I saw Melissa, who was cleaning up from class in the rectory. Her hair was radiating in the sunlight that shined a spotlight on her as she swept up some construction paper clippings in the hallway.

  “Need a hand?” I asked her.

  “No, thank you. I’m just fine,” she replied.

  Not accepting the brush-off, I reached for the dustpan and knelt down to allow her to scoop the debris, which she did.

  “Thank you,” she said. Her voice was dispassionate, uninterested.

  Just then, Pastor Paul truly changed my life.

  “Garrett,” he called from the end of the hallway in his hellfire-and-brimstone voice, as if from above. “Good luck on your decision between Harvard and West Point.”

  Now Harvard had never really been an option, though I suppose if I had ever thought about it, it might have been. Catching his quick wink as he turned away confirmed to me that the pastor was doing me a solid by tossing me an icebreaker or perhaps a life preserver.

  “Harvard?” Melissa said, taking the bait.

  Not wanting to get off on the wrong foot with a whiff of dishonesty, I shrugged and said, “Probably West Point.”

  No fool, Melissa’s eyes narrowed. “Wait a minute. You’re the general’s son. You’re definitely going to West Point, and I’m not sure you’re smart enough to be going to Harvard.”

  She was nothing if not blunt and honest, and correct.

  “Well…”

  “Don’t get me wrong,” she continued. “I’m sure you’re smart, but I’m in all the AP classes and haven’t noticed you gracing our presence. Too busy on the baseball field, I think.” She tapped her lips in a thinking pose that made my heart leap. Her hair flowed over her shoulders. Her green eyes were clear, innocent, and knowing at once. Her attire was a proper mid-calf Sunday school dress revealing nothing but the contours of a tall, slender, athletic body beneath. She wore practical pumps and carried a three-ring binder like everyone used to carry back before iPads and smartphones. The label on the binder’s spine read SUNDAY SCHOOL. There was a yellow smiley face sticker at the bottom.

  “I do well enough in school, but I’m certainly not as smart as you,” I said in my failed attempt at self-deprecation.

  “I know that,” she said. “But Harvard is a bunch of snobs anyway, right? I’ve heard a little about you, and it’s not all bad.” She smiled. “Plus, you’ve been here awhile, unlike a lot of the transients. Not that the transients are bad, but it’s hard to know the depth of someone without understanding their roots, their background, their faith, and so on. And you’re reasonably good looking, not that you should let that go to your head.”

  I was simply going to ask her if she wanted to grab a doughnut, but here we were in a deep philosophical discussion about life, partnerships, and potential mates, which I soon learned was Melissa’s approach to life. She was simultaneously enjoying the moment while advancing her cause, that of her community, and that of the country in general. There was never a more solid or devoted patriot than Melissa Sinclair.

  “I’ll take ‘reasonably,’” I replied.

  “A tad generous, but it is Sunday,” she said, smiling.

  “Thank God.”

  “Indeed. And here we are meeting in church, another positive.”

  Melissa’s mind was an amazing synthesizer of information, environment, and potential pros and cons. She was a rock-solid decision-maker, and anyone fortunate enough to have been in her hemisphere of influence, from family readiness groups, which helped family members of combat units, to friends and family, was better off today because of her.

  “It would be proper of me to offer to carry your books—or book, in this case.”

  “It would,” she said, smiling again.

  For a moment, I was confused but understood where she was leading me, where she would always lead me … to do the right thing without preamble.

  “May I carry your book?”

  “Good job,” she said. “But you were right the first time.”

  She led me around the corner into the classroom, where she had four boxes of religious textbooks ready for movement to the hatch of her dated Jeep Cherokee. These were thick hardcover books, and each box weighed at least thirty pounds.

  “You’re clever,” I said, ferrying the boxes to her car.

  “Aren’t I, though? But I’m also fair. I’m buying at Bell’s.”

  We eventually grabbed that doughnut and Coke at Bell’s Feed and Seed, which she paid for, and spent some time getting to know one another, which consisted mostly of her talking and me listening, a positive harbinger of our courting, marriage, and life together. She shaped our life by bearing us two children, raising them to be wonderful, if not occasionally obstinate, kids, and providing me support and love like I could have never experienced with anyone else. As with all Melissa did, she loved me wholly so that I could focus on my tasks as a soldier and leader of combat warriors. It was one of her many ways of serving our country. No one leads soldiers without support, and the best leaders I know have firm encouragement that gives them the unfettered focus on the mission in front of them.