“Was it prison or something else?” he asked.

  I shrugged. I knew what he was asking. How had I gone from being an all-in selfless military leader commanding thousands of soldiers in defense of our nation, to becoming a broken man sapped of spirit and hope? I didn’t have the strength to argue with him and acknowledged the truth.

  “It’s everything, Mitch. The loss. Destruction. Callousness. You name it.”

  “I never visualized you as someone who would feel sorry for himself.”

  He was attempting to pluck a chord in me, I knew, but I clapped back at him.

  “I don’t feel sorry for myself, Mitch. I feel nothing for me personally. My emptiness is that it’s quite possible it has all been for nothing. The sadness I feel is for everyone on the other side of that door. The people I love. What might their futures hold if we don’t find a path to unifying the country? Very few men or women have fought and sacrificed so much for so little only to have an ungrateful political class bastardize our constitutional moorings to achieve their shallow, contemporary power grabs. I don’t care about political parties or philosophies. I care about results, and if anything, I’m energized to save our nation.”

  “I think we are closer in heart and mind than you think.”

  “It never occurred to me to consider any alignment between us because I simply don’t care about you. I will, however, fight to the death to protect those close to me and for the ideal of America.”

  “Very well then. That’s essentially what this is about. We should get you moving. I’m afraid that Evelyn’s skills are needed posthaste.”

  I nodded. “With Phalanx looking for me, I’ll need some sort of diversion or disguise. I can’t just buy a plane ticket to Paris. I’ll never make it.”

  “Leave that part to me, General. I am a billionaire.”

  “All right, call my team in here,” I said. “I’ll deliver the news.”

  They came filing in, Mahegan, Hobart, and Van Dreeves leading the way.

  “I’m going alone,” I said.

  “No way, sir,” Van Dreeves said.

  “It’s the only way,” I replied. I had expected pushback, but I wasn’t going to waver.

  “Look at that map,” he said, pointing at the display on the wall.

  The map showed several blinking red icons scattered across the United States and world, including Denver, Houston, and Biarritz.

  “Those are known locations of Phalanx squads based upon LanxPro intercepts that this Zebra team gave Misha,” Hobart said. “You’re toast if you go anywhere alone.”

  I turned to Jake and said, “I need you to stay here and protect Misha. The others can stay if they want. I can go find Evelyn and bring her back. Mitch is resourcing me with a plane and other essential equipment,” I said.

  Jake nodded. The rest of my team glared at me.

  I thought about Evelyn, my grandfather’s dog tag, and why I really wanted to go find her. I wasn’t sure. More than my father, “Coop” had been my mentor and role model. My father wasn’t a bad man, he just didn’t possess my grandfather’s wit and wisdom, and we never connected in the way Coop and I had. I still had his black and red 1935 Cadillac LaSalle Coupe that he had dragged out of a junkyard in Raleigh and over the years fully restored. It was one of my greatest memories of him, working on the car and me handing him tools. It was a lifelong project. He was always replacing a mirror or the seats or anything to make it .01 percent better than it was before. He was a perfectionist, and so it was fitting that when Cat and I were born, we were instructed to call him “Coop.” Not gramps or pop-pop or any other cute nickname. His soldier friends had nicknamed him Coop, and that’s what everyone called him. In turn, Coop had nicknamed me Trip, short for Triple, for being the third in the Sinclair lineage. Absolutely no one, other than him, called me Trip.

  “This place is more secure than Fort Knox,” Van Dreeves said. “What happened to the team, boss? Don’t need us anymore?”

  “I need you more than you could ever know, Randy. You can stay with Jake to pull shifts to protect Misha and the others if you want. But I’d prefer that everyone just go home. Joe, you go home to Zoey and Syl. Randy, I need you to fill that giant hole in your heart left by Sally.” I turned to Misha and said, “I need you to take care of your father.” Then to Matt and Amanda I said, “Go home to Virginia and live your lives. Go to your farm in Greene County and get off the grid.” To Jeremy, I said, “Go to your wife and four kids in Arkansas.”

  I turned and faced Mahegan. “Jake, protect Misha, like you did before. We are all we have left. It’s time to live your lives and quit sacrificing for an uncaring bureaucracy that only takes and never gives.”

  Then to the collective group, I said, “I love all of you. In addition to Brad and Reagan, you’re the only family I have left. And my decision is that you stand down and go home to love the people you have while you still can.” For me, it would be my children. I could no longer say the same about my parents. Though still alive, I hadn’t heard from them since I was sent to prison, and our relationship was marginal before that.

  After a pregnant pause, I added, “Until Valhalla.”

  They were silent a moment, perhaps caught off guard by the Valhalla comment. A cloud crossed Mahegan’s eyes, then he said, “Roger that, boss.”

  I walked out of the room, leaving them dumbfounded. I hadn’t thought out a big speech and that was about all I had in the fuel tank. Something broke inside me, a last reed perhaps, as I stepped through the chamber into the hyperloop where Drewson was waiting for me like a chauffeur.

  “All set?” he asked.

  I nodded. The doors hissed shut and we rocketed somewhere underground for a couple of minutes. When the doors opened, we stepped through another chamber and then walked through a door into the crisp air inside of a sleek hangar. A nondescript white Hawker jet had its passenger steps open. Two pilots were twisting knobs inside and preparing for flight.

  “This is a brand-new Hawker with a supplemental type certificate approved for an extended range fuel tank addition that gets you from Colorado to Biarritz without needing to refuel. These are my personal pilots. Inside are two duffels filled with everything you requested.”

  I turned to Drewson and put my finger in his chest, which caught him off guard.

  “If you fuck with my people, I will come back and deliver you straight to hell. Understand?”

  He stepped back, held his hands up, and said, “I got them out of jail, remember? I brought all of you together. I appreciate your loyalty, but your anger is misdirected at me when you’re really pissed off at the world. I’m your only resource. Your government if you will.”

  “You’re not my government,” I snapped back.

  9

  I TURNED AND WALKED up the steps of the luxury jet. He was mostly right. I was pissed off at the world. We taxied out of the hangar and drilled into the early morning sky whereupon I lifted Coop’s dog tag from my chest and stared at it.

  I remembered the way Coop had affectionately called me “Trip” to distinguish me from my father. I always suspected that Coop had been disappointed in my dad, though I didn’t know why. My dad had retired as a three-star general and was living the good life in South Florida now with my mother. They had transitioned to Naples, and the years had scratched away the father-son linkages. I couldn’t remember the last time I had spoken with him.

  As a kid, I would help Coop most days in the summer when I wasn’t playing baseball. He was always tooling around his garage workshop behind their home on the outskirts of Fayetteville. He would turn wrenches while I held a fender or bumper in place or some other menial, low-risk task where a kid could do no harm to his prized Cadillac. Even in the sweltering heat of a North Carolina summer, Coop typically wore long-sleeve shirts. I remembered watching him roll up his sleeves, where I caught a glimpse of a dark blue elongated diamond shape no bigger than a dime.

  “What’s that, Coop?” I asked one hot summer morning when he had absently rolled up his sleeves.

  He looked at me and said, “My business.” He never later explained, and I had forgotten about the moment until now. My mind spiraled into much needed sleep after almost forty-eight hours of continuous operations.

  * * *

  THE GARAGE WAS dank and musty, which was the way he liked it.

  “Like a German pillbox,” he said. “We got in several of those concrete pillboxes and killed every last son of a bitch. Started with Normandy and we fought our way across France, into Holland and then Germany. By the end there were less than ten of us left. Lost ninety percent of my men. Damn fine men.”

  “Was it worth it, Coop?” I asked. I was twelve years old and more interested in playing shortstop than going to war at the time. It was hard to calculate the staggering losses and the psychological pain he must have endured. As he turned the wrench, a small black tattoo on the inside of his wrist that looked like a baseball diamond peeked from beneath his shirtsleeve. Even as a kid, I understood this symbol to be the World War II Ranger battalion insignia.

  “My only regret,” he said, “is that I didn’t go with them. I tried, Trip. I got in the face of every Nazi I could find and charged full speed ahead. After every fight, I sobbed because I hadn’t been killed.”

  “You were lucky … and good,” I said.

  “No luck in living, Trip,” he said.

  “What else is there?” I naively asked him.

  “Just about everything. Pride, honor, dignity, shared sacrifice, defeating evil, comrades, family, country.”

  I was flipping a Rawlings leather baseball in my hand as we talked. The red stitched seams were worn from use, and the once-white cover was pocked with bat bruises and dirt stains from the infield.

  “No, sir, young man. No luck in living, at all.”

  The plane hit some turbulence, and I rolled onto my side, sliding back into the dream.

  Now, Coop and I were standing in the middle of the village of Sainte-Mère-Eglise surrounded by American paratroopers landing from the sky all around us. Silk parachutes fluttered. The “oomph” of wind leaving the diaphragm accompanied the soft thud of jump boots twisting into the cobblestones. German soldiers and French civilians ran in every direction. Gunfire popped all around us, though we were impervious to the bullets, perhaps just as a young, twenty-five-year-old Major Sinclair had been leading his Rangers. Coop clasped my hand, and we moved swiftly through the melee into the outer reaches of the village. Three gray-uniformed German soldiers piled into a small home from which female screams pierced the sky.

  My grandfather suddenly had an M1 Garand in his hands, as did I. I was no longer a kid but my adult self. Flames engulfed the house as we burst through the heavy oak door. Three women were huddled in the corner, the Germans clawing at them to use as human shields.

  Coop fired, killing one. I shot a second man, felling him. A third ripped my grandfather’s dog tags from his neck as he held two girls, a knife in his hand. The girls were blond and no more than eight or nine years old.

  A bullet hole appeared in the German’s forehead but neither of us had pulled the trigger. I looked over my shoulder and saw Evelyn Champollion standing there, holding a modern sniper rifle and shouting, “Leave my family alone!”

  * * *

  I SNAPPED AWAKE, a light turbulence rattling the airplane again. Last year, in the Eye of Africa, Evelyn had referred to Coop having some connection with her family. I had read in his combat diary that he had called France his “new home and family.” What memory or fated hand had guided that dream? The presence of the dog tag could have spurred the visions, but was there more to it?

  I looked at the small monitor on the bulkhead in front of me. We were crossing the United Kingdom with another two hours to Biarritz Airport. I needed to call my children and let them know I was okay. I was conflicted, though, because I knew every communication would be monitored, but I missed my kids, and I needed a favor.

  While in prison, Brad, Reagan, and I did the old trope of leaving draft emails in a jointly accessed account. Reagan was more active than Brad, but they both sent me almost daily missives expressing their love for me. I looked at prison as just another deployment, being somewhere I didn’t care to be, though sent there by “my country.” There was a greater than 90 percent chance that Warden Smyth and his minions had been reading the drafts, and now I suspected Aurelius Blanc and the Phalanx team may have read them, too, but we had always been a close family and I wasn’t going to abandon my children.

  I dialed from a satellite phone that was part of my equipment request to Drewson. On the third ring a sleepy Reagan answered.

  “Who is this?” she asked.

  “Hey baby girl,” I said.

  After a long pause, which I imagined included her checking the windows of her apartment in Charlottesville to see if she was being watched or if any listening vans were present, she said, “Dad?”

  “Just wanted to let you know I am not where I was,” I said.

  “The papers are saying you were moved. That there was an accident at the prison. Brad and I have been worried,” she said. I recognized the sound of soft sobs that she was trying to suppress. She was a tough girl, an athlete and beautiful woman, but a daddy’s girl at heart. So that was the story Phalanx had run to disguise their botched hit? Or had Drewson run it to give me cover? Either way, I didn’t want to endanger my children, so I remained vague.

  “I’m okay. Just wanted to let you know. Can you loop Brad in?”

  “Yeah, sure, but Dad, what’s going on?”

  “Loop Brad in. I don’t have long,” I said.

  After a long pause I heard Brad’s voice, “What’s going on, Reags? I’m in between sets.”

  Brad played lead guitar in a rock band that toured the East Coast college campuses. It wasn’t my first choice for my William & Mary College–educated son, but I was proud of him for pursuing his dream. He had named the band Napoleon’s Corporal, after he and Reagan spent a couple of weeks in Paris, Normandy, and the southwest coast of France not far from Biarritz at a place called Hossegor. A French exchange student in Brad’s high school class, Laurent Ballantine, had briefly been the lead singer of their band until he had to return home to attend the Sorbonne. Brad liked the addition because the kid looked like he had just walked off the cover of GQ, at six foot four, with his Elvis smile and eyes, lean, muscled frame, and lyrical voice. The college girls loved him, and by extension, Napoleon’s Corporal. His family summered in Hossegor, a beach resort and surfing mecca twenty kilometers north of Biarritz. Laurent had worked as a manager at the campground nearby while he studied for a master’s degree in tourism. Whether he, or anyone for that matter, would be at the rustic cabins in the lashing winds of February on the Atlantic Coast was doubtful.

  “Brad, shut up,” Reagan said.

  “Hey Brad,” I said. “I only have a minute, but I wanted to tell you both that I love you.”

  “Dad? WTF? Where are you? We’ve been going crazy. There was an explosion at the prison. Oh my God. Where are you?” Brad wasn’t typically an emotional person, but I could hear that they both had been worried. As a father, it bothered me that I had caused them concern but also plucked a chord of love and comfort within me to know that despite my troubles, my kids still loved me.

  “Just remember, guys, that good wins,” I said.

  They stopped arguing enough to listen to me when I used their mother’s refrain.

  “Dad, oh my God, what kind of trouble are you in?” Reagan gasped.

  I didn’t reply, because I knew they were smart kids and would understand what I had just said.

  “Tell Laurent hello for me and that I might need to build a bonfire,” I said and hung up the phone.

  For a few minutes, images of Brad, Reagan, and Melissa flipped through my mind like a slide show. I loved my life. Beautiful, smart wife. Two amazing children. Loyal black lab named Scout, who resided with Brad now, though Reagan would steal him occasionally and sneak him into her UVA dorm. I had everything I ever wanted in life until it was taken from me, and I continued to power on because it was the only alternative. The only way out of the ambush, as they say, is through it. If you don’t move, you assuredly die in the beaten zone of enemy fire.

  I imagined that they stayed on the phone trying to decipher what I had said and what they should do. Brad would understand that I couldn’t stay on the phone for any length of time because of intercept programs both foreign and domestic, but it would be Reagan who would get the Laurent comment. As a sixteen-year-old girl, she had been smitten with Laurent, who had managed the campground just south of the Adour River in the Pignada Forest on the bluffs east of Biarritz. She and some of her friends had spent a week at the camp with Brad, Laurent, and some mutual friends. They had built bonfires on the beach, surfed, and spearfished.

  My destination was one of the cabins at the site. The surveillance state we lived in today necessitated me being off the grid as much as possible while still being able to conduct reconnaissance on Evelyn’s location. It would be the best I could do on short notice. I used the remainder of the time to dig through the kit bags Drewson had scrambled for me. He had assembled an assortment of gear that would be useful regardless of what I found. After an hour, I had checked the equipment, applied the disfiguring makeup and contact lenses, and prepared for night movement to wherever Evelyn might be.

  The satellite phone buzzed next to my captain’s chair. I answered and Drewson shouted into the phone.

  “My sources are telling me that Blanc is on his way to interrogate Evelyn at the Hôtel du Palais. It would be best if you got there first,” he said.

  I hung up without responding to him, free of the burden of answering to anyone or, quite frankly, of being responsible for my team going once again into the fray. This time it was just me, and I preferred it that way. The only loss I could cause would be my own, or so I thought.