“What was it that he said?”

  “Doesn’t matter, but finally, when I had an opportunity, and I had to be sneaky about that opportunity,” Joe shared, with a nod, “I checked his full name, only to find that it was a play on words of my son’s name. That hit me hard, you know? I mean, I’m sure people all over the world share an exact name with someone across the globe. Still, the similarities were hard to ignore. My son was Chester Fibke.” Joe sighed. “This other guy, the day sergeant, was Chester Fibek, like the last name had been misspelled.”

  “That could be some mistake or coincidence, right?”

  “Close, but not close enough. I don’t know. I was so surprised by it. I didn’t think anything of it at first, but it kept nagging and nagging at me, and finally it took a bit of time and some money to find out that his real name had been changed from Chester Fibke to Chester Fibek,” he said, his voice breaking.

  She stared at him for a long moment, not comprehending. “Sorry?”

  He nodded. “Yeah, I’m not surprised that you’re confused,” he replied. “Believe me, I was too.”

  She didn’t quite get it, but her mind was working its way through it. “So, your son changed his name?” she asked cautiously.

  He shook his head. “No, my son didn’t change his name because the man who had been using my son’s name was not my son.”

  *

  Mountain and Magnus raced toward the convergence of the two men, as several other shots rang out, but luckily the bullets weren’t coming in their direction, or so it seemed. Out here, sounds were distorted. So just because gunshots didn’t appear to be headed to you, they still could be. It added to the dangers up here. By the time they reached Barret, he was staring up at the sky above him, blinking hard.

  “Did you take a hit?” Mountain asked Barret immediately, as the big man ducked down beside him. Magnus was right there with them, weapons ready, as he fired several warning shots.

  Barret looked up at Mountain. “Yeah, I took a couple hits,” he murmured, “but I think they’re in my vest. I don’t think they went through. Honest to God, I’m lying here trying to catch my breath,” he admitted, with a constricted laugh. “It seemed the simplest thing to do.”

  “Yeah, you’re not kidding,” Mountain muttered, as relief washed over him when he checked out Barret. Then shout-outs came. He answered them, with the news of another one down. That left them with a total of two they had shot down, and quickly they were surrounded by Nikolai’s and Rogan’s and Egan’s voices, all overlapping.

  “Damn it, speak one at a time,” Mountain snapped.

  “We have another man down off to the side,” Nikolai said.

  Mountain nodded. “Dead?”

  “Soon to be dead.”

  “Do we know who he is?”

  “Yeah, we know who he is. At least one of the two. The other one? … Well, he’s our mystery participant in this mess,” Egan shared, as he looked down at Barret. “How are you doing, buddy?”

  “I’m okay,” he replied, with a smile. “I’m just not too anxious to move. I think I took one in the chest and one in the shoulder.”

  “Let’s hope the bulletproof vest held you in good stead.”

  “I think it did, but it still hurts to take a hit. I don’t want to move just yet,” he said, with a snort.

  They all looked in the direction of the second man.

  “I’m still confused,” Magnus said, staring at the nearest body. “This is the colonel, and over there is the day sergeant. How the hell are they connected?”

  “He’s the other partner we weren’t sure about,” Mountain explained, as he frowned at the injured colonel. Mountain would love to leave him to die in the cold but … “Now we need to get everybody back to the base and fast. This one is shot up pretty bad, but let’s see if we can get any answers out of him before he dies on us.”

  “Both are pretty shot up,” Nikolai confirmed, as he checked the second downed man. “As far as I’m concerned, he could rot up here, but we don’t know if he’s dead yet, do we? And, if he’s alive, we need answers.”

  With that, Rogan and Egan ran to get the snowcat, while the rest of the men split up to carry the injured. Mountain walked over to the colonel, on his back in the snow, staring up at the sky. When Mountain crouched beside him, the colonel rolled his head to the side and looked at him, giving a gurgled laugh. “I figured you would get me.”

  “Yeah, we got you. I sure wish I understood why though,” Mountain replied, as he lifted the colonel.

  “Elijah can explain,” he murmured. “If not, I’m pretty damn sure Joe would tell you all about it.” Then he gave a heavy breath and died in Mountain’s arms.

  Mountain slowly straightened up, carrying the body, then called out to the others, “The colonel’s gone, but he did say that Elijah and Joe could tell us what this is all about.”

  “Let’s get everybody back to base then because this guy’s still alive,” Nikolai said, crouching over Chester to get his pulse.

  Magnus was near Barret, telling him to rest until the snowcat arrived. “Guys, some of you will be on skis getting back to base, so we have room for three to be prone inside the cat, but let’s all stick together.”

  Nikolai drove the snowcat, with Chester, Barret, and the colonel quickly loaded inside. Mountain handed out the skis from the snowcat to the others. With Egan bringing the sled and the dogs, Mountain, Magnus, Rogan, kept up a consistent pace with the cat, skiing as quickly as they could back to Sydney, hoping for whatever medical magic she might still have left to fix Barret and Chester. If they were lucky, they would keep this mystery participant alive long enough to at least get to the bottom of whatever the hell had been going on.

  When they arrived back at base, Sydney stood nervously waiting for them. As soon as she saw who the victims were, and who were on their feet, she immediately turned all business and nodded. “Put them on the cots set up here in the clinic.” She immediately checked over Barret, confirming that his vest caught both bullets, leaving him bruised and sore, but he would be fine. Then she moved over to the next one.

  She stared down at him in shock. “Chester.”

  He stared up at her, rolled his head ever-so-slightly to the side and whispered, “Will I live, Doc?”

  “Yes,” she replied, “at least if I have any say in it.”

  Almost immediately he gripped her arm. “Then don’t. Let me go. I’m supposed to be dead anyway.”

  She blinked as she stared down at him, then looked back over at the others. “I don’t think it’s quite so easy as that,” she replied, “as there are an awful lot of questions.”

  He nodded. “I have some answers, but I don’t have them all.”

  “How about starting with why the hell you don’t want to live?”

  “Because my life after this … will be a shit show.” Slowly he gasped for breath and struggled to even speak. “It’s time for this to be over.”

  “I would say it’s definitely that time,” Amelia stated from the doorway. Joe was beside her. “I think it’s way past time, and I sure as hell think you owe this man an apology and an explanation.”

  Chester looked up at Joe and whispered, “I’m so sorry, man. I’m so sorry.”

  “Did you kill him?” he asked, his voice harsh. “Did you kill my son?”

  Tears in his eyes, Chester slowly nodded. “I didn’t mean to,” he began. “It was an accident, an accident that I couldn’t not take advantage of.”

  “What do you mean, an accident?”

  “We were training in the middle East. We were training out in the fields, and, when he went down, and I realized that I’d killed him, I knew I was in trouble, so I changed identities with him. It had always been a plan that my father and I had talked about. I didn’t want to be out there, facing the world in wartime,” he explained. “I didn’t want to see live action. I didn’t want to be doing any of it, but I was there, and I couldn’t get out of it.”

  He took a deep breath. “My father kept telling me to walk away, to find a life that I could live with, one that gave me peace instead of torment, but I couldn’t. I was stuck in a loop. I was looking for another answer. And then the colonel suggested this. Not killing anybody obviously, but taking a dead man’s name. Then the colonel could put me out of the line of fire, and that’s what he did.”

  “So, you took my Chester’s name?” Joe asked.

  “I took your son’s name, even after knowing that I’d killed him accidentally. I probably could have been cleared because Chester stood up when he shouldn’t have. He broke cover to save a dog and dodged in front of bullets,” he explained. “He had been desperate to save the dog, but, because of our training, … he wasn’t supposed to get up, so he ended up getting shot. All kinds of chaos happened, and he got shot for it.”

  “So, where is my son?” Joe asked, his gaze frozen on Chester.

  “It was determined in my briefing that he’d gone missing during that whole scuffle, when in truth I had buried him on the roadside where he died—an act that I have never forgiven myself for, and an act that never gave you any closure. I took his tags, and I left mine with his body,” he said. “Then I buried him.”

  Joe swayed and was caught by Amelia, now both struggling forward, and Mountain rushed to them.

  “And for that,” Chester said, his tears falling heavily, “I’m so damn sorry. But that’s not the worst of it. Then I had to make sure his body could not be identified. So I had to …” He couldn’t say more, just wailed.

  A shocked silence filled the room.

  “I fired aimlessly, I didn’t even think about it at the time,” he whispered. “He was gone. I couldn’t do anything about it, and I didn’t want to go down because of it. Maybe it was a chance for me to get moved out,” he explained, with a teary face. “He didn’t have the rank that I did. He didn’t have the pathway that I was on, and I stepped back into anonymity, somebody nobody knew, one who the colonel could then move around. He put me in a different position. … I am so ashamed of what I did, ashamed of walking away from what I was supposed to be doing, ashamed of walking away from what I did to your son, my cousin… and I can’t get those visions out of my head. I didn’t knowingly kill him, and he did die an honorable death out there but a stupid one.” Chester’s voice broke with the memories. “I didn’t need to deal with it in that way.”

  Joe stared at him for a long moment. “That’s not an honorable death. Nothing is honorable about being shot during training. I hope you rot in hell. His mother died without ever getting any answers. We never had his body to mourn,” he bellowed and struggled to get to Chester, but Mountain held him back. “My son was missing in action for years. We got no news, nothing to have closure. We had NOTHING left of him.”

  Chester nodded. “I shot him and buried him to try and keep some of the buzzards and whatnot away, but I never could find him again. … And you’re right. I didn’t handle it properly. I didn’t do anything that preserved his memory. I took his name and kept on going, and, as soon as I could, I created my new name, something that would be similar but not quite something that would give me trouble. I knew he had friends, people who cared for him.”

  “And, making it easier for you, paving the way for you, was Elijah and the colonel,” Samson noted, with a shake of his head. “Chester, you should have reported the incident. It was friendly fire, with some culpability on the part of Joe’s Chester. However, what you did afterward was where you committed various crimes.”

  Chester faced Joe and said, “I wish I could go back and fix it. I wish I had done the right things and not the rest of it. I’m sorry, Joe. I really am.” Meanwhile Chester gasped in pain, as the blood flowed from his wounds onto the floor all around him. He wouldn’t make it. Chester added, “While I’m making my death-bed confessions, everyone should know that Elijah is my father.”

  Joe stared at him for a long moment. “But you look nothing like the boy I remember.”

  Chester tried to chuckle, but it came out more as a blood-filled cough. “I grew up, Joe. I think keeping all these secrets inside aged me. I don’t know. However, I am truly sorry I didn’t do right by you or your son. I wish I could take it all back.”

  “What do you know about all the killings here?” Mountain asked.

  Chester gave a half laugh. “The colonel had a few problems. I was always one of his favorites. … He kind of … held me over Dad all the time, making sure that Chef stayed with him, making sure that Chef followed him into every mission, every battle, every training session. With my father around, the colonel didn’t kill anybody,” Chester shared, gasping for breath.

  “As long as my father continued to look after the colonel in the way that he wanted to be looked after and treated him the way he wanted to be treated, then he would stop killing, but then the brass sent him up here. He’s had a ton of experience in places like this, but he did not want to be here. He knew he was on the way out, and it would be ugly, and he didn’t want to go the way that they were trying to make him go, and he started to fall to pieces.”

  Mountain, Sydney, Magnus, Whalen, Nikolai, Egan, Rogan, and Barret all stared at Chester in dead silence.

  “At one point in time, I asked my father about it.” Chester heaved badly and coughed blood. “The colonel was bad news, and it needed to stop here, but Elijah didn’t know how to make it stop. Because the colonel, … he’d gone off the rail, and he was killing indiscriminately.” Chester shook his head. “They were bound by such ugly things, prior killings that I have no knowledge of,” he admitted, with a sad smile, “but I had my own debt to pay to the colonel. My father tried hard … to stop him. He really did.”

  No one tried to interrupt the flow of information, and so Chester continued. “He gave Amelia supplies. He gave the villagers supplies. Anytime anybody needed anything, … he was right there for them because, like me, … Chef couldn’t live with the guilt of what had happened. It broke him to know that it was his own nephew who had died in my place, yet … he would be forced to live without me. Neither one of us wanted to admit what I’d done. The colonel had taken many lives in wartime and in peace. So he didn’t care about Elijah and me, doomed to be apart. Lives didn’t matter to the colonel.”

  Joe sniffled, his tears flowing freely now.

  “There was no getting away from it. Once you take that corner, you’re done. And, with that, always in the back of my father’s mind, he kept the colonel from doing more harm all these years, until he came up here, where he slowly unraveled, and there was nothing that could be done to stop it. He kept telling the colonel he had to stop, that this was enough, but the colonel said that I would end up being found out for what I’d done, and then the colonel would have the last laugh because, after all this time, he was the one who knew all about it. Nobody else did, but he was also the one who could pull the strings and who could make it all go away—or it not go away, and we would all go down together.”

  Chester sighed. “Dad … struggled with that, and I’ve never been able to call him Dad to his face ever since. Yet that betrayal kept us bonded, and we knew we were both alive, but we both knew that it shouldn’t have been that way. Then I found out about Eric, … that he had somehow found out about the colonel’s murders across the pond decades ago. It may have started with just one man, a single man, Nikolai’s father, Peter, but it continued on for decades, from what I learned. The colonel was a green kid at the time, … newly recruited and so excited, and so … passionate that he lost control, and … people died.”

  Chester eyed Nikolai. “Under the guise of training, your father’s death was hushed up, and they managed to get it all to go away somehow. Years later the colonel hushed up Joe’s son’s death and managed to get that to all go away too. I have no knowledge of what killing the colonel did in between those two events, but I’m sure he killed others. He was an unfeeling monster. … Sometimes it makes you wonder how someone can even do things like this, what kind of sickness within our souls allows it,” Chester admitted, tears in his eyes. He gasped several more times.

  Then the door opened, and Samson walked back in. Mountain hadn’t even realized that Samson had left them. He’d gone to get Elijah.

  Elijah walked over to the cot, sat down beside his son and grabbed his hand. “Go now, son, if it’s time to go.”

  His son looked at him, sorrowful, as the life visibly drained from his face. “Why didn’t you tell me that you had cancer, Dad? I wish we had more time, but we don’t. So you need to tell them everything.”

  “I will,” Elijah vowed, “and I’ll pay the price for all this.”

  “No, no, not at all,” Chester argued. “That wasn’t you. I did this. And the colonel did the rest.”

  “But I knew,” Elijah said, “and I didn’t put a stop to it.”

  “I’m your son,” Chester replied, with a small smile, “and I’m proud to have you as my father. You kept that asshole from killing more people.”

  “Did I? It seems to me that all I did was make things worse.”

  “Amelia is alive right now. Nikolai is alive.”

  “Eric isn’t though,” Elijah replied, his tears spilling out, “Jerry, Scott, Yegorahn, Ralph, Carl, Kaylan, and many more.”

  “Yes, we lost them, but Eric was blackmailing the colonel, so I’m not sure that we can give Eric a pass for any of this either,” Chester noted. He looked at Sydney and added, “Please tell Helen that she was the love of my life, that she had me wanting to own my mistakes from way back when. And, Dad, I felt you were rebelling against the colonel with your kitchen supplies to those that needed them, which made me want to cut ties with him too. Little did I know that this last favor I would do for him would end my life. … I’m so sorry.” Then he gasped several times and fell silent.