Chapter Seven
Chapter
Seven
Aiden was having a good time. He
couldn’t argue that. Four members of Bravo team had dragged him and
Sam out of their private booth and over to a large table while Nick
was dealing with the guys fighting in the pool room. When he’d
finished he’d joined the table. They were a great group of guys,
funny as hell and had the some of the best on-the-job stories that
Aiden had ever heard. But their timing sucked, and he was anxious
for it to go back to being him, Nick, and Sam alone, and to get an
answer from Sam on the whole trust thing. Something in Sam’s past
had him running scared eighteen months ago, and they needed to know
what it was in order to get past it.
“You got quite the
reputation in the EOD.”
The statement brought Aiden out of his
musings, and he turned toward the quiet man who’d asked the
question.
“I’m almost afraid to ask
what that might have been,” Aiden said with a wry smile. Glenn was
by far the quietest of Bravo team, and the others were very
protective of him. It might not have been something that they
consciously did, but they definitely moved to ensure he was flanked
by friendlies.
Glenn smiled, but it never reached his
eyes. “I’m sure you know it as fact, but it was rumored that you
were the best EOD technician to come out of the Naval academy.
After you saved Riley here, Marcel looked you up, and a lot of your
trainers talk about you to their new recruits to this day. They say
you were able to defuse even the most difficult charges, and
identify weak spots in walls of fire that no one else could
see.”
The rest of the men at the table had
fallen quiet, and Aiden had to fight to keep the color from rising
into his face. “I studied hard I guess.”
Glenn leaned forward, staring at Aiden
in a way that made him think he was looking at the sniper and not
the man. “But it was more than that, wasn’t it? It’s like it is for
me when I have the crosshairs in front of me. You fall into a zone
where the landscape, the terrain, everything all falls away, and it
becomes like a grid in your mind.” Aiden froze as Glenn uncannily
put into words what Aiden had often failed to explain. “Everything
disappears until it is just the target, or in your case, the inner
workings of an explosive device. You see it as a living thing, much
like I do the trajectory of a fifty caliber bullet, even when the
target is surrounded by collateral. People everywhere and only
small windows of opportunity to strike the target. I would hazard a
guess that it’s exactly like that for you when you are looking for
weak spots in a fire.”
Aiden stared at the man with a
newfound respect. “Yeah, that’s exactly what it’s like. My
instructors used to say it was like I was part of the device, and
that fire to me was a living entity, and it was strange to me that
they, the men who were tasked with the job of training me, didn’t
see it as the natural beast that it is. You have to respect the
fire. It kills indiscriminately and without remorse. You have to
rein it in, you have to control it, and you sure as hell have to be
smarter than the fucker who planted the device. I approach every
situation with the opinion that I can disarm anything, and that no
one knows explosions and fire like I do. It’s saved my life on more
than one occasion.”
“Mine, too,” Riley said
quietly. “And I reckon there are hundreds of servicemen and women
that would say the same.”
The group fell silent for a moment, no
doubt drawn back into their own memories of the horrors of war.
Aiden hated being the center of attention like this, especially
when it came to his job as an EOD tech, and he cast a look to
Nick.
“So you’ve all been
together since basic?” Nick asked reading Aiden’s need for a
diversion.
“Pretty much,” Dev said
with a grin around the table. “I have had the misfortune and
pleasure of leading this group from the moment I was promoted and
given a posting with a sniper team.”
“What was it like putting
a small team together like that?” Nick asked from beside Aiden with
an ice pack pressed to his knuckles. He’d started out trying to
break up the fight with his voice, and his badge, but it ended with
him having to put both the drunks on their asses.
Dev grinned but shook his head. “It
was a fucking challenge. You had to get the right group of men
together with the right skills, and somehow try to get them to act
and react as one unit.”
“Dev had a week with a
group of fifteen Marines to choose his team from,” Marcel added.
“He was a bastard during that week, too.”
“Really?”
“Hell yes,” Sam answered
from beside him. “I would rather be fired on by a maniac wielding
an RPG whilst sitting in a fucking tree than go through that week
again.”
“As you’ve been through
both, then we’ll take that as gospel, Pretty Boy,” Finn McGregor
said with a shit-eating grin, “but I want to know why Dev made you
carry a potted tree around with you for much of that
week.”
Sam groaned, and the rest of his team
laughed, which meant the story wasn’t a story Aiden wanted to miss,
so he made a mental note to ask about the RPG incident at a later
date.
“Goddamn you, Finn,” Sam
growled. “I really am going to shoot you one of these
days.”
Finn batted his eyelids at Sam. “We
need to talk about your obsession with shooting me, but for now I
think Aiden and Nick would both like to hear that story. So I’ll
start.” Finn leaned forward on the table toward him and Nick and
grinned. “Sam didn’t start the week off well. In fact, he was late
for everything, and—”
“Not everything,” Sam
protested loudly, “just the first two muster calls. Dev was
overreacting.”
“Like fuck I was,” Dev
said in a dry tone. “I told you after the first time that I would
think of a better punishment than something physical if it happened
again. And when it did, I made good on my promise.”
Sam crossed his arms over his chest,
but humor flickered in his eyes. “I wasn’t late the second
time.”
“But you were last,”
Marcel pointed out. “Granted, the rest of us decided to get there
five minutes early to ensure you were last, but the fact remains,
you were the last one to report.”
“Fuckers,” Sam muttered,
and the table laughed.
“Sam turns up, and
everyone has fallen in,” Dev continued the story. “The fucking look
on his face was classic. But he falls in and looks at me with a
look that could only be translated as ‘oh fuck!’”
“Sam then starts to
splutter an explanation,” Glenn took over the story, “Dev walked
right up to him, gets right in his face, and Sam’s voice disappears
on a squeak.”
Aiden grinned when Sam cursed under
his breath. “Fuck you, Glenn, it wasn’t a squeak.”
“Sounded like a squeak to
me,” Glenn continued. “Anyway, Dev starts talking in this deep
voice he has when he gives orders,” Aiden knew the tone because
Nick had the same one, “and he says, ‘Stay right here. Don’t go
anywhere.’ Dev storms off into the company building he was using as
an office. Now, we all know that when your LT says, ‘stay right
here, don’t go anywhere’ that something shitty your way cometh. He
comes back with this potted tree, which he all but threw at Sam
here.
“Dev told him that he had
to keep that damn tree alive and he had to carry it with him
wherever he was in uniform for the entire week. He had to take it
to PT, he had to take it to chow, and he had to train with the
fucking thing all week. He told him that if anyone asked why Sam
was carrying that fucking tree around he had to answer—”
“It’s to replace the
oxygen I stole from my LT when he gave me an order I didn’t comply
with it,” Dev took over and delivered the punchline that had the
table erupting into laughter.
“Did you make it the
entire week with the tree?” Aiden couldn’t help but ask when the
noise quieted down a little.
Sam nodded with an embarrassed grin
that endeared him to Aiden even further. “I did. I carried that
damn tree and gave that answer when anyone asked. And then when Dev
chose me for the team, and the ink was dry on the contracts, I got
rid of that tree.”
From the evil glint in his eye and the
way the rest of the team all grinned, Aiden knew there was more to
the story. “How?”
“Wood chipped that bastard
down to nothing but dust.” Sam suddenly smiled huge and looked over
at his CO. “Then, for the next three weeks, I slowly fed it to Dev
in his food.”
Dev’s eyebrows shot up, and shock
filled his face. “The fuck you say!”
Sam nodded his head. “I figured if I
had to carry the oxygen I took from you then it was my duty to pay
you back for it.”
Finn threw his head back and roared
with laughter, reaching out to stop Dev from leaning over the table
in Sam’s direction. “Damn, Pretty Boy! You got a vindictive streak
in you that I never knew about!” Finn turned to him and Nick. “You
boys had better watch out. You make one wrong move, and God knows
what he’ll do in retaliation.”
Aiden watched as the smile left Sam’s
face and he turned to look at him and Nick. “They already know what
my modus operandi is, Finn. I run.”
The table was suddenly plunged into
silence, and despite their audience, Aiden knew now was the time to
revisit their earlier conversation. “The question is,” Aiden asked
quietly, his gaze locked to Sam. “Are you going to go down the same
path again, or are you able to answer my earlier
question?”
****
Sam gaze flicked between Nick and
Aiden’s as his mind whirled. This was one of those crossroad
moments in life. Turn to venture down any of the roads that lay
before him and the outcome would be different.
Seems to me that the there
are two men in this town who want to be a part of your future. The
question is do you see yourself as part of theirs?
Dev’s words from a few days ago echoed in Sam’s
mind, and he was suddenly able to answer that question. At the time
he’d been asked, the answer had proved elusive, but now, looking at