Chapter 22
Chapter 22
T he contact lived in Israel. Outside Jerusalem. A fifteen-hour flight. I knew flying that far risked keeping us from a quick response to anything inside the US, but what else did we have to go on? Ashley’s people had turned up nothing. Steve’s interrogation had turned up very little.
Camp again found me shaking my head. “You good, sir?”
The extent to which I’d become unaware of my own actions was concerning. “Thinking about the girls.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Camp?”
“Sir?”
“We’re level on the playing field. You don’t have to call me sir.”
He tilted his head from side to side. “Colonel, sir. I was standing there when the vice president promoted you.”
“And the people we’re chasing couldn’t care less.”
“You called Bones ‘sir.’”
“That’s different.”
“How so?”
“He’s my mentor.”
“And you’re not?”
I hadn’t really considered that. “But he’s... Bones.”
“And you’re . . . Murph.”
“Camp, I’m just a guy who kicks down doors.”
“Sir, among us—guys that care, guys that still believe—you’re... storied. You’re who we’re hoping to be. I’ve worked with other governments and their operators talk about you. They whisper your name.” He waved his hand across me. “Your tattoos, the whole back thing, it’s... Sir, you just need to know, you’re the pinnacle.”
I tried to drill it down. Get at the root of what was bothering me. And what was bothering me was the sense that Camp felt about me the way I felt about Bones. Which meant if something happened to me, Camp would hurt the way I was hurting. And I couldn’t prevent that. Couldn’t make that hurt any less. I knew what he was saying was true. I also knew that to love is to be vulnerable. To risk. When in pain, we adopt the lie that to protect our hearts, we must put them away. Lock them in a vault. Suck the air out. The problem we encounter is that when we open that chamber and try to use this once-fleshy thing we call a heart, we find it hard. Impenetrable. Icy. Unbreakable. Unfeeling. That’s what I was asking Camp. In saying, “Don’t call me sir,” I was asking Camp to become unfeeling. To lock his heart away in a place where my absence or death couldn’t hurt it. In pain, I had wrapped myself in self-protection, demanding he do the same. For him to do what I wanted him to do, to wipe “sir” out of his mouth, he’d have to become unfeeling. Pulse-less. But to do this work, to endure, to get off this plane when it landed, you had to be able to bleed. Which immediately presented a problem. How did you stop it? And if the wound was too deep, could you stop it at all? My experience proved not.
This was the worst type of rescue. The waiting kind. With nothing to go on. No lead. Languishing in earsplitting silence. All we could do was try not to think about what was happening to the girls. Their fear. Their pain. Their disbelief and horror. I sat in the plane and tried not to think about them, which only made it worse.
Camp put his hand on my shoulder. “Sir, we’ll find ’em.”
I remembered when I allowed my hope to speak. Before my pain choked it out. I nodded and stared out across the shimmering blue below.
Five minutes later, Eddie called.