Chapter 31 #3
“No.” Ferguson stepped forward. “Don’t fucking Ferg me. Tell me Zorro is wrong.” But they all knew Sullivan couldn’t. Ferguson waited until the silence became unbearable.
“Jesus Christ.” He turned away, one hand going to the back of his neck, and Tyrone watched him walk three steps before stopping because apparently that was as far as his legs could carry him.
Someone else spoke. “Dwight trusted you.”
Sullivan looked toward the voice.
The Raider standing there had tears in his eyes and didn’t seem to give a fuck who saw them. “We all did.”
“I never intended for Dwight to die.”
Tyrone felt the vibes in the room change, and so did Sullivan.
Ferguson slowly turned around. “What did you say?”
Sullivan closed his eyes, but it was already too late. Until that moment, none of them wanted to fully believe it. “You heard me.”
“No.” Ferguson walked back toward him. “I want you to say it again.”
Sullivan’s face hardened as though anger might still save him. “I said I never intended for Dwight to die.”
A sound came from somewhere in the room, half disbelief and half disgust.
Ferguson stared at him. “So he’s right.”
“It wasn’t supposed to happen like that.”
Tyrone felt his fingers tighten around the wire of Dwight’s cage.
Not yet.
His turn would come.
Ferguson shook his head. “Earn It Every Day.” Sullivan’s gaze snapped to him. “You remember that?”
“Ferg—”
“You fucking taught it.” Ferguson’s voice cracked, and the sound seemed to piss him off enough that when he continued, there was steel beneath every word.
“Yesterday didn’t buy you today. Your rank didn’t buy it.
Your reputation didn’t buy it. You stood in front of young Raiders and told them they earned their place every fucking day by what they did for the men beside them. ”
“I know what I taught.”
“Then what the fuck happened to you?”
Sullivan didn’t answer.
Another man spoke from Tyrone’s right. “Always Faithful, Always Forward.” Nobody looked at him immediately.
They didn’t need to. “Which part did you forget first, Sully?” Sullivan’s jaw flexed.
“The faithful part?” the Raider continued.
“Or did you figure moving forward meant leaving Dwight’s body behind you? ”
“Enough.”
“No,” somebody else jumped in. “Not even fucking close.”
The voices weren’t piling on for effect. Tyrone could see the shock behind them, the individual reckonings happening as men looked at Sullivan and rearranged years of memory around what they had learned in the last ten minutes.
One of the younger serving Raiders stepped forward.
“Humans are greater than hardware.” Sullivan looked at him as though he barely knew who he was.
The younger man didn’t care. “That gets taught because people are the capability. Mature men. Judgment. Trust. You had all of that standing around you, and you sold one of them.”
“I didn’t sell Dwight.”
Yes, you fucking did, and then you fucked over his woman and sold his child.
Tyrone’s hand tightened harder against the wire.
The younger Raider’s expression turned cold. “You sold information that put him in the kill box. You can call it whatever helps you fucking sleep.”
“Quality over quantity,” another man said from near the cages. “That was always the point, wasn’t it? Small teams because the men inside them were selected to a standard. You didn’t need a hundred men if you had the right fourteen and every one of them knew the others would do their fucking job.”
Sullivan looked around.
Tyrone watched him finally understand that there was nowhere safe to put his eyes. Every direction held another Raider. Another man who understood what those words meant. Another man measuring Sullivan against the standard he had once claimed as his own.
“You stood in this fucking room with us.” That came from somewhere to the left.
The Raider continued before Sullivan could respond.
“Right here. You watched us gear up. You watched men walk out that door knowing they might not come back. You stood here when they didn’t. You fucking grieved with us.”
Sullivan looked toward Dwight’s cage, and him.
Bad fucking choice.
“You knew what this room meant,” the man said. “You knew what it meant when somebody checked your kit, covered your six, or climbed on that bird beside you. You knew.”
“I made a mistake.”
The words landed so badly, Tyrone almost felt the physical recoil move through the room.
Ferguson laughed, but there was no humor in it. “A mistake?”
“I was in debt.”
“You were in debt?”
“You don’t know what was happening in my life.”
Ferguson stared at him for several seconds. “You had a fucking battalion full of brothers.”
Sullivan’s face twisted. “It wasn’t that simple.”
“It was exactly that fucking simple. You tell somebody you’re drowning.”
“You think command would’ve?—”
“I didn’t say command.” Ferguson stabbed a finger toward his own chest and then swept it toward the men around him. “Us. You tell us. One of us. Any fucking one of us.”
Tyrone thought of Glenna standing in a storage unit finally allowing other people to help carry boxes she could have struggled with herself.
He thought of Gunnar, Remi, Marco, Colt, Talon, Levi, Mojo. They were his brothers now. How many times had one of them stepped in without waiting for him to ask properly? Sullivan had possessed the same thing, and the motherfucker had sold out one of his men instead.
A Raider near the back shook his head. “Trust. That’s the whole fucking thing, isn’t it?
” Nobody answered. He looked directly at Sullivan.
“You can train skill. You can buy hardware. You can plan until your eyes bleed, but eventually somebody has to step into the unknown believing the man beside him won’t fuck him.
” Sullivan looked down. “We all fucking trusted you.”
There it was; the words seemed to move through the room and take something with them, and Sullivan’s shoulders dropped.
Tyrone watched decades of reputation disappear from the man’s face as he finally understood that none of it could protect him.
Every mission he had led, every commendation, every good decision he might genuinely have made and every life he might once have helped save still existed, but none of them purchased absolution for this.
Earn It Every Day.
Sullivan had taught them that himself.
Ferguson wiped a hand over his mouth. “Fuck.” His eyes were wet.
Tyrone had never seen Ferguson cry. Not even when they buried Dwight, and that had almost broken them all.
Sullivan saw it too. “Ferg, I’m sorry.”
Ferguson flinched as though the apology had struck him. “Don’t.”
“I never meant?—”
“Don’t you fucking apologize to me.” Ferguson pointed toward Tyrone.
“His closest friend is dead.” Tyrone’s breath caught.
Then Ferguson’s hand shifted toward the empty space behind Tyrone.
“His brother stood in that cage. Geared up in that cage. Trusted every motherfucker in this room from that cage.” Ferguson’s voice broke again, but this time he didn’t stop.
“You sent him out knowing you’d given somebody enough to hunt him. ”
“I didn’t know they were going to kill him.”
Tyrone let go of the wire, and the room quieted again as he stepped out of Dwight’s cage.
Sullivan watched him come. Tyrone crossed the concrete slowly.
Dwight had walked across this floor thousands of times.
So had Tyrone. They had crossed it, geared up, exhausted, pissed off, laughing, half-dead on their feet, and once so fucking drunk after a celebration that Ferguson had threatened to make them sleep in the cages if they didn’t stop acting like assholes.
Now Tyrone crossed it toward the man who had made sure Dwight never crossed it again.
Sullivan looked at him when he stopped in front of him. “Tyrone?—”
“You don’t get to use my name like we’re having a conversation between old friends.” Sullivan’s mouth closed. “You knew what you were selling. ‘Information.’”
“I didn’t give them an order to kill him.”
“No. You did something more cowardly. You handed them what they needed and kept your own hands clean enough to spend years telling yourself the blood belonged to somebody else.”
Sullivan’s face went pale when Tyrone stepped closer, and somewhere behind him a man shifted, but nobody touched him. Nobody needed to.
“You let us think it was the mission. You let us tear that fucking ambush apart trying to work out what we missed. You let me wonder whether Dwight missed something. Whether I could’ve seen something. Whether any of us could’ve changed it. Then you went on with your life.”
“It wasn’t like that.”
“Wasn’t it?”
“No.”
“Then tell me what it was like.”
Sullivan stared at him, and Tyrone waited. For years he would have given anything for the answer. Now, standing here, he realized there wasn’t one Sullivan could offer that mattered.
“I was desperate.”
Tyrone nodded slowly. “So was Glenna.”
Sullivan’s expression changed.
Oh, yeah, asshole, I’m going there.
“You remember her?”
“Tyrone.”
“Answer me.”
“Yes.”
“And Kelsey?”
Sullivan looked away.
“Look at me.”
His gaze returned.
“If you didn’t mean it to happen, tell me why you screwed over his woman and sold Dwight’s baby girl to the same motherfuckers who took our brother’s life? Kelsey was a baby when you sold her father.”
Disbelief rippled through the men around him, followed almost immediately by anger as the full weight of what Tyrone had told them sank in.
“You did that shit to his woman and his kid?” somebody demanded, while another Raider swore viciously beneath his breath.
Then came the one that seemed to hit Sullivan hardest, spoken by Ferguson, a man who had probably trusted him almost as much as Dwight had. “Jesus Christ, Sully. She was a fucking baby.”
“I didn’t sell Dwight.”