Primary Command. Джек Марс

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      Luke Stone stared down the trench at Robby Martinez. Martinez was screaming.

      “They’re coming through on all sides!”

      Martinez’s eyes were wide. His guns were gone. He had taken an AK-47 from a Taliban, and was bayoneting everyone who came over the wall. Luke watched him in horror. Martinez was an island, a small boat fighting a wave of Taliban fighters.

      And he was going under. Then he was gone, under the pile.

      It was night. They were just trying to live until daybreak, but the sun refused to rise. The ammunition had run out. It was cold, and Luke’s shirt was off. He had ripped it off in the heat of combat.

      Turbaned, bearded Taliban fighters poured over the sandbagged walls of the outpost. They slid, they fell, they jumped down. Men screamed all around him.

      A man came over the wall with a metal hatchet.

      Luke shot him in the face. The man lay dead against the sandbags, a gaping cavern where his face had just been. The man had no face. But now Luke had the hatchet.

      He waded into the fighters surrounding Martinez, swinging wildly. Blood spattered. He chopped at them, sliced them.

      Martinez reappeared, somehow still on his feet, stabbing with the bayonet.

      Luke buried the hatchet in a man’s skull. It was deep. He couldn’t pull it out. Even with the adrenaline raging through his system, he didn’t have the strength left. He yanked on it, yanked on it… and gave up. He looked at Martinez.

      “You okay?”

      Martinez shrugged. His face was red with blood. His shirt was saturated with it. Whose blood? His? Theirs? Martinez gasped for air and gestured at the bodies all around them. “I’ve been better than this before. I can tell you that.”

      Luke blinked and Martinez was gone.

      In his place were row upon row of plain white gravestones, thousands of them, climbing the low green hills into the distance. It was a bright day, sunny and warm.

      Somewhere behind him, a lone bagpiper played “Amazing Grace.”

      Six young Army Rangers carried the gleaming casket, draped in the American flag, to the open gravesite. Martinez had been a Ranger before he joined Delta. The men looked sharp in their dress greens and their tan berets, but they also looked young. Very, very young, almost like kids playing dress-up.

      Luke stared at the men. He could barely think about them. He took a deep breath. He was beat. He couldn’t remember a time—not in Ranger school, not during the Delta selection process, not in war zones—when he had been this tired.

      The baby, Gunner, his newborn son… wouldn’t sleep. Not at night, and hardly in the day. So he and Becca weren’t getting any sleep, either. Also, Becca couldn’t seem to stop crying. The doctor had just diagnosed her with postpartum depression, complicated by exhaustion.

      Her mom had come out to the cabin to live with them. It wasn’t working. Becca’s mom… where to begin? She had never held a job in her life. She seemed baffled that Luke left every morning to make the long commute to the Virginia suburbs of Washington, DC. She seemed even more baffled that he didn’t reappear until evening.

      The rustic cabin, beautifully situated on a small bluff above Chesapeake Bay, had been in her family for a hundred years. She had been going to the cabin since she was a little girl and now acted like she owned the place. In fact, she did own the place.

      She was making noises that she, Becca, and the baby should relocate to her house in Alexandria. The hardest part for Luke was that the idea was beginning to seem sensible.

      He had started to indulge fantasies of arriving at the cabin after a long day, the place dead silent. He could almost watch himself. Luke Stone opens the old humming refrigerator, grabs a beer, and walks out to the back patio. He’s just in time to catch the sunset. He sits down in an Adirondack chair and…

      CRACK!

      Luke nearly jumped out of his skin.

      Behind him, a seven-man team of riflemen had fired a volley into the air. The sound echoed across the hillsides. Another volley came. Then another.

      A twenty-one-gun salute, seven guns at a time. It was an honor that not everyone merited. Martinez was a highly decorated combat veteran in two theaters of war. Dead now, by his own hand. But it didn’t have to be that way.

      Three dozen servicemen stood in formation near the grave. A smattering of Delta and former Delta operators stood in civilian clothes further away. You could tell the Delta guys because they looked like rock stars. They dressed like rock stars. Big, broad, in T-shirts and blazers, khaki pants. Full beards, earrings. One guy had a wide, closely cropped Mohawk hairdo.

      Luke stood alone, dressed in a black suit, scanning the crowd, looking for something he expected to find: a man named Kevin Murphy.

      Near the front was a row of white folding chairs. A middle-aged woman dressed in black was comforted by another woman. Near her, an honor guard made up of three Rangers, two Marines, and an Airman carefully took the flag from the casket and folded it. One of the soldiers lowered to one knee in front of the grieving woman and presented the flag to her.

      “On behalf of the president of the United States,” the young Ranger said, his voice breaking, “the United States Army, and a grateful nation, please accept this flag as a symbol of our appreciation for your son’s honorable and faithful service.”

      Luke looked at the Delta guys again. One had broken away and was walking alone up a grassy hillside through the white stones. He was tall and wiry, with blond hair shaved close to his head. He wore jeans and a light blue dress shirt. Thin as he was, he still had broad shoulders and muscular arms and legs. His arms seemed almost too long for his body, like the arms of an elite basketball player. Or a pterodactyl.

      The man walked slowly, in no particular hurry, as though he had no pressing engagements. He stared down at the grass as he walked.

      Murphy.

      Luke left the service and followed him up the hill. He walked much faster than Murphy did, gaining ground on him.

      There were a lot of reasons why СКАЧАТЬ