Primary Target. Джек Марс

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СКАЧАТЬ in the future. But that wasn’t going to help Chambers.

      Luke didn’t like to look at Chambers.

      “Why are you here?” the leader said yet again.

      Luke shrugged. “I don’t know, Riggs. Why are you here?”

      “I’m trying to help men get their lives back,” Riggs said. He said it without missing a beat. Either it was a canned answer he kept for when people confronted him, or he actually believed it. “How about you?”

      Luke said nothing, but everyone was staring at him now. He rarely said anything in this group. He would just as soon not attend. He didn’t think it was helping him. Truth be told, he thought the whole thing was a waste of time.

      “Are you afraid?” Riggs said. “Is that why you’re here?”

      “Riggs, if you think that, then you don’t know me very well.”

      “Ah,” Riggs said, and raised his meaty hands just a bit. “Now we’re getting somewhere. You’re a hardcase. We know that already. So do it. Step up. Tell us all about Sergeant First Class Luke Stone of the United States Army Special Forces. Delta, am I right? Neck deep in the shit, right? One of the guys who went on that botched mission to kill the Al Qaeda guy, the guy who supposedly did the USS Sarasota bombing?”

      “Riggs, I wouldn’t know anything about any mission like that. A mission like that would be classified information, which would mean that if either of us knew anything about it, we wouldn’t be at liberty…”

      Riggs smiled and made a spinning wheel motion with his hand. “To discuss such a high-level and crucial targeted assassination that never existed in the first place. Yeah, yeah, yeah. We all know the talk. We’ve heard it before. Believe me, Stone, you’re not that important. Every man in this group has seen combat. Every man in this group is intimately aware of the—”

      “What kind of combat have you seen, Riggs?” Luke said. “You were in the Navy. On a destroyer. In the middle of the ocean. You’ve been riding a desk in this hospital for the past fifteen years.”

      “This isn’t about me, Stone. It’s about you. You’re in a VA hospital, in the psych ward. Right? I’m not in the psych ward. You are. I work in the psych ward, and you live there. But you’re not committed. You’re voluntary. You can walk out of here any time you want. Right in the middle of this session, if you like. Fort Bragg is five or six miles from here. All your old buddies are over there, waiting for you. Don’t you want to get back together with them? They’re waiting for you, man. Rock and roll. There’s always another classified FUBAR mission to go on.”

      Luke said nothing. He just stared at Riggs. The man was out of his mind. He was the crazy one. He wasn’t even slowing down.

      “Stone, I see you Delta guys come through here from time to time. You never have a scratch on you. You guys are like, supernatural. The bullets always miss you somehow. But you’re freaked out. You’re burnt out. You’ve seen too much. You’ve killed too many people. You’ve got their blood all over you. It’s invisible, but it’s there.”

      Riggs nodded to himself.

      “We had a Delta guy come through here back in oh-three, about your age, insisted he was fine. He had just come back from a top secret mission in Afghanistan. It was a slaughterhouse. Of course it was. But he didn’t need all this talk. Sound like anybody we know? When he left here, he went home, killed his wife, his three-year-old daughter, and then put a bullet in his own brain.”

      A pause drew out between Luke and Riggs. None of the other men said a word. The guy was a button pusher. For some reason, he saw that as his job. It was important that Luke stay cool and not let Riggs get under his skin. But Luke didn’t like this kind of thing. He felt a surge building inside him. Riggs was moving into dangerous territory.

      “Is that what you’re scared of?” Riggs said. “You’re worried you’re gonna go home and blow your wife’s brains all over the—”

      Luke was up from his chair and across the space between him and Riggs in less than a second. Before he knew what had happened, he had grabbed Riggs, kicked his chair out from under him, and thrown him to the floor like a rag doll. Riggs’s head banged off the stone tile.

      Luke crouched over him and reared back his fist.

      Riggs’s eyes were wide, and for a split second fear flashed across his face. Then his calm demeanor returned.

      “That’s what I like to see,” he said. “A little enthusiasm.”

      Luke took a deep breath and let his fist relax. He looked around at the other men. None of them had made a move. They just stared dispassionately as if a patient attacking his therapist was a normal part of their day.

      No. That wasn’t it. They stared like they didn’t care what happened, like they were beyond caring.

      “I know what you’re trying to do,” Luke said.

      “I’m trying to break you out of your shell, Stone. And it looks like it’s finally starting to work.”

* * *

      “I don’t want you here,” Martinez said.

      Luke sat in a wooden chair next to Martinez’s bed. The chair was surprisingly uncomfortable, as if it had been designed to discourage loitering.

      Luke was doing the thing he had avoided for weeks—he was visiting Martinez. The man was in a different building of the hospital, yes. But it was all of a twelve-minute walk from Luke’s own room. Luke hadn’t been able to face that walk until now.

      Martinez was on a long road, a road that he seemed to have no interest in traveling. His legs had been shredded, and could not be saved. One was gone at his pelvis, one below the knee. He still had the use of his arms, but he was paralyzed from just below his ribcage down.

      Before Luke came in here, a nurse whispered to him that Martinez spent most of his time crying. He also spent a lot of time sleeping—he was on a heavy dose of sedatives.

      “I just came to say goodbye,” Luke said.

      Martinez had been staring out the window at the bright day. Now he turned to look at Luke. His face was fine. He had always been a handsome guy, and he still was. God, or the Devil, or whoever was in charge of these things, had spared the man his face.

      “Hello and goodbye, right? Good for you, Stone. You’re all in one piece, you gonna walk right out of here, probably get a promotion, some kind of citation. Never see another minute of combat because you were in the psych ward. Ride a desk, make more money, send other guys in. Good for you, man.”

      Luke sat quietly. He folded one leg over the other. He didn’t say a word.

      “Murphy stopped by here a couple of weeks ago, did you know that? I asked if he was going to see you, but he said no. He didn’t want to see you. Stone? Stone’s a suck-up to the brass. Why should he see Stone? Murphy said he’s gonna ride the freight trains across the country, like a hobo. That’s his plan. You know what I think? I think he’s gonna shoot himself in the head.”

      “I’m sorry about what happened,” Luke said.

      But Martinez wasn’t listening.

      “How’s your wife, man? Pregnancy coming along good? Little Luke junior on the way? That’s real СКАЧАТЬ