Chapter 5
It was the expression of a man who had waited a very long time to do a thing and had just been told he got to do it now.
“That’s her,” he said.
He did not say it to me.
He said it to the air, to his aide, to the morning, the way you say a thing out loud to make it real.
“That’s the one.”
His name was Anton Varga.
In the spring of 2012, he had been a lieutenant in the partner company at our outpost. Twenty-five years old, the kind of young officer who is all promise and no scar tissue yet.
On the morning it was overrun, he had been badly injured. I had tied off what needed tying, pressed my hands where they needed to go, and dragged him to the collection point. Then I carried him when there was no one left to help carry the last stretch down to where the aircraft could reach us.
I had not known if he lived.
We had been separated at the evacuation, his people and mine, and in the way of those things, I had never found out. I had assumed, the way you assume to protect yourself, that a wound like that in a place like that meant he had not made it.
I had folded him into the general grief of the morning and not let myself look at him too closely.
He had made it.
He had not just made it.
He had gone home and healed and stayed in his army and risen through it.
And he was standing in front of me now as one of the most senior officers his country had.
He had asked, as the single personal condition of a visit to the most powerful military command in the region, to meet the American officer who had carried him off a mountain.
He had given them my name.
They had put it on a manifest.
A colonel with a protocol badge had read it and could not imagine that it belonged to the woman he had sent to wait with the cars.
Varga crossed the few steps between us.
He reached out and took me by both shoulders just for a moment, and looked at my face the way you look at a face you have carried in your memory for fourteen years, to make sure it is the real one and not the remembered one.
Then he stepped back and came to attention.
This general, in front of his own delegation, in a foreign command, raised his hand and rendered me a slow, deliberate salute.
His eyes were wet and steady on mine.
“Captain Sloan,” he said.
He used the rank I had held that morning, not the one I held now, and I understood why.
It undid me a little.
“You carried me off that mountain. I have wanted to stand in front of you and say it for fourteen years.”
I became aware, the way you become aware of weather, of everything else happening around the edges of that salute.
The second vehicle had opened, and the four-star commander of the entire command, General Raymond Sterns, was crossing toward us with the long, unhurried stride of a man who runs a war and does not need to hurry for anyone.
His face was doing something complicated as he took in the scene.
His foreign guest was saluting a woman in civilian clothes holding a parking wand at the curb.
Behind me, from the direction of the doors, I could hear fast footsteps, and I knew without turning that it was Colonel Maddox arriving at the half-run of a man who had felt the floor drop out of his morning and did not yet know why.
I returned Varga’s salute.
My hand was steady.
Fourteen years of practice at being steady, and it finally had something worth being steady for.
I dropped my hand and found my voice. The first thing I said to him, in the few words of his language I still had, was the thing I had said to him in the dark fourteen years before.
I told him to stay with me.
It came out of me without a decision.
His face broke and reformed. He laughed a wet, broken laugh and answered me in English.
“I stayed,” he said. “I stayed the whole way.”
General Sterns reached us then.
He was a big man with a quiet voice, the kind of senior officer who has learned that the more power you have, the less of it you need to show.
He looked at me. He looked at the clipboard and the wand in my hands. He looked at his foreign guest standing at attention in front of me.
He was too good an officer not to have already assembled the whole picture from those three facts.
When he spoke, he did not speak to me, and he did not speak loudly.
He spoke to a point over my shoulder, to the colonel I could now feel arriving behind me, breathing hard.
May you like
“Colonel Maddox,” Sterns said in a voice with no edge on it at all, which was worse than any edge, “this is the officer the deputy chief of defense flew across the world to meet. The one his entire visit was conditioned on. Would you like to tell me why she is standing in my parking lot holding a parking wand?”
I turned then.
