War God in Disguise

Chapter 3

The mountain had no name on any map Jack was ever shown.

Command called it Ridge Seven. The men under him, in the dark humor soldiers reserve for the places most likely to kill them, called it 'the anvil', because that was what the wind did up there — hammered you flat against gray rock for six hours a day and dared you to still be standing by nightfall. Even now, Jack could still feel that wind if he let himself, a phantom cold that had nothing to do with the mildewed stairwell of the Ashford Residences and everything to do with a version of himself he'd buried on purpose.

He didn't let himself feel it often. Tonight, alone in the security office with the monitors throwing gray light across an empty desk, he let himself feel it for exactly as long as it took to finish a cup of instant coffee gone lukewarm.

Almost to the week, though he'd long since stopped counting.

'Commander William West had a laugh that carried across a ridge line — too loud for a man in his position, the kind of laugh that should have gotten him killed a dozen times over by giving away a position, except that he was good enough to earn the right to be careless about it. He was the only officer Jack had ever served under who treated a chain of command like a suggestion rather than a wall, who ate last and slept least and somehow still had breath left over to needle his own second-in-command about the state of his boots.'

'West hadn't worn a uniform full-time in over a decade by then. He'd built West Industries up from a single government contract into an empire, and could have spent the rest of his life behind a desk with no one thinking less of him for it — except that the reserve unit which kept a quiet retainer on men like him only called when the job was too sensitive for anyone currently in uniform, and West never once said no, no matter how many years it had been since he'd needed to remember how.'

'"You polish those things like you're expecting an inspection from God himself," William said, that last morning, watching Jack work a rag over leather that had already seen four years of mountains. "God doesn't care about your boots, Jack. God cares whether you come home."'

'"With respect, sir, you say that every morning, and every morning we're further from home."'

'William laughed — that laugh, the one that carried — and clapped a hand on Jack's shoulder hard enough to sting. "That's what makes it true every morning. Ask me again tomorrow."'

'There was no tomorrow. There was an ambush at 0940, three positions collapsing into one crossfire that should have been impossible to survive, and there was Jack dragging William fifty meters over broken ground with two rounds in the man's chest, screaming for a medevac that arrived four minutes too late to matter.'

'William didn't waste his last four minutes on pain, though there must have been plenty of it. He spent them on one thing.'

"'My daughter," he said, blood in his teeth, hand fisted so tight in Jack's collar it left bruises that lasted a week. "Grace West. She's twenty-two. She thinks the company runs itself. She thinks the world is fair because nobody's ever shown her otherwise." A cough that brought more blood than words. "She doesn't know how to be careful. Watch her for me. Not as a soldier. Not as — " another cough, worse " — not as anyone she'd recognize. Just watch her. Promise me, Jack."'

'"I promise."'

'"Nobody can know it's you. Not her. Not command. If they know War God is watching over William's daughter, they'll use her to get to you, or use you to get to her, and either way she ends up a chess piece in someone else's war." His grip loosened. Not from calm — from the last of his strength leaving his hand. "You disappear. You become nobody. That's the only way she stays safe from what we are."'

'"I understand."'

'"Say it back to me."'

'"I become nobody. I watch her. Nobody knows it's me."'

'William's eyes had already started to lose focus by the time he managed the ghost of his old laugh, one last time, quiet now instead of carrying across a ridge. "Good man," he said. "Good man, Jack."'

'He died forty seconds later, and Jack held the position alone for eleven more minutes until backup arrived, and told no one — not that day, not in the after-action report, not ever — what the last order he'd received actually was.'

Somewhere on the monitor bank, a car Jack didn't recognize idled at the end of the block for the second time in an hour, headlights off. He noted it the way he noted everything now, filed it, didn't let it become anything yet. Years of watching had taught him that most things that circled a building at midnight meant nothing. The ones that meant something never circled twice by accident.

The official record said Commander William West died a hero, which was true, and that his second-in-command, Colonel Jack Reed — the man three separate governments had quietly started calling 'War God' after Ridge Seven and the eighteen months of increasingly impossible operations that followed it — had gone on to a distinguished career before an honorable discharge for medical reasons.

That part wasn't true. There was nothing medically wrong with Jack that a normal life wouldn't eventually cure, and even that was optimistic.