Chapter Nine
Harry found it easy to maintain his military bearing.
Standing in front of the colonel’s desk, sustaining a much more rigorous form of attention than he had in a very long time, Harry carefully kept his eyes fixed on the gray bulkhead six inches above Murphy’s head. They were alone in Murphy’s small—and rarely used—personal office. The thin door panel maintained the fiction of privacy, but Harry was pretty sure the colonel’s preceding dissertation on “Mister Tapper’s” historical, current, and future shortcomings had been perfectly audible across the station. Certainly, the two Lost Soldiers waiting in the outer office had heard everything. Then again, Bruce Lee and Murphy’s bean counter and hatchet man Makarov had heard worse.
Probably.
Murphy paused his diatribe and leaned back in his chair. The silver eagle of his rank—a competent local knockoff—shone from each collar point, and the subdued embroidery of a Combat Infantryman Badge and his name tape showed above opposite blouse pockets, partially obscured by the folded arms that Murphy seemed to periodically tense and relax. The multiple monitors that lined one edge of the desktop had all been locked, displaying only station time.
He’s only been at this ten minutes? Feels like more.
“Tapper, you aren’t just the sorriest excuse for an officer I’ve the misfortune to have assigned to this mission, you have evolved into the sorriest example of a soldier we’ve awakened.” Murphy began again, delivering his points with the cadence normally associated with sustained, aimed rifle fire. “Self-control? None. Respect for command authority? None. Awareness of the tenuous quality of our alliance? None. Childish, absolute self-absorption and self-pity? Total.”
Harry’s boss hadn’t really raised his voice once. Once he’d elicited the handful of answers to the initial yes or no questions used to confirm the particulars of the disastrous poker game tableau, he’d made Harry’s position clear.
“Tapper, until I tell you different, I will send, and you will remain in receive mode only!”
His clear, penetrating delivery had therefore been completely one-sided and, so far, without repetition.
“Do you think you’re irreplaceable? Hardly. Do you believe your performance and accomplishments somehow exempt you from the same rules that govern the rest of our team? Of course you do. Have you considered that perhaps, just maybe, the reason you were originally left in cryogenic suspension is something you should work on since we are all living on a razor’s edge margin of survival?”
Harry stood mute.
“I would like to hear your response at this time, Tapper,” Murphy said precisely, impatiently tapping one boot on the deck. “Your response might be all that stands between you and the void, if our hosts get their way.”
“He drew first,” Harry stated flatly. “And I didn’t even mark him, let alone kill him. He needed to be reminded that his rank doesn’t protect him from bad decisions. That the little people matter, that they can’t be used and discarded.”
“You think I don’t know that, Tapper?” Murphy asked, momentarily raising his voice. “Korelon, the asshole with a direct link to the RockHounds’ Legate, isn’t the question. What’s on the table is your poor—no, your utter lack of good—judgment as demonstrated by your threatening one of our allies. Small table stakes, you said. Build stronger relationships, you said. Somehow you left out the drug smuggling and knife fighting.”
“Saying I didn’t mean for it to happen would be meaningless, sir,” Harry said, gaze still fixed above Murphy’s head.
“The reason I was there, Major, is that I was coming to alert officers and key personnel for a situation update,” Murphy said, clearly trying to jam his temper into the background. “I knew I’d find you at the game, and I was prepared to overlook minor irregularities in the interest of unit morale. However, your little display tore that strategy all to hell. So tell me: What. Is. Going. On?”
“Sir, I’m fully mission capable to return to the surface,” Harry replied.
“I came to rely on you a very great deal and trusted you implicitly. But since your return, you’ve been a borderline insubordination case. Spill, Harry.”
The silence stretched a bit.
“C’mon, Harry, it’s me.”
It stretched a bit further and then Harry took the plunge.
“When you recruited me for the first crazy op, I wasn’t in love with the idea,” he said. “In the end, it wasn’t your appeal to SEAL pride that put me in motion, Murph. It was the realization that I had literally nothing left to lose. You pointed it out, and you were right: everything and everyone I loved was dead. But after the op, that wasn’t true anymore.”
Harry lowered his gaze to return Murphy’s regard evenly. Neither man commented on Harry’s familiarity.
“I was in love,” Harry said. “Crazy, out of nowhere love, forged on the ragged edge of insanity, considering what we were doing, but real love, nonetheless. I also came to appreciate Stella’s clan and their culture. And then, after giving the clans just enough rope to hang themselves by fighting and driving the satraps out of their own towns, we left. There’s no guarantee we’ll be back, either. Now, I have something to lose again, and I have to tell you, I’m more than a bit protective of it.”
“I figured that was it, Harry.” Murphy sighed, rubbing one hand across his face. “You aren’t the only one this happened to. It’s a routine risk when troops integrate tightly with indigenous personnel. But we aren’t the same as the indigs, Harry, and they aren’t the same as us.”
“They’re good enough to fight for us, though, aren’t they?” Harry snapped. “Good enough to die for us?”
“Yes, they are,” Murphy said, sitting straighter. “And you helped them get even better, specifically for that purpose. If you found a scrap of love or real affection while you were down there, that puts you ahead of the other ninety-five percent of us. Be thankful and get back on mission.”
“My family is on R’Bak, Colonel,” Harry said, dropping some iron into the words. “I walked away from my first family, including my kids, in order to advance some damn op that a long-dead politician thought was worth American lives. And what did our country get in trade? What difference did it make? Poke your finger in a glass of water, pull it out and wait for the water to calm. Take a good look at the water glass; that’s how much difference we made in Somalia. And if my catch-up reading of history serves, in every American war since. Why would I ever sacrifice anything for that again, sir?”
Maybe that was a bit much.
No! Not even close to enough!
Harry returned to the position of attention.
“You’re a member of a military outfit, Tapper,” Murphy said, matching Harry’s tone. “You go where you’re told, support our allies as ordered, and destroy our enemies as required. You do not have the luxury of picking your battles—especially out here. None of us do. Period. Dot.”
“I just want to get back to the surface,” Harry replied, flicking his eyes down to meet his boss’s flat gaze. “Send me back to what I’m good at. A long-term liaison slot on the surface makes sense. You could let me keep what I’ve regained, and I can make sure there’s a bolt hole for all of us, if you need it. Win-win all around.”
“We’re a small team, Tapper,” Murphy answered firmly. “We’ve taken casualties. I’ve had to spread the rest around to meet as many commitments to our hosts as possible. We aren’t close to being finished yet. You were crucial to building our first alliance on the surface. You did good work seizing the ground vehicles, and you did great work following up during the other actions on the surface. You’re a natural leader, respected by everyone who works alongside you. The convoy ambushes were spectacular. The R’Baku like you; they even admit to admiring you. The Sarmatchani think you’re the hottest thing going save for the Searing. But you are a part of this team, and I need you to focus on that and nothing else!”
“Let me bottom line my position for you, Colonel,” Harry said. “I know what the odds are, and I’m shocked we haven’t lost more people. Sooner or later, my number will be up. And I’m not leaving another orphan or widow behind. Stella and our infant son mean more to me than the Dornaani or the SpinDogs. Or the rest of humanity! I laid everything on the line for an abstraction once already. We both know it cost me everything.”
Harry tried to slow his respiration, tried to calm his pulse. He failed.
“What I don’t get, sir, is why you’re surprised I’m not excited about doing it again,” he choked out.
“What the hell happened to you, Harry?” Murphy asked wonderingly. “You know I can’t ignore direct defiance.”
“This entire situation is crazy, sir,” Harry answered as honestly as he could, if not as humbly. “It’s driving me mad, and I’m only a symptom. All of us are screwed up in one way or another. Putting us in combat hasn’t welded us into a proper team, and it hasn’t healed the losses we took. In the field, we focus on the op and the enemy—there are things to absorb our attention. There are people to fight, someone tangible between us and our objective. But as soon as we’re out of the field, we have too much time to think, and we think about Earth. Which you would understand if you spent more time on the sharp end and le…”
Harry stopped before completing the damning statement.
First time for everything.
The silence stretched uncomfortably.
Murphy put his hands down on the armrests of his chair and slowly, deliberately, smoothly stood. He was more lightly built than Harry, but everybody was. What he did have was sheer force of personality, like a glacier implacably pushing away every obstacle in its path.
Harry very carefully looked past his commanding officer’s face, unwilling to meet Murphy’s eyes.
“Go on,” Murphy said. The boss’s voice had become dangerously soft. “Finish what you were saying. If I spent less time where, exactly?”
Keep your mouth shut. First rule about being in a hole is to stop digging.
One menacing minute passed. A whole minute. Then another.
Murphy leaned on the desk, bracing himself with his knuckles.
“The better part of valor, eh?” he asked curtly, looking Harry up and down before calling out, “Major Lee.”
The door slid open so quickly that Harry knew Lee must have had one hand on the manual latch.
“Major Tapper, you’re confined to quarters,” Murphy said briskly as he took his seat. “The Hounds have revoked your tribal kinsman’s station visa and he is, as we speak, being repatriated to the surface. In light of that, I am certain that any attempt to resubmit your request to allow your dependents to join you on-station will be denied and so is an exercise in futility. If you break the habitat regulations regarding weapons or cause further disruptions, to include gambling, you will be remanded to RockHound custody under our Status of Forces agreement with the host nation. No further discussion will be entertained. Major Lee will escort you out. Dismissed.”
Harry gaped, disbelieving.
He felt Lee tug on his elbow. “Let’s go, Harry.”