Firepower, John Cutter [best summer reads .txt] 📗

face that were creasing toward sadness now. Her blue eyes had sparkled in photos; now they seemed flat with pain. She glanced at the AR-15 and he could see her decide not to ask about it yet.

She smiled ruefully at Vince. “I had no idea you were so… How tall are you?”

“Six-five.”

“Lord, I thought my Chris was tall…” Her lips buckled and she turned away. “Come on. Have a drink and tell me all about it…”

She led the way into the cabin. It was three rooms, one story, rough-cut lacquered pine with interlocking corners. Judging by wear and tear, Vince guessed it had been built in the 1960s. Two battery-powered lanterns hung in the main room and a small wood fire burned in the stone hearth. A dusty elkhorn rack was poised over the fireplace. There was an old settee, one leg replaced by a chunk of firewood, across from a sofa, with a deeply worn hook rug between.

“Take the sofa, good for the big guys,” she said, going to a little portable liquor cabinet that stood on wheels against the log wall.

Vince took off his pack, leaned it with the rifle against the wall, and sat back on the old faded-red sofa, feeling awkward. He glanced at the backpack and thought about what was in it. She didn’t know about that.

“How about a whiskey and soda, Vincent? Got some Jameson here.”

“That’ll be fine.”

“There’s no electricity but I still have some ice that hasn’t melted… Got a bag from the Quickie store down the road…” Her voice quavered a little. She seemed to be talking just to keep from crying. “The water’s on, though; we have a tank-full. Not that much, but you can take a shower, get some cooking water, use the toilet. There’s a septic tank. I put some food in the cooler — it’s in the bedroom. Place doesn’t have a kitchen to speak of, just a shed attached to the back with a sink. But you’ll find a propane camp stove out there, pans, dishes, a coffee pot… and two pounds of coffee.”

“It’s… good of you to let me stay here for a few days,” he said. “Chris always said we’d come out here and…” He winced. Probably not the right time to bring up what Chris would never again do. “…and do some fishing.”

She brought him the drink, a tumbler with crushed ice, whiskey, a splash of soda, then sank down on the settee. She took a sip from her tumbler and said, “You can still do that, on your own. Fishing’s at Chickasaw Creek, down the trail southwest. Dead Springs creek here, when it’s running, empties into it. The spring runs when it’s been raining, mostly… Supposedly called Dead Springs because most every time the hunters came here for a drink it was dry… There’s been a couple days’ rain, so it’s got some ditchwater in it…

They were silent for a minute. It seemed much longer than a minute. She gazed at the fire.

Vince could see unshed tears glistening in her eyes. She’d asked to meet him in person because he’d been with Chris when he’d died. “Rose — you still want to know how it happened? What happened to Chris? I mean — in more detail than ‘a missile impact’?”

She looked at him. Firelight played on the left side of her face in the semi-lit room. “Yes. Please.”

He nodded. He’d been hoping to spare her the hard fact that Chris had not died instantly. “We were in the Yucatan, in the jungle, that much you know. Just about twenty clicks from the border with Guatemala.”

“What was that company called? He told me, and I even wrote to them once, but I seem to be blocking it…”

“Pro-Active Security International. PASI.”

Rose shook her head sadly. “Not even the US military. To die working for people like that…”

Vince nodded. “I know what you mean. I’ll just say — we were genuinely fighting bad guys. Enemies of America. The drug cartels. We had some connections to the DEA and Mexican State Security. We were subcontractors but…” He didn’t want to go into it any farther. The campaign against the Yucatan cocaine and meth manufacturing centers had seemed to make sense to him. But it went sideways. Chris died because of PASI admin’s sloppy intel and bad decisions. Then Vince heard about Tac Two’s mission. Innocent people were killed. An entire family. Because PASI didn’t care about the non-combatants. When Vince found out, he resigned from PASI. The PASI CFO said he was in violation of contract and refused to pay him the second 100k they owed him. But Vince didn’t care. The job had already gone sour for him when Chris was killed. Now they were letting their men cut down innocent bystanders. He didn’t want another cent from them.

Chris Destry and he were tight. Chris was a buddy who’d fought at Vince’s side for three years in northern Afghanistan and two years in Delta Force.

He took a deep breath and went on. “We were about a quarter klick south of the factory and they must’ve gotten some sense of our heli insert — they sent out a drone to locate us. We spotted the drone watching us and I told PASI on the sat-link that we were burned, we should cancel the action. They insisted that the factory had no strong defenses and we had to go on. I was only in nominal command — mercenaries aren’t bound by military law — so I asked the other men what they wanted to do. Every man wanted to go in, including Chris. There would be a big bonus if we took this dope factory down. So… I split the men into two teams, sent them at the factory in a double flank… but then the gunship came. They had their own second-hand Blackhawk — something we