Damage Control

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

As they climbed into the Pathfinder and closed the doors, Jonathan inventoried their situation. They had plenty of water and gasoline, adequate food, and roughly eight hundred rounds of ammunition between them, counting all the weapons. Throw in the supply of GPCs-general purpose charges, blocks of C-4 with det cord tails that were good for so many things-a couple of claymores and assorted other toys, and they should be able to sustain themselves in an all-out firefight for at least a few minutes.

With the engine started, Boxers fitted a pair of NVGs-night vision goggles-over his eyes, but Jonathan stopped him. “Let’s save those for the desert,” he said. “Or for an emergency. I don’t want to run out of juice. Remember, we don’t have any spares.”

He could tell that Boxers wanted to argue-ownership of the night was an operator’s leading advantage over the bad guys-but the facts were the facts. The Big Guy grudgingly turned on the headlights and headed down the road they’d marked on the GPS.

Boxers announced, “Next stop: The middle of friggin’ nowhere.”

Tristan settled into the corner where the seat met the back door, and tried to find a comfortable position among the cargo. The smell of gasoline from the jerricans on deck behind him was slightly nauseating, but he hoped that he’d stop noticing it after a while. He closed his eyes and tried to imagine a better place.

Instead of a better place, though, he thought about home. He wondered if his mom had told the family that he’d been kidnapped. Isolde, his older sister, would certainly be worried, but twelve-year-old Siegfried probably wouldn’t understand. What responsible parent would saddle his kids with such ridiculous names? It was his dad’s inside joke to the world. A fourth-generation American, his father, Richard Wagner, had thought it would be fun to name the kids after operas written by the nineteenth-century composer of the same name yet different pronunciation.

Tristan had never wanted to come on this stupid trip in the first place. In fact, he’d already arranged a cool job as a ticket taker at the local Cineplex when Pastor Mitchell announced this missionary opportunity. She was always announcing that sort of thing, so Tristan hadn’t paid much attention at the time. When they got home from services, though, his mom was way spun up by the opportunity to do the Lord’s work for the poor people of Mexico.

“If it’s so important,” Tristan had argued at the time, “why don’t you go? I’ll stay home and take care of Ziggy.” See what happens when you start with a name like Siegfried? It becomes an even stupider name like Ziggy.

His mom hadn’t taken well to the backtalk. Once she finished bitching about his attitude, she dialed in to the need for him to expand the extracurricular chapter of his high school résumé. How else, she asked, could he expect to get into the Ivy League?

He hadn’t yet broken it to her that he had no interest in working that hard for a piece of paper when nearly identical pieces of paper could be obtained from Buttscratch University in Bumfuck, Idaho. All things in time.

And that night wasn’t the time. Thinking back on it, he wasn’t sure he’d ever actually said yes; but he had never said no either, so voilà. A living nightmare.

He wondered if Mom’s excitement at sending him to Mexico wasn’t tied to just getting rid of him for a while. He’d become something of a pain in the ass in the past few years-ever since Dad’s cancer-but from where he sat, pains in the ass were in the eyes of the beholder. As Mom got more and more enraptured by God (Thank you very much for taking my mother away, Pastor Mitchell), she’d made it her mission to keep Tristan from having any fun.

And come on, let’s be honest. Tristan wasn’t a druggie and he wasn’t a boozer. He’d never even gotten a stern lecture from the principal, for God’s sake. Look up “good kid” in the dictionary. You’ll find Tristan’s picture.

But that wasn’t enough. Rachel Wagner-Mom-had taken it upon herself to monitor his email and the books he read. In the case of the latter, a single bad word rendered a book the work of the devil and it was therefore banned from the house. Hell was first and foremost a bad word, by the way, not a place of eternal damnation. Oops, damnation was a bad word, too. See how ridiculous this shit got?

As for his emails, Mom expected him to not use it. No shit. That was her solution. His time would be far better spent reading the Bible and surrounding himself with the wonders of the Lord’s love. Tristan didn’t even know what that meant.

Isolde, meanwhile, knew a losing battle when she saw it, and decided to stay on the sidelines. Just do what Mom says. Helluva battle cry, Sis. And brave, too, being fifteen miles away with her live-in boyfriend.

Tristan had actually tried to live with all the restrictions for a while, but it didn’t take long for him to start identifying with Carrie White from the Stephen King book. Having already been born into Ichabod Crane’s body, and carrying the name of some German knight, he didn’t need any other fictional metaphors in his life, thank you very much.

So he started to push back. Hard. In so doing, he discovered that Mom’s parenting weaponry was pretty much limited to guilt speeches and crying jags. As a teenager, you can adapt to those pretty quickly, but parents adapt, too. She started invoking Dad’s memory-specifically, how disappointed he must be in his son.

So Tristan adapted again. The secret to success, it turned out, was simply to hide everything and lie like a rug. It works, he figured out, because deep down inside, she didn’t want to know the truth. As long as he had the decency to pretend, she would never look past the thin outer crust that his private life had become.

Isolde had moved out by the time the craziness started, so she was totally disengaged, but Tristan worried about Ziggy. He wasn’t more than a few years past Santa Claus, so he took a lot of Mom’s bullshit as gospel-literally-and it was already beginning to get him beaten up in school. Tristan did what he could to serve as a sanity buffer, but next year he had an appointment with Buttscratch University, and when that train pulled into the station, there was no power on earth that would keep him from climbing aboard.

As the time for this trip had approached, he’d talked himself into believing that maybe it would be a good time. He did, in fact, spend too much time on his computer, whether with surreptitious emails or games-truly the devil’s work-so he’d suspended disbelief just enough to give it a try.

There were supposed to be more people than this on the trip back then. Bill Georgen was supposed to be here, and so was Bobby Cantrell. Neither were what he’d call good friends, but they were decent enough, and they’d shared a few laughs over the years. A week before the trip, though, both of them dropped out, leaving him alone with two jocks, a diva, and a cheerleader, all of whom seemed far more attached to the party potential than the doing of God’s work on Earth.

When Tristan had found out about the change in the cast, he’d considered petitioning his mom for a reprieve, but abandoned the thought before even trying it.

It wasn’t a battle worth fighting.

So here he was, the lone survivor, sitting among guns and explosives and gasoline, in the company of people whose primary talent seemed to be killing people. With his eyes closed, he could see the carnage all over again, the white flashes of bone against the crimson background of extruded tissue. If he allowed himself, he could even smell the blood. Who even knew that blood had a smell?

“You okay back there, kid?” the driver asked. Big Guy.

“Tristan. Not kid. Tristan. And no, not especially. To be really honest, I’m scared shitless.”

“Good,” Scorpion said.

“Excuse me?”

He turned in his seat to look back at him. “The thickest streams of bullshit flow from terrified people who claim not to be scared.”

“Does that mean that you’re scared, too?”

Scorpion thought about it before answering. “Scared’s not the right word,” he said.

“Frightened?” Tristan helped. “Terrified? Paralyzed with fear?”

Scorpion laughed. It was a hearty, happy sound that showed genuine amusement. “None of the above,” he said. “Big Guy and I have been doing this stuff for a long time. It’s more like that feeling you get before you walk out on stage to give a speech. Anticipation, I guess.”

Tristan smiled. “You must give some wild speeches, dude. Seriously, what do you think our chances are?”

“Chances are of what?”

“Getting home.”

The humor drained from Scorpion’s expression. “Remember that you asked,” he said. “And that I promised not to lie to you.”

Tristan felt the wash of dread.

“None of this is going to be easy,” Scorpion went on. “People want us dead, apparently in a bad way. If they want it badly enough, they’ll put bounties out on us, dangling cash for the person who kills us, or at least turns us in.”

“Holy shit,” Tristan breathed.

“While we’ve got a thousand miles to travel through some pretty hostile terrain. Then, when we finally get to where we’re going, it looks like we’re going to have to be smuggled out of the country.”

Boxers growled, “Christ, Scorpion. You’re depressing me.”

“Well, those are just the risks, Big Guy. Now, on the positive side-”

“There’s a positive side?” Tristan interrupted.

“There’s always a positive side,” Scorpion said. “On the positive side, these are by no means the darkest odds I’ve ever faced, and I’m still here. Plus, I have a team of colleagues back home who are moving heaven and earth to help us work out the details.”

“Mother Hen?” Tristan asked.

“And others,” Scorpion confirmed. “You eavesdrop well. You’ll make a good intel officer one day.”

Tristan assumed that to mean intelligence officer, and if that was a job that involved shit like this, he wasn’t interested.

“Plus,” Scorpion said, “be honest with yourself. I know you’ve seen a lot of trauma and you’ve lost friends, and I don’t mean to take anything away from that. You’ll have a whole lifetime to grieve. But ask yourself this: Aren’t you living pretty intensely right now? I mean, if you take away the fear and the loss and the pain, can you think of any time in your life that has felt like a bigger adventure?”