First Team

1

Corrine felt the tears starting to come even before the monsignor approached the lectern at the side of the altar. Like many of those crowded into the large church, the monsignor had known the Conners family for decades, and when he talked of the sergeant, still remembered him as a young man. The priest’s words weren’t elegant, but they came from the heart; he spoke of sacrifice and duty, and he illustrated those qualities with things he had seen Conners do himself. Even Van Buren, sitting next to Corrine, felt tears forming in his eyes.

As Rankin and Ferguson got up to join Conners’s relatives and friends bearing their comrade from the church, Corrine noticed that Ferguson had an odd smile on his face. She thought to herself that he was a cold creature, a man so out of touch with his emotions that he couldn’t cry. His eyes met hers. She shook her head; he smiled and seemed to wink at her.

Rankin had found a real trumpeter to play taps at the cemetery, but there was a surprise waiting next to the tarped pile of dirt when they reached the graveyard — a bagpiper, who played two songs, one a dirge, the other closer to a jig. And then one by one the mourners went to the grave, tossing their flowers.

Ferguson was the last to go to the grave. He knelt and slipped a bottle from his pocket.

“For you, Dad,” he said, sliding the whiskey gently down to lie at Conners’s head. He looked back as he walked away, part of him truly expecting that Conners would pull a real-life Finnegan and rise from the grave.

In the car, Corrine took out her sat phone and checked for messages. One had come from Corrigan — the Team was needed for a briefing ASAP. The war against terror knew no days off.

“My car’s at the airport,” she told Rankin and Guns. “I can drive you over.”

“Sounds good,” said Rankin. Van Buren had already offered him a lift, but he preferred riding with her.

“Hey, what about Ferg?” said Guns.

“What about him?” said Rankin. “He was with one of the cousins. They gave him a lift.”

“He know where we’re going?” asked Guns.

“Call him,” Corrine said.

Rankin made a face, but took out his phone. Ferg’s voice mail answered, and he left the message.

An hour after he left the cemetery, Ferguson strode into the bar that Conners had told him about while they were on their mission in Chechnya. Its wood-lined walls were thick with the accumulation of nearly a century’s worth of tobacco smoke, and the polished surface of the bar had heard a million tales of glory and misery. It was only one o’clock in the afternoon, but the place already had a decent crowd. There was a lively buzz in the air, the sort of sound that made Ferg glad his hearing had come back.

“Two shots whiskey, neat, both of ‘em,” Ferg said, pulling his wallet. “Beer chasers — make it Guinny,” he said, pointing at the Guinness tap.

As the bartender poured the drinks, Ferguson took a tape out of his pocket.

“I wonder if you’d play this for a friend of mine,” Ferg told him.

The bartender took the tape and looked at it quizzically. He was an older man, and he’d heard much stranger requests than this, so he shrugged and went over to the tape deck, putting in.

Liam Clancy’s voice filled the bar, off an old album Ferguson’s sister had tracked down for him. Ferg raised his shot glass and turned to the room, adding his own to Clancy’s as he came to the final verse of “Parting Glass”:

As the song faded, Ferguson tossed the whiskey down his throat and turned back to the bar. Standing, he reached into his pocket and pulled out a thick wad of hundred-dollar bills, withdrawn from his personal account that morning. He spread them out on the bar near the untouched shot glass.

“No one pays for their own drink today,” he said. “All for the honor of Sergeant Hugh Conners, a braver man you’ll never see.”

And then he took a last sip from his beer, leaving the glass half-full as he walked out into the cold New Jersey afternoon, alone.