The Summer House

Chapter 10

In his cell at the Ralston town jail, Staff Sergeant Caleb Jefferson is awake, sitting up against the concrete wall, legs stretched out, listening to one of his squad mates snore. It sounds like Specialist Ruiz, originally from El Paso and a good man to have at your side in a foxhole. Ruiz is a great shot and a great scrounger on post, and he has the amazing ability to fall asleep at any place or time, whether in a cold, ice-crusted trench high up in the mountains or in an FOB shelter with mortar rounds dropping in.

A groan and Corporal Barnes seems to come awake. He whispers, “Ah, crap, not again, Ruiz. Hey, Ruiz, knock it off.” The snoring increases, and Barnes kicks the barred door to his cell, making it rattle. “Ruiz, wake up! Or roll over! Christ...”

Jefferson keeps an eye on the situation. The jail here consists of six cells, built back when black-and-white television was still the rage. Old-fashioned bars and locks, concrete beds with thin foam mattresses, single wool blankets, foam pillows with a case thin enough to see through. Stainless-steel commodes and sinks. His orange uniform is starched, smelling of detergent.

“Sergeant, you awake over there?” Barnes asks.

“I am.”

Another voice comes out of the darkness. “Me too. Jesus, when Ruiz starts sawing wood...”

The fourth and youngest member of his squad, Specialist Vinny Tyler, is from Idaho. Skinny but, by God, can that kid hump the gear when need be, especially climbing those rock escarpments that seemed to rise klick after klick, right up into the clouds.

A cough and a hack. Ruiz — originally from personnel recovery — snorts and wakes up. His cell is across the corridor from the other three. “Hey, what’s going on?” he says. “What did I miss?”

Barnes says, “Nothing much. Miss Sullivan County trotted through here in a see-through nightie, handing out coffee and doughnuts.”

Ruiz yawns loudly. “Fine by me. I hate doughnuts.”

Jefferson smiles as there’s low laughter from his men, and he thinks, Hey, cops out there surveilling us with hidden cameras, try to figure that mood out. It’s a good fire team, handpicked by him, one of the best, roughest, and finest in the company. He knows their strengths, their weaknesses, and, most important — right now — their family status. None are married, none have kids, and that’s a good thing not to have in the back of one’s mind when chasing the Taliban through ravines.

Or facing serious trouble stateside.

Save for him. His wife died two years back from ovarian cancer, and her daughter — his stepdaughter, Carol — is under the care of an aunt in Savannah and is mending at a treatment center in Hilton Head.

His team is lean and mean, just the way he wants it.

Tyler calls out, “Staff Sergeant Jefferson?”

“Right here,” he says.

“Everything... everything’s gonna be fine, right? You’re sure, right?”

Jefferson thinks of that old house with the filth inside and the yells and shouts, and he knows Tyler is scared. It’s one thing to fly hot into an LZ or to take fire from a tree line or to make a dynamic entry into some rock-and-dirt farmhouse over there in Afghanistan.

But this is here, this is CONUS, this is the blessed safety zone.

“Everything is going to be fine,” he says. “Don’t you worry none.”

Ruiz says, “Hey, Specialist?”

Tyler says, “Yeah, Ruiz, what is it?”

Ruiz swears in Spanish. “You second-guess the sergeant one more time, the first chance I get, I break your freakin’ nose.”