Ghost Watch

Ghost Watch by David Rollins Read Free Book Online Page A

Book: Ghost Watch by David Rollins Read Free Book Online
Authors: David Rollins
Tags: Fiction, Suspense, Thrillers
turned around and ran, which was a relief. Killing kids, even ones that would happily plant me in the ground, was not something I wanted to have to answer to myself for.
    I wondered what had spooked them.
    With still no sign of the choppers, I followed through with my plan, hopped on the pushbike I had seen beside Meyers and pedaled back to the base.

 
Photograph

 
    ‘W e sure as shit don’t need this kind of crap.’ Lieutenant Colonel Charles Mertins tossed a copy of the New York Times on the desk in front of me. ‘You want to explain what got into you here?’
    Mertins’s nose was white with anger. It was a big nose and didn’t go with the shape of his long, thin head, or the size of his ears, which reminded me of Dumbo’s. In fact, I wondered if Mertins had been assembled from spare parts. My commander wasn’t my kind of guy, or anyone else’s as far as I knew. A guardsman from Montana, he’d left the OSI in the mid-nineties and joined the Helena PD. He was a detail hound, not very popular, and within a year they’d packed him off to Siberia – running the evidence lockup in the basement of a secondary building at the bottom of a long stairwell. His unit’s call-up to Afghanistan was like giving him parole.
    ‘I wouldn’t know, sir,’ I said.
    ‘You don’t know? That’s not good enough, Cooper. You usually go out on a mission looking like this?’
    ‘No, sir,’ I said. The photo was printed in full color beneath the headline ‘Harrowing escape in Afghanistan – Hero up for Air Force Cross’. I was familiar with the picture, of course, as was everyone here at Camp Eggers. Fallon had snapped it with his iPhone when I rode into camp on the pushbike. That it had reached the media was news to me. Even more surprising was this business about the decoration. Aside from the fact that I was being considered for it, the consideration for a thing like that was supposed to be a closely held secret. Someone must have leaked it.
    I took another glance at the photo. The powdered masonry dust gave my head the color of bone. The overhead position of the sun caused black shadows to gather in my eye sockets. I looked like a skull, an extra macabre touch being the crimson stripes of Stefanovic’s blood that he’d finger-painted down across my mouth. I recalled the terror on the faces of those Afghan kids when they looked up and got a load of me. Thank God the fight had gone right out of them – I owed Allah one for that.
    ‘US Forces don’t slip into costume when they’re out on patrol, goddamn it,’ he said.
    ‘No, sir.’
    ‘Cooper, shit like this makes us look like cowboys – on top of the fact you lost the principal and Specialist Rogerson. Al-Eqbal might have been a jackass, but he was an elected jackass. Democracy’s fragile here. Losing him to the Taliban chalks up major points on their scoreboard. To the local populace we look weak as camel spit.’
    I could have added that al-Eqbal was an elected crook who got even more crooked when he believed he was beyond reach, largely because US Forces rode shotgun on his wagon. But the flames were doing fine by themselves; I didn’t need to throw gasoline on them.
    Mertins stood and walked to a vase of wildflowers on top of a cupboard. He topped up the vase with water from an old bottle. I wondered if he knew that the flowers were plastic. Maybe being kept down that stairwell in the evidence dungeon all those years had rewired his reality.
    ‘I’ve read your report,’ he said, taking his seat again. ‘I spoke with the people on your team. Fortunately for you, they supported your story. Meyers said the principal was jumping out of the moving vehicle.’
    ‘That’s how it was, sir.’
    I was going to mention those M16s, but decided to let it pass. I’d brought it up with intelligence, but the anonymous weapons didn’t seem to arouse anyone’s curiosity. Perhaps it would’ve been a different story if I’d managed to bring a couple home. There were

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