Semper in Arms

The blood on my knuckles wasn't mine. That was the first thing I noticed when I came back to myself, standing in the shower of the barracks with water so hot it should've hurt. It wasn't my blood. It was already drying, flaking off in rust-colored specks that swirled down the drain. I watched them disappear and thought about how easy it was for something to just wash away.

"Yo, Mantenez. You planning on drowning yourself in there?"

Daniel's voice cut through the steam. I hadn't heard him come in. That was unusual. I heard everything, normally. That was my job.

"Considering it," I called back, shutting off the water. "Figured it'd be a shame to waste a perfectly good existential crisis on dry land."

I grabbed a towel and stepped out. Daniel was leaning against the lockers, arms crossed, still in his fatigues. The uniform was clean, but I could see the exhaustion in the set of his shoulders, the way his steel-gray eyes kept flicking to the corners of the room like he was still checking for threats. Old habits. We all had them.

"You look like shit," he said.

"Thanks. You look like a recruiting poster for the AARP."

That got a flicker of something. Not quite a smile, but close. Daniel didn't smile much anymore. I remembered when he did, back before everything went sideways. Back when we were both still stupid enough to believe we could save people.

I pulled on my jeans and a faded t-shirt, then reached for my leather jacket. It was beat to hell, scuffed and worn in places that would've made a fashion critic weep, but I'd had it for eight years. It had been through three continents and two failed relationships. I wasn't about to trade it in for something newer just because it looked better on a hanger.

"You eat?" Daniel asked.

"Not hungry."

"You need to eat."

"I need a lot of things. A vacation. A therapist. A reason to get up in the morning that doesn't involve someone else's blood on my hands."

Daniel didn't flinch. He just stood there, solid and immovable, like a cliff face weathering a storm. That was his thing. He absorbed the hits so other people didn't have to. I used to think that made him noble. Now I wondered if it just made him a target.

"Come on," he said. "I've got a bottle in my quarters."

I followed him out. The base was quiet, the kind of quiet that settled in after a mission, when everyone was too tired to talk and too wired to sleep. Fluorescent lights hummed overhead. Somewhere down the hall, a radio played something soft and old, Frank Sinatra maybe, crooning about lost love and second chances.

Daniel's quarters were small and sparse. A bed, a desk, a chair. A single photograph on the nightstand, face down. I didn't ask who it was. I already knew.

He pulled a bottle of whiskey from his footlocker and poured two fingers into each of two glasses. No ice. He handed me one and sat down on the edge of the bed. I took the chair.

For a while, neither of us said anything. We just drank, and the silence did the talking for us.

I met Daniel Withers three years ago, back when I was still working for the agency and he was still pretending he'd retired. We'd been assigned to the same operation, a joint task force that was supposed to take down a network of arms dealers operating out of Eastern Europe. It went bad. Most of them do, eventually. You start thinking you're in control, that you've got the intel, that you've accounted for every variable. Then someone you trusted turns out to be someone else entirely, and suddenly you're in a warehouse in Moldova with a bullet in your shoulder and no way out.

Daniel got me out. He didn't have to. He could've followed protocol, called for backup, waited for the extraction team that was forty minutes away. Instead, he came in alone, killed three men, and carried me to the rendezvous point on his back. I still didn't know why. I'd asked him once, a year or so after, when we were both drunk enough to be honest. He'd just shrugged and said, "You looked like you had somewhere to be."

That was Daniel. He didn't do things for reasons you could put in a report. He did them because they needed doing, and because he was the only one willing to do them.

I took another sip of whiskey. It burned going down, but it was a good burn. The kind that reminded you you were still alive.

"You hear anything about the debrief?" I asked.

"They're pushing it to tomorrow. Apparently, someone upstairs wants to review the footage before they decide what story to tell."

"What story? We did what we were told. We went in, we extracted the asset, we got out. End of story."

Daniel looked at me then, really looked at me. His eyes were tired, but there was something else there too. Something sharp.

"That's not what happened, and you know it."

I did know it. I just didn't want to say it out loud. Saying it out loud made it real, and I'd spent the last six hours trying to convince myself it wasn't.

The mission had been simple. Extract a defector, a scientist named Elena Vasquez who'd been working on something she wasn't supposed to be working on. She'd reached out to us through back channels, said she wanted out, said she had information that could save lives. We were supposed to bring her in, debrief her, and hand her over to the people who handled that sort of thing. Standard operating procedure.

But nothing about it had been standard.

We'd found her in a safehouse on the outskirts of Kiev, just like the intel said. She was scared, but she was ready. She had a suitcase packed and a hard drive with everything she'd promised. We were ten minutes from extraction when the men came.

They weren't soldiers. They weren't even professionals, not really. They were thugs, hired muscle with cheap guns and cheaper training. We should've been able to handle them.

But there were more of them than we'd expected. And they weren't there for Elena.

They were there for us.

I still didn't know who sent them. I still didn't know why. All I knew was that one minute we were moving toward the extraction point, and the next we were in a firefight that lasted seventeen minutes and left four people dead.

Elena was one of them.

I didn't kill her. I want to be clear about that. The bullet that hit her came from one of the thugs, a kid who couldn't have been more than nineteen, with a twitchy trigger finger and terror in his eyes. He'd been aiming at me. She'd stepped in front of him. I didn't ask her to. I didn't want her to. But she did, and now she was dead, and I was here, drinking whiskey in Daniel's quarters while her body was probably still lying in a morgue somewhere, waiting for someone to claim it.

"You couldn't have stopped it," Daniel said, like he could read my mind.

"I know."

"Do you?"

I set my glass down. The whiskey was making me loose, and I didn't want to be loose. I wanted to be sharp. I wanted to be angry. Anger was easier than guilt. Anger was something I could use.

"She was thirty-two years old," I said. "She had a daughter. Did you know that? A daughter, back in Madrid. She showed me a picture while we were waiting for the extraction. Little girl, maybe six years old. Missing her front teeth. She said she was going to take her to Disneyland when she got back. She said she'd promised."

Daniel didn't say anything. He just sat there, holding his glass, his face unreadable.

"I keep thinking about that promise," I continued. "About how it's never going to happen now. About how that little girl is going to grow up without a mother because we couldn't do our jobs."

"We did our jobs."

"Our job was to keep her alive."

"Our job was to extract her. We tried. It didn't work. That's not on us."

"Then who's it on?"

He didn't have an answer for that. Neither did I.

The silence stretched between us, thick and heavy. I could hear the radio again, still playing somewhere down the hall. The song had changed. Something slower now, sadder. A woman's voice, singing about how love was a losing game.

"You ever think about getting out?" I asked.

"Every day."

"Why don't you?"

Daniel took a long drink, then set his glass down next to mine. "Because if I leave, who's going to do this? Who's going to protect the people who can't protect themselves?"

"Someone else."

"There is no someone else. There's just us. And we're running out of us."

I didn't have a response to that. He was right. We were running out. Every mission, every firefight, every body we left behind, it took something from us. And eventually, there wouldn't be anything left to take.

Daniel stood up and walked over to the window. The blinds were drawn, but I could see the faint glow of the base lights through the slats. He stood there for a long moment, his back to me, his shoulders slumped in a way I'd never seen before.

"I'm tired, Jason," he said. "I'm so goddamn tired."

I stood up and walked over to him. I didn't know what I was going to do. I just knew I couldn't sit there anymore, watching him fall apart from across the room.

"I know," I said. "I know."

And then, without thinking, I put my hand on his shoulder.

He flinched. Just for a second, just a twitch of muscle under fabric, but I felt it. I felt the way his whole body went rigid, the way his breath caught in his throat. I should've pulled back. I should've apologized and stepped away and pretended it hadn't happened.

But I didn't.

Instead, I turned him around. Slowly, carefully, like I was handling something fragile. And when I saw his face, when I saw the tears he'd been holding back, the cracks in the armor he'd spent years building, something inside me broke open.

"I'm sorry," I said. "I'm sorry I couldn't save her. I'm sorry I couldn't save any of them."

Daniel reached up and grabbed my wrist. Not hard. Not to push me away. Just holding on, like I was the only thing keeping him tethered to the ground.

"You saved me," he said. "Three years ago. You don't even know how many times I've thought about that. How many times I've wanted to tell you."

I didn't know what to say. I didn't know what to do. So I did the only thing that made sense in that moment, the only thing that felt true.

I pulled him into my arms and held on.