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Luke tensed in his arms but didn’t move otherwise except to drag his fingers back and forth over Gray’s side where he was holding him. His ear was pressed to Gray’s chest and he could only imagine that Luke could feel his racing heart.
“It happened last fall. My unit was on a mission in this village just outside Kabul. There’d been intelligence that a high value Taliban leader was hiding out there with his family so we were supposed to go in and find him.”
“Did you?”
Luke shook his head. “We broke up into two man teams to sweep the residences but when we couldn’t raise our Staff Sergeant and the Private he was with, my buddy Eddie and I went to check on them.”
Luke was quiet for so long that Gray asked, “What happened?”
Luke shook his head. “It was over so fast. We were clearing the residence Staff Sergeant Shaw and Private Barnes had been in and then Eddie was gone. Then I got hit. I woke up in a hospital in Germany a week later with no memory of that night.”
“Your colleagues?”
“Were fine. Barnes was there when I woke up and told me his and Shaw’s Comms had gone down and they’d already cleared the house. He said an insurgent must have come in afterwards…”
“I’m sorry, Luke.”
“Eddie was twenty-two years old. His girlfriend had just given birth to their daughter a couple weeks earlier and he was planning to ask her to marry him on his next leave.”
Gray tightened his arms around Luke since he doubted anything he said would help him make sense of the tragedy.
“What happened after that? Did you go home or back to Afghanistan?”
“Home. It was our unit’s last mission for that deployment so my team was already back in the States by the time I got back. Barnes accompanied me home. About a week after I got back I went to see Eddie’s girlfriend. She lived in a small apartment off base and had decided to move back to Arizona to be closer to her family. I was helping her load up some stuff into her car when the first flashback hit me.”
Gray tensed. “From that night?”
Luke nodded. “I didn’t realize what it was at first – just some voices, a gun-shot, Eddie falling. The doctors had said not to expect my memory of that night to return so I kind of just passed it off as a one-time thing. But it kept happening. Flashes here and there that I couldn’t make sense of.”
The tension in Luke’s frame was telling and Gray said, “You remembered all of it, didn’t you?”
Another nod.
“Tell me,” Gray urged.
“All of it came back to me in a rush one night about six weeks ago.”
Right before Luke had shown up on the side of the road outside Dare.
“When Eddie and I were clearing that house, we heard voices – yelling. We recognized the man’s voice as Staff Sergeant Shaw’s so we followed it to this back room. Shaw and Barnes were standing over this woman and her three kids who were all on their knees. Shaw was convinced she was the wife of the man we’d been looking for and he was screaming at her to tell him where the guy was. She was crying and saying she didn’t know who they were talking about.”
Luke’s voice cracked and Gray stroked a hand over his shoulder. “Then Shaw pulls out his gun and shoots the first kid. A little boy – not even three years old. I shouted at him and then Eddie falls to the ground. I got hit next. After I fell, I saw Shaw point his gun at the next kid and then everything went dark.”
Understanding dawned and Gray felt the bottom of his stomach drop out. “They’re the ones who’re after you.”
“Shaw is. After my memory came back, I went to Barnes’ place to confront him – he’d been by my side the whole time I was in the hospital and he became like my shadow when I got back. I thought he was just trying to be a good friend at the time.”
“He was watching you to see if your memory came back.”
“He and Shaw left me in that house thinking I was dead. Some guys from my team found me and Eddie when they couldn’t reach us on our Comms. After I realized it was Barnes and Shaw, I went to Barnes’ apartment. I found him lying on the floor in his living room in a pool of blood. I was checking for a pulse when Shaw walked in from a back bedroom. When he saw me he actually laughed and said I was saving him a step. Then he pulled a gun on me and asked me if it looked familiar.”
“It was your gun?” Gray asked as everything began to fall into place.
Luke nodded. “He or Barnes must have taken it off me at some point after I was shot.”
“He used it to kill Barnes, didn’t he?”
“My fingerprints all over a weapon that belonged to me…”
