"Daniel." James looked at the younger man with an expression that managed to be both fond and exasperated. "Your father used to try to manage me too, once he got his legs back and decided he owed me a debt and the way to pay it was to run my life more efficiently than I was running it. It didn't work for him either. I am not getting into a staff car."
"I ride in," James said. "That's the whole point of the ride. If I arrive at Fort Callahan in the back of a car with the windows up, I'm just a passenger, and I can be a passenger any day of the year. On this day I ride." He rested his hand on the fuel tank, on the old military green paint he had restored himself in his garage over one long winter after Maggie died, when the house had been too quiet and his hands needed work with an order to it. His thumb found, without looking, the small brass plate screwed there, scratched and dull, and the twelve tiny notches cut into its edge. "She's carried me there fifty-six times. She'll carry me once more."
It was then that the rear door of the third convoy vehicle opened and a young soldier stepped down โ tall, broad-shouldered, with a close haircut and James's own jawline unmistakably repeated in a face sixty years younger.
"Grandpa?"
"Noah," he said. "Well. Look at you."
Specialist Noah Harris, twenty-four, crossed the gravel in a dozen strides and then, remembering where he was and who was watching, checked himself and offered a salute that was half regulation and half helpless. "Sergeant Major," he said, formally, and then gave it up entirely. "Grandpa. Are you all right? When the convoy stopped I saw the patrol cars from the back window and my stomach just โ I told the driver, that's his bike, that's Grandpa's bike โ but they wouldn't let me out until the colonelโ"
James took the salute and turned it, gently, into an embrace, one arm around his grandson's shoulders, the other hand clapping him twice, hard, on the back. Noah bent to it โ he was four inches taller than his grandfather now, and had to stoop โ and when he straightened, his eyes were wet and he did not bother to hide it.
"I'm fine. I was fine the whole time. It was a misunderstanding, and it's settled." James glanced, deliberately, at Carter as he said it, giving her the gift of his version in front of his grandson: settled. "You're with the escort? Your father didn't tell me."
"It was supposed to be a surprise," Noah said, grinning. "Colonel Ortiz arranged it. My unit's on post at Callahan this month and he got me attached to the escort detail for today and tomorrow. I was going to be standing at the gate when you rode in." His grin faded. "When we were late โ the belt, on the lieutenant's vehicle, shredded like spaghetti โ I kept thinking, he's out there riding alone and he's going to think we forgot, he's going to think nobodyโ"
"Noah. I've known your colonel's family since before he was born. Late is a thing vehicles do. Forgotten is a thing people do, and Ortiz people don't do it." He released his grandson's shoulders. "Though I'll admit, when I heard the engines and saw the dust, my first thought was that Officer Carter here had called for serious reinforcements, and I was in more trouble than I understood."
Noah looked between them, reading the weather of a situation he had arrived in the middle of, and wisely said nothing. But his hand had settled, unconsciously, on the motorcycle's handlebar โ the way of a young man who had been promised, in the loose, unspoken way of families, that the old machine would be his someday, when he was ready, whatever ready turned out to mean.
James saw it, and seeing it, was somewhere else for a moment.
The treeline had not looked like anything. That was the thing he had tried, over fifty-seven years, to explain to people who asked, and he had mostly stopped trying, because the words never carried it. It had looked like every other green, dripping, humming stretch of jungle edge they had patrolled past a hundred times, and that was why it had worked. The first burst took the point man and the man behind him before the sound fully registered, and then the world narrowed, the way it does, to noise and mud and the terrible arithmetic of who was where and who was down.
Miguel Ortiz had been hit twice, in the leg and low in the side, and had gone down in the open, with the fire walking the ground around him. James remembered the taste of the mud, and that his hands had not shaken until later, on the helicopter. He remembered Miguel's weight โ a wounded man who cannot help you is heavier than anything โ and how Miguel came round halfway through the carry, gripped James's shirt with a bloody hand, and said, "Jim. Listen. You put me down and you go. Elena. The baby. You tell her it was quick. Promise me the lie, Jimโ" And James, knees going, lungs burning, said, "You're going to tell her yourself on the telephone in the hospital, you stubborn son of a bitch, so shut up and let me work," and Miguel laughed, a terrible wet sound, and fainted again โ leaving James briefly, coldly certain he was carrying a dead man.