Except that it was early morning and the sun was still behind the mountains.

The big smiling face of the sun was not that at all. It was the leering demon face of a mushroom cloud. Many miles distant but massive, and it seemed frozen against the darkness, like a brand burned onto the flesh of night. Not a nuclear blast, which is a mercy, I suppose. This was the entire Aghajari oil refinery curling upward in a fireball five hundred feet high.

I said the word that I didn’t want to say, asking it as a question.

“Violin?”

Top sighed.

“She and the Arklight team tried to stop the knights from setting off the charges. She … never made it out, Cap’n.”

I could feel all of the horror and outrage and fear of the last couple of days sear that image onto my soul. I knew that I would never forget it. I would never be able to forget it.

We had won, but we had also lost.

Epilogue

Epilogue

(1)

I was out of it for a long time.

Church was there when I opened my eyes. He looked haggard and old.

“Christ,” I said. “If you look that bad, I must be a frigging mess.”

He didn’t smile.

“What do you remember?” he asked.

I had to think about it, and I fell asleep a couple of times.

When I opened my eyes again it was morning and there was sunlight slanting in through the windows. Rudy was gone. Instead it was Mr. Church in the chair beside my bed.

“Where am I?” I asked.

“The trauma center at Columbia Presbyterian Hospital.”

“In?”

“New York.”

I thought about that. My body was swathed in bandages and, although there was pain, it was buried under a heavy layer of something. Morphine. My head felt like it was stuffed with bubble wrap.

“What do you remember?” he asked,

“Rudy asked the same question.”

“When?”

I couldn’t answer that, and I realized that this wasn’t the same room. “I don’t know.”

“Do you remember the raid on the refinery?”

It took me a long time, and the memories were sluggish and reluctant. “Some of it. Maybe. Did we … did we win?”

Church nodded. “You had the code scrambler. All eight of the devices have been secured.”

“Eight? I … don’t remember eight.”

But then I did. And that memory brought other memories. Church watched my face as each came tumbling downhill at me. Grigor. The army of Upierczi. Everything else.

“My team,” I asked. “John Smith?”

“No,” he said.

“Khalid.”

“No.”

We sat in the silence of that for a long time.

“I’m sorry, Captain,” Church said eventually. “They were good men.”

“They were family.”

“Yes,” he said. “They were.”

“What about the others?”

“Everyone else took some hits, but they will all recover.”