Hardy took in a deep draft of clean air. It was so much cleaner here. You simply couldn’t deny it. Made a man wonder about the shit he’d been breathing all his life. He took another look at the empty beach. It was a pity to fuck up such a nice-looking place. The sea would be just about perfect for bodysurfing. The glassy green rollers crunched in with a nice hollow boom, and the sand was so white you just knew it’d blind you when the sun got higher. There wasn’t a single piece of trash to be seen anywhere. No condoms. No broken glass. No discarded syringes.

“Okay,” he sighed. “Y’all know the drill. We’ll take it like any other atrocity site. Just pretend you’re back in Yemen or Syria. Form a box, two hundred meters out. Bukowski, you come with me. We’ll have to drag ’em up or else they’ll get washed away. We’ll walk over there through the surf. But keep your eyes peeled anyway. We might get lucky. Lazy fuckers might’ve tossed a weapon into the water.

“Okri, you get your ass back to town. Call our guys first. When they got their shit together, let them call the local yokels.”

Private Okri, who could run the legs off the rest of the squad, nodded and took off, being careful not to intrude into the invisible box Sergeant Hardy had drawn around the scene.

USS KANDAHAR, PEARL HARBOR, 0612 HOURS, 9 JUNE 1942

Captain Francois and Colonel Jones regarded the body with a mix of sadness and disgusted anger. Second Lieutenant Myron Byers had killed himself with a single shot through the temple. The wall behind his body was still sticky with blood and matted hair. A letter, a photograph, and a wedding ring lay together in a ziplock bag on a fold-down bedside shelf. The lieutenant and his wife of eight months smiled out of the photo. It had been taken on their honeymoon.

The brief note apologized for the mess in the cabin and asked that his wife’s family on her maternal grandmother’s side be given the ring, the photograph, and all of his personal items. They were to keep his belongings in trust for her until her eighteenth birthday, many decades away. His savings were to be invested and held in trust for her until that time, as well.

“Jesus, what a fucking mess,” Jones said, despondently.

Francois knew he was talking about the request, not the cleanup job.

“You gonna do it?” she asked.

“It’s a man’s dying wish,” he said. He fell quiet for a few seconds. “I should have been paying more attention, seen this coming.”

Captain Francois rubbed her burning eyes with the heel of one palm.

“Don’t beat yourself up, Colonel,” she said. “He won’t be that last one we lose this way.”