Page 52 of What is Lost

“No problem. You’re kinda early, aren’t you, Captain? Glutton for punishment? Shift doesn’t start for another coupla hours and you...” The tech hemmed. “You look sort of rough. No offense, sir.”

“None taken.” He tried on a smile that kept slipping. “I think we’re all run pretty ragged. Anyway, I couldn’t sleep. Figured to get a jump on the day.”

“Thank God, one of the last,” the tech said. “Won’t be too much longer is what I heard. Buddy over at Command said last civilian transport’s tomorrow.”

“Tomorrow?” He was startled. He thought that, counting today, they had at least five more days. “Not the end of the month?”

“Doc, weareat the end of the month, more or less. State Department guys are going to clear as many civilians as they got space for and then we break everything down, pack ’er up, and adios. Marines got it the worst. Those poor guys got here first, and they get to stay until the very end when the embassy and command staff leave and the turnover to the Taliban’s official.” The tech shook his head. “Can you imagine what’ll be like? There got to be thousands,tensof thousands of people out there we aren’t taking. Word gets around about the last transport plane tomorrow, and they’re going to try and tear this place apart.”

Just like Vietnam.His Uncle Dare had plenty of stories. He missed listening to Dare talk until the front room of his lake cabin darkened and the night peepers began their evening chorus. “So,” he said to the tech, “we shake the proverbial dust from our sandals?”

“Ah...” The tech didn’t get the allusion. “I guess? I got a buddy said he couldn’t get Iraq out from under his fingernails for a month.”

“Let’s hope Afghanistan doesn’t takethatlong,”John said as the van’s engine chugged to life. He would take the remainder of the deployment one day at a time. Stay away from Roni. Minimal interaction and then only official or doctorly stuff. Get through the next few days. Things should be easier once the last civilian transport left tomorrow. That would be Friday. It would take them the better part of a day to dismantle the med tent, pack up. He bet they’d be on a transport to Doha and then Germany by Sunday. Monday, at the latest.

As for the rest...what happened when they got back to Benning? He’d put in for a transfer. Try and make sure they didn’t wind up on-call together. Take doubles, if he had to.

Time and distance, that would do the trick. He already knew what helped mend a broken heart.

Déjà vu all over again.A salty lump formed at the back of his throat.I am the Tin Man from Oz and now I know I have a heart because it’s breaking.

Something sparked to his left, and his head swiveled in time to see the barracks’ front door open. Roni, in her camis and geared up, rushed out. Her hand was up; she waved, but the van was already pointed in the wrong direction. Unless the driver looked in his rear view, he’d never spot her.

He only realized he’d been about to tell the driver to stop when he caught himself leaning forward and felt the word ready to take a swan-dive off the springboard of his tongue.

No.He sat back. He aimed a sidelong glance at the tech, who was busy rummaging in his various pockets. No one else on the van seemed to notice, and he didn’t look her way again.

But as the van pulled away and left her in the dust, he did think, and with a stinging red ferocity that surprised him because it felt so damn good:Go to hell. Go break someone else’s heart. Go break Driver’s. Just don’t come crying to me when he breaks yours.

And one more thing. Once they were on a real airplane headed for home? He was sitting in the back, where it was safest for when the pilot had a stroke, and the copilot freaked. Just see if he didn’t.

Hasta la vista, baby.He jammed on his wraparounds.Cuz I won’t be back.

A few minuteslater as they neared the drop-off, a guy in the seat in the van’s rear asked, generally, “Anyone hear anything about whether they got the guy?”

“Guy?” Frowning, the tech craned a look over his shoulder. “What guy?”

“Suicide bomber,” another soldier, a Marine, said—and then, at the general silence: “Man, you didn’t hear? They closed down Abbey last night, ’bout 2200.”

Someone said, making no attempt to hide hisderision, “You sure it wasn’t because the State Department guys went for their coffee break?”

At that, there were general nods and grunts. The consular officials were known to just evaporate, sometimes for twelve hours at a stretch. Without them, no one could be cleared and so the Marines would have to close the Gate. This only made the Afghans on the other side even more desperate than they already were, since no one knew when the line would cease moving for good. In turn, things got even worse for the Marines who had to hold everyone back. The joke—not a very funny one—was that everyone knew that State Department guys, who were responsible for clearing refugees, worked. The question was whether they workedhardorhardlyat all.

“Positive,” the Marine said. “I know someone who said intelligence has been monitoring scuttlebutt all week that there are a bunch of guys holed up in some hotel.”

Someone else said, “So, did they get them or what?”

“We’re going on duty, and there ain’t been a ka-boom,” said another soldier. “So, I guess either they didn’t get them or there was no one to get. But I’ve been hearing this all week.”

“Which kind of makes you wonder,” the tech next to John said, “if maybe they oughtn’t just to close things down now. Like, why haven’t we?”

“I heard it’s on account of the Brits,” the Marine said. “Over at the Baron? They still got a boatload of people to process.”

Much like the State Department checkpoint beyond the Abbey Gate, the Baron Hotel, which was really just down the road, had been chosen by the UK Border Force as their official checkpoint. There, they searched and cleared civilians before moving them to the airport for RAF evacuation flights. Their security apparatus was, in a way, even worse than at Abbey Gate; all the Brits had was a chevron of shipping containers and a bunch of soldiers. That had been so slow, their soldiers had done what the Americans had: ripped open a section of barbed wire along the same canal to allow more people eligible for evacuation through.

“That is messed up,” the tech said.

“This whole operation’s messed up,” someone else said. “I mean, seriously, think about it. Give us a couple weeks, we coulda set up sandbags, Hescos, good security. But what do we got? Barbed wire on top of a concrete wall. Like that’ll do a lot of good. Meanwhile, our asses are hanging out waiting on the Brits to get their act together. You ask me, we ought to just close Abbey down.”

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