“And no Palm Sunday, maybe.” Britt remembered low, weary. She found the words this time. About how they couldn’t get ahold of their father. They’d tried, for so long. Pete nodded. He started to say something but whatever it was got stuck. He nodded again.
Jean-Jacques gave the moment a few seconds, then cut in. The adrenaline from his rant was still juicing his veins. And there was only so much wrongness a man could take.
“The Legion won Vietnam,” he said. “Don’t get it twisted. It knew how to fight guerrillas. It knew what it took. Praise to the Victors, sure. But ‘Spill blood for America’ got it done.”
No one argued with that. How could they? Jean-Jacques thought. It’s the fucking truth.
“Beirut,” Pete said, first to himself before repeating it to the group. He was trying to get the subject to something they could agree on. “Yeah. That’s the lynchpin, I think.”
“But the wars didn’t ratchet up until Palm Sunday.” Flowers sounded unbowed. “And it sort of worked! New Beirut is amazing. Only peacemongers don’t like it being a state. My lesbian aunts went there last year. Had a great time. Got me a snow globe. If we did more of what we did there?” He puckered his lips and whistled. “Who knows.”
“Sometimes things work. Sometimes they don’t.” There was nothing practical about talk like this. Jean-Jacques felt an instinctive need to crush it. “Big ideas up here.”
The others looked at Jean-Jacques, faces ashen and drawn, unsure of what to say, and he realized he was being pissy for the sake of being pissy. What did he know, really? He was just a trigger puller. He was just a soldier. All that mattered to him was duty. It was up to others to figure out where and why. Jean-Jacques wanted to press the turbo button and get away from everyone to clear his head. But there was no place in the city to run like that.
“Well.” As if just noticing the gory state of his hands, Pete rubbed his palms across the bottom of his shirt, trying to force a wince into a toothy smile. “At least no one said oil.”
Even Jean-Jacques laughed at that.
“I ask because it’s easy to forget how we got here. Even for those of us devoted to the fight.” Pete stopped to look at both Jean-Jacques and Flowers. “No small thing. What you said is right. And more, too.
“It’s easy to be against something these days,” Pete continued. Now, he looked straight at his sister. She looked back with razors in her eyes. “Anti this. Counter that. It’s much harder to be for something.”
Pete Swenson, true believer, was already back. And giving a homeland version of his Do Something! Speech, heard by operators, soldiers, and Legionnaires across the globe. “The risks of inaction are greater than the risks of action.” “The only thing badder than a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with one.” Et cetera. He didn’t hear me at all, Jean-Jacques thought. He’s still convinced they want us. He’s still convinced they need us.
He’s still convinced we’re always part of the solution.
Whatever he’s conjuring, Jean-Jacques decided, I’m out. Damn out. While I still can: I’m gonna do me.
“What’s hell to you, Sebastian?” Pete asked, the first Volunteer to use the hostage’s name. The hostage sputtered out something about other people.
“On your last day on earth, the person you became will meet the person you could have been,” Pete said. “That’s hell.” His coral eye moved from person to person in slow consideration, his black one remaining pinned on Sebastian. Jean-Jacques knew what came next. Words about glory and grief, an ode to heroism and service in an age when such ideas were supposed to be dust. Jean-Jacques had seen it work on cynics and fools, wild men and dreamers, too, anyone and everyone in between. Not me, though, he thought. Not anymore.
“Only three percent of Americans serve in the military. Only three percent love America enough to fight for it. Our country needs help. Here, now. Everyone knows it. Everyone feels it. We can help. We can—”
Jean-Jacques’s phone buzzed. He pulled it out to find a text from his cousin asking, again, to meet up. In succession, Britt pulled out her phone, too.
“Uhh, guys,” she said.
“In the middle of something,” Pete said, his aggravation flashing like silver.
“Okay,” Britt said. “Just thought you’d want to know who blew up the city.”
The entire group turned to her, expectedly. “It’s okay for me to talk now?”
“Brittany,” Pete said. “Go on.”
“Of course, Peter.” She faked a yawn and then half-smiled at her brother. “So. Jonah Gray. Age forty-six. From Ohio.”
“Be serious.”
“I am, Peter. This is a state alert. He’s an army vet.”
Something in the air seemed to curdle. Flowers swore. Pete shook his head and closed his eyes, turning away, into the dusk.
“Jonah Gray.” Jean-Jacques sounded out the name. He couldn’t help himself. The vet thing was bad. But opportunities to rattle Pete like this didn’t happen often. “What you think, man? Sunni or Shi’a?”
Coming next year to a movie theater near you…
AMERICAN LIONS. An unprecedented blend of real-life heroism and original filmmaking. AMERICAN LIONS stars a group of active-duty military heroes in a film like no other in history. A fictionalized account of the real-life raid by the Volunteers to capture infamous terror chieftain Abu Abdallah in the Mediterranean, AMERICAN LIONS features a spellbinding story that takes audiences on an adrenaline-fueled, edge-of-their-seat journey. Thanks to an extraordinary collaboration between the War Department and Hollywood, the Volunteers play themselves, bringing raw, thrilling authenticity to their roles and to the film. Abu Abdallah is played by Christian Bale. AMERICAN LIONS combines stunning combat sequences, state-of-the-art battlefield technology, and heart-pumping emotion for the ultimate action-adventure film, showcasing the skills, training, and tenacity of the greatest action heroes of them all: real American soldiers.
CHAPTER 7
SEBASTIAN STARED AT his plate of spring rolls and tried to make sense of what Pete had told him. They sat at a corner table along the port, watching the afternoon go by. The sky was sick with heat and a police motorboat drifted in the water behind them. Different thoughts kept coming to Sebastian but he didn’t know how to express them. He’d taken days to find the courage to ask his question. Now that he had an answer, understanding was slow to come. He tried again.
“So you weren’t there to get me.”
“We weren’t there to not get you,” Pete offered. “But the primary objective was Abu Abdallah’s wife. And the baby. Higher thought detaining them would draw him out.”
“Huh.”
Sebastian hadn’t known he’d been held in the same Tripoli compound as the great terror chieftain’s family. He hadn’t seen a woman or a child his whole time there. But that didn’t mean anything. He’d been kept in a basement.
“You don’t look great. Another brew? Yo! My man here needs a refill.”
It’d been six days since Jonah Gray had been announced as a suspect in the war memorial bombings. Had he acted alone? No one believed that. The security state loomed over everything, out and open as it could be only after disaster. Beat cops held the corners, SWAT commandos ghosted the rooftops. The mechanized hum of police helos and large black monitor drones layered the skies. “Presence patrols,” the mayor had said. Nothing else had been revealed to the public.