Khomeini's Boy: The Shadow War with Iran by Bryce Adams Page A

nose and something down his throat. Machines sighed quietly around him like the lapping of waves at the seashore. He closed his eyes and felt tears gush down his face until he passed out again.
     
    * * *
     
    “So you’re telling me he’s awake but he’s not talking to anyone?” Ambrose heard a gruff, predatory voice say out of the darkness that surrounded his head.
    Another voice, feminine, answered, “He talks a bit, but nothing useful yet. Unless this is a rank issue, Sir, I’m not comfortable with you being here while the patient is processing the trauma he’s endured.”
    The gruff voice hummed thoughtfully before answering, “That’s reasonable, but what I have is time-sensitive, so yeah doctor, let’s make this a rank issue for fifteen minutes, then I’ll leave him alone. Please close the door behind you.”
    The doctor’s voice assented, and hard-soled shoes clacked away from Ambrose until they disappeared behind the metal-on-metal sound of a door being shut.
    “Hayes,” The gruff voice said to him, “I need five minutes of your time.”
    Ambrose opened one puffy eye and saw a silhouette half-blocking the overhead fluorescent lights. It materialized into a man with a round face and dark features who also wore a hospital gown. He was on crutches.
    “You told the doctor fifteen minutes, not five,” Ambrose replied.
    The man smiled and answered, “Let’s start with five and see where this goes. Now let me put your bed up.”
    Ambrose heard the whirr of his reclining bed bending upright, which always reminded him of being pushed by the flat palm of a giant metal hand. When he was upright, he saw that his intruder was a short, extremely broad man who looked equal parts East Asian and Hispanic, probably fifty-something years old with grey hair and a thin van dyke beard. He was wearing a hospital robe, and he was on crutches. Ambrose saw the bottom part of a cast protruding from his right leg.
    The man said, “Good. Now that you’re upright I can sit the hell down.” He grunted as he hopped backwards into a generic vinyl reclining chair that looked like every other lounge chair ever put in a hospital to try and convince patients that they weren’t in a hospital. The man pressed a button and the foot of the chair extended, allowing him to elevate his right leg.
    He nodded at his leg and said, “I was in Fallujah on a fact-finding mission when shooting broke out. A shard of something or other went right through my kneecap. It was so hot that it cauterized the tendons immediately after severing them. Virtually impossible to operate on with so much of the wounded material simply annihilated,” He shrugged and continued, “The VA could do a knee replacement stateside, but that means some fucker will try to make me go to Washington. I’ll take a hardened knee brace and a cane over Washington any day.”
    “I wouldn’t.” Ambrose said.
    The man smirked. “Mister Hayes, why were you and four marines in Sadr City three nights ago? How did you come in contact with a nerve agent?”
    “You already talked to Tesoro. He remembers better than I do.”
    “Corporal Tesoro killed himself last night, hours before I was scheduled to debrief him. His bunkmate says he’d been talking to someone, apologizing over and over. Then he snuck out of bed and stepped in front of a Humvee as it passed the Green Zone entrance gate. His bunkmate says he’d been sneaking out a lot after lights-out. Seven or eight times in the last few months, by his count. He still thinks this is all about a girl, and I didn’t tell him any differently, not that there are enough women in the Green Zone to fuel that kind of mystery for long.”
    Ambrose didn’t like crying in front of other people any more than anyone else did, but the muscles around his eyes weren’t giving him much choice. He felt water pouring over his high cheekbones again, then following his jawline all the way down his stubbly chin. Wait, there was something wrong