York. They’d furnished it and told him there would be a car waiting in the parking garage when he arrived. His worldly possessions, most of which fit easily into a large Army-issue duffel bag, had already been sent on ahead of him.
He muttered his destination to the driver as he got into the back seat, then settled in for the ride to the airport.
It was a short, easy flight. The landing, though, was a bit of a surprise. When he limped off the plane, keeping to one side so the other passengers could rush past him in their hurry to the gate, he had no idea what was awaiting him in LaGuardia’s main terminal. In fact, when he first glimpsed the press, the cameras, the people waving their tiny flags and holding up their signs, he wondered what celebrity had been on that airplane with him.
Then a reporter said, “Welcome to New York, Colonel Stone! How does it feel to be back home?”
The microphone hovered in front of his face, and he thought about laughing out loud. This wasn’t home. Home was a camouflage-colored tent or sometimes a hole in the ground. It was men in fatigues carrying automatic rifles, and bad food and warm water, and anti-nerve-gas injections. It wasn’t this.
But aloud, he only said, “Great. It feels great. I’m glad to be back.”
“Colonel, how is your leg?” another one shouted, shouldering her way to the front of the pack.
“Foot, not leg,” he corrected. “It’s as good as can be expected, I suppose.”
“What’s your reaction to the news that earlier today a daisy-cutter was dropped on the caves where you were held?”
“I hadn’t heard.” He wondered if any of the men who’d held him were stupid enough to have remained in the same place this long and doubted it. “They get anybody?”
“A pile of them. They’re still sorting through the remains.”
He swallowed his reaction to that and wondered who’d been killed for the sake of avenging the latest American hero. He stopped answering questions, shouldered his way through the mob, not without effort, but they didn’t give up until he got into a cab outside the airport.
It was only as the cab pulled away that he saw her.
She was getting into a long black limousine. She wore dark glasses and real fur, and her hair was wild and loose. Her pale, pale skin, like alabaster, was almost luminous in the dusky light of sundown. Her legs were endless, her nails as red as her lips.
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