Blueprint

 

Chapter 1

2010 — Helmand Province, Kajaki
MARSOC Team Briefing Room

The ceiling fan rattled like an old engine fighting for life, pushing warm, sand-thick air around the cramped briefing room. Fluorescent tubes flickered overhead, humming in that uneven, electric buzz that felt more like a warning than a light source. The plywood walls were sweating under the Helmand heat, map sheets pinned to them with dull-edged push pins. Dust crept into everything—gear, lungs, eyes. Even the coffee tasted like sand.

Gunnery Sergeant Mack O’Rourke sat at the long folding table, forearms thick with corded Marine muscle, hands wrapped around a stainless thermos he’d carried through three tours. He wasn’t a big man, not in height, but his presence filled space—quiet, deliberate, hard as the ground outside. His beard was regulation short, sun-bleached at the tips. His eyes—steady, slate-blue, carved from calm—were locked on the large screen mounted on the front wall of the room.

Beside him sat his spotter, Staff Sergeant Ellis “Hawk” Halden, leaner, sharper, wiry in the way men get when they run on adrenaline and instinct. Hawk had the reflexes of a fox and the observational instincts of a hawk, which is how he’d earned the call sign long before the Corps made him a sniper.

Three other men filled the team roster this rotation—
• Corpsman Jacob “Doc” Reyes, the team’s medical spine.
• Sgt. Tom Bishop, comms specialist, square shoulders, silent intensity.
• Cpl. Addison Rowe, the youngest, an intelligence NCO with the look of a man who read everything twice.

The room smelled faintly of CLP, or gun oil, and burnt instant coffee.

Captain Rourke—no relation to Mack—stepped forward. He was tall, angular, a thinker first and a fighter second, the kind of officer enlisted Marines tolerated because he didn’t waste their time. He tapped a key and the screen shifted, pulling up an ISR feed from a Raven drone circling miles away.

“Alright, listen up,” the captain said. “We’ve got an HVT—callsign Naiad. Real name: Qassim Durrani, mid-level Taliban facilitator, weapons courier, liaison to a foreign fighter pipeline we’ve been tracking for the last six weeks.”

The drone feed zoomed in on a mud-walled compound, its shadows deep and black against the desert floor. A small courtyard. One rusted truck. Two outbuildings. A lone generator with a cough like a dying tractor.

Mack leaned forward, elbows on his knees.  He’d done this a hundred times, in a dozen provinces, against enemies who changed their faces but not their intent. This part—the briefing—always felt like someone dropping a map of a chessboard onto a table, but leaving out the part where the pieces were booby-trapped.

Captain Rourke clicked to the next slide—pattern-of-life.

“Target arrives here every third evening between 1900 and 1930 local. Meets with a courier. Stays between fifteen and thirty minutes. No women, no children. Good isolation. Best window we’ve had. Tomorrow is his predicted next appearance.”

Addison Rowe cleared his throat. “SIGINT traffic confirms chatter about incoming shipments through Kajaki crossing points. Durrani is coordinating the handoff. If we remove him, the line freezes for weeks.”

Hawk leaned back in his chair, chewing on a toothpick, eyes never leaving the screen.

Captain Rourke went on. “Success criteria: one-shot elimination of the HVT. No civilian exposure. Clean exfil. Abort thresholds: any noncombatants entering the compound or crossing into your backstop arc. Weather degradation below visibility—dust storms trigger automatic abort.”

Doc Reyes leaned forward. “Last storm hit two nights ago. We good tomorrow?”

Rowe checked his notebook. “Forecast is clear. Winds steady out of the northwest.”

Mack nodded once. “Good enough.”

The captain shifted to a topographic overlay. Brown, tan, and red rock. Elevation lines like scars.

“Your firing position is here,” he said, tapping a ridgeline two klicks east of the compound. “Elevation gives you a straight lane. Minimal dead ground. Hawk will confirm dope from spotter position Bravo.”

Hawk smirked. “As long as Mack doesn’t pull left like last time.”

Mack shot him a look. “My rifle doesn’t pull. You just can’t call wind.”

The room chuckled—quiet, but real. Even Captain Rourke cracked half a smile.

Mack felt the tension in his chest ease. Humor wasn’t accidental in rooms like this—it was a pressure valve.

“Exfil is a two-phase option,” the captain continued. “Primary: foot movement south to TRP Blackjack for helo pickup. Secondary: movement east to COP Lavender. Movement north is not advised—ISID militia activity is high.”

Bishop raised his hand. “Comms windows?”

“Primary window: every fifteen minutes. Secondary: emergency burst only. If chatter spikes, we lift the abort.”

Mack’s fingers tapped an invisible rhythm on the table. Not nerves—calculation. His mind cataloged distances, angles, escape paths, fallback points, wind breaks, and the thousand micro-variables that kept Marines alive in Helmand.

Captain Rourke looked around the room. “Questions?”

Doc Reyes raised a hand. “What’s the backstop?”

Rowe responded. “Vacant wadi. No structures. No foot movement for days.”

“Good,” Mack said. “Hard backstop means clean conscience.”

The captain nodded. “This is a tier-two elimination. You’re the best team in the region. I trust your judgment. But I’ll say it anyway—don’t force it. If it’s not perfect, you walk away.”

Mack’s jaw tightened. “Understood.”  He always understood. It didn’t make walking away easier.  The screen went dark. Chairs scraped. The briefing dissolved into the next phase—the real work.

 

 

The team shifted to the rear of the room where a sand table covered half a sheet of plywood. Addison had built it meticulously—compound layout, walls to scale, surrounding terrain in layered colors.

Mack picked up a grease pencil and traced the firing lane. “Two klicks, slight elevation drop. Wind channel from the northwest. We get downdraft off this ridge—Hawk, you’ll need to read it early.”

Hawk crouched beside him. “Copy. Morning thermals?”

“Probably minimal by 1800, but keep an eye. If they rise too late, we get shimmer.”

Rowe pointed at the outer wall. “Compound gate stays closed until the courier arrives. Gate guard rotates every ten minutes.”

Mack studied the position. “Guard rotates clockwise or counterclockwise?”

“Clockwise.”

“That buys us fifteen seconds of dead angle every cycle,” Mack said. “Not much. But something.”

Hawk swallowed. “What about sun angle?”

Addison brought up another map. “Sun sets behind you. You’ll be in shadow.”

“Good,” Hawk said. “We stay invisible.”

Mack walked to the wall where imagery stills from ISR hung from binder clips. He traced his finger over the compound roofline. “What’s this dark patch?”

Rowe squinted. “Collapsed plaster. Roof is stable but uneven.”

“Uneven is good,” Mack muttered. “Breaks up silhouettes.”

He studied every line, every shadow, every approximate measurement. He wasn’t just memorizing positions. He was building range cards in his head. Each line became a mental equation—wind, light, elevation, movement probability, distance, intervening terrain.

Hawk appeared at his side. “Hey.”

Mack didn’t look away from the imagery. “Yeah?”

“You’re running hotter tonight.”

“Lot on my mind.”

“Welcome to Helmand,” Hawk muttered.

Mack didn’t smile. “It’s not Helmand.”

“What then?”

Mack finally turned toward him. “It’s the pattern. Every time we get a clean lane, something shifts. Someone steps where they shouldn’t. Something goes sideways. I’m not superstitious. But I’m not blind, either.”

Hawk folded his arms. “You trust your instincts. So do I.”

“We need this perfect,” Mack said. “No second chances at two klicks.”

Hawk nodded. “We’ll make it perfect.”

But Mack didn’t answer. He stared at the compound photo again, tracing the shadow lines. There was something about Durrani’s schedule—too regular, almost staged. Routine meant predictability, but it also meant bait. Mack didn’t speak it out loud. He wasn’t the type to poison the well without proof.

The team worked silently for long minutes, studying angles, depth, distances.

Rowe finally spoke. “You two good?”

Hawk answered. “We’re good.”

Mack added, “We’ll finish our range cards after chow.”

 

 

Hours later, the desert darkened into a purplish bruise as night settled in. The team’s tent was lit with a single red lens lamp, shadows long and soft. The smell of dust, nylon, sweat, and gun oil blended into a familiar chemical haze.

Mack laid out laminated sheets on his cot—range card blanks, reference photos, wind charts. Hawk sat opposite him, boots off, socks dusty, a notebook open on his knee.

“Distance markers,” Mack said. “Compound wall: 1,957 meters. Courtyard center: 2,015. Roof edge: 2,002.”

Hawk read off his notes. “Backstop wadi: 2,065. Courier truck likely stops at the gate—range 1,890.”

“Angle?”

“Three degrees down. Maybe four.”

Mack penciled numbers. “Wind?”

“Steady ten knots northwest, gusts to fourteen.”

Mack wrote it in crisp block letters. “Impact shift at two klicks, with ten-knot crosswind, is—”

“About .8 mils hold left,” Hawk said.

Mack nodded. “Dope confirmed.”

They worked in practiced silence, the kind that only comes from hundreds of hours side-by-side. Hawk’s observations were razor-precise, descriptive but never poetic. Mack’s notes were clean, ordered, calculated to the second decimal place.

After ten minutes, Hawk leaned back. “So how many of these range cards have you made in your career, Gunny?”

“Full cards?” Mack shrugged. “Hundreds. Partial cards? Thousands.”

“Ever framed one?”

“Why the hell would I frame a range card?”

“To remember where you were.”

“I remember anyway.”  Hawk sighed. “That’s your problem.”

“What?”

“You remember too damn well.”   Mack stopped writing.

Hawk pressed on. “Guys like you… you carry every shot. Every mission. Every face. Most Marines learn to forget enough to stay sane.”

Mack stared at him. “You think I’m not sane?”

“I think you’re exact,” Hawk said. “And exactness is a double-edged blade.”

Mack didn’t respond. He turned the range card square, aligning it perfectly with the edge of the cot.

Hawk watched him with a quiet sadness, the kind only teammates recognize—the knowledge that genius and burden often share the same seat.

 

 

Back in the armory half an hour later, the fluorescent lights were harsher, humming louder, reflecting off the concrete floor. Racks of rifles lined the walls. Tools lay arranged on cloth mats. The space smelled like oil, metal, and discipline.

Mack knelt beside his rifle—a custom-built bolt-action .300 Win Mag with a matte-black finish and a suppressed barrel. The weapon was an extension of his body, a conversation between steel and muscle memory.

He unfolded a cleaning cloth and laid out tools with surgical precision.

Doc Reyes watched from his seat on a nearby ammo crate. “You prep that rifle like you’re dressing a wound.”

Mack didn’t look up. “You want a clean exit wound, don’t you?”

Doc grinned. “Fair enough.”

Hawk sat on the opposite crate, working on his spotting scope. “I ever tell you Mack once took apart his rifle blindfolded? Just to prove he could.”

Doc laughed. “Bullshit.”

Mack spoke without lifting his head. “It wasn’t blindfolded. It was dark.”

“Same difference.”

“Not really.”

Doc leaned forward. “Gunny, you ever gonna let us inflate the legend a bit?”

“No,” Mack said.

Hawk gestured at him with a rag. “This man will rewrite the Marine Corps ethos someday: Honor, Courage, Commitment, and Pain in the Ass.”

Mack looked up slowly. “Keep talking, Hawk. I’ll make you carry my pack tomorrow.”

Doc chuckled. “Man’s got jokes tonight.”

Mack didn’t laugh, but the corner of his mouth twitched. That was enough.

He wiped the bolt assembly clean, checking surfaces under the bright lamp. “Optics,” he said quietly.

Hawk passed him the rifle. Mack checked the Schmidt & Bender scope—no dust inside the glass, no scratches, no shift in zero.

“Zero was confirmed yesterday,” Hawk said. “Quarter MOA right. You fixed it.”

“I didn’t fix it,” Mack said. “I corrected it.”

Doc smirked. “Same thing.”

“No,” Mack repeated. “Correction is precision. Fixing a mistake is correcting a failure. Not the same.”

Hawk glanced at Doc. “See? Told you. Exactness.”

Mack placed the bolt back into the receiver, the metal sliding into place with a clean, perfect click.

Bishop entered the armory carrying two cases of ammo. “Lot numbers confirmed. All cartridges from the same batch. Berger 190-grain OTM. Ballistic tables printed and laminated.”

“Good,” Mack said. “What about atmospheric?”

“Rowe’s running it now.”

Mack looked up. “Tell him to calculate for night saturation. Humidity shifts after sundown.”

“Already done,” Bishop said.

Mack nodded approval.

He began loading rounds into his magazine with the reverence of someone handling live truth. Each round slid in smoothly, polished and deadly.

Doc whistled softly. “Every time I watch you do that, Gunny, I swear it’s like watching a priest prepare communion.”

Mack paused mid-load.

Doc swallowed. “Sorry. Maybe not the right metaphor.”

Mack finished loading, slid the magazine into the rifle, and set it aside gently.

“Don’t apologize,” he said. “Just don’t romanticize this. I’m not here to pray. I’m here to end a problem.”

Doc leaned back. “Yeah. But sometimes ending a problem feels like salvation.”

Hawk shot him a warning glance.

But Mack didn’t flare. He simply wiped his hands on the cloth and reached for the ballistic chart.

“Salvation’s not my job,” he said quietly. “Just the shot.”

 

 

The team gathered outside under the night sky. Stars burned sharp and hard above them, unpolluted by city lights. The air was cooler now but still carried heat from the desert floor. The compound perimeter hummed with generators, distant convoys, and the metallic rattle of Marines working late into the night.

Rowe jogged over. “Atmospherics chart updated. Temperature drop of eight degrees expected by 1900 tomorrow. Barometric shift minor. Shouldn’t affect density altitude too much.”

Mack took the sheet and scanned it. Hawk hovered beside him, reading over his shoulder.

Doc tightened straps on his medical pack. “Anyone else get the feeling tomorrow’s gonna be loud?”

Mack shook his head. “Won’t be loud. Not if we do this right.”

Hawk tapped his spotting scope case. “Better not be loud. I didn’t polish this glass for a firefight.”

Rowe smirked. “I’ll pass that note to the Taliban.”

Bishop adjusted his earpiece. “Comms check at 0600?”

“0600,” Mack confirmed.

The team drifted into silence—a reverent quiet that settled around them like a weight. Not fear. Not dread. Just the focus that comes when warriors understand what tomorrow demands.

Hawk nudged Mack with an elbow. “You ever wonder how many of these nights we’ve had?”

“No,” Mack said. “I wonder how many we have left.”

Hawk whistled. “Dark.”

“Honest.”

Hawk didn’t argue.

Mack lifted his rifle case, the weight familiar and grounding. He looked at each member of the team—Hawk, Doc, Bishop, Rowe. Men he trusted with every breath he had.

“Get some sleep,” he said.

Doc grinned. “You first, Gunny. Otherwise the universe collapses.”

Mack didn’t smile, but something eased behind his eyes. He started toward his tent, boots crunching over gravel.

Hawk called after him. “Hey.”

Mack stopped.

“Tomorrow,” Hawk said softly. “We make it perfect.”

Mack nodded once. “We will.”

He stepped into the darkness, rifle case at his side, the weight of tomorrow already settling across his shoulders with silent precision.

And the night swallowed him whole.

 

 

2014 — Manassas, Virginia

Mack straightened slowly from the laptop, vertebrae cracking one after another like someone racking a slide in slow motion. His chair creaked under him, old wood complaining. The screen’s pale glow washed his hands in cold light, making the scar along his knuckle look like a thin white rope.

He closed his eyes and leaned back, letting the chair tip until it balanced on the rear legs, that fine edge where control met gravity. His lower back seized in protest, a band of tight muscle drawn across old injuries. He pressed his palm into it, fingers digging, searching for relief. He’d been sitting too long. Again.

A breath leaked out of him, long and ragged.  He realized, abruptly, that he’d been holding it.  He opened his eyes and let the chair drop back onto all fours. His gaze returned to the laptop screen—black text on a white field, a frozen slice of another lifetime:

The ceiling fan rattled like an old engine fighting for life, pushing warm, sand-thick air around the cramped briefing room…
Gunnery Sergeant Mack O’Rourke sat at the long folding table…

He stared at the name.  He hadn’t changed it yet.

“Jesus,” he muttered.

Too close. Too literal. It read like a mission report, not fiction. The therapist at the VA had called it “processing.” Mack called it “dragging old ghosts into the daylight and poking them with a stick.”

He rubbed the back of his neck, thumb digging into the tense knot at the base of his skull. The muscles were granite. His body still believed it lived in 2010.

Too close to real. Will have to change that.

He highlighted the name with a flick of the trackpad. Gunnery Sergeant Mack O’Rourke glowed in pale blue. His own name, boxed in on the screen like it belonged on a casualty list.

He sat there, finger hovering over the delete key.

You wanted this, he thought. You chose to write it this way.

The VA therapist had suggested journaling first. “Just write about your day,” she’d said. “Write your thoughts, your feelings, your dreams. No judgment, no structure. Just get it out of your head and onto paper.”

He’d nodded, polite and distant, and gone home and stared at a blank notebook for an hour.

Journaling. Like he was a teenage girl with a lock and key diary.  No. That wasn’t him.

The notebook sat now on the edge of his desk, three-quarters empty, its first pages scrawled with early, half-hearted attempts. Short, stiff lines: Woke up at 0300 again. Same dream. Sand. Smoke. Hawk yelling my name. Then nothing for weeks. Then: Doc from the unit called. Another guy ate his gun. Then a page ripped out so cleanly it left only the faint serrations of regret.

Fiction had seemed like a better compromise. You tell yourself you’re making it up. You hide behind character and plot and a little label that says “novel” instead of “confession.” But fiction still had teeth. Especially when you wrote what you knew.

Marines. Grunt stuff. Operations. Sand. All of it.

He let his hand drop from his neck and settle on the desk. The wood bore scratches and dents from another life before him—an old oak beast he’d found in a used furniture store off Route 28. It reminded him of an ops table: functional, scarred, reliable.

The living room around him was quiet, the muted hush of a small Manassas townhouse on a rainy afternoon. The front windows were tall but narrow, framed by cheap blinds and clean, military-straight curtains. On the wall opposite his desk hung a shadow box with his ribbons and medals, an old unit patch, a folded flag. Beside it, a framed black-and-white photo of five men in desert MARPAT, squinting against Afghan sun. Hawk on his left, Doc on his right. All younger. All harder in the eyes.

The television was off. The radio was silent. No news, no commentary, no white noise.

Just the tick of the cheap wall clock above the hallway and the soft, constant static of rain against glass.

He glanced at the time. 1417.

He should eat something. He should stretch. He should do a dozen things besides stare at a screen and circle the same memory like a vulture.

Instead, he watched the cursor blink at the end of the paragraph. One small, stubborn heartbeat.

The ceiling fan rattled like an old engine fighting for life…

He heard it again. Not imagined, not written—the real fan in the 2010 briefing room. The smell of dust and gun oil and burned coffee. Hawk’s quiet sarcasm. Doc’s grin. The captain’s calm voice.

His chest tightened.

“Too close,” he said quietly.

He closed the laptop halfway, leaving it at a forty-five-degree angle like a hinged lid over something volatile. The screen dimmed, then went dark. His reflection appeared faintly in the black surface: short-cropped hair gone more salt than pepper now, crow’s feet deeper, jaw still stubborn.

“You’re supposed to be relaxing,” he told the reflection dryly.  It didn’t answer.

He pushed the chair back and stood, knees popping as they straightened. His back complained again, a dull ache running from lumbar to shoulder blades, the legacy of too many rucks and too many nights sleeping on rock.

The living room was small but organized. A worn but solid couch along one wall. A low coffee table holding a stack of dog-eared paperbacks—Le Carré, Clancy, Forsyth, some newer stuff with glossy covers and grim titles. A bookshelf with more military history than was healthy. A framed topographic map of Helmand Province beside a framed map of Washington, D.C., both at matching heights, like a before-and-after.

He moved past the couch, bare feet whispering over the cool laminate floor. The house was never quite warm enough. Virginia had a damp cold that seeped into the joints, different from the dry Afghan nights that at least felt honest.

The small kitchen opened off the living room, separated by a waist-high counter that held a coffee maker, a chipped ceramic mug, and a neat row of vitamins he forgot to take half the time. The kitchen smelled of coffee and the faint ghost of bacon from that morning.

The overhead light was off. The only illumination came from the overcast sky pressing down against the small back window. Rain streaked the glass in slow, heavy lines, blurring the view of the narrow yard and leaning fence. The world outside was gray, like someone had turned down the saturation on his life.

He stepped to the counter, picked up the mug, and frowned at the dried ring around the inside. He rinsed it with one hand, let hot water run and steam over his knuckles, then refilled it from the half-full coffee pot. The machine gurgled in protest, as if annoyed to be woken.

He took a sip and winced. It was burnt, bitter, hours old.

“Perfect,” he muttered, and drank again anyway.

He moved to the small window and stared out over the narrow strip of wet grass and the neighboring townhouses built in the same cheap, repeating pattern—brick fronts, white trim, identical back patios. A single maple tree in the shared yard drooped under the rain, its leaves a tired green heading toward the browns of fall.

Cars sat in their assigned spaces along the alley, parked in neat rows like domesticated animals. A white sedan with a faded Obama sticker. A dark blue pickup with a Marine Corps emblem on the back window. He didn’t know the guy who owned the truck yet. He hadn’t decided whether to knock on his door or keep it simple and anonymous.

Manassas, 2014. Present day. Superpower capital’s outer orbit.

And him. Gunnery Sergeant Mack O’Rourke, retired. Forty years old. Divorced. VA frequent flyer. P.T. for the back, CBT for the head, pills if you ask the right questions, brochures if you ask the wrong ones.

Writing a novel at a desk in his living room because his therapist thought journaling might help.

He snorted softly.

The rain tapped at the glass, steady and unhurried. He exhaled and watched the faint fog of his breath disappear.

He remembered the therapist’s office—drop ceiling, framed prints of generic landscapes, diplomas on the wall, box of tissues on the small table. She’d been younger than him, sharp eyes behind simple glasses, a voice that tried very hard to be both firm and gentle.

“How do you sleep, Gunny?”

“Badly.”

“Nightmares?”

“Some.”

“About what?”

“Stuff.”

“What kind of stuff?”

He’d shrugged, eyes on the cheap carpet. “Sand. Blood. Men yelling. The usual.”

She hadn’t laughed. “You might find it useful to write about those things. Not for anyone to read. Just for you. Writing can give form to things that feel overwhelming.”

He’d nodded like he agreed, then gone home and stared at blank paper.

Now here he was, writing the same missions he refused to talk about.

He took another drink of coffee, grimaced, and set the mug down.

Fiction. That word still felt like contraband in his mouth.

The idea had come from a different place, really. A story he’d read once where the writer clearly had no idea how Marines actually operated. The tactics were wrong, the dialogue was cartoonish, the rifle details were laughable. He’d thrown the paperback across the room and thought, If you’re going to use us, at least get it right.

Maybe that was ego. Maybe it was just the same compulsion that made him re-check the locks two and three times a night.

He left the kitchen and returned to the living room, carrying his mug. The air felt heavier now, as if the words he’d just written had mass.

He stopped beside the bookshelf and ran his fingers along the spines. The Killer Angels. Matterhorn. Redeployment. Real war, fictional frames. Men bleeding in ink.

He pulled one book out—a battered hardback copy of Without Remorse. The cover was faded, the dust jacket frayed. He’d read it in boot camp, then again on deployment. The protagonist in that story had done terrible things for what he believed were good reasons. Fiction had carried the weight when real stories couldn’t be told.

“You write what you know,” he said quietly to the shelf.

But what if what you know still smelled of cordite and hospital disinfectant?

He slid the book back into place, aligning it with the others. Order. Control. Clean lines.

He moved back to his desk and set the mug down on a coaster, not because he cared about the finish, but because he hated rings. Rings were sloppy. Rings said you were too lazy to move your hand an extra inch.

He lowered himself into the chair, felt the cushion give, the wood frame embrace familiar grooves. The laptop waited, half-closed, a black shroud reflecting a muted version of his face.

He flipped the screen open.

Light flooded his eyes. The text returned.

Gunnery Sergeant Mack O’Rourke sat at the long folding table…

He stared for a long moment. Then, with a small, stubborn sigh, he moved the cursor to the name and deleted it.

The letters vanished in reverse order. M-A-C-K.

He replaced them with another name: Gunnery Sergeant Ryan Cole.

Generic enough to be different. Close enough to feel like a lie.

He looked at it, tasted the new name in his head. Cole. Short. Hard consonant. Worked fine on the page.

Didn’t change a damn thing in his chest.

He scrolled up and reread the scene—from the rattling ceiling fan to the dark Helmand ridge, from the briefing room to the careful preparations. He’d written it straight, almost like he was transcribing video. His hands had moved faster than his awareness. That happened sometimes when he got in the groove; the words outran the filter.

Now, in the quiet of his living room, with rain whispering outside and the faint hum of the refrigerator in the next room, the scene felt less like fiction and more like evidence.

He heard Hawk’s voice in his head as clearly as if the man were leaning against the wall: You remember too damn well.

Mack’s jaw tightened.

“Yeah,” he muttered. “I do.”

He leaned back and let his eyes drift closed again, just for a second.

He was there again. The weight of the rifle. The smell of CLP. The heat. Doc’s offhand joke about communion. The captain’s tone when he said, “If it’s not perfect, you walk away.”

He hadn’t walked away.

He opened his eyes and forced himself back into the present. The living room. The desk. The cheap clock ticking. The rain.

He typed:

Cole shifted in his chair, the old ache in his lower back flaring as the briefing wound down. He’d learned to live with the pain. Lower spine, left knee, right shoulder. Afghanistan had a way of leaving signatures on the body…

He paused, hand hovering over the keyboard.

He was giving the pain to someone else now. Putting it on a fictional man’s skeleton and calling it creative expression. Was that honest, or was it cowardice?

His therapist would probably say something like, “You’re creating distance while still engaging the trauma in a safe way.”

He called it hiding behind names.

Still, his fingers moved again, tapping out another line. Then another. The words smoothed themselves out, sentences settling into place.

For a few minutes, he forgot to think and just wrote. Helmand flowed through him again—the terrain, the light, the angles. The way mission briefings felt like both routine and judgment. The quiet jokes. The unspoken fear.

He wrote until his vision blurred and the letters started to double. His back sent up a flare of protest. His leg tingled.

He stopped, flexed his fingers, and sat back.

The clock on the wall read 1449.

He’d added maybe six hundred words. On a good day, he could do three times that. Today didn’t feel like a good day.

He took another drink of coffee. It had cooled, losing the last of its heat. He swallowed anyway. He’d choked down worse.

His gaze wandered around the room again, as if searching for something to anchor him.

On the side table next to the couch lay a folded letter from the VA. He didn’t have to open it to know what it said: We received your claim. We’re processing it. Estimated completion: sometime before your death, if we’re feeling generous. He’d been through it before. He’d go through it again.

Next to that lay a small spiral notebook with a list of things he should probably do:
— Call Mom.
— Refill prescription.
— Go to group.
— Write 1,000 words.

He stared at the last line.  He’d written more than that now. Technically, he could cross it off. He didn’t.

He thought about the VA group the therapist had mentioned. “Others like you,” she’d said. “Men who’ve seen similar things. Talking helps.”

Talking had never been his strongest suit. You couldn’t talk a sniper round back into the barrel. You couldn’t talk a dead Marine back onto his feet.

But maybe you could write things that looked like talking.

He looked back at the laptop.

The cursor blinked patiently.

He rested his hands on the keys, but didn’t type.

“What are you doing, Mack?” he asked the empty room.

Silence answered. The rain kept falling.

He thought about the bigger idea that had started to form at the edges of his mind over the past year or so—something beyond Helmand, beyond missions. A novel, not just about Marines and war, but about politics and power and what happens when words are treated like weapons. A story that poked at the country’s fault lines.

He wasn’t there yet. Right now, all he had were fragments—this scene, that memory, a what-if about a President and a rifle that wouldn’t leave him alone.

His therapist would probably have a field day with that.

But this was where it started. At a desk in a quiet townhome, with rain on the windows and a burned pot of coffee and a man who didn’t know how to stop living in both the past and the possible future.

He let out another slow breath.

“You wanted to write,” he said to himself. “So write.”

He put his fingers back on the keyboard and began to type again, line by careful line, the rhythm slow but steady. Not because it felt good. Not because it healed.

Because he didn’t know what else to do with the ghosts.