Page 28 of Point of Contact

Jesse nodded his thanks, glancing down at the video feed again. All quiet.

Riley cleared his throat. “You want to come home with me for mid-tour leave?”

Jesse wasn’t sure he’d heard him right. “What?”

“Come home to Colorado with me for mid-tour, Jess,” Riley said earnestly, breaking off when Jesse gave a bark of derisive laughter.

“Yeah, right. Your dad hates me, Riles.”

Narrowing his eyes, Riley retorted, “Jesus, he does not hate you! My dad is one of the nicest guys you’ll ever meet.”

Jesse stared out at the endless darkness surrounding them. “It doesn’t have anything to do with whether he’s nice or not,” he mumbled. “I was the fuckin’ prick that night, not him. I’d hate me, too.”

Riley was silent for a moment. “I think he understands, Jess.”

Jesse glanced at him sharply, meeting Riley’s steady gaze. “Understands what?”

Before Riley could reply, the sound of footsteps scraping along the shale reached their ears. They swung their guns in that direction, just in time hearing Kimi’s low voice calling to them from a few feet away.

“Damn it, it’s me. Don’t shoot.”

“Jesus Christ.” Jesse eased his finger away from the trigger as Riley gave a disgusted snort.

“Sneaking up on a couple of armed soldiers. Real smart, KJ.”

She climbed into the tower with them, a sheepish look on her face. “Sorry, I couldn’t sleep and I heard you talking, so—”

Jesse tuned her out, his heart still thundering in his ears, both from the shock of her sudden appearance and fright over what Riley had been about to say. What did he mean, his dad would understand?

There was no way that guy could’ve figured out the truth about him, not when Jesse had done his fuckin’ best to come across as a drunken pig. He still cringed when he thought of the crassness he’d spewed, the demeaning things he’d said about women and about Trevor himself. Trevor should hate him, not understand. Riley, too.

Unless...they’d figured out why he’d done it.

His gut roiling, Jesse stared at Riley. He might be just a kid, but he was also one of the kindest, most honorable and forthright people Jesse had ever met. What must it’ve been like for him, growing up with a gay dad? Wincing, Jesse thought of his own dad, of taunts from strangers who assumed Deaf equaled mentally challenged, of spoken cruelties that his dad couldn’t hear but Jesse could.

Riley had to have gone through the same thing. He’d leaped to his dad’s defense the night of the party with the swiftness of a bullet, the anger of a man who’d heard it all before and wasn’t gonna hear it again, especially not in his own home. It had been a knee-jerk reaction from someone protecting a beloved father from a stranger’s venom, a battle Jesse had fought more than once himself.

But if Riley and Trevor had somehow seen through all that ignorant buffoonery to the fear that lay beneath it, what now?

Jesse sucked in a deep breath and blew it out, willing his heartbeat to slow and watching Riley, who was pointing out the features on the drone feed to Kimi. They were so much alike, he and Riley, only children who loved their dads fiercely, especially in those times when it felt like it was them against the world.

If Riley and Trevor knew about him, if they’d guessed...so what? Jesse bit his lip. So fucking what? If there was one thing the Valley had taught him so far, it was that he could trust Riley with his life. With everything about his life.

He let himself cautiously relax, tuning back into the conversation just in time to hear Kimi say, “It blows my mind that the pilot of that thing is sitting somewhere like New Mexico right now, keeping tabs on a bunch of guys thousands and thousands of miles away.”

“The Taliban have drones, too,” Riley said as he peeled open an energy bar with a crackle of cellophane. “They’re called crows, and they circle above us looking for scraps of food. Serves the same purpose, pinpointing our location. Who needs million-dollar technology when you got a bunch of fuckin’ birds?” He ate his bar in three large bites, throwing the wrapper negligently over the side.

Jesse watched it flutter away in the breeze. “Every advantage we have, they know how to beat,” he agreed. “We have weapons and technology they can only dream of, yet they’re kicking our asses every time we step outside the wire. Why? All you have to do is look around you.” He pointed at the drone feed, everything colored an otherworldly green by its night-vision capability. “The mountains hate us, the villagers hate us. As far as I can tell, we aren’t accomplishing jack shit, but we’re ordered to be here, so we’re here.”

Kimi pulled her poncho liner closer around herself, hunching against the late-night chill. “There are rumors that 9/11 was planned in this Valley,” she said quietly, “that bin Laden uses it as a corridor for trafficking weapons and men in from Pakistan.” She sighed, watching the hazy outlines of the village on the screen. “You see these people here and wonder how they could allow that, could allow the Taliban to bring war right into their homes. Then you realize in a place like this, survival is the only thing that matters to them.”

“They don’t fuckin’ care about abstract shit like duty or loyalty.” Riley lit another cigarette. “All they care about is themselves, their crops and their goats, like they have for hundreds of years. The Soviets tried to change things, and got their asses kicked to hell and back. History repeating itself, man.”

Kimi winced. “These villages you’re going into tomorrow are hard-core Taliban, guys. One-hundred percent hostile.”

Riley took a vicious drag, blowing the smoke out with a furious exhale. “These assholes have to know we mean business, Kimi.” His voice was grim. “We can’t let them think they get to shoot us up, lay hands on one of our brothers, and we’re not going to retaliate somehow. We were taking them goddamn rice and beans, for fuck’s sake.”

“So the answer is sending more young men out there to die?” she shot back, her tone fierce with anger.