Philadelphia Noir - Carlin Romano [14]
“I should kill you right now,” Miller said.
“Yeah you should. So why don’t you?”
“Because I need to hear, from your own mouth, why you helped the enemy in Tora Bora.”
Richard was parched. He was finding it difficult to breathe, let alone talk. The house seemed to be getting colder. Still, he wanted to tell him why, because in a perverse way, Richard needed to hear it from his own mouth too.
Richard ripped open his T-shirt, revealing the ugly scar on his chest. “I did it because of this,” he said.
Miller looked at him curiously.
“Fighting the battle at Tora Bora was like getting this scar all over again,” Richard said wistfully. “It was like reliving ethnic cleansing.”
Miller furrowed his brow. He was clearly confused.
“I’m Bosnian. I grew up in a mountain village where you could look out and see minarets from four-hundred-year-old mosques poking through the clouds. It was beautiful. It was peaceful. It was home. Then the war started.
“I was eleven years old when the Serbs came to our village. They stripped the men and paraded them in front of their wives before executing them. Then they raped the women. I was lucky, I guess. They just sliced my chest with a machete and left me to die.”
Richard looked up at Miller, who’d been struck dumb by the story. “I saw my mother and sister violated. I saw my father humiliated. I saw all of them murdered. And the only thing I had to remember them by was this scar. Even after I got adopted by a nice American diplomat and his wife, even after they changed my name from Mujo to Richard, even after I learned to love this country, I never forgot what happened to my people. I couldn’t, because I had this scar to remind me.
“I never thought when they trained me for Special Forces and put me in Delta Force that I’d end up fighting Muslims in those mountains in Tora Bora. But when I did, something snapped, and it was like I was that frightened, angry little boy back in Bosnia.”
“So you sent a radio transmission to make them think you’d been cut off from your unit,” Miller said matter-of-factly. “Then you went over a mountain pass and killed enough Afghan militia to let the mujahideen escape.”
The house was silent except for the sound of Richard’s increasingly labored breathing.
“Did you realize who you were helping?” Miller asked.
“I realized I was helping Muslims who had the ability to fight back. That was more than my family ever had.”
“But you knew that the man commanding those Muslim fighters in Tora Bora was Osama bin Laden. Didn’t you?”
Richard closed his eyes and smiled. It was a joyless gesture—one fraught with all the contradictions that had plagued him all his life. “Of course I knew. That’s why I kept going back to Afghanistan. I wanted to make up for it by doing my duty for America. But when I couldn’t atone for my sins, I wanted to forget I’d ever committed them. That roadside bomb that hit my Humvee was a blessing in disguise. It allowed me to come home and forget Afghanistan. It allowed me to come here and marry Corrine. At least for a little while, I had something beautiful again. But you and your men took that away too.”
“Actually, they didn’t.”
Richard’s eyes snapped open at the sound of that voice. It was velvety, feminine, and familiar. It was Corrine. As she walked into the room, Richard tried to make his mouth form the question, but it wouldn’t.
Perhaps he’d been struck dumb by the blood loss and the resultant dementia. Or maybe he was already dead, and Corrine was meeting him in paradise.
“You did a good job, Agent Miller,” she said to the squad leader who’d captured Richard. “We lost five men, but at least we got our subject, and we got him alive.”
“Our subject? What are you talking about?” asked Richard.
“The same thing you were talking about a few minutes ago,” Corrine said as she wiped the fake blood from her chest. “Doing my duty for my country.”
“But you can’t be real,” Richard said, laboring to breathe as he began