Harris wouldn’t be the first to crack from combat burnout. Who wasn’t pulling double and triple duty these days?
“I asked for the deployment.” Harris thumped himself on the chest. “I embraced it. I wanted to go over from the minute I finished training, to have my chance at defending my country.”
Catriona gasped, her attention on Harris even as her hand gravitated into her hobo bag to pull out a chew toy and toss it to Fang. “Brandon, you wanted to go to the Middle East?”
Harris winced, looking down at the planked floor. “I thought I was a badass, that I could go over there and make a difference all by myself.”
“Lieutenant,” Liam said, to pull Harris back into the conversation, into the moment, rather than wherever he’d drifted off to. “What exactly was your tasking?”
The silence stretched out, filled only by the increasing storm outside. A crack of thunder vibrated through the cabin.
Harris looked up sharply, blinking. “I was a military bodyguard for a high-profile civilian contractor in southern Afghanistan. I went everywhere with him… meetings, dinner, trips from base to base. Even his shopping trips to pick up touristy crap for his wife and kids back home.”
“A regular family guy,” Liam said, more to keep him talking than anything else.
“No,” Harris’s eyes hardened. “He wasn’t. Those trips to different marketplaces were a cover. He was meeting with contractors from other countries.”
“Not unheard of.”
“That’s what I thought at first.” He swiped the perspiration off his forehead, taking his time, as if gathering his thoughts. Or preparing his story? As a military cop, he would have training in interrogation. Enough to fool the room? To fool a shrink?
“I’m just a lieutenant,” Harris continued, “a lowly nobody, as far as they were concerned. Window dressing. So they talked more openly in front of me than they would around you, Major, or some other higher-ranking official. I know this sounds far-fetched, but as I pieced together those different meetings, I realized they were setting up the exchange of military information.”
“Whoa.” Jose held up a hand. “Contractors from different countries? That’s treason.”
“If I could prove it.” Harris rolled his shoulders. “Which I couldn’t. I spoke to my commanding officer, and he said they already had an eighteen-hour workday chasing down tangible threats with hard evidence. So I kept my mouth shut and ears open, waiting for something concrete I could take to the authorities, get some sense of who was pulling the strings. They talked a lot about their ‘bosses’ and reporting back to contacts in the military community, but I never got a name.”
Liam smiled darkly. “That would be too easy.”
“They were reckless, but not that reckless. It’s obvious they worked with someone high up the military chain of command. At first I thought it was a money thing, but the more I listened, the more I got the feeling it was about affecting the balance of power.”
“Whoa,” Cuervo interrupted. “Balance of power?”
“Right,” Harris continued. “It was about reshaping the face of the command structure, personal agendas for military armament programs that should excel versus which ones they would make sure failed.”
Damn. It would have been so much easier to go after a greedy bastard. Money trails were simple. But power-hungry types with an ideological ax to grind? Liam focused back in on Harris.
“Maybe a month into the assignment, things shifted. It was about more than talk. They planned an actual exchange, something to do with the coordinates for when U.S. satellites would be conducting intelligence gathering. If another country knows when you’re watching them…”
Shit. The implications were hellacious. U.S. intelligence operatives, military members on maneuvers… They would all be sitting ducks.
“Uh, yeah.” Liam scratched the back of his head. “That would constitute treason.”
Harris didn’t smile. “I could hardly believe what I was seeing. An exchange. A simple little chip that they passed over by exchanging cell phones.” He paused. “The data chip was in the phone. All I had to do was report them to officials on base and…”
“And?” Rachel touched his arm softly.
“The marketplace was bombed.” His voice went flat, his eyes hollow. “Bodies flew part. The two contractors died on impact. I heard sirens and screams. None of it fully registered. I just closed my hand around one of the cell phones and passed out. The next thing I remember, I woke up in a battlefield hospital ward.”
Liam leaned back in his chair, churning over Harris’s story in his mind. “That’s it?”
“When I got out of the hospital, I was pretty rattled. Go ahead and laugh if you want. Lieutenant gung ho was totally freaked out after a few months of combat and one especially close call. They tell me I was catatonic.” He shrugged. “When I came out of it enough to be moved to a rehab center, they gave me my stuff back. And there was that cell phone.”
“From the marketplace?”
“Exactly. I tried to alert the authorities to what happened. They informed me I was suffering from battle stress and that my memories were faulty.”
“Why didn’t they at least check the chip in your phone? That wouldn’t have taken long, to verify information.”