0045 hours.
Where did you grow up? That was the question Stevens had asked, so that’s where Finn started.
He was surprised how difficult it was. He tried to stay on one memory, to bring it more sharply into focus and see how far he could play it, but it would shift and crackle and blur and another completely unrelated memory would cut in. Like radio signals gone awry in an ocean of static.
Running through the trees, the sun-dappled forest floor…Boyd, scrabbling to reorient himself, getting sucked into the maw of the destroyer’s ballast pump…following deer tracks with Ray…sitting against the interior wall of the brick-and-plaster dwelling, heat lightning searing his field of vision…black blood pooling, flies buzzing—
His eyes jerked open as a wave of nausea slammed into him, knocking him breathless. The darkness of his cell felt terrifying.
Breathe in, let it hold, four, five, six, seven, breathe out.
Breathe in…
During the pool competency phase in BUD/S, instructors would devise the most fiendish torments possible—tie your air hose in knots, rip your respirator out of your mouth, shackle your wrists to your feet, anything to push you to the point where you had to come up and gasp for air. But if you did, you flunked, and Finn had seen a dozen guys pass out underwater and pop unconscious to the surface like dead goldfish. Not Finn. He would just sink to the bottom and sit, waiting out the instructor.
He needed to do that now, to sink to the bottom of this dark pool. And wait.
He closed his eyes and sank.
Sun-dappled forest floor…following deer tracks with Ray…Ray making grilled cheese sandwiches…the place by the millstream where you could lie down and watch the minnows and goldfish and frogs and the—
His eyes jerked open as he gasped for air, the wave of nausea slamming into him again, nearly forcing him back onto the rack’s thin mattress.
He fought it, rocking forward and back, slowing, stilling himself. Gripped the edge of the bunk with both hands. Drew a shuddering breath in, then heaved it out with a whoosh. Then another. And another, slower, more measured.
And again, slipping down into the deep.
Remembering.
The cabin in the woods, canopy of broadleaf maples, scent of grand firs…
It was almost an hour before he found it.
He was deep in early memories (fat slice of chocolate cake on a plate, a dimly lit kitchen) when his eyes jerked open again—for the tenth time? eleventh? twentieth?—and he burst back up to the surface.
His hands had gone numb, his cell filled with a buzzing sound.
He shook his head.
It was that ringing in his ears, the same one he’d experienced a few weeks earlier with Tom the Ordie. They’d been down in that flare magazine, talking about Biker the jet pilot and how she never drank coffee—
And that was when he heard it.
Somewhere in the depths of Finn’s brain there came a soft click—a neurochemical spark flying between temporal lobe and prefrontal cortex as one among thousands of innocuous memory fragments suddenly burst open, a single rocket against the night sky.
Coffee.
Finn sat straight.
Closed his eyes again.
Sorted through the stills and clips.
Saw images of sailors getting coffee at Jittery Abe’s—dozens, hundreds, thousands of sailors, a forest of lattes, a landscape of grande double-shots.
And one coffee order that didn’t fit.
“Americano, tall,” he heard her say.
A short, black-haired jet pilot.
Biker.
Who never drank coffee.
He opened his eyes and called out to his jailer.
“Hey, Frank,” he said. “I need to get a message out.”