“It’s our best shot.” The pilot winced.
“He’ll be fine,” said the junior PJ. “He’s not gonna die, right?”
The senior PJ wanted to yell at his comrade, scold his casual attitude, but he knew that it wasn’t the boy’s fault. Most of the squad felt the same. Hell, he once felt that way himself. But then he had watched a friend walk straight into a field of IEDs, convinced he couldn’t die, and he lost both of his legs instead. It’s the fucking strings, the PJ thought. Because of them, suddenly everyone is invincible.
Until they’re not.
“I won’t go if you don’t think it’s the right call,” said Javi. “But I’m ready.”
The senior PJ hated to separate from one of his own, but he couldn’t ignore the two civilians under their care now. And he didn’t like their chances of walking more than a mile undetected, with two of his men barely hobbling.
“Okay,” he finally agreed. “You’re a good man, García.”
Reynolds spotted the group through an opening in the trees. There were only five.
“Where’s my copilot?” he shouted, as the PJs loaded the two injured men into the back of the chopper.
“He’s coming,” said the junior PJ.
The rest of the group climbed inside, and Reynolds was all set to fly. But Javi wasn’t back yet.
A tense minute passed, followed by another.
And then they heard the engines.
“Shit.” Reynolds felt a shiver of anxiety run through his body, but still he waited.
The rumbling grew louder. The injured doctor moaned. The rescued pilot was breathing rapidly, and the flight engineer tapped her fingers nervously on her knee. The senior PJ sitting directly behind him leaned forward. “Remember we have two civilians with us, Reynolds.”
But still he waited. “I won’t leave García.”
The sound of the engine was approaching even closer now.
The junior PJ whispered, so as not to alarm the doctors, “We’re fucking target practice on the ground, Reynolds.”
“Just give him a chance to get here!” he shouted back.
Then Reynolds remembered something that his commander once told him: For all the damage they had wrought, the true gift of the strings—of every soldier knowing when he would die, and choosing his path accordingly—was that no soldier would ever have to die alone.
If he left now, Reynolds reasoned, abandoning Javi in enemy territory, at least Javi had a long string. At least he would survive.
The loud popping of nearby gunfire cracked through the silence.
“Goddammit Reynolds!” someone shouted.
He couldn’t wait any longer.
“We’ll come back for him,” Reynolds said, for himself more than for anyone else.
From his spot on the ground, Javi heard the unmistakable sound of the helicopter passing overhead, his only shot at salvation flying away.
But it wasn’t salvation. Not really. The chopper would have bought him a few extra hours, perhaps. A chance to send a final message to his parents back home. But he had already ended every phone call to his family, over the past five years, with the same three words that he would have said now. The only words that mattered.
So Javi pressed one last time onto the wound in his chest, the stray bullet burrowed somewhere inside, then lifted his hands to search his rucksack. It took him a minute, but he finally found it. A tattered old prayer card, its corners now smeared with the blood from his fingers.
He gripped it tightly in front of him, the same card that had been passed down from Gertrude to her lover, from Simon to his friend, from Grandpa Cal to his grandson, and from Jack on to him, even when he thought he didn’t want it.
And Javi read aloud the words that all of the card’s owners before him once read. So he wouldn’t die alone.
Jack
The army had been shocked by Javier’s death, believing him to be a long-stringer, and though they remained unaware of Javi’s true actions and intentions, the top brass quickly assumed that some form of deception must have occurred in the days between Javier’s graduation and his ultimate assignment. The strings never lied, but humans sure did.
A few army officials had contacted Mr. and Mrs. García, after delivering their son’s belongings, and asked them not to speak with any members of the press until the military decided how best to proceed.
Javier was not the first short-stringer to die in combat after the STAR Initiative, since many soldiers were ultimately grandfathered in. But Javi’s death was the first to spark suspicion of purposeful fraud. Javier’s parents were given permission to arrange a veteran’s funeral, but their son’s precise function in the army—and, specifically, his clearance for active combat—was not to be discussed in public.