The Knife: A Novel - Softcover

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Ross Ritchell is a former soldier in a United States Special Operations Command direct-action team conducting classified operations in the Middle East. Upon his discharge, he enrolled at Northwestern University, where he earned an MFA. He lives with his family in Illinois.

Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

1

He was Shaw to everyone in the squadron, nobody to the rest of the world. His given name was Dutch Robert Shaw and his grandmother raised him. She called him her Little Dutch, or the more formal Dutch Robert if he was in trouble, but with her gone his pre-squadron life might as well have been buried in the Minnesota soil along with her lifeless body. She was gone now and he was changing.

Special operators lived in the shadows and he was a team leader in the darkest of them. Their lives were classified and they liked it that way, for it let them do their job. The next deployment would be Shaw’s tenth, the team’s fifth together, and he didn’t even think about it as killing after a while. Besides someone having an interesting mustache or getting whacked in their underwear, the kills weren’t worth much of a second thought. Holding a weapon? Two in the chest. Strapped with a vest? Two in the head. If he’d wait a second longer it’d be him on the floor leaking into the ground, or one of his buddies. Maybe a building full of people. It was work. Living over life, way of the knife.

Summer was just giving way to fall then. They weren’t slotted to head out on their next hop for another couple months, but the warmer weather brought an influx of farmers and goat-herders with pockets fattened by jihadist contracts. They’d swarm out of the mountains, deserts, and villages and attack anyone in uniform. Just like back home in the cities, the violence increased with the temperatures. So teams and squads back in the States cleaned their weapons and kept their eyes on the news. There were one hundred three coalition deaths in June. One hundred thirty-four in July. One hundred sixty-one in August. Speaking averages, the numbers usually dropped in September, but then one of their sister squadrons lost fourteen men after a Chinook and a Black Hawk went down in the mountains on the same day. The tally for the month rose to nearly two hundred. Shaw knew they’d be getting spun up early. Bets were placed with each passing day.

“Sir, a refill?”

The girl pouring coffee stood in front of him, her blond ponytail splayed over her shoulders and chest like parted curtains. Her name tag read Stephanie and she’d drawn a little heart to dot the i in her name. She wore khaki pants and a dark green sweater and a little too much eye makeup. She was cute, beautiful soon if she didn’t start smoking or fall in love with any of the guys like the one seated before her. Their profession aged people.

She looked sweet and relaxed and she had her eyebrows raised, as if she wasn’t yet annoyed but was thinking about getting there. Shaw looked older with a beard, so she probably didn’t see him as someone liable to hit on her. He was safe, thus was she, she might have thought. But he wasn’t safe in that regard, merely distracted. He’d been drumming his fingers on his empty cup, focused on the TVs nailed to the walls. The news had been broadcasting widespread suicide bombings in the Middle East for the last few days and the beeper he wore in his pocket weighed heavier than normal. He hadn’t noticed her sweater-strangled breasts hovering mere inches from his face.

“Sir, a refill?” she repeated.

He turned toward the sound, quick and abrupt. He nearly nosed her breasts. The longer strands of his beard pricked the loose wool of her top. He nodded and tipped his cup toward her. Smiled. He had a good smile, deep dimples on both cheeks. “Please.”

The dimples were a strong peace offering. She smiled back and poured.

“Cream?”

He nodded. “Thank you.”

She held her smile longer for him than she did for most customers. She poured from a small silver creamer and stopped when he cut the air with his fingers. He thanked her again, and she had probably just started staring through his beard, recognizing the handsome face buried beneath it, when an older couple seated at another table called her over. An old woman held her white coffee cup in the air with arthritic fingers while her husband sat across from her, asleep, with his head in a book. The old woman looked like she wouldn’t be able to hold the cup up much longer, so the waitress backpedaled quickly over to the old couple, running her fingers through her hair. She kept her eyes on Shaw as she moved and he watched her while he blew waves in his coffee, the tattoos on his wrists freed and visible from his sleeves. His lips hovered over the rim of the cup and he mouthed her name. Stephanie. Stephanie. He watched her pour for the old woman and liked the way she rested her hand gently on the old woman’s brittle shoulder.

He could see her smooth hand and the fragile, delicate wrist emerging from the sweater she’d rolled up to pour the coffee. A leather bracelet emerged on her wrist and he wondered who’d given it to her. A family member or friend, maybe. Another man. She probably hadn’t seen Shaw’s fingernails, stained with gun oil, but she might have learned to love that about him.

The news continued blaring in the background, but he was too busy counting strands of the blond hair cinched into her ponytail to care. And she might have started noticing something in him beyond what everyone else in the shop could see: a tall blond guy with a wild beard and large back muscles shifting beneath a trim blue sweater that hugged his chest and waist.

And then the beeper in his pocket rumbled.

He took it out and black stars filled the screen with a minus-2. He let out a breath. The stars meant rush—two hours to get back to base—and it was October second, which meant he owed Hagan fifty. Hagan bet on the first week in October and Shaw the second.

He opened his wallet and fingered the fifty he now owed Hagan and the five that would cover the coffee. He’d just thought of asking the waitress for her phone number when the beeper went off. It was pointless now—he’d be leaving in hours—so he stood up and made sure to catch her eye when he did. He waited for her to turn away from the old couple’s table, and when she did her blond hair caught the sunlight. For just a moment, he let himself think of what it might look like lying next to him on the grass of a farm in the summertime, a baby on the way. Maybe two or three others further down the life line. Then he smiled at her, held the fifty up in his hand, and left it on the table for her.

He’d tell Hagan to shove it. Hagan would be upset only for as long as it took him to talk about the girl he was with the night before.

Huge tits,” Hagan said.

He was smiling wide and appeared to be quite in love with himself. Shaw thought he might have forgotten their bet entirely. The youngest guy in the team, Hagan had a round, doughy face but carried nothing but muscle on his frame. Dressed in cargo pants and utility shirt like everyone else, he had flecks of dip stuck in his bottom teeth and his lower lip bulged with the brown flakes of tobacco. He stood propped in the doorway leading to the pit, his hands flexed around invisible breasts he’d given himself, and was rocking back and forth on his heels. He looked like a hulking, giddy idiot. A middle-school pervert.

“Huge.”

Shaw nodded because to Hagan they were always huge, and because he needed to be believed. Hagan was fragile like that. Plus, keeping his mind on tits would keep his mind off the money Shaw owed him.

“Congrats on the huge, Hog.” Shaw slapped Hagan on the back and walked around the wooden pallets being filled up with all their gear. Hagan didn’t ask for the money, so Shaw laughed and continued on past him. “And you’ve got shit in your...