True Faith and Allegiance

None of the U of M students believed her at first when she said she was an Army officer. She looked just like another coed to them. When they asked her to prove it with an ID, she instead reached down the front of her blouse and pulled out her dog tags, then spun them around to the laughs of all around her, male and female alike.

A good-looking guy about her age who said he was in grad school working on an MA in history offered to go fetch her another vodka tonic, incorrectly assuming she was drinking alcohol, but she demurred. She wouldn’t mind talking to the guy some more, when there wasn’t a group of his friends standing around, but instead she went by herself to the picnic table set up with beers, booze, and mixers and fixed herself another tonic and lime.

Carrie liked the fact that, right now anyway, she didn’t feel much like the copilot-gunner of Pyro 1–1. She loved the Army but didn’t mind stepping away from it once in a while to remind herself of her past life, her other identity. This would all change next week, when she donned her ABDUs, packed her 5.11 backpack, and headed to the airport from her parents’ house in Cleveland for her flight to Germany. She’d be at Katterbach less than a day before returning to the battle zone, although she did not yet know where, exactly, she would be sent.

As she stood there alone and sipped her drink she glanced in the direction of the good-looking grad student, hoping to catch his eye, and while she did so it occurred to her that America itself had turned into something of a battle zone in the past few weeks. The same ISIS monsters she’d been fighting over there were now over here — the Chicago massacre the evening before was naturally the main topic of conversation here at the party — and every day on the news there were new stories about a soldier or intelligence officer being targeted somewhere in the country.

It pissed her off, and made her eager to go back to work, where she might be able to have an effect on the war here at home.

She glanced up from her drink again to see the grad student looking her way, and then he smiled and began walking over, leaving his friends behind. Carrie Ann started to blush, and she hoped like hell the tan she’d picked up in Afghanistan would hide it, while she simultaneously wished like hell she had poured a double shot of gin in her tonic to calm her nerves.

Just as the guy approached he made a peculiar face. It suddenly did not look like he was interested in her at all, but almost immediately she realized he was focused on something behind her. She smiled at his expression and looked back over her shoulder.

And when she did, her own face took on a look of confusion.

An African American woman and a Middle Eastern man, both in their early twenties, walked up the driveway around to the party at the back of the house. There were African Americans and Middle Easterners all around the party, but these were the only two wearing black windbreakers that were clearly covering something attached to their bodies, and as they moved forward they separated, one going to the right along the fence at the far end of the carport, and the other breaking left along the rear of the house.

Their dead-set expressions, their dress, their movements. Instantly Carrie Ann knew something was seriously wrong.

The Middle Eastern man was just twenty-five feet away from Carrie Ann when he reached back over his head with both hands and then flung them forward. From each hand she recognized live grenades launching out, over her head and toward the dozens of men and women behind her. The woman standing on the driveway did the same, and one of her grenades arced through the air in the direction of the picnic table bar and Carrie Ann’s own position.

Carrie Ann Davenport turned around, took two steps toward the stunned master’s student, and she tackled him across the top of the table, knocking over bottles and cans and ice and stacks of Solo cups along with them. The two rolled off and over, and had just landed on the ground, he on top of her, as the four grenades exploded all over the garden party.

Screams and yells from the wounded and the panicked, and the chants of “Allahu Akbar” rang above it all, and then Carrie Ann heard the gunfire. From under the picnic table she could see both the attackers moving forward, pistols in their hands, shooting at men and women scrambling away in front of them.

Carrie Ann rolled off the U of M student, hiked her white sleeveless blouse out of her skirt, and reached to the small of her back. She drew a tiny Smith & Wesson Bodyguard .380 pistol, reached over the top of the table, and aimed it at the body of the man walking toward her. She was just about to press the trigger when she recognized the man might have been wearing body armor under his big jacket, so she activated the Crimson Trace laser on the weapon and put the shaking laser dot on his forehead.