out for South America. They’d gotten the go-ahead from the Defense Department, the Colombian government, and the Peruvian government to do whatever it took to get rid of the NRF rebels. So it was one of those no-holds-barred–type deals.”
Yeah, he knew about those. He’d been running no-holds-barred for the last six years, and he had a feeling that he’d learned a lot of what he knew from this man.
“I think we did our share of those together,” he said, watching Creed’s face in the firelight.
The Jungle Boy smiled but the expression was fleeting.
“More than our share, brother, saving the world in spite of itself most every time.”
Yeah, J.T. understood that, too. He watched Creed take something out of his pack, and he grinned when he recognized what the SDF guy had brought.
“Tobacco.”
“Honduran cigars,” Creed said. “From Danlí.”
That set him back.
“Orlando’s?” He’d smoked many Danlí cigars over the last few years. Handmade in the Honduran highlands, chanted over by Mario Sauza Orlando, the brujo who rolled them, they’d often been his first line of defense against the pain wrought by Dr. Souk’s drugs.
“I found a box of them in your house on the Tambo River, sorting through the wreckage after you and I had our little run-in down in the boathouse.” Creed handed him one of the cigars, then bit the end off another and stuck it in his mouth. “And I swore, so help me God and the Virgin Mary, that someday, somehow, someway, you and I would sit down and have a smoke together.” He pulled the stick out of the fire and lit his cigar then held it over the flames for J.T. to do the same.
After they both got their cigars going and were puffing away, Creed slipped out of his coat and rolled up one of the sleeves of his shirt, exposing the three lines of scar tissue on his upper left arm.
“Alazne?” J.T. asked, surprised. The information on the scars he bore on his left arm had been part of his debriefing with the guys, but he hadn’t expected to see the same scars on anyone else.
“No, not the witch,” Creed said, a trail of smoke escaping with his words. “Kid and I marked each other in Peru, while we were chasing the NRF.” He finished blowing out a stream of smoke. “Let me see your arm.”
J.T. complied, pushing up the sleeve on his left arm, knowing Creed wanted to see the three stripes incised into his skin, the only scars on him that hadn’t come from Dr. Souk.
Creed looked a them from across the fire. “I watched her the night she did that to you,” he said, taking another long pull off the cigar, his face growing grim. “And I watched the night Pablo Castano took his knife to you.”
Hard, hard times—what Creed had been through, what they’d all been through.
“He died for the deed,” Creed continued. “I sent him to hell in the mountains of Peru, watched his blood soak into the ground, and took it as my revenge, but it wasn’t enough, could never have been enough, until Paraguay, when I knew you were alive.”
The Jungle Boy lowered his gaze and went back to stirring the fire.
J.T. had dozens of scars all over his body, but none compared to the thick ridge of scar tissue running the length of his chest, the one Creed had witnessed, Castano’s work. Of all the horrors he didn’t remember, he was most grateful for not remembering that night.
But his man remembered, and J.T. knew he wasn’t alone in his nightmares, not anymore.
Hard, hard times.
Dylan and Red Dog had felt the bite of Souk’s Thai syringes. They knew what he’d suffered in Bangkok. J.T. wasn’t alone in knowing that pain, not anymore, not now that he’d made it home.
He blew a ring of smoke across the fire and watched it fall apart in the flames.
“Good cigar,” he said.
“Damn good,” Creed agreed.
“Thanks,” he said. “Thanks for everything.” Thanks for not forgetting. Thanks for killing my enemy. He didn’t know how else to say what he felt, this utter thankfulness to be in this quiet wild place, to be finding his way back.
“Semper Fi,” Creed said.
J.T. looked up and met the Jungle Boy’s pale, gray-eyed gaze, and he’d never felt the meaning of the words more strongly—Semper Fidelis. Always faithful.
Always.
CHAPTER FORTY-FIVE
Seven months later, Kaua’i, Hawaii
“We’re setting a record here,” J.T. said.
“For most consecutive hours of doing absolutely nothing?” Jane asked, taking the last two weeks into account.