Sea Glass Winter (29 page)

67

Eig
ht weeks later

Unlike the championships held for every other high school sport in Oregon, basketball championships took place in nearly every geographical region of the state.

As he paced the sidelines of what could be the most important basketball game of his life, Dillon decided it was a good thing that the 4A division had been assigned the famed Gill Coliseum, because from the noise practically raising the roof, it seemed nearly all the 10,400 seats were filled with Shelter Bay fans.

Surprising everyone, most of all him, the Dolphins had played the last half of their season as if they’d been drinking rocket fuel. Oh, they still couldn’t shoot as well as their opponents, something he’d have to work on next season, but their passing skills were right up there with the best in the league, and they’d developed what some players never learned—a sense of reading the floor, knowing where not just the opposing players, but also their teammates, were at all times.

They also drew more fouls than any team he’d ever seen. A fact that had not escaped the fans of their opponents over the past weeks and had drawn criticism from other towns’ newspaper sports columnists and even the occasional editorial.

But Dillon didn’t care. Because they’d accomplished what he’d hoped for. They’d meshed as a team, playing as a unit. Each had the others’ backs, and together they’d proven unstoppable.

The score had been seesawing back and forth all evening. With less than five seconds to go, they were tied with the Klamath Falls Pelicans. As the crowd roared and stomped their feet in the bleachers, drowning out the sound of sneakers squeaking on the polished wood, Dirk Martin drove down the court, managing to power past his defender, only to be double-teamed.

He passed to Matt, who, feinting left, suddenly went right, revealing that the lesson Dillon had taught him that first day had sunk in.

When he, too, found himself facing a wall of defenders, he switched hands and, on the run, passed the ball to Johnny.

Who dribbled right in front of a charging defender, who crashed into him just as he went up for the shot.

The ball bounced off the rim as Johnny landed on his butt on the floor.

The opposing coach was apoplectic. Dillon wasn’t sure whether the guy was more furious with his own player, or the Dolphin’s number six, Johnny Tiernan-St. James.

“He’s going to stroke out if he doesn’t chill,” Dillon told Don as the coach began yelling at the ref who’d called the foul.

“He’s not the only one,” the assistant coach said as he glanced up at the clock. There was one second left. “This makes me really glad baseball doesn’t have a time clock.”

“It was a smart move by the kids,” Dillon decided. “They knew no one was going to risk blocking either Matt’s or Dirk’s shot. But everyone knows Johnny’s the worst player on the team. The odds of him successfully making any shot, under all this pressure, are pretty slim.”

“That was the first half of the season,” Don said as Dillon called a time-out to give the Dolphins their last pep talk of the season. “The last few weeks, I sure as hell wouldn’t bet against any one of them.”

“I’m not going to do the rah-rah thing,” Dillon said as the team gathered on the sidelines. He only raised his voice loud enough to be heard over the cacophony of the dueling pep bands and screaming fans. “You guys don’t need me to motivate you, because you’ve done that yourselves. What I am going to say is that whatever happens, you’ve done everything I’ve asked. And more.

“The Dolphins are a team everyone, even our opponents, look up to. A team admired for our poise on the court and leadership off the court. Over this season, every one of you has set an example, not just for every student in Shelter Bay High School, but for the younger kids, who dream of someday wearing a blue-and-white Dolphins letterman jacket.

“I’m proud of you.” He looked at each player, even the benchers, one by one. “Now go out there and bring that trophy home.”

“Hoorah!” they shouted as one as they ran back onto the floor.

As Dillon looked up at Claire, she flashed him a bold grin and a V sign. He viewed not an iota of doubt on her exquisitely lovely face.

The players lined up on either side of the basket.

Johnny took a deep breath. Bounced the ball.

Once.

Twice.

A third time.

Then sent it airborne.

Although Dillon knew it was a trick of the mind, like the way an adrenaline rush seemed to slow time down in battle, the ball seemed to take forever as it arced toward the basket.

It could have been his imagination, or perhaps any crowd noise was being drowned out by the roaring of blood in his ears. It was as if a hush had come over the sold-out arena.

Just when he was certain his heart was going to jump out of his chest, the pebbled brown ball reached its destination.

Swish.

Nothing but net.

Dillon Slater’s Steamed Clam Recipe

Ingredients

3 tablespoons butter (or half butter, half very good virgin olive oil)

3 cloves of fresh garlic, minced very finely

1½–2 fresh Manila or littleneck clams

½–¾ cup white wine (Dillon often substitutes a dark beer or ale for a richer, more robust flavor, especially in fall and winter.)

3 tablespoons chopped fresh parsley

Lemon

Sourdough bread for dipping

Preparation

Rinse clams, one at a time, in a colander to get rid of any sand that might linger. If any are open, tap them gently to see whether they close. Discard any that don’t.

(Remember, clams are alive. If you’re not using them immediately, gently lay them in a shallow dish, cover them with a damp paper towel, and store them in the refrigerator for up to three days. You may want to redampen the towel, but don’t cover them with water; since they need to breathe, definitely don’t keep them in an airtight container or cover them with plastic wrap.)

Melt butter (with olive oil, if you use it) in a large pan.

Add garlic and cook it until it softens and just barely begins to brown.

Add wine or beer and bring to a simmering boil.

Add clams, being careful not to crack the shells, and cook covered, stirring occasionally, for five to seven minutes or until all the clams open. Again, discard those that don’t.

Place the clams in serving bowls, pour the sauce over them, sprinkle them with parsley, and stir slightly.

Serve with optional lemon wedges and bread—either warmed and sliced or brushed lightly with olive oil, then grilled until brown and crunchy—and a crisp white wine or beer.

Enjoy the yum!

Serves 2–4 as appetizers, 2 for a meal.

Read on for a special preview of the next book

in JoAnn Ross’s Shelter Bay series,

Castaway Cove

Available everywhere books are sold in July

Afghanistan

Disney Drive, the main drag of Bagram Air Force Base, was about as far from the Magic Kingdom as a person could get.

A river of bumper-to-bumper vehicles was headed out of the base, packed together like salmon swimming upstream.

“I swear it’d be easier to just get out and walk,” Staff Sergeant MacKenzie “Mac” Culhane remarked to the cameraman and the female Airman correspondent from American Forces Network who were traveling with him.

“Is it always this crowded?” asked the “backpack” journalist from the
Seattle Examiner
, who’d been waiting for Mac when he’d arrived at the radio station that morning.

Apparently someone above Mac’s pay grade had decided that some positive warm and fuzzy stateside press was in order, which was why they were traveling to the village for a meet, greet, and schmooze photo op with the locals.

“Actually, you’re seeing it on a good day,” Mac said. “At least we’re moving.” Though nothing near the posted twenty-five-miles-per-hour speed limit.

“So, is there a story why this street’s named after Walt Disney?”

Jeez. You’d think the guy would’ve at least done some homework on the flight from the States.

“It’s not. It’s named for an Army specialist who died here when some heavy equipment fell on him,” the AFN reporter said. Although her voice remained neutrally polite, Mac could tell from the very faint edge to her tone that she was as irked by the guy’s question as he was.

“You definitely don’t want anything on this base named for you,” Mac said. “Because that means that you’re dead.” Another example being the Pat Tillman Memorial USO.

Mac might be a deejay, assigned to play songs and impart news and information, but like all the others he worked with, he took the AFN motto—“Serving those who serve”—seriously. Which was why whenever he could, he’d go outside the wire and travel to some of the world’s most dangerous war zones to entertain the troops and film footage that was shown not only on AFN television, but also sent home to family and loved ones.

After having been assigned to bases around the world, he was now on his third tour in Afghanistan, where, in addition to entertaining with music and banter, he also delivered the news of troop deaths. More during the surge, but lately the bad guys had stepped up their game again.

“Damned if you didn’t jinx us by saying we were moving,” the cameraman complained as the river of vehicles on the lane leading out of the base came to an abrupt halt.

In less than a minute, the driver of one of the white pickups civilian contractors tended to drive leaned on his horn.

Yeah. As if that was going to help.

In front of the pickup, unable to move due to the stalled traffic in front of him, the driver of a commuter bus ferrying soldiers and civilians around the sprawling base stuck a single finger salute out the window. Intended, Mac guessed, for the pickup driver.

Not wanting to be left out of the fun, a utility four-wheeler, looking like a combat golf cart behind Mac’s MRAP (Mine Resistant Ambush Protected vehicle) got into the act, adding his horn to the cacophony, which wasn’t helped by the roar of jets streaking overhead.

Meanwhile, pedestrians were packed as tightly together as the vehicles. Military personnel, who automatically snapped out salutes, jockeyed for some semblance of personal space with civilians and Afghans. Some, trying to speed up the process, had taken to walking or jogging in the street.

Finally, they got beyond the gate and headed out into the country, where the roads were even more of a joke. While Bagram was definitely not a country club base—with rocket attacks coming so often that diving into bunkers became routine, not to mention the constant threat of insurgent attacks, and more recently “green on blue” violence—Mac often thought that you really took your life in your hands by traveling on any of the narrow, winding roads.

The base was in a valley surrounded on four sides by the Hindu Kush, where sunshine had the snow on the mountains gleaming like diamonds. Cutting its way through the nearly impassable mountains at ten thousand feet was the Salang Pass. Last spring, as the snow began to melt, an avalanche on the pass had swept over an entire village clinging to the edge of the two-lane roadway, burying it in tons of snow, ice, and stone.

There’d been a time a thousand years ago when Bagram was a wealthy, bustling city on the Silk Road. These days it was a village dependent on farming, base employment, and fighting.

The drive past the fields with the mountains in the distance could have been pleasant were it not for the metal signs warning of land mines leftover from Soviet occupation hanging on wires along the road, and the constantly blowing sand that had the consistency of talcum powder. Even when you couldn’t see it, you could feel it in your eyes, nose, and throat whenever you went outside.

The market was bustling. Children, some of the boys wearing blue Cub Scout uniforms supplied by one of the majors at the base, who’d set up the Scouting program for the local population, dodged the traffic as they ran through the streets. Giggling, remarkably carefree girls jumped rope and played hopscotch on courts drawn in the dirt.

Women in dark burkas were focused on their shopping, while local police, trained by Allied forces, patrolled past the food stands. As the translator gave the reporter the tour, Mac chatted in his less than fluent Dari with the shopkeepers and his fans, who treated him like a celebrity every time he came to town. At first he’d been surprised by that, but then he came to realize that while Freedom Radio might consider the troops their target audience, a good proportion of the civilians listened as well. And even if they couldn’t understand all the banter, music proved universal.

As he bought some goat meat and yogurt from an elderly man whose eyes were nearly black in his dark, sun-weathered face, a brightly colored vehicle, locally referred to as a “jingle truck” because of the bells drivers put on the top of their cabs, pulled up to deliver a load of
kaddo bourani
, Afghan pumpkins.

Which had Mac telling the Seattle reporter how he and his crew were going to set up a catapult for Freedom Radio’s Thanksgiving pumpkin-hurling competition. He was just thinking how much he freaking loved his job when the world exploded in a fireball that sent him flying through the air.

Mac didn’t know how long he’d been unconscious. But when he heard the Airman calling his name over the ringing in his ears, he managed with difficulty to open his eyes, which were even grittier with sand than usual. He hoped that explained the fact that everything he tried to focus on was like looking through a fractured mirror.

“I’m okay.”

If you didn’t count the crushing headache, the nausea, the blood he could feel pouring down his face, and the fact that he felt as if his body were peppered with fiery birdshot.

He wasn’t sure whether he had managed to get the words out of his mouth or whether he’d just thought them. And although he could sort of hear her shouting, either she’d begun talking a foreign language or his brain wasn’t decoding what she was trying to ask him.

As disoriented as he was, one searing thought flashed through Mac’s mind:
Please, God, don’t let my brain be permanently scrambled.

“Okay,” he repeated, flinching as he turned his head to try to look around.

His left eye seemed to have been flash-blinded, while his right was like looking through cracked glass, but that didn’t keep him from seeing that the explosion had ripped through the heart of the market, clearing a wide swath. At the periphery, burned and bloody bodies were piled up like so much cordwood.

He heard the cries and moans, but was grateful that along with the obnoxious ringing in his ears, whatever had happened to his hearing made the voices sound distant, like when his grandfather Culhane had taught him to listen to the sound of the sea inside a conch shell.

A mob of distraught people was rushing toward the scene, trying to dislodge the bodies, desperately searching for the living.

The Airman and her cameraman had lifted him up and were running toward the MRAP vehicle.

He was wishing he could assure them that he was fine, that they should leave him and go help the civilian women and children, when his right eye caught sight of what appeared to be a small arm wearing Cub Scout blue stretching out from beneath a jumble of human pick-up sticks.

As he felt himself being carefully placed into the vehicle, a burning pain began washing over him in hot waves. Even as he fought against it, as the MRAP roared away with its horn blaring loud enough that even he could hear it, Mac surrendered to the darkness.

After having shrapnel painstakingly picked out of his arms and legs and treatment for second-degree burns by the medical crew at Bagram, he was airlifted to Landstuhl Regional Medical Center in Germany.

“So, here’s the deal,” the doctor, a captain from next door Ramstein Air Base told him. “You were lucky.”

The weird thing was that although every part of him hurt like one of the lower circles of hell, even through the haze of IV drugs they were pumping into him, Mac knew the doctor was right.

At least he was alive, unlike the Afghan translator he’d worked with for the past eight months, or the newspaper reporter, who’d had the bad luck of joining the growing ranks of journalists killed while covering the war.

“You’ve got lacerations on your chest and arms, shrapnel in your thighs, legs, and shoulders, but fortunately your helmet, body armor, groin flap, and fire retardant uniform prevented serious injury to your body.”

“What about my eyes?” Mac was hoping the reason he couldn’t see a thing was only because they were wrapped in sterile gauze.

“It’s too early to tell.” He listened for optimism in the female doctor’s tone, but heard only exhaustion. “But they’re intact. Which, even with your ballistic goggles, which I heard were toast, is really amazing given how close you were to the blast.”

“I should’ve seen it coming,” Mac muttered. The thought had been continuously circling through his mind, along with blurred but still horrific images he knew he’d never be able to unsee.

“Yeah, with your X-ray eyes and superhero powers,” she said dryly. “I know it’s difficult for you warriors to get it through your heads, but you are, when it comes right down to it, human beings. Like the rest of us.”

“I’m not a warrior,” Mac said. “I’m just the guy on the radio.”

He’d always been aware that his job was a walk in the park compared to so many others with whom he’d served. The troops worked damn hard, some risking their lives every minute of every day. His job, as he viewed it, was to always be there for them. To provide a little bit of home and bring some semblance of normal to a life that was anything but.

“Yet you were blown up, which I doubt would’ve happened if you’d chosen to remain a civilian deejay working in Albuquerque or Topeka.”

Despite the pain, Mac smiled at that. “And how boring would that be?”

“Just what I need—another adrenaline junkie.” She sighed as she pulled back the sheet and began examining his wounds.

“Explosions can work in inexplicable ways,” she said. “We never know what we’re going to be looking at when we get the call for incoming. In the instant of detonation, shrapnel and heat rush out at supersonic speeds. Which means that they should have been picking pieces of you out of the dirt into the next century. But there’s no order to explosions. Some areas are thick with shrapnel. You could have just as easily been cut in half by a door or the hood of the truck that suicide bomber set off. But you happened to be standing in a partial seam that was empty of any lethal debris.”

Unlike his translator and the reporter. Mac figured that just as he’d always have images of the aftermath running through his head, survivor guilt would become a constant companion.

“The surgery eased the swelling in your brain,” she continued. “We’ll want to keep an eye on you a couple more days to make sure you’re out of the woods, and then we’ll be shipping you back to CONUS for continued treatment.” CONUS was military speak for the continental United States. “Your liaison will be visiting as soon as I leave, but he wanted you to know that your father called. My suggestion, not that you asked, is unless you feel you need immediate family support, it makes more sense for him to meet up with you at Travis, where you’re ultimately headed.”

“I’m fine,” Mac lied, as he had been since he’d found himself lying on the ground surrounded by chaos. “If I’m staying only a couple days, there’s no point in having him fly all the way here only to turn right around again.”

“That was my thinking.”

Mac debated asking if his wife had called. But he figured the doctor, who’d drawn the sheet back up, would have mentioned it if Kayla had felt moved to contact the hospital.

Of course, maybe his father filling her in was enough. Maybe, unlike her husband, she was still speaking to her father-in-law.

Two days later, he left Germany, spending a night layover at Andrews Air Force Base in Maryland before continuing on to David Grand USAF Medical Center at Travis Air Force Base in California.

His father was waiting for him.

His wife was not.

Which, unfortunately, didn’t come as that much of a surprise since she hadn’t emailed or Skyped with him for the past three months, ever since he’d informed her that instead of getting out, as he’d admittedly promised, he’d reenlisted.

Three weeks later, two weeks after he’d begun climbing the walls, he was transferred to outpatient status.

Although the bandages had been removed, his vision was still blurry. The retina tear on his left eye had been repaired, but the prognosis wasn’t good. The doctors assured him that with a cornea transplant his right eye should be as good as new.

His father had wanted to accompany Mac to Colorado Springs, Kayla’s hometown, where she’d moved with their daughter, Emma, three months before.

Not knowing what type of reception he’d receive, and needing to concentrate on repairing his wounded marriage, Mac insisted on going alone.

From the stilted phone conversations they’d shared while he’d been at Travis, he wasn’t surprised when Kayla didn’t show up at the airport. After giving the address to the house he’d never seen to the cabdriver, he sat in the backseat, practicing what he was going to say to make things right again.