Nature does not yield to a federal priority badge.
I eased my foot off the accelerator as the convoy pulled into the underground sally port beneath the Walter Reed National Military Medical Center complex.Heavy blast doors slid shut behind us with the deep, pneumatic hiss of a bank vault locking out the world.
Dr.Jonathan Vance—no relation to the dirty county sheriff I had left bleeding on the Harrington herringbone floor—stood by the decontamination airlock.
He wore gray scrub trousers and a black ballistic nylon jacket over his surgical smock, his credentials clipped to his collar: Directorate of Special Operations, Human Performance & Recovery Division.
Twenty-two years ago, he was a fresh-faced navy flight surgeon who had stitched three bullet tracks out of my left thigh inside the hold of a C-130 banking hard over the Mediterranean.
“Vesper,” he said, offering no hand, no smile, no condolences.In our world, sentimentality was a biomarker for operational decline.
