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MacTavish woke into darkness and pain.
His head ached and his throat burned, but the pain in his arm outranked all of them in its pure, all-consuming agony.
He groped in the glue-filled void where his brain had been, each thought forming with glacial slowness, his head throbbing as if squeezed in a vice. Finally he dragged himself into wakefulness, and with the surging force of a bursting dam, all the horrors of the night before slammed into his head.
He stumbled through a chaotic mess of flames, screams and bursts of gunfire. Shadow men coalesced out of walls like they were made of smoke. Knives flashed in the darkness. It all whirled and danced through his aching head: warping, neon-hued psychedelic images smeared with rising terror and pain.
He woke again, back into the same darkness, the same same agony. Fire burned through his arm, and his head felt like it would burst. Deep in his belly, an aching pressure resolved into a plaintive protestation from his bladder.
A memory intruded, this one clearer and sharper than the others: the Mexican countryside outside the truck, shrouded in night, the faint lights of the dashboard on the dirty white skull of Ghost’s mask as he peered out into the black through the spider eyes of night vision goggles, his foot flat to the floor as they barrelled down the highway, desperately widening the gap between them and their pursuers.
He shut his eyes again, his head pulsing with pain, but he gripped the memory from the truck with as much mental energy as he could muster, anchoring himself in the roiling slew of mental noise. It had a clarity that made its provenance in reality almost certain. They had escaped.
Suddenly, he was back in the car, the relief accelerating his recall. Blood loss, overexertion and the lulling white noise of the tyres on the road had made his eyelids begin to droop, and despite all his fight against it, as the adrenaline had seeped slowly from his system, he’d drifted off. When the engine stopped, the sudden absence of noise had brought him to wakefulness, into painfully bright dawn light.
A hotel . He remembered a dilapidated building, brickwork crumbling at the corners, peeling paint on the doors and the half-lit flickering neon sign that proclaimed the place to be the El Palacio.
Blinking away the fugue of sleep, he turned to Ghost, but in the driver’s seat there sat a stranger: a pale man, with shaggy ginger hair, filling the space where he’d been, who glared at him and asked, in a voice that MacTavish recognised but couldn’t remember why. Can you walk?
MacTavish had stared blearily at him through gritty eyes, his exhausted brain trying to make sense of this until then something had slipped into place, the wheels of his mind finally shifting gear and reality hit him in the face.
This was Ghost .
There had been a snort of laughter from the driver’s seat as MacTavish snapped bolt upright and averted his eyes. He heard a low, familiar voice muttering. One of us got their wish anyway.
In the present, MacTavish blinked, stared at the ceiling and tried to clear his aching head. He could cope with the pain, but the cloying grip of fatigue that dragged his eyelids down against his will, he struggled to fight . He wanted so badly to slip back into the welcome black hole of sleep, away from the pain and confusion, but his bladder protested again, more urgently now, and he knew that he would have to move.
He turned his head, the muscles painfully stiff, squeezing his eyes shut as his stomach churned alarmingly, the room spinning around him. When the vertigo settled, he opened them again. A faint red-tinged glow from outside permeated at the edge of the curtains, allowing him to make out the pale shadow of a plastic garden chair beside the bed.
El Palacio. Yeah. Right .
A shard of memory rose from the depths like a breaching whale: Ghost, sitting cross-legged on the floor, sorting through the medical pack and laying it out on that chair. MacTavish remembered the painful contortions to peel the damp, tattered shirt from his skin without moving his injured arm more than necessary, all the while trying to keep his eyes from seeing Ghost’s exposed face.
He remembered the awkward silence as Ghost held his arm with surprising gentleness, his large hands deft for a man so capably violent. Nevertheless, with the anaesthetic effect of surging adrenaline long washed from his blood, each tiny movement made him wince. He gritted his teeth, grateful for the sting of a needle and the safe knowledge that a few minutes later, the agony would subside.
There were stories about Ghost. MacTavish had heard many of them since he’d learnt of his reassignment, and started to make discrete enquiries amongst his friends. He’d said the name, and a dark look had passed between the older men, who’d turned back to him and said that he didn’t want to know.
Pressed, and more adequately lubricated with alcohol, they said Ghost was one of Them: the weird boys who volunteered for the dirty work, the sort of top-secret, off-the-books violence done in dark places that no one ever spoke of again. They said his name and pointed to their own heads, circling their fingers in a gesture signifying madness. They said that he was a loner, a freak, a hard-wired thrill-seeker with an unnatural capacity for violence, that some part deep within the folds of his brain was missing.
MacTavish had taken this in his stride. Rumours always blossomed and grew into wild tales in dark corners of the mess hall. The Regiment had always attracted strange men, and he figured that this Ghost was just another in the long line of eccentric mad bastards that the Regiment had collected since David Stirling had sauntered into the prison cell containing the madness of Paddy Mayne in 1941 and convinced him that driving hundreds of miles behind enemy lines to lay waste to the Axis airbases of Libya would be a fun and diverting use of his time.
MacTavish felt a soft plume of warm breath on the skin of his arm as Ghost exhaled, the strange touch of gloved hands on numb skin and the slow rivulets of what he hoped wasn’t blood running down under the inexorable pull of gravity to drip from the end of his fingers.
“What’s red and bad for your teeth?”
MacTavish started, and he had to fight the impulse to look round. This again . “I don’t know.” he replied.
“A brick.”
MacTavish groaned, and rubbed his face with his good hand, wincing as he accidentally pressed his bruised forehead.
“Did you work in a fucking Christmas cracker factory or something before this job?” he asked. This close, the initiated conversation feeling like an invitation, he found the temptation to look at his exposed face hard to bear.
Ghost sighed, his exhaled breath another rush of air that made the hairs on MacTavish’s arm rise. “Just checking you’re still alive.”
“What’s the verdict?”
“Clipped you good, but you’ll live. Going to have a nice scar to impress all the ladies with when we get back. If you like that sort of thing.”
He got up from the floor with a grunt, long legs and arms unfolding until he towered over the bed and blocked out the light. From his vantage point in the bed, MacTavish fully appreciated his colossal mass as it loomed over him, understood what it was like to be small with a keenness he’d not felt since he was a child. He looked away, but out of the corner of his eyes, he watched curiously as Ghost bent and gathered the detritus of the medical kit, crumpling empty packages in his hands, compressing them into a more manageable ball which he tossed onto the chipped and battered corner shelf installed to serve as desk and dining table combined, with a casual underhanded lob. Then he stretched: arching his back and reaching his arms up, running his fingers through his hair and pulling the headlamp from his head in one swift movement, unfolding his arms until they were fully extended, his fingers almost brushing the crumbling paint.
“You should keep it dry, and try to keep it clean”
He strained as he said it, making a satisfied grunt as he reached full extension, and apparently much improved, dropped his arms back down to slap against the side of his thighs.
MacTavish’s eyes snapped away as he turned round.
“Lets have a look at the rest of you.” said Ghost, and before MacTavish could answer, he was leaning over him. He tried to avert his eyes, but Ghost gripped his jaw with one big hand, brisky appraising his features like he was about to buy him at auction.
“He really clocked you, eh?”
A mix of fortune and good training had made MacTavish flinch back and roll with the blow from the rifle butt. Instead of smashing his nose across his face, it had gone high, striking him in the forehead and sending him down to the floor in a dazed heap. He had no idea what his face looked like now, but he had felt the lump there and didn’t imagine it looked pretty.
Ghost turned his face one way and then back, squinting at the damage. A gloved thumb pressed MacTavish’s eyebrow and he winced. In the silence, MacTavish could hear the soft rush of air as Ghost breathed, feel the gentle movement of air on the exposed skin of his naked chest. The sudden, unexpected intimacy made his stomach clench.
He realised that he was gritting his teeth, clenching his breath inside his chest, fighting the urge to crawl further up the pillows and preferably up the wall and along the ceiling. He let the breath out, a measured exhalation across a slow count of ten that left him wrung out and empty, but when he inhaled the wrongness of what his nose sensed caught him by such surprise that he froze.
He sniffed again, thinking that in his exhausted state he had started hallucinating, but it was definitely there: above the musty, background odour of the shabby room, the damp that permeated their dirty clothes and the lingering sulphurous edge of spent gunpowder an unexpected soft, sweet scent that shouldn’t be there.
“What’s that smell?”
Ghost stopped, one thumb contorting MacTavish’s injured eyebrow.
“You what?”
MacTavish sniffed again, more certain. “Like flowers.” He sniffed harder. “Perfume.” He raised his head, fighting the pressure against his forehead to get a better breath. “Is that.. you ?”
He realised in that instant that he was staring, that without realising it his gaze had fallen to follow his nose and he was looking directly at Ghost’s exposed face.
Ghost stared back at him, his face frozen in a sudden, wide-eye, confused expression that seemed strangely comical to MacTavish’s eyes. In the brighter light of the room, out of the shadows of the mask’s hollow eye sockets, the pupils of his eyes had constricted, revealing encircling rings of polished mahogany. Ghost’s eyes stared back at him, wide and unblinking, unnatural in their unwavering glare, as if they were examining the grubby cloth of MacTavish’s soul. He felt the grip of cold fear close around his heart, the terror of being caught giving in to temptation, but he couldn’t resist it, couldn’t tear his eyes away.
Beneath the wide eyes, framed with pale lashes so blonde as to be almost white, he saw a strong nose with the telltale ridge of an old fracture, imperfectly set, and beneath that, thin lips pressed into a frown, stretching the crease of a long healed scar on the top lip into a pale white line. Beard stubble over the edge of his jaw caught the light like frost.
Are you ugly?
Quite the opposite.
As the silence thickened between them, the innocence of the confused frown darkening like a storm, MacTavish realised that he shouldn’t have spoken, that in his exhausted, anaemic state he’d transgressed the unwritten rules that governed the tolerance of the various weird eccentricities amongst brothers in arm, and most of all, the weird eccentricities of more senior officers who could return him to unit at the stroke of a pen if they merely disliked the way he drank his tea.
He was about to start a scrambling backtrack, and blame a clearly non-existent housekeeper and their choice of cleaning products as the explanation when Ghost made a little snorting noise and spoke.
“Face wipes, the ones for taking off makeup. Gets rid of the war paint in a hurry.”
He spoke with a flat tone that dared MacTavish to pass further comment on pain of grievous and extremely painful bodily harm.
“Oh.” said MacTavish, his voice coming out an octave higher than normal. “That’s clever.”
“That’s why I’m in charge.” said Ghost, and he gave MacTavish a thin, humourless smile.
MacTavish felt the pressure on his face change as Ghost finished his inspection. He patted MacTavish’s cheek twice, with more force than was strictly warranted for mere reassurance.
“You’ll have a lump for a few days, but no lasting damage. You should get some sleep.”
“I slept in the truck” said MacTavish. “You-”
“I wasn’t asking.” snapped Ghost, the command in his voice as sudden and sharp as an unsheathed blade. “We need stuff: food, water, clean clothes and medical supplies.” He counted the list off on his fingers. “You look like you lost a wet t-shirt competition and a gunfight at the same time. And you smell like shit. Not conducive to not drawing attention to ourselves. You’re confined to quarters, and I’m going out.”
MacTavish had a dim memory of stammering agreement, but after that the memory blurred, and then, as he tried to grasp the edges, evaporated and dissipated like vapour on the wind.
He presumed he’d followed the order. He had a dim sense that he had rested for a while, interspersed with flashes of nonsense that he couldn't be sure were real. How long was I asleep? He lifted up his wrist, the muscles of his good arm complaining about the movement, but the watch was gone. He didn’t remember taking it off. He didn’t remember taking the rest of his clothes off either, but he was naked beneath the sheets, the cheap fabric scraping his skin as he moved.
What the fuck happened?
He tried to push himself upright, but his aching muscles trembled under the sudden effort, and the surge of fire down his injured arm as he tried to put weight on it made him gasp.
“Fuck!” he hissed, falling back against the pillow as the arm buckled and his fatigued body gave way.
He felt movement, and the rumpled sheets beside him rustled.
“Johnny?” a hoarse, familiar whisper in the darkness. “What’s wrong?”
“ Ghost?”
MacTavish flinched as a hand pressed his forehead, the calluses of the palm scraping across his skin. He heard a grunt of approval and it withdrew.
“You need to drink something,” said Ghost.
MacTavish wobbled as the mattress shifted. He heard Ghost push himself off the bed with a grunt of exertion. A pale shadow in the gloom rose and resolved into a more familiar tall, broad shouldered, human shape, white t-shirt bright in the darkness, pale, bare legs beneath. He began to move stiffly across the room, his feet slapping against the tile. MacTavish heard more rustling and a muttered curse.
He pushed up again with his good arm, and this time, with a concerted effort, managed to get himself into a sitting position. He flopped forward, his exhausted muscles trembling with the effort, too fatigued to keep him upright. Wincing and grunting, he twisted round until his legs were hanging over the bed where he rested, breathing hard.
“I need a piss.” he said, the sound from his raw throat no more than a rasping whisper.
The looming shadow beside him grunted acknowledgement. “Drink first.”
He jerked as a hand grasped his good shoulder, wincing as his exhausted body protested at the movement. He swayed, head reeling, but the grip held him steady.
“Drink.”
He flinched as something hard and plastic butted his face, pushed between his lips and scraped his teeth. Water flowed into his mouth too quickly for his addled brain and he spluttered, coughing it out.
Another grunt in the darkness, this one a little irritated. He felt the bottle against his lips, more gentle this time, the flow of liquid more sedate. He swallowed gratefully. Even tepid and stale, poured over his raw throat, it soothed like honey and he flailed to grasp it, to slake his sudden, overwhelming thirst.
When it was empty he dropped it on the bed beside him, and looked up, expecting to see a soft white skull looming out of the darkness, judging his efforts, but just at the edge of the shrouds of shadow, MacTavish saw the hint of tousled, naked hair above a black, featureless blob where the face should have been.
The mask… take it off.
At least one of us got what they wanted.
He tried to place the face he dimly remembered onto the shadow above him, but he couldn’t make it fit. His head still hurt and the pressing need to deal with the pain in his belly took priority. He tried to push himself up. His injured arm protested, and the aching muscles of his legs managed a brief burst of exertion that failed before he even left the bed. He fell back with a grunt.
He saw movement in the darkness and all at once he found himself gripped roughly around the chest, and hoisted upright into a powerful, crushing embrace. His legs trembled, threatened to buckle beneath him, the muscles screaming at the sudden, unexpected work of standing. His head spun alarmingly and he bit down on the urge to retch.
For a few moments, he swayed, his knees wobbling beneath him as he waited for the room to settle.
“Fuck me .” he groaned.
“Steady on” muttered Ghost. “You ain’t even bought me a drink yet.”
MacTavish opened his mouth to tell him where he could go, but a sudden rush of nausea made him snap it shut quickly. He groaned, screwing his eyes up against the churning in his gut, and let his head flop onto Ghost’s shoulder, as if they were about to start a shuffling slow dance at a wedding disco. The floral smell that he’d noticed before had vanished, replaced by the familiar base mix of unwashed clothes and old sweat, sprinkled with high notes of spent gunpowder: the classic eau de soldier he knew so well.
The familiarity of this helped clear his head, and after a few moments, the tide of vertigo ebbed enough that he could raise his head without his belly lurching into his throat.
“Come on.”
Ghost shifted his grip, manhandling MacTavish so that he could support him on one broad shoulder like a human crutch. With one arm around MacTavish's back, gripping beneath his injured arm, and the other hand grasping the wrist of the arm that now flopped over his neck, he half-carried, half-dragged him across the room in an awkward, shambling gait as MacTavish staggered like a newborn foal.
“Feels like-” MacTavish grimaced, wincing at each movement of his aching arm. “Jesus Christ! Feels like I got hit by a bus.”
They both squeezed through the door in an awkward stumble, and lurched into the bathroom, MacTavish hissing in pain as his injured arm brushed the doorframe. Ghost swung him round and without ceremony, dumped him onto the toilet.
He watched the shadow of Ghost departing, listened to the soft footsteps receding before he slumped forward, head between his knees. He knew he lacked the strength to stand.
Great . Pissing like a fucking lassie.
He relieved himself anyway, the discomfort in his belly blissfully receding, overriding his injured sense of dignity.
He heard rustling in the other room, and then, with a soft click, a meagre light seeped through the open bathroom door. The footsteps returned, and a few moments later, Ghost loomed in the doorway, ducking beneath the lintel to come inside.
In any other circumstances, someone walking into him sitting on the toilet would have been told, on no uncertain terms, to fuck off, but too worn out to protest, MacTavish sat slumped in silence. Close to his head, he heard the sound of running water. He flinched as something cool and wet dropped across his shoulders. He felt hands on him, gathering sodden towelling and, as he raised his head, wiping it across his face. He winced like a child under the rough handling, but submitted to it for lack of the energy to fight.
“Infection.” said Ghost, “Something nasty got into the wound, into your blood.”
Another memory crashed into MacTavish’s head with the force of an avalanche.
Late afternoon, the shadows lengthening as he kept watch, amusing himself with a battered pack of playing cards that Ghost had liberated from somewhere on his foraging mission, trying to remember the variations of patience he’d been taught over the years. He remembered intermittently looking up at the long shape stretched out beneath the blankets, the peaks and valleys of Ghost’s sleeping body on the bed, the temptation to stare too great to resist for long.
He’d been ignoring the building headache for some time, hoping that it would clear itself as he flipped over card after card, but now the pounding felt unbearable. He got up to rummage in the paper sacks Ghost had brought back, found some paracetamol and swallowed them dry.
From the slow, barely audible susurration of his breathing, MacTavish knew Ghost was asleep. He felt a perverse urge to creep closer to get a better look, but caution stayed his itching feet. Ghost lay curled on his side, and MacTavish wasn’t sure if this was natural, or because he simply exceeded the size of the bed if he stretched. A less astute observer might have thought that his right arm snaked under the pillow so as best to rest his head, but MacTavish knew his hand curled around the butt of his pistol, that his sleeping state rested on a hair-trigger.
Nevertheless, curiosity ate at him until he could resist no longer and he craned his neck, standing on tiptoe to peer at the forbidden sight of Ghost unmasked. With his eyes closed, and his expression neutral, serene in sleep, burnished copper tufts of hair sticking up in greasy clumps like a damaged halo around his head, he looked almost angelic.
Now that he could stare unmolested, MacTavish tried to place the face, and thought it might be familiar. There were approximately three hundred men in the regiment, and between their varying deployments and secondments, there were men he could go his whole career without ever meeting, particularly men who made it their personal mission not be met. Had he seen Ghost before? He couldn’t be sure.
As if he sensed the pressure of MacTavish’s curious gaze, Ghost shifted in his sleep. Fearing discovery, MacTavish darted back, socked feet padding silently on the tiled floor, until he was out of sight. Gingerly he lowered himself to the floor and went back to his cards.
At this point, he remembered that he’d started to feel cold. He felt like an idiot looking back as his addled mind tried to rationalise the feeling away, refusing to accept the obvious signs of poison in his blood, the chill before the rising fever. He told himself it was the cool tiles of the floor, and sat on the plastic chair instead, shifting restlessly as he shivered. Then he’d thought it must be the air conditioning, even though El Palacio was clearly not equipped with such luxuries. Nevertheless, he’d made several confused attempts to find a hidden thermostat to turn the temperature up until, teeth chattering, he'd given up. He crawled onto the bed and in desperation slid between the blankets into the warm space that Ghost had made there.
Ghost growled like an annoyed bear, prodded out of hibernation a month too early.
“What the fuck are you doing?” he snapped.
“I’m cold .”
He’d expected this statement to be given short shrift, and when Ghost had rolled over in a rapid series of shuffling twists he’d shrunk back from the admonishing whack he’d expected. Instead, Ghost stared at him, his brow furrowed into an expression of concern, instead of rage. He shook a hand free from the tangle of sheets and reached up to touch MacTavish’s face, not to slap him, but to rest his hand on his cheek, as if on the verge of romantic confession. The frown deepened, and he moved his hand to place it on his forehead, palm up, so that the back of it rested against MacTavish’s skin.
“ Shit .”
Ghost pushed himself up and out of bed like something had bitten him.
MacTavish remembered how he’d wanted to sleep, acutely aware of how tired he felt, and how much his head hurt. He remembered being drowsy, felt the inexorable tugging at his eyelids, the pounding in his head even greater now. He remembered watching blearily, as if Ghost stood in a slowly thickening cloud of mist, pulling his clothes on, stuffing knives and money into pockets, the pistol pressing into the small of his back as the belt of his jeans tightened around it.
He rolled into the warm place Ghost had left, pulling the sheets tighter around him as he shivered. From his new vantage point at the edge of bed, he watched Ghost turn to face him, say something that he couldn’t make out, and then the image collapsed into meaningless static.
He remembered almost nothing coherent beyond that point and for lack of strength to rise, he played a little game of Real or Not Real? with the fragments of images of noise his mind offered.
He remembered a party, a ceilidh with a mariachi band, Valeria and Hassan dancing heel-toe, heel-toe in a jolly military two-step and decided that probably hadn’t happened.
But the blurry, barely coherent image of holding Ghost’s face in his own hands, stubble scraping at the skin of his palms and telling him he wasn’t ugly? That he shouldn’t hide his face? He bit his lip as this memory uncurled into a longer, coherent thread and he recalled Ghost sighing, saying he knew that, and telling him he had to drink something with the tone of a long suffering parent negotiating with a particularly difficult child.
Shit .
MacTavish stifled a groan of shame. He pulled the wet towel from his shoulders and pressed it to his face until his eyes hurt, his vision a roiling storm of meaningless colour. When he could stand it no longer, he wiped his hands and jettisoned the towel into the base of the shower with a soft, wet slap. He decided that whatever he had done, there was no point worrying about it now. Either Ghost had the good grace to keep quiet, or he would never hear the end of it. I’ve got bigger problems , he thought, like getting up.
He braced himself and thrust forward, using the momentum to drive his body upwards until he stood, legs wobbling alarmingly, half his weight against the wall next to him, the naked skin of his shoulder scraping the poorly finished plaster. He grunted with the effort, but managed to hold fast. Using the wall for support, he stumbled from the bathroom like drunk man on legs made of jelly.
Ghost had turned on the headlamp and sat it on the bed. It illuminated the room with a meagre, grey light. Ghost stood in the corner, rummaging through the contents of the bag he’d left on the desk. He didn’t look round.
“Where’re my clothes?” asked MacTavish.
Ghost reached over without looking, pulled a bundle of fabric from the little bedside table and tossed it onto the bed. It unravelled to reveal a brand new t-shirt and a pair of underpants.
“I wouldn’t bother.” he said as MacTavish stumbled forward to reach for them “I need to see your arse in a minute anyway.”
“ What ?”
Ghost held up a small, white, rectangular box between his thumb and forefinger “For your sacrament with our lady of…” he paused to squint at it “ Tiecoplanina ”
MacTavish stared at him, uncomprehending, frozen in the act of reaching forward.
“It’s an antibiotic.” Ghost explained. “And it’s the only reason you’re still walking and talking.” He discarded the box into a small pile of similar ones on the shelf.
“Where did you get that from?”
“Hospital in Morelia.”
“You just rocked up and they gave it you?” MacTavish asked, his disbelief evident in his voice. He picked up the t-shirt, and appraised it for size.
Ghost inclined his head coyly “After a bit of persuasion.”
MacTavish felt suddenly uncomfortable with the direction of the conversation. He didn’t like collateral damage at the best of times, but robbing a hospital full of innocent civilians didn’t sit well with him “What kind of persuasion?” he asked.
“Do you want to get better, or not?” snapped Ghost, and then he saw MacTavish’s expression and sighed. “If you must know, I swapped it for one of them eagle sovereign things. That good enough for you?”
MacTavish had forgotten about the escape fund: the little roll of Gold Eagles that he’d signed out from under the beady eye of one of Laswell’s minions. The thought that he’d be able to write them off as missing in action after the events in Las Almas and cash them in himself instead cheered him up a little.
Got to get out of this mess first.
He realised Ghost was staring at him, a little syringe and unsheathed needle poking out from between his index and middle fingers like a casual cigarette. He gestured towards MacTavish with it.
“You going to be a big brave boy about this? Full disclosure: I’m all out of lollipops”
MacTavish pulled the t-shirt on, and then realised that this was a mistake. Before, he had been merely naked, and for all his discomfort at being trapped in a small hotel room with his terminally camera shy lieutenant, public nudity was a de facto part of military life, and the situation hadn't felt wrong, or at least not felt any more wrong because of it. Now he had covered half of himself, this served to highlight the absence of the rest of his clothes even more. The shirt came down to the top of his thighs, leaving everything between his legs dangling, peeking into view. His balls tightened as if by sheer force of will they could hide behind the hem of his shirt.
He wasn’t afraid of needles, but he wasn’t thrilled by them either. Anaesthetics, bringing the blessed, immediate, relief of pain, he could tolerate, but assaults on his more intimate areas he had less desire to submit to. In his sorry state, faced by the advancing, colossal mass of Ghost, the meagre light casting dark shadows on his exposed face, glinting on the sharpened steel between his fingers, he felt a little knot of fear in his belly.
Ghost stared pointedly at him, his judgement on MacTavish’s lack of movement evident on his face. MacTavish folded. Heaving an enormous sigh to cover his nerves, pretending to be merely annoyed at yet another imposition on his fatigued body, he dropped, prone, onto the bed.
He flinched as the mattress wobbled under Ghost’s additional weight, his whole body clenching as he felt Ghost reach over, grab one cheek of his backside and squeeze. Something cold and wet swiped briefly across his naked skin and before he could brace himself, Ghost speared him, stabbing the needle deep into his flesh in a single fluid motion. MacTavish grimaced, his whole body tensing at the stinging wave of the syringe’s payload hitting home.
“Christ! You made less fuss when you got shot.”
MacTavish glowered into the sheets, his still aching head short of witty responses. He yelped as Ghost slapped his hand over the tender skin and exclaimed, in a voice filled with sadistic cheer “All done!”
“You could at least pretend you’re not having fun!” MacTavish snapped.
He rolled over to snatch the underpants from the bed, and sat up to wiggle them on as best he could without hurting his aching arm or newly throbbing backside any further.
Ghost ignored him. “You need to eat something,” he said.
MacTavish considered this. He tried to remember when he last ate, and couldn’t, but at the same time, couldn’t stomach the idea of food. “I’m not hungry.” he said.
“Tough shit.” snapped Ghost, the steel of command back in his voice.
He spun round and lobbed something across the room towards the bed. It bounced and rolled, coming to rest next to MacTavish, who, recognising it as some kind of jar, picked it up and squinted at it.
“What’s this?” he demanded.
“Peanut butter.”
“ Peanut butter?”
A thrown spoon bounced off his chest.
“Bland. High calorie. Lots of protein. Just what you need.”
MacTavish was about to tell him to fuck off when he saw the expression on Ghost’s face. Chagrined, he unscrewed the lid, scooped out a spoonful and shoved it into his mouth. The dry, salty paste on his tongue made him retch, but, under Ghost’s oppressive glare he screwed his eyes shut and swallowed. For a few minutes the two of them sat in silence, MacTavish slowly working his way through the contents of the jar under duress, alternating between drawing off mouthfuls from a bottle of cola that Ghost had left open to go flat and the dry, nauseating spoonfuls, until he could take no more.
“How long has it been?” he groaned.
Ghost looked up from his vantage point on the plastic chair. He had picked up a book in the silent interval of MacTavish’s meal and been silently reading since. Heroically posed on the cover a bare-chested, long haired man stood beneath a gathering storm, a woman whose dress appeared to be malfunctioning clasped in his arms. The title, picked out in lurid pink metallic print, caught the light and MacTavish read A Duke’s Desire against the dark sky.
Ghost placed a flattened antibiotic box between the pages to mark his place, checked his watch and said “You got shot on Wednesday night. Started running a fever on Thursday. It’s Saturday morning now.”
“Jesus Christ!”
“Looks like you’re on the mend now, on account of making a lot more fucking sense. So, we’re moving out tomorrow morning.”
“Where to?”
“Back into Las Almas. Alejandro had a safe house.”
“What? He never mentioned it.”
“It’s up in the hills, he said, but he only gave me coordinates, nothing else. I need a map before I’ve got a chance of finding it.”
MacTavish considered this. Getting away from Graves’ mob had been the priority, and he remembered how Ghost had taken a long route south east at high speed, barrelling down the highway towards Mexico City before suddenly changing his mind and striking west. Graves would figure they’d make for capital, he’d explained, aiming for the sanctuary of their own embassy rather than stick around. He’d said nothing further, just kept his eyes on the road and his foot to the floor until they’d arrived at the cheapest hotel in Uruapan just after dawn broke.
He remembered their intention to spend the night here, paying for a long stretch in the room to cover their tracks, but Ghost hadn’t mentioned anything beyond that point. He supposed that when he woke that evening, he’d intended to fill MacTavish in on his plans, but then, when he felt the heat of MacTavish’s face, his plans had all gone to shit.
“Why didn’t you leave me?” MacTavish asked suddenly, looking up at Ghost. “When I was getting sick. Why didn’t you dump me at a hospital and take care of yourself?”
“That was plan B.” said Ghost, flatly, not looking up from his book “I don’t know if Graves and his mob are plugged into the police network, or how it works between states, but if your description’s got a life-changing amount of money attached to it, I don’t fancy your chances much.”
MacTavish mulled this over. Ghost had taken some risks, risks that he’d clearly planned for given the speed at which he leapt out of bed and started pulling on his clothes when he’d felt the heat of MacTavish’s fever. He’d planned for it, MacTavish realised, made up his mind that he’d run the gauntlet of robbing a hospital- MacTavish had no illusions that they’d given the drugs up of their own free will, even if they’d been more than adequately compensated for their loss- in a city two hours drive away.
So you do like me.
I like you alive.
What would I have done? MacTavish asked himself. He looked up at Ghost, back with his nose between the pages of A Duke’s Desire , sanguine under the pressure of their circumstances. He didn’t know the answer.
“What the fuck was all that about, anyway?” he asked instead.
Ghost replaced his makeshift bookmark and put the book to one side “Graves?”
Without the distractions of injections, or the erosion of his anxiety by the delirium of infection, MacTavish still felt the sensation of looking on something unnatural, forbidden when he saw Ghost’s face, but with increasing exposure, habit eroded his urge to look away.
“Graves and Shepherd. What the fuck do they want with Alejandro’s boys?”
Ghost stood up, arching his back like a cat as he stretched out with a satisfied grunt. He rubbed his eyes, and MacTavish noticed, with the meagre light throwing unnatural shadows on the room, how tired he seemed: the dark rings around his eyes, the way his eyelids dropped, the drowsy edge to his voice.
“The cartels and the Iranians teaming up is new,” he said “But it makes sense, sort of. Hassan wants to deploy those missiles against the US, and what greater insult than to launch them from US soil? He buys postage from Correos de Cartel and sends them in.”
“How the fuck did he get American missiles anyway.” asked MacTavish
“Fuck knows. Maybe someone’s playing a double game?”
MacTavish stared at him. He’d voiced the very worry that had been rattling through his head since they saw the logo on the first weapon. One of their allies? Someone in the US military themselves? Factions in the CIA? “You think?”
“Probably not.” Ghost shrugged. “More likely they were a sweetener in some deal with someone else, and Hassan got his grubby mitts on them somehow.” He straighted up the sheets on the nearest side of the bed, and then pulled them back in a neat, hotel style triangle before he slid himself underneath, the springs of the ancient mattress twanging alarmingly under his weight. He sat with his back to the wall, propped up on a pillow, and put his book in his lap, a picture of cosy domesticity if you ignored the pistol that had slid out onto the sheets. “We allied with the mujahideen against the Soviets in the Eighties and twenty years later one of our poor bastards in Helmand gets his leg blown off by a rocket launcher made in Sweden, and paid out of Washington’s budget.”
MacTavish considered this. He had learnt about the arming of the mujahideen when the US had gone into Afghanistan at the start of the century, and realised that whilst his history teacher had done her best within broad remit of the national curriculum, there was a lot that went on in the world that he hadn’t known about. He’d spent an instructive few weeks working his way through books some of the senior officers had recommended him, his cynicism accelerating with every page he turned.
“Either way.” he said “It’s not something they want the world to know about.”
“ Exactly .” replied Ghost “Although who made the thing doesn’t really matter. It’s who gets blamed for it when it hits the ground and evapourates prime American real estate that’s important. My guess is that Shepherd oversaw the missile deal as it was intended, and it went south, so it’s his head on the chopping block if anyone finds that out. Us, Alejandro’s Vacqueros? We’re collateral damage.”
MacTavish brindled under this remark. He didn’t like collateral damage, especially when he was included in it.
“So Hassan is shipping the missile into the US. Valeria is the courier.”
“He’s bought her smuggling routes, and some of her muscle. They don’t want that to become the new status quo, so Graves is ripping the Las Almas cartel out from the roots. He’s sending a message.”
“What’s in it for Valeria?”
“Hard cash. Weapons. If it had gone down, then I don’t doubt the Delta boys would have been re-routed from their cross-border work to smash a hammer down on Hassan’s lot, giving her some breathing space.”
He thought of his fever dream, of Hasan and Valeria polkaing across the dance floor and tried to make it make sense without success. He suddenly felt very tired.
“What time is it?” he asked.
“Half past midnight,” said Ghost. “You staying up?”
MacTavish shook his head. He filled a plastic cup with bottled water and gratefully accepted a toothbrush that Ghost had left for him beside his jeans. He started work on scouring the cloying taste of peanut butter from his mouth and it was only as he sat there, his mind wandering that he understood the problem: there was only one bed.
Ghost looked up and saw MacTavish standing, staring.
“You coming to bed or what?” he snapped, the fatigue in his voice evident.
MacTavish took that as an order. Gingerly, he peeled back the rumpled blankets, carefully respecting the undrawn border between his side and Ghost’s. The bed was a double, designed to be just enough for two average sized adults to sleep independent of each other if they wanted to, but not large enough that two, broad shouldered men could maintain a comfortable distance, which was something MacTavish wanted very much. He rolled to the very edge, maximising the space between Ghost and himself.
Behind him, he heard rustling, and with a soft click, darkness returned. Ghost shifted and wiggled down beneath the blankets, the springs of the ancient mattress protesting. MacTavish felt something touch him, like a snake moving across his body. He realised with rising horror that it was an arm, Ghost’s arm, curling over his flank and coming to rest against his belly.
MacTavish stopped breathing.
What the fuck?
He waited, his whole body tense, muscles clenched between fight and flight, rigid under the weight of Ghost’s arm. He waited, but nothing happened. No soft, wet kiss on the nape of his neck. No suggestion whispered in his ear, insistent and obscene. No movement of the dangling hand down between his legs. Ghost just lay there, his arm flopped across MacTavish’s body, as if it fit there naturally, holding him in a loose embrace.
MacTavish ribs ached with the pressure of holding his breath, and slowly, he exhaled, allowing the air to leave him without making a noise, fearful that movement or any sound could be misinterpreted, that he might, by dint of a tiny unintended gesture, invite a response he didn’t want.
He realised then that he could feel Ghost’s bare legs brushing his own, that as he curled around him, he almost sat in his lap. Yet despite this, he felt no signal of carnal desire, nothing poking insistently between his thighs.
What the fuck are you doing?
MacTavish drew breath and courage to ask the question, fortified himself against the long entrenched military hierarchy and the awkward nature of the complaint. Then he stopped.
Beyond the last coherent memory, he remembered only fragments, snatches of sensation and noise between the roiling, confusing mass of nightmares. Dimly, he recalled the press of something cool on his face, rough towel over his skin, hands on his body redressing his injured arm, removing the clothes drenched in sweat and replacing the sheets. He heard Ghost speak, pleading and encouraging him to drink.
He stopped, and considered for the first time that it wasn’t a gesture he was meant to decipher, that there might be nothing cryptic in pressing close against the world that seemed united against them. Outside of the room, outside of the bed , he realised, who was left to trust? Price and Gaz, if they were even alive, were halfway across the world. Alejandro had been captured. Laswell was tainted by Shepherd’s betrayal. They had a few weapons, a small cache of ammunition and each other, with the last part hanging in the balance until the antibiotics had kicked in.
Was it such a crime to want to huddle close, given the circumstances? Did he need another reason?
So you do like me.
I like you alive.
Ghost lay still behind him, one arm still flopped over MacTavish’s flank, resting against his belly, his breathing slow and even. He made no move to do anything else.
MacTavish came to a decision, and rolled over, shifting until he came to rest with his arm across Ghost’s body, his face against his chest.
Ghost’s breathing hitched, his body tensing in MacTavish’s embrace.
“Johnny?”
“Uh huh.”
“What the fuck are you doing?”
MacTavish looked up, squinting into the darkness where he thought Ghost’s face might be.
“What do you mean,” he asked “What the fuck am I doing?”
“You’re…” Ghost stopped, drew breath to speak and then paused again, as if he couldn’t quite find the right words, until he said “You’re... cuddling me.”
“ I’m cuddling you ?” MacTavish retorted “You started it!”
Ghost made an exasperated noise. “ I am trying to keep you warm , like I’ve been doing all day , on account of you whinging and crying when I didn’t. What the fuck did you think I was doing?”
“Oh.” said MacTavish. Oh shit. What have I done?
Ghost sighed, and shifted. MacTavish heard a rasping noise as he rubbed his face with his free hand. “You don’t remember any of that, do you?”
He didn’t. He felt very stupid, and extremely embarressed. In a small voice he said “I- I just thought you wanted a cuddle.”
“For fuck’s sake!” Ghost exclaimed, the exasperated eye-roll evident in his voice.
MacTavish lay there, stewing in shame, too embarrassed to move. When he could bear the tense silence no longer, he pulled himself together, but as he poised on the cusp of withdrawing, about to roll away to the furthest possible part of the bed, he felt Ghost shift beneath him. He heard him sigh, a long, bone-weary, deflating exhalation, and felt his arm move, coiling further around him, drawing him close in a tight, squeezing embrace.
His breath stuttered as he breathed in, pressing MacTavish against him, driving his face into his hair as he muttered “How’d they let a big soft bastard like you do this job?”.
MacTavish, clasped against him in the darkness, feeling the great bass thump of Ghost heart beneath his chest, the tremor in his embracing grip, tension in his body as he gripped him tight like a precious thing, saw by the light of this sudden candour that the grim and gruff front Ghost presented was just another mask, a protective cover to hide the man beneath. He thought about what to say, and decided to say nothing.
He squeezed him back gently, and simply let it go at that.