A small, sad smile played on her lips. “Is that what you think I am?”
“Prove me wrong,” Sterling challenged, the pain meds starting to take the edge off, making him bolder. “Tell me the closest you’ve ever been to a kill zone—watching it on CNN?”
Sarah walked over to the sink to wash her hands.
She dried them slowly with a paper towel. The air in the room seemed to grow heavier, charged with static electricity that made the hair on Sterling’s arms stand up. She turned to him, her face completely void of the polite customer service expression she had worn earlier.
“You asked for a corpsman, Colonel,” she said. “You asked for someone who knows the difference between a femur and a fibula under fire.”
She reached for the collar of her scrub top. For a second, Sterling thought she was undressing, and he opened his mouth to object, but she didn’t take the top off.
She grabbed the left sleeve of her undershirt, a long-sleeved white thermal she wore under the scrubs, and pushed it up. She rolled the fabric past her wrist, past the elbow. Sterling’s eyes widened.
There, on the inside of her forearm, covering the pale skin from wrist to elbow, was a tattoo. But it wasn’t a butterfly or a flower. It was a chaotic, beautiful, terrifying mural of black and gray ink.
In the center was the Eagle, Globe, and Anchor, the sacred emblem of the Marine Corps. But superimposed over it was the caduceus of the Medical Corps, and woven through the anchor chain were the distinct, jagged lines of a map. Sterling knew maps; he knew that map.
It was the street grid of Fallujah, the Jolan District. Below it, in bold Gothic script, were the words: So Others May Live. But what made Sterling’s breath catch in his throat wasn’t the map.
It was the small, distinct emblem inked right near the ditch of her elbow: a skull with a spade, the Dark Horse 3/5 unit crest. Next to it was a date: November 2004. Sterling stared.
The year of Phantom Fury, the bloodiest battle of the Iraq War. “You,” Sterling stammered, his brain struggling to reconcile the middle-aged woman with the ink on her arm. “You were attached to Three-Fifths?
In ’04?”
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