My marriage was over. After six years it was gone - stuffed, and shafted - and I needed a place where I could brood for a bit and then get on with the rest of my life.
I figured my deputy could babysit the business, while Katerina began splashing the settlement she'd danced away with. The geography says Hawaii is a full four thousand miles, one continent, and one ocean away from Galveston. That seemed about far enough. I booked a ticket to Honolulu and told Willy Carstens I'd be back on deck in three weeks.
I began my new life with four days loafing around the famed Royal Hawaiian Hotel, enjoying an occasional beer, a deck chair that earned tips for the hotel's beach boys, and a view of Waikiki's bikinis -- the good, the bad, and those who shouldn't have.
Then I caught a morning flight out to Kauai, "The Garden Isle." My next-door neighbour, Alfie Schwab, had tipped me off to an old weatherboard holiday rental that was not too flash but over-compensated for this with a back lawn that dipped straight down onto a white sand beach. He'd stayed there twice and maintained it was about three steps better than paradise, and an ideal spot to lose yourself.
The house needed a rental car for access, and I booked it through a local island agency, as I figure the smaller joints rip you off more sunnily than their big brothers at Hertz and Avis.
"Good choice taking the convertible. Life's better topless," joked the old guy who owned the place. "Give my daughter Sammy the paperwork. She's got your keys. Step outside, and you've got that new Mustang she's hosing."
His daughter was thirty-ish; a tall, slim, brunette, and in anyone's language, a looker. But oddly, she was wearing long slacks despite the tropical heat, and these were covered in splash-marks from her cleaning work. As she stepped towards me, I saw the daughter carried a slight limp and favoured her right side.
"Your car's ready to rumble. So where are you heading off to?" she asked.
"I hope I've got lucky. I've booked an old house a friend said had a great location. It's right on the beach, near Hanalei."
"Ah, Han-a-lei. It's as lovely as it sounds, and not more than an hour from here," she said. "Let me match up your driving license and the papers, then you're on your way." I passed my license to her. She glanced at it, then bent her head to examine the details more closely.
"Daniel Scott Thurlow, from Galveston." she read out. She looked up at me and studied my face. "I think that must be Captain Dan Thurlow. Decorated in Afghanistan. Served with the Tenth Mountain Division in its Third Combat Brigade
"Yeah, that's gotta be you," she murmured, and shifted her sunglasses up onto her hair. The eyes were mesmerising - deep brown with distinctive green flecked irises. Her right eye, I realized, was slightly lazy.
I'd done my best to leave Afghanistan behind when I finally left the armed forces. But who was this mystery woman who apparently knew me? I couldn't place her, yet it wasn't a face to forget.
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Afghanistan in 2011. The Tenth's Third Brigade is called The Spartans. We were named after the Greek super-warriors, whose motto said you return from battle "With your Shield, Or on It."
That sounded fine at home base in Fort Drum, but not so great two days out on patrol from Forward Operating Base Pasab, in the Pakistan border country. We'd lost more than one hundred men since the war begun and were now working gingerly through one of the Taliban's heartlands -- a terror zone where the villages had shrunk as scared families fled to the regional capital of Kandahar.
It was strongly rumoured that Mullah Omar, the 6ft 6-inch religious zealot who founded the Taliban, was being protected somewhere near us. I had one of my three platoons with me - about forty men in it. We were six miles south of Highway One, and a month into the brigade's mission to break the Taliban's hold on the Zihar region. This meant pushing their terror back to south of the Arghandab River, so we could free up the main route down into Pakistan. We'd also begun building the first of twenty new schools where Afghan girls too could be free to join classrooms.
Unlike most of Afghanistan, much of Zahir is flat and rich, with orchards and vineyards that are irrigated by channels pulling water from the river. But Zahir could also be deadly. The Taliban had fields and tracks sown with mines, and in the villages, thick-walled baked mud homes with their small grilled windows, sometimes made nasty machine gun nests.
I paused my platoon a hundred yards short of a small village, because we'd had a sudden medical emergency back down the line. In front of us three women in burqas helped by their children, were lifting buckets from a well, and putting them on a cart.
"Reporting on Urlich," snapped Corporal Browning, a wiry NCO whose competence I trusted. "It's acute appendicitis. Bloody hell! We need to chopper him out. Real fast, according to Lonesome Dove."
"Lonesome Dove? Who the fuck's Lonesome Dove?"
I'll give Browning his credit -- he blushed. "Sorry, that's Private Anoki, the stand-in medic. Turns out she's part Sioux Indian. Anoki doesn't know it yet, but she's been called Lonesome Dove. It kinda makes sense. She's the first woman we've had in the platoon; she'll be back at base in a week anyway, and she's also alone. So -- we have ourselves Lonesome Dove, like in that book and TV series."
"Well, if you say so. And how well's our temporary Medic shaping up?"
"It's early, but she seems good at what she does. The guys like her - and the guessing is that hidden behind the dark glasses and helmet, Lonesome Dove may be a treat."
Lonesome Dove -- Private Anoki. By now I should have spent some time with the fill-in Medic. It was my fault, but there'd been no real chance. Her presence had come as a surprise. Hadlee, a stand-up guy who'd been the Medic for six months, broke his ankle skylarking the night before we left Pasab's tent base. One hour before we drove out through the heavily armed base gates, the army (which doesn't always know best) took Anoki from its mobile "gypsy medic" team and assigned her to us. Women weren't yet meant to be risked on direct ground contact patrols, but it wasn't the very first-time necessity had stretched this rule.
The drama with Urlich's rumbling appendix had slowed us down, and instead of being front and back of the column, both our Cougars - MRAP (Mine Resistant Ambush Protected) vehicles - were now at the rear.