Covenant Read Free Page A

lieutenant in the United States Marines after finishing college, leading a provisional rifle platoon with the 15th Marine Expeditionary Unit during Operation Enduring Freedom before taking up employment as a war correspondent. Despite the advice he’d been given not to resign his commission, Ethan had been driven by a desire to document the horror of war and to expose the injustices he had witnessed, to be more than just a foot soldier. He had been embedded with Jarvis’s unit in Fallujah during Operation Iraqi Freedom, and had obtained footage of the war that had helped secure his career as a correspondent. They had gone their separate ways after that, maintaining only occasional contact since. The last he’d heard, Jarvis was working for the Department of Defense or something.
    “I’m getting by.”
    “Sure you are.”
    Ethan decided not to respond and gestured to the couch, acutely aware of his meager surroundings. Jarvis removed his jacket and sat down as Ethan discreetly tossed the bouquet out of sight into the kitchen.
    “So, what brings you here, Doug?”
    “There are some people from the Defense Intelligence Agency who want to talk to you.”
    The DIA, that was it. “Why would they want to talk to me?”
    “Because I recommended you. I need you to come with me.”
    Ethan felt another wave of anxiety flood his nervous system. “What the hell’s going on?”
    “How long have we known each other, Ethan?”
    “Twenty years, give or take.”
    “Two decades,” Jarvis agreed, and then hesitated, rubbing his temples. “Son, I know what you went through in Palestine, but so does the department, and it’s why they want to talk to you. They’re confident that you’re the man for the job, enough to have fronted your bail on my say-so.”
    “I’m not in the business anymore, not after what happened in Gaza.”
    “I know,” Jarvis admitted. “But this time it’s different.”
    “Surprise me.”
    “Two days ago, an American scientist went missing in the field and we need to locate her.”
    Ethan knew all too well that thousands of people around the world went missing every year, vanishing from the face of the Earth and leaving their families unable to grieve or abandon the hope to which they clung so desperately. The suffering of those they left behind, people like him, could not be measured simply in terms of grief, of regret, or even of guilt. It was the corrosive anxiety of not knowing, the terrible pangs of helplessness searing and scalding through the veins.
    “Where was she when she went missing?” he asked.
    “The Negev Desert, Israel, near the border with Jordan.”
    “So call the Red Cross, inform Interpol, and hopefully she’ll turn up.”
    Jarvis smiled tightly.
    “It’s not quite that simple. Israel is in the middle of peace negotiations with the Palestinian authorities, and for once the various factions that make up Palestine’s resistance have all observed a strict cease-fire. If we raise the alarm with Interpol or have the Red Cross scouring the Gaza Strip, and either Palestinian insurgents or Israeli right-wingers are accused of abduction, both sides could walk away from the table before the signing ceremony on August twenty-sixth.”
    “So what do they want from me?”
    “They want you to go in there, discreetly, and find out where she is.”
    Ethan had seen it coming, but hearing it still felt as though someone had clubbed him around the head. On the rare occasions when Ethan could be honest with himself he accepted that his life was dull, shitty, and almost entirely devoid of hope. But if there was anything that the last two years had taught him, it was that he didn’t need the endless traveling and the artillery-shelled hotels, the vacant stares of traumatized children and the undiluted misery that war inflicted upon the innocent masses groveling for mercy beneath its wrath. The memories were a swollen abscess of pain festering deep within his chest that was slowly being