The Magical Stranger Read Free Page B

whispered in my ear.
    â€œDo not mention this to your father.”
    Back on the ferry, I watched the woman double-check her kids’ restraints. She gave her little boy a sippy cup, combed his hair, and smoothly moved into the driver’s seat. She was completely in command. I couldn’t look away. It was a scene from a play I had never seen.

Chapter Three
    A few miles away, a man I had not yet met prepared to take Dad’s last job.
    Commander James Hunter Ware III carefully laid out a white uniform on the bed in his Anacortes, Washington, home. He took out a ruler and made sure his medals were perfectly aligned, a trick he learned at the Naval Academy. On paper, he was the American man as hero. There was the buzz cut, the flight jacket, and a cowboy’s squint. His garage housed his Harley, a beat-up Ford pickup truck, a still for his nasty homemade hard cider, and license plates from five states. He was an Eagle Scout, an Annapolis grad, and a former test pilot. For a decade, he had flown in harm’s way—most recently jamming Taliban communications in the skies above Afghanistan—and then landed his EA-6B Prowler in the dark on the deck of a carrier. There were ribbons on his uniform to prove it.
    Tonight, Ware dressed for VAQ-135’s dining-out, a formal dinner marking the squadron’s change of command. Tomorrow, he would become skipper of a squadron heading to sea, the Navy’s glamour job.
    There was so much he wanted to do. He’d been in enough squadrons where number chasing was the only goal: percentage of sorties completed, percentage of sailors promoted, percentage of wives participating in Toys for Tots, blah, blah, blah. The Navy was no longer about sailors, thought Hunter; it was about stats and checking boxes. As far as he knew, a stat wasn’t what would get a Prowler aboard a carrier in a driving rainstorm. It was the 167 men and women of VAQ-135, and they’d have to do it with the four oldest EA-6B Prowlers in the fleet.
    Ware knew it sounded new agey, but his command was going to stress “sailors taking care of sailors.” That didn’t mean screwups and misconduct would be ignored—Ware had no tolerance for shitty sailors and excuses—but it did mean looking out for one another, taking personal responsibility, and not passing the buck—long a VAQ-135 staple. Ware guessed if he could pull that off, not nearly as easy as it sounded, getting jets in the air and getting jets home safe wouldn’t be a problem. Promotions and sortie completion quotas would follow, and pretty soon he’d have his dream: the top electronic attack squadron in the U.S. Navy. If all that happened, his own future—he had dreams of commanding his own ship—would be his to write.
    Ware could change lives with a signature, but at home he was still a figurehead king. Downstairs, he could hear his daughters—twelve-year-old Brenna and ten-year-old Caitlin—chattering with his wife, Beth, and his mother, Cindy, about dance classes, Harry Potter, and sleepovers. He caught snippets of dialogue as he drifted in and out of earshot. He knew his daughters better than most Navy dads, but sometimes he felt like a stranger in his own home, trying to understand a language not his own.
    Ware spent a lot of time laughing about how little power he held over his own life. (It beat crying.) A Pentagon fleet monkey decided when he came and went. Another fleet monkey ruled on his screwups. Entire days were spent trying to protect himself and his sailors from the flying bullshit being pushed by men living in the D.C. echo chamber—men who hadn’t been to sea for years, men who had forgotten what it was like to spend eight months away, missing babies being born.
    In reality, Ware didn’t even hold the deed to his own name. He was named James after his father and grandfather, but raised as Hunter, shortened to Hunt by his mom and Beth. But that was only