Read The Devil's Horn for Free Online Page B

it’s sweet.”
    LB rocked in his seat. The plastic under him threatened to buckle.
    “You’re kidding.”
    Quincy made a ridiculous face.
    “Fuck yes, I’m kidding.”
    When Marius returned with beers dangling between his thick fingers, the team stopped sniggering. The pilot asked what the hilarity had been. LB tried to wave it off as nothing, but Jamie told him about Wally on one knee, proposing over the radio in the back of a cargo plane to a major all the way back in Djibouti.
    Marius laughed hard, perhaps to be included.
    “Jirre.” This was the Afrikaans way of saying “wow.”
    For uncomfortable moments, the laughing Marius remained unaware that no one had joined him. Jamie, who’d told the story, licked his lips and hung his head, a sorry pose. Doc and Quincy drummed their fingers on the metal table. LB worked on his beer, waiting this out. The clueless Marius didn’t quit fast enough. LB set down his beer and raised a palm.
    “Okay, pal. Let it go.”
    Marius sniffed away the last of his laughter.
    “What?”
    “I said just let it go. Wally’s getting married. So good for him.”
    “ Ja , good for him. But you laughed.”
    Jamie tried to placate him, leaning across the table.
    “I shouldn’t have said anything. My fault.”
    When Marius glared at Jamie, Doc tugged the young PJ upright in his chair, keeping him out of it.
    Marius spread his arms to survey the Americans at the table. He could have taken on any of them except Quincy, and he would have been a handful for the big PJ. Though the bar rippled with an international flavor today, Marius had an ample number of South African Army and Air Force members nearby, and as a rule they ran large.
    For no reason LB could articulate, because in his way of thinking he’d done nothing to bring this on himself, Marius addressed him.
    “I buy you drinks.”
    “Thank you.”
    “I let you pretend to rescue me. In front of fucking ten thousand people.”
    “Like I said . . . Thank you.”
    “So suddenly I’m an arsehole?”
    Why do it? LB had never developed complex answers to simple questions. This was his strength, what he valued most about himself and believed others admired in him: he gave dogged and linear, reliable, repeatable responses to challenges. This was what LB tried to teach young pararescuemen as an instructor at Pararescue Indoctrination, what he tried to give to the wounded in combat when they’d lost almost all their own strength. Never quit. Focus, narrow it down, right here and now. Later will take care of itself. Why jump out of a copter into a raging sea or out of a plane into a boiling desert, into an icy crevasse, into a firefight, into this? Why? Because that was the job.
    “Not suddenly.”
    Marius shot up, the rim of the table in his hands. Bottles cascaded past LB, spilling on the bricks, one of the full ones doused him. With a heave, the big pilot tipped the table into LB’s lap; LB fended it off, and the table rolled away to rest upside down. Doc, Jamie, Quincy, and the beer-soaked LB sat in an empty ring where it had been. Marius, standing alone, moved his arms and fists like a flexing gorilla. The rest of the patio’s patrons swallowed their tongues; the music in the background was the only sound left, with Marius commanding everyone’s attention, awkward and wrong.
    “Get up.”
    Whether through surprise or lack of desire, Doc, Jamie, and Quincy stayed rooted to their seats. LB stayed in his plastic chair for a different reason. He’d been told to stand.
    Marius grunted.
    “You’ve got a snotklap coming, mate.”
    The pilot took one stride across crunching glass. His next step was interrupted.
    Wally slipped into the circle without making a sound, even without treading on the glass. Taller than Marius, rangy and erect, cropped, tucked, and certain, Wally hoisted both hands to ward off the advancing goonish pilot.
    “I don’t know what he said or did, but I’m sure you deserve an apology.”
    Marius pouted,