He Was Just Serving Coffee — Until the General Used His Old Call Sign and the Memories Came Back
Chapter 2
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As he neared Chen's station again, the lieutenant leaned back, stretching his arms over his head. "The intel from the drone is good, but it's too passive. We need eyes on the ground. Real-time human intelligence. The kind of old-school stuff they wrote about in textbooks."Rostova scoffed without looking away from her monitor. "Human intel is messy. It's slow. It gets people killed. Let the tech do the heavy lifting. We have thermal. We have satellite. We have signals intelligence. The only thing we need a person for is to pull the trigger when the computer tells them to.""Still," Chen mused, his eyes flicking toward Thomas, who was quietly collecting empty sugar packets, "you have to wonder what it was like back then. Guys with muddy faces and a compass, trying to figure this stuff out." He gave a dismissive little laugh. "Probably why it took them 20 years to do what we can now do in 20 days."The comment hung in the air, thick with the arrogance of youth. It was a casual dismissal of entire generations of soldiers, a footnote in their own self-aggrandizing story.Thomas's hand paused for a fraction of a second over a crumpled napkin. His back was to them, and his face remained impassive—a mask of calm service. But inside, a distant drum began to beat: a faint echo from a world of mud and rain and fear. He felt a familiar placidness settle over him, the same calm he'd once found in the heart of a storm.They didn't know; they couldn't. To them, history was a data point, a lesson to be optimized. To him, it was the earth he still felt beneath his feet, the ghosts of friends who still walked beside him.His gaze drifted to the general. Thorne was still locked onto the map, but Thomas saw a subtle tightening in his jaw. The general had heard the exchange. In a room this sensitive, every word was a piece of data, every intonation a potential signal.Thomas gathered the last of the disposables and turned to leave. As he passed Rostova's station, she finally looked up, her eyes narrowing not at him, but at his wrist. He wore a simple, unadorned leather band, darkened with age and sweat, cracked like old earth. It was a starkly personal, organic object in this world of metal and light."What is that, anyway?" she asked, her tone a mix of curiosity and disdain. "Some kind of retro fitness tracker?"Chen leaned over to look. "Looks like something my grandpa would wear. A relic from the Stone Age?"Thomas stopped. He looked down at the band of leather encircling his thin, veiny wrist. It wasn't a tracker; it wasn't a fashion statement. It was a promise. It was a memorial.The sterile blue light of the war room flickered, and for a heartbeat, it was replaced by the strobing green of a Huey's interior light. The hum of the servers became the deafening whump-whump-whump of rotor blades slicing through thick, humid air. The scent of coffee was washed away by the smell of jet fuel, ozone, and wet jungle rot. He felt a phantom weight on his back: the familiar heft of a PRC-77 radio and the cold steel of his rifle in his hands.