And the kid's grin was still half up on his face, caught between the joke he'd been telling and the cold thing climbing up his spine.
"That's not funny," Mercer said. And his voice had lost something. "You can't just... That's a real call sign. That's somebody real."
The old man didn't argue. He never argued.
He just held the kid's eyes and let the silence do the work. And the silence was terrible, because the kid wanted so badly to be told it was a coincidence, and the old man wasn't going to give him that.
The whole bar was watching now.
Sal had gone very still beside his friend. And it was Sal who got up slow, one hand on the table to push himself standing, and walked toward the door with his phone already at his ear, saying something none of them could hear.
Nobody noticed him go. They were all looking at the old man and the kid, locked together in the middle of the room. The loud, certain young man, and the quiet one who hadn't raised his voice once.
It might have ended there, in awful stalemate. Except that nine minutes later, the door opened, and a man walked in who changed the temperature of the room before he'd said a word.
He was old, too, but he carried himself like a flagpole. Ramrod straight, in a windbreaker, with a small gold star pinned to the collar that some of the younger Marines recognized and some didn't. The ones who did came halfway out of their chairs on instinct.
Retired Major General Frank Halloran had driven over from a base function the second Sal called him.
And he walked through that bar like he owned the desert it sat in, straight past Captain Mercer without a glance, and stopped in front of the corner booth.
And then the major general did something that none of those young Marines would ever forget.
He came to attention. In his street clothes. In a bar. And he held it.
"Sir," he said to the thin old man in the faded cap. His voice cracked right down the middle of the word. "It's been a long time."