The volunteer reddened. Marisol thanked the old man quietly, and he went toward the dining room while she stepped to the registration desk. Behind it sat a woman with a neat bun and a clipboard. The woman checked a list, looking more attentive than the young man at the entrance.
"Welcome, ma'am. Name?"
"Marisol Quinn."
The registrar's expression changed almost imperceptibly. Her finger moved down the page to a name marked in blue ink, and she closed the folder so the people behind Marisol could not see it. Then she leaned forward, lowering her voice to the level of a confidence.
"Table 14. We've been expecting you. A friend of this unit asked for you. His flight lands at 1:00; he'll be here by 2:00."
Marisol understood the reference. Retired Sergeant Major Arthur Boone had spent six weeks persuading her to attend and had promised that General Jonathan Ellsworth would be there before the unveiling. Boone had not promised what the general would say, or whether the men who had believed the wrong version of history for twelve years would be willing to hear the right one.
"Does anyone else know?"
"Not a soul."
The answer made Marisol's stomach tighten. She had requested secrecy because she wanted to meet Daniel Mercer's widow without turning the moment into a performance, but secrecy also left her exposed in a room where one man had made a career from a lie. She took her name card and walked through the wide hallway toward the memorial photographs. Daniel's face appeared in the second row: young, tired, laughing into the camera with one hand raised to shield his eyes from the sun.
She stood very still before his photograph. In the picture he was thirty-two, while the years had continued without him for everyone else. His wife had turned forty; his daughter, whom he had only known as a toddler, was now a teenager. Marisol pressed the folded invitation against her chest and whispered the only greeting she could manage.
"I'm here, Daniel."
Beyond the display, several former soldiers had gathered around Brock Hollister, laughing at his stories of Tarak Valley. Marisol recognized his voice immediately, even before she saw the expensive campaign watch on his wrist and the polished ribbon mounted beneath his lapel. He spoke with the confidence of a man who had told the same account so often that repetition had become certainty.
"I threw red smoke, and they came running."
A heavyset veteran near him leaned forward, eager for a detail that had become part of Bravo Company's mythology.
"And you carried Mercer yourself, right?"
"Every step. Every step."
Marisol's fingers closed around the strap of her handbag. A different picture rose behind her eyes: a narrow ravine, a smoke plume bending in the rotor wash, four injured men who had nearly vanished beneath the dust. Hollister stood by the refreshment table with a glass of iced tea, enjoying the applause of people who had not been there when the helicopter touched down.
"Red smoke."
She did not intend to speak loudly, but the words escaped as if she were testing them. Then she corrected the memory that had been twisted into a legend.
"Yellow."
Hollister turned. His eyes skimmed her plain clothes, missing the warning in the steadiness of her expression. He answered with an indulgent smile that made several men chuckle.
"Red. Always red."