Those Who Wish Me Dead by Michael Koryta

Author:Michael Koryta [Koryta, Michael]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: Fiction, Thrillers, General
ISBN: 9780316279963
Google: vVg_AQAAQBAJ
Amazon: 0316122556
Barnesnoble: 0316122556
Goodreads: 18587089
Publisher: Little Brown
Published: 2014-06-03T05:00:00+00:00

23

Between Red Lodge and Cooke City, Ethan began to count. It had started as a simple exercise, a fight against the adrenaline and rage and fear. It had started as simple numbers. One to a hundred, then in reverse. When that grew old, he counted the cars they passed, and then, because there weren’t enough of them, he counted the switchbacks. Later, higher up the mountain, he chose something else.

He began to count the men and women he had trained in the art of survival. Started with the ones from the most recent days, the private work, and went back in time. Back to the Air Force, to the jungles and the deserts and the tundras where they’d dropped him off for a week or ten days or a month. There were about thirty in each group, and he trained four groups a year, and he’d trained for fifteen years. That was eighteen hundred for the military alone. Add in the civilians, and he believed it was close to twenty-five hundred. Perhaps, all told, it knocked on the door of three thousand.

Three thousand people he had taught how to be survivors. For some of them, it had worked. He knew that. A pilot downed in the Pacific; a soldier separated from his unit in Afghanistan; a hunting guide who’d broken his leg in a fall. Ethan had received letters and phone calls. Not to mention commendations and awards.

Three thousand sets of instructions.

Not one test for himself.

Not a real one, at least. He’d trained, and trained, and trained. With the best in the world, for a lifetime, he had trained, but he had never been tested. The finest fighter never to see the ring.

Only he was no fighter. It was the old conversation with his father again: a Marine’s son who’d joined the Air Force, that had been the first offense, but his dad had been able to shake it off, reckoning that the world had entered a new age of combat and in the future all scores would be settled with missiles and drones, sad as that seemed to make him. Then Ethan had become a survival instructor, and that was even more of a personal affront to his father somehow, more disappointing in some perverse way that came from his father having measured his own worth based on his ability to kill.

You just teach them what to do if they’re out there alone? he’d asked. From over here? How will you know if it works?

How it had pained him, the idea that his son would always be over here. There was no war at the time, but that didn’t matter to Rod Serbin—there might be, there would be, and when it came, his son would be on the sidelines, by choice. Whether or not he saved any lives didn’t seem to matter. He wouldn’t take any lives, and that was the measure. It bothered him, but not Ethan. Not until today. Now he drove, and he planned, and he wondered.

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