Free Small Wars by Matt Wallace Page B

thousand dollars. Within four hours of accepting her title and check Cindy has gambled half of the money away in the casino. Ritter observes her from a safe distance the whole time. She pounds rum and cokes with alarming rapidity and rarely speaks to anyone around her.
    When she anoints herself too buzzed to make rational card-playing decisions, Cindy retreats to a video poker machine far away from the nearest other patron.
    That’s where Ritter approaches her, taking a seat in front of the machine one removed from her own.
    â€œYou want something?” she asks him after a few awkward minutes.
    Ritter nods. “I do. I want to hire you.”
    â€œWhat I look like to you, dude?”
    â€œA soldier.”
    That statement briefly takes Cindy aback, and then she looks down at the exposed ink on her arms. An Explosive Ordinance Disposal “crab” badge is tattooed on her right forearm while a navy anchor whose shaft is a lit stick of dynamite opposes it on her left.
    â€œAll right,” she says, more composed. “So what?”
    â€œSo I’m going to talk for sixty seconds, and if you want to hear more I’ll be in the McDonald’s in back of this shit-hole waiting with two cups of coffee. Fair enough?”
    Cindy shrugs. “Whatever.”
    â€œYou’re what, six months out? You’re drifting. You’re drinking too much. You’re gambling too much. You can’t remember the name of anyone you’ve fucked since your discharge because you never really asked their name in the first place.”
    Cindy starts at that, angrily, but when she searches his expression for some bullshit gender-based judgment she finds none.
    She realizes he sounds like he’s speaking from experience.
    She realizes he’s one soldier speaking to another.
    â€œYou’re still a soldier,” he continues. “That’s all you want to be. You’re not built for civilian life, but that’s where you are. You need a mission. But with your service record the only mission anyone is going to give you would be wiring the car of a drug lord or sweeping the caravan of some profiteering corporate fuck overseas. And you don’t want that. Because despite why they booted you, you have a conscience.”
    â€œWho the fuck are you?” she asks him, on the verge of tears.
    â€œI can offer you a mission you can be proud of. One that’s about serving people instead of blowing them to hell and gone. It’s straight work. It’s well-paid work. And I’ll never ask you to do anything that will make you hate yourself.”
    Ritter stands up. “That was a little more than sixty seconds, but I thought that pitched better. Like I said, I’ll be in the McDonald’s over there.”
    Ritter exits the casino. He crosses the hotel lobby to the small food court that operates twenty-four hours. He orders two large coffees from the McDonald’s kiosk and occupies a table in the common area.
    He waits.
    Cindy joins him before the coffee has cooled.
    Now
    They drive northwest, to Bontddu, near Barmouth, in Gwynedd.
    None of them except Hara have any idea how to pronounce the names, and he doesn’t feel the need to comment.
    They pass the more famous Clogau mine, which remains active to this day. A few short decades ago there was still as much as five hundred thousand ounces of gold waiting to be unearthed in its bowels, but since the late nineties it’s been mined completely dry.
    They drive off the beaten path to a far less known, smaller mine that has been abandoned for years since its veins ran dry. It’s removed and set against a Tolkien-esque wilderness.
    Ritter halts the van and they all get out, Ryland reluctantly and uncoordinatedly. They pull coveralls on over their clothes, fitting the straps of air filtration masks around their necks and attaching devices to their forearms that monitor air-toxicity levels.
    The entrance to the abandoned mine