"We'll get back to the island," Lipton said, with the unshakable confidence of an optimism he didn't quite feel. "And you'll have that time." The 'at least' went unsaid, but in rang in the air anyway.

"I don't know my war will end, it was people who came after me who had that knowledge. Perhaps if Scorpion had come from a few months later than you, or a few years, he would've said the same as Webster and Buck, that there was an end in sight." He shook his head. "It sure didn't seem like it was near the end for me, or that things would necessarily go our way." He suspected those dark days in the Ardennes would never stop haunting him, where the lives, limbs and sanity of Easy were battered and broken.