Dangerous Territory: An Alpha Ops novella (4 page)

Really? He still remembered her stupid flight attendant name after three years? But then again, she’d remembered his name was Josh. Remembered everything about him, despite the bastard of a hangover she’d had when she woke up alone in his room.

She’d also been thinking about him on and off for the past few years. Mostly on. He was her savior, a perfect man in her memory. She’d always considered that night as the happy place she escaped to whenever she was lonely or sad.

“My name is Grace. Sally is my go-to identity when I don’t want to talk about my life or my job. And who are you today?” She took a step closer to him. “Josh? Or T.S., my rescuer?” She had no idea why she was being such an ass.

Ironic really, because he’d been her rescuer back then, too. He’d brought her back from the edge of… something unpleasant. Something she never let happen again, something she never allowed herself to feel again.

“I’m T.S. I didn’t know you were a reporter,” he said flatly.

“I didn’t know you were a soldier.”

“Airman.”

“Sorry. Airman. You didn’t give a hint of it that night.”

“I don’t live the dream when I’m stateside. I just do my job. I don’t shout about what I do here.” He crouched over the backpack she passed to him and took out an Ace bandage.

What was he doing? She wasn’t hurt. But then he eased himself to the ground and unlaced his boot.

“Are you hurt?” A note of anxiety slid into her voice.

“Nothing serious. Just turned my ankle when I jumped off the rope.”

“I heard gunshots. You weren’t hit, were you? You’re not just being stoic and brave, right?”

He let out a half laugh. “I’m fine. Don’t worry about me.”

After a pause, she sat down facing him. “I am a little worried.” And then she saw how swollen his ankle was. “Okay. Now I’m quite a lot worried.”

“Seriously? Is this your first time at war? This is peachy compared to some things you’ll see.”

Images flooded her head. Blood, a dangling limb. A fragment of a joke Sarah gasped just before her eyes glazed over and her blood stopped pumping. Frantic hands trying to stop the bleeding and give her CPR. Her friend dying in front of her. A friend she should have known better than to make.

Never get close to your subject.
It had been her professor’s mantra, one she hadn’t listened to before but now she was a gold medalist at. She scooched back from him as if distance would erase the images.

“This is my fourth time here. When we… first met, I had just returned from my first embedding. This is my third since then.”

“And you’re reporting this war for what? For fun? To be famous? To tell the world how awful war is, how many atrocities are being committed in the name of democracy? Are you one of those reporters? What am I asking? You’re all like that. So how have you been doing? Blown the lid off any scandal? Made more people think that this was a bad idea?”

What the hell? Chip much? She wanted to placate him, but she’d heard this way too often to bite back the words that she wanted to bash him with.

“You fight for democracy, yes? But there is no democracy without a free media. You get that, right? It’s the First freaking Amendment that no one regulates the rights of the press. Have you read the Constitution?”

He started wrapping his ankle really, really tightly. So tight she was worried that his whole foot would fall off due to lack of blood.

“You think I don’t know that?” he said. “It’s not as simple as that. Every time one of you reports on something terrible that a guy under unthinkable pressure has done, it exponentially increases the danger to me and everyone fighting here. Do you think that your reports don’t go around the world? That a satellite TV in one of the villages here doesn’t get watched? Of course they see it. You’re feeding our enemy with more reasons to want to kill us.”

“Hell, Josh. Take a pill. You’re killing your own foot.” She took the bandage from his hand, unwrapped it partway, and rewrapped it a little looser. Pulling out a granola bar from her backpack, she asked, “Have you eaten recently? You’re off-the-charts grumpy, and I’m hoping there’s a biological reason for it, or I’m totally screwed.” She thrust the bar at him. “Eat. So I won’t have to kill you in your sleep. Or you won’t kill me.” She grinned, trying to lighten the lead-weight tension that they had brought into their cave in about three minutes flat.

He smiled back at her, although it looked somewhat reluctant, and took the bar. “Do you have one, or do you want to share?”

“It’s all yours. I had a big dinner before we left on patrol.”

He looked skeptically at her. He obviously knew what the mess halls were like at the forward operating bases as well as she did.

“Well, I ate a lot of the bread. And drank a lot of the coffee. Which reminds me, I hate to be a girl, but I kind of need a bathroom break.”

“Okay. I’ll scope the area outside the cave and then point you in the right direction. I’ll avert my eyes, but as soon as you’re done, you need to scoot the fuck back in here.”

“Roger that.” She snapped a sassy salute at him with two fingers, and he rolled his eyes. Thank God they had moved past the obviously different points of view they had about the role of the media in modern culture. Not that she wrote about the war, exactly. But she supposed he had no way of knowing that. He didn’t look the type to read
Vanity Fair
.

Grace grabbed wet wipes from her bag and followed him. What had her fantasy come to? Her dream man, the one she was always looking for in D.C. The one whom she always hoped to see again, the one who’d saved her. That one. He hated her.

And he was about to facilitate her squat-peeing. This wasn’t how it was supposed to be. Hope that she had been carrying for three years was stripped away like a welded-on Band-Aid. It hurt with a pain that almost outweighed her terror at being stuck in a mountain cave, surrounded by bad people with guns.

She looked around like
The Exorcist
girl as she removed her jeans and panties. Unfortunately for her line of work, she’d never been able to pee in the wild without peeing on herself. If she was going to die here, it wasn’t going to be covered in pee.

Just as she had cleaned up and put her panties back on, a hand wrapped around her mouth and another arm lifted her clean off the ground. Her legs kicked in panic until he whispered in her ear, “Shhhh. Two men at our five o’clock. Be silent.”

She nodded under his hand and he removed it, but he continued to carry her back into the cave. When he set her down, she followed him around their corner, as fast and as silently as she could. Shit. Shit. This really wasn’t what she’d had in mind when she had assigned herself to the unit.

He gathered their packs and flashlights and stowed them at the very back of the cave. He pointed at the ground and she sat, huddled in a corner.

She could see nothing until her eyes adjusted. Josh had placed himself directly in front of her, pointing his sidearm toward the corner that led to the entrance of the cave, taking aim at whatever planned to do them harm. He was so steady, unwavering. She pitied anyone who tried to take them. The threat of tears fizzed behind her eyes at the image of Josh protecting her from an unseen enemy.

Her thoughts flickered to Beth and Walker. Was she okay? Would he get in trouble for disobeying orders to stay with her? Before she could wonder further, she shut her brain down. No attachments, no emotion. She repeated it over and over in her head until she could no longer even discern their faces in her memory. She felt safe but was terrified nonetheless.

Suddenly, the sound of falling scree and footsteps echoed around them. It sounded as if a hundred people were invading the cave. Tiny pieces of grit sprinkled from the roof, and Grace instinctively wrapped her arms over her head. Maybe the whole cave was collapsing in on them. And yet Josh didn’t move. She peeked out and saw him in exactly the same, unwavering position, protecting her. Gradually, the noises subsided, and Josh finally moved.

He bent down to her ear. “Stay,” he whispered. He moved very slowly away from her until she was left alone in the pitch-blackness. What the fuck was she doing with her life? A second Pulitzer wasn’t worth this, was it? Was it? She was used to this train of thought. Every time something uncomfortable happened, every time something happened to take her out of her zone, she considered a life back in the United States. Safe in a town, writing for a weekly local newspaper. A puppy and a… man? When she pictured this, the placeholder face her man had was Josh’s. She guessed she would have to come up with a different man for her fantasy. Maybe revert to Chris Hemsworth instead. He had been her fail-safe fantasy husband before her one-night stand with Josh. Sweet Jesus, she was going to have to stop thinking about that now. She’d had no inkling that he was military at the time. How could she? Not many troops hang out at the Four Seasons on Christmas Eve.

“It’s okay. They didn’t even find the cave.” He came back and reestablished the faint light on the ledge. He plunked on the floor next to her. “Are you all right?”

“How did they not find us?” It seemed impossible. “They sounded as if they were inside with us.”

“It’s the acoustics of the valley, I think. There were a bunch of people on the other side of the pass, but it sounded as if they were right here. The two men I saw walked straight past us. The moon’s gone in.”

She paused. “Why were you at the Four Seasons?”

He rummaged around in his pack for something and was silent for a moment. When he found what he was looking for, he leaned back against the rock and his shoulder settled against hers. Her skin fritzed again.

Not real
, she insisted to herself. Just the adrenaline of the situation. “Tell me, Grace. Are we on, or off, the record here? Are you memorizing everything we do and say so that you can hit the wires as soon as we get back to base? Are you going to tell everyone that your rescuer’s radio broke? That your life was put in danger not once but twice by the military? Are you going to complain about how you were treated? What’s your angle here?”

Grace hesitated. It was a difficult question, and she had a feeling that her answer would affect the rest of the night and the rest of her rescue if she said the wrong thing.

“I… I won’t use any of your personal details if I write about this. Not your name, not anything you tell me about yourself. I promise.”

“So we are absolutely off the record here?”

“Absolutely.” Grace rubbed her bare legs in the dark. Thank goodness he couldn’t see her.

“Okay, then. The truth is, I always disappear a couple of days before I deploy. I go somewhere nice, to the best hotel I can find and… just disappear. I hate being with my parents.” He shifted. “I love them, of course, but in the days before I deploy, they become tense, and more and more people phone the house, wanting to say good-bye, just in case they never see me again. And I’m not into that. Sometimes I think they just want to be on television, telling a reporter, “Oh yeah, I spoke to him the day before he left,” just to prove that they knew me really well. I would be pissed if anyone I knew talked about me to anyone like you…” He said the word in the same way a preacher might say the word “devil.” “That’s why I was there. I was flying out of Baltimore.”

It was the most he’d said to her, ever, in fact. She wondered what it would be like to have so many people care about her, to want to call her before she shipped out. But between her assignments, her cell phone stayed silent for the most part. Something inside her felt restless for someone to care about. A pang of… guilt, maybe? For keeping people out of her life? For considering a lifestyle that she didn’t want to legitimize by thinking about? Whatever it was, it remained in her stomach, pinching and nagging.

*     *     *

He’d given her that snippet of information to hold her at bay. It was a reverse interrogation tactic. Tell them something that sounds very personal, something true, something that would percolate in their mind so they wouldn’t notice no other personal information was coming their way. In truth, he used it all the time when he dated. Not that he’d had the time stateside to do that recently. This was his sixth tour in four years. He didn’t mind. This job was a calling more than a career.

Right now he wanted to keep her talking. In these situations, it was best to do everything possible to prevent the person being rescued from doing too much thinking. Especially in a war zone. It was easy to imagine the worst, and giving a brain time to come up with spiraling scenarios was not a great idea. Panic killed people. And probably him, too. If she talked, he could zone out and formulate a rescue plan.

“So why were
you
at the Four Seasons that night?” he asked, fully prepared to switch his ears off as soon as she started talking.

“To forget.” She sighed into the darkness and fell silent.

Good God, a woman who didn’t ramble on indefinitely? That put a wrench in the works.

“You were there to forget?”

“Oh, no. I guess I was at the bar to forget.” She shifted her position a little. “I was at the Four Seasons because, essentially, that’s where I live.”

“What?” Jesus. How rich was she, anyway? Being a soul-sucking predator paid that well?

She laughed softly, a sound that filled him with a warmth that he enjoyed for a second and then shook off. “I… don’t really live anywhere, anymore. I’ve been in Afghanistan for four years, embedded with army units. I’m back in D.C. only between deployments, which has been for only one or two weeks at a time. I guess Afghanistan is my home.” She laughed again, but this time without amusement.

“What were you trying to forget?” Something in his memory of that night floated to the surface. “Wait. It was your friend’s death, right?”

There was a sudden rush of air as she got up and moved away, farther into darkness. “If I told you, if I even thought about it now, how would that be forgetting?”

She had a point. He hated that. But still. “Have you spoken to
anyone
about it?”

She stopped pacing. “What part of the word ‘forgetting’ don’t you understand?” She was beginning to sound irritated, which was much better than fearful or panicked.