Double Vision (8 page)

Such a bitch of an emotion, guilt. It doesn’t care where it hangs its hat. It’ll settle on anyone’s head that isn’t covered.

“Commander, look—”

“Nathan,” he said softly. “Call me Nathan.”

“Okay, Nathan.” She walked over, clasped a reassuring hand to his biceps. “You did your job. Douglas is in a dangerous profession by choice. He isn’t a lamb you led blindly to slaughter. You need to remember that—and to believe that we’ll find him.”

“But when we do, will it be him or one of GRID’s doubles?” Forester’s frustration escalated. “Hell, Kunz was in Leavenworth. Arrested, tried and convicted, and it wasn’t even him. How will we know Douglas is Douglas?”

Kate scanned for a way. “We’ll use the bag of sand. Only Douglas would know he sent me the bag of sand.”

“Unless he tells them.”

Drug and mind manipulation therapy. He could tell them. “Remember the flirting?”

Forester frowned.

“We can use that. We can act as if Douglas and I have a thing. If he goes along with it, we know he’s not Douglas. If he doesn’t, then we’ll know he’s himself.”

“Seems rather simplistic.”

“Who cares?” she said with a huff. “Will it be effective? That’s all that matters.”

Forester looked at her hard, as if he’d only now noticed she wasn’t just a woman some man—Douglas—might desire but also a soldier. “It might.”

She wasn’t sure if she should be flattered or insulted, so she settled for neither. “Okay, then.”

Forester nodded. “Kate,” he started, looking as if the words he was about to say choked him. “I haven’t been
easy on you. But I want you to know I appreciate your help.”

The words had cost him. Nathan Forester was a proud man. But he was also realistic, and Kate was grateful for it. “You’re welcome, Nathan. We’ll visit the site—”

Gunfire erupted, spraying the tent.

N
athan shoved Kate down to the sandy floor, shielding her with his body.

With adrenaline gushing through her veins, Kate struggled against his weight, her hip grinding into the gritty dirt, stretching to grab the edge of the cot. A partial sheet of plywood was wedged behind it, blocking a hole blown it in from the previous attack. If she could snag it, it would give them a little more protection…

Gunfire erupted constantly: sand sprayed, fragments exploded. Dangerously close. Automatic weapon. Submachine gun.

“Soviet?” Nathan rendered his opinion on the make.

“No.” She involuntarily jerked. “German.” The timing was a dead giveaway.

The gunman swept a line of fire two feet in front of them. Sand scattered, stinging her wounded face, her arms,
even her legs through her clothes. Nathan took the brunt of it and the sting had every muscle in his body tight, his face contorting.

Stretching, trying again, she let out a deep groan and her fingers locked on to the green Army blanket. She jerked with all her might.

The blanket went lax.

The cot tumbled over them.

The plywood fell, slapping Nathan across the back. His breath swooshed out; Kate felt it in her chest.

Bullets continued to rip through the width of the tent, loud and piercing, showering sand, bursting everything in site. The center pole took a direct hit. Wooden splinters flew like targeted arrows and the top of the pole collapsed.

The tent caved in.

“We’ve got to get out of here.” Nathan rolled off her and motioned to the hole in the canvas the plywood had been blocking. “This way.”

She hand-signaled Nathan to crawl on his belly. Even on his haunches he was too tall for the collapsed tent; he’d be an easy target. Down on her haunches, using the plywood as a shield to protect them both, she inched toward the hole. The gunfire continued to storm from behind them.

At the tent’s edge, Kate snagged Nathan’s gun, darted a quick glance outside into the darkness. Convinced by the shots a single gunman was launching this attack, she squinted, strained, but trying to see through the wind-driven sand was an exercise in futility. Her stomach flipped, and so did her attitude. Visuals sucked, and that was bad—and good. It would be equally hard for the gunman to spot them. She signaled for Nathan to trail her.

He inched to a duffel bag, pulled out a second gun and followed her lead.

The firing suddenly stopped.

“Gone?” Nathan whispered.

Kate shook her head. The jerk’s gun had jammed or he was reloading.

She seized the opportunity and scanned the immediate vicinity. She dipped the nose of her gun, signaling Nathan to go left. When he nodded, she headed to the right. Her blood thrummed in her temples as sweat poured down her face, between her breasts, soaking the back of her shirt. The bullet’s spray pattern had been right to left. The gunman had to be to her right.

Another
rat-a-tat
spray of bullets fired.

So much for the jam theory. The jerk was active again, continuing to drop a deluge of bullets on the tent. Whoever this was, he wanted to make damn sure she and Forester were dead.

The rapid-fire bullets sounded like a series of taps. It couldn’t compete with the howl of the wind or the noise of the sand beating against everything in sight. That howl had her ears ringing so loudly that if Nathan was calling her, she wouldn’t hear him.

Kate blew out three puffed breaths to steady herself, hugged the canvas to her back and stretched tall, then she moved. The gunman was aiming low, assuming they’d be belly-crawling in the dirt. Upright, at worse, she’d end up with a blown-out ankle or shin wound. At best, he’d miss.

She turned a corner and nearly bumped noses with Nathan. The barrel of a gun shoved deep into her stomach. “Don’t shoot!”

Nathan jumped, swerved the nose of the gun away from her. “Jesus, Kate.”

Realizing how close she’d come to getting killed, she started to shake and tried hard to refocus. “See anything?”

“Sand.”

“Same here.” She grimaced, turning her attention to the gunfire. “Timing’s changed.”

“He’s shooting shorter.”

“Out in front of the tent,” she stated. Now why would he deliberately drop good ordnance into the sand?

The gunfire abruptly stopped.

Kate caught a glimpse of something red and charged after it. It moved through the blinding sand haphazardly, but she kept a fix on it from one end of the outpost to the other, never losing sight of it.

It’s a trap. It’s a trap. He’s leading you out into it, Kate. Stop!

She pulled to a halt near the showers, taking cover more from the sand than the gunman. Sliding behind the drab-green stall wall, she dropped to her haunches. The rippled fiberglass had been worn nearly smooth by the sandstorm. Letting her forehead rest against it, she caught her breath. The blowing sand had made it almost impossible to breathe during the run, and her lungs were in full protest.

Forester caught up to her and dropped beside her, his chest heaving, his face raw and red from the grating sand. “Did you lose him?”

“It was a trap.” Still trying to regain her breath, she looked over at him. “He was leading me out of the outpost.”

“What warned you it was a trap?”

She took in a gulp of air, let it out and felt their breaths mingle. “How many times have you seen anyone wearing red here?”

He thought about it, then blinked hard. “It was a trap.”

She nodded. “GRID members are a mixed bag of nationalities. Kunz doesn’t want patriotism or religion inter
fering. He wants loyalty only to him and money. The shooter couldn’t be local.” Locals wore only black or white. That had clued Kate to her general location the first day here. “He didn’t know red would flag him as an outsider.”

“Could’ve been a deliberate ploy,” Forester said as he stepped over her, turned on a shower, and rinsed off the sand caked on his face. The red in his skin deepened, hot and wind-burned and sand-scrubbed. “Possibly a local insurgent who wanted us to think he was an outsider.”

“Who knew which was your tent? Attacked only it?” Kate shook her head at him. “That’s not working for me.”

He turned grim, slapped the shower tap and shut off the water. “GRID.”

“I’m afraid so,” she replied. “But something’s still weird about it, Nathan.”

He hiked up his eyebrows, asking without words.

“Remember when he shortened his aim?” Nathan nodded and she went on. “He laid down at least fifty rounds in the sand in front of the tent. Why would he do that? Just waste bullets?”

Nathan’s left eye twitched. “I don’t know.”

“Me, either.” She stood. “But I think it’s important.”

He stood beside her. “I believe you’re right.”

“But why?”

Nathan tilted his head. “Maybe he didn’t want us dead? Maybe he wanted someone else to think we were?”

That possibility shed an entirely different light on the event. And opened doors on new possibilities that definitely needed to be explored.

“Let’s go back, see if we can find anything to help us figure out the details on this.”

“Okay.” Kate turned to follow him.

They walked back toward the tent. About halfway, Kate felt the distinct shift in the wind. The weather was finally calming down.

The tent was totaled. What hadn’t been shot up was sand torn. Taking a look around, Kate verified the spray pattern.

“Where was he firing from?” Whispering, Nathan looked left and then right.

So did Kate. “He was in motion the entire time. The bullet pattern was consistent, but the trajectory constantly altered.” She treated the area as a crime scene and walked the grid anyway, but she wasn’t so foolish as to think she’d find a solid lead to the gunman. Whipped for hours by violent, unrelenting winds, the entire outpost was sheathed in a heavy cloud no vision gear known to man could penetrate. Any leads were as gone as he was, swallowed by the sand.

The hair on her arms ruffled and something important nudged at her. Niggling. Niggling.

Then it hit her full-force. “Nathan?” She stopped and faced him, her head tilted to keep her face out of the wind. While no longer violent, it still pinged sand that stung through her clothes like thousands of tiny needles. “Where the hell are your people?”

Not one soul had responded to the gunfire.

T
he sixty men in the outpost under Nathan’s command were safe.

In the mess tent, they ate. In the recreation tent, they read, teamed up and played cards, waiting for the sandstorm to end so they could resume their search of the caves for the weapons cache. In the command post, they rushed about, conversing via satellite link, radio and field phones with Search and Rescue, trying to get more information on Douglas.

There wasn’t any.

So far, there’d been no sign of him anywhere, Riley reported. “Search and Rescue is fighting the storm, too, sir.”

“But they’re flying over water,” Nathan rumbled.

“Yes, sir,” Riley said, thumbing his clipboard. “The sand isn’t a problem so long as they’re away from the shoreline, but the wind is kicking their backsides.”

Nathan seemed more, not less, irritated by Riley’s remark, so Kate interceded to take the heat off the owl-eyed clerk. “By regulation standards, the choppers should be grounded until the weather clears.”

“Yes, ma’am. That’s true, sir.” Riley nodded at Nathan. “The pilots were ordered to return to base. The choppers were grounded. But the pilots all claimed they had communications malfunctions. The orders didn’t get to them.”

Appreciation funneled through Kate. She’d done the same thing herself, more than once. “They don’t want to abandon one of their own.”

Nathan swung a level gaze on her. “They don’t want to discover later that he was under their noses and had died because they’d given up on him.”

“That, too,” Kate agreed. She certainly understood the complex emotions that went into making the call to quit. Too many times, she’d dealt with that demon in similar situations. Regret, like guilt, was a merciless bitch.

Riley frowned at Nathan. “Sir, do you think they have a chance of finding him?”

Nathan hesitated. “I’m sure they’ll do everything they can.”

Innately, Kate knew that Search and Rescue didn’t have a prayer of finding Douglas. Not until Thomas Kunz decided he wanted Douglas found and he had his GRID minions release him. But Riley looked so worried. She couldn’t violate security to share her near certainty on what had happened to Douglas, which meant she couldn’t reveal her honest opinion on this. Yet she didn’t want to lie to Riley.

“They might get lucky,” Nathan said, sparing her.

She shot him a grateful look. “Riley, did you hear gunfire a few minutes ago?”

Surprise widened his eyes. “There was gunfire in the outpost a few minutes ago?”

“Never mind.” Kate looked to Nathan, who silently shared her concern.

That was it then. No one at the outpost had heard the gunfire or seen anyone wearing a red scarf in the outpost.

Nathan turned for his cubicle. “Captain Kane.” He nodded toward his office. “Please.”

Kate followed him.

He sat behind his desk and motioned for her to take the visitor’s chair. When she sat, he leaned forward and dropped his voice. “I can’t believe that in a group of sixty men not one heard a submachine gun fire off a couple clips.”

“I believe them, Nathan.” Kate leaned toward him, held her voice just above a whisper. “We’ve been inside, out of the storm, a full fifteen minutes, and my ears are still roaring. Out there, I couldn’t see a foot in front of my face. Even inside the tent and looking out, vision was impaired just beyond the edge of the tent. The gunfire sounded like light hammer taps.”

“But a perimeter guard, someone, should have seen something.”

“They’re inside, out of the storm.”

“So you don’t think it was an inside job?”

“No, I don’t. Your men would know better than to wear red.”

“Okay.” Nathan weighed all they’d been told and a strange look crossed his face. “Riley,” he shouted loud enough for Riley to hear him from his desk.

“Yes, sir, Commander.” He grabbed his clipboard and rushed over, poising his pen, ready to write.

“Set up a guard detail. Full circle around the outpost.”
He spoke to Kate. “If someone can infiltrate the camp and pick any one of us off at will, we need an early warning system.” He darted his gaze back to Riley. “Tell Kramer to trip-wire the damn perimeter—and make sure every man here knows it’s wired.”

“Yes, sir.” Riley scribbled fast and looked up. “Is that all, sir?”

“Yeah, thank you.”

When Riley left, Nathan looked at Kate. She sipped at a steaming cup of coffee more because it was wet than because she needed something hot to drink. Her throat felt raw and irritated, coated from the blowing sand. “What?”

“GRID didn’t know until now the outpost existed. You were right. No one followed you back here.”

“You’re assuming they didn’t know the outpost existed.” She dipped her chin. “You have no evidence of that.”

“I have circumstantial evidence,” he countered, clearing his throat and then filling a cup with piping hot coffee. “If they’d known it, they would’ve sent in a team to take us all out, Kate. They wouldn’t have messed around with a lone gunman.”

Kate blew into her cup and thought about it. “On that, I happen to agree.” She set down her cup. “The thing about him firing into the sand is really nagging at me.”

“Me, too.” He stood. “Maybe the bastard didn’t want to kill us, after all?”

“What if it was someone who wanted to make GRID think we were dead?”

“Who?”

She shrugged. “Douglas?”

“What?”

“Bear with me.” She stood beside Nathan. “What if
they did snatch Douglas. Habitually, GRID tries to convert abductees. What if Douglas played along? What if he deliberately missed us? What if he wore red so we’d see him and know what he was doing?”

Nathan stared at her, long and hard. His left eye twitched like crazy and the skin between his eyebrows creased deeply. “It’s possible.”

“It is,” she said, unsure how her next revelation would be received. “Especially if Douglas has decided to insert himself undercover.”

“Oh, man. He could.” Nathan let his head loll back on his shoulders. “Surely he wouldn’t do that, Kate. Surely he’d leave that to you. You’re the professional at that type of thing.”

“He might,” she admitted, guilt stealing over her. “I didn’t let him know I was coming. He could’ve thought he was on his own.”

“Why didn’t you tell him?”

“Honestly?” She swallowed hard. “I assumed he’d know. It didn’t occur to me that he wouldn’t know.” She lowered her gaze, unable to bear to see condemnation in Nathan’s eyes. “But I didn’t think. He isn’t S.A.S.S. He wouldn’t automatically know that any summons is answered.”

“We still don’t have irrefutable proof it was him. It could’ve been, but it might’ve been GRID.” He chewed at his inner lip, mulling, then checked his watch. “It’s getting late. I need to see if there’s anything I can salvage from my tent.”

When he turned to walk out of his office, she called after him. “Can I help?”

He paused, stared into her eyes, then nodded. “Thanks.”

Riley was sitting at his desk on the horn with someone.
Nathan didn’t slow his stride when walking past, but Riley anticipated something; he grabbed his clipboard.

“Get me a tent, will you, Riley?”

He wrote furiously. “Yes, sir. Fifteen minutes, sir.” Satisfied with himself, he set the clipboard back down.

Kate smiled and shot him a thumbs-up as she passed. He was an excellent clerk.

He smiled back at her and dipped his chin to his chest, embarrassed.

At the tent, Kate pulled a T-shirt from the rubble, shook it out and wrapped around her head to protect her face from the blowing sand. Bent double, she helped Nathan dig through the fallen tent for what was left of his possessions. Shoving aside a splintered piece of wood, she unearthed the zippered edge of his duffel bag, and looked over to Nathan to tell him, but the expression twisting his face stopped her dead in her tracks.

He stood, shoulders slumped, hands trembling, jaw clenched and blinking rapidly, holding the shattered photo of his wife.

Caught unaware in the clutches of raw pain, the arrogant, cold man who blamed her for Douglas’s disappearance, who, she suspected, kept her nearby only so he knew exactly where she was and what she was doing, and who lacked more than a little faith in her expertise, appeared close to tears.

Something alien gushed through Kate’s chest. Something not as simple as compassion, or as complex as sympathy. Something far more nebulous and subtle and yet so powerful it had her knees weak. Her eyes, too, burned—and the wind or gritty sand had nothing to do with the cause. The cause lay in what for Kate had been an age-old wound.

How did it feel to have someone—anyone—love you the way Nathan Forester clearly loved his wife? To know that to that one person you were vitally important? To know that you were in his heart and mind even when you were thousands of miles apart?

Kate had no idea. And only on the rare occasion did she indulge and allow herself to hope that one day she would know.

When he seemed over the worse of the shock—why it was a shock to find the photo he knew would be there, Kate had no idea, but it clearly was—she cleared her throat to remind him she was here. He didn’t respond. Then she saw that the photograph had been destroyed. Her heart hitched, in pain for him. “I’m sorry about your photo, Nathan.”

He looked over at her, but he didn’t really see her. “Me, too.”

His reaction surprised her. Why did he sound so forlorn? It was a photo. Sentimental, because it was of his wife and had once saved his life, but surely his wife would send him another one.

He didn’t move, just stared at her, hopeless and helpless, and…devastated.

Confused and upset, Kate straightened. It hurt to see him this way. She’d rather face the arrogant pig he could be than this man so clearly suffering any day. That side of him didn’t inspire a desire to reach out and comfort. This one did. This one shoved in her face all she was missing by not having a man in her life who loved her. A man like Nathan Forester.

And again a shaft of envy, hot and swift, stabbed at her, slicing into her heart, and stunned by it, she sat right where she stood. For some reason, here in the twilight, sitting among the half-collapsed tent, among the rubble and his
destroyed possessions, she felt an overwhelming need, and began to talk. “My parents were workaholics,” she said softly. “They ignored me most of my life.”

Something glinted. A spare watch. She picked it up and rubbed its cracked crystal between her forefinger and thumb. “Actually, it was more like they forgot I existed than they ignored me,” she corrected herself. “Until they wanted to pull me out of cold storage to parade around in front of people they wanted to impress.”

Nathan walked over, sat across from her, and held the photo with both hands between them.

Kate pursed her lips and looked right into his eyes. Why she felt compelled to tell him this, she had no idea. But she did. “I never gave them a reason to regret it.”

“You loved them,” he said, his voice deep. “You wanted them to be proud of you.”

She pursed her lips and gave him a little negative shake of her head, her expression reflecting the sadness tightening her chest. “I knew better than to hope for their love. But I thought if I could be perfect, then they would at least include me in their lives. I could stay off the shelf, waiting for the next parade.”

His serious face grew more so. “Did they?”

“No, they didn’t.” Even now, all these years later, it hurt to admit that to herself, much less to anyone else. She sucked in a sharp breath. “I learned to live without it, without them, really. I relied only on myself. From kindergarten on, I packed my own lunches, cooked my own meals, and did my own laundry. I did everything I could do to avoid the mistake of bothering them.” She let out a humorless laugh. “My parents didn’t react well to being bothered, Nathan.”

He frowned and rested the photo on one knee. “Did they punish you?”

“If razor-sharp tongues and brutal verbal skills qualify as punishment, yes.” She grunted. “But I didn’t let that stop me. I was determined to win them over. I worked really hard to trick them into liking me.”

He stared at her with honed insight. “But you feel you failed.”

“Oh, yes. I don’t just feel it. I know it. Indeed, I failed. Unequivocally. Huge.” She dusted at her knee though there was no lint, not even sand, clinging to it. “I kept trying, though. My freshman year in high school, I caught a lucky break.” She smiled. It was a weepy smile, but she’d take whatever she could get that wasn’t a railing protest. A kid—any kid—should feel loved by her parents. Even Kate.

“This lucky break got their attention and they saw the light?”

“Not exactly. They never saw the light, but I certainly got their attention.”

“How?”

She grinned and, surprisingly, it was sincere. “I blew up the science lab at school.”

He laughed out loud. “I’ll bet that impressed the hell out of them.”

“You know, it really did.” She shrugged. “They had no idea I had enough smarts to actually cause something to deliberately combust.”

“Fancy way of saying that you blew up the lab.”

“They were fancy-talking people.” She looked away, feeling a little wistful.

“And you’ve been blowing things up ever since, trying to impress them again.”

Surprised and not totally comfortable with his insight, she jerked her gaze back to him. But she didn’t see the cen
sure in his eyes she expected. She saw understanding. And at that moment, Katherine Kane did the most stupid thing a woman can do.

She fell in love with a married man, and decided she absolutely hated his wife for being his wife.

Of course, he would never know it, and that was the only saving grace and salve for her wound.

She gave herself a mental shake. Love? Here? With a compelling, married pig?

Apparently.

Her conscience weighed in. Who in their right mind would ever imagine it? Who would be that stupid? Not her. That’s for sure. It had to be delusions.

Try, fact.

Absurd. Delusions. No more, no less. Just delusions.

Possible? Yes. Probable? No.