GAGE: A Bad Boy Military Romance (14 page)

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

I was stationed near the downed chopper. Through my binoculars, I could see one of the pilots peeking his rifle over the hill. I couldn’t see Ashley, but I knew she was there, probably scared shitless—and I didn’t blame her.

We were all scared shitless. None of us have ever seen a Hajji before, and none of us had ever shot at anything other than a target. If the bastards had the means to nail a bird with an RPG, then they had the means to clear out a dozen poorly-trained Marines.

Thankfully, whoever was stalking us in those hills never moved in for the attack. They never even came close enough for us to get an ID on them. As far as we knew, they were insurgents, timing an attack. Or maybe they were friendly Freedom Fighters, ICDC, or just a bunch of curious civilians who saw a helicopter go down. Maybe there was no RPG at all.

Hell, I never saw them. As far as I knew, the guys were just seeing bushes.

Regardless of who or what was out there, we were all on edge, especially when the rescue chopper came in to pick up Ashley and the two pilots.

“We’ve got the cargo, taking off in five, en-route to the BIAP,” the rescue pilot radioed. “Thanks for the backup, boys. Careful gettin’ home, we saw some POGS drivin’ Hajji-armoured trucks a few clicks south of here, on our way in. Over and out.”

The chopper took off. My heartbeat stopped momentarily as the bird flew over the hills where the guys thought they saw the Ali Baba. There was some comfort in knowing the rescue chopper had twice the armour of a cargo chopper, and a properly-trained door-gunner in case some idiot tried to take them down with another RPG.

But I knew I wouldn’t be able to relax entirely until I heard, with my own ears from HQ, that Ashley was in Baghdad.

“Alright, boys. Let’s head on back to the CHUville!” Darby called out.

“Two fuckin’ years and we can finally say mission successful,” Miller said, patting me on the back. “Let’s hope the next one’s a bit more exciting.”

He helped me load our ballistic shield into the truck.

“You okay, Daniels?” he asked.

“I’m fine. Just getting sick of the Sandbox.”

“Already missing your lady?”

I thought about brushing the question off, afraid of looking like a pussy for admitting to it. I was missing Ashley, a lot. “Yeah. So what?” I said.

He stared at me in silence for a moment and then walked away from the other guys. “Come here,” he said. He led me around a hill where we were out of sight.

“What?” I said.

“You don’t belong here, Daniels. You should be back in the States. You should be boxing.”

“I’m a shit boxer, Miller.”

“Who cares? Everyone’s a shit everything. Just cause you’re a shit boxer doesn’t mean you shouldn’t be boxing. Mayweather’s a shit boxer, too. He cheats and refuses to fight guys he know will beat his ass. You wanna box? Go box. Who gives a shit if you suck at it?”

“What’s the point?”

“What’s the point? You need a point? What’s the point of being out here, sitting around some camp for two years? You’re a smart guy, Daniels, smarter than me, smarter than anyone else at UA-14—you telling me there’s more sense in you being here than you being back home?”

“People don’t bug me when I’m out here,” I said.

“Who gives a shit about what they think? People don’t know shit. They think we’re out here fighting a war—and yeah, I’m sure there’s someone out here fighting a war, but it ain’t us—all we’re doing is drinking, smoking, and fucking away their goddamned tax dollars because they need to meet a fucking quota with how many guys they send out.” He started to laugh. “What’s the point... Jesus, Daniels, I thought you were smarter than that. You need to go home, lose some fights, and be with that girl.”

I watched him laugh and shake his head. “What about you? Why are you here, if you know it’s just a waste of time?” I asked.

“I’m here ‘cause I don’t got nothing else. My mom’s dead, my dad’s a drunk, I’m too stupid for school, girls don’t want to fuck me, and no one will hire me.”

“What do you want to do?”

“I want to die, Gage, okay? The girl I liked my whole life married another guy so I went to the recruitment desk and said I want to sign up for the most dangerous position you have. They sent me here. I came out here to die, Gage. Put out your leg.” He tilted his head down towards my leg. “C’mon.”

“What? Why?”

“I’m going to shoot your foot.” He took out his rifle and motioned for me to stick out my leg again. “C’mon, quick. Before we have to go.”

It wasn’t a bad idea—lose a toe or two and gain a couple years back on my life. I’d get to go home and see Ashley again. It would’ve fucked up my foot pretty good, and made it pretty hard to box, but that didn’t matter much. I was already a shit boxer.

But if I let Miller shoot me in the foot, they would punish him. The last guy who shot a man in the foot (for the same reason) got two weeks of ground patrol. It didn’t matter much back then, when there was no activity in the area. But now, the Hajis were here, stalking the hills, shooting down choppers with RPGs.

“I can shoot myself in the foot,” I said.

“Don’t be an idiot. You shoot yourself, you’ll get discharged. No pay, nothing.” He was right, there was a reason Joes got other Joes to do the deed. No one wanted to spend two years in the Sandbox just to be sent home without even a reference on their resume.

“Thanks, Miller, but I’ll figure it out myself.”

We returned to the Humvees, which were now fully loaded and ready to go. Before we left, we pillaged all of the supplies out of the downed chopper. We didn’t have the means to get the whole bird back to the base with just the Humvees, so we were going to have to return for it later in the week with a hook and a flatbed.

It was an hour and a half drive back to the outpost, all on rocky, turbulent terrain. The ride back home wasn’t nearly as bad as the ride in, as our four vehicles had managed to smooth out the dirt some on the way in.

The guys were all excited because, for once, they got to do something. They got to point their guns at things that weren’t painted with red circles, and for once, they could all say they’d been behind enemy lines. I was just happy to be crossing back over into friendly territory, happy there was a glimmer of hope that I would get to see Ashley again.

We were half an hour from the base when we hit the IED.

Miller and I were in the lead truck with two recruits. The bomb went off directly under the rear of the Humvee and took out the truck behind us, too.

Darby was in the second truck with five other guys. They all died. The explosion was powerful enough to blow our truck five feet into the air and flip us onto our side.

The shockwave smashed our windows and it hurt like all hell. I was knocked out when the truck flipped and I smashed my head into the wall. When I came back to, there was lots of screaming around me and I was being pulled out of the truck. They put me down next to a bloody leg that apparently belonged to no one. I wondered if it belonged to me but my neck was too stiff to check.

I slipped back out of consciousness and then woke up when one of the recruits was stomping on me with his boot. I was too weak to ask what the fuck he was doing, but just before I slipped back out again, I realized I was on fire.

The next thing I remember is waking up in a hospital bed, in a room that didn’t belong to COIQ-UA-14. It was night, and there was no one else around. There were beds all around me, dozens of them, but they were all empty.

I tried sitting up but my body was still too weak. I felt weightless and spacey, which probably had to do with the morphine drip that hung next to my bed. “Hello?” I managed to say, despite my face being totally numb.

No one answered.

I managed to tilt my head up for a few seconds to inspect my body. All of my limbs were intact. I looked around for a button to ring the nurse. I found one, but I was fairly certain it didn’t work, seeing as no one came when I pressed it.

Before I fell asleep again, I noticed some Arabic writing on the wall, which I recognized as the spelling for ‘Baghdad.’

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

I missed my flight out of the Baghdad airport by mere minutes, but according to the US Marines Sergeant that met me at the helicopter pad, Sergeant Kyle Pike, it didn’t matter. Pike told me they would need to run some paperwork before they could get me on another plane home.

And before I could get around to making my statement for their paperwork, they told me I needed to get treated for smoke inhalation. Apparently, I inhaled a dangerous amount of smoke after the RPG hit our helicopter. They sent me to the Baghdad Al-Rasheed Military Hospital, which was a bigger and nicer hospital than the general public hospital just down the street. It was practically empty, unlike the overflowing public hospital.

The doctor told me I would have to stay for at least two nights, and that he was “worried about my mental well-being after the helicopter incident.” I tried to tell him I was fine, just a bit shaken up, but he seemed to think otherwise.

I didn’t fight it.

It was the same hospital where they’d sent the two men Gage beat up for X-rays, which made me uneasy, seeing as both men tried to make moves on me just days earlier. Thankfully, I ended up on a different floor, with my own room.

The hospital staff treated me like royalty. Recruits from the nearby army bases came in and brought flowers and cards. Instead of hospital food, they brought in delicious Iraqi food from a nearby, world famous restaurant. They even had a guy come in and set up a television with English channels, just for me. He even helped me set up my laptop on the hospital’s internet, which I would never have been able to figure out on my own, seeing as the internet name and password were in Arabic.

I had an email marked ‘urgent’ from my agent. It was titled, “Get your ass home now!”

Ashley,

I just got off the phone with the people at New Regency Pictures. This isn’t me fucking with you. Alejandro Florentine wants you to be the female lead of his next film. He asked for you specifically. This guy’s the real deal, Ash. He won three Oscars for those Waterman movies.

He’s not asking you to audition—he’s giving you the part, darling. Filming for this thing starts next month. It’s a big one, too. Looking like twelve months down in Chile and then another twelve in Northern Canada.

Congratulations, darling. Call me as soon as your home.

Brit Sanders

Morgan & Sanders Talent Agency

I had to read the email four times before it sunk in, and another four times to make sure I wasn’t missing the part where she said, “Ha! Got you!”

The email was legit. Unless it was some cruel joke, New Regency wanted me for their next big movie. One of the biggest living movie directors, Alejandro Florentine, wanted me in his film.

The excitement was short-lived. The next day, I checked the news headlines. One read, “Eight dead in roadside bomb.” My heart dropped into my gut. I took a deep breath. The odds of it being Gage’s party were slim to none. There were hundreds of combat outposts in Iraq. Roadside bombs went off every day.

But as I continued to read, my fears became real. The article didn’t specifically name the soldiers killed, but it listed everything else—the Al-Najaf province, the nearby town of Shamiya, even the outpost, COIQ-UA-14. The article even mentioned me when it said, “the soldiers were returning from a rescue mission after a chopper that had been carrying a Playboy Playmate went down roughly two hundred kilometers south of Baghdad. The Playmate was in Iraq, visiting US military outposts as part of a promotional tour that was cut short after an attempted assassination in the small Iraqi town of Shamiya.”

My eyes filled with tears and I became restless, standing up from my bed. I tried to remember back—How many soldiers were part of that rescue mission? There were four Humvees. I could remember four men getting out of the Humvee that parked next to the downed chopper.

I felt crushed. I felt stupid, hearing Gage’s voice echoing in my mind. “I might not be alive in two years, Ashley.” He wasn’t just feeding me some bullshit excuse. He meant it. He was trying to protect me, trying to save me from the very crushing anxiety I was feeling now.

The nurse passed and I called her over. I asked her for a phone, but she didn’t speak a word of English, and she didn’t understand my hand gestures. She went to get someone who could understand me, a young private with pale skin and red hair.

He helped me get through to Nancy over at the outpost. I asked her who survived. Nancy, unfortunately, didn’t know much about the bombing.

“No one came back, dear. I think they sent them all somewhere else.”

“Can you get Major Richards? Doesn’t he know who survived?”

“Major Richards is gone, dear. He left an hour ago. No one here knows anything. There’s about a dozen soldiers here, sitting by the phones, waiting to find out, just like you.”

“A dozen? How many people did they send out to the helicopter?”

“I’ll ask.” There was a silence while she did. “They said they sent out fourteen men.” More than half of the men were killed by the roadside bomb. More likely than not, Gage was among the killed.

“I have to hang up, sweetie. These men are all waiting for a call from the Major. Be safe, darling.” The call ended.

I asked the young Private if he knew of any way I could reach Major Richards, but he had no idea.

Then, I saw Major Richards walk past my room. I thought I was hallucinating. I thought I’d lost my mind, maybe from all the smoke the doctors claimed I’d inhaled. There was only one way to know for sure. I ran out into the hallway.

“Miss?” the redheaded Private said to me, standing confused in my room.

“I’ll be right back,” I said. My heart was racing, my hands were shaking.

I looked down the hall, but couldn’t spot Major Richards. Maybe it was just an optimistic daydream. The nurses watched with wide-eyed concern as I ran around the corner. Then I saw him—Gage, dressed in a hospital gown, being helped down the hallway by a nurse. I stared for a few seconds, making sure I wasn’t hallucinating, that I hadn’t fallen into some sort of deranged psychosis.

It really was Gage.

He looked over and saw me as I ran up and nearly tackled him to the ground. I wrapped my arms around him and squeezed, and he did the same. My heart was still beating a thousands times per minute, blasting adrenaline through my body. I wanted to drop to me knees and bawl my eyes out, but at the same time, I didn’t want to let go.

“You’re alive,” I said.

“Yeah.”

Running my hand down his side, I could feel the bulging stitches from where the shrapnel got him. His left arm and left leg were both heavily bandaged, covering the burns. His right leg was in a cast, and so was his right wrist, but he was alive.

“They’re sending me home,” he said, still holding me tight against his body.

The nurse told me to let go, that I was going to pop his stitches, so I let go. Gage kissed me on the forehead.