Moonshell Beach: A Shelter Bay Novel (33 page)

The hair on the back of his neck stood up as combat intuition born from years of experience kicked in.

“We’re being set up,” Jason West, one of his team members, said from the backseat as they pulled up next to a Hummer with Arabic writing painted on the side.

On Dillon’s first tour here he’d learned the script translated to
Not EOD
(Explosive Ordnance Disposal). Having the guys on your side wanting to make sure no one mistook
them
for bomb guys was an indication of how popular Dillon and his team tended to be with the local population.

“Could be,” he agreed. “Then again, we could have some hotshot showing off to his pals by playing with us.”

He jumped down from the vehicle and went over and talked to the Rangers, who’d called in the possible explosive, and learned that none of the few civilians they’d been able to question had seen anyone plant an IED.

Surprise, surprise.

One of the cool things about the Buffalo armored mine-disposal vehicle he drove was its thirty-foot mechanical arm with both a claw and a camera attached. He extended the arm to get a better look at the device that was only partially buried right behind the basket pole.

“Bingo,” he said as the camera eye caught the familiar pink wire an eagle-eyed Ranger, who’d come here for a pickup game, had spotted. “This has cell phone guy’s fingerprints all over it.”

In the beginning, the IEDs Dillon had dealt with had been simply pressure plates. Drive over it or step on it, two pieces of metal connected, and
boom
.

They’d been crude. Hell, if he’d been into bomb making when he’d been a kid, he could’ve put one together in ten minutes for a fourth grade science fair project. But they didn’t need to be fancy and high-tech to kill.

The problem was that they also killed indiscriminately. Meaning they were just as likely to take out civilians as they were American and NATO forces. Which hadn’t exactly made their makers all that popular.

So the insurgents had upped their skill set, adding command-wire remote controls to the mix. Bury one in the middle of the road, and if the patrol you’d planned to hit changed routes, you simply turned it off and avoided the collateral damage of blowing up some poppy farmer’s donkey. Or wife. Or child.

Then, just as easily, it could be switched back on again when the timing proved right.

In the beginning, garage door openers had been popular. More and more Dillon had been running into cell phones all tied up with pretty pink wires, which tended to make his team edgier and even, from time to time, paranoid. Was that guy over there talking on his phone really talking to his wife, telling her what time he’d be home for dinner? Or was he about to hit
TALK
and blow more Americans sky-high?

“We could wait for another robot to be brought in,” said West, who’d been riding shotgun.

Their own robot, Larry, named for Larry Fine Robot in
Revenge of the Nerds
, had been injured when it rolled off a ledge two days earlier, and they were still waiting to either get him back or receive a replacement.

“If it’s a setup, the longer we stay here, the more we become sitting ducks.” Chance Longstreet, who was in the back, pointed out what they all already knew.

“Good point,” Dillon said.

Maybe it wasn’t a bomb at all. Maybe just some buried wires designed to pull the team into sniper range. Or worse yet, a kill box. The Buffalo might be armor clad, but if mortars started raining down on them from the roofs of those buildings, they’d all be toast.

Although their missions tended toward knitting them into a tight, cohesive unit that aimed for consensus, as team leader, it was Dillon’s call.

He had a month left downrange, and then he was leaving the military and going back to the States, where he’d signed up with a program called Troops to Teachers and already had a job waiting for him in Oregon as a high school physics teacher and basketball coach.

Which should’ve been the good news. And it was. But there was always a flip side, and the flip side of
this
situation was that while EOD was already one of the most dangerous jobs in the military, the last thirty days of a deployment were the riskiest, when fatigue, anticipation, and distraction dulled instincts.

As everyone was all too aware, in war, if you
stuck around long enough, good luck ran out. Dillon was determined to be one of the soldiers who left this hellhole lucky.

“I’m going in.”

Dillon vowed he was going to employ enough patience to keep from focusing on the separation countdown clock ticking away in his head.

West sealed him into the eighty-pound Kevlar bomb suit, which looked sort of like a hazmat outfit but made Dillon feel like the Michelin Man. It also increased the intense desert heat to a temperature that felt like the surface of the sun. Not helping were the additional ninety pounds of equipment he was carrying.

Finally, lowering the face shield on the bulbous helmet, he began plodding forward. Although the suit had a radio receiver, he turned it off to avoid sending out stray radio waves that could set off the IED.

Which meant that he was walking toward a bomb which he knew nothing about, without any communication with his team, an easy target trussed up in a bomb suit that definitely hadn’t been designed for sprinting out of danger if things went south.

It was deathly quiet. The only sounds Dillon could hear as he took the long walk he hoped to hell wouldn’t be his last were the pounding of his heart, his steady breathing, and the whir of the fan inside the helmet. With the temperature at 102 degrees, the fan was fairly useless, and salty sweat began dripping into his eyes, making him think he should’ve just opted for the lighter weight body armor and helmet. Hell, if the thing did blow, he’d go right up with it, no matter what he was wearing.

Putting that thought aside, various scenarios began
running through his mind. The explosive could be set on a timer, which meant it could go at any moment.

Thirty feet to go.

Or it could be electronically controlled by one of the dozen pairs of eyes he could feel watching him from those buildings surrounding the deserted square, which was more likely, given that familiar pink wire.

Twenty.

Dillon dropped to his stomach, took out his telescoping trip wire feeler and began crawling toward the target, altering his direction because if the bomb maker was watching and saw him take a straight line, next time there’d be a pressure bomb waiting for him.

This was where luck really came in. One zig where he should’ve zagged and Shelter Bay High School would be looking for a new coach.

Dillon considered another option—maybe the wire was merely a decoy, drawing him closer onto a buried pressure plate, just waiting for his body to set it off.

In his business, Murphy’s Law ruled.

At ten feet out, he’d definitely reached the point of no return.

His mind shifted into a familiar zone, and he made it the rest of the way, took out a paintbrush from his kit, and began removing dirt and sand from what was, as he’d suspected, yet another cell phone bomb. It sometimes amazed Dillon that in this remote part of the world, where electricity or indoor plumbing were considered luxuries, every damn bad guy out there seemed to have a smartphone.

Time slowed, and, feeling as if he were moving in
super–slow motion, he began digging away at the blasting cap, trying to lift it out without causing it to blow.

Just as the wire gave way, the world exploded.

From inside the blazing fireball, Dillon heard a bell ringing. Blindly groping around, his hand found the phone, picked it up, and put it to his ear.

“Yeah?” His voice was as shaky as the rest of his body, which was buzzing with adrenaline. Afghanistan faded away and he found himself in his bedroom.

“You okay, Coach?” the male voice on the other end of the line asked.

“Yeah,” Dillon repeated as he dragged himself out of the familiar nightmare. There were various versions, but all had him checking his body upon awakening, just to make sure every part was still where it belonged. “Sure.”

“Did I wake you up?”

“Hell, no,” Dillon lied, reaching out to grab his watch, with its lighted dial, from the bed table. It was mid-November and dark at six in the morning. “What’s up?”

“I wanted to remind you that you’re having breakfast down at the Grateful Bread with the boosters this morning.”

“I’ll be there.” If only for the sweet-potato hash. The company, which Dillon understood was well-intentioned, he could definitely do without.

“Thought I’d better warn you that you’ll be fielding a lot of questions about the SoCal phenom.”

Now that his heart had settled down to something resembling a normal rhythm, Dillon decided to try
to get out of bed. Ooh-rah—both his legs were not only still attached, but proved capable of holding him up. Just barely.

“And what SoCal phenom would that be?”

“Templeton. A kid from Beverly Hills who was the highest-scoring freshman in the history of California state hoops last year.”

“Good for him. Sounds like the Beverly Hills High JV coach is going to have a dynamite season. And you’re telling me this why?”

“Because he just transferred into Shelter Bay. He’s our golden ticket to the state championship, Coach.”

Dillon rubbed his hand down his face, then dragged his body toward the kitchen, desperately in need of coffee for this conversation. Ken Curtis was a nice sixtysomething guy who owned Harbor Hardware and had headed up Shelter Bay High School’s booster club for the past three decades.

“Shelter Bay High School hasn’t had a winning season for twelve years,” he felt obliged to point out.

“That’s why we hired you.…Just a minute.” Dillon heard a woman’s voice in the background. “Marcy wanted me to remind you that you’ve also got a meeting with the cheer moms right after school this afternoon. They’ve got a new routine they want to debut at the opening game.”

Dealing with the cheer moms, dance squad, bag lunch cadets, the parent committee, and myriad other groups intertwined with the basketball team was a part of his job description that hadn’t been covered in his Troops to Teacher training.

As he poured water into the Mr. Coffee, Dillon,
who’d always been an optimist, reminded himself that unlike his last gig, none of those Shelter Bay residents seemed inclined to kill him.

At least not yet.

Although Claire Templeton’s career as a jewelry and glass artist tended to have her working seven days a week, especially leading up to the launch of a new season’s line, she’d always enjoyed Mondays.

Monday represented the start of a new week filled with possibilities. This Monday, however, sucked.

She’d been fighting a culinary battle for the past thirty minutes and was losing. Badly. After she’d stuffed the first two batches of pancakes down the garbage disposal, the third, charred black on the bottom, had set off the smoke detector, which was blaring loudly enough to wake the dead in Shelter Bay’s Sea View Cemetery.

She’d turned off the gas burner and was carrying a wooden chair around a stack of cardboard moving boxes when her teenage son, Matt, appeared in the doorway.

He was wearing a pair of baggy surfer shorts, a rumpled black Last Dinosaurs band T-shirt that had fit him a mere three months before but now ended an inch above his waist, and his usual petulant expression.

With his heavy-lidded brown eyes, tousled dark hair hanging over a forehead tanned by fifteen years spent in the Southern California sun, and lush lips she’d known Beverly Hills women to pay a fortune attempting to duplicate, he could’ve stepped off the pages of an Abercrombie & Fitch catalog.

During this past difficult year, he’d gone from
golden-boy jock to wannabe bad-boy delinquent. Which was why Claire had left the only home she’d ever known and moved here to the small coastal town. Hopefully here he wouldn’t face the daily temptations Los Angeles had offered.

“My alarm didn’t go off,” he said, cutting her off before she could point out that he didn’t want to be late for his first day in a new school.

Which she hadn’t been going to say.

Okay, she’d admittedly been thinking it, but, wanting to avoid another argument about personal responsibility today of all days, she held her tongue as he took the chair from her and moved it out of the way.

Physically taking after the father he’d never known, he’d topped her five feet five inches by the time he was twelve. Now, although he still wasn’t old enough to shave, he’d hit six-three, and if his oversized hands and feet were any indication, he still had a great deal of growing to do.

“You could’ve knocked on the bedroom door.” His beautiful lips curled in a sneer. “Setting off the smoke detector is definitely overkill.”

He reached up, removed the white plastic casing, and turned off the siren. Blessed silence. The only sound was the low roar of white-capped waves outside the kitchen window. When she’d first made the decision to leave Los Angeles for this coastal town, Claire had had visions of the two of them taking long walks on the beach, healing after the rough year they’d both suffered through, catching up at the end of the day, growing close again. As they’d been for so many years.

“I didn’t set the alarm off on purpose.” Was that a
tinge of defensiveness in her tone? Dammit, yes, it was. “I was making your grandmother’s chocolate chip pancakes.” Or at least
trying
to.

Claire opened a window to air out some of the smoke, which in turn let in damp sea air tinged with salt and fir from the trees surrounding the cottage on three sides. “For luck.”

Her mother, with whom she and Matt had lived since she’d first brought him home from the hospital, had always made chocolate chip pancakes for special occasions. Looking down at the gooey mess stuck to the bottom of the pan, she realized that, like so many things Mara Templeton had made look effortless, cooking a breakfast Claire had always taken for granted was more difficult than it looked.

“That’s okay.” Those were the first halfway positive words she’d heard from him since she’d told him they were leaving California. He took a box of Cheerios down from the cupboard. “It’s not like I’m going to need luck.”