First to Burn (4 page)

The assassin had retrieved the blade, picked a bloody envelope from the dead man’s shirt pocket—indeed, there’d been a picture—and stalked out of the shack that doubled as a bar. And so on the first day of his first job, Draycott had vomited next to his first body. Four decades later, he appreciated the killer’s polite half salute as he’d exited. Opponents who understood limits had become less common over the years, and those with flair had evaporated with the Cold War. The man in Mogadishu had left him alive, and thus able to sit in a chow hall in Afghanistan, one donkey ride past the end of the Earth, and stare at the assassin’s identical twin.

Except that was absurd. The soldier sitting across the mess had the same profile, but the sergeant couldn’t be a twin, or the same mercenary. Every joint in Draycott’s body attested to the years since 1968. Although Draycott knew three men who seemed eerily unaging, this soldier couldn’t be like them. He might be the son of the man from Mogadishu, but not the same man.

With his steak finally cut to a width matching the oven fries, he set the knife across the top of his plate. His shoulders itched to fill in the blanks and connect this sergeant to the Mogadishu hit, but gathering information about a member of Special Forces could boomerang and impact cargo ops. The company pulled in two-point-five million euro per week, nicely north of three-point-three million dollars, tax-free. He earned one percent of gross as a combination secret shopper, help desk, quality control and security hotline. His thumbs-up or thumbs-down went to the Director. Therefore his decisions had to align as perfectly as the food on his plate. Because operations in Eastern Afghanistan were as orderly as the stacks gracing his dish at the three, six, nine and twelve positions, he would not check into this sergeant.

Personal curiosity about an episode from his past couldn’t be allowed to jeopardize his current job. If it did, the Director would fire him. With extreme irrevocability.

Chapter Three

Another Saturday afternoon in her plywood office. While the nurses were in staff training, Theresa anticipated tomorrow’s break. Most of Camp Cadwalader worked seven-day weeks, but Colonel Loughrey ran the clinic half staffed on Sunday afternoons. Barring mass casualties, she had four hours off every fourteen days. Four hours to lounge on her bunk, ponder her leave itinerary and maybe paint her toenails.

“Busy?” The deep voice pulled Theresa out of her reports and to her feet.

“No, sir. Paperwork.” She blinked to merge her memory with the ruffian on the other side of the intake counter. “Sergeant Wardsen? You’re here?”

He stuffed his boonie hat in a cargo pocket. His hair, definitely shaggy, showed the imprint as he rubbed his neck. “We were on patrol with the Afghan National Army for ten days.”

“You look like you returned in the last five minutes.” Dirt blurred the pixelated camo patterns on his pants and shirt, and his smell rivaled the dining facility Dumpster.

“Fifteen.” One corner of his mouth turned up as he indicated his uniform. “Guess I should’ve waited to come. The others draw lower pay, so they get first shower.”

“No privileges for rank?” She’d learned that Staff Sergeant Wulf Wardsen was the A-team’s noncommissioned officer in charge.

“None I’ve noticed.” He slid a folded paper across the particleboard counter. “Still get yelled at by officers.”

Her face heated as she recalled telling him to knock it off. “I didn’t mean—” When the wicked teasing in his eyes registered in her brain, she closed her mouth.

“The email I promised. I told the team we were chipping in for a baby gift, so they don’t know about this.”

“You should do that. In fact, buy a baby jogger. I read about postpartum depression, and sometimes exercise helps. Wait.” She hunted on her desk, then joined him at the counter. “These are details on the new-parent-support program at Campbell. They’re trained to recognize depression, make medical referrals and facilitate infant bonding.” He didn’t smell much worse than the gym, and the trade-off for standing this close was that she could see the cleft in his chin. “And they do home visits. I emailed the coordinator last week, and she has openings for Tuesday afternoon and Thursday morning—”

The crinkles around his eyes deepened as his lips twitched and
ohmigod
she’d turned into an uncapped gusher
again.
She shut up, but couldn’t look away. Above his stubble, his cheekbones beckoned her fingers to explore, so she locked her elbows at her sides.

“You don’t mess around, do you, Captain?” His voice had dropped to a register that vibrated the air trapped between her skin and her loose shirt. His compliment sounded like an open-door invite straight to trouble.

“I wanted to be ready in case you came the next day.” She bit her lower lip. In a softer voice she added, “I hadn’t realized you were in the field.”

He stared at her so long she stifled the need to touch her hair and check for strands that had escaped today’s bun. Amber flecks swirled in his blue eyes like a whirlpool, but she needed to avoid being sucked under, no matter how much she wanted to lean close to count each speck and learn their different colors.

“Would you like an adventure?” No one had ever asked her something so ambiguous or seemingly forbidden. “We need a female doctor to examine a village leader’s third wife. She’s pregnant. You’d fly in with us and do what you can.”

Her chest inflated and she bit her lip to keep from cheering at the thought of going beyond the sandbags and blast wall. Aching to do anything that wasn’t paperwork for her four-hundredth respiratory complaint, she must’ve nodded her agreement because he smiled.

“Monday. Be at the flight line in battle rattle at 0600. Doctors do have combat gear?”

“Of course. We even have to qualify with our weapons.”
Crap.
Her mouth had sped past her brain again, but at least he was too polite to roll his eyes at a doctor who talked weapons.

“Until then.” When he removed his palms from the top of the counter and left as silently as he’d arrived, legs and arms flowing as smoothly as his namesake, she realized her forearms were also on the counter. They’d been leaning far too close to each other.

She’d see him again in two days. Then the enormity of his request hit: pregnancy, real Afghans, outside the wire. After six months of staring at the mountains that ringed this plateau, she’d set foot on one.
With him.

On the counter he’d left a playing-card-size patch of dark fabric embroidered with a poppy. She opened her mouth to call him, but then she understood.
For her.

The silk’s miniscule irregularities caught her dry skin as she traced the stitches of the blood-tinted petals. In her brown-toned world, the red blossom popped with promise. Verdant leaves reached for her as she lifted the fabric to her face. The scrap retained his body heat and caressed her cheek like skin on skin.

She squashed those thoughts. A sergeant was off-limits. If Colonel Loughrey authorized the medical mission, she could see Sergeant Wardsen again, but she could never consider more.

* * *

Monday morning arrived before Theresa felt ready.

“I am so freaking jealous.” Jennifer leaned against the metal bunk post, watching her quintuple-check the tactical vest spread on her bed. “I haven’t escaped Caddie since we got here. You’re going out on a mission and in two weeks you’re on midtour leave.”

“Sixteen days.” Theresa tried to ignore her stomach flutters. She was due on the flight line in twenty minutes.

“Glad you’re not counting.”

She clutched a sealed bag of surgical gloves and another with antibiotics. “Where should I stuff these?” Four loaded magazines for her Beretta M9 pistol filled the vest’s ammo pouches, her most serious pocketknife and a strap cutter graced chest loops, and her personal first-aid kit and tourniquet attached on the shoulders.

Her roommate studied the bulletproof vest. “Cargo pocket.”

She squeezed her left thigh, where she’d stuffed a meal-ready-to-eat. No space. In her right she had a waterproof notebook—as if it might rain this year—and pens, but the bags fit. Even her gear was cooperating to send her packing.

“You fiddled with this load for two days.” Jennifer crossed her arms. “Time to put it on.”

Filled with her stethoscope, blood pressure cuff, a portable heart monitor she hoped could detect a fetal heartbeat and every other drug or relevant equipment she could snag from the clinic storeroom, her ruck weighed a thousand pounds. The weight of it and her vest probably compressed her spine a half inch.

“Here.” Jennifer held out a Tic Tac mints box. “Stick these somewhere handy.”

“What for?” She leaned forward to create enough slack to snap the pack’s waist belt.

Her friend shoved the gift closer. “Fresh breath.”

She must have looked blank because Jennifer continued. “You are single. You are almost thirty. You’ll be spending a day with several manly men, one of whom watches you at meals like you’re an ice cream cone he wants to lick.”

“He does not.” She didn’t have to ask who Jennifer meant.

“He does so. Take them.”

“Fine.” The tiny mints rattled a warning from inside their plastic box.
Chhk-chhk-chhk-don’t-think-it.

“Adios.” Jennifer followed her to the prefab’s door. “And be safe!”

“Bye,
Mom
.” She escaped through the dawn and headed for the flight line.

The normal eight- or nine-minute walk stretched to twelve, then fifteen, as she struggled. Her feet wanted to shuffle, and her shoulders tipped forward despite constant effort to lift her legs and straighten her back. She’d almost prefer a kidney stone to this gear. Almost.

Trying not to resemble a tent with legs prevented her from absorbing the activity at the flight line until she was seated aboard the Black Hawk helicopter for the crew chief’s safety brief. As she inserted a pair of squishy foam earplugs, Sergeant Wardsen—she couldn’t allow herself to think of him as Wulf no matter how much Jennifer teased—buckled into the next spot. A prudent professional would nod politely, then ignore him.

Wh-wh-wh-whump-whump.
The Black Hawk lifted off, shifting her into his upper arm, the one body part he didn’t have sheathed in a protective plate. Her vest and gear refused to obey her spine’s signal to sit tall; each lurch of the helicopter bounced her against his shoulder.

Forget polite. She needed to get
off
him.

She braced on his solid thigh, another part decidedly without armor, and pushed. The contact lasted a second or less, a blink, but his quad jumped under her hand. It left a brand of hard male muscle that seared her palm even after she’d planted her boots on the vibrating floor and pinned herself to the side of the helicopter.

Then he spread his legs for stability too and crowded a finger width from her space.

Maybe her flush could pass as a heat reaction. If she unclenched her fist, could she let go of how strong he’d felt? She had a better chance of the metal decking opening up and swallowing her
right now
while she counted rivets on the walls, read the yellow warning stencils, searched for a distraction that didn’t include his thigh.

A soldier clipped to a safety line manned a .60 caliber gun in the open side door. Past him, the land streamed below. She’d flown into Caddie at night. For six months her workday glimpses of summits beyond the camp walls had seemed more like theater scenery than reality, but this morning her flat, orderly world disappeared, replaced by carved and eroded mountains, valleys and gullies. Below the helicopter any green, anything alive or made by humans except this machine and themselves, had vanished. They could be flying through time instead of air, heading for Genghis Khan or an ancient myth instead of a pregnant village girl.

Her watch said they’d been in flight forty-five minutes when the ceaseless unfolding of mountains was interrupted by a narrow green line where water enabled valley farming.
Toto
,
I
have a feeling we’re not in Caddie anymore.
The Black Hawk’s wheels settled on a plateau of packed dirt and rocks above the irrigation canal. At the dusty edge of the rotor wash, a half dozen boys wearing traditional baggy trousers and dress-length shirts jumped from foot to foot.

She followed the team out of the bird and found herself in the middle of their line formation. At the front, boys clustered around the tank-size sergeant from Hawaii, who doled out oranges and bananas from his cargo pockets. A mud-walled compound hung so precariously from the cliff above that she worried anything dropped from a window would hit her. The walls had turned the exact color of the earth and stones, nearly white with reflected glare if she looked over her sunglasses, pale brown when she looked through the tinted lenses.

The hike up a winding, rocky track dragged on until the ground shimmied with each step. She blinked to keep sweat out of her eyes, because lifting a hand to wipe her forehead required extra effort. Not even breathing through her open mouth banished this dizziness and nausea. Maybe helicopters didn’t agree with her.

Sergeant Wardsen came alongside and matched her pace. “You’ll be on your own with the girl. Okay with that?”

She nodded while trying to conceal her gasps. If she didn’t pull herself together, she’d fail before she had a chance to start examining the patient.

He grabbed her hand and pressed his thumb to the inside of her wrist. For a moment she stopped her plodding to concentrate on breathing.

“Damn.” He thrust a blue-and-white canister with a cup-shaped lid at her. “Take a hit.”

She let her eyebrows ask
What is it?
because she couldn’t speak.

“Canned Oh-Two. We’re over seven thousand feet and you’re humping at least forty pounds. You need oxygen.” Mercifully, he flipped the lid over and held it to her face. “Steady, Doc. You’re not acclimatized to this elevation.”

Ahhh. Her vision cleared and the flutters in her chest calmed with each suck.

“Better?” His question anchored her in the here and now.

Hypoxia
. She’d succumbed to altitude sickness so quickly she hadn’t recognized her own symptoms. She pulled the face mask off. “Thank you. I—”

“Move out.” He waved a hand over his head to indicate the others should continue forward. They rose from defensive positions in the rocks. Only she and Sergeant Wardsen had been standing like sandwich boards, and his body had been positioned between her and the edge.

She couldn’t let that happen again. She’d keep up or puke trying, and she damn well better remember her soldier skills.

After circling a boulder, the path ended at a mudcrete wall bisected by a wood-and-iron gate. How long ago trees that size had grown where now she only saw scrubby orchards, she couldn’t imagine. The gate led to an open-air courtyard. More than a dozen men sat on carpets under a cloth shade. One of them, his weathered skin contrasting with his white beard and eyebrows, had a sunken atrophic scar instead of a left eye. When he smiled and rose to welcome them, she noticed he had proportionally fewer teeth. Sergeant Wardsen and Captain Deavers spent enough time greeting this man that she assumed he was the leader whose wife needed medical care.

“Captain Chiesa, please join us.” Hearing Sergeant Wardsen speak English startled her. She’d been so absorbed in studying the clothing and architecture, she hadn’t consciously processed the fact that he didn’t use an interpreter.

While they sat on elaborate rugs, the next half hour stretched through introductions to the elderly leader—Dostum—and tea-drinking formalities. The other Afghans studied her freely during the old man’s deep conversation with Wulf and Captain Deavers. She didn’t see any women or girls. Finally Dostum seemed to be satisfied, and everyone, including her, stood.

“Mir will take you to the women’s quarters,” Sergeant Wardsen said.

A boy wearing a blue-and-gold vest led her through a door with a labyrinthine pattern of inlaid wood and across a small room, then pushed aside a heavy curtain. She had time for one breath to steel herself—she didn’t know what she’d be able to accomplish alone after she crossed that threshold—before she ducked into a concealed world.