Operation Willow Quest (23 page)

He patted the side of
the bed. “Come and watch football with me,” he said and grinned.

“Oh, can I? Please? I
haven’t seen enough grown men running around in ridiculous tights knocking each
other over,” she simpered.

“Well, this is going to
be a barrel of fun for the next few days,” he muttered, turning his gaze back
to the television set.

“They could have at
least got a bigger place—one with my own room.”

“The whole point is
we’re supposed to be in here
rockin
’ each others’
socks off, Sheldon.
Kinda
defeats the point of
putting on a show if we’ve got separate rooms, don’t you think?”

“God! How much sex do
they think one couple can have a day?” she muttered, flopping down on the bed dejectedly.

Del
’s soft chuckle didn’t
improve her mood. She turned her head to face Del, seated on the bed, his back resting
against the head board, and sighed.

“Do you think this bait
thing will work?” she asked.

Giving up on watching
the football game, Del
clicked off the remote and sighed, then shrugged. “I have no idea. It depends
how much pressure
Trèago’s
put on the guy, I guess.”

“What makes a person so
cold they can kill a complete stranger for money, do you think?” she wondered
out loud.

“People will do pretty
much anything if the money’s right—or if they’re pushed far enough,” he added.

“This person doesn’t
even know us—I don’t understand that mentality.”

“The world’s full of
bad people who’ll do bad things. It’s human nature,” he said, his fingers idly
toying with a strand of her hair that rested near his hand on the bed.

“It doesn’t make it
right.”

“Nope—but there’s
nothing you can do about it. There’s always going to be corruption and murder
and violence.”

“Don’t you ever get
tired of seeing it?’ she asked curiously.

“Don’t you?” he
countered with a soft drawl.

She gave a resigned
chuckle. “I guess we
do
have something
in common.”

The silence settled
between them, as they were both lost in their own thoughts.

“I used to worry I
wouldn’t cope with what I’d see when I went on my first tour overseas,” he said
quietly. “Like that was the worst thing that could happen.” He snorted. “Then
after I’d been there a while, I worried more about the fact it was becoming
normal to see bodies and death and pain all around me.”

“Do you ever think
about getting out?” she asked.

“Sometimes. But I don’t
think I’d fit in out in civilian-land any more. I think I’ve been too well
conditioned,” he admitted.

She nodded; she could
understand that feeling. “Sometimes it’s hard to watch happy, healthy kids back
home when you’ve seen how hungry and underprivileged some other kids are. It’s
almost as though you lose your ability to pretend the world’s a beautiful place
once you’ve seen babies dying of starvation, people driven from their homes and
made into refugees or slaughtered. That’s why I have my photography—when I need
a break, when it gets too much dealing with reality—I escape into the
mountains, or a desert, somewhere far away from people with just the land and
the sky and the ocean. It’s the only way I can stay sane sometimes.”

“You’re good at what
you do, Sheldon.”

She shook her head
slightly. “Sometimes I wonder—I mean what if no one even bothers to read about
the things I write—maybe you’re right, maybe nothing can change human nature,
and it’s pointless to try.”

“Maybe you can’t change
everything that’s bad in the world—but at least you try, and that’s more than
most people do. What you do is important—it makes a difference,” he said with a
certainty she wanted to believe.

Leaning closer, he
gently touched her lips with his own. It was the lightest of kisses, barely
more than a kiss two friends would share, but the bolt of electricity that shot
straight to her heart was anything but friendly. It was as powerful as a
branding and it reminded her, all too vividly, just how deeply her feelings for
this man ran, even as she fought to deny them.

Moving away, she lowered
her gaze to the floor. She couldn’t do this again. She wasn’t going to play the
bad guy twice. With a deep breath, she took a pillow from the bed and walked to
the tired-looking lounge across the room.

“You’d better take the
bed, the lounge is too short,” she said, avoiding his gaze.

There was along silence
before he let out a tired breath. “Okay, Willow,
however you want to play it. Get a good night’s sleep. We have a lot to get
done tomorrow.”

Good night’s sleep…as though that’s
going to happen.
She wriggled on the lumpy old lounge trying to get
comfortable. Del
switched off the light and checked the locks, then the squeak of the bedsprings
indicated he’d gotten into bed.

Staring up at the
ceiling despondently, she argued all her reasons why it was so sensible to stay
away from the Marine in the bed across the room, starting with the fact he was
simply no good for her piece of mind.

When he was with her
they argued and when he was away, she couldn’t stop thinking about him—it was
an exhausting thing, being in love with Peter Delaware, she thought, then froze
as she
realised
what she just said to herself.

A large shape loomed
over her lounge and a gasp stuck in her throat as she was picked up and dumped
on the bed.

“Don’t say a word,” he
warned, looking down at her tightly. “I can’t sleep with you all the way over
there, tossing and turning, so for my piece of mind, you are going to sleep
right here where I can keep an eye on you.”

Staring up at him in
surprise, Willow
couldn’t have spoken even if she could have thought of something to say. Walking
to the other side of the bed, he turned his back on her and lay back down
quietly.

Willow
felt his body relax
beside hers and felt hers doing the same. Within moments she was drifting off
to a peaceful sleep.

Chapter 15

The room was hot,
uncomfortably so, there were strange shadows on the walls, and noises like
screaming in the distance.

She
was so tired, she’d walked for miles only the two days before, and her feet
were still bloody and bruised from the hike. She wanted to ask for a drink of
water but her throat was too dry to speak. She tried moving her lips but they
cracked and stung as the wounds reopened.

Her face was sore, it
felt tender to touch, and she could hardly open her left eye. The screams came
again, louder than before, and she quickly clamped her hands over her ears and
tried to shut out the noise.

She heard the boot
steps on the stairs outside and curled her self into the corner, hoping she’d
become invisible, hoping they’d leave her in peace, but the
thunk
,
thunk
,
thunk
of his boots
vibrated through the floor and her skin pricked in fear.

“You will tell me where
the files are,” he said in his guttural accented English.

“I don’t know what
you’re talking about,” she said, her voice sounding horse and unfamiliar to her
own ears.

“You lie.” He swung his
wicked little whip cruelly against her shoulder.

“No,” she cried out and
bit her lip against the pain, tasting the bitter saltiness of her own blood.
“I’m telling the truth,” she sobbed.

Willow
awoke, sitting up in
bed with Del’s
arms wrapped tightly around her as she sobbed. She heard his soft assurances
that she was all right, and slowly her tears began to fade and she leant
against him weakly.

“I’m sorry.” She was
embarrassed that this was the second time he’d witnessed her nightmares.

“You want to tell me
about it?”

“I don’t think I can.”
The thought of actually voicing her memories was enough to make her stomach
lurch sickly.

“I’ve had them too,” he
said after a few moments. “The same one, night after night. We were sent to
evacuate a mission full of kids run by a couple of nuns. When we got there the
place was a mess—we were too late, they’d already been attacked. There wasn’t a
sign of anyone until we started searching and found a small dugout. There had
to be at least twenty kids in there, shaking like scared rabbits. The nuns were
both dead, but they’d managed to hide the kids before the attack. We were
trying to get them out when this kid walks out of the jungle. He was strapped
with explosives.

We tried to tell him to
stop, you know, stand still,” he said, quickly trying to explain, “but he
couldn’t speak English, he didn’t understand. He just kept coming and we were
yelling at him, ‘Get down, get down…’ He was scared, and too little to
understand what was happening.” Del
stared out through the darkness—into distant horrible memories, seemingly
forgetting she was there.

“He was booby-trapped,
there was nothing we could do for him—if we tried to un-strap him we’d set it
off. He was walking towards the other kids, and we knew the minute they rushed
out to help him take it off, they’d all be blown away…they were just kids…they
didn’t understand…that’s why they sent him back—in case they missed anyone. And
if there wasn’t anyone left, then he’d eventually set it off the minute he
tried to wriggle out of it.”

Willow
waited fearfully,
listening to the silence that stretched between them painfully, until she
forced herself to ask the question—even though she was certain she already knew
the answer.

“What happened to him?”

“He started pulling at
the tape, trying to get it off…he wouldn’t listen, he wouldn’t stop. We…I shot
him,” he whispered hoarsely. The sound came out sounding like sandpaper against
timber—raw, painful and broken.

She turned in his arms,
holding him tightly. Tears ran down her face as she thought about the poor
little child, used in a sadistic war of violence, and the suffering this man in
her arms went through, when he’d been forced to make a decision that went
against every fiber of his being.

“He wouldn’t have felt
anything, it would have been instantaneous…the thing was going to blow and he
was heading for the other kids…they would have been blown apart…dying in
agony.”

She knew he must have
said this same thing to himself countless times since it had happened. His arms
tightened around her as he turned his face into her neck, and she felt the
violent shudder that passed through him.

There were no words she
could say to give him comfort—what could anyone say in response to such an unspeakably
horrible act of cruelty those men had bestowed upon a small child? In places
where life—even a child’s life—was completely dispensable, it was impossible to
comprehend. For those who never have to live in a world of starvation and poverty,
war and hatred—there was no way to understand it.

Willow
simply held him and
cried her own tears, unsure if she were shedding them for Del or herself. Eventually, they eased back
down in the bed and she felt Del pull up the blankets to cover them—keeping
Willow securely against him, playing with the strands of her dark hair as she
rested her cheek against his chest in silence.

The room was in shadowy
darkness, the outlines of things looking alien in the faint, silvery light
shining in through a small gap in the curtains.

Willow
felt the steady
thump, thump, thump
of Del’s heartbeat and started talking, without
conscious thought.

“The nightmares aren’t
always the same,” she said quietly. “Sometimes, I can see them executing the
French doctor, and other times it’s…something that happened to me, but it’s
always dark—even though some of it happened in broad daylight. I can still
smell him…the commander, before he handed me over to
Trèago
,
I was locked up in his prison for a week or more…his sweat… Sometimes I wake up
and I can smell it all around me, as though he were really there.” She
shuddered, then felt relieved when Del
tightened his arms around her protectively.

“He’s dead.” Del’s deep voice
vibrated under her cheek. “He can’t hurt you anymore.”

Willow
sighed slowly. “I know
that logically, it’s just that I didn’t see it. I sometimes wonder, what if he
escaped? What if he’s still out there somewhere?”

“He’s dead, Willow, I promise you…I
was there—remember?”

“Did you see…are you
sure?” she asked uncertainly.

“I’m sure.” He pulled
away from her so she could meet his gaze. “I promise you, he cannot hurt you—or
anyone else, ever again.”

Searching his eyes, Willow finally gave a
small nod and the faintest of smiles touched the edge of her lips. Dropping her
head back to his chest, Willow
felt wrung out. “I remember the first time I saw you…in the plane,” she said
softly. “I remember your eyes…I don’t remember the others, just you and those
damn blue eyes,” she said drowsily.