Archie smiled, briefly. Not humor, more as if he were considering whether or not he held an emotion inside that he didn’t know about.
“Keeping up with Emily Beale is the hardest thing I’ve ever done, and I’ve been doing it for ten years now. But I did it, Kee. Whether you believe it or not, I know it. I know to the core that I’m the one who did it. Sure, Emily picked me out of the crowd and drove my ass into the ground. But I’m the one who stood out from the crowd, and at West Point that is a seriously high-class crowd.
“And I kept up. Did better at a few things. Not many, but a few. She can outfly anyone, even Henderson. But I can outgun her, especially in high-speed situations. I have a better strategic feel for what the enemy is doing before they do it. She is the master of the tactical situation, how to take out the key pin. I know what to do to keep the enemy from placing that pin in the first place.”
Kee kept her mouth shut.
“So, Kee, what I want to know is why you of all people would say what you just did? You fought as hard as any of us to get where you are, or you wouldn’t be here. Maybe harder, considering your background. Henderson picked you out of the crowd. Convinced Emily you were good enough, and trust me, being her husband probably made that task harder, not easier. Emily doesn’t believe in favoritism.”
“Considering my background?” Kee didn’t know if she should strike out, run away, or weep.
He nodded. He didn’t apologize. He didn’t redefine. He was asking on the level. Speaking plain truth.
Kee didn’t know if that was something she was ready to do with this man. Not with any man, or woman, but Archie had a hold on her that she didn’t like. And she’d slapped at him, hard. That required repayment. She didn’t like being in debt to anyone.
A wave of panic washed over her, and she tried to let it flow by as she’d been trained. But it didn’t. It left her stranded high and dry.
One thing was clear, she owed him truth. Plain truth.
“The first DAP Hawk I ever saw was on night patrol.” Kee knew it was a cheat, but she’d answer the easier question first. “We were in the thick of it and it was ugly. Trying to get Americans to safety in the midst of that Nigerian coup a couple years back.”
She picked at the moss on the stone wall. It didn’t let go, clinging tight to the ancient weathered rock.
Archie sat in silence, nursing his water bottle, the perfect audience.
“We were pinned down outside a US contractor’s office building, grand term for two stories of aging mud and mortar. My squad, what was left of them, was the only thing keeping several dozen civilian Americans alive and breathing.
“Out of nowhere, a DAP Hawk appeared like it had been teleported. Inside of twenty seconds, the gun emplacements that had pinned us for twelve hours were gone. Four Little Birds raced in from the four points of the compass. A full Ranger team fast-roped down, hit the ground, cleared, and secured the entire block. One minute later, probably to the second, six Black Hawks were on the street and all the civilians were being loaded. I’d never seen coordination like that.”
She closed her eyes and could taste the dust on the air—and the blood.
“All hell was breaking loose and this Ranger master sergeant strolls over to our hidey-hole, as if it were a sunny day here in Italy and not 2 a.m. in Hell. He leans into our dug-in position calm as could be with a full-blown firefight raging at either end of the street and says, ‘Y’all want a ride?’”
Kee opened her eyes and looked at Archie.
“I’m alive today because of those guys. We were down and on the way out. Most of our squad was hit.” She pulled aside one tail of his shirt and pointed to the front-and-back scar below her rib cage where a round had passed through, missing vital organs by millimeters and miracles.
Archie traced a finger across it gently, as if he could wipe the past from her side.
“That’s when I set my sights higher than becoming a regular Army sergeant before I achieved KIA. Until then, Killed In Action was about as high as I was gonna go. That’s the day I became a SOAR sergeant. Though it took my career three years of brutal work to catch up with me and two more of training once it did.”
Archie nodded. Nodded as he accepted her story. Nodded as he slid his hand until his palm covered the front bullet scar and his fingertips the rear one. Exactly the position she’d been held in by the Ranger medic aboard that Black Hawk to keep her from bleeding out before they made it back to base.
“I lay in that hospital for two weeks. On my first day out, I applied for the Green Berets. Three years later I was the first woman through Green Platoon after Ms. Legend Beale. Haven’t looked back since.”
He pulled her forward by that hand wrapped around her scar as if holding her life inside her body.
When their lips met, the heat didn’t flash like powder. Every other time they kissed, it slammed into her like an ignition circuit on a Hellfire missile.
This time Archie’s kiss ran gently over her lips. Instead of pure heat, she felt texture, shape, care. In contact only at their lips and his hand on her waist, a circuit was completed. A circuit that opened a honey-slow flow of warmth.
He pulled away, a mere breath apart. Her heart pounded so fast, she couldn’t have shot a target three meters away, never mind three hundred and fifty.
She’d never wanted anything in her life as much as she wanted Archie to kiss her like that again. He slid his other hand along her cheek and into her hair. Unable to raise her own hands from where they rested on his knees, she leaned in for more of that kiss.
A high-pitched, double trill sounded so loudly, they banged foreheads hard.
As they scrabbled in their fanny packs, Kee knew two things for certain.
First, their pagers had announced the end to their vacation.
Second, she’d never forget exactly where they’d left off because she wanted to start up later in exactly that same spot.
27
“Sergeant Kee Smith answering a page.” She’d snagged a pay phone at the Castello. She still hadn’t completely caught her breath from their run back.
“Location?” The operator’s voice was Army impersonal.
“Castello Sonnino, south of Livorno, Italy. On a non-secure phone.”
“Understood.” The silence stretched for thirty seconds as a keyboard rattled at the other end of the line.
To Archie’s raised eyebrows, all she could offer was a shrug. He moved close enough that they could both hear. She could feel his body heat, but how long would it be before she found another chance to do something about it?
“There is a northbound bus that will be stopping at your location in one hour and five minutes. Proceed all haste to Livorno. From there,” more keys rattling, “you’ll have an hour to catch the bullet train to Rome. Tickets will be waiting at the airport.”
“I also have contact with Captain Archibald Stevenson.”
“Roger that. Same. Confirm?”
Boat? She mouthed at him.
Dad. Archie nodded it would be okay. Dilya? He asked in turn.
Kee smacked her forehead. Who knew what they were flying into?
Parents? She asked.
Archie waggled a hand, then shook his head. He mimicked signing a piece of paper. Right. Dilya’s travel documents required she be in Kee’s care.
“Do you confirm?” The voice on the other end was clearly impatient.
“Um, make those tickets for three.”
“Everyone else paged has already reported in.”
“I have a dependent traveling with me. Check your records.”
“Hold… She’s a kid.”
“She stays with me.”
“Your head.” On a platter. And his tone told her that he couldn’t care less if it were cut off or not.
“Confirmed.” Definitely her head.
The line clicked dead. The operator, safe in his Fort Campbell billet, didn’t care how much trouble Kee got in. As long as they were moving.
But what else was she supposed to do?
If she was lucky, they were being called back to their same base and Dilya could drop right back into her old routine.
If not… She didn’t have time to think about that right now.
Dilya took the sudden uprooting with the same flexible calm she always maintained. Archie’s father knew from experience that Archie could be gone on a moment’s notice.
It was his mother that Archie worried about. They’d built their first fragile connection and he didn’t know what to do about it. Given a couple days, with the start Kee had given him, they might begin to bridge the misunderstandings and hurt feelings that kept them apart. But now instead of days, they had minutes.
He knew he should be doing something about that, but he didn’t know what. They’d all rushed out to the boat and gathered their belongings. Now they stood at the Castello’s bus stop with a bag of sandwiches, sodas, and a large collection of cookies Kee had thrown together.
They had ten minutes. Maybe less.
He inspected the pretty sailboat anchored out in the cove along with the others. The wind carried the soft sound of the surf up the hill. He’d thought to have time to teach Kee how to sail. Three days aboard, not enough time. Never enough time.
Kee swore loudly in Spanish, clearly ready to unleash a stream of profanity but stopping for Dilya’s sake. The girl knew so little English, they’d all agreed to be careful not to start her off speaking like an Army grunt. Even Tim and John had bought in.
Kee grabbed both his hand and his mother’s. She dragged them five quick steps along the road, away from Dilya and the worried look furrowing his father’s brow.
She turned to his mother.
“Betty, it has been a great pleasure meeting you.” She gave the woman a hug that was returned tentatively at first, and then, with a sudden strength, his mother wrapped her arms tightly about Kee’s neck and held on.
Archie could feel envy for that. Kee grew close to people so easily. They trusted her, and she them, with an ease he had never achieved.
When they parted, his mother nodded. Archie knew how hard the words were for her, he hoped Kee understood how much his mother had unbent in her presence.
Kee turned to stand toe-to-toe with him and looked up into his face. He raised a hand to brush her cheek, but she slapped it aside. She’d thrown that internal switch she had, faster than the blink of an eye from lover to Army sergeant. Was lover the right word, or perhaps—
“Okay. Remember, it was you who asked.”
“Asked what?” Had he asked anything in the hectic hour they’d spent rushing to ship and back to shore?
“I grew up on the Street. Capital S. It’s a place all its own. Daughter of a coke whore and who the hell knows. She sure didn’t. She’s dead now, I guess. I couldn’t find her when I went looking after Basic Training. I didn’t look too hard. Didn’t see her much before the Army either.”
Archie opened his mouth, closed it again, and looked over Kee’s head at his mother. She didn’t look surprised, as if she already knew. Accepting. Perhaps sorrowful.
Kee didn’t turn to check on her reaction, her attack had a single point of aim. Him.
He tried to think if he knew anyone whose mother was dead. Divorced, sure. But dead? And not caring?
“I grew up stealing for food, fighting for a place to sleep, and trusting absolutely no one at any time for any reason.” Kee’s voice continued like hammer blows battering against him.
He fell back a step but she didn’t stop. Her words shot out short and sharp as if fired from her Minigun in a rapid-fire stream he couldn’t dodge or evade.
“I slept with men or women for food. Not for money, though in a way I did. Anna fed both of us. When the hunger gnaws at your belly long enough and deep enough, you don’t care anymore. I killed to stay alive. My best and only friend was a whore,” Kee reached for the small braid of blonde hair, “who died in my arms at eighteen. I killed her murderers in a gunfight, and I don’t have a single regret about that. If I could have known beforehand, I’d have killed them first and taken the Murder One charge. It wasn’t self-defense. I was alive. They were leaving. It was an execution. But they’d taken down cops. They were on L.A.’s Most Wanted. The judge offered me self defense and the Army.”
Each phrase so foreign, so alien. From another life.
“This is your mother.” She turned to his mother. “This is your son. You two have no idea what a gift you each have in the other. Now get with the goddamn program!” Fury suffused her face, making it dark and more dangerous than he’d ever seen. She stalked away still in full warrior mode past Dilya, past his father. Finally grinding to a halt fifty feet down the road.
Archie looked at his mother. They stood two steps apart, a chasm that neither had really crossed in as long as Archie could remember.
It always felt like she hadn’t been there, but he could remember she had. She’d rarely missed a school event. Was aboard for the maiden voyage of every sailboat he and his father had ever built. She was the one who had taught him Cat’s Cradle, Jacob’s Ladder, and all the string figures he shared with Dilya.
He’d gone to West Point to impress her, but now he saw that he hadn’t needed to. That he had grown to love it as well had been a gift of its own.
He closed his eyes against all those years with so much distance between them. So far apart. Yet here she stood, right now, living and breathing. He could hear the sound of the bus as it crested the hill out of Quercianella and put on the brakes at finding their party waiting at the stop in front of the Castello.
He opened his eyes and saw the tears running down his mother’s cheeks, felt them on his own.
All these years they hadn’t needed words.
They both took a step forward and wrapped their arms around each other.
And they didn’t need words now.
28
Kee feigned exhaustion on the bus and the train. She couldn’t keep it up forever, but it wasn’t all a sham. Stepping back into her past had drained her to the core. Keiko Sato was a screwed-up, nasty, shit-vicious punk she’d left standing at the curb eight years ago. She hadn’t bothered to toss her gun in the sewer. She’d stood there, completely numb, and watched Anna bleed out. The hole in her forehead didn’t bleed much, but it made tending any of the other injuries a waste of time. The cops were a long time coming.
She was better than that girl who’d had no concept of life beyond the streets. She changed her name the day she signed with the Army and no one complained. Kee Smith, the all-American kid from absolutely nowhere. Now she was SOAR. And that was more than she’d ever expected to achieve. A member of Emily Beale’s crew, and Kee now knew that meant something. People trusted her. Trusted her not to screw up and get them all killed.
And that was where the convictions rose.
Anna had depended on her. Had called Kee her own personal lifesaver. Kee was always finding little gifts of bright, round Life Savers in her pocket, under her pillow, in her shoe. Anna had been a gentle, dark-eyed, golden-haired beauty. Willowy and fragile against Kee’s strength. When a trick tried to rough Anna up, Kee was crouched in the hallway ready to pound the shit out of him.
And she’d died in a random drive-by, not something Kee could guard against. The best guard in the world couldn’t stop that, but she’d been the one to fix it. Personal risk was never an issue. On the Street, living past sixteen wasn’t all that common. It allowed a certain mental freedom to take on all comers.
The Army offered a different view and a better life expectancy. For one thing, you had to be eighteen to join. It already selected for the survivors. Still Kee’d lost so many squadmates in the 10th Mountain and later in the Green Berets that it was hard to keep track. Usually they lived, if you got to them fast enough. Field medicine and medevac were so good that if you found ’em alive, they usually stayed that way. But no one who’d been in deep combat counted themselves alive if they were blinded or one-armed. At least
not for a long time afterward.
For now she had a crew and a young girl…and whatever Archie was. She glanced over as covertly as she could, picking up Dilya’s cat from the floor where it had slid while the girl slept. Archie stared off into the distance not seeing the outskirts of Rome flitting past their window. He’d kept to himself since they’d left the bus stop.
Had she chased him off? Too much reality for the Boston blue blood? Easy answer of yes. Bastard. Well, it had been only one night in the sack, plus fooling around on an Italian hilltop. She’d certainly had enough one-night stands in her life. No biggee.
While it proved hard to be surprised, that it hurt like hell shocked her. Kee had certainly enjoyed his body. She hadn’t gone with the long and lean often, but what he could do with it had made her a convert.
And running. There were men who could outrun her, a few. She’d always enjoyed running in unison with a squad, didn’t matter if it included full gear and a field pack. And there were always other grunts who loved to run. Archie was a step beyond. Their run over the Italian countryside had filled her with a harmony, an ease, a joy that not even the sex in the grass had matched. Their bodies constantly found a state of soundless communication that flat-out worked for her.
Now… Walking away from a lover had never felt like a knife in the gut. Not before this.
On the flight from Rome to Kabul, he still hadn’t come back. Dilya was watching him strangely so Kee knew it wasn’t all her.
Thousand-yard stare. That look when someone’s thoughts were turned so far inward, you could slip a grenade down their pants and they might not notice. Usually happened to forward-deployed grunts who saw one buddy too many wiped off the face of the planet.
Archie looked as if Kee’d been shot dead in front of him. Maybe she had. Gone from a cuddlesome quick bit on the side to way too real. He looked full-on shell-shocked.
That had been one of the things that had perplexed the psychologists at her pre-trial assessment. Her best friend had died in her arms. She’d shot the three perps dead in cold blood. And the psychs couldn’t figure out why she wasn’t in shock.
I Own the Dawn Page 17
