Day Three

by Patricia Spencer

  He couldn’t believe he’d willingly walked away from his safe sunny home to subject himself to this.

  If day broke without Brenna’s return, he would cross the city alone, do everything she had instructed him to do.

  Except.

  He would not leave Kavsak without her. He would get help and somehow find her.

  Tonight he had lain with her, limbs entwined.

  Even as hurt as he was, he was intoxicated by the lingering imprint of her body against his. Desire suffused him, thrumming in his chest like a giant engine slowly gaining momentum. Under any other circumstances, locked together like that, restraint would have been impossible.

  He snorted self-deprecatingly in his hollow cell. He couldn’t be that badly hurt if he was still thinking about sex. He scowled in the dark, chiding himself for his lust. Get in line, he thought. Behind all the other men who lay eyes on Brenna Rease and wanted the same thing. Hell. Get behind the ones who’d already got it. Put it in perspective, he told himself. This was lust, pure and simple.

  No.

  That was a lie.

  Tonight, at the railing, he had seen her teeter at the edge of a crumbling emotional precipice, face in hands, woman’s heart momentarily exposed. She was desperate to be enfolded. Yet, what she knew how to give—comfort—she didn’t know how to receive. She was by herself, roaming hostile streets. Had been, for thirty months. She needed shelter.

  And, Lord help him, he wanted to provide it.

  He yanked at his shirt. He wanted to get the medications out of sight. She had left him her ticket out of here, along with the precious bags that in D.C. she hadn’t even let him touch. Loosening the belt of the pouch so he could get it around his waist, he froze.

  Trucks.

  Coming this way.

  His fingers fumbled in the darkness, racing to clasp the unfamiliar buckle. A blade of light slashed the wall across the street, so bright it cut his eyes. He hit the ground, cheek flat against the reeking floor. Military vehicles. Had to be. No Pea Pod deliveries in this town. Gears ground downward and the trucks slowed, creeping nearer, roof-mounted floodlights sweeping alternate sides of the street. Brilliant flashes caromed off the ceiling of his narrow cell.

  These vehicles weren’t passing through. They were on a mission.

  Diesel engines clacking, exhaust hanging low in the cold air, the trucks came nearer. His doorway flared laser-bright. He plastered himself to the cement, head down, staring at the stitching on Brenna’s bags. The light explored his narrow crypt, unable to probe the wedge of shadow where he lay. He held his breath.

  They weren’t moving on.

  Sweat ringed his neck. Damn it, how interesting could a doorway be? Finally, the forward vehicle crept onward. He was plunged abruptly into pitch darkness. He exhaled.

  An unintelligible order erupted over a public speaker from the rear vehicle. The forward truck halted with a squeal. Grumbling soldiers flung open steel doors, filling the air with what were surely oaths. Booted feet rounded the truck on the double, rifles clattering.

  Flashlight beams criss-crossed the night in his direction, flaring into and out of the doorway. Had they seen him? Voices called from the direction of the second truck like bloodhounds signaling the pack. We’re on the scent. The nearest men topped the sandbag barrier and landed heavily on the sidewalk, scarcely three feet from where he hid. His life was about to end with the stink of piss in his nose.

  A beam of light cut inside the doorwell and stabbed his eyes. An exultant shout rose and spread contagiously to the furthest man. The prey was cornered.

  He stood up, shielding his eyes. All he could make out was rifles, silhouetted men, and clouds of breath hanging in the bitter air.

  The point man advanced, muzzle aimed at Daniel’s gut, and ordered him to step forward.

  Daniel’s heart pounded. Adrenaline swept through his body. He straightened, facing the soldier. Screw that. Come get me.

  The point man kicked Brenna’s bags aside, and seized Daniel’s injured shoulder.

  He roared, staggering, and rammed the soldier in the gut. They hit the concrete wall. The backup troops surged forward, tearing at his arms. Daniel fought them in the confined space. He was outnumbered. Resistance wouldn’t change the outcome, but he refused to submit.

  A biting command erupted behind the teeming mass. The effect was electric. The men froze in mid-motion.

  Was his mind playing tricks on him? The voice sounded familiar. The soldiers released him and stepped back.

  “You might cut them some slack, Ellsworth. They’re only trying to help.”

  He blinked uncomprehendingly. The flashlight angled to the ground. Brenna stepped out of the shadows.

  “Twenty-four minutes,” she said, a hint of amusement in her cool voice. “Sorry for the delay. Ukrainian crew, you know. Language barrier.”

  “Remind me to get you a phrase-book,” he said, and lost his balance.

  Her hand shot out and caught him.

  Inside the eight-wheeled Ukrainian BTR-4 armored personnel carrier, Brenna watched Ellsworth. He was hunched forward, clutching a liter bottle of Evian water in one hand, cradling his head with the other. Swaying with the motion of the moving vehicle, he grimaced every time they hit a pothole. She had topped him up with morphine, but it hadn’t kicked in yet.

  She believed his day was collapsing on him. Not just because of the physical pounding he’d taken, but because he defined himself as a moral man and today Kavsak had forced him to revise his opinion. He was struggling psychologically, clinging to his beleaguered sense of personal decency while Kavsak hammered him.

  Welcome to Dirty City.

  She was grateful now that she had hidden him and gone reconnoitering. Turned out it was the UNPROFOR—holding the Old City despite deep Nationalist incursions—that had been drawing the gunfire she’d heard. By following the fracas she found them, flagged them down, and convinced them to return for Ellsworth. Luc, bless him, had issued a forces-wide lookout for them after Michael Stanford was found in the torched van.

  Ellsworth broke the silence. “Where’re we going? The hotel?”

  She shook her head. “Airport.” There was a clinic there. Also, a Comm center.

  In minutes, they would get medical help. Just like that, the fickle pendulum had swung.

  She leaned back, thinking about the P2 memory card tucked in her jacket. It proved Cavic’s role in mass murder. Her task now was to get it out of Kavsak and broadcast it as widely as possible.

  Since she had been on their payroll when she shot it, EBS owned the footage. But given that the cable channel did not produce a nightly news show, it made sense for Sam Chisolm to license it to the highest-bidding network, thus retaining ownership of it for the documentary and benefiting from free advance publicity. Done right, the footage could generate enough income to cover her fee. Her work could effectively become a freebie for EBS.

  However, it was tricky.

  Stateside news was notoriously uninterested in international politics. How many bodies, an editor would ask. And how many were American? Cavic’s body count—and the fact she caught him red-handed—might be worth forty seconds of prime time. A bit more on a slow news night. Fleetingly sensational, but insufficient to mobilize public opinion. What she needed was an American angle, some hook that would make the networks play the footage over and over, keeping the issue in view long enough for the message to sink in.

  She frowned. The only U.S. perspective in this story lay in her kinship to America’s foremost statesman.

  This damning footage—taken on the eve of Special Envoy Brendan Rease’s negotiations with Cavic—had been taken by Rease’s own daughter. Sam Chisolm had to sell the clash between the Envoy and his notoriously rebellious Problem Child. With that noted, the networks would turn up the heat themselves.

  She could hear the newscasters now: “As you know, Brenna Rease has a long record of public acrimony with her father...” Her eyelids slid shut. Shit. Her past wo
uld be resurrected. The Billiard Ball, her drinking sprees, the string of men—the awful reputation she wanted forgotten. Her history refused to fall away. The fresh start she had envisioned stateside would not be hers.

  And her father. This campaign of hers might land the blow from which he could not recover, and send him down sputtering at the end of a brilliant career, his lifetime of accomplishment canceled out by her final willful act. How consistent it was, that her life brought him nothing but grief.

  And yet. A hundred and sixty-seven voices had joined the multitudes crying out to her. Who would shake a sleeping international community, if not her? Who else would protest what had happened to Michael Stanford, and the keening widow in the marketplace, and the woman who’d been gang-raped in the square? She had borne witness to the barbarity that had befallen them all. It was her job to tell the world.

  The vehicle rolled to a stop.

  Ellsworth stirred, and lifted his eyes to hers.

  “Airport checkpoint,” she explained, hearing men’s voices. A chain clattered, and the armored vehicle rolled forward with a toot of the horn. They would arrive at the terminal in a minute.

  Brenna glanced at her watch, rapidly calculating time zones. “Where would Sam Chisolm be at four-thirty in the afternoon?”

  Ellsworth turned a blank gaze in her direction.

  “At what telephone number?” she prompted. “Give me his private line, if he’s got one. His cell phone—all his numbers.”

  He stumbled through the familiar digits while she jotted them on her tiny notepad.

  “Do you want to write the copy?” she asked, pro forma, chuckling inwardly at the thought of what he’d compose in his drugged state.

  “Uh…copy?”

  “For the footage. I’m going to ask Luc to beam it out.” A brazen request, it would further muddy the boundaries between Brenna and Luc’s personal lives and their work.

  Daniel shook his head, trying to clear his brain.

  “I can do it if you like. It’s pretty standard,” she said, affecting a newscaster’s voice in soft mockery: “In Kavsak today, General Cavic personally ordered the massacre of one hundred and sixty-seven unarmed women, children, and elderly men corralled in the market by his Nationalist army. This footage, shot by his daughter Brenna, belies U.S. Special Envoy Brendan Rease’s assertion that the General has not been personally involved in ethnic cleansing.”

  “Sure,” he mumbled. “Standard. File it.”

  An icepick-sharp squeal of brakes skewered Daniel’s eardrums, and he was thrown forward. A moment later, the rear hatch opened from the outside and cooler air mixed with the heat accumulated in the steel cocoon. The vehicle was on a ramp, inside a building of some sort. The basement of the terminal? An out-building? A string of pallid light bulbs lit the low-ceilinged corridor. There were sandbags piled against both sides of the walls, and he heard the muted sound of a generator coming from behind a set of steel doors.

  A young brunette with a medic insignia appeared with a wheelchair.

  “I had them radio ahead to get you a ride,” Brenna said.

  Colonel Luc Morriseau, back straight, uniform crisp, stepped into view beside the medic and peered inside the APC. His eyes lit on Brenna. The tension in his face broke, transformed itself into pleasure, then longing.

  Brenna cleared her throat.

  The colonel hastily shifted his gaze to Daniel. “Mon Dieu.”

  Brenna crouched forward and took Daniel’s water bottle. The rear hatch was hip-high to the ground and offered no steps. To get in, he had leaned heavily on her, then been boosted by the Ukrainian soldiers when the pain in his deeply-bruised hip and shoulder prevented his getting in unaided.

  He tried to get up and nearly toppled.

  “Easy,” she murmured.

  Luc reached inside the APC, his powerful hands aiding Daniel. The medic maneuvered the chair closer. Daniel crouched over to the hatch, braced himself on the center post, and stepped down. The ground didn’t feel solid.

  While the medic guided him into the chair, Luc offered Brenna a hand. She took it and hopped out, her boots lightly patting the ground.

  She’s magnificent, Daniel thought. Tender and courageous, exhausted but undefeated. She embodied the headiest blend of strength and vulnerability he had ever encountered in a single six-foot stretch of woman.

  Evidently, Luc thought so too. He’d drawn Brenna so possessively alongside himself that his hand was brushing the side of her breast.

  As the medic turned him away, Daniel heard Luc murmur to Brenna: “My quarters?”

  “Yes,” she replied.

  Daniel lowered his aching head.

  Yes.

  Luc led Brenna to his quarters.

  A windowless, prison-cell small room, it only had space for a clothing cabinet by the entrance, a hard cot pushed against the rough-poured concrete wall, and a narrow table and chair. What marked the privilege of rank, however, was the door and the privacy it afforded. Hearing she was on her way, he had spread out one of his white handkerchiefs as a makeshift placemat and set out a plate of rations and a fresh bottle of water for her.

  Brenna entered and set her bags on the floor by the door.

  “Hungry?” He always offered food, even if all he had were Canadian Forces IMPs, Individual Meal Packs.

  “Oh, Luc,” she said, seeing what passed for a chicken casserole with rice. “Thank you.”

  Her response was generous. His soldiers called the pre-packaged meals ‘I Must Pukes’.

  She went to the table, pulled out the chair, and picked up the fork. In the field, he knew, she never turned down an offer for food, never complained about its quality. Food was a rare commodity.

  Luc crossed his arms over his chest, leaned against the wall, and studied her while she ate. She had lost weight lately. She looked haggard, bruised by exhaustion. Her beauty lay under siege. Soon, she would exceed her body’s ability to withstand abuse, and the lines and shadows would become permanent.

  No one seeing her like this could imagine the woman he had met six-and-a-half years ago in Israel, nor imagine the emotional punishment she had endured to become the beleaguered spirit sitting in this dreary room.

  But he still remembered her, snapshot-clear, posing for Ari on the Mount of Olives. Hanging onto her wide-brimmed hat, wind plastering her thin summer dress against her thighs, her laughter like the sound of silver bells as she told her adored Ari how to work her camera.

  Ari Rosen was a stocky little Jew, a good foot shorter than she, and fifteen years her senior. Separated at a cocktail party, no one would have matched them. The pairing was too improbable—the Israeli career soldier and the American journalist who despised the military.

  Luc himself had introduced them at the lavish wedding that Ari sponsored for Rachel, the kibbutz orphan he had taken under his wing. Ari wore civilian clothes that day, and wept with unconcealed love as Rachel made the transition from being his foster ‘niece’ to being Solomon’s wife. As a soldier, Luc found Ari’s open emotion embarrassing, but Brenna had been instantly drawn to him.

  “It’s true I’m a short, balding Jew and you are the tallest, most astonishing gentile I ever saw—” Ari quipped when they were introduced “—but this I’m willing to overlook, if you are.”

  The two of them flirted outrageously until Ari went to refill her drink and she asked Luc how he knew Ari. “We met during multi-force maneuvers in the desert,” he said. “Ari’s an Israeli Army Colonel.”

  The humor in her eyes died, and when Ari returned, she coolly excused herself.

  “I did something wrong?” Ari asked, unhappily watching her disappear into the crowd.

  “She’s anti-military. She didn’t realize you’re a colonel.”

  “And she associates with you? You’re armed forces.”

  “We’re Canadian,” Luc pointed out. “Peacekeepers.”

  Ari started after Brenna, but Rachel claimed his arm. “Uncle Ari! Come play for me. The song you comp
osed for our wedding.” Ari forced a smile and allowed himself to be led to the grand piano.

  Without bothering to call the guests to attention, he began playing. A hundred conversations ceased and everyone, including Brenna, turned to watch. Bent over the keys, his fingers caressed them. The music flowed out of his chest. The melody began slowly, hinting at longing and desire, building itself, note by haunting note, moving faster and deeper until the room was filled with the need and passion of his music.

  From across the room, Luc watched Brenna become enthralled.

  When the last chord vanished into the air, Ari slumped over the keys, eyes closed, exhausted hands fallen to his thighs. Had he ripped apart his chest, he could not have exposed more of his heart.

  The crowd rose, clapping, shouting, cheering deafeningly. Ari looked up. His eyes found Brenna’s and locked on them. He held his stare, challenging her: Don’t assume you know who I am.

  From that one look, Luc knew his hopes with her were dashed.

  She resisted Ari at first, declining his invitations to dinner, to dance, to sit by the sea, steadfastly refusing to fall in love with a soldier, no matter how charming. But one early Sunday, six weeks after they met, Ari knocked at her apartment door armed with the ultimate weapon in his arsenal.

  “All my life, I have been looking for you,” he told her, standing at her threshold, unaware that Luc stood in the living room behind her. “This small thing, my career, shouldn’t stand in the way.” He extended a manila envelope to her.

  She eyed it warily.

  “Open! Open!”

  Hesitantly, Brenna obeyed, and found three objects: A condom, a plain gold wedding band, and a stamped business envelope, unsealed.

  “The first two, you’ll recognize, I’m sure. The letter, you read.”

  Brenna pulled it out. It held a sheaf of documents. She scanned them, not understanding their purpose until she saw the title of the form. Her eyes widened in astonishment. It was his signed resignation from the army. All she had to do was date the letter and mail it.