“You choose, Brenna, what order we use these three things.”
She gaped at him.
Luc stepped forward, wondering what had disarmed Brenna to the point of speechlessness, and for the first time, Ari saw him, clad like Brenna in his bathrobe, unshaven, unbathed, obviously having spent the night. Ari’s face burned to the top of his thin hairline. Looking from Luc to Brenna to his commission in her hands, he sputtered, his brazen strategy turned to ashes.
“A basic military concept, scouting ahead,” he was finally able to say, desperately striving for composure, stilling hands that wanted to grab the envelope and disappear. “So, a general I’ll never make.”
Her unwavering gaze burned through Ari, adding to his humiliation.
“I’m an ass,” Ari whispered, his eyes meeting hers, full of apology, confessing though he knew Luc would hear. “A stupid, middle-aged putz chasing a woman who can have her pick of men.” He held out his shaking hand to retrieve what now seemed like pathetic offerings. “I won’t bother you again.”
She pressed the papers against her chest. “This is really your resignation?” she said.
“Yes.”
She stared at him, transfixed.
“Please,” Ari repeated.
Not taking her eyes from Ari, she widened the door. “Luc is playing tourist and asked to borrow a room,” she explained, calling over her shoulder. “If you want to go ahead and shower, Luc, you’ll get that early start you wanted. There’s a coffee shop around the corner.”
The dismissal stung, but Luc hid it. With a military snap to his nod, he moved toward the guest room to pack, fully understanding he’d just been shipped out. Behind himself, he heard her ask Ari to enter, with a tenderness he had never before heard in her voice.
Brenna didn’t know when she opened her door that loving Ari would cause her the second grievous emotional loss of her life, that she would be left drifting like a raft in mid-ocean, trailing the ties that once moored her. She had no way of predicting she would end up in this awful city, locked in a deadly contest for her life.
Somehow righting herself after she lost Ari, she defined an existentialist core for herself. She was here, so she would live. There was nothing beyond survival itself, she kept saying. But a troubling detachment threaded itself through everything she did, and Luc suspected that Brenna unconsciously taunted death. Drawing her double-edged sword of courage and commitment to public awareness, she walked into its jaws, flaunting herself, daring it to take her in a fair contest. Deep-down, he believed, she didn’t care if she lived or died. But Ari’s sheltering body had saved her life when the car bomb exploded, and on those grounds alone, she refused to surrender it without a fight.
Brenna set down her fork. “You’re quiet.”
Luc shook off his memories. “I have to write to Corporal Stanford’s family.” The task had weighed on him since the Ukrainian patrols had found his grisly remains in the van. Luc pushed off the wall.
Brenna turned in her chair, tracking him.
He sat on the edge of the bed, elbows on his knees. “There were parts of a charred skeleton left. How can I talk about that to a mother, a father?”
“Michael was shot by a sniper,” she said. “He died instantly. Before we hit the wall, before the fire.”
Luc gratefully rested his forehead in his open palm. “Grâce à dieu.” Thank god.
“He’d been telling me about his family’s ranch in Alberta and his plans to go back when this tour was over.” She gave him more details, an anecdote the corporal had told her about his younger brother, and about his fondness for his parents.
Listening to her, he realized she had created as detailed an image of the youth as any she could photograph, given him something he could relate back to the family about the boy’s final minutes.
She leaned forward, mirroring his pose, her fingers nearly brushing his knees.
“Thank you,” he said. “Thank you.” He matched the tips of his fingers together several times before he laced them. “And you? I have never seen you this tired. Working with this man Daniel is too much?”
“He knows squat about surviving here. But he has courage and kindness. At one point he thought I’d been captured and—” her voice cracked “—I just want to get him safely home again.”
A terrible ache spread through Luc’s chest, as painful as any physical blow he could experience. He felt his chin slowly dropping to his chest. That tenderness was in her voice again.
“Luc?”
He sprang to his feet, suddenly unable to bear his proximity to her, and turned his back. He was the one she should feel affection for—not this Daniel man she hardly knew. He was the one who’d stood by her through all the shit over the photograph. After Ari’s funeral, everyone had fallen out—Rachel, Solomon, all her press corps buddies. Everyone accused her of betraying Ari. They reviled her, left her to sit the week of Shiva alone. But not him. He was the one who had recited Kaddish with her. For once that sweet inflection should be for him.
“Luc. Is something the matter?”
Oui. Something was desperately the matter. He wished she wanted him for a change. If wishes were horses… He straightened up. They weren’t. And there was no use dreaming. He was an officer, a rational man who wouldn’t undertake a campaign destined for failure. “Non,” he said. “Pas du tout.”
Nothing at all.
“There’s something I want to show you.”
She got her camera, put it on his bed, inserted the memory card, and adjusted the LCD monitor so he could see the playback. Handing him the earbud, she pressed a button and stepped back.
Luc recognized General Cavic entering the market in his Jeep. He leaned forward, watching. Three horrifying minutes later, Brenna reached across him and stopped the picture.
“Mon Dieu,” he whispered, removing the earplug. “How did you get this?”
“Balcony seats.”
“At the market?” Luc frowned. “It’s a miracle you’re alive.”
“And to think,” she shrugged, “people diss the nosebleed seats.”
“How many dead? Because I know you counted.”
“One hundred and sixty-seven.”
“So many times, we hear rumors, but never any evidence,” he said, still stunned.
“Cavic, Luc. Not rogue officers. Not hearsay. The General himself, in perfect focus.”
Brenna was pacing, agitated. And no wonder. She must have been terrified.
“I want you to put these pictures up on the satellite for EBS,” she said.
Luc snorted. Civilian use of military communications links was strictly forbidden. “What you ask,” he said carefully, “I see why. But...I cannot. This compromises my command.”
“Does it, Luc? How many times have I watched your frustration at being able to do so little? You’re under-manned, under-equipped, so grudgingly here, as you always say. Isn’t this exactly what your command needs, Luc? Public support? The Canadian Parliament was slow to commit the forces, afraid of public opposition. But these pictures can help viewers understand why more international help is needed,” she entreated. “It can do nothing but help, politically.”
“I am not a politician.”
“No. You’re a peacekeeper. And the people in this city are being butchered. Not soldiers. Not trained, armed men. Civilians. Harmless women and children. Old people.”
Luc didn’t like it any better than she did. But he was in this country under a set of rules that, if broken, undermined the legitimacy of the peacekeeping process itself. “Take it with you when you leave. One day more or less—good will still come of it.”
She collapsed on the seat, deflated, desperate, grasping her hair in her fists. “God, Luc! I haven’t even made it to the fucking hotel yet! One day more or less, I may not be alive. The safe zone has been violated. Nationalists broached the Old City today. Tomorrow’s borrowed time. This footage has to go out now.”
Brenna was sputtering, going down. If not to
night, he thought sadly, then soon. He was sure of it. He’d seen this despair before in soldiers who had stayed in country too long. If she were one of his troops he would immediately send her home.
She lifted her face and he saw a shift in her eyes, a slight jutting of her jaw. “There’ll be tribunals some day. War crimes to prosecute. Evidence will be needed, documenting the atrocities. I got photo IDs.”
He grunted. Leave it to Brenna to find an argument he could hang a breach of orders on.
“Luc. Please.”
He sighed. “All right. We transmit a full copy to UNPROFOR international HQ in support of a future international war crimes tribunal process, and, as a courtesy to EBS for having provided the evidence, five minutes dish time. Agreed?”
Her shoulders slumped with relief. She nodded mutely, utterly spent.
“And when you finish,” he said. “You rest.”
As always when she came to him, he would give her his bed and go sleep with the enlisted men.
Brenna stepped out of the Comm Center into the central corridor two hours later, so tired she could hardly stand up.
The laborious job of patching through calls, establishing the link, and transmitting the pictures had been accomplished. Sam Chisolm had been ecstatic, and agreed readily to her suggestions. “Sure thang,” he’d drawled. “Ah’ll get the ball rolling.”
Oh, joy. She was going to be in the middle of a publicity frenzy again.
Luc’s room lay twenty paces to the left. The infirmary was situated in the opposite direction, a million miles distant. She turned unsteadily toward it.
A desk passing for a medic’s station stood near the entrance to the tiny clinic, the lamp on it the sole source of light for the room. A competent-looking man with soulful brown eyes mouthed a soundless greeting.
She nodded distractedly. Four beds crowded the room, not an arm’s length between one and the next. Space heaters hummed in the background, barely holding their own against the chill radiating from the concrete walls. The facilities were rudimentary. Serious casualties were evacuated to Ancona, Italy.
Daniel was asleep under olive drab blankets in the second bed. She tiptoed over, eased onto the edge beside him.
He stirred vaguely, but didn’t wake. Her heart sank at the sight of him. The left side of his face was scraped and swollen. Four dark stitches puckered the gash over his left eyebrow now, and small red burns lurked like the pox in his dark stubble. She could only imagine the bruises beneath his hospital gown.
If he had fallen this rough-bearded and battered on an American sidewalk, he’d be sidestepped as a drunk. And yet, he had stood at the railing at the market, ready to risk his life to help a woman he’d never met.
The medic, T. Brownlee on the name tag, appeared at her side.
“How’s he doing?” she whispered.
“Give or take some misery, he’ll be fine,” he said, a Celtic lilt faintly discernible in his voice. “Concussion, exposure, bruised hip, sprained shoulder. No broken bones, though—a miracle, given the severity of the bruises.”
“No blood in his pee? No internal injuries?”
“A bit wet at the bases of the lungs—he got a bit too close to the fireworks, don’t you know? But he’s been given a thorough examination, he has, and been dosed with antibiotics and pain killers. We’ll give him a pocketful when he leaves, to keep him on his feet until he gets back to the real world.”
Relief swept through her in an unexpected rush. She stared at her scraped hands, folded on her lap. They’re filthy. She hadn’t washed before eating, she thought foolishly.
T. Brownlee’s eyes followed hers. “You were in the same brawl, the two of you? I’ll patch them up.”
It took her a moment to realize this gentle medic was offering to tend her hands. “I’m too tired,” she said.
“I’ll be right quick.” He ignored her and stepped to the medical supply shelf, reaching for gauze and disinfectant. “Would you want the bed next to his for the night?”
She glanced at the adjacent bed, neatly made up, ready for occupancy. From where she sat, the walk back to Luc’s seemed like a forced march. If she stayed here, all she had to do was lean in.
But sleep rarely brought her rest. Sleep was the combat zone between her need for repose and her need to barricade herself from her memories. As she relinquished herself to oblivion, her past rose and rampaged through her, forcing her to re-view and re-feel its sorrows and horrors. She shook her head. “I can’t.”
Sleep was a battle she waged without witnesses.
Three troubled hours after falling into Luc’s bed, Brenna awoke again. The hands of her watch glowed in the dark. Five-fifty. She fumbled for the light bulb chain. Crink. Dim light washed the room. She sat gritty-eyed and heavy-limbed on the edge of the cot and raked her swollen fingers through her hair.
Day two.
See if they could get to the Holiday Inn.
Home base, four miles away. This time, she was asking Luc for a ride in an armored car.
Meanwhile, she had a lead to follow up. Last night, in the Comm Center, she heard that a light infantry unit had been recalled to the airport HQ from their posting in the region outside the city. It wasn’t significant in itself, except that every possible chaplain and psychologist in the battalion had also been called back to the airport to debrief them.
“Debrief?” she had asked one of the comm engineers.
It turned out the troops in question—like all the UNPROFOR peacekeepers, under strict orders not to fire unless fired upon—had been forced to watch helplessly while the Nationalists ‘cleansed’ a village. The civilian population, mostly women and children, was tortured and killed in the process.
The stench of death thick in the air, the troops were ordered to perform the ground sweep for the bodies. Some of the dead were so hot from the fires, that the infantry had to douse them with water before their steaming corpses could be zipped into body bags.
After that horror fest, Brenna doubted the troops were sleeping well either. In fact, she bet they’d be first in line for coffee. She dragged her wool pants off the back of Luc’s chair, thrust her long legs inside them, and pulled them over her hips. If she hustled, she could tape a few interviews before Daniel stirred.
UNPROFOR could call it what they liked, but those chaplains hadn’t been summoned for debriefings. They were there to keep the men from losing their minds.
Daniel came to in a muted world, drugged and disconnected from reality. He’d been slit open, stuffed with cotton, and left to die. Why else would he feel this way? Ah, he moaned, he remembered now. Collisions. Explosions. Massacres. Gang rapes. His eyes slid shut again. Sleep was better. In his dreams, gentle hands wove comfort through his hair. Brenna’s hands.
Christ! He fought the bedcovers. What time was it? Where was she? How much of the day had he missed? He shook his head to clear the fog. No. Shaking was bad. Prying a single burning eyelid open, he vaguely made out a tall medic hovering at his bedside.
“Good mornin’.”
“I wouldn’t put it in writing,” Daniel said, squinting at the medic’s name tag.
T. Brownlee chuckled, picked up his wrist, and counted silently. Pulling a penlight from his pocket, he flashed it across Daniel’s pupils. “How’s the pain?”
Daniel withdrew from the intense beam. “I feel like shit.” Hissing through clenched teeth, he lowered his feet over the edge of the bed. “What time is it?”
“You’ll not be running off,” T. Brownlee declared, withdrawing a stethoscope from his lab coat pocket, “until I get to listen. I heard some crackles last night. You need to be minding the lungs after inhaling explosive debris.”
T. Brownlee tugged the tie at the neck of Daniel’s hospital gown. The pale blue fabric slid into his naked lap. T. Brownlee hooked the stethoscope into his ears and pressed the disc below Daniel’s left nipple.
On his commands, Daniel inhaled, held, and released his breaths.
“Lean forward.
” T. Brownlee reached over his bare shoulder and pressed the instrument against his back.
He jumped.
“Sorry,” T. Brownlee murmured. “Hard to find a bruise-free spot. In.”
Behind Daniel, the infirmary door clicked open.
“Ma’am,” T. Brownlee said.
Ma’am? Daniel twisted, glimpsing Brenna over his sore shoulder. Cripes! His butt was hanging in the breeze! Thinking only of covering his exposed flank, Daniel leapt to the cold floor. The gown tumbled away. Too late, he remembered he was no longer tied into it. He lurched, gracelessly grabbing for the vanishing garment.
He missed.
The gown pooled around his ankles. He stifled a groan. He had a way of humiliating himself when she walked in a room.
He lifted his eyes, met hers, and confirmed the worst. Photographers never look away.
She was shamelessly inspecting every exposed inch of him—not even having the decency to avert her gaze when it followed the thin trail of dark hair leading down from his navel.
He cupped his hands over his genitals and straightened with studied dignity.
Beside him, a century too late, T. Brownlee scooped the gown off the floor and plastered it against Daniel’s belly. Daniel accepted it gratefully, freeing one hand, then the other to clasp the flimsy fabric to his groin. His Adam’s apple bobbed in his throat. He could still feel a draft. The gown was hanging limp as a flag on a breezeless morning, not spreading out in the least. He wasn’t sure how modestly covered he was—but he’d be damned if he’d look down there to check. He cleared his throat like a priest calling the congregation to order.
Brenna startled, and lifted her eyes again.
“I need a couple more minutes,” he said.
She nodded, turned on her heel, and left the clinic.
After the door closed, Daniel sagged miserably on the edge of the bed, crumpling the useless gown in his lap.
T. Brownlee rested a sympathetic hand on his shoulder. “I wouldn’t worry, sir. I doubt she noticed the gown was hitched up on the one side.”
He groaned, clutching his aching head. Almost two decades had passed since he’d stood nude before a woman who wasn’t his wife—and this was how he revisited intimacy. Hanging a testicle out in front of his employee. If Brenna had a heart, she would walk away and never contact him again.
Day Three Page 12
