by Dees, Cindy
“Any brilliant ideas on how we should proceed?” she asked, leaning her head back against the headrest and closing her eyes.
“That’s a hell of a question, given that I had to let my target go so I could run into that house and save your neck. Again.” He thumped both hands on the steering wheel in anger. “I had him, dammit. I had visual on the bastard. I’ve been tracking him for months!”
There wasn’t anything she could say to that. She was grateful—beyond grateful—that he’d come into that house to let her know it was on fire. She had lost situational awareness and likely would not have realized what was happening in time to save herself.
And then, when she’d gone back up to the kitchen and that smoke had been so thick and black—she couldn’t have seen her hand even if it was touching the end of her nose—she’d had no idea she would be completely, totally blind. It had been one of the scariest moments of her life as flames and heat and embers swirled around her and she had no idea how to get out.
Thank God Mike had been there. She didn’t want to think about what would have happened if he hadn’t grabbed her hand and led her to safety.
He spoke heavily. “We need to get your samples to a lab and that thumb drive to a techie expert. Let’s sincerely hope they give us a lead on how to pick up the trail of my Palestinian again. If not, I’m screwed.”
“What do you mean?” she asked in quick alarm.
He glanced over at her sourly. “I disengaged my pursuit of an international terrorist to go into that house and save you. I’ll be thrown out of the Navy on my ass for this, if I’m lucky.”
“If you’re not lucky?”
He shrugged. “Court-martial. Jail time. Dishonorable discharge.”
“Because you saved my life?” she squeaked.
“I was specifically tasked with finding and stopping a dangerous terrorist. I chose to ignore that imperative. I disobeyed orders.”
“I’m sure the government won’t take that extreme a view of the situation—”
“I’m not a civilian like you. I’m a military officer. Duty, honor, country, and the whole nine yards. I was derelict in my duty. Period.”
She subsided against her seat. Well, rats. That sucked. “Is there anything I can do to help?” she offered in a small voice.
“My decision. My problem.”
His stoic attitude made her frown. “You don’t have to suffer the consequences entirely alone, you know. I’m here for you.”
“What? You’ll send me brownies in jail?” he snapped. “I didn’t take you for the sort who bakes.”
She didn’t try to talk with him anymore. Chances were the data she’d collected would be extremely valuable in understanding what exactly had been going on in that lab. She’d managed to copy what looked like the lab notes for the past few months. And to have snagged actual tissue samples, in the form of those dead mice, was a major coup. But she didn’t bother trying to explain all of that to Mr. Grumpy Pants.
Mike seemed determined to anticipate the worst, and far be it from her to correct his negativity. If he wanted to heap all the responsibility on his own shoulders, so be it. Except even as she thought it, an urge to help him, to protect him from harm, startled her.
Once they crossed the frontier, they would be marginally safer. Marginally being the operative word. The road passed out of the bush and onto wide-open savannah that stretched away to the edge of forever. The sky was a gigantic dome overhead, stained with oranges, roses, and lavenders as the sun slid beyond the far horizon. More importantly, this region marked their return to North Sudan. She breathed a small mental sigh of relief.
“God, Africa’s big,” she said in a hush. “Sometimes I forget just how big.”
The Dark Continent lived up to its name as night fell quickly. The sky faded to purple, then navy, then velvety black. She was surprised when Mike continued to leave the headlights off, however, driving only by the scant starlight starting to twinkle overhead. Must be more of his aversion to drawing attention to their presence.
“Please tell me you know this road,” she said nervously.
He looked surprised. “Oh. Yeah. I drove it all the time when I was working with…an American contractor…down on the border.”
Contractor, her foot. He’d been working with mercenaries. Probably hired to observe the informal war raging along the disputed border, or maybe to smuggle supplies and/or people one direction or the other, or maybe hired to tip the scales in the conflict by helping one side or the other.
She was well aware of her government’s proclivity for using civilian contract guns-for-hire to do dirty jobs and give Uncle Sam plausible deniability when it came to certain unsavory missions and operations. Guys like Mike were assigned to “watch” and “observe” but not to interfere or, heaven forbid, get caught participating in the wet work and black ops run by civilian mercenaries.
They drove for a good hour across that gigantic plain, and then the road passed into light forest interrupted by plentiful tilled fields. Mike turned on the headlights and proceeded more normally toward the north.
Abruptly, he broke the silence. “When we get back to civilization, we need to follow the money. It always comes back to that. Someone’s got to pay for the bullets, bombs and bad guys.”
“And bacteria, while we’re alliterating B’s,” she added.
One corner of his mouth turned up sardonically. He leaned toward her, and her pulse spiked like crazy in spite of her resolve to let what had happened in Khartoum stay in Khartoum. After the epic sex they’d shared, she’d have thought she would be used to his nearness by now. But apparently not.
He reached behind her seat with his free hand and emerged with a two-liter water bottle. “It’s the only one I’ve got left, but we can share it.” If it was a peace offering, or at least a truce offering, she took it gratefully, murmuring her thanks as she lifted the bottle out of his hand.
Greedily, she guzzled her half of the bottle of tepid water and passed the rest to him. She watched, enthralled as the muscles of his throat worked with each swallow he took. There was nothing boyish about him. He was all man, muscular and in his prime. “How old are you?” she asked.
He looked over at her startled, tossed the empty plastic bottle over his shoulder, and replied, “Thirty-four. You?”
“Twenty-five.”
“What’s a baby like you doing out in the field?”
“How old were you when you went on your first Special Ops assignment?” she demanded.
“Nineteen. But I was a SEAL and dumber than dirt. I had a team to save me from my general lack of age and experience.”
She shrugged, her point made. They drove for a while more in silence, thankfully a little less tense than before. Mike followed crappy little dirt tracks generally north and east across North Sudan.
“How’d you get into this line of work?” he asked her.
“I kind of fell into it. My dad raised me and my brother by himself. He was a Marine. If you met him, you’d know how I ended up here.”
Mike made a sound of commiseration. “My old man was a Green Beret. Ex-military men can make for high intensity parents, eh? That’s one way of describing it.”
“Did he teach you how to shoot?”
“Yup.”
“Hell of a teacher.”
“Thanks.” She was surprised by the compliment from him.
“What happened to your mother?” Mike followed up.
“She took off when I was a baby.”
“Were you that rotten a baby?” he asked humorously.
She snorted. “I don’t remember. But I suspect it had more to do with my father being crazy than with me.” Oh, how she’d raged at her mother over the years for abandoning her with him. If her mother couldn’t stand being with the man, what made her think her daughter would be able to tolerate him, either?
Of course, if her mother had taken Piper with her, no telling how different her life would be. One thing she knew for sure. She
wouldn’t be sitting in a Jeep with Mike now, bumping across the African bush, wearing combat boots and toting a pistol. Would she be a girly girl? Wearing pretty clothes and make-up and doing something traditionally feminine? Although, what the feminine thing might be, she had no idea.
“Are we headed back to Khartoum?” she asked cautiously.
“I’m burned in K-town. Can’t go back there.”
As was she. Maybe more than she’d realized until today’s events. “Where to, then?”
“Djibouti. U.S. Navy operates out of there to fight pirates along the Somali coast. We can catch a hop stateside from there.”
And get a hot shower. And a decent meal. And some sleep. She couldn’t decide which one sounded more orgasmic.
They stopped for gas in a medium-sized village, punctuated by Mike muttering strict orders for her to stay in the car at all costs. What she could see of the village looked a lot like the worst slums in Khartoum.
Mike handed her a greasy paper bag and a couple more bottles of water when he got back in the Jeep, and he pulled out quickly. A half-dozen young men were just converging on the gas station when he peeled out. Good thing she hadn’t asked for a potty break.
She did ask for one once the village’s lights had retreated well behind them, though. He pulled over and stopped the engine. “Don’t go more than ten feet from the rear tire, Piper. And make sure your pistol’s in your hand while you pee.”
“Jeepers, how dangerous is this place?”
“Thugs aren’t the only problem at night. That’s African bush out there. Critters who think humans are tasty snacks abound. Make it fast.”
She had never gotten out of gear, peed, and gotten back into gear half that fast in her life. Visions of lions chowing on her tender tush sent her racing for the safety of the jeep in a matter of seconds.
The paper bag turned out to hold some sort of fried, falafel-like cakes made of ground grain and a bean-based paste. They were tasteless and greasy, but they eased the gnawing sensation in her stomach.
The border crossing into Eritrea, a narrow strip of a country running along the north side of the horn of Africa, was uneventful. Better to transit this relatively peaceful country than Ethiopia to the south, she supposed. Whatever documents Mike showed the border guard satisfied the guy completely. The soldier didn’t even ask to see her passport. As Mike accelerated away from the checkpoint, she asked, “How’d I get through there so easily?”
“American dollars grease palms effectively in this part of the world. I slipped a hundred dollar bill inside my passport when I handed it to him.”
She wouldn’t have had any clue that a bribe was expected. Why didn’t somebody brief her on that back in Washington? Mike’s comment from the night they’d met danced through her brain, not for the first time. Did her bosses want her to fail out here? To die? To prove that girls were not as good as boys at hostile surveillance ops? It sounded like the sort of thing her father would do. Her jaw hardened as she stared out the window at the blackness.
She fell asleep sometime during the drive and woke up with a stiff, sore neck when a car horn honked nearby. They were in a big city, albeit mostly deserted at whatever late hour this was. She surreptitiously wiped a little drool from the corner of her mouth and prayed she hadn’t snored while she was out.
“You will need to show your passport at the next checkpoint,” Mike commented as he slowed and turned into a heavily fortified driveway leading to some sort of sprawling, fenced industrial area.
The guard, in civilian clothes, was American with a thick southern drawl. He dropped ma’ams and sirs in every sentence and stood ramrod straight while he inspected their passports. If that guy wasn’t military or recently retired from the military, she was a monkey’s uncle.
Whatever this compound was, it closely resembled a military base, complete with temporary quarters along the lines of a very clean, very sparsely furnished hotel. Before long, she and Mike each had a room assigned to them. She’d kind of hoped they would stay together. She really liked sleeping with him—or not sleeping as the case might be.
“I’m going to try and scare us up some food,” Mike announced. “I’ll stop by your room in a while. You wanna take a shower?”
The mere thought of a hot shower made her shudder in delight. She hadn’t had a real shower in weeks. Even the bath at Mike’s place, although heavenly, hadn’t really steamed her clean all the way to the bottoms of her pores. “You have no idea,” she breathed.
He grinned and left the building while she made a beeline for her room. She stripped and climbed under the hottest shower the building’s hot water heaters could deliver up. It was even better than she’d anticipated. It pounded out the soreness from her muscles and finally eliminated the gritty feeling she’d had ever since she hit the ground in Sudan last month. God, she hadn’t thought she would ever feel clean again.
She wrapped herself in the largest bath towel, turbaned her hair in a smaller towel, and headed out to the bedroom. A white plastic grocery bag stood on the lone table. Frowning she peeked into it. A couple of big water bottles, a box of snack crackers, some jerky sticks, a can of children’s pasta, and a pouch of dried apples were inside. And a bottle of after-sun lotion. Aww, he’d noticed her sunburn. God bless Mike.
She plunked down on the bed and picked up the TV remote. Lord, she’d missed electronics. She pointed the device at the TV and sighed in contentment as a 24-hour weather channel came on. It would be lovely to sit here and watch repeats of the forecast over and over for the next year or so.
She snacked on the food, downed the water, and finally declared herself human once more. Along with hydration and nourishment came alertness, and her thoughts turned back to the case. What was up with those dead mice? Would they hold the key to the research being conducted at the secret lab?
She headed for her backpack to pull out the plastic bags and refrigerate the tiny corpses. She rooted around in her stuff but didn’t spot the bags. She tried the outer pouch. Huh. Not there. Frowning, she dumped the entire contents of her pack on her bed. A whole bunch of gear scattered across the bedspread, but no dead mice in bags. They were kind of hard to miss, after all.
What the heck? She’d tucked them in the pack herself. Had they fallen out somewhere in their mad dash and hours of crawling around? She backtracked in her mind. No, she had zipped the main pouch before they’d fled the fire. And this was the first time since that she’d opened the thing.
At least she still had the thumb drive. She reached into the side pocket where she’d stowed it and froze, her hand buried inside the empty pocket. What the hell? Surely she hadn’t lost both of the key pieces of evidence from the lab.
Her gaze snapped to the grocery bag of food. Mike. He’d been in her room while she was in the shower. Had he stolen her evidence? In disbelief, she searched her room from top to bottom, and after nearly ten minutes with no sign of dead rodents or any thumb drives, she could only conclude that the bastard had, in fact, stolen every bit of intel they’d brought out of the secret lab.
Fury coursed through her. She was going to kill him.
She should have known something was up when all of a sudden he got over being mad at her in the car and had waxed all chatty with her again. He must have plotted this theft hours ago, the rat bastard!
She yanked on her filthy clothes, not even caring as grit and sand grated against her freshly clean skin. She stomped into her combat boots and didn’t bother to lace them before storming out of her room and back to the front desk.
“May I help you, Miss?” a young man with bright eyes and high-and-tight hair worthy of a marine recruit asked.
“I need Mike McCloud’s room number,” she demanded.
“We don’t have a Mike McCloud staying here, ma’am.”
She took a closer look at the clerk. He sure as hell looked like the kid who’d checked her in. “You did check me in earlier, right?”
“Yes, ma’am. At oh-one-oh-four hours.”
“The guy with me. What room is he in?”
“What guy, ma’am?”
She stared at the kid’s stone-faced expression. “Very funny. You two have had your joke. I have to talk to him right now. He took something from me and I want it back.”
“I don’t know who you’re talking about, ma’am.”
She planted her palms on the counter and leaned across it aggressively. She spoke low, her voice vibrating with fury. “Whatever he paid you, I’ll double it. Tell me where to find him, or else I swear I’ll bang on every door in this building until I find him.”
“I promise, ma’am. He’s not here!”
“Hah. So you admit you know who I’m talking about. Where is he? I’m a CIA field officer. Don’t make me pull rank on you and call in my superiors. They’re some severely heavy hitters.” She didn’t technically work for the CIA, but the aid organization she did work for, Doctors Unlimited, fed data to the CIA and took requests from the agency as to where to send their medical “observers”. And right now, she was too pissed off to split hairs.
The kid’s stonewalling wavered. “He’s not here, ma’am. He left about five minutes after you checked in.”
“Where did he go?”
A shrug. “I don’t know. He just left with all his gear in a big hurry.”
Her jaw dropped. He’d gone? As in totally gone? Abandoned her here, alone? Her mouth snapped shut. Murder exploded in her heart. She was going to find him, and then shove the mice down his throat and the thumb drive up his ass.
“Did he give you any idea where he was going?”
“No, ma’am. He did drive away in his vehicle, however.”
“I need a phone. And the number for the front gate’s guard shack.” The young man was eager to help her, and a quick call confirmed that Mike had left the compound nearly an hour before, destination unknown.
Crud. He could be headed anywhere by now. Was he even who he said he was? Or had he played her for a colossal fool all along? Surely, he didn’t work for the same terrorists who’d paid the Scientist and/or were doing business with the PHP guys. Horror flowed through her.
“I need an overseas phone line,” she announced. “Where can I get one?”
