by Callie Hart
Contents
COPYRIGHT
PROLOGUE
ONE
TWO
THREE
FOUR
FIVE
SIX
SEVEN
EIGHT
NINE
TEN
ELEVEN
TWELVE
THIRTEEN
FOURTEEN
FIFTEEN
SIXTEEN
SEVENTEEN
EIGHTEEN
NINETEEN
TWENTY
TWENTY-ONE
TWENTY-TWO
TWENTY-THREE
TWENTY-FOUR
TWENTY-FIVE
TWENTY-SIX
EPILOGUE
UPCOMING WORKS
CALLIE'S NEWSLETTER
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
TELL ME YOUR FAVORITE BITS!
Callie Hart
Copyright © 2016 Callie Hart
BETWEEN HERE AND THE HORIZON
copyright © 2016 Callie Hart
All rights reserved.
No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the author, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law. For permission requests, write to the author, addressed “Attention: Permissions Coordinator,” at [email protected]
This is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to peoples either living or deceased is purely coincidental. Names, places and characters are figments of the author’s imagination, or, if real, used fictitiously. The author recognises the trademarks and copyrights of all registered products and works mentioned within this work.
CHAPTER ONE
AFGHANISTAN
2009
“Get back, Fletcher! Get back! The tank’s gonna blow!”
I was running. Behind me, seven miles of desert stretched out toward Kabul city, glowing in places where burned out military trucks were being devoured by fire. Twisted metal rained down from the sky, on fire and sharper than a razor’s edge, impacting in the dirt. Thud. Thud, thud. Thud. Shrapnel whistled through the air, striking the ground a few feet away from me as I weaved my way through the wreckage. Smoke was biting at my lungs, acrid and burning, making it hard to breath.
“Fletcher! What the fuck, man!”
Behind me, Specialist Crowe was losing his mind. Alternating between shouting into his radio and shouting at me, he couldn’t seem to decide which course of action to take. I’d ordered him to follow, but I could understand why he hadn’t. The situation was more than unsafe; charging headlong into the fire and destruction was a suicide mission, and I knew it. I also knew that my men were trapped inside the upturned vehicle still a hundred feet ahead of me, however, and I knew the truck was going to blow any second. They were going to burn to death if I didn’t help them. I wasn’t going to abandon them to that fate.
“Captain! God, man, stop!”
My heart was surging, my veins overflowing with adrenalin. My boots hit the dirt, left, right, left, right, left, right, my fists pumping back and forth as I sprinted toward the truck that was laying on its roof up ahead. Through the fractured windshield, I could see Hellaman and Wicks still strapped into the front seats of the vehicle, upside down and unmoving. They were either unconscious or dead. Hopefully they were just out for the count, but there was a lot of blood splattered on the inside of the glass. A lot of blood.
Black smoke curled upward from the underside of the truck, and I could already hear the hissing sound of fuel burning and sizzling somewhere. Groaning. I could hear groaning, too.
I reached the truck just as something inside the engine caught fire, and Hellaman came to. His eyes were wide with pain and fear as I dropped down onto my belly next to the driver’s side window, which was smashed out, small cubes of safety glass scattered into the dirt.
“Captain? Captain Fletcher. Shit, I can’t breathe. I can’t…breathe.” His face was deathly pale, and his hands shook violently as he tried to claw at the seatbelt that was digging into his chest.
“It’s okay. It’s okay, Private. We’re gonna get you out of there, okay? Just hold on a moment.” My bowie knife was in my hand. I took it and made quick work of slashing through the webbing holding Hellaman in place. There was nothing I could do to cushion his fall. Slamming into the roof of the truck, Hellaman groaned weakly, and then passed out again, either from pain or from the shock, I didn’t know. I stowed my blade and grabbed him by the shoulders, then wrestled him free through the window. His face was cut; his arms were striped with blood and running rivers of crimson out onto the ground. No time to be gentle, though. No time to be safe. I hooked my hands under his arms and I quickly jogged backwards, dragging him away from the wreckage. Twenty feet was enough.
I ran back to the truck. Flames were visibly licking at the underside of the vehicle now, snaking upward toward the night sky. Wick was still out cold. I ran around to the back of the truck and tried to force the loading doors open, but they were jammed closed, bent and warped, refusing to budge.
“Shit.”
Clang.
Clang.
Clang.
There was someone alive inside. Running out of time. Almost no time left. I positioned myself by the truck’s rear right window, thanking god the thing was already splintered. The bulletproof windows on military trucks were no joke. You could take a semi automatic to them and it would take longer than I had to smash them. The impact of rolling three times had obviously been enough to compromise the glass, though.
“Shield your faces,” I hollered. “Glass, glass, glass!” Bracing, I spun around and smashed the sole of my boot against the window as hard as I possibly could. The glass groaned, fracturing some more, but it didn’t shatter. I kicked again, and again, and again. Finally, the window exploded in a shower of bright shards, giving in under the force of my boot.
“Captain, there’s fuel in here,” someone inside yelled. “Get back!”
I ducked down and lay flat on my stomach again, crawling in through the now empty window frame. Inside the truck, gasoline hung heavy in the air, burning my nostrils and my eyes. Next to me, Roberts was dead, his head twisted at an odd angle, eyes staring, unseeing into the abyss.
On the other side of the truck Private Coleridge, Sam, a nineteen-year-old kid from Houston, was lying on his back on the roof, holding his rifle in both hands, his body convulsing wildly. His eyes swivelled to look at me, but his head remained locked in position, his teeth grinding together.
“What…what happened, Capt’n?” he asked. “We were drivin’ along, and then…everything was…spinning.”
“IED,” I told him. “Desert’s full of them. Come on, let’s get you out of here.”
“I can’t…move. I can’t feel…anything.”
He wasn’t paralyzed. If he were, he wouldn’t be shaking the way he was right now. He was just in shock. A sharp slap to the face would probably go a long way to getting him moving, but there simply wasn’t time for that kind of motivation. Grabbing him by the webbing stitched onto the strap of his pack, which was still on his back, I hauled him to me and then backed out through the window as quickly as I could. The fire was raging now. I dragged Sam back to where I’d left Hellaman and was about to run back to the truck when a loud metallic crack split the air apart, and then a ball of fire rocked the truck, a wall of heat and pressure slamming into my body, sending me reeling back into the dirt.
“Oscar!” Sam yelled. “Oscar’s still alive in there!”
“Fuck.” I was up on my feet and runnin
g. The heat was intense—so intense that I had to shield my face as I grew closer to the wreck. The fire had consumed the underside of the truck, the tires blazing, the gas roaring as the fuel line was engulfed. And I could hear screaming. The kind of blood curdling, awful screaming of a man being burned alive.
My radio headset crackled with static, and then Colonel Whitlock’s voice barked out through the speaker. “Fletcher, do not go back inside that vehicle. Do you hear me? Do not go back inside that vehicle.”
Disobeying a direct order from a colonel was an offense worthy of court marshal. I ripped my headset from my ears and threw it to the ground, ignoring it. Ignoring the consequences. Another blood curdling scream reached me, and that was it. I was on my stomach, crawling into the mouth of hell.
My side pressed up against the frame of the window, and pain tore at me, sinking its teeth into my skin. Heat. The heat was overwhelming, so fierce and violent that there was no oxygen inside the truck. Only smoke and confusion. Only death.
“Oscar!” I called out, reaching with both hands, trying to find him. “Where are you, man?” The truck was only a six-guy transport, but the billowing, rolling clouds of black smoke hid everything. I went by touch until I heard him cry out again, weaker this time, voice riddled with agony. He was at the very rear of the truck. A few seconds was all I had. Any longer and I would either suffocate or burn up myself. My head was pounding, my lungs begging for clean air, and I could feel myself start to drift.
The journey to the back of the truck took an eternity. One hand over the other, I pulled myself around an upturned transport box, and jammed my body in between the narrow gap at the right hand side of the vehicle, reaching out, groping, searching, until I found what I was looking for. A leg. A foot, to be precise. I grabbed hold of it and pulled. An agonised yell filled the truck.
“Ahh, my leg. My leg. It’s fucked!”
“I know. I’m sorry, man. I can’t get you any other way.” I gritted my teeth, and I pulled. In any other situation it would have been a crime that I was handling an injured man this way. The clock was running down, though, and if causing more pain, causing even more damage meant the difference between one of my guys being injured or being dead, then I was going to do what I had to do.
I somehow managed to maneuverer myself so that I was over Oscar—I couldn’t even see his face, the smoke was so thick—and then I started shoving. Six hard pushes and I managed to drive him through the gap in the window frame, out onto the desert floor. His body was ripped away, pulled free by someone else, and then he was gone. I was almost too tired to heave myself free, but I scrounged up my last scrap of energy and I crawled forward, determined to make it out before the entire vehicle was enveloped. Halfway out, my fingers clawing in the dirt, my body lit up with pain. Indescribable. Unbearable. A pain so sharp and breathtaking that I couldn’t even cry out. It felt like something was ripping my body in two. I spun around and looked up to see a burning line of fuel pouring down on me, hitting my side, burning into me. I was on fire.
I kicked and jerked myself out of the truck, ripping at my jacket. Tearing at the material, trying to get it off. The fabric seemed to come away in my hands, and then I was shirtless in the cold, cold desert, rolling on the ground, trying to put the flames out.
The world went black. Someone threw something over me, and then hands were beating at my body, slapping and trying to roll me. A strangled gasp worked its way out of my mouth, but that’s all I could manage. The flames were out. The thick, heavy material that had been thrown over me was pulled back, and Crowe stood over me, face covered in soot and grease, eyes the size of dollar coins. I could barely see him properly. Barely hear the words coming out of his mouth.
Colonel Whitlock appeared next to him, and then the sky was filled with the beating thump of helicopter blades. They spoke for a second, and the thundering drum of the helo overhead dipped long enough for me to make out what Crowe said to Whitlock.
“He didn’t stop, sir. He didn’t stop until they were all out.”
Whitlock scowled. “I can see that, Specialist. He disobeyed a direct order in doing so, too.”
“He’ll be reprimanded?” Crowe asked. He was speaking as if I was no longer present; both of them were.
“No,” Whitlock said sternly. “Ironically, I think Captain Fletcher’s more likely to be honored than punished in this particular instance. Now get him on the chopper before I change my mind. The crazy bastard’s bleeding everywhere.”
CHAPTER TWO
The Law of Odds
I had been waiting for disaster to strike all my life.
It had seemed, for want of a more intelligent, rational explanation, inevitable. Ever since I was old enough to read the paper or tune into the evening news, I had been bombarded with people losing their loved ones in terrorist attacks, cars crashing and burning, trains derailing, bank robberies turned horribly wrong. Every day, some natural disaster or terrifying violence splintered the world in two. Everywhere you looked someone’s life was lying in ruins, irreparably damaged and unrecognizable.
I’d spent the last five years, since I moved out of my parents’ house in Manhattan Beach, California, wondering when it would be my time. When would the bomb go off on my bus? When would I get held up at knifepoint for my fourth generation iPhone? When would I not look where I was going and step out in front of a Mac truck?
It was a matter of playing an odds game, after all, and no matter how hard I tried to avoid thinking that way, it seemed unreasonable to assume that tragedy wouldn’t visit my doorstep at some point in my life. Until that time I was simply holding my breath, waiting. Perhaps it would happen tomorrow. More likely, it would happen today, as the plane I’d boarded to travel from one side of the country to another, all the way from L.A. to New York, crashed into the Hudson. It had already happened once in recent years. No reason why it wouldn’t happen again.
My stomach tumbled over itself as the plane pitched to one side, swinging dramatically to the left, circling wide over New York. Out of the window next to me, the city sprawled in every direction for as far as the eye could see, only coming to an abrupt halt in the distance where steel colored water ate up the horizon.
I was being stupid. I knew the plane wasn’t going to crash, but I couldn’t seem to convince myself that I was perfectly safe when we were hurtling through the air toward so much concrete and glass and metal.
“Miss Lang?” The woman sitting next to me smiled, patting my hand reassuringly. “I just wanted to wish you luck again. I’m sure you’ll do just fine, y’know. These things, these job interviews—” She waved her hand dismissively. “They’re never as scary as you assume they’re gonna be. And you being such a lovely, charming girl and all? I’m sure everything’s going to work out just fine.” She hadn’t stopped talking the entire six-hour flight. I’d had the full rundown, gotten most of her life story in between the marginally unpleasant in-flight meal that came around somewhere over Colorado and the lone glass of gin and tonic I threw back somewhere closer to Indiana: her name was Margie Fenech, fifty-eight years old, and she had three grown sons, all of whom were now married, but boy if they weren’t any one of them would have just loved to date me. She’d been patting my hand and touching my arm like we were old friends for hours now, and to be honest I hadn’t minded. Not one bit. The contact, if anything, had been reassuring.
There were breaks in between her constant chattering, where she’d asked me questions about myself and I felt obliged to respond in kind. She’d easily managed to wheedle out of me my purpose for visiting New York in the middle of the week. She knew all about my parents’ struggling restaurant back in the South Bay. I’d told her of the illusive Ronan Fletcher, about whom I knew a few sporadic facts: he was ex-military, the recipient of the Purple Heart, so obviously a bit of a badass. His wife had died last year, leaving him with two young children to care for. And his personal net worth was pretty up there, somewhere close to the billion-dollar mark. Margie also kne
w that I hated flying, and she knew that I had no stomach for turbulence; in her own way I supposed she was trying to distract me from the abrupt angle to the ground the plane had adopted now that it was coming in for its final approach to land.
“Yes. Yes, I’m sure it’ll be okay. Has to be, right?” I said, flashing a brief, watery smile in her direction.
“Oh sure, sweetheart. If you take care of those little kiddies for six whole months, think about all the money you can save to help out your parents. You said it yourself. You won’t have any expenses. And you won’t know anyone in the city, so you won’t be out wasting your money every night of the week like some youngsters are prone to do.”
I objected to being called a “youngster” on a very deep level. I was twenty-eight years old, past the point in my life where I was out partying and frittering away my money every weekend. I’d been an elementary school teacher for the past five years, paying my bills, saving fifteen percent of my income religiously every paycheck, squirrelling away my funds in order to buy a house. I thought those were all very grownup things to have been doing for such a long time. I’d still have been doing them if the public school I’d been working for hadn’t had to close down due to insufficient government funding, too. I lost my job along with the rest of the school faculty four months ago, around about the same time Mom and Dad pulled me aside and told me, embarrassedly, that the restaurant was going under. They hadn’t asked for help, but I’d seen that they’d needed it. Needed it badly. So there went my savings. All of it. Now I had no more money saved to give them, and no job to make any more, which was how I found myself on this plane next to Margie, on my way to interview for a glorified babysitting job on the other side of the country.
I didn’t know how it had come to this. I should have been able to find another teaching job, but it was the middle of the school year and all positions had been filled. Support teaching was fine, but it was also sporadic and unreliable and I needed a steady income to make sure I could keep Mom and Dad afloat. When the agency I signed up with called and told me about Ronan Fletcher and his two young children, I hadn’t had much of a choice but agree to accept the all-expenses paid trip across the States to meet with this strange, wealthy individual and find out what he’s looking for.
