“Let your eyes get used to it.” His own voice was a rumble in his chest as his other senses kicked in more fully. There was a raucous battle going on between tree frogs and locusts, and Team Locust was winning.
He could hear the sound of Ashley breathing, too. Her inhales were too shallow—she was breathing too fast.
“Easy,” he murmured.
“Nothing about any of this is easy,” she muttered.
“Rumor has it that Bull Edison wept and wet himself before his team leader night-hike was over,” Jim told her.
She laughed. “Telling me that is inappropriate. And mean.”
“Or I’m creating a false narrative to bolster your self-confidence.”
This time her laughter was a short burst of air but no less musical. “You mean you’re lying to keep me from weeping and wetting myself.”
“I’m convinced that weeping and wetting yourself is something that you would never do. Ever,” he emphasized as his own eyes adjusted and she turned into a dark shape standing on the road beside him.
But she sighed heavily again. “This isn’t going to work,” Ashley said.
“What isn’t?”
“I thought I could run ahead—leave you here with the flashlight. I thought if I could move fast, I could see where this road leads—if it’s an obvious route back to the camp—and then run back to let you know if I’m right. But there’s no way I can run without a light. This darkness is dizzying.”
“So take the flashlight,” he suggested.
“I’m not leaving you alone in the dark.”
“Navy SEAL,” he pointed out.
“I don’t care,” she said.
“Really, Ashley, I’ve been left alone in the dark a lot.”
“Well, I’m not gonna do that to you. Not tonight.” She was absolute, which was interesting. Apparently she was capable of standing her ground—when someone else’s comfort and safety were at risk.
He heard more than saw her shift, but was still surprised when her fingers lightly bumped his shoulder.
“Sorry,” she quickly said.
Jesus. If someone followed this woman around and recorded everything she ever said, the word-cloud created would feature Sorry smack in the middle, in a size four hundred font.
She cleared her throat. “May I have… Are you allowed to let me have the flashlight? You did say I could take it…?”
“Here. Yes.” Jim caught her reaching hand and pressed her fingers around the thing, making sure she had it firmly in her grasp before he let it and her go. Funny, her fingers were cool despite the night’s heat. Cool but not as fairy-princess soft as he’d imagined. She clearly used her hands to do hard work. Huh.
“Thanks,” she said. “Watch your eyes, Lieutenant, I’m turning it on.”
The fact that she’d thought to give him a heads-up was interesting, too. Dunk had given Jim and the other the instructors a variety of warnings about working with civilians, and the most dire involved the use of NVGs—night vision goggles. Be ready, the former senior chief had said, for some numbnuts to flip on the headlights and completely blind you.
Apparently, Ashley DeWitt didn’t fall into the typical SEAL World numbnuts subset.
And yet again, she was surprising Jim as he watched her through squinted eyes. He’d expected her to lead the way down the road in the direction that the van had driven off—at a walking pace so that he and his freaking knee braces could keep up. Instead she used the beam of the light to explore the area at the side of the road. She even shone the light up into the branches of a big banyan tree.
He laughed, and she glanced over at him so he said, “I have no idea what you’re looking for.”
“It’s going to rain,” she informed him as—right on cue—thunder rumbled. And yes, it was louder—the storm was closer—this time. “I was hoping this tree would provide at least a little shelter.”
“Shelter…?” Jim echoed.
She used the light to examine a rather impressive lump of a bench-sized tree root before somewhat gingerly sitting down on it.
“What…?” Jim laughed. “Wait…”
“Exactly,” she said, looking up at him. “That’s my plan. We wait.”
He found himself pointing down the road. “You don’t want to…?”
“Potentially put more miles between us and the camp?” she finished his question for him. “Nope.”
Now he was surprised for a different reason. “Wow, I didn’t peg you as a quitter.”
“I didn’t say quit,” Ashley said. “I said wait. We know we’re five miles from the camp, and we also know the GPS will go off in three hours. I’m banking on the fact that at least one of the other team leaders will go crashing off in the wrong direction and put himself more than five miles from the camp, which means that his team—not mine—will win the black-tank loser’s prize.”
“Sitting still means you definitely won’t win the, you know, winner’s prize,” Jim pointed out.
“Please sit down,” she told him. “I’m turning off the flashlight, both to conserve batteries and to keep mosquitos from being drawn to us.”
As he sat, she plunged them back into darkness as she continued, “I feel pretty confident that the winner’s prize is not within our reach. Realistically. I mean, come on. But not-losing—not coming in dead last—that we can do. With a little luck. Especially when that also means you don’t have to walk any miles tonight.”
“You need to stop worrying about me. I’ll be fine.”
He heard her turn toward him, even though he was surely as much of a dark faceless shape to her as she was to him. She asked, “You really expect me to believe that your knees won’t hurt after five miles—”
“My fucking knees hurt,” Jim snapped, “every fucking minute of my fucking life, regardless of whether I’m sitting still or walking.”
And… scene.
Except there was no curtain, and the frogs and locusts were still screaming their relentless chorus with that basso profundo thunder descant coming more often now. Could a descant be basso profundo, or did it always have to be a soprano line? Jim honestly didn’t know and he filed it under Things he’d Google later, when he was back in his RV icing his knees.
Meanwhile, Ashley’s silent response to his bratty baby-man outburst continued to rack up time on this conversation’s scoreboard.
When she finally spoke, it was to say, “I’m so sorry.”
“Oh, Jesus!” Her use of her favorite word pissed him off all over again. “You don’t have to be sorry for my freaking knees! What you should be sorry for is your bullshit acceptance of some deluded belief that just because you’re a girl you can’t win this thing!”
She countered his loud-and-angry with a voice that was super calm and in control. “I’m a woman, not a girl.”
“Yeah, no, sorry,” he said. “How did you say it?” He spoke in an obnoxiously bad imitation of a high-pitched little girl’s voice, complete with an Elmer Fudd-like speech impediment. “A wittle girl like me will never win a game against all those big stwong boys. Wealistically. I’m just too weak and dumb. I mean, come on.” Back to his real voice. “What the hell was that…? You know what you don’t have? You don’t have upper body strength. Big deal. You have a giant brain and legs that can run forever—”
“And a companion who just admitted he’s in constant pain—which I already knew. I could tell just from looking at your face,” she said, but her voice was still calm, contained. “That was me, doing what I thought a team leader was supposed to do—be aware of my teammate’s limitations. Because I also know that you’re lying, and your knees will hurt worse after walking five miles. I said we couldn’t win this thing, but if I were alone, trust me, I would already be running.”
“Then run,” he said. “I’ll keep up.”
“No,” she said. “But I will let you sit here in the dark. Flashlight’s going on,” she warned as she stood up. “Move into the road. I’m going to run out about a mile, and t
hen I’ll come back. It’ll take me about fifteen minutes.”
Jim stood, too. “Yeah, I can’t let you do that. There’s really only one unbreakable rule for this particular exercise. Separation of team leader and instructor is that one giant no-can-do.”
Ashley stared at him in disbelief.
He shrugged and hit her with her favorite word. “Sorry.”
It was then, with diabolical timing, that thunder clapped almost directly overhead, and the skies opened up in a deluge.
CHAPTER SIX
“You told me to take the flashlight,” Ashley shouted at Jim over the roar of the rain as he pulled her closer to the main trunk of the banyan tree. “You tried to talk me into leaving you here! And now that’s not an option…?”
The branches overhead helped only a little, and she had to close her eyes because the rain was streaming down her face. Without a hat, it was like standing in the bathtub with her face aimed up at the shower head.
“It was actually a good idea,” he shouted back. “I wanted to see if you’d do it. And since you didn’t want to, I didn’t have to shut it down. Until you did, and then I did. Shut you down. Because yeah, we’ve gotta stay together. We can definitely run—I can keep up.”
Ashley opened her eyes to look at him and had to use her hands to shield her face from the rain. “You’re serious.”
He was still holding the flashlight and it made his eyes look very blue. “Yeah. Navy SEAL…?”
It was then, as their gazes were locked with the rain pouring down around them and on top of them that Ashley realized… She may not have had a map, but she had a Navy SEAL.
“What would you do?” she asked him. “If you were in charge.”
“First, it’s called command, if I were in command.”
“That,” she said. “What would you do?”
He was silent but only for a few seconds before he said, “I’d take inventory.”
“Inventory?” she repeated.
“Yeah, you know, what do I have, what do you have…?” he said. “I’d also do an inventory of the team members’ skill sets. You’re a runner, that’s great, but alas, right now I’m an anti-runner, with my knees. But okay, what else are you good at? Arguing a court case—not gonna do us a helluva lot of good out here…”
“What are your skill sets?” Ashley asked him. “An ability to pull an extra baseball cap out of your ass during a thunderstorm would be awesome.”
Jim laughed. “Okay, so you’re way funnier than I thought.”
“What,” she repeated as pleasantly as she could, “are your skills sets?”
“Are you sure that’s the question you want to start with?” he countered.
Ashley rewound their conversation just a bit and… “What are you carrying in your pockets or… wherever… that could help us? I have the GPS tracker thing that’ll let them find us, and basically my clothes and underwear, although right now I’m desperately wishing I took the time to put on a bra. You have… a flashlight… What else?”
His gaze had flickered down to her chest at bra, but her arms were crossed because the rain was chilling. And also because her shirt and PJ top were both white and probably transparent while soaking wet.
“Here,” he said, shrugging out of it. “Take my over-shirt.”
“What I really want is your ass-cap.”
He laughed again. “Sorry. No extra hat, or… ass-pulling-out-of hat-producing skill-set.”
“That’s too bad.” She took his shirt gratefully. It was heavier than hers—more like a jacket than a shirt—and still warm from his body heat. “So what else do you have with you?”
“A power bar,” he told her. “And… drum roll, please… my phone.”
She gasped. Oh my God! “You have your phone? Are we allowed to use it?” She answered her own question. “Yes, because there’s only one rule—that we stick together. So, hand it over—wait! Does it have a water resistant case?” God forbid she got him to hand over his phone, only to have it drown in the ongoing deluge.
Jim was grinning broadly at her. “Navy SEAL,” he said. “And congratulations—”
“Hold the champagne, and be less cryptic,” she ordered.
“SEAL stands for Sea, Air, Land,” he said, still smiling as he handed her his unlocked phone, “so yes, my case is waterproof not just resistant. It’s not dive-proof, though.”
“Not planning to scuba dive any time soon, thanks,” Ashley told him, already manipulating the screen through the plastic cover. He had great cell connection—a surprising full set of bars out here in the middle of nowhere—so she scrolled through his applications to find a map with GPS, and the fastest, shortest route back to camp.
“Brains over brawn,” Jim said. “We just might win this thing.”
* * *
They didn’t win.
But they placed, coming in second, which was significantly better than Bull had done a few months back, when he’d done his Team Leader Night Hike.
Or so Jim had heard.
“Thank you again,” Ashley said, handing him his shirt—still soaking wet—as he’d walked her to the fork in the path leading to their separate RVs.
And yeah, the long-sleeved, button-down shirt she was wearing beneath it was white and glued to her body like she’d inadvertently entered some super creepy corporate version of a wet-T-shirt contest. Don’t look, don’t look… Ah, shit, he’d looked, and it was something he could never un-see, because yes, she was female and kinda freaking perfect in a way that was weird, because he generally liked breasts in the XXL range, and hers were far from that.
But Jim now kept his gaze glued to her face—even though it was shadowed by the new boonie she’d picked up at the Gedunk. He had to clear his throat before his vocal chords would work. “You did good.”
She recognized that her costume had, indeed, malfunctioned exactly as she’d predicted it would, probably due to his insanely intense eye contact, and awkwardly folded her arms across her chest. “With your help. It seems a little unfair that you have to be up by six, too.”
Jim checked his watch. It was just after 0330. And he still had to talk to Dunk… “We get a bit of a break, since our first session’s on the paintball field.”
“Paintball…?” And yes, that was dismay in her voice.
“Don’t worry, we don’t start with a game. That’s not scheduled until later in the day. It’s good,” he tried to reassure her. “It’s a learning session. A lot of sitting and listening. Some target practice. But no running or jumping.”
“Just Bull and Todd clutching weapons of death in their sweaty, misogynistic hands.”
He laughed. “I wouldn’t call a paintball marker a weapon of death. A weapon of humiliation, maybe. Still, bravo. Ability to joke at oh-dark-thirty is a highly rated skill in the SpecOp community.”
“I wasn’t joking,” she said, but she did manage to smile back at him. And damn, that smile lit her up. Even wet and bedraggled, she was prettier than most of the women on the planet—at least the ones he’d bumped into in his life. He was lucky they’d spent most of their one-on-one time tonight in pitch darkness. And he was lucky, too, that their being alone together was unlikely to happen again. Which should have made him feel relieved, but didn’t, damn it.
“Get some sleep,” he said abruptly because the silence had turned slightly odd and charged with… Nope. Not going there. No, no, no. “You did a good job tonight.”
“Thanks.” Ashley finally turned and headed toward her RV, but then turned back. “Your knees—”
He cut her short, forcing a smile. “No worries, I’m fine.”
She was looking at him hard, so he pushed his smile wider. Fine, see? She nodded, but he knew she didn’t buy it.
“See you in the morning, TL,” Jim tossed over his shoulder as he headed back down the trail to the main building.
He tried not to make it obvious, but he watched until she was safely inside of her trailer. Once the door had firmly closed thoug
h, he picked up his pace—as well as let himself limp.
Fine—like that crazy-eyed cartoon dog sitting as the room burned around him….
The mess was dark when he got there, but a light was shining from the open door of Dunk’s office.
Rio was sprawled—yawning—on the sofa, along with Lucky who was frowning at something he was reading on his phone.
“He here?” Jim asked, he being the senior chief—Dunk.
“He’s back in the medical supply closet, with his majesty, King Thomas,” Lucky looked up to say. He was one of a very few people who dared to tease Thomas—he’d first met the young SEAL officer back when the kid was still in high school—but even he didn’t push too hard or far. In a community filled with nicknames—Lucky’s real name was Luke, Rio came from Mario, and Jim got called his unfortunate moniker Spaceman far more often than he liked—Thomas usually wasn’t even shortened to Tom or Tommy.
He was respected that enormously. Even in a squad made up of the best of the best, Thomas King was recognized as being elite.
“Hey, LT.” Thomas appeared from the back room, carrying a bucket of ice, along with some other gear, including towels and a heating pad.
“Uh-oh, did someone get hurt tonight?” Jim asked.
“Nah, I was gathering this stuff for you, sir.”
“Me?”
“Your team leader asked me to get you set up with some ice—and heat, too, if you want it,” Thomas told him.
His team leader…? When had Ashley…? Ah, Jim had come out of the head to see her talking quietly with the hospital corpsman, soon after they’d arrived back in the mess hall, right after she’d bought that new hat.
“I’m fine,” Jim said again, and it made him think about that word-cloud he’d imagined, and Ashley’s Sorry. His size-four-hundred-font phrase would be I’m fine.
Jesus.
“Yes, sir,” Thomas agreed evenly. “But your TL thought a little ice might move you from fine to a little more comfortable.”
“Then she should’ve asked you to bring me a cold beer, too,” Jim quipped.
Thomas smiled as he pushed a bit of the ice aside to reveal a bottle of Sam Adams nestled in the middle of the bucket. “She appears to be a step ahead of you, sir.”
SEAL Camp Page 6
