Wings of Gold Series

by Tappan, Tracy

  Grooves cut into Jason’s brow. “Is there any other place your phone could be?”

  “Why is this happening?” she fired at him.

  “I need you to stay focused, Farrin.”

  But her hysteria wanted nothing to do with logical thought and planning. What it wanted was to consume a fistful of Haldol, then lay in an embryonic knot in a padded room. What it did was keep her mouth running. “You military people come into my aid station, use it as a base for some super-secret mission you tell me nothing about, and now I’m covered in gray matter and blood, and a man”—without looking, she gestured at the dead pilot—“got shot in the head right in front of me!”

  Another blaze of red spread across Jason’s face.

  “Who took my phone?” she demanded, her voice high. “Who’s Kaleem? Who are his friends? Why were your helicopters shot down?”

  Jason’s color grew redder and redder.

  “Who shot them down? Why did—?”

  “Stop it!” Jason thundered at her. “Stop asking me questions!” His eyes went wild, and a dozen muscles in his jaw leapt. “You ask me one more damned question, and I’ll…” His sentence clipped off. Something dark and buried rose up in him.

  Her hysteria slunk away, leaving her breathless.

  Air streamed from Jason’s nostrils. “Ask me one more question,” he said in low, controlled syllables, “and I’ll punch him in the face.” He cut a hard gesture at Shane.

  She cast a look at Shane, and what she saw…didn’t make sense to her.

  This man, this SEAL, who had traveled for miles across Pakistan bearing three gunshot wounds, who’d scrubbed dirt out of those wounds without benefit of pain medication, who’d barely expressed much more than a glimmer of discomfort during it all, now showed pain. It was only the briefest flicker over his face, but unmistakable.

  Shane raked his gaze away.

  Jason abruptly found interest elsewhere.

  Her heart beating out of rhythm, she shot her eyes back and forth between the two men.

  What was it these two weren’t saying?

  Chapter Thirteen

  Twenty-six years ago

  Beacon Hill, Boston, Massachusetts

  “Father is calling us to the living room.”

  Jason spun around on his seat, his thumb automatically pushing pause on the controller of his Sega game. “Is he in his armchair or on the couch?” Stupid question.

  Terror was written all over Danny’s face, and that meant, no, Spencer wasn’t in the comfortable armchair he sat in when he read the newspaper and relaxed after a tough day of doing brain doctor stuff. He was on the couch, the place he sat when either Danny or Jason had been bad and were going to get grilled about it.

  “Th-the couch.”

  Jason leapt to his feet. “Okay, don’t worry.” He flung on his bathrobe. “It’s gonna be okay.”

  Danny’s lower lip trembled.

  Yeah, stupid again. Neither of them was ever okay during a grill session. Because there was no way to win against Spencer, just no way. Jason wasn’t even sure if there was a way to lessen whatever punishment Spencer wanted to inflict on them. His father seemed to pre-decide these things.

  But it was impossible for Jason not to at least try and make his little brother feel better about what was going to happen. Danny was seven, two years younger than Jason—way too young to be dealing with a grill session. “Can you think of anything you might’ve done, Danny?”

  “I-I didn’t do anything,” Danny stuttered out, his face pale.

  “Are you sure?” Jason tightened the belt on his robe. “Did you mess with any of Father’s woodworking tools, maybe?”

  “No.”

  “Did you go in his desk? No, sorry,” Jason added quickly, “of course you didn’t.” Mistakes were made only once, and a while ago Danny had borrowed a pencil out of Spencer’s desk…and accidentally nudged another pencil out of its precise grouping with the others. Danny hadn’t been allowed to go on a Cub Scouts camping trip he’d been planning for a month because of that.

  “N-no,” Danny answered anyway, getting shakier, probably remembering the Cub Scout punishment, too. “I-I’ve been trying to think, Jason, but there’s nothing.”

  “Okay. It’s okay.” Knowing ahead of time what bad thing they’d done never helped, anyway. Nothing ever did. “Let’s just get down there.” He hurried to his bedroom door. “Don’t say anything extra, all right? And don’t cry.” Crying only made Spencer meaner.

  “You talk, okay, Jason?” Danny’s chin trembled.

  “I will. Don’t worry.” A dangerous ball of tears wedged into his own throat. He’d do anything to save his brother from this, but it didn’t matter if he wanted to do all the talking or not. Spencer was in charge of how things went.

  Downstairs, the two of them marched single file into the family living room.

  Spencer followed their progress, his eyes extra-shiny, his lips stuck together. He held an alcoholic drink.

  Their mother was seated on the other end of the couch from their father. Her lashes were down. She was examining her fingernails.

  Jason hid a swallow. He headed for his assigned chair across from the couch—he and Danny knew exactly where to go—sat down, and waited.

  “Boys,” Spencer addressed them both coolly, “do you know why I’ve called you here?”

  Sweat slicked Jason’s upper lip. This sounded like a simple question, but Spencer always laid booby traps beneath everything. A no answer would earn a lecture about the necessity of paying proper attention to oneself. A yes answer generally led to more questions about how bad they’d been exactly.

  Jason stalled for time. “Um…”

  Danny squirmed.

  Spencer gave Danny a chilly stare.

  “We’re not sure, sir,” Jason leapt in.

  “No?” Spencer took a sip of his drink. A slow sip. How did he make drinking look mean?

  “You’ve misbehaved.” Spencer glared. “I feel quite certain you know this, Jason. Would you care to admit to what you’ve done?”

  This one should have Warning! spray-painted all over it. Once, Jason figured that confession might earn him points for owning responsibility—one of his father’s favorite lectures. So he admitted, yes, he’d accidentally moved some Campbell soup cans out of their assigned rows while making lunch. Turned out what had actually displeased his father was Jason forgetting to realign the pattern on the small towels in the upstairs bathroom after drying his hands. His dad imprisoned Jason’s two Labradors in a kennel for a month for Jason’s double crime. From that point on, Jason dried his hands on his pants after washing—and never said anything extra again.

  “No, sir.”

  “You’re choosing to be obstinate?” Spencer accused.

  “No, sir. I-I…” Stay calm, stay calm. “I just don’t know what I’ve done.”

  “You would be lying if you told me you didn’t know what you’ve done.”

  Giving in to a spurt of panic, Jason darted his eyes around the room. Was anything wrong in here? If there was, it wouldn’t be his fault. It was his mother’s job—not even the maid’s—to check this room before Father came home. Every night Georgette went around with a ruler and measured everything, making sure the family photos on the mantel were exactly three inches from the wall, the candlesticks on the coffee table five inches apart and in a perfect triangle. Whatever needed to be done. Not that it would save Jason if she had been the one to mess up. The idea of his mother taking the blame for anything was a joke—not the kind worth laughing about. The kind that made him want to punch stuff.

  “Your play at ignorance,” Spencer continued, more and more cold, “is not making this situation any easier on you.”

  Jason tried really, really hard not to cry, but tears burned at the back of his eyes anyway. What was he supposed to say to make his father happy?! He never knew how to answer all of Spencer’s stupid questions!

  “A glass”—the word punched out of Spencer’
s mouth—“was left on the kitchen counter.”

  What? Astounded, he shot a glance at Danny. No way had his brother made such a rookie mistake. He silently asked to be safe. Did you…?

  Danny shook his head.

  Jason looked back at his father. “We didn’t do it, sir.”

  Spencer exhaled. From his nostrils. Like a dragon. “Do you know what it is to be a good citizen, Jason?”

  He didn’t know how to answer! He sweated, his brain feeling like a stalled-out Sega game—intact but incapable of processing. Stop asking me questions!

  “A man—a good man—owns responsibility for his actions.” Spencer set his cocktail glass on the center of a coaster on the coffee table, taking an extra moment to make sure it was dead center. “What is it I must do to make you understand this?”

  Snot ran down from Jason’s nose onto his upper lip. He quickly swiped it away with the sleeve of his bathrobe. Please don’t take my dogs away from me again.

  “Spencer, darling,” his mother put in, “Jason has been in his room sick all day, and Daniel was at school and then Cub Scouts. It couldn’t have been either of the boys.”

  Jason’s mouth hung open for a couple of heartbeats before he snapped it shut. Did Georgette just defend them?

  Sniffing, Spencer gave her a flat look.

  Jason’s friends said his mom was pretty, and he guessed so—she was slim and blond. But Jason had never seen her manage to pull off any kind of influence over Spencer…no matter how often she called him “darling.”

  “Are you saying you did it, Georgette?”

  His mother swept a don’t-be-ridiculous hand gracefully through the air. “The maid brought her son with her to work today, darling. It must have been her boy.”

  Oh, no. Jason kicked himself on the inside. Shane did go downstairs for a drink of water today, but Jason forgot to trail him. They were having so much fun together, Jason hadn’t been thinking of bad stuff.

  Spencer’s lips stuck together again, lines spearing out from around his mouth. “And whose duty is it to monitor a guest’s actions, Georgette?”

  Georgette said nothing.

  Spencer picked up his drink and squinted at the ice, melting it with his eyes, if you asked Jason. “I’ve been thinking, Georgette, that three horses are more than you need. We should consider selling at least one.”

  Jason began to shake. He jammed his fists under his thighs to try and stop himself. But it was impossible. Here’s where it happens… His chest shriveled up and his stomach shrank into a small knot. His mother was going to throw him under the bus.

  “You’re right, darling.” Georgette concentrated on her fingernails again. “Jason should have seen to his friend.”

  Spencer returned his glacial eyes to Jason.

  He should pay attention now. He was about to have something important ripped from his life as punishment. But he could only stare with all the hatred in his heart at the woman who loved her horses more than her sons.

  Chapter Fourteen

  With a short motion of his wrist, Jason slung his rifle strap over his shoulder and stepped back from Farrin, who was currently making an art out of gawking at him like he was a horned beast about to gore her.

  A glottal sound of self-disgust escaped his throat. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d checked out like this. Numbing out he did, definitely, but that was different. For the former, he lined his brain with cushions and took a breather inside the protective space from whatever was annoying him. This current check-out was his twisted psyche taking control after he’d landed dead nuts in the middle of his family living room on Beacon Hill.

  Unacceptable.

  One of the bedrocks of his existence was being able to keep an iron lid on unwanted thoughts. Hell, the last unauthorized trip down the Magnificent Mile of Memories he’d taken was ten years ago, right after graduating from SEAL training, when he was called into the CO’s office to find four Navy captains waiting for him. He’d assumed he was about to face an inquisition—all too uncomfortably close to a grill session—not be offered a career change that would turn out to be the best and worst thing in his life. Another memory he didn’t care to contemplate right now, not with Shane back in his life and being a cornhole.

  Why now? What was allowing warped thoughts to get past the scar tissue he’d formed around them long ago, necessary defenses to keep all his shit in solitary confinement, sealed off from the rest of his basic brain functioning? His only excuse—and he hated to make one—was that having missed saving his copilot, Paul, by ten seconds had tapped out his already exhausted reserves.

  Ten measly seconds of faster running from Farrin’s tent to the post-op ward—maybe five seconds—and he would’ve been able to blow a barn door out the back of the laundryman’s head before the ass-wad shot Paul. Missing by such a small margin was turning out to be the putrescent cherry on top of a triple scoop of crap-fuck-flavored past nineteen hours. So when Farrin started firing a bunch of unanswerable questions at him, well…

  It hadn’t exactly been champagne wishes and caviar dreams.

  “I’m sorry I was short with you,” he apologized to Farrin. He probably owed Shane an apology, too, for threatening to coldcock him, but the man wasn’t getting one. Due consequences for acting like a cornhole and all. “Your questions are valid, but right now we need to concentrate on evacuating.” Get back to business. Yeah. Then maybe he could pretend this ugliness never happened: his sanity check-out, as well as firing the bullet that had unfastened the face of the dirtbag laundryman. Although Farrin standing in front of him covered in blood and gunk was going to make forgetting that ugliness a whopper of a chore. He gestured brusquely at the empty lockbox. “Is there any other place your satellite phone could possibly be?” he asked again.

  Farrin swallowed a couple of times. “Nowhere that I know of. The lockbox is the only place I kept it.” She pushed the surgical cap off her head, the gesture seeming absentminded and habitual…except for the shaky hand part. “It was there this morning. I made a call from it to find out what happened to the people in the helicopter crashes.”

  “All right. Are there any other means of—?” Helicopter crashes… His brain skidded into a sidetrack, a nagging feeling returning. In his memory, he replayed the failed mission, again hearing Mikey’s voice blasting through his earpiece.

  Ambush underway! Abort the mission! Repeat. Abort!

  Then—wham!—RPGs struck, and too many fine American men got killed.

  Drawing his brows together, Jason studied the dead laundryman, face-up on the ground with his arms flopped into a stick-’em-up position, the top of his head looking like a rotten watermelon.

  The sun broke from the clouds in Jason’s brain, and he knew what had happened. “This jackass”—he hacked a hand at the dead man—“is responsible for your phone, Farrin. I’m guessing he’s been using it for a long time now, and today, for some reason, he decided to outright steal it.”

  His words didn’t have any appreciable impact on her at first. She just stood in the silence of her own working-it-all-out, her eyelashes moving in a kind of irregular, flappy way. “What…what makes you think so?” she finally said. “If you don’t mind my asking?” she added hastily.

  More unpleasant embarrassment. “Earlier you wanted to know why those two helicopters were shot down. The same thing’s been bothering me. My team was on a mission to rescue the four American hostages taken from the Mangla Dam, and our helos were fired upon the moment we arrived on target…as if the bad guys knew we were coming and were waiting for us. Now I believe those slimeballs were waiting for us. This fuck-nut laundryman called ahead, using your satellite phone, to warn his terrorist buddies about our imminent arrival.”

  “Dear heavens…” Farrin sank down onto the bed again, her surgical cap fisted in her lap. “Kaleem was spying for them?”

  “Yes, or he’s one of them himself. Best guess is he’s working with JEM.” Jaish-e-Mohammed, or JEM, was the extremist group who
’d kidnapped the Americans. The bad guys had been negotiating an exchange with the US, offering to swap the four hostages for some of their JEM cohorts out of Guantanamo. Clearly JEM hadn’t been too happy about a bunch of US Navy SEALs trying to snatch the hostages back minus the trade. Now the whole situation was—

  Jason went still.

  Silent tears were pouring down Farrin’s face, washing flesh-toned streaks out of the blood on her cheeks. She met his gaze. “Y-you said don’t let anyone into the post-op ward. Only you. But I let Kaleem in, and now your copilot is dead.”

  Jason stared at her for the longest heartbeat known to man, no words coming. The galaxy flipped over; it must have. If he had any cell phone coverage, he would’ve checked Instagram to see if any pictures of pigs flying were posted. Because here was a woman taking responsibility for her actions, instead of trying to sandbag another to save herself.

  “It’s not your fault.” His tongue went weird around the sentence, like he had a mouthful of Boggle alphabet cubes and was trying to make words out of those—he was reasonably certain he’d never cut a woman any slack before. “You couldn’t have known about your laundryman.”

  She dragged the heel of her palm across one cheek, making a worse mess of herself. “I’ve supervised other aid stations in volatile locations. I’m not new to this.”

  “IHMR vetted your laundryman, though, right?” Any large international organization would thoroughly investigate TCNs, or Third-Country Nationals, used as local labor. “And I bet he was the nicest guy, right? Never gave you an ounce of trouble in all the time he worked for you.”

  Her brow crinkled, the expression creating furrows in the wet blood on her forehead.

  He felt the strangest urge to stroke his thumb over the soft pleats, smooth them away. “Right?”