He couldn’t blame her—he’d walked away from her two months ago in the DRC and hadn’t gotten in touch with her since.
To be fair, she hadn’t exactly been knocking down his door either.
“You know Agent Michaels,” Saint said, acknowledging the elephant in the room as he pulled his own chair closer to Chris in a show of support.
“How are you feeling, Chief Petty Officer Waldron?” She was all business, addressing him formally, although there was an edge of softness to her tone that only Chris could discern. He’d heard that same softness when her naked body had pressed against his.
“Let’s get this over with.” He slid back into the bed and yanked the covers roughly over his bare chest, more as a shield than for any particular modesty, and out of respect for the job she was here for.
To have to talk about this, time and time again, was hard enough. To have to share every last vulnerability in front of Jamie made every primal instinct scream.
It’s not Jamie—it’s Special Agent Michaels standing here watching you.
He rubbed his cheek, bruised and tender from where he landed after the embassy exploded in front of him, remembered cracking his nose back into place on his way to the helo.
She remained standing, nearer to the window than to him. She had a pad on the sill, pen in hand, and she kept her eyes focused on his. “Can you confirm that your team could not save the UN peacekeepers?”
Chris’s hands fisted the sheets tightly. “Do you think you’d be here asking me these questions if the mission had gone well?”
“Are you going to answer the question?”
“You don’t want to fuck with me now—if you’re not going to ask real questions, get out.”
“I’m trying to make this easy on you, Chief Petty Officer.”
“Well, thank you for that, Agent Michaels. I sure as shit appreciate it.” His voice was guttural and Saint shot him a warning look. But he ignored it, too busy watching Jamie.
She didn’t react, didn’t blink. He wanted to see something from her, but she had her game face on.
It was time for him to put his on as well. If nothing else, he owed calm and collected to Mark Kendall.
It was Mark’s own words that came to mind now, a speech he’d given to the new BUD/S recruits during their first Evade and Escape session.
Mark, who’d been captured twice before and escaped, had used his own experiences to pound the recruits under his charge.Capture comes when you least expect it. Sometimes it’s because you lost focus momentarily. Sometimes it’s because you let your guard down when you shouldn’t have .
In real life, letting your guard down happens. In combat, it should never happen.
When anyone would ask Mark if he felt like he had nine lives, he would always answer,No one’s that lucky .
“I’m going to cut the title crap, call everyone by their first names. I know that’s not how you like to operate—”
“I can live with that,” she told him, and at least she was focusing on him and not Saint. Progress.
He fought an urge to drop his head into his hands and rub his temples. “You know the mission was to rescue a group of UN peacekeepers who’d been kidnapped outside Khartoum along the road to the British Embassy. They were with an American ambassador and his wife, who were traveling to a meeting with the Sudanese government because they’re trying to adopt a child from the country.”
“And they had their children with them,” she added.
“Yes.” Losing an American ambassador would be bad enough—losing an internationally beloved movie star and her two small children would’ve put an international spotlight on both the kidnapping and the failure of the United States to protect their own. It would lead to copycat kidnappings and a breakdown in communications at a time when Homeland Security needed to gain much more cooperation from the Sudanese government. “That trip was a nightmare from the beginning—way too much publicity and not nearly enough protection. They didn’t even bring a bodyguard with them to the embassy—a show of good faith.”
“I guess they thought that the publicity would protect them,” Jamie mused. “That and the peacekeepers.”
He didn’t answer that, still couldn’t get over what the ambassador had done in leaving his family wide open like that.
Jamie pressed on. “From what I’ve read, your instructions were specific—you were given an exact time and place to meet the rebel soldiers and make the trade.”
Except there wasn’t going to be a trade. The United States didn’t play that way. The trade was supposed to have been a surprise takeout of the rebels. Nothing Chris and his team hadn’t done before. Working with the Joint Task Force was new, but all of the men were more than qualified to pull the mission off.
“We arrived hours earlier than the meeting,” he explained. “We were on the ground waiting by 0200, and we knew something was off.” In fact, all of them had gotten an instant sense of goatfuck.
That was the problem with covert missions—they were so classified, so secret that sometimes getting help to the correct areas was difficult, if not near impossible.
“But you didn’t leave—didn’t radio anyone for clarification, correct?” she asked.
“No, we didn’t. We made the decision as a group to move forward. We had the cover of night on our side.”
“And by going in early, weren’t you afraid of compromising the lives of the peacekeepers?”
He forced his voice to be dispassionate. “Those men had been dead for a long time—probably since the night they’d been kidnapped.”
The mud-and-brick makeshift structure where the trade was to have taken place was still hot from the warmth of the day, the stench of death overpowering from the second they’d opened the door. Without even closing his eyes, he could still see the faces of the four men who’d been hanged, the blood pulled from their faces. It had taken him several long moments before he’d been able to force himself to look away.
Jamie paused for a second, the rat-tat-tat of muffled machine-gun fire echoing around the building—a near-constant, most familiar sound in this part of the world. “The ambassador and his wife weren’t among the dead.”
“No. There wasn’t anyone else there—I searched the area myself, with Cam. Mark, Rocco and Josiah cut the bodies down and prepared to carry them back to the beach to the LZ.”
But the blast of mortar fire rocked the structure, already precariously built into the mountainside, and the men scattered, looking for cover.
“Rocco was killed instantly,” he said bluntly. “The fire-fight cut off comms on our end. When we got the bodies to the beach, we were given intel that the ambassador and his family were being held at the Sudanese Embassy, which was surrounded by Darfur rebels.”
“Were you wounded?” she interrupted.
“Most of my injuries occurred after the explosion.”
By the time they’d arrived at the embassy—close to dawn—the place was getting rocked. There was as near to a riot as Chris had ever seen, and he and his remaining team members waited quietly by the back wall, assessing the situation.
The carnage was everywhere, victims splayed all along the main area—men, women and children indiscriminately murdered.
But there were signs of life—signs that none of them wanted to see or hear. More rebel soldiers than their group of four could effectively deal with.
Of course, that didn’t matter—each of them was more than willing to go in, despite their injuries from the earlier skirmish.
But Josiah refused that plan. “We’re not going in. It’s suicide.”
Mark hadn’t argued at that time, but Cam had, the pain in his face evident.
Seven hours later, even as Cam and Chris escorted the ambassador and his wife onto the helo, that pain was still there, as if etched forever in the man’s features.
It was the screams that had gotten to them, had most likely been what forced Mark into the building against Josiah’s orders. Chris had a
lways thought he could get lost inside his own mind, the way he did during capture training exercises. But nothing could’ve prepared him for the gut-wrenching sounds of the ambassador’s wife’s cries.
“So Mark Kendall disobeyed a direct order from Josiah.”
“Mark sacrificed himself so we could get the ambassador and his family out of there,” Chris shot back.
“Did everyone agree with his decision?”
“I was the only one he told, until Josiah realized he’d gone. At that point, the three of us took a vote—Josiah still said no to going in but Cam and I disagreed. Josiah wasn’t happy about that—he advised we stay put and refused to come into the embassy with me and Cam. But when I came out the back door, Josiah was there, waiting for me. Ready to give cover.”
“How did things escalate from the rescue to the explosion to what happened afterward?”
What happened afterward…What a nice way to put it. Made it sound like he sat down and had tea after the entire embassy exploded instead of waking up facedown in the dirt, head pounding and ears ringing.
Even now, he still smelled the burning fire, the aftermath of the explosion, as if it was embedded in his senses. “I saw the rebel soldiers carrying Mark’s body out of the embassy. The next thing I knew, the building exploded. When I woke up, most of the building was down—I couldn’t find any of my team members. I circled what was left of the building, looking for signs of life. Still saw none of my team and ascertained that my best course of action was heading to the LZ for backup.
“Who was at the helo when you arrived?”
“Cam.”
“So he’d left everyone behind.”
He let his gaze flick over her coolly for a few seconds, wondering if he could make her squirm at all.
Nothing. Fuck. “His job was to get the ambassador and his wife and children to safety. That was his charge—his order from Josiah.”
“And what’s the last thing you remember about Josiah—the last order he gave you?”
“One minute he was next to me. The next, there was no sign of him.” Chris heard the small break in his voice, blamed the dizzying combination of exhaustion, pain and grief.
“What is the last order you received from Josiah?” she persisted.
He practically shot up in bed, which startled her. “There was none, Jamie. At that point, there were no more orders.”
For Zoo and Lily, always
Too Hot to Holdis a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
A Dell Mass Market Original
Copyright © 2009 by Stephanie Tyler
All rights reserved.
Published in the United States by Dell, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.
DELLis a registered trademark of Random House, Inc., and the colophon is a trademark of Random House, Inc.
eISBN: 978-0-440-33900-7
www.bantamdell.com
v3.0
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Writing a book is never a solitary process, and I have many people to thank for their enthusiasm and unyielding faith in me.
First and foremost, a special thanks to my editor, Shauna Summers, for her wonderful insights and guidance through this entire process.
Thanks to everyone at Bantam Dell who helped make this the best book possible, cover to cover—from Jessica Sebor, who always goes above and beyond to help, to the art department, who rock my world with their awesome covers; and to Pam Feinstein, for being such an amazing copy editor.
Special thanks to Boone Medlock and Bryan Estell, whose military insights and personal stories were invaluable.
Thanks to authors Lynn Viehl, aka PBW, and Holly Lisle, for giving so much of their time to mentor and share their own experiences with so many writers via their blogs. I can’t tell you how much this helped me.
Finally, last but never least, thanks to my fellow authors whom I’m proud to call friends: Lara Adrian, Maya Banks, Jaci Burton, Alison Kent, Amy Knupp, and especially Larissa Ione, for all their support in ways too numerous to list.
Too Hot to Hold Page 30
