by Julie Rowe
But he could offer her support. “Come here,” he whispered. “Let me hold you.”
Yeah, he was an ass, because he was totally taking advantage of her kindness and empathy for him, so he could comfort her.
She came to him without hesitation, without question, wrapping her arms around him and burying her face in the hollow of his shoulder. She didn’t cry, but she held on tight. So tight her arms shook.
A crunch on the rocks behind him accompanied by a whisper of sound.
Sharp glanced over his shoulder to find Smoke there, his face set in cold lines.
“March is gone,” Sharp told him.
Smoke only nodded, then turned away to stand guard on the entrance.
“I’m so tired of my friends dying,” Grace said to him, her voice rough with tears. “So tired of killing people.” She pulled away and wiped her face with her sleeve. “No one is going to win. There is no win.”
He didn’t say anything. What was there to say? She was right.
“When did he pass?”
“A few minutes before you got back. I held his hand. I told him he could go, and he went.”
He buried his face in her hair and whispered, “Thank you. Thank you for being there for him.”
“If it had been you, I’d have yelled and screamed at you to stay.” She pulled back far enough to meet his gaze. “I wouldn’t have let you go.”
A glad sort of fierceness filled him at knowing she would have fought for him. He smiled savagely. “Good.”
He hugged for another moment, then pulled away to frown at her. “You promised not to take risks.”
“I didn’t.”
“You climbed a couple stories and anyone looking in your direction would have seen you.”
“There was a sniper up there taking shots at you.”
“I knew he was there.”
“He was trying to flush you out so his friends could kill you.”
“I knew that too.”
She growled at him. “So, I’m just supposed to stay out of sight, stay safe, while you play hide-and-seek with a bunch of men who are trying their best to kill you?” She poked him in the chest. “Fuck that.”
Her growl and willingness to have his back had his cock at fucking attention. If they survived, he wasn’t going to let her out of bed for a week. “You promised you’d take no unnecessary risks. That risk was unnecessary.”
“I can’t read your mind, Sharp. I saw a situation and knew I had to do something. The least you could do is trust me enough to know what I’m doing.”
“I do trust you.”
“Oh yeah? Then what’s with the I’m-the-soldier-you’re-the-asset routine?”
“Grace—” He cut himself off. They didn’t have time to argue. “Just leave it for now. We’ve got to get back to the base.”
She scowled at him for a second, then nodded her head once in agreement. “I thought a helicopter was going to pick us up?”
“The base came under fire about ten minutes ago. No one can land or take off. We’re on our own for now.”
“Our friends,” Smoke said, “left a couple of trucks.”
She stared at him, then at Sharp. “But we didn’t accomplish anything here.”
“We know this was a trap that almost worked.”
“It did work. Clark, Runnel and March are dead.”
“Grace. We expected to find a lab here. We didn’t. I think this whole place was intended as a distraction at the least or a deadly trap at best.”
“So, if we didn’t find the lab here,” she said slowly. “Where is it?”
“Exactly.”
She looked at him, tilted her head to one side and asked, “If it were you planning this attack with anthrax spores inside grenades, how would you do it?”
Both men froze, their gazes unfocused, considering her question.
Sharp answered first. “The boy who cried wolf.”
“Yes,” Smoke agreed.
“Distraction. Distraction. Distraction. Direct attack,” Sharp explained.
A simple plan.
Simple plans work more often than complicated plans.
“Where are we in the pattern?” Grace asked.
Sharp ticked one finger off. “The attack on the village.”
Smoke ticked off the next one. “The deaths of Cutter and the two marines at the base.”
Grace ticked off the last one. “This decoy slash trap.”
“The direct attack is happening now,” Sharp said.
They stared at each other for three long seconds.
Grace swallowed. “Where did you say those trucks are?”
* * *
Sharp hung on to the door as Smoke yanked the steering wheel of the ancient half-ton he drove to the right then the left in order to miss a rock that would have hung them up. He followed no road, drove straight across country in a direct line, or as direct as he could manage, toward the base at the fastest speed he dared.
All three of them would be lucky to arrive with their bones intact and their insides not upside down.
Sharp was ready to rearrange the insides of the enlisted moron on the radio. He’d explained that the base was in danger of attack, a second anthrax attack, but the moron kept trying to tell him they had it handled.
“You will do your fucking job,” he said into the radio in a tone promising bad, nasty things if his orders weren’t followed. “You will inform General Stone of my report and you will do it now.”
The moron finally said he’d find someone to report it to and requested Sharp keep the channel open.
“Wow,” Grace said to Smoke. She sat between him and Smoke on the torn-up bench seat. “It sounds like Sharp’s ready to carve that kid up.”
Smoke grunted his agreement, then frowned at the dip in the terrain coming at them and growled, “Hang on.”
Grace, unable to reach anything bolted down, grabbed Sharp around the waist. After a couple of hard bounces and a jerk resulting in a metallic clang, they headed down into a small valley.
“What was that?” Grace asked.
“Probably the suspension,” Sharp said. “Or the muffler.” He thought about it some more. “Or it could have been the brakes.”
Smoke pumped them and nothing happened. “Brakes.”
“No brakes?” Grace yelled.
“Don’t need ‘em,” Sharp said. “We’ll be going uphill in a couple seconds.”
The truck gave an almighty shake as they started up the other side of the valley. Three seconds up the slope, the drive shaft dropped out like it had only been attached to the vehicle with Silly String.
The engine gave a cough, a wheeze and died altogether.
The truck came to a stop then rolled backward.
“Abandon ship,” Sharp said, grabbing his weapon and leaping out the passenger’s side. Grace followed him while Smoke went out the driver’s side.
His radio squawked.
“Who the fuck am I talking to now?” Sharp snarled into it as if he hadn’t just jumped out of a moving vehicle.
“General Stone.”
“My apologies, General, I have no patience for stupidity or assholes. The cave was in use by Akbar, but not as his lab. It was a trap. We lost three men inside and had to fight our way out.”
“Major Samuels?”
“She’s good and keeping up with Smoke and me just fine. Sir, we think Akbar is going to attack the base with grenades containing spores.”
“We came under attack, small arms, about thirty minutes ago. I’m preparing to send out units. One to you and one to deal with whoever is shooting at us.”
“Don’t. I think this is all a distraction to make it easier for Akbar to get his anthrax grenade where
he wants it.”
There was a two-second pause. “Your dead?”
“Inside the cave. I don’t think anyone is going to bother them while we find the fucker responsible for killing them.”
“Agreed. Get your asses back here.”
“Yes, sir.”
With Smoke on his right and Grace behind him, Sharp crested the hill. He took a good look around with binoculars. The base was visible to the northwest, about two miles away, and nothing much between them and it but rocks, brush and a landscape that could easily hide a few men with a grenade launcher.
“What are we doing?” Grace asked.
“Going back to the base. Up for a run?”
“Do I have a choice?”
“Nope.”
She shook her head, the picture of female exasperation, but followed him readily enough when he started out.
Smoke took rear guard.
Sharp kept the pace steady as he watched for anything out of place.
A weakly waving arm qualified.
Sharp brought Grace and Smoke to a stop and a crouch with a hand signal. He pulled out his binoculars and scanned the area. The hand wavered like the owner of it didn’t have enough strength to keep waving all the time. He could see little else, his view blocked by brush and terrain.
“There’s someone ahead with a hand in the air, like they’ve been wounded,” Sharp reported.
“What are the chances they’re American?”
“Not very good.”
“Another distraction?” Grace asked.
“Or a decoy.” Sharp scanned the area again with his binoculars, then went out wider. Could this be another attempt to draw help away from the base or remove defenders from it?
“We can’t leave him like that,” Grace hissed.
She was right, but probably not for the reason she was thinking.
They couldn’t leave a possible hostile in a position where he could approach from behind.
“Smoke,” Sharp said. He didn’t have to say anything else. The big man moved out, fast and quiet.
“How does he do that?” Grace muttered.
“What?”
“Disappear. I didn’t even hear him move.”
Sharp shrugged. “We don’t call him Smoke just because it’s his name.”
It took a couple of minutes before Smoke broke radio silence with a single word, “Doc.”
Sharp nodded at her and they both headed Smoke’s way. What they found chilled Sharp’s blood down to the bone.
An Afghan man lay curled up on the ground. The visible parts of his body, hands, face and neck were covered with bloody sores. He was breathing, but it sounded like he was doing it through an old-fashioned coffee percolator. The kind his grandfather used on the stove. The man coughed, and blood droplets appeared on the ground in front of his face.
Grace knelt next to the man, but didn’t touch him in any way.
“Anthrax?” Sharp asked.
“Yes.” She looked up, glanced at the man on the ground and shook her head.
He wasn’t going to make it.
“He was left behind,” Smoke said. “Fresh tracks, two men, continue toward the base.”
“Shit.” A high point in the terrain wasn’t far. He jogged over with Smoke beside him and looked around using his scope.
Two men carrying something in a long sack were within five hundred feet of the base. They didn’t need to be close. Anywhere inside four hundred feet would work for what they wanted to do. Including introducing a deadly spore to everyone inside.
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Grace wanted to ease the Afghan man’s suffering, but she didn’t dare touch him. He could have spores on his skin and clothing.
His face told her more eloquently than words that he was in agony. The coughs racking his body only made things worse. She sighed and was about to move back when his hand snaked out and grabbed her wrist.
She tugged out of his grip fairly easily and crab-crawled backward, until she saw what was in his other hand.
A grenade.
A grenade with its safety pin removed. She had no idea if this grenade had spores in it, but given the condition of the dead man in front of her, the possibility was high.
The man’s hand shook and he almost dropped it on the ground. She lunged forward and grabbed it before he could release the safety lever.
No gloves on.
Damn it, wasn’t this just lovely.
The man coughed again, then fell silent.
Now, what the hell was she supposed to do? She was holding the worst sort of bomb. The kind that killed slowly.
Sharp and Smoke weren’t far away, looking for the men who’d left this poor man behind. Men with more grenades.
She couldn’t ask Sharp and Smoke for help. It would put them at risk, and she wasn’t about to endanger them any more than they already managed to do for themselves. Damn Special Forces soldiers thought they were indestructible, until they weren’t. Sharp would take the grenade from her and sacrifice himself. It was the way he was built, to protect, to give and give until he had nothing left.
Her body shook with the rejection of that possibility. No. This was one sacrifice she couldn’t allow him to make.
On the heels of that thought came another. Like a freight train, it smashed through every barrier and fortress she’d ever built around her heart, and for a moment everything stopped. Her breathing, her heartbeat and her perception of the world around her.
She loved him.
Moments of them together flickered through her mind. Sharp smiling and laughing, playing chess and poker, kissing her, touching her, his hands and lips making her feel like she was the only woman in his world.
All of it solidified into one thought, one unalterable truth.
The biological weapon in her fist wasn’t going to eat him alive. She couldn’t permit it.
She had enough cuts on her hands to make infection likely, and Sharp had lost too much already, too many of the people he cared about. She wasn’t going to make him watch her die too.
“I’m so dead.” There was no hope. None. Not a single move left open to her.
Except for one. She had to go somewhere where she could throw this death trap away without risk of infecting anyone else.
Anthrax spores were hardy and could survive with all their lethal capabilities intact for decades in some environments.
She couldn’t think of a single safe place.
If she threw it down a well, the spores would contaminate the water.
If she threw it into a ravine, the spores would get spread around and picked up by people and wildlife alike.
She needed somewhere isolated. Somewhere people were unlikely to go. Somewhere a sustained, controlled fire could destroy all the spores without spreading them around.
The cave?
It wasn’t perfect, but it was the best option she could think of that she could reach on her own without help.
Sharp and Smoke were out of sight behind the brush, but she could hear them speaking softly to each other. Distances. Wind speed. Smoke was acting as Sharp’s spotter.
She crept around the plants, kept the hand holding the grenade at her side and out of sight, and waited until Smoke noticed her. It didn’t take long.
“He’s dead,” she said, jerking her head toward the deceased Afghan. “Do you have a target?”
“Yeah.”
“You do what you’ve got to do. I’m going to move back a little ways and keep watch to be sure no one tries to sneak up on us.”
“Stay safe,” Sharp said in a tone that told her if she didn’t, there’d be hell to pay.
She was already paying. Knowing she wasn’t going to be able to tell him how
she felt about him, how much his trust, respect and desire for her meant to her, was an open, festering wound.
Better than watching him die next to her.
She’d go to the cave and let the grenade destroy its deadly payload and herself quickly.
With one last admiring look at his fabulous ass, she turned and broke into Sharp’s ground-eating run.
* * *
Sharp’s target wasn’t cooperating. “Come on, you fucker. A little to the right.” He could see a scrap of cloth from the top of the Afghan’s pakol, or hat.
Smoke’s whisper was little more than a wisp of fog on a cold day in his ears. “Wind speed steady. Range six hundred yards. Two targets.”
Through the scope, Sharp could see the spotter for the shooter clearly, but he wanted them both. Leaving one alive wasn’t an option.
A moment later, the tip of the grenade launcher rose into the air. Come on, fucker, come on.
The shooter’s head rose.
Sharp took the shot. He repositioned for the second target, and fired.
“Both targets down,” Smoke reported.
“Look for movement or a secondary team,” Sharp ordered.
Smoke was already on it, already scanning the area with his binoculars. “No contact.”
Sharp radioed the base. “Targets are down,” he said, then repeated it. “Targets are down.”
“Can you confirm the kill?” the base radio operator asked. Not the same guy as the moron.
“Not without a bio-suit,” Sharp told him. “Advise a one-hundred-yard safe zone around the targets.”
“Understood. Return to base, Sergeant.”
“Roger.” Sharp pulled out of his shooting position. “Fuck, I’m tired.”
“The doc is quiet,” Smoke observed. “Sleeping?”
“She’s been tough to keep up with us this long,” Sharp replied. He wasn’t going to say a word to anyone if they found her sacked out in a hole.
They walked to their rear, looking for her, but she didn’t seem to be about. “You see her, Smoke?” Sharp asked the other man.
