The Woman Left Behind: A Novel

by Linda Howard

  Fucking New Guys. They couldn’t work where they worked and not have picked up a lot of military slang, so none of them committed the embarrassment of asking what the initials meant. Instead there were some awkward head bobs.

  “I’m Baxter.” He didn’t say if that was his first name or his last, not that it mattered. “Okay, we’ll start out the same way as if you were entering the military. First you’re going to run. We need to see who’s in general good shape and who isn’t. Follow me.”

  He took off at an easy lope, his bulk moving with surprising ease. The group of ten cast questioning looks around, then gamely set off after him. Jina settled herself firmly in the middle of the pack, trying to keep Baxter’s shaven head in sight. She didn’t want to come in last, but she had no desire to be first; either one would get her noticed, and she didn’t want to be noticed. Pacing herself was the key; keep something in reserve, because she didn’t know what would be thrown at them next.

  That was a good theory, but in practice it meant the jostling bodies in front of her—and all of them taller than she was—sometimes blocked her view of the terrain. She stumbled when a berm rose sharply under her feet, barely caught herself when she topped it and the ground fell away, then stumbled again when abruptly they were running in sand so soft her feet sank into it and fine grains sifted over the tops of her sneakers. That explained why all the men she’d seen had been wearing lace-up boots instead of sneakers. Only she and the other nine FNGs were wearing sneakers, though MacNamara had specifically said athletic shoes.

  Lesson learned. Ask the people who actually did this kind of stuff what type of footwear she’d need.

  That was assuming she wasn’t the first one to wash out of PT.

  Damn if I am, she thought grimly. Not that she wanted to be assigned to an actual GO-Team, but neither did she want to fail. She’d grown up in the country, in southeast Georgia, running barefoot most of the year, so surely she could hang with at least some of the guys who likely had only done some jogging on a track or city street.

  After about five minutes, her muscles were beginning to burn a little, her heart was pounding, and her breath was coming fast. Five minutes! She was in sorrier shape than she’d realized. About that time, the guys behind her evidently realized they were running behind a girl, and they all started pushing harder.

  Jina dug deeper, ran harder, determined to stay in the middle of the pack. That was all she had to do. This wasn’t a race she had to win, she just had to do what was necessary and not draw attention to herself.

  Abruptly someone roughly brushed by her, jamming a shoulder into her and knocking her to the side. She lost her stride, and when she got back into gear, she was dragging at the end of the line. Panting, sucking air, she glared at the shoulder jammer. It was Donnelly; he’d been in something to do with encryption, and she thought he’d been assigned to Kodak’s team. Easygoing Kodak was the plum assignment, the one she’d have chosen for herself if she’d been given a choice.

  Bastard. Donnelly, not Kodak. Jina sucked in deep breaths and pushed herself harder, driving her legs, passing a few guys and positioning herself just behind and to the side of Donnelly. The uneven terrain made it risky to take her attention away from her footing, but there were some things she just couldn’t let go. Donnelly must have felt her presence behind him; he cast a quick glance over his shoulder, and she took advantage of his momentary lapse of attention to throw a quick kick into the middle of his stride. She didn’t actually hook her foot into his because that would make her fall, too, but the kick was enough to make him stumble and windmill his arms in an effort to regain his balance. He failed and tumbled to the side, skidding face-first in the dirt.

  Baxter must have had eyes in the back of his shaven head, because without turning around he barked, “Get up and run!”

  Donnelly scrambled to his feet and lurched after them, now about five yards behind without much hope of catching up unless he had an untapped reservoir of strength, which she didn’t think he did. She threw a quick glance over her shoulder; he was red in the face, his mouth open.

  What the hell! Why had he jammed her? She’d never done anything to him, never had a cross word with him. Yeah, she’d beat him in the video games, but she’d beaten everyone, not just him. Guess he’d taken it personally.

  Tough, she thought fiercely. It was a freaking game. She’d have never played the damn thing if she’d known it would lead to this. She’d much rather be sitting in an air-conditioned building instead of running in the heat, with sand scrubbing the skin off her feet and dust getting in her mouth and coating her lungs until she wanted to just spit—except her mouth was too dry and too full of dust. Her legs hurt. She thought she might throw up.

  Some guy she didn’t know peeled off and bent over with his hands braced on his knees while he lost breakfast. She sucked in air and willed herself not to do the same. She would not, she would not, she would not—

  Just as she reached the point of being sure she was going to throw up, Baxter held up a fist. “Water break,” he called,

  Oh, God. She lurched to a stop and forced herself to stay upright as she desperately sucked in oxygen. Everyone around her was making the same harsh, gasping sounds. She wanted to bend over, but she was afraid she would collapse if she let her spine bend at all. Not only that, if she bent over, her stomach might take that as a sign to go ahead with its impending spasm. Instead she looked at the sky and concentrated on her wobbly knees, ordering them to not dump her on her butt in the dirt.

  “Don’t just stand there, you morons,” Baxter barked. “Grab some bottles! Hydrate!”

  Water. There was water. There was a big cooler sitting on a rough bench, lid open, revealing beautiful glistening ice and bottles of water nestled within. She stumbled over to the cooler, shoving her arm past the bigger bodies of her run buddies, and snagged a bottle. Every muscle in her body was trembling; she fumbled as she tried to twist the cap off, dropped the bottle, and watched it roll under their feet. Shit! Rather than chasing it down she went for another bottle, because she still wasn’t certain she could bend over without barfing. Her clumsy fingers grabbed some ice along with the bottle and that struck her as a good thing; quickly she slapped the shards of ice on the back of her neck and sighed at the immediate relief. Maybe she wouldn’t puke. Maybe she wouldn’t pass out.

  “Pitiful,” Baxter said in disgust. Jina wondered if she should take offense, then realized he was talking to all of them. That was okay. She didn’t mind being pitiful in a group of pitiful. “A herd of fucking turtles would be faster. Half of you are on the edge of passing out, and we’ve done a measly two miles. The other half of you aren’t much better. Damn, son, are you puking?”

  Huh. That couldn’t be right. If the turtles were fucking, they wouldn’t be covering any ground at all. She thought about pointing that out, but elected to keep her smart mouth shut in favor of guzzling water. Discretion was the better part of valor.

  Wait. They’d run two miles? Only two miles? That was wrong on two counts. First, yay, because she’d run two miles! There was no “only” to it. But they’d been running for hours, it seemed, so shouldn’t that have been something like twenty miles? Her lungs and heart thought it was twenty miles. Baxter’s odometer was clearly wrong.

  She wiped the sweat off her face and guzzled more water. When she lowered the bottle, her attention was caught by something . . . kind of threatening.

  She squinted. Seven men were strolling toward the group, abreast like they were walking toward the showdown at the OK Corral. One and all, they were scary. And big. Big and scary. They were as dusty and streaked with sweat as everyone else, bare arms roped with muscles, not a smile anywhere in sight. The way they moved was fluid with power. Various weapons hung off their bodies, which was scary in itself, because this was a training ground, right? Those looked like real knives and guns and stuff.

  Not guns, she reminded herself—weapons. They never said guns. She knew that much.

&n
bsp; They were focused on the group of FNGs like lions on a herd of gnu, or whatever lions hunted. FNGs, evidently.

  Jina could almost feel her skin twitching in alarm. She stared at the wall of man-flesh advancing toward them, uneasily wondering what was going on, if there was going to be some kind of God-awful hazing of the newcomers. “Hey, y’all,” she said in warning, looking around at the others to give them a heads-up—only to find there were no others, that somehow Baxter had led them away without her having noticed, mainly because she’d been riveted by the man-wall.

  Damn it! She took a hasty step after the group and that was as far as she got in all the time she had, because it was there, the man-wall, and it surrounded her. Seven men stared down at her, and there wasn’t a smile in sight.

  She felt as if the sun had been blotted out. She was a normal-sized woman, not a tiny one, but she suddenly felt insignificant and she didn’t like it one bit.

  Her heartbeat stuttered in alarm. Her head told her they wouldn’t hurt her; too many repercussions. Her primitive instincts said she was at the mercy of a group of predators, and anything could happen. “Anything” had been happening to women since forever, since before caves and loincloths. Smart women never let down their guards.

  She wanted a weapon, any weapon. Lacking that, she straightened her shoulders, narrowed her eyes, and glared belligerently around, waiting for them to speak. So far all they’d done was smother her with their closeness, choke her with the thick miasma of sweat and testosterone.

  There were seven of them, one of her. She was already exhausted by Baxter’s wretched running. Even if she could break free, any one of them could chase her down . . . if she ran.

  She wasn’t running. No way would they make her run.

  The biggest one spoke, in a dark, rough voice that sounded as if he gargled with rocks.

  “We hear you’re our girl.”

  Two

  Jina’s gaze darted around at all of them, though she was too on edge for her to really see their faces or focus on anything other than that they were big, and they had her surrounded. Don’t show fear, she thought; they might attack. No, wait, that was dogs. Regardless, she knew she needed to be cool about this. Instinct also told her not to get pissy about being called a girl; a successful battle was about timing, and this wasn’t the time, not on the first meeting and with them looming around her, probably a little hostile and already doubting she could do the job. Instead she said, “Then I guess you’re my boys.”

  The big dude stared down at her. “Babe,” he said, his tone faintly astonished. They all looked taken aback by her voice, which, yeah, was deep and smoky, a little raspy, and way sexier than her appearance. She’d dealt with that raspy voice her whole life; even when she’d been a little kid, people on the telephone had thought they were talking to an adult.

  Another guy said, “I think you just named her.”

  What? No! Alarm shot through her. She knew what they meant. They all had nicknames, and she didn’t want to be a “Babe,” either human or pig. She wanted a cool nickname, a kick-ass nickname, something that would make people think twice about messing with her. “Babe” practically invited messing.

  “Not Babe. I don’t like Babe,” she said. “I like Grenade, or Mankiller, something like that.”

  A round of snickers greeted that. “Sorry, you don’t get to choose,” the big dude said.

  “No one will take me seriously.”

  “We don’t anyway,” he replied coolly.

  How was that for smacking her in the face with the unvarnished truth? She couldn’t even disagree with them, considering the circumstances. “Maybe you don’t now, but you will,” she said, and scowled at him to show she meant it.

  They laughed, all of them except the big dude. He didn’t look as if he had much of a sense of humor—not that she’d been joking, but still.

  “We’d better, since our lives will depend on you being able to do your job.” Big Dude looked impassively down at her. “That’s why we’re taking over your training. It’s already set up.”

  Uh-uh. No. No way; they’d kill her. They were way out of her league. She wanted to run in the middle of the pack of FNGs, she didn’t want to humiliate herself by demonstrating all that she couldn’t do to a group as superbly trained as these guys were. Maybe in six months she’d be ready to join them for more training. She waved in the vague direction where she thought the others had gone. “No, I need to stay with my group. I’m not ready for your level, honest.”

  “We know that,” the smallest guy said, small being a relative term because he was still a six-footer. His face was so dirty she likely wouldn’t recognize him after he washed, but he had blue eyes and what looked like two small round scars in the middle of his forehead. “But we’ll bring you up to speed faster than Baxter will, because he has to focus on everyone and we’ll be focusing just on you.”

  A dread deeper than the Grand Canyon seized her. She swallowed hard, and said, “My cup runneth over.”

  “You have no idea,” Big Dude said and crooked his finger at her. “C’mon, let’s get started.”

  Oh. Hell.

  Six hours later, Jina lay flat on the ground staring up at the blue sky and thinking breaking a bone would be preferable to this. Maybe she could manage that, fall off or over something, break one or both her legs, get a concussion—anything to get her out of this hell. She didn’t like being dirty and sweaty, but every inch of her was covered with grime. She didn’t like physically pushing herself to the point of puking, but she’d done that twice already, puking in front of her new teammates. Unfortunately, puking hadn’t earned her any sympathy from her tormentors; instead, the blue-eyed one—his nickname was Snake—had said, “We’ve all been there,” and the big dude, who was Ace himself, had said, “Get up and get your ass in gear.”

  Asshole.

  They all were assholes, but he was the biggest one, literally and figuratively. He was also the boss asshole, and something about the look in his eyes, as if he fully expected her to bail out and she’d have to scrape the bottom of the bucket to get as low as his opinion of her, kept her from bailing no matter how much she wanted to. She got her ass up and got it in gear. It was a gear that barely ground along, but she was moving, even when she’d have sworn she couldn’t.

  A bottle of water gripped in a big, grimy hand appeared in front of her eyes, and a drop of condensation dripped off the bottle onto her face. “Hydrate,” Ace ordered, and she managed to move one aching arm enough to take the bottle from him, though how she was going to drink while lying flat on her back was another question entirely. Maybe just pouring it over her face would let her suck in an ounce or so.

  No, not going to work. Puking in front of them was bad enough; she would damn well sit up and drink her water.

  Groaning, she rolled to the side and got her left elbow braced under her, then heaved herself into a semierect position. More painful effort got her sitting up, though her body was unhappy about it. She twisted the cap off the water bottle and tilted it up to drink. She’d already learned not to guzzle, so after two sips she lowered the bottle and glared at Ace. “I hate you,” she said grimly. “I hate all of you. You’re bullies and sadists. You probably kick puppies for a hobby. You scare little kids at Christmas instead of Halloween. All of you,” she said again, in case he thought she was railing against him in particular, though as team leader he was the worst of the bunch.

  Snake dropped to the ground beside her. “Now, don’t be like that,” he said cheerfully. “We’ll have you in the best shape of your life. You’ll be able to run and swim for miles—”

  “I don’t want to run and swim,” she interrupted. “I want to not hurt when I breathe. I don’t like dirt under my fingernails, and look!” She held out her hand; all her nails were not only dirty, most of them were also broken and jagged. Not that she kept her nails fashion-model long, because long nails got in the way on the computer keyboard, so she could deal with the broken nails. Dirt�
�no. Just no.

  One by one the team dropped to the ground until they were all in a rough circle. During the last six torturous hours, she’d learned their names. Ace was Levi Butcher, team leader, head badass. She had a tough time thinking of him as “Ace,” which seemed kind of lighthearted for someone who wasn’t. He was one scary dude, mostly because of the way his expressionless dark eyes drilled holes through her. He’d made it plain he didn’t want her here, but because she was, he’d get her in shape if it killed her. She wasn’t certain which he wanted to do most: kill her or get her in shape. She was betting on the first choice.

  Snake was the team medic and he was generally the most cheerful, which at first had made her think kindly of him, but on second thought, what kind of sadist was put in such a good mood by making someone else suffer? She kind of wanted to smack him for making her distrust cheerfulness.

  Crutch was blond, kind of quiet, which was misleading because from what she’d seen he was the most likely to pull a practical joke. His quietness was a dodge, and knowing he was deceitful that way made her give him a wide berth, lest she fall victim to one of his pranks. She couldn’t handle pranks right now. She could barely handle walking.

  Then there was Boom, who looked to be the oldest of the bunch, maybe late thirties. He was kind of bulky in build, but fast and agile anyway. She figured “fast and agile” was in the job description, so what the heck was she doing here?

  Trapper seemed as easygoing as Snake, and again that was misleading, because she’d figured out that Trapper was the team sniper, which meant he was very good at killing people. Jina couldn’t quite get her head around that. It wasn’t that she didn’t know what the GO-Teams did, but somehow she’d expected that they wouldn’t seem so normal—excepting their superman physical conditioning, of course. Trapper was like one of the guys, kidding around, laughing at jokes, joining in the competitive nature with which they tackled everything.