About Face

by Christian, Claudia Hall

  To annoy him, Alex rolled onto her left hip and looked at her right. She shrugged.

  “Fine, why?” Alex asked.

  Offended, John crossed his arms and scowled at her. She grinned.

  “It hurts,” Alex said. “I don’t think the joint was designed for a billion hours of continuous motion in the open ocean.”

  “At least you’re weren’t alone,” John said.

  Alex’s eyes filled with tears. She shook her head.

  “Jesse was with you, wasn’t he?” John asked.

  “I haven’t seen him since Ingram’s office,” Alex said.

  She sniffed back her tears.

  “You’ve called for him?” John asked.

  Alex nodded.

  “And?”

  “I haven’t seen or heard from him since Ingram’s office.”

  “And Max has been in France working on that case,” John said. “I know I haven’t spoken to him in months. Have you?”

  Alex shook her head and bit her lip. John put his arms around Alex.

  “I’m so sorry,” he said into her ear.

  Alex let go of an ocean of tears.

  F

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  Six hours later

  Thursday afternoon

  November 3 — 2:17 p.m. PDT

  San Diego, California

  “I know that I’m being unreasonable,” Alex said to her doctor. Her voice was a raspy mess from coughing and crying. “I just want to go home. Please. What will it take?”

  She’d forced herself to stand up as a way of proving that she was ready to go home.

  “Mrs. Drayson, you almost drowned,” he said.

  “But I didn’t actually drown,” Alex said.

  “You . . .”

  “I actually drowned last year,” Alex said with what she hoped was a smile. “So I know the difference.”

  “You have a history of sepsis,” the doctor said. “If you spike a fever, and you’re in Oceanside, you could easily die before . . .”

  “I’ll take care of her,” MJ stepped into the room. “If she spikes a fever, I’ll be right there.”

  “And you are?” the doctor asked.

  The doctor looked up at MJ’s face. A tall man, MJ’s red hair and ruddy skin gave him a reckless air that he made good on in life. MJ smiled.

  “US Marine Corps Sergeant Michael Scully,” MJ said. “I’m a medic. I happen to be her medic, sir.”

  “Her medic?” the doctor asked. “You’re listed here . . .”

  “It’s complicated,” Alex said.

  Not wanting to ask, the doctor signed the release papers.

  “I wondered why you were wearing body armor when you came in,” he said with a smile. “Please schedule a follow-up. I might not be as cool as Sergeant Scully, but I am your doctor.”

  “Thank you, sir,” MJ said, with a nod.

  “Thank you,” Alex said.

  “Thank you for your service,” the doctor said and left the room.

  Alex dropped down to the bed.

  “Did you figure out how you were going to actually get out of here?” MJ asked with a grin.

  “You usually have to take a wheelchair,” Alex said.

  MJ smiled.

  “Listen, I was across the street getting my prosthesis tuned up,” he said. “They couldn’t see me for a while, so I came over. Would you like to come over with me? I can take you home when I’m done.”

  “I can take you home,” the blond woman from the boat last night said.

  Hearing her voice, Alex felt a flood of gratitude. Alex glanced at the woman. Her long hair was up in a bun, and she wore a fashionable business suit. She had perfect fingernails and tastefully enormous diamonds on her ring finger, wrist, and neck. She looked like someone who’d stepped out of the celebrity pages. In fact, if Alex hadn’t been there herself, she would never have believed that Leah had rescued anyone at sea.

  “Leah?” Alex asked.

  The woman nodded.

  “What . . .?” Alex started the question but wasn’t sure how to end it. “Um, MJ, this is Leah Zutterberg. Hank’s wife.”

  “Widow,” Leah said.

  “Ma’am,” MJ said. “Thank you for retrieving the Lieutenant Colonel last night.”

  “She saved my life,” Alex said. “Zack’s, too.”

  “Then double thanks,” MJ grinned.

  “I apologize for eavesdropping,” Leah said. “I’ve been waiting to speak with her. I can easily take her home. You can check on her when you finish.”

  “Alex?” MJ asked.

  “If she’d wanted to kill me, she could have easily done that last night,” Alex said.

  MJ nodded.

  “Quince is at home?” MJ asked.

  Alex nodded.

  “Why don’t I walk you out?” MJ said. “Can you get dressed?”

  Alex nodded. He set the plastic bag with her clothing in it on the bed.

  “I’ll get a copy of your medical file and be right back,” MJ said.

  He gave her a soft smile and left the room.

  “He’s very protective,” Leah said with a sniff.

  Leah was known in the intelligence community as the “Ice Queen of Military Contracting.” Alex thought it was an act.

  “I was on an SF team with his father,” Alex said.

  “Michael Scully?” Leah asked. “The Fey Special Forces Team?”

  Nodding, Alex rotated to sitting. She opened the bag to find her wet underwear and body armor. Alex scowled. She hadn’t remembered that.

  “No clothing?” Leah asked. “Why don’t I ask the nurse for something to wear?”

  “That would be great,” Alex said.

  Leah left. Alex dropped her head to her knees. She was emotionally spent, and exhausted, and, now, she would have to spend a few hours with the clearly distraught widow of Hank Zutterberg. She would have bolted, but Leah had searched all night to find her.

  Alex would not have survived the night without Leah Zutterberg. Leah deserved Alex’s time and attention. Without thinking, Alex flipped her legs back into the bed and fell sound asleep.

  FFFFF

  Thursday afternoon

  November 3 — 3:35 p.m.

  Between San Diego and Oceanside, California

  Alex opened her eyes. Not quite awake, she could tell she was in a moving vehicle. She forced herself to sit up. She looked for Jesse, but he was nowhere to be found.

  “There you are!” Leah said from the driver’s seat of a luxury sedan.

  Alex’s new Shetland friend “Scotty” was sitting in the passenger seat. He turned around to give Alex a bottle of water. She’d just finished the water when he held out a cup of convenience-store coffee.

  “Oh, my favorite,” Alex said.

  She took the coffee. It was lukewarm but fabulous.

  “I took a chance,” Scotty said. “Cream only. That’s what the report says.”

  “Chocolate sometimes, but only the right kind,” Alex said.

  “Oh, yes — bad chocolate is truly awful,” Scotty said. “Like snipers or child marriages.”

  “More like snipers,” Alex said with a grin.

  “Indeed,” Scotty said.

  Grinning, Leah shook her head at their comparisons.

  “How are you?” Leah asked.

  Her gleaming white teeth sparkled in the rearview mirror. Her perfect hair was perfectly blonde from roots to ends. Her hair combined with her faultless teeth, flawless tan, completely unlined face, fat free body, manicured French tip nails screamed “TROPHY WIFE.”

  Alex blinked to keep herself from asking the direct questions, “Aren’t you a trophy wife? What the hell were you doing last night?” She cleared her throat.

  “I’m wondering how I got in this vehicle,” Alex said.

  “That’s easy,” Leah said. “The nurse helped us dress you. We put you in the back of my family vehicle.”

  “They let me check out while I was asleep,” Alex said.

 
“You were already checked out,” Leah said with a shrug.

  “Money talks, Alex,” Scotty said, turned in his seat and winked at Alex.

  “We’ll send you a bill,” Leah said with a grin. “Extraction is one of our services.”

  Scotty laughed, and Alex smiled. She drank her coffee.

  “I’m sure you must have a million questions,” Leah said. “I thought we could talk in the car. It’s fairly private.”

  “The last time I saw you, you were not so happy with me,” Alex said.

  “I wasn’t,” Leah said.

  “In fact, you were furious that Hank wasted his ‘last moments on earth’ with me and not with his family,” Alex said. “You told me you never wanted to see ‘the likes of me’ again. Ever.”

  “I was angry,” Leah said.

  “What changed your mind?” Alex asked.

  “Ethan,” Leah said.

  “The Monk?” Alex asked. “What could he possibly have said that would cause this dramatic of a change of heart?”

  “He said that Hank was already dead by the time he came out of the bathroom,” Leah said. “He said that you killed his murderer and then were present and kind to him while he died. I don’t know why, but it means a lot to me that Hank wasn’t alone when he died.”

  “I told him about the women who worked kitchen patrol switched their shifts around to see him,” Alex said with a nod. “He was so handsome that women came for miles just to bat their eyes at him.”

  “Was that true?” Leah asked.

  “It was,” Alex said with a nod. “Dying people know the truth. I couldn’t have lied to him.”

  “But the rest of it?” Leah asked. “The stuff Mac Clenaghan and Olivas said at his memorial?”

  “I honestly can’t say,” Alex said. “As I’m sure you know, I didn’t have a lot to do with Hank in training. It’s odd to me now. But honestly, I was pretty overwhelmed.”

  “I can imagine,” Leah said. “I . . .”

  Alex watched Leah’s face flush with emotion, and then she steadied herself.

  “Ethan told me about losing your base,” Leah said. “And then, I heard about what happened with Admiral Ingram.”

  “From who?” Alex asked.

  “Your old boss,” Leah said. “He wanted to give me a heads-up in case you wanted to join the world of contracting. There’s a rumor that the Fey might be on the market.”

  “You talked to the Admiral?” Alex asked. “I used to talk to him twice a week, every week, for years. I haven’t heard a word in . . . months.”

  “The politics are incomprehensible,” Leah said.

  Alex grunted and finished off her coffee.

  “How did you wind up finding me and Zack last night?” Alex asked.

  “One of our teams is involved in the . . .”

  “War games,” Alex said.

  “I was going to use the word ‘maneuvers,’ but, yes, we’re involved in the war games,” Leah said. “I was out on the water and I received a call.”

  “From?” Alex asked.

  “Vice-Admiral Henderson,” Leah said. “He asked me not to tell you, but I think you should know who your friends are.”

  “How would he know that we were lost?” Alex asked.

  “He monitored the situation,” Leah said. “He assured me he did not send the F-15s. He wasn’t sure who did.”

  “My pilot’s second said that it was because I was supposed to be dead,” Alex said.

  “That’s as good of an excuse as any,” Leah said.

  “But you think . . .?” Alex asked.

  “I have no idea, Alex,” Leah said.

  “Is there a missing SEAL platoon?” Alex asked.

  “Yes,” Leah said. “More than one, in fact. Only one platoon was able to call in.”

  “These missing teams,” Alex said. “They wouldn’t happen to be from SEAL Team 8, would they?”

  “How did you know?” Leah asked.

  “Just a guess,” Alex said. “What happened when the satellite reached them?”

  “Nothing,” Scotty said.

  “They did not make contact,” Leah said.

  “Huh,” Alex said. After a moment, she shrugged, “It is November, after all.”

  “What does that mean?” Leah asked.

  “There’s a lot of weather in that part of the world,” Alex said. “Crazy snow, frozen rain, unbelievable wind. And there’s a whole lot of nothing there for many, many miles. If they’re in the Wakhan, which I sincerely doubt, they could be in crazy snow, or wind, or eerie freezing fucking cold stillness, rock slides, or . . . anything, really. Any idea who sent soldiers out there at this time of year?”

  “No,” Leah said.

  “Henderson told me it was a target they’d been tracking for two years,” Alex said.

  “I heard it was the missing PFC,” Scotty said.

  “The PFC is a guest of the Taliban in Pakistan,” Alex said. “He’s not in the Wakhan.”

  “How can you be sure?” Leah asked.

  “I can’t, obviously,” Alex said. “I only know what I’ve been told. Both the Kyrgyz and the Wakhi say there are no ‘visitors’ in the Wakhan. It’s something they would know.”

  “How would you know that?” Leah asked.

  “I know people in the tribes,” Alex said with a shrug. “Intelligence is always about who you know, not what you know. I spent a lot of time getting to know regular people. My old team . . .”

  “The Fey Special Forces Team?” Scotty asked.

  “Yes,” Alex said, continuing. “We had a reputation for being honorable, respectful, and helpful to the Pashtun — as long as they weren’t Talib or committing atrocities against innocents. The Fey Team has worked to foster that same opinion.”

  “Military intel doesn’t have this information,” Leah said

  “They should,” Alex said. “I’ve reported everything. It’s hard to fathom, but these people take a long time to warm up to. They have a cultural memory such that Alexander the Great and Marco Polo seem like they visited last month, not two thousand years ago. They’re not tapped into the ebb and flow that is Western life.”

  Alex shrugged.

  “I’ve had the luxury of spending years around people in these areas. That’s some of why our team worked so well,” Alex said. “If someone told me a lie, it wasn’t some random ‘haji’ lying. It was Mohammed or Omar or whatever from this family and in that province. I could go back to the person and ask what happened. That was true in a lot of countries. We’ve tried to keep that going or expand it quite a bit with the Fey Team. Margaret Peaches has a real ability to connect with native people. She has developed her own network of people.”

  “Everyone knows the Fey will give them a fair shake,” Leah said.

  “I guess that’s all over now,” Alex said.

  “Would you like it not to be?” Leah asked.

  “I don’t know what that means,” Alex said.

  “Why don’t you come and work for me?” Leah asked. “You could buy in as an owner or be an employee. I’d happily hire your entire team or help you create a fleet of new ones. And . . .”

  Leah swallowed and nodded.

  “You can help me find the people who killed Hank,” Leah’s voice was a hoarse whisper.

  “I am going to do that, no matter what,” Alex said.

  “This way, you could get paid what you’re actually worth,” Leah said. “You’d likely work on the same assignments for the same funders. This way, you’d have a real chance to lead.”

  “Is this a game?” Alex asked, making sure her voice was neutral. “Get me out of the military so I do my job as a contractor. Deny culpability?”

  “No,” Leah said. “At least I haven’t heard that from anyone. Why?”

  Alex shrugged.

  “Where do you live?” Leah asked. “We’re close to town.”

  Alex gave her the address. They were living just outside Camp Pendleton in an area near the Arrowwood Golf Course. Not sure
how to respond, Alex looked out her window as they drove through Oceanside.

  “Honestly, Alex,” Leah said, breaking the silence. “Since Hank died, I haven’t been able to think about more than one project at a time.”

  “I can attest to that,” Scotty said.

  “We had a lot of work booked,” Leah said. “When Hank died, I thought I’d just finish these jobs and close the company. We have plenty of money to live on from his life insurance. Then, I was on the water last night, and . . . I don’t know. Something inside of me changed.”

  “Is it going to burst out of you like in the movies?” Alex asked in a wry tone.

  Leah smiled at Alex’s joke.

  “I saw how hard you fought to save Zack’s life,” Leah said. “I knew that you would have fought that hard for Hank. Then it came to me — there is nothing more important to me than finding these Black Skeletons and ending their plot against the world.”

  Leah chuckled.

  “What?” Alex asked.

  “I sound like someone from a comic book,” Leah said.

  “In a good way,” Alex said.

  “You’re the only one who can keep the world from burning,” Leah said. “I didn’t know it until I saw you there in the middle of the ocean fighting for the life of your friend and yourself.”

  “I’m not sure what you expect,” Alex said. “But I can’t really do anything right now.”

  “Have you tried?” Leah asked.

  “Tried what?” Alex asked.

  “You used to have access to the Intelligence Center and the CIA servers, right?” Leah asked. Alex nodded. “Have you tried logging on? Have you contacted anyone else in command?”

  “My boss fired me,” Alex said. “He effectively told me that I had cheated my way to my ranks, I didn’t deserve my beret, and the tax payers shouldn’t have to pay my measly pension. He laughed with glee at the idea that I would be demoted to Private again. I think that speaks volumes for what my command thinks of me.”

  “Have you asked anyone else?” Leah asked. “Captain Gordon? Reached out to the Admiral? There’s no one more connected than General Patrick Hargreaves. Have you talked to your father?”

  “No, I . . .” Alex fell silent.

  She’d felt ashamed. It never occurred to her to contact anyone else. She’d just crawled into her own safe hole and stayed there. She shook her head.