The dog had never been fond of storms, probably because the accident that had cost the dog her leg had happened during a storm, and this one was stronger than usual. As a clap of thunder crashed above them, Tripod yipped with fright and tore off, running down the hall.
Patsy sighed. She’d have to calm the dog down before she could tend to her own needs. The opportunity to slip into a nice warm, dry set of sweats was looking farther and farther away.
“Come, Tripod,” Patsy called, coaxing the dog to her as she trudged down the short hall to her bedroom.
Once she had the dog calmed down and had dried herself off, she slipped into a comfortable, fleece sweat suit to banish the chill from the rain and the air conditioning inside.
Finally, the storm abated, and she fed Tripod, who ate her dinner with gusto, then turned her attention to a stuffed chew toy. Patsy heated up a microwave meal and carried it in to the living room. Only then did she think to look through the mail she’d left in her purse.
She sorted through the damp envelopes as she sat in front of the television set, her meal on the coffee table in front of her. With one eye on the screen and the other on the pile of mail, Patsy almost missed the small, grubby envelope near the bottom of the collection of circulars and junk mail. She looked closely at the return address on the envelope, then looked again, dropping her fork when she recognized the name scrawled nearly illegibly on the top line.
SSGT Raymond Darling!
She worked one trembling finger underneath the sealed envelope flap, careful not to tear through the return address.
Tears of joy filled her eyes as she read the letter inside.
Ray understood.
He knew what she was thinking and was right on the money. Oh, how she loved her Ray Darling.
And he loved her. He’d loved her for ages, but apparently had only realized how important it was to say the words to her when he saw her—he saw her!—the morning he left. He’d mouthed the words to her, but she hadn’t caught that…
Her microwave dinner forgotten, she hurried to her desk for pen and paper.
She had to tell him just how much she loved him. He had to know for sure.
She had to explain and beg him for forgiveness.
RAY KNEW NOT TO EXPECT a response from any of his letters this soon, but he tried to guess when they might arrive. He also tried to imagine what the recipients would say, how they would react.
Would they respond at all?
He had to hope that they would.
In the meantime, his team had an important and dangerous job to do. He was suited up in desert survival gear, night-vision goggles at the ready, his parachute and pack strapped to him. This was going to be a big mission, and he didn’t know what would happen, but at least, he’d done what he could to make peace with those he loved.
Just taking that first step, writing, had eased his mind, and he’d finally been able to get some restful sleep. Now, feeling refreshed and alert, he could be optimistic about both the mission at hand, and his future. It would all work out for the best.
He closed his eyes and tried to envision his homecoming.
Ray and the rest of his teammates waited impatiently as the big C-130 transport plane bringing them back to Hurlburt shut down its engines. Waiting for the signal that they could disembark, he looked toward the loadmaster.
Spouses and loved ones were not officially invited to the ramp when Special Operations teams returned from an operation, but usually someone figured out when they were due to arrive, and word went out through the “grapevine.” The ramp was always crowded with loved ones waiting eagerly for glimpses of the returning servicemen and women.
He and the team still had to be debriefed and would have to stow their gear at the squadron, but just knowing that their loved ones were there waiting made it better.
Finally, the signal arrived and the crew opened the doors. Eagerly, the men filed to the door, one by one, cheerfully jostling and jockeying for position to be first to get outside.
Finally, he was on the ground. Ray scanned the jubilant congregation of people gathered in the shadows around the base operations building. One woman broke away from the crowd, apparently just as impatient and restless as the men on the team, and ran into her lover’s arms. Then another. And another.
And suddenly, Patsy was there, grinning and laughing through tears of joy, her long blond hair blowing around her face in the night breeze. Ray opened his arms, and Patsy rushed to him, pressing her soft body against his chest, as he crushed her against him. If he had his way, he’d never let her go.
“I love you, Ray Darling,” she whispered softly, shy in front of so many other people.
Hoo-ah, he cheered inwardly.
“I love you more, Patsy,” Ray whispered around an enormous lump in his throat. Then their lips met and they kissed until Sergeant Scanlon interrupted it all too soon and called them to get their gear put away so they could be dismissed….
Ray smiled. He knew it was just a hope, a dream, but he had done his best to make it come true. If Patsy were even half the woman he hoped she was, he knew she’d be there when they finally came home.
“Why on earth are you standing there grinning like a fool, Sergeant?” Scanlon asked. “You sure you’re up for this mission?”
“As ready as I’ll ever be, Sergeant Scanlon,” Ray replied.
“Well then, let’s roll.” The team leader turned to the assembled group of men and gave them the signal. “Load ’em.”
THE LETTER FROM RAY had done a great deal to brighten Patsy’s outlook, and she found that she wasn’t quite as dependent on the newspaper and television for news of Ray.
Now, she could expect it in his own hand.
Once again, she hummed cheerfully as she performed her duties at the clinic. Everyone noticed, some people commented, and Patsy didn’t mind at all.
One particularly busy morning, Patsy all but skipped into the clinic waiting room to call for the next patient, when she realized that every man and woman waiting there was riveted to the television set high on the wall. Patsy stopped short. “What’s going on?”
“Quiet. Just listen,” a sergeant with enough stripes to have authority told her tersely. So Patsy hushed and looked up at the screen.
“A detachment of special operations commandos, reported to be from Hurlburt Field, Florida, was ambushed in Taloom Kapoor last night,” the announcer said. Footage of fighting, mostly flashes of light from guns firing against a dark green background seen through what must have been night-vision lenses, played on a screen behind him.
Patsy’s heart nearly stopped beating and her legs went weak with the shock. She slumped into a chair. No, it couldn’t be!
“Details are sketchy at this point, but though the unit was able to successfully defend themselves against the enemy, the number of casualties is extremely high,” the announcer continued, his expression and tone appropriately somber.
The scene playing behind the man switched from battle footage to that of many wounded men being carried on stretchers to several waiting rescue helicopters. The faces of the attending medical personnel showed their concern, and that image told Patsy much more than what the announcer was saying.
Hardly daring to breathe, Patsy strained to see if she recognized the faces of any of the wounded, but the footage was too grainy and dark. Trembling, she pushed her heavy, nerveless body up out of the chair and stumbled back toward the examination rooms. She couldn’t deal with this in front of everyone. She needed to be alone.
Mary Bailey caught up with her in the hall. “Do you think someone you know is involved in that?” she asked gently.
Numbly, Patsy nodded. “Oh, Mary, I don’t know what to do,” she whispered, fighting to hold back tears.
“Someone you care about?”
“Yes, I love him,” she confessed. “And I never got the chance to tell him.”
Mary, older and more experienced in matters like this, took Patsy by the arms and made
the younger woman look her square in the face. “People are counting on us to do our jobs here, and keeping yourself occupied will help you keep your mind off what’s going on until we get more news,” Mary told her firmly.
Wait? All she’d done for the past few weeks was wait. She’d finally admitted her feelings to herself and now Mary, as well as Ray, even if it was only on paper, and she didn’t want to wait a moment longer.
She wanted Ray here. Safe with her. She wanted to hold him, to love him, to never let him go.
But she would do as Mary suggested.
She would keep herself busy.
And she would wait.
Chapter Twelve
Patsy performed her job at the clinic with the same quiet efficiency as she always had, but one tiny portion of her mind remained focused on any news she could get of Ray and his team.
One of the women she knew slightly had gotten a phone call from her husband telling her that he had been injured. She had been thrilled to know that he would be coming home soon.
Patsy had heard nothing.
Not a word.
She clung to the hope that she would get a telephone call, go home to find a message on her answering machine, a letter, anything that would assure her that Ray was alive. That he’d received her letter. That he would be coming home to her.
But days passed, and…nothing came.
All she could assume was that Ray was dead. And since Patsy was not a member of Ray Darling’s family and since his family probably did not know about her because of their long estrangement from their son, she would likely never know exactly what had happened to the man she had realized too late she loved. Though Sergeant Hagarty had started that pool, and Ray’s teammates obviously must have known about her, Patsy didn’t think she could count on any of them to get word to her.
Patsy could only hope that when the rest of the team returned, she would hear about what had happened. But special operations personnel were notoriously close-mouthed about their missions, so she couldn’t even count on that. She would eventually hear something about what had happened at Taloom Kapoor, but never the whole story, the real story. And she would never be certain that Ray had gotten her letter.
In the meantime, she had to go on. It had taken her many long months to pull herself out of the shock of losing her husband and family, but she didn’t have that luxury now. She had an important job to do, as Mary had reminded her. She would do it.
When Mary came to her with a written order to send a nurse over on a transport plane going to Taloom Kapoor, Patsy leaped at the chance to go. Maybe someone there would know what had happened to Ray. Maybe she could find him. Maybe she could make it all right.
AFTER A LONG trans-Atlantic flight that included a stop at Lajes Air Base in the Azores for refueling, the plane finally landed at the temporary base one hundred miles south of Taloom Kapoor. Though Patsy had been able to walk around a little on the plane, and had even been allowed to get off the plane when it refueled, her legs were cramped and stiff from the long flight. She limped down the ladder from the plane to the ground and squinted in the brilliant sunshine. After the humidity of Florida, the arid heat of the desert was shocking to her system.
Patsy rubbed her dry and gritty eyes and tried to straighten out her aching limbs.
“Quite a change, isn’t it?” Major Tewanda Hardy, the pilot, had climbed out of the plane and stood, surveying the rocky, treeless landscape.
“It looks so desolate,” Patsy replied, glancing over at the tall, commanding woman she’d seen a few times around the base.
“It isn’t exactly Florida, is it?” Major Hardy commented. “But what a boring world it would be if everything and everybody was exactly the same.”
“I suppose you’re right,” Patsy agreed.
A woman in desert camouflage BDUs drove up on a big-wheeled all-terrain vehicle that kicked up a cloud of dust and sand. She stopped, leaving the motor idling, climbed out and approached them. “Is one of you Pritchard?”
Patsy nodded as one of those large human transport vehicles, a Humvee, pulled up next to a helicopter across the ramp.
“Well,” Major Hardy said, smiling, “you go do what you have to do, and I’ll catch you on the return trip.” Nodding to the newcomer, the major pivoted smartly, then strode away.
“Wow, was that Tewanda Hardy?”
“Sure. Why do you ask?”
“You don’t know?” The woman seemed incredulous that Patsy had seemed so nonplussed about chatting so casually with the major.
“That she’s up for an air medal? Sure. She’s a nice lady.”
Major Hardy was a much-honored and well-known female aviator, almost a legend around Hurlburt Field. She had flown her C-130 to where some special forces troops had been pinned down by the enemy, and had made a short-distance landing on the desert hardpan between the two opposing sides. The unexpected arrival of the plane had so startled their opponents that they had briefly forgotten to fire, allowing the Americans to get away. It had been a risky and gutsy move, and the major had been both reprimanded for her stunt and praised for her flying by her superiors.
The major had dismissed it as a bunch of unnecessary hoopla, supposedly telling the television bigwigs who had come calling that she was just a little girl from Huntsville, Alabama, who put her panty hose on one leg at a time like everyone else and didn’t need all that attention.
Patsy admired her for her humility. As well as her heroics.
The corpsman, who was apparently there to escort her to the hospital, was still gawking at Major Hardy, so Patsy cleared her throat. “Don’t we have something to do?”
“Oh, yeah,” the corpsman said. She introduced herself and, looking appropriately embarrassed, went on. “I’m supposed to escort you to the hospital. Most of the guys are stable and won’t need much care, but there are one or two who will need meds and dressing changes during the trip. We’ll need to get you up to speed on their situations before you take off in the morning.” She gestured for Patsy to climb into the all-terrain vehicle.
Still blinking in the brilliant afternoon sun, Patsy did so. Everything was happening so quickly, but perhaps now, she would be able to find out about Ray. Maybe he was one of the ones who needed special care.
She could only hope.
The airman prattled on about Major Hardy as she revved up the engine and Patsy glanced up at the dusty Humvee as they passed it. She could have sworn that one of the men in the cab looked a lot like Ray—he even wore dusty birth-control glasses—but that would have been too much of a coincidence. Patsy shook her head, then reached up to straighten her slouch hat. Her hair, pinned up for the trip, promptly tumbled down into her face. A gust of wind caught it and it flew around as though it had a mind of its own. As she fumbled to pin it back into place, she looked directly at the man who looked like Ray.
“It has to be wishful thinking,” she told herself sternly as she attempted to secure the hat firmly on her head. It would be just too convenient for her to fly halfway around to world to find out any news about Sergeant Ray Darling and to have him drive by, apparently unharmed and safe and sound.
“You say something?”
“Oh, no.” Holding her hat in place, she shook her head. “Just muttering to myself,” she said and settled onto the seat beside her escort.
“Okay, fine,” the woman said, and started off.
Then Patsy had her hands too full hanging on for dear life as the vehicle bumped across the uneven terrain to wonder about the man she thought she’d seen.
“I MUST HAVE BEEN out in the desert way too long,” Ray muttered, taking his glasses off and wiping them against the sleeve of his BDUs. He could have sworn he had just seen Patsy Pritchard climbing into an ATV. But that couldn’t possibly be. Patsy was a civilian nurse safely back at home and working in the Flight Surgeon’s Clinic at Hurlburt.
Still, he had to be sure. He placed his glasses, now only marginally cleaner than before, back on his nose and looked
again through the window of the bouncing vehicle, which was kicking up an awful lot of dust, making it even harder to see. It certainly looked like her.
The woman was dressed in an obviously-new battle dress uniform still unfaded by the relentless sun, but the BDU appeared devoid of military rank or any service designation. He shrugged. She could be a reporter or some other civilian coming to observe.
Then the woman lifted her hand to shade her eyes and knocked her floppy camouflage hat off. Her flyaway mane shone in the bright desert sun like a gossamer web of flaxen silk, just like Patsy’s. Time stood still as he stared at the waking dream in front of him. Then the woman grabbed at her hair and stuffed it up under the hat.
Ray shook his head to clear it of the imaginary image. Damn, he was seeing things.
The woman looked up and, for just an instant, their eyes met. If it wasn’t Patsy, why did he feel as if the breath had been knocked out of him?
The waiting helicopter, fueled and ready to take them on another of an endless string of reconnaissance missions, started up and Ray climbed aboard. He didn’t have time to think about what he’d seen.
Besides, it was ludicrous to think that Patsy Pritchard was out here in the desert.
It had to be some sort of mirage. Or daydream. It was simply wishful thinking resulting from loneliness and too many days and nights sleeping in a tent out in the desert.
It damn sure couldn’t be real.
WHILE SHE WAITED for her patients to be prepped for transport, Patsy wandered through the hospital in Taloom Kapoor, but she saw not one familiar face. She strained to recognize anyone through burns and bandages and sunburns and razor stubble. Not one of the wounded was Ray. And no one seemed able to tell her what had happened to one SSGT Ray Darling. It was as if he had vanished from the face of the earth.
She had to find out something, to glean some tiny little fact that would tell her that he was alive. Or dead. Anything.
Then one, last, desperate idea came to her. There was one other person who might be able to give her the information she needed. Patsy approached the charge nurse who had performed triage the night the casualties had come in.
Sergeant Darling Page 14
