Tinderbox (Flashpoint Book 1)

by Rachel Grant

  He held Dr. Adler beneath him as the echo from the blast faded. He’d had to fight her every step from the vehicle, which pissed him off. If she’d managed to escape his grip and made it back to the car, he’d have had to follow, blowing them both to bits. That didn’t sit well with him.

  He glared at her as she struggled beneath him, her face contorted with grief and rage as if someone had just stolen her baby. With hearing dimmed due to the explosion, cursing her out for her stupidity would have to wait.

  Damn, that had been close. If they hadn’t stopped her, she’d have made it to Camp Citron. She never would have made it through the screen, but the explosion would have taken out more than the foolish woman and whatever it was she’d been desperate to get from the trunk of her car.

  Hell. He owed Callahan fifty bucks. He’d been certain the tip was bullshit.

  Dust filled the air, limiting sight distance, but shielded as she was by his body, he could see every bitter emotion that crossed Dr. Adler’s features. He had a feeling this was her first rodeo and would be braced for waterworks except she was too angry to realize she’d just come very close to becoming the source of a blood rain in the desert.

  He peeled his body from hers and got to his feet. Five yards away, Callahan also stood. “I’m getting too old for this shit.” Cal’s voice was muted but firm, indicating he was uninjured.

  She flopped backward when freed of his weight and closed her eyes. Her chest rose with two deep breaths.

  Maybe she’d launch into hysterics after all.

  Pax radioed the base, informing them of the explosion while keeping his eye on Dr. Adler. The conversation was frustratingly short, as he didn’t know exactly who the woman was and why she’d carried a package from Etefu Desta. Their Humvee had been damaged in the explosion, so the base was sending a convoy to pick them up. A second team would investigate the explosion and recover the Humvee.

  He clipped the radio to his belt and faced Dr. Adler. He needed answers. Now. He offered her a hand, but she ignored it and instead pushed herself up from the ground. “Dammit! The fossils are gone!” With her gaze fixed on the smoldering vehicle, she cursed again, as creatively as she had while he carried her.

  Pax glanced from the woman to the wreckage. “I’ve never heard the word jizz used in quite that way.”

  Cal grimaced. “I’m never going to look at a goat in the same way again.”

  The woman glared at Pax. “Why didn’t you let me grab the box? There was time! I could have saved—” Her voice cracked on the last word, and finally an emotion besides anger slipped through. Tears began to roll down her cheeks.

  Shit. He’d take anger over tears any day. Even anger that pissed him off.

  “Maybe you could have grabbed whatever it was from the trunk,” Pax said. “But we had no idea how much time we had. No idea if we’d be able to clear the blast zone at all. Grabbing crap from the car was a risk I wasn’t willing to take.”

  “But I was,” she said.

  “I couldn’t leave you. In going back for whatever it was you wanted to save, you risked my life too.” His voice hardened. “I’m not okay with that, Dr. Adler.”

  Her jaw snapped shut. All at once she deflated. Her knees buckled and she dropped to the ground again. She stared at her smoldering, annihilated vehicle. Color leached from her face—something he’d have thought impossible in the intense desert heat—and she covered her mouth as though she was trying not to hurl.

  “What was it? What was so important you risked your life for it?” This from Cal, who sounded genuinely curious and not nearly as pissed as Pax.

  She met Cal’s gaze, giving Pax a chance to take in her profile. She had pretty—almost angelic—features, and the pat down had revealed impressive curves hidden under the loose field shirt. But it was her mouth that really caught his attention. She had the sweetest lips that said the foulest things. The woman was Barbie’s raunchy alter ego.

  “What just blew up?” she repeated Cal’s question as she swiped away tears with a trembling palm. Her hand dropped, revealing a smear of red desert dirt across her cheek. “Only a piece of the biggest paleoanthropological find in East Africa this millennium. A bigger find than Lucy.”

  “A piece?” Pax asked, curious now. He knew about Lucy.

  She nodded. “We lost Linus’s dinner.”

  Chapter Two

  Morgan couldn’t take her eyes off the wreckage. Gone. All gone. Bones that had been butchered by an australopithecine male over three million years ago, the only find of its kind, destroyed in an instant.

  “We still have Linus,” she said under her breath, as if saying the words was a talisman against losing the hominin remains.

  “Who is Linus, and why do we give a fuck about his dinner?” the soldier who’d dragged her away before she could grab the bones—Blanchard—said.

  “Have you ever heard of Lucy? She’s an australopithecine fossil found in the seventies in Ethiopia by Donald Johanson and his team. She’s estimated to be about three-point-two million years old—”

  Blanchard cut her off. “Skip the lecture. I know what Lucy is.”

  She shook her head to clear it. “Sorry. I’m—” Her voice cracked again, and she cleared her throat. “Two weeks ago, I found a male fossil that likely dates to the same epoch, similar in age to Lucy. It’s hard to estimate in the field, and it’s too early for us to have dates back from the lab, but several characteristics of the skeleton are consistent with the Lucy fossil. It seemed natural to name him Linus.”

  The name had been her own private joke, because while the field workers provided by the Djiboutian government all knew of Lucy the australopithecine, they weren’t familiar with Lucy van Pelt and her little brother, Linus, from the Peanuts comic strip. She met the gaze of the soldier who’d been—understandably—glaring at her because she’d fought him as he carried her away from her car and the fossils.

  He cracked a smile, and she enjoyed the moment of sharing the joke with someone at last, but she’d been abominable toward him. Kicking. Scratching. And the things she’d said… It was a wonder he hadn’t tossed her to the compacted ground and continued running.

  She’d thoughtlessly endangered him and the other soldier. Shame flooded her. She’d been unable to think of anything beyond saving the fossils. They were so much more than the find of a lifetime. The remains and associated artifacts would change what was known about Homo sapiens sapiens’ hominin predecessors.

  She hadn’t wanted to save them for personal glory—although that would come when the find was announced to the world. The fossils had been pure information. Scientific data about a period of human evolution that was represented by scant few fossils. And the bones were now lost forever.

  She met the gaze of the other soldier, noting his name tape said CALLAHAN, then faced Blanchard again. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I shouldn’t have risked your life—either of your lives—by fighting you.” She shook her head. “I just couldn’t think about anything other than the fossils. I took them from the site to protect them from Etefu Desta.” The car smoldered in the distance. The scent of burned rubber reached her on the hot wind. “And now they’re gone. Frankly, I’d rather Desta have them than they be destroyed. And I never, ever thought there’d be a reason to wish a warlord had possession of any artifacts or fossils.”

  “You said Linus’s dinner was destroyed. Not Linus?” Callahan asked.

  “No, thank goodness.” She stood and brushed off her pants, trying to recapture some dignity. “One thing that makes Linus special is he—unlike any other fossil of his age—has tools. An entire assemblage. And—” Her voice broke again. So much for dignity. “He’d butchered an animal. A meal. No one has ever found a hominin with tools, let alone with the butchered remains of a protein source. The butchered bones were in a box in the trunk. That’s what I was trying to save.”

  “Why did you take those from the site and not Linus?” Blanchard asked.

  “Because Linus is still
in the ground. He’s exposed and vulnerable—which is partly the reason I was going to the base—but removing him quickly would have destroyed him. So I took the fossils that had already been excavated and left Linus and his tools, hoping, praying, Desta’s men wouldn’t steal him while I was at Camp Citron pleading for help.”

  “What happened with Desta’s men?” Blanchard asked. His voice hardened as he said the warlord’s name. She guessed he was more on her side now than against her.

  The enemy of my enemy is my friend.

  And Desta was most certainly a shared enemy.

  She explained how Desta’s henchmen had shown up at the site and declared the find theirs. “Linus is a secret. The only official who knew about him is the minister of culture. I can’t imagine why he would tell Desta, but if he did, I can’t trust him. Basically, with the embassy closed, Camp Citron was my only hope.”

  “What about your field crew? Couldn’t one of them have told Desta of the find?”

  She couldn’t hold back her gasp at that. In the two months she’d been in Djibouti, the five men who worked for her had become like family. Ibrahim had learned so much about archaeology and was a natural in the field. He had a new career ahead of him. The idea that one of her crew could have betrayed the site to a warlord brought the return of bile to her throat. “It’s possible,” she said so softly she could barely hear her own words over the ongoing ringing in her ears. “But right now, I’m more afraid for them than afraid of them.”

  If her car had been bombed, what did that mean for her crew?

  Callahan pulled his radio and spoke to someone on the base again, using jargon she didn’t understand. Her thoughts wandered to the plight of her crew. Had Ibrahim gotten them safely away? Could a bomb have been planted under his car as well?

  It was an open secret that the US military launched lethal drone strikes from Camp Citron, making it strategically important—and a high-priority target for enemy states. She’d never wished death from above on anyone before—hell, she’d been opposed to the drones on principle—yet she wouldn’t bat an eyelash if the US had the coordinates for Etefu Desta’s base of operations and opted to use that knowledge for a deadly strike.

  The warlord had tried to blow her up, after all.

  He’d threatened her crew.

  And he’d destroyed Linus’s dinner.

  Callahan clipped his radio to his belt and said to Blanchard, “Double or nothing Desta was behind the threat to the ambassador that triggered the embassy lockdown.”

  Blanchard gave him a terse shake of his head. “No bet.”

  She wondered what the original bet was. The sequence of events paraded through her aching head. The armed goons at the site, the closed embassy, her mad drive to Camp Citron. If Blanchard and Callahan hadn’t stopped her, there was no doubt she’d have reached the gate just in time to explode.

  And die.

  Who had called in the tip that saved her life? Had Desta been both tipster and bomber? Did he intend for her to be stopped outside the camp, or was there a traitor in his midst?

  The thought of her body shattered in a thousand pieces and littering the entrance to Camp Citron sent a shudder through her.

  It finally began to sink in, how close she’d come to dying. Horror at losing the fossils had clouded her brain, making her stupid.

  She could have died.

  Would have died, if not for these two men.

  “We need to head back to the road to meet the convoy that’s coming to pick us up,” Callahan said.

  She nodded and took a step toward the road, toward her decimated rental car. Does the rental insurance provided by my credit card cover bombing by warlord?

  As soon as she was alone, her panic attack would be epic.

  Blanchard’s hand on her arm stopped her. “We aren’t going near the wreckage.” He pointed east. “We’ll meet up with the road if we go that way.”

  They walked in silence, the soldiers flanking her. She assumed this was to protect her, and was again chagrined at the things she’d said as Blanchard carried her away from her vehicle. She needed to work on her people skills.

  After a half mile, she requested they stop so she could catch her breath. She usually avoided working during the highest heat of the day, and this walk without water had taken a toll. Her head—already aching from the explosion—now throbbed with an unforgiving dehydration headache. The water bottle she always kept handy in this country, where water was far more precious than oil, had blown up along with her laptop and Linus’s dinner.

  She dropped onto a boulder and tried not to think about the loss of her computer or thirst. While she was at it, she might as well not think about the omnipresent heat. Or the fact that she’d just driven fifteen miles across a desert with a bomb attached to her fuel tank.

  Blanchard appeared in front of her, and she shaded her eyes to look up at him in the bright, hot sun, wishing she still had her boonie hat. At least her sunglasses had stayed on her face in the midst of the dash and tumble.

  I still have sunglasses. She couldn’t even muster fake cheer at the pathetic positive note.

  “Drink,” Blanchard said, and she realized he was holding out the bladder for a hydration bag. Blinded by the sun, she hadn’t seen it. So much for the glory of Ray-Bans.

  “Thank you,” she croaked, her throat too dry for smoother speech. She took only a small sip. She wouldn’t deprive the man who’d saved her life of precious water. The convoy would arrive soon. She could wait.

  She handed him back the bladder, but he shook his head. “It’s a spare. Keep it. You need it.”

  Both men wore heavy, bulky packs, which couldn’t be pleasant in the heat. She glanced at each in turn. Both were big—tall and muscular—and handsome. Blanchard was the taller of the two, at least three inches above six feet. With the exception of the slight smile at her explanation of the name Linus, his expression had remained largely cold—impressing her with his ability to pull off a chilly demeanor in the sweltering heat of midday—while Callahan had a much more congenial air. But then, she hadn’t compared Callahan to slug jizz while he carried her across the harsh landscape.

  The US ARMY label on Callahan’s uniform caught her eye again. “I thought Marines provided security for Camp Citron.”

  “We’re not the regular security detail, ma’am,” Callahan said.

  When he didn’t offer more, she glanced at his rifle and cataloged his other gear. “Special Forces?” she asked.

  He nodded. “I’m Sergeant First Class Cassius Callahan. Call me Cal. And”—he nodded toward Blanchard—“the hulk looming above you is Master Sergeant Pax Blanchard.”

  Blanchard didn’t even acknowledge the introduction. Instead, he pulled out a water bottle and removed his sunglasses to splash water over his face before taking a long drink. He had heavy, dark brows that capped brown eyes framed by thick lashes many women would kill for, but combined with his long straight nose and strong chin, his face was hard and masculine. And hot, which wasn’t a reference to the water that mixed with the sweat dripping from his hairline.

  “Special Forces,” she repeated, pulling her mind back from the unwelcome thought. He was exactly the type of man she didn’t want to find hot. She’d devoted herself to avoiding men just like him for a dozen years. “Capitalized, as in Green Berets?”

  “Yes, ma’am,” Callahan replied.

  “How did you get the job of stopping me?”

  “Just lucky, I guess,” Callahan said.

  Blanchard made a sound that was suspiciously like a snort. “We were meeting with our XO when the tip came in.” He cocked his head. “Ready to go?”

  “Yes.” The bladder had a strap, which she slung over her shoulder. It must’ve been nearly frozen when he set out earlier, because the water was still chilled and felt heavenly against her skin. She hurried to take her place beside him, and again both soldiers flanked her.

  “How did you end up working in Djibouti, Dr. Adler?” Callahan asked. />
  “Please, call me Morgan.” She took a deep breath of air so hot, she feared it would sear her lungs. “A few months ago, I landed a contract with the Djiboutian and Ethiopian governments to locate and clear sites along the planned route for the Ethiopian railway expansion at the Port of Djibouti. It’s a private sector contract, and the Djiboutian government is paying me, but the US Navy has a vested interest in the project because the government of Djibouti agreed to allow for an expansion of Camp Citron if the US helps expedite the construction of the railway, which is being paid for by China. Djibouti is desperate for the cash the railway will bring, and frankly, they’re playing our country off China to get it done quickly.”

  It was a tangled web of bureaucracy that had her on edge, not knowing if the project would happen until she’d boarded her flight. And even then, she’d wondered if she’d arrive in Djibouti, only to be turned back due to the fact that she was the proud owner of a vagina. She’d been tempted to pack a strap-on, but didn’t think the customs inspectors would be amused.

  “I thought they were breaking ground on the railroad next week?” Callahan said.

  “At the Ethiopian border, yes. A geologist who specializes in this region cleared that portion of the line months ago. I was brought in to investigate two proposed routes that meet up with the cleared portion. I’ve only investigated one APE—Area of Potential Effect—so far, which is where I found Linus. I was supposed to start surveying the second APE weeks ago, but finding Linus delayed us. If the second route is clear, then the railway will go that way, avoiding Linus. If not, then the government will have to decide which route, and do a full-scale data recovery excavation of all sites along the chosen route.”

  Would she be the one who surveyed the second route? Someone had planted a bomb under her rental car. That was a strong argument for going home.

  Her PhD was in New World archaeology; she’d never expected to work as a paleoanthropologist, but this project had come together thanks to friends in the right places, and all that had mattered were the letters “PhD.” No one cared that she’d never worked in Djibouti. But then, few had; there were only eight professional archaeologists who’d ever reported on digs in Djibouti, and she’d consulted with the ones who were still alive before she arrived.