Jake grimaced and looked away for a moment, his eyes alive with anguish.
One of the pilots came to the entrance and called Jake by name.
He had to leave. Ana released him. She patted the soft, rainbow-colored scarf that hung down his chest. Wiping her eyes, she whispered, “Take care of yourself?”
Caressing her damp cheek, he turned and placed his foot on the step leading into the Learjet. “Yes, sweetheart, I will….”
Ana backed away. She watched Jake wave to her one last time and then disappear into the jet. The whirring sounds of the stairs being pulled up and the door locking into place against the Learjet fuselage made her heart cringe. Soon the engines would start up. Ana turned and walked toward Maya, who had a sad look on her features. More tears squeezed out of Ana’s eyes. She didn’t try to stop them now. The whine of the Lear’s engines began. Jake was leaving. He would be gone—forever. Ana had no fantasy about him returning. Not ever.
As Ana came over to Maya, she saw her C.O. reach out with her hand to grip her shoulder.
“I’m sorry, Ana.”
Nodding, afraid to speak because she’d sob, Ana kept on walking toward the helicopter in the distance. She heard the Lear’s engines heighten. Ana didn’t—couldn’t—look back. She couldn’t stand to see Jake’s face at the window. Her heart thrashed with pain. As she reached the Bell helicopter, opened the copilot’s door on the left side and slid in, she sobbed unabashedly, her face buried in her hands. She leaned over, the pain so great that she wanted to double up, but couldn’t. She vaguely heard the other door open and then close, and felt Maya’s quiet presence in the right seat, the pilot’s seat.
Trying to get a hold on herself, Ana felt Maya pressing several tissues into her hand.
“Life is hell,” Maya muttered. She waved to the man who removed the chalks from around the wheels of the Bell helicopter. Busying herself with starting up the engines, she glanced sadly at Ana once more.
Straightening, Ana mopped her eyes and blew her nose. She saw the Learjet trundling slowly down the runway to the takeoff point. Her heart felt squeezed by a huge, invisible hand. “Yes,” she whispered brokenly, “it’s hell on earth…” And she started sobbing again.
“Get your harness on,” Maya told her gently. “It’s time to go home, Ana.”
Home. Jake had said she was his home. What did that mean? Ana was aching too much, caught in the storm of her love and loss of Jake, to figure it out. As the Bell’s rotors began to turn, the engines revving with a whine, Ana strapped herself in. Just as the Learjet took off and headed north, the helicopter took off and headed westward, toward Agua Caliente.
Ana sat there, the tissues gripped in her clenched hands, her eyes blurring continually with tears. The dark brown of the mountains quickly slipped past as the helicopter descended in altitude from twelve thousand to six thousand feet toward Agua Caliente, an hour away from Cusco.
Finally, Ana put on the headset. She saw Maya give her worried glances from time to time. Even though she wore dark green aviator glasses, Ana could feel her C.O.’s caring.
“You fell in love with him, didn’t you?” Maya asked.
Nodding, Ana whispered, “Yes. But I don’t know how, Maya.” Ana pressed her hand to her aching heart. “I don’t know how…there wasn’t enough time…It’s loco—crazy….”
Maya chuckled, her full mouth parting in a derisive smile. “Well, I’m not one to know about real love. That’s never happened to me. I thought I was in love once, but that got shattered in a hurry. So I’m not the one to tell you one way or another about how much time it takes to fall in love.”
Sniffling, Ana blew her nose and wiped her eyes of the last of the tears. She knew she’d cry many more times over Jake leaving her.
Above them, the sky was a pale blue color. The dark brown ridges, and the apus—the snow-capped mountains in the distance—gave her some feeling of comfort because she’d been raised in Rainbow Valley, over which they now flew.
“I gave him my chalina.”
“I saw. Does he know what that means?”
“Yes.”
Maya shifted uncomfortably in her seat. “I don’t know, Ana. Norteamericano men don’t come highly recommended in my book. They don’t know our customs, our belief system down here.”
Ana bowed her head. She knew Maya was trying to tell her not to expect Jake to honor the chalina, or what it meant. She was right, of course. Jake might like her, might try to honor her people’s traditions, but Maya’s grimly spoken words had a lot of experience behind them. Maya, who was Brazilian, had been adopted as a child by a North American couple and knew of what she spoke.
“I know…” Ana managed to reply finally. Wiping her eyes a final time, she swiveled her head automatically to look for Kamovs. They were in a civilian helicopter, so they were safe, but that didn’t stop her from giving in to her training and strong survival skills.
“All my run-ins with norteamericano men have been a disaster,” Maya growled. She moved the Bell helicopter to an altitude of eight thousand feet, from which vantage point Rainbow Valley’s farms and plowed fields were spread out below them.
“Jake was different, Maya.”
“You ever have a relationship with one before him?”
Shaking her head, Ana whispered, “No…just Roberto…and he was Peruvian.”
“Well,” Maya said, reaching out and rubbing her hand in a soothing motion across Ana’s right shoulder, “don’t expect too much, okay? They say a lot of things and never deliver on their promises. That’s my unfortunate experience with them. They’re afraid of responsibility and commitment to anything beyond a one-night stand.”
Mouth quirking, Ana said, “Jake promised me nothing.”
Raising her brows, Maya said, “Well, maybe he’s a jaguar of different spots then, because those men up there are real good at lines and lies. I know—been there, done that.” She glanced wryly at Ana for a moment. “I just don’t want to see you hurt, Ana. You’re a one-woman man. I saw that with you and Roberto. And it looks like you’ve fallen hard for this Jake Travers guy. I’m sorry. I really am. We’ll keep you busy at the base and maybe that will lift some of your pain.”
Yes, work always helped, Ana knew. “I won’t be able to fly for five more weeks, Maya. I feel really awful about that…about the pressure it puts on you and the rest of our pilots.”
Giving a derisive laugh, Maya said, “Don’t worry about it. Consuelo is leaving in two weeks. She took care of getting the supplies for the base, and I don’t have a replacement—yet. If you could go over to the mining side of the mountain, and work with her and take over her job, I’d be grateful. I’ve got a requisition in for a supply clerk, but the army, as usual, is dragging its feet. And I can’t be without a supply clerk. You interested in that kind of collateral duty?”
Ana smiled gratefully at her commanding officer. “Sure. I’m pretty good with numbers. I’ll help out any way I can.”
Giving her a relieved look, Maya said, “Thanks…” was sweating this one. We’re so undermanned all the time. And the damned CIA and Pentagon are strangling us with a budget that doesn’t cover all our needs. I don’t know what we’re going to do….”
Ana heard the worry in Maya’s husky tone. Over the last three years, they had literally carved the base out of nothing to fulfill Maya’s vision, her belief that they and the other fifty army volunteers—all women—could make a difference in the drug trade in Peru. Maya had found a huge cave inside a lava mountain fifty miles south of Agua Caliente, and for a year, Navy Seabees had helicoptered in all the necessary supplies to build the base. Ana knew from taking Apache helicopter training at Fort Rucker with Maya that the U.S. Army wanted all of them out from underfoot. Out of sight, out of mind was how the army wanted to deal with the scandal that had erupted while their class had undergone training on the Boeing Apache gunship.
Now Ana was worried as she looked out the window. The comforting tremble of the helicopter always s
oothed her anxiety. The green fields of Rainbow Valley flashed beneath them. She knew that the army would like to see Maya and her all-woman base die of monetary strangulation. Each year, they had cut Maya’s budget more and more. The base was a spec ops, and money was usually thrown at such high priority items. But not at them. It was as if there were people in the army and the Pentagon who wanted to see them fail.
Well, Maya Stevenson wasn’t going down without a fight, and Ana backed her a hundred percent. They ran shorthanded. The pressures were tremendous on all of them. They operated on a wartime footing every day of the year. So far, they’d been lucky and no one had been killed, but such a record couldn’t hold forever, Ana knew. And with the pilots stretched to their physical limits, sleep deprivation the real enemy to all of them, it was only a matter of time.
Ana tucked the tissue away in the pocket of her jeans. If she could be of help to Maya as a clerk, then so be it. No job was too lowly or unimportant on the base, and every woman there was a team worker. There were no bruising egos at Black Jaguar Base. No, only a group of highly patriotic women who believed in their mission and in Maya Stevenson’s vision.
Sniffing, Ana felt a little better, but she knew another storm of grief and loss would batter her later. Maybe working as a clerk and learning a new job would take her mind and heart off Jake—and her love for him. Because whether Ana liked it or not, she knew he would never return to her.
Chapter Ten
Jake stood in the living room of his parents’ huge old two-story farmhouse, looking out the window. It was May and the trees were bursting with the first buds of spring. The last patches of snow had melted at the beginning of the month. April showers bring May flowers, he thought. In his hands was the chalina. Ana’s chalina. The alpaca wool was soft and he stroked it tenderly with his fingers. Feeling it was like feeling her.
A sigh broke from him. As he scanned the farm, the lawn a sparkling green and yellow daffodils beginning to bloom along the concrete sidewalk leading from the house to the white picket fence, he tried to stop thinking about Ana. He saw his father walking to the big red barn to get his tractor. The land had dried out enough from the snow to begin the plowing and planting. Jake had wanted to help his father, but Tal had an appointment with her therapist in town and Jake wanted to drive her there.
The pleasant clink of dishes and pans being washed out in the kitchen by his mother soothed some of his inner restlessness. A day hadn’t gone by in the three months since bringing Tal home to heal that he didn’t think of Ana and their time with one another. His heart ached. He felt incomplete without her. That warm smile of hers lifted him, made him feel special and desired. Jake was sorry he hadn’t made love to Ana, but in another way, he was glad he hadn’t. From a point of integrity, he had respected the morals and values of her people, and her, by not taking her.
Looking down at the bright pink, red, orange and purple colors of Ana’s rainbow chalina, he smiled sadly. Touching her scarf was as close as he was going to come to touching her.
“Jake?”
Hearing Tal’s soft voice across the room, he partly turned, the scarf in his hands. Tal was standing there watching him through half-closed eyes. Since coming home, his sister had allowed her blond hair to grow. She had always worn it short, in a pixie style to show off the smooth oval planes of her face, but now it fell below her ears. As he searched her serious blue eyes, Jake realized that the physical trauma had healed. She was as pretty as ever. And she was learning to walk again, although she still had a slight limp. Her physical therapist was proud of her progress. But, the old Tal he knew and loved was gone. Or maybe submerged was a better word to use, as the therapist had said. Because of the rape, she was now introverted, cautious, jumpy and hyperalert about every sound and everyone. Inwardly, Jake grieved daily for the changes in his younger sister.
“Yeah. What’s up?” Jake quickly folded the scarf and set it on the back of the overstuffed couch. The living room was huge, with blond oak paneling that was nearly a hundred years old. Many generations of Travers had lived here and farmed the land before he and Tal had come along. Changing times and economics had stopped him and his sister from becoming farmers. Now Jake almost wished they had.
Tal watched him place the chalina on the sofa. “You were thinking of Ana?”
Shrugging, Jake stuffed his hands in the pockets of his jeans. “Yeah…I guess….”
One corner of her mouth hitched upward as she walked to where he stood. “You men,” she teased gently. “Why is it so hard for you to admit you love someone?” She reached out and placed her arm around his broad shoulders, giving him a sisterly hug.
“I don’t know if it’s love,” Jake muttered, avoiding her searching gaze.
“Don’t you think you owe it to Ana and yourself to go back down to Peru and find out, then? There isn’t a day that goes by that I don’t see you sitting off by yourself, Jake, and thinking. And I know you’re thinking about her.” Tal eased her arm from around him and grazed the colorful chalina gently with her fingers. “It’s beautiful,” she murmured.
“Yeah…” he muttered, and cleared his throat, wondering what his sister was up to. Ordinarily, Tal wasn’t so talkative or sensitive about other people or their problems. She’d used to be, before the rape, but now she seemed to be diving headlong into a dark spiral that no one could pull her out of. The therapist had counseled the rest of the family that Tal had to go down into her wounding before she could arise from it.
Right now she was going through the five stages of grief; on any given day, and sometimes hourly, she would whipsaw between depression, tears and rage. It had taken Jake a long time to adjust to his sister’s uneven emotional states. He tried to put himself in her shoes, and when he did, Jake was sure he’d be feeling a storm of emotions, too. Right now, as he looked at Tal, he realized she was in a very clear, stable state. There was even a hint of life in her dark blue eyes, and that gave him hope that she was getting better, even if it was at a snail’s pace.
“Have you heard from Ana? I know you said you wrote her a couple of letters over the last month or two.” Tal leaned against the couch and crossed her arms.
“No…not a word. My letters were returned to me, unopened.” Why had he expected her to reply to the heartfelt words he’d penned so painstakingly in those letters? He couldn’t promise Ana anything. They were a continent apart.
“Maybe she never got them. Mail to South America is often interrupted, lost or stolen.”
“Yeah. Maybe the address was wrong or something….” How he wished. No, he felt Ana had gotten his letters and decided to not answer them. Instead, she’d handed them back to the post office and told the postmaster to send them back to him—unopened. Unanswered.
So Jake had remained with his sister. The therapist had told him that when she wanted to talk, he should listen. That he should be there for her. Not that Tal talked that much about what had happened, but Jake could see glimmers of change, good changes, in her this past month. She was slowly emerging from the trauma, and he felt a huge load lifting off his heart and shoulders. Everyone in the family was trying so hard to help Tal. On some days it worked, and on other days it was a painful hell for all of them to see what she was working to come to grips with. Jake still wanted to kill Rojas for what he’d done.
“Jake?”
“Yes?”
“I’ve made up my mind about something…and I hope you’ll support me in my decision.”
He looked over at her. Tal’s face was serious. She was staring out the window, her lips compressed into a line that he recognized as stubbornness. Taking his hands out of his pockets, he said, “What decision?” He hadn’t been aware that Tal was making any decisions about anything. His heart beat a little harder because he felt uneasy for no explainable reason.
“I just got off the phone with my therapist. I had a long talk with her.” She slanted him a glance. “I’m going back down to my job in Peru. I want to go back to do what I went down
there to do.”
Shock bolted through him. Jake opened his mouth. And then he snapped it shut. Ruthlessly examining her pensive features, her sad-looking eyes and the set of her lips, he rasped, “Are you crazy?” And then, just as quickly, he was sorry he’d said those words. Tal winced, as if struck.
“No, I’m not crazy,” Tal told him tightly. She glared up at him. “I’ve given this a lot of thought for the last three months I’ve been home. I need to go back, Jake. I have to face it. Right now, I feel like a part of me is still down there. I need to reclaim the spirit Rojas stole from me, as silly as it might sound to you. I know I can do that only if I go back and live in those villages and do my job. That’s part of my healing process, whether you think it is or not.”
Gulping, Jake stared at her. “But…your therapist…what did she say?” He held out his hand toward her.
“She’s backing me in my decision,” Tal told him quietly. She unlocked her arms and ran her slender fingers through her ruffled blond hair. “I’m scared, but I have to do this, Jake. And that’s why I’m telling you first about the idea.”
“But,” he sputtered, “the Wiraqocha Foundation. Do they want you to go back?”
“Sure…they have a five-year contract with me.”
“And they talked you into going back down there? Back to Rojas’s turf?” His mind spun. Jake didn’t know if Rojas was dead or alive. He assumed it was the latter. Tal would be working in villages within his little drug fiefdom. Tal would be once again in danger’s path.
“No. They had nothing to do with this decision, Jake. I called them. They didn’t call me. And yes, they’d like to have me come back down to Peru. Those villages still need wells. You saw the children, how cute they are. How loving. Can you imagine sixty percent of them dying by age ten just because they can’t get a good, safe water supply? Can you?” Her blue gaze drilled into his eyes.
“I understand, but I don’t agree with what you’re going to do,” he growled. “I don’t think you’re emotionally strong enough yet to handle it.”
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