Trinity: Military War Dog

by Ronie Kendig

  A slap on that same spot about made him come out of his skin.

  Augh!

  “How’s that shoulder?” Candyman asked.

  That thing would leave a nice, shiny bruise. Pushing to his feet, Heath grunted. His back felt as if someone had driven a stake through it. “Much better now that you hit it.” Rotating his arm to test the range of motion, Heath took up Trinity’s lead with his other hand. When he turned, he met malice-hardened eyes.

  Four men wrangled an Afghan to his knees a few feet away.

  “Here’s your dog killer.”

  “Or attempted killer,” another sergeant said.

  Gaze locked on the shooter, Heath lunged.

  So did Watters. “Hey!” Caught him by the arm. Swung him around. Candyman was there in a heartbeat, too, both strong-arming Heath back a safe distance.

  “He tried to kill Trinity—took shots at her. I’m not—”

  “Ghost.” Watters shoved him back with his shoulder, then braced him with two palms against his chest. “We’ve got him.” His calm, in-control gaze stilled the fury in Heath’s chest. “He’s not going anywhere, no more weapons.”

  Only as he saw the concern in his former buddy’s face did Heath grab hold of his sanity. What is wrong with me? Nerves buzzing, he stood down. Blew out a breath as he turned a circle.

  Rather than longing to be in the middle of combat, taking a bead on the enemy, suddenly Heath wanted nothing more than to jog the trail at the ABA ranch. Escape. Again, it hit him: I don’t belong here.

  Parwan Province, Afghanistan

  “Push in, push in,” Darci said, scooting along, palms flat against the wall of the cave, her mind hooked on Toque’s sacrifice. Why? Why had he done that? The shot she’d heard as she dove into the cave and tripped … had that been the signal that he was dead?

  Think positively.

  Darci squinted to see the thin thread of light that filtered in from the opening thirty feet back. But slinking farther into this cave to hide was as bad as trying to hide in a coffin. Dark, no air … death.

  Think. Positively!

  Her shoulder ached, a sticky mess after all the exertion and trauma. Darci gritted her teeth against the pain. She had to get Badria and Alice to safety. Back to Bagram.

  “Why are we in here? Won’t they find us and …?” Alice’s voice trailed off.

  “This area is home to thousands of tunnels,” Darci said, crouch-walking inch by inch. “It should lead us to a safe location.”

  “And if it doesn’t?”

  Darci sighed. “Let’s keep our options open, okay?” If they didn’t, they’d give up before they started. But she was determined to find a way home. She wouldn’t abandon her father, no matter what he had done in the past.

  “Right.” For a young, naive girl from the country, Alice had a strength about her that surprised Darci.

  “Trust me, we’ll be fine.”

  “What about the others?”

  Frustration coiled around Darci’s mind. “Let’s not talk for a while. We have no idea if they’ve followed us, and we don’t need to be a homing beacon.” Besides, she needed mental space to think and work out a plan.

  “Right.”

  As darkness gathered them into its arms, Darci knew she had to push her mind somewhere pleasant or she’d suffocate herself. Okay, so … where? Home? With her father?

  No …

  On the training field. A dog barking. Warm gray eyes that led to a very deep, rich—but tortured—soul. He’d been so crushed when she tried to lower the boom that they didn’t have a chance that she’d wanted to take back the words, feed him empty promises. And yet … yet, he’d pressed in. Yanked the truth out from behind her barriers like some thief. Some guy who thought he owned the world.

  And yet … he didn’t. What a strange dichotomy in him. Broken, but strong. Confident, yet uncertain.

  She’d left their lunch date without handing out promises. That had been intentional, and his hurt lingered in her mouth like a bitter herb. But she wouldn’t. She worked targets and objectives. She wouldn’t work a guy she … liked.

  Look how things ended for all of James Bond’s girls—dead or gone to the dark side. No thanks. She wouldn’t bear the blame for things like that.

  If only the double life she led could compare to the glitz and glamour of James Bond. And yet Bond had a string of heartbroken women in the wake of his speedboat-style life. That’s the reason Darci never went there.

  Okay, so the mission in China had taken longer than usual. Jianyu had gotten under her skin, under her defenses. The biggest mistake of her life. She hadn’t seen the real him. And when she had …

  A shudder ripped through Darci. She blamed it on the clamminess soaking her shirt. But she knew better.

  “Why’d you stop?” Alice’s whispered words skidded into the darkness. “What’s wrong?”

  “Sorry.” Darci hadn’t even realized she’d stopped. “Leg cramp.”

  A small hand touched her knee. Darci wrapped hers around the tiny, icy fingers. This far up in the mountains, coiling their way through the innards, lowered their core body temperatures. They couldn’t stay hidden from the sun much longer. Holding Badria’s hand, Darci used the wall to push to her feet. Hot and cold swirled through her, the pain mind-numbing. “Just a little farther.”

  “You’ve been saying that for an hour.” Exhaustion tugged at Alice’s slow words that bounced off the walls.

  I have? Had they really been hidden that long? What if they never made it out of here?

  Don’t think that!

  Why hadn’t Darci listened to the promptings that told her this mission would be her last? What made her think she could do this job indefinitely? She didn’t want to. Weariness tugged at her the last few missions.

  She’d loved this job once. With a brutal passion. It helped her feel like she gave hope to people who didn’t have any. Her psych assessment before she took the job revealed she wanted this role because of what happened to her mom. The evaluation didn’t make sense to her, but if she somehow honored her mom, helped others who were in danger and didn’t know it, then that was a good thing.

  But … to what extent? What did she have left? What hope did she have?

  “Because of what’s happening right here.” Even at the memory of his husky words, Darci felt the warmth she’d experienced several nights ago in his arms.

  If only it could happen. If she could walk away…

  “How much farther?” Alice said through a yawn.

  Too bad Heath wasn’t here. With that gorgeous dog of his. Trinity would find her, find an escape. “It can’t go on forever.” She hoped.

  “My thoughts exactly.” Alice pulled in a breath. “But what if it does?”

  “Alice.”

  “Right.”

  Around a corner, the shadows lightened. Air swirled as if … Trekking her fingers along the ribs of the cave, she slowly rose to—

  Her head thudded against the ceiling. She grimaced but was glad she could stretch her legs. “Let’s stop.” As her eyes adjusted to the open area, Darci noticed light streaming through two different locations. Straight ahead and at her two o’clock.

  “But that … that’s light. It means there’s an out, right?”

  Yes, but where precisely would they exit? What if they’d managed to come full circle back to the camp? What if they dumped out into a Taliban stronghold? Despite her best efforts at keeping her sense of direction, Darci had only an educated—if you could call it that after so many twists and loopbacks—guess about their direction.

  “Is something wrong?” Alice’s voice skated along Darci’s cheek.

  The girl was close. Then again, in a narrow cave tunnel with darkness, everything felt close. “Just resting.”

  Darci knelt and tugged her pack from her back. She fished through it for her sat phone. Normally she wouldn’t take this risk, but they were out of options. Odds said the team had been killed. Toque—

  Darci sq
ueezed off the thought as she pulled out the phone. Her thumb slipped into a depression. A hole? Since when did her sat phone have a hole? She angled it toward the lone halo of light and stilled. A bullet blinked back at her, the light glinting off the surface. They’d hit her—the phone—and she’d never known. Heat speared her stomach at how close she’d come to dying. She couldn’t even recall feeling the impact. Adrenaline had shoved her through the opening. Besides, after the pain from the first bullet, with another Death would come knocking.

  “Ah, Death, the spectre which sate at all feasts!”

  As if hearing her Poe quote, the light beam straight ahead fractured.

  Darci pushed back, drawing Badria into her arms. “Quiet,” she hissed to Alice, whom she expected to start peppering her with nervous questions.

  Shouts slithered into the cave. They bounced off the walls as if searching for them.

  Positive thoughts gone. We are dead.

  Eighteen

  En Route to FOB Murphy, Afghanistan

  Despite the chill, body odor and tension radiated through the steel hull of the MRAP as they lumbered out of the village and gained speed. At the village, the Green Berets requested and received clearance to move to FOB Murphy. Eighty minutes had passed since the explosion. Though no official orders had come down, the new location would put them closer to the base and the mountains.

  Watters was no dummy positioning his team in a prime location. Heath could tell by the way he was moving his team and staying on top of updates. That’s the way of it in the military. If you suspect your fellow American troops are getting hammered, military branch divisions and rivalries vanish. You help. You help fast.

  Then later, after saving the rivals, remind them constantly who saved whom.

  Chin resting across Heath’s and Hogan’s legs, Trinity yawned and moaned as he ran a hand along her back. Hogan smoothed her coat, too, eyes closed. No doubt she took comfort in Trinity’s rhythmic breathing. He had. Did now. Even during furnace summers out here, it never felt hot or suffocating to have his furry partner stretched across him as he waited in the field. Laid prone on lookout, her side pressed to his.

  At the FOB, soldiers went one way while A Breed Apart entered a three-story structure that housed a small eating area and multiple rooms with bunk beds. Grabbing rack time when possible kept soldiers alive and alert. Heath opened an MRE and dropped onto the bunk beneath Jibril. Meals-Ready-to-Eat had other infamous, derogatory names, but they supplied enough calories to keep him from caring. Across from him Aspen and Hogan occupied the other bunks.

  Heath fed half his meal to Trinity and provided her a bowl of water from a cooking pot he’d reallocated to himself from the kitchen. When they geared out, it’d be returned, with the addition of some slobber. Served them right for cutting him and the team out of the mission briefing.

  Munching a chocolate candy-bar stick-looking thing, Heath rose and went to the window, clouded by years of grime and dust. Blending with the landscape made a ragtag huddle of buildings that served as a checkpoint almost indiscernible. For years, locals paid what little they had to clear the checkpoint, contributing to the bloated recreational funds of corrupt officials and their perv underlings. Liberal media outlets might call this war useless, but try telling that to the average Muslim trying to make his or her way across a land polluted with corruption and greed. Now they could traverse it without selling their souls.

  Jia.

  As the name lodged into his still-pounding skull, he looked to the mountains, but his mind looked to that heart-shaped face. The kiss he’d almost stolen, wanted bad. Though his TBI had been an excuse to pull back from the world, Jia made him want to reenter it. Be there with her, for her, beside her….

  Was she up there? The explosion—did she die?

  He kneaded the ache in his temple, thinking through how he’d find out if she’d been on the casualty list—if there was one. That was the thing of it. Nobody knew what happened.

  Correction: They knew. He didn’t.

  In fact, he had little doubt they were getting briefed on it as he stood here.

  “You weren’t ready.”

  Heath felt the words as much as heard them. Coarse, tight, controlled, but vitriolic all the same. He looked over his shoulder.

  Hogan hovered less than a foot behind and to the side. She glanced back, and that’s when he noticed the others had cleared out. “Where’d they go?”

  “Don’t ignore what I said.”

  The challenge pulled him around. “I’m not.” He stared her down. Though she couldn’t be more than five five, the woman made up for it in attitude. “But what I do and when I do it—that’s not your concern.”

  “It is when you black out in the middle of a gig.” On her toes, she leaned in. “When you put my life, and Trinity’s, on the line.”

  Heath cocked his head. She’d just accused him of putting his dog’s life in jeopardy. “Step off.”

  “No.”

  Heath drew himself straight. “Hogan—”

  “Look, I get it.”

  “I don’t think you—”

  “You wanted this.” Intensity flamed through her irises. “But that scar you got wrecked everything. So you get this chance to be back here and you grab it.” Her expression softened. “But you weren’t ready … yet.”

  Amazing that a three-letter word could stand him down when a 120-pound woman couldn’t.

  Her brown eyes searched his. “Heath, I saw you black out.”

  Could she hear the shelling of his heart? She had said nothing to the others. When he didn’t respond, she plowed on as Hogan always did. “I have a feeling it wasn’t the first time since the plane touched down. And you’ve had a headache the whole time, haven’t you?”

  Heath swallowed. The last time he felt dressed down by a woman, Auntie Margaret had chewed him out for skipping football practice his senior year. That was two summers before she died. He’d joined the Army a month later.

  “And then that Asian chick. You freaked out, thinking she was in that explosion, right?”

  “I—”

  She thrust a finger in his face. “Don’t bury feelings. She may be the only piece of heaven on earth to keep you sane. I’m not saying you have to get all gooey over her—God knows I don’t need to see that—but feel what you feel.” Sincerity pinched her eyebrows as she bobbed her head at him. “Don’t bury it. You’re stressed out of your mind, and that’s what’s making the headaches worse.”

  He blinked. She was right. He knew she was. But owning up to it …

  “Despite my objections about you coming, I think there’s a reason you’re here.”

  Heath stared at the fiery wonder. For an annoying, mouthy woman, she was all right. Little sister came to mind. “You covered me.” It was hard to read her expression thanks to the bangs that fell into her eyes. “Out there, in the village when I went down.”

  She gave a curt nod.

  As voices floated down the hall, Heath glanced toward the closed door, then to her. “Why?”

  “You get whacked out and A Breed Apart is shot.” She backed away and climbed onto the top bunk. “You think you’re the hot snot now, but wait till I get Beo under the spotlights.”

  “His drool alone would wipe out the audience.”

  Grinning, she flung a wad of MRE trash at him.

  He caught it, his mind weighted by the profound conversation. One he’d never expected from Hogan. He’d underestimated her. And on every count, she was right.

  Talk about cutting a man down to size. Big chunk of humble pie, hand-fed by a woman he’d detested a week ago.

  Heath glanced at her. Looked down, ashamed. “Thanks.”

  “Don’t thank me.” Arms stretched behind her head, she closed her eyes. “I’m trying to convince you to get out. I want your job.”

  Parwan Province, Afghanistan

  “Back.” Darci caught the edge of Badria’s shirt and tugged her backward. “Farther.” She bumped against Alice, w
ho scrambled back into the gaping maw of darkness.

  Darci’s world spun, a feeling of lightness and swimming all at once. She shook her head, strained to see. If her head felt so light, why did her legs feel like lead weights?

  Stumbling, she gripped Badria tighter, tumbled into the cave wall. Fire lit down her arm again. Darci steeled herself against the wave of nausea and light-headedness that wrapped her in a tight cocoon. When was the last time she ate? Or had anything to drink? At this rate, she’d never get Alice and Badria to safety. Propped against the wall, her arms still around the precious girl, Darci swallowed and let out exhausted breaths.

  “What—?”

  “Quiet!” That whisper had razor-sharp precision, severing Alice’s question. Though guilt bit at Darci, desperation and pain chomped into that guilt. She rolled her head to the side, to the other route of darkness, knowing that a dozen feet that way were two more tunnels. Two avenues of escape. They couldn’t see the light beams, so they didn’t know if they were being searched. And in the cave, noise echoed and popped off every surface with maddening clarity, making it impossible to know from which direction the noise originated. To the right, the way back to camp. More than an hour’s journey. They couldn’t do that. She couldn’t do it.

  Banging her head against the wall did nothing to shake off the haze. Panic fisted itself around her heart—if she was blacking out, she wouldn’t know till …

  Well, she may never know if they killed her.

  Okay, genius. Do something.

  To her left lay the dual tunnels. There people were searching. No doubt the Chinese. Nobody else would be looking for them, at least not on foot. Not this fast.

  So, if she led them out the wrong tunnel …

  Searing, an image of Badria soaked in blood popped before her.

  Darci squeezed her eyes tight. Okay, no good. Why did it feel like a brick sat on her chest?

  Shake it off, Darci. Get them out of here—alive.

  “Okay,” Darci said in a whisper to her right, to where she imagined Alice hunkered. “We have to split up and—”

  “No!”