With Garth standing waist-deep in the water, they were almost eye to eye. “Are you hurt ma’am?”
The woman turned at the sound of his voice, eyes blank with incomprehension. In the light from the dash, her brown face was a mask of terror. “My baby—”
“I see him. Is there anyone else in the car?”
“No, just my baby—”
“Let me help you out of the car, ma’am. I’ll get him for you.”
“Him first.”
“I have to move you to get to him. It’s going to be okay. Put your arms around my neck.” When she didn’t comply, he put her arms on his shoulders. “I’m going to lift you up to the bank. Hang on.”
He set the mother on the ditch bank and knelt on the driver’s seat. The car was full of the smell of brackish water. Water had risen to the seat bottom. In the greenish light of the dash, he could make out a little boy flailing his arms and legs.
“Mommy! Mommy!” The child’s screams escalated when he realized his mother was gone.
“Hey, buddy.” Garth made his voice smooth and casual, trying for the tone his dad had always used. “Your mom is safe and waiting for you. Time to get you out of here, don’t you think?”
He felt along the straps, trying to determine by feel which ones kept the child’s car seat in place and which ones restrained the child. When he found the catch, it took him two heart-stopping seconds longer than it should have to work the mechanism. Note to self: study how the catch of every child restraint works. There it was. He pressed the plastic knob and felt the straps go slack.
“Got you now. Come on, big guy.” He lifted the sturdy little boy.
“Hand ’im here,” a deep voice over Garth’s shoulder said. A man in a fluorescent yellow slicker banded with reflector strips held out his arms.
After passing over the child, Garth backed from the car. He dropped into water that was now almost chest deep. He hauled himself up the ditch bank that was slick with mud and algae and saw a large closed truck equipped with spotlights trained on the wreck. More cars had stopped. Beside the highway, clumps of people stood under umbrellas.
His helper in the slicker passed the child to other waiting hands, and in seconds, mother and child were reunited. “Anyone else in the car?” the man asked Garth.
“She says not, and I didn’t see anyone. Have you called 911?”
“I am 911.” The big man’s blunt features split in a huge grin. “EMT with the Black River rescue squad,” he explained. “Highway Patrol and the squad are on the way. I was passing and thought you might need a little help. Doug Cruikshank,” he introduced himself. He stuck out a palm as wide and as thick as Garth’s granny’s Bible.
Garth wiped his hand on his shirt—for all the good it did. He grinned at the futility of the gesture and offered his hand anyway. “Garth Vale.” The man’s simple, open pleasure and pride in being a rescuer were touching. He was exactly what he appeared to be.
Once upon a time, Garth might have felt a little superior, a little patronizing, knowing he was stronger, faster, tougher. No longer. Doug had probably met up with people he couldn’t save but damn few he couldn’t help because he had somebody he needed to kill first.
“You from around here?” Doug asked.
“Near Sessoms’ Corner.”
“I’ll be. You the chap running the CIA drop-off?”
“CIA?”
“Yeah. The landing strip. E’erbody ’round here says Coastal Air’s a front for the CIA.”
So much for keeping the airstrip’s purpose a secret. The real agency operating the tiny airport was too secret to have a name. He’d seen the looks, some speculative, some wary, when he announced he worked for Coastal Air. Doug, apparently, didn’t believe in beating around the bush. Garth faked a chuckle and shook his head. “CIA. That’s a good one.”
“Hey, I know you can’t say nothing. Listen, you handled yourself pretty good. No money in it—we’re an all-volunteer organization—but we can always use another man on the rescue squad. Come around and talk to us sometime.”
“Maybe I’ll do that,” Garth answered easily. Not that he really thought he was going to. Unfortunately, he wasn’t exactly what he appeared to be, and he hoped to be gone from this area as soon as possible. Still, if he was going to stay here, Doug Cruikshank would be a man he’d seek out. “Well then, you’ve got it handled. I’ll be on my way.”
“Wait, are you okay? Sometimes it hits you hard—after it’s over—even when everything turns out okay. ’Specially when there’s a kid involved.”
Doug meant the cold shakes or the jacked-up high that went with a brush with danger. Garth could feel a reaction, but it was more a sudden feeling of lightness and expansion. “I’m all right. I feel… um, good…” He nodded toward the woman he had rescued who, sheltered under umbrellas held by bystanders, continued to hug her little boy while crying tears of joy. “You know?”
Doug’s thoughtful smile and short nod told Garth he did know. After a moment of wordless communication, Doug pointed to Garth’s thigh. “Looks like you’re bleeding.”
Garth glanced down. His soaked shorts leg had a long, ragged tear. Blood mixed with dirty water ran down his leg. “Shit. I liked these shorts,” he groused as he lifted the edges of the tear to check the skin underneath. “No real damage; just a scratch.”
“Blackberries,” Doug observed wisely. “They love ditch banks. Wicked thorns. I’ve got a first aid kit in my truck. Let’s get you out of the rain, and I’ll clean it up for you.”
“Not much point in worrying about getting wet now. I’m pretty well drenched.” Rain streamed down his face and ran down the neck of his shirt. It was cold, but he was just as glad to let it wash off the rotten-vegetation stink of the ditch water. More to the point, he could hear sirens. He’d just as soon not draw the authorities’ attention, even for the most benign of reasons. “I’ll put something on it when I get home.”
“You got somewheres to go besides that trailer beside the runway? The National Weather Service has issued a tornado watch. You know how tornadoes are.” He shook his head in mock sorrow at the phenomenon’s perversity. “They’re gonna head straight for any trailer they see.”
Garth grinned. It wasn’t true that tornadoes sought out mobile homes, but it was true that trailers were more likely to sustain wind damage than other structures. “I guess you’ve seen what the wind can do to one.”
“Seen more’n I want to. That’s a fact.”
Garth suddenly understood Doug’s reluctance to let him go. Doc—Davy Graziano, Garth’s hospital corpsman in Afghanistan—was similarly driven by the same sort of nurturing, protective instincts. He considered letting Doug tend his leg, just because Doug needed to do something, but then had a better idea. “I need to get moving. My girlfriend’s going to jerk a knot in my tail if I’m not back soon. Can you stay for the mop-up?”
“Girlfriend, huh? Gotta keep ’em happy. A pissed-off woman can make a man’s life a misery. You go on, I’ll stick around.”
Garth waved and climbed in his truck. He had a girlfriend to keep happy. Wonder how she’d take it when she found out.
Chapter 13
SEALs don’t eat their young.
—SEAL motto
The house was dark except for a dim light at the back, Garth saw as he approached it on foot, large plastic sacks slung over his shoulder. He had hidden his truck in some brush on a side road and hiked through the woods to the doctor’s house. The fewer people who saw him come and go from there, the better. Trees still dripped, but the rain had ended. Nevertheless, the night was still hot and humid. So it wasn’t a chill in the air that made chills prickle at the back of his neck. The front door stood wide open.
The door’s lock was undependable; it might mean nothing that the door was open. He clamped down on his imagination that made him see women and babies, their blo
od mingling and soaking into the rough stones paving the courtyard.
He made his way through the dark and silent house, down the hall to the kitchen. From the dim light that had been left on over the stove, he could see that it too was empty.
A board squeaked when he stepped on it. From the room beyond the kitchen came the scrabbling and scraping of dog toenails. Finally Mildred was sensing an intruder. Some watchdog.
“What is it, Mildred? Is it the baby?” Bronwyn’s voice, fuzzy with sleep, also came from the darkened room.
“What’s going on? Why is the front door unlocked?” Garth demanded, his voice sharp with the sudden anger of relief.
“Don’t do that!” Bronwyn, who had been sitting in a chair, her tiny frame hidden by its high, upholstered back, jumped up. She planted her fists on her hips. “You know what? I have had it with hulking silhouetted figures.”
She was his woman. Already standing up to him, giving him what-for. Now that he knew she was okay, the relief made him almost light headed. Garth chuckled. “Hulking silhouetted figures?”
“Yes.” She pointed an accusing finger. “You. With the light behind you and those sacks on your shoulders, all I could see was a huge black thing with legs. You scared me.”
Garth thought of how large he must have seemed with sacks adding to his bulk. “Hey. I’m sorry I scared you. It scared me, too, when I found the door open.”
“Well, don’t do it again! I don’t need it. This house already creeps me out enough.” She stalked into the kitchen, rubbing her face. She suddenly cocked her head. “Did you say the door was unlocked?”
“Unlocked and wide open.”
“Now I know there’s something wrong with the catch. I was sure I had locked it.”
“Wrong. Anybody could have walked right in.” He slung large, white plastic bags onto the yellow-topped counter. “It’s locked now.”
Bronwyn flipped a wall switch to turn on the overhead lights. She blinked in the brighter light. More of her hair had lost its battle with gravity, leaving her with only a silly little spout of a ponytail sticking straight up, while the rest hung in a silky mahogany curtain. She shoved her hair behind her ears, still clearly sleepy, still trying to get oriented.
She looked adorable. He wanted to pull her close, to nestle her, to rub her back and let her come awake in his arms. God, he wanted her. The intensity of desiring not just with his body but with his whole being left him tongue-tied. Soon, he promised himself. Soon.
Unaware of the direction his thoughts had taken, she squinted at him, taking in his appearance for the first time. “Whoa. You’re soaked. Is it still raining that hard?”
“Out on 42, I was caught in a cloudburst. A car hydroplaned and went into a drainage ditch.” He couldn’t think of anything else to say about it. “How’s the baby?”
“She’s asleep. She’s okay,” Bronwyn informed him shortly, not willing to be diverted from her line of questioning. “You’ve been in a wreck?”
“Not me. The car in front of me went off the road. I had to stop and help.” He opened one of the three large plastic sacks. “Here are the bottles, the formula, and the Pedialyte stuff.”
Bronwyn frowned. She made no move to examine his purchases. Instead she looked him up and down. “You said you weren’t in the accident, but your shorts are torn. Is that blood on your leg?”
Garth had forgotten the rip in his shorts. The ragged V-shaped rent opened them all the way to the crotch. “I tangled with some briars when I was getting the woman out of the car. Got a scratch, that’s all.” It burned like fire. Now that he was in the light, there was more blood than he had thought.
“Let me see.” She bent forward to lift one edge of the tear.
He stepped back out of reach. “It’s a scratch.”
“I want to see it.” Her eyes twinkled up at him. “Come on, I’m a doctor.”
Garth’s face got hot. “I’m—uh—commando.” He couldn’t believe he was blushing. Modesty wasn’t a trait found in many SEALs. But images of being naked with her notwithstanding, exposing himself to his future wife without any preliminaries didn’t feel right.
Her grin widened. “And I’m still a doctor. Here. Take off the shorts and cover yourself with this.” She handed him a towel and, keeping her back to him, went to the sink where she washed her hands. “Sit up on the counter so I can see. Tell me when you’re ready.”
“You can turn around now,” he told her when he had draped the towel over his lap.
It was torture of the very sweetest kind as she stepped between his knees to look closely at his thigh. She was so close he could feel the warmth of her body. He breathed deeply to take in the fresh, herbal smell of her shampoo and her enticing woman scent. He refused to let that thought go where it wanted to—not with her standing almost eye level with his crotch.
Laying her hand on his knee, she positioned his leg to catch the light. He’d never felt anything like the warm buzz that radiated from deep within his flesh when she touched him. He was so captivated that the sting instantly decreased.
The zigzag, red wound had black, coagulated droplets of blood beaded along its length, but it really was just a scratch. Tough to figure why it had bled so much. It hardly needed the scrutiny she gave it before snapping on plastic gloves and cleaning it with a moistened, antiseptic-smelling pad.
“That’s some amazing stuff you’re putting on me,” he told her.
“This? No, pretty standard. Why?”
“Look at the scratch. It looks better already.”
She made a noncommittal sound. “You probably heal quickly.”
“I do. In B/UDS—the SEAL basic training—I could be pretty much a wreck one day and healed up enough to go on the next.”
“Injured? How?”
“Skin gone from large sections of my hide, bruises, blisters, sprains, concussion. The instructors are diabolical in their ability to think of exercises that will elicit maximum pain while doing minimum permanent harm.”
“Why do they do that?”
“They need to find out which trainees will quit and which will keep going.”
Bronwyn leaned away from him to look into his face, her brows drawn together in a scowl. “Is SEAL training some kind of macho test? So you can join the man-of-steel club? Making you ignore pain doesn’t sound like good training to me. If an exercise causes pain, you should stop. People who ignore pain might look tough now, but they’re going to pay later.”
“If a man isn’t going to stick, the sooner they can get rid of him, the more time they have to spend with the ones who will make it.”
Bronwyn snorted, unimpressed. “It sounds very survival-of-the-fittest. Like societies that deliberately expose babies to hypothermia. If they live, they are hardy enough to be worth raising.”
“In a way it is. A man who will give up won’t survive in battle. Even worse he’ll be a liability. He’ll reduce the other men’s chances of survival.”
Bronwyn’s eyes widened in horror. “But to make you endure pain without complaint in order to prove you’re worthy? It’s the ultimate abuse paradigm! The abuser tells you he’s treating you harshly ‘for your own good.’ If you stay in the situation, you have to identify with your torturers and invalidate your own feelings.”
How had this discussion gone to shit so fast? Some people thought SEALs were nuts for going through the toughest training in the world, but he hadn’t expected an argument from the love of his life.
“It isn’t about inflicting pain. It’s not about proving you can tolerate more pain. It’s about when you have come to the limits of your endurance, will you find another source of strength? It’s about, even if you’re hurting and tired, will you reach back to give another man a hand?”
Bronwyn tilted her head, listening. Another clump of mahogany hair slid from her ponytail. “See,” Garth went on, “
they don’t really take you to where you’re physically at the end of your rope. They’re watching very carefully to make sure you don’t die and are not going to come to permanent harm. But they will take you to where you think you’re at the end of your rope—and see if you’ll go on anyway.”
Bronwyn opened another antiseptic pad. “Go on.”
“Okay. Let me give you an example. On the last day of Hell Week, the last evolution—what you might call an exercise—was a four-mile run. Well, you have to understand that by the last day of Hell Week, nobody is capable of running. You’re too tired. You’ve only had about two hours of sleep in five days. Your coordination is way off, your joints are swollen. The best you can do is hobble along on the dregs of energy you have left.
“My knee was the size of a basketball, but I wasn’t going to quit. Two other trainees say, ‘All right, we’ll carry you.’ They sling my arms over their shoulders and they’re trying to run, and I’m doing what I can with my one leg, kind of like a five-legged race, but it’s not long before we’re a good mile behind everybody else, with two instructors following us in a jeep.
“They’re playing mind games with us, saying stuff like, ‘Don’t you want to DOR?’ That means drop on request. ‘Say the word, Mr. Vale. Just think about how nice a hot shower would feel. We’ll let you sleep for a week if you want to.’
“Sometimes they worked on my buddies. ‘It’s going to take the two with good legs until midnight. They should leave him behind. Look after themselves. After all, they’re hurting, too.’
“Of course, we could hear them—they meant for us to—but we just kept trudging. So then one of the trainers says, ‘I’m worried if we let Mr. Vale finish this run, he’s going to do permanent damage to his knee.’ The other says, ‘It would probably be okay with some rest. We could roll him over to the next class, but if we do, he’ll have to repeat Hell Week.’
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