Some of the newbies are so damn jumpy, as if they really believe the Taliban is in the foothills, ready to blow us away. Thank God we don’t have live rounds—a rookie shot me today when we ran an Afghan military trainee/traitor scenario. He thought I was the enemy.
Alec Ravissant is one cool dude. Since I was dead, my team had to recover my body. Surreal, let me tell you. But after my body was safely returned to the field HQ, I got to hang with Rav in the control booth and watch my team continue to screw up.
Everyone calls the control booth God’s Eye, because there are about a hundred monitors that show the action in the training areas. You can see everything—it’s like something out of a futuristic movie.
Rav said I’d been doing a good job—until I got dead—and asked why I never applied for Ranger school. I told him I had a bratty little sister who would have freaked if I did. I told him how I’d been your guardian since you were fourteen, and that you’re all grown up and working on your PhD but are still a handful and I won’t stop worrying about you until I marry you off.
I don’t know if you’ve heard of Alec Ravissant (Rav to the troops), but he’s like, legendary. He’s apparently from some snotty, rich family back east. Dude went to Harvard. He’s got like a genius IQ and was being groomed for politics. When he was twenty-one, he’d been accepted at Harvard Law, but he ditched it and joined the Army. His family tried to pull strings to keep him out of combat. His response was to apply for Ranger school. He served with the Rangers for years, deployed on lots of special ops missions. After he left the service, he bought Raptor with pocket change.
Knowing the guy is rich, smart, and can hold his own in a firefight, I asked Rav if he was in the market for a wife. He laughed and said he had enough on his plate and couldn’t handle the troublemaker I’d described. Sorry, sis. I tried. But then he surprised me by asking if I was planning to reenlist. He said he liked the way I worked with the soldiers, and—holy shit—he offered me a job.
I’m stunned. I’ve always figured I’d be a career enlisted man. Without college, what else am I good for? I know. I know. You’ve nagged me about the GI bill often enough—but I don’t want to go back to school. Shit. Can you see me in a classroom full of nineteen-year-olds? After two tours of duty in Iraq and three in Afghanistan, I don’t think I could handle being in a classroom again. Honestly, I don’t understand how you put up with the academic bullshit.
I’m thinking about the offer. I like Rav and the work Raptor is doing now that he’s running the place—although I have to admit, some of the training is a bit too damn real. Everything here is done to simulate the real thing, to trick us into panic mode, so those who shut down will learn how to pull out of it. It’s scary and intense, but valuable, especially for the kids fresh out of boot camp who’ve never seen combat.
I hope the meeting with your shithead advisor went well and your dissertation flies through all the hoops they throw at you. I can’t wait to start calling you Doc Izzy.
Love,
Vin
P.S. Email me a photo of you. If I end up dead in God’s Eye again with Rav, I’ll check email and make sure he sees your picture. If I have to, I could throw myself on a dummy grenade... I’m looking out for you, Sis.
Alec couldn’t help but smile. If Vin had flashed Isabel’s picture his way, he wondered if he’d have asked for her number. Maybe. Probably. Superficial, sure, but also, Alec remembered the pride in Sergeant Vincent Dawson’s voice as he described his little sister. Alec had been intrigued.
Vin had told Alec how he became Isabel’s guardian. He’d been a freshman in college and Isabel a freshman in high school when their parents died in a car accident. With no other family to turn to, Isabel would have gone into foster care, but eighteen-year-old Vin dropped out of school and joined the Army so he could support her.
It was no wonder the two had been fiercely close, and Vin was especially proud that his brilliant little sister was just a year away from obtaining her PhD in archaeology.
Except she didn’t have a PhD. As far as Alec knew, she’d dropped out of the program when Vin died. He suspected her decision had more to do with her crusade against Raptor than a change of academic plans, which made Alec’s skin crawl with shame. He’d let Vincent Dawson down in a way that would have mattered to the soldier very much.
He shook his head. He was supposed to be reading Vin’s emails about Raptor, looking for hints as to what had happened to him and connections to what had happened to Alec yesterday, not looking for insight into the soldier’s little sister’s psyche.
He knew the basic timeline of Vin’s last months. Two months after sending Isabel that email, Vin received an honorable discharge from the Army and started the job for Raptor less than a week later—Alec had paid him a huge bonus for starting so quickly, because between purging the roster of employees loyal to Robert Beck and having Apex, a rival private security company, headhunting his best operatives, he’d been dangerously short-staffed at the Alaska compound.
Vin’s first emails after moving to the compound were as expected. He shared his sister’s love of the outdoors and described Tamarack and the surrounding taiga forest in detail only another avid hiker would appreciate.
The fourth email—sent about a month after Vin moved to the compound—held the first hint that things weren’t perfect in his new northern home.
Izzy,
Sorry I haven’t emailed in a while. I was down with a nasty bug. I’m fine now—nearly 100%—or I wouldn’t tell you about this at all, because I know how you worry.
The bug was bad, knocked me on my ass for a few days. I don’t know if I’ve ever been so sick. I was out in the woods, hiking on my day off, when it hit me. Explosive pain in my head. Nausea. I passed out—I think I was only out for a few seconds, but it scared the shit out of me. I thought I was going to die.
I finally got the strength to get up and walk. It took me three hours, but I made it back to the compound. Went straight to the infirmary. They ran a gazillion tests—checking for stroke or anything else that can explain it—but came up with nothing. Doc thinks it was a virus. He’s warned me not to go hiking alone anymore.
I wish you’d come visit. You’d love the hikes, and I could use the company. No one here is into hiking, and I just reach a point where I’ll go crazy inside the compound. I need to get out. The simulated settings are just too much like a war zone for me I guess. The noise, the smell, the intensity.
I need to hike to escape it.
I know what you’re thinking—PTSD. I’m dealing with it, I promise. Rav made it a condition of employment—all vets see a shrink who drives up from Fairbanks twice a month whether we show signs of PTSD or not. Some of the guys resent the hell out of it. Others give lip service to hating it, but I think are secretly glad it’s required. I’m probably one of those, but don’t tell anyone.
Also, the shrink is kinda hot. It’s a shame she’s all loaded down with no-dating-patients ethics.
Miss you.
Vin
Alec had read both the doctor’s report on Vin’s sudden illness, and he’d reviewed the psychiatrist’s notes. Vin had signed a release upon employment to allow human resources and senior staff access to all medical records including mental health. It was vital for Alec to know the mental state of the men and women who were training soldiers for combat.
Vincent Dawson passed every psych evaluation given him.
Two weeks after his illness, Vin had gone back to the woods alone. When he failed to return to the compound that evening, two operatives set out to find him. In deference to the doctor’s orders about not hiking alone, he’d left a map indicating the area he intended to explore. He was out cold when the operatives found him, and it appeared he’d suffered a fall from a short but steep hillside and hit his head.
His next email to Isabel after that held the same degree of reassurance as before—he was fine, his injuries minor—but he also described a dream he’d had while unconscious. He’d said it
had the feel of a night terror. He’d felt like he was awake, but couldn’t move, couldn’t talk, couldn’t scream, and everything felt as though it was happening in real time. In the dream, he’d been dragged into a cave by two masked men. It had been so real, he’d believed he’d somehow gotten caught up in a Taliban hostage-taking scenario that was being run for a small group of soldiers on the compound.
Inside the cave, the terrorists tested his ability to withstand torture, and he no longer thought it was part of a Raptor training exercise.
On the ceiling of the cave, Vin saw a petroglyph. A lynx, identifiable due to the feline’s distinctive ear and beard tufts. He’d focused on the etched cat while they tortured him, fiercely holding on to sanity by reciting aloud all he knew about big cats followed by everything Isabel had taught him about petroglyphs and archaeology. By fixating on the lynx, he’d stopped himself from divulging classified information about his tours in Afghanistan.
The experience had been terrifying, but when he came to after being found, aside from a few bruises from his fall and a concussion from hitting his head, there’d been no bruises on his body from the torture, telling him it had all been a horrific, vivid dream.
Nicole pulled him from the trainings and gave him a desk job for three weeks, as was their standard concussion protocol. He passed the next psych eval with no red flags indicating he wasn’t fit for full duty, but he didn’t tell the psychologist about the dream. He only shared that tale with Isabel.
Six weeks after his fall while hiking, in the middle of a survival training exercise in a remote part of the compound, Vincent Dawson disappeared. His body was found three days later. There wasn’t a mark on him to indicate he’d died of anything other than exposure.
The day he went missing, Isabel received a text from her brother, which she’d shared with the Raptor search party as soon as she learned he was missing. His final message to his sister: Oh shit. I found the lynx cave.
After his body was found, the area was scoured for caves. No caves, and certainly no lynx petroglyphs were located.
The FBI, the local police, and Alec’s own men conducted a full investigation, finding no sign of foul play. It appeared Vincent had either suffered a mental break—perhaps he’d crossed paths with a lynx, which were known to inhabit the area—and it had trigged memories of the dream, or maybe his mental constructs had crashed during the tense survival training. Whatever had happened, it appeared he’d gotten lost and forgotten the very survival skills he was imparting to a team of soldiers.
He’d gotten wet crossing a river and lost his pack midstream—it was found several days later, having caught on a beaver dam—and he’d died from hypothermia a day or two after he’d gone missing.
The insurance company claimed his death was a suicide, but Alec’s lawyers had used the loss of the pack to argue for accidental death. In the end, because he’d been on the clock when he disappeared, his death was deemed a training accident.
Alec had visited those woods himself, had searched both where Vin had disappeared from and where he was found. There was nothing to indicate Sergeant Dawson’s death was anything other than a tragic accident due to a mental breakdown.
At first Alec’s lawyers thought Isabel had protested because her brother was mentally unfit for duty but had been put back in the field. They thought she was angling for a bigger payout than the accidental death policy she’d already received.
But she’d surprised everyone with her own narrative—that Vin had actually been taken into a cave and tortured, and during the training, he’d stumbled upon the cave again, and whoever had tortured him the first time had somehow managed to lure him across the river and left him to die.
Her theory was nutty on every level. There was no cave for Vin to stumble upon in the area where they’d conducted the survival training, and there hadn’t been a mark on Vin’s body to indicate he’d been tortured the first time, let alone had somehow been coerced into crossing a frigid river in late fall. Vin was, first and foremost, a soldier. Alec had seen the man in action and knew he was as fit as any Ranger he’d fought beside.
Vin was also a hiker and outdoorsman, as proficient in the woods as his little sister. It was hard to imagine a man like Vin could be forced to cross a river, hike a mile, then lie down and die, without leaving a mark on the man.
Vin would have fought like hell.
Unless his only opponent was his own inner demons.
At least, that was what Alec had believed, until he woke up deep in the forest with a splitting headache and no memory of how he got there. Now he didn’t know what to believe.
A noise came from the kitchen, and he set the computer on the coffee table to investigate. Before he rose from the couch, the culprit came to him in the form of a fluffy gray cat. It must’ve entered the cabin through a pet door.
The cat looked too sweet and fuzzy to survive being an outdoor cat in the middle of the Alaskan wilderness, but he had a feeling the creature was a lot like its owner, tough as hell under a beautiful, fragile exterior.
The cat stared at him in that assessing way cats do, and finally deigned to jump up on the couch. Then it walked across his lap, without stopping before it settled in the corner, just out of Alec’s reach. Of course it could have just jumped to that end of the couch, but where was the not so subtle message in that?
He’d always been a dog person and suspected this cat knew it.
The cat held his gaze, and he wondered if it was choosing which part of him to shred first.
“You two fighting over which one is the alpha cat?” Isabel asked.
Alec startled at her voice and had a feeling he lost status with the cat when he broke the staring contest and faced Isabel. He caught his breath. Even damp, her red-and-gold locks formed tight spirals that appeared intent on doing whatever they pleased. She had gorgeous, obstinate hair, which he found entirely fitting.
“Gandalf, meet Alec Ravissant. Alec, meet Gandalf the Grey,” she said.
He grinned. She was a Lord of the Rings fan, which almost made up for her being a cat person.
She frowned. “Is something wrong?”
“No. Why?”
“You’re staring at me. Kind of like a tiger ready to pounce.”
“Sorry. I just… Your hair is—”
“A pain in the ass.”
He stood and slowly crossed the room. As he drew near, she took a surprised step backward. He continued forward until he’d backed her into the wall. He planted a hand by her ear and leaned over her. “Your hair is gorgeous. It’s the most beautiful hair I think I’ve ever seen.”
Her eyes widened as she stared up at him, and her breath hitched, proving she was as stirred by him as he was by her. Good.
A drop of water gathered at the end of a ringlet. He watched it fall, landing in the hollow of her collarbone. He wanted to lick the moisture from her skin.
This was foolish as hell, yet he didn’t want to be anywhere else.
The pulse at the base of her throat jumped. Maybe he’d start there instead. He lowered his head.
“This isn’t the smart thing,” Isabel said, her voice so soft it was almost a whisper.
“The smart thing?” he asked.
“Sometimes you have to make a choice between the smart thing and the right thing. This isn’t the smart thing.”
He grinned, liking very much the option she left open. “But it definitely feels like the right thing.” He leaned down and pressed his mouth to hers, not hard and fast, but soft, testing. Giving her a choice. She leaned forward, into him. He took that as a good sign and slid an arm around her waist, pulling her against him as he slipped his tongue between her lips.
The slide of her tongue along his triggered a current that coursed through his body. Absolutely the right thing.
She was every bit as sweet as he’d imagined when he woke with her in his arms this morning.
She dropped back to her heels, introducing space between them when he craved the exact op
posite. He wanted to demolish all distance and give her nothing but pleasure. Erase pain and conflict with an act as old as humanity. Older than war.
“We shouldn’t—” she said.
“I’m finding it hard to give a damn about shoulds and shouldn’ts.”
She gently pushed at his chest. “Then I will for the both of us.”
He leaned back and held her gaze. What he saw gave him hope. Not rejection. Caution.
He rubbed a thumb across her full bottom lip. “Fair enough.” He stepped back. She was right to be cautious. Hell, he needed to think before he jumped in too. Just this morning, he’d been certain she’d orchestrated his abduction as some sort of twisted revenge for her brother.
She pushed off the wall and straightened her shirt—even though his hands hadn’t strayed and messed with her clothing. He only wished they had.
She looked cute in the blue flannel top and faded, worn jeans that adhered perfectly to her curves. Comfortable, relaxed. But he’d probably think she looked cute no matter what, because something had happened to his brain when he was hit over the head, and he found himself focusing far too much on her hair, body, and lips than a responsible man ought to.
He should be asking her about the forest yesterday, probing for missed clues. Her cell phone was missing. She’d found him on the rock, stewing in a pool of his own blood. What else? “Was I faceup or facedown on the rock when you found me?”
“Up,” she said immediately, and he had a feeling she was relieved he was getting down to business. “I wasn’t sure if you were dead or not, but then I saw you breathe.” She crossed the room and dropped onto the couch and pulled Gandalf to her lap. The cat settled in like a blanket.
“You bandaged me right away?”
Vote Then Read: Volume II Page 245
