Brotherhood Protectors: Soldier's Heart Part 2 (Kindle Worlds Novella)

by Ilsa J. Blick

  Duckwalking over the rocks, she stepped carefully, feeling how the angle of the slope changed. Gravity palmed her back and tugged at her chest. A vision of her body, arms and legs splayed in a star as she peeled away to spin off the mountain and all the way down played before her eyes.

  “You keep imagining it, you’ll make it happen, Kate.”

  “I know, I know.” Words to live by. Angling her body, she leaned upslope, knees bent, crampons clacking and crunching and stuttering against icy stone. Like the boulders blocking the path, the rocks had come to rest at weird angles, with gaping chasms wide enough to trap and wedge her in place. All I need is to pull a James Franco. Right. Get stuck, saw herself in half with her handy-dandy K-Bar, piece of cake. There were stories of people winding up as human corks, jammed in tight. This time of year, someone might not find her until spring. (If she did blunder in, though, be interesting to put her jackhammering skills to the test. She wondered if her right hand was up to it. Destroy a tree, crater a guy’s skull, sure. But solid rock? Well, be something to occupy her time, at least.) By the time anyone found her, ten to one, she’d be minus a head—nothing tethered a skull to the spine, something cop shows never got right—as well as her left arm and anything juicy. They might never find her legs. Her right arm was a toss-up. Synthetic skin was probably about as appetizing as an old inner tube, and forget her titanium bones. Dollars to donuts, some hiker would happen on her arm and wonder who the hell was crazy enough to haul a mannequin all this way.

  She wondered if the wolves would snack. Probably. Hadn’t she read that dogs resisted chowing down on an owner for about a week, but that cats started in right away? Figures. To a cat, we’re all staff.

  “Morbid much?” Jack observed.

  “Only when facing imminent death.” Now that she was creeping down the slope, she could tell that bizarre stick was much farther from the edge than she’d originally thought. Dropped? Possibly. Her vision sharpened on nearby dark blotches speckling the rock. Because of the slope’s pitch and the wind, there wasn’t as much snow here, and now she spotted small dark blotches speckling the rock near that stick. Lichen? She wished her spidey-sight came with a high-power zoom; she just couldn’t tell. Then wind spun up from the cliff’s edge and twirled ice and snow, and she caught a whiff of something that smelled of algae and salt water.

  “Kate?”

  “I know, Jack.” Shit. No mistaking that blood-scent. Crabbing closer to the stick and blood, she braced her feet then eased down.

  “Well,” Jack said after a moment’s pause. “All right, that’s interesting.”

  “Yeah,” she breathed. “I’ll say.”

  Because this wasn’t a stick at all.

  It was an arrow.

  11

  Heaving a satisfied sigh, Hank scraped the last of his crisp and ice cream. “That hit the spot. The ice cream was great. Did you like it?”

  “Yeah, it was terrific.” She’d forced down every mouthful through a throat that felt no wider than a straw. The ice cream was sour on her tongue, and the crisp carried the bitter tang of char and wood smoke, but she thought only she noticed. Even though she’d scrubbed away dried salt from her cheeks, her face felt stiff and wooden, her tight smile more like the rictus grin of the dead. “Thanks.”

  “No problem.” Eyes twinkling, he licked his spoon then let it clatter into his bowl. “And I got to stop before I go for thirds.”

  “Wouldn’t want to lose that girlish figure.” As he chuckled, she thought, He doesn’t suspect. Hard as this was, she was pulling it off. Hank hadn’t noticed a thing. If he had, he would have said something, teased it out of her little by little. He was very patient that way. A touch maddening as if she was a little-girl-lost in need of protection. Which might be, after all, what this whole charade—Hank’s friendship—was about: shielding the clueless kid from things about which she’d best not bother her pretty, empty little head. It was like something from a novel by Austin . . . no, Thackeray. Vanity Fair, wasn’t it? Faithful old Colonel Dobbins keeping poor, benighted, completely and willfully clueless Amelia in the dark about her late, beloved George, who’d regretted marrying her and become nothing but a cheat, unfaithful, a liar. The best thing George ever did for himself was get killed so Amelia could make him into a hero. Hard to compete with the exalted dead.

  She now wondered if Hank and Pete had discussed keeping her in the dark like this. More than likely. Hank wouldn’t have those pictures otherwise. Besides, all soldiers wrote a just-in-case letter before big missions. (Had Hank gotten one? She bet he had.) She’d received hers five months into Pete’s deployment. Her letter was now worn, as soft and flimsy as a piece of old parchment, and creased from re-reading, re-folding, a little smudged and blotchy from tears. She kept the letter with her, always. It was here now, at the bottom of a crate, in a Ziploc bag under a packet of pictures (though hers were nothing like Hank’s). She hadn’t read Pete’s letter in a long time. Didn’t really need to. She knew that damn thing by heart:

  Just in case I don’t come back, I want you to know I wish with all my heart we had another fifty years. I have more love for you than you can possibly know, so much I think sometimes it might burst.

  I’ve asked a lot, I know. I’ve asked you to be patient while I serve my country, and I’ve asked you to put our life on hold.

  And then this sentence: I’ve asked you to understand that I can’t tell you everything.

  God, that had always nagged. That sentence, which wasn’t the last in his letter but certainly the oddest, was a fish hook in her brain. At the time, she assumed he meant the standard stuff all military families endured. Soldiers couldn’t say where they were, what they were doing. Pete’s emails were sanitized—almost trivial sometimes—and he was vague when they Skyped.

  Now, she had to wonder what everything really meant.

  “Well, we’d better clean up. Getting late.” In the harsh white light of the Coleman, Hank’s eyes were the clear bright-blue of ancient glacial ice. Taking up their dishes, he placed them on the floor for the waiting dogs, who immediately set to work. “There you go, you old beggars.”

  “You’re going to spoil them.” She didn’t want to speak. Every word was a boulder she had to push over the cliff of her teeth. She forced out more. “They never fed Soldier anything but Science Diet when he was a working dog.”

  “I think I remember that.” Dropping back into his chair, Hank hooked his thumbs in the waistband of Pete’s camo pants, kicked back, stretched his legs, and tipped his chair until it rested on two legs. “Pete said Soldier had a special operation?”

  “Stomach tacking. It’s prophylactic. A dog’s stomach can twist, and then they get a volvulus. It’s called bloat. Kills a lot of dogs, not just German shepherds.”

  “I guess the military figures they’re going to make the investment, they might as well do everything they can to keep the dogs healthy.”

  “In working order, you mean.” That came out flat and a little harsh. At his sudden, sharp look, she thought, Watch it. On the other hand, if Hank would simply tell her, that might make up for . . . well, the humiliation, she guessed. My God, what must he really think of her? “Did you know that not so long ago military dogs were viewed as expendable, pieces of machinery, like a gun or tank? They left the dogs behind.”

  “Yes, Pete told me about that. I think it’s one of the reasons the military’s made all dogs NCOs. That way, a dog always outranks its handler.”

  “But it’s weird, isn’t it? That they’d never leave another soldier but saw nothing wrong with leaving a dog?” Scraping back her chair, she stood. “Makes you wonder who and what else soldiers leave behind.”

  If Hank heard the dare . . . or was it a taunt . . . his clear blue gaze never wavered or grew hooded.

  “Yeah, it does,” Hank said. “Makes you wonder.”

  12

  “Okay,” Jack said, “now you have to wonder.”

  “Uh-huh.” Must’ve slipped out of Gabrie
l’s quiver. Plucking the arrow from the rock, Kate turned the carbon shaft over in her hands. The arrow’s three-bladed head gleamed dully in the light of her headlamp. Odd, too. She frowned.

  “What?”

  “That this fell out.” She eyed the distance between her and the cliff’s edge. “There’s a good fifty, sixty feet to go.”

  “So?”

  “So, why is there blood here?” Flipping back her left pop-top, she touched her fingers to a drop of frozen blood then, moving with exaggerated caution, twisted to search the way she’d come, inching her gaze over stone. Nothing, nothing . . . her eyes snagged on a spot . . . there you are.

  “What are you thinking?”

  Not sure. “There’s not enough, Jack.” Her eyes dropped to the blood spatter at her feet. She also didn’t know shit about how spatter ought to look. Although that wasn’t quite true, was it? She knew about blowback. A sharp pain cramped her heart. She knew what happened when bullets plowed into . . .

  “Kate, focus.”

  “Right. Yeah.” Pulling in a shaky breath, she swallowed. Thanks, Jack. “I’m not an expert, but the way the blood looks here, it’s like Gabriel dropped something. His quiver, maybe? The arrows fell out, and he bent to pick them up and that’s how the blood ended up on the rock. Right? It drips? Then he straightens up and keeps walking back the way he came.”

  “Which is why there’s not a lot of blood there?” A thoughtful pause. “So, blood from . . .”

  “Gunshot.” Had to be. Straightening, Gabriel’s arrow still in her left hand, she peered downslope, fanning her lamp right and left. More speckles of blood—and then, closer to a shallow depression in the rock at the mountain’s edge, her lights passed over purple-black stains fanning right to left.

  “Bingo,” Jack said. “Or X marks the spot.”

  “Now, who’s being morbid?” She picked her way closer to the edge. Most of the rock was void of snow here, though a small drift had gathered in that depression and the rock was still slick, the pitch even more acute. One slip-up, one misstep, and you could kiss your ass good-bye.

  She could picture it now, too. Gabriel makes his way to the edge. He takes off his quiver and bow, his pack. Her gaze touched on those splashes of blood and, now that she was looking more closely, frozen clots of hair and skin and a blueish curd she hoped was pulped muscle and not brain. No bone that she could see, or teeth. Most of the mess had adhered to rock leading away from the edge.

  “Ever think of a career in CSI?”

  “Oh, ha-ha.” Yet, she did have a lot of experience with death. As an EMT, and well before Afghanistan, she’d been scraping people up with a spatula. (One guy she knew used an old powder-blue metal snow shovel. No joke. He’d gone into great detail about how the business end was the right shape and width: Better than a regular shovel . . . well, unless you use one of them flat-edge spades. Only you got to watch them heads ’cause those suckers do roll.)

  So, Gabriel had a gun. He sat on the cliff’s edge. And then? He must’ve considered simply eating his weapon, putting the bore in his mouth and pulling the trigger. She’d bet he did try, just a little taste. Wasn’t as if she hadn’t tongued a barrel herself more than once. But then, for whatever reason, he decides against that. Precious few options left, then. Under the chin or drill his temple. Gabriel was right-handed, and all the gore fanned to her left. So, a head shot then, except something shook him at the last second because there wasn’t enough hair and blood. More importantly, there wasn’t a body.

  “He could’ve fallen off the mountain.”

  “You’re forgetting the arrow, Jack. There were all those other shots, too.”

  “Proving only that perhaps one and no more than two were Gabriel’s because there’s another scenario you’re not considering. Say, for whatever reason, our boy pulled his shot. That would account for what you’ve found so far. We know for sure that he didn’t touch off five more rounds unless he was shooting at someone, which also seems unlikely. So, he gets up, gathers his stuff, staggers away from the edge . . .”

  She saw where he was going. “Slipped and fell off the mountain?” Clambering back to a stand, she retraced her steps up the slope, her crampons digging into iced rock until she found the spot where she’d discovered the arrow. “So, he makes it forty, fifty feet.”

  “And then he loses it. Yup. It’s icy, he was off-balance and hurt, he drops the arrow, reaches for it, and then he slips. He clearly didn’t make it any farther than that point because there’s no blood anywhere else.”

  She chewed her lower lip. Jack was right, damn him. Except . . . “Wait a minute. When people fall, what happens? They throw their arms up, right? Like a reflex? Then they try to use their hands to grab onto something, break their fall?”

  A pause. “What’s your point?”

  She swept a hand over the rocks. “No gear, Jack. There’s one arrow, and that’s it. But if Gabriel gathered everything up, shouldn’t there be more?”

  “First off, you’re assuming he hadn’t bothered to put on his pack or the rest of his gear. Second, you don’t know that he’d gathered all his gear. Maybe when he flinched, some stuff went over the edge. Maybe only his bow and quiver or just the quiver was left. Then he gets up, slips, and everything skips off the slope except a single arrow.”

  Damn it. Her sudden flare of elation guttered. Why did Jack have to be so remorselessly logical?

  “I can’t be anything but what you already are, honey.”

  “Yeah, yeah. So, let’s both humor me for one more second, all right? Let’s say he simply dropped the arrow, didn’t notice, and kept going.”

  “Meaning he sheltered somewhere around here?”

  “Bingo.”

  “Kate, you called. He didn’t answer.”

  “He might be tucked in somewhere and not be able to hear in all this wind. He might not even be conscious.”

  “Yeah, he might be really dead.”

  “Put a sock in it, Jack.” She threw a look upslope toward the wall where she’d left her gear. Even with the headlamp and her new spidey-vision, Jack was right: she wasn’t a superwoman. Unless she went for a hike up there, she wouldn’t know for sure.

  Another possibility that accounted for why Gabriel hadn’t answered was he could’ve wandered off. Wounded animals did that. So did people. The same snow shovel-wielding EMT once said people might cover a lot of distance in the cold before they froze to death. The weirdest part is, right before they pass out, they think they’re burning up. So, they take off their clothes. Found a guy like that once, just followed his tracks and then his clothes laid out like bread crumbs, and there he was, buck-naked against a tree.

  So, Gabriel could be up there now. But would he be dead yet? Maybe not. How long did it take for someone to die of hypothermia? She didn’t know. She could check if he’d stumbled farther uphill, though.

  “As you just pointed out, you’re not a superwoman, and though you did cost more than the Six Million Dollar Man, get yourself killed or freeze to death because even you can get hurt—and think of all that taxpayer money gone to waste.”

  Ah, but she did have one ace in the hole.

  “Vance?”

  “Yeah, activate my tracker and he’ll scramble a team.” Probably. No, of course, he would. She was his pet rat.

  “Assuming that’s true, and they find you before you do a Captain America and become an ice cube, they’ll also make sure you never go freely anywhere again.”

  Yes, but to paraphrase you . . . they can try. “If I find Gabriel and he’s badly off, I might have to anyway, Jack. I can’t let the guy die.”

  “Okay, before you go all noble on us both, let’s think this through. You call, he doesn’t answer. There’s blood. Your spidey-sense hasn’t picked him up at all. Yeah, yeah,” he said before she could rebut that. “The wind might be against you, he could be holed up someplace deep, blah, blah. There is still one more possibility, Kate.”

  “Such as?”

  “You
spotted blood on the way up here, Kate. We know he was hurt before he got here.”

  She opened her mouth in a rebuttal, closed it. She hadn’t considered that. “I didn’t think of that.”

  “Yes, I know. So, it’s just as likely he dropped that arrow as he was heading for the edge, not away, and either didn’t notice or didn’t care.”

  “Okay, okay.” His voice held a relentless edge, and she felt herself bridling, her unwillingness to give him an inch hardening into stubbornness. “And the shots?”

  “What about them? You and Gabriel are here in the Black Wolf. Who’s to say there aren’t tons of other late-season hikers? In fact, those shots prove you’re not alone up here. So, the first shot, the one that woke you, could’ve been Gabriel. As for the others, who knows? Maybe whoever pulled the trigger spooked a bear or just got plain spooked when they heard Gabriel’s gun go off. The point is you can’t know for sure.”

  Anger seared her chest. “It’s almost as if you want him to be dead. Come on, be honest. You never wanted me to find him, did you? Not really.”

  “You serious?”

  “As a heart attack, Jack.” When he didn’t reply, she let out a bitter laugh. “What, you jealous?”

  “That’s not fair, Kate. As I recall, I was the one who pointed out that it might not be a bad thing for you to find a man who’s real.”

  The words were a slap, and stung. “I remember, but I also remember that you did a pretty damn good job taking my mind off—”

  “You wanted that. You did that to yourself.”

  Hadn’t she the same thoughts? “You . . . no, Jack, I felt you, I feel you.” I know your scent, how you taste.

  “I’m a man you never kissed, Kate. You’ve spun me from dreams.”

  She’d thought that, too. What was he doing, twisting her thoughts back on herself? “What, you’re blaming me?” Sputtering, furious, she flung back, “I wanted that as much as you did!”