Heroes In Uniform (50 page)

Sandberg walked into the center of the dwelling and lowered Thompson to the hard-packed dirt floor. Even in the dim illumination from the lantern in the corner, she could see how pasty his skin was. She put on surgical gloves from the med kit, took his pulse and got to work assessing the wound more thoroughly, darting glances at Sandberg as he spoke to the elder. Thompson groaned when she revealed the bullet wound. She pushed his hands away and whispered for him to lie still while she worked.

The round had gone through his abdomen and out the side of his waist. Too low to have hit his kidneys, and too far to the side to have hit his bladder. With any luck it’d torn right through muscle and not much else. She poured in clotting powder and bandaged him up, wondering what the hell Sandberg was saying and how he’d learned to speak the language like a native. Had to be former Spec Ops. Who was he working for now?

By the time she finished and stripped her bloody surgical gloves off, Sandberg came over. “Bleeding slowed?”

“Nearly stopped. Hoping it’s just a really bad flesh wound, but without further assessment and better lighting I can’t tell.”

“We need to move again, fast. Sorry, but has to be done,” he said to Thompson as he reached down to haul him back atop his shoulders. Thompson gritted his teeth and let out a throttled sound, eyes squeezed shut.

Once again, Erin scrambled to get her gear together and rush after him. “Where are we going?” she demanded as they stepped out into the bright sunshine.

“Up the access trail.”

She resisted the urge to snap at him at his clipped responses and followed him and three of the younger men up the trail. It snaked up the hillside in a winding route, but this time following wadis and dry streambeds that concealed them from anyone looking up from the bottom of the hill. Almost twenty minutes later another, smaller village came into view near the crest of a ridge. The faint sound of truck engines below in the valley floor reached them.

“Quick.” Sandberg motioned for her to run ahead of him. She followed one of the villagers down a slight incline and into a shallow ravine, struggling to keep her balance with the added weight of her ruck. A minute later the first dwelling came into view. One of the men ushered them into the fourth house on the right, set against the hillside, and motioned them toward the back wall where a heavy carpet hung. He pulled it aside to reveal a passageway. Sandberg said something to him, received a reply, and motioned for her to enter what appeared to be a long tunnel. The carpet dropped over the opening, plunging them into blackness. In the sudden silence their breathing sounded magnified.

“What’s going on?” Thompson rasped.

“Passage leads into a cave in the mountain,” Sandberg answered. “Got a light?” he asked Erin.

She fished a slim flashlight out of her ruck and switched it on. The tunnel they stood in was narrow and small enough that even she would have to crouch to get through it. Staring ahead into the blackness beyond the beam of light, a sickening sense of dread filled her. The walls seemed to squeeze closer together even more, making the old panic rise up. She swallowed and forced herself to take a slow inhalation as she fought the old fear.

“I can’t carry Thompson through here. You’ll have to take point,” Sandberg said to her in a low voice.

She nodded, doing everything she could to mask the terror trying to wind its tendrils up her spine. Keeping the light steady, she carefully picked her way down the tunnel.
Don’t think about it, don’t think about it
, she repeated to herself. “How far?”

“Until we get to the cave on the other end. Few hundred feet or so.”

Great
, she thought sourly. She pushed away the panicky sensation in her chest and kept going, reminding herself that she wasn’t trapped in here.
Yet.
“You trust that guy?” she made herself ask.

“No reason not to. They’ll keep us hidden and come for us once the soldiers leave the area.”

No reason not to?
“How do you know?”

“Pashtun tribal code. It’s an honor thing.”

“You believe him enough to risk our lives, waiting in here?” Being
trapped
in this tunnel with only two possible exits, in what could be a hostile village.

“Yes.”

His immediate response surprised her. Since she didn’t have a choice but to go forward now, she made herself walk on. The air in here was chilly, the stygian darkness ahead making her heart pound. Knowing Sandberg’s and Thompson’s big frames blocked the exit behind her intensified the fear. She was all too aware of the seconds ticking past, of the rock squeezing in from all sides, making her throat tighten more and more. Only she must not have masked her fear very well, because Sandberg’s low voice broke the silence.

“You okay?”

Not even close.
“Yeah.” There was no help for it; she’d have to keep going until they reached the cave.

It seemed to take forever for her to inch her way through the rock tunnel, her heart pounding a painful rhythm against her ribs with every step, but finally she noticed a lightening up ahead. She picked her way over the uneven ground and the crushing fear began to recede as the tunnel finally widened a bit. The light ahead grew stronger and stronger until she was able to see well enough to turn off her flashlight. At last the tunnel took a slight turn. Their footsteps began to echo slightly, alerting her that a larger chamber lay ahead.

“Stop here,” Sandberg whispered.

Without feeling like she was entombed in a rock sarcophagus, Erin was at last able to draw a full breath as she hunkered down and pulled off her ruck. “You hanging in there, Thompson?” she whispered.

“Trying to,” he answered, his voice strained.

Sandberg shifted behind her and lowered the other man to the ground. “Aim your flashlight on him and let’s check the wound.”

She did, liking that he wasn’t pulling alpha male bullshit and actually treating her like an equal in the process. In the beam of light, Thompson’s bandages were soaked through with blood. Sandberg peeled the tape away from the edges to pull it back. The clotting agent was still doing its job, because the wound was only bleeding sluggishly despite all the stress just placed on it. Thompson was shivering as she added more Quick Clot gauze and re-bandaged the wound.

Once she was done she switched off the light, reassured by the faint natural light seeping in from ahead. “Now what?” she whispered to Sandberg.

“We wait for them to come get us.”

Though she understood the basic tribal code and the sense of honor that ran deep among these people, she still thought it was a huge mistake to trust them with their lives. Honor was one thing, but she’d been over here long enough to know that allegiances here shifted as quickly as the weather. But if they left the cave now, they’d be exposed to the men now combing the hills for them. In the expanding silence she was aware of the thud of her pulse in her ears. “What happened at that checkpoint?”

He shifted but didn’t answer.

“It was you they were after, wasn’t it?” It was the only thing that made sense.

He grunted.

“Why?” she pressed, growing frustrated. After what they’d been through, she and Thompson deserved to know the truth.

A deep sigh filled the space. “Long story.”

“Yeah, well, you’ve now got a captive audience with the two of us here. So what the hell’s going on?”

He hesitated a long moment before answering. “Has to do with a job I was recently on.”

She could just imagine what sort of “job” he referred to. “And?”

Another grunt and the sound of material shifting, as if he’d just shrugged. She opened her mouth to say something else but the distant sound of voices made her whirl to face the cave entrance. She could feel the tension radiating off Sandberg as he squeezed past her. Crouching in front of her, he reached back and put a hand on her shoulder, whether to reassure her or order her to stay put, she couldn’t tell. Instinctively she backed up toward Thompson and withdrew her weapon from its holster.

Sandberg’s wide shoulders all but blocked the trickle of light coming down the tunnel. The male voices grew louder, then came the sound of footsteps in the cave. Voices echoed off its walls, carrying to them. Erin couldn’t understand what was being said, but the angry tones told her all she needed to know. Someone from the enemy security force was there, arguing with at least one of the villagers.

Her fingers tightened around the grip of the pistol as she waited, barely daring to breathe. Sandberg was still-as-stone in front of her. One man snarled a string of what sounded like curses at someone else, then the crash of what sounded like crates or boxes filled the air. Tension rolled off Sandberg at whatever they said, pulsing from him in tangible waves. Erin swallowed, fought to calm her racing heart as she strained to hear if anything was happening behind them in the tunnel. Were they being cut off? Surrounded?

The arguing continued for long minutes as the soldiers searched the cave. Then, finally, one man gave a terse command and everything got quiet. Real quiet.

Sandberg stayed poised ahead of her. After an unknown amount of time passed he began inching his way toward the cave opening. She stayed where she was, ready to grab Thompson and start dragging him back the way they’d come, or rush out shooting to defend Sandberg. He paused just out of view and remained there for a few minutes. Not long after that, a man called out softly. She was shocked to hear Sandberg answer him a moment later. Why had he just given away their position?

Shuffling footsteps came closer, and she relaxed when she recognized his big silhouette blocking the opening. “Come on,” he said softly, reaching out a hand to her.

She hesitated for a heartbeat, then took it and allowed him to help her to her feet. His warm, sure grip helped calm her racing pulse. “What’s going on?”

“They’re gone. Looking for us up the mountain. But they won’t be here long—backup’s already on its way up. Should be here within a half hour, the elder said, judging by their progress up the hill. We’ll wait just at the cave entrance for them. Can’t bring a helo in here without giving away our position and there’s no good place for one to set down, so we’ll likely have to hump it out to an extraction point for them to pull us out.”

Erin eyed him. She might not trust Sandberg fully, but he’d gotten them to safety and had put himself in front of her to protect her and Thompson. She’d follow his lead for this part of it too. “Well,” she said into the darkness after a long silence. “Guess this means we’ve missed our flight.”

Something close to a chuckle answered her, but it sounded rusty, as if it had been so long since he’d done it that he’d forgotten how. There were so many things she was curious about with him. Just what the hell had he been doing on this last “job” of his? She settled back against the rock wall, resigned to spending at least one more night at Bagram.

The man was still hiding something big from her, something that had almost gotten them killed. Once she got back to Bagram, she intended to find out exactly what had precipitated all this.

Danger Close: Chapter Five

Erin trudged back to her B-hut in the early morning sunlight a few hours later, still trying to come to terms with everything that had happened in the last twenty-four hours. After staying in that cave all night and hiking nearly four kilometers to the extraction site with the rescue team, then the debriefing she’d just come from, she was exhausted. And since she wasn’t going anywhere until at least tomorrow morning, she was looking forward to some serious rack time.

Opening the door of the hut, Erin stepped inside to find Ace standing next to her bunk, in the process of stripping off her flight suit. “Hey.”

Ace paused in the act of pulling down the zipper and blinked at her in surprise. “Hey. What are you doing back here?”

“Short version of that story is that I had quite a little adventure yesterday on the way to Kabul that I can’t talk about. Except I
can
tell you that I got to spend some quality time with Cam earlier this morning.” Cam Munro was a Pararescueman, and engaged to Devon, a former roomie of theirs. He and the CSAR team had dropped in by parachute before hiking in to the rescue site to lead them to the extraction point. She’d never been so glad to see a familiar face when he’d shown up in the cave just before dawn.

Ace’s dark eyes widened as she scanned her from head to boots. “Holy shit. Are you okay?”

“I’m fine. Just tired and shaken up.” And pissed that no one would tell her anything about the incident. There was no way those guards would’ve just randomly targeted them. She knew this whole thing had something to do with Sandberg’s “job” he’d mentioned, but he hadn’t told her anything more. When she’d stopped to see Thompson at the hospital after he’d been stitched up—no surgery required other than a good debridement, thankfully—he’d told her he hadn’t heard anything either. He was bad enough that they were sending him home though, and he was slated to be on a transport bound for the States in a few hours. Ironically, it now looked like he’d arrive home before she did.

Ace eyed her in concern, taking in the fresh scrapes and cuts on her forearms. “You sure you’re all right?”

“Yeah, just tired.” The only sleep she’d gotten was brief combat naps in that tunnel, until she’d at last succumbed and fallen fast asleep sometime before dawn. She’d woken to find her head resting on Sandberg’s muscled shoulder rather than the rock wall when he’d shaken her slightly to alert her that the rescue force had arrived. Though she couldn’t be sure, she suspected he must have settled her against him at some point during the night. And even though he was a virtual stranger who’d inadvertently put them in grave danger, she couldn’t deny the magnetic pull she felt toward him. Waking up against his powerful frame had made her feel oddly safe and protected.

Ace sank onto her bunk, frowning. “Will you still get to take your leave?”

“God, I hope so. You just get in?”

“Yeah. Had a good night. Took out two targets.”

“Perfect. We can crash together.” And after everything that had happened, she’d feel better knowing Ace was close beside her while she slept. Erin dumped her ruck at the foot of her bunk, unlaced her boots and pulled back the fresh sheets she’d put on before leaving yesterday. Ace hit the lights and within minutes of crawling between the sheets, Erin was asleep.