Never Been Kissed (3 page)

Got it,
he typed back before putting the phone in his pocket. Then he took another minute to check the Glock 21 in the holster under his arm and his hunting knife, a gift from Sean he felt naked without, strapped to his ankle.

His phone buzzed again and he fished it out. This time, instead of text it was a picture. A woman, her dirt-smudged face surrounded by matted and wild brunette hair. Her brown eyes huge. Terrified and defiant at the same time.

Ashley.

His reaction was an earthquake miles away, cataclysmic but distant.

They just sent this as proof she was okay,
Harrison texted.
But it’s the same picture they sent a week ago.

After a deep breath Brody buried the phone back in his pocket and opened the Cessna door.

“Hey, man.” Clayton put a hand over his shoulder, reading Brody’s mind in the way of a fellow soldier. “Typically the pirates don’t hurt the hostages. It’s why they’re able to stay in business.”

Brody nodded. He’d been telling himself the exact same thing. But there had been that group of civilians murdered on their boat. And the old photo bothered him. So did those boys with guns. An accidental shot could kill you just as dead as a planned one.

Outside, the hot dry wind stirred the sand into the air, where it stung any exposed skin. And the tension was just as thick. He could feel the boys sizing him up, taking note of the gun under his arm. They all clutched their AKs a little tighter, tried to seem a little harder.

For the most part it worked.

Brody had gotten soft in the last ten years. Protecting dirty senators and paranoid movie stars had not put him in this kind of situation.

His whole body prickled with awareness and warning as if he’d been stripped down to nerve-endings.

“Hello!” Umar greeted Brody like he was the front-desk man at a five star resort.

“Where is Ashley?”

“I will walk with you.”

“She’s close?”

“Enough.”

The village was tiny, full of packed dirt huts cobbled together with roofs of tarps and plastic bags. Children watched him with wide eyes from dark doorways, their hands curled in their mother’s clothing. Umar led him to a hut at the end of the dirt stretch crisscrossed with tire tracks. The tarp roof was an eye-searing orange. Two jerry cans of water stood near the door. There were embers of a dying fire in front, scattered pots. A knife lying in the dust.

“She’s in there,” Umar said, pointing to the door.

Brody scanned the area before stepping into the dark room. The boys were chewing Qat, the narcotic leaves and stems turning their teeth and lips green.

A bunch of high kids with guns. Perfect.
This is what Harrison had meant when he said things could get ugly.

Brody needed to find Ashley and get the hell out of this place.

Inside, the room was cast in a strange orange glow from the sunlight coming through the tarp—it took his eyes a moment to adjust, and what he initially thought was a bedding moaned.

Ashley.

Instantly, he was beside her, helping her roll to her back.

The Marine Corps basic training, the brief time in Afghanistan, it took over and his reaction to Ashley and the shape she was in got buried. Put down some place crowded now with fear and outrage.

She’d been beaten. Recently. Blood covered one side of her face, still oozing from a giant gash over an eye already swollen and black. The sundress she wore was filthy, bloody and torn at the low sleeve, revealing in the back of her arm a deep slice that dripped thick dark red blood. He grabbed a handkerchief from his back pocket and tied it around the dirty wound.

“Ashley,” he said in a loud clear voice but she didn’t open her eyes. A concussion probably. With steady hands he felt her arms and legs. No broken bones. Then he pressed her belly, there was no way of knowing if she had internal bleeding, without an X-ray. But the tissue all felt solid. She was able to move, which ruled out dangerous spinal damage. When he touched her ribs she moaned. Carefully, as gently as he could he traced her ribs, not finding any broken ones. But the skin was raw and turning dark.

She’d been kicked.

The outrage boiled over and all he could do was clench his teeth against it. There were major medical questions unanswered but he couldn’t leave her lying in the dust with armed children getting stoned out front. He slid his hands under her body, and lifted her into his arms.

“
Fadlun,
” she whimpered.
Please.
For a moment, stark and wild he wanted to tear down the hut, beat every dead-eyed teenager out there. But he swallowed the furious instinct and concentrated on what was important. Getting Ashley to reliable heath care.

Outside the door, Umar stood with his band of boys. A new man was there, raw red scratches across his face. And when he looked at Ashley he could hardly contain his distaste. He muttered something Brody couldn’t hear, turned, and spat in the dirt.

Some of the boys laughed and the whole scene teetered on a knife’s edge.

I could put a bullet in your head and the world would
be a better place,
Brody thought, a hair’s-breadth from doing it.

Ignoring the boys, who stared at them with unfocused eyes, Brody walked toward the plane, which Clayton had fired up the minute Brody had stepped out of the hut.

A hundred meters,
he thought.

“There was a situation,” Umar said as he jogged to catch up to Brody.

Fifty meters.
He could see Clayton’s features through the dusty windshield of the Cessna.

“The man with the scratches on his face?” Brody had no doubt that Ashley had done it.

Almost there.

“When it came time for Yeri to separate the women, they fought him.”

Good for them.
“Where is the other woman?”

“Taken to Mogadishu, where her family will pick her up.”

Brody didn’t believe Umar for a minute, but any further conversation with these criminal bastards was a waste of time. And Ashley was his priority.

Under his boots the sand turned to the asphalt of the short runway and Clayton reached across the cockpit and opened the rear cargo door as they approached the plane.

“We’re done?” Brody said to Umar.

Umar smiled, revealing gold incisors and molars. “All is satisfactory. Yes?”

If I ever see you again,
Brody thought,
I’ll make you choke on those teeth.

Instead of saying that aloud, he nodded a curt affirmative and turned his back on the translator.

“She all right?” Clayton asked.

“Unconscious,” Brody said, sliding her into the cargo area of the small plane. He made a pillow for her head and surrounded her with the blankets they’d brought.

“Holy shit,” Clayton said when he got a look at her.

Brody felt very keenly the guns behind him. The old Browning in the back of that truck could bring down the plane, kill all of them.

Quickly, Brody climbed into the cramped cargo area with Ashley and shut the door.

“Get us the fuck out of here,” he said.

Rattling down the runway clearly caused her some pain and he did everything he could to cushion her, protect her. But it wasn’t enough.

Violently, he dug the first aid kit from beneath the pilot’s seat. It popped open under his rough hands, gauze unraveling across the metal floor of the plane.

They’d touched her. Hit her. Kicked her. Terrorized her.

Ashley.

The thought was a hot wire in the center of his brain. His uselessness ached.

The plane lifted and bounced onto the air, banking in a hard right.

“We need to make a stop in Nairobi,” Brody said.

“That’s where I’m headed. We have just enough petrol to get there.”

It was a three hour flight, but the closest reliable medical facility.

He pulled his phone out and called Harrison.

“Is she all right?” Harrison asked before the first ring had stopped.

“She’s been beaten,” Brody said, looking out the window down at that technical truck with the guns and boys—the symbol of a country out of control. “She’s unconscious, probably has a concussion, maybe cracked ribs. We’re heading to Wilson Airport in Nairobi; have a doctor meet us there.”

Brody hung up and started opening the small packets of alcohol wipes to try to clean Ashley’s face. He’d need about thirty for the blood alone.

And in truth, there was nothing he could do to clean this up. Nothing.

“Fuck,” he growled, and unable to stop it, unable to hold it back anymore, he took aim at the passenger seat in front of him and punched it. Hard. The plastic seat cracking against his knuckles. “Fuck. Fuck. Fuck.”

“Oy, mate,” Clayton snapped. “That’s my plane you’re punching.”

Right. A dozen deep breaths and he brought himself back under control. He opened his aching fist. Alcohol swabs. Clean Ashley up. Do what he could to make this go away.

But when he turned to her, she was staring at him from the one wide brown eye that could open.

His heart kicked hard against his ribs as if seeking its freedom and he couldn’t breathe for the obscene pleasure of her being alive and awake.

And near.

Tears gathered against her eyelashes, pooling in the corner of her eye and dripping down the side of her nose. Tears leaked out from under the purple swollen lid of her other eye. And her body, dirty and battered and bloody, began to shake.

“You’re okay,” he told her, leaning in close to her ear so she could hear him over the engine noise. He placed a hand at the top of her head, the other at her shoulder. A hug of sorts. “You’re out. You’re safe. Everything is going to be fine.”

He wondered if in her shock and the long stretch of years between them, she would recognize him. And if she did, he hoped it didn’t cause her any more pain. She had enough on her plate.

But her fingers, the nails broken and jagged and dirty and, Brody was pleased to note, rimmed with blood—hopefully Yeri’s—twisted into the sleeve of his gray T-shirt.

“Brody?” He barely caught her whisper over the sound of the plane, but he nodded.

“It’s me, Ashley,” he said, wiping the tears and blood from her face, while her eyes slowly shut and she slid back into sleep. “I got you.”

Exhausted, Brody stood in the doorway and watched Ashley sleeping on the small single bed of her private room in the Nairobi Hospital.
Thank God for money,
Brody thought, taking a sip of the super-sweet chai from the cafeteria. Montgomery money had greased a lot of wheels in the last forty-eight hours.

He rubbed his eyes, too wired to sleep, too exhausted to be of much use. His knee throbbed, and he reached down to rub the ache. It had been a long time since the old wound had bothered him, but it had also been a long time since he’d crouched for three hours in the back of a plane.

“Hey!” Harrison stood from his chair on the other side of the bed near the lamp where the light was better for him to work. “Sit down, man. I … forgot about your leg. The doctor won’t clear her to fly for another,” Harrison checked his watch, “twenty-one hours, you should sleep while you can.”

“I could say the same about you,” Brody said, waving him back down. There were chairs in the hallway for him.

Reluctant, Harrison sat. The guy had been working non-stop, greasing those wheels. As a logistics man, Brody had to admit, Harrison was good.

“There’s still a lot of work to do,” Harrison said,
looking down at his phone. “She doesn’t have any ID. Keys. Phone. I just want to make things as smooth as possible for her when we get back to New York.”

Brody nodded, though Harrison wasn’t watching. In the hallway someone dropped a metal tray and a man yelled in Swahili.

Ashley on the bed flinched, rattling her IV tubes. She’d been severely dehydrated when they arrived. That combined with the concussion had made the young Kenyan doctor insist she not travel for at least twenty-four hours. That was three hours ago. “What … ?” Brody stopped, it wasn’t any of his business. He even shook his head to remind himself of that. Took a sip of tea.

“Did you say something?” Harrison asked.

Fuck it. He was tired and he was involved. And there were twenty-one hours that needed to be filled with something other than staring at a wall and going out of his mind.

Hospitals were not his favorite places.

“What was she doing over there?” Brody asked.

“She spent most of the last year in Kenya. An aid worker in a Dadaab refugee camp.”

“A year?”

“We’ve—the family—we’ve been trying to convince her to stay home. That with our money and connections she could do more good from the States than passing out rice in the camps.”

Somehow he imagined her doing more than passing out rice, but he kept his mouth shut.

“She didn’t agree?”

Harrison’s smile was fond but weary. “You remember her well, I guess.”

Blue swimsuit straps slipping down pale shoulders.

Yes. He remembered her.

On the bed, Ashley began to stir, saving him from his memories.

She’d been cleaned up, her dress exchanged for a pale yellow hospital gown. But blood and dirt were still smeared along her hairline. Against her pale skin the black stitches were thick and ugly.

“Kate,” she murmured, kicking off the blankets like she was about to get up.

Harrison stood, his exhausted face creased with worry. Ashley had regained consciousness briefly when they arrived, but had been mostly confused, which the doctor had said was due to the concussion.

Her good eye popped open, startling both of them. “Where’s Kate?” she said in a strong, clear voice, seemingly ready to charge out of this bed to get her friend. This woman … she would have been a hell of a Marine. Fierce. Strong. Loyal. Smart. Like General Mattis said, “No better friend, no worse enemy.”

Mattis could have been talking about her.