Pursuit (4 page)

Robert would win, then, though. He’d be getting away with it—getting away with snuffing out the life of her father. Getting away with trying to pin it on her. He’d find a way to inherit Court Industries and live happily ever after, with his loathsome titanium golf clubs, Porsches, and Hugo Boss shirts.

He’d be delighted. She’d be solving all of his problems in one stroke. Slowly, so as not to wake up the fierce giant living in her shoulder who took huge bites out of her flesh, Charlotte fingered the pills once more.

She couldn’t let Robert win, she simply couldn’t.

One by one, by touch alone, she slid the pills back into the cylinder, the little rattle as they hit the bottom sounding almost loud in the silence of the room. Thirty-three. She stared, dry-eyed, at the crack in the ceiling until the chemical darkness came to take her away.

VA Hospital

Leavenworth, Kansas

February 24

Fifty miles away, Lieutenant Commander Matthew Sanders opened his eyes and stared at the ceiling. It was painted puke green and had a big crack running through it. Opening his eyes and staring at the ceiling was Matt’s newest, latest skill and was a huge step up from lying flat on his back in a coma, which is what he had been doing up until a month ago. It was an even huger step up from dying, which is what he’d done on a lonely, sun-blasted Afghan plain.

His heart had stopped four months ago, when he and his men had been exfiltrating from a series of caves at the foothills of the Hindu Kush. They’d destroyed close to a million pounds of ammunition and were running for the Huey swooping in to the prearranged exfil point. Matt was hustling his twelve men into the safety of the helo.
Five, six, seven
he counted in his head. He had one foot on the skids to pull himself in after the last man, when his blood ran cold.

A nest of tangos, lying in wait behind a hill, rose up out of the dun earth seven hundred yards away, scattering clods of dirt and stones. What had the hair on the back of his neck rising was the profile of the Al Qaeda terrorist at the top of the hillock. Matt had superb eyesight. Even through the dust kicked up by the helo’s rotors, he could easily make out the RPG-7 on the man’s scrawny shoulder. A Soviet-made rocket-propelled grenade. Helicopters are swift and agile and have only two moments of vulnerability—at takeoff and while hovering. The pilot was hovering, had to, for the men to scramble on board. Men were still clambering onto the cargo deck of the helo. It would take the pilot at least two minutes to pull out of range since he had to wait for the last man to board. RPGs don’t operate at distances greater than a thousand yards, but by the time the pilot got them out of range, the RPG would have shot them down.

Matt had watched a Black Hawk with close friends in it go down over Fallujah, brought down by an RPG. It was not going to happen again. Not while he could do something about it. Not to his men. Not on his watch.

“Lorenzo!” he shouted over his shoulder. “Your SR-25!”

Sgt. Dominic Lorenzo, the team sharpshooter, automatically reached behind him for his heavy sniper rifle in its scabbard and handed it down. As Matt took the rifle from him, he saw Lorenzo’s eyes widen as he realized what was going down.

Lorenzo could never get a shot off at that distance from the heavily vibrating Huey. The last man was in the helo. Matt slapped the skids.

“Get out of here! Go go
go
!” he screamed over the noise of the engines as he went down on one knee in the dust, sighting through the Leopold VX III scope. Once, a long time ago, he’d been a sniper. Sniping skills are perishable, but he’d kept his up. Time went into combat slo mo. The dust and the noise and the confusion disappeared as he made the world narrow, then disappear. This shot mattered. It would be his last shot in this lifetime, and it had to be perfect. The old sniper’s mantra.
One shot, one kill.
Shooters shouldn’t have to shoot twice. In this case, he wouldn’t have a second chance, anyway.

High low angle rule,
he reminded himself. A rule he’d drummed into his recruits’ heads. Shooting up, aim high, shooting down, aim low. He was shooting up. He’d been running, and he knew his heart rate was topping 145 beats per minute, that red zone where motor skills drop, hearing is lost, and tunnel vision sets in. He’d trained for this and knew what to do, only it took some time. It would be a race to the finish because the tango was ready to fire.

Matt needed his heart rate at 80 bpm, and he needed it there
now
. He rolled his shoulder muscles and took two deep breaths, relaxing all the major muscle groups as he shouldered the rifle.

He was at a disadvantage. All of this worked in training and on the range. He’d trained his body to obey his cortex instantly. But the midbrain—the animal part of him that valued personal survival above honor and duty—was going haywire. It knew perfectly well that he was preparing to die, and it didn’t want any part of this. Matt wasted two perfectly good seconds tamping the midbrain monster down.

He breathed in and out, bringing the heart rate down 20 bps with each breath. He had to shoot between heartbeats and between breaths.

Now!
He breathed slowly, in and out. In and out. In. And. Out. In and—he pulled the trigger—out.

Seven hundred yards away a tiny figure flung its arms up and fell backward, taking the RPG with it. Fifteen other men on the hillside shouldered their rifles. It was the last thing he remembered. He spent the next three months in a coma and the month after that lying on a hospital cot staring at the ceiling, counting the cracks and water stains.

Later, he was told that Fred “Goat” Pierce, who’d grown up on a ranch in Texas, had lassoed him just as he was crumpling to the ground. His unconscious, bleeding body had dangled for long minutes from the helo as the pilot banked and hauled ass out of there. He flatlined once they got him up onto the cargo deck, his system closing itself down in shock at the massive blood loss from five bullet wounds. He lost almost two pints of blood in the first minutes, and his heart had stopped beating by the time the medic, Morrison, got to him.

Morrison refused to give up on him. He defibrillated him and pumped four bags of plasma into him, keeping him stabilized until they got back to base. He’d been airlifted to Ramstein, where a team of surgeons worked on him for eighteen hours straight, and when his vital signs had stabilized, he’d been airlifted—still in a coma—to the VA hospital. He’d first opened his eyes a month ago. He remembered the deep bass
whump whump
whump
of the Huey’s rotors. He awoke to the sound of the EKG machine beeping and an orderly swabbing the corridor outside his room, softly singing a blues song. It had taken Matt several sweaty minutes to realize that he was alive and in a hospital and hadn’t been tossed into some scary hell reeking of disinfectant with puke green walls and cracked ceilings.

There was someone else in the room with him—a silent figure almost completely wrapped in bandages from his head to the two stumps that ended about seven inches below his torso. Only his nose and his fingertips were visible. A jarhead, a nurse had said. Victim of an IED in Iraq. Double amputee. In the week that Matt had been awake, the jarhead had shown no signs of life other than a few weak moans in the night.

“You okay, buddy?” Matt asked the man softly, as he had every morning since he’d come back to life. That was his second brand-new skill—talking. The first day out of the coma he’d been unable to articulate any words. He’d think the words, but all that would come out of his throat were raspy, guttural sounds, like an animal. It had terrified him, almost as much as the fact that he couldn’t move much more than his fingers and his toes. As always, the figure next to him swathed in white didn’t answer. He wasn’t hooked up to any machines. He had a drip of a clear solution going into a tube that disappeared into one bandaged arm and a catheter coming out of his groin took the liquid back out. White in, yellow out.

When Matt had asked the nurse how long his roommate had been in a coma, she’d replied that he wasn’t in a coma, he was “clinically depressed.” Well . . .
yeah,
Matt had thought. What else can you be in a clinic?

Matt had got over his own depression. Matt had big big plans for today. Huge, ambitious plans. He was going to get out of this hospital bed and stand on his own two feet, by God. Right now, standing up was the most thrilling thing he could imagine, the most ambitious plan his exhausted mind could encompass.

In the Teams, Matt was the company tactician and strategist. He’d always been good at thinking ahead several moves, planning actions while always keeping the overall goal in sight. He could see the next step and the one after that, as clearly as if he were looking into a crystal ball. He planned missions down to the tiniest detail so that when the plan was put into action, it was as if he’d already lived it.

Not now. Not lying flat on his back on a hard cot in room 347. Now his horizon was totally shrunk to today, to getting through each pain-filled hour. Up until now, making any kind of a plan had seemed impossible—something other people did, not people with broken bodies on hospital beds.

Well, he was going to start grabbing his life back. He knew the hospital schedule by heart. Some black sludge, powdered milk, and a stale Danish had been served up, about a hundred on the Crap Scale, worse than the worst MREs he’d ever had to eat in the field, and just as guaranteed to gum you up for life.

Nurse Ratched, who’d been assigned to him as part of the VFW’s ongoing effort to make his stay memorable, had cranked his bed up and insisted on waiting until he’d choked down every bite of the Danish, though it tasted like cardboard, and swallowed every drop of the coffee that tasted like what Helmut Dietmayer used to call Lutheran Church Basement Coffee.

Nurse Ratched—actually, her name was Doris Barnes, R.N., as the badge stuck on her flat chest indicated—would be back in half an hour to wash him, a humiliating ordeal he endured daily. He was treated like a piece of meat—uninteresting meat at that. Everything about being here was humiliating, starting from the appalling weakness he felt. Well, Matt thought, it’s time to change all that. He had half an hour. With a little luck, Nurse Ratched would come back and find him standing on his own two feet, like a man. And then he’d go to the head all by himself and burn the bedpan. Or rather, since it was plastic, toss it out the window.

He had it all mapped out in his head—throw off the covers, grab the overhead rails for traction, scoot his legs to the right and over the side of the bed, and slowly stand up, holding on to the side of the bed for balance.

That was the theory and that was the strategy and that was the mission—slide legs out of bed, put legs on floor, stand up. He had half an hour to do it in.
Go!

Grim-faced and determined, Matt threw back the covers. Or at least, he tried to. Damn things weighed a fucking ton. It took him three botched attempts. Such simple movements, even an idiot could do it. Clutch the covers, and swing the arm up and to the left. Nothing to it. But his hand’s grip was weak, and his arm faltered halfway through each swing. He ended up entangled in the top sheet, blanket, and light cotton cover. Even this light exertion had him breathing heavily from exhaustion and frustration.
Goddammit! I can do this!
He swung his arm again and again until the sheet and blanket and cover were entangled around his knees. In frustration, he tried to kick them down to the bottom of the mattress, moving his feet frantically, making a bigger mess. He stopped and breathed, enraged and panicky. This part was supposed to be
easy
. This was only the first damned step to getting up. If he couldn’t manage getting free of the blanket . . .

Stop!
He ordered himself. He had to stop and regroup before he ran completely out of strength.

Jesus. Getting out of bed. How hard can it be?
He was thirty-four years old. He’d done it over twelve thousand times in his lifetime. Even an idiot could get out of bed. An idiot, maybe, but apparently not him.

Matt pressed the button on the side of the hospital cot and listened to the quiet motor purring as it lifted the head of the bed up. He raised it to its full extension. Maybe sitting up would help him. Sitting up was another nifty skill he’d just relearned, thanks to the hospital bed. Sitting up gave you a whole new perspective on the world as compared to lying flat on your back. Yesterday, he’d actually fed himself some watery soup while sitting up in bed.

Man, he was on a roll.

He looked with hatred at the tangle of sheet and blankets at the bottom of the bed and devised a strategy for dealing with it. Craftily, he slowly bent his knees and pulled his legs up until his feet cleared the tangle and were planted in the middle of the bed. Then he pushed them back down again, pushing the tangle of sheets and blankets to the bottom of the bed.
Smart move, Sanders
, he congratulated himself.

Glancing at the figure in the bed next to his, at a man who would never again in this lifetime stand on his own two feet, Matt thought—
this is for you, buddy
—and twisted his torso and straightened his legs until they dangled over the side of the bed. Moving hurt like hell, and he had to stop to get his breathing under control. His quick pants of exhaustion were loud in the quiet room. Eventually the walls stopped spinning, and the pain subsided enough for him to get a grip on himself. He sat on the side of the bed, trying to breathe regularly and trying to steel himself for what came next.