Authors: Mary Margret Daughtridge

SEALed with a Ring (5 page)

"You're going to move out? But this is your home."

"Correction: it's your home. And, as you've forcibly reminded me, Caruthers is your business."

"Now wait a minute. You're taking this the wrong way."

"Did you think I would meekly continue to live here while you attempt to coerce me into living my life on your timetable?"

Lucas's intensified frown told her that was exactly what he had thought.

All his life, Lucas had issued orders and people had done as he said. Smart as he was about making money, careful as he was to treat his workers
his idea of well
, he had one weakness as a manager: he didn't anticipate how others would react emotionally. If he thought some thing was a good idea, he thought they should think it was equally good and be grateful.

JJ watched his face as he sought for some bargaining chips. There weren't any. JJ was of age, and she had her own money, the Jessup fortune, a legacy from her grandmother. She almost felt compassion for him as she saw how slowly he thought through his options and how poorly he hid the sadness in his eyes. Almost.

"I'm not going to back down," he said at last.

"I don't expect you to."

"Then why…?"

JJ shook her head. He didn't get it. Even when it was brought to his attention, he didn't understand that his actions had caused her to withdraw from him. If she tried to explain her feelings, he would only say she was wrong to feel that way.

For the first time, JJ felt a measure of compassion for her father. He had been forced to rebel to obtain any au tonomy. One of his most important acts of rebellion had been marrying JJ's mother, a totally unsuitable woman.

On the drive home, through the darkest hours of the night, JJ had considered—and discarded—the same course. Her father had been heedless of the destruction left in his wake. JJ wasn't. Her mother had married her father for his money, as she freely admitted, and with no thought to the responsibilities she would acquire. Chaos had followed.

Hundreds of people, if you counted all JJ's employ ees and their families, depended on JJ to get this right. She had chosen, instead of mindless rebellion for which others would pay or committing acts that harmed no one but herself, to direct her anger toward its cause. Between yesterday and today, something had hardened within JJ.

There was no point in trying to explain why she was moving out. If she tried, they would only get into a shouting match.

JJ rose and carried her mug to the sink where she rinsed it and set it in the dishwasher. "You have my cell number. I'll write down the address and landline num ber. There are frozen dinners in the freezer if you don't want to go out to eat. Esperanza will be at church right now, but I'll call her later and arrange for her to start coming in every day." JJ smiled coolly as she replaced the sponge. "Is there anything else I can do for you be fore I leave?"

Lucas Caruthers looked at the set face of his grand daughter. She had the sort of warm, apricot complexion that didn't pale easily. Except for her eyes, which she had gotten from him, she looked more like her mother, who had had a drop or two of Indian blood. He could see it in the strong curve of JJ's cheekbones and in mo ments like this when she could look so unmovable she appeared graven. He understood her, he thought, but he hadn't anticipated that she would move out as part of accepting his challenge.

JJ's problem was that there weren't a lot of men who were her match in drive, strength of character, and pow erful will. Without some sort of come-ahead signal from her, most men weren't going to make a strong enough play to get themselves noticed. Lucas had hoped that if challenged, she would finally start looking at men as suitors. If she applied herself, he felt sure she would find someone worthy, someone to share her life with, someone to be there after he was gone.

He had thought long and hard before offering her the choice of finding a husband or losing Caruthers. He didn't believe in empty threats, didn't think he could have gotten by with one anyway. But he had tried every way he knew to make JJ see that she was letting Caruthers consume her.

He understood her drive—she got it from him—and, to an extent, he blamed himself. She was what he had trained her to be. But even when the tide of his young manhood had been in full competitive spate, he had had extracurricular activities. He'd loved taking the
Daddy
Carbucks,
his twenty-six-foot Chris-Craft out to the Gulf Stream for some deep-sea fishing, and if he used the trips to do a little business, that was okay. He didn't invite anyone who didn't love the big sport fish as much as he did. There'd been other leisure activities that he wasn't so proud of, but the point was, he had them.

He'd also had Beth. In the early days of their mar riage, he had thought she was his hood ornament. Too late, he realized she was his outrigger. Without her, he floundered.

He didn't want to take Caruthers away from JJ. He had given up the notion of leaving it to her father even before he died. When Lucas realized JJ liked it, even though she was just a little girl, he felt as if the meaning of life had been given back to him.

It would break his heart not to pass the business to another generation—she must see that—but he would.

If destroying Caruthers was the only way to free her from its thrall, then destroy it he would.

Chapter 8

Afghanistan

HE WAS GOING TO DIE TODAY.

Davy's eyes snapped open. In the east, a mountain crag that had no name was a dark smudge against a barely lighter sky as dawn came to the Afghanistan mountains. Around him, the other fifteen men of his SEAL platoon began to stir, grousing about the frigid morning. SEALs, both intrinsically and through train ing, had greater tolerance than most people for cold conditions, but that didn't mean they liked being chilled. Winter came early in the thin, dry air of the Hindu Kush, the westernmost finger of the Himalayas. Higher peaks were already capped with snow, even though it was only the second week in August.

Hearing his buddies complain assured Davy he was really awake
this
time.

He'd had one of those dreams in which you dream you wake up. In the dream, he'd been awakened by the sound of a woman crying. He'd gone looking for the source and found his mother, her plump shoulders rounded with grief, sobbing.

Davy rolled over in his sleeping bag to ease the crushing feeling in his chest. That was the part of the dream he hadn't liked. The rest of the dream, in which he saw a wooden coffin with row after row of golden SEAL Tridents slapped against its gleaming walnut lid, had been okay. He had died doing what he loved, being who he had wanted to be. In the dream, he had not felt saddened to be dead weeks shy of his twenty-eighth birthday but incredibly fortunate to have had the life that fitted him perfectly.

Still, he didn't like for his mother to cry.

Raised with a matter-of-fact acceptance of ESP, Davy didn't question his dream's significance. Dreaming true ran in his Irish mother's side of the family, as did fore knowledge of one's death. He'd rarely experienced a premonition himself.

On the other hand, he'd never died before, either. Davy chuckled, feeling for the sleeping bag's zipper. Maybe he'd never before needed a warning dream.

He sat up, still laughing, and rubbed his cheeks, finger-combing the glossy, black curls of his beard. With his black hair, large dark eyes, and olive skin, he blended into the local population, a fact he capitalized on by pulling a blue-checked shirt over his body armor. Close up, he wouldn't fool anyone, but from a distance, if his appearance made a shooter hesitate even for a sec ond, it could save his life.

An hour later, Davy looked up from checking his medical supply kit in time to see McHale lead a kid in baggy, dusty black pants and a once-white shirt over to the platoon's lieutenant.

"Hey Doc." The platoon's lieutenant, Garth Vale, waved him over. "Lemme talk to you for a second." The lieutenant clapped Davy on the shoulder and drew him out of earshot. "The kid's name is Hamid. He says his sis ter's in labor in the next village. Wants you to come."

"Shit." Davy stubbed at a pebble with the toe of his boot. He was often the platoon's goodwill ambassador— the first person villagers would open up to, the one whose help they would seek. He relished the role, even though what he could do for them was often a drop in the bucket compared to what they needed. But in a situ ation like this, he couldn't help anyone. He could lance an abscess, sew up a cut, or even set a bone in men and children, but he couldn't touch a woman.

The fundamentalist Muslim interpretation of modesty decreed that letting a woman die was preferable to al lowing a man who wasn't a relative to see her body. "I can't do anything for her. They're not going to let me examine her. Her husband's not going to let another man look at his wife."

"The kid says he will. Says the husband sent him. But it's up to you. I'm taking the guys into a village south of there. We're going in like it's a 'search and appre hend.' Supposedly they're ready to talk about where some Taliban placements are. We'll make it look like we weren't invited—just in case the Taliban are watching."

Here in the mountains, villagers were often caught in a no-win situation between the Allied forces and the Taliban—since alliance with one invited attacks from the other. The media were quick to condemn any civil ian deaths caused by the UN forces but slow to mention the unrelenting terrorism inflicted on their own people by the Taliban.

"I don't expect anything to come of it," the lieutenant added. "I can spare you."

Garth was leaving it up to him. This war would never be won without the aid of the Afghanis. Any amount of trust he won could make a difference. "If they've asked for help, I guess I ought to go. I probably can't do anything for the woman, but maybe some other villager needs me."

Seeing that Davy had made up his mind, the lieuten ant clapped him on the shoulder. "All right. Do what you can. I've asked for extraction at fourteen-hundred. Stay in touch."

The woman died. There was nothing Davy could do. Nothing he
could
have done.

As his driver (the same twelve-year-old who had come for him) kept the rattletrap Toyota pickup hugging the mountain side of the dirt track, Davy fought the hot prickle at the back of his eyes. Woman hell, the littl
e
girl, barely fourteen, had bled to death. Her baby, stil
l unborn, had died with her.

Since he rarely saw Afghani women except at a distance and swathed head to toe in their blue burqas, it was easy to forget that one cause of the country's dismal childbirth statistics lay in the practice of forced marriage. It wasn't uncommon for girls to be married before puberty—and not in name only. A girl of nine or ten could be married and her husband, a man three or four times her age, would insist on his rights.

Sure enough, when Davy got there, he'd found the husband, a forty-year-old man, arguing with the vil lage headman, a man of sixty or so. If Davy's Dari, the local variant of Farsi, was up to the task of translation, the headman was the husband's father-in-law—the girl's father.

Finally the headman had given in, but only, Davy suspected, because he knew it was already too late. He could claim he had mercifully heard his son-in-law's pleas, and, at the same time, the smirch upon the fam ily's honor, caused by letting a man other than a relative look upon her, wouldn't have to be expunged by killing her—if his daughter was already dead.

So Davy had entered the windowless room, the usual odors of spice and incense and unwashed bodies over whelmed by primal birthing smells and the hot, sticky, metallic tang of blood thickening the air.

Even now, instead of the yellowish-tan monochrome of the landscape through which the Toyota traveled, he kept seeing her wide, emerald-green eyes set in black, curly lashes—all that was visible of her blue burqa covered face.

She had opened those green eyes (all he knew of her), gazed at him with distant interest and, with a sigh, slowly closed them again as the last drops of life drained away.

He'd only seen eyes of that pure, intense green once in America. In Afghanistan, although the color was al ways startling, it wasn't rare. He'd encountered it over and over, and every time he did, he remembered the woman whose name he never knew.

The memory embarrassed him, but he couldn't seem to erase it. Fucking a woman whose name he couldn't remember afterward was one thing. He wasn't proud of it, but it happened. Carelessly not bothering to ask was inexcusable. He even dreamed occasionally that she was running away from him and he was running behind her, yelling, "What's your name?"

At the time, it hadn't seemed to matter.

At the time, all that had mattered was getting together with her as fast and in as many ways as possible. If he had thought about it at all, he'd probably assumed they'd talk the next morning—in between more languorous bouts of lovemaking. They'd certainly have exchanged names then. But her abrupt departure at oh-four-hundred had erased all assumptions about how they'd spend their next morning. Later, nobody seemed to know who the woman in the brown dress had been.

Careless. A mistake he could neither fix nor forget. But he'd made sure it would never happen again. These days he learned the names of women—all women—the instant he met them.

The road narrowed, and his kid driver edged the truck even closer to the mountain. It was a long way down on the other side. More important, staying in close also made them a little harder to target from above. They were so close to the top of the mountain now that there was little above them to worry about, but when they started their descent, it would be a different story. The back end of the Toyota fishtailed as nearly bald tires fought for purchase on the rough gravel track.

Davy absently thumbed the switch on the radio, not really surprised to hear nothing. He'd been trying to check in with the platoon since they started back, but the mountain was blocking reception. As soon as they rounded the next bend, they should be in line of sight with the village, and he'd get a signal again.

The tiny pickup shuddered. The boy had felt it, too, and braked before Davy could tell him to
tawaquf,
stop. With the whine of the motor silenced, both could hear thunder, sometimes seeming near, sometimes far, as the sound echoed back and forth between the mountains. The pickup shuddered again. Pebbles slithered down the sheer rock face.

Rocket-propelled grenades. This was very bad news because his platoon didn't carry any RPGs. The Russian made weapons were cheap and easy to use, a favorite of the Taliban. Their presence indicated a planned, orga nized ambush, which was very bad news indeed.

Davy signaled the kid to stay where he was, and ran around the bend in the road. Below he could see the mud-walled village. On a saddleback ridge to the south, sun glinted on metal. He was above them, and they didn't know he was there. It was the first bit of luck.

He radioed headquarters and requested an air strike. He considered how to make maximum use of the small amount of tactical advantage he had. It wasn't in a SEAL's nature to sit back and wait while others did the heavy lifting. Every member of his platoon could be dead before help arrived. Look after your buddies
.
They are your life insurance. A man alone in combat
does not survive.
He was alone. He could still look after his buddies.

Everything about the Taliban force's placement spoke of a carefully planned trap. From his higher position, he could see the routes along which they intended to scatter before reinforcements arrived.

If he took the fight to the Taliban, he could distract them, keep them busy. He would also be inside the kill zone of the Apache helicopters. If the Taliban didn't kill him, friendly fire would. So be it.

He had surprise on his side. Violence of action was the SEAL credo. He would only get one chance to maximally confuse and disorganize their attack on the village.

He set his rifle on automatic and lobbed a grenade into their midst. Then before the first echoes of the ex plosion reached him, he charged down the hill.

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