Authors: Stephanie Tyler
“I always keep my word.”
That was so much more than she could say about Aaron. “When you saw him last… I mean… how was he?”
Nick nodded as he spoke. “He was all right. I was the one who’d been shot.”
“He was a good Ranger.” She couldn’t bring herself to say
man
, even though the military seemed to think the two terms were synonymous. She knew better.
“I believe you.”
“How did he look?”
“I don’t know what he looked like before. I have nothing to compare it to.”
She pulled a picture out of her bag, the one of a non-smiling Aaron, fresh out of Ranger School and in full uniform. The day it had been taken, the moment, actually, she’d known it had been the beginning of the end for them.
Nick took the picture from her and stared at it. “That’s him. His hair was longer. He had a beard and he looked like he’d been through hell.”
He stayed close to her, both of them leaning against the side of the brick building as the words tumbled out of her mouth.
“I met him when we were both only fifteen. I barely saw him after we got married—he went to Ranger School and then he went off to save the world.
Leading the way,”
she said, unable to keep the sarcasm out of her voice as she used the Ranger creed.
There was none in his. “Not easy for a military wife.”
“The military would’ve made me a widow by the time I was twenty-six anyway.” She’d gotten notice of Aaron’s death from the Army four years ago—gotten his personal effects, which included a key to a safe deposit box that contained the list of names, and Aaron’s final words.
I’m sorry
.
In her estimation, that wasn’t nearly enough.
“How long have you had my name?” he asked finally.
“I didn’t open the safe deposit box until two weeks ago—I didn’t know he had a list in there.” Her words came out nearly a whisper, but she felt as if she’d shouted them.
“And then you had your friend at the DoD tracking me to the ends of the earth.”
She tilted her head to stare up at him. “Why are you such a hard man to find?”
He ignored her question and fired back his own. “Why did you wait four years to open that box? What changed two weeks ago?”
Would he believe her? She barely believed it herself, but she’d come too far to quit now. “I got a phone call from a dead man.”
Nick was doing a piss-poor job of shutting this one down, could just imagine the shit his brothers would give him if they knew where he was and what he was doing. Thankfully, he’d managed to slip out the back of the bar when they were both too distracted to notice.
They’d notice soon enough.
“Hold on a minute—you think Aaron called you? Dead Aaron?” he asked Kaylee.
“Yes. Maybe. And you can stop speaking to me like I’m crazy.”
He let his eyes flicker over her—he had the advantage, was used to working in the dark even without the benefit of night vision goggles. She thought she was hidden, didn’t realize how much her body language, her expressions, gave away.
Even now, she sucked her bottom lip lightly between her teeth—something she’d done often and well in the ten minutes he’d known her. It drove him crazy every time.
She was telling the goddamned truth, for sure, and he dragged a hand through his hair and wondered why he wasn’t running for the escape hatch.
“What did he say?” he heard himself asking, against his better judgment.
“He said,
Happy birthday, Kaylee
. The line was all crackled—I asked him where he was and he didn’t answer. And then he said,
I’m sorry, KK.”
She paused. “He was the only one who ever called me KK. Always in private.”
“It’s a mistake. Someone playing a trick, a horrible trick, on you.”
“I never saw a body, Nick. I didn’t go to the funeral—I don’t even know if he had one.”
“What exactly did the Army say when they notified you?”
“They told me he was KIA,” she explained. “The problem was, the list of names he left me was dated … the dates begin a year later than the Army claimed he died.”
She might not have known that Aaron had gone over the hill, but how could the Army not have known? “Aaron was AWOL when he saved me.”
She shook her head in complete disbelief. “No, not Aaron. The military was his life. He loved being a Ranger. Loved it more than anything else.”
“Including you?”
“Yes, including me. To be fair, I didn’t do much to try to keep him from that.”
The way Kaylee looked should have been enough. She was all long-legged, hot as anything, with dark auburn hair, long and wavy and kind of wild, like the woman herself. He’d noted the black leather pants and vintage AC/DC T-shirt the second he’d laid eyes on her, and yes, Kaylee Smith might just be the most dangerous thing he’d run across on a non-mission basis. Part angel, part hellcat, and shit, it was not cool when he realized that one night wouldn’t be enough time with her. Not even close.
She was trouble.
“I know what happened that night, on your mission,” she told him. “Aaron wrote down more than your name. He’s got a whole report. He called it a Situation Report.”
Damn, that couldn’t be good. What had Aaron been thinking, writing up a SITREP?
This had gone from being a favor for a dead man to something much different. “If you’ve got the whole story, why am I here?”
“For your side of things. I want to fill in the gaps, to know what Aaron really did for you. Please.”
Whether or not Aaron had deserted, a plea from a widow couldn’t be ignored. Nick could tell her the story without telling her the whole story.
There are such things as false truths and honest lies
, his dad would say.
He shifted away from her and began to walk slowly toward a small playground beyond the apartment buildings—mostly grass, with a swing set in the middle of the area. And he laid down, flat on his back, arms folded behind his head, and stared up at the night sky and wondered why the hell all this chose to come down on him now, after all this time.
He closed his eyes and tried to recall his memories from that night, pulling it into sharp focus.
Six years ago, he’d been Petty Officer Third-Class Devane, twenty-one years old and on his first mission with his original SEAL team. And members of the militant militia group he’d been sent to recon in the Congo were trying to kill him.
Near death had happened to him before, mainly when he was younger and was not expected to live past his first, second, third birthdays, and he’d honestly never thought he’d make it to legal age.
But still, lying there, just beyond the row of tin-roofed, pastel-colored houses in a small town on the outskirts of Kisangani, he’d been going down hard, and he remembered how badly it had pissed him off.
“That mission was supposed to take under six hours from start to finish,” he said finally, more to himself than to her. In at dark, out before the dawn.
“American helo arrived in the DRC at 2200, just outside Kisangani,” she said, and she was speaking from memory rather than from paper.
She’d lain down on the grass next to him, despite the fact that the air was chilled and the ground even colder. Like him, she stared up at the sky when she spoke.
He’d always made it his practice to not look backward, to keep moving forward and to try not to make the same mistakes twice. Apparently, that wasn’t in Kaylee’s plan.
You owe this to Aaron
, he told himself, because he understood what it was like to not want to be found, even as the other half of his brain told him that he didn’t owe anybody shit beyond what he’d promised. And he’d kept that promise by handing over the patch to Aaron’s girl.
He didn’t like thinking about Kaylee as
Aaron’s girl
.
“Six men inserted into the LZ,” she continued. “Blue on Red fire began immediately, forcing the group to split. Blue on Red means you took on enemy fire, right?”
He nodded in agreement. Six SEALs from his team were prepared to insert just below their intended target for recon of a potential new terrorist cell that utilized monies and resources from the militant militia. A completely classified, locked-down mission with the highest priority.
The helo had traveled up the Lualaba River toward Isangi—a small town outside Kisangani and their ultimate destination—would drop them over ten miles away along a deserted part of the river and far away from any checkpoints and towns, save for the smaller villages.
As soon as the last man, Wolf, had fast-roped down to the ground and their ride left, the team had begun taking on enemy fire.
The shadows seemed to surround them from everywhere and anywhere, their howls echoing through the jungles, to start a chain of events that would spiral quickly out of control. An ambush of goatfuck proportions.
The militia wanted nothing more than to make examples of more American soldiers, the more elite, the better.
Nick remembered Wolf radioing for a Quick Action Force, remembered Brice and Jerry and Tim going east to try to get behind the enemy.
Nick had split west behind Joe and Wolf, covering their six as the rapid fire of AK-47s rang over their head.
Divide and conquer
, Wolf had said.
“Man number six caught artillery fire to the chest after killing two militia and launching a grenade to push back the enemy.” Kaylee’s words echoed in his ear and he could hear the sharp impact of the shots echoing in the night—the bullets that tore through his shoulder had taken him down briefly.
Joe had already gone down—a shot to the thigh that had him cursing and still firing as Wolf had been dragging him to safety, while Nick had been trying anything to buy them some time.
“Man number six is separated from his team.”
When the bullets hit, Nick had been knocked backward and unconscious—woke seeing stars, but he’d still been able to feel, and move, fingers and toes and he’d known that there had to be a reason he wasn’t moving. Because the sound of renewed automatic machine-gun fire in his general direction had been as real a wake-up call as he was going to get.
Fight or flight had been ingrained in him from the time he could walk—that response wouldn’t desert him now without a damned good reason
.
He raised his head slowly off the dusty ground, a bare-bones movement that sent a shot of pain through his skull and nearly knocked him out again. By the time he put his head back down, he had his answer
.
The damned good reason was a loose wire attached to a claymore that he’d fallen on when he’d passed out. If it had been a tight wire, he wouldn’t have had a shot in hell. As itwas, the mine was less than twenty-five meters from him and it was live, lethal—and tangled in his gear
.
So fight or flight had now become be still or die
.
Fucking motherfucking clusterfuck.
His radio was long gone—smashed when he’d slammed to the ground. His only way out right now was himself
.
He kept his breathing shallow, by design more than choice, given the wounds he’d sustained. They were closer to his shoulder than his chest—at least that’s what he kept telling himself, but he couldn’t be sure of anything. The fact that he was conscious and breathing was the best sign
.
He closed his eyes and listened to the quiet surrounding him, searching out any scrap of intel
.
This is the best adrenaline rush you’ll get this side of legal,
his old CO had boasted during training
.
Yeah, this was a real fucking adrenaline rush. Complete with the dizziness and dry mouth, life flashing before his eyes. His body was too far gone to feel much pain—his nerve sensors were pretty much destroyed, so much so that in order to feel any physical pain, he’d have to be hit pretty damned hard
.
He’d been hit pretty damned hard
.
Carefully with his right hand he reached into one of the utility pockets for his Ka-Bar knife—once he had it firmly in his palm, he cut the loose wire on the right side. It probably took less than five seconds but it felt like he’d been swimming through oil to get the job done
.
He transferred the knife to his left hand and prepared to cut that wire, when he realized that someone had come behind him—someone as covert as he’d been trained to be, and that was the only reason his senses went on alert
.
Friend or foe might not even matter, not if he couldn’t cutthe other end of that loose wire. The wire was designed to be a closed loop—if he didn’t cut the wire on both sides, the claymore would still be live
.
“Man number six is wounded and is found lying on a loose wire attached to a live mine.” Kaylee’s words were soft, a relief against the harshness of the memories. His chest grew tight, the way it had been that night—from fear, from pain, from the will to get the hell out of there alive and intact.
“That’s when Aaron came through the brush to help me,” he told her.
“Don’t move,” the guy said with a small smile and Nick closed his eyes and fought the urge to curse. But when the guy cut the other side of the wire and said, “All clear,” Nick wished he could shake the guy’s hand
.
Instead, he’d begun a rough crawl toward the device
.
“Hey, man, what are you doing?” the guy asked, put a hand on his arm
.
“I’d feel better if you’d let me disarm it completely,” he muttered
.
“I’d feel better if I could stop you from bleeding out first.”
“
That might work too. Who the fuck are you?” Nick asked as the guy quickly assessed his injuries, told him he had two exit wounds and put some pressure on them with a towel first and then a bandage
.
“I’m Aaron. Aaron Smith. You and your men were ambushed,” the guy finally said in answer to Nick’s question
.
Aaron was dressed for combat, jungle greens, but so was everyone in this godforsaken place. You couldn’t tell good from bad, because it had nothing to do with color. “I saw it happen,” Aaron said
.
“Because you planned it?”
The guy gave a short laugh as he began to search in the black bag Nick recognized as a medic’s kit and pulled out a syringe. “Wasn’t me. But someone sure as hell knew you guys were coming in here.”
Nick held a hand up to refuse the injection. “I’m allergic.”
“To what?”
“To pretty much everything you’ve got in that bag.” He closed his eyes when he heard the man sigh
.
“So you’re just going to tough it out, then?”
“No other choice.”
“You’ll live,” Aaron said and for the first time Nick opened his eyes and realized that, yes, he would. It was just going to hurt
.
Pain is just weakness leaving the body, Devane. You’ve always known that
.
“Man number six got up on his own volition to head to the next safe area, collecting a wounded teammate along the way,” Kaylee continued.
It sounded so much better than the reality had been. Different than the smoke and blood and the overall sense of fucking doom that pervaded that night.
He reached for Joe’s radio—his teammate had been hit hard, had lost enough blood to keep him passing out every few minutes, and Nick wasn’t going to bother to wake the guy until it was time to make a break for it
.
“What are you doing?” Aaron asked
.