WAR: Disruption (18 page)

“Yes,” he grumbled. “I’m not an invalid.”

She bit her tongue instead of answering.

“Let me guess,” he said as he removed the cover from the spare. “Changing a tire was included in your emergency training.”

“Of course. Father made certain that everyone in the family, including Mother, could change a car’s oil, other fluids, and tires.” People who met her reserved, impeccably dressed father in his three-piece suits never believed that he could change a car’s tire, unclog a toilet, and perform other daily maintenance. And watching her blonde, aristocratic mother don a pair of blue jeans and a ratty t-shirt to work on the car with her father had always made Emily smile.

Despite the weathered look of the Jeep, it had been very well maintained. The lug nuts on both the spare and the flat tire came off easily. As she helped Max lower the spare tire to the ground, Emily’s back and shoulder muscles threatened to give out. Thankfully, the spare tire was full-sized and in good condition. It took them less than twenty minutes to change the tire. Max was just tightening the final nut when Emily saw headlights down the road in the direction of the way station.

“Max, a vehicle is headed this way.”

“Shit.”

Max shoved the flat tire into some bushes while Emily tossed the tools into the cargo compartment. Then she slid behind the wheel and drove with the lights off until she found a spot a few hundred yards down the road with just enough room for the Jeep to squeeze between the trees. As she navigated the obstacle course of above ground roots and thick bushes, she kept shooting glances in the rearview mirror, expecting to see headlights racing toward them. But despite their slow progress, the other vehicle wasn’t in sight yet.

A couple of minutes later, Max declared, “This is good. Turn off the engine.”

Not liking the spooky green tones of the night vision goggles, Emily tugged them off. The complete darkness that engulfed her sent a shiver down her spine as her eyes struggled to adjust. Through the open window, she heard the tick of the engine as it cooled. The silence caused by their passage through the jungle was soon replaced by the buzz of insects and the occasional cry of a bird. It was another five minutes before she heard the rumble of a truck engine. Even though she knew the Jeep was parked out of sight of the road, her heart still skipped a beat.

What if the rebels had some sort of night vision equipment that allowed them to see heat signatures? Should she start the Jeep? Prepare to flee? But where? Trees hemmed them in on all sides. She’d never get the Jeep started fast enough to get away if the rebels burst through the jungle.

She struggled to breathe against the rising tide of panic. What if—

Max reached over and took her hand, squeezing reassuringly. That point of contact temporarily steadied her. She squeezed back. “Max,” she whispered. “What if they have heat sensing equipment?”

“Shh… The rebels aren’t that sophisticated. They don’t have the money for that type of stuff. Now hush.”

As the wait for the truck to pass stretched on, the air pressed down on her, threatening to suffocate her. Despite Max’s reassuring presence, her mind kept conjuring up grisly scenarios of what would happen if the rebels found them and she struggled not to succumb to complete panic.

The truck eventually passed by without so much as reducing speed. Yet five minutes later, her body was still poised on the edge of flight.

“Easy, Em, we’re okay. They’re gone.” Max tugged on her hand and she went willingly into his arms.

Safety. Strength.

She snuggled against him. “How do you do it? Live with that kind of fear on a regular basis?”

She felt Max shrug underneath her cheek. “That’s what my life is like. It’s normal for me. I’d definitely panic if you put me on stage in front of hundreds and asked me to dance.”

Emily snickered at the image of Max in a pair of ballet tights, dancing a
pas de deux
with a semi-automatic in hand.

“Better?” Max whispered.

“Yes. Thanks.”

“Good. Let’s get some rest.”

Emily helped Max string their mosquito nets over the open windows of the Jeep, made a quick pit stop in the bushes, then tumbled onto the sleeping bag Max had laid out for her.

She waited for sleep to claim her, but although she remained enervated, her mind refused to shut down. She kept replaying all the events of the day. “Some of the rebels at the crossroads were so young,” she murmured. “Just boys. I’d heard reports from other wars in Africa, so I know the use of child soldiers is common, but still, it’s a shock.”

“Yeah, I know.”

“Why? Why do they enjoy hurting and killing people?” She knew the question sounded naïve, but she’d never been able to understand why people resorted to violence. What made someone like Agatha, who’d seemed so docile and sweet, decide that the best way to further her career was to throw acid on Emily in hopes of taking over Emily’s position? It hadn’t worked out the way Agatha wanted, but what had made her think violence was the answer?

“If I could figure that out, I’d be able to stop all the bloodshed,” Max said.

There was a dark edge to his voice that let her know he’d seen horrible things. Based on how he’d been abused at the hands of Ziegler, she knew he must have experienced situations that would have turned her bitter and angry. “How do you keep going without losing your own humanity?”

There was a long pause before he answered. “Sometimes you just have to lock everything away. Ignore the suffering. Ignore your conscience shouting at you to do something to help, because there’s a bigger picture and what you’re doing will have an effect on more people. And each time that happens, you lose a little more of your soul.”

The silence that followed was heavy. She wanted to probe. To know more.

“I’m not a hero, Emily. You were right to be wary of me. I’ve been in Africa this past year and seen countless incidents of abuse and other acts of violence. Yet I’m not here fighting to stabilize the region. I’m not a political idealist intent on making the world a better place. My motives are entirely selfish.”

She heard his body shift against his sleeping bag, then his deep exhalation. “I’m here for revenge.”

MAX STARED INTO the darkness, unable to believe those words had come out of his mouth.

It wasn’t that he’d been hiding his need for revenge against Dietrich. Kris and the rest of his former team had no illusions regarding Max’s real mission. And Wil had been quite vocal in his opposition to Max’s one-man quest to take Dietrich down.

No, what shocked him about what he’d just said was how reluctant he was to lose status in Emily’s eyes. He might be beat-up and barely able to carry out his mission, but being with Emily reminded him that there was life outside of this narrow world he’d immersed himself in. Reminded him that people laughed and loved and went about their everyday lives without a thought to men like Dietrich whose work destroyed that peaceful world.

For Emily, Max wanted to be a hero.

Emily’s soft sound of surprise reminded him that she was waiting for an explanation. “Dietrich has a side business to his arms dealing. He also deals in intelligence, if the price is high enough.” He sighed and shifted on his sleeping bag to relieve pressure on his knife wound. “Okay, there’s really no way to make this story short.”

To Max’s surprise, Emily moved in and laid her head on his chest. He draped his arm around her and she snuggled close. “We have time,” she murmured. “I’m physically exhausted, but my mind won’t settle down. Think of this as my bedtime story.”

He snorted. “Yeah, well, I don’t know that this story will relax you, but here goes.” He took a deep breath. “I started my junior year of college in 2001, working on a double major in history and folklore. I hoped to get a position with a museum. Then the attacks of 9/11 happened. Like so many guys I knew, I desperately wanted to take action. In fact, a bunch of us headed into town and joined the Marines.”

“You were a Marine? Really? You don’t seem to have the ah…appropriate respect for authority.”

Max chuckled. “Yeah. That’s what my father thought. ‘Max, you’re always questioning. Always figuring out alternative ways to achieve a goal. You will not fit in with the military, particularly not the Marines.’ But I didn’t care. I wanted to be a Marine, like my younger brother Wil, who’d enlisted right out of high school.”

“How’d it go?”

“For the first few years, it was fine. During basic training, I was so pumped up with patriotism that I tamped down my need to always understand why I was being asked to do something. Then I got assigned to a newly formed crisis response team and the specialized training for that kept my mind occupied. It also helped that I served under excellent commanders. Men who knew how to put my intelligence to best use. Who encouraged me to become a leader. But then my lieutenant was killed during a raid that should have been a cake walk. I helped plan the mission and everything was solid—our intel, our approach, and our execution. No way should the enemy have known we were coming and prepared an ambush. Yet they’d set up a kill zone. Fortunately, our rifleman had spooky good instincts. He insisted something was wrong, so we scaled back on our approach. His warning prevented the whole platoon from getting mowed down. As it was, we lost the lieutenant, two other men, and took severe casualties.”

“You blamed yourself.”

“Yeah. Because—”

Emily put her hand over his mouth. “No, Max. I’ve seen how protective you are. How thoroughly you think things through. You did your best to make the mission safe for your men, right?”

“Of course, but—”

“Uh-uh. You’re not to blame.”

He sighed. “That’s what the rest of the team said. Still, it…” His throat closed up. “It haunts me.”

“Of course. You lost people you cared about. People you respected. I can’t even begin to imagine the pain you dealt with.” She stroked her hand down his chest and, oddly enough, he felt some of his grief ease.

“So what happened next?”

He cleared his throat. He figured Dietrich knew most of the rest, so telling Emily didn’t put her at too much risk. Plus, he needed to tell her. To have her know why he’d eventually gone off on his own, so that if he died in the next couple of days she wouldn’t judge him harshly. “We discovered that the weapons used by the terrorists in the ambush had been supplied by Dietrich. When we passed on the intel we were warned by our superiors to ignore it. That it was being handled by another team and any action on our part could screw up that operation. But Dietrich’s name kept popping up as the arms dealer supplying the local terrorist cells, making it clear that no one was working to take him down.” His heart beat faster as he remembered. “I was furious when I realized that no one was investigating the ambush. That the deaths of our teammates were being swept under the carpet.”

“I’m sorry.”

He shrugged and forced the roil of emotions away. “Before our team could decide what to do about our suspicions, a man approached me with an intriguing job offer. He represented a deep black ops government unit with unconventional rules.” He glanced at Emily to see if she understood. At her puzzled look, he explained, “Black ops are such ultra secret operations that no one not directly involved even knows they exist. Capturing high value targets. Rescuing U.S. personnel. Destroying enemy assets. Missions that never make the news, even when they prevent thousands of deaths. The man promised that if I joined this group, not only would I have free rein to go after Dietrich, but I’d have the unit’s full support. He was recruiting only the brightest, most unconventional members of the military and law enforcement.”

“So you accepted.”

“Yes. But every time we got close to Dietrich, he managed to escape. Either something went wrong on our end that prevented us from carrying out our mission—strange equipment failures when we’d double checked everything, failure of our backup to arrive—or we arrived and discovered that Dietrich and his men had fled. I suspected that someone on our side was sabotaging our missions in order to protect Dietrich.”

Emily’s hand clenched on his shirt.

“I began to doubt the competence of those in charge. Because only a handful of people knew we even existed, let alone were privy to actual mission data, it should have been simple to ferret out the traitor. He was either one of my teammates, or one of the people who gave us our missions. Unfortunately, the ones who’d founded our group had hidden themselves behind a thick layer of secrecy. Even the man who recruited me only knew them as the Consortium. Finally, my team decided to go after Dietrich without notifying anyone in command. Again, I helped plan the mission. This time, it went down without a hitch. We managed to screw up a big deal Dietrich had scheduled. Took down his buyer and captured Dietrich. His right hand man, Ziegler, was wounded but managed to get away.” Max had been part of the squad in charge of clearing out the building. Sometimes he wondered if things would have been different if he’d instead been assigned to guard Dietrich.

“En route to headquarters, the convoy transporting Dietrich and the other prisoners came under attack. Several vehicles crashed and burned. Dietrich was reported dead, although his body was never recovered. Our unit’s commander was killed. My gut told me that we’d been betrayed again. That someone on the secondary team—the ones responsible for taking Dietrich and the other prisoners away—had relayed the convoy’s route to Dietrich’s sponsor. I believed the crash had been staged and that Dietrich was alive, but without proof, our new commander didn’t want to hear it.”

“Did you ever figure out which man had leaked the route?”

“No. With Dietrich supposedly dead, my team was kept busy with other missions. I continued to investigate whenever I found the time, since part of my job was doing research and analyzing data.”

“You were an analyst? Not a soldier?”

He shook his head. “Both. In order to be a quick-deploy unit, we were cross-trained on all aspects of a mission, from gathering intel to taking down a target with a sniper rifle. My strengths were analysis, planning, and covert infiltration. I didn’t have the patience to be a good sniper, lying in the dirt all day without moving.”