Her Heart and the Friend Command Read online

No, not the gray khet partug with the white vest.

  Yes, with the kufi hat.

  Yes, it looked remarkably silly on him.

  Yes, she wanted to shout. I will bang your heads together if we get out of this alive.

  No, she didn’t have a clear shot on the leader.

  Because Garret, you’ve got to move your ass out of my way.

  She looked to Sergey, but he didn’t have any ideas either. They were separated by ten feet behind two different piles of junk. Then she noticed that his tail had light on it. Light from one of the trucks shining past the various debris and the engine block.

  Very slowly she signaled him out of the light. The view on her wrist screen was now partially blocked by a spare tire, but there was no revealing light hitting Sergey. And the area of the warehouse that Sergey’s video feed revealed allowed her to remain hidden, seeing part of the bay with one eye and the dog’s angle with the other. She couldn’t maintain the split vision for long, but it was enough.

  The next time Garret gestured toward something on the truck he glanced back. Then he very deliberately moved aside.

  She wanted to kiss him again. He’d been interfering with her picture, because he was trying to protect her dog. He’d seen Sergey’s tail and been very careful to block the leader’s sightline. That wasn’t something a merely good man did. Only a truly wonderful one did something like that.

  “I have an idea,” Baxter called over the radio. His Pacific Northwest non-accent was a little flatter than Burton’s. “Give me a minute.”

  She could feel Garret’s nerves stretching thin as surely as if there was a lead in her hand but connected to Garret rather than Sergey.

  In the midst of a sudden clatter from the unloaders, she risked a whispered, “More like twenty seconds.”

  The second truck was unloaded.

  The leader, whose gun was still aimed at Garret, was looking around as if searching for something.

  Then Hukam groaned behind her.

  The leader twisted her way.

  She rolled out into the gap between her engine block hideaway and Sergey’s tire and fender pile, and shot the leader in the face over Garret’s shoulder. Twice for good measure.

  Garret swung free his AK-47 and between them they dropped the other unloaders. The engine roared to life. Then Garret emptied his magazine through the back window of the pickup killing the driver and another guard seated there. The truck lurched halfway out of the bay, then stalled to a stop.

  The other two truck engines racketed to life.

  “Let the lead driver go,” Baxter called out.

  There was a harsh blast from the big DShK mounted on the second truck. Stone exploded over her head as rounds from the heavy machine gun pummeled into the warehouse bay. It fired ten, half-inch rounds every second. Rock dust, machine parts, everything seemed to be flying into the air at once.

  Then the big gun cut off abruptly as Jeff declared, “Got him!” Thank god for snipers.

  Liza risked looking up from where she’d cowered during the fusillade.

  “Feh! That’s nothing, dude,” Mutt transmitted just moments before all hell broke loose.

  The Toyota pickup, along with its driver, the DShK, and its dead gunner lifted upward in a massive explosion. BB had planted IEDs out in the yard on just such a chance. Mutt must have triggered one that happened to be directly under the pickup.

  The truck shattered. Shrapnel blew into the warehouse bay. Everything that wasn’t nailed down blew in her direction.

  Once again, flat on the floor, she just prayed that the recently delivered explosives didn’t trigger as well.

  “Whoops!” Mutt muttered when the explosion had cleared. The entire bay was brightly lit by the truck burning just outside the door. Scorch marks ran halfway down the length of both walls from the tongue of flame that had shot at them. Afghanistan was hot, but the space was now as hot as an oven and for a moment it hurt to breathe.

  Garret had rolled under the partially disassembled SUV during the worst of it. Now he rolled back out and turned to look at her. He wore a boy-happy grin on a man’s face. There was not even a hint of the dour, glowering boy who had haunted the high school’s hallways.

  The third truck engine ground gears and raced its engine as it tried to make good its escape. Garret grabbed the AK-47 from the leader’s body and was scrambling toward the door.

  “No!” She shouted, remembering that he didn’t have a radio. “Baxter said to let it go.”

  Garret skidded to a halt and looked at her down the length of the bay.

  She might have expected confusion, understanding, or surprise on his face. She never expected to see horror.

  In that instant, not two feet behind her, she heard the unholy snarl of an enraged Malinois and the scream of a man the moment before his throat was ripped out. She spun just in time to see the steel pipe that Hukam had raised high to smash down on her head fall from nerveless fingers as he tumbled backward under Sergey’s onslaught and died.

  14

  “Check it out,” Baxter climbed up onto the safehouse roof and came over with his laptop.

  He held it so that Garret and Liza could see it from where they were sitting side-by-side, leaning back against the roof’s balustrade and watching the sunset.

  “It worked.”

  Baxter had dropped down from the roof and ducked out into the open to attach a radio bug under the lead pickup before the firefight had begun—that’s why he’d said to let it go. But knowing the Taliban would check for any stray signals, Baxter had set it to turn on after six hours, then deliver only a one-second pulse every ten minutes. Essentially undetectable unless someone was specifically listening for it. The US military had a drone up at forty-thousand feet doing just that.

  “Hasn’t moved in the last nine hours. Based on the imaging from the drone, I think we have our explosives supplier located.”

  Garret held up his hand and they traded high-fives. Baxter headed back down the ladder whistling.

  Now it was just the three of them, sitting together on the roof of the safehouse—him, Liza, and Sergey with his head happily in her lap. They were just above the line of the protective barriers. High enough to see the great bowl of the Afghan sky, but not high enough to be exposed to any distant snipers on the ground.

  Hukam’s widow had been very forthcoming on the other caches and local bombmakers she knew around town. She’d hated her husband’s fanaticism and had just wanted to live quietly and have a family. With her guidance, Afghan regular forces were going in and clearing out Hukam’s former associates.

  He wanted to put his arm around Liza. Hold her, pull her in tight. He’d like to—

  “Is there a reason you haven’t kissed me?” Liza asked the question completely matter-of-factly. She was so his kind of woman. Ten years of abandoned, mostly, fantasies and she kept exceeding them at every turn.

  “Well, I have to admit, there are a couple.”

  “What? Do you want your own Kong dog toy and crunchy biscuit?”

  “Not so much.” He risked putting his arm around her shoulders, because if her question wasn’t an invitation to enjoy himself at least that much, he didn’t know what was.

  Sergey’s eyes followed him closely, but he didn’t raise his head from her thigh.

  Liza leaned into his side and he upgraded to tightening his arm into a one-armed side embrace. Still no squirm.

  “First, that world-class kiss you laid on me was enough to give a man performance anxiety. Could I ever return that one appropriately?”

  “That’s crap, Garret. You were never a man to not trust himself around women. Remember I saw you in the high school halls all those years.”

  “Maybe I changed.”

  “Ehhhh!” Liza made a harsh buzzer sound of “total fail.”

  “Okay, caught me. Two, I know that kiss was in the heat of the moment right before a battle and—”

  “Had a lot of experience with pre-battle kisses, have you?�
�

  He couldn’t help laughing. “Can’t say I have.”

  “Should I check that with Mutt, or Jeff?”

  Garret offered a fake shudder in response. “Both have beards. Ick!”

  “So do you.”

  “But it looks good on me.”

  “It does,” she agreed then continued before he could do more than be surprised. “So what’s the real reason?”

  “Got two actually. First, this mission is over for us. Out team is moving out tomorrow. Going after that explosives supplier.”

  “Maybe you should take me there.”

  “It’s way into the worst country you can imagine. Through the heart of Kandahar Province into Lashkar Gah. We did three months there and it makes this place look like a Caribbean resort.”

  “Maybe you should take me there too.”

  Garret opened his mouth, but nothing came out. He began to wonder if he’d ever keep up with this woman.

  “Bet you could use a good dog team in Kandahar.”

  “Bet we could,” he said it slowly and carefully to give himself time to think fast. “You were a huge asset here. We’d have still been checking the first couple warehouse rows when that truck bomb was rebuilt and had crossed the border if it wasn’t been for you two.” He scratched Sergey’s head. His hand came back unmangled, which he’d take as a good sign. In all his years he’d never seen anything like Sergey taking down a man three times his size.

  “Bet we could think of something to do together at a Caribbean resort too.”

  The air whooshed out of him. There was no answer possible to that one. The Minnow in a bikini on a tropical beach—no Baltimore boy could be that lucky, but he could sure hope.

  “What’s the real reason you haven’t kissed me?”

  Garret smiled at her. He just couldn’t help himself. As easily as he could imagine Minnow in a beach bikini, he could imagine Liza Minot in a beach wedding dress. The craziest and best part was that he could imagine himself standing right there beside her, feet planted in the sand, with a dog for a ringbearer.

  “The real reason…” he trailed it out.

  “Uh-huh,” she looked up at him with those perfect blue eyes that he never wanted to look away from.

  “I don’t think Sergey would like it much.”

  Liza leaned down and tickled the dog’s ears. “What do you think? After all, he’s not quite the arrogant master sergeant we thought he was. Maybe we need to come up with a command past ‘Friend’.”

  Sergey inspected him balefully for a long moment before heaving one of his dog sighs as if giving in to the inevitable. He shifted his position so that his back lay along her thigh, but he was now looking out at the desert. Apparently it was okay with him, but he’d rather not watch.

  “Well,” Liza looked up at him and Garret could feel his heart pick up the pace. “I guess Sergey doesn’t really mind. And I most certainly don’t.”

  As he leaned in to kiss her, Garret still kept one eye on the dog.

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  Reaching Out at Henderson’s Ranch (excerpt)

  He reached to console the frightened villager child.

  Stan Corman knew it was dangerous, but he couldn’t stop his hand. His left hand kept moving closer though some part of him screamed for it to withdraw, to fall by his side.

  The boy, no more than five, could have been his nephew Jack. They had the same tousled dark hair, though Jack’s skin was far lighter.

  His hand continued to reach.

  Deep inside himself, Stan cursed and fought, but his arm moved without his willing it.

  No control.

  Except his eyes. Though his hand remained out of his control, he could see with his eyes.

  Stan could see the little boy’s fear—his eyes so wide that the dark irises were almost lost in the vast field of white. He’d knelt so that they were eye to eye. Then Stan looked down and he could see his dog Lucy abruptly sit, close in front of the boy.

  Lucy wasn’t supposed to sit without a command unless—

  Stan’s hand brushed the boy’s arm.

  Lucy whined.

  She was a military war dog and was trained to sit and be still when she smelled—

  The boy disappeared in a cloud of light that slammed Stan into the void.

  The scream tearing out of his throat ripped him from nightmare to darkness.

  Absolute darkness…except for the afterimage of an exploding boy etched so deeply on his retina that it was all he’d been able to see when he woke in the hospital.

  Now, months away, he tried to rub at his eyes as his pulse peaked somewhere past skyrocket and began a slow fall that Stan knew from experience would banish any hope of sleep for hours.

  But there was no hand to rub his eyes with, only a fleshy stump remained of his left hand. His other hand was tangled in the sheets and for a long awful moment he was sure he had lost that one as well. Before he could scream again, he managed to pull it free and pressed his hand to his face.

  Five.

  He counted four fingers and a thumb pressed from jaw to forehead. Flesh and blood. He could feel them. Five. His right hand still remained intact.

  As did the image of the exploding boy.

  Stan’s life had been saved because the boy’s parents—or whatever total bastard had wired the kid up—had rigged the explosives too low. The alignment of explosive and Stan’s life had been almost entirely shielded by Lucy’s body.

  The helmet had protected his head, the goggles his eyes, and except for nasty scarring on his left cheek, the rest of him had been behind armor and dog. Lucy had taken the hit and like a nuclear blast burn image, the shape of her had been imprinted on his lower face and chest in blood and bone fragments. The rest had healed: the dozen broken ribs where parts of Lucy had slammed into him, the concussion from the wall he’d been thrown into so hard that even his helmet hadn’t saved him from that. They’d managed to save his left calf and knee with screws and titanium plates, but had warned him it would always be fragile. Just what every SEAL wanted to be labeled: fragile.

  He lay in a cot. His pulse had slowed enough—though the rate of his breathing hadn’t yet—for him to feel the hard chill of the cabin. The fire had gone out, which meant it was past three a.m.

  It was a good sign. Usually the nightmare woke him by midnight in plenty of time to restoke the small cast iron woodstove for the long, sleepless dark watch. He considered waiting until dawn under the covers, but experience also had taught him to get up and build the fire now or the cabin would stay frosty until midday.

  A North Carolina boy, his only experience with true cold before now had been on assignment. The Afghan winters had been brutal, but that’s where Special Operations said to go—so he and Lucy went.

  Lucy. Shit. They’d been together for two years in-country. She was six months dead and he still missed her every damn day.

  He snapped on a flashlight, for all the good it did him. All he could see right now was the little Afghan boy etched in light. The doctors insisted that it was psychosomatic rather than retinal damage because doctors made shit like that up when they didn’t know what was going on. The only part of his vision that he could use for the next hour would be in the one dark, dog-shaped patch that had been Lucy in the lower right corner of his vision.

  He swung out of his bunk, tipped his head back and to the side so that he could see where he was going, and crossed to the woodstove. Grabbing the handle without a hot pad had him yelping again—not pain but a sharp, panicked sound that rang harshly in the small cabin. If he damaged his right hand he’d be beyond fucked. It was all he had left. He sucked on the slight warmth on his palm as if it was a second-degree burn, cursing the damn stove for still being hot to the touch, but not heating the cabin.

  Reaching with his other hand didn’t help. The paired titanium hooks of his prosthetic arm didn’t care about the heat, but he hadn’t pulled the rig on and all he had to wave about was his fuck
ing stump.

  Fumbling toward the woodpile, which was on the side he couldn’t see, he found a small log and used it to whack the metal handle upward and swing the door open. For its duty and fine service, he chucked the log onto the few remaining embers inside.

  Raising one knee, he propped a small bellows on his thigh and pinned its lower handle in place with his stump. With his remaining hand, he worked the upper handle until he coaxed a small snap of flame to life. It was bright enough to shine through the boy’s afterimage. Carefully stoking the fire, he watched the flame grow as the boy faded.

  The stove wasn’t throwing much heat yet; all of the iron had cooled…except the goddamn handle. But he didn’t move away. His bare skin rippled with goosebumps, but he remained to watch the flame.

  When he’d first come to this small cabin in the Montana foothills, he’d spent many nights contemplating throwing his fake arm into the fire and then himself. At first he only resisted because he knew he’d piss off the ranch owner, and you didn’t piss off a man like Mac Henderson or his son Mark.

  Mac was a former SEAL—except he’d done his twenty years and retired. Being a SEAL, it was an easy bet that Mac would have followed Stan straight into hell and dragged him back to whup him good for throwing away the gift of life.

  Gift of life, my ass.

  It was early April. Back in North Carolina, the Sweet William would be blooming right now. The cherry blossoms would have already had their spring and the young cottonwood leaves would be unfolding to seek the sun.

  Instead, he was squatting in front of a cold fire in a ramshackle cabin on the edge of the Montana wilderness surrounded by snow. It wasn’t the life he’d pictured. But the life he’d pictured had thrown him out on his ass. When he’d gone home, his mother had burst into tears every time she looked at him. His fiancé hadn’t even bothered to Dear Stan him. True love hadn’t even lasted out the month for the half-man he’d become to make it out of the hospital. His sister had forced Stan’s brother-in-law to offer him a pity-job at the bank, as if Stan would be forever helpless. Besides, there was no way he could ever survive working indoors. And young nephew Jack had taken one look at his steel hooks and run away screaming in terror—as terrified as the little boy in the Afghan village.