Freefall (3 page)

It was dark. Dark as midnight. Or a tomb. Or death.

Was that what had happened? Had she died?

She lifted her right hand, and although she was holding it right in front of her face, she couldn't see it. Something above her shifted with an earsplitting screech of stone on stone. As she tried to wipe the thick, chalky dust from her eyes, nose, and mouth, she began to cough.

Pressing her uninjured hand against her chest, she took a few shallow breaths. It felt as if she were breathing live flames.

Over the distracting ringing in her ears, Sabrina heard the frantic wail of sirens.

Acrid smoke, tasting of chemicals and melted plastic, began to slip into her small space between the stones.

Although she dearly hoped it was her imagination, Sabrina thought she felt the rocks getting hotter. Whether they were or not, she feared that if she didn't escape soon, she'd die.

Marshaling every bit of strength she possessed, and using her right arm as leverage, she managed to push herself up into a semi-upright position.

And slammed her forehead into the low stone ceiling. Stars swam in front of her burning eyes. Her stomach roiled again.

She fell back, hitting her head with a nasty thud.

And was instantly thrown into the void.

On those rare occasions when she allowed herself to think about it, Hallie would wonder how she'd gotten herself into this situation.

One thing she was sure of was that it had all been her snake of a husband's fault.

Jake Conroy hadn't been anything like the polite Southern boys she'd usually dated. Boys who would address her career military father as "sir" and remember to bring flowers to her mama.

Which had been precisely the point.

Jake had been exciting. Hot. A bad boy in black leather who actually owned a Harley, he hadn't been the least bit impressed with her straight-A average, but had told her, that first night they'd met, that the way her tits looked in her tight red cheerleader's sweater made his cock throb.

No boy had ever used such graphic language in her presence. And while her typical dates were not above trying to cop a feel while watching a movie in the back row of the Magnolia multiplex, never in all her sixteen years had she ever felt like such a sexual being.

She'd known, as a fever began to burn beneath her skin, that the bad boy known as Jake the Snake knew things. Wicked, dangerous, thrilling things. Things she wanted to know. Things she ached to experience.

Unfortunately, she'd been wrong. Jake turned out to be far too selfish and concerned with getting off himself to ever think about giving a girl pleasure.

Bad enough that she'd run off to Savannah and married him two weeks after they'd met, setting up housekeeping in a tacky trailer park, which had experienced yet another meth bust last month.

When Jake turned out to be incapable of holding down a job, she was forced to struggle to support them both on what she made selling kitschy knickknacks in the Swann Island village during the day and working as a cocktail waitress across the harbor at the Somersett Wingate Palace hotel six nights a week.

They'd been married a month the first time he stayed out all night.

Which was when she should've left.

But to go crawling home to her mama and daddy in shame, admitting she'd been so wrong, hadn't seemed like an option at the time. Besides, hadn't Jake apologized? And come home with that filmy red baby doll nightie from Wal-Mart?

He'd declared their makeup sex the best ever.

Not wanting to drive him away by being a nagging wife, Hallie lied and agreed. And forgave him.

Until the night she'd stopped to toss a load of dirty clothes into the washer before leaving for the hotel and found lipstick on the front of his tighty whiteys. Which she sure as hell hadn't put there. A subsequent search of his jeans pocket revealed a credit card receipt from a motel in Somersett. Not only was he a cheating snake, he was a stupid one.

Putting two and two together, Hallie knew as well as she knew her own name that his story about going deep-sea fishing with the guys this weekend was a bald-faced lie.

After her shift at the hotel was over, she drove to that same no-tell motel, where she found him fucking some bottle-blond bimbo.

She yelled.

Screamed.

Cursed like a drunken sailor on shore leave.

She snatched a lamp from the table and threw it at his lying, cheating head. She would've thrown the TV, too, but it was bolted to the damn dresser.

Meanwhile, the slut leaped out of the bed and raced for the bathroom. Hallie grabbed her hair, intending to pull every damn strand out by its bleached roots, but Jake caught her around the middle and lifted her off her feet.

Kicking ineffectually, she informed him that if his things weren't out of the trailer by this time tomorrow, she was going to burn them. She had a lot more she wanted—needed—to say, but when a voice yelled from the neighboring room that they were calling the cops, she decided the time had come to leave while she still had a bit of dignity intact.

She spent the next hour driving around aimlessly, unwilling to go home and face that wedding picture she'd had enlarged and framed, which was currently hanging on the wall behind their bed.

Capping off the shittiest night of her life, shortly after she drove off the ferry and onto the island, her right front tire began thumping on the road. Immediately afterward, the rear one started making the same ominous sound.

Damn. Bad enough she'd gotten one flat. But two?

She kicked the second tire and felt the sting of her toes hitting hard rubber all the way up her leg.

As she stomped down the dark, deserted road in the pouring rain, alternately sobbing and cursing the man she'd been foolish enough to marry, Hallie decided to cut her losses and divorce the snake.

Before things got even worse.

Before she ended up pregnant and stuck with a kid to take care of.

"I hope they both get a fucking incurable STD," she fumed.

The idea of Jack's prick being covered with oozing red blisters was bringing a bit of comfort when she heard a car slowing down behind her.

She may have made a fool of herself over Jake the Snake, but that didn't mean she was a total idiot. She had, after all, been an honor roll student before she'd fucked up her life.

Hallie kept walking, her strides longer, her pace faster, the spike heels she wore to earn extra tips in the hotel's bar clattering on the uneven pavement.

"You're a long way from home," a male voice said.

Although the low-hanging clouds had covered the moon, turning the night as dark as a tomb, Hallie thought she recognized the voice bouncing around in the fog swirling all around her.

The car crept along beside her. "I passed your vehicle back there a ways on the road," the driver said when she didn't immediately respond. "Swann Island isn't the big city, but it's still not safe for a woman to be out so late, on a deserted road. And you're soaking wet. Why don't you at least let me drive you home, Hallie? And you can call the auto club in the morning."

Okay. He knew her name. Then again, everybody pretty much knew everybody around here. Wasn't that what made the place so damn boring?

And, she admitted secretly, wasn't that partly what had once made Jake, the outsider from the big city of Miami, so exciting?

Hallie heard the click of a lock. Then the passenger door opened. It would only be much, much later that she'd realize the interior light hadn't come on.

During her imprisonment, she'd come to fear him. And hate him.

It didn't take a degree in psychology to understand how auctioning her off like some nineteenth-century chattel last week had given him a sort of sick pleasure. His excitement had been palpable, rolling off him in hot waves as he buckled the black leather cuffs around her wrist, then raised her arms over her head, chaining her to the steel suspension bar hanging from the ceiling.

Displaying her in the most degrading ways, he moved his hands all over her body, turning her to show off the letter
S
he'd burned into her flesh.

The stranger's laugh had been rough with lust as he accepted the invitation to strike her on that brand.

Once.

Twice.

A third time.

The slaps stung, but things were about to get worse. Much, much worse.

The man, the
monster
, she'd made the mistake of trusting, had jacked off while watching her submit to another man's lash, being taken in ways most men only dared imagine in their darkest, most private fantasies.

Afterward, when he slit the man's throat—to keep him from ever talking about what he'd seen, what he'd done—Hallie threw up.

Which had only earned a second, more brutal beating that still had her peeing blood.

She heard the all-too-familiar crunch of tires on gravel. The sound of a car engine cutting off. A door opening and closing.

When the key rasped in the padlock, Hallie tensed, her heart pounding painfully against her ribs, unaware that this would be the night her desperate prayers to stay alive would be in vain.

Zach found both Shane and his copilot still seated in the cockpit. Like the LT, the copilot was dead.

"I tried kicking out the door," Shane told him as another round of fire hit the smoking instrument panel. "But nothing happened. I figured my flight suit had gotten caught up on something." He glanced down at his leg. "Guess I was wrong."

"I guess so." Talk about your friggin' understatements! The leg in question was spurting blood like Old Faithful. The material of Shane's flight suit had been blasted away, revealing flesh that was glowing green through Zach's NVGs.

"Shit." Zach ripped off a glove. "You're hit."

"It appears so," the helo pilot said mildly as he stared down at his smoking flesh.

"You've caught a tracer round." Zach dove into the wound with his bare hand.

Shane hissed through clenched teeth, proving, not for the first time, that an army flyboy could be as tough as a SEAL.

"How bad is it?" he asked.

"Hell, even for a Winnebago jockey, you don't rate a yellow tag," Zach lied. He pocketed the tracer, then took the lanyard off his 9 mm and using it as a tourniquet, tied it around Shane's bloody leg, right below the knee. "Maybe a green."

A green tag was triage talk for "walking wounded"—injuries that needed treatment but were unlike to deteriorate over a few days. A yellow was any injury that was potentially life-threatening, a wound that would require extensive treatment.

Which, although neither man was prepared to admit it, was probably what they were talking about here. If the pilot was lucky.

"Okay," Zack said as he handed Shane back his M4. They both ducked as another round of machine-gun fire tore through the cockpit. He unfastened the copilot's seat belt and put him on his back. "Let's go get the LT. Then we're out of here."

Pulling himself forward by his arms and one leg, dragging the other behind him, Shane followed Zach as they crawled through the companionway to the back of the bird.

Which was even more of a mess than the cockpit.

It was also on fire.

Again.

Not a good thing, given that they'd topped off the fuel tank before leaving Gardez.

Anyone who'd ever watched
ER
would immediately have recognized that Lieutenant Michael Roberts was definitely a black tag.

Something the medic on the scene confirmed. "He's gone," Chaffee said.

Roberts's eyes were open but glazed. His chest wasn't moving.

Zach pressed his bare fingers, bloodied from having gone spelunking in his best friend's leg, against the LT's throat. Then shook his head.

He exchanged a look with the other two men and knew they were all thinking the same thing.

It didn't matter that a dragging two corpses through the snow during a firefight would be time-consuming, extremely complicated, and meant a low chance of their own survival. All that mattered was the code that all Special Ops forces, no matter their service affiliation, would, if necessary, follow to their own death.

Leave no man behind.

"Okay," Shane said, as wires jumped and sparked around them, bullets pinged as if they were inside a giant pinball machine, and this second fire, even more dangerous than the first, began greedily eating its way up the side of the bird. "Let's go show those tangos who's in charge of this show."

"Fuck!"

Yanking on the steering wheel of the pickup, Zach pulled over to the side of the oyster shell road and slammed on the breaks.

Reaching into the console between the seats, he pulled out a yellow plastic lemon. His hands were—dammit!—trembling as he unscrewed the cap and shot a stream of the concentrated lemon juice onto his tongue.

Thank you, Jesus, it worked. The tart acid taste jerked him from what had turned out to be a slaughter in the Afghan mountains back to Swann Island.

He'd been stateside six months. After experiencing a flashback that had him pulling a gun on his dad, who'd stopped by the house to drag Zach out of the bottle he'd been trying to drown himself in, he'd reluctantly admitted he might, just maybe, have a small problem.

So he'd gone in for counseling, and while he figured it would be a long time before he got the images of that mountain battle out of his head—how about never?—at least he was able to fake being a reasonably normal person.

Most of the time.

He'd tried the antidepressants Doc Honeycutt had pushed on him, but they hadn't done anything for the nightmares, and had left him feeling flat. Empty. Which he supposed some people might consider an improvement over the flashbacks of battle.

Zach wasn't one of them.

Besides, he wasn't stupid. Nor was he ignorant about PTSD. Hadn't he seen enough cases of it up close and personal? He knew damn well he wasn't the first veteran to deal with post-traumatic stress.

And unfortunately he wouldn't be the last.

"One day at a time."

The military shrink at the VA hospital he'd gone to in Somersett when the flashbacks started getting out of hand had suggested he try talking to himself out loud, to remind himself that he was back home in South Carolina, not in a war zone.

Sometimes that helped.

Other times it didn't.

Which was why he'd locked his weapons away.

He'd lied when he promised to get rid of them. But hey, if there was anything he'd learned during his years in the military, it was that bad guys could show up when you least expected them to.

Better to be ready than sorry.

Which was why he'd kept his guns.

Just in case.

He'd also, on the shrink's advice, quit watching the nightly news. Which hadn't proven hard at all, given that most of it was flat-out depressing. Zach wasn't positive, but he thought the nightmares had lessened somewhat once he'd gone cold turkey on those twenty-four-hour cable marathons that he'd stayed up all night watching while trying to drink the state dry.

He was working on being more social again, too, like the shrink advised. Not isolate himself so much. Which was why he'd forced himself to drive into town and spend a couple hours at The Stewed Clam on the waterfront, nursing a non-alcoholic beer and knocking brightly colored pool balls into pockets.

And why he'd taken his dad up on the offer to do some construction work out at Swannsea Plantation. Although he was in better shape than the average guy, twelve hours of swinging a hammer had proven a lot tougher than he'd remembered from all those summer vacations working for his old man.

Most nights he went home and crashed. Which at least allowed for a few hours' sleep before the ghosts returned.

It had been two weeks since he'd last been ambushed by a flashback.

Three weeks since his last full-fledged panic attack.

"Which is an improvement," Zach reassured himself as he turned the key in the ignition and pulled back onto the road.

Plan for the worst, hope for the best, accept whatever happens. The SEAL saying was meant to be applied to combat situations, but since Zach was discovering day-to-day life could be a battle, he figured it applied.

He could do this.

Or he could let the ghosts win, sink deeper into the void, and end up one of those burnout cases who'd pop the first pill before getting out of bed, then spend the day hiding from the world in the dim light of a bar, lying to themselves about there not being anything wrong with tossing back bourbon and branch water for breakfast.

Which occasionally didn't seem like such a bad idea. If you spent your day buzzed out on booze and drugs, well, hell, you couldn't be expected to be responsible for anyone.

Which let you off the hook.

Until the day you climbed a tower or walked into a fast-food restaurant with an automatic rifle and let the demons hiding inside you escape.

Wasn't that a rosy flicking scenario?

Zach tensed at the flash of headlights in his rearview mirror.

"Just some civilian, driving home after a night on the town."

Maybe a couple who'd been out to dinner and a movie and were now headed home for some hot monkey sex.

Those were ordinary, everyday headlights. Not tracer bullets. Not the enemy.

He wasn't undercover in Afghanistan, or Iraq, or Russia, or some godforsaken, mosquito-infested Central American jungle. He was in the good old U.S. of A., in one of the most serene, molasses-slow-moving towns in the universe.

There was absolutely no reason for anyone to be following him.

To think otherwise was sliding back into Paranoiaville.

"You can absofuckinglutely do this," he assured himself for the gazillionth time as he pulled up in front of his rental house.

He
had
to do it.

Because the alternative was not an option.

One day at a time.

He waited in the truck until the car that had not been tailing him passed by. A late-model Volvo, which, last time Zach looked, was not exactly the choice of terrorists. He'd bet dollars to Krispy Kremes that there was a kid's car seat strapped into the backseat.

Taking a deep breath, he climbed out of the truck and, carrying his toolbox with him, walked up the steps to the front porch. The front door had three locks, which admittedly might be overkill, but Zach was going to fight his demons one day at a time, and triple locks sure as hell weren't hurting anyone.

He was beat, but wired from that flashback of what he hoped would be the most horrific day of his life. Because if things could get any worse, he wasn't certain he wanted to stick around to witness them.

He carried the metal box into the kitchen, spread his tools out on the table, got out some oil and a cloth, and began cleaning them.

After a mission, every SEAL put all the things he might be aching for—food, sleep, a shower, a cold beer—on hold until his weapon was broken down, cleaned, and put back together. Because you never knew when you'd need it.

Okay, so the hammer and screwdrivers and chisels might not need cleaning. The thing was, Zach found routine soothing.

And these days a guy had to take his comfort wherever he could find it.