Guarding the Soldier's Secret (8 page)

“Why did you do it?” Hunt’s voice was low, meant for her ears only. He moved his head slightly, indicating the little girl sitting so quietly in the backseat. “Why did you bring her here?”

Yancy shifted to face forward again and spoke in tones as soft as his. “Here—to Afghanistan? It’s where she was born. It’s her heritage. I thought she should know—”

He nodded. “But why now?”

“Because,” she began, then lowered her voice even further. “Because I thought it might be now or never. In a few weeks the last of the coalition forces will be gone. Who knows what will happen then? With Taliban forces strong in the border regions, how long will the current stability last? If the Taliban regains control—”

“There are people working hard to make sure that doesn’t happen,” Hunt interrupted, his voice hard.

On the verge of a reply, Yancy turned instead to gaze at him in silent understanding. The knowledge came to her in the quiet way that made her mind whisper,
Of course
.

Of course. He is one of those people.

Without his having to say another word, she understood that this was his mission, the goal he’d been working toward for three years, if not longer. He’d been working undercover, living as a native, a tribal elder, working to forge coalitions to resist the Taliban. It came down on her all at once, the understanding of why his identity must be kept absolutely secret at all costs, the realization of how she and Laila must have jeopardized his mission and his cover, and how much he’d risked by intervening in their attempted kidnapping. How much he was risking by being here with her now, and with Laila.

Her heart hammered wildly as the revelations rocketed through her mind. The words she couldn’t say all but deafened her.

Oh, my God.

But she couldn’t say even that much.

* * *

The lamb wriggled free of her grasp, but Laila didn’t seem to mind. She stood clapping her hands as the lamb scampered back to its mother, and her laughter carried across the field on the breeze, the sound reminding Hunt of the wind chime that hung on his mother’s front porch back in Nebraska.

It was the second time in less than twenty-four hours he’d thought of the old home place, which had to be a record of some kind.

Beside him Yancy stirred, and he knew she’d turned her head to look at him.

“Thank you,” she said softly.

“What for?”

“For this. You know...” She tilted her head toward the little girl doing her best to imitate the lambs hopping in the field.

He waited, and when she didn’t continue he shrugged and said, “You arranged it. Seemed important to you. To her.”

He heard a soft exhalation. “It was the only thing she asked for, when we were planning this trip. To see some lambs and goats. And donkeys,” she added with a small laugh. “I guess she remembers playing with them when she was little. And it’s not like she’s had much chance to see farm animals, living in New York and DC as we do.”

“No farmers in your family, I gather.”

He was pretty sure he’d said it without inflection, but it blipped on her reporter’s radar anyway. The look she gave him was keen, inquisitive as a cat’s.

“Nope,” she said, “I’m a city girl through and through. What about you?”

So he told her, because he could think of no reason he shouldn’t. “I grew up on a farm. Not sheep, though. Cattle and hogs, corn and hay, mostly.” He added, as an afterthought, “My mom had chickens.”

Again he felt her gaze and waited for the inevitable questions. Instead, she nodded and muttered—a trifle smugly, “I thought so.”

He gave a short laugh, amused rather than annoyed. He’d forgotten what a top-notch reporter she was. “Oh, yeah? Why?”

“I noticed the way you were with our host, when he was showing us around.” She nodded toward the man now joining Laila in the field, the flock that had come pushing and shoving to surround him and the child. “You seemed comfortable. And knowledgeable.” He nodded but didn’t say anything, and after a moment, she asked, “Where was it? Your family’s farm.”

“Not was—is. They’re still there, on the farm where I grew up.” He paused and again couldn’t think of any real reason not to tell her. “It’s in Nebraska.”

She smiled. “Of course.” They were both silent, watching Laila, who was obviously delighted by the jostling sheep, not at all afraid. Then Yancy drew a breath and said in a carefully neutral voice, “Do they know you’re alive?”

“Yes,” he said, and the breath came out ragged and uneven. “I probably broke some rules, but I did manage to get word to them.”

The silence stretched between them. He could feel the anger and hurt radiating from her like body heat, hear the silent question that had to be screaming inside her head:
You got word to them, yet you couldn’t have done the same for me?

“Yankee,” he began. “You—” she said at the same time. And they were both silenced by the deep hum coming from beneath his tunic.

His satellite phone. The phone he carried with him at all times and which was supposedly used only for emergencies.

Yancy watched him reach inside his tunic, pull out a sat phone and put it to his ear. In the split second before he jerked around, turning his back to her, she saw a frown darken his face. She clenched her fists and bit back her questions while frustration, a hint of relief and a growing unease made chaos of her emotions.

Part of her wanted to scream at him,
If you were able to let your parents know you were alive, couldn’t you have let me know, too?

For Laila’s sake, she told herself.
Of course, for Laila’s sake.

At the same time she was glad for the distraction, giving her the chance to bury the hurt deeply enough that he’d never know how devastated she’d been, all those years believing him dead. Believing him gone forever, without a word of goodbye. She’d fortified herself against that kind of loss...she’d thought.

I did! I did protect myself. It’s not about me. But Laila? How can I forgive him for abandoning her?

But all that came and went in seconds as she watched the tension gather in Hunt’s shoulders, and the awareness that something was obviously wrong became a beeping on her reporter’s radar that drowned all other thought.

“What is it?” she asked in hushed tones when he finally turned back to her, the phone clutched in one fist.

His face seemed carved from stone; his eyes glittered, bright as jewels. “Car bomb,” he said, his voice clipped, carefully devoid of emotion. “Downtown Kabul.”

She caught a breath in an involuntary gasp. “Oh, God. I thought—”

“Yeah, I did, too. It seems I was wrong.”

“Casualties?” Calm settled over her as years of experience and training took over.
Get the facts: who, what, where, when, why, how.
“Who was it? The Taliban? Where—”

“Six dead—so far. Dozens injured. The Taliban is claiming responsibility.”

His eyes bored into hers, and just like that, her unease returned, clutched at her chest, twisted in her belly. “What is it? What aren’t you telling me?”

“Yankee—” He put his hand on her arm, and she shook it off.

“Hunt—” She gasped out his name while a dozen scenarios, a dozen reasons for the way he was acting, rocketed through her head. Whatever it was, it had to be bad. Awful. What could a car bombing in Kabul possibly have to do with—

He took a deep breath and answered. “The target appears to have been WNN headquarters.”

Chapter 6

H
e might as well have spoken to her in a foreign language. She stared at him while the syllables fell flat on her ears and echoed incomprehensibly in her mind. She repeated them, like someone of limited intelligence.

“W...N...N?”

He nodded and again reached to take her arm. “Yankee—”

And again she pulled away. “World News—my network—our Kabul bureau, the offices where I—” Her head filled with images, a montage of all the tragic and gruesome violence she’d seen and reported on in her calm, veteran correspondent’s voice from her professional distance, caring with her mind but never with her gut, her heart, her soul. But these were her friends, colleagues, people she’d worked with under the most trying, even dangerous circumstances, and inevitably bonded by that. She knew their families, their children. Familiar faces swirled into the violence and gore in her mind, and she felt as if her head would explode.

“My God,” she whispered, hands clamped to her head as if to hold it together. “Why? I don’t understand. They’ve never attacked the news media specifically before. Yes, they’ve kidnapped and detained journalists, cameramen, but never anything like this. And why
now
? With the end of the war so close?”

“I don’t know why. I have an idea, but I don’t want to talk about it here.” His face was grim, his lips a thin, angry line. He glanced toward the field where Laila was still enthralled with the antics of the lambs, her laughter an ironically sweet descant to the ominous pounding of Yancy’s heart.

“Hunt, we have to get back there. I have to be there. We need to leave—
now
.”

He faced her and spoke with icy calm. “Yankee, get hold of yourself. Remember who you are. And
where
you are. And more importantly, who you’re with.”

His words were like a splash of cold water. She caught a breath, threw a quick look toward the field, where the farmer had already started toward them, having evidently realized something was amiss.

“I won’t have you upsetting her,” Hunt said softly.

“
You
won’t—” The spark of anger flared only briefly because, of course, he was right. She nodded.

“I’ll try to explain our breach of etiquette to our host, since we’ll be leaving before sharing in the meal his wife has no doubt spent days preparing,” Hunt said in an undertone as he went to intercept the farmer.

Cheeks flushed and eyes glowing, Laila bounced up to Yancy’s side. “Did you see me, Mom? Did you see that one lamb? It jumped straight up in the air, like
this
.”

She proceeded to demonstrate, which gave Yancy time to put on her mom-face before bending, laughing, to hug her daughter. Over Laila’s head she watched Hunt soothing their host with what appeared to be extravagant apologies to both him and his wife, and promises to come again and stay for a meal next time. The leaden feeling in her stomach told Yancy it was a promise they most likely wouldn’t be able to keep.

* * *

For the first half hour of the drive back to Kabul, Yancy and Hunt sat in silence while Laila chattered excitedly about the lambs and goats she’d gotten to play with, oblivious to any ominous undercurrents. Yancy listened and made appropriate responses, but her mind was casting about furiously for answers that weren’t available to her, while her chest ached with grief and worry and her face felt stiff with the pressure of holding back tears and forcing smiles instead.

Who is it? Who’s hurt...dead? Is it Max, the cameraman, who just got married last fall? Or Kevin, with his annoying addiction to country music and insistence on always playing Texas Hold’em when they had to overnight in some godforsaken outpost. Oh, God, please don’t let it be Doug, with two little kids at home...

“I have to go there,” she said in a low voice, having confirmed with a glance toward the backseat that the silence did indeed mean Laila had finally fallen asleep. “Those are my friends, Hunt. I know them. I’ve worked with them for years. How can I not?”

Hunt’s glance flicked toward the rearview mirror. “You have a child with you. You can’t very well go dashing off to a war zone.” His voice was hard, almost derisive.

Yancy swallowed a retort, again because he was right. She couldn’t take Laila to what would almost certainly be a scene of chaos and carnage. She chewed her lip for a moment, thinking about it, then said, “Okay, how ’bout this? You can drop me off somewhere downtown. You keep Laila with you, and I can make my own way to the scene—”

He was already shaking his head. “No way,” he said flatly. “I’m not letting either one of you out of my sight.”

Yancy subsided into one of the loudest silences Hunt had ever heard, but he wasn’t naive enough to take the silence for acquiescence. He wouldn’t put it past her to try to find some way of getting to the scene of that bombing, and how could he blame her? He’d do the same thing, in her shoes. The fact was, if it was his people maybe killed or injured, there wasn’t any force on earth that would keep him away.

He mulled it over while he navigated through Kabul traffic and the car’s interior filled up with tension and frustration until he almost thought he could see it—like smoke. He pulled the car up in front of his house and turned off the engine, then glanced over at Yancy. She hadn’t moved a muscle, and her features were set in an expression that looked to him more obstinate than obedient.

Swearing under his breath, he got out of the car and opened the door to the backseat. Laila stirred when he picked her up, and he had only a second or two to remember the way she’d felt in his arms three years ago, the way her thin little arms had clung so tightly to his neck, the way her warm tears had wet his neck and the collar of his shirt. To marvel at how much she’d grown...and to feel a pang at how she’d grown
up
.

Too soon, she was awake and squirming to be put down because she was too big now to be carried like a baby.

Clinging to his hand, she turned to look at Yancy, still sitting like a statue in the front seat of the car. “Isn’t Mom coming? Come on, Mom. We’re here.”

Hunt paused and his eyes met Yancy’s, hers swimming with grief and worry and fear. Anger, too.

“Well, kid, here’s the deal,” he said to Laila. “Your mom and I have to go to the hotel and get your stuff, because you’re going to be staying here with me. And
you
—” he put a hand on top of her head to quell her delighted hopping “—are going to stay here and help Mehri fix dinner, so when we get back we can all eat together. How’s that?”

Laila considered the proposal, gnawing on her lip, then aimed a winsome gaze at him from under her eyelashes. “Can I have some ice cream? It’s prob’ly going to be a lo-ong time before you come back, and I’m already hungry.”

Oh, Lord, she’s a charmer already
, he thought, and he wondered what she was going to be like at fifteen. And whether he would be there to witness it.

“If it’s okay with your mom,” he said gruffly, looking again at Yancy. This time the glow in her eyes gave him an uncomfortable feeling in his chest.

* * *

Yancy watched her daughter go into the house with Hunt’s housekeeper, hopping excitedly at the prospect of helping in the kitchen. When the front door had closed solidly after them, she hurried back to the car and climbed into the passenger seat, turning to Hunt as she slammed the door. She opened her mouth to speak, but he was already shaking his head.

“Don’t even think about it.”

“But—”

“You know what it will be like down there. You won’t be able to get within blocks of the scene.”

“The hospitals, then. I have to know—”

“Again—you know it’s going to be a while before they get any of the victims ID’d, and then they’re not going to release names until families have been notified. There’s nothing you can do, Yankee.”

“Then why did you— Why are we—”

He drew in a breath and put the ancient Mercedes in gear. “Just what I said to Laila. I’m taking you to your hotel to get your things. You’ll stay with me until I can get you out of the country.”

She was silent for a long moment. The old car moved noisily along the quiet, shaded street while a cold prickling began in her scalp and crawled down her spine. At last she said, “Hunt, what do you know?”

He made an impatient sound. “I don’t
know
anything. Put away your mama-bear protective instincts for a minute and
think
. Yesterday you and Laila were almost kidnapped in a busy marketplace. Today a bomb targets a network news bureau’s downtown offices.
Your
network. Coincidence? Not likely.” He threw her a glance. “I don’t think what happened yesterday had anything to do with Laila. I think the target was—and is—you.”

“Me!” It burst from her in reflexive protest, but she couldn’t argue with him. The cold that was spreading now to the pit of her stomach told her he might be right. “The Taliban.” She whispered it. “Because of—”

He nodded. “INCBRO. Think about it. You’re not only rescuing child brides, but you’ve been convincing their families to have their daughters educated instead of selling them off like cattle. The Taliban wants to regain control in Afghanistan after the Americans leave, and education, especially for women, is something they can’t tolerate. Hell, they’ve killed people for a lot less.”

Again Yancy sat silent. Her brain felt paralyzed with the implications.
If that’s true, then I’m responsible for the bombing. For my friends...

And with fear.
I’ve put Laila—my child—in terrible danger.

“Oh, God,” she whispered at last.

“Is there anyplace you could go? Someplace the Taliban wouldn’t be able to find you?”

She stared at his hands where they gripped the steering wheel, mesmerized by their size and strength while a memory came unbidden.
Those same hands touching me...with such gentleness and terrible intimacy...
She shivered and shifted restlessly as she shook her head. “What good would it do? If the Taliban wants me dead, they’ll track me down—”

“If the Taliban wanted you dead, you’d be dead.” His voice had turned hard. “They’re sending you a message.”

“A message!” she cried out in anguish. “By killing my friends?”

“Exactly. What they want,” he said more gently, “is to get you and your organization out of Afghanistan. You’re the organizer, the face of INCBRO, and you’re high profile. But if they kill you, someone else will just pick up the flag...right? But if they make it clear they’ll keep killing people you care about until you back off, they know you’ll back off.”

Her every instinct wanted to deny it. She sat silently, wanting to scream at him, to argue, to tell him—

“You know I’m right,” he said softly, and as traffic slowed to a crawl, he turned to look at her.

The pain and compassion in his eyes stunned her.

He really cares about them. These people. This country. His mission.

He would have to care, she realized, to have given so much of his life for them. His sacrifice wasn’t only about protecting his own country—it was about saving theirs.

She nodded and, as her own eyes burned and blurred with tears, turned her face away from that pain-filled gaze.

“So... Laila and I need to disappear, right?” There was no need for him to confirm it, and he didn’t. She drew a steadying breath. “Okay. I, um...I think I might know of a place.”

She stretched around to grope in the backseat for her purse, then settled again with it on her lap. She sat for a moment without opening it. Her hands felt unsteady as they rested on top of the buckled flap, but her eyes could detect no sign of shaking. After a moment, she opened it and took out a folded envelope, its thick, expensive paper making it easy to find in the crowded depths of the purse. She opened the envelope and extracted two folded pieces of paper, one of which was in sharp contrast to the quality of the envelope. It was cheap lined paper, like the kind schoolchildren used, and the writing on it was by hand. The second sheet of paper was of the same quality as the envelope and contained a typed translation of the first letter. Hunt glanced at the papers as she held them in her hands but made no comment and asked no questions.

She held the letters until he had parked in the hotel’s outdoor parking lot and turned off the engine. He took the letters from her, glanced at the handwritten one, then began to read the typewritten translation. Yancy closed her eyes and followed the words in her mind, as they were imprinted indelibly in her memory:

My Dear Yancy,

First off, my name is Sam Malone, though for some reason many have preferred to call me by the nickname Sierra, and I happen to be your grandfather.

I am a very old man now, and I’ve lived a full and interesting life, during which I managed to amass a considerable fortune and squander the love of three beautiful women. As a result, I was not privileged to know most of my own children, although I did at least get to see my son, your father, grow up. It is my deepest regret that I did not find more time to spend with him when I had the chance. But this is not the time for regrets, and I can’t change the past anyhow.

Since I have outlived all of my wives and my children, it is my desire to share my earthly treasure with my grandchildren, any that may chance to survive me, and it is this last wish that has led me to write this letter to you. I have sent one to your sister, Miranda, too, of course. If you are not too dead set against me and would care to come to my ranch to collect your inheritance, I do not believe you would be sorry.

My lawyer will no doubt include with this letter the information you need to contact him to make the necessary arrangements.

Yours very truly,

Sam Malone

Hunt looked up from the letter to find Yancy watching him, waiting quietly for his reaction. “Sam Malone.” He tapped the lined paper with its handwritten, barely legible scrawl. “Not...
the
Sam Malone? The legendary billionaire recluse—”

“Yep,” she said, one corner of her mouth quirking upward, probably in appreciation of his reaction, he thought. “The very same.”