Trinity: Military War Dog (25 page)

“Sorry.” Darci hadn’t even realized she’d stopped. “Leg cramp.”

A small hand touched her knee. Darci wrapped hers around the tiny, icy fingers. This far up in the mountains, coiling their way through the innards, lowered their core body temperatures. They couldn’t stay hidden from the sun much longer. Holding Badria’s hand, Darci used the wall to push to her feet. Hot and cold swirled through her, the pain mind-numbing. “Just a little farther.”

“You’ve been saying that for an hour.” Exhaustion tugged at Alice’s slow words that bounced off the walls.

I have?
Had they really been hidden that long? What if they never made it out of here?

Don’t think that!

Why hadn’t Darci listened to the promptings that told her this mission would be her last? What made her think she could do this job indefinitely? She didn’t want to. Weariness tugged at her the last few missions.

She’d loved this job once. With a brutal passion. It helped her feel like she gave hope to people who didn’t have any. Her psych assessment before she took the job revealed she wanted this role because of what happened to her mom. The evaluation didn’t make sense to her, but if she somehow honored her mom, helped others who were in danger and didn’t know it, then that was a good thing.

But … to what extent? What did she have left? What hope did she have?

“Because of what’s happening right here.”
Even at the memory of his husky words, Darci felt the warmth she’d experienced several nights ago in his arms.

If only it could happen. If she could walk away…

“How much farther?” Alice said through a yawn.

Too bad Heath wasn’t here. With that gorgeous dog of his. Trinity would find her, find an escape. “It can’t go on forever.” She hoped.

“My thoughts exactly.” Alice pulled in a breath. “But what if it does?”

“Alice.”

“Right.”

Around a corner, the shadows lightened. Air swirled as if … Trekking her fingers along the ribs of the cave, she slowly rose to—

Her head thudded against the ceiling. She grimaced but was glad she could stretch her legs. “Let’s stop.” As her eyes adjusted to the open area, Darci noticed light streaming through two different locations. Straight ahead and at her two o’clock.

“But that … that’s light. It means there’s an out, right?”

Yes, but where precisely would they exit? What if they’d managed to come full circle back to the camp? What if they dumped out into a Taliban stronghold? Despite her best efforts at keeping her sense of direction, Darci had only an educated—if you could call it that after so many twists and loopbacks—guess about their direction.

“Is something wrong?” Alice’s voice skated along Darci’s cheek.

The girl was close. Then again, in a narrow cave tunnel with darkness, everything felt close. “Just resting.”

Darci knelt and tugged her pack from her back. She fished through it for her sat phone. Normally she wouldn’t take this risk, but they were out of options. Odds said the team had been killed. Toque—

Darci squeezed off the thought as she pulled out the phone. Her thumb slipped into a depression. A hole? Since when did her sat phone have a hole? She angled it toward the lone halo of light and stilled. A bullet blinked back at her, the light glinting off the surface. They’d hit her—the phone—and she’d never known. Heat speared her stomach at how close she’d come to dying. She couldn’t even recall feeling the impact. Adrenaline had shoved her through the opening. Besides, after the pain from the first bullet, with another Death would come knocking.

“Ah, Death, the spectre which sate at all feasts!”

As if hearing her Poe quote, the light beam straight ahead fractured.

Darci pushed back, drawing Badria into her arms. “Quiet,” she hissed to Alice, whom she expected to start peppering her with nervous questions.

Shouts slithered into the cave. They bounced off the walls as if searching for them.

Positive thoughts gone.
We are dead
.

            Eighteen              

En Route to FOB Murphy, Afghanistan

D
espite the chill, body odor and tension radiated through the steel hull of the MRAP as they lumbered out of the village and gained speed. At the village, the Green Berets requested and received clearance to move to FOB Murphy. Eighty minutes had passed since the explosion. Though no official orders had come down, the new location would put them closer to the base and the mountains.

Watters was no dummy positioning his team in a prime location. Heath could tell by the way he was moving his team and staying on top of updates. That’s the way of it in the military. If you suspect your fellow American troops are getting hammered, military branch divisions and rivalries vanish. You help. You help fast.

Then later, after saving the rivals, remind them constantly who saved whom.

Chin resting across Heath’s and Hogan’s legs, Trinity yawned and moaned as he ran a hand along her back. Hogan smoothed her coat, too, eyes closed. No doubt she took comfort in Trinity’s rhythmic breathing. He had. Did now. Even during furnace summers out here, it never felt hot or suffocating to have his furry partner stretched across him as he waited in the field. Laid prone on lookout, her side pressed to his.

At the FOB, soldiers went one way while A Breed Apart entered a three-story structure that housed a small eating area and multiple rooms with bunk beds. Grabbing rack time when possible kept soldiers alive and alert. Heath opened an MRE and dropped onto the bunk beneath Jibril. Meals-Ready-to-Eat had other infamous, derogatory names, but they supplied enough calories to keep him from caring. Across from him Aspen and Hogan occupied the other bunks.

Heath fed half his meal to Trinity and provided her a bowl of water from a cooking pot he’d reallocated to himself from the kitchen. When they geared out, it’d be returned, with the addition of some slobber. Served them right for cutting him and the team out of the mission briefing.

Munching a chocolate candy-bar stick-looking thing, Heath rose and went to the window, clouded by years of grime and dust. Blending with the landscape made a ragtag huddle of buildings that served as a checkpoint almost indiscernible. For years, locals paid what little they had to clear the checkpoint, contributing to the bloated recreational funds of corrupt officials and their perv underlings. Liberal media outlets might call this war useless, but try telling that to the average Muslim trying to make his or her way across a land polluted with corruption and greed. Now they could traverse it without selling their souls.

Jia.

As the name lodged into his still-pounding skull, he looked to the mountains, but his mind looked to that heart-shaped face. The kiss he’d almost stolen, wanted bad. Though his TBI had been an excuse to pull back from the world, Jia made him want to reenter it. Be there with her, for her, beside her….

Was she up there? The explosion—did she die?

He kneaded the ache in his temple, thinking through how he’d find out if she’d been on the casualty list—if there was one. That was the thing of it. Nobody knew what happened.

Correction: They knew. He didn’t.

In fact, he had little doubt they were getting briefed on it as he stood here.

“You weren’t ready.”

Heath felt the words as much as heard them. Coarse, tight, controlled, but vitriolic all the same. He looked over his shoulder.

Hogan hovered less than a foot behind and to the side. She glanced back, and that’s when he noticed the others had cleared out. “Where’d they go?”

“Don’t ignore what I said.”

The challenge pulled him around. “I’m not.” He stared her down. Though she couldn’t be more than five five, the woman made up for it in attitude. “But what I do and when I do it—that’s not your concern.”

“It is when you black out in the middle of a gig.” On her toes, she leaned in. “When you put my life, and Trinity’s, on the line.”

Heath cocked his head. She’d just accused him of putting his dog’s life in jeopardy. “Step off.”

“No.”

Heath drew himself straight. “Hogan—”

“Look, I get it.”

“I don’t think you—”

“You wanted this.” Intensity flamed through her irises. “But that scar you got wrecked everything. So you get this chance to be back here and you grab it.” Her expression softened. “But you weren’t ready … yet.”

Amazing that a three-letter word could stand him down when a 120-pound woman couldn’t.

Her brown eyes searched his. “Heath, I saw you black out.”

Could she hear the shelling of his heart? She had said nothing to the others. When he didn’t respond, she plowed on as Hogan always did. “I have a feeling it wasn’t the first time since the plane touched down. And you’ve had a headache the whole time, haven’t you?”

Heath swallowed. The last time he felt dressed down by a woman, Auntie Margaret had chewed him out for skipping football practice his senior year. That was two summers before she died. He’d joined the Army a month later.

“And then that Asian chick. You freaked out, thinking she was in that explosion, right?”

“I—”

She thrust a finger in his face. “Don’t bury feelings. She may be the only piece of heaven on earth to keep you sane. I’m not saying you have to get all gooey over her—God knows I don’t need to see that—but feel what you feel.” Sincerity pinched her eyebrows as she bobbed her head at him. “Don’t bury it. You’re stressed out of your mind, and that’s what’s making the headaches worse.”

He blinked. She was right. He knew she was. But owning up to it …

“Despite my objections about you coming, I think there’s a reason you’re here.”

Heath stared at the fiery wonder. For an annoying, mouthy woman, she was all right.
Little sister
came to mind. “You covered me.” It was hard to read her expression thanks to the bangs that fell into her eyes. “Out there, in the village when I went down.”

She gave a curt nod.

As voices floated down the hall, Heath glanced toward the closed door, then to her. “Why?”

“You get whacked out and A Breed Apart is shot.” She backed away and climbed onto the top bunk. “You think you’re the hot snot now, but wait till I get Beo under the spotlights.”