Wings of Gold Series

by Tappan, Tracy

  Footsteps moved closer to the ambulance, and Max’s eyes darted back over to Kyle.

  “I’m a woman,” she said low. “If they capture me, it, uh…it won’t go so well.”

  And she wasn’t referring to being decapitated. The image speared into Kyle’s mind of her at the back of the Jebel Ali Club, her flesh pale and feminine in the moonlight, the bones in her hips looking so delicate when she dropped her pants. As small as she was, any abuse—any at all—would break her. His nostrils flaring, Kyle climbed into the back of the truck again, holding his AK in a hard fist. “I can’t get a good shot off at them from inside the ambulance, so I’ll need your help.”

  He watched her throat move with a swallow, and the muscles in his chest felt like they were going cement on him. She wasn’t wearing any makeup, like she had been last night, and with the babushka headscarf on, framing her small face, she appeared incredibly vulnerable.

  The footsteps moved away again.

  “I’m going to open one of the back doors,” he said, “and once I do, I want you to start shooting at those assholes with this.” He held out his Beretta. “Only stick your arm out, okay? Not your head or any other part of your body. I don’t want you getting hurt, and it’s not like you have to hit anything. Just get them to take cover, so I can beat feet out there and get into position behind the ambulance. All right?”

  “Yes.”

  “Do you know how to shoot a pistol?”

  “I assume one pulls the trigger,” she said wryly.

  He made a noise in his throat. “How the hell am I supposed to know if a liberal can distinguish her ass from a hole in the ground when it comes to guns?” He handed her the Beretta. “Be careful. The safety’s off.”

  She nodded.

  “The Beretta carries a fifteen-round magazine,” he told her. “I put one in the guy’s belly, so you’ve still got plenty.”

  “Should I save one bullet for, uh…myself?” Her face was white. “Just in case.”

  His heart almost reeled out of his chest. “What the fuck, Max? No, dammit. That shit is only from the movies. Don’t kill yourself if they capture you.” He almost wanted to pull a Last of the Mohicans speech on her, since he’d brought up the movies, Daniel Day Lewis to Madeline Stowe, You be strong, you survive. You stay alive, no matter what occurs. I will find you. No matter how long it takes, no matter how far, I will find you! But all those points were moot here. Because if Max was taken, Kyle would be dead. No other way it was happening otherwise.

  “Are you ready?” His voice sounded gruff.

  She nodded again, then positioned herself at the bottom edge of the ambulance.

  He unlatched the rear bay door closest to the ground and let it bang open to the desert floor. Dust puffed up. He gave Max the go-ahead signal, and she stuck her arm around the edge of the truck and started pulling the trigger.

  The explosive sound of bullets being projected through the muzzle of a pistol ripped through the quiet.

  AK tucked in close to his body, Kyle rolled out of the ambulance, got his feet under him, and ran, bent over, around the ambulance for cover. Squatting down, he braced his shoulder against the side of the ambulance, which was actually the roof. The enemy returned small arms fire, several bursts from a rifle and a pistol. No machine gun yet, thank his lucky stars. But still… Please, Max, tell me you ducked back inside.

  Washing the thought from his mind, he concentrated on slowing his breathing and evening out his heart rate. He would need all of the sniper skills he’d learned in his short stint in the Marines for this. His range to target was three hundred feet, and the AK was reasonably accurate at a little over a thousand. That part was easy. Hard part was him not being able to lie on his belly and take his sweet time lining up the shot. He’d only get a split second to pop-the-weasel out and do his thing. He took a last, even inhale of breath. Okay…

  Go time—

  Switching knees, he spun into the open, rifle coming up, stock butted against his shoulder, his brain assessing the enemy position even as his eye was lining up the sights. He applied even pressure to the trigger and snapped off a shot. The instant smell of nitroglycerin and graphite was familiar and oddly comforting.

  The bullet tore into the head of the man who was working at mounting the machine gun. It frayed off a chunk of his skull, leaving behind shards of ragged bone and stringy ribbons of meat flailing from the man’s head as he fell over like a dead weight, because that’s exactly what he was—dead.

  Kyle ducked back into hiding. His breathing and heart rate were still calm, even though that’d been mondo gross. One more to go…

  The jeep engine roared to life. Well. Guess the gross factor was too high for the other enemy, and so the man was opting out of tangoing anymore with Kyle. And driving off to get more of your buddies, while I don’t have a workable mode of transportation and two lives depending on me…? Sorry, dude, but you’re dead, too.

  Kyle stood up, sand cascading off his knees, and blam!—shot out a rear tire before the jeep could drive too far out of range. He then picked off the driver with a single bullet to the neck. The body wilted out of the doorless vehicle and rag-dolled to the dirt. The jeep stalled out and came to a rolling halt, five hundred feet away now.

  Kyle lowered his rifle and scanned the area. No one else was around. He wouldn’t have minded a peek through a magnified sniper scope to confirm his solitude farther out, but he was shit out of luck on that score. At least he knew the bad guys from the first jeep wouldn’t be sneaking up his back door. They’d been totaled along with their jeep.

  Returning to the back of the ambulance, he stooped over and peered inside the one open bay door.

  Max was in the front cab, straddling Jobs and looking at… Ah, hell. She’d watched the whole evolution in the passenger side mirror. As she dropped down to meet his eyes, her expression was bilious.

  He straightened. Fuckity fuck fuck. He ground the heel of his hand into his eye, moving sand grains around his cornea. He heard boots sloshing through first aid rubble, and then Max was standing in front of him.

  “That was…um. Wow.” She cleared her throat. “You’re an incredible shot, Kyle.”

  The sound of his name on her lips tumbled his stomach into a ball. It was as though he could actually feel her tongue lightly pressing the back of her upper teeth on the L. He fiddled with the action of his AK. He didn’t know what to say. “I seem to be making a nasty habit of killing people on deployments.” Oh, beautiful. Nice decision. While he was at it, why didn’t he just confess how many times he’d been fool enough to boink an ex-girlfriend whose favorite pastime was treating him like her royal ass-wiper? He glanced at Max.

  She nodded, almost imperceptibly, like a subtle message of understanding and solidarity. Good ol’ Max. Got your shit back together already, do ya, so you can be here for me? Gosh. If she’d been a buddy, he would’ve slugged her good-naturedly on the arm. Too bad her nod was a lie. Because no woman understood him. Not many men did, either.

  Hell, he himself was without clue. Like this whole killing thing. He didn’t understand why he couldn’t muster any feelings. Just tiredness, same as when he’d taken out two Colombian banditos—maybe three, if another had gotten himself particle-ized along with a generator Kyle blew up. No doubt the numbness was a sign he was heading for a case of PTSD a bunch of psycho-quacks would love to write papers about.

  Wordlessly, Max handed the Beretta to him.

  Equally mute, he slid the pistol into his boot holder. Propping his AK against the outside of the ambulance, he trudged back inside. It was an awkward endeavor with a completely flaccid body, but he managed to maneuver Jobs from the front cab to outside, lying him down on a soft spot of sand. “Can you wrap up his arm?” he asked Max, handing her the gauze and medical tape. “I’m going to check to see if the radio still works.” If it didn’t, they had one helluva long hike back to camp ahead of them. Jeep number two didn’t have a spare tire in the holder on the back.

&n
bsp; Luckily, the radio functioned. He asked the aid station to send someone to pick them up, and suggested they might want to bring a contingent of Pakistani guardsmen along with them.

  When he went back outside, Max was seated with her back propped against the ambulance, her camera bag next to her, and Jobs’ arm was neatly wrapped. She jerked her chin at Jobs. “Our boy’s sleeping like a baby.”

  Kyle half-smiled. Maybe with a diaper full of sand, too.

  “Camera’s busted.” She gestured at the bag. “But luckily not the GPS.”

  He sank down next to her, setting down his AK.

  “I suppose that’s sort of good news,” she mused. “The camera is mostly for show, whereas the GPS is necessary to the operation.”

  He arched his brows. “You still consider this mission a go? Didn’t a bunch of JEM shit-sticks just try to kill us?”

  “Those men weren’t JEM.” She plucked her thermos out of a pile of supplies she’d hauled outside. “I recognized a man in the lead jeep as one of the aides to Rizwan Akhtar, agency director of ISI.”

  Kyle stilled. Inter-Service Intelligence? Was she fucking kidding? “Are you telling me Pakistani Intelligence just tried to take us out?”

  “It makes sense,” she reasoned. “ISI has always covertly backed the Taliban, much to the US government’s disapproval. One of JEM’s key leaders, Asmatullah Moavia, split from JEM in 2007 to join the Taliban, and since then JEM and the Taliban have been rivals.” Unscrewing the top of the thermos, Max peered into the empty interior and sighed. “Crud, I wanted more coffee. Anyway, if JEM manages to get some of their key players out of Guantanamo with this current hostage exchange, then they’d up their power. ISI clearly wants to stop that from happening.”

  By killing us? “Unbelievable,” Kyle bit out. “Bad enough we have to deal with a bunch of uppity terrorists, now we’re up against all of Pakistani Intelligence.”

  “Worse, this is going to set us back with JEM. Once they hear about this attack, they’re going to get skittish.” Max picked up an energy bar and opened it, tugging the wrapper down halfway like the husk on a corn cob. “Think about it. Only JEM and our little group knew the particulars of this meeting. How was ISI able to attack us exactly on this road at this time, if not for a spy inside JEM?”

  “Crap,” Kyle said simply. More time in custody for Kelleman’s nephew while this foul-up gets figured out.

  “I’ll contact JEM when I get back to camp, see how this plays out. We’ll go from there. Here.” She gave him another energy bar. “I found these among the medical supplies. I haven’t opened this one, so, you know, you don’t have to worry about my saliva.”

  He smiled. Almost laughed. Cute. She was real cute. “Thanks.” He tore open the bar and took a bite. “Ouch.”

  “What’s wrong?”

  “I don’t have mad love for chewing right now.” He grimaced. “I bit my tongue when we crashed.”

  “Really?” She chuckled.

  He gave her a disgruntled look. “What? Did I just say I shit my pants?” He passed on mentioning the sand “dump” in his shorts, although the confession would’ve probably earned another chuckle out of her. And it was great to see her amazing eyes getting back to their regular amazingness.

  “I jammed my wrist,” she offered.

  He lowered his brows. “You said you weren’t hurt.”

  “It’s not too bad. Mainly sore.” She rotated her wrist for him to see. “We’re lucky, actually. We could’ve been hurt way worse.”

  She was referring to the crash, but also she meant—she had to—what the bad guys would’ve done to them if Kyle hadn’t logged in those kills. Her relief swept some of his malaise away. He’d saved Max and Jobs today. Nothing wrong with that. “Once Jobs is back on his feet, we can have him check out the camera. Dude can fix anything.” He glanced down at his energy bar. It already had sand on it.

  Max took a bite out of her bar. “Good. We can’t exactly go into a media interview, fake or not, with a broken camera.”

  Kyle tossed aside his bar and made a face. “Is it me, or does everything in this country taste like grit?” He scratched his beard, sending tiny grains of sand pattering down to his lap. “Dammit, I have sand everywhere. And I’m talking places I didn’t even know I had.”

  “You want to see something?”

  He looked at her.

  Nudging her head covering aside, she stuck her pinkie finger in her ear, wiggled it around, then showed it to him. It was coated in sand.

  A laugh exploded out of him.

  She smiled at him, the bright blue color near her pupils lighting up.

  Man, a guy could fall in love with Max Dougin based on those eyes alone. All it would take was—He snapped the amused expression off his face. Uh…not him. But, you know, a guy. He turned away, watching a gusty breeze whisk up a top layer of sand and dance it along the ground for a few inches.

  A companionable silence fell between them.

  This was the strangest side of weird, ever. He didn’t do companionable with women. If he wasn’t hitting on a female, he was maneuvering himself into the best position to escape her. Far as he was concerned, women weren’t constructed out of friend materials.

  All right. Enough of this shit. He was going to make himself want to screw Max, right the hell now. He ran a narrow gaze over her, and… Jesus, she might as well be wearing a gunny sack for how sexless her clothes were. He could barely find her tits anywhere under her shirt, and her pretty hair was covered by the stupid scarf. All right, so her hair was pretty. It was short, yeah, but the color was really—

  His stomach lurched. Red liquid was oozing from the upper edge of her headscarf. “You’re bleeding,” he told her.

  Her head came around, her expression surprised.

  He gently pushed her scarf off and wadded it up, pressing it to her forehead.

  She angled her eyes up toward his hand. “I don’t even feel it.” She reached up to take the scarf from him, and her hand settled on top of his.

  Warmth raced down his arm and shot in tingling streaks through his chest. He released the scarf to her, but the warm feeling stayed. Good. He wanted to screw her now. Or…did he? Wait…what was this? It seemed like…

  Abruptly pushing to his feet, he brushed himself off and took a couple of steps in the direction of nowhere. The muscles in his abdomen twitched.

  You were going to leave Brodie’s hospital room today, weren’t you?

  Yeah. Always running away from the hard shit in life, aren’t you, Kyle?

  Throat tight, he peered off at the horizon. It was nothing but endless barren sand, like a part of the country God forgot. His discarded energy bar stood in the sand, the breeze ruffling the foil wrapper. It was the only sound.

  He shut his eyes, blocking out the apocalyptic view.

  Chapter Seven

  Corpsman Kitty Hart turned from the chore of feeding surgical instruments into a pot of boiling water, and checked bed three. Sure enough, the occupant was waking up; he groaned again. Flipping a stethoscope around her neck, she walked over. “Good morning, sir.”

  A pair of groggy hazel eyes peered up at her out of a heavily freckled face. The fellow might as well have been wearing a baseball glove and eating apple pie for how All-American Boy he looked.

  When he’d been brought into the triage ward yesterday with a gunshot wound to his arm, his appearance had momentarily thrown Kitty. Here at the aid station, she and Dr. Barr exclusively treated Pakistani civilians caught in the crossfire of the war, many of those bearded, older men. And before she’d been sent TAD22 here, she’d been on board the USNS Mercy—where she was still officially attached—whose mission was offering humanitarian aid to foreigners; these days, American soldiers who were injured in the European and African theatres were generally flown directly to Landstuhl Army Hospital in Germany. She’d all but forgotten what a wounded American boy looked like. Correction: man.

  Lieutenant JG Steve Whitmore, as his dog tags proclaimed
him, might have a face that was a cross between Eddie Redmayne’s and Peter Pan’s, but his body was no narrow-chested, youthful thing. When she cut his shirt off yesterday, she’d discovered a nicely defined form. Not as massively muscular as her ex-boyfriend, Shane’s, had been, but still nothing as pre-pubescent as his appearance would’ve led a girl to believe. Poor fella. Face like his probably put him as bad off as a rubber-nosed woodpecker in a petrified forest when it came to getting a girl to give him a poke.

  “I’m HM3 Hart, but you’re supposed to call me Kitty.” She smiled as she stuck the stethoscope in her ears, picking up the end. “I’m going to check your vitals, okay?”

  Her patient kept blinking, his eyes gradually clearing.

  She dipped the stethoscope beneath the front of his blue and white striped hospital gown and listened to his heart. Sounded good.

  “I was shot,” he croaked out.

  “Yes, sir.” She took his pulse. “You sure were.”

  “I…” He lifted his other hand, dragging his IV line over the blanket, and rubbed a palm over his brow. “Aw, man, I passed out.”

  Pulse was good, too. “Well, you were wounded bad.” Kitty set his hand down and tucked a thermometer in his mouth. “The bullet got lodged in your humerus.” With anyone else she would’ve added, that’s the upper arm bone. But Steve Whitmore was an officer, so he had the college. “It took a fair bit of work for Dr. Barr to dig it out.” It’d been a nasty job, and the lieutenant would have a devil of a time recovering from it. In fact—“How’s your pain?” She glanced at his IV bag. He was three quarters of the way through it.

  “Okay, I guess,” he muffled around the thermometer.

  “I can give you more morphine, if you—”

  “No.” He took out the thermometer and handed it to her. “Thanks, but I don’t want to sleep anymore.”

  Normal temperature. The lieutenant was coming along nicely.

  He struggled to sit up, and she helped him, arranging pillows behind his back.