Target of One's Own

by M. L. Buchman

  “There is a safe dose of arsenic?”

  Luke chuckled. She really liked the deep, welcoming sound. It was like his enveloping hugs that she could almost disappear into. “Not in that lake. So no swimming, you hear?”

  “Yes, sir, Lieutenant Commander, sir.”

  “Just trying to keep you safe, Chief Warrant.”

  And the warmth of that truth sustained her through the rest of the harrowing nine-hundred-and-twenty-seven-kilometer drive. They never did catch the person raising dust ahead of them, but they came close. By the time everyone had rolled into the San Juan bivouac, they were back in third.

  22

  “What if he isn’t here?”

  “He is,” Luke tried to reassure her. It was past midnight and her restless flailing had kept them both awake. Seven stages down, they really needed the rest day tomorrow, especially if they didn’t get some sleep tonight.

  He could hear Zoe was out at her limits. It was a time that every top sailor, and top soldier he supposed, reached. It was a tricky moment. How many strong fighters had he seen hit this wall and tumble back? It was why Hell Week thinned two-thirds of any SEAL class—it’s why Hell Week existed. People who couldn’t push through those limits might be dedicated fighters, but they’d never be true warriors.

  Because of her skills as a pilot, she’d passed into the Night Stalkers, perhaps without ever having tested her limits. Well, driving The Dakar would do that to anybody.

  “Maybe he dropped out. Almost a third of the field are already gone. Both of the US motorcyclists have gone out in this last stage.”

  Luke pondered the grim reports.

  One had broken a chain—badly. It had wrapped around the rear sprocket, locking up the wheel at the worst possible moment. How the rider had survived the high-speed flip into a cliff wall had been more miracle than luck. That he’d survived it with only a couple broken ribs and a shattered arm made it God’s own miracle.

  The other had blown an engine, literally. It was like a bomb had gone off inside it, shattering an entire casing so that the cooling fins had shot like shrapnel into the guy’s leg. Dude would be lucky if he kept the leg. Luke had never seen anything like it and he’d seen a lot of bad shit on bikes over the years.

  He’d spent an hour checking in with the Malles Motos guys last night. Partly to see how they were doing, but mostly wanting to cheer them up. Neither of the guys who went down had been Malles Motos—they’d both had full support teams—but accidents that bad struck too close to home. Now that he’d seen just what it took to run in the Dakar Rally, he was really impressed that they were doing it solo. If he had to do everything he’d been doing, and on top of it had to service his own ride without any help… Well, he liked the sound of that—what Spec Ops soldier wouldn’t—but that didn’t make it any less impressive.

  But he’d also learned from them that, with only a few exceptions, the first third of The Dakar dropouts were mostly in two categories: amateurs and mechanical failures. Hathyaron’s garage said that he was anything but an amateur. And that his ride would be maintained in top form.

  “No. Whoever Hathyaron is, he’s still running.”

  She buried her face against his shoulder. “There’s got to be some way to find him. He didn’t just dematerialize into thin air.”

  Luke blinked into the darkness, then started laughing.

  “What?” Zoe propped herself up on his chest to look down at him despite the darkness.

  “You know that you have sharp elbows?”

  “Luke!” She was so cute when she tried to growl like a six-foot SEAL warrior.

  In answer he picked up his phone and speed-dialed Nikita, then whispered while it was ringing. “Not dematerialize into thin air. But where did he materialize from?”

  “Uh,” Nikita grunted after the third ring.

  “There’s a car carrier ship that delivered the cars from France to Argentina prior to the race. When did it leave France?”

  “End of November,” Nikita mumbled at him.

  He could feel Zoe freeze, then she started pounding her forehead against his chest as if she was pounding it against a brick wall. Yeah, it was a real duh! moment for him too. But she was doing it hard enough to actually hurt. He wrapped his free arm around her in a headlock before she cracked one of his ribs with her pounding.

  She struggled for only a moment before trying to tickle his ribs. Thankfully, he wasn’t ticklish there.

  “Find out everyone whose car wasn’t on that ship. You can cross out Japan and the Americas, too.”

  “Unless they transshipped through one of those countries to confuse their trail,” Zoe mumbled from somewhere around his armpit. He might not be ticklish where her hand was headed, but he was certainly sensitive.

  He amended the request to Nikita quickly and managed to hang up just before Zoe latched her hand around him. He grunted hard as she wasn’t gentle.

  Shuffling her around, he shifted the headlock into a hard kiss. She squirmed against him—closer rather than trying to get away. It was a long wrestling match that left them both with bruises, but much more content.

  When she finally slept he wondered how neither of them had seen it. The car carrier ship had left France in November and they’d missed the goddamn arms dealer by only hours in Pakistan on New Year’s Eve. He’d had his car flown across the Atlantic just as they had—and probably just as clandestinely. Again, his path would be nearly impossible to trace, but at least they’d know that anyone who’d used the ship wasn’t their target.

  He pulled Zoe more tightly against him and rested his cheek atop her head. It no longer hurt, but he could feel where she’d clobbered him that first time on the beach. None of tonight’s bruises would hurt for more than an hour or so—these had been earned in joy, not pain. He wished he could reach down inside her and rip out the pain she carried. Even if he knew it was impossible.

  But it didn’t stop him from wishing.

  23

  Nikita had the list for him in the morning. Her dark scowl said exactly what she thought about him going back to sleep while she’d done the research and rousted the intel people to get her the ship’s manifest. Except he and Zoe hadn’t gone right back to sleep for a long, awesome time.

  He offered Nikita his best happy smile before returning to his coffee and studying the list. Their layover day bivouac was in Copiapó, Chile, at the southern end of the Atacama Desert. Unlike the heart of the desert—that they’d be passing through tomorrow, which typically received a millimeter of rain per year—Copiapó typically received fifteen to twenty. A whole three-quarters inch of rain per year. Made it a damned weird place to build a city of a hundred and fifty thousand people. Though he supposed the copper and gold mining was enough reason.

  He was looking forward to doing the tourism thing with Zoe. Copiapó had jumped onto the world’s consciousness with the 2010 Chilean Mining Disaster. It had trapped thirty-three miners seven hundred meters underground for ten weeks—but they all made it out. That was a definite must see.

  Did Zoe like flowers and such? There were some nature walks. There were supposedly some great beaches around the high mineral lakes. He wondered if Zoe had that yellow string bikini tucked away in that suitcase of hers. That he definitely wanted to see.

  Nikita had gone to get some coffee and was already grumbling her way back. One problem with thinking about Zoe, it was an incredibly distracting hobby. He focused on Nikita’s list.

  Eighty cars and trucks, nearly two hundred campers and assistance vehicles, many of which had a load of motorcycles aboard. That was in addition to sixty media and thirty officials’ vehicles. Over three hundred entrants and barely half of the racers had been on that ship. It helped, but it wasn’t enough.

  He crossed out the dropouts. The overlaps helped, but there were still a hundred possible candidates for the role of Mr. Weapons, the non-Pakistani invisible arms dealer.

  Well, they’d have a quiet day to think of something else without h
aving to worry about a stage race. Ahmed and Drake had the Citroën well in hand under Christian’s watchful eye. They had whole sections of the car torn open: wheels off and brakes opened for inspection, a full fluids change, Nikita had been set to clean out the carburetor. A local boy was going through with a brush and already removing his second bucket of sand from every nook and crevice of the inside of the car.

  Zoe was still sacked out, exactly where he wanted her to be. She had a scheduled couple hours with the media, but that wasn’t until after lunch. Then maybe they’d get out of here for a while. Just the two of them.

  “Excuse me.” A guy who looked like a hippie well past his prime was poking around. “Is this Zoe DeMille’s team?”

  Luke saw the guy’s eyes register the yellow Citroën, so he already knew the answer to that question.

  Her fans were being a major pain in the ass. She was still holding top three. Even the slightest mistake by any of the leaders could change that instantly—missing a waypoint, having an on-course breakdown, even getting lost for just a few minutes could change the whole shape of the race. The leaders were just that close.

  The media had made sure she premiered in every “Rookie” segment. Actually, she was overshadowing the race leaders; everyone knew they had a hot story. Per their deal, Liesl was the only one who got the personal interviews, but even those, he knew, Zoe carefully censored.

  The Soldier of Style Brigade had gone insane. People were flying in to watch the Dakar, easily identified by their lemon-yellow clothing. The racer guys were going wild too, because so many of Zoe’s fans were women—both dyed and real blondes. The party atmosphere ramped way up—what happened in Chile remained in Chile—and the male drivers and the rabid female fans were making the most of it together.

  And any time Zoe left the bivouac—something she’d stopped doing several stages back in central Argentina, but not soon enough—she was mobbed by fans.

  Fans had been getting past security constantly and hunting down Zoe. Christian had even hired some local bodyguards to rebuff anyone who made it this far. And still a few, like this guy, slipped through. Maybe it was because he wore nothing that was lemon-yellow. His hair was as dark as Zoe’s part and his eyes as blue. He was a lightly-built man, barely halfway between Zoe’s and his own height.

  Luke felt a nasty itch between his shoulder blades.

  “Who’s asking?” Luke rose to his feet and stepped well into the guy’s personal space. He shied away with as much spine as you’d expect from a civilian.

  “I’m her father, Brian DeMille.” He tried holding out his hand, which Luke ignored. “I’ve always wanted to come to The Dakar Rally, but I never dreamed it would be to see my daughter driving.” He was craning around and looking in every direction.

  “She said you were dead.”

  “She…what? Why would she say that?”

  “You gotta ask?”

  The guy squinted at him as if he really did.

  “If I were her, I would have said the same thing, rather than admitting to your existence. You’re dead to her and it’s going to stay that way. Now turn the fuck around and never come back.”

  “Why would she say that?” Guy was a goddamn broken record.

  Nikita was hurrying toward him, holding her palm out vertically in the military hand sign for stop.

  “You rape your teenage daughter and you gotta ask why she tells everyone you’re dead?”

  Nikita skidded to a halt still several steps away with a look of horror on her face.

  To hell with her too. It was high time someone confronted the bastard.

  “Zoe?” the guy’s voice was soft with shock. But he wasn’t looking up at him. Instead he was looking off to Luke’s left.

  He’d been too late to protect her. Luke could feel her there close behind him. He closed his eyes for a moment. The one thing he could do for her was keep her “dead” father away—and he’d failed.

  Shit!

  “You fucking asshole!” Zoe was screaming.

  He opened his eyes, but she wasn’t facing her father, she was facing him.

  “I trusted you. I trusted you and this is how you repay me? To think I thought that I—” She choked off whatever she was about to say.

  The depth of her fury made her clobbering his jaw last week seem mild by comparison.

  “Asshole!” She spit it out like an epithet. No tease this time—she was in dead earnest. It hurt worse than Marva’s dispassionate slur by a hundredfold.

  “Oh, Daddy,” Zoe turned to her father. She clung to his arm and began walking him away.

  It wasn’t right. He’d done that to her and she still clung to him? What was wrong with her?

  Nikita stepped up to take Zoe’s place in front of him before he could follow. She didn’t look furious, instead she looked desperately sad.

  “What?” He knew better than to try and shove Nikita aside—she was a Team 6 SEAL and looked seriously planted.

  “You really stepped in it, sir.”

  He watched over Nikita’s shoulder. Zoe and her father had stopped twenty meters out into the lane between the two sections of the camp. To either side were vehicles being gone over by their teams. There was laughter, camaraderie, and hard work.

  Not with them. The two of them were hunched together like they were having a deadly serious conversation.

  When her father stumbled back, Zoe gathered him into her arms and held him. The two of them stood there in the shining sun holding onto each other like lost souls in a shipwreck.

  “Anything you want to be telling me?” Luke couldn’t tear his eyes away to look at Nikita.

  “Not my story to tell. As far as I know, there are only two people aside from Zoe who know what really happened, and I’m one of them. At least until you did that. Now there are three.”

  If her father hadn’t known and the guy who did it to her really was dead, then… Clearly he himself didn’t know shit. Three would be Nikita, now Zoe’s father, and…

  “Who’s the other?”

  Nikita stood silent for so long that he finally looked at her.

  “Not your story to tell.”

  She shook her head sadly. Then she did the strangest thing. Nikita, the warrior woman, rested a hand on his cheek.

  “You gotta find a way to fix this, Luke. I’ve seen you two together. You gotta find a way.”

  Then as she walked away, he heard her say as if to herself, “I just wish it was possible.”

  She’d never used his first name before.

  24

  Zoe didn’t return to the camp at all that day.

  Luke had waited. After a couple of hours he’d gone looking for her, but the trail was cold. He didn’t have Zoe’s number because he’d never had occasion to call her. They’d been attached at the hip since the start of the mission, never beyond shouting distance apart.

  He tried enrolling Nikita’s help, but she flatly refused. “You’re my commander, but she’s my friend.”

  Even his offer to help Drake work on the car was turned down.

  “Nothing personal, Luke,” Drake had assured him. “But Nikita warned me off—though I’ll tell you on the sly that I don’t know shit. They’re close, those two. Anyway, Nikita said it was better if you stewed in your own juices than distracted yourself with work. Guess she wants you to think about things.”

  Luke tried to think about what he was supposed to think about, but he didn’t know what the hell was going on. Except that Zoe had gone off somewhere with her father—who he’d just accused of being a rapist. No, worse. Who’d he’d just told the secret of his daughter being raped when he didn’t know.

  He couldn’t talk it out with Nikita, who knew something but wouldn’t say.

  He couldn’t talk with Drake without betraying Zoe’s trust—which wouldn’t be acceptable—because apparently he knew even less than Luke did.

  No way on Earth was he talking to Christian about anything to do with Zoe.

  Luke pulled ou
t his phone again and stared at it. His contact list held the numbers for his team, his commanders, the intelligence agency, and the supply personnel he sometimes needed. Scrolling through the list looking for friends was a fruitless endeavor, but he did it anyway. It had been ten years since he’d needed anyone outside his team. He’d always figured that was all any man needed and he’d been damned lucky to have the one he did. Ten years since Marva had fucked him over by fucking someone else. Her number was still in his phone for some reason. He must be a real mess if he thought for even a single second she might be able to help.

  Definitely a mess, he considered it for five seconds before deleting her entry.

  The only person he knew well enough to really talk to didn’t want to talk to him.

  Even if he had her number.

  Finally, he figured he’d find her at the nine p.m. briefing if she was still going to be racing. He picked up the next day’s Road Book, but there was no sign of the petite blonde who’d punched a hole in his life.

  25

  “Are you alone?” Zoe whispered when Nikita answered her phone.

  “With Drake, but not Luke. Are you okay?”

  “Definitely not.” Zoe hadn’t been this not okay in a long time. She’d just destroyed every fond memory her father had held about his best friend. Mom had been right about one thing at least: Brian DeMille might be a good man, but he was not a strong one.

  He was a man with simple needs. He’d loved three things in his life: his wife, his daughter, and his auto business with his best friend. It had been all he’d ever needed. He’d survived Bob’s death only because he still had the two of them and the business he loved.

  And Luke’s accusation had forced her to utterly destroyed all of those happy memories.

  Zoe had never been so strong as the moment she managed not to destroy the third. It had taken everything in her to spare him from the last piece of the truth—about his wife, her mother.