by Cat Johnson
“You helped a lot and I appreciate it.” Tuck felt a little better about leaving.
Jace, even with all his joking around, was basically a responsible guy. And the man practically breathed rodeo. Tuck had no doubt Jace would fill the gap left in the coaching staff just fine. As far as the gap he’d be leaving in the ROTC program, Logan, in spite of all his bitching, would have no problem covering Tuck’s duties there, either. A local guy in the Army Reserves was interested in the position and willing to take over until Tuck returned.
The only thing left that still bothered him was leaving Becca, but unlike ROTC and the rodeo team, that wasn’t such an easy fix. Tuck wouldn’t find a replacement to fill the hole he’d be leaving in Becca’s life even if he could. Though it scared the hell out of him, she might just find one on her own.
And that was exactly why he needed to go. He was too damned attached to her already. Well on the way to feeling for a woman the way he’d thought he never would again after the disastrous end to his marriage. If he stayed, he’d get more attached. They’d end up getting careless and eventually get caught, and she’d be fired.
“You’re okay with going, aren’t you?”
He glanced up and encountered Jace’s intense stare. “I’m fine with it. Why?”
“You just looked . . .” Jace hesitated. “I don’t know, worried, I guess. You’ve been there before. It’ll be just like that, right?”
“Yeah. It’ll be fine. I got a lot of loose ends to tie up before I go. And I’m leaving for my parents’ house tonight, so I needed to get everything OSU related out of the way now. That’s all.” He hated hearing himself say those words. Loose ends. Becca was many things to him, but that was not one of them.
“Well, I’m here for you. Whatever you need. And don’t worry about the rodeo team. That loose end’s been tied good and tight.”
Good and tight—just like the knots saying good-bye to Becca this morning had tied in his gut. He’d thought it would be easier on them both to say their final good-byes this morning, after spending the night together, than it would have been later on today when he was busy getting ready to leave. It hadn’t been. For the last few hours, he felt as if he’d been punched, and the feeling didn’t seem to be going away any time soon.
Chapter Twenty-four
The Kunar Province, Afghanistan
All of the early-morning workouts with the cadets hadn’t prepared him for this. When—if—he ever got back to the States, he’d give Logan a piece of his mind about the ROTC training. Because even though Tuck had been deployed to Kandahar, and had kept himself battle ready during his year on the faculty at OSU, nothing had prepared him for what he found here in the mountainous region that lay between Eastern Afghanistan and Pakistan.
These mountains broke both men and machinery. Make that American men and machinery, because it seemed the locals had long ago figured out how to use the terrain to their advantage. The proof was in the numbers. The company he’d joined had a disproportionately high percentage of both contact and casualties compared to elsewhere. One reason they were happy to take Tuck. They had to rotate in new men to replace those sent home either wounded or, sadly, in body bags.
And today was supposed to be a fairly easy assignment. Tuck and his team were hiking into position to provide overwatch for a foot patrol. But for a man not used to these conditions, the simple mission felt more like climbing Mount Everest.
Pain seared through his lungs, and he had to wonder if it had been the mountain or the enemy that had gotten to all those men.
The weight of all he carried had long ago made various body parts go numb. Water, food, weapons, ammo, first aid kit, body armor—it all added up to nearly half his body weight. At one point during the five-hour hike, Tuck got so hot he started to feel icy cold. Yet he kept going. To fall out would put all of them in danger. He, the new guy among men who’d already been here for close to a year, was not going to be the soldier to do that.
Even when it hurt so bad the only thing a man could focus on was stopping to rest, he knew there was still more inside, and he dug deeper to find it. There was always more. Mind over matter. Man versus mountain.
The echo of a single gunshot bounced between the peaks, and every man around him dropped into a crouch. Tuck dropped as well. He crab-walked to the edge of the path until his back was pressed flat against the rock, wondering if there was a sniper in the area, until the sound of machine-gun fire cut through the silence. Bullets began hitting all around them, pinging into the dirt and sending bits of loose shale into the air. Short bursts of rapid fire interspersed with the slow pop, pop, pop of slower rounds.
“. . . we have TIC. I repeat, we have troops in contact. Request air support. Over.” Between the louder bursts, Tuck heard one of the guys on the radio, calling back to base with their coordinates.
He glanced to his right, where Conseco, a soldier of Cuban descent from one of the tougher areas in Chicago, crouched calmly next to him. Beneath the dirt and sweat, his expression looked as calm as if they were waiting for a bus. The man glanced down at his boot as a puff of dirt was thrown into the air inches from his toes.
“That was a close one.” Conseco made the statement with a kind of detached excitement. Kind of like a fan watching his favorite baseball team on television when the runner had just made it safely to home plate. Like there wasn’t anything he could do about it either way, but he was happy it had all worked out.
Incoming enemy fire from AK-47s, belt-fed machine guns, and RPGs all rained down hell upon them. It was apparent this wasn’t a single sniper, but a full-out ambush.
“What do we do?” Tuck couldn’t take his eyes off the enemy fire hitting the ground at their feet; he couldn’t stop listening to the boom of the rocket-propelled grenades that had missed their mark. He felt more like the new guys everyone here called cherries than a man with nearly a decade in the service as well as combat experience behind him.
Conseco shrugged. “Wait ’em out. We’re pinned down. We move, we die. They’ll either run out of ammo or the Apaches will get them.”
Tuck looked around him. Even the 240 gunner was pinned down, as helpless as the rest of them in spite of the thirty-pound machine gun he cradled against his chest as if it were his child.
“How long will that take? For the air support to arrive.”
The Taliban fighters must have been on the next ridge, firing down at an angle. It was like shooting fish in a barrel. If Tuck and Conseco hadn’t been able to get to the crevice barely as deep as their bodies . . . He didn’t want to even think what would have happened. The rest of the squad had taken similar cover.
“An hour. Maybe less if we’re lucky. Depends.” Conseco shrugged.
At times the shots pummeling the area where the squad had taken cover were so close together it made one continuous din.
“What the hell? I thought with the drawdown there wouldn’t be much contact here anymore.” Tuck shouted over the noise.
Conseco’s response was a snort. “I guess the Taliban didn’t get that memo.” When Tuck frowned at him, he continued above the noise. “Don’t get me wrong. The guys in the valley, before we pulled out of Korengal in two-thousand-ten, used to get hit like five, sometimes seven times a day.”
“Seven times a day?”
“Oh, yeah. My buddy was there. They had a guy hit in the leg while taking a nap in his bunk. They’d get shot at while minding their own business trying to take a piss. We’re usually only hit outside the wire. So yeah, I guess you can call that not much contact.”
His back against the wall, Tuck was still trying to absorb that he supposedly had it good compared to some others when Conseco asked, “So, you got a girl at home, Jenkins?”
The rounds had slowed, but they sure as hell hadn’t stopped. Maybe the enemy fighters were starting to run out of ammo and were forced to ration it. Good. Maybe they’d run out completely. That thought gave him a small amount of hope.
“You want to talk about home now?” Tuck
still had to raise his voice to answer.
Conseco shrugged beneath his body armor. “Sure. Why not? You got something better to do?”
Tuck glanced at him. “I’d feel better if I were shooting back.”
“We all would.” Conseco blew out a sound of disgust. “If you’d like some ventilation holes in your helmet, go ahead. Stand up and try to take a shot. Otherwise, we’re stuck here waiting.”
They exchanged looks, and Tuck realized Conseco was right. He gave in and answered. “No, I don’t have a girl at home. Well, I kind of did. But not really. I don’t know.”
Tuck realized how pitiful that sounded. He laughed, but it was short, more like a wheeze as the bullets peppering the ground in front of him kicked up enough dust to make him choke.
“You don’t know?” Conseco laughed.
“I’m not quite sure.” Pressing back as close as he could against the wall—and safety—Tuck admitted the sorry truth. “I didn’t mean to, but I think I might have totally ended any chance we had by leaving.”
That he wasn’t sure where he stood with Becca, where he wanted things to stand between them, was a pretty sad state of affairs. Especially since today could be his last.
“Sounds like there’s a story there.” Conseco angled just his head toward Tuck. “Tell me about her. What happened?”
“Seriously? You want to hear it all?” The incoming fire had slowed to sporadic bursts, making talking a little easier.
“Sure, I’m bored and we could be here a while. It’ll help pass the time. I’ve heard all these other sorry bastards’ stories a hundred times over the last nine months. It’ll be refreshing to hear something new for a change.”
Tuck had never felt so helpless, and Conseco was bored and wanted to chitchat. But in this situation the man next to him was the one with experience, and like it or not, Tuck was the cherry.
Since he hadn’t been struck yet, he calmed himself enough to glance around them and reevaluate the hellish situation. Shooting back was out of the question. Even if his weapon was trained in on where the insurgents were hiding, which it wasn’t, to get a clear shot he’d have to expose himself to their hail of bullets.
His teammate was right. The best thing to do was sit and wait for air support, or for the bad guys to run out of ammo. Either way, it was going to be a little while.
“All right.” Tuck shrugged and was reminded of the weight of his pack braced against the rock wall.
Even though he’d never told the story in its entirety, not even to his best friends, he swallowed away the dry grit in his mouth and launched into the tale of two city girls who walked into a rodeo one July night in Oklahoma. He somehow felt he had to tell it, from start to finish. That another living person knowing it all would keep the memory alive because there was a very real chance he wouldn’t leave this valley. At least not that way . . . alive.
He glossed over the very intimate bedroom details, but told Conseco everything else, right down to his deciding to leave when they got caught in the library on the security video and how he thought he had to, before they both got into trouble.
When he’d finished, Conseco shook his head. “That’s a hell of a story. Sounds like true love to me. Like a damn fairy tale.”
“Nah. We weren’t that serious.” The statement rang so false in his ears, he elaborated to make it sound more convincing. “Just having some fun together.”
That didn’t sound any more truthful.
Love. The other reason Tuck had left in such a hurry. Love was a word Tuck had deliberately avoided saying or even thinking, yet Conseco spat it out easily. Maybe daily near-death experiences did that to a man. The fear of love and getting hurt by it was starting to feel ridiculous as real pain, the kind inflicted by automatic weapons, loomed literally at their feet.
But as for the fairy tale? No. Tuck couldn’t embrace that concept even a little bit, because being crouched against a rock face braced for the impact of the bullet that would take his life while Becca was back in Oklahoma totally unaware of why he’d really left was certainly no fairy tale ending.
“Here’s my question.” Conseco paused to spit a dribble of tobacco-tinged saliva into the dirt. “If you were having so much fun, then why the hell did you leave her and volunteer to come to this shit hole? I would have said fuck it to the university and their fucking rules and kept seeing her on the sly.”
Another bullet hit close enough to Tuck he could hear the whoosh of it passing his ear. To hell with it. If this were the last thing he ever said, the last man he ever spoke to, he intended on speaking the truth. That old saying was true. There were no atheists in foxholes, and though he would give a year’s salary just to have a foxhole to hide in right now, this shale crevice was close enough.
As if Conseco was a priest and Tuck at confession, he finally spoke the truth. “I guess I left because I love her.”
“Did you tell her you love her?” Conseco’s dirt-encrusted brows rose beneath the rim of his helmet.
“No.” A round hit particularly close, sending shards of rock into Tuck’s face. He closed his eyes to protect them and then blinked away the dust.
Conseco let out a snort. “You should have.”
Didn’t Tuck know it.
Chapter Twenty-five
Through the haze of sleep, the ringing fit right into her dream. Becca crawled her way up out of the darkness and back to reality, or at least the fuzzy approximation of it.
She took a second to register it was her cell phone’s ringer blaring away on the bedside table. She’d stayed up late looking at websites dedicated to troop support until she’d finally gotten so tired she’d given up and gone to bed.
It was crazy. She hadn’t heard a word from Tucker since he’d left weeks ago—not a phone call or an e-mail or even a damn letter—but she was still obsessed enough to go searching for information about soldiers online just so she’d feel connected to him.
She’d been dreaming she was baking cookies to send to the troops, and the oven timer began to ring, over and over again. Consciousness now told her it hadn’t been the timer.
There were no cookies. Only sleep deprivation and a really loud cell phone ringtone.
Becca flung one arm in the general direction of the annoying object and eventually connected with it. She juggled the phone, nearly dropping it as she somehow managed to answer. At least she assumed she’d answered it.
The ringing stopped, which was a relief, but there was no way she could focus her eyes on the glaringly bright display to see if she’d actually hit the right button or the caller had just given up.
Only one way to find out. She pressed the phone to her ear and said through what felt like a mouthful of cotton, “Hello?”
“Becca?” The static on the line cut away enough for her to hear a male voice, unclear and far away.
“Tuck?” Even in her semi-asleep state she knew it was he. She struggled to sit up against the pillows, more alert. Her heart began to pump blood faster through her veins just from hearing his voice. “Oh, my God. Are you okay?”
“Yeah. I’m fine. How are you?” he asked.
How was she? She wasn’t living in a war zone like he was. Becca didn’t need niceties from Tucker. She needed assurances. “I’m worried about you.”
There was a pause. The amount of static on the line made her wonder if maybe he was speaking and she just couldn’t hear him until he finally said, “Please, don’t worry about me.”
“How can I not considering where you are?” The pitch of her voice rose with the question.
“Because your worrying about me won’t change anything, and while I’m here I’d rather picture you exactly how I remember you. Living your normal life. Pawing through dusty old volumes of Chaucer in the library. Eating take-out pizza and barbecue at your place. It helps, believe me. You don’t know how much.”
“All right.” She was willing to give him anything he needed to ease this deployment. “Can I send you something? Do you need
anything? Sunscreen, bug spray, baby wipes, beef jerky, flip-flops for the shower, disposable razors . . .”
What else had she read the troops needed in that area? She racked her brain for any other items he might need or want.
He laughed, a warm, genuine laugh. The laugh she’d first heard that night at the rodeo when he was still just a cowboy, amused by her city girl ways. It was a really good sound.
“That was some list, darlin’.”
“I read online at one of those troop support websites that’s what guys like to have over there in the warmer months of the year. But it’s going to get cold soon so maybe you need socks? Or hand warmers?”
He chuckled again. “No, I’m good. Really.”
“I want your address anyway. So I can at least send you letters.”
There was another pause before his answer. “Letters would be real nice.” When it came, his voice had softened, all amusement gone.
“I wasn’t sure if I’d hear from you.” Becca hated the doubt and insecurity she heard in her own voice. “You’ve been gone a while.”
And wasn’t that the understatement of the year.
“I know. I’m sorry. Communications are hard. There are a few shared computers with satellite Internet set up, but only here at the firebase. We take turns rotating back every couple of weeks from the outpost. There’s only radio comm there.”
Outposts. Firebases. Radio comm. These were all words—and a world—so foreign to Becca, Tuck might as well have been speaking another language. She vowed her next foray on to the Internet for research would be to learn some of the lingo.
“I can’t stay on much longer.” His voice broke into her relief over hearing from him, because now he’d have to go and she’d be left to wonder and worry. Even so, she couldn’t seem to bring herself to ask him if and when he’d call again.
“Oh, okay.” She wrestled herself all the way into a sitting position and pulled open the bedside table. “Do you know your address so I can mail you?”