Hell for Leather

by Julie Ann Walker

  And to tell the truth, though he was sorry as hell for Delilah and the pain and anguish she was going through—then there was his own anxiety surrounding the matter; he happened to like Theo Fairchild immensely—he wasn’t sorry to have something other than the anniversary of that clusterfuck in Afghanistan to occupy his mind. Because, try as he might—and you can bet your ass he’d been trying with all his might—he hadn’t been able to wash away with good Scottish whiskey the memories of that hot desert afternoon and the gruesome images that flashed behind his lids anytime he closed his eyes.

  And, yes, he fully realized that numbing his pain at the expense of his liver was anything but mature, and he usually made a concerted effort to be out on a mission when this particular date rolled around. But with one of the Knights’ wives about to pop out a mini Knight at any moment, Boss, the esteemed leader of their little group of covert operators, had done his best to make sure as many of the guys as possible were on hand to witness the blessed event.

  And, wouldn’t you know, Dagan’s last mission had ended three days ago, and since then, nothing pressing had come over the wires necessitating him to head back out to parts unknown. Which meant that he was stuck. Here. Waiting on the arrival of a bouncing bundle of joy and unexpectedly finding himself in the middle of a party he wanted no part of…

  Then again, that wasn’t totally true. Because he was happy for his fellow operator. Honestly, he was. Even now, as he looked at Ghost rubbing the lower back of his extremely pregnant wife, Ali, he couldn’t deny the tiny spark of satisfaction…and is that longing?…that flashed deep inside him.

  The Knights’ transient lifestyles, while thrilling, tended to make them a bad bet for solid relationships. Being hell and gone all the time seemed to curtail serious attachments. But somehow this guy, this hard-driving, hard-fighting operator, had managed to make it work. He’d managed to find a measure of peace, a little bit of happiness, despite the oftentimes spectacular pile of shit that was their under-the-table and off-the-books work for Uncle Sam. And standing there, watching him grin at his wife like he’d just won the lottery gave Dagan hope that maybe someday he, too, might discover a love that could repair all the broken things inside him. A love that could bring him some small level of contentment, that would…he didn’t know…make it all, all the struggle and pain, all the regret and sacrifice, worth it.

  On the other hand, Ghost was a grade-A, stand-up guy who didn’t have the blood of five innocent people on his hands, so—

  “Three more barley pops for the new arrivals, Steady!” Ozzie, the Knights’ on-staff computer whiz, called cheerfully to the ex–Army Ranger medic who now served as BKI’s in-house sawbones. “And while you’re at it, pass me one, too.”

  “I thought you said you were headed out to sow your wild oats,” Steady retorted as he popped the top on the big cooler positioned beside his bright red Adirondack chair.

  “Sow his wild oats?” Becky, BKI’s wunderkind motorcycle designer/mechanic, scoffed from her position on Boss’s lap. She was simultaneously sucking down suds and lapping at one of her ever-present Dum Dum lollipops. And just imagining that particular taste combination made the scotch in Dagan’s stomach threaten a reappearance. “Is that what you call getting more ass than a sorority house toilet seat?” A wet, slightly fishy-smelling breeze blew in from the nearby Chicago River and teased the ends of her long blond ponytail. Then her smile quickly morphed into a frown as she pointed the end of her sucker in Ozzie’s direction. “And you can wipe that look off your face right this minute.”

  “What look?” Ozzie asked innocently.

  “The one that says you know what color panties I’m wearing.”

  “Well, I can’t help that.” Ozzie grinned, reaching up to adjust an invisible tie around his neck. “Guessing the color of women’s drawers is just one of my many talents.”

  “Ozzie…” Boss warned.

  “Now back to this sorority house toilet seat comment,” Ozzie blazed ahead. “I thank you for the vote of confidence in my manly prowess, but if we’re talking manwhores, we need to turn the spotlight off me and shine it on this guy sitting beside me.”

  “Me?” Steady hooked a thumb at his chest. The firelight flickered across his swarthy, Hispanic features and flashed in his laughing black eyes. “I’m not the one who goes through women like Kleenex, cabrón.”

  “Pfft.” Ozzie waved him off. “I may technically,” he stressed the word, “have a few more notches on my bedpost than you do.” Dagan rolled his eyes. Surely they weren’t keeping a running tally. Surely. “But at least I’m not the high king of one-night stands. At least I’m gentlemanly enough to take them out to dinner a couple of times afterward, make some kind of connection. I think you’re known around town as Mr. One-and-Done!”

  “Okay, children.” Boss clapped his hands together. “That’s enough.” Frank “Boss” Knight was well versed in riding roughshod over a group of overgrown men who liked slinging bullshit at one another almost as much as they liked dangerous missions, high stakes odds, and bright, shiny new weapons. Usually Dagan enjoyed the good-natured camaraderie, the relentless ribbing. But not tonight. Tonight he either wanted to wallow in his own self-pity or find something to take his mind off the weight of his unremitting guilt. The scotch had been helping him, albeit marginally, to do both… “Let’s not forget we’re here to celebrate the imminent birth of a little hellion,” Boss continued. “So how ’bout those beers, Steady?”

  “Coming right up,” Steady said, but Mac stopped him before he could fish the bottles of Honkers Ale from the sea of ice. Part of Dagan couldn’t help but grieve the lost opportunity for a frosty brew. Because, unfortunately, the last blessedly numbing drops of Lagavulin had worn off right about the time he was chasing Mr. Timberlands down the street.

  “We’re gonna have to pass on the suds, folks,” Mac drawled while simultaneously trying to bat Delilah’s administering hands away from his side. From out of nowhere—or maybe from out of one of the saddlebags on her Harley—Delilah had produced a travel pack of tissues, and she’d been doing her best to tend to Mac’s stab wound ever since. It’d been Dagan’s experience that most women took the Boy Scouts’ always be prepared motto to heart.

  “And while we’re on the subject,” Mac continued, flashing Delilah a look of utter exasperation when she refused to quit dabbing at his injury all while making tutting noises like an old Jewish grandma, “we need you guys to put a lid on this little celebration, too.”

  Holy fuckballs, do those two have it bad, Dagan thought. And it was his heartfelt belief that should Mac ever wise up and stop wearing his ass as a hat—he knew Mac’s history, knew just how sordid it was, but the guy gave new meaning to the phrase once bitten twice shy—then Dagan would have the honor of bearing witness to another fairy-tale ending.

  “What? Why?” Becky asked. Then she noticed Delilah’s ministrations. “Whoa.” Her chin jerked back. “What the hell happened to you, Mac?”

  “Delilah stabbed me,” Mac deadpanned.

  Delilah sputtered like a backfiring motor as Boss hooted with laughter, gleefully slapping his knee. “And I’m sure you totally deserved it!”

  “I most certainly did not,” Mac harrumphed, crossing his arms over his chest, his brows angled down his slightly crooked nose.

  “Of course you did,” Ozzie declared. “You have, after all, been taking those penis-enlarging pills recently.”

  This time it was Mac’s turn to sputter. “I most certainly…what the hell are you talkin’ about?”

  “The fact that you’ve been a bigger dick to Delilah in the last handful of months than ever before,” Ozzie asserted, his eyes sparkling with mischief. The whiz kid turned to bump knuckles with Steady as a dull roar of laughter competed with the snap and crackle of the fire. Dagan couldn’t help it, despite this night and the horrendous anniversary it observed, he felt his lips twitch. Ozzie had a biting wit that was equally amusing and annoying, depending in large part on whether or n
ot you happened to be the one on the receiving end of his rapier repartee.

  “Shut the fuck up, Ozzie,” Mac growled. Dagan wasn’t surprised to discover the ex–FBI agent had fallen into the Ozzie’s Sense of Humor is Annoying group on this particular occasion.

  Ozzie quickly replied with, “Seriously, though, Mac. Just give me ten minutes alone, and I might be able to help you remove that giant stick from your a—”

  “Ozzie.” Mac’s eyes were drilling into Ozzie with so much force it was a wonder the guy didn’t spring a couple of leaks from the set of through-and-throughs in his head. “Don’t push me tonight.”

  “All right,” Ozzie capitulated, sighing dramatically. “We’ll just leave it where it is then. All safe and secure.”

  Mac opened his mouth to respond, then snapped it shut again, shaking his head. “Look, folks. We don’t have time to—” He sucked in a hissing breath when Delilah hit a particularly sore spot. “Ow! Damnit, woman! Will you leave off, already?”

  “And let you bleed out?” she yelled back, her pretty green eyes overly bright even in the dim light cast by the fire. “I’ve already stood by and watched one man bleed to death because of something I did! I’ll be damned if I stand by and watch it happen again!”

  A stunned silence settled over the group as everyone looked on in fascinated horror while one of the toughest women they knew went ahead and lost her shit. It started out slowly, with just a slight wobble of her lower lip. Then her stubborn chin followed suit. Finally, her chest heaved once, and it was game over. The waterworks exploded like a main pipe had busted.

  Mac looked stunned for all of a half-second, before his big, Irish face caved in on itself and he yanked the flame-haired bartendress against him, hugging her tight and muffling the sounds of her pitiful sobs into his chest. So, Brendan hadn’t been joking about Delilah’s trouble in dealing with her friend’s recent murder. And that, combined with the overpowering and stone-cold terror she’d been feeling all day, had finally gotten the better of her.

  “Shh, darlin’,” the big Texan crooned, rubbing a hand down her hair and kissing her tenderly on the forehead. “Shh, now. There’s no need to—”

  “Zoelner?” Boss snagged Dagan’s attention. The man’s craggy face was pulled down into a fierce frown, causing the scar cutting up from the corner of his mouth to pucker angrily. “What the hell is going on?”

  And as jovial as the party atmosphere had been just seconds ago, that’s how somber it was now. It was as if someone had flipped a switch. Flick! On to off. Go to stop. Green to red.

  Hell, even Ozzie appeared pensive.

  “Delilah’s uncle is missing,” he informed the group. The collective gasp was so strong, he thought it was a wonder the fire didn’t instantly flame out from lack of oxygen. “And she’s depending on us to help her find him…”

  ***

  Cairo, Illinois

  “What happened?” Qasim ibn Hasan barked into the phone, turning to watch as two of his most loyal men lifted the body of the dead American from the rotted wood floor. It’d only been a half dozen hours, but the corpse was already starting to smell, fouling the air inside the dank and musty abandoned building, making it nearly impossible to breathe.

  Not that he wasn’t used to the stench of rotting flesh. He’d been fighting jihad for well over a decade. And living with the stink of the dead and dying was just part of that struggle. But, still…filthy American pigs. Filthy murderous American pigs…

  “I was interrupted during my search for the woman’s address,” came the reply from Haroun, his second-in-command. And that was another thing that irked Qasim about the Americans. Why did some of them insist on using post office boxes instead of physical addresses?

  Haroun’s hunt for and abduction of Delilah Fairchild would’ve been so much easier had their extensive Internet search turned up her place of residence. All Haroun would’ve had to do was break into her house or apartment while she was at work, wait for her to arrive home, and incapacitate her before delivering her straight to Qasim. As easy as one, two, three, as the Americans liked to say.

  Unfortunately, counting to three had not been their destiny…

  “Then you must find a way to take her away from her workplace or en route from her workplace to her home,” Qasim instructed. “Those are our only other options.”

  “But they are not,” Haroun said, instantly piquing Qasim’s interest.

  “No?” he asked, his lip curling with disgust as his men carted the remains of the old Marine by him. When the light from the low-burning kerosene lanterns revealed a drop of coagulating blood falling from the body to the dusty floor, barely missing the toe of his shoe, he frowned at Sami and Jabbar.

  “Idiots,” he growled, jumping from the cheap plastic chair they’d managed to scrounge up from the wreckage of this sad, forsaken town, “mind where you are going with that lump of filth.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Sorry, sir.”

  After Charles Sander died of a heart attack within hours of beginning his interrogation and torture, Qasim had wondered if perhaps he’d been sent on a fool’s mission. If perhaps Allah himself wasn’t laughing down at him for thinking he could accomplish what so many of his brethren over the years had not. But then, just as he was howling over his lost leverage—he’d intended to use Charles and Theodore against one another, torturing one to make the other talk—he’d opened Theodore Fairchild’s wallet to discover what would undoubtedly be the ultimate chink in the man’s armor. Photographic evidence of a girl—a niece Qasim had discovered after a quick Google search—whom Theodore had raised as a daughter. She was just the bargaining chip Qasim needed to make the old Marine give up the information stored inside his head. And it was at that moment that he began to think that qadar, or Fate, had once more swung in his favor…

  Praise Allah! This might actually work!

  “Shall we just drop the body next door?” Jabbar asked, straining under the weight of Charles Sander and looking peculiar in his Western-style clothing.

  “Take him far enough away so that his stench does not reach us,” Qasim instructed his men. Then he turned back to the phone conversation. “What were you saying?” he asked Haroun, lamenting the fact that Jabbar had inadvertently smashed Theodore’s cellular phone during the struggle to apprehend the man. Because how much simpler would this whole situation have been had they been able to send Delilah Fairchild a text message from her uncle’s phone instructing her to come to Cairo. After all, that exact plan had worked so well using Sander’s phone in order to get Theodore here…

  Such is life, he sighed pragmatically. Allah gives us obstacles to overcome in order to make the victory that much sweeter. And just as soon as he had his hands on Delilah Fairchild, he would be victorious. And it would be very, very sweet.

  “It was the woman herself who interrupted me,” Haroun explained. Qasim’s heart beat faster as hope bloomed in his chest. Could it be so easy? “I would simply have grabbed her there, but she was not alone. Two men were there with her. I was forced to abandon the premises.” Qasim resumed his seat, his shoulders slumping in disappointment. No, of course it could not be. “I hid until they left the old Marine’s house. Then followed them to some sort of motorcycle repair shop. The place has high security, so I will wait to grab her when she exits. I do not know how long that could be.”

  Qasim glanced over at Theodore. The aging, white-haired man was tied to a chair, and the blood dripping from his broken nose stained the gag they’d secured over his large, bushy mustache and mouth, turning the cream-colored material a dingy, repugnant crimson. That shade would always remind Qasim of the bloody sheets he wrapped his wife and two sons in after a drone strike leveled his village in Pakistan.

  It’d been barely a year after the towers were destroyed on September 11th. And the United States had told the media the attack was necessary due to the presence of a high-level al-Qaeda operative in the town. But Qasim didn’t know anything about an al-Qae
da operative, high-level or not. And all he found when he returned home to search through the rubble of his life were the mutilated bodies of his friends and neighbors…the shredded corpses of his wife and children.

  Before the drone strike, he’d never been tempted to join the groups of bewhiskered men who occasionally came through his village, ranting and raving about justice and the need to perpetrate revenge on all the infidels. But that all changed the night an unmanned plane, flown by a soldier sitting in front of a computer screen thousands of miles away, dropped an AGM Hellfire air-to-ground missile on everything Qasim held dear.

  AGM Hellfire air-to-ground missile… He would always remember the name of the ordnance that obliterated his family.

  Hellfire…

  The newspapers had printed it without thought to what that word would mean to those who’d survived the massacre.

  Hellfire…

  It was exactly what he and so many others were going to rain down on American mothers and fathers, wives and children, in the weeks and months to come.

  Filthy American pigs, he thought again. Though, as he let his gaze once more travel over Theodore Fairchild, he had to give the man credit for his strength. Even after the beating Sami and Jabbar had given him, and even after watching his friend die a wheezing, eye-bulging death, Theodore remained upright, his chin held high, his aging blue eyes bright with fury.

  But that strength would only last so long. And Qasim knew just how to strike fear into the hardened heart of a man like Theodore.

  Smiling to himself, he tilted his head at his hostage. Theodore was listening intently to his phone conversation. Not that Qasim was concerned. It was unlikely Theodore was able to understand the stilted Arabic he was speaking—stilted because Punjabi was his native tongue and he’d only learned to speak Arabic after joining The Cause. Still, not being able to understand the words Qasim spoke did not stop the old soldier from straining to hear any recognizable phrase. Which was why Qasim winked before saying, “Excellent, Haroun. I look forward to meeting Delilah Fairchild,” he emphasized the name, “very soon.”