Her heart swelled. She saw he meant every word he’d said, his gold eyes darkening, intense and desiring her. “Every time I’m around you,” she admitted softly, her hands on his upper arms, “I feel myself flying apart inside.” Khat drowned in his primal look. “Maybe I’m afraid of myself, more than you.” She gave him a bewildered look.
“Khat, you’re in the driver’s seat here. It’s your call. I want you to come to me on your own terms and time. Otherwise,” he said wryly, “I’d be like every one of these men on this base who want you.”
His words helped dissolve her feeling anxious. “It’s been a long time, Mike, since I had a relationship with a man.” She forced herself to hold his gaze. “Things have happened. Things I haven’t told you yet.”
The worry was back in her eyes, and Mike knew what it was about: her scars. “We’ll take this as slow or fast as you want, Khat.” Well, that was a damned lie, but Mike wasn’t about to destroy the trust they’d just built based upon his sexual needs. Her expression calmed. She licked her lower lip nervously, and stepped away from him, her arms falling to her sides.
He reached out, grazing her cheek, the skin soft velvet beneath his fingertips. “Come on, let’s finish up here.” She nodded and picked up the towel she’d laid across Mina’s back. Mike walked to the other side of the horse.
There was a new sense of building yearning escalating and throbbing between them now. He swore he could feel it, and it wasn’t a bad thing. It was something alive, something triggered by their kiss. A waiting. A promise. And it was galvanizing. He was going to have a hell of time keeping his hands off her.
CHAPTER EIGHT
SOMETHING WAS WRONG, and Mike could feel it. What was it? After washing the horses, Khat wanted to go lie down for a while and rest. He went back to work on his mission-planning duties. Finally, toward 1600, he got up and ambled into the chief’s office.
“Come on in,” Mac said, “I’m ready for a break.” He leaned back in his chair.
Mike shut the door and sat down. “I need to talk to you about Sergeant Shinwari,” he said, scowling. He filled in Mac on what he’d found out.
Mac scratched his brown beard, looking up at the ceiling, considering his thoughts. “Bottom line is she needs her ass hauled off that op.”
Mike nodded. “That’s what I think, but I wanted to run it by you.”
“This is a FUBAR,” Mac muttered, turning around in his chair and putting his hands on the desk, pushing a few papers around. “You know, some of these handlers just let their people run loose, not enough oversight.”
“Do you know Commander Hutton?” Mike asked, well aware any master chief in the SEALs knew everyone, their reputation and background. Mac’s blue eyes grew hard.
“Hutton, unfortunately, got deep-sixed into that job because his shit is not tight.”
Which meant to Mike, Hutton wasn’t living up to the SEAL ethos, and so the officer was put someplace where he could do the least amount of damage to the personnel around him. Just great. Now Khat was suffering the consequences under his authority. “Okay, but I’m worried about her. She’s on a razor’s edge, Mac. She’s got PTSD, and she’s been tortured. And I know she hasn’t taken the shore leave to get help or even begin to assimilate those experiences.”
“And her family is a no-go?”
Mike grimaced. “Her father is Afghani. He was against her decision to go into the Marine Corps. And she hasn’t brought it up, but I’m sure after she was captured, her family knew she was MIA. And then, thirty days later, were told their daughter was rescued after having been tortured. That bends minds, Mac. No parent wants their child in this kind of place.”
“But it’s especially tough on an Afghan father who has grown up believing his daughter would be married young, have a passel of children and he’d be a grandfather. Yeah,” Mac mumbled, “I got the picture.”
“What can we do?” Mike knew he was too low on the SEAL food chain to influence much of anything. But Mac, as a chief of a SEAL platoon, had incredible power. He watched him, holding his breath. If Mac wouldn’t take up Khat’s cause, he was stonewalled.
“What I need to do,” Mac said, thinking out loud, “is get to the head of that black op she’s working with.”
“It’s called Operation Shadow Warriors.”
Brows raising, Mac cut him a glance. “And you know this how?”
Giving him a sheepish look, Mike told him about Lt. Addison Sinclaire, the intel officer at SEAL HQ at Bagram.
“You’re pretty good at workarounds, Tarik,” he said, grinning. “Does Lt. Sinclaire have the head honcho’s name?”
“Yeah, a US Army General Maya Stevenson. She’s in the E ring of the Pentagon.”
Rubbing his beard, Mac considered the information. “Okay, here’s what we need to do. I can’t go upstairs to the admiral with this because I have to have proof.” He drummed his fingers. “I need to get those psych evals they’ve been doing on her. That should show us something.”
“What about getting her leave history for those years she’s been in Operation Shadow Warriors?” Mike suggested. “I consider psych evals useless. I don’t have much faith in shrinks, sorry.”
Snorting, Mac said, “Yeah, I hear you. But maybe there will be a pattern I can pick up or see in those evals. Something… Anything to show she’s been out there too long and needs to be reeled in for her own good.”
His heart rate went up with hope. “Then you’ll follow this up?”
“Sure. Someone has to have her back.” Mac smiled a little. “She saved four of our SEALs. We owe her.”
“She’s going in for that psych eval tomorrow morning,” Mac continued. “Some shrink’s flying in from Bagram to sit and ask her questions,” he said, frowning. “You know her better than I do. Is she smart enough to trick a shrink?”
“I don’t know. I think she is. Which is why I suggested, instead, that you get her leave and schooling background for the years she’s been with this operation.”
“Good point,” Mac grunted. “Okay, so noted. Go back to work. I’ll let you know what I can find out after nosing round a little. I’ll probably contact Lt. Sinclaire. She seems to be a dog that’ll hunt. Intel officers can be worth their weight in gold.” He grinned.
*
“YOU LOOKING FORWARD to this psych eval?” Mike asked Khat as he walked her over to the headquarters for Camp Bravo the next morning. She had her game face on. Dressed in her Marine Corps cammies, she was back in the harness of being an operator.
Khat shrugged. “It’s a pain in the ass,” she muttered. The air was beginning to heat up, the sun having crested the Hindu Kush to the east of the camp. The smell of aviation fuel kerosene filled the air. A number of helicopters were warming up, getting ready for the day’s missions at Operations, which was near where they were going.
“Why do they put you through it?” Mike wondered.
“They’re evaluating women in combat. I agreed to this when I volunteered to be a part of the experiment. I hate doing it because I always get some idiot who has never been in combat asking me stupid questions.”
“I wouldn’t like it, either,” Mike admitted sourly. He felt the tension in Khat as they walked down a long row of tents on either side of them. “Is there such a thing as failing a psych eval, then?”
“I don’t know. I try to stay in touch with some of the women friends I made when we went through the one-year training before being turned loose in combat over here. They all consider it a pain in the ass, too. I’ve never heard of any of the volunteers being yanked out of combat because of their psych eval.”
“I see,” Mike murmured. “So it sounds like the general is accruing long-term information that, after the seven-year op is over, will show a larger picture of women’s mental and emotional fitness for combat?”
Khat smiled a little. “Nothing gets past you, does it, Tarik?”
He gave her a bemused look. “Not much.” He gestured to the left and said, “That’s the building. Ju
st go in, show them your brand-new security identification, and they’ll get you to this shrink.” He looked at his watch. “Meet you here at noon? We’ll go over to the chow hall and grab some lunch.”
Halting in front of the cinder-block building that was two stories high, Khat said, “Yes, I’d like that.”
“See you then.” And then he smiled. “Good luck with the eval. Better you than me,” he teased. He saw the tension in her eyes. Khat was not looking forward to this three-hour session at all. She managed a slight smile.
“See you then.”
Climbing the stairs, Khat dragged in a deep breath and then pushed through the door. She hated this testing. And she was scared because she knew a bad psych eval or a failure as the shrink saw it, could potentially haul her off the operation. Her hands were damp with anxiety, and she pushed them down the sides of her trousers.
In no time, she was escorted into a small office. When she opened the door, she saw a Marine Corps officer with wire-rimmed glasses. He was short and lean, his eyes a watery blue color. She came to attention and gave him her name and rank.
“At ease, Sergeant Shinwari,” he said. “Have a seat. I’m Captain Robert Carter.”
Khat’s nostrils flared as she sat down in front of the desk. He wore cammies like her own, and he carried a side arm. She wondered if this officer had any combat experience. Most likely not. She nervously watched him open her thick personnel file. Everything about her was in there. It wasn’t a redacted copy like the one Chief McCutcheon had gotten from Commander Hutton.
Forcing herself to relax, she knew Carter would be watching her like a proverbial hawk. That’s what they did: observe. The problem was, their observation was skewed because they were human, too, and they had their own set of problems and projections. So how was this man going to honestly see her?
*
MIKE WAS WAITING for Khat at the bottom of the stairs at noon. She was about fifteen minutes late. He sensed her coming before he heard her. Turning, he looked up and saw her. Her game face was in place; he really couldn’t interpret how she really felt.
“Ready for lunch?” he asked, walking with her toward the chow hall.
“Yeah,” she snapped.
Ouch. Mike watched her face change. Her full mouth was thinned, and she was upset. “How’d it go in there?”
“The usual. The little twerp doesn’t have a clue as to what combat is. He sits back in his air-conditioned office at Bagram playing head games.” She pushed her black baseball cap off her head and ran her fingers distractedly through her hair caught up in a ponytail.
“What’s the upshot? Or do you know?”
Khat didn’t want to go there. Why the hell Carter homed in on her lack of leave, of staying in the war zone without taking the six months back to the States, really wore on her nerves. “Let me come down, Mike. I’m pretty upset.”
While they ate lunch, finding a table in a corner that was occupied by many others, Mike felt anger radiating off her. It was nothing overt, except she was stabbing at the steamed broccoli on her tray like she was sticking a KA-BAR into Carter, most likely.
“I got a hold of Emma Shaheen earlier,” he told her. “They’d like us to fly in this afternoon. She’s really looking forward to meeting you.”
“Who will take care of my horses?”
“I asked one of our SEALs from our platoon. He’s from West Texas, and his name is Travis Cooper. He grew up on a cattle ranch, and he knows horses. Said he’d enjoy feeding and watering them.” Mike saw the worry leave her eyes. “You okay with that?”
“Yes, that’s very nice of him to do it for me.”
“The guy likes animals,” Mike said, finishing off his meal and pushing the tray aside. “Travis found a starving puppy at a village, and the little guy started following him around. Travis asked the villagers if it belonged to anyone, and they said no.” Mike grinned. “So he brought him back to the platoon. Named him Cheese because the puppy loves cheese.” He chuckled. “Your horses will be in good hands with Travis.”
“Sounds like it,” Khat said, pushing her tray aside. She hadn’t eaten much. Her stomach was in knots over the intense three-hour session with the shrink.
She picked up her cup of hot Darjeeling tea, wrapping her fingers around it. Mike’s presence automatically soothed her. “Are you getting tired of being my babysitter?” she asked, a partial smile tugging at her mouth.
“No,” he said, sipping his coffee. “You’re a feast for my senses. Why would I trade being your mentor for sitting on my ass doing mission planning all day long?”
She nodded and smiled, feeling his compliment flow through her. “I like your company, too,” she admitted softly, not holding his gaze. Moving the mug in her hands, she sighed. “That shrink was on a mission,” she muttered, brows drawing downward.
Mike watched her wrestling with a lot of emotions, her lips pursed, her brow wrinkled. “Want to talk about it?”
Rolling her shoulders as if to get rid of unwanted tension, Khat lifted her head. “The bastard homed in on the fact I wasn’t taking my yearly allotment of leave. And that when I did rotate back to the States, I’d do my paramedic upgrades then immediately deploy right back to Afghanistan.” She blew out a breath of air. “He didn’t get it. He doesn’t understand.”
“That your Afghan blood calls you back here?” he asked quietly. Khat’s eyes were dark and filled with frustration. She kept moving the tea mug around between her hands.
“Yes. I tried to explain it to him, but honest to God, I felt like I was talking to an alien from another planet.”
Treading carefully, Mike said, “Have you considered taking your leave? The kind of work you’re doing is damned intense, Khat. Not to mention dangerous. Everyone needs a break from combat.”
She glared at him. “Now you sound just like him.”
Holding up his hands, he said, “Whoa. I’m asking as a concerned friend, Khat. I don’t have any axes to grind with you.”
She sipped her tea, eyeing him. “I don’t see any problems. I like what I do. It’s a calling. A passion, Mike. That man did not get it. I doubt he understands passion at all,” she growled. “He was a robot.”
Mike wondered if Mac could get ahold of this shrink’s evaluation. It would certainly support what he was seeing in Khat. “Well, let it go,” he suggested. “Would you like to get a hop to Bagram this afternoon? Emma will have their driver meet us at Ops, and he’ll drive us to their villa. It would be a nice change of pace.” Never had he wanted anything more than to get Khat disconnected from her military obligations as she saw them.
Shrugging, Khat said, “Sure.” And she didn’t add anywhere was better than being near that damned psychiatrist. Worried, she wondered if General Stevenson read every psych eval on every woman in the program. If he put anything in there about her being in too much combat and not rotating back under the rules of the operation, she could be screwed. The last place Khat wanted to be told to go was Stateside. Her people, the blood of her tribe that ran through her veins, was her life, her focus. She didn’t want to leave her area of operation because it would leave those villages open to attack by Khogani. He’d kill men, women and children.
Sickened, Khat felt miserable and filled with angst over the eval. That bastard could hurt her objectives. Hutton didn’t care what she did. Out of sight, out of mind, was his philosophy. But someone else above him, back in the Pentagon, might care, and that had her deeply concerned.
*
MIKE STEPPED INTO Mac’s office later, making sure he got permission to leave for Bagram with Khat. The chief motioned for him to shut the door and sit down. When he sat, Mac gave him a triumphant look.
“Seems Commander Hutton is authorizing background reports on Khat to us.”
Surprised, Mike said, “That’s unexpected.”
“Yeah, I made a personal call to him, feeling him out. He’s more than happy to offload anything having to do with her to me. I didn’t tell him why I wanted the i
nfo.”
Shaking his head, Mike snarled, “He’s sandbagging her. He doesn’t give a rat’s ass if she’s burned out or not.” And then he quickly filled Mac in on their lunch conversation.
“Well,” Mac said after hearing the info, “if this shrink puts that in the report, it’s a nail in her coffin insofar as being allowed to operate without proper oversight. Hutton’s not monitoring her at all. He doesn’t care, or they’re getting such good actionable intel from Sergeant Shinwari that they don’t want to lose her contacts if she left.” Drumming his fingers, he said, “Hutton’s sending over the pdf documents on her psych evals to me later this afternoon. When you get back from Bagram, we’ll talk.”
“Good enough,” Mike said. “Give me my TAD orders so we can get going?”
Mac nodded. “Yeah, drop by in thirty minutes.”
Mike found his good friend, Travis Cooper, out back with the horses. The lanky West Texan was leaning against the rails, idly observing the two black mares resting. Travis was nearly six feet tall and relaxed. Anyone who knew Travis well, knew that casual look around him wasn’t for real. He struck like a rattler when necessary, out on patrols. He was twenty-six years old, laid back and easygoing.
Mike had always liked Travis. He was one of their snipers and the best of all of them. He was a country boy raised in Rush City, Texas, a small West Texas town. There, he’d been a local football hero. His team had taken the championship, no small feat for such a little town.
“Hey,” Mike called, joining him, “doing some wishful thinking about throwing a leg over one of them?”
Travis gave him a welcoming nod. “Now, there you go again, Tarik, mind reading me.”
Mike liked his slow Texan drawl. “Those horses are worked pretty hard,” he said, gesturing toward them.
“Yeah,” Travis murmured, “that one mare has a puffy front right leg. That comes from overwork. Mare must be doing a lot of fast, quick, tight turns to cause the condition. Thought I’d do some massaging of her legs while you’re gone. You think that Marine Corps sergeant who owns them would mind?”
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