He’d also had Beth. In the early days of their marriage, he had thought she was his hood ornament. Too late, he realized she was his outrigger. Without her, he floundered.
He didn’t want to take Caruthers away from JJ. He had given up the notion of leaving it to her father even before he died. When Lucas realized JJ liked it, even though she was just a little girl, he felt as if the meaning of life had been given back to him.
It would break his heart not to pass the business to another generation—she must see that—but he would.
If destroying Caruthers was the only way to free her from its thrall, then destroy it he would.
Chapter 8
Afghanistan
HE WAS GOING TO DIE TODAY.
Davy’s eyes snapped open. In the east, a mountain crag that had no name was a dark smudge against a barely lighter sky as dawn came to the Afghanistan mountains. Around him, the other fifteen men of his SEAL platoon began to stir, grousing about the frigid morning. SEALs, both intrinsically and through training, had greater tolerance than most people for cold conditions, but that didn’t mean they liked being chilled. Winter came early in the thin, dry air of the Hindu Kush, the westernmost finger of the Himalayas. Higher peaks were already capped with snow, even though it was only the second week in August.
Hearing his buddies complain assured Davy he was really awake this time.
He’d had one of those dreams in which you dream you wake up. In the dream, he’d been awakened by the sound of a woman crying. He’d gone looking for the source and found his mother, her plump shoulders rounded with grief, sobbing.
Davy rolled over in his sleeping bag to ease the crushing feeling in his chest. That was the part of the dream he hadn’t liked. The rest of the dream, in which he saw a wooden coffin with row after row of golden SEAL Tridents slapped against its gleaming walnut lid, had been okay. He had died doing what he loved, being who he had wanted to be. In the dream, he had not felt saddened to be dead weeks shy of his twenty-eighth birthday but incredibly fortunate to have had the life that fitted him perfectly.
Still, he didn’t like for his mother to cry.
Raised with a matter-of-fact acceptance of ESP, Davy didn’t question his dream’s significance. Dreaming true ran in his Irish mother’s side of the family, as did foreknowledge of one’s death. He’d rarely experienced a premonition himself.
On the other hand, he’d never died before, either. Davy chuckled, feeling for the sleeping bag’s zipper. Maybe he’d never before needed a warning dream.
He sat up, still laughing, and rubbed his cheeks, finger-combing the glossy, black curls of his beard. With his black hair, large dark eyes, and olive skin, he blended into the local population, a fact he capitalized on by pulling a blue-checked shirt over his body armor. Close up, he wouldn’t fool anyone, but from a distance, if his appearance made a shooter hesitate even for a second, it could save his life.
An hour later, Davy looked up from checking his medical supply kit in time to see McHale lead a kid in baggy, dusty black pants and a once-white shirt over to the platoon’s lieutenant.
“Hey Doc.” The platoon’s lieutenant, Garth Vale, waved him over. “Lemme talk to you for a second.” The lieutenant clapped Davy on the shoulder and drew him out of earshot. “The kid’s name is Hamid. He says his sister’s in labor in the next village. Wants you to come.”
“Shit.” Davy stubbed at a pebble with the toe of his boot. He was often the platoon’s goodwill ambassador—the first person villagers would open up to, the one whose help they would seek. He relished the role, even though what he could do for them was often a drop in the bucket compared to what they needed. But in a situation like this, he couldn’t help anyone. He could lance an abscess, sew up a cut, or even set a bone in men and children, but he couldn’t touch a woman.
The fundamentalist Muslim interpretation of modesty decreed that letting a woman die was preferable to allowing a man who wasn’t a relative to see her body. “I can’t do anything for her. They’re not going to let me examine her. Her husband’s not going to let another man look at his wife.”
“The kid says he will. Says the husband sent him. But it’s up to you. I’m taking the guys into a village south of there. We’re going in like it’s a ‘search and apprehend.’ Supposedly they’re ready to talk about where some Taliban placements are. We’ll make it look like we weren’t invited—just in case the Taliban are watching.”
Here in the mountains, villagers were often caught in a no-win situation between the Allied forces and the Taliban—since alliance with one invited attacks from the other. The media were quick to condemn any civilian deaths caused by the UN forces but slow to mention the unrelenting terrorism inflicted on their own people by the Taliban.
“I don’t expect anything to come of it,” the lieutenant added. “I can spare you.”
Garth was leaving it up to him. This war would never be won without the aid of the Afghanis. Any amount of trust he won could make a difference. “If they’ve asked for help, I guess I ought to go. I probably can’t do anything for the woman, but maybe some other villager needs me.”
Seeing that Davy had made up his mind, the lieutenant clapped him on the shoulder. “All right. Do what you can. I’ve asked for extraction at fourteen-hundred. Stay in touch.”
The woman died. There was nothing Davy could do. Nothing he could have done.
As his driver (the same twelve-year-old who had come for him) kept the rattletrap Toyota pickup hugging the mountain side of the dirt track, Davy fought the hot prickle at the back of his eyes. Woman hell, the little girl, barely fourteen, had bled to death. Her baby, still unborn, had died with her.
Since he rarely saw Afghani women except at a distance and swathed head to toe in their blue burqas, it was easy to forget that one cause of the country’s dismal childbirth statistics lay in the practice of forced marriage. It wasn’t uncommon for girls to be married before puberty—and not in name only. A girl of nine or ten could be married and her husband, a man three or four times her age, would insist on his rights.
Sure enough, when Davy got there, he’d found the husband, a forty-year-old man, arguing with the village headman, a man of sixty or so. If Davy’s Dari, the local variant of Farsi, was up to the task of translation, the headman was the husband’s father-in-law—the girl’s father.
Finally the headman had given in, but only, Davy suspected, because he knew it was already too late. He could claim he had mercifully heard his son-in-law’s pleas, and, at the same time, the smirch upon the family’s honor, caused by letting a man other than a relative look upon her, wouldn’t have to be expunged by killing her—if his daughter was already dead.
So Davy had entered the windowless room, the usual odors of spice and incense and unwashed bodies overwhelmed by primal birthing smells and the hot, sticky, metallic tang of blood thickening the air.
Even now, instead of the yellowish-tan monochrome of the landscape through which the Toyota traveled, he kept seeing her wide, emerald-green eyes set in black, curly lashes—all that was visible of her blue burqa-covered face.
She had opened those green eyes (all he knew of her), gazed at him with distant interest and, with a sigh, slowly closed them again as the last drops of life drained away.
He’d only seen eyes of that pure, intense green once in America. In Afghanistan, although the color was always startling, it wasn’t rare. He’d encountered it over and over, and every time he did, he remembered the woman whose name he never knew.
The memory embarrassed him, but he couldn’t seem to erase it. Fucking a woman whose name he couldn’t remember afterward was one thing. He wasn’t proud of it, but it happened. Carelessly not bothering to ask was inexcusable. He even dreamed occasionally that she was running away from him and he was running behind her, yelling, “What’s your name?”
At the time, it hadn’t seemed to matter.
At the time, all that had mattered was getting together with her as fast and i
n as many ways as possible. If he had thought about it at all, he’d probably assumed they’d talk the next morning—in between more languorous bouts of lovemaking. They’d certainly have exchanged names then. But her abrupt departure at oh-four-hundred had erased all assumptions about how they’d spend their next morning. Later, nobody seemed to know who the woman in the brown dress had been.
Careless. A mistake he could neither fix nor forget. But he’d made sure it would never happen again. These days he learned the names of women—all women—the instant he met them.
The road narrowed, and his kid driver edged the truck even closer to the mountain. It was a long way down on the other side. More important, staying in close also made them a little harder to target from above. They were so close to the top of the mountain now that there was little above them to worry about, but when they started their descent, it would be a different story. The back end of the Toyota fishtailed as nearly bald tires fought for purchase on the rough gravel track.
Davy absently thumbed the switch on the radio, not really surprised to hear nothing. He’d been trying to check in with the platoon since they started back, but the mountain was blocking reception. As soon as they rounded the next bend, they should be in line of sight with the village, and he’d get a signal again.
The tiny pickup shuddered. The boy had felt it, too, and braked before Davy could tell him to tawaquf, stop. With the whine of the motor silenced, both could hear thunder, sometimes seeming near, sometimes far, as the sound echoed back and forth between the mountains. The pickup shuddered again. Pebbles slithered down the sheer rock face.
Rocket-propelled grenades. This was very bad news because his platoon didn’t carry any RPGs. The Russian-made weapons were cheap and easy to use, a favorite of the Taliban. Their presence indicated a planned, organized ambush, which was very bad news indeed.
Davy signaled the kid to stay where he was, and ran around the bend in the road. Below he could see the mud-walled village. On a saddleback ridge to the south, sun glinted on metal. He was above them, and they didn’t know he was there. It was the first bit of luck.
He radioed headquarters and requested an air strike. He considered how to make maximum use of the small amount of tactical advantage he had. It wasn’t in a SEAL’s nature to sit back and wait while others did the heavy lifting. Every member of his platoon could be dead before help arrived. Look after your buddies. They are your life insurance. A man alone in combat does not survive. He was alone. He could still look after his buddies.
Everything about the Taliban force’s placement spoke of a carefully planned trap. From his higher position, he could see the routes along which they intended to scatter before reinforcements arrived.
If he took the fight to the Taliban, he could distract them, keep them busy. He would also be inside the kill zone of the Apache helicopters. If the Taliban didn’t kill him, friendly fire would. So be it.
He had surprise on his side. Violence of action was the SEAL credo. He would only get one chance to maximally confuse and disorganize their attack on the village.
He set his rifle on automatic and lobbed a grenade into their midst. Then before the first echoes of the explosion reached him, he charged down the hill.
Chapter 9
Charlottesville, VA
HIS MOTHER’S KITCHEN WAS THE MOST SILENT HE COULD ever remember. It was as if all the noise in the house had been sucked out by his mother’s death.
Friends and neighbors had made pools of chatter as they cleaned the kitchen, stored the casseroles, and tidied the living room and dining room. After they departed into the September dusk, Davy and his brother and sister sat at the glass and wrought-iron kitchen table, idly turning cups of coffee on spongy plastic placemats shaped like sunflowers. They were trying to absorb the senior chief’s verdict that there wasn’t any money in their mother’s estate.
Four days earlier, Davy had looked up from the Nintendo he was playing with in the hospital dayroom.
“Hey, guys. Garth. Lon,” he amended, grateful their names had come to him in such a timely fashion. Davy’s eyes went from one man to the other. Garth, injured in the same action as Davy, had graduated to a cane. Lon was his same burly, massively competent senior chief self. “This is bad news, isn’t it?”
“Your sister has been trying to reach you,” Garth began. “When she couldn’t, she called me.”
Garth faltered, and Lon, his eyes kind, took up the story. “Your mother passed away last night.”
Davy’s heart squeezed. “Last night? Was that yesterday?” Davy thought if he could get the time sequence right, he’d understand the rest of what Lon said.
“Yesterday, yes.”
“That can’t be right. I talked to her yesterday.”
“It was last night. Late.”
“How…?”
“She called your sister. Said she felt bad. Your sister called 911. By the time the paramedics got there, she was already gone.”
Davy understood the words, and something more. He didn’t remember being hit; he didn’t remember what they said he’d done. The closest he could come to acknowledging it happened was recognizing that it was something he would have done—and been glad to.
What he did remember with perfect clarity was the dream he’d had that morning in Afghanistan and the certainty he’d felt that he was going to die. A thousand times, while he was recovering from surgeries to put the pieces of his face back together, he had pondered why he had dreamed of his mother and of dying when he hadn’t died. Now he understood at a level far deeper than rational thought.
He had been right all along. He was supposed to die. His mother had known it. She had bargained with God or something—he was hazy on the details—and once she was sure he was safe and on the mend, she had taken his place.
Davy had asked Lon to stay behind after the other SEALs who had come to his mother’s funeral had left. Lon was the steadiest man he knew, and Lon had the experience to look at financial statements and sum up the situation.
Even with Lon’s help, Davy had looked too long at papers, straining to read with eyes that weren’t quite used to their new, slightly different positions. Davy ignored the hot ice-pick of pain that stabbed through the back of his left eye. The pain made the walls he’d always thought of as a cheerful yellow glare with nauseating intensity under the overhead fluorescents.
His pain would decrease as the swelling from his injuries abated. Being blown behind a rock by the rocket-propelled grenade had probably saved his life, but landing among rocks had smashed his cheekbone and fractured his eye socket.
Everyone said he was lucky. Lucky to be alive, lucky not to lose an eye, lucky the shard that had sliced open his cheek hadn’t severed… that nerve. He knew the anatomical name—he was a hospital corpsman, for chrissake—but the word wouldn’t come.
Yeah, he was lucky he wasn’t killed or totally, permanently messed up, but he wasn’t sure his family had been so fortunate.
Shit, if he’d been killed, at least his family would have had his life insurance.
“Is it true you might be up for the Medal of Honor?” Harris broke the silence, his steel-blue gaze both sharp and remote. He and his twin sister, Elle, short for Eleanor, had inherited their light brown hair and blue eyes from their father, Davy’s stepfather, while Davy took his Italian looks from his own father. Harris’s build was bonier than either his twin’s or Davy’s. He was an inch or so taller than Davy—or he would have been if not for an already noticeable scholar’s slump.
“It’s true.” Lon affirmed from Davy’s mother’s home-office desk where he had sat while going over bank statements. “Unfortunately, there’s no money in it, unless you write a best-selling book about it, the way Audie Murphy did.”
“Who’s Audie Murphy?” Harris asked.
“World War II hero,” Lon told him. “Pretty as our Davy here. Went on to be a movie star.”
Elle ignored the byplay. “Why didn’t you tell us about the medal?�
� she demanded. “Didn’t you know how proud we’d be?”
“I’d sort of forgotten about it. It isn’t likely. They don’t hand out many Medals of Honor.”
“The men I overheard were talking about what you did. How you deliberately drew the Taliban fire until an air strike could arrive. Don’t you think you deserve recognition?”
“I can’t remember what I’m supposed to have done, but I know this much: I’m not a hero… The whole thing just embarrasses me.”
Harris thought that over. “I guess that means ‘no book.’”
“Harris!” Elle’s round blue eyes widened in outrage. Unlike her twin, her gaze was rarely remote. “Even for you, that’s insensitive. Don’t you realize David is relating his feelings?”
“Oh. You mean because he said he was embarrassed? I’m sorry, David. But amnesia for the event is frequent in cases of traumatic brain injury,” Harris informed them all, showing off his nascent medical knowledge. He and Elle were in their first year of medical school.
Davy didn’t feel up to explaining that being called a hero was what embarrassed him, not the amnesia.
They all fell quiet again while Davy wondered how could he effortlessly use words like nascent and then blank on ordinary words that should have been easier to summon. It kept him constantly off balance, never knowing when he was going to hit a wall.
Elle began to cry again. She made no sound. She patiently wiped the tears from her round cheeks, as if dealing with a slow leak. Her round eyes puffy, she finally broke the silence.
“She told us everything was okay after Dad died.”
Mary Margret Daughtridge SEALed Bundle Page 64