Breaking Boundaries
Teresa J. Reasor
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination, or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Breaking Boundaries
COPYRIGHT © 2015 by Teresa J. Reasor
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission from the author, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews.
Contact Information: [email protected]
Cover Art by Tracy Stewart
Edited by Faith Freewoman
Teresa J. Reasor
PO Box 124
Corbin, KY 40702
Publishing History: First Edition 2015
ISBN: 13: 978-1-940047-05-8
ISBN: 10: 1-940047-05-6
Kindle Edition
Dedication
For all the competition and good-natured (for the most part) rivalry between the branches of military service, when the chips or down, or men’s lives are at stake, Marine, Army, Air Force, and Navy personnel band together to support one another.
This is for them.
And to the many programs that support our wounded warriors, a heartfelt thank you.
Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright Page
Dedication
Prologue
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Epilogue
About the Author
Books by Teresa Reasor
For New Releases
Prologue
‡
Afghanistan
The squeak and rattle of the vehicle’s chassis as they hit another pothole in the dirt-clotted road acted as a minor irritant compared to the hundred and twenty-degree heat inside. Corporal Cal Crowes, the driver, twisted the wheel to the right in an attempt to miss a hole big enough to bury a wheel and grunted in satisfaction when he straddled the pit.
“Fuck me!” Private Jasper Holland exclaimed. “Ollie Gunter deserves a fast trip to hell with a short poker.”
Cal started to laugh at the comment and decided he didn’t have the extra energy. The rolling oven they were traveling in, better known as a Humvee, slowly baked the moisture from his body like a sauna. The two privates trapped inside with him weren’t fairing any better. The only one in their foursome getting any relief was Private first class Neil Carter, who was on the roof, riding in the gun shield.
The dusty road stretched ahead as they worked their way toward the northern mountains.
Jasper continued his grumbling, “Why couldn’t he fix our damn air conditioning before this patrol? He had twelve fucking hours.”
Though Cal had similar feelings about the mechanic, he needed to pull rank and head off the bitchfest. “Griping about it doesn’t change anything, Jazz. I’ll deal with it as soon as we return to base.”
“After eight hours in this fucking kiln, we’ll be so dehydrated none of us will feel like taking on that shit brick,” Private Mitchell Ellison said in a deadpan voice.
Cal tracked movement as they passed a cart being pulled by a young boy heading in the opposite direction. His jaw tightened. Sweat rolled down his sides beneath his shirt, but it did nothing to cool the sensation of being baked inside his body armor. The window next to him beckoned with the promise of some small relief, but the likelihood of having a grenade tossed into the vehicle or a lucky shot from a sniper, they didn’t dare risk opening the window even a crack. “I’ll deal with Ollie.”
In the rearview mirror Cal caught Ellison’s quick movement as he tossed a look behind them at the small convoy of vehicles following theirs. “I bet if we were SEALs Gunter would have fixed our vehicle,” Ellison grumbled. “Those guys can get things done when they need it.”
The Special Ops eight-man team, riding four to a vehicle in the convoy behind them, had looked well-armed and focused. Flash Carney, the team sniper, and Greenback Shaker had accompanied Cal’s Marine squad on more than one patrol to clear buildings suspected of harboring insurgents. They were the only two Cal knew.
Those guys probably fixed their own damn vehicle issues when they had to. Maybe if his squad was able to do the same they wouldn’t be steaming inside the armored Humvee with nothing but the faintest of breezes from above. The situation fed his anger, and there was an edge to his voice when he said, “I put in the order. Gunter didn’t do the work, and I had no control over that. I’ll have control over what happens when we get back, though. Now stow this shit and keep your eyes o—.”
A shallow depression, suspicious and threatening, led up to the next pothole. Cal stomped on the brakes and swung the wheel sharply to the left to avoid it.
Sound roared through the vehicle, pounding his eardrums, his brain. The front of the Humvee heaved upward. The steering wheel clipped his chin and snapped his head back. His vision went white, then gray fading to black.
He woke to a harsh ringing in his ears and the smell of smoke. He threw out a searching hand. Who was beside him? Jazz? He gripped the mesh on the man’s body armor.
Smoke billowed from the front of the vehicle. They’d been hit. They had to get out of the Humvee. He forced his eyes to stay open. Blood gushed from Jazz’s mouth to run down his chin onto his BDUs. The car’s engine sat in his lap, pinning him to the seat.
God. “Ja—.” Cal’s jaw hung numb and useless. His mouth was full of marbles. He used his tongue to work them out. Bits of his own broken teeth hung off his chin.
The door beside him was jerked open. The rattle of machine gun fire sounded muffled as it burst from a few yards to the right. He reached for his sidearm and drew it. He had to protect himself, his men.
He focused in relief on the camouflage uniform directly in front of him. Thick red hair stuck out from under a boonie hat. Dark green eyes, stony with purpose, scanned his face. A rust-colored beard covered the lower half of the guy’s face. He reached in and dragged Cal free.
Cal’s head pounded like his skull was being beaten to dust by a jackhammer. The world tilted and the sky, burning bright blue, blistered his eyes, and he closed them as pain knifed through his brain.
“My men,” he tried to say and it ended up sounding like “M-mn.”
“Where’s that chopper?”
The words were still muffled, but he could hear them.
“Fifteen minutes out.”
Bullets rattled and pinged off the smoldering remains of the Humvee’s chassis. Red threw himself over Cal to cover him, his body curved to hold his weight off of him as much as possible. An explosion sounded from close by and the shots ceased. Red pried Cal’s sidearm out of his desperate grip. “You won’t need this. You’re covered.”
“Bowie.” Red flipped a length of stretchy rubber and a tongue depressor at the soldier beside him. “Get a tourniquet on that leg.”
Cal barely felt the needle he jabbed into the bend of his arm. Red hooked up an IV.
Whose leg? Was it one of the guys’? When Bowie knelt at his side, Cal realized it was his leg they were talking about. Where were his men? Jazz? Neil? Ellison?
Cal tried to turn his head in the direction of the vehicle but the red-headed guy gripped his face. He nearly screamed as the pain shot to the top of his head.
“Don’t move your head. You have a broken jaw and maybe a broken neck.”
His body felt numb, but he could still move his arms and legs. “Mn.”
Red stopped what he was doing to lean over him. “Focus on getting through the next minute, Corporal, then the next five. Keep breathing. You’re going to make it.”
By not saying anything about the others, he was saying they were dead. Ellison with his dry wit. Jazz with his soft Tennessee twang who tried his patience. Neil, the quiet boy from Oklahoma. They were gone.
The pain of it crushed his lungs and brought every injury he had roaring to life. He couldn’t grit his teeth against the pain because his jaw didn’t work. Both his legs burned with agony. He choked out a groan while Red cut away his pants and applied pressure dressings around different parts of his legs.
When they lifted him onto a stretcher he yelped, every muscle in his body spasming against the pain. His vision went white, then gray again.
“Stay with me, Corporal.” The SEAL medic wrapped an ace bandage around the stretcher and his forehead, ensuring his head remained stationary. “I can’t give you any morphine because you have a head injury. They’ll assess you at the hospital and give you something for the pain then. You just have to hold on a little while longer.”
Five minutes seemed like an hour when the numbness receded and his injuries began to scream. His whole face ached and his eyes watered. His legs were on fire. Red crunched a chemical ice pack and put it to his face. The coolness eased the pain a tiny bit. He gripped the man’s wrist in gratitude.
A Black Hawk chopper came in low, spun around and landed in the desert a hundred feet from their location. The SEALs lifted the stretcher and carried him over.
The rotor blades whirled above, pounding him with air and jerking at his clothing. Three black body bags next to him rustled. He was flying back with his men, the men he’d begun the patrol with. Their faces, their voices, rushed back to him in a kaleidoscope of anguish. He’d swerved the Humvee too late to avoid the IED. The world had gone to hell. Tears streamed down his temples.
The medic on board the chopper reached across him and grabbed the IV bag from Red.
Flash, the SEAL sniper he’d worked with, leaned over him and gave his arm a squeeze. “You’re going to make it, Cal. Believe it.”
With the dead bodies of his men lying beside him, it was hard to believe in anything.
Chapter 1
‡
San Diego, California
Kathleen O’Connor braced her feet against the wind’s intermittent tug. From the twentieth floor of the new high-rise, she looked out across the open expanse of blue sky, dark gray-blue ocean, and the plethora of multi-level buildings around her. The extraordinary view would certainly be a draw once the structure was finished. At four hundred fifty feet high, it wasn’t the tallest building in San Diego, but it came close. She’d seen the plans and the scale model the team designed, and knew the exterior design for the complex would make it one of the most striking profiles in the city.
With her shiny new master’s degree from MIT mounted in her new, square office space, she dreamed of seeing some of her own designs constructed. But first she had to take the baby steps of settling into a team and pushing for her ideas to be accepted. She knew a lot about working as a team. Her professors had insisted on it in college.
She’d believed she had teamwork down pat in her personal life as well, until Lee demonstrated to her that nothing she had to offer was enough.
She quashed the thought and its inevitable accompanying bitterness. She wasn’t going to allow him to steal her joy. She was moving on with her life. She was going to be the most successful architect on the planet, have her own firm, and build structures that would be included in art history texts for generations to come.
Gee, was she setting the bar too high? The beginnings of a smile quirked the corners of her mouth.
“What do you think?” Paul Warren, project manager for Wiley Design and Construction, asked from behind her.
“It’s going to be amazing once it’s done.”
“The crown jewel of the company.”
“Thus far,” she added.
Warren laughed. In his early thirties, he had already begun to gray at the temples. With his olive skin and hazel eyes, he was an attractive man. Luckily he did nothing for her.
Her life was going to be about her work from now on. She wasn’t interested in an office romance. She doubted he was either. The vibes she was picking up were probably a knee-jerk reaction to the new kid on the block. She knew what she looked like in spite of her concealing dark blue jeans and gray MIT sweatshirt. Her hips were wide, though her stomach was flat. The sweatshirt strained against her breasts even though her waist was small. Her figure wasn’t fashionable, but it was what her Irish-American genes had decreed. She was through trying to fight it. Besides, fat lot of good the struggle to change her curves had done back in Boston.
She held the yellow hard hat in place. She hadn’t yet gotten the hang of adjusting the straps so it would fit properly. Her dark hair whipped across her face, blinding her. She removed the helmet, tucked it between her knees, gripped the long strands, and secured them with the rubber band she kept around her wrist specifically for that purpose.
The wind was picking up. It pushed against her with such force she swayed, her sweatshirt only partially holding off the biting chill.
“We always encourage a little competition in the company.”
Good. “With eight brothers, I come from a family of competitors.”
“Wow. Eight?”
She smiled at the shock in his expression. “My mom was determined to have a girl.” Bet that scared him off.
She grinned when he abruptly changed the topic and said, “We have a few more sites to hit before we go back to the office.”
“I’m eager to see them.”
A shout came from down the platform. She turned in that direction. From twenty feet away a man lay on the concrete belly-down, his upper body hanging over the edge. “Someone’s in trouble.” She broke into a jog across the concrete slab and knelt on the concrete next to the prone figure. Jerking the aggravating hard hat off, she dropped it on the floor before peering over the edge.
Held only by the single-handed grip the man beside her had on one of his arms, a man dangled below. The man’s eyes were wide with fear, his face pale, making the dark olive of his skin look gray. “Jesus, God, Cal, don’t let me fall,” he screamed.
The man called Cal grimaced and Kathleen could tell he was pushing against the concrete, probably to keep from being dragged over the edge by the other man’s weight.
They needed a counterbalance.
“Grab my legs,” Kathleen yelled at Warren while she flattened her body on the concrete. Warren gripped the waistband of her jeans and she ignored the uncomfortable familiarity of male fingers against her skin. She stretched both arms down. “Grab onto me,” Kathleen yelled against the wind. Just beyond the man’s shoulder, and twenty stories below, the ground rushed up to meet her as vertigo hit her and she experienced the falling sensation that went with it. Her stomach twisted. She closed her eyes against the sickening reaction and reached down blindly to grip the man’s flailing arm.
His fingers found her wrist and bit into it while she gripped whatever she could with her other hand. Warren’s shout was followed by the sound of running feet. The blare of an emergency buzzer attacked her ears. She flinched.
More hands gripped her legs and heaved back. Her fellow rescuer’s hard hat toppled off and went sai
ling over the edge as he was tugged back, too. The man being rescued was dragged onto the platform belly first. His face was stiff, and his eyes glittered wide with shock.
For several moments all of them just lay facedown on the cold concrete, their chests heaving. Someone killed the alarm, though for seconds it continued to reverberate in Kathleen’s ears. Her wrist ached as the man’s grip eased and he released her. She sat up.
Cal sat up, rolled his shoulders, and extended and retracted his arms a few times, as though easing overworked muscles. “You okay, Julio?” He gripped the man’s shoulder.
Julio sat up, his face wet with tears, and he wiped them away with the torn sleeve of his shirt. “Thanks to you, man. You saved my life. I saw the ground rising up to meet me and you—you just jerked me out of the air.”
He embraced his savior and pounded him on the back several times. Then he turned to Kathleen to grip her hand, and she noticed could barely feel the ache where his fingers had dug into her wrist. It was blessedly numb.
“Señorita.” A stream of Spanish followed that she only understood because of his expression and the fervent kiss he pressed on the back of her hand. She offered him a shaky smile. “I’m glad you’re all right.”
More men pushed forward to see what was happening. Surrounded by steel toe boots and long legs, Kathleen was hit by a wave of claustrophobia and moved to rise. Numerous hands gripped her arms and helped set her on her feet. Someone handed over her hard hat. Others patted her shoulders, her back. Two men rested hands on Julio’s shoulders in support.
“What the hell happened here?” Warren barked.
Julio raised his head. “The wind caught me, and I lost my footing and fell. Cal grabbed my arm, and I almost dragged him over the side, too. He saved my life.” Julio’s eyes flashed to her. “They both saved my life.”
“It was a team effort, Julio,” Cal said, his voice just audible above the force of the wind. He tilted his head up, and his startling blue eyes settled on her face. He gave her a nod of acknowledgement.
Breaking Boundaries (SEAL Team Heartbreakers Book 5) Page 1