A Prince Among Men (Red, Hot & Blue)

by Cat Johnson

  Dedication

  For all the men and women in uniform and those loved ones who stand beside them.

  For my consultants in combat boots who patiently answer my many questions.

  For the dedicated readers who have stood behind me for eight—now nine—books in the Red, Hot & Blue series.

  Chapter One

  Afghanistan, early 2008

  Sergeant of the guard. The title sounded really impressive, unless you knew what it meant—twenty-four straight hours of guard duty.

  What bastion of military intelligence thought that would be a good idea? Certainly not the Army infantrymen who had to endure it. Of that, Sergeant Ryan Pettit was certain. His being sure of anything at all was pretty amazing, because after one long shift of guard duty, gallons of coffee and no sleep, he wasn’t clear on much.

  There was something else Ryan thought pretty much a certainty. Though going to bed would be welcome about now, his mind was definitely too wound up and caffeinated to sleep. No matter how worn down his body felt as he finally made his way to his quarters, he doubted sleep would come easily.

  An unwelcome, bright orange ball on the horizon had Ryan squinting against the glare during the walk to his room. He almost didn’t recognize it as the sun. It had been so long since he’d seen it shine over his little corner of Afghanistan.

  At least it had stopped raining for a few minutes. But the fact that the sun was up and shining was in direct contradiction with his plans to go to bed. It would do nothing to help convince his weary but over-stimulated body and mind it was time to go to sleep.

  Oh, well. It wasn’t the first time he’d been exhausted this tour of duty, nor would it be the last. With an air of acceptance of that unavoidable reality, Ryan absently reached for the handle of his door. Home, sweet home, at least for now.

  Once inside the cozy—a nice way of saying laughably tiny—mud hut, he looked around. Ryan shared his lodging with his squad leader, Staff Sergeant David Hawkins, but Hawk wasn’t here. It took only one quick glance to confirm to Ryan he was alone. That wasn’t a surprise. If there were a job to do, Hawk would be out there doing it, even at the crack of dawn. If possible, the man spent less time sleeping than Ryan did, and that was saying something.

  Since it was doubtful he could fall right to sleep anyway, he decided to take advantage of the privacy and this rare opportunity to update his oft-neglected blog.

  Ryan sat and flipped open the lid of his laptop. Hawk was a good roommate and a good leader, but he also didn’t get the whole World-Wide-Web thing. If Hawk didn’t have the incentive of emailing his cutie girlfriend, Emily, back in the States, Ryan doubted his leader would have any recreational use for cyberspace at all.

  Hawk was a hands-on kind of guy, but he didn’t consider putting hands on a computer keyboard part of that credo. He definitely didn’t understand that Ryan often gave up sleep to write his own military blog. Ryan found it was simply easier to avoid Hawk seeing him doing it whenever possible rather than debate the point and listen to Hawk’s stubborn opinion about it.

  Maybe it was stupid, but Ryan wasn’t going to ask for any more razzing than he already got from his leader. Why look for trouble? That was Ryan’s credo, and to date it had served him well.

  Meanwhile, even though he didn’t get to it as often as he liked, Ryan’s blog had gained quite a following judging by the number of hits and comments it got. One woman, screen name Vicki V, had commented on every post for the last month, telling him how beautiful his writing was. Ryan got a secret thrill from hearing compliments like that.

  All right, truth be told, Vicki V’s compliments were not the only thing that sent a thrill through him. He and Vicki, whoever and wherever she may be, had gotten kind of flirty with each other lately. That was another reason he’d often log in rather than hit the rack.

  Their entire correspondence so far had been conducted in public blog comments, which meant they had to get creative to keep things PG on the surface. Even so, the undercurrents in their messages hinted toward something more. Ryan found the public but kind of sexual nature of their relationship a huge turn-on. That probably just proved he’d gone far too long without having a woman.

  A yearlong deployment with little to no chance of sex led a man to do strange things. Blog flirting being one of them, he supposed. He pushed aside the disturbing thought that he knew nothing at all about Vicki. Hell, she could just as easily be a man with a woman’s screen name as she could be someone’s ninety-year-old grandmother.

  He pushed those unpleasant thoughts aside. No use squashing the illusions he’d created about Vicki since the chance of his ever meeting her was slim to none. He’d rather continue to think of her as smart and sexy and with very good taste in milblogs.

  After throwing one last furtive glance over his shoulder to look out the window and confirm Hawk wasn’t on his way back to the hut, Ryan set fingers to keyboard. He logged into his blog account using what he thought was his very clever screen name Groundpounder. After all, that’s what he was in the Army infantry—a groundpounder and proud of it.

  Waiting for him on his latest blog post, just as he’d hoped, was a new comment from Vicki V.

  Ryan grinned. She never let him down. If only his real girlfriend back in Germany was as reliable as Vicki. Though to be fair, Gretchen was not exactly his girlfriend—theirs was a complicated relationship.

  Dismissing thoughts of Gretchen for the time being, Ryan leaned forward to devour each and every new word from Vicki.

  Groundpounder,

  You never disappoint. Again, I say bravo. Your words sent a shiver straight through me, culminating in an ending that left me breathless. My only complaint, you don’t do it often enough.

  Looking forward to the next time you come (back to the blog, that is).

  Vicki

  Ryan blew out a long, slow breath and leaned back. Damn, his cock was starting to get hard just from reading her words, and the subtle double entendres within them.

  The next time you come…

  Tired or not, after that Ryan had a feeling he would be coming in the naughty sense of the word sooner rather than later.

  Drawing in a deep, steadying breath, Ryan leaned forward again and hit Reply.

  Dearest Vicki V,

  Once again, your compliments never fail to inspire this humble soldier to do exactly as you wish. I will do my best to come far more often, starting today.

  Your servant,

  Groundpounder

  Fueled with new inspiration, Ryan ignored his hard-on for the present and began typing his next post.

  When I left you with my last blog post titled “Cheeseburger in Paradise—Not”, I believe I was complaining about eating meatloaf patty for nearly every day of the week. Thanks to a welcome care package from a troop support site last mail call, we now have ketchup, hot sauce, grated Parmesan cheese and ranch dressing with which to disguise said meat patty and make it a bit more palatable. But never fear, I have something new to complain about: the weather.

  Oh, yeah, have we got weather. Everyone here thought freezing temperatures were a bad thing. But just when I assumed it couldn’t get any worse than winter in Afghanistan, with the waist-deep snow, the midnight frigid treks to the pee-tubes when nature chooses to call at the most inopportune times, or the challenges presented us by frozen toothpaste and water bottles, it hit—Afghani Spring. Hey, that might make a good song title.

  Anyway, it’s been rainy here. Pouring rain mixed with hail at times, and it has been like that for days, barely letting up for a moment, and definitely not for long enough to dry out the paths or the mud huts we live in. Everything is absolutely saturated, my last pair of c
lean socks included.

  My base is at such a high elevation that most times it seems we are in the middle of the storm itself, almost walking in the clouds. Real fun when lightning strikes, especially when one happens to be using the above-mentioned pee-tubes at the time. Can you say lightning rod? Yikes.

  The good news is that with the coming of spring, the snow has mostly dissipated and there is only a bit of powder still on the higher peaks. The bad news is that when warmer weather arrives so does the wildlife—snakes, scorpions, lizards and spiders—and also unfortunately, so do the local bad guys. Enemy contact has increased substantially, to put it mildly.

  I often have the feeling of being watched. It is becoming a familiar sensation—the tingle at the back of my neck. It’s usually followed by a pop, then the whoosh and bright trail across the night sky of a rocket-propelled grenade. It’s inevitable, I guess. After all, you can’t swim in shark-infested waters and expect the bloodthirsty predators to just stare at you. To paraphrase the great bard, Jimmy Buffet, there are bad guys to the left and bad guys to the right and we’re the only bait in town.

  Ryan leaned back in his chair and reread what he’d written. He was about to launch into the news that a new group of British soldiers had recently arrived to join the US, Afghan and Romanian Army troops already occupying the forward operating base when he heard a muffled shout cut through the air.

  The hair on the back of Ryan’s neck stood on end. He grabbed his weapon with one hand and his helmet with the other. Luckily, he’d never gotten around to removing his body armor, so he saved a bit of time there and was outside running toward the unknown situation in seconds.

  Ryan saw one of the guys in his squad, Sergeant Trent Wallace. Wally staggered forward, looking dazed as he came out of the base’s operations center. While standing in the drizzling rain, which had begun to fall again, Wally reached up and brushed what appeared to be large hunks of dirt from the top of his head.

  When he got closer, Ryan watched as his teammate touched his hair again and then inspected his hands, as if he were checking for blood.

  “Wally, are you okay? What the hell happened?”

  Wally barely had time to point to the structure next to him when Ryan heard a loud groaning noise. He stood, wide-eyed and unbelieving, as the building appeared to shift slightly and ever so slowly to one side. The operations center was just a fancy name for the mud room containing radios and maps, but as crappy as it was, it would still be really bad if it fell down. That’s exactly what appeared to be happening.

  “Holy shit. That building’s going to cave.” Ryan’s shocked observation brought the speechless Wally to his senses. He leapt farther away from the hut.

  Ryan’s gaze shifted to the other section of the building—the attached living quarters. Losing the equipment in the operations center under a pile of mud was one thing, but losing the men still sleeping in the attached living quarters was quite another. As Ryan watched helplessly, it appeared inevitable that both sections of the mud hut were collapsing with nearly a dozen men about to be buried within.

  He’d already taken a step forward to warn the Joes, who were most likely all still sleeping inside at this hour, when Hawk appeared from out of the hazy dawn.

  “Get those men out of that building. Now.” Ryan’s squad leader was shouting as he ran.

  Since he’d been about to do exactly that, Ryan was the closest and fastest to respond. Wally was still kind of dazed and wouldn’t be much help, so Ryan sprinted through the door of the mud hut, shouting for the troops to get out.

  As soon as he cleared the doorway, he felt the plywood floor begin shifting beneath his feet, but it was the walls visibly quivering that held his attention. That was until he dared to raise his gaze to the ceiling and check to see if it was still holding up.

  Amazingly, he didn’t see sky yet. Taking that as a good sign, Ryan continued to shout at the recently sleeping but now very wide-awake soldiers. Those in the top bunks leapt down half-dressed. Instinct kicked in as every one of them grabbed for body armor and weapons first. It wasn’t until they were suited up that they tried to load their arms with the things most important to each of them—family photos, laptops. Whatever was in reach and could be easily carried.

  Aware of the others around him doing the same, Ryan tried to help by grabbing what he was able. Everyone dumped what they could carry outside where it would be clear of danger from the collapse, each man running back in for more. By his second trip inside, Ryan realized it was only a matter of seconds before it would all come crashing down.

  Having been stationed in California during a point in his career, Ryan had once had the dubious privilege of experiencing an earthquake firsthand. That was the only thing he could compare this to, the surreal feeling as a large part of the rain-saturated ceiling finally gave way while the walls began to buckle before his very eyes.

  As one soldier reached for his laptop and spent precious time struggling to get it unplugged from the extension cord, Ryan grabbed him by the arm. “Bender, you gotta get out now. These walls are starting to go.”

  Diving headfirst, Ryan and Bender, carrying his laptop but without its now abandoned power cord, were barely able to leap clear as everything mere feet behind them collapsed with a loud roar. Huge logs and sections of rock-hard, water-soaked ceiling crashed down as Ryan, lying in the mud, watched in amazement.

  “Holy fucking hell.” Nearby, Wally let out an uncharacteristically foul curse. ”I’ll be goddamned. This all started with just a few pieces of dirt hitting me in the head. Look at it now.”

  Hoisting himself out of the muck, Ryan ignored the sorry state of his mud-covered cammies as he blinked the rainwater out of his eyes. “Damn. That was close.”

  “You can say that again.” From next to Ryan, Hawk agreed.

  “What now?” Ryan glanced at his squad leader.

  Hawk sighed and looked at the assembled group of shell-shocked soldiers and their scattered belongings littering the wet ground. “Now I’m going to have to go and break the bad news to the company commander. I’ll get back as soon as I can to help clean this up. Meanwhile, Pettit, organize the squad and dig what you can salvage out of that mess. And have a team set up temporary sleeping quarters for the displaced troops in the other buildings.”

  Inwardly, Ryan thought Yeah, right. Eight men from their squad and the three most recent arrivals from the British troops had been squashed into what was now rubble, and Hawk wanted them all relocated to the other buildings, which were already fully occupied?

  Outwardly, Ryan nodded crisply. “Yes, sir.”

  With the responsibility for the cleanup temporarily in Ryan’s hands, Hawk took off in search of the commander.

  Now fueled by adrenaline as well as caffeine, Ryan took quick stock of the situation. He would get the job Hawk had assigned to him done, but he could forget about sleep for the near future.

  Within a quarter of an hour, he and his squad had the personal belongings on the ground covered with a tarp to protect them from the incessant rain. He had rotating crews digging for more salvage amid the rubble. Meanwhile, a team of soldiers led by Wally had been sent to find any spare mattresses or blankets and begin setting up temporary sleeping quarters in the other buildings.

  Ryan’s squad worked together well, whether it was on a mission or digging in the mud. His troops weren’t the problem, but as he looked around, it seemed two of the new British arrivals, who’d done nothing yet to help, just might be.

  Walking up to the two men sitting on the sidelines while everyone else worked, Ryan kept international diplomatic relations in mind.

  “Is anything wrong here?” He mustered as much politeness as he could in the state he was in.

  “No, Sergeant. I’m fine. Stunned is all.” The Brit who’d spoken looked away from Ryan to glance pointedly at his companion as he answered and began to rise.

  The other Brit, looking panicked, pointed toward the streak of blood smeared across his friend’s
forehead. “You need to see a medic, sir.”

  “So you’ve said numerous times. And thank you for your concern, Rumsfield, but I really am fine and I’d like to help.”

  “But, sir—”

  “Rumsfield, this place is in a shambles. I’m not going to sit around on my arse while the rest of the lads work. I’ll let the medic take a look after I help.”

  Ryan watched the exchange between the two with about as much interest as could be expected given he was wet, dirty and tired. He did spare a thought that they bickered more like an old married couple than a couple of soldiers, even for Brits.

  “We’re digging out what stuff we can,” Ryan informed Lieutenant Wales, the bloodied Brit’s name according to the name tape on his mud-caked uniform. Hell, if Wales said he wanted to help in spite of what this Rumsfield guy thought, Ryan may as well tell him what needed doing.

  Wales nodded crisply in response to Ryan. And with one last glance at the still-concerned Rumsfield, Wales was off toward the heap of rubble, his friend a shadow right behind him as he went.

  Ryan watched their departure for a few seconds before heading off to do one of the thousand or so other things that needed to be done before his head would hit a pillow.

  Chapter Two

  It appeared the press conference would be starting late. Again. In spite of the fact that the overly warm room had long ago filled with reporters, the British Prime Minister had yet to appear to answer their questions.

  Meanwhile, Vicki Vanover had already checked her email on her shiny new phone, organized her notes and had even cleaned all the old crumpled gum wrappers out of the bottom of her oversized bag.

  With an impatient huff, Vicki placed her camera gently on the floor and pulled her cell phone back out of her weathered—okay, perhaps beaten-up was a better description—leather satchel.

  Moments of free time were already too few and far between. Since Vicki was unwillingly experiencing one right now, she might as well use the time to surf over to her newest favorite online pastime, reading military blogs.