Once a Warrior

by Fran Baker

  Even though she knew better, Cat blamed the salty perspiration that was trickling down her forehead for making her eyes sting. Maybe it was too soon for her to be attracted to another man. Maybe not. But she had opened her heart to him, urged him to take it, and had felt his own heart racing to accept before he’d ruthlessly snapped his control back in place. Crushed, she angled her chin and forced her lips to curve into a smile. “I’m fine.”

  It took a vicious twist of will on his part to ignore that wounded look in her eyes behind the veil, the echo of pain in her voice. So what if she made him feel clean and innocent again? Made him forget that there was anything or anyone on the planet except the two of them? So what if she had reached in and clamped a hand on his heart? It wasn’t fair to either of them to let this go any farther than it already had. Because the more he wanted her, the more he needed her, the more difficult it would be to let her walk away.

  “Let’s go.” He looped his arms around her and, together, they moved forward.

  Cat’s second trip through the jungle seemed to go not only smoother but also faster than the first. Oh, there were still vines and roots and creepy things that hissed and slithered and crawled. But she was too busy holding tight to the little miracle in her arms to worry about anything happening to herself. And with Cain at her side, despite the emotional distance he’d put between them, she felt safer than she’d ever felt in her life.

  “We’re almost there,” he said when they reached the river.

  She let out a sigh of relief on hearing that. “Thank heavens.”

  He untied the netting he had wrapped her and the baby in, wadded it into a ball and stuck it in his pocket. Then he scooped her up into his arms and started wading out to the boat. He’d left the ladder hanging from the rail the night before, but she couldn’t figure out how they were going to accomplish their reboarding without getting the baby wet.

  “Grab the ladder with one hand,” he said when her feet were secure on the bottom rung, “then give the baby to me.”

  As soon as she’d climbed up the ladder and over the rail, she reached down and took the baby from him so he could do the same.

  “We did it!” Cat crowed as she covered the baby’s face with kisses.

  Basking in the attention, he gurgled.

  “If you two lovebirds will excuse me . . .” Cain removed the pack from his back, then reached into the purse she was wearing Pancho Villa style and took out the can of mosquito repellent. He walked toward the hatch like he had an army of red ants in his pants. Only it was leeches, not ants, that were worming around in there. “I’ve got a little problem I need to take care of.”

  While he was gone, she carried the baby into the wheelhouse to get him out of the sun. He had no fever now and his coloring was so much better than it had been the night before, but he was beginning to fuss and she didn’t know whether that meant he needed a clean diaper or he wanted a bottle. She took the sheet out of the backpack and spread it on the floor to change him. Then just to be on the safe side, she fed him.

  “I’m new at this mothering stuff, pal,” she explained as she lifted the baby to her shoulder and patted his back to burp him. “So you’ll just have to put up with me until I learn the ropes.”

  “Don’t you think it’s about time you gave him a name?” Cain was standing in the doorway wearing a pair of dry jeans. He was shirtless, but his slicked-back wet hair and smooth jaw told her he’d showered and shaved while he was below.

  That made her think of the bra and panties she’d left hanging in the head. And that made her blush. To hide the hot color that was climbing her cheeks, she shifted the baby to the crook of her arm and smiled down at him.

  He grinned up at her, but Cat was pretty sure it was just gas. Still, she took the opportunity to waggle his cute little nose and stroke his cheek. “What is this?” Now she was positive he smiled. “Men against women?”

  “It’s going to be us against the Cong if we don’t get a move on.” Cain’s statement was a grim reminder that all wasn’t sweetness and light.

  Her face was pinched with anxiety as she looked up at him. “Should I take the baby down to the cabin?”

  “Use that sheet to make him a pallet on the floor,” he suggested. “Maybe the motion of the boat will rock him to sleep.”

  “Come on, Horatio.” Cat gave the baby a quick squeeze before she handed him up to Cain and got to her feet. She tucked her hair, which was damp with sweat, behind her ears. “It’s naptime.”

  “Horatio?”

  “It’s only temporary, until I can think of a permanent name.”

  “Frankly, my dear,” Cain said in his best Clark Gable voice, “I think he looks like a Fletcher.”

  She laughed when the baby grabbed her finger. “How about Flipper?”

  “Flipper Brown.” He pretended to mull that over, then nodded. “Not bad.”

  “Isn’t he beautiful?” Cat cooed.

  “Handsome,” Cain corrected.

  “And so alert!”

  “Coordinated, too.”

  The baby grinned again, and the two adults standing over him smiled at each other, becoming enmeshed in the illusion that they were proud new parents. That’s all it was, though—an illusion. Because the woman had no legal claim on him yet and the man never would.

  “Well, I’d better raise the anchor . . .” Cain came to his senses first, his smile vanishing like smoke as he relinquished the baby.

  Cat took him and, clutching his tiny body tightly, backed out of the wheelhouse. “I’ll go below and make him . . .”

  “Don’t forget the sheet.”

  “Oh”—she stooped to scoop it up—“right.”

  He stepped around her. “I’ll open the hatch doors for you.”

  “Yes . . . thanks.” Cat started down the first step, but the sheet she’d carelessly thrown over her shoulder had somehow gotten coiled around one of her ankles.

  “Don’t fall.” Cain caught her arm to steady her, his firm touch scorching her skin through the thin cotton sleeve of her pajamas.

  But he was too late. She’d already fallen. Not down the hatch, of course, but it was almost as devastating as if she had. Because she’d fallen in love with him. And it had literally knocked the wind out of her.

  “No . . .” She looked up into his worried gray gaze with a helpless mixture of wonder and despair. “I won’t fall.”

  Wrenching her arm from his grasp then, she fled down to the cabin as if an entire company of Viet Cong guerrillas was hot on her heels.

  * * * *

  Cain was just lighting a cigarillo when he heard Cat come topside. He took a drag, then blew a plume of smoke toward the wheelhouse ceiling. Thunderheads were building in the north, presaging a stormy night in Saigon, but here the sun still beamed hot and brilliant in the sky. And ahead, the river was calm and as gently curved as the woman who was making her way across the deck.

  He’d been tempted, so damn tempted, to take her up on that baby-I’m-yours look he’d seen in her eyes right before she’d run down the stairs. Had, in fact, felt his heart tumbling headlong after her. It was something that had never happened to him before. And it surprised the hell out of him.

  Not the lust. Hell, he’d been in let’s-get-it-on lust with plenty of women over the years. Sex without strings—that had always been his specialty. He wasn’t proud of it. Neither was he bragging about it. That was simply the way the world had turned.

  No, it wasn’t the lust but rather the love he felt for this one special, spunky woman that had struck him like a bolt out of the blue and left him reeling. Which in his line of work wasn’t just dumb. It was deadly. Because a man who lost himself to emotion was in serious danger of losing his life.

  So now, he parked the slim cigar in the corner of his mouth and flicked her a smile over his shoulder. “Is Flipper asleep?”

  Cat had taken the coward’s way out, hiding in the cabin and using the baby as an excuse not to have to face the man. Emotions had poure
d through her—sweet and confusing and sad—as she’d tried to come to terms with her feelings. Despite what Johnny had done, she knew she would always care for him in a special way. He’d been her first love, the boy to whom she’d given her heart when she was but a girl.

  But what she felt for Cain was different. It encompassed her entire being. She loved him as a woman should love a man—intellectually, spiritually and physically. The fact that it was a love without hope of a future made it no less genuine. It simply spurred her determination to make the most of the few days they had left to them. Because those few days would have to last her a lifetime.

  So now, she took a deep breath and answered the question he’d asked her as she stepped in beside him. “Finally.”

  He shot her a glance, then tucked his tongue firmly in his cheek. “You look a little frazzled.”

  She blew her sweat-soaked hair out of her eyes. “Don’t start any trouble, and there won’t be any trouble.”

  He snapped her a crisp salute. “Yes, ma’am.”

  Cat tried to laugh, but couldn’t quite manage it. Her heart had fluttered into her throat and swelled. She laid her hand on his arm and looked up at him. “Thank you, Cain.” Her voice went husky with emotion. “Thank you for my son.”

  Fucking war, he thought on a sudden burst of fury. He gunned the throttle when what he really wanted to do was turn this old tub around and head for the South China Sea. Take Cat someplace safe and secluded and solely their own. A peaceful place where he could kiss her and savor the taste of her mouth, the silk-soft texture of her skin for the rest of his days. He wanted nothing more than to breathe in the life of her, the gentle compassion wrapped in courage, the grace of her body against his. And he wanted nothing less than all of her for all time.

  Because that was impossible, because he was already committed to a cause that was sacred to him, he focused his attention on the river that was carrying them back to Saigon. “You’ll make a good mother, Cat.”

  It wasn’t simply the compliment, but the confident way he paid it that touched her deeply. At the same time, though, she sensed him pulling back on every level. She dropped her hand before she made a fool of herself. Again.

  “He really is a sweet baby. And just a touch stubborn.”

  “I take it he didn’t want to go down for his nap?”

  “Not at first. So I gave him a bath in the galley sink, which he loved. Then I gave him his medicine, which he hated.” With a half-laugh, she lifted her hair off her hot neck. “And then I had to rock him and sing to him until—”

  “He’s making up for lost time.”

  Seeing his jaw square reminded her that he was a man who’d been through hell as a boy. He’d survived, though it tore at her heart to think of the scars he must carry on his soul. Losing his parents was bad enough. But as a student teacher, she’d seen how cruel children could be. How they formed little cliques and, often simply echoing sentiments they’d heard at home, made fun of other children who were somehow different from them.

  Cat knew the slurs Cain must have been subjected to. Words like “chink,” or much worse, that would have been intolerable to a boy who loved his mother and was proud of his heritage. She knew too that he’d probably had to study harder, run faster, jump higher, work longer just to keep pace with his “pure-bred” peers.

  Pained, not only for him but also for any child who had to suffer those kinds of taunts, she looked away. She stared out the window and toward the shore, where a grove of twisted banana and coconut trees reminded her that this was a country at war. “May I ask you something?”

  “Shoot.” He heard their rolling thunder before he saw them—a flight of jets, their silver bellies reflecting the sun, the bombs they carried hanging slim and dark from their wings—and it all came back to him in a flash. The soaring sense of freedom in conquering the heavens. The electric buzz of terror while dropping ordinance in 45 degree dives with the black puffs of flak and automatic gunfire thickening the air around him. The almost sexual thrill of flying into the face of death and surviving.

  Cat waited until the deafening whine of the planes’ engines faded into a dull roar. While she waited, she watched a woman and a scrawny boy in a rice paddy stop working and stare up at those birds of the Apocalypse. She couldn’t see their eyes, of course, but she imagined they were pools of fear. When the woman put a succoring arm around the boy’s shoulders, she thought of the baby sleeping peacefully below. And she wondered who would have comforted him if she hadn’t come along.

  “How many of these children would you say there are?” she asked as the jets’ contrails drifted behind them like lazy carnival streamers in the air.

  “From this war, tens of thousands.” Cain uttered a sound that could have passed for a laugh, though it was far from jovial. “Since 1945—who knows?—probably hundreds of thousands.”

  She turned back to him, shocked, and tilted her head. “That many?”

  “Soldiers always leave children behind, in every army.” He took another drag on his cigarillo. “Confining it to Asia now, have you ever stopped to think how many children the American occupation of Japan and South Korea have produced?”

  She hadn’t, of course. “I wonder why I’ve never read anything about it.”

  “No one’s bothered to write the story. And an ugly story it is, too.” A muscle flicked in his jaw. “In Japan, for instance, those children are called Half’ and are ostracized for their Caucasian or black features by a society that prides itself on its ethnic purity.”

  “How sad.”

  “It’s even more complex in Korea. They respect Americans, almost all of whom have mixed blood, but they don’t respect Amerasians. So the kids, who are branded twi ki—half-breed—face a lifetime of discrimination, unemployment, and even exclusion from marriage.”

  “In other words,” Cat deduced, “they treat the children like criminals when their only ‘crime’ was being born.”

  “What you have to understand,” Cain explained, “is that paternity, family name, means everything in Confucian societies. It’s the father who enrolls the child in school, bringing along the family birthright. Later the missing name means the child is excluded from the family trade, which is handed down by the father or paternal uncles. Because Amerasian children must retain their mother’s name, they have no family rights.”

  “Their mothers must be devastated.”

  “Most of them are outcasts themselves for having consorted with the enemy.”

  “And the American fathers of these children?”

  “Some of them really want to marry the women but can’t get permission. Others don’t even know they’ve sired a child. And still others just don’t give a damn.”

  She thought a moment. “Do the people at the Pentagon or in Congress know this is happening?”

  “They don’t want to know,” he said in a derisive tone.

  “Why not?”

  “Because in addition to the politicians having to admit that we got into this war for all the wrong reasons and the generals having to admit that we’re losing it for all the right reasons, they’d have to assume responsibility for the kids that resulted from it.”

  “What about the commanders on site?”

  He snorted. “Half of them have hootch-girls themselves.”

  “Hootch-girls?” Cat’s confusion made a blank of her face.

  Cain’s think-about-it look told her he was talking about women like Lily.

  “I wonder if Colonel Howard has a hootch-girl?” she murmured.

  Spotting a fishing boat along the shoreline, he cut his speed to avoid rocking it. “Ol’ Pencil-Dick is too busy trying to track me down to worry about women.”

  “Pencil-Dick?” She barely conquered the laugh that sprang to her lips. “Now who’s calling names?”

  His white teeth grinned around his cigarillo without a hint of apology. “And that’s a nice one.”

  Frowning now, she got back to the subject under discussion. �
�What about the commanders who don’t have hootch-girls?”

  “They believe . . .” His smile faded. “Well, it’s a pretty gross old military adage.”

  “I’m a big girl,” she said flatly.

  “They believe that a man who won’t fuck won’t fight.”

  She watched the smoke from his cigarillo haze, then vanish. “I’m still surprised the media hasn’t picked up on this.”

  “They’re so focused on their own agenda—which mainly consists of making war on our warriors—that they’ve yet to notice the boom in babies with round eyes and wavy hair.”

  Cat tilted her head, considering. “What if someone called it to their attention?”

  “Front page news, maybe.” Cain hailed an old couple on a sampan going in the opposite direction, then swiped his sweaty face with the back of his hand. “Would you mind getting me a beer the next time you go below? I’m wringing wet.”

  “No, of course not. I need to check on the baby, anyway.” As she stepped out of the wheelhouse, she drew a breath that lay heavily in her lungs. “Gosh, it’s really gotten humid.”

  “Storm’s coming,” he said, and put the pedal to the metal, hoping to make port before it broke.

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  They didn’t make it.

  When the first patrol boat came plowing through the murky water and pulled alongside them, less than a mile from the Port of Saigon, Cain didn’t give it much thought. He simply figured it was heading for the naval base on up the river and that the small chop had thrown it off-course. But when the second and third boats moved in like armored geese to complete the V formation, he knew that this was his own personal welcoming party.

  Lightning blazed in the cloud-bruised sky as he eased back on the throttle and, ever watchful, started looking for a way out. Thunder boomed, loud as a shot across his bow, when the patrol boats slowed right along with him. At the same time a fourth boat pulled in behind him, blocking that exit.