by Aiden Bates
"Oh calm down." Morna glared at him. "We might not even survive this firefight. Make yourself useful and tell me how many people we're dealing with on the other side of that door."
The prisoner closed his eyes and shrunk into himself even further. "Um. There are four of my friends, two men who say they're from Daesh, and six from some bunch of lunatics calling themselves White Dawn."
"Oh, good. Are you particularly attached to any of them?" Mal checked his gun.
"Well, my friends are my friends. I'd rather they didn't die."
"What's your name?" Morna jostled him.
"Sam. Sam Sahnoune."
"Well, Sam, we'll do our best. But let's face it, if someone's shooting at us, our options are limited." Morna faked a cheery smile and rolled her eyes at Mal.
Mal couldn't decide if she was being ridiculous or not.
He took the precaution of searching Sam Sahnoune before securing him within the little stairwell room. "Be a gem and wait right here, would you? If we fail, they'll see we overpowered you and all that rot. And if we win, well, we'll be back in a bit."
Sam snorted. "That fills me with confidence."
Morna jerked her head toward Sam. "I think he's getting it." She turned her head toward the door. "How do you want to do this?" She switched to English, for convenience.
"Hm. I'd say grenade, but we don't want to catch his friends in the crossfire." Mal waggled a hand back and forth. "Unless we do, that is. Got any smoke grenades?"
"Of course." Morna puffed herself up a little. "I love those things. You're thinking we toss off a couple of those and go in, even the odds a bit?"
"Great minds do think alike. They're a bit of a fire hazard, but it's not like we weren't planning to set the place off anyway." Mal shrugged. "Do you want to do the honors, sister dear?" He reached for a mask to draw over his face. The smoke didn't agree with his lungs as a general rule.
Morna had her mask on, pulled down below her face. "I thought you'd never stop yapping long enough to ask, brother dear." She pulled two smoke grenades out of her pack. In a fluid motion, she stepped up to the door, opened the door, and tossed them through.
Only then did she take the time to draw her mask up.
Mal was already firing. He'd gotten a glimpse at the room before he headed in. He'd been worried at first, but now he could see the newer recruits were as safe as they could be during a firefight. Human behavior being what it was, the twelve people in the room had separated themselves off into little sects. The men who knew each other already huddled in a corner, unarmed, and clearly nervous. Two older men, who had a more Eastern Mediterranean than North African look to them, stood on the other side of the room.
And over near the electronics, which had to be running on prayer since there was no electrical service to this old pile of rocks, sat the White Dawn men. They were easy to pick out from their compatriots. They didn't just look the part. It was the way they completely refused to acknowledge either group of Muslims in the room while they drank beer and watched football.
As the smoke filled the room, Mal fired toward the center and right. That was where the real dangerous types were. He heard one body hit the ground and another curse and cry out that he'd been hit.
It was a good start.
The others moved, and Mal couldn't rely on memory. He heard someone about his height, and heavier than him, approach from the side and ducked under what he hoped was a punch or a stab. He shot his assailant in the stomach and let him fall.
He pulled his knife off of his belt and held it in his other hand. If people were going to get that close to him, maybe the knife would be better. He darted away from where he'd been, lest someone saw muzzle flash in all the smoke and grabbed the next victim.
As his arms wrapped around his enemy's neck, he could feel the man had no hair. There had been three White Dawn men sporting the shaved head look, while all of the other men had full heads of hair. Mal drew his knife across the man's throat and stepped away.
He almost stepped into a problem. The smoke was cloying, choking, and the only reason Mal could see anything was his goggles. Even then, he couldn't see much. White hot pain blossomed in his left arm as he caught a glimpse of something quickly moving across his field of vision.
He shot out in that direction, and someone screamed. The scream was high pitched enough Mal was worried for a moment, but it didn't quite have Morna's tone or timbre. He kept fighting.
Some bastard grabbed his leg and tried to give his knee a wrench, but Mal got free and stabbed the man for his trouble. The others finally found their own weapons, but all of them seemed disinclined to use firearms in a place like this. Mal knew Morna preferred to stab in an old, thick-walled building like this, lest bullets ricochet.
Mal wanted whatever advantage he could get.
The fight was over in twenty minutes, including time to "clean up." Three of the newer recruits had joined the fray and tried to fight for their new masters. They'd died like the others. Mal felt a pang of regret for that, but only a small one. He'd done what he had to do, and he couldn't regret defending himself.
The remaining friend of Sam begged to be released. He told a similar story to Sam's. Mal wasn't all that interested in their tale of woe. He'd heard it before, and he had limited patience for people who joined up with actual mass murderers to give themselves a sense of potency. He guessed he couldn't stop them, though, so he had to sit back and accept it.
The only problem was that now they had two prisoners. They didn't have anything to do with two prisoners. It wasn't as though the Wolves had a facility somewhere, some kind of headquarters. Mal and Morna couldn't just drive up to whatever dive Da was staying in now and dump the men on his doorstep.
Da wasn't much for forgiveness. Mal didn't think Da would have much to say to men who'd been caught up in a Daesh recruitment scheme.
For now, the O'Donnells hustled the men out to their car and drove off toward Narbonne. "Here's the thing, gentlemen." Morna gripped the steering wheel while she spoke. "We can't take you right back to wherever it is you're from. We found that little base of yours somehow."
"The other guys were just sleeping." Sam had gone ashy-pale when Mal escorted him past the bodies of the men he'd known, but he didn't say anything. Perhaps he knew what was good for him. "What if they just walk right back to Nimes?"
"Then that's their choice. I don't think that would be the wisest course of action, but then again these are the guys who decided to join a terrorist organization so maybe that's the kind of thing they'd do." Mal struggled to wrap a bandage around his cut arm. It would need stitches, but he couldn't do them in a moving car. Even doing them on himself would be a challenge.
Morna took over. "You're going to need to figure out how you talk about this, and what you say, and to whom. Also, I'd figure out how to talk very fast if I were you."
Mal's phone went off in his pocket. He didn't think his father would be calling right now — it was an odd time of day, and Da was a creature of habit. Sometimes things happened outside of his control, though, and he needed to convey new orders in a hurry.
The ringtone wasn't Da's, but that didn't give Mal much pause. Da used alternate phones sometimes or had to ditch the old one if the number got too hot. "Hello." Mal kept his voice pleasant and neutral and didn't bother looking at the caller ID. It was late, he was in pain, and he was tired.
"'Hello? I'm in Europe for the first time in how long and all I can get is 'Hello?'"
Trent's voice was teasing. At least it was mostly teasing.
Mal thought he might stop breathing. "Trent? Is that really you? Are you really in Europe?"
"You bet. We're in Toulon. We, ah, might need your help with something."
Mal looked into the rearview mirror. Would this help their guests or would it put them in more danger than they'd be with Da? "Excellent," he said. "We just finished up a little something. I wonder if you might be able to help us with some complications. There might be some good inf
ormation in it for you."
~
Trent fumed as he paced around the common area in the Toulon barracks house. "He's out there fighting."
"We know." Floyd sat on the couch. He had been slouching with his hand covering his eyes. Now he pulled the hand away and gave Trent a pissy look. "We know, because you've told us fifty-seven times. Yes, he's out there fighting."
Adami snickered. "What did you think he was going to do, Kelly? Go find a shelf and sit on it for nine months? Get real."
"He should be out there keeping himself safe, and he knows it. Hacking is one thing. Mixing it up is another."
"He's here." Chief's voice was mild as he called out from the window.
Trent's whole body shook. He hadn't seen Mal in weeks, and now that he was going to see the love of his life and he was too angry to do anything but sit here and fume. How dare Mal go out and put himself in harm's way like that? Never mind himself — Mal was a grown man who made his own choices, and he didn't truly know any other way of life. But how could he put their baby in harm's way like that? For crying out loud, didn't he care?
The door creaked open. Morna entered first. She marched in a kind of military state of alertness, scanning the room before she allowed the men following her to enter the building.
Trent's initial reaction was anger. How could she not trust them after everything they'd done for her? Then he got over himself. She wasn't so much worried about the SEALs as she was taking proper care with regard to the men in her charge.
The ropes around their wrists showed their prisoner status easily enough. Trent recognized one of the two from the identity card he'd carried in his pocket only today. "Sam Sahnoune!" he blurted.
Mal brought up the rear. He looked terrible. His hair was a mess from his helmet, and his face was streaked with soot. A blood-soaked bandage wrapped his arm, and blood stained his clothes as well. The only clean space was where a bullet-proof vest would have gone. "I see you've met," he said drily.
"No," Sahnoune denied, shaking his head. He spoke French, because of course he did. They were in France, not America, and Trent needed to keep his mind on the job. "I've never seen him! Tell me you didn't turn me over to more of —" He stopped himself when he noticed Floyd sitting on the couch. "Oh."
"These are some friends of ours," Mal explained. French hadn't ever been Trent's strong point, but he'd picked up enough of it running around the Mediterranean that he could carry himself off without too many problems. "They can keep you safer and more comfortable than we can."
"Hi, Sam." Trent grinned at the young man. "I met your mother. She's concerned about you."
Sam who, to be fair, had been through a lot recently, burst into tears. His friend caught him in his arms. "Will you take us to Cuba now?" the friend asked, suspicion in his eyes.
"That's not the plan." Chief entered into the conversation. "I definitely want to hear more about how you two wound up with these two. In the meantime, I think Gingerbread here might want to get a stitch or two, and you two might want to get a nap in."
Some of the men escorted the two defectors away, and others wandered off to their respective bunks. Morna disappeared too, and Trent wasn't sure where she was being escorted to, but she probably wanted a wash and a few hours' shuteye. The only thing that mattered to Trent was he was now alone with Mal.
Mal tossed him a wry grin. "So I'm guessing this isn't the reunion you were hoping for."
Trent had been torn between anger and relief. Mal was, at least, alive. The baby bump told him things were at least going well on that front. Mal's almost flippant comment tipped the scales into anger. "God damn it, Mal, you're supposed to be taking care of yourself!" He stalked into the kitchen to fetch the medical kit.
Mal was still there when Trent got back, but his entire demeanor had changed. He was so tired his face looked like a bruise, but now it looked like a bruised mask. "I'll be out of your hair just as soon as I can collect my sister."
"Oh my God, shut up." Trent rolled his eyes. "You're not going anywhere until I've taken care of that arm. Which is still bleeding, by the way. What were you thinking? You're pregnant. You've got a damn baby bump. Were you trying to have a miscarriage? Is that it?"
Mal looked at him through narrowed eyes. "Yes, yes, my super special condition means terrorists get free reign to do anything they want. One baby, who will probably die along with me when it's born, means more than the two hundred people who would have died if this particular group had gotten to pull off their plan."
"Would you shut up about dying? You're not going to die. We're working on bringing you to Virginia, okay?" Trent gestured to Mal's shirt. "Are you going to take that off or are you emotionally attached to it or something?"
"As a matter of fact, I can't take it off by myself right now." Mal glowered at him. "It's a wee bit painful between the bandage and the gaping hole in my arm. And I'm sure you're doing what you can to bring me back to your nation of homicidal maniacs, but let's be real. It's not going to happen." He met Trent's eyes. "Even if I were enthusiastic about going to America, and you were about the only thing it had going for it, I can't sit here and count on it happening. I have to be realistic."
"You have no faith in me at all, do you?" Trent unwrapped Mal's bandage. After looking at the injury, he decided to cut the shirt off. "You made this worse by using the arm after you got hurt."
"It was two against twelve. You thought I was going to get an injury time out?" Mal raised an eyebrow at him.
"What the actual fuck?" Trent threw the scissors across the room. They left a dent in the cheap plaster, and Mal jumped. "Mal, you are pregnant! You have a baby growing in your belly! You cannot just jump into a fight with odds like that! We're trained SEALs and we'd have hesitated before we tried something like that! What were you even thinking?"
"I was thinking they had plans to send some of those confused young men into a crowded football match with remote-detonated suicide vests." Mal stepped back from Trent. "Tell me, big bad SEAL. What would you have done? Sat back and waited for someone else to come to the rescue? Flailed your hands around and said, 'Oh dear, oh mercy me?' Prayed for a miracle?"
"That's different. I'm not pregnant." Trent reached for iodine.
"And I'm not someone who gets a bit of bad news and decides he has to sit back for nine months like some kind of goddamn doll." Mal spat out the words. "I'm going to keep doing my damn job until I can't do it anymore, and then I'll take the consequences. But if I sat by and let things happen, knowing I could have done something about it, there's no way I could have looked myself in the mirror."
"You're going to have to." Trent wagged his finger in Mal's face. "When you get to America, you're going to have to sit by and let things happen. You can't just go shooting up a bunch of terrorists willy-nilly. There would be consequences, and who would look after the kids?"
"Would you shut up about that?" Mal pulled away and snatched the iodine out of Trent's hand. "You know damn well I'm not going anywhere. Stop pretending."
"Well, maybe it would get easier if you didn't do things like release a damn virus into the CIA." Trent watched as Mal painted iodine over his own injury. It wasn't the first time he'd done it. It probably wasn't the last, either.
"Thread me a needle." Mal didn't ask, he just glared. "You think I'll last long enough to give birth if I start disobeying orders?"
"You guys get orders?" Trent almost dropped the needle.
"Of course we get orders." Mal snorted. "I'm not looking forward to the point when my father finds out I'm pregnant, to be honest. I might have to run."
Trent blinked at the casual way Mal said it. "Wait, you haven't told your family?"
"My family consists of Morna, who already knows, and my father, who's more like your command back in Virginia with an extra side of fanaticism." Mal took the needle and started to sew up the gash in his arm. It looked awfully deep to Trent, but Mal didn't flinch. "Taking ourselves out of the field for any reason other than an injury
isn't permitted, at all."
"But you're pregnant. He'll be happy about that. You're continuing the family." Trent couldn't tear his eyes away from the way Mal sewed his own skin, like he was mending a shirt.
"Not his cup of tea, I'm afraid. That would be taking ourselves out of the field because we were selfish enough to think about a night of pleasure instead of the good of the Wolves." Mal raised his eyebrows. "I'm not sure he understands how that works, in terms of birth control failure and such. Not sure he'd care, either."
He looked up at Trent again. "That's not the point. If I can find a way to avoid telling him and just tell him I had a bad injury and need to be out of commission for a while, I might be able to pull it off. Assuming I survive."
Trent had been caught up in sympathy for his lover, but the reminder of Mal's fear flipped him back to anger. "I don't understand why you think I'd abandon you. Or why you won't go to a hospital."