by Linda Howard
“Do your families ever meet the other team members?” she asked, unable to contain her curiosity. To date, she hadn’t met any of their family members or outside friends. Maybe they were like her and were too tired when they got home to hang out with friends.
“Sure,” Trapper said. “There are cookouts, things like that. Boom and Snake both have kids, and their wives do things together, take the kids to do stuff.”
Jina wondered if they’d had any cookouts in the past three months, because if they had, she hadn’t been invited. She didn’t let herself feel hurt; though she’d been assigned to Levi’s team, she wasn’t yet an official member because she hadn’t completed training. If—when—she was cleared and began going on missions, and they still didn’t include her, then she’d let herself brood about it, but that time wasn’t now.
While they were in a talkative mood, she pressed on. “Do your families call you by your team nicknames?”
“In a way,” Snake said. “My wife calls me by my name, but everyone else’s family members call me Snake.”
“Why Snake? Do you crawl fast on your stomach, or something?” She’d wondered about all their nicknames but was usually so busy trying to keep up and stay alive that she hadn’t asked.
In answer, he pointed to the two round scars on his forehead, rolling his blue eyes up as if he could see them.
She gaped at him. “A snake bit you? Really? What kind?”
“A rattler. I guess the only reason I’m alive is it didn’t eject any venom. I about pissed my pants, though.”
“You’d probably be called ‘Snake’ even if you weren’t on a GO-Team,” she muttered. “Why do we need nicknames anyway?” She didn’t like “Babe” at all, would never like “Babe,” and wouldn’t like it even if she was a babe, which she wasn’t.
“Technically, we don’t.” After their heart-to-heart talk in his truck on the first day, when he was making it plain to her she was the most expendable person on his team, Levi seldom spoke directly to her except in command. Hearing his voice behind her made her heart jump, and her stomach went into the jitters. She didn’t turn to look at him, though, instead holding herself as still as a rabbit being eyed by a cobra. “But we aren’t military so we don’t have the protection of a military structure behind us. We’re civilian, and officially unauthorized, no matter how unofficially authorized we are. It’s safer for us not to have our real names broadcast over a radio.”
She sighed. Unfortunately that made sense, which meant she wasn’t going to be able to jettison the “Babe.” Calling her that was probably already too ingrained, anyway. She wasn’t certain any of them even remembered her real name.
“What about you?” she asked, moving on to Jelly. “What’s behind your name?”
“Nothing as special as a snake bite, I just like jelly.” He gave her one of his beatific smiles that made him look about sixteen.
“On almost everything,” Snake pointed out.
“I like what I like.”
One by one she got the stories behind their nicknames. Boom got his nickname by falling on the top of a vehicle and making a loud boom; Voodoo’s name was because he was from Louisiana; Trapper once constructed a small trap out of sticks and caught a mouse; Crutch had broken three toes the first day of training and gimped around on crutches for a couple of weeks; and Levi was called Ace because he’d once played in the World Series of Poker. He hadn’t won the big pot, but he’d walked away with a couple of hundred thousand. Jina was impressed despite herself; she didn’t play poker, but she’d—out of boredom—actually watched some of the tournament the year before, so she wasn’t completely ignorant. Yeah, she could see him sitting stone-faced at a poker table with a bunch of other stone faces.
“You get the nickname trophy,” she said to Snake, smiling. “Getting snake-bit on the forehead is kind of exotic. Everyone else’s nickname is boring compared to yours.”
“Break time’s over,” Levi said brusquely. “Let’s get back to it.” He two-pointed his empty water bottle into the trash bin nearby and rose effortlessly to his feet, his powerful leg muscles and abs doing all the work.
Hah! Jina could do that too . . . now. She’d even practiced doing so at home, so no one would see her when she gracelessly collapsed to the floor. Getting up unaided required all sorts of muscles, muscles that she now had. She got to her feet, and per his instruction got back to it.
She could do this. She could handle anything he threw at her, and she was far more confident now than she’d been three months ago. She had this.
Two months later, she regretted even thinking those words. “Say what?” she said in horror. Surely she hadn’t heard him right. She couldn’t have heard him right. This was so far out of her capabilities it might as well be in outer space.
“Parachute training,” Levi repeated.
“Uh-uh. No.” Jina began backing away from him, as if distance would help; her hands were up as if she could ward off the words. “I can’t do that. I can’t jump out of a plane. That’s unnatural. Only crazy people do that.”
“Are you resigning?” he asked neutrally, though his cold dark eyes were boring into her. The other guys stopped what they were doing to listen; Voodoo snickered, but she didn’t expect anything else from him, the jerk, so she ignored him. In turn, they all ignored that she’d just called all of them crazy. Hey, if the tinfoil hat fit, wear it.
“No.” The word was thick on her tongue, but she managed to get it out. “Resign” was another word for “quit.” And though she’d stuck it out this long—five months now—climbing a freaking rope and running for miles and all sorts of other crap wasn’t in the same category as jumping out of a plane. Her survival instinct was too strong for that, and her need for an adrenaline rush way too weak. Pain and bone-deep fatigue had become her new normal, but jumping out of a plane . . . she didn’t know if she could.
“I’ll try,” she said, hearing the doubt in her own voice. She wanted to run screaming, because she knew—she knew—she wasn’t going to be able to do any suicidal leap out of a plane, but pure cussedness kept her in place. She was already beginning to shake in dread, just at the idea. God only knew what would happen when she was actually in a plane faced with the imminent prospect of plummeting to her death—pass out, maybe. Yeah, that would work. Maybe. She wouldn’t put it past him to pick up her unconscious body and toss her out of the plane.
Levi had thrown that bombshell at her while they were all kind of winding down after a long day of small-arms training, running, lifting weights, then swimming in the Olympic-sized pool in the gym the GO-Teams owned—or rather, that the government owned, unofficially and completely off the books.
While they’d been off doing other stuff she’d also spent a couple of hours with the drone, too, the real drone, a thing so miniaturized it was the size of a small bird, but equipped with high-definition cameras in both infrared and live-feed digital. With the equally state-of-the-art laptop and highly classified program, she could finesse Tweety, as she’d come to think of him, into a small pipe if she wanted to. She could perch him on a limb, peek from behind a rock, evade a diving hawk, which had taken her by surprise, but she had since learned raptors tended to see her little Tweety as prey. She was determined that Tweety would stay safe on her watch.
Sometime along the way, she had started hanging out some with the guys after training was over for the day, nothing social but sitting around afterward and shooting the shit. There had been some other socializing away from training because she’d heard them talking about it, but she still hadn’t been invited, and she’d noticed she was being excluded even if she hadn’t let herself react. She was damned if she’d let them know it bothered her.
Until now, swim days had been her favorite days of training, but she didn’t know if they could recover that ranking after being linked in her mind with parachute training. Still, good old swimming had a lot going for it; at least when there was swimming involved there were also showers, both befor
e and after the swim, and she now took a change of clothes—or two—in her car wherever she went. She didn’t have to go home filthy and tired, just tired. Being clean made a big difference. And she liked swimming, in a way she would never like climbing a rope or running in weather so hot she felt as if her skin was melting.
Other than the times when they were gone on unspecified missions, almost all her awake time was spent with the guys, so it was a good thing they were on better terms now. For better or worse, they were a team . . . for the most part. She was still sometimes taken aback by their guyness. She didn’t know a single woman who would think it was hilarious to dump a bucket of mud over the top of a teammate’s head, but Crutch and Jelly had laughed themselves sick after doing that to Trapper. Then they’d eyed her, and she’d given them a stony look and said, “Whoever dumps mud on my head will have to wash my hair and blow it dry.” Considering how long her hair was now, because she hadn’t had time to even get it trimmed since starting training, they had immediately disavowed any intention of getting mud on her. Uh-huh, sure; she believed that like she believed in the tooth fairy.
But because she liked them—for the most part—and because she wanted to shove Levi’s conviction that she couldn’t do the job down his throat, she had worked her ass off for the past five months. To become worthy of being on the team she had pushed herself so much further than she’d ever thought she could go. She could run an easy eight miles now, ten if she pushed herself, which she constantly did. She could do a hundred push-ups, though chin-ups still gave her problems and her numbers went way down with them. She’d mastered the technique of hook-and-pinch on the rope, though they called it brake-and-squat, and could go over the wall almost as fast as they could. She had qualified with small arms, learning how to handle a variety of weapons even though her job description didn’t call for that, but as Levi put it, every day things happened in the field that weren’t planned for in the book. She hadn’t turned a hair at handling weapons; being a country girl from south Georgia had made her comfortable with rifles and such long before she was old enough to drive.
She had changed; there was no way she could have avoided changing. She was far more sure of herself when it came to her place on Levi’s team. The woman she saw in the mirror was slimmer, harder, refined down to muscle and bone . . . and she liked it. She liked being able to do things, liked feeling capable.
She’d paid a price for working so hard to be here. Once upon a time, she’d had a few girlfriends with whom she’d seen movies, gone to bars and concerts, a little bit of shopping. She hadn’t heard from them in months. Come to think of it, she hadn’t heard from her mother in . . . maybe a month? The threatened visit hadn’t materialized, and abruptly she felt a wave of homesickness. She needed to call home tonight, because Levi was going to kill her tomorrow. He was going to throw her out of a plane.
Reading her expression, Trapper bumped her shoulder with his fist and said encouragingly, “You can do it. You know how it is when you’re afraid of something; you’re nervous only until you actually jump, then after that you’re too busy doing what you need to do to think about it.”
Yeah? She gave him a dubious look. He was assuming she wouldn’t pass out, but she wasn’t assuming anything. Everything else she’d done had been physical effort, pushing and pushing and not letting herself stop, but this . . . this was different. This was terrifying.
“When do I do it?” she asked, too terrified to be embarrassed that her tone was so thin.
“Tomorrow,” Levi said.
Oh, shit.
Jina called her mom that night, and managed to sound normal, managed to keep the conversation general and light even though she felt as if she might vomit from nerves. She slept in fits and starts, unable to ignore the jitters in her stomach or her sense of overwhelming dread. She even handwrote a will—not that she had a lot to leave anyone, but still—and left it on the table, dated and signed. Then she wondered if the existence of the will would make someone think she’d suspected she was in danger, and her parents might be tormented for the rest of their lives wondering if she’d been murdered. Sighing, she wadded up the sheet of paper and tossed it in the trash, then got it out and held it over the lit eye of the gas stovetop until it caught fire. Then she spent ten minutes cleaning up the damn ashes; burning something wasn’t a tidy way of disposing of anything.
Jina’s eyes were hollow with fatigue and dread when she showed up at training the next morning, but she was so wound up she could barely sit still. She hadn’t eaten breakfast, because she was so terrified she couldn’t swallow anything solid.
They were all standing in a clump, arms crossed, waiting for her. Over the months she’d gotten used to how big they were, but now felt like the first day all over again, when she’d felt insignificant and pretty much useless compared to them. Everything she’d done, all the effort she’d made, would mean nothing if she failed now. She’d be kicked out of training and likely she’d never see them again, because even if she was assigned another job with the agency, she wouldn’t have any actual contact with the team. They had become her life, to the exclusion of almost everything and everyone else. Nevertheless, she either managed this or they’d walk away from her and not look back, because a smoothly functioning team meant more to them than any individual.
She walked up to them, her boots crunching on the gravel, the chilly morning air going all the way to the bottom of her lungs. “All right, let’s do this,” she said, trying to sound tough. She failed at pulling that off because her voice wobbled.
The seven of them looked at her woebegone face and burst out laughing, even Voodoo and Levi, who laughed about as often as a blue moon rolled around.
“What?” she asked, stuffing her hands in her pockets and feeling self-conscious.
“You thought you’d jump out of a plane without knowing what you’re doing?” Jelly asked, snickering.
“No, I thought y’all would throw me out of a plane without knowing what I’m doing,” she retorted. “The word ‘jump’ implies I’d do it willingly.”
“Ground training first,” Levi said. “Then we throw you out.”
There were a few more snorts of laughter, none of which belonged to Jina. She tried to look as stony as he did. “What’s ground training?”
Jelly smiled a big, completely distrustful smile. “It’s where we teach you how not to go splat.”
Seven
“Ground training sounds good,” Jina said fervently. That meant she’d be on the ground, right? She liked being on the ground.
“Step over here with me,” Levi said shortly, turning and walking a good thirty feet away.
Jina hid her astonishment—and trepidation—and trudged in his wake, trying not to show her reluctance. Whatever induced Levi to break his normal behavior with her, meaning mostly ignoring her, had to be fairly important.
He stopped and turned so he was facing the rest of the team, folding his arms across his chest. His impassive dark gaze fastened on her as she approached, each step slower than the last because she really didn’t want to have a one-on-one conversation with him, given how well the first—and only—one had gone. She stopped a good five feet away, crossed her arms in the same posture he’d taken, and waited. On the theory that she didn’t want to look him in the eye, she stared instead at his nose; it was close enough to his eyes that maybe he wouldn’t notice she wasn’t exactly meeting his gaze.
Her theory didn’t work. She could feel him looking at her, so intensely it was almost like a touch that sent waves of heat washing over her skin. She shifted uneasily, wondering what the odds were that he’d give up and tell her what he wanted. Those odds had to be long, because he simply waited, silently, until she couldn’t stand it any longer and made eye contact. Immediately all her nerve endings jolted, as if she’d grabbed a live wire. His dark gaze bored into her, an invisible force field battering at her, scouring her from the inside out, frying her blood in her veins.
Shit. Silent
ly she acknowledged that she let him get to her way too much, but she didn’t know what she could do about it. He was the team leader, for now the ruler of her universe. She wanted to poke at him until she broke through that iron control of his, see what she could stir up, and dear God she had to be absolutely crazy to even think of such a thing.
“What?” she asked, unable to keep the truculence from her tone. Damn it. She really needed to work on her attitude, she thought, annoyed at herself. Her brothers had always said her mouth would get her in big trouble one day, and she’d spent years proving them right.
His eyes regarded her as remotely as if she weren’t a sentient, carbon-based life-form. The twitch at one corner of his mouth told her she was about an inch from overstepping her bounds; she sucked in a deep breath and braced herself for whatever he was about to unload on her, but a small, deeply buried part of her quivered with excitement that finally, finally, she was getting a reaction from him.
“You just don’t have any stopping sense, do you?” he finally observed.
“Sorry,” she muttered. “And, no.” Like he had to ask. She’d spent the past several months demonstrating to all of them that she and stopping sense had nothing more than a nodding acquaintance.
“One of these days you’re going to push too hard, little girl, and then you’ll be on the road of no return,” he said in an eerie echo of her brothers’ predictions.
Little girl? She swallowed her ire at the dismissive phrase, because she’d pushed and she knew it. Levi was the boss, and they didn’t have to be in the military for his orders to count. The team leaders were the badasses, and what they said went, at least as far as each leader’s own team. Axel MacNamara might run the entire agency on the administration side, but he listened to his team leaders and got them everything they needed. Without them, the GO-Teams were nothing.