by Linda Howard
Knowing she’d been chosen because she was the least effective team member when it came to hitting what she was shooting at, she swallowed her chagrin and slid her weapon back into her thigh holster, then secured it before approaching and kneeling beside the medic bag. While she searched through the disordered bag, Snake squirted the wound with saline solution to wash out any trash, then did more mopping before pressing the wad of gauze against the wound.
Jina located the QuikClot pack and tore it open. “Slap it on,” Snake said, and she did, holding the gauze pad in place while he quickly tore off strips of tape with his teeth and secured the pad. She tried to keep her eyes firmly on what she was doing, though she was acutely aware of smooth tanned skin and heat and a lot of hard muscle that made her mouth water. She tried—and she failed. She’d never seen Levi without a shirt before, for which she could only thank God, because if she had, she might have lost her fight with temptation. Some of the guys had gone shirtless in front of her, and though they were all in extremely good shape, they hadn’t appealed to her. How could they, when all her senses had been focused on Levi?
He was kneeling on his right knee, leaning forward a little with his left forearm propped on his left knee, his weapon in his right hand while Snake tended to him. The broad expanse of those powerful shoulders made her heartbeat stutter; she was so acutely aware of him that she noticed everything: the tufts of dark hair under his arms, the tattoo of the ace of clubs on his left shoulder, another tattoo of the letters PBJ (the initials of an old girlfriend?) on his right shoulder, the deep furrow of his spine, the hot scent of his sweaty skin, the thick layers of muscle. He was on high alert, head turning back and forth as he surveyed the surrounding foliage, his dark eyes narrowed, searching.
“Okay, that’s enough,” he said, surging to his feet. Snake efficiently stuffed his supplies back in the roll bag and slung it crossways across his back, morphing from medic to operator in the matter of a half second. Jina wasn’t as fast getting back into mission mode; she forced herself to look away from Levi so she could regain both her breath and her composure. Still, he moved back into her line of sight as he jerked his bloody shirt back on over his head; she saw the dark patch of hair spread in a tree-of-life pattern on his chest, and her mouth filled with drool again.
Stone-faced, she returned to her position between Voodoo and Jelly.
“I know who this is,” Ramirez said, looking down at the body Trapper hauled into the open. “He’s one of the Restrepos, three brothers who belong to FARC. They’re known as ‘the hounds,’ because finding people is their job.”
“Hunting you specifically?” Levi asked.
“Seems likely.” Ramirez was from Chicago but spoke a couple of the Colombian dialects like a native. He shoved his sweaty hair out of his face. “They spread out when they’re hunting. The other two will have heard the shots and will be converging on us.”
“Then we have to move,” Levi said sharply. “Babe, move to the center. Crutch and Boom, fall back to the rear. Double time.”
Jina opened her mouth to protest, then shut it. He wasn’t moving her to protect her; he was moving her so the team members most accurate with their weapons were both in front and in the rear. They had to move now and move fast. They might run straight into one of the remaining Restrepo brothers, but that was a chance they had to take because what they couldn’t do was sit in ambush, maybe for hours, and miss their ride out. They had already lost precious minutes, and the timing had been tight to begin with.
They began double-timing out of the area, Levi still taking point. As before, Jina soon lost sight of everyone except Voodoo in front of her, but he would have eyes on the team member in front of him just as Jelly, behind her, kept her in sight. The heat and humidity pressed down on her, making every breath an effort because the air felt so thick. She was coated with sweat, sticky sweat that made dirt and insects stick to her. Damn, why couldn’t they ever go somewhere with a temperate climate, like maybe Seattle?
Abruptly she noticed that Voodoo wasn’t in sight. She could hear him, but she’d lost line of sight, and that was bad.
Shit. She couldn’t let them get separated, or there’d be hell to pay. She dug deeper, pushed harder, reached for every bit of speed she could muster. Her thigh muscles ached, her lungs burned. She ignored them; she’d breathe later, when they were on the plane. Air was overrated, anyway.
She pelted around a huge tree, leaped over a giant protruding root—and slammed headlong into the side of a man who popped out of thin air, his head turned toward Voodoo, whose back was just visible as the man raised a rag-wrapped weapon and pulled the trigger.
Simultaneously:
The sharp crack oddly muffled by the vegetation and thick air, out of balance because her left ear was protected by the communication bud she wore, but her right ear was unprotected.
Whump! as she collided with the shooter.
Sick shock reverberated through her. Voodoo had likely been hit, maybe killed. The shard of sorrow that pierced her gut was unexpected. Voodoo was an asshole—but he belonged to her the way the other guys did. He was a part of the whole.
The impact of the collision rattled her teeth, jarred her bones—twice, because she hit the guy at full speed, bounced off, then hit the ground flat on her back. She landed on the equipment bag, knocking her breath out.
The shooter staggered sideways, swung around to face the unexpected attack. She saw slanted dark eyes, a mop of matted, dirty black hair, bad teeth, his weapon coming up, and she knew she was dead. The realization was staggering and brought a sort of numbness with it. Then there was another crack, this one from behind her, and clots of red sprayed out of his chest. He staggered back, still bringing his weapon around toward her, and a second shot hit him square in the forehead. He went down like a rag doll, falling across her feet and legs.
Jina gasped for breath, too much happening in a couple of seconds for her to process. She couldn’t get her lungs to work, or her brain to move faster than wet mush. A body lay heavily across her legs, brain matter leaking out of the massive exit wound on the back of his head. She couldn’t push it off, couldn’t even sit up.
Jelly ran up. Keeping his weapon aimed, he hooked his foot under the shooter’s armpit, rolled him over, mostly off Jina’s legs but with her left foot still trapped. His expression was grim and set, no sign of the incorrigible team joker on his face now. He slanted a fast glance at Jina. “You all right?” he asked, then snapped his attention back to the guy’s body.
No. Maybe. She didn’t answer, couldn’t answer. All she could do was move her lips like a guppy, trying to somehow get air into her lungs. Her brain said she was okay, she’d just had the wind knocked out of her, but her body was in a panic and the two were miles away from agreement. She totally took back the thought that air was overrated, because she couldn’t breathe, and all of a sudden that was damn important.
She had a confused sense of being converged on, the rest of the team surging around, weapons drawn and ready. She saw Voodoo, not only alive but evidently unhurt, though she wasn’t sure how that had happened. Levi’s face swam into view, his expression so savage she’d have run if she could. Fat chance of that; she was dying here, lying on the forest floor with damn bugs crawling on her, and they were too busy to notice. But he stood astride her like an avenging angel, holding an HK MP7 instead of a flaming sword, his head on a swivel as he looked for additional threats. Snake slid in beside her, as if he were a runner stealing second and she were the base; before he could do anything, Levi must have realized what was wrong because abruptly he leaned down and grabbed the waistband of her pants, jerked her up and shook her, let her drop—and blessed air rushed into her lungs.
That hurt. For a minute all she could do was suck in deep, shuddering breaths. Awkwardly she rolled to the side as much as she could, what with Levi still standing astride her, Snake on her left, and the dead guy still lying across her foot. She was surrounded by men, and none of them were doing
anything helpful—well, except for Levi practically body-slamming her to the ground and knocking the air back into her. Her throat hurt. Her chest hurt. Her right ear rang.
She coughed, gagged, then managed a groan.
“Are you hit?” Snake was asking urgently, when she could pay attention to something other than her body’s desperate need for oxygen.
Still unable to make a sound anywhere resembling an actual word, she coughed some more while she vehemently shook her head.
“What the fuck happened?” Levi snapped. “Ramirez, is this another one of the Restrepos?”
Ramirez crouched by the dead man, examined the face distorted by the head shot, then shook his head. “No. I don’t recognize this one. This means it isn’t just the three of them, they have others with them.”
Jina needed to sit up, so she could cough and gag more efficiently. She tapped Levi on the knee. He didn’t move. She felt as if she was going to choke to death if she didn’t get up, but no one was paying attention. She glanced at Snake, but he was busy keeping surveillance on the forest around them, now that he knew she hadn’t been shot.
Damn it all. She punched Levi on the knee as hard as she could, then shoved at him. That predatory gaze swooped down to her; she shoved his leg again and understanding flashed. He stepped over her, releasing her from the cage of his stance, and leaned down to grip her forearm and haul her to a sitting position.
“Thanks,” she managed to say, though the word was so strangled it sounded more like “hgnsks.” She coughed violently, bent over from the waist, but finally her lungs and diaphragm and throat were all on the same page and air was moving in and out, and her brain decided she wasn’t in danger of dying. She’d seen football players get the wind knocked out of them before, but she hadn’t realized how weird and awful it felt. In retrospect, she had a lot more sympathy.
“I repeat: what the fuck happened?” Levi’s tone sounded like the first step into hell, with worse awaiting.
Jelly said, “Babe all of a sudden kicked into high gear. I didn’t see the bastard until she hit him broadside. She looked like a fucking linebacker—a little linebacker, but still. He had Voodoo square, if she hadn’t plowed into him when she did. She bounced off him, hit the ground. He came around on her and I plugged him in the chest, then the insurance tap to the head.”
Eight men looked at her. Jina wiped her watering eyes. “It was an accident,” she croaked, and tried to get up but the dead guy still had her left foot trapped. Annoyed, frustrated, she half yelled, “Would someone get this dead guy off me?”
Maybe she should be more upset that she’d just seen someone killed. Maybe she should be in hysterics that the guy’s body was lying across her foot. Maybe in an hour or two she would be upset, but right now Voodoo was okay and no one else had been hurt—her included, because for that frozen moment when everything happened she’d been sure she wouldn’t survive—and all she wanted to do was get up and punch a tree or something.
Boom and Ramirez rolled the dead guy onto his back, off her foot. Freed, she pulled her knees up and rested her head on them, breathing hard and trying to get herself back. Being on the team was no longer an adventure; even though she’d known in her head that people could get killed, actually seeing it happen was something else entirely. She gave herself maybe five seconds, then set her jaw and rolled to her feet. Like before, the gunfire would bring anyone in the area down on them, and they needed to get moving.
She settled the equipment bag back into place and hoped Tweety and the laptop had survived her landing on top of them. “I’m ready,” she said, though she wasn’t certain of that. Her chest still ached, and her emotions felt numb.
No one moved. Levi still looked like a thundercloud. “You tackled an armed man?”
“No. I ran into him; big difference. I told you, it was an accident.”
They didn’t believe her. She could see it in their expressions, incredulity blended with something else she couldn’t read. She shifted uncomfortably and said, “Let’s go.”
Crutch said, “I dunno, Babe. Maybe instead of tackling the guy you could have whistled, or something, to give Voodoo a heads-up?”
Oh, for pity’s sake! Angry, upset, and growing more hostile by the second, Jina shouted at them, “I’m a girl! Girls don’t whistle! We don’t spit or scratch our balls, either. Those are guy skills. Now can we get the hell out of here before I throw up on someone?” To her chagrin her eyes began burning, and she turned away before the burning became actual tears. It didn’t help that she really couldn’t whistle, and Jordan and Taz had teased her relentlessly about it when they were growing up. Even her baby sister, Caleigh, could whistle. It was dumb for such a little thing to surface now and upset her, especially given that she knew Crutch was teasing.
“You heard her,” Levi snapped. “We need to get the hell out of here.”
So they did, falling into line and resuming their sprint through the green hell. She noticed Voodoo checking over his shoulder a couple of times, as if making sure she was still in sight. That was so unlike him it unnerved her, especially given that she knew her speed was slower than before. Her energy level had dropped, and she couldn’t seem to do anything about it. Even worse, Jelly was sticking closer to her than before, too. She didn’t want them babying her, because that might undermine her fragile self-control.
When they were finally on their way back home, she’d have to set them all straight on what had really happened.
Despite their previous bad luck, they didn’t encounter any more of the FARC hunters and reached the designated clearing just a half minute after two Jeeps roared to a stop. They all hopped on board, the drivers floor-boarded the gas pedals, and they bumped and swerved and tempted fate at a dangerous speed until they reached an airstrip with another small plane waiting for them. This one didn’t hold a candle to the small jet that had brought them in, but this one wouldn’t need as much runway and Jina didn’t care if they all had to pack themselves in like sardines, as long as that engine had enough power to get them airborne.
It did. Even better, it took them to another airstrip, where a cargo plane awaited. As uncomfortable as cargo planes were, at least she’d be able to stretch out her legs, which was more than she’d been able to do in the small plane. She was exhausted. Everything that had happened had drained her dry, and the run through the forest was the least of it.
Levi and Boom went to talk to the pilots. The other guys stowed their gear, grabbed some bottles of water, began winding down. Jina stood alone for a minute, still trying to ground herself, and finally boosted herself into the cargo hold and found a flat place to sit. Wearily she unbuckled the equipment bag, took out Tweety and the laptop, and checked both for damage. They were fine, so she repacked them and settled back, letting the momentary solitude sink in and relax her. She would have only a few minutes, if that long, but by the time the guys began loading up she had regained a measure of equilibrium—enough, at least, to last until she got home, where she could truly be alone.
The guys began boosting themselves into the hold. Levi tossed her a bottle of water and said, “Hydrate,” just the way he had that very first day, months ago. She caught the bottle and began drinking, only then realizing how thirsty she was and how good the water felt on her strained throat.
Ramirez climbed aboard, and his dark eyes swept the interior of the cargo hold. His gaze lit on her and before she knew it he was lowering himself to sit beside her. “Real introduction,” he said, giving her a slight smile. “My first name is Joseph. And you’re Babe . . . ?”
“Modell,” she said, a little bit at a loss.
“When we get to D.C. and I’ve been debriefed, would you be interested in—”
From across the hold, Levi said, “Get away from her or we’ll break both your legs.” He was stretched out, his eyes half closed, but the dark gleam under his thick lashes was hard and direct.
Trapper looked up from where he was wiping down his weapon. “That’s i
f I don’t shoot your ass first.”
Ramirez’s eyebrows shot up, and he held up both hands in surrender. “I was just—”
“Yeah, we know what ‘just’ is,” Boom muttered. “You heard the man. Get away from her.”
Confused, stunned, Jina looked around at all the guys as Ramirez did what he was told and moved to another spot. They all looked pretty ragged and lethal, and none of them were smiling. What the hell?
“We heard about your rep,” Levi said to Ramirez, which explained their sudden hostility. She was tired, but not so tired that she couldn’t figure out Ramirez was evidently a player. He was good-looking enough, but she didn’t have time to play. Besides . . . he wasn’t Levi.
Voodoo settled into the spot on her left that Ramirez had vacated. He sat silently for a moment, then held out his left fist toward her. Her sense of surprise was so great she almost gave him a “what the hell?” look, but she recovered after a split second and silently bumped his fist with hers. Okay, the social stuff had been taken care of; now she could close her eyes and maybe grab a nap—
“That’s it?” Crutch demanded. “He’s been an asshole to you since day one, and all he has to do is offer a fist bump and you’re letting him off the hook? He owes you big-time, Babe.”
Jina forced her eyelids to at least half-mast. “I know he’s an asshole,” she snapped. “But he’s my asshole. One of them, anyway.” She paused and thought about what she’d just said. She heaved an exhausted sigh. “That didn’t sound right.”