by S A Gardner
“She swore she’d never be another doctor serving and being served by the system,” he said. “Never give it the chance to corrupt her into someone protecting herself over her patients’ dead bodies.”
I’d known he knew. Since he’d gone digging up all the ammo he’d needed to expel me from GCA, and medical practice.
But oh, God, he more than knew—he understood.
Of course, he did. But he neither sanctioned nor sympathized.
He went on. “She kicked up serious trouble for everyone she considered responsible for her sister’s death, to the point where she was arrested a couple of times, then expelled from medical school. Not to be thwarted, she sought entry into GCA’s experimental medical licensing program.
“She impressed Sir Ashton so much, he broke every rule to recruit her. He doctored her application, even forged recommendations, painting an image of the perfect candidate, when the real her was everything the program rejected. He proceeded to lavish privileges and special training on her, letting her fast-forward through the program, until he had her performing major surgeries before she even obtained her license. But she was insatiable, kept demanding more freedoms and challenges. So he started Combat Doctor Project, to give her that final edge, to make her the prototype of his life’s ambition to create surgeon/black ops hybrids.
“He enlisted PACT to train her, but he had one problem. Me. He thought only I could give his peerless protégé the molding she needed, chisel her into the unstoppable weapon she was born to be. But he knew I wouldn’t take the real her on, and wouldn’t be fooled like his GCA cronies, would research her for myself. So he went all out in his efforts to mislead me, burying her history to the point where even I found nothing but his falsified records. It took some extensive digging to unearth everything I just related. But I found it out too late. The rest you know.”
I gaped at him. Ed did, too.
It felt as if he’d just rewritten my whole life in a couple of paragraphs.
But I’d wanted him to give me his worst, hadn’t I? Damian always delivered.
But…he made it sound as if Sir Ashton had created CDP for me. Could that have any basis in fact? And had Sir Ashton really gone to such lengths for me? From the start? If so, why had he suddenly stopped going above and beyond after Sudan?
That was an issue of such enormity, pondering it made resuming Damian’s dissection feel like the lesser evil.
Speaking of that, I thought he’d mention Jake. Or Dad. Or Mom. Or Sir Ashton and himself in their later roles. But he seemed to consider Clara’s death my one major turning point. My trigger, as he’d said. Everyone and everything else had only been more catalysts in the chain reaction.
He could be right. I’d stood with my parents at Clara’s grave, wondering how much of their souls were being buried, how much rage and outrage would forever eat at the remainder.
A static-laced voice erupted from one vehicle left in recognizable form. Damian ran toward it, ending this session of Analyze Calista. I followed with Ed.
I knew some Russian. None of it was included in the torrent emitting from the radio. Damian picked the bloody hand of the dead man he’d arranged at the wheel, one of the leaders he’d executed, pressed the outgoing button and answered.
My jaw dropped and cold air rushed into my lungs.
Like in a horror movie, when an alien voice exited someone’s lips, a wheezy tenor issued from Damian’s.
The entity inside him choked like someone about to expire from massive injuries. After a few strident sentences between the frenzied shouts on the other side, he signed off with an ultra-convincing dying gurgle.
Then he turned to us. “According to this, we have twenty minutes tops to move out.”
Holy hell. The way his voice switched back to his authoritarian tones. Versatile didn’t even begin to cover it.
His gaze panned to me as he said, “Let’s do it.”
Though I was still nauseous from his unfeeling postmortem of Clara, and my own vivisection, and with everything that had happened in the last three hours, those words hit deep. In all the inflamed and irrational parts of me. The parts that didn’t care who we were, what lay between us or ahead of us. Or that he’d never mean the double entendre I heard. Nothing made a difference to the reaction I barely held back.
Yes, please, let’s. Your trailer or mine?
Seventeen
Somewhere between Nalchik and the Refugee Camp
“Are we there yet?”
Ayesha guffawed, took her eyes off the road to look down at me as I lay with my head cushioned in her lap.
“I swear, Cali, you’re like a bored, whiny kid. It’s only five minutes since you last asked that.”
I looked at my activity tracker, whined even louder. “It’s been thirteen minutes.”
“Asking won’t make us go faster and you know it. Not that I’ll convince you any more than I ever convinced Fatima.”
Fatima. Her daughter.
She’d disappeared at fourteen, fourteen years ago. Both the police and private investigators had found no trace of her, but had had theories, each more gruesome than the last. From rape and murder, to kidnapping and slavery. Their optimistic possibilities had pegged her as a runaway addict. Everything they’d done had ended in her being lost beyond hope of retrieval.
When Ayesha had thrown her lot with me, she’d enlisted my help in finding Fatima. It had been a major reason why she had joined. Three months later, following her suspicions, vague information and her mother’s instincts, we’d found Fatima’s trail. Fatima had been kidnapped by an organ-harvesting operation.
They’d been our first big bust. Our first executions. We’d tried breaking up their grisly operation first. But they’d slipped through the loopholes of the law. They’d even come after Ayesha herself.
But we’d stopped them before they could continue “filling their clients’ needs.” We’d reserved the right to execute her daughter’s murderers to Ayesha.
Afterward, she’d always talked about Fatima as if she were there, safe and growing up right under her eye. Though Fatima, had she lived, would have been my age, to Ayesha, she was now eighteen. She’d restarted counting Fatima’s age from that moment she’d avenged her.
Matt had freaked out when he realized what she was doing. An eternal widower himself, he lived with the ever-present memory of the wife he’d lost to a gang rape. He lived with Ayesha’s same unimaginable pain and wrath. But he vented his agony in aggression against all sorts of rapists and murderers. Her inability to tell fantasy from reality made him fear she might be a time bomb.
Remembering Damian’s denunciation of me, my stock reply was, “What’s another time bomb in this outfit?”
Not that I hadn’t worried at first. I did, for a very short while. Modern psychology diagnosed her as delusional, but I’d long ago stopped putting much faith in its tenets. Ayesha had found closure when she’d taken apart the man who’d hacked up her daughter and sold her a piece at a time, and all those who’d helped him.
Sinking into depression, as most other bereaved parents would have done, would have been the morbid reaction in my opinion. Channeling her outrage and pain outward, turning it into a fearless, selfless struggle so that others wouldn’t meet the same fate as her and her daughter, was mighty healthy to me.
And that was before she’d told me she was fully aware that Fatima wasn’t there. She just saw no reason to deny herself the make-believe comfort.
Apart from her indulgence in this fantasy, Ayesha was probably too rational. She was neither violent nor unstable. She was methodical, analytical, cautious. Certainly no time bomb. Since that day she’d snuffed the atrocious life of that monster in the most degrading, terrorizing, painful way, she’d been at peace.
And therein lay her danger. Villains beware.
She now reached for one of those caramelized sesame and coconut flakes bars she’d gotten me hooked on, held it over me.
Chuckling, she let it drop on my c
hest. “Go ahead, you baby. Make it all better with an overdose of sugar.”
The bar rolled on to my tummy as I pulled myself up. “I want two.”
Mock-malicious pleasure lit up her dark-chocolate beauty. “You ate your quota for today. For the next week, you glutton. Wonder where it all goes.”
I gave her my best pout. It got me nowhere.
Grumbling that she was a hardened miser, I tore through the wrapper, mouth watering, stomach grumbling. This perpetual hunger was getting worrisome.
I crunched into the sticky calorie bomb, smirked at her. “Oh, this stuff is going places alright. I can feel it settling straight into my thighs, sitting in this trailer doing nothing for days on end.”
Ayesha shook her head, indulgence set on maximum. “You have an exaggerated sense of time, just like any kid. But just as a reality check, it’s only been six hours since we left Nalchik. According to Damian it’s another four until we find our way to the camp. So settle down, will ya?”
Scooting to the door, I huddled against it, nibbled the bar, watched more magnificent mountains on one side and rolling plains on the other, and sulked.
From this road trip’s history so far, these four hours could turn to four days. Or never. The detour to Malka had stretched our road time by seventy-two hours.
After that deserted shortcut GCA had charted for us had made us ripe raid material, Damian had course corrected to a populated route. We’d passed through towns that seemed to have been frozen in a cold-war-era limbo, where roads were barely paved and beleaguered inhabitants regarded us with suspicion and annoyance as we’d caused traffic jams. We’d traversed once-bucolic hamlets now lined with dirt lanes, withering houses and collapsing barns, where adults were weathered and watchful and far outnumbered the children who chased us asking for treats and souvenirs.
Another side effect of the time warp we’d entered had been that the three days had felt like three weeks. I could swear the damned pale, warmth-free sun had been winking coldly between cumulus clouds, hanging in the same spot, for hours.
I should be grateful that time was passing so uneventfully. It was clear by now Damian had succeeded in covering our tracks, that we’d gotten away with it.
Not that we could be totally secure, though. Stuff could still surface. Literally. Readiness must be in the red at all times.
Sure. That was why I’d been hibernating most of the past three days. Escaping I guess. The memory of the massacre.
And Damian. Mostly Damian. And what he made me feel. Hell, he didn’t make me feel anything. I was seething on my own.
He’d deferred to my war strategy, even fearing it could end in disaster. He’d protected me with his life when I’d been unarmed, and once I’d been, he’d trusted me with it, as we’d fought back to back. He’d given me gratitude when I’d only done my job, and an admission of his prejudice and my efficiency. Most of all, he’d spared me from participating in our prisoners’ execution, to preserve what he could of my psyche unpolluted by aggression and brutality. And it all sent me into a tailspin.
I’d come to depend on his antagonism. I’d been secure in the knowledge that I was exiled from his approval and concern. Then he’d given me a glimpse of how potent they could be.
That he’d reverted to his old pitiless self, with new heart-twisting disclosures thrown in, only made what he’d let slip more hard-hitting.
Pitiful. To be in such turmoil over a taste of his esteem, his compassion. Stupid. To need either.
Yet I did. Always had.
But when he’d been out of reach, pragmatism had been a refuge. Now, Sir Ashton and his cronies had chained us together and thrown us in shark-infested waters to sink or swim.
Didn’t those oblivious execs, who fought their battles from the luxury of their boardrooms, know what they’d done, forcing proximity with extreme stakes on us? Throw in sexual tension to power all forty-six Russian oblasts—at least on my side—conflicted history to fill a public library, a years-old frustration, and we were talking impending meltdown
Even without all that, the guy was my maker. Before him, I’d been a mere potential. He’d made what I was today a reality. As an unlikely Galatea as I was, I’d never gotten over losing the empowering glint in my Pygmalion’s eyes, when I’d met and surpassed his expectations.
As for the glint in his eyes since that attack…
I could be imagining it. My hormones sure didn’t think so. They insisted on what they perceived. Admissions and struggles, inside a maze of needs and aversions. The works.
Truth was, I was always a breath away from pouncing on him, and getting it all out of our systems, for everyone’s sake. Not wise to have the mission’s leaders writhing in frustration with nothing but long, hot, hard sex on the brain.
But it could fizzle out to nothing. Or worse. A fumbling dud with Damian would only leave us more at each other’s throats, putting our Mission Impossible more at risk.
Okay, so only in my self-preserving dreams could “fumbling” and “dud” be associated with Damian. But the sobering projection was just another thing to keep me biting down on the urges seething inside me.
The main thing holding me back was…Jake.
Jake. I could see him again. I was going to see him again.
But then what? I’d changed. Beyond my own recognition. And what could have happened to him? What if what I remembered feeling for him was amplified by the way I’d lost him, by the warping of time and the enormity of guilt? If I had to be brutally truthful, there’d been months on end when I hadn’t even thought of him. And it hadn’t been because I thought I’d lost him forever. I’d thought the same of Damian, and no day had passed without him popping into my yearnings. Not to mention my fantasies.
But what if everything was resurrected the moment I laid eyes on Jake again?
I couldn’t have Damian occupying my focus and senses, when Jake would reenter my life. What he’d left through no fault of his own.
Through my fault.
It was because of me he’d joined GCA. I was the one who’d cost him one-fourth of his life in far worse than hell.
Logically speaking, this meant he couldn’t still feel anything for me, not anything good. Jake was the most logical person I’d ever known. Which meant I was terminally stupid eating myself up worrying about my feelings towards him. Or towards Damian. When each man had every reason in the world to wish they’d never laid eyes on me.
So between tending our post-op patients, I vegetated, escaping the memories and hunger and confusion and guilt.
All through, Ayesha spoiled me. Feeding me, stroking my hair, singing gospel songs, lulling me to sleep or to a semblance of calm.
I brought out her motherly side. And she brought out the little-girl side of me. It wasn’t the first time I’d snuggled up to her like I used to with my mother. Before she’d left.
Oh, Mom…
I never blamed you for leaving.
Who was I kidding? I blamed me. After Clara, and between Dad and me, especially me, we’d driven her beyond endurance. I only hoped she’d managed to find peace away from us. To one day see her again. I doubted I would. The day she’d left our house and disappeared, she’d vowed—no more.
I’d sold the house and put half the money in the bank in her name. What she’d never touched. The rest, I’d used to finance my Sanctuaries.
She’d been right. I was lost to her, sucked whole into the life she hadn’t been able to reconcile—
Something catapulted me clear out of my self recriminations. A succession of things, coming at my somnolent awareness like a hurtling train in the dark.
Ayesha’s shout. The wrenching brakes. The bone-rattling ram into Matt’s trailer. My body slamming into the dashboard.
And before, during and after all that—the detonations.
It took me three frantic heartbeats before I realized.
Land mines.
Eighteen
“They lied”
My shout rang
in the silence that exploded after the convoy came to full stop.
As if that was a shock. We were dealing with some of the most deranged scum in history. Of course they would lie.
So they hadn’t cleared the mines. No. The previous aid operations hadn’t reported any incidents. Which meant they’d put in more. The filthy cockroaches. And I’d been torturing myself over exterminating a few of them.
But which truck had detonated the mine? Had to be one of those in the lead. The one in the lead? Damian, oh God…
“St. James. You will let me handle this.”
Damian’s voice boomed over our radio and in my heart.
Not him—not him.
Not Matt either—his trailer was intact and right ahead of us. So who then? Had they been hurt?
I fumbled to answer him, but he gave me no chance, switching to the general channel and barking orders.
“Everyone stay put. UXO situation and protocols. That’s Unexploded Ordnance for you docs. Land mines. Ed—report.”
This last order held an edge of agitation.
So it had been Ed’s trailer. He had Shad and Suzanne with him.
Silence answered Damian, descended on me like a suffocating shroud. Were they too injured to respond?
I rushed out of the driver’s compartment into the back. After dragging out real disaster bags, I ran back, opened the door to try to pinpoint the hit trailer’s position. Damian must have seen me opening the door in his side mirror.
“Stay the hell put, St. James or I’m coming to knock you out with a fist to your jaw.”
“Save your aggression for the ones who planted those mines, De Luna. My weight won’t detonate the antitank mines and I—”
“Will just trigger one of the antipersonnel mines littering antitank mine zones to discourage de-mining efforts.”
I was about to say I’d learned very well when he’d taught me all there was to know about manual de-mining methods. And that I knew it would take me all day to clear a ten square meters of the hundreds to Ed’s truck. I also knew I didn’t have all day. Had to reach Ed and the others fast. Seconds could—did—count.