First to Burn Page 2

  As silently as combat boots allowed, she retreated. She’d meet with the big guy when she had more answers. This afternoon she had only questions.

  Chapter Two

  Theresa hated treadmills, gym rats and clanging weights. She hated to stretch in front of half the American soldiers in Paktia Province, their eyes all over her, but this was Tuesday, when she didn’t have the luxury of a solitary four miles at dawn around the airfield’s dirt track. On Tuesdays, she warmed the doctor seat at the 0600 briefing before her clinic shift. If she ran outside now, the eighty-plus-degree May afternoon would drop her like an aneurysm. At her normal duty station in Fort Hood, she could endure the Texas swelter, but Camp Cadwalader’s elevation seemed to add an insurmountable layer to the heat. Preferring to survive the second half of her deployment, on Tuesdays she thumped the treadmill in the air-conditioned gym.

  “Hey.” Her roommate stepped on the next machine. “Finally finished the M and M.” Responsibility for the weekly morbidity and mortality report rotated among the four captains in the medical unit.

  Theresa punched the button to decrease her speed enough to talk. Since the acoustics sucked in the converted Soviet warehouse, she also raised her voice. “Tough?”

  “More missing paperwork.”

  “The same?” After eavesdropping on Colonel Loughrey’s blowup last week, she’d told Jennifer about the pattern with Staff Sergeant Wardsen. Only four hundred twenty permanent parties crammed into this camp, but neither of them could find Wardsen.

  “Yeah.” The second treadmill reached speed and they matched strides. “Inbound medevac call. Projectile penetration, a by-the-book gunshot wound, but nobody showed. Nada.”

  “Think he exists?” Maybe Wardsen was a fictitious name Special Ops used for cover-ups or to treat anonymous CIA spooks. No one could have wounds like medevac had reported for Sergeant Wardsen and keep walking away.

  “Uh-huh.” Jennifer entered a faster workout phase. “I think...SF guys...take paperwork...away.” She panted up the incline. “Secrecy...freaks.”

  In her cooldown, Theresa could breathe and talk easier than her roommate could. “They’re not allowed to do that.” Her duties included coordinating patient care for soldiers moving between camps or leaving theater. If people removed their paperwork, follow-up care would disintegrate, an outcome she wouldn’t accept.

  “You tell them...what they can...can’t do.”

  “If I can find them.” Theresa stepped off her machine, plucked her towel from the safety rail and wiped her face to unstick strands of hair from her forehead and neck. Turning, she froze halfway through retrieving her water bottle from the floor.

  Isn’t that ironic. She and Jennifer had been griping about how hard it was to find men who were right behind them. Across the gym Captain Chris Deavers, commander of Special Forces Operational Detachment Alpha-5131, crunched out sit-ups on an inclined bench.

  Jennifer punched a button to override the hill function and twisted to look. “Hellooo girlfriend, now what are you cooking up?”

  “I’m going to ask Chris about his sergeant.” Straightening out this mess would take three or four simple questions. She aligned the corners of her towel.

  “Chris?” Her friend’s eyebrows arched.

  “We’re both captains. It’s perfectly acceptable to use his name.” She folded the towel into thirds lengthwise and draped it over her forearm.

  Her roommate looked at the white fabric, then at her face. “So why are you stalling?”

  “I know Chris, but the others...” Faded Cyrillic graffiti climbed the walls above the cheap mirrors that multiplied the dozen men lifting in the corner. Her first week at Caddie, a nurse had told her the Russian translated to “Trust your mother, shoot the rest,” which fit the men surrounding Chris. Despite superficial differences in skin color and hair, they shared identically serious expressions. These men didn’t trash-talk while they cranked out push-ups and pull-ups, and they were the only men who didn’t stare when the Wonder Twins—two postal clerks from a Florida reserve unit rumored to be professional football cheerleaders in civilian life—did lunges. Their focus insulated them from the gym cacophony.

  “Forget it.” Jennifer broke into her thoughts. “Their super secret special ops voodoo isn’t going to crack for you. What’s a little missing paperwork?”

  “They can’t flout the rules any more than anyone else.” Regardless of her stepfamily’s choices, she’d always believed rules, like laws, should be obeyed. Entering the army had reinforced and rewarded that belief. She squared her shoulders and tossed her towel at Jen.

  Her workout partner caught and twirled it. “Sure you won’t need a white flag?”

  “Not a chance.” White flags were for bandages, not her. She wasn’t a quitter, and she hadn’t given up on anything since the day she’d joined Army ROTC and paid for Princeton without one cent of her stepfather’s dirty money. After two years of her returning the envelopes of cash Carl and her mother left in her dorm, her family had accepted that she was going to make it on her own, completely legit. She could do this, easy as taking blood pressure.

  Jennifer touched two fingers to her eyebrow in a mock salute. “I’ll be here when you scurry home.”

  Interrupting their training might be a faux pas, like pushing aside a curtain before a patient fully disrobed, but it wasn’t wrong. As she drew closer, she recognized a soldier she’d examined for concussion and temporary hearing loss after an explosion. He hadn’t sneaked away with his paperwork. One man stood out, although she couldn’t pinpoint the reason. Leaner than the others but well-muscled, he wasn’t the shortest or the tallest. His dark blond hair almost curled on his neck, but the SF guys always pushed the army’s grooming standards, often growing beards to blend with the Afghans.

  When he returned her scrutiny across fifteen feet of empty mat, she understood why she’d noticed him. His eyes. Their blue depths carried burdens she could see from here. He appeared to be younger than her, but his stare spoke of losses no one should bear. She thought of the faces she’d seen during her residency ICU rotation, the expressions in the eyes of parents holding a dying child or the man kissing his wife as her ventilator was removed.

  She bit her lip against the need to offer him a comforting touch. She had another purpose.

  “Hey, Doc.” Chris recovered from his sit-ups and jumped to his feet, wiping his palms on a towel. “What’s up?” The captain’s smile shined with Midwestern sun.

  “I want to locate some forms for a soldier on your team.” She took a deep breath and focused on Chris, ignoring the man with the devastated eyes and the others who crowded the mats. “A sergeant who was injured.”

  “Sergeant Jackson? He’s great. Your people treated him well.”

  “Not Sergeant Jackson.” She shook her head without looking away.

  Although his smile barely shifted, Chris’s welcome face closed with a nearly audible slam. None of his men moved. The packed mass didn’t even seem to breathe.

  “Nobody else was hurt this week.” He lifted his towel to wipe his forehead as if nothing mattered, but veins popped in his neck. He wasn’t as relaxed as he pretended.

  “Look, today an inbound medevac radioed an incoming with penetration wounds, Staff Sergeant Wardsen.” Her words hung between them. The wait seared her lungs, as if the air-conditioning had stopped, until she felt compelled to fill the silence. “We’re missing his file.” She could smell her own sweat despite the fully saturated tang of the gym. “Was he treated?”

  “No.”

  The men beside Chris loomed larger as she turned to search each face. Their physical training uniforms didn’t have name tapes, so she couldn’t determine who among them was Wardsen. The dark blond with the tortured eyes shifted his weight, but a Polynesian-looking soldier shouldered into him.

  She wanted
to ask Chris for the real story, but the testosterone and stench clogged her throat. “Can we talk about this somewhere else?”

  “No.”

  “What?” She struggled to keep her eyebrows from meeting over the bridge of her nose. She needed to project friendly and professional, and she didn’t want to come off like a badgering fobbit, the stereotype of a forward-operating-base paper pusher. She worked up a smile. “Well?”

  Chris shrugged. “Nothing to talk about.” He bent to a barbell for a set of arm curls. “Dust-off made a mistake.”

  “Four times with the same soldier? And only that soldier? I don’t believe it.” Chris was concealing either who had been injured or how. But why? “I want to meet Sergeant Wardsen.”

  The dozen men blended into a pool of silence so thick, so viscous with disapproval and rejection, that she struggled to move. The answer hit like a fifty-pound weight—friendly fire. The other captain didn’t make eye contact. “If that’s all, Doc, we have our workout.”

  “Fine.” A fellow officer had dismissed her in front of a pack of staring enlisted guys. Her cheeks burned and she could barely pry her lips far enough apart to speak, but if Chris wanted a pissing contest, she’d give him one. “You’ll receive a written request from me tomorrow for the sergeant’s treatment records.”

  “Classified.” He grunted over another rep without facing her.

  “Really? We’ll see what Colonel Loughrey and I can do about that.” She spun on her heel and stomped to Jennifer.

  Her friend slowed the treadmill. “How’d it go?”

  “Don’t ask.” Theresa grabbed a five-pound barbell and curled with gusto. The weight bounced off her upper arm. Whoa, too hard. She’d have a bruise.

  “Didn’t I tell you not to bug those guys? They don’t talk to lesser mortals.”

  “You were right.”

  Jennifer tucked her chin and stared, eyebrows raised. “You never say that.”

  “To quote the boss, they’re shitheads.” She thunked the weight on the ground. She needed to get out of the gym. Now. “You can write that in stone.”

  * * *

  Thirty minutes later, draft memorandums requesting medical files danced in Theresa’s head as she left the women’s shower for the dining facility. After six months in-country, Theresa ranked the lavish mess hall food provided by Black and Swan contractors on par with cold med school pizza. Crispy shrimp, loaded burgers, and surf and turf were better than the chicken breasts she cooked, but she missed her empty apartment fridge in Texas. At least when she opened it after a night on call, the half-and-half carton and jar of olives were hers.

  While she stopped at the dining hall entrance for the mandatory weapon safety check, a soldier exited and the cold burst of air-conditioning brought the promise of dinner. Tuesday’s meal rotation included the one item she still desired: deep-fried chicken cordon bleu. She usually substituted salad for fries, but no monthly weigh-in could make her give up cordon bleu.

  Inside the metal building, she headed for the hot line as the server slipped the last golden mound to the private in front of her. She hadn’t run four miles on a treadmill for iceberg lettuce. “Excuse me, are there more?”

  “Two minutes, ma’am.”

  A green tray slid behind hers on the line. “Are they bringing another pan?”

  Theresa glanced at the speaker and froze. This close his eyes were as compelling as they had been across the gym, but now she could see brown-and-amber flecks around the iris—a rare combination that gave depth to the blue—and a star-shaped scar on his left temple that she hadn’t cataloged earlier. She imagined he’d hit a corner of a board or rock and left it unstitched.

  She broke the stare and read his name tape. Wardsen.

  “You!” She studied his body. Feet planted firmly on the floor, weight distributed evenly without favoring a leg. His uniform pants stretched across his thighs and tapered down his calves to tuck into tan boots. Nothing in his posture hinted at a concealed injury. She raised her eyes to his chest, and he obligingly took a deep breath. The line of his shirt across his shoulders didn’t appear to hide evidence of bandaging. When he’d been wearing less clothing in the gym, she hadn’t seen bulky wrappings, but then she hadn’t known he was the elusive Staff Sergeant Wulf Wardsen.

  “Would you like to check my teeth?”

  She snapped her gaze to his face and collided with his smile. It transformed him from a carving of a thunder god into a heartthrob.

  “You give a thorough exam, Doc.”

  “You weren’t shot!” Her heart rate notched up as she prepared for a second confrontation.

  “Good to know.” He lifted an eyebrow, its toffee color darker than his hair.

  Her eyes narrowed. “Why did medevac report you?”

  “I didn’t realize they had.”

  “Then what are you hiding?” He must have overheard her exchange with Chris, but he wasn’t making it easy to argue with him.

  “Nothing.” His smile didn’t budge, his eyes didn’t shift, his expression didn’t flicker.

  “I will find out what’s going on.” She focused on the small, steady beat at his neck. His skin didn’t have the ruddy tone of most fair-colored people, as if the stones of Afghanistan had scoured away any hint of pink long ago. Blond hairs showed above the neck of his T-shirt. Unlike the rest of him, they looked silky soft. “The flight medic got reamed by my commander. Whatever you’re up to, other people are paying for it, so knock it off.”

  “Understood.” He nudged his tray until it touched hers. “Are you going to keep holding up the line?”

  She turned her shoulder to cover her embarrassment. First she’d stared at him like he was a particularly succulent entrée, then she’d chewed him out. “I’m waiting for cordon bleu.”

  “That one?” He nodded at a plate sitting on the serving hood.

  Grabbing it, she turned to the salad bar. As she piled lettuce and cherry tomatoes on her plate, the hair on her arms stood up, letting her know he’d lingered.

  “Captain Chiesa.” He put the correct Italian spin on her name, pronouncing the first sound like “key” instead of “chee.”

  She concentrated to avoid spilling salad dressing. Having him watch her made her hands not work the way she intended.

  “About that misunderstanding in the gym.”

  “What misunderstanding?” She set the vinaigrette next to the other bottles. Her palms were slippery, but she didn’t want to wipe her hands on her pants in front of him, so she gripped her tray and hoped it wouldn’t drop.

  “Captain Deavers came down a little hard.” He looked at the floor as if struggling with how much to say. “I’m sorry. The team’s sorry.”

  It sounded like a genuine I’m sorry, and her stomach muscles unclenched, the tension replaced by a feeling almost like the euphoria that came from eating dinner after having missed lunch. Sergeant Wardsen had apologized for the humiliation she’d felt talking to a bunch of men’s rears.

  “He’s receiving rough email from his wife. She’s not coping well alone with their new baby. He’s worried she has...postpartum depression?” He said the words as if using a foreign language guidebook.

  “Thank you for telling me.” The awareness that Chris had bigger problems, and yet she’d hounded him about medical records, embarrassed her enough that she wanted to slink into a hole darker than Tora Bora. To be successful in private medical practice next year, she’d have to clue in better to patients’ unspoken needs. “Maybe I can help?”

  * * *

  “Please. That would take a worry off the team’s minds.” Wulf suspected the doctor fulfilled her promises. The way she’d barreled across the gym for his paperwork told him she was determined, and the glare when she’d ordered him to stop involving flight medics in his team’s escapades had rivaled desert h
eat. “Maybe you could be subtle?”

  “You don’t want your commander to know you talked to me?” Captain Chiesa spoke over her shoulder as she carried her tray to the beverage dispensers.

  If he didn’t want to shout loud enough for the guys to hear, he had to follow the damp ponytail bouncing in front of him. She’d tucked her dark hair under and up in one of those styles used by female soldiers. It made some look like bobbed horses, but on her it highlighted her cheekbones and eyebrows. “The captain’s a private guy.”

  Captain Chiesa rolled her eyes. “And I had the impression you were all over-sharers.” Humor added cinnamon and cloves to her brown eyes, and the dimple that flashed in her cheek turned the steamroller into somebody’s girl-next-door. But not his. He couldn’t afford a soft spot for a woman.

  “His wife’s in charge of the family support group.” If he prolonged the conversation, he might catch a whiff of her shampoo. Women’s hair had mesmerized him since he had watched his mother plait her braids. “Might reflect badly with higher-ups if she can’t hold it together.”

  “Can your wife help her?”

  Centuries had blunted the ache of losing Zenobia enough that he didn’t clench his fists or lock his jaw or betray with his eyes what that word had once meant. Instead he lifted his mouth in a half-assed smile. “If the army wanted me to have a wife, they’d issue one.”

  “I wasn’t asking...” Her olive skin darkened at her cheekbones, broadcasting embarrassment with a color lighter than the angry flush she’d shown in the gym. “So, what post are you guys from? Maybe I know someone who—”

  “Fort Campbell.” He handed her a bottle of water to cut her off. She wouldn’t like to be caught babbling. Bits of frizz softened the sharp widow’s peak of her hairline, and he wanted to trace the heart-shape with his finger. Better to grip his tray. “The lieutenant’s wife should be able to reach the captain’s wife. Shall I get their emails from the LT?” He bit his tongue as she nodded. Now he was the babbler, because of some straying hair and the fact that she cared enough about people to jump in and help a flight medic. Damn. Even if army rules didn’t prohibit touching to find out if those curls felt as soft as he suspected, he could never get close to a doctor. Faster than other women, she’d notice he was different.