First to Burn Read online

  “I’ll remember your assistance.” He withdrew two steps, a strategic retreat, but his stomach flipped as the distance between them stretched greater than his reach. “Thanks.”

  “Don’t get shot for real.” Her wish sounded so damn sincere. Her smile seemed so damn wholesome. Her tilted head revealed the curve of her neck and a smooth expanse of skin so damn vulnerable that he couldn’t help sucking air between his teeth.

  “If I do, I’ll make sure my paperwork’s complete.” He laid a hand over his heart.

  Her eyes followed the gesture. When she looked up, her gaze didn’t rise past his lips.

  He could almost feel her fingers brush across his mouth. A woman’s touch was a rare treasure in this hole.

  No. He shook his head and broke whatever linked him to Captain Chiesa. He didn’t know her first name, but already he’d built a fantasy that risked the life he’d constructed.

  She blinked twice and muttered something that sounded like, “My food’s getting cold,” before she walked away.

  He nearly sagged against the counter as he filled two glasses with milk, but her reflection on the stainless-steel dispenser kept him standing tall. She crossed the room to her friend, probably another doctor. They stuck together as much as his A-team did. The army was a big gathering of small clans who spent their days working and eating and bunking together, which made it easy to hide in plain sight. Like the doctors, his team stayed apart from most others except the Night Stalker aviators. His men’s silence, their separateness, protected him.

  His tribe had gathered midway from the flat-screen television. Tonight the commander and lieutenant had chosen to eat with other officers, so nine pairs of eyes stared as he sat in the last-man seat closest to the door, with his back to the room. Nine brothers, each as concerned as his blood kin at the chance he’d be exposed, but he couldn’t rewind ten minutes to skip his conversation with Captain Chiesa. Even if he could, he wouldn’t. He liked the spark he’d felt when he looked at her hair and eyes, and he’d liked it especially when she told him off.

  “Took you long enough.” Sergeant Kahananui broke the silence. “Cruz volunteered for recon patrol.”

  Ignoring the big Hawaiian, he bit into his corn on the cob. Chewy, no crunch. Frozen too long between an American field and this dining facility fifty klicks from the Pakistani border.

  “That doc jacking you?” Sergeant Cruz started to rise, but Wulf shook his head.

  “Don’t think our high-speed leader is getting jacked. Yet.” Kahananui had usurped Wulf’s usual spot, from which he could observe the whole mess. “Need us to run interference?”

  “I’m fine.” He hadn’t told the doc anything that was an actual lie. With luck, he’d deflected her questions. He chomped another bite. Spray-on butter instead of corn flavor, but it was still good fuel.

  “Mmm-hmm.” Kahananui raised both black eyebrows and curled his lips, like he’d pulled the pin on a grin and was about to let it rip. “Had a funny view from this seat.”

  Men’s stares ping-ponged across the silent table between him and Kahananui, but he wouldn’t talk with his mouth full.

  Cruz took the bait in his place. “What?”

  “Saw a wolf separate a doe from the herd,” Kahananui said.

  The guys always joked that Caddie’s three dozen women traveled in packs and never gave a lonely soldier a fighting chance. Most of his team had stable marriages, wives and kids waiting stateside, so they loved to flip shit at guys who didn’t, like him and Cruz.

  “Didn’t know he was on the prowl, did we?” the Hawaiian added.

  The three men closest to the Big Kahuna snorted. Another one fluttered his eyelashes and murmured a falsetto, “Oh, Wulf, want to taste my Italian dessert? It’s a tir-a-miss-you.”

  “Knock it off,” Wulf said. Another mistake, but no stupider than trying to catch a whiff of Captain Chiesa’s shampoo.

  The rest hooted while Kahananui whooped like a pickup backfiring in subzero. “Got a live one, boys.”

  “Look, I convinced her to drop the medical records request.”

  “Hardship duty, huh?” Kahananui flashed a shaka hand sign at Wulf, thumb and little finger sticking out from his fist. “Capital H-A-R-D—”

  “Enough already. She’s an officer. And a doctor.” Noise buried his last words as the engineering NCO lifted his palms across the table for high fives. Wulf sank his face in his second glass of milk. Fine. Better they think he was flirting with the doctor, which he wasn’t, than that he’d asked her to help the commander.

  * * *

  Glad that her legs had brought her to the table without buckling, Theresa slipped into the seat across from her roommate.

  Jennifer looked up from her phone. “What took you so long?”

  “You didn’t see?” How could Miss Nosy have missed this? Sergeant Wardsen had stalked her through the chow line in full view of the entire room.

  “Text from my sister.” Her friend leaned across the table. “What’d I miss?”

  “One of the special ops guys.” For the rest of this deployment, she’d savor the way that phrase froze the other doctor in her chair.

  “What?” Jennifer’s eyes bugged as if she needed a Heimlich.

  “Sergeant Wardsen, he of the missing papers, wanted to talk.”

  “One of those ginormous mystery men spoke to you? Actual words? Wait—he exists?” She pointed her empty fork at Theresa. “You’re shamming me.”

  “Am not.” As she cut into her chicken, a rivulet of melted cheese pooled on the plastic plate, the way she liked it. A damn fine Tuesday. “He stopped me in line to apologize for his commander’s rudeness in the gym. He said, and I’m quoting, ‘I’m sorry. The team’s sorry.’”

  Jennifer’s mouth dropped open for a long moment until she put a fork full of pasta in it and chewed. “So, was he cute?” She started to turn in her seat.

  “Stop!” Theresa pinned her friend with a glare. Talking about men in the abstract, in the what-will-I-look-for-after-I-leave-the-army way, passed the time. But she drew the line at staring at real men. “Don’t you dare look.”

  “Why not? A guy chatted with you. You’re blushing. I want to check him out.”

  Theresa rolled her eyes. “He’s a sergeant, Jen.”

  “That’s not an answer.”

  “It is for me. It is for the army.” They both knew the fraternization rules.

  “And you’re a short-timer, so why not? Human catnip, huh?”

  “I’m not answering that.” His pants had fit noticeably well, and when he smiled his bottom lip had curved with invitation, but she couldn’t RSVP yes. Men were off-limits out here, and once she was back in civilization, she’d be so close to her final separation date, she wouldn’t have time to think about dating until she was settled in the next stage of her life.

  “And he speaks in full sentences?”

  “Please, thank you, the works.” Sergeant Wardsen’s eyes had warmed as they talked, as if she’d thawed something inside him. She speared a tomato to stop the flutter in her stomach.

  Jennifer sighed. “A sensitive warrior.”

  “Skip the melodrama.” She’d never admit that Sergeant Wardsen’s struggle to describe his commander’s problem made her agree, so she ignored her roommate and ate another bite.

  “You exchanged what? Three sentences?”

  “More like...” Theresa replayed the conversation while she crunched the chicken’s thyme-seasoned crust. “At least a dozen.”

  “With that much chitchat I’m surprised you don’t know his Social Security number.”

  “I asked if he was—” A crumb stuck in her throat, and she had to gulp water to stop coughing. “Married.”

  “I couldn’t possibly have heard that correctly.”

  She covered
her forehead and eyes with one hand. “You did.”

  “No effing way.” Through her fingers, she saw Jennifer’s shirt front droop into leftover red sauce as her friend leaned halfway across the table. “Is he?”

  “Nooo.” The single stretched sound might have been an answer to the question or a plea to drop the subject or even good advice to herself. She couldn’t decode her emotions.

  Jen whistled without a sound and shook her head. “When you go for it, you don’t mess around. And a sergeant.”

  How did her friend know exactly the tone her grandmother had used when good Italian girls dated outside the faith? “That’s why we forget it.” Her gaze drifted to the special ops table where guys were high-fiving each other while Sergeant Wardsen sat with a stiff spine at the end of the row. “He’ll never talk to me again.”

  “Oh, I don’t think those dudes give up easily.” Jennifer gulped her cola. “If you won’t let me stare from here then I need a refill.”

  “Please be subtle. Please.” That was like asking a surgeon to thank you when you provided a clamp, so she slipped lower in her seat as Jennifer marched to the drink bar.

  * * *

  Claiming a seat by the door usually improved John Draycott’s odds of a pleasant dinner, since none of the thugs currently working for Black and Swan wanted their backs exposed with every entrance or exit. A decade of Afghan operations had weeded the decent guys out of the organization, leaving men who increasingly resembled the manager of Bagram Airfield. Efficient and ruthless, to be sure, but not men with whom Draycott wanted to dine, so in addition to choosing a bad seat, he always read a book as a barrier to company.

  Tonight the printed page didn’t hold his gaze. Only forty years of clandestine training kept him from blatantly studying the soldier who sat across the mess hall with the Special Forces. He was the spitting image of another man, one Draycott had met in Mogadishu in 1968.

  Despite Draycott’s attention, America’s finest didn’t show a flicker of return interest. Soldiers barely glanced at civilians unless they were the Dallas Cowboy cheerleaders or surrounded by a security detail. Since he had neither tits nor an entourage, merely extra chins and a comb-over, he chewed—and occasionally glanced at a certain table—unnoticed.

  Although his vision had degenerated along with his waistline, it didn’t matter that he couldn’t make out a name on the staff sergeant’s shirt. A professional never forgot the face responsible for a failure, and certainly not the face responsible for his first failure.

  While he cut his meat, he remembered Somalia. Beautiful place in ’68, when the station chief had sent him into the capital’s slums to find a Belgian gun for hire. His agency boss had wanted a photo that allegedly linked a local mercenary and a World Bank official. The days of simple photos and film negatives. He’d assumed he was on a haze-the-new-guy snipe hunt to acquire an envelope full of Asian porn or Monopoly money. Assumed, that is, until he’d returned from the jakes to find his Belgian and a stone-faced blond stranger pointing guns at each other. One breath later, all assumptions had died as his contact choked on a knife.

  The assassin had retrieved the blade, picked a bloody envelope from the dead man’s shirt pocket—indeed, there’d been a picture—and stalked out of the shack that doubled as a bar. And so on the first day of his first job, Draycott had vomited next to his first body. Four decades later, he appreciated the killer’s polite half salute as he’d exited. Opponents who understood limits had become less common over the years, and those with flair had evaporated with the Cold War. The man in Mogadishu had left him alive, and thus able to sit in a chow hall in Afghanistan, one donkey ride past the end of the Earth, and stare at the assassin’s identical twin.

  Except that was absurd. The soldier sitting across the mess had the same profile, but the sergeant couldn’t be a twin, or the same mercenary. Every joint in Draycott’s body attested to the years since 1968. Although Draycott knew three men who seemed eerily unaging, this soldier couldn’t be like them. He might be the son of the man from Mogadishu, but not the same man.

  With his steak finally cut to a width matching the oven fries, he set the knife across the top of his plate. His shoulders itched to fill in the blanks and connect this sergeant to the Mogadishu hit, but gathering information about a member of Special Forces could boomerang and impact cargo ops. The company pulled in two-point-five million euro per week, nicely north of three-point-three million dollars, tax-free. He earned one percent of gross as a combination secret shopper, help desk, quality control and security hotline. His thumbs-up or thumbs-down went to the Director. Therefore his decisions had to align as perfectly as the food on his plate. Because operations in Eastern Afghanistan were as orderly as the stacks gracing his dish at the three, six, nine and twelve positions, he would not check into this sergeant.

  Personal curiosity about an episode from his past couldn’t be allowed to jeopardize his current job. If it did, the Director would fire him. With extreme irrevocability.

  Chapter Three

  Another Saturday afternoon in her plywood office. While the nurses were in staff training, Theresa anticipated tomorrow’s break. Most of Camp Cadwalader worked seven-day weeks, but Colonel Loughrey ran the clinic half staffed on Sunday afternoons. Barring mass casualties, she had four hours off every fourteen days. Four hours to lounge on her bunk, ponder her leave itinerary and maybe paint her toenails.

  “Busy?” The deep voice pulled Theresa out of her reports and to her feet.

  “No, sir. Paperwork.” She blinked to merge her memory with the ruffian on the other side of the intake counter. “Sergeant Wardsen? You’re here?”

  He stuffed his boonie hat in a cargo pocket. His hair, definitely shaggy, showed the imprint as he rubbed his neck. “We were on patrol with the Afghan National Army for ten days.”

  “You look like you returned in the last five minutes.” Dirt blurred the pixelated camo patterns on his pants and shirt, and his smell rivaled the dining facility Dumpster.

  “Fifteen.” One corner of his mouth turned up as he indicated his uniform. “Guess I should’ve waited to come. The others draw lower pay, so they get first shower.”

  “No privileges for rank?” She’d learned that Staff Sergeant Wulf Wardsen was the A-team’s noncommissioned officer in charge.

  “None I’ve noticed.” He slid a folded paper across the particleboard counter. “Still get yelled at by officers.”

  Her face heated as she recalled telling him to knock it off. “I didn’t mean—” When the wicked teasing in his eyes registered in her brain, she closed her mouth.

  “The email I promised. I told the team we were chipping in for a baby gift, so they don’t know about this.”

  “You should do that. In fact, buy a baby jogger. I read about postpartum depression, and sometimes exercise helps. Wait.” She hunted on her desk, then joined him at the counter. “These are details on the new-parent-support program at Campbell. They’re trained to recognize depression, make medical referrals and facilitate infant bonding.” He didn’t smell much worse than the gym, and the trade-off for standing this close was that she could see the cleft in his chin. “And they do home visits. I emailed the coordinator last week, and she has openings for Tuesday afternoon and Thursday morning—”

  The crinkles around his eyes deepened as his lips twitched and ohmigod she’d turned into an uncapped gusher again. She shut up, but couldn’t look away. Above his stubble, his cheekbones beckoned her fingers to explore, so she locked her elbows at her sides.

  “You don’t mess around, do you, Captain?” His voice had dropped to a register that vibrated the air trapped between her skin and her loose shirt. His compliment sounded like an open-door invite straight to trouble.

  “I wanted to be ready in case you came the next day.” She bit her lower lip. In a softer voice she added, “I hadn’t realized you w
ere in the field.”

  He stared at her so long she stifled the need to touch her hair and check for strands that had escaped today’s bun. Amber flecks swirled in his blue eyes like a whirlpool, but she needed to avoid being sucked under, no matter how much she wanted to lean close to count each speck and learn their different colors.

  “Would you like an adventure?” No one had ever asked her something so ambiguous or seemingly forbidden. “We need a female doctor to examine a village leader’s third wife. She’s pregnant. You’d fly in with us and do what you can.”

  Her chest inflated and she bit her lip to keep from cheering at the thought of going beyond the sandbags and blast wall. Aching to do anything that wasn’t paperwork for her four-hundredth respiratory complaint, she must’ve nodded her agreement because he smiled.

  “Monday. Be at the flight line in battle rattle at 0600. Doctors do have combat gear?”

  “Of course. We even have to qualify with our weapons.” Crap. Her mouth had sped past her brain again, but at least he was too polite to roll his eyes at a doctor who talked weapons.

  “Until then.” When he removed his palms from the top of the counter and left as silently as he’d arrived, legs and arms flowing as smoothly as his namesake, she realized her forearms were also on the counter. They’d been leaning far too close to each other.

  She’d see him again in two days. Then the enormity of his request hit: pregnancy, real Afghans, outside the wire. After six months of staring at the mountains that ringed this plateau, she’d set foot on one. With him.