Taking Fire Read online

  “Keep them that way.”

  “Trust me, your balls are my utmost concern.”

  Grif’s mouth twitched into a grin. “Fuck, it hurts, Deuce.”

  “I know.” She pushed the Demerol. The dose was calibrated for an average-sized man, but Grif wasn’t average sized. The narcotic would help with the pain but it wouldn’t obliterate it, and she couldn’t give him any more. His BP was too low, and she didn’t know how long they’d be out in the field. She didn’t want to run out. “The Demerol will kick in shortly, but I’m going to need to get a look underneath this bandage. That’s gonna hurt a lot more in a minute or two.”

  “Great.” Grif turned his head, struggling to focus on Max. His pupils were pinpoint and divergent. The Demerol was starting to work. “What about the target? We get her out?”

  “Not yet.” Max glanced toward the door where Rachel squatted, staring out, the assault rifle held stiffly away from her body as if it were a wild thing that might bite her. A rare slice of sunlight illuminated the side of her face. Her shoulder-length hair had come loose from its tie and lay in soft tangles on her shoulders. Her jaw was long and shapely, her cheekbones delicately arched, her nose straight above the whimsical mouth. Her eyebrows were distinct and subtly arched. A laceration marred her cheek just below her right eye, and a smear of blood discolored the skin over her jaw. Even bruised, bloody, and dirt-smudged, her face was an arresting combination of strength and beauty.

  Max had witnessed her strength, physical and emotional, seconds earlier when Rachel had insisted on carrying Grif despite the rounds whizzing by their heads. Unfortunately, Rachel was also stubborn and prone to ignore authority. Personally, Max would prefer Rachel be a little less brave and a lot more pliable, but she’d worry about that later. She realized the woman, the target, had become Rachel to her sometime in the last half hour, and she pushed that strange and unwelcome realization aside. She needed to concentrate on priorities, and the first was keeping Grif from bleeding to death. She didn’t doubt for a single second that someone would come for them if she could keep them all alive. She just wasn’t sure how she was going to do that.

  “Anything out there?” Max asked as she broke open another pack of hemostatic gauze and a new pressure bandage.

  “No. Not that I can see.” Rachel blinked against the bright sunlight illuminating the center of the clearing. When had the sun come up? She strained to see into the shadows where the jungle canopy obscured the demarcation between the bare ground around the tents and the nearby undergrowth. She imagined she could see a hundred pairs of eyes peering out at her, the glint of sunlight off a hundred rifle barrels, and the menacing faces of enemies everywhere. Dacar’s body and that of another guard lay not more than twenty feet from where she knelt, but already they seemed unrecognizable to her. Their features had not changed all that much, but the absence of life left them looking vacant and empty, as if they had never been vibrant human beings with goals and ambitions and fears and joys. How could this have happened? Of course, rationally she knew how it could happen. She was in the middle of a country that had been at constant war for more than two decades, in a continent where almost every country had a centuries-long history of internecine strife. She knew the risks, but her mind rebelled against the senselessness of it all.

  The Red Cross was recognized around the world for its humanitarian goals and its careful neutrality. She and her coworkers had come to help the very people whom the rebels purported to represent—the native Somalis, the people of this land. She’d seen the briefing reports. She knew that Islamist extremists had joined forces with the rebels, strengthening and feeding their militant might and fervor. But why had they attacked the camp?

  Her father had warned her the area was no longer safe, but if he’d known they were about to be attacked, he would have told her. Maybe he had, in his own way. He’d insisted she be ready to leave just before dawn. Maybe the attack had come early. Maybe he’d breached security to contact her at all. She wanted to believe that, but none of it really mattered any longer. She was here now, and her father and all his resources and power could not change that.

  She checked over her shoulder to see how Grif was doing. Max knelt by his side, speaking in short curt phrases to Amina, her movements rapid and sure as she worked. She was more than just a soldier. The caduceus on her collar spoke to that, but how could a healer justify the violence of war? The two extremes were impossible for Rachel to reconcile. All the same, she was glad Max was here, because she suspected she and Amina would both be dead without her. They still might be.

  “Where are they?” Rachel asked, almost wishing she could see someone. She didn’t want to shoot anyone, but she didn’t want to sit here waiting to be shot either.

  “They’re probably gone,” Max said in her level, emotionless way. “The rebels are known for their hit-and-run tactics. Once the birds opened up on them, they probably decided they’d had enough of a fight for one day.”

  “Will they be back?”

  “Possibly. Do you have anything here of particular value?”

  “I don’t know what they would consider of value.”

  Max smiled faintly and wrapped some kind of external pressure device around Grif’s leg. “Good point. Weapons?”

  Rachel shook her head. “Only what Dacar…” Her throat suddenly closed on the name. She didn’t know him very well. He’d been a quiet, reserved man, but his smile had been friendly and he seemed competent and professional. She only saw the others briefly whenever they changed shifts and came in to eat before returning to their tents to sleep or talk quietly among themselves. She’d never known anything about them beyond their names. “Only what the guards were carrying. We have no money.”

  Amina spoke up. “We have the hospital. Equipment, medicine, drugs. And we have food.”

  Max grimaced. “Yes. And those are valuable commodities. If they’re aware that you have these things, they’ll be back.”

  “What are we going to do?” Rachel surprised herself with the question, realizing she had automatically assumed that Max de Milles would be in charge from now on. Why had she done that? She never looked to others to solve her problems or protect her. The answer was simple and unavoidable. She was completely out of her depth. She knew nothing about the waging of war, only the consequences.

  “My team will be back,” Max said.

  “How can you be sure?” Rachel asked.

  Max’s brows, two heavy dark slashes above intense blue-black eyes, lowered. “They’ll be back.”

  “But they don’t know we’re alive.”

  “It doesn’t matter. We don’t leave anyone behind—and we make no distinction between the living and the dead.”

  The way she said it, as if for her life and death were indistinguishable, chilled Rachel’s heart. Was this what war did, crushed the emotions, obliterated the value of life? Or was it that in order to wage war, one must already have lost one’s humanity?

  Chapter Seven

  “I’m going to take this dressing off,” Max said to Amina. “There will be more bleeding.”

  “I’ve seen blood before,” Amina said, her voice almost sad.

  “Okay. Just keep doing what you’re doing.” Max pulled on a clean pair of gloves and gently removed the old bandage, trying not to dislodge any clot that might have formed. Bright red blood spurted onto her sleeve, and she pressed a finger over the femoral artery above the inch-wide entrance wound in the center of the fleshy part of Grif’s upper left leg. The wound was through and through, with a ragged exit hole four times as big on the back. His balls were fine, he’d be happy to learn, but from the nature of the bleeding, the round had nicked a branch of the big artery in his thigh. If they were lucky, it was just a branch. If the femoral was hit, they were in deep shit.

  Grif had lapsed into semiconsciousness again, partly narcotic effect and partly blood loss. His vitals had stabilized, but he was rocky. The golden hour—the optimal time period to transport the wou
nded from the field to a forward hospital for definitive care—was about up, and she doubted they’d be extracted anytime soon. All she’d done so far was control the immediate threat, but that wasn’t going to be enough if the bleeding continued.

  Amina gave Max a worried glance. “How is he?”

  “Better than he was. You don’t need to squeeze the fluid in anymore.” Max finished applying the new dressing and sat back on her heels. She capped one of the IVs and connected a fresh bag of saline to the line running into his left arm. Four liters in already. Much more and she’d need to start worrying about his lungs and fluid overload. “Could you bring one of those chairs over here? I’ll hang his IV from it so you don’t have to keep holding it.”

  “Of course.” Amina retrieved a folding chair from in front of the long table holding the communication equipment and placed it next to Grif’s shoulder. “I think there are blankets in the back. Should I get some to cover him?”

  “That would be good. Thanks.” Max propped up the IV bag and rubbed her face. Amina had been as steady while Max changed Grif’s dressings as if she’d had battlefield experience, and maybe in her own way she had. Violence was a way of life in this place. “You did great.”

  Amina smiled almost shyly and went to retrieve the blankets. Max rose, stretched the cramps from her lower back, and checked her watch. Seven hundred hours. She felt as if they’d been inside the sweltering tent with its stale, oppressive air for a week already. Her shirt stuck to her back with cold sweat despite the heat, and she loosened her clamshell body armor and set her equipment belt on the floor next to Grif. Now that he was stable for the moment, she had to deal with the rest of their situation. She joined Rachel at the door and looked out.

  “Everything quiet?”

  “Yes, but I keep thinking I see things. And then I don’t.”

  “That’s pretty common the first few times on watch. Don’t worry about it. If there’s someone out there who doesn’t want you to see them, you won’t. And when you do see them, you’ll know for sure. They’ll be pointing a rifle at you and probably firing.”

  Rachel sucked in a breath. “Why are you so calm? Doesn’t that frighten you—the idea of being a target, or do you get used to it?”

  “There’s no point thinking about it, and there’s no way to change it. You just deal with what is.” Max had spent so much time with troops the last few years—with those who lived under the same cloud of violence and death as her—she’d forgotten how foreign her reality must seem to those who were strangers to war. She wondered, seeing the questions and confusion in Rachel’s eyes, why she had looked forward to going home, where she’d be an outsider surrounded by people who had no concept of where she’d been or what she’d seen.

  “The ultimate living in the now?” Rachel asked.

  “You train for every eventuality, prepare for any contingency, until you know, down to your last cell, you’re ready. Then you put it aside.” Max shrugged. Fear could get you killed as quickly as arrogance. If she’d ever been philosophical, and she couldn’t remember a time when she was, she’d long since lost any interest in trying to understand the why of the random happenings she saw around her every day—why one person took a round in the forehead, while another, standing inches away, went unscathed, as if there was some cosmic meaning to events. Maybe there was some great plan, maybe everyone’s fate was preordained, but she couldn’t see how that mattered. All that mattered was what she did in response. Was that living in the now or merely surviving?

  Out here there wasn’t much difference. She summed it up and hoped that would be the end of the conversation. Rachel Winslow couldn’t possibly understand, and why should she? Even the suffering of the displaced civilians Rachel had come to help couldn’t compare to the depraved cruelty of war, and Max had no desire to enlighten her. “The less you worry about what might happen, the better.”

  Rachel’s brows furrowed. She clearly wasn’t a woman who accepted anything at face value. “Is that scientific fact or personal opinion?”

  “Experience.”

  “How long you been out here?”

  “This time? A little over a year. The first time about the same.”

  “That sounds…hard.”

  “I joined the Navy. I knew what that meant.”

  “Did you,” Rachel said softly. She cut her gaze to the camp and the jungle beyond. “How could you possibly? How could anyone?”

  Max said nothing. She had no answer, and Rachel wasn’t really talking to her. She was trying to make sense of a senseless situation. She’d learn not to soon enough.

  Rachel turned back. “The helicopters—you’re sure they’re coming back?”

  “Yes.”

  “Can you call them or something?” Her eyes brightened. “We have a satellite connection—maybe we can call headquarters in Mogadishu? If they know what happened—”

  “They know,” Max said. “The people who need to know already know, and they’re not in Mog. They’re at Lemonnier.”

  “Is that where you came from?”

  “Yes.” Max scanned the jungle, dense and green and impenetrable. An ancient force onto itself, neither friend nor enemy. “The rebels were a lot closer than we expected. I’d rather not try radio contact now until we’re sure they’re not still out there. No point putting a big sign over our heads.”

  “How far are we from your base?”

  “A few hours’ flying time. They’ll contact us if they can when they’re back in range.” Or they’d just materialize out of the dark, troops and birds dropping from the sky like something out of myth, or nightmare.

  “When will they be back?”

  Max debated how much to say. She needed to keep the civilians from panicking. Rachel and Amina had handled themselves better than most in the midst of the crisis, but the danger was far from over.

  “Don’t sugarcoat it,” Rachel said briskly. “We have a right to know what we’re facing.”

  “My guess is not before sundown, at the earliest. The birds are made for night maneuvers, and it’ll take a while for command to sort out what happened here and why. This was supposed to be straightforward in and out.” She didn’t want to say it might not be sundown tonight. If a large rebel contingent with surface-to-air rockets or a stockpile of RPGs had located in the area, the birds might not be able to land. If an extraction team had to infiltrate on foot, it would take a day or two. At best.

  Rachel grimaced. “Someone’s intelligence was faulty.”

  “Maybe. Maybe not. The rebels could’ve hit here purely at random, and it was just a coincidence that we arrived at the same time.”

  “I don’t know about you, but I find that coincidence a stretch.” Rachel sighed, her exasperation clear. “I don’t understand any of this. We’ve been here almost two months. They must have known we were no threat.”

  “They took a trouncing this morning,” Max said. “Random attack or not, there’s not a lot of reason for them to return. You said yourself you don’t have much they might want except the medical supplies.”

  “Maybe that’s reason enough,” Rachel said, but she didn’t look or sound convinced.

  Max had an uneasy feeling Rachel might know something more about what had prompted the attack than she let on. Considering the mission objectives, she was almost certain Rachel knew they were coming that morning. The French medics had been ready to evacuate the patients before the birds had even gotten into range. “What else do you know about this morning?”

  “What? Nothing—why should I?”

  “You tell me. Someone in your life must be pretty important, because we were sent here specifically for you. You, most importantly.”

  “I don’t know why,” Rachel said, the heat rising in her cheeks. She didn’t want to betray her father by revealing his call. She really didn’t know why he’d insisted she leave, and she had no clue if the attack was related to her. All the same, her stomach roiled. Had her friends been killed because of her? Had the so
ldiers and sailors been shot because of her? She repeated softly, “I don’t know.”

  “Who are you?”

  “I’m Rachel Winslow.” Rachel stared into the flinty blue eyes that examined her with stony calculation. Max de Milles didn’t trust her. The realization hurt, though she couldn’t say why. The woman was a stranger, hardened and cynical and cold. “You know that. You asked for me by name.”

  “That’s because we were sent here to retrieve you. But I still don’t know who you are that made that necessary.”

  “Does it matter? Am I any more important than the other eleven people who were here?” Rachel could hear how defensive she sounded, but she wasn’t more important than her friends, her coworkers. She hadn’t asked for special privileges. She certainly hadn’t asked for people to put their lives in danger because of her. She wouldn’t have this woman holding her responsible for something that had not been her choice.

  “Someone thinks you’re more important.”

  The way she said it made it sound as if Rachel felt the same way. Rachel’s back stiffened. “Shouldn’t we be concerned about what happens next and not spend time on fruitless questions? That sounds like something to suit your logical view of things.”

  The corner of Max’s mouth twitched, and damn it if she didn’t smile. Her remoteness faded for the briefest instant and she suddenly looked approachable. Human. And despite the dirt and sweat that caked her face, incredibly attractive. Rachel’s heart skipped, a sensation she would not have believed if it hadn’t happened again when a soft chuckle reverberated in Max’s throat.

  “Well, you’re quick,” Max said. “No, none of that matters all that much right now.”

  The tension in Rachel’s shoulders lessened and a swift wave of relief passed through her, as if she’d been forgiven, which was ridiculous since she hadn’t done anything wrong. Why she even cared what Max de Milles thought of her given the situation was equally absurd. Feeling foolish and uncharacteristically unsure, she bristled. “Well, now that we’ve established where we both stand, what’s next?”