Yasmine trailed her fingers along the rough exterior wall, flecking paint free, moving nearer to the end of the airport building. Nearer to voices. The Colonel's voice rode the wind toward her as he talked to two other men while four soldiers climbed to the one-story roof, a line of a hundred more filing alongside the building.
The four men...ran toward the edge?
Yasmine gasped. "Why are they doing that?"
Crusty tipped up his sunglasses and searched. "Doing what?"
She pointed toward the four lunatics hurtling through the air toward the sandy earth. Landing. Rolling to their sides. Ouch! "Jumping off the building. Falling down."
Laughing, Crusty dropped his aviator shades back into place. "Parachute training. Practicing their PLF—parachute landing fall. They're using the one-story, flat roof as a makeshift PLF platform."
"Fall? That seems silly. Why not land on your feet?"
"Because you might shatter your ankles or knees. Falling to the side in a controlled manner helps absorb the shock of the landing by distributing it out among different body parts." Crusty reached into the leg pocket of his flight suit, pulled out a small pack of peanuts. "Ever lay on a bed of nails? Same principle."
He proffered the snack bag her way in an obvious attempt to change the subject. "Want some?"
"No thank you." She watched the soldiers roll to their feet again and dust sand from their uniforms. "I thought these soldiers were only here to distribute food and medical aid."
"We all need to stay up on our parachuting skills." Crusty pitched back a handful of peanuts while the OSI officer silently pierced her soul with all-knowing, sea-green eyes.
She kept her gaze steady on Crusty, a man who never seemed to stop eating. Perhaps she could pry information out of him with a cookie—baked by someone other than herself, of course. "These are some of your Airborne Rangers, then?"
Crusty walked alongside, crunching peanuts, assessing her with narrow-eyed suspicion before answering. "Soldiers other than Rangers can be airborne qualified. Regardless, we always train. Always. What we do is dangerous even if it's a simple humanitarian run. And of course we're always working to be mission ready for the worst."
Her gaze locked on the Colonel's broad back in mottled tan camouflage as she wondered how shoulders that seemed so invincible seconds before now had mortality etched across them. "What if one of them breaks his leg and can not work?"
"Better his leg than his life from lack of training."
"But can't they die in training, too?'' How many odds had the Colonel defied over the years?
"It happens. A reality of a dangerous job. But training hard under controlled circumstances keeps our casualties lower, and ultimately keeps far more of us alive in combat."
"Are not the higher-ups in service like Colonel Cullen exempt from these dangerous training exercises?"
"Well, no doubt a commander becomes valuable for the overall knowledge he has, the cohesiveness his leadership gives to a unit. But he still has to perform in the field." Crusty pointed his half-eaten bag of peanuts toward the Colonel. "The Regimental Commander over there, for example. Above all, he's still an Army soldier. Airborne qualified. No different from an aviator wing commander staying current on his flight status. He may not fly as often—or in this case, jump—but he still has to be qualified. And he'd better not screw up in front of his men or his credibility is shot to hell, which means there goes the unit cohesiveness if they can't trust their leader."
Which meant her colonel still threw himself out of airplanes, an image that thrilled and scared her all at once with how much the man already affected her emotions.
And she didn't even know his first name.
What a stressful way to live. "Your wife is all right with this?"
"She's a special lady."
This man was definitely taken, and happily so until it almost stirred envy. "Did you have a nice conversation with your wife and little brothers last night?" >Yet hadn't she kissed him? Waited for him? Her clean aloe scent teased into his memory along with the taste of her when they'd kissed. Progress? Maybe, but then he'd realized how much more he wanted for her, all or nothing. Win or lose, no in between, in what promised to be a tough-as-hell battle without much of a foundation to withstand the storm in the making.
No trust either way. He realized now that it hadn't been there to start with or they would have told each other more.
Easier to tell crap that didn 't matter.
In a splash of further realization as blinding as a floodlight for a guy wearing NVGs, it hit him why she hadn't told him about Yasmine. Because it mattered. It hurt too damned much.
Exactly the same reason he hadn't told her about Tina.
He would have sworn he was over losing her. God, it was fifteen years ago. Yet right now he could almost feel the pinch of a bandage being ripped from an old wound only to find the whole damned thing had festered under the protective covering.
Froot Loops. Things from the past dogged a person no matter what. He wasn't over Tina's death. The cut-off-at-the-knees pain of it burned all over again from being exposed, leaving him in need of somewhere to hide out alone to lick his wounds until he could put himself back together again.