“Sure, I’ll get an updated map. It is sounding like we have six employees left there and their families. We will have a couple vehicles, so we should be all right. It will only take us a few minutes to get to the airport then, depending on the rebels.”
“Nate, these people aren’t going to just let you drive to the airport. What kind of RPGs or missiles will you have? Grenades? Machine guns? What are you guys bringing?”
Ana sounded like one of the guys as she discussed the weapons she thought we should bring with us. It was quiet adorable because I couldn’t imagine her really knowing or understanding what any of those things were.
“We will all have our hand guns with us and a couple guys have some sniper guns.”
Ana jumped up and put her hands on her hips. She had a look of absolute disgust on her face as she looked at me.
“No. You absolutely cannot go in there like that. You need tanks, machine guns, bombs—you need it all.”
“Calm down, Ana; we travel through war zones all the time, it will be all right.”
I tried to calm her concerns, but they were the same ones I had had many times over while traveling through war zones. We were never properly prepared and our equipment was out of date. Ana was right to be outraged, but I couldn’t tell her that.
This was my last job with my company. I would just have to do the best I could with what we were given and then learn from the experience before starting my own company. With my own business, I would make sure everyone had high-powered guns and bulletproof vests. I’d ensure whenever possible that our vehicles were also bulletproof. High-end clients were willing to pay high-end prices for the security they needed and I was determined to be that person who provided it to them.
“You’ve got a death wish, don’t you? You’re the kind of guy who constantly does dangerous stuff and you don’t care if you die or not.”
“No, I’m a skilled soldier. I know what I’m doing over there and I don’t need some twenty-something girl without war experience telling me what I need and don’t need while I do my job.”
The words came out of my mouth swiftly, and I regretted them instantaneously. If I could have paused time and rewound that moment to stop myself from talking I would have done it, but I couldn’t. There was nothing I could do, the words had already entered the stratosphere, and I watched in horror as Ana reacted to them.
“So, that’s the kind of man you are,” she said as she turned her naked body around and walked straight to her bedroom.
The slam of her door echoed throughout the house as I put my head into my hands in despair. I was the kind of guy who always ruined a good thing when I had it. Anytime a woman got close to me, I did whatever necessary to force her away from me. That was the type of guy I was and I hated it.
Chapter Thirteen
ANA
The idea that I would have traveled with Nate to Syria started off as an absolute joke. I didn’t want to go to that place, but I did have something to offer him with my knowledge of the area. I wasn’t exactly sure how I had expected him to respond, but certainly not the way he had.
He made me feel like I was just some ditzy blonde who couldn’t add two and two together. I had outrun him for two weeks and could have easily strangled him out in the shed the other day. I wasn’t just a helpless woman who couldn’t take care of herself.
Sure, I had hidden in a closet to avoid a raccoon, but how was I to know it wasn’t an actual person breaking in? Nate could have handled my offer in a much better way.
The next morning, I was still fuming with anger toward him so I got up and went for my run without Nate. I didn’t need him to run with me; in fact, he only held me back. I slowed down when I ran with him so he didn’t feel bad being left behind. Except for the first day when I had run home way ahead of him, the rest of the days I had slowed my pace so we could run together.
But that morning I ran full out. I cleared my head and just let my body go into overdrive as I ran over the hills and as far as my body could go before I had to stop. The trail had ended and I was running between the trees and bushes when I finally decided to sit down and catch my breath.
The clearing that I stopped at was magnificent. It had two-foot high grass that stretched out over a mile-wide prairie. I fought to catch my breath as I watched the grass blow in the breeze.
My chest heaved with the morning air and it took me a good twenty minutes before I felt like I had started to breath normally again. I was a long way from the cabin, much farther than we had gone before, and I regretted taking myself so far away without any way of communicating or any water to drink.
I made my way back the same route I had come in search of the end of the trail that Nate had made through the woods. It seemed to take me forever before I found what I thought was the trail again, and by that time, I was tired and my adrenaline exhausted me, so I chose to walk instead of run.
My thoughts drifted to Nate and what had happened the night before. Certainly he wasn’t a bad guy, and I was going to try and not hold his words against him too much. It was ridiculous that I had even suggested it, but in that moment, I felt so vulnerable when he had laughed at me and dismissed the idea. Saying that it wasn’t allowed would have been simple enough. But instead he hadn’t handled it well at all.
Relationships weren’t my thing. I hadn’t had a long-term one and I certainly hadn’t lived with a guy before. As angry as I had been the night before, my run and walk had cleared my head. At least I could try and talk to him again before he left and smooth things over. I didn’t want him to go overseas with us in some sort of weird place.
As I continued to walk, I realized that where I was didn’t seem familiar to me. We had run on Nate’s trail for almost two weeks straight and the curves had become like second nature to me; wherever I was at that moment was foreign.
There was certainly a trail that I was following, it just wasn’t the one Nate had made. This trail had turned into a very narrow path that would have been impossible for two people to run on together.
In the distance, I saw what looked like a cabin. I made my way toward it in an effort to see if anyone was home. Perhaps, if they were home, they could give me directions to Nate’s cabin. I was sure it had to be somewhere near there, I just didn’t know quiet which angle I needed to be walking in.
The cabin was dark, but it looked like someone had been there recently. There was a light on inside, but no cars around the building. I knocked and waited to see if anyone answered before I started to look through the windows. There were an enormous amount of pictures hanging on one wall with a map that looked like it was of the woods. I moved around to a different window to see if I could get a better look at the pictures.