“I’ll see you tomorrow,” he said, leaning in and kissing me tenderly. He smiled as we broke apart, and for that one brief moment, it was as though his persistent dark, serious nature was gone.
I did that, I thought. I made him smile.
I don’t know why it was such a surprise, but as he got dressed and slipped back out into the cool night air, I had to smile in response. I curled around my pillow feeling utterly content.
4
Ace
When I got back to the barracks, the place was a flurry of movement, guys throwing their gear together.
“Dude, where’ve you been?” Kit—John Kitteredge, our medic—asked me.
“Just around,” I said, shrugging. “You know me.” I didn’t give them time to think about it. I didn’t know exactly what they’d do to me if they had caught me in bed with Harper, but I knew it wouldn’t be good. Not that I regretted it, but I did feel kind of stupid for potentially threatening my whole career for a woman.
She wasn’t just any woman, though. I liked Harper. She was surprising in so many ways. And sexy as anything, with those dark eyes and seductive curves.
“What’s going on anyway?” I asked, looking around, even though I was pretty sure I already knew the answer.
“Get your shit together,” Habs said. “We got the call. We’re heading out.”
I nodded and methodically started putting my things back in my bag. Fortunately, it was automatic by now. My things never seemed to spread out like everyone else’s either. I smiled wryly to myself. That was after a lifetime of being taught not to make messes and to be ready for shit to hit the fan at any moment.
For a minute, I thought about Harper. I wanted to go back to her barracks and knock on the door. To tell her that we were leaving, maybe to kiss her goodbye. But I couldn’t do that. There wasn’t time, first of all. And anyway, I had already risked enough that night. Better to ship off silently and take my chances seeing her when we got back.
She’d been there for a while now anyway. She knew how things were. She wouldn’t expect me to show up and say goodbye. I’d be back; our unit was never out on the front line for long, not if the powers that be could help it. We were too specialized a unit, too important to lose over some stupid fighting. I’d see her when I got back.
“Where are we off to?” I asked Kit as we got on our truck. I had to fight not to look over toward Harper’s building. She was probably asleep by now anyway. She wouldn’t be there to see us off. I hid a smile as I thought back to how she’d looked when I’d left. Her wild hair had been fanned out across her pillow, and she’d looked totally fucked out. She’d looked sweet, and there was so little sweetness to life in Kuwait.
I shook my head and forced my thoughts back to the present. “It’s a hostage situation,” Kit explained. “They need us to go in, clear the area. Shouldn’t take too long; I think they want it done quickly.”
“Do we know anything about the hostage?” I asked. That was always useful, just from a planning standpoint. A political hostage reacted a lot differently from a military hostage.
But Kit just shrugged. “No one’s really talking about this one,” he said, letting me draw my own conclusions. That meant that whoever it was, they were important.
I nodded and leaned my head back. Things would be busy once we arrived, so we might as well try to get a little shut-eye before we arrived. It was a little tricky on these bouncy, Kuwaiti roads, but I was surprisingly worn out after everything with Harper, and I fell asleep quickly, my mind blank and my body calm.
We arrived at the makeshift base just as the sun was coming up. None of us were really too sure where we were, but it didn’t really matter. All we needed to worry about was our mission. We spent the morning getting briefed. They still didn’t want to give us too many details, which only confirmed my suspicions that this mission was sensitive.
That’s why they needed the best of us, I supposed.
We waited until the evening to move. We had a long slug across the desert to even get to our target. We’d secure the zone and rescue the hostage, and then hopefully they’d be able to get trucks out to pick us up. Otherwise, if they didn’t think it was safe enough to send the trucks for us, we’d have the long walk back as well.
Movies always make military exercises seem so much more interesting than they really are. In reality, missions like these were just long. It was evening, so at least we weren’t trapped in the oppressive Kuwaiti heat. But it still wasn’t cool, not exactly, and especially not when we had on our full uniforms and our heavy gear.
Everything went as planned, surprisingly. It didn’t take much to secure the city and get our guy out. In fact, it almost seemed too easy, which only made us all jumpy and nervous. We kept expecting that we’d walked into a trap. But they must have just spread their forces too thin.
The roads were blocked off, we were told, so we started the long walk back.
Boom.
We were all on high alert immediately. Even more so when one of the guys—which guy? I couldn’t even see—started yelling in pain. Kit was there in a flash, tearing the leg off Sherbs’s pants and flipping open his medical kit. “Shrapnel,” he muttered, glancing back over his shoulder.
“IED,” one of the other guys confirmed. Improvised explosive device. We knew they were out there. This was a dangerous area. And no matter how many precautions we took, there were just some things that we couldn’t prepare against.
“You’re gonna be fine, Sherbs,” Kit said soothingly as he bandaged up the other man’s leg. “Just a surface wound, nothing more. You’re going to be fine.”
Meanwhile, Tripp was on the radio about a transport. “I don’t give a shit if it’s unsafe,” he snapped. “I have a man who’s not going to be able to walk out of here, and the rest of us have too much shit to carry him, too. Plus, the last thing we need is for your fucking hostage to get blown to smithereens as we walk him across the length of this godforsaken country.”