Shattered (5 page)

“So, what do you think?” Quinn asked Zach.

They’d left the tent to talk in private. Countless eyes were on them, none of the refugees seeming fooled by their native outfits.

Some looked too stunned by their circumstances to give a shit that a bunch of American military men had landed in their midst. Some looked suspicious. Others looked downright hostile. Unfortunately, every man in the place appeared to be armed. Including those terrorists the doc had told them about.

“The deal was I’d have O’Halloran call the spook when we were ready for that helo to get us out of here and back to base,” he reminded Quinn.

“There’s a good chance we might have to fight our way out.”

“So what else is new?” Zach looked around. “Okay, maybe this isn’t turning out as good as it could be. But it sure as hell beats Garrett dying while waiting for exfil.” He looked down at his black dive watch. “It’s eleven thirty-five.”

Quinn grinned, immediately catching his drift. “I knew our luck had to change.”

Kirby had done all she could. She’d cleaned the wound—and poured in hemostatic material designed to control high-volume arterial bleeding. Because she was afraid to give Shane too much morphine at this altitude, she’d stuck as much as possible to injecting local anesthetic.

Except for a few muttered curses and the occasional flinch, he’d remained amazingly stoic.

“This is really weird,” he said, after she’d finished pumping him full of blood to replace what he’d lost. “I was thinking about you right before my helo got hit with that damn RPG. Wondering where you were and how you were doing. I was even planning to track you down after this mission. And, wow, here you are.”

“News flash, Captain,” Kirby said as she wrapped his leg in sterile bandages, “getting yourself shot out of the sky just for a reunion was overkill. Even for you.”

“What can I say?” Somehow, through the pain he managed that cocky, flyboy smile that had always had the power to melt. Oh, it might only be about a third of the wattage she remembered, but it was still damn effective. “I figured you’d appreciate the grand gesture.”

“You’re incorrigible.”

“Yeah. I remember you saying that a time or two. Especially that time—”

“Shut up.” She put two fingers over the lips she could still, in her dreams, taste. He’d always tasted like cinnamon, from the Big Red gum he chewed. “You need to conserve your strength.”

He looked inclined to argue, when the all-too-familiar whomp, whomp, whomp of a helicopter’s rotor blades drew her attention.

In Iraq, that sound had meant incoming trauma patients. Even now, it spiked her pulse rate and sent adrenaline surging through her.

“Stay here,” she said, immediately realizing how stupid that sounded. Like he was going to get up and go crawling out to do battle on his one good leg?

Unfortunately, knowing him as well as she did, Kirby wouldn’t have been at all surprised if he’d tried to do exactly that. “And stay quiet.”

She went outside, looking up at the incoming copter. Given that the Iraqi government had bought a lot of helicopters from Poland, as it grew closer, she recognized it as Russian.

Was it, she worried, Imam Jalaluddin, come to collect his injured son?

And wasn’t that just what they all needed?

“Relax,” the leader, who’d been outside conferring with the larger man, said. “It’s ours.”

“Ours, as in CIA,” she said.

“Hey.” His grin was quick and belied the seriousness of their situation. “Surely you’ve heard of ‘Don’t ask, don’t tell,’ Doc.” His expression sobered. “I’m sorry to bring this down on you,” he said. “It could make your work here more difficult.”

And wasn’t he just the master of understatement?

“Maybe you can have one of your baby soldiers put a gun on me when you leave,” she suggested. “At least make it look as if I didn’t have any choice.”

“That’s a good idea,” he said. “But they’re not baby soldiers. I don’t know what they were when they climbed on the helo. But they definitely became men today.”

“Point taken.” Kirby felt duly chastised.

The men worked well together, which was what they were trained to do. Still, the way they’d gotten Shane back on the SKED, this time wrapped in a non-flea-ridden silver space blanket she’d contributed, and out of the tent, was impressive.

As the copter hovered to land on the outskirts of the camp, blowing down a handful of tents created from blue tarps, people scattered.

Guns were drawn. Kirby prayed there wasn’t going to be a battle.

Damn. The Americans weren’t the only ones who had use for that copter. The men who’d held those guns on her would undoubtedly rather fly back to wherever the father was hiding out than carry the boy back into the mountains.

“This could be bad,” she murmured, not wanting to think of what could happen if bullets started flying. “In case you haven’t noticed, you’re a bit outnumbered.”

“Don’t worry, Doc,” the big guy said. “We’re only talking about, oh, a hundred of them against each one of us.”

“Piece of cake,” the leader said cockily.

“You realize that you’re all crazy,” she said. But her voice held both the respect and the affection she had for these brave men. There was a reason they called them Special Forces.

“Spoken by someone who should know,” a deep voice from the SKED said, with what, amazingly, given that he’d been unconscious when he’d arrived, sounded like humor.

One of the things she’d loved about the SOAR pilot was that he’d always managed to find something positive in any situation.

“The sane thing for you to have done after leaving the Army was land yourself some cushy job in a big-city hospital where you could get beaucoup bucks. But instead, you ended up here in what’s gotta be one of the lower rings of hell,” Shane said, unwittingly echoing her own thoughts this morning.

Had it been only this morning? It seemed a lifetime ago.

“Not that I’m not real glad to see you,” he said. “And not just because you’re the best doctor in these mountains.”

“I’m the only doctor in these mountains.”

“Well, there is that,” he allowed. His brown eyes, which had been hazy from the pain and the scant amount of morphine she’d risked giving him, suddenly and unexpectedly cleared, like a camera lens coming into sharp focus.

“But if I had to get blown out of the sky, there isn’t any other hospital I’d rather land in than yours, Captain.”

Kirby was a physician. Not only that, during her years as an Army CSH doctor, there wasn’t much she hadn’t seen. And while she’d never been able to close her heart to her patients, she’d learned early in her internship to save the tears for when she could weep in private.

But that didn’t stop the mist from blurring her vision as she crouched down beside the SKED and tucked the shiny blanket more snuggly around him.

“Gotta move out,” the leader said abruptly, saving her from having to come up with a response.

She stood up. Folded her arms.

“Good luck,” she said.

“SEALs make their own luck,” the big guy said.

“Rangers, too,” one of the younger soldiers said.

She knew Spec Ops guys believed in their invincibility. Most of the ones she’d met believed they could outrun locomotives and leap tall buildings in a single bound. Not to mention that myth about bullets bouncing off them.

As she watched them head toward the waiting copter, Kirby could only hope that would prove true today.

The situation, which had been bad from the beginning, really sucked.

Except for the part about fate landing him in Kirby’s medical camp.

Shane had thought, at the time, that would have done it. That the torch he’d been carrying for her while ferrying those SEALs all over northern Iraq, hunting Saddam, would be doused.

He’d been wrong. In fact, just the opposite had happened. The more he’d been with the sexy captain, the more he’d wanted her. And although she’d continued to play the affair, or relationship, or whatever the hell it was they had going, as if it’d been an extended spring break in Baghdad, he’d begun to think they’d connected.

In more ways than just the what-fits-where physical part of their relationship. Not that they hadn’t fit perfectly. In fact, the sex got more mind-blowing every time they were together.

He’d just decided that he was the luckiest son of a bitch in the universe, and was going to suggest taking their thing to the next level and see how it went, when damned if Special Forces hadn’t found Saddam in that spider hole, causing him to be shipped out to Afghanistan.

Then a month after that, she’d been rotated out to Heidelberg, and suddenly his e-mails seemed to all land in a black hole. He’d even used one of those phone cards USO handed out to call her, but her tone had been distant. Almost remote.

No. Not almost. Really, really remote.

Which could only mean that his feelings had been one-sided. Oh, he didn’t believe she’d just been a Night Stalker groupie. While they might not get the press that the SEALs or D-Boys did, a SOAR pilot never left a bar alone unless he wanted to.

No. Captain Kirby Campbell hadn’t been a groupie.

But, apparently, all she’d wanted from him were a few laughs and a lot of sex.

The ironic thing was that at any other time in his life, he’d have been singing hosannas to find a multiorgasmic woman who only wanted his body.

But, dammit, Shane had wanted more. Which was why he’d decided to find her and convince her they belonged together.

Bygones, he told himself as he dragged his mind back to her refugee camp he hadn’t even been aware of being carried through when they’d arrived.

Jeezus. There was a reason this was regarded as the most armed region in the world. Instead of Game Boys or basketballs, even the kids were lugging around AK- 47s and ammo belts. It only took one look at the all the guns in the camp to totally wake him up.

And, here was a big plus, all the adrenaline racing through his veins numbed the pain.

“You gotta give me back my gun,” he said as they began forging their way through the crowd.

Not a single person moved to stop them. But their eyes were hard. And deadly.

Tremayne looked down at him. “You sure?”

“Do tangos shit in the woods?”

Tremayne shrugged and handed him back his M4. “That doc’s good,” he said.

“The best,” Shane said.

“And hot,” McKade volunteered, even as his head kept moving, scanning the crowd, watching for the slightest movement.

“Which explains why, when you woke up enough to recognize her, little red hearts started doing the South Carolina shag in your eyes, flyboy,” Tremayne said.

“Ha ha ha,” Shane said, even as he suspected that accusation might be true.

Like every pilot who’d spent thousands of hours listening to radio traffic, he’d learned to tune out what was unessential, while immediately catching what affected him. He’d been drifting in and out of consciousness, only vaguely aware of people talking around him when that one all-too-familiar voice cut through the clutter.

Shane decided that the little spurt of lust he’d felt when Kirby had bent over him was proof he was going to live.

“Tangos at nine o’clock,” Tremayne said quietly.

Quinn’s head didn’t move, but Shane knew they both were checking out the terrorists Kirby had told them about.

“You going to try to snatch the kid?” Shane asked.

“Any other time, I would,” Tremayne answered. “If I could manage it without getting the doc killed. See what he knows, maybe even use him for a bargaining chip. But right now our mission is to get the hell out of here without any more lives lost.”

“What if they shoot first?”

“We shoot back. But I don’t think that’s going to happen.”

“Why not?” Shane tilted his head just enough to the left to see the group of tangos in question. They sure as hell didn’t look harmless.

“First of all, they’ve got the kid to protect. If we try to grab him, they’d go off, all guns blasting. Then again, if this place turned into the O.K. Corral, which we’d make damn sure it did, how’d you like to be the guy who has to explain to Imam Jalaluddin that you’d gotten his kid killed?”

“Heads would probably roll.”

“Literally,” McKade said.

“Besides,” Tremayne continued, “the guy in charge realizes that all we want is the same thing they want. To have our wounded patched up and get the hell out of here.”

That made sense, Shane decided. But . . .

“What if one of the so-called civilians in the camp decides to open up?”

“That’s when the second reason we’re getting out of here alive kicks in,” McKade said.

“What’s that?”

Tremayne looked down at his watch. “It’s eleven fifty-nine hours.”

“So?”

Before either of the SEALs could answer, somewhere in the crowd, someone with a megaphone began calling the adham, the call to prayer devout Muslims were required to answer five times a day.

Every man in the camp knelt for the Dhur, the noon-time prayer.

All except one. The tall, armed-to-the-teeth man Kirby had pointed out as the terrorist leader.

Tremayne lifted up both gloved hands, palms out, a universal signal to show he wasn’t looking for any trouble.

After a moment’s hesitation, the man did the same.

“Next time,” Tremayne murmured.

Although he was too far away to hear, the man must have sensed the SEAL’s words, because he slowly nodded.

Still embarrassed as hell that he couldn’t make it on his own, Shane allowed the Rangers—who’d definitely earned their Spec Ops cred today—to lift him into the bird.

The helo was a Russian M17, which Shane considered inferior in every way to his beloved Chinook those damn tangos had shot down. The manufacturing was Russiancheesy; it only had the capability of carrying thirty troops, compared to the Chinook’s fifty-five; and its speed was a mere one hundred and thirty-five knots, compared to his Chinook’s one fifty-four.

Still, as the bird lifted off, he decided that he wasn’t exactly in any position to be picky.

Once they were safely in the air, the burst of adrenaline wore off. Shane closed his eyes and drifted back into the void. And just as he’d been doing earlier, right before he’d come to and found himself in that hospital tent, he returned to dreaming of hot, mind-blowing sex with former Army Captain Kirby Campbell.