The Unsung Hero (29 page)
“All right. I was on an op with my Troubleshooters, the SO squad from Team Sixteen,” he said. “These guys are the best, the elite of an already elite organization. I can’t tell you where we were. I can’t tell you what we were doing. All I can say is, we ended up clusterfucked—if you’ll pardon the expression. Trust me, it’s exactly what it sounds like. And once things started going wrong, they kept going wrong.”
He told her about the helicopter going down, about the blast that had sent him flying.
“Actually,” he added with a smile, “that was the okay part. It was landing that caused the problem. Let’s just say my dismount needs work.”
God, he could actually joke about it. “Where did you hit?” she asked.
“Where didn’t I hit?” he countered, then relented. “Like I said, I don’t remember much of it, but apparently I came down pretty hard on the left front of my head. I fractured my left temporal bone.”
Kelly moved closer. “I know I did this downstairs, but . . . do you mind?”
Tom shook his head, and she reached up, gently touching his head, lightly at first then a little bit harder. Now that she was looking, she could see the tiny red scar from his surgery. It was so small, it was almost invisible. “Let me know if anything hurts,” she murmured.
“It’s mutual, you know,” he said suddenly. “This attraction thing.”
His face was about five inches from hers, his leg close enough for her to feel his body heat. His gaze dropped to her mouth for several long seconds, and Kelly knew it. This was it. After waiting for a lifetime, Tom Paoletti was finally going to kiss her again.
“It’s extremely mutual,” he said again. And then he pulled back, away from her. “But there’re a few more details you need to understand before this goes any further.” He ticked them off on his fingers. “I was in a coma for weeks, this injury could well be career ending, and I think I’m losing my mind, big time.”
For weeks he was in a coma? . . .
“I’ve been seeing this guy,” he said. “And I don’t know if he’s real or if he’s some paranoid figment caused by—” He choked on the words. “—brain damage from my injury. He’s called the Merchant. He’s a terrorist, Kelly.”
He was watching for her reaction, and she knew she gave him a big one there. “A terrorist. You mean, like, a terrorist?”
“Yeah, I know,” he said. “It sounds nuts.”
“Tom, are you—”
“I need to tell you all of it,” he said. “Just let me get it all out, and then if you have any questions . . .”
Kelly nodded. Fair enough. A terrorist . . .
She listened as he told her about the Merchant, a man who delivered death for money. The Paris embassy bombing in ’96 was apparently his handiwork. Tom had been part of a team sent to catch him.
“I lived and breathed him for months, preparing to go up against him. It was like a government approved obsession,” he told her. “My team studied the son of a bitch until we’d be able to recognize him in a dark room at midnight while wearing blindfolds. I knew him so well, Kelly, I swear, I could think like the bastard—anticipate his every move. When his cell—his team—was tracked to England, we moved in, ready to take him down. We would’ve, too, if we could have operated without the restrictions from the bureaucrats. Instead, it was a goatfuck. Again, excuse me.”
Kelly laughed despite herself, despite the seriousness of what he was telling her. “A goatfuck this time. Is that better or worse than a clusterfuck?”
“It’s messier.” Tom’s smile was rueful. “I’m sorry. I don’t mean to offend you. That language just kind of slips out when I talk about this shit.” He winced. “Sorry.”
“Do I look offended?”
His gaze was almost palpable. “You look . . .” He shook his head, looking away, exhaling a burst of air. “I’ve got to tell you the rest of this before . . .” He cleared his throat. “We went in—badly—and the shooting started almost immediately. That’s my definition of a goat, you know, fuck. When the shooting starts. SEALs operate very quietly. We’re trained to insert and extract covertly. No one knows we’re there until long after we’re gone—if then. But once you start firing an MP4 submachine gun, people tend to notice you. Our plan was to go in and grab the Merchant silently. I don’t even know what went wrong—who started shooting first—but suddenly we were in the middle of a firefight. And the Merchant ran. The bastard escaped.
“According to allegedly reliable sources, he was seriously injured. And when he dropped out of sight—and it’s been years since anyone’s heard anything from him—a lot of people presumed he’d died.”
“But not you.”
“I try not to make a habit of ever presuming anything.” Tom rubbed his forehead as if his head was hurting badly again. “So okay. Here I am. Years later. In the middle of an entirely new clusterfuck. The helo goes down, and the blast knocks me on my head. I come to a few minutes later, and even though I’ve got a headache from hell, I figure everything’s cool, I can stand up, I remember my name—I’m going to be okay.”
“The lucid interval,” Kelly said softly. Even with extremely severe head injuries, there tended to be some amount of time, as much as an hour or two, before internal bleeding caused coma.
“Exactly. And right on schedule, a few hours later, my vision’s tunneling. I’m checking out. My XO, Jazz Jacquette, literally carries me to safety, but it’s fifteen hours before I hit the nearest ER, and by that time, I’m in a pretty deep coma. Apparently, there was both epidural and subdural hemorrhages putting pressure on my brain. The surgeon drills a little hole in my skull, drains whatever needs to be drained, ties off whatever needs to be tied off, monkeys around in there, doing God knows what. A few weeks later, I wake up.”
A few weeks? God, he was lucky.
“And I’m the miracle man, because everything still works. There’s no apparent brain damage. I can talk, I can walk, I can read and write. I remember just about everything—there’s no huge chunk of my life missing. I go through all the tests with flying colors. Except for one. And it wasn’t even a real test.”
He’d pushed himself back so that he was leaning against the headboard of his bed, and he sat there now, with his elbows on his knees, head in his hands.
“First day back on CONUS,” Tom told her, “that’s Continental United States, in Navyspeak—I have a little run-in with a rear admiral who was trying to downsize and eliminate Team Sixteen.” He shifted, resting his head back against the wall. “I got a little too angry.”
He told her evenly about the psych evaluations, the medical reports, the conclusion that his injury had caused his aggressive behavior, the required convalescent leave. Kelly knew it wasn’t easy for him to tell her any of this.
“When I go back, I’ve got to convince the Navy shrinks and doctors that I’m up to speed or else it’s thank you very much and welcome back to the civilian world, Mr. Paoletti,” he said. “I came here believing that my career is riding on my ability to get mentally healthy over the next thirty days.”
Tom sat forward, gazing directly into her eyes. “But now that I’ve started spotting international terrorists in Baldwin’s Bridge, I’m wondering if I’m suffering from some kind of weird injury-related paranoia. For the first time in my life, I’m doubting myself, Kelly.” His voice broke, and he faltered. “I need to know if I’m fit for command, or if my career’s over.”
Kelly didn’t know what to say, didn’t know what to do. But he wasn’t finished.
“I’m telling you this for a couple of reasons,” he continued. “Obviously, I need to find a doctor I can trust—someone I can have faith in to be dead honest with me about what’s going on here. Also obviously, after tonight, I need another CAT scan, to find out if something’s started bleeding inside my head again. I doubt it, but I have to make sure. I need to find out more about this paranoia crap, too. I need to know what the hell’s real and what’s not.”
He took a deep breath, letting it out in a rush. “Okay. Lecture’s over. Any questions from the captive audience?”
Questions. God. She had about four thousand.
“Terrorists,” Kelly said. “Plural. You said you’ve spotted terrorists—more than one?”
“Oh, yeah, tonight’s bullshit.” He winced. “Sorry.”
“I know the word,” she told him. “I’ve even used it upon occasion. I’ve used the other words, too, and . . . Just tell me what happened tonight.”
He did, in that matter-of-fact, reporter-dry manner, as if his career, his life weren’t on the verge of destruction. The convenience store. The man with the eyeball tattoo on his hand. It was pretty gutsy to mark his people so visibly on the hand, but that was always part of this Merchant’s deal. Apparently, just seeing that tattoo was enough to make most people scared to death.
As Tom went on, Kelly closed her eyes, picturing him running after a man on a bike, just a short time out of the hospital after a near-fatal head injury. He described the dizziness, the tunnel vision that had hit him at the carnival.
“All of a sudden, I realize I’m in a crowd of people who’ve all got the Merchant’s mark on the back of their hands. It was like a nightmare, Kelly. For a minute, I was sure I’d gone completely insane.”
His hands were shaking, just from recounting it, and Kelly couldn’t help herself. She reached out and held on to him.
“And then I realized,” he told her, his voice barely more than a whisper, “it wasn’t a tattoo. It was a hand stamp from the carnival. I can only assume that the guy in the Honey Farms—that the mark on his hand was from the carnival, too. I see one thing, and my mind turns it into something else. Something sinister. Sounds pretty goddamned paranoid, huh?” His voice shook. “If that’s the case, then Admiral Tucker’s right in wanting me gone. There’s no room for me in the SEAL teams.”
He’d been holding her hand tightly, but just like that, he loosened his grip. “Sorry,” he said. “I didn’t mean to get all weird on you.”
He tried to pull away, but Kelly wouldn’t let him go. “You spend an awful lot of time apologizing to me.”
Tom nodded. “I have this overwhelming urge to tell you I’m sorry about that, but somehow I suspect that would be the wrong thing to say.”
Kelly laughed, emotion balled tightly in her chest. She was on the verge of tears. Again. How many times could a person cry in one night? Shouldn’t there be some sort of daily limit to emotional outbursts? Although, if there were, she’d probably built up a lifetime supply from holding it all inside during those years she’d lived with her father and then Gary.
And after what Tom had just told her, this was not a time to be reserved. Reaching up, she touched his face. “Thank you for telling me all this,” she said softly. “I won’t tell anyone—not even Joe. I promise. Not unless you want me to.”
His skin was warm, his cheek slightly rough against her palm. He’d shaved this morning, but this morning had been hours and hours ago.
“Kelly, you did hear everything I just said, right? I’m probably crazy. And I’m twenty-eight days from being unemployed. And homeless. I live on base, so I’ll have to move out, and—”
“But you’re not alone,” she countered. “I’ll help you. I know one of the top neurosurgeons in Boston. In the world. He’s brilliant—you can trust him, I promise. I’ll go with you to see him, if you want. He’ll schedule a CAT scan for you first thing tomorrow and—”
“But you’re a doctor. I trust you.”
Oh, God. “I can’t be your doctor. You need a specialist. Besides, I don’t want to be your doctor. I want . . .”
Kelly didn’t think. She didn’t plan. She didn’t anticipate or analyze. She just leaned forward and kissed Tom Paoletti.
His lips were warm and impossibly soft. He tasted like toothpaste—he must’ve brushed his teeth right before she came up to his room.
It was a small kiss, a gentle, brief one, not deep and lingering, not soul shattering and near orgasmic, not at all the way she’d remembered kissing Tom had been.
She’d surprised the hell out of him—and out of herself as well.
She stared at him, and he stared back at her for what seemed like twenty minutes, but was probably more like twenty seconds.
Then he spoke. “I’m crazy. Hello? Didn’t you understand what I just told you?” His laughter was edged with a dangerous-sounding desperation. “Christ, and then you kiss me anyway. Where’s your common sense, Ashton? What were you thinking?”
She shook her head. “You’re not crazy. You might still be suffering side effects from your injury, but—”
“Those side effects could be permanent and you know it,” he said harshly.
Hearing the pain in his voice, Kelly reached for him again. She put her arms around him and held him close. Lord, it was like hugging an unyielding mountain. But this mountain had a heart. With her head against his shoulder, she could hear Tom’s heart racing.
It didn’t take very long for him to relent. He put his arms around her, too, tentatively, though, almost reluctantly touching her hair.
“I can help you,” she whispered. “I don’t know that much about head injuries as serious as the one you’ve had, but I can certainly look up the information. I’ll find out whatever I can. And we’ll get you that CAT scan, too.”
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