Beyond Limits (Tracers #8)(72)

She glanced back at his truck again. “I have this album on my iPod.”

“Yeah?”

“I couldn’t sleep, like, the entire month of May. So I’d sit on my balcony at night and listen to this.”

She looked so pretty sitting there, and he reached out to stroke her hair away from her face. “Because of what happened?”

She shrugged. “I had trouble sleeping before that. Getting the shit beat out me didn’t really help, though.”

He gritted his teeth at the reminder and glanced at her scar.

She looked at him. “I thought about you a lot, you know.”





* * *





She held her breath, waiting for what he’d say. Her own words surprised her. They were the first truly honest words she’d said to him about the time when he’d been gone. She didn’t know why she was telling him this now, but it seemed to want to come out.

“I thought about you, too.” He covered her hand with his in the dirt.

“I thought about you getting shot down in a helicopter, or driving over some roadside bomb, or jumping in front of a bullet for one of your teammates.”

“We generally try to avoid bullets.” The corner of his mouth lifted in a smile. “IEDs, too. First thing they teach you in SEAL school.”

“I’m serious,” she said.

“I am, too.”

She looked out at the meadow, and the tension was back again, bunching up her muscles, making her neck tight. He always wanted to defuse any tension with a joke, but she was trying to be honest with him. Honest about why things would never work. Why she felt adamant about not sleeping together again when she knew he wanted to, and she wanted to, too.

“I ever tell you about my first tour?”

She turned to look at him. He’d never told her about any of his tours. When he talked about his work, it was usually about the training.

“This was up in the mountains,” he said, and she took that to mean Afghanistan. “End of the fighting season, so it was getting cold at night. Your breath would turn to frost in the air, and you’d have to stomp your feet to keep from freezing. We’d spent the whole summer assaulting cave complexes—which is hot, filthy work—and we were glad to finally get some cold, even though we knew we were going to be hating it in only a few weeks.

“Anyway, we get this intel from one of the terps at base camp in the valley. And this isn’t just any valley, it was a snake pit—that’s what we called it. The whole place was crawling with TAQ—Taliban/Al Qaeda fighters.”

“What’s a terp?”

“Sorry—interpreter. This one was working with the Army guys at the base. He brings us this intel that an HVT—that’s a high-value target—is hiding out in a cave complex in the neighboring valley. This target was tops on our list. We knew he’d been recruiting kids in the villages for suicide missions in Kabul—marketplaces, security checkpoints, that kind of thing.”

“He was getting kids to do this?”

“Yeah, this guy was a real scumbag, no moral code whatsoever. That was something I learned on my first tour: some of the top TAQ guys were the biggest cowards. So this guy’s high-priority, and we get this tip about him, but of course, we’re wary. Single-source intel tends to be unreliable. But the commanders get together and decide to send some guys in, see if we can get the dope on this cave complex. It wasn’t on any of our maps.”

“Sounds like a red flag.”

“Yeah, but you never know. Especially back then. This was early days in the war, and we didn’t have all the intel we have now. In some of the more remote places, we were still using Soviet maps, if you can believe it.”

“So I’m guessing you were on this team they sent in?”

“Me, Gage, Luke, and this guy Kevin Bunker. You haven’t met him, but he’s big. He was in the BUD/S class ahead of me, aced all the PT. He could bench-press three-fifty, but he was fast, too—always smoked everyone in the timed runs. He got the nickname ‘Hill’ because of his size.”

“As in Bunker Hill?”

“You got it.”

He offered her the flask again, and she shook her head. She wanted him to keep talking freely. He’d never shared so much about his job before, and she was lapping it up.

“So there’s a village located near this supposed cave complex, but it’s on a steep hillside, and I mean steep. We’re talking accessible by goats and locals, not outsiders. So they get out the maps and determine that the best way to get to this area is to hike down to it, and that’s what we did. Our four-man element dropped in high about 0400 hours. It was a straight SR mission, search and recon. Depending on what we found in terms of forces and weapons, we were planning to bring a bigger team in to finish the job.

“We start making our way down, and like I said, it’s steep. So we’re traveling combat light, which means we’ve left a lot of our armor on base. Even without it, each of us is carrying forty to fifty pounds of gear—water, radios, ammo. It’s only a twenty-four-hour op, but you never go anywhere without at least five pounds of water and an MRE in case things go off the rails.”

She watched him talk, deeply disturbed by the image of him behind enemy lines, moving around without body armor.