The Sparks Broker, page 8
part #2 of S.A.S.S. Series
“Yes, sir, Commander.” He grabbed his clipboard and rushed over, poising his pen, ready to write.
“Set up a guard detail. Full circle around the outpost.”
He spoke to Kate. “If someone can infiltrate the camp and pick any one of us off at will, we need an early warning system.” He darted his gaze back to Riley. “Tell Kramer to trip-wire the entire perimeter—and make sure every man here knows it’s wired.”
“Yes, sir.” Riley scribbled fast and looked up. “Is that all, sir?”
“Yeah, thank you.”
When Riley left, Nathan looked at Kate. She sipped at a steaming cup of coffee more because it was wet than because she needed something hot to drink. Her throat felt raw and irritated, coated from the blowing sand. “What?”
“GRID didn’t know until now the outpost existed. You were right. No one followed you back here.”
“You’re assuming they didn’t know the outpost existed.” She dipped her chin. “You have no evidence of that.”
“I have circumstantial evidence,” he countered, clearing his throat and then filling a cup with piping hot coffee. “If they’d known it, they would’ve sent in a team to take us all out, Kate. They wouldn’t have messed around with a lone gunman.”
Kate blew into her cup and thought about it. “On that, I happen to agree.” She set down her cup. “The thing about him firing into the sand is really nagging at me.”
“Me, too.” He stood. “Maybe the guy didn’t want to kill us, after all?”
“What if it was someone who wanted to make GRID think we were dead?”
“Who?”
She shrugged. “Douglas?”
“What?”
“Bear with me.” She stood beside Nathan. “What if they did snatch Douglas? Habitually, GRID tries to convert abductees. What if Douglas played along? What if he deliberately missed us? What if he wore red so we’d see him and know what he was doing?”
Nathan stared at her, long and hard. His left eye twitched like crazy and the skin between his eyebrows creased deeply. “It’s possible.”
“It is,” she said, unsure how her next revelation would be received. “Especially if Douglas has decided to insert himself undercover.”
“Oh, man. He could.” Nathan let his head loll back on his shoulders. “Surely he wouldn’t do that, Kate. Surely he’d leave that to you. You’re the professional at that type of thing.”
“He might,” she admitted, guilt stealing over her. “I didn’t let him know I was coming. He could’ve thought he was on his own.”
“Why didn’t you tell him?”
“Honestly?” She swallowed hard. “I assumed he’d know. It didn’t occur to me that he wouldn’t know.” She lowered her gaze, unable to bear to see condemnation in Nathan’s eyes. “But I didn’t think. He isn’t S.A.S.S. He wouldn’t automatically know that any summons is answered.”
“We still don’t have irrefutable proof it was him. It could’ve been, but it might’ve been GRID.” He chewed at his inner lip, mulling, then checked his watch. “It’s getting late. I need to see if there’s anything I can salvage from my tent.”
When he turned to walk out of his office, she called after him. “Can I help?”
He paused, stared into her eyes, then nodded. “Thanks.” Riley was sitting at his desk on the horn with someone.
Nathan didn’t slow his stride when walking past, but Riley anticipated something; he grabbed his clipboard.
“Get me a tent, will you, Riley?”
He wrote furiously. “Yes, sir. Fifteen minutes, sir.” Satisfied with himself, he set the clipboard back down.
Kate smiled and shot him a thumbs-up as she passed. He was an excellent clerk.
He smiled back at her and dipped his chin to his chest, embarrassed.
At the tent, Kate pulled a T-shirt from the rubble, shook it out and wrapped it around her head to protect her face from the blowing sand. Bent double, she helped Nathan dig through the fallen tent for what was left of his possessions. Shoving aside a splintered piece of wood, she unearthed the zippered edge of his duffel bag, and looked over to Nathan to tell him, but the expression twisting his face stopped her dead in her tracks.
He stood, shoulders slumped, hands trembling, jaw clenched and blinking rapidly, holding the shattered photo of his wife.
Caught unaware in the clutches of raw pain, the arrogant, cold man who blamed her for Douglas’s disappearance, who, she suspected, kept her nearby only so he knew exactly where she was and what she was doing, and who lacked more than a little faith in her expertise, appeared close to tears.
Something alien gushed through Kate’s chest. Something not as simple as compassion, or as complex as sympathy. Something far more nebulous and subtle and yet so powerful it had her knees weak. Her eyes, too, burned—and the wind or gritty sand had nothing to do with the cause. The cause lay in what for Kate had been an age-old wound.
How did it feel to have someone—anyone—love you the way Nathan Forester clearly loved his wife? To know to that one person, you were vitally important? To know you were in his heart and mind even when you were thousands of miles apart?
Kate had no idea. And only on the rare occasion did she indulge and allow herself to hope that one day she would know.
When he seemed over the worse of the shock—why it was a shock to find the photo he knew would be there, Kate had no idea, but it clearly was—she cleared her throat to remind him she was here. He didn’t respond. Then she saw that the photograph had been destroyed. Her heart hitched, in pain for him. “I’m sorry about your photo, Nathan.”
He looked over at her, but he didn’t really see her. “Me, too.”
His reaction surprised her. Why did he sound so forlorn? It was a photo. Sentimental, because it was of his wife and had once saved his life, but surely his wife would send him another one.
He didn’t move, just stared at her, hopeless and helpless, and... devastated.
Confused and upset, Kate straightened. It hurt to see him this way. She’d rather face the arrogant pig he could be than this man so clearly suffering any day. That side of him didn’t inspire a desire to reach out and comfort. This one did. This one shoved in her face all she was missing by not having a man in her life who loved her. A man like Nathan Forester.
And again a shaft of envy, hot and swift, stabbed at her, slicing into her heart, and stunned by it, she sat right where she stood. For some reason, here in the twilight, sitting among the half-collapsed tent, among the rubble and his destroyed possessions, she felt an overwhelming need, and began to talk. “My parents were workaholics,” she said softly. “They ignored me most of my life.”
Something glinted. A spare watch. She picked it up and rubbed its cracked crystal between her forefinger and thumb. “Actually, it was more like they forgot I existed than they ignored me,” she corrected herself. “Until they wanted to pull me out of cold storage to parade around in front of people they wanted to impress.”
Nathan walked over, sat across from her, and held the photo with both hands between them.
Kate pursed her lips and looked right into his eyes. Why she felt compelled to tell him this, she had no idea. But she did. “I never gave them a reason to regret it.”
“You loved them,” he said, his voice deep. “You wanted them to be proud of you.”
She pursed her lips and gave him a little negative shake of her head, her expression reflecting the sadness tightening her chest. “I knew better than to hope for their love. But I thought if I could be perfect, then they would at least include me in their lives. I could stay off the shelf, waiting for the next parade.”
His serious face grew more so. “Did they?”
“No, they didn’t.” Even now, all these years later, it hurt to admit that to herself, much less to anyone else. She sucked in a sharp breath. “I learned to live without it, without them, really. I relied only on myself. From Kindergarten on, I packed my own lunches, cooked my own meals, and did my own laundry. I did everything I could do to avoid the mistake of bothering them.” She let out a humorless laugh. “My parents didn’t react well to being bothered, Nathan.”
He frowned and rested the photo on one knee. “Did they punish you?”
“If razor-sharp tongues and brutal verbal skills qualify as punishment, yes.” She grunted. “But I didn’t let that stop me. I was determined to win them over. I worked really hard to trick them into liking me.”
He stared at her with honed insight. “But you feel you failed.”
“Oh, yes. I don’t just feel it. I know it. Indeed, I failed. Unequivocally. Huge.” She dusted at her knee though there was no lint, not even sand, clinging to it. “I kept trying, though. My freshman year in high school, I caught a lucky break.” She smiled. It was a weepy smile, but she’d take whatever she could get that wasn’t a railing protest. A kid—any kid—should feel loved by her parents. Even Kate.
“This lucky break got their attention and they saw the light?”
“Not exactly. They never saw the light, but I certainly got their attention.”
“How?”
She grinned and, surprisingly, it was sincere. “I blew up the science lab at school.”
He laughed out loud. “I’ll bet that impressed them.”
“You know, it really did.” She shrugged. “They had no idea I had enough smarts to actually cause something to deliberately combust.”
“Fancy way of saying that you blew up the lab.”
“They were fancy-talking people.” She looked away, feeling a little wistful.
“And you’ve been blowing things up ever since, trying to impress them again.”
Surprised and not totally comfortable with his insight, she jerked her gaze back to him. But she didn’t see the censure in his eyes she expected. She saw understanding. And at that moment, Katherine Kane did the most stupid thing a woman can do.
She fell in love with a married man, and decided she absolutely hated his wife for being his wife.
Of course, he would never know it and his wife would never know it. That was the only saving grace and salve for her wound.
She gave herself a mental shake. Love? Here? With a compelling, married pig?
Apparently.
Her conscience weighed in. Who in their right mind would ever imagine it? Who would be that stupid? Not her. That’s for sure. It had to be delusions.
Try, fact.
Absurd. Delusions. No more, no less. Just delusions.
Possible? Yes. Probable? No.
Then evidently it was lust. Or better yet, indigestion from eating too much sand.
Perhaps.
That possibility made her feel better. Lust she could accept—would accept and cling to with the tenacity Nathan held on to his wife’s photo—because that possibility didn’t leave her with her heart exposed and her feelings hanging out on a line just waiting for tension to snap it and leave her in pieces.
Nathan was looking down at the photo again, and the sadness in him returned.
She had been self-sustained out of necessity, and she should never forget its lesson. Still, to have a man look at a photo of her that way, with such depth and tenderness, she might just risk loving. Someone. Someday.
Yet the need to comfort him arose as naturally as her breaths. “I’m sure she’ll send you another photo, Nathan.”
He looked up at Kate, agony burning in his eyes. “She can’t.”
“Sure she can. They’ll pass it to you in a secure pouch.”
“From Heaven?”
Kate went stone still. “What?”
He dragged in a sharp breath, as if the words he was about to speak were heavy blows and he needed to brace to sustain himself against them. “My wife died five years ago, Kate.” He licked at his lower lip. “This photo is all I have left of her.”
Stunned, Kate couldn’t pull her thoughts together long enough to grasp them or to find something decent to say. Finally she managed. “I’m sorry for your loss, Nathan.” And she was grateful for saying it.
He nodded that he’d heard her, but kept his gaze fixed on the dirt, hiding from her the pain he clearly felt so intensely he knew it would reveal itself in his face even now.
Five years? Kate couldn’t believe it. He still acted so...well, married. Still wore his wedding band, still slept with her photo beside his cot, still thought of himself as married.
Five years was a long time for a man to be a widower and still think and act and feel so married.
And that might just make Kate most envious of all. “It’s nearly 2:00 a.m.,” Nathan said, then stood. “Let’s call it a night, Kate. The storm’s broken. In the morning, let’s take a look at where Douglas went missing.”
Kate stood, dragged the duffel bag out of the debris through an opening and left it in the sand with the other possessions pulled from the rubble. “Okay. I need to go back down where I dove today, as well.”
“No,” he insisted. “Not without a backup team.”
She stiffened and looked him right in the eye. “I have no choice.” The C-273 had to be located. The sooner, the better.
His aversion to her objecting to his orders surfaced. “Why?”
He wouldn’t like her answer any better. She resisted an urge to sigh. “I can’t tell you that.”
“Can’t?” A speculative gleam lit in his eye. “Or won’t?” Not the anger she had expected, but why did the man always have to push? She wasn’t sure she wanted to look that deeply herself. “I could,” she clarified, and then decided to be totally honest. “But if I did, I’d have to kill you.”
He gave her a strange glance, one she couldn’t fully interpret, then drove it home with a snort. “I’m surprised you’re not jumping at the chance.”
Feeling just enough pressure not to resist the urge, she teased him. “Mosquitoes are annoying, Nathan, but you don’t kill them with a cannon.”
He laughed.
Even exhausted, standing in the middle of a half-collapsed tent with ringing ears, sand scratching every inch of her body, and worries flooding her mind and fighting for her attention, the sound of Nathan Forester laughing made her smile. She hated that.
“Sir?” Riley appeared just beyond the edge of the tent. “Kramer just radioed in. He’s out at the perimeter, finishing the setup on the trip wire. He reported that someone just left the outpost, sir.”
“Who?” Nathan asked, fully alert.
“He couldn’t tell, sir. But it was a man and he had a red scarf on. And he was carrying a black box in his hand.” Kate’s heart thud hard and fast against her ribs. “How big was it—the box, I mean?”
“Kramer said about six by six, ma’am.”
“Inches, millimeters—what?” Kate knew she was shouting but, come on, this information was vital, and his description told her absolutely nothing.
Forester sensed something significant was going on with this black box. Kate saw it in his face, and while he shot her an unspoken question, and that importance resonated in Riley’s expression, Kate ignored them both, waiting for an answer.
“Inches, ma’am,” Riley said. “The box was six-by-six inches.”
Knots cinched down in Kate’s stomach. God help them. It could be the C-273 communications device.
Chapter Seven
By dawn, the storm had passed and the dry, still heat had returned with a vengeance.
Kate suited up in her wet gear, and met Forester at the mess tent. They wolfed down a lousy breakfast of reconstituted powdered eggs, instant coffee and some kind of fried bread that the cook referred to as a whole cake.
Between bites, Forester issued Riley orders. “Get my tent moved. Being right next door to where I was, just makes it easier for the insurgents to hit me again.”
Kate didn’t miss his putting the attack off on insurgents, and she was glad to hear it. Informing the entire outpost about GRID wouldn’t be a wise move at this point Actually, if it could be avoided, it should be. Knowing GRID existed increased their odds of becoming targets.
Nathan wiped at his wide mouth with a paper napkin. “Get an update on Douglas from Search and Rescue, too.”
He paused a second, then added, “Guess you’d better notify headquarters that we’ve had a perimeter breach, as well. Get authorization to move the outpost ASAP.”
Riley scribbled the orders down on his habitual clipboard. “Sir, should I have Captain James start breaking down the camp to prepare for the move?”
“Yeah, James is fine.”
Riley nodded, adding the note. “The boat you requested is ready and waiting for you and Captain Kane at the dock, sir.”
“Thanks.”
“Is that it, sir?”
“Yes.”
Riley passed Kate a new loop of rubber tubing. “For your tags, ma’am.” He shrugged. “I noticed yours was missing.”
Very observant. A valuable asset in a unit clerk. “Thanks, Riley.”
He gave her a shy grin. “Sure thing, ma’am.”
Within minutes, Nathan and Kate loaded their gear into the jeep, and made their way to the dock. The going was slow due to the storm. Sand covered the road, so the entire trip was a four-wheel succession of bumps and jarred teeth.
Finally, Kate spotted the shore, then the dock. Nathan parked and they hauled their gear to the boat. Before boarding, Kate ran a check for explosive devices and bugs.
Nathan likely considered it unnecessary, but if he did, he kept any objections to himself. Kate appreciated that, because in her job, checking was as automatic as dreaming.
It took about thirty minutes to do the job right. Nathan stood on the dock, watching her every move, but never said a word. When she was done, she looked up at him from on the boat. “Let’s roll.”
He got in and they made ready. Nathan removed the ropes mooring the boat to the rocks and coiled them inside the boat. When he was finished, Kate slipped behind the wheel and took off for the site where Douglas had disappeared.
While she steered the boat, Nathan monitored their position on a handheld GPS that he was careful not to let Kate glimpse. She knew they were in the Middle East somewhere. Judging strictly by the landscape, they were either in Iraq or Iran.
“Set up a guard detail. Full circle around the outpost.”
He spoke to Kate. “If someone can infiltrate the camp and pick any one of us off at will, we need an early warning system.” He darted his gaze back to Riley. “Tell Kramer to trip-wire the entire perimeter—and make sure every man here knows it’s wired.”
“Yes, sir.” Riley scribbled fast and looked up. “Is that all, sir?”
“Yeah, thank you.”
When Riley left, Nathan looked at Kate. She sipped at a steaming cup of coffee more because it was wet than because she needed something hot to drink. Her throat felt raw and irritated, coated from the blowing sand. “What?”
“GRID didn’t know until now the outpost existed. You were right. No one followed you back here.”
“You’re assuming they didn’t know the outpost existed.” She dipped her chin. “You have no evidence of that.”
“I have circumstantial evidence,” he countered, clearing his throat and then filling a cup with piping hot coffee. “If they’d known it, they would’ve sent in a team to take us all out, Kate. They wouldn’t have messed around with a lone gunman.”
Kate blew into her cup and thought about it. “On that, I happen to agree.” She set down her cup. “The thing about him firing into the sand is really nagging at me.”
“Me, too.” He stood. “Maybe the guy didn’t want to kill us, after all?”
“What if it was someone who wanted to make GRID think we were dead?”
“Who?”
She shrugged. “Douglas?”
“What?”
“Bear with me.” She stood beside Nathan. “What if they did snatch Douglas? Habitually, GRID tries to convert abductees. What if Douglas played along? What if he deliberately missed us? What if he wore red so we’d see him and know what he was doing?”
Nathan stared at her, long and hard. His left eye twitched like crazy and the skin between his eyebrows creased deeply. “It’s possible.”
“It is,” she said, unsure how her next revelation would be received. “Especially if Douglas has decided to insert himself undercover.”
“Oh, man. He could.” Nathan let his head loll back on his shoulders. “Surely he wouldn’t do that, Kate. Surely he’d leave that to you. You’re the professional at that type of thing.”
“He might,” she admitted, guilt stealing over her. “I didn’t let him know I was coming. He could’ve thought he was on his own.”
“Why didn’t you tell him?”
“Honestly?” She swallowed hard. “I assumed he’d know. It didn’t occur to me that he wouldn’t know.” She lowered her gaze, unable to bear to see condemnation in Nathan’s eyes. “But I didn’t think. He isn’t S.A.S.S. He wouldn’t automatically know that any summons is answered.”
“We still don’t have irrefutable proof it was him. It could’ve been, but it might’ve been GRID.” He chewed at his inner lip, mulling, then checked his watch. “It’s getting late. I need to see if there’s anything I can salvage from my tent.”
When he turned to walk out of his office, she called after him. “Can I help?”
He paused, stared into her eyes, then nodded. “Thanks.” Riley was sitting at his desk on the horn with someone.
Nathan didn’t slow his stride when walking past, but Riley anticipated something; he grabbed his clipboard.
“Get me a tent, will you, Riley?”
He wrote furiously. “Yes, sir. Fifteen minutes, sir.” Satisfied with himself, he set the clipboard back down.
Kate smiled and shot him a thumbs-up as she passed. He was an excellent clerk.
He smiled back at her and dipped his chin to his chest, embarrassed.
At the tent, Kate pulled a T-shirt from the rubble, shook it out and wrapped it around her head to protect her face from the blowing sand. Bent double, she helped Nathan dig through the fallen tent for what was left of his possessions. Shoving aside a splintered piece of wood, she unearthed the zippered edge of his duffel bag, and looked over to Nathan to tell him, but the expression twisting his face stopped her dead in her tracks.
He stood, shoulders slumped, hands trembling, jaw clenched and blinking rapidly, holding the shattered photo of his wife.
Caught unaware in the clutches of raw pain, the arrogant, cold man who blamed her for Douglas’s disappearance, who, she suspected, kept her nearby only so he knew exactly where she was and what she was doing, and who lacked more than a little faith in her expertise, appeared close to tears.
Something alien gushed through Kate’s chest. Something not as simple as compassion, or as complex as sympathy. Something far more nebulous and subtle and yet so powerful it had her knees weak. Her eyes, too, burned—and the wind or gritty sand had nothing to do with the cause. The cause lay in what for Kate had been an age-old wound.
How did it feel to have someone—anyone—love you the way Nathan Forester clearly loved his wife? To know to that one person, you were vitally important? To know you were in his heart and mind even when you were thousands of miles apart?
Kate had no idea. And only on the rare occasion did she indulge and allow herself to hope that one day she would know.
When he seemed over the worse of the shock—why it was a shock to find the photo he knew would be there, Kate had no idea, but it clearly was—she cleared her throat to remind him she was here. He didn’t respond. Then she saw that the photograph had been destroyed. Her heart hitched, in pain for him. “I’m sorry about your photo, Nathan.”
He looked over at her, but he didn’t really see her. “Me, too.”
His reaction surprised her. Why did he sound so forlorn? It was a photo. Sentimental, because it was of his wife and had once saved his life, but surely his wife would send him another one.
He didn’t move, just stared at her, hopeless and helpless, and... devastated.
Confused and upset, Kate straightened. It hurt to see him this way. She’d rather face the arrogant pig he could be than this man so clearly suffering any day. That side of him didn’t inspire a desire to reach out and comfort. This one did. This one shoved in her face all she was missing by not having a man in her life who loved her. A man like Nathan Forester.
And again a shaft of envy, hot and swift, stabbed at her, slicing into her heart, and stunned by it, she sat right where she stood. For some reason, here in the twilight, sitting among the half-collapsed tent, among the rubble and his destroyed possessions, she felt an overwhelming need, and began to talk. “My parents were workaholics,” she said softly. “They ignored me most of my life.”
Something glinted. A spare watch. She picked it up and rubbed its cracked crystal between her forefinger and thumb. “Actually, it was more like they forgot I existed than they ignored me,” she corrected herself. “Until they wanted to pull me out of cold storage to parade around in front of people they wanted to impress.”
Nathan walked over, sat across from her, and held the photo with both hands between them.
Kate pursed her lips and looked right into his eyes. Why she felt compelled to tell him this, she had no idea. But she did. “I never gave them a reason to regret it.”
“You loved them,” he said, his voice deep. “You wanted them to be proud of you.”
She pursed her lips and gave him a little negative shake of her head, her expression reflecting the sadness tightening her chest. “I knew better than to hope for their love. But I thought if I could be perfect, then they would at least include me in their lives. I could stay off the shelf, waiting for the next parade.”
His serious face grew more so. “Did they?”
“No, they didn’t.” Even now, all these years later, it hurt to admit that to herself, much less to anyone else. She sucked in a sharp breath. “I learned to live without it, without them, really. I relied only on myself. From Kindergarten on, I packed my own lunches, cooked my own meals, and did my own laundry. I did everything I could do to avoid the mistake of bothering them.” She let out a humorless laugh. “My parents didn’t react well to being bothered, Nathan.”
He frowned and rested the photo on one knee. “Did they punish you?”
“If razor-sharp tongues and brutal verbal skills qualify as punishment, yes.” She grunted. “But I didn’t let that stop me. I was determined to win them over. I worked really hard to trick them into liking me.”
He stared at her with honed insight. “But you feel you failed.”
“Oh, yes. I don’t just feel it. I know it. Indeed, I failed. Unequivocally. Huge.” She dusted at her knee though there was no lint, not even sand, clinging to it. “I kept trying, though. My freshman year in high school, I caught a lucky break.” She smiled. It was a weepy smile, but she’d take whatever she could get that wasn’t a railing protest. A kid—any kid—should feel loved by her parents. Even Kate.
“This lucky break got their attention and they saw the light?”
“Not exactly. They never saw the light, but I certainly got their attention.”
“How?”
She grinned and, surprisingly, it was sincere. “I blew up the science lab at school.”
He laughed out loud. “I’ll bet that impressed them.”
“You know, it really did.” She shrugged. “They had no idea I had enough smarts to actually cause something to deliberately combust.”
“Fancy way of saying that you blew up the lab.”
“They were fancy-talking people.” She looked away, feeling a little wistful.
“And you’ve been blowing things up ever since, trying to impress them again.”
Surprised and not totally comfortable with his insight, she jerked her gaze back to him. But she didn’t see the censure in his eyes she expected. She saw understanding. And at that moment, Katherine Kane did the most stupid thing a woman can do.
She fell in love with a married man, and decided she absolutely hated his wife for being his wife.
Of course, he would never know it and his wife would never know it. That was the only saving grace and salve for her wound.
She gave herself a mental shake. Love? Here? With a compelling, married pig?
Apparently.
Her conscience weighed in. Who in their right mind would ever imagine it? Who would be that stupid? Not her. That’s for sure. It had to be delusions.
Try, fact.
Absurd. Delusions. No more, no less. Just delusions.
Possible? Yes. Probable? No.
Then evidently it was lust. Or better yet, indigestion from eating too much sand.
Perhaps.
That possibility made her feel better. Lust she could accept—would accept and cling to with the tenacity Nathan held on to his wife’s photo—because that possibility didn’t leave her with her heart exposed and her feelings hanging out on a line just waiting for tension to snap it and leave her in pieces.
Nathan was looking down at the photo again, and the sadness in him returned.
She had been self-sustained out of necessity, and she should never forget its lesson. Still, to have a man look at a photo of her that way, with such depth and tenderness, she might just risk loving. Someone. Someday.
Yet the need to comfort him arose as naturally as her breaths. “I’m sure she’ll send you another photo, Nathan.”
He looked up at Kate, agony burning in his eyes. “She can’t.”
“Sure she can. They’ll pass it to you in a secure pouch.”
“From Heaven?”
Kate went stone still. “What?”
He dragged in a sharp breath, as if the words he was about to speak were heavy blows and he needed to brace to sustain himself against them. “My wife died five years ago, Kate.” He licked at his lower lip. “This photo is all I have left of her.”
Stunned, Kate couldn’t pull her thoughts together long enough to grasp them or to find something decent to say. Finally she managed. “I’m sorry for your loss, Nathan.” And she was grateful for saying it.
He nodded that he’d heard her, but kept his gaze fixed on the dirt, hiding from her the pain he clearly felt so intensely he knew it would reveal itself in his face even now.
Five years? Kate couldn’t believe it. He still acted so...well, married. Still wore his wedding band, still slept with her photo beside his cot, still thought of himself as married.
Five years was a long time for a man to be a widower and still think and act and feel so married.
And that might just make Kate most envious of all. “It’s nearly 2:00 a.m.,” Nathan said, then stood. “Let’s call it a night, Kate. The storm’s broken. In the morning, let’s take a look at where Douglas went missing.”
Kate stood, dragged the duffel bag out of the debris through an opening and left it in the sand with the other possessions pulled from the rubble. “Okay. I need to go back down where I dove today, as well.”
“No,” he insisted. “Not without a backup team.”
She stiffened and looked him right in the eye. “I have no choice.” The C-273 had to be located. The sooner, the better.
His aversion to her objecting to his orders surfaced. “Why?”
He wouldn’t like her answer any better. She resisted an urge to sigh. “I can’t tell you that.”
“Can’t?” A speculative gleam lit in his eye. “Or won’t?” Not the anger she had expected, but why did the man always have to push? She wasn’t sure she wanted to look that deeply herself. “I could,” she clarified, and then decided to be totally honest. “But if I did, I’d have to kill you.”
He gave her a strange glance, one she couldn’t fully interpret, then drove it home with a snort. “I’m surprised you’re not jumping at the chance.”
Feeling just enough pressure not to resist the urge, she teased him. “Mosquitoes are annoying, Nathan, but you don’t kill them with a cannon.”
He laughed.
Even exhausted, standing in the middle of a half-collapsed tent with ringing ears, sand scratching every inch of her body, and worries flooding her mind and fighting for her attention, the sound of Nathan Forester laughing made her smile. She hated that.
“Sir?” Riley appeared just beyond the edge of the tent. “Kramer just radioed in. He’s out at the perimeter, finishing the setup on the trip wire. He reported that someone just left the outpost, sir.”
“Who?” Nathan asked, fully alert.
“He couldn’t tell, sir. But it was a man and he had a red scarf on. And he was carrying a black box in his hand.” Kate’s heart thud hard and fast against her ribs. “How big was it—the box, I mean?”
“Kramer said about six by six, ma’am.”
“Inches, millimeters—what?” Kate knew she was shouting but, come on, this information was vital, and his description told her absolutely nothing.
Forester sensed something significant was going on with this black box. Kate saw it in his face, and while he shot her an unspoken question, and that importance resonated in Riley’s expression, Kate ignored them both, waiting for an answer.
“Inches, ma’am,” Riley said. “The box was six-by-six inches.”
Knots cinched down in Kate’s stomach. God help them. It could be the C-273 communications device.
Chapter Seven
By dawn, the storm had passed and the dry, still heat had returned with a vengeance.
Kate suited up in her wet gear, and met Forester at the mess tent. They wolfed down a lousy breakfast of reconstituted powdered eggs, instant coffee and some kind of fried bread that the cook referred to as a whole cake.
Between bites, Forester issued Riley orders. “Get my tent moved. Being right next door to where I was, just makes it easier for the insurgents to hit me again.”
Kate didn’t miss his putting the attack off on insurgents, and she was glad to hear it. Informing the entire outpost about GRID wouldn’t be a wise move at this point Actually, if it could be avoided, it should be. Knowing GRID existed increased their odds of becoming targets.
Nathan wiped at his wide mouth with a paper napkin. “Get an update on Douglas from Search and Rescue, too.”
He paused a second, then added, “Guess you’d better notify headquarters that we’ve had a perimeter breach, as well. Get authorization to move the outpost ASAP.”
Riley scribbled the orders down on his habitual clipboard. “Sir, should I have Captain James start breaking down the camp to prepare for the move?”
“Yeah, James is fine.”
Riley nodded, adding the note. “The boat you requested is ready and waiting for you and Captain Kane at the dock, sir.”
“Thanks.”
“Is that it, sir?”
“Yes.”
Riley passed Kate a new loop of rubber tubing. “For your tags, ma’am.” He shrugged. “I noticed yours was missing.”
Very observant. A valuable asset in a unit clerk. “Thanks, Riley.”
He gave her a shy grin. “Sure thing, ma’am.”
Within minutes, Nathan and Kate loaded their gear into the jeep, and made their way to the dock. The going was slow due to the storm. Sand covered the road, so the entire trip was a four-wheel succession of bumps and jarred teeth.
Finally, Kate spotted the shore, then the dock. Nathan parked and they hauled their gear to the boat. Before boarding, Kate ran a check for explosive devices and bugs.
Nathan likely considered it unnecessary, but if he did, he kept any objections to himself. Kate appreciated that, because in her job, checking was as automatic as dreaming.
It took about thirty minutes to do the job right. Nathan stood on the dock, watching her every move, but never said a word. When she was done, she looked up at him from on the boat. “Let’s roll.”
He got in and they made ready. Nathan removed the ropes mooring the boat to the rocks and coiled them inside the boat. When he was finished, Kate slipped behind the wheel and took off for the site where Douglas had disappeared.
While she steered the boat, Nathan monitored their position on a handheld GPS that he was careful not to let Kate glimpse. She knew they were in the Middle East somewhere. Judging strictly by the landscape, they were either in Iraq or Iran.
