“I won’t have my staff pulled off other soldiers—ones with real fucking injuries—or the night shift woken up from sleep—for your piece-of-shit calls.”
She evaluated the loose papers in her hand. Her commander was a surgeon, and that meant his picture popped up when someone searched for the word perfectionist. At the best of times, he detested incomplete data and vague conclusions. Right now she suspected he wouldn’t like anything less than a ticket home.
“Fuck up again and I will personally see you grounded.” Colonel Loughrey would, but not out of vindictiveness. Out of concern that incompetence would kill someone. He printed the name of every soldier they hadn’t saved on an index card he carried inside his helmet. Last week she’d seen him write the first name on the back. He was a good man, and a good leader, but he was wrong to blame the flight medic. Something bigger was going on, something that seemed to have happened before, although she didn’t know what. The name Wardsen was her first clue.
As silently as combat boots allowed, she retreated. She’d meet with the big guy when she had more answers. This afternoon she had only questions.
Chapter Two
Theresa hated treadmills, gym rats and clanging weights. She hated to stretch in front of half the American soldiers in Paktia Province, their eyes all over her, but this was Tuesday, when she didn’t have the luxury of a solitary four miles at dawn around the airfield’s dirt track. On Tuesdays, she warmed the doctor seat at the 0600 briefing before her clinic shift. If she ran outside now, the eighty-plus-degree May afternoon would drop her like an aneurysm. At her normal duty station in Fort Hood, she could endure the Texas swelter, but Camp Cadwalader’s elevation seemed to add an insurmountable layer to the heat. Preferring to survive the second half of her deployment, on Tuesdays she thumped the treadmill in the air-conditioned gym.
“Hey.” Her roommate stepped on the next machine. “Finally finished the M and M.” Responsibility for the weekly morbidity and mortality report rotated among the four captains in the medical unit.
Theresa punched the button to decrease her speed enough to talk. Since the acoustics sucked in the converted Soviet warehouse, she also raised her voice. “Tough?”
“More missing paperwork.”
“The same?” After eavesdropping on Colonel Loughrey’s blowup last week, she’d told Jennifer about the pattern with Staff Sergeant Wardsen. Only four hundred twenty permanent parties crammed into this camp, but neither of them could find Wardsen.
“Yeah.” The second treadmill reached speed and they matched strides. “Inbound medevac call. Projectile penetration, a by-the-book gunshot wound, but nobody showed. Nada.”
“Think he exists?” Maybe Wardsen was a fictitious name Special Ops used for cover-ups or to treat anonymous CIA spooks. No one could have wounds like medevac had reported for Sergeant Wardsen and keep walking away.
“Uh-huh.” Jennifer entered a faster workout phase. “I think...SF guys...take paperwork...away.” She panted up the incline. “Secrecy...freaks.”
In her cooldown, Theresa could breathe and talk easier than her roommate could. “They’re not allowed to do that.” Her duties included coordinating patient care for soldiers moving between camps or leaving theater. If people removed their paperwork, follow-up care would disintegrate, an outcome she wouldn’t accept.
“You tell them...what they can...can’t do.”
“If I can find them.” Theresa stepped off her machine, plucked her towel from the safety rail and wiped her face to unstick strands of hair from her forehead and neck. Turning, she froze halfway through retrieving her water bottle from the floor.
Isn’t that ironic. She and Jennifer had been griping about how hard it was to find men who were right behind them. Across the gym Captain Chris Deavers, commander of Special Forces Operational Detachment Alpha-5131, crunched out sit-ups on an inclined bench.
Jennifer punched a button to override the hill function and twisted to look. “Hellooo girlfriend, now what are you cooking up?”
“I’m going to ask Chris about his sergeant.” Straightening out this mess would take three or four simple questions. She aligned the corners of her towel.
“Chris?” Her friend’s eyebrows arched.
“We’re both captains. It’s perfectly acceptable to use his name.” She folded the towel into thirds lengthwise and draped it over her forearm.
Her roommate looked at the white fabric, then at her face. “So why are you stalling?”
“I know Chris, but the others...” Faded Cyrillic graffiti climbed the walls above the cheap mirrors that multiplied the dozen men lifting in the corner. Her first week at Caddie, a nurse had told her the Russian translated to “Trust your mother, shoot the rest,” which fit the men surrounding Chris. Despite superficial differences in skin color and hair, they shared identically serious expressions. These men didn’t trash-talk while they cranked out push-ups and pull-ups, and they were the only men who didn’t stare when the Wonder Twins—two postal clerks from a Florida reserve unit rumored to be professional football cheerleaders in civilian life—did lunges. Their focus insulated them from the gym cacophony.
“Forget it.” Jennifer broke into her thoughts. “Their super secret special ops voodoo isn’t going to crack for you. What’s a little missing paperwork?”
“They can’t flout the rules any more than anyone else.” Regardless of her stepfamily’s choices, she’d always believed rules, like laws, should be obeyed. Entering the army had reinforced and rewarded that belief. She squared her shoulders and tossed her towel at Jen.
Her workout partner caught and twirled it. “Sure you won’t need a white flag?”
“Not a chance.” White flags were for bandages, not her. She wasn’t a quitter, and she hadn’t given up on anything since the day she’d joined Army ROTC and paid for Princeton without one cent of her stepfather’s dirty money. After two years of her returning the envelopes of cash Carl and her mother left in her dorm, her family had accepted that she was going to make it on her own, completely legit. She could do this, easy as taking blood pressure.
Jennifer touched two fingers to her eyebrow in a mock salute. “I’ll be here when you scurry home.”
Interrupting their training might be a faux pas, like pushing aside a curtain before a patient fully disrobed, but it wasn’t wrong. As she drew closer, she recognized a soldier she’d examined for concussion and temporary hearing loss after an explosion. He hadn’t sneaked away with his paperwork. One man stood out, although she couldn’t pinpoint the reason. Leaner than the others but well-muscled, he wasn’t the shortest or the tallest. His dark blond hair almost curled on his neck, but the SF guys always pushed the army’s grooming standards, often growing beards to blend with the Afghans.
When he returned her scrutiny across fifteen feet of empty mat, she understood why she’d noticed him. His eyes. Their blue depths carried burdens she could see from here. He appeared to be younger than her, but his stare spoke of losses no one should bear. She thought of the faces she’d seen during her residency ICU rotation, the expressions in the eyes of parents holding a dying child or the man kissing his wife as her ventilator was removed.
She bit her lip against the need to offer him a comforting touch. She had another purpose.
“Hey, Doc.” Chris recovered from his sit-ups and jumped to his feet, wiping his palms on a towel. “What’s up?” The captain’s smile shined with Midwestern sun.