“I want to locate some forms for a soldier on your team.” She took a deep breath and focused on Chris, ignoring the man with the devastated eyes and the others who crowded the mats. “A sergeant who was injured.”
“Sergeant Jackson? He’s great. Your people treated him well.”
“Not Sergeant Jackson.” She shook her head without looking away.
Although his smile barely shifted, Chris’s welcome face closed with a nearly audible slam. None of his men moved. The packed mass didn’t even seem to breathe.
“Nobody else was hurt this week.” He lifted his towel to wipe his forehead as if nothing mattered, but veins popped in his neck. He wasn’t as relaxed as he pretended.
“Look, today an inbound medevac radioed an incoming with penetration wounds, Staff Sergeant Wardsen.” Her words hung between them. The wait seared her lungs, as if the air-conditioning had stopped, until she felt compelled to fill the silence. “We’re missing his file.” She could smell her own sweat despite the fully saturated tang of the gym. “Was he treated?”
“No.”
The men beside Chris loomed larger as she turned to search each face. Their physical training uniforms didn’t have name tapes, so she couldn’t determine who among them was Wardsen. The dark blond with the tortured eyes shifted his weight, but a Polynesian-looking soldier shouldered into him.
She wanted to ask Chris for the real story, but the testosterone and stench clogged her throat. “Can we talk about this somewhere else?”
“No.”
“What?” She struggled to keep her eyebrows from meeting over the bridge of her nose. She needed to project friendly and professional, and she didn’t want to come off like a badgering fobbit, the stereotype of a forward-operating-base paper pusher. She worked up a smile. “Well?”
Chris shrugged. “Nothing to talk about.” He bent to a barbell for a set of arm curls. “Dust-off made a mistake.”
“Four times with the same soldier? And only that soldier? I don’t believe it.” Chris was concealing either who had been injured or how. But why? “I want to meet Sergeant Wardsen.”
The dozen men blended into a pool of silence so thick, so viscous with disapproval and rejection, that she struggled to move. The answer hit like a fifty-pound weight—friendly fire. The other captain didn’t make eye contact. “If that’s all, Doc, we have our workout.”
“Fine.” A fellow officer had dismissed her in front of a pack of staring enlisted guys. Her cheeks burned and she could barely pry her lips far enough apart to speak, but if Chris wanted a pissing contest, she’d give him one. “You’ll receive a written request from me tomorrow for the sergeant’s treatment records.”
“Classified.” He grunted over another rep without facing her.
“Really? We’ll see what Colonel Loughrey and I can do about that.” She spun on her heel and stomped to Jennifer.
Her friend slowed the treadmill. “How’d it go?”
“Don’t ask.” Theresa grabbed a five-pound barbell and curled with gusto. The weight bounced off her upper arm. Whoa, too hard. She’d have a bruise.
“Didn’t I tell you not to bug those guys? They don’t talk to lesser mortals.”
“You were right.”
Jennifer tucked her chin and stared, eyebrows raised. “You never say that.”
“To quote the boss, they’re shitheads.” She thunked the weight on the ground. She needed to get out of the gym. Now. “You can write that in stone.”
Thirty minutes later, draft memorandums requesting medical files danced in Theresa’s head as she left the women’s shower for the dining facility. After six months in-country, Theresa ranked the lavish mess hall food provided by Black and Swan contractors on par with cold med school pizza. Crispy shrimp, loaded burgers, and surf and turf were better than the chicken breasts she cooked, but she missed her empty apartment fridge in Texas. At least when she opened it after a night on call, the half-and-half carton and jar of olives were hers.
While she stopped at the dining hall entrance for the mandatory weapon safety check, a soldier exited and the cold burst of air-conditioning brought the promise of dinner. Tuesday’s meal rotation included the one item she still desired: deep-fried chicken cordon bleu. She usually substituted salad for fries, but no monthly weigh-in could make her give up cordon bleu.
Inside the metal building, she headed for the hot line as the server slipped the last golden mound to the private in front of her. She hadn’t run four miles on a treadmill for iceberg lettuce. “Excuse me, are there more?”
“Two minutes, ma’am.”
A green tray slid behind hers on the line. “Are they bringing another pan?”
Theresa glanced at the speaker and froze. This close his eyes were as compelling as they had been across the gym, but now she could see brown-and-amber flecks around the iris—a rare combination that gave depth to the blue—and a star-shaped scar on his left temple that she hadn’t cataloged earlier. She imagined he’d hit a corner of a board or rock and left it unstitched.
She broke the stare and read his name tape. Wardsen.
“You!” She studied his body. Feet planted firmly on the floor, weight distributed evenly without favoring a leg. His uniform pants stretched across his thighs and tapered down his calves to tuck into tan boots. Nothing in his posture hinted at a concealed injury. She raised her eyes to his chest, and he obligingly took a deep breath. The line of his shirt across his shoulders didn’t appear to hide evidence of bandaging. When he’d been wearing less clothing in the gym, she hadn’t seen bulky wrappings, but then she hadn’t known he was the elusive Staff Sergeant Wulf Wardsen.
“Would you like to check my teeth?”
She snapped her gaze to his face and collided with his smile. It transformed him from a carving of a thunder god into a heartthrob.
“You give a thorough exam, Doc.”
“You weren’t shot!” Her heart rate notched up as she prepared for a second confrontation.
“Good to know.” He lifted an eyebrow, its toffee color darker than his hair.
Her eyes narrowed. “Why did medevac report you?”
“I didn’t realize they had.”
“Then what are you hiding?” He must have overheard her exchange with Chris, but he wasn’t making it easy to argue with him.
“Nothing.” His smile didn’t budge, his eyes didn’t shift, his expression didn’t flicker.
“I will find out what’s going on.” She focused on the small, steady beat at his neck. His skin didn’t have the ruddy tone of most fair-colored people, as if the stones of Afghanistan had scoured away any hint of pink long ago. Blond hairs showed above the neck of his T-shirt. Unlike the rest of him, they looked silky soft. “The flight medic got reamed by my commander. Whatever you’re up to, other people are paying for it, so knock it off.”
“Understood.” He nudged his tray until it touched hers. “Are you going to keep holding up the line?”
She turned her shoulder to cover her embarrassment. First she’d stared at him like he was a particularly succulent entrée, then she’d chewed him out. “I’m waiting for cordon bleu.”
“That one?” He nodded at a plate sitting on the serving hood.
Grabbing it, she turned to the salad bar. As she piled lettuce and cherry tomatoes on her plate, the hair on her arms stood up, letting her know he’d lingered.
“Captain Chiesa.” He put the correct Italian spin on her name, pronouncing the first sound like “key” instead of “chee.”