Slivers had cut her face, but nothing seemed to be catastrophic. “You’re going to—”
He saw her leg. Her boot was gone. More than the boot. Tendons and flesh hung unconnected to anything, flapping like shredded fabric.
This nightmare couldn’t be real, but gravel peppered his cheek as the ambulance skidded to a halt. Medics jumped out and the Quick Reaction Force secured a perimeter. The stretcher was a familiar flat rectangle, never more foreign than when he laid Theresa on its olive-colored canvas.
Clutching him, she howled when the medics straightened her limbs. They put on a tourniquet and stuck a needle in her, something for her pain. Each thing they poked into her bit into him too. He’d failed. He hadn’t convinced her to stay inside the wire. He hadn’t protected her.
She moaned as relief took hold. He couldn’t be sure, but maybe she said, “Don’t leave.”
“I won’t. I won’t leave.” The medics bumped him aside, but he didn’t let go of her hand. “You’re not alone.”
“She’s out now, Sarge.” Someone peeled his fingers from Theresa’s while someone else thrust a tube down her throat. “We’re rolling.”
Her blood, smeared across his knuckles and wrists, branded an oath onto his soul. As soon as he knew she was safe, he’d tear the village outside Camp Caddie apart until they pointed him to the Taliban who’d planted this bomb. The bomber would repay every drop of Theresa’s blood. Tenfold or a hundredfold, from three generations or from a dozen, the guilty would suffer for hurting his woman.
Twenty-four hours later, Wulf lurked along the fringes of the intensive care wing of the Landstuhl Regional Medical Center in Germany. He wanted to sit beside Theresa and study her eyelids for flutters when he said her name, but security had already cornered him because he wasn’t her next of kin or her chain of command. He couldn’t risk a confrontation where a clerk might check the authority-line numbers on the travel orders Deavers had created for him. He’d bet it was paperwork, not his best friend, that had toppled Caesar too. Maybe a sympathetic nurse on the next shift would let him slip into Theresa’s room. Until then, he’d wait in the hall.
It was after 7:00 p.m.—already twenty-one thirty in Afghanistan—when his smartphone flashed an encrypted message. His neck tingled as he entered codes. The only intel important enough for Deavers to send now concerned the IED. Did the team have a lead?
He read the message twice. FBI agents from Kabul had swarmed to Caddie because a senator had died, and more were en route from stateside. That made sense, but with the exception of Laura and the bodies from the wrecked SUV, the rest of the convoy had vanished. Not even paperwork remained. No record of who’d signed for fuel, no motor pool inventory of VINs—even the manifest the lead driver had given the gate guards was missing. While the guards remembered Laura and Theresa, no one could describe the drivers with more detail than “White guys.” Four men and two vehicles had evaporated into the Big Fucking Empty.
Staccato taps that never came from nurse footwear interrupted his third review. The couple that turned the corner had to be Theresa’s mother and stepfather. The lady, flamboyant from her open-toed heels to her unnaturally dark hair, hurried ahead of a military escort and a track-suited man who dragged a rolling suitcase.
Wulf snapped to attention.
“Where’s my daughter?” The woman pinned him with dark brown eyes identical to the ones seared into his memory. Like her daughter, she wasted no time.
The breathless specialist arrived to block the door. “Ma’am, we have to wait for—”
“No, we don’t.” She lifted a hand and pointed. “Carl.”
“Sorry, kid. Gotta listen to my wife.” Theresa’s stepfather lunged more quickly than Wulf expected of a man wearing crisscrossed carry-ons. With Carl’s bulk crowding the startled soldier into a precarious lean, it only took a gentle shove on the shoulder to send the escort stumbling aside. Wulf whisked the door open for Theresa’s mother.
With a shrug at the spluttering aide, he followed Carl. Theresa’s mother circled the bed to press her cheek against her daughter’s. Theresa’s arms lay flat on top of sheets that were only slightly paler than her skin. Intravenous tubes, finger clamps and other equipment he didn’t understand poked out of or latched on to every part of her, but it was the sight of her right leg that paralyzed him. The sheets were pulled away from what resembled a heavily wrapped log. That swaddled mess with its dangling tubes couldn’t belong to the woman who’d sprinted and jumped and kicked so hard at his side.
From between stubble-darkened jowls and thick eyebrows, Carl’s suspicious eyes fastened on Wulf. “You’re no doctor. Who’re you?”
Crowding into the room behind Wulf, the medical entourage cut off conversation.
“You again!” One of the attending surgeons ordered Wulf out.
“He can stay.” Holding her daughter’s hand, Theresa’s mother spoke with the nasal New Jersey sound Theresa only let slip when angry.
“Mrs. Chiesa,” the colonel in charge of Theresa’s care began.
“Napolitano.”
“Mrs. Napolitano.” He started over. “Your daughter’s prognosis is good. She’s in the best hands for her type of injury.”
“What type is that?” As she posed a question no mother wanted to ask, she looked transparent enough around the edges to float away without the anchor of Theresa’s hand.
“In layman’s terms, she lost her right foot above the top of her boot. We recommend a second operation to reshape the remainder of her tibia to better fit a below-the-knee prosthetic, but initial evaluation shows minimal or no brain injury.” He described, without detectable irony, how the medical texts she’d straddled in the car had shielded her left leg from the blast.
While her parents volleyed questions, Wulf imagined holding Theresa’s other hand. If he indulged himself and slid close enough to confirm that her skin held the warmth of the living, someone would demand he leave, so he focused on her face. The dark wings of her eyebrows were sedated into immobility, but nurses had picked shrapnel and glass from her cheeks and dabbed ointment on her scabs.
The lead physician checked his watch as the medical team filed out. “Visiting ends in fifteen minutes. Your escort’s at the main desk, ready to show you to your room at Fisher House.” He frowned at Wulf. “Sergeant, you go when they do. This is your final warning before we call the MPs.”
In the restored quiet, Theresa’s mother sank to a chair beside the bed.
The only part of Carl that looked gentle was his hand on his wife’s shoulder. “You never answered me. Who are you?”
Wulf recognized the impotent rage in the other man’s voice. He shared it. “Her escort.” He’d used that line around the hospital. “I flew in with her.”
Carl lowered his unibrow and patted his wife’s back before he slipped around the end of the bed—without, Wulf noted, showing his back. His eyes fastened on the identifying patches on Wulf’s uniform. “I spent 1966 with the 173rd Airborne in Cu Chi.” He lowered his voice. “Don’t shit me they put a guy from your unit on escort duty. Tell me. What’re you doing here?”
When Wulf didn’t answer, Carl continued. “I may sound like a goombah from Jersey, but I read the papers and listen to NPR like the smart guys.” With an Italian’s regard for personal space, he crowded Wulf’s chest.
Wulf stood his ground.
“I was listening to radio talk about the deceased senator when the phone rang, and then I heard my wife scream.” He grabbed Wulf’s arm with a grip that would have made a butcher proud. “I got that chest pain when you know, you just know, and I prayed I wouldn’t have a heart attack right then because Jeanne was gonna need me.”