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Credits

Editors: Ruth Sternglantz and Stacia Seaman

Production Design: Stacia Seaman

Cover Design By Sheri (GraphicArtist2020@hotmail.com)

Acknowledgments

When I was five I wanted to be a space commander like Captain Glendora, who “manned” the spaceship SS Glendora on a local TV show. By ten I had switched to alternately being a soldier—I faithfully watched Combat!, a WWII TV drama, every week—or a sheriff, à la Gunsmoke. I had the various toy guns, hats, helmets, badges, and patches to go with every persona. No one mentioned I might not be able to be those things seeing as how I was a girl, although I occasionally had problems convincing my friends (all boys in my neighborhood) that I should be in charge. Contrary to popular criticisms, those shows didn’t instill a tendency for violence or disregard of life in me, but rather a deep appreciation for honor, justice, valor, and self-sacrifice. I love to write heroes because I think the world needs them—whether they be military, law enforcement, firefighters, medical, or unsung family and friends. The First Responder series lets me write about a variety of heroes, and this one was a challenge on many levels. Having never been to Africa, I had to do a lot of Google mapping; having never been in a Black Hawk—ditto fact searching; having never seen death in war, I had to read about it. I am indebted to Phil Klay, whose book Redeployment offers an unflinching and soul-shattering view of the war in the Middle East. I apologize for any factual errors in this work and hope that I have done justice to the many heroes who have experienced what I have not.

Thanks go to senior editor Sandy Lowe, whose patience is limitless; to editor Ruth Sternglantz for refining my work; to Stacia Seaman for keeping me honest; and to my first readers Connie, Eva, and Paula for constant encouragement.

Sheri got the cover exactly right—thank you for fourteen years of amazing artwork.

And to Lee, my own personal hero–Amo te.

Radclyffe, 2014

For Lee, for taking chances

Chapter One

Djibouti, Africa

Four more days before she punched her one-way ticket out of hell. New York City wasn’t exactly Max’s idea of heaven, but it would be an improvement over Djibouti and nirvana compared to Afghanistan. The life she’d left fourteen months ago hadn’t consisted of much more than work, but no matter how empty the rest of her existence might be, no one would be shooting at her in Manhattan. Maybe.

Max lay on her cot in the twilight watching the sand swirl in random eddies through the half-open door of the containerized living unit. The other compartment in the ten-by-twenty sand-colored metal box was empty, as were most of the other CLUs in the neighborhood. Only one thing could empty the hundreds of identical boxes in CLUville so completely—chow time. She couldn’t be bothered to traverse the heat and the flies and the hundred-yard trek to the chow hall even though the food at Camp Lemonnier was a thousand times better than what she’d grown immune to at the forward operating bases. Half the time the pre-packaged meals at the FOBs tasted about like the cardboard they were shipped in. Besides, calories were calories, and drinking them had its advantages. The bottle of no-label whiskey tucked under her mattress provided fuel for the engine with the side benefit of a few hours’ oblivion. If she couldn’t sleep, she’d take what she could get. At least the alcohol blanked the dreams—a civilized term for the images that haunted her, awake and asleep.

A shadow fell across her face and a blocky form filled the doorway. “Yo, Deuce—you gonna grab some chow?”

“Hey, Grif. You go ahead.” Max had told the corpsman a thousand times to call her Max, but the closest he could get to ignoring her rank was the nickname she’d gotten the first time she’d set foot on the sand. Lieutenant Commander Max de Milles, US Navy Medical Corps. MDM, MD fast became MD2 and from there just plain Deuce.

“You sure?”

She could hear his frown, although his face was lost to shadow. “Yeah, I’m good. Just going to catch some sleep before my next duty shift.”

“Won’t be long before you can do that with both eyes closed instead of just one,” he said. “When’s your ride out?”

“End of the week.” She tried to sound casual, like it didn’t really matter, but she hated to even talk about the end of this tour. She’d always been a little superstitious—most surgeons were, but war had a way of honing everything down to the sharp, bright core, and superstition had become a religion. She’d learned pretty quickly on her first tour that talking about something was a sure way to jinx it. Or worse, bring your nightmares to life. Everyone knew the consequences of breaking the unwritten rules: never discuss the danger of going outside the wire, never brag about the girl waiting back home, never count the days until end of tour. If you did, you might mistake that buried IED for a rock, or log on to the Dear John email, or get the last-minute change in your separation orders.

“Man,” Grif sighed. “A few weeks on a ship and a day’s flight—you’ll be home before Labor Day.”

“You won’t be far behind me.” She didn’t want to make small talk. She didn’t want to hear about Ken Griffin’s high-school-sweetheart-now-wife or his three kids back in Kansas City, or how he was going back to his job as an EMT. She didn’t want to imagine him with his family or hear about his dreams—not when all that could end in a millisecond. After tending countless troops with shattered bones and battered bodies and devastated lives, she’d finally managed to wall herself off from the human beings who depended upon her. Her brain and hands functioned mechanically to fix their torn flesh as efficiently as ever, but her emotions had disconnected. When she failed, when she lost one, she no longer thought about the suffering of the husband or wife or kids back home. She just moved on. Until she fell asleep.

Grif grinned the soft, loopy grin he got when talking about his family. “Yep—maybe I’ll bring Laurie and the kids to New York City and look you up.”

“Sure,” Max said. Just shut up. Just…don’t say any more. Don’t you know it only takes a second, one misstep, to change everything forever?

“Right then.” His tone held a little uncertainty, a little concern. Grif was worse than a girl sometimes—his feelings played across his face like images on a marquee in Times Square. He worried and fretted and most of his anxiety was directed at her. Not because she was a girl, but because she never unloaded. Never got drunk and trashed her tent, never shot off her mouth about the fucking Taliban, never joined in movie night and hooted at the lousy porn, even though plenty of the female troops did. She burned inside like a boiler about to blow at the seams. She knew it and so did he. What he didn’t know about were the nights she walked outside the wire until the lights of the FOB faded and there was just her and her constant companion, death. Or how she sat in the sand in the still, dark desert with her bottle and watched the stars revolve overhead and dared the gods of war to come and get her. None ever did.

No one knew. No one ever would.

“I’ll email you my number,” Max lied. “You give me a call and we’ll meet for dinner.”

“Awesome. ’Night, Deuce.”

“’Night.” Max waited until he moved away, leaving a patch of black sky and a haze of dust in his wake, and reached for the bottle.

*

Juba jungle, Somalia

The tent flap twitched aside and Amina peered in. “A Skype request came through for you to call back soonest.”

Rachel frowned, closed her laptop, and tucked it under her arm. She wasn’t scheduled to use the camp’s satellite hookup and wasn’t expecting any communication from Red Cross headquarters. She joined the dark-haired interpreter, who had started out as her liaison with the Somali Red Crescent Society and had soon become a friend, on the walk through camp to the base station. “Who was it, do you know?”

“It was from America. A pleasant blond woman requested we have you call. She did not say why. Only that you’re to use official channels.”

“Oh.” Rachel was glad the weak illumination from the solar lights strung at intervals along the perimeter of the encampment hid her blush. She hated having attention drawn to her special status, one she tried very hard to downplay if not erase. Blending in at the field outpost with Somalis from the Red Crescent Society, the multinational delegates from the Red Cross, and the French medical team from Doctors Without Borders would have been a lot simpler if she didn’t have special diplomatic status on top of being one of the few Americans. “I’m sorry I’ll be using up someone else’s airtime.”

“No one here has anyone at home who can afford to have Internet, or if they do, they’re too busy to use it.”

Amina’s smile lightened her voice, and the affection in her nut-brown eyes and the teasing expression on her elegant face showed even in the almost-dark. Rachel was thankful for the hundredth time she’d found a friend who didn’t care about her family or her status. “I thought you said your fiancé was a techie.”

“He is, and he spends all his waking hours working with or playing on his computers—not Skyping me.”

“Then he’s crazy.”

Amina slipped her arm through Rachel’s. “Something tells me you could teach him how a betrothed should act.”

Rachel laughed. Amina had been educated in England and was far worldlier than the other Somali women on the Red Crescent relief team, but she doubted Amina would have made the comment if she’d known Rachel’s preference for partners. The subject had never come up—why would it out here in the jungle where there were so many more important things to think about, like how to stem the measles epidemic that was devastating the nomadic populations, or how to get food and shelter to the displaced herders and farmers in the wake of the famine and devastation brought on by recent tropical storms, widespread flooding, and attacks from marauding rebels.