It was funny being here again too because in part, this job, back in this city, was a direct reflection of that weekend with Carson–he had encouraged me to follow my own dreams, to do what made me happy. And look where I had ended up. Life was wild.
"Can I help?" a male voice asked and I looked up into a smiling pair of the bluest eyes I'd ever seen.
I smiled back and picked up one of the two piles of books I had already made, and stood up. "Thanks, that would be great," I said.
He bent down and picked up the other pile and followed me to my office, less than fifty feet down the hall. I set my pile of books on my cluttered desk and he did the same with his pile.
I turned to him and rubbed my hands on my jean-clad thighs and held one out. "Grace Hamilton," I said, smiling again.
"Ah! I've heard great things about you, Grace. Welcome aboard," he said, his handsome face breaking into a warm smile and his hand reaching out to shake mine. "I'm Alex Klein. I'm a prosecutor here too."
"Nice to meet you, Alex. I'm happy to be here." I smiled again. There was a lot of smiling going on between Alex and me. I moved a box over on my desk and looked at him. He was smiling again and I laughed and shook my head. He laughed too.
"Well, Grace, I'll leave you to the unpacking. I'm working late and was going to order a pizza in a little bit if you have time to join me for a slice or two?" He gestured down the hall to where I assumed his office was.
I turned around fully as he backed out my door. "Oh, um–"
"I could brief you on who you'll be working with around here," he smiled again, "who to get in good with and all that." He grinned.
"Okay, sure, Alex. Thank you."
"Okay, great, I'll come get you when the pizza's here." And with that, he turned around and walked back to his office. I watched him walk away, smiling slightly to myself. When he got halfway down the hall, he looked back and smiled. I laughed and turned around, grinning now as I started unpacking.
**********
Carson
We closed in, Leland putting a finger over his lips and cocking his head to the left to indicate our target was in the next room. We all nodded and moved in, none of us making a sound. Josh counted on his fingers as we stood to each side of the door, turning as he kicked it in on three. The door flew inward and we moved in as one unit, surprising four men, holding weapons, but sitting down on chairs, their feet propped up, clearly not expecting trouble.
We fired on them before they could even raise their guns, killing them instantly.
There was another small door beyond that room and when Josh kicked that one open, we moved in and immediately took in a man cowering on the floor in the corner. "Mehran Makar?" Eli demanded.
The man narrowed his eyes, cursing, calling us dirty pigs, and Eli fired, killing him. Maybe it was cold, but I felt nothing. Our mission was complete.
We cleared the rest of the room, letting down our guard only slightly until we were confident that no one was hiding. We had been given intel that there were only four guards, but we couldn't rely on that one hundred percent until we had checked it out ourselves.
"Clear?" Noah asked, coming back in the room.
"Yeah," I said. "All clear out front?"
"Yeah. Let's check out back." There was a small building behind the larger warehouse that Leland was now covering. There was only one door and no windows, so no way for anyone to escape. But we needed to go in carefully in case someone was waiting inside.
Ten minutes later, we had the door open and had moved inside the small structure. It looked to be deserted.
Josh flicked a light switch on the wall and Leland and I sucked in a breath. Noah swore, "Holy shit," and Eli muttered, "Mother fucker."
At the back of the room, was the biggest stash of weapons I had come upon, Russian made surface to air missiles and rocket propelled grenades. It was a f**king stockpile.
"Jesus, that fucker had some serious plans," Josh said.
We all stilled as we heard a small scraping sound in the back. When I examined the back wall, I noticed a small door next to the shelves of weaponry. It almost blended into the wall.
I nodded to the other men, making sure they saw it too, and we moved in.
Noah kicked the door in this time and as Josh shined his flashlight into the pitch-black space, we all recoiled at the smell. "God damn!" Josh coughed.
The sight that met our eyes was straight out of a horror movie.
**********
"You okay, man?" Noah asked quietly. I brought my head up from out of my arms, resting on my knees and looked up at him. "Figure I will be. You?"
His chin went up in a jerky nod. "About the same."
I nodded back, watching the other four men walk up the rocky slope toward us. "The other team will be here in about twenty minutes," Eli said.
When we had called in the night before, we had been ordered to stay with the weaponry until another team could get there to inventory it. The morning sun was already fully up in the sky.
Noah and I nodded, Noah speaking quietly, holding up his radio, "We're supposed to be at our rendezvous point in six hours."
"We'll be ready to leave as soon as the other team gets here then," Leland said, emotionless, a faraway look in his eyes that I didn't like. Even Josh was somber, patting Leland on his back as he walked by him.
Half an hour later, we had briefed the second team and were ready to leave. I stood up, hefting up my gear and securing it to my back as the other men did the same. We started walking. I only looked back once.
**********
It had taken us longer than we thought it would to jog the distance to our rendezvous point, and we were still about an hour away when the sun started to set in the desert sky. It was the end of October when night temperatures dropped rapidly in Afghanistan. Our breath came out in short white bursts as we hiked quietly, all of us aware of our surroundings, as we were trained to be, but quiet in our own thoughts.
Suddenly, Josh, who was walking in the lead, stopped and held up his hand to indicate we stop as well. We all came to a halt, listening. When none of us heard anything, we moved forward again. A few hundred feet later, Josh halted again and we all halted as well, readying our weapons. We were trained well enough to know that one hunch based on the snapping of a stick in the desert might be dismissed, but two most definitely shouldn't be. We all moved so that our backs were to each other and circled slowly, squinting our eyes to see as far as possible in the darkening distance.
"Shit!" Leland grunted as one shot rang out and his leg buckled and he went down next to me.
The rest was a blur of gunfire, blood, explosions, and pain. So much f**king pain.
I heard someone moaning from faraway and for just a second, I was lucid, the noise exploding back into my brain as I came to and lifted my head from the ground, where somehow I had ended up.
Leland was next to me and I could see that his leg was in bad shape, part of the bone broken and protruding almost straight out of the skin. He was moaning and trying to drag himself toward me.
I went to push myself off the ground and bit my lip to stop myself from screaming out in agony, my hands were covered in blood and blisters, the skin hanging loose in several areas. A surge of adrenalin pulsed through me and I sprung to my feet and hefted Leland under his arms, bearing his weight on my forearms as I dragged him away from the gunfire that was still hitting rocks to the left of us, where I could also hear Eli, Josh and Noah yelling and returning fire. There was too much smoke for me to see what was going on. My job now was to get Leland out of the line of fire. As I moved away, I tripped on something, my body jerking strangely. I struggled to stay upright with Leland's weight in my arms and after a second, kept moving.
Leland grunted in pain as I dragged him with me, my own grunts of exertion mingling with his. I looked behind me and saw a rock big enough that I thought we could both fit behind it, and picked up speed. I rounded the rock a couple seconds later and lay Leland down and collapsed to the right of him, just as a spray of bullets took out a piece of the top of the rock, small pebbles raining down on us as we covered our heads.
Leland looked at me, pale and expressionless and passed out again. I saw more blood coming through his jacket and moved it open with my forearms. Thank God it was unzipped. "Fuck! Fuck! Fuck!" I grunted out. He had been shot in the chest too, and the blood was slowly spreading, soaking his shirt underneath. I glanced back down to my mangled hands, so swollen now, they were entirely useless. I leaned over him, putting pressure on the bullet wound with my arms, closing my eyes and picturing the only thing that brought me true calm–the sunrise. In my mind, I pictured it coming up slowly over the horizon, bathing the world around it in light, in hope.
The world swam around me. I heard the sound of a helicopter propeller and more shots rang out, followed by more yelling and another explosion, and then finally, quiet. I looked down. My arms were now entirely drenched in Leland's blood. If he lost much more, he wouldn't survive.
The helicopter landed and I heard footsteps running toward us. "Here," I called out. "He needs a medic." Why did I feel so damn cold and tired? Why did the SEAL kneeling down in front of me look like he was moving further and further back, through a long tunnel? I blinked my eyes, my head feeling heavy on my shoulders. The last thing I heard was, "He's shot too–he's going down." Who? Who was going down? The world went dark.
CHAPTER 20
Three months later, October
Grace
I looked down at the diamond on my finger, smiling a small smile, before picking up the brief that I had been working on.
A small knock sounded at my office door. "Come in!" I called.
The door opened, and Alex came in and shut it behind him. "Hey gorgeous fiancé," he said.
"Hey yourself," I said, smiling, but not getting up.
He came around my chair and put his hands on my shoulders and started massaging them as he leaned down and kissed the top of my head.
"Ahhh," I moaned out. "Don't stop, that feels great."
"You almost done here?" he asked.
I frowned. "Probably not. Another hour?"
"I'll wait. We'll grab a late dinner."
"Okay. I'll come get you when I'm done." I looked back over my shoulder, smiling up at him.
He kissed the top of my head one more time and then headed out the door, closing it behind him.
I glanced back down at my ring again. I was still getting used to seeing it there, as it had only been three days since Alex had proposed.
I leaned back in my chair, thinking of the whirlwind the last three months had been–getting settled in a new job, which I loved, and meeting Alex, my sweet Alex. We had only dated for three months, but as I had told Abby and my sisters, when you know, you know. I was twenty-seven years old. I knew what I wanted. And so when Alex dropped down on one knee during dinner at Joël Robuchon, I had immediately said yes. We hadn't set a date yet, but I was thinking a fall wedding. I looked at my ring for another minute and then I got back to work.
**********
Carson
I threw back the last of my beer and sat it down on the bar in front of me. Leland, sitting to my right, his crutches propped up on the bar next to him, gestured to the bartender for two more bottles.
The bartender put a finger up. "Hold on, man," he said on a smile.
Leland nodded and looked over at me. "Last time I heard those words, I was on a helicopter spouting blood," he chuckled.
I laughed a humorless laugh. "Yeah. Can't say I remember much of that flight."
We were silent for a minute before the bartender put our bottles in front of us. I nodded thanks.
"So, Carson," Leland said, "have you decided if you're gonna take the medical discharge?" He looked over at me cautiously, taking a sip of his beer.
I closed my eyes for a minute. "I think I'm gonna stay," I said, thinking that I was grateful the Navy had given me the choice. Turned out, the bullet wound to my chest had just missed my heart. A centimeter to the right, and I'd have died on the spot. The burns to my hands had all but healed, except for some slight scarring in several places on my fingers and palms, but the nerve damage would take a lot longer. It would be at least a year before I could be trusted to fire a weapon properly. It'd suck to sit at the base cleaning weapons while all my buddies came and went, but that was the way it went. I had no other option.
Leland hadn't gotten so lucky. The internal injuries from the bullet wounds had been repaired, but his leg was f**ked up badly enough that he'd been medically discharged, no choice. At least he hadn't lost it though. He'd always walk with a limp, but he'd walk on his own flesh and bone.
Leland nodded, looking like he was deep in thought. Finally, he looked over at me. "Would you make a different choice if you had a job, something meaningful, to go back to?" he asked.
I furrowed my brow. "I'm not worried about finding a job when I get back. Being a SEAL, having that on my résumé, I figure I could do a lot of things. I'll just have to figure out what. You have all that opportunity too, man."
He nodded. "Thing is, I have a built-in job. My father is gonna want me to run the hotel when I get back. I've been thinking a lot though, these last three months man, and I know you have too." He ran his hand through his dark hair. "Shit, about a lot of things–about you saying we needed to do something, Carson. You were the first one to say that." He was silent for another few beats as I nodded, acknowledging that I had said that, and I had meant it.
"If you'll listen to me, I might have a job offer you can't refuse," he said quietly.