Lean on Me

LEAN ON ME

an Alex the Fey thriller

by

CLAUDIA HALL CHRISTIAN

Cook Street Publishing
Denver, CO

Also by
Claudia Hall Christian

ALEX THE FEY SERIES

(AlextheFey.com)

The Fey

Learning to Stand

Who I Am

Lean on Me

THE DENVER CEREAL

(DenverCereal.com)

The Denver Cereal

Celia’s Puppies

Cascade
Cimarron
Black Forest
Fairplay

THE QUEEN of COOL
(theQueenofCool.com)

Copyright © Claudia Hall Christian

Licensed under the Creative Commons
License:

Attribution–NonCommercial–Share Alike 3.0

Smashwords Edition Licensing Notes:

Thank you for purchasing this ebook! You are
welcome to share it with your friends. This book may be reproduced,
copied and distributed for non-commercial purposes, provided the
book remains in its complete original form. If you enjoyed this
book, please return to Smashwords.com to discover the Denver
Cereal, the Queen of Cool and other works by Claudia Hall
Christian. Thank you for your support

ISBN (
13 digits
) :
978-1-938057-02-1
Library of Congress
:
2012930933 (print)

PUBLISHER’S NOTE:

This is a work of fiction. Names,
characters, places and incidents either are the product of the
author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

First edition © February, 2012

Cook Street Publishing
PO Box 18217

Denver, CO 80218

To Michele
Woodward
for the right word at the
right moment
to a stranger, now friend.
Thank you.

“
Wherever you are, it is
your friends who make your world.”

William James (1842-1910)

PRELUDE

Tuesday afternoon

October 20 – 1:30 p.m. AFT

FOB Sharana, Paktika Province,
Afghanistan

“
What is it?” he asked the
moment she shifted to sitting on their bed.

She had been pressed against him with his
arm around her as they lay on their sides on the small cot. She
shook her head. He gave her a soft smile and rolled onto his back.
A tall, former NFL football player, her partner easily took up the
bed.

She looked up at the air conditioning unit
over their door. They had been warned to leave the unit going. With
all eight units in the B-Hut going, the plywood housing had a
gentle buzz that covered most of the team’s sleeping noise. They
had been offered officer housing, but they would have had to
scatter around the post. Instead, the Fey Team took a vacant B-Hut
in enlisted housing. Each set of partners shared a tiny plywood
compartment. The plywood walls went from the floor to around two
feet from the ceiling. The B-Hut was easier to guard and would
allow them to leave in a moment’s notice.

She stood from the cot. The cooling
Afghanistan temperatures combined with the air conditioning and
gave the air a stale, wet chill. After last week’s fun in the sun
in Corfu, she felt frozen through and through. She pulled on a pair
of thick tights and a fleece sweater.

“
You okay?” His Queen’s
accent was hard, but his words were kind and intimate.

She nodded.

“
Don’t go far.”

She looked around their eight-by-six plywood
space and he smiled. He reached out and took her hand. Their eyes
caught and she stared into the depths of his gray eyes. He smiled
and kissed her hand. He gave her a nod and she let go.

She took a seat in the camp chair just
inches from the cot, turned on a desk lamp, and opened her netbook
computer. He made a noise and she glanced to see if he had
something to say. He was asleep. Not wanting to face all the people
shouting at her via email, she set her netbook on the tiny plywood
shelf in front of her and opened her small black bound journal.

Yesterday, she’d written:

Everything depends on me doing this.

Everyone believes I can do this.

I have to do this.

But how?

She grimaced at her horrible handwriting and
the fact that nothing had changed overnight.

She’d never been the leader of an active,
multi-unit military team. No one had. She had no rule book to
follow and no role models. Worse yet, none all of the sage advice
she’d received applied to her or her situation. After a lifetime of
following in her fathers’ huge footsteps, their trail had
ended.

She had to break her own trail. She had to
face the unknown alone. Her stomach rolled over with anxiety. The
screaming panic in her head rose to a nauseating pitch. If there
had been a toilet nearby, she would have thrown up. She shook her
head at her partner. Couldn’t he hear the screaming in her
head?

She bit her lip. She fumbled in the dark for
her backpack and took out her new Magic 8 Ball. The day everyone
had died, she’d given the Magic 8 Ball she always carried, to her
goddaughter and sister, Helene. As a good luck present, the girl
had given her this Magic 8 Ball just before leaving for this
mission. Now was the time to put it to use. She closed her eyes and
asked the question:

Would she fail?

Turning the ball over, she peered in the
window hoping to see her fortune. She saw only a dark cloud of
sediment stuck to the other side of the transparent window. The
black patch effectively blocked the fortune-telling die. She shook
the ball to clear the window and asked again. The blue-black smudge
blocked her view of the white die. She moved the Magic 8 Ball under
the lamp to see if that would help. It didn’t.

Her anxiety rose. She tried again.

Nothing.

The Magic 8 Ball knew the truth but couldn’t
tell her. Her way, the team’s way, was blocked from her view. She
stuffed the ball back in her backpack.

“
What did it say?” he
asked.

Surprised by his voice, she jerked to look
at him. He held out his hand. She took the Magic 8 Ball from her
backpack and gave it to him. He turned it over.

“
I see your concern,” he
said.

“
The answer is blocked,”
she said. “All of the answers are out there… just out
there…”

“
Maybe you should focus on
what you can control,” he said.

“
Like what?”

“
What can you control?” he
sat up on his elbows.

“
You.” She
smiled.

He laughed.

“
You’re smart and
intuitive,” he said. “We’ve built a great team. You can trust them
to be loyal as we face what we cannot know.”

He held out the ball to her. She stuffed it
into her backpack. When he held out his arm, she couldn’t resist
the lure of his warmth and safety. She lay down against him
again.

“
Don’t be frightened,” he
said in her ear. “We’ll face it all together.”

She was glad he couldn’t see her face. The
last men who’d said that to her had died under the streets of Paris
three years ago.

“
I know what you’re
thinking,” he said in her ear.

She looked up at him. He gave her a soft
smile. She nodded and he lay down behind her. His arm held her
tight. They lay together for a while before her computer
dinged.

Her Sergeant’s face appeared on her
netbook.

“
Got the call,” Sergeant
Dusty said. “It’s worse than you thought. A chopper’s warming for
you.”

“
Thank you, Sergeant.” She
stood and called over the plywood partitions, “Fey Team. It’s
time.”

“
Yes sir,” a few members of
the team called from their rooms in the B-Hut.

“
Time to move,” her second
in command and old Fey Special Forces Team member, Major Joseph
Walter said from the hallway.

“
Get dressed,” Captain
Matthew Mac Clenaghan said. “Go through your checklist and check
your partner.”

“
Body armor, full load,”
Joseph said. “Five minutes.”

Joseph flicked on the B-Hut’s two overhead
fluorescent lights.

“
Jakkman?” Matthew asked.
“There’s a helicopter with your name on it and some kid warming it
up right now.”

“
We’re on it,” Zack said.
The door banged behind Captain Zack “The Jakker” Jakkman and his
co-pilot Sergeant Cliff Mauer.

She sent an email to her superior officer
while the team dressed then checked their partners for body armor
and weapons. In teams of two, the men and women left the B-Hut
until she and her partner were alone.

She dressed quickly. Her partner, Arthur
“Raz” Rasmussen checked to make sure she was wearing her body armor
and was armed. She went through the checklist with him.

“
Sir?” Captain Andrew
“Trece” Ramirez asked. “White Boy and I are waiting to escort
you.”

Raz opened their plywood door for the large
bodybuilders. She nodded to Trece. Trece and White Boy led the way
out of the B-Hut. She glanced back at Raz and he nodded her
forward.

Turning off the lights, Lieutenant Colonel
Alexandra “the Fey” Hargreaves stepped out of the B-Hut and onto
her own path.

F

CHAPTER ONE

Tuesday afternoon – 2:30 p.m.

Over Paktika Province, near Shkin

Afghanistan on the Pakistan border

“
Raz! I need that
satellite!” Alex said into her microphone.

They were flying fast in US
Air Force Captain Zack “The Jakker” Jakkman’s favorite bird, a Pave
Hawk helicopter, over Afghanistan. The President was keeping a
campaign promise to visit the soldiers serving in Afghanistan.
Since this President tended to be thorough, he insisted on visiting
Paktika Province, the most dangerous province in Afghanistan.
Everyone
important
had agreed that the President should not got to Paktika
Province but the President had insisted. If the US military was
stationed there, he would go there.

“
Make it happen” rang down
the chain of command. Everyone from the Secret Service to every
branch of the military responded to protect the President. A plan
was forged, modified, and worried over until it was finally
approved. The President and his security flew to Afghanistan. The
media heralded the trip as an enormous success.

No one talked to Alex about the trip. In
fact, no one thought to ask her. As the head of the world’s best
hostage extraction team, it made some sense that they wouldn’t ask
her about the plan. But Alex was the creator and maintainer of the
Fey maps. A fact that Brass tended to forget.

Alex knew the map for Paktika Province was
wrong. Bordering Pakistan, the entire region had been remodeled by
the war and activities of the Taliban and Al Qaeda. The changes
weren’t significant enough to show on satellite imaging and
certainly weren’t on any GPS map. Alex had heard about the changes
from soldiers on the ground at FOB Sharana via the answering
service, which she called the Map Phone. The Map Phone was the
Intelligence Center’s solution for keeping the maps as up-to-date
as possible. In order to know about the changes in Paktika
Province, someone would have to speak to a person with intimate
knowledge of the geography and a connection to the people on the
ground. No one had asked Alex.

When she found out about the President’s
adventure to Afghanistan, she’d immediately offered her team’s
assistance – but was turned down flat.