The Heart Has Reasons (17 page)

“Yes.”

He
shoved her down and spread the blanket over her.  “Don’t move and don’t
make a sound.  If you force me to kill him, it’ll be just like
you
pulled the trigger.”  He slid the door closed and locked it.

A
moment later, his voice came softly to her from the driver’s door.  “He’s
young, about your age.  Probably has a wife and kids.”

You
asshole!
 
I hope
you forgot to remove the freaking ski mask.

What
should she do?  Should she cry out and hope for the best?  Despite
the fact that he treated her well overall, she instinctively knew he could be
ruthless.  Although he probably didn’t want to kill an innocent man, he
just might do so in order to save his own sorry ass.

The
police officer wouldn’t be expecting anything, thinking this was just a routine
check on a driver possibly having car trouble.  Her kidnapper however
would be poised and ready for anything.  If she cried out for help, the
officer would be dead before even realizing anything was amiss.

Then,
for the rest of her life, she’d have to live with the fact that she’d caused
his death.  Of course, the rest of her life might be measured in mere
days.  Nevertheless, the policeman would still be dead, his family
grieving for him.

The
vehicle came to a stop beside the van.  “Good afternoon,” said a male
voice.

“Afternoon,
officer.”

“Car
trouble?”

“No,
sir.  Just stopped to stretch my legs.  I’ve been driving since five
this morning.”

“Where
you headed?”

“Wyoming. 
Going to visit an old Army buddy.”

She’d
been right.  They
were
headed west.

“I
thought you looked ex-military,” the cop said.  “I was Army too.  Did
four years, three of ‘em in Iraq.”

“Fourteen,
eight in Afghanistan,” her kidnapper replied, and she filed that bit of
information away as well.

“No
shit?” said the cop.  “You speak the language?”

Her
kidnapper began speaking in another language and, by the effortless way the
words flowed off his tongue, she knew he was fluent.

“Damn,”
exclaimed the cop.  “You sound just like a rag-head.  You know, when
I was over there in Iraq—”  He broke off abruptly as his radio squawked.

A
feminine voice came over the crackling radio, saying something Larissa couldn’t
make out.  “Ten-four,” the officer replied.  Then, to her kidnapper,
“I gotta check out a domestic disturbance.  There’s a storm headed this
way, so you be careful.”

“You,
too,” her kidnapper replied.

As
the policeman — possibly her one and only chance for survival — drove away, she
burst into tears of frustration.  What a goddamned fool she was.  If
she survived this ordeal, she’d see to it that the kidnapping asshole spent the
rest of his life in prison, in a cell right next to Sparrow’s.

She
should have taken a chance and trusted the cop.  After all, he’d been
aware of the dangers of the job when he became a police officer.  But if
he’d died, the burden of his death would have rested on her, and she doubted
she could have borne the weight for even a moment.

A
key sounded in the lock and the side door slid open.  “You just saved that
man’s life.”

She
angrily wiped her eyes.  “And killed myself in the process.”

“Stop
being melodramatic.  You’re not going to die.”

“Yes
I am!  You’re just too stupid to realize it.  Or maybe you just don’t
care.”

“I’m
not
taking you to the maintenance man.  The man who hired me
doesn’t look anything like the man you described.”

“Maybe
Sparrow used an intermediary,” she challenged.  “He’s the only one who
could have hired you.”

“There’s
no one else who’d have an interest in you?”

“No!”

“I’m
not as gullible as you seem to think.  You never shot anybody. 
You’re a liar, and not a very good one.”

“I’m
not
a liar, and I
did
shoot him!”

When
she held his gaze without blinking, a shadow of doubt slowly crept into his
eyes.  “I’m being paid very good money to transport you,” he said
finally.  “How would a maintenance man get that kind of money?”

“How
would I know.  Maybe he robbed a bank.  Maybe he won the lottery.”

“We
need to get going.  Lie down so I can secure you.”

“He’s
going to kill me,” she said miserably, hating him with every fiber of her
being.  “And when he does, it’ll be just like
you
pulled the
trigger.”

* * * * *

As Chase quickly restrained her feet, she
angrily refused to look at him, green eyes brimming with tears.  He wanted
to touch her, to stroke her skin, to slide his fingers into her hair and kiss
her, to comfort her and tell her that everything would be okay.  It was
only with the greatest effort of will that he refrained from doing so.

When
he pulled back onto the expressway, the sky ahead was lowering.  Sheet
lightning pulsed dully in the western sky, followed by a faint rumble of
thunder.  They were driving straight into the storm.

The
incident with the state trooper had been much too close for comfort, and he
would be eternally grateful to her for not doing anything to alert the officer
to her plight.  He could have easily disarmed and restrained the man, giving
them sufficient time to get away.  The problem would have arisen when the
officer subsequently failed to respond to his radio.  His fellow troopers
would have quickly mounted a search and, once they’d found him, the trooper
would have given a detailed description of both him and his vehicle. 

Larissa
was so quiet that he asked, “Are you all right, back there?”

“I’m
just great,” she grumbled.  “You should give me a sleeping pill.”

“No.”

Intermittent
flashes of lightning brightened the rapidly darkening sky.  He deeply
regretted having to tell her that he’d kill the officer and it pained him that
she now believed him a cold-blooded killer.  He regretted even more
telling her that she would’ve been the one responsible for the officer’s
death.  However, not only had the lie been necessary, it had been
successful.  He comforted himself with the reminder that she’d lied to
him, was
still
lying to him.

No
matter how much she denied being married, no matter how much she denied knowing
where he was taking her, she was lying.  He’d seen the portrait and
Keswick knew too much about her.  He badly wanted to confront her with
what he knew, but there were forty thousand very good reasons for not doing so.

From
behind him, she asked, “Why’d you stay in Afghanistan so long?”

God
damn
it.  He’d suspected she’d been able to hear his conversation with the
state trooper, but he disliked having that assumption confirmed.  “I’ve
never been in the military, never been in Afghanistan.  That was a lie
constructed for the trooper’s benefit.  You think I’d give him real
information about me?”

“What
are you, some kind of adrenaline junkie?”

“Larissa—”

“And
now that you’re back in the States, you’ve resorted to kidnapping in order to
get your fix?”

“If
you don’t shut the fuck up I’m going to gag you!”

Thankfully,
the threat was sufficient to quiet her.  Jesus.  Her intuition was
downright scary.   Hell, being an adrenaline junkie was practically a
prerequisite for joining the Special Forces.

He
had loved how the danger of going on missions made everything seem so
profoundly intense that he could feel the rapid and steady rhythm of his pulse,
the very flow of the blood through his veins.

He’d
loved how the adrenaline would sharpen his vision to the point that everything
seemed edged in glass; how his hearing and his sense of smell seemed to
increase; how he became intensely conscious of things even at the periphery of
awareness, seemingly able to focus his attention on a nearly microscopic level.

The
feeling had been magical…

Right
up until the moment everything had started going wrong.

It
had all begun when their team, along with two young and jittery intelligence
officers and a team of Afghan soldiers, had geared up for a four-day mission
into enemy terrain to neutralize Taliban forces.  Just after dark, they’d
piled into a Chinook helicopter and lifted off.  Hugging the contours of
the rocky peaks, the pilot took them up the side of Abas Ghar, and set the
chopper down just above the timberline, in enemy territory.

The
men spilled out wearing night-vision goggles, the pilot lifted off, and they
began humping along a mountain ridge.  They’d traveled perhaps two miles
when, with absolutely no warning, mortars were exploding around them, live fire
snapping by their heads.  He took a round through the shoulder and, as he
turned to bolt for cover, an explosion lifted him from his feet before slamming
him to the ground.

Bleeding
heavily from his gunshot wound, his back lacerated by shrapnel, he crawled for
cover.  Pinned down, the men dug in and laid down return fire, while the
insurgents continued to fire and lob mortars at them from behind an escarpment
above.

Little
Mike slapped a pressure bandage on his wounds, and then the two men slipped around
an outcropping of rock, and moved stealthily through the darkness, circling up
and behind their attackers.  Relying on bladed weapons until their
presence was discovered, he and Little Mike managed to eliminate all ten
insurgents.

After
destroying the enemy’s weapons, Chase and Little Mike returned to the rest of
their team, to find that Dago Joe and The Wizard were dead, along with one of
the intelligence officers and four of the Afghans.  Every single survivor
bore wounds of varying severity.

The
Wizard had been carrying the radio.  Both he and the radio had taken a
direct mortar hit.  They field dressed their injuries and, with no way to
call for an evac, at first daylight started down the jagged mountain
slope.  Roach carried Dago Joe’s corpse.  Travis carried The
Wizard’s.  Mad Dog was alive but had one broken leg and a gunshot wound in
the other.  Disregarding his own wounds, Chase lofted him over his
shoulder, fireman-style and, with the Afghans seeing to their own dead and
wounded, everyone started the spine-jarring trek down the mountain.

Halfway
down, they stopped to catch a bit of rest in a ditch.

Waking
a short time later with his clothes stiff with his and Mad Dog’s mingled blood,
Chase stubbornly insisted upon carrying Mad Dog the rest of the way. 
Travis and Roach lifted the now-unconscious man, draped him over Chase’s
shoulder, and the team continued on.  When they stumbled upon a path
barely fit for donkeys, Chase was nearly delirious from pain and blood loss.

An
unmanned Predator drone had been in the air the whole time, sending video feeds
by satellite link to the ground control station.  They humped down the
mountain past bombed-out homes and abandoned cottages and, by the time they
reached the base of the mountain, support troops were there waiting for
them.  The injured and the dead piled into a convoy of up-armored Humvees
with Mk 19 grenade-launchers mounted above, and headed back to base camp.

Chase
awoke eighteen hours later in a makeshift hospital, sutured, bandaged, and
hooked up to an IV drip.  Mad Dog was in the bed to his immediate right,
Travis to his immediate left, along with eight other men, both Americans and
Afghans.

Fancying
himself a comedian, Little Mike was the youngest of the group and Chase’s
closest friend.  Not confined to the hospital tent by his injuries, Little
Mike nevertheless spent most of his time with the wounded keeping everyone’s
spirits up.

A
week later, Chase and Mad Dog were still in the hospital when Eduardo died on a
relatively simple mission.

Ten
days after that, they lost Spider.  As the oldest man among them and the
one with the most missions under his belt, Spider had seemed nearly
indestructible.  He didn’t die, although all agreed it would have been
better if he had.  A lucky shot from a sniper’s rifle paralyzed him from
the neck down.

A
superstitious lot, the men started to believe they’d fallen under a curse.

Then,
during Chase’s first mission after his discharge from the hospital, on their
way back to camp after a three-day mission, Little Mike accidentally tripped an
anti-personnel mine.  He should have died outright, for there hadn’t been
much left of him below the waist.

Little
Mike had a scheduled leave coming up in two weeks to return to the States to
marry his pregnant fiancé.  As he unholstered his Colt .45, he said to
Chase, “Tell Pearl I love her, and that I’m sorry.”

Clutching
Little Mike’s free hand, Chase promised, “Count on it.”

With
a cry of “De Oppressor Liber!” Little Mike put the gun in his mouth and pulled
the trigger.

Chase
and Travis both sobbed unashamedly.  Mad Dog went into a screaming
rage.  Inscrutable as always, Roach, the only Native American among the
group, calmly assisted the others in returning Little Mike’s remains to camp.