the hostiles wouldn’t put him in his feels in the slightest, but she was highly sensitive to the taking lives part of his job description as a SEAL. So he worked to clear that up as quickly as possible. “The compound was deserted—I took time to check. We were right—it’s been burned. There was only one casualty—one man, dead when I found him, in the brush near the driveway, like he was trying to fight back. Bullets to the upper chest.” It was messy, not the double-pop of professionals.
“Oh my God, that’s terrible,” she said, then asked, “But Ted and his family got away?”
Thomas hesitated. She pulled back and he quickly let her go as she came up with alternatives herself.
“Or they were taken by whoever burned the place,” she said. “Or they burned to death in the fire.”
“That last one’s highly unlikely.” He didn’t hesitate this time. “Sure, we could come up with a scenario where the entire security detail—except for one man—was taken out by, I don’t know, some kind of grenade or missile, while they were all—except that one guy—inside the lodge? Yeah, no, security leaders would have placed a team on the perimeter, a team inside, while another team took a break. They’re never all in one location at the same time, and that makes option B less likely, too. The entire security detail, what, surrendered? Nah.”
“Unless the attackers took the bodies, and missed that one guy.”
“There’d be blood on the ground where the others fell.”
“Washed away by the rain.”
“There hasn’t been that much rain,” he countered. “Believe me. Blood is...” He decided not to finish that sentence. She knew he was a hospital corpsman, and that his Believe me could be taken at face value.
“What if it was an inside job,” Tasha speculated. “And the security team—”
Thomas cut her off. “The entire team?”
“Except that one man.”
“Highly unlikely,” he said again. “Even if only half of them were working for the abductors—and I’m sorry, that’s not really possible with the vetting that’s done—there’d be a much higher body count.”
“Unless they tied up the half that weren’t in on it, and locked them in the burning building—” She cut herself off. “Okay, clearly I had too much time to think about this. What else did you find? You said the lodge was deserted, can we go there, find the kitchen, maybe part of the building still has a roof and four walls...?”
“It’s badly burned,” Thomas told her grimly. “There was definitely chemical accelerant involved, for that level of destruction. And what’s left isn’t safe. Because yeah, I was hoping to find us some food, but nope.”
“Well, at least you got a rifle,” she pointed out.
“We’re a little short of ammo,” he said. “I’ve got two bullets.”
“Oh, perfect, one for each of us,” she said.
“Don’t even joke about that,” he shot back.
“Sorry,” she said immediately. “Sorry, I’m... scared, so I try to pretend... I’m not.”
“Yeah, I know,” Thomas said quietly. “But I’m not going to let anything happen to you.” The good news was that the entire time he was out in the woods, he hadn’t heard or seen even the slightest sign of anyone. He’d half-expected the Ustanzian compound to be crawling with hostiles. But whoever had lit the fire and killed the dead man had bugged out. Which didn’t mean entire squads of soldiers weren’t regrouping, three miles down the road. But that was a problem for later. “We need food, we need shelter—and I’m sorry, but not in that order. It’s gonna get cold tonight. I found a cave where we can—”
“We should go to the bomb shelter,” Tasha interrupted him. “Ted made me memorize the entry code, in case there was trouble. Seven two two eight. I thought he was being paranoid. Or at least mildly obsessed with the idea that someone would try to kill him to take power. Like, he’d watched too many episodes of Game of Thrones—”
“Wait a minute,” Thomas interrupted her. “Back up. Rewind. Bomb shelter? This compound doesn’t have a bomb shelter.”
“Yeah it does,” Tasha said. The moon had come out again, brightly enough this time so that he could see her face, even through the branches. She was completely serious.
“I think maybe Ted was...” He shook his head.
“Punking me?” she asked. “No. Ted isn’t... He wouldn’t... Look, he said it was nine-hundred and twenty-four meters from the northwest corner of the lodge—he made me memorize that, too.”
She said it as if that precise detail proved it was true.