Headed for Trouble - By Suzanne Brockmann Page 0,93
over the sink. But his contribution was little more than dry heaves, since there was nothing left for his body to expel.
Still, his eyes watered, and his hands shook, and his body strained.
Robin finally flushed. “Sorry. God, I’m so sorry.”
“We all knew it was just a matter of time.” Sam turned on the water for him.
Robin only briefly splashed his face before returning to sit. “Hurry. Please.”
“I’m going to need you to carry both Ash and Emma at first,” Sam said, as if there’d been no interruption as he swiftly finished the job and used a towel to wipe the remaining hair from Robin’s head and shoulders. “While I make sure there’re no guards in the back alley, and dispatch them if there are. Can you—”
Robin didn’t hesitate despite his shaking hands and watering eyes. “I can. I will. Whatever you need.”
Out in the room, Gina and Emma had managed to gather the other sheets from the beds, and Sam and Robin now wrapped themselves in white, too.
“If I tell you to do something,” Sam said, kissing Ash’s sweet-smelling little head before handing him over to Robin, who put him into Alyssa’s frontpack, “you do it. Is that clear?” He looked from Robin to Gina to Emma, including the little girl.
She nodded as Sam picked her up and handed her to Robin, who was sweating, but still managed to smile at Sam. “Let’s do this thing.”
CHAPTER EIGHT
Afghanistan
“Best way to help,” Alec MacInnough told Jules and Max and Alyssa, “is to not get killed. It’ll be over before—” He laughed as Commander Lew Koehl came through the door. “Looks like it’s already over.”
“We got ’em,” Koehl said, actually cracking a very satisfied smile.
Max was not as happy. “How long have you known about this?”
“Long enough,” Koehl said, “for you to be pissed. I’d be pissed if I were you.”
“You put my team into danger.”
“That’s not why I’d be pissed,” Koehl countered. “You were never in danger. And even if you were, what? You’d rather we’d sent a USO tour in your place? Your coming out here was necessary. It was business as usual. I’d be pissed about the fact that some of our allies are not in truth our allies. The information we share gets shared in turn with the very same people who want to kill our soldiers. That’s why I’d be pissed. Because we have to pretend to be friends with those who side with our enemies. In order for our diplomats to keep up the charade, you couldn’t know. You had to be in the dark.” Max was silent.
“I’m okay with being bait under these particular circumstances,” Jules said.
“The good news,” Koehl told Max, “is that the President never intended to visit a FOB as part of his trip. That was misinformation.”
“Oh, thank God for that,” Alyssa said.
“So what just happened here?” Max asked. “A team of your SEALs inserted … how?”
“HALO jump,” Koehl said, which Jules knew stood for High Altitude Low Opening. And that meant that a team of SEALs had jumped out of a plane way, way high up in the sky, up where they’d needed oxygen masks and tanks to keep from suffocating. And after leaving the plane, they’d gone into freefall for a ridiculously long amount of time, only to open their parachutes relatively close to the ground, under all radar, where they could coast to a landing, undetected.
They’d then, no doubt, dug in despite the bad weather, forming a perimeter around the forward operating base, and waiting for the bad guys to show up with the newly purchased rocket launcher.
At which point, the SEALs crushed them like the amateurs that they were.
Mission accomplished.
“Let’s get the generator back on line,” Max said. “We need Internet access to—”
“I’m sorry, sir,” Koehl said, “that’s going to take a while. We had to let them get close enough to take out our SAT towers. And one of their snipers took a very lucky shot at the main generator, and … We’ll need to wait for the weather to clear before we can switch that out with the backup generator.”
Max looked from Alyssa to Jules, and Jules knew that Max was thinking about Gina and his kids, stuck in besieged Tarafashir with Sam and Ash and Robin.
“Sam’s the best,” Jules reminded him. “And Robin’s with him.”
This was what it was like to be assigned to one of these remote outposts. Every now and then, in fact, probably more often than not, they’d lose contact with the outside