Читать книгу The Guardian - Cindi Myers - Страница 11

Chapter Four

In the silence that followed the burst of gunfire, the drum of Michael’s pulse in his ears was so loud he was sure everyone could hear it. He slowed his breathing and strained his ears, alert for any clue about the shooter. Beneath him, Abby shifted, and he became aware of her ragged breathing. She shoved and he realized he was crushing her. Better crushed than shot, he thought, but he eased up a fraction of an inch, putting more of his weight on his hands, braced on the ground beneath his shoulders, and his knees, straddled on either side of her.

They lay in a depression in the ground, a shallow wash pocked with rocks and low scrub and a few stunted piñons. Turning his head, Michael spotted Graham and Carmen about five feet away. His eyes met Graham’s. The supervisor looked angry enough to chew nails.

“Who’s shooting at us?” Abby whispered, her voice so low he wondered at first if he’d imagined the question.

“Sniper,” Graham answered. “I make his hide site about three hundred yards to the south, on that slight rise.”

Michael turned his head, but he couldn’t see anything except grass and dirt and the trunk of a piñon. They were too exposed here for him to even lift his head.

“He must be wearing a ghillie suit,” Carmen said. “I can’t see a thing.” Michael turned back to look at her and realized she was half sitting behind a boulder. She’d pulled binoculars from her pack and was scanning the area.

“What’s someone out here doing with a ghillie suit?” Abby asked.

Michael had been wondering the same thing. In a training course he’d taken, he’d seen men in the cumbersome camouflage suits covered with twigs and leaves so that when the wearer froze, he blended in completely with the surrounding landscape. It wasn’t something you could pick up at your local outdoor supplier.

“They could have stolen one from the military, or made their own,” Graham said. “These drug operations spare no expense to protect their business. That sniper rifle he’s got is probably military issue, or close to it.”

Graham shifted, reaching for his radio; the movement was enough to draw another blast of gunfire, bullets spitting into the dirt in front of them. Abby flinched, jolting against Michael. “Are you okay?” he whispered.

“Just a rock on my cheek. It’s nothing.”

More gunfire exploded, this time to their right. From her vantage point behind the boulder, Carmen had returned fire. “He’s too far away,” she said, lowering the weapon.

“Ranger Two, this is Ranger One, do you copy?” Graham had used the distraction to retrieve the radio from his utility belt and key the mike.

“Ranger Two. I copy.” Simon’s voice crackled through the static.

“We’re pinned down by a sniper in the backcountry.” He recited the GPS coordinates Abby had given them for her plant find. “Looks like one shooter. His hide site is approximately three hundred yards south of our position. He’s on a small rise, maybe wearing a ghillie suit.”

“We’re on it. We’ll try to come in behind him.”

“Roger that. Over.” Graham laid the radio on the ground beside his head. “Now we wait,” he said.

Michael tried to ignore the cramping in his arms. If he let up, he’d crush Abby again, but any movement was liable to draw the sniper’s fire. “Sorry,” he said to her. “I know this isn’t the most comfortable position.”

She didn’t answer. Instead, she started to tremble, tremors running through her body into his. She made a muffled sound, almost like...sobbing.

The sound tore at him. The sight of the dead man hadn’t moved him, and while the sniper’s fire got his adrenaline pumping, it didn’t shake him the way Abby’s sorrow did. “Hey.” He slid one hand to her shoulder and turned his head so that his mouth was next to her ear. He spoke softly, not wanting the others to hear. “It’s okay,” he said. “Our team is good. They’ll nail this guy.”

She tensed, her fingers digging into the dirt beneath them. Her breathing was ragged, and he could sense panic rising off her in waves. Was she having some kind of flashback? How could he help her—comfort her?

He’d been shot at plenty of times as a PJ, but they always had the Pave Hawks to swoop them out of danger. He’d always been too focused on the mission, on saving lives, to worry much about his own. It must have been worse for troops on the ground, like her.

He tried to lift more of his weight off her. “Hey,” he said again. “Abby, talk to me. You’re going to be okay.”

She sucked in a ragged breath, her body rising and falling beneath him. “I hate this,” she said after a minute.

“I hate it, too.” The words sounded lame, even to him, but he’d say anything to keep her talking. “But you’ll be okay. The cavalry is on its way.”

The muscles of her cheek against his shifted; he hoped she was smiling at his lame joke. “This is probably the last thing you expected when you came out here to dig plants,” he said.

“Yeah.” The shaking wasn’t as violent now—only a tremor shuddering through her every now and then. Her hands had relaxed, no longer gripping the dirt. He resisted the urge to smooth his hand along her back; she might take it the wrong way. As it was, he was becoming all too aware of the feel of her body beneath his, the side of her breast nestled beside his arm, the soft curve of her backside against his groin.

“This is just a little too familiar,” she said.

He realized she wasn’t talking about the feel of their bodies pressed together. “You’ve been pinned down by a sniper before?”

“Oh, yeah. That was the thing about being over there—the unpredictability of it all—not knowing when an IED would explode or a sniper would fire, not knowing who you could trust.”

You can trust me, he wanted to say. But he didn’t. Trusting him didn’t change the fact that there was somebody they couldn’t see determined to kill them if they so much as lifted their heads. He hadn’t done a very good job so far of protecting her. The best he could hope for was to provide a distraction. “Have you always been interested in plants?” he asked. “Did you always plan to study biology?”

“I was going to be a television news anchor,” she said. “Or a model. This scar on my face put an end to that.”

Only a deaf man would miss the bitterness in her words. She was certainly pretty enough to be a model—but she probably didn’t want to hear that, either. He tried once more to get the conversation back on track. “What you’re doing now—finding plants that could cure cancer. That sounds a lot more rewarding.”

“Yeah.” She fell silent again. Okay, so she didn’t want to talk. At least she’d stopped shaking.

“Mostly, I like the solitude,” she said after a moment. “It’s so peaceful out here. Usually.”

“Yeah. Usually it is. You just got lucky.”

She actually chuckled then—the sound made him feel about ten feet tall, as if he’d done something a lot more heroic than make lame jokes.

“Why do you think he’s shooting at us?” she asked. “Is it because we found the dead man?”

“I doubt it’s that. My guess is the dead guy’s an illegal. He won’t have any ID on him, or anything to tie him to anyone or anything. Most likely the sniper is protecting something. A meth lab or something like that.”

“But doesn’t firing at us give away the fact that there’s something out here worth protecting?”

“Yeah, but it keeps us from getting too close and buys them time to move the operation. When we finally make it out to investigate, whatever is going on will be long gone.”

“What happens after that?”

“We have a starting place for our search. From there we try to track them to their new location.”

“Like in the war,” she said.

“Yeah. A lot like in the war.”

“Just my dumb luck that I come out here to get away from all that and end up in the middle of it. Do you ever feel that way?” she asked.

“Yeah,” he said. “I thought my job would mostly be inspecting shipments and checking passports—looking for drugs and illegals, for sure. I knew I’d carry a weapon, but I didn’t expect to ever have to use it. But then I think, maybe I’m exactly where I’m supposed to be. Maybe my military training can help me put an end to some of the violence, at least.”

“Do you really believe that?” she asked. “That things happen for a reason?”

“Yeah. I mean, don’t you think it’s more than coincidence that we met up again after all this time?” Five years in which he’d never really forgotten about her. “I mean, what are the odds?”

“That’s why it’s called a coincidence,” she said. “It’s random. Just like me ending up out here in the middle of your little drug war. It’s the way life works, but it doesn’t mean anything.”

* * *

MICHAEL DIDN’T SAY anything after Abby shot down his theory that the two of them were meant to meet up again. Well, sorry, but she didn’t believe in fate. She wasn’t meant to be flat on her stomach, squashed by some big guy in fatigues while another guy took potshots at her, any more than she was meant to disappoint her family by becoming a recluse who wandered the desert in search of rare plants. Life was life. Things happened and you rolled with the punches. She liked looking for plants in the desert, and she hoped the work she did now would help somebody else someday. But that didn’t mean she’d been guided by fate. She made her own choices and accepted the consequences.

She closed her eyes, thinking she might as well catch a nap while she waited for whatever Michael’s partners were doing out there. But closing her eyes was a mistake. As soon as her eyelids descended, she was back in Kandahar, pinned down by a sniper, her face in the dirt just like it was now. Only back then, there had been no cavalry to come to the rescue—the rest of her unit had been pinned down by enemy fire or already wiped out. For six hours she’d lain there with her face in the dirt while the guy next to her silently bled out and the guy on her other side freaked out, sobbing like a baby until every nerve in her was raw. In the end, the shooter must have decided they were all dead and moved on. Her own company thought the same thing—she woke up with two men slinging her onto a stretcher and someone shouting, “Hey, we’ve got a live one here!”

She opened her eyes again. Time to think about something else. Mariposa. Where were she and Angelique right now? Was she safe? Was she somehow mixed up in whatever illegal operation the sniper was protecting? What was she—somebody’s wife or girlfriend, along for the ride, in over her head now? Was she as surprised by the violence that intruded on such peaceful surroundings as Abby was?

“When you were out here before, collecting your plants, did you see anybody else?” Michael asked. “Besides the men who were after our dead guy?”

What was he, a mind reader or something? “No, I didn’t see anybody,” she lied.

“No other hikers or campers?”

“I saw two hikers three days ago. They were tourists from Australia. And I pass people on the roads and see campers in the campground.”

“That’s it?”

“Why? Don’t you believe me?”

“In interrogation training, they tell you that if you ask the same question in several different ways, you sometimes get different answers.”

“So now you’re interrogating me?” What she wouldn’t give to be able to look him in the eye when she spoke. Instead, she was forced to address the ground while he lay on top of her. She appreciated that he was doing his best to hold himself off her, but still, the guy was big and solid. An easy one hundred and eighty pounds.

“It’s a harsh word for questioning,” he said. “A lot of law enforcement is just asking the right questions, of victims, or witnesses, or suspects.”

“Well, you’re not going to get different answers from me.” She saw no reason to betray Mariposa to him. “Do you think you could just slide off me?” she asked.

“I don’t think we’d better risk it. Movement seems to set off our shooter.”

“Why did you throw yourself on top of me in the first place?”

“I’m trained to protect civilians. And I don’t care how politically incorrect it is, my instincts are to keep women and children out of harm’s way.”

“How chivalrous of you.” She hesitated, then added, “But thanks, all the same.” The one thing she’d missed about the military was that sense that her buddies had her back.

“You’re welcome. Sorry we couldn’t have gotten reacquainted under better circumstances.”

“Now that he’s not actually shooting at us and we’re just waiting, it’s pretty boring,” she said. “Like most of the time in the war.”

“Are all our conversations going to come back to that?” he asked.

“Does it bother you, talking about the war?”

“Not really. I thought it bothered you.”

“Sometimes it does,” she admitted. When other people asked about her experiences in Afghanistan, she deflected the questions or changed the subject. “It’s easier with you. You were over there. You understand.”

“I guess I do relate to what you went through. A little bit anyway.”

The radio’s crackle made them both flinch. Abby turned her head toward the sound. Graham keyed the mike. “What have you got?” he asked.

“All clear here.” One of the team members—maybe the sour-faced guy, Simon—said.

“No sign of the shooter?” Graham asked.

“Somebody was here, all right. There’s broken brush and we found some shell casings. Looks like a .300 Win Mag. The dirt’s a little scuffed up, but the ground’s too hard to leave much of an impression.”

“Get Randall and Lotte on it.”

“They’re here. The dog picked up a scent, but it died at the road. We found some tire tracks that look like a truck. We figure someone was waiting to pick up our guy. We never saw signs of a vehicle, so he probably left not long after he fired the last shots at y’all.”

Graham swore under his breath and shoved up onto his knees. No gunshots split the air. Abby let out the breath she hadn’t even realized she’d been holding.

Michael rolled off her and popped to his feet, then reached out a hand to help her up. She let him pull her up, her limbs stiff and sore from so long being prone. Clearly, she wasn’t in as good a shape as she’d thought. “You’re bleeding,” he said, and gently touched the side of her face.

She flinched as his fingers brushed against the scar, but then she felt the stickiness of already drying blood. “A rock ricocheted off the ground,” she said. “It’s nothing.”

“Here.” He handed her a black bandanna, then offered a bottle of water. “You should clean it up.”

Head down, she accepted the water and dampened the bandanna. The square of cloth was clean and crisp, like something a businessman would carry tucked into his pocket. She turned her back to the others as she cleaned off the blood and dirt from the side of her face.

“Let me have a look.” Michael moved around in front of her. “You may need stitches.”

“It’s nothing.” She tried once more to turn away, but he put his hand on her shoulder and took her chin in his other hand. “It’s okay,” he said softly. “I promise I don’t faint at the sight of blood.”

The teasing quality of the words almost made her smile. If anyone had seen her at her worst, it had been this guy. She had no idea what she’d looked like when the PJs had hauled her onto that helicopter, but the doctors had told her the shrapnel from the IED had torn through the side of her face, narrowly missing her eye. As much as she hated the scar, it was nothing compared to how she might have ended up.

She let him lift her chin and study the side of her face.

“It’s just a little cut, pretty shallow. When we get back to the truck I’ll get a bandage for it.”

“Thanks.” She turned away and combed her hair down to cover the side of her face again.

“Get Marco to help you with recon,” Graham said. “I’ll notify the park rangers that the backcountry is closed indefinitely. No more permits, and they’ll need to round up anyone out with a permit now. Over.”

“You mean just the backcountry within the park, right?” Abby asked.

“I mean all the park, the recreation area and Gunnison Gorge. If these people have a sniper looking after their interests, they have some real money and muscle behind it. Until we know the scope of their operation, we can’t risk the safety of the public.”

“You can’t expect to keep people out of an area that large,” she said.

“We can’t prevent all unauthorized access, but we can stop issuing permits and close all the roads leading into the area. I’m sorry, but that means you won’t be able to continue your research in the area.”

His tone of command left little room for argument. He looked past her to Michael. “Take her back to headquarters, then meet up with Simon and the others. Ms. Stewart, we may have more questions for you later.”

She doubted she’d have any useful answers, but she only nodded and turned to follow Michael back to the Cruiser. By the time they reached the vehicle, she was fuming.

“Sorry about your research,” Michael said as he started the truck. “Maybe you can come back and finish up next summer. Hopefully, things will have calmed down by then.”

“I don’t have next summer,” she said. “My grant is for this summer. Next summer I’ll have to find a job and start paying off my student loans.”

“Is there someplace else you can research—another park, or another part of the state?”

“My grant is to explore this area. Shifting my focus requires a new grant application. Your commander is overreacting. He doesn’t have to close off all one hundred and thirty thousand acres of public land. That’s ridiculous.”

“Can you blame him? He’s already under the gun from politicians who think this task force is a waste of money—can you imagine the fallout if some tourist gets taken out by a sniper? We’ve already got one murder on our hands. Your plants will still be there when this investigation is over.”

“Don’t patronize me.”

“I’m not patronizing. I’m just trying to get you to calm down.”

His words only made her more furious. She did not need to calm down. She’d just been shot at and forced to lie on her stomach on the ground for over an hour, and suffered the humiliation of almost flaking out in front of a bunch of strangers—if she didn’t give vent to the tornado of emotions inside of her she might explode. “Shut up,” she said. “Whatever you have to say, I don’t want to hear it.”

He glared at her for a long moment, then turned his attention to the road. The truck rocketed forward, bouncing over the rough two-track so that she had to grip the handle mounted at the top of the door to steady herself. Dust boiled up behind them, and rocks pinged against the undercarriage like BBs. She clenched her jaw to keep from shouting at him to slow down and not be so reckless. But that was what he wanted from her—another reaction. She wouldn’t give him the satisfaction.

She’d already let him affect her emotions too much, his combination of brashness and consideration, strength and tenderness, touching vulnerable places inside her she hadn’t let anyone see. She never talked about the war with anyone, and yet she’d confided in him. She didn’t willingly let others see her scars, but she’d turned her face up to him with only a moment’s hesitation. She didn’t like how open and undefended he made her feel, with all his talk of fate and meaning behind what had to be only coincidence.

After a few miles, he slowed down enough that she could relax back in the seat. She hugged her arms across her chest and stared out at the landscape. Most people probably thought the land was ugly, with its scraggly vegetation and covering of rock and thin dirt. The real treasure lay beneath eye level, in the startlingly deep, narrow canyon that cut a jagged swatch through the high desert, its walls painted in shades of red and orange and gray. People long ago had dubbed it the Black Canyon, since sunlight seldom reached its depths. The silvery ribbon of the Gunnison River rushed through the bottom of the canyon, nurturing lush growth along its rocky banks, creating a world of color and moisture far below the parched landscape above.

But that stark desert held as much interest for Abby as the canyon below. She’d enjoyed discovering the secrets of the twisted piñons and miniature wildflowers, learning about the deer, rabbits, foxes and other wildlife that thrived there. She thought of herself like them—someone who had learned to survive amid bareness, to find the beauty in hardship.

They pulled up in front of headquarters. Her car was the only one in the lot now. She unsnapped her seat belt and her hand was on the door when Michael spoke. “Look. It isn’t safe for you to go into the backcountry by yourself, but what if I went with you? You can look for your plants while I patrol. I can square it with Graham.”

She could only imagine the pushback he’d get from his supervisor when he made that suggestion. Captain Graham Ellison struck her as a man who wasn’t into bending the rules. “Why would you do that?”

He shrugged. “I kind of feel responsible for you.”

Wrong answer. She didn’t want anyone—she especially didn’t want this man—to be responsible for her. She was responsible for herself. She climbed out of the truck and turned to face him. “I get that you saved my life,” she said. “And I’m grateful for that. But that doesn’t give you any kind of special claim on me.”

He held up both hands. “I’m not making any claim on you. I’m just trying to help.”

“I don’t need your help. Thanks anyway.” She turned and stalked away, though she could feel his gaze burning into her all the way to her car.