Deep breathing barely pulled Luke back from the edge.
Pine scent.
Not jungle.
Dry air.
Better.
He’d been civilian for six months now, and no day was easier. The only easy day was yesterday! He kept repeating the SEAL motto to himself, but it wasn’t helping. “Yesterday” had totally sucked as well.
There was no way to predict when it was going to slap him; half his team gone between one breath and the next.
They’d been deep in the Democratic Republic of the Congo having a quiet moment in a quiet town. The woman had strolled by where they were eating lunch with a basket of melons balanced on her head. The brightly-colored flowing kanga had hidden only parts of her fine form; the part that had been five kilos of explosives. The blast had ripped her, half his team, and one whole end of a Congolese market to shreds.
He did his best to focus on Candace Cantrell’s lecture about how to deploy a fire shelter.
Breathe in the dry pine.
Piece by piece he forced his brain back together.
Only easy day was yesterday.
U.S. soil, not the Congo.
Training here—way easier than any single day of BUD/S.
Essential survival techniques that didn’t include flak vests and Kevlar helmets. Weapons of the forest were a Pulaski tool and a chainsaw, not an M-249 SAW machine gun and Barrett M107 sniper rifle.
Luke dug the toe of his boot into the thick mountain bunch grass, appreciating Candace’s steady manner and calm voice. Getting easily lost in it. She’d been growing more and more crucial to his daily control, his well being.
Anyone who’d served and said that each day wasn’t a massive struggle was only lying to himself. But being around Candace made that struggle seem worthwhile.
That thought finally kicked him all the way out of his downloop and left him blinking at her in surprise.
She was important to him.
How the hell had that happened?
Women were…not like her. It’s like she was a different breed or species or something. A better one.
Some part of his brain, trained by far too many officer harangues, had kept up with the lecture. She now stood close enough that he could smell her—like sweet honey and glacier-fed streams—as she had him stepping into the shelter, pulling it up over his back and his head, and lying down with his face in a hole dug into the dirt.
“Keep your face in the hole, it’s where the air is coolest,” Candace called out loud enough to be heard easily through the shelter. “Feet to the fire. Your team leader may call out a last moment shift. If so, you keep your face in the hole and rotate your feet around. Do not, I repeat, do not lift the edge of your shelter. That is a life-and-death decision. The edges stay down even when you think you’ll go mad.”
Great! Just what Luke needed, another reason to lose it.
“Fire is loud. Freight train loud. It will try to rip away your shelter. Don’t let it.”
And then all hell broke loose.
His shelter slapped down on him!
A thunderclap of noise!
He was back in battle! God, no!
He fought the urge to scream.
Struggled for focus.
Orders.
His commander had said to hold fast. To stay down. Under cover. He gripped the edges of his shelter harder than he’d clutched the stock of his MP5N machine pistol as he was blown backward into a goat merchant’s stall. Gripped so hard he wondered that his fingers didn’t break.
He heard a voice yelling out, “Stay under the shelter!” Candace’s voice.
The blast moved away, battered another shelter nearby, returned! Then moved off again. It was…the spray of a fire hose off the wildfire engine. Water began to trickle under the edge of the shelter.
Shit.
Not a bomb.
Not a war.
He racked in a painful breath. Just a test with water. No cracked ribs this time, he could breathe. He started laughing…then crying. Mickey, Ralph, Doug; shooting the shit over Ndakala fish curry one second and scattered in pieces the next.
Water flowed under the edge of the shelter and he couldn’t stop it.
Couldn’t stop it as it flowed out of his eyes as well.
For the first time in the year since he’d lost them, he wept into his dirt hole in the ground as the cleansing water washed over and under him inside the safety of his little shelter.
A woman’s voice kept calling to him that it would all be okay, just stay safe.