24

By the time Coop had finished putting security through their paces later that day, the wind had picked up and the temperature had dropped by fifteen degrees. It was nippy, to say the least, and heading for sundown, when it would get even colder.

Rhonda was waiting for him beside the rental Jeep when he walked across the parking lot a little after 6:00 p.m., their agreed-upon meet time.

“Sorry.” He quickly unlocked the vehicle. “Hope you haven’t been waiting long.”

“Just got here.” The fact that she’d flipped the collar of her coat up around her ears and wrapped it tightly around her said she lied. Her nose was red with cold, and she didn’t waste a second scrambling into the passenger seat.

“Should have some heat soon.” He shifted into gear and started across the lot to the exit point.

She buried her nose deeper into her coat and shivered, and he found himself wishing he could pull over, drag her into his arms, and kiss her until her internal furnace cranked up enough to make them both hot.

But Bombshell Burns had made it very clear this morning that she would not appreciate that kind of gesture.

“I’m ready to wrap things up here,” he said. “How about you?”

“Yeah. Me, too. I’m satisfied this crew is top-notch. I’ve got a few more tests I could run if I had to, but it would be redundant. They’re in great shape.”

“Except for a few minor tweaks that they’ve already put in place, same goes for the physical security. So are we agreed that we can move on to Utah in the morning?” That was the last stop of this trip.

“Fine by me.”

Several minutes of silence passed as they headed toward the hotel.

And another night.

Which would not be a repeat of last night, because that’s the way she wanted it.

Feeling restless and a bit out of sorts, he drummed his fingers on the steering wheel.

“You do that a lot,” she said.

He glanced her way. “I do what a lot?”

“Tap your fingers on the wheel. Like you’ve got a song playing in your head.”

“Just eager to get this next assessment in the bag and head back to Langley.”

Where they hadn’t come up with anything solid on the case. Where, according to the phone call from Mike, Coop was due for extra grunt duty for withholding the information about the playing cards and designer bullets.

He didn’t care. He knew Mike would cool off.

What he cared about was nailing the bastard who’d shot Eva.

She could have died. Her life over, just like that. Sudden death wasn’t new to him; men had died beside him in battle. He’d had five very near misses himself and probably more that he didn’t know about.

Which was something he generally worked hard not to think about. The uncertainty of life. The inevitability of death. It made him think about things he wished he’d done but had never gotten around to.

He glanced at Rhonda and, for some inexplicable reason, decided there was one thing he was going to do right now.

“The One-Eyed Jacks was a joint task force.”

She turned her head toward him, surprise brightening her eyes.

“As you already figured out, we got our name because every guy in the unit carried a jack of hearts or a jack of spades, one-eyed jacks. The cards were symbols of solidarity, I guess. That, and we spent a lot of time playing cards between ops.

“Anyway, our unit was an experiment set up by the Joint Special Operations Command. They recruited us from three Spec Ops branches: Rangers, Special Forces, and Delta Force from the Army, Navy SEALs, and Force Recon Marines.”

“You were a Marine? Force Recon?” she asked hesitantly.

If she knew about Force Recon, she knew what he’d gone through to make the grade. Everyone heard about the grueling regimen that Navy SEALs went through to make it. Force Recon was just as horrific.

“Yeah. I was. Anyway, Mike, Taggart, a select handful of other good men, and I were put together as a unit and shipped off to Afghanistan.”

“Isn’t that unusual? I know they perform joint missions, but an actual mixed unit?”

“It’s unusual, but it had been done once before. Look up Captain Nathan Louis Black sometime.”

He saw the moment it registered. “You mean Nate? Our Nate?”

“He was the CO of the first experimental unit ever, during and after Desert Storm. Jones, Green, Reed, and several more—all of the Black team were part of Task Force Mercy.”

“Like you, Mike, and Taggart were the One-Eyed Jacks.”

He still didn’t know why he was telling her this. He’d never told any other woman. But he liked knowing that she was interested. And he liked knowing that someone other than the team and his parents knew about what happened. About what they’d all gone through.

“We’re what’s left of the One-Eyed Jacks.”

The rest spilled out like a lava flow from a volcano.

“We’d been kicking ass all over Kandahar Province, messing with the Taliban’s supply routes, destroying their ammo dumps, generally playing havoc with their entire operation.” He paused as he thought back to that one brutal and deadly night.

“What happened?” She was hesitant; he could see it in her eyes. She wanted to know, and yet she didn’t.

“Operation Slam Dunk happened. The brass sent us out to find out if the Taliban was still giving a local village trouble. A recon mission, nothing more. But it didn’t quite go down like that.

“It was night. Mike had set the Black Hawk down like a baby in a cradle in a wide spot in the mountains. Webber—” He stopped and swallowed, thinking of his dead teammate. “Webber flew copilot. Taggart was on the mini-gun, ready to fire if we had unexpected visitors. I was running commo. The rest of the team had offloaded as soon as Mike set the bird down, heading for the village that was just over a ridge.

“We were getting worried, because they’d been gone too long. They finally radioed in to report that Taliban fighters were randomly killing the villagers, and they requested permission to engage. I got hold of our command post, and Mike relayed the urgency of the situation. They denied us permission to intervene.”

“What . . . why?” The bewilderment in her tone was eclipsed only by outrage.

“The answer to that comes later. Mike tried to call the guys back to the chopper, but he couldn’t raise them. We knew then that they were in trouble. Mike and Webber had to stay with the bird, so Taggart and I went out to scout.”

He stopped again, his throat suddenly thick. “The Taliban had them. And we were way outnumbered. We hightailed it back to the bird, relayed the info to Mike, and he radioed command, again requesting permission to engage. They told him to stand down and wait for airship support.”

“So you waited?”

“Hell, no. Mike lifted off, and we headed for the village. And all we found were bodies. All of our guys dead, along with the villagers.”

He had a vague recollection of Taggart screaming at the top of his lungs, leaning on the mini-gun, and scattering Taliban in every direction.

“I don’t remember a lot after that. We took a direct hit and went down. Webber was dead on impact. I was unconscious. Taggart had a broken leg. Mike had a dislocated shoulder and some pretty bad burns. Somehow, he managed to drag us both out of the bird and behind cover before the chopper exploded. Next thing I remember, I was in a military hospital. And I’d been charged with negligence in the line of duty, willfully disobeying orders, dereliction of duty, and being responsible for the deaths of my team members and innocent civilians.”

“How could they do that to you?”

“Not just me. Mike and Taggart, too. Our court-martial was scheduled. Then, suddenly, it wasn’t. Mike had cut a deal. We ended up with less than honorable discharges, and they let us go.”

“But you didn’t do anything wrong! Why would Mike settle for that? Why not fight it in court?”

“That was my question. Taggart’s, too. It was tough to swallow, but it looked like Mike had betrayed us. Cut himself a deal and dragged us down in the dirt with him. At least, that’s what we thought at the time.”

“What was his explanation?”

“He didn’t stick around long enough to give us one. We wouldn’t have listened anyway. Hate isn’t a strong enough word for what I felt for him back then. Anyway, Mike dropped off the grid, ended up down in Peru, drinking his way through several years before he finally got sober. I didn’t know that until later, because I dropped out, too. I found out later that Taggart had signed up with the first military contractor who would take him and ended up back in Afghanistan fighting the Taliban again.”

“Where did you go?”

“I couldn’t face my family. I wasn’t guilty of anything, but I felt like I was. I didn’t want to hear their sympathy or see the questions in their eyes that they were afraid to ask. So I split for Australia. Did a lot of surfing, some modeling, and generally tuned out. Then Eva Salinas came along.”

“Eva? How does she possibly tie in?”

He dragged a hand through his hair. “It’s complicated. Her husband was killed in Operation Slam Dunk.”

“Oh. My God.”

“She’d been told he’d died in a training accident. Then, eight years later, the file on OSD mysteriously found its way into her hands. It laid the blame squarely on Mike’s shoulders, and she made it her mission to find him and make him own up to what he’d done.”

“Only he hadn’t done anything wrong.”

“That’s what she finally figured out. She and Mike also figured out that our commanding officer in Afghanistan, a man we all idolized, had set us up. He had a lucrative side business with the Taliban, cashing in on the opium trade. We’d been too effective rooting them out, and Brewster—our CO—needed to put us out of commission.”

“So you weren’t expected to come back from the mission that night?”

Pure rage burned in his belly. “None of us was supposed to walk away alive. The three of us ended up as pesky loose ends. He hadn’t counted on us living, just like he hadn’t counted on Mike making a deal that broke our spirits but saved our lives.”

“So Mike didn’t sell you out. He saved you.”

“Yeah. Too bad it took eight years to get it sorted out and to take down the man who set us up to die.”