Page 73 of The Woman Left Behind

“It’s my off day, so I volunteered to meet your plane,” Terisa said. “The guys are all tied up at headquarters. The shit hit the fan over what happened, though Marcus has been his usual lock-jawed self and I don’t know any of the operational details, just that Voodoo and Crutch were hit bad, and your feet are hurt and you can’t walk. Your car has been collected and taken home, I’ve gone shopping and stocked your fridge with food—girl, seriously, you had nothing to eat but crackers. Anyway, if you want to stay at home and rest for a few days, you can, or if you want to get out of the house, all you have to do is call. If I didn’t have to work tomorrow, I’d take you home with me, though I figure you’d rather have peace and quiet and a chance to get yourself back.”

“You don’t know how much I appreciate this.” Had Terisa somehow guessed how she felt? As a nurse she routinely saw people who had been through traumatic experiences, so maybe she knew getting back to normal took time. Had Boom told her that she’d saved herself by running for hours, on bleeding feet, through the desert?

She didn’t want to think about that. And she didn’t want to get back to normal, she preferred the disconnect.

Instead she focused on the mundane, because that was safer. She hadn’t gotten as far as thinking about the food situation at home—usually lousy, these days—or how she would function until she was cleared to drive, which would be when she no longer needed pain medication. She could always order in pizza, she supposed, but the driving would have to wait. “Have you heard how Voodoo and Crutch are doing? I saw them yesterday, talked to Voodoo some, but Crutch wasn’t awake.”

“Voodoo has been upgraded from critical to serious, and if he keeps improving, he’ll be moved to a regular room tomorrow. Crutch is still critical, his fever is still up, but his vitals are stabilizing.” Terisa’s tone was the businesslike one of an experienced nurse. She shook her head, her gaze worried. “He has a long way to go before he’s out of the woods. Whether or not either of them will be able to work again...” She gave a brief tilt of her head, indicating that was unlikely.

Unspoken was the reality that the team was on stand-down for the foreseeable future, at least for the missions that required full strength, because a third of the team was injured and unable. Jina thought of the team without those two, and it didn’t feel right. A team was a whole, and family of sorts; losing them would leave a huge gap.

Losing her... wouldn’t leave as large a gap. She had been an add-on. She’d thought she’d become completely accepted as a teammate, but she’d been wrong.

Terisa took Jina home, fixed a sandwich for her, and made her eat. When she was satisfied that the basic needs had been met, she left and Jina tumbled into bed. She didn’t care about resetting her internal clock, because she didn’t have to hit the training field tomorrow. She could sleep if she wanted to, and she did.

She slept for hours, woke up hungry, and hobbled her way to the kitchen to eat a cinnamon roll. Thank God Terisa had included some junk food, because even nuking some instant oatmeal was beyond her. She went back to bed then woke up in the early hours, made some coffee, took a basin bath, and put on regular clothes. It was good to wear something other than the hospital scrubs she’d been given in Germany.

At seven o’clock, her phone rang. She reached for it, recognized Levi’s number, and jerked her hand back. But he was still her team leader, and now that she was home there was likely debriefing to be done, debriefing that wouldn’t wait for a little thing like not being able to drive. Reluctantly she answered.

“Can you be ready in fifteen minutes?” He didn’t even say hello, but she gave a mental shrug; it wasn’t as if she didn’t know who was calling.

“Yes.” She didn’t tell him she was already dressed.

“Mac is sending a car. There’ll be a wheelchair.”

She disconnected, and wondered if sevena.m.was too early to start drinking. She didn’t feel like doing this and hated like poison to be rolled through headquarters as if she was an invalid—though technically she was an invalid. Okay, literally she was; that didn’t mean she liked it.

She also didn’t like wearing the paper booties, which were getting ragged anyway, so she tried to put on her only pair of bedroom slippers. Forget that; besides, Caleigh had bought them for her a couple of Christmases ago, and they had moose heads bobbing on the toes. Better she wear paper booties than moose heads.

Ten minutes after Levi’s call, she gingerly made her way downstairs. She couldn’t flex her toes because of the bandaging, so she had to go down sideways, like a toddler, clinging to the banister for balance. The car Mac had sent pulled to the curb just as she went outside, and the driver, a burly guy in dress pants and a polo shirt, gave her a perturbed look. “I was coming up to get you,” he said.

“How? Wheelchairs don’t work on stairs,” she pointed out.

“My orders were to carry you.”

Carryher? She must have looked as appalled as she felt, because he mumbled something about not knowing she could walk yet. She hobbled around the car and got in the passenger seat and hoped he wasn’t chatty.

He wasn’t, though she could feel him giving her occasional glances as if he was trying to size her up. When they reached headquarters, he jumped out and got the wheelchair from the trunk, unfolded it, held it steady while she transferred from the car to the seat. She already felt tired; despite her dislike of the chair, she was happy not to be walking the distance required.

He pushed her along the sidewalk, up the handicap ramp, into the building where the air-conditioning was already cranked up to maximum, as if trying to get a head start on the day’s heat. Headquarters interior was very humdrum, deliberately so. Anyone who entered the building by accident would see a drab lobby, a single receptionist who would kindly direct them away and who would be holding a pistol under her desk, pointing at them. The door leading back to the business part of the building was armored and accessed only by a facial recognition program and a key card.

Beyond that, the hallways seemed to have been designed by a drunk troll, though she knew they were deliberately laid out for defense. Finding her way around, when she’d first been hired, had been a challenge. After a while she hadn’t noticed the mazelike layout and navigated the building without any problem. Now she saw things with different eyes and recognized the effectiveness of the design.

Every time they met someone in the hallway, whoever it was stepped to the side and stopped to stare at her. Jina began to feel uncomfortable. Was it the wheelchair? Then they met a woman she recognized from her days in Communications, though she couldn’t remember the woman’s name. Whoever it was stopped and said, “Jina!” Grabbing both of Jina’s hands she said, “I admire you so much. When we heard what you did—running for hours like that... well, I couldn’t have done it. That was amazing.”

“Ah... thank you,” Jina finally managed. So that was it. Should she tell them she hadn’t done anything heroic or amazing, that she’d been operating on blind desperation and the will to survive? In the end she let it go, because doing otherwise would take too much effort and she didn’t care enough.

He wheeled her to one of the secure conference rooms. Mac was there, looking as impatient and ill-tempered as always. Levi was also there, and three others, two men and a woman, who she took to be intelligence analysts.

“I have her,” Levi said, taking control of the wheelchair from the driver he’d sent.

“Sure thing.”

Levi pushed the chair up to the conference table, then poured a cup of coffee and set it in front of her. She murmured a thanks and was sincere about it—the coffee, anyway.

No one introduced the three strangers, which didn’t matter to her. She’d likely never see them again, anyway. Mac paced around, scowling. “Okay, we know this mission was in the crapper from the get-go. Ace has been debriefed. What happened on your end?”

“The kid, Mamoon, came in and watched me while I was operating the drone. I picked up a thermal signature, zoomed in on it. I thought he was amazed, interested, but now I know he was alarmed because he knew I would see the men who were waiting to ambush the team. He left, and a few minutes later I heard a voice outside, probably at the truck we were supposed to use to exfil. Whoever it was, Mamoon was talking to him. They were trying to be quiet, probably thought I couldn’t hear them.”

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