Page 55 of The Woman Left Behind

In her ear Trapper said, “Confirmed kill.”

“Babe, deploy Tweety and take a look around.”

“Affirmative,” she replied, trying to replicate the dead-level tone they’d been using, and not knowing if she succeeded. Levi still sounded so damnnormal,as if this was no more stressful than crossing the street. She rolled to a semisitting position, trying to keep herself as much under cover as possible, and swiftly unpacked the equipment bag. She had done this so often that getting Tweety in the air was a matter of seconds, rather than minutes.

She eased the drone in a three-sixty, looking for any other unwanted company. She used the thermal imaging, found nothing humanlike, though there were ways to thwart a heat signature. Because of that she took her time, examined every hint of a heat signature she could find to make certain it was animal.

“Babe.” Levi was showing some emotion in his tone now; unfortunately, it was impatience.

“Hold your horses,” she replied testily, and she took Tweety higher, into the understory where the monkeys lived—monkeys that were uncharacteristically quiet, and she wanted to know why. But the ones she found were going about the normal business of monkeys, paying no attention to the human contingent on the forest floor.

Relieved, she brought the drone home. “Clear,” she finally said.

“Medic,” Levi said, back to the emotionless tone.

Medic?Medic!Someone was hurt, someone at the front of the line where the shot had come from. Her blood began rushing through her veins, making her hands shake as she got Tweety and the laptop safely stowed once more. Jelly was there as she climbed to her feet, his sharp gaze constantly moving over the vegetation-clogged forest floor. A rain forest floor wasn’t a thicket—the canopy restricted light and kept the going relatively clear—but “relatively” didn’t mean “open.” Fallen trees, ferns, tangled vines, all meant a short field of sight and provided a lot of cover. An army could hide behind the huge tree trunks, except she had already peeked around them with Tweety and the team was alone—for right now.

Now she drew her weapon, feeling like both a fool and a fake, but at least it was in her hand instead of her holster as they moved forward as quietly as possible. Voodoo was already up and moving, his head swiveling back and forth like Jelly’s.

In less than a minute they joined up with those in the front of the line, who had formed a guard circle, each on one knee, around Levi and Snake. A long splinter of wood—if something at least six inches long and half an inch wide could be called a “splinter”—stuck out of Levi’s right scapula, and a dark stain of blood was seeping down his shirt. Jina skidded to a halt, her stomach leaping into her throat.

Common sense told her the wound wasn’t particularly serious; he’d be okay with some stitches and antibiotics. Still—this was Levi. She wanted to shove Snake out of the way and take care of him herself, an insane reaction because Snake was a trained medic and she wasn’t, but one that was so strong she had to look away to keep herself from acting on it. She forced herself to do what the others were doing and focus on their surroundings.

A grunt from Levi jerked her gaze back to him, in time to see Snake use forceps to pull the splinter out. He dropped the bloody piece of wood on the ground. As soon as the splinter was out, Levi jerked his shirt off over his head and twisted his neck to try to get a look at the injury.

“Cut that shit out,” Snake said as he mopped at the blood, which was trickling in rivulets down Levi’s muscled back. “Just hold still.” He pressed the wad of gauze against the wound and with his other hand searched for something in his bag. He didn’t carry a military-issue kit, but a long, narrow bag that he packed himself and carried quiver style across his back. “Shit,” he said again. Quickly he looked around, and his gaze settled on Jina. “Babe, come over here and get a QuikClot out of the bag for me. Things must have got a little disorganized when I hit the ground.”

Knowing she’d been chosen because she was the least effective team member when it came to hitting what she was shooting at, she swallowed her chagrin and slid her weapon back into her thigh holster, then secured it before approaching and kneeling beside the medic bag. While she searched through the disordered bag, Snake squirted the wound with saline solution to wash out any trash, then did more mopping before pressing the wad of gauze against the wound.

Jina located the QuikClot pack and tore it open. “Slap it on,” Snake said, and she did, holding the gauze pad in place while he quickly tore off strips of tape with his teeth and secured the pad. She tried to keep her eyes firmly on what she was doing, though she was acutely aware of smooth tanned skin and heat and a lot of hard muscle that made her mouth water. She tried—and she failed. She’d never seen Levi without a shirt before, for which she could only thank God, because if she had, she might have lost her fight with temptation. Some of the guys had gone shirtless in front of her, and though they were all in extremely good shape, they hadn’t appealed to her. How could they, when all her senses had been focused on Levi?

He was kneeling on his right knee, leaning forward a little with his left forearm propped on his left knee, his weapon in his right hand while Snake tended to him. The broad expanse of those powerful shoulders made her heartbeat stutter; she was so acutely aware of him that she noticed everything: the tufts of dark hair under his arms, the tattoo of the ace of clubs on his left shoulder, another tattoo of the lettersPBJ(the initials of an old girlfriend?) on his right shoulder, the deep furrow of his spine, the hot scent of his sweaty skin, the thick layers of muscle. He was on high alert, head turning back and forth as he surveyed the surrounding foliage, his dark eyes narrowed, searching.

“Okay, that’s enough,” he said, surging to his feet. Snake efficiently stuffed his supplies back in the roll bag and slung it crossways across his back, morphing from medic to operator in the matter of a half second. Jina wasn’t as fast getting back into mission mode; she forced herself to look away from Levi so she could regain both her breath and her composure. Still, he moved back into her line of sight as he jerked his bloody shirt back on over his head; she saw the dark patch of hair spread in a tree-of-life pattern on his chest, and her mouth filled with drool again.

Stone-faced, she returned to her position between Voodoo and Jelly.

“I know who this is,” Ramirez said, looking down at the body Trapper hauled into the open. “He’s one of the Restrepos, three brothers who belong to FARC. They’re known as ‘the hounds,’ because finding people is their job.”

“Hunting you specifically?” Levi asked.

“Seems likely.” Ramirez was from Chicago but spoke a couple of the Colombian dialects like a native. He shoved his sweaty hair out of his face. “They spread out when they’re hunting. The other two will have heard the shots and will be converging on us.”

“Then we have to move,” Levi said sharply. “Babe, move to the center. Crutch and Boom, fall back to the rear. Double time.”

Jina opened her mouth to protest, then shut it. He wasn’t moving her to protect her; he was moving her so the team members most accurate with their weapons were both in front and in the rear. They had to move now and move fast. They might run straight into one of the remaining Restrepo brothers, but that was a chance they had to take because what they couldn’t do was sit in ambush, maybe for hours, and miss their ride out. They had already lost precious minutes, and the timing had been tight to begin with.

They began double-timing out of the area, Levi still taking point. As before, Jina soon lost sight of everyone except Voodoo in front of her, but he would have eyes on the team member in front of him just as Jelly, behind her, kept her in sight. The heat and humidity pressed down on her, making every breath an effort because the air felt so thick. She was coated with sweat, sticky sweat that made dirt and insects stick to her. Damn, why couldn’t they ever go somewhere with atemperateclimate, like maybe Seattle?

Abruptly she noticed that Voodoo wasn’t in sight. She could hear him, but she’d lost line of sight, and that was bad.

Shit.She couldn’t let them get separated, or there’d be hell to pay. She dug deeper, pushed harder, reached for every bit of speed she could muster. Her thigh muscles ached, her lungs burned. She ignored them; she’d breathe later, when they were on the plane. Air was overrated, anyway.

She pelted around a huge tree, leaped over a giant protruding root—and slammed headlong into the side of a man who popped out of thin air, his head turned toward Voodoo, whose back was just visible as the man raised a rag-wrapped weapon and pulled the trigger.

Simultaneously:

The sharpcrackoddly muffled by the vegetation and thick air, out of balance because her left ear was protected by the communication bud she wore, but her right ear was unprotected.

---