Page 74 of The Woman Left Behind

“Did you understand what they were saying?”

“No. I don’t speak Arabic. Even if I did, the words weren’t distinct. I could hear just enough to know there was someone with Mamoon.”

“What happened next?”

“I flew the drone ahead of the team’s position, looking for the thermal signature of the informant. Instead I saw a group of signatures, I’m guessing about fifteen. I didn’t have time to count them. I immediately alerted the team to the ambush, then the truck exploded and I was knocked... not unconscious, but dazed. I could see two people picking their way through the ruin, toward me. I destroyed the laptop, per instructions, and managed to work my way outside through a hole in the wall.”

“Why didn’t you contact the team to let them know your location, that you were alive?”

Ah. There it was, the question she’d hoped they wouldn’t ask, because that was what she most didn’t want to discuss, or even remember. “My throat mic was damaged,” she said steadily. “I could hear what they were saying, but I couldn’t respond.”

She could feel Levi’s hooded gaze on her, fierce and intense. He hadn’t known that, hadn’t known that she could hear him. She couldn’t say that he’d made the wrong decision; looking at it unemotionally, she knew he’d made the correct one, the only one he could with the information he had. Unfortunately, though her head knew he was right, her heart couldn’t join in the applause.

Mac said, “You didn’t have your comm headset with you when you reached the secondary exfil point.” It was an accusation, as if he thought she might be lying.

She hadn’t known that, hadn’t thought about it. “I fell a lot, running in the dark. It must have been torn off. Deduct it from my pay.” The last was said with a coldness she hadn’t known she could muster.

Levi must have thought Mac was capable of doing just that, because he said sharply, “It was damaged anyway. Forget about the inventory.”

Mac gave them both an intensely annoyed look, but he didn’t argue.

The debriefing continued. How odd that so much could be compressed into so few words. If anything, telling them about it made everything feel even more unreal, made her feel even more distant from events.

The analysts grilled her for over an hour, going over details, asking for her impressions, what she thought could have happened. Why did she think the truck had been exploded? Was it possible there had been more than one person outside with Mamoon? Why hadn’t they simply come in and shot her?

“My guess is the only way they could make enough noise to warn the others was to set off an explosion.”

And, “Possible, but I heard only the one other voice.”

And, “I’d taken my weapon out of my holster, had it lying beside the laptop. Maybe they thought I wouldn’t be an easy kill, and a shot inside the ruin might not have been loud enough to serve as a warning, so they opted for the warning explosion first, then came in to take care of me. I don’t know. Parts of it just seemed like poor planning.”

Mac interrupted at that point. “Part of it seems damned Machiavellian. A team was sent to the Syrian interior because of the informant’s supposed intel about Graeme Burger. That’s a hard place to get into, a hard place to get out of. It looks as if the purpose of the whole plan was to bait a team into a hostile environment and eliminate the entire team.”

“More likely the informant was captured, interrogated, and that was the best plan that could be put together on very little time,” the woman analyst said. “I agree with Ms. Modell. Parts of it are either poorly planned or poorly executed, or both.”

“Or there was no real informant to begin with.” Mac scowled. “The intel we could put together on him was thin. Everything about Graeme Burger is thin, a hint here and there. But then he pulled that disappearing act, and—” He stopped, rubbed his eyes. He looked tired, as if he’d been up all night. “From my perspective, it looks as if a deliberate attempt was made to eliminate an entire team, a team that had been focusing on Burger.” He said abruptly, “All right, that’s it. You’re through for now, Modell. You can go.”

She wasn’t cleared to hear any further intel that might be discussed, so she wasn’t surprised. She started to wheel herself away from the table, but Levi took control of the wheelchair and pushed her out of the room, down the hall.

I can do it.She thought it, but didn’t say it. If she could run the equivalent of a marathon at night, without water, and with bleeding feet, she could damn well handle a wheelchair. For the first time she felt a flicker of emotion, and it was anger.

She didn’t want the anger, didn’t want to feel anything. She pushed it away and sat silently as he wheeled her back to where her taciturn driver waited.

“Thanks, Terrell. Take care of her. I owe you.”

“No problem,” Terrell the driver said, though from the exchange Jina figured his job wasn’t driving.

Terrell drove her home, where she refused his somewhat awkward determination to carry her upstairs, and made it under her own steam.Carryher in? What the hell had Levi been smoking?

Late that afternoon, Ailani called. “Hi, you,” she said warmly. “Do you feel up to some company?”

“Sure,” Jina said, though she really didn’t. A pain pill—the last one she’d take, she had decided—had eased the pain in her feet and made her feel dull and drowsy.

“I’ve been cooking today, trying out new recipes. I’ll bring you a few meals to put in the freezer, just heat them when you get hungry instead of making do with a sandwich. See you in an hour!”

It wasn’t just Ailani who came, though; Snake was with her, though they were kidless. “We hired a babysitter for the hellions,” he explained. He was holding a cardboard box, which freed Ailani to give her a big hug. He hefted the box. “Food. I wanted some of it and Ailani said no, so I want you to think of me every time you eat.”

“I won’t,” she assured him. “You can find your own food.”

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