Page 5 of Asher

Asher pulled Marlowe against his thighs. The poor woman’s back, mostly her lower back and bare backside, had been whipped raw. “Hemostatic dressing. Everything you’ve got. Hurry, Lee. Christ!”

“No shit.” Lee reached into an open overhead compartment, broke open a full box of field dressings, and tore several foil packets apart. Tossing one to Beau, he ordered, “Glove up. I need something to lay these dressings on. Now, damnit!”

“Already gloved up.” Beau broke open a pack of sterile towels and laid one on the floor in time for Lee to dump the compressed bundles of specially formulated, absorbable gauze, consisting of oxidized regenerated cellulose, on the towel. “We should’ve killed those bastards faster, Ash,” Beau muttered as he and Lee pressed squares of expandable hemostatic dressing over and into the open flesh on Marlowe’s back.

“I should’ve checked her better as soon as I had her,” Lee growled. “I knew she was bleeding, but I needed to—”

“Stop it. Both of you. Quit! Just quit!” Asher ordered, leaning over Marlowe now and helping staunch the flow of those open wounds. There were so many. “We can only do what we can, when we can. We might still lose her so—” He stopped short of telling his friends to shut the fuck up because he should’ve known she was bleeding to death. He was the bastard who had fucked up this rescue, and Marlowe was paying the price. If she died—

No!Asher slammed that what-if out of his stupid head, refusing to let the guilt clawing up his spine get even the tiniest toehold. He’d done all he could amidst a shitstorm of very few options. She would live, damn it. She had to.

Little by little, they got the worst of the bleeding slowed, leaving him cowed by his negligence and pissed all over again.

“Thanks, guys,” Lee breathed, swiping the back of his gloved hand across his forehead. “Shit. There was so much blood. I thought we lost her.”

Lee had lived through torture at the hands of a notorious Taliban banker years ago. This had to be hard on him, seeing a woman treated as badly as he’d been back then. But he wasn’t to blame. This death would’ve been on Asher, and he knew it.

As soon as the mighty craft was airborne, it pivoted a quarter circle west, toward the small army of terrorists once again gaining altitude below. The mechanical gears to the door-side Gatling guns clinked loudly as those weapons automatically zeroed downhill on the terrorists, thanks to the proprietary system on every bird in Alex’s fleet.

“Send ’em back to hell, Boss,” Beau growled through the shared comm links via the headsets, spraying hand sanitizer over hispalms as he stepped over to the open door, his feet spread wide for balance.

“Negative,” Murphy answered evenly. “Only if they’re dumb enough to fire first. Then they’d have to be damned good shots to hit us all the way up here.”

“I could hit ’em, easy.” Beau gripped the overhead frame with both hands. Was he making himself a target? Sure looked like it.

“Let it go, guys,” Murph ordered. “We’ve got everyone we came for, plus one. Let’s call it a day and put this shithole behind us.”

“Incoming,” Beau bellowed, just as—

WHOOSH!A Hellfire air-to-surface missile screamed past their helo and zipped down the rocky terrain, obliterating the tightly-packed group of terrorists in a cloud of black smoke and orange fire.

“Guldarn it, I said only if they fired first, Deck,” Murphy bellowed.

“Keep your panties on, Murph,” Decker Edison, former Air Force colonel, A-10 pilot, and the man at the stick of the Black Hawk behind them, yelled back. “The moment they stopped climbing, I knew they were up to something. Turns out they were shielding the jackass with the anti-tank missile launcher on his shoulder. I did what I had to do.”

“Get us out of here before we cause an international incident,” Murphy grumped.

“Think we already did,” Beau quipped, shutting the side door on the scene below.

“She won’t make it to Ramstein, Murph,” Asher told his boss.

“Already taken care of, son. You guys get her into that flannel coveralls while we head for the American Embassy in Islamabad. They’ve got a medical emergency team there. Miss Rich is going to be okay.”

“There’s only so much we can do, Asher. Hold her tight while I…”Snap.Lee corrected her dislocated shoulder without waiting for assistance. She didn’t groan or cry out, but Asher winced for her.

“Forget the coveralls. She needs blankets,” he muttered, smoothing out the wrinkles in the layers already covering her and wishing like hell he could comfort her. That he could tell her how sorry he was that he hadn’t rescued her sooner. There was no sense maneuvering her poor battered body into coveralls. She was in shock, plugged into an IV, oxygen, and a heart monitor. All Asher could do now was hope she survived and pray like his life depended on it.

Chapter Four

Marlowe drifted on a feathery soft cushion of clouds and freedom. No nightmares. No worries. No pain. No lists and no schedules. Just sweet relief from a thousand years of never doing enough or being good enough. Of loneliness and struggle. Of always running but never running fast enough. Never catching up. She saw the miserable little girl she’d been through a kaleidoscope of rainbow colors. Instinctively, she shied away from the dark indigos and the sucking vortex of the ebony blacks surrounding those colors. There was danger in drawing too close to shadows. They lied and pretended to be what they could never be, especially to little girls: Kind. Gentle. Honest. Uh-uh. She turned back around to the bright yellow gold of a thousand sunflowers and—

“Hey, sunshine. It’s time to wake up, honey. You’re safe and you’re on your way home.”

The fantastical world she drifted in vanished with that strangely masculine call from somewhere else. The rainbow was gone. She found herself falling into—

Ugh.The real world. A room she’d never seen or been in before. Unnaturally bright lights overhead. A ceiling with sharp corners. A stiff collar holding her head forward and her left arm in a rigid sling. Those had to go. The bed she’d fallen into wasn’t nearly as soft as that narcotic cushion of fake clouds and phony freedom. Her body felt heavy, leaden; her head like someone used it as a basketball. A lot. Must’ve been a long game. Her brain pulsed with pain, which made her dizzy and nauseous and queasy and…Oh, hell.“I’m going to throw—”

“No worries, I’ve got you,” that same voice said. A plastic barf bag appeared under her chin, and a big, warm hand lifted her head high enough, making sure she hit that tiny target despite the harness restricting her neck. Again and again, she retched, while that guy held her steady.

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