The Woman Left Behind: A Novel Read online

  She didn’t let herself think. This was big, maybe bigger than she could handle, and if she got caught in the details, she’d falter. She had to be a machine, she had to run the way she’d trained to run—beyond how she’d trained, because this was farther than she’d ever run before. This was hours and hours in the dark, in the heat, unable to avoid pitfalls or vipers or anything else. One of those weird rabbit/kangaroo rats—what had Mamoon called it? She couldn’t remember—might jump on her and trip her.

  Don’t think, Jina. Don’t worry about the rat. Just move, keep moving.

  Was she still alive?

  The possibility, slim as it was, ate at his guts. Levi set a brutal pace when he was on point, driven by the need to move, to get his men to safety and good medical care before it was too late, before they were carrying two corpses instead of two teammates. The faster he got to the pickup point, the sooner he could go back.

  He had to. He had to find her.

  Even if she hadn’t survived, he had to bring her body back. No man left behind. No woman, either. That was the creed he’d operated under when he was in the military, and nothing had changed when he joined the GO-Teams. He wouldn’t leave her for the jackals, the rats.

  Only Voodoo and Crutch, saving them, kept him focused. Every time he thought about Jina, hearing the explosion and seeing the fire glow in the distance, he nearly buckled under the despair that gutted him. He hadn’t kept her safe.

  He’d done what he thought he had to do, for the cohesion of the team, and kept her at a distance, always thinking that things would change, that he’d have time later to explore this thing between them. Now it was too late. She was gone. All the things he thought he’d have time for, holding her and laughing with her, fighting with her, those were gone with her.

  “Hold up!” Snake said and did a quick check of the wounded men. Voodoo was in danger of bleeding out, and Crutch had an abdominal wound that could be fatal even if he’d had instant medical care. The massive infection from wounds to the gut was difficult to overcome, period.

  Unable to help himself, Levi turned and looked behind them, as if he could conjure a small figure emerging from the night, blue-and-amber eyes flashing while she called them morons for going off and leaving her.

  He’d left her.

  Boom’s hand closed on his shoulder. Levi didn’t look at his friend and teammate, because sometimes not looking was easier.

  “You couldn’t have done anything,” Boom said, his tone rough with emotion.

  “Doesn’t matter.” Guilt and regret, grief and rage and despair, all balled together in his chest until he felt as if he could barely breathe. “When we get Voodoo and Crutch on the bird, I’m going back.”

  “I’ll go with you,” Boom immediately volunteered.

  Levi shook his head. “No. You have Terisa and the kids to go home to, so you go. The mission is done, it was an ambush. Fuck if I know how it was set up, or why. You can report as well as I can.”

  “Two doubles the chance of success,” Boom retorted.

  “I can go,” Trapper said. “I’m not married.”

  “Or me,” Jelly offered.

  Snake had a savage expression on his face. Not only did he have a family, too, but he had to stay with Crutch and Voodoo, keep them alive if he could.

  Again Levi shook his head no. “This is on me. I won’t risk any of you. I made the decision to leave her, and I’m going back for her.”

  The ground went out from under her. Jina gave a hoarse shriek as she tumbled down the rough side of a dry wadi. She hit hard, narrowly missed a large rock. She scrambled away from the rock, in case a snake was using it as shelter. Or maybe snakes were using the night to hunt, and sheltered during the searing heat of the day.

  The impact hurt, but she hadn’t broken any bones. Was this the human version of having a beat-up chassis but a good motor? She don’t look like much, fellas, but she runs good.

  She ran good. Hours and hours and hours of running. Legs like steel. Lungs like . . . lungs like jellyfish. Breathing hard, she decided now was a good time to recheck her course. The short rest would keep her from overtaxing her stamina.

  Shaking, she pulled out the compass and penlight, and replotted. She’d gone a little off course, but not too bad. Okay. Really, she was doing pretty good. She’d covered some ground, not as much as she’d have liked because what she’d have liked was to be there right now, but a decent distance.

  What time was it? How could she not have thought of that before? She roughly estimated the distance, then looked at the luminous hands on her heavy-duty wristwatch like all the guys wore. The world’s top marathoners could run that distance in two-something hours, but she wasn’t a top marathoner, and they ran in daylight, in sneakers on city streets, with people giving them water along the way. She figured her speed would be less than half that, so . . . at best she had, probably, another five hours of running, and that was if she didn’t fall and break a leg or crush her skull, though in the case of skull-crush, her worries were over.

  Covering that distance in five hours was a reasonable expectation, she thought. A nice brisk walk would cover a mile in fifteen minutes, four miles an hour, twenty miles in five hours.

  Five hours would at least be nautical twilight, and she’d be able to see.

  What kind of time would the guys make? They were by necessity traveling slower, but had a shorter distance, and she knew they would push themselves to get Crutch and Voodoo to medical help as fast as possible. They were strong, they could see, and they had water. They might not be much slower.

  If they got to the exfil point ahead of her, Levi would call in the helicopter for pickup, and they might be gone before she could get there. It was a short hop for the helicopter, across the Iraqi border just into Syria, then back. It wouldn’t wait; as soon as the guys were on board, it would lift off.

  She had to go faster.

  She climbed out of the wadi and set off again, picking up the pace. The boots rubbed up and down on her feet despite the two pairs of socks she wore. She was sweating so much her socks were damp, anyway. Nothing she could do. She felt the blisters rubbing, felt the pain burning. She ran. She had to cut that time down.

  She ran. She fell. She got up and ran again. Over and over. Her gasping breath burned in her chest. But every time she fell she used the opportunity to recheck her course, to catch her breath. Veering off course would be disastrous.

  God, her feet hurt. The pain was crippling, so debilitating that tears stung her eyes, rolled down her cheeks. Furiously she ordered herself to stop crying, because she couldn’t afford to lose even that much moisture. She stopped, stood weaving back and forth. Could she pull her boots off, run barefoot? Yes, there were rocks and rough shrubs and all sorts of other things, but could that hurt worse than scrubbing her feet raw?

  Yes, it could. Her feet were already raw, she could tell by the sharpness of the pain. If she tried running barefoot she’d be inviting massive infection in her feet. Her fault; she’d grabbed the wrong boots.

  Run anyway. No matter what, she had to run anyway. Forget her feet. One step after another, that was all she had to do, take the next step, and the next, and the next. Five hours. She could get through five hours. She could focus only on the next step, the next yard, the next mile. She could because she had no choice.

  She ran.

  What was Levi thinking? Did it bother him that he’d left her behind, was he thinking of her at all, or only about getting his wounded men to safety?

  She began crying again.

  He’d told her, in words so plain there was no misunderstanding: she was the least valuable member of the team. And now he’d proven it to her.

  How many miles? She stopped, tried to calculate how far she’d gone, but the numbers didn’t make sense. She couldn’t remember, but she knew the coordinates, knew the time. She felt the minutes passing, tick-tock, closer and closer, later and later. Any minute could be one minute too late. She concentrated, dug deep