The Woman Left Behind Read online

  “Do your families ever meet the other team members?” she asked, unable to contain her curiosity. To date, she hadn’t met any of their family members or outside friends. Maybe they were like her and were too tired when they got home to hang out with friends.

  “Sure,” Trapper said. “There are cookouts, things like that. Boom and Snake both have kids, and their wives do things together, take the kids to do stuff.”

  Jina wondered if they’d had any cookouts in the past three months, because if they had, she hadn’t been invited. She didn’t let herself feel hurt; though she’d been assigned to Levi’s team, she wasn’t yet an official member because she hadn’t completed training. If—when—she was cleared and began going on missions, and they still didn’t include her, then she’d let herself brood about it, but that time wasn’t now.

  While they were in a talkative mood, she pressed on. “Do your families call you by your team nicknames?”

  “In a way,” Snake said. “My wife calls me by my name, but everyone else’s family members call me Snake.”

  “Why Snake? Do you crawl fast on your stomach, or something?” She’d wondered about all their nicknames but was usually so busy trying to keep up and stay alive that she hadn’t asked.

  In answer, he pointed to the two round scars on his forehead, rolling his blue eyes up as if he could see them.

  She gaped at him. “A snake bit you? Really? What kind?”

  “A rattler. I guess the only reason I’m alive is it didn’t eject any venom. I about pissed my pants, though.”

  “You’d probably be called ‘Snake’ even if you weren’t on a GO-Team,” she muttered. “Why do we need nicknames anyway?” She didn’t like “Babe” at all, would never like “Babe,” and wouldn’t like it even if she was a babe, which she wasn’t.

  “Technically, we don’t.” After their heart-to-heart talk in his truck on the first day, when he was making it plain to her she was the most expendable person on his team, Levi seldom spoke directly to her except in command. Hearing his voice behind her made her heart jump, and her stomach went into the jitters. She didn’t turn to look at him, though, instead holding herself as still as a rabbit being eyed by a cobra. “But we aren’t military so we don’t have the protection of a military structure behind us. We’re civilian, and officially unauthorized, no matter how unofficially authorized we are. It’s safer for us not to have our real names broadcast over a radio.”

  She sighed. Unfortunately that made sense, which meant she wasn’t going to be able to jettison the “Babe.” Calling her that was probably already too ingrained, anyway. She wasn’t certain any of them even remembered her real name.

  “What about you?” she asked, moving on to Jelly. “What’s behind your name?”

  “Nothing as special as a snake bite, I just like jelly.” He gave her one of his beatific smiles that made him look about sixteen.

  “On almost everything,” Snake pointed out.

  “I like what I like.”

  One by one she got the stories behind their nicknames. Boom got his nickname by falling on the top of a vehicle and making a loud boom; Voodoo’s name was because he was from Louisiana; Trapper once constructed a small trap out of sticks and caught a mouse; Crutch had broken three toes the first day of training and gimped around on crutches for a couple of weeks; and Levi was called Ace because he’d once played in the World Series of Poker. He hadn’t won the big pot, but he’d walked away with a couple of hundred thousand. Jina was impressed despite herself; she didn’t play poker, but she’d—out of boredom—actually watched some of the tournament the year before, so she wasn’t completely ignorant. Yeah, she could see him sitting stone-faced at a poker table with a bunch of other stone faces.

  “You get the nickname trophy,” she said to Snake, smiling. “Getting snake-bit on the forehead is kind of exotic. Everyone else’s nickname is boring compared to yours.”

  “Break time’s over,” Levi said brusquely. “Let’s get back to it.” He two-pointed his empty water bottle into the trash bin nearby and rose effortlessly to his feet, his powerful leg muscles and abs doing all the work.

  Hah! Jina could do that too . . . now. She’d even practiced doing so at home, so no one would see her when she gracelessly collapsed to the floor. Getting up unaided required all sorts of muscles, muscles that she now had. She got to her feet, and per his instruction got back to it.

  She could do this. She could handle anything he threw at her, and she was far more confident now than she’d been three months ago. She had this.

  Two months later, she regretted even thinking those words. “Say what?” she said in horror. Surely she hadn’t heard him right. She couldn’t have heard him right. This was so far out of her capabilities it might as well be in outer space.

  “Parachute training,” Levi repeated.

  “Uh-uh. No.” Jina began backing away from him, as if distance would help; her hands were up as if she could ward off the words. “I can’t do that. I can’t jump out of a plane. That’s unnatural. Only crazy people do that.”

  “Are you resigning?” he asked neutrally, though his cold dark eyes were boring into her. The other guys stopped what they were doing to listen; Voodoo snickered, but she didn’t expect anything else from him, the jerk, so she ignored him. In turn, they all ignored that she’d just called all of them crazy. Hey, if the tinfoil hat fit, wear it.

  “No.” The word was thick on her tongue, but she managed to get it out. “Resign” was another word for “quit.” And though she’d stuck it out this long—five months now—climbing a freaking rope and running for miles and all sorts of other crap wasn’t in the same category as jumping out of a plane. Her survival instinct was too strong for that, and her need for an adrenaline rush way too weak. Pain and bone-deep fatigue had become her new normal, but jumping out of a plane . . . she didn’t know if she could.

  “I’ll try,” she said, hearing the doubt in her own voice. She wanted to run screaming, because she knew—she knew—she wasn’t going to be able to do any suicidal leap out of a plane, but pure cussedness kept her in place. She was already beginning to shake in dread, just at the idea. God only knew what would happen when she was actually in a plane faced with the imminent prospect of plummeting to her death—pass out, maybe. Yeah, that would work. Maybe. She wouldn’t put it past him to pick up her unconscious body and toss her out of the plane.

  Levi had thrown that bombshell at her while they were all kind of winding down after a long day of small-arms training, running, lifting weights, then swimming in the Olympic-sized pool in the gym the GO-Teams owned—or rather, that the government owned, unofficially and completely off the books.

  While they’d been off doing other stuff she’d also spent a couple of hours with the drone, too, the real drone, a thing so miniaturized it was the size of a small bird, but equipped with high-definition cameras in both infrared and live-feed digital. With the equally state-of-the-art laptop and highly classified program, she could finesse Tweety, as she’d come to think of him, into a small pipe if she wanted to. She could perch him on a limb, peek from behind a rock, evade a diving hawk, which had taken her by surprise, but she had since learned raptors tended to see her little Tweety as prey. She was determined that Tweety would stay safe on her watch.

  Sometime along the way, she had started hanging out some with the guys after training was over for the day, nothing social but sitting around afterward and shooting the shit. There had been some other socializing away from training because she’d heard them talking about it, but she still hadn’t been invited, and she’d noticed she was being excluded even if she hadn’t let herself react. She was damned if she’d let them know it bothered her.

  Until now, swim days had been her favorite days of training, but she didn’t know if they could recover that ranking after being linked in her mind with parachute training. Still, good old swimming had a lot going for it; at least when there was swimming involved there were also showers, both befor