He dried himself off with a towel and wrapped it around his hips, padding on bare, wet feet into the tiny kitchen. The apartment wasn’t more than eight-hundred square feet. Dan often thought the cockroaches owned half of it. They skittered and scurried as he walked down the grimy wooden floor. This place was a mess—but so was he. It reflected him well enough, Dan thought, jerking open the door to the refrigerator.
The light made him wince as he reached in and grabbed a can of beer. Slamming the door shut, he ripped off the tab and gulped down half the can, the beer hitting his tense, knotted belly. Dan moved over to the only window in the living room and pushed the curtains aside, staring out toward the airport. As far as airports go, it wasn’t much—although the red granite floors within the terminal were clean and highly polished. Someone in Sudan was trying to replicate first-world expectations when people disembarked from a flight. His upper lip curled. Visitors would find out very quickly that the cleanliness of the terminal was not outside those swinging glass doors. This port was busy, and all kinds of commodities were traded with the rest of this part of the world. The odors, when the wind was right, were overwhelming to the sensitized noses of visitors. They hurried to get the hell away from the port because it was raw, real, and visceral. The suffering human condition was everywhere. It couldn’t be avoided.
Dan decided a long time ago that Port Sudan was an outer reflection of how he felt inside. He tipped his head back, finishing off the first can. His knees were almost solid now, and his heart had stopped floundering in his chest. He went and got a second can from the fridge and returned to the window, looking again at the lights of the airport. Beyond it lay the busy, twenty-four-hour-a-day shipping port. Dan could see the bright yellow lights on top of big gantries and cranes that moved the metal shipping containers off arriving ships. His gaze moved down the shoreline of the city to another area where ships came to fill their bellies with Sudanese oil from the southern jungle portion of the country. There were also natural gas terminals where ships with huge, round metal containers bolted down on a deck were pumped full for a trek to Europe. Beyond that were the stockyards where cattle were herded onto other ships to be taken all over the Middle East for slaughter or to be sold as breeding stock.
The second can of beer began to combat the anxiety that flooded his body. Dan knew that in a few minutes, he’d start the adrenaline crash. He’d feel weak and exhausted. Finishing the beer, he went for a third one. This time, he sat on the worn, red cotton couch. The cushion groaned under his weight, and he eased his back against the end of it, pulled up one of his feet, and rested the other on the threadbare Persian rug.
Sipping the third brew, feeling the fingers of alcohol start to numb out the restless torrent of emotions still holding him prisoner, Dan closed his eyes, the cold beer resting against his thigh. The coldness felt good, focused him, and made him feel less hopeless. It was a damned good thing he had nothing on the schedule for the next six days. It usually took him three days to get over this virulent nightmare. He didn’t want to fly the Delos Charities CH-47 anywhere when he was in this state. The damned nightmare grounded him, and he was like a bird with a broken wing. Sometimes, if the Delos medical schedule conflicted with an unexpected nightmare, Dan would cancel it and reschedule. He knew it caused a lot of problems for the charity and the villages in desperate need of medical attention for their people, but he couldn’t help it. There was no way in hell he was going to fly and put a medical team at risk when he was in this broken state.
Dan would take the heat from the Delos home office, instead. He knew they got frustrated with him, but he wasn’t about to tell them why he arbitrarily canceled a flight out of the blue. If they knew the truth of what he’d done, his lousy flight skills, they wouldn’t have hired him two years ago. But he’d been in a good space at that time, the nightmare leaving him alone. And when he was solid like that, he could fool the world. He’d walked confidently into Dilara Culver’s office in Alexandria, Virginia, and given her one hell of an employment interview. Dan knew he was good at putting on that game face and pretending to be what he wasn’t.
He liked Dilara. She was a good woman—heart-centered. In fact, Dan felt a ray of hope when she hired him as a helicopter pilot for Delos Charities to ferry food, clothing, and medical teams, all over Sudan. Dilara reminded him of Andy’s wife, Sable—that same warm, nurturing personality. It was something he craved—something he didn’t own and never would. The only other woman with that same healing personality was Sloan Kennedy.
Sloan…
Dan missed her so damned much he couldn’t put it into words. He’d met her at Bagram, at a canteen. She was an 18 Delta combat medic attached to a Special Forces A team, one of the few women in that role. But damn, that woman knocked him off his feet, grabbed his heart, and never let it go.
Closing his eyes, he finished off the last of his beer. Just thinking about Sloan again, about their torrid affair with one another, made him feel hope. But the crash changed everything. Stretching out on the old couch, he pushed his legs to the other end of it, settling his head against the arm of the sofa. He closed his eyes.
Sloan…
Even as he was coming out of the worst of his nightmare, he remembered their love affair. He pictured Sloan’s oval face, those kind, understanding gray eyes. He could still feel her long fingers sliding across his body. She had poured all her nurturing care into him, and it made the dirtiness, the terror, and shame he carried, dissolve. And she’d been his until he’d been an asshole, and walked out of her life without an explanation. He had no one to blame but himself. Like everything else in his life, he destroyed the good.
Dragging in a ragged breath, Dan felt sleep taking hold of him again. Sloan…I miss you so damned much. I wish I hadn’t been such a coward…I’m sorry I hurt you. You saved my life that night. You and your team. And I repaid you by walking out of your life and never telling you why.
Grief slid through him, wrapping around his slowly beating heart—grief over losing Sloan. She had been so damned special, and cool and calm in a firefight. He could still remember her whispering words of hope in his ear as she’d leaned over him, trying to stop the bleeding from his shattered right arm that night. Dan knew he was bleeding out from that bullet wound he’d sustained in the cockpit. They could have all died that night, but the captain of the A team got them out of there and into one of the thousands of limestone caves that peppered the Hindu Kush, hiding them from the Taliban.
Dan remembered everything from the days in those darkened caves. The Taliban were crawling around the mountains, hunting them. If the Army tried to send another helo in to rescue their sorry asses, it would have been destroyed.
Through it all, Sloan had tended him. They had been lovers for a year and a half before that, still going together when Dan crashed and got wounded.
The last thing Dan thought as he drifted off into an exhausted sleep was that the joke was on him. It was all his fault, and he ended up living to remember it all—every last detail of that night whether he wanted to or not.
CHAPTER 2
“Tal! Good to see you again,” Sloan Kennedy said, walking into her office at Artemis Security. She smiled as Tal rose from her chair and walked around the desk, opening her arms to Sloan.
“Been too long,” Tal agreed, her voice emotional as they hugged. She released her and stood back, giving her an intense study. “You’re thin.”
“Yeah,” Sloan said with a grimace, turning and shutting the door. “I can’t say that Somalia does one’s spirit any good.”