Tactical Rescue

“Could you understand what they were saying?” she asked.

“Yup.” He chuckled slightly. “Basically, it all came down to ‘Shoot him!’ and ‘Take her!’ and ‘Stop acting like an idiot or I’ll kill you.’”

They reached the road. It was empty. The kidnappers and their van were gone. They walked back toward her camper. Every inch of her skin seemed to tingle with electricity from being this close to him. The old, familiar smell of him filled her senses. I’m frightened. I’m angry. I’m beyond frustrated that Zack won’t give me answers. And my heart won’t stop fluttering whenever he glances my way.

She could now see the camper between the trees. She stopped walking and turned toward him. They stood there a moment, chest to chest, face-to-face, just inches apart in the dirt.

“Can you tell me one thing?” she asked. “Is your target the man who blew up the road? Or Black Talon? Or me?”

“None of you are my target.” His hands swung wide above his head, as if he was trying to swat the horizon. “Like I told you before, I’m not on assignment right now. I’m on vacation. On leave. This is my holiday. I actually need to report back to base in less than two days for overseas deployment.” His arms dropped back down to his side. “This morning I was camping at the side of a lake about an hour south of here, then I heard something on the news—which I’m guessing you haven’t heard or you wouldn’t be asking so many questions—and I figured you might need an old friend to talk to.”

His hands parted slightly like he wanted to hug her but wasn’t sure if he should.

“When you climbed out of the rocks, I didn’t think you recognized me,” he went on, “and I was trying to figure out how to tell you who I was when my commanding officer called and suggested I shouldn’t.”

“How did he know you were with me?” she asked.

“He guessed.” He looked past her into the trees. “I have a very old news clipping about you winning that martial arts trophy taped inside my footlocker. Now, please stop asking me questions I can’t answer. Just stop. Please. I’m already in trouble enough with my CO for potentially barging onto a gigantic mess for personal reasons.”

A “mess” that involved foreign criminals, explosives and weapons.

“Just let me ask one more question, please, then I’ll stop.”

He ran both hands over his head. “Go ahead.”

“Why is there a newspaper article about me in your locker?”

An article about the night you broke my heart?

His eyes glanced to the sky and his lips moved for a moment like he was praying.

“Because you changed my life, Rebecca.” His eyes dropped to her face. “You believed in me and stuck by me when nobody else did. I’d never forgotten what it was like to walk into that gym, overweight, out of shape, feeling laughed at, and yet wanting to be better than I was. And you...sorry to be so blunt, but you were the cutest thing I’d ever seen and yet you walked right over and asked me to partner with you. You befriended me. You encouraged me. So yeah—” and here his voice rose, as if he was arguing with an opponent she couldn’t see “—today when I realized you could be in trouble, and knew I’d followed your career just enough, and remembered your stories well enough, to know you might not be too far away, I came to find you. Because you had my back when nobody else did and I wanted to make sure I had yours now.”

Her heart flipped in her chest, as if they’d been standing on the mats and he’d just grabbed her by the heels and tossed her end over end.

“But it was a mistake,” he said. “Because there’s something big going on and guys like me don’t have the luxury of making personal decisions. Not where stuff like this is involved.”

He stepped back, reached into his pocket and pulled out his phone. “Now that I’ve got a signal, I’m going to call my commanding officer again and tell him we just had some unwanted company. Do you need any help packing up your camper?”

She shook her head. “No, thanks, I’ll be fine.”

He walked her to her camper door, waited until she stepped inside and then dialed a number. She could hear his voice fading in the distance as he strode off through the trees. She sat down on her bunk and dropped her head into her hands, feeling as if she should pray but not even knowing how to start sorting out the scattered feelings of her heart.

Her gold martial arts trophy sat on the small shelf beside her bunk, on top of the glossy hardcover copy of General Arthur Miles’s autobiography that someone on his staff had mailed her, she guessed out of courtesy, even though she and her mother weren’t in it. Rebecca had never been close to her stepfather, which had probably disappointed Zack a bit when they were younger, considering how much he’d admired the man and how often Zack had hinted that he hoped she’d introduce them. It’d been odd being in the same family as someone whose name everyone seemed to know and yet she’d never personally felt close to, even though her mother had insisted she and Rebecca both change their last names to “Miles.”

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