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Sierra was glad to have his bulk nearby. He towered over her. She felt that male warmth pouring off his body. They’d walked very fast. She wasn’t out of breath, but it had been a good warm-up. Taking her M-4, she placed it across her lap, the safety off, the muzzle pointed away from them.
“When we’re out here,” Mace told her in a low tone, “you can sit here if you want. Or you can wander around. The intersecting trail there,” and he lifted his hand and pointed to the T-intersection, “is a main trail. This is a feeder trail that leads to the meadow.”
“Does Belov move his men at night?”
“Hardly ever,” Mace said. He turned off his NVGs and pulled them down, so they hung around his neck. “You won’t need these unless you hear something. Then flick them on. Saves batteries that way.”
Sierra followed suit. Her eyes quickly adjusted to the night. There had to be a fairly full moon phase somewhere over above the western horizon because she was able to barely start to make out the dark shapes around her.
“Did you bring an extra lithium battery for your NVGs in case you need to replace it?”
She patted her top pocket on the right side, “Yes. I’ve worked with SEALs too much in the past to forget something basic like that,” she told him wryly. “They have a saying: One is none, two is one.”
“It’s a good saying,” Mace agreed. “Murphy’s Law sure as hell is alive and well in the black ops community.”
She laughed softly. “No joke.” If something could go faulty on an op, it would. Sierra knew from way too much experience that, no matter how well a mission was planned, something always went wrong. Always. And it was up to the operators to be flexible and figure out a fix to keep the mission from going sideways.
“Did you bring a protein bar and gallon of water in your ruck?”
“Yes.” Mace had given her a list of things he wanted the guard to place at the entrance. He was meticulous, but Sierra found a sense of protection in the sergeant’s experience and knowledge of the territory.
“Scrabble game?”
She slapped a hand against her mouth, muffling the laugh. Twisting her head, she looked up in his direction, seeing his eyes gleam in the very low light. His face was harsh and rugged looking, but she felt his smile even though she couldn’t see it. She wished she could. She thought it would change Mace’s whole face. Make him look less harsh. Less intimidating. “That was the best laugh I had in a long time,” she admitted, grinning broadly at him. “Your guys… they really needed that release. So did I.”
“Yeah,” he muttered, looking around. “It was good for all of us.”
“I needed it badly,” she admitted more softly. “I saw so much in Somalia. It’s got to be the most toxic human waste dump on this planet. I swear to God it is.”
“Not high on my vacation list of places to go, either,” he agreed drily.
Sierra said nothing for a moment, trying to take in the night sounds: any noise that was out there that told her no humans were coming. If anyone was, the night sounds would suddenly halt. And if they did, that’s when she’d go on alert. She felt companionable with Mace close to her right now. This time, he didn’t intimidate her, for whatever reason. Finally, she got up enough courage to ask, “Do you really play Scrabble?” She heard him chuckle: a deep, rolling sound in his chest.
“Yeah. When I was a kid. I never played it once I joined the Army, but Ana Beth loved the game.”
Sierra heard his voice suddenly go off-key, barely hidden emotion behind it. She felt her heart thump once to underscore the sudden vulnerability she heard in his normally hard, emotionless tone. “Who is Ana Beth?” She felt him tense for a moment. He moved his M-4 around on his lap, as if thinking before he answered. Had she overstepped her bounds with him? It had been a personal question after all, and normally, asking about that kind of stuff, about anything not directly related to the op, was off limits.
“I fell in love with Ana Beth when I was eight years old,” he told her. “We went to the same grade school. I thought she was the most beautiful, most lively, smiling girl in my class.”
“Your childhood sweetheart?” Sierra probed gently, hearing his low voice go warm with memories.
“Yeah. When I was in the sixth grade, I told her I was going to marry her after I joined the Army. She believed me. And so did I.” Mace moved his hand lightly across the stock of his weapon, good memories surfacing. “Then I was twenty and so was she. She became an Army wife. And she put up with me. She was a little thing; barely five foot six, thin as a rail and delicate.” His voice fell. “Ana Beth was fragile…”
Sierra said nothing, sensing that Kilmer had slipped into the past, recaptured by it. She understood. She had been through loving Jeb and losing him. Sensing the same bad vibe now in Mace’s voice, she remained silent. Mace lifted his hand, trailing his fingers slowly back and forth across the weapon on his lap, as if in deep thought.
“Ana Beth did a lot of good wherever she went.” He laughed a little. “She was a charity hound. Always doing something for others. Always taking care of those who had less than us. Who were suffering… She used to knit caps and mufflers for children for Christmas presents. She was a sewing queen and she loved to quilt. She was always making charity quilts for folks who lost their homes to fire, or flood or whatever. She made beautiful baby quilt blankets for newborns for the local hospital.”
“She sounds like a wonderful, caring person,” Sierra said quietly, feeling a terrible sadness settle around Mace. Almost literally, she could feel the heavy blanket of it embrace him. It brought tears to her eyes, and she blinked rapidly, forcing them back.
“She contracted breast cancer when she was twenty-five. I was on a four-month deployment to Afghanistan. She told my commander not to tell me. She knew it would distract me. That I’d want to be home to support her.” He shook his head, his voice ragged. “When I got off deployment, she was near death. I walked into our house, and she was there, on the couch, covered in some of her quilts she made, so cold. So cold…”
Sierra’s heart froze with anguish. Closing her eyes, she suddenly wanted to cry for him. There was nothing she could say. Nothing. Steeling herself, feeling the scabbed-over grief and loss of Jeb ripping off from its most tender edges, she wanted to reach out and slide her arms around him. Just hold and protect him. Against the pain he must have walked into. The shock of finding his wife like that. Thinking she was well but finding her dying.
Mace sighed heavily. “You know, she loved Scrabble. She taught me how to play it. I didn’t often have much time with her, always training, always getting called away on missions. But sometimes… sometimes, when I had a night at home, she’d plead with me to play. She’d put that damn game up on the dining room table, get it all set up, give me the word dictionary because she knew I’d need it,” and he laughed a little.
“Did she live?”
“No. There were—complications.” His hands stilled on the M-4 and he stared into the night. The words came out quietly, through barely held emotions. “Ana Beth got pregnant. Three months into it, and I didn’t know anything about it, the doctor found a tumor in her breast. It was the most aggressive kind of cancer. The doc told her to have an abortion so she could take the chemo and radiation to try and save her life. She refused. Ana Beth was born to have children. She loved them. And we’d been trying for some time to get her pregnant.” Mace shook his head. “She was trying to avoid chemo or radiation to get our baby viable so it could be taken from her and still live.”
