believe it had been that long. He should, he acknowledged. A lot had changed in that time.
Including him. Maybe especially him.
He realized that he was unconsciously fingering the patch that covered the empty socket of what had been his right eye. He forced his fingers away from it, his lips tightening as he remembered how that loss had occurred.
Grace Chancellor and Afghanistan. Two items of unfinished—and very personal—business.
There weren’t many of either in his life these days. Other than the security consultation firm he’d started almost as soon as he resigned from the Agency, there was very little that touched him personally anymore. Both of those did.
Grace Chancellor and Afghanistan.
How well Griff knew him, he thought, his lips lifting in a smile of self-derision. And how cleverly he had chosen his weapons.
Landon hadn’t made many mistakes in the years he’d been an operative. In his line of work, he couldn’t afford them.
What Cabot had set before him this morning, like the food and water the ancient gods had set before Tantalus, was a chance to rectify the two most spectacular ones he’d made in his entire life. And to do it at Griff’s expense.
That wasn’t entirely true, he acknowledged, no matter what Dalton offered. Money was the least of what this journey would cost. And there was no guarantee that he would be able to do what the U.S. Special Forces in the area had not be able to accomplish and find the three Americans. That didn’t mean he wasn’t going to try.
If Grace was alive, he’d find her. And if she wasn’t… He took a deep breath, thinking about what that loss would mean.
“Hang on, Gracie,” he whispered, looking down on the area still marked by the attack of madmen. “The bastards haven’t won one yet. They damn sure aren’t going to win this time, either.”
Chapter Two
“Better?”
Mike Mitchell opened fever-bright eyes to look up into hers. His cracked lips lifted in a ghastly semblance of a smile. “Thanks,” he whispered.
Grace set down the cup of tepid water from which she’d just helped the pilot drink. She put her hand on his chest, wishing there was something else she could do to ease his suffering. Not that any complaints had crossed his lips in the weeks of their captivity.
Every day, however, she had watched a little more life slip out of those blue eyes. And every night she had listened to his labored breathing until she fell asleep, praying that she would still be able to hear it when she awoke.
“Try to get some rest,” she said inanely.
The grin widened before it became a grimace. Mitchell closed his eyes against the wave of pain, but when he opened them, he smiled at her again.
“I didn’t have anything much on my agenda for today.”
“That’s good,” she said, returning the smile, despite her fury at their captors.
Although she and Colonel Stern had begged for a doctor to see the pilot or for some kind of exchange to be made that would put him in the hands of either the coalition forces or the International Red Cross, their entreaties had been met with stony-eyed indifference. And with each day of their captivity, Mitchell had lost ground.
The infection that could have, at one time at least, been easily treated with antibiotics now ran rampant throughout his wasted body. If something didn’t change soon…
She turned away, trying to pretend that she’d been distracted by a noise outside the cave. In reality she needed a moment to regain control of her emotions. And she didn’t intend for Mike to see her tears.
Actually, she didn’t intend to shed any, she decided, fighting the burn at the back of her eyes. She had always despised crying women.
She hadn’t broken down when the Agency had “disciplined” her. Or in those first few terrifying hours after the crash. She wasn’t going to do it now. Not in front of a man who had kept his sense of humor and his will to live intact, despite the battle of survival he had been fighting—and was now losing.
She recognized that the causes of her emotional vulnerability ran even deeper than her anger over Mike Mitchell’s treatment. There was also the gnawing uncertainty about what was going to happen to them, as well as the frustration of having no control over whatever did.
Despite Stern’s insistence that they be afforded the same protections given prisoners of war—an insistence that had earned him the butt of a rifle in his stomach the last time he’d made it—the conditions under which they were kept had been both primitive and deliberately intimidating. Her immediate fear that she might be subject to sexual assault had thankfully not proven true.
Of course, neither had her hope that the men who held them would ransom them to some of the friendly forces in the area come to fruition. And again, frustratingly, she knew that those forces were very close.
For one thing, they had been moved three times in as many weeks. In the distance behind them they had heard both small-arms fire and the sounds of heavy bombardment. Not surprisingly, considering what she knew about the reliability of U.S. humint in the region, their captors seemed to have better information than whoever was searching for them.
Please God, let them still be searching for us…
Mitchell’s hand, almost skeletal now, closed over hers. She turned back, looking down at him.
He was lying on a rough pallet of rugs and blankets, which were all they’d been provided in the way of bedding. Despite the cold mountain nights, she and the colonel had given most of their share of those to keep Mitchell as warm and comfortable as possible, even as the relentless infection spread from the bullet hole in his thigh throughout his body.
She should have known what kind of treatment they were in for when one of the horsemen who had surrounded the downed chopper shot the pilot as he’d climbed out of the cockpit, his hands in the air. Stern’s aide had reacted by going for the weapon he’d already thrown down. He had died in the attempt.
“It’s going to be okay,” Mike said.
She smiled at him in response, refusing to comment on that ridiculous promise.
“You got somebody, Grace?”
“What?”
“Somebody who’s waiting for you back home.”
Mitchell had already shown her pictures of his wife and two children, a little girl almost three and a six-month-old baby boy. She couldn’t begin to imagine what these weeks must have been like for them. And for Mike, of course, thinking about what their life would be without him.
“Not really,” she said.
“You should have.”
“I guess I’ve been too busy with other things,” she said, a trace of defensiveness creeping into her voice.
“Lying here like this… Thinking about it
