Page 2 of Between Here and the Horizon
Disobeying a direct order from a colonel was an offense worthy of court marshal. I ripped my headset from my ears and threw it to the ground, ignoring it. Ignoring the consequences. Another blood curdling scream reached me, and that was it. I was on my stomach, crawling into the mouth of hell.
My side pressed up against the frame of the window, and pain tore at me, sinking its teeth into my skin. Heat. The heat was overwhelming, so fierce and violent that there was no oxygen inside the truck. Only smoke and confusion. Only death.
“Oscar!” I called out, reaching with both hands, trying to find him. “Where are you, man?” The truck was only a six-guy transport, but the billowing, rolling clouds of black smoke hid everything. I went by touch until I heard him cry out again, weaker this time, voice riddled with agony. He was at the very rear of the truck. A few seconds was all I had. Any longer and I would either suffocate or burn up myself. My head was pounding, my lungs begging for clean air, and I could feel myself start to drift.
The journey to the back of the truck took an eternity. One hand over the other, I pulled myself around an upturned transport box, and jammed my body in between the narrow gap at the right hand side of the vehicle, reaching out, groping, searching, until I found what I was looking for. A leg. A foot, to be precise. I grabbed hold of it and pulled. An agonised yell filled the truck.
“Ahh, my leg. My leg. It’s fucked!”
“I know. I’m sorry, man. I can’t get you any other way.”I gritted my teeth, and I pulled. In any other situation it would have been a crime that I was handling an injured man this way. The clock was running down, though, and if causing more pain, causing even more damage meant the difference between one of my guys being injured or being dead, then I was going to do what I had to do.
I somehow managed to maneuverer myself so that I was over Oscar—I couldn’t even see his face, the smoke was so thick—and then I started shoving. Six hard pushes and I managed to drive him through the gap in the window frame, out onto the desert floor. His body was ripped away, pulled free by someone else, and then he was gone. I was almost too tired to heave myself free, but I scrounged up my last scrap of energy and I crawled forward, determined to make it out before the entire vehicle was enveloped. Halfway out, my fingers clawing in the dirt, my body lit up with pain. Indescribable. Unbearable. A pain so sharp and breathtaking that I couldn’t even cry out. It felt like something was ripping my body in two. I spun around and looked up to see a burning line of fuel pouring down on me, hitting my side, burning into me. I was on fire.
I kicked and jerked myself out of the truck, ripping at my jacket. Tearing at the material, trying to get it off. The fabric seemed to come away in my hands, and then I was shirtless in the cold, cold desert, rolling on the ground, trying to put the flames out.
The world went black. Someone threw something over me, and then hands were beating at my body, slapping and trying to roll me. A strangled gasp worked its way out of my mouth, but that’s all I could manage. The flames were out. The thick, heavy material that had been thrown over me was pulled back, and Crowe stood over me, face covered in soot and grease, eyes the size of dollar coins. I could barely see him properly. Barely hear the words coming out of his mouth.
Colonel Whitlock appeared next to him, and then the sky was filled with the beating thump of helicopter blades. They spoke for a second, and the thundering drum of the helo overhead dipped long enough for me to make out what Crowe said to Whitlock.
“He didn’t stop, sir. He didn’t stop until they were all out.”
Whitlock scowled. “I can see that, Specialist. He disobeyed a direct order in doing so, too.”
“He’ll be reprimanded?” Crowe asked. He was speaking as if I was no longer present; both of them were.
“No,” Whitlock said sternly. “Ironically, I think Captain Fletcher’s more likely to be honored than punished in this particular instance. Now get him on the chopper before I change my mind. The crazy bastard’s bleeding everywhere.”
CHAPTER TWO
The Law of Odds
I had been waiting for disaster to strike all my life.
It had seemed, for want of a more intelligent, rational explanation,inevitable.Ever since I was old enough to read the paper or tune into the evening news, I had been bombarded with people losing their loved ones in terrorist attacks, cars crashing and burning, trains derailing, bank robberies turned horribly wrong. Every day, some natural disaster or terrifying violence splintered the world in two. Everywhere you looked someone’s life was lying in ruins, irreparably damaged and unrecognizable.
I’d spent the last five years, since I moved out of my parents’ house in Manhattan Beach, California, wondering when it would be my time. When would the bomb go off onmybus? When wouldIget held up at knifepoint for my fourth generation iPhone? When wouldInot look where I was going and step out in front of a Mac truck?
It was a matter of playing an odds game, after all, and no matter how hard I tried to avoid thinking that way, it seemed unreasonable to assume that tragedy wouldn’t visit my doorstep at some point in my life. Until that time I was simply holding my breath, waiting. Perhaps it would happen tomorrow. More likely, it would happen today, as the plane I’d boarded to travel from one side of the country to another, all the way from L.A. to New York, crashed into the Hudson. It had already happened once in recent years. No reason why it wouldn’t happen again.
My stomach tumbled over itself as the plane pitched to one side, swinging dramatically to the left, circling wide over New York. Out of the window next to me, the city sprawled in every direction for as far as the eye could see, only coming to an abrupt halt in the distance where steel colored water ate up the horizon.
I was being stupid. I knew the plane wasn’t going to crash, but I couldn’t seem to convince myself that I was perfectly safe when we were hurtling through the air toward so much concrete and glass and metal.
“Miss Lang?” The woman sitting next to me smiled, patting my hand reassuringly. “I just wanted to wish you luck again. I’m sure you’ll do just fine, y’know. These things, these job interviews—” She waved her hand dismissively. “They’re never as scary as you assume they’re gonna be. And you being such a lovely, charming girl and all? I’m sure everything’s going to work out just fine.” She hadn’t stopped talking the entire six-hour flight. I’d had the full rundown, gotten most of her life story in between the marginally unpleasant in-flight meal that came around somewhere over Colorado and the lone glass of gin and tonic I threw back somewhere closer to Indiana: her name was Margie Fenech, fifty-eight years old, and she had three grown sons, all of whom were now married, but boy if they weren’t any one of them would have just loved to date me. She’d been patting my hand and touching my arm like we were old friends for hours now, and to be honest I hadn’t minded. Not one bit. The contact, if anything, had been reassuring.
There were breaks in between her constant chattering, where she’d asked me questions about myself and I felt obliged to respond in kind. She’d easily managed to wheedle out of me my purpose for visiting New York in the middle of the week. She knew all about my parents’ struggling restaurant back in the South Bay. I’d told her of the illusive Ronan Fletcher, about whom I knew a few sporadic facts: he was ex-military, the recipient of the Purple Heart, so obviously a bit of a badass. His wife had died last year, leaving him with two young children to care for. And his personal net worth was pretty up there, somewhere close to the billion-dollar mark. Margie also knew that I hated flying, and she knew that I had no stomach for turbulence; in her own way I supposed she was trying to distract me from the abrupt angle to the ground the plane had adopted now that it was coming in for its final approach to land.
“Yes. Yes, I’m sure it’ll be okay. Has to be, right?” I said, flashing a brief, watery smile in her direction.
“Oh sure, sweetheart. If you take care of those little kiddies for six whole months, think about all the money you can save to help out your parents. You said it yourself. You won’t have any expenses. And you won’t know anyone in the city, so you won’t be out wasting your money every night of the week like some youngsters are prone to do.”
I objected to being called a “youngster” on a very deep level. I was twenty-eight years old, past the point in my life where I was out partying and frittering away my money every weekend. I’d been an elementary school teacher for the past five years, paying my bills, saving fifteen percent of my income religiously every paycheck, squirrelling away my funds in order to buy a house. I thought those were all very grownup things to have been doing for such a long time. I’d still have been doing them if the public school I’d been working for hadn’t had to close down due to insufficient government funding, too. I lost my job along with the rest of the school faculty four months ago, around about the same time Mom and Dad pulled me aside and told me, embarrassedly, that the restaurant was going under. They hadn’t asked for help, but I’d seen that they’d needed it. Needed it badly. So there went my savings. All of it. Now I had no more money saved to give them, and no job to make any more, which was how I found myself on this plane next to Margie, on my way to interview for a glorified babysitting job on the other side of the country.
I didn’t know how it had come to this. I should have been able to find another teaching job, but it was the middle of the school year and all positions had been filled. Support teaching was fine, but it was also sporadic and unreliable and I needed a steady income to make sure I could keep Mom and Dad afloat. When the agency I signed up with called and told me about Ronan Fletcher and his two young children, I hadn’t had much of a choice but agree to accept the all-expenses paid trip across the States to meet with this strange, wealthy individual and find out what he’s looking for.
“How old are the children again?” Margie asked. My arm got a squeeze this time.
“I’m not sure. I think the file said five and seven.”
