Lone Star Survivor. Colleen Thompson
leg. “Off the horse now. Gun!”
“No, Ian,” she said, recognizing the panic ripping through his voice, the glazed eyes seeing a time and place she knew was as real to him as this one. Clearly, he had tipped into a flashback, something she had witnessed so many times in clients. “It was only a reflection, I’ll bet, maybe some piece of trash blowing in the—”
“Gun, damn it!” This time when he lunged, he caught her belt from behind, and she screamed as he pulled her down. Her terror echoed with the horses’ whinnies as they bolted for the ravine’s entrance, the clatter of their hoofbeats followed by a shattering boom.
Lightning strike, she thought as Ian caught her in his strong arms and started dragging her toward the shaded hollow where the cattle had lain. She’d heard of bolts from the blue, even on the clearest days.
The second blast convinced her she was wrong, the loud plunk as the post Ian had been working on exploded. Someone was really shooting, firing on them here and now and not in Ian’s imagination. Had some out-of-season hunter mistaken them for game?
“No!” she shouted. “Don’t shoot at us! We’re down here!”
Ian clapped a hand over her mouth and ordered, “Quiet. Now,” through clenched teeth. One arm around her waist, he hauled her forward. Already knocked askew, her riding helmet fell as another shot echoed through the creek bottom. Grit spattered the back of her leg from where another bullet drilled the ground behind them, right where she’d been standing a half second earlier.
As her survival instincts kicked in, Andrea quit fighting Ian. Because whether or not this nightmare was rooted in his missing year inside the war zone, there was no denying it could kill them in the here and now.
* * *
His heart thundered in his chest, but Ian’s mind dropped into mission mode as he guided the civilian with him under branches and around rocks. Because the civilian was the mission, her safety paramount in his mind, no matter how confused he was to have Andrea here with him.
Hadn’t he left her behind in the peace and safety of Southern California? And hadn’t she left him, too, a memory slicing through the darkness like a shard of broken glass, saying that she wanted another kind of life, a life without his secrets? So it made no sense that he was half leading and half dragging her here across this shallow creek, in a place where he used to hide out when his old man got that dangerous look in his eyes. But with no time to stop and think it through, Ian accepted this bizarre tangle of the half-remembered like another of his convoluted nightmares.
He searched the deepest shadows, focused on finding the one spot where he knew Andrea would be safe. A few steps beyond the water, he pointed out a horizontal shelf of weathered rock that had been undercut by past flooding. Partly filled in by damp pebbles, it would be a tight squeeze on her hands and knees, but if she could wedge herself in that space, she would be well hidden from the person up top with what sounded like a rifle.
“Crawl under there, where he won’t see you.”
“Down there? In that hole, you mean?” Her eyes were huge with disbelief.
He nodded. “Back yourself in, and don’t come out, no matter what you hear or see.”
“What about you? There’s no room for both of—”
“Just do it, Andrea, and I’ll come back for you. I swear to you, I will.”
Their gazes locked, his blue with her hazel. And in that fraction of a second, some understanding passed between them. Face pale with terror, she blew out a shaky breath.
“You’d better,” she whispered, grabbing handfuls of his shirt, “because if you leave me out here all alone, I swear to you, Ian, I will... Hunt. You. Down.”
Dire as their situation was, he grinned at her bravado, then ducked his head to briefly touch his lips to hers.
Shock mingling with confusion on her beautiful face, she took two steps back and then crouched to do as he’d asked, crinkling her nose as she backed into the dank space. “There’d better not be spiders in here, especially those ones with the nasty, hairy legs.”
“You’ll be just fine,” he assured her, not wanting to mention that a scorpion encounter was a lot more likely.
Still able to see her eyes, he dragged a tree branch to disguise the opening and moved off without another word. Stooping to palm some stones, he hurled them farther downstream, setting off a clatter.
The sniper didn’t take the bait, probably wanting to get a visual before wasting another bullet. Or maybe he’d decided to cut his losses and get out, now that he had lost the element of surprise.
Whichever was the case, Ian zigzagged up the steep hillside, his progress as silent as the animals so often drawn here by the water. When he heard the deep thrum of an engine, he picked up his pace, not wanting to miss a glimpse at the SOB who’d tried to shoot them here, on his family’s spread.
Remembering his brother, Ian paused and pulled the phone out of his pocket—the phone that he had, thank God, at last remembered to both charge and bring along. But down in this damned ravine, it was showing zero bars—no service. He tried sending a quick text, but it just sat in the outbox.
Jamming the cell back in his pocket, he continued his climb. With every stop, he fought to hold on to his focus, but his mind kept slipping backward, toward a past that had the blue sky above him and the brush before him fading to the ink-stained silhouettes of buildings along a blackout-dark street, where he craned his neck to see a minaret against a star-strewn sky. The crescent-moon shape at its top marked it as a mosque. He breathed in the dense smells of a city, the cooking smoke tinged with exotic spices, the animal dung mixed with burning sandalwood. A reminder that life mingled with death here, death that waited to jump out of the shadows...
As the thrumming sound receded, he wondered, by returning here to Texas, had he brought death back with him? Were the gunmen who’d abducted him heading to the house to storm its walls?
He staggered to a stop, the realization ripping through him that he hadn’t lost his freedom in a remote desert ambush as he’d been told. Hadn’t been knocked unconscious and captured when an explosive device overturned his Hummer and killed one of his comrades. Hadn’t been in Iraq with his unit...because he hadn’t been a member of an army unit at all.
The knowledge doused him like ice water, the certainty that he’d never been what he’d told his family, friends and Andrea. So what the hell were you, if you weren’t really army? And how’d you get so screwed up you’d swallow your own cover story?
Not only that, but the army itself had backed the whole sham, sending officers to debrief him, military shrinks and doctors to poke around his head. Which had to mean they were operating under someone’s orders. Or more likely, some of them had really been CIA agents, trying to determine what he knew. And whether he was capable of accidentally spilling truths they preferred to remain hidden.
Was it possible they’d sent a team to guarantee his silence? Could one or more gunmen be waiting on the prairie above, knowing he must eventually emerge from cover?
Frozen to the marrow, he was blindsided by more fragments of the past, each more horrifying than the rest. A dark cell so cramped he couldn’t stand up, so rank that he could scarcely breathe. A pang of horror as the door clanked open and two pairs of rough hands dragged him out for yet another beating. A coil of loose chain in the filthy straw, dripping with his blood and buzzing with flies.
As he crouched among the bushes growing along the side of the ravine, he slowly became aware of the shifting of rock and the crunching of leaf litter, the thud of fast-approaching footsteps.
Footsteps of a new threat coming up behind him, the fate he’d let himself imagine he’d escaped.
* * *
Between Andrea’s cramped, uncomfortable position and the fear that at any moment, a killer would appear and shove a gun in her face, she was miserable