Free Fall

Carefully, the boy tossed away the weapon and raised his arms in the air, the rising sun swelling behind him. Wind from the rotor blades whipped his too large khakis and T-shirt. His broad forehead was furrowed, his hair buzzed short. He was skinny, but it was tough to tell if that was from hunger or just teenage lankiness.

It all happened so fast, not more than five or six seconds, and in that time, any of them could have shot the boy. Or given the way the kid handled the rifle, he could have killed them in their hesitation. What the hell were they supposed to do with him now?

Stella approached him with the weapon still drawn, both equal in height. “Go back into the trees, away from the aircraft.”

Jose shoved the student onto Bubbles and followed her, scanning the trees. “Stella, we need to leave.”

The boy took a step toward her, hands still in the air. “Let me come with you,” he said in heavily accented English. “Please, ma’am, take me with you. Do not leave me here. They will kill me.”

Bubbles barked, “We gotta go.”

“No!” The kid lurched forward. “I know things, important things. I will tell you.”

Anyone could say that, but if what he said was true… Shit. They couldn’t stand around here chitchatting. “The boy comes with us. We don’t have time to sort it out now. We’ll search him for explosives and weapons and if he’s clean, cuff him and load him up.”

The boy didn’t even hesitate. He thrust out his wrists. Jose took the battered rifle, then patted him down, finding no explosives.

Bubbles stepped into the void and pulled out a set of plastic cuffs. He zipped the kid’s wrists tight. “Let’s bounce.”

Jose escorted the kid, leaving Bubbles and Stella to haul the student the rest of the way to the waiting aircraft. The crew chief inside the CV-22 reached out to steady each passenger up the back ramp and into the belly of the craft. Webbed seating stretched along either side, metal beams and cables lining the cargo hold. Jose strapped in the kid straight off, not trusting the teen, not trusting anyone. Especially when Stella was involved.

He didn’t give ten damns right now how much professional training she had. This was his rescue. His gig. And he wasn’t lowering his guard for an instant until he had her safely back at base.

The back load ramp groaned as it closed, sealing them inside with the crew chief and flight engineer. Jose dropped into a seat and strapped in beside Stella just as the CV-22 lifted off. Still, she had his gun trained on the kid.

Could she do it? Shoot a teenager?

Their time together hadn’t involved work, not after the initial meet-up in the Gulf of Aden. They’d just been two people dating, getting to know each other. He hadn’t seen her on the job, and he sure as hell hadn’t seen a woman who could draw down on a teen.

Had her nerve-wracking time as a hostage messed with her head? Maybe he shouldn’t have given her the gun after all. He closed his hand over hers, slipping the weapon from her grip, and she didn’t even protest. But then perhaps she was thinking like an undercover agent after all, trying not to draw attention to her training.

Although her standoff with the kid a few minutes ago had been mighty damn official.

The engines groaned as they shifted, pointing the rotors forward. The CV-22 accelerated, speeding forward at double the pace of a helicopter. They were that much closer to freedom.

Completely free for her to walk away from him.

He blinked the fog of denial clear from his eyes and scoured the hollow inside of the aircraft. Almost as hollow as he felt.

Sutton pointed at the kid, shouting over the roar of the engines. “You were with them, the ones who held us at the compound.”

Jose looked fast at Stella. Had she known that too from the second she saw the kid? If so, no wonder she’d drawn a weapon. And no wonder she hadn’t wanted to let the boy go.

The teen held up his cuffed hands, fingers splaying in some kind of universal pleading gesture. “They made me. I didn’t have any choice. Until now. I came to you.”

Sutton turned wild, scared eyes to Jose. “Are you just going to believe what he says?”

“Doesn’t matter,” Jose answered. “He’s in custody. We’ll sort it out later.”

So far they’d managed to keep her real identity from Sutton, although the student had been eyeing them suspiciously since realizing they had once dated.

The way they’d worked together to get to this point had been so damn smooth, even when they’d been derailed by the land mine. Why the hell couldn’t she see how good they’d been together? He’d wanted her to just accept him as he was, a great big flawed human being who was doing the best he could, one day at a time. He could already hear her answer of how he should be, what he could be—a father. God, she’d even suggested he go to medical school.

With her sitting so close, he found himself thinking about her tearful, angry request during their last fight. Really thinking, even though it made his gut knot. The engine slowed again, jerking as the engines shifted upward like a helicopter again. Landing. Time to think was over.

Before he could gather his scrambled thoughts, the back hatch opened again. The bright sun swelled inside, stinging his eyes. He blinked, seeing the hangar that held their command center, the CIA dudes and SEALs waiting. He was back where he started.

Except now the welcoming crew included more than the CIA dudes and the SEALs. His PJ team stood with them—Brick, Data, and Fang out front.

And in that moment, Jose was the thirteen-year-old kid again, sitting in front of the TV watching an Air Force recruiting commercial. He saw what had gotten him out of his screwed-up home, away from his family. He saw what had pulled him up again after he’d surrendered to the family legacy and become an alcoholic.

And he knew without question there wasn’t a middle ground for him with Stella. All he had was this rapidly closing window of time with her.

***

Stella watched the clock as the somewhat nerdy-looking Mr. Brown questioned the teenage boy, while hard-ass Mr. Smith observed from a corner. Of course, the geek thing was Brown’s act. His specialty? Martial arts, anything from Krav Maga to a black belt in karate. His unassuming appearance—five foot seven, wiry, and wearing glasses he didn’t need—had caught more than one person off guard in the field.

Would it work with the teenager?

They’d been placed in the small office in the hangar, a ten-by-ten coffee break area now being used as an interrogation room. She would be debriefed later. But for now—so far as the kid knew—she was just a freed prisoner who’d identified him as one of her captors and was listening in to verify what he said.

The second she’d seen him charging toward the CV-22, she’d recognized him. She’d noticed the kid a couple of times. Every person and every second of her captivity was catalogued in her photographic memory. The teenager had looked a helluva lot more fearsome at the compound, holding a gun and guarding his corner of the camp.

When she’d seen him running toward her, her gut had cramped with the fear she’d barely let herself feel while she was held captive. And before she could think, her instincts as a field agent went into high gear and she had Jose’s gun in her hands.

The whole ride back to base, she’d felt Jose’s eyes on her, felt his questions.

Felt the draw to be with him.

But until she had a few answers of her own, she couldn’t risk even talking to Jose. Sorting out the tangled mess of emotions inside of her would be tough enough on a calm day.

Sorting through them right now with an interrogation to get through was impossible. So the best thing she could do? Finish this interview with the teenager as quickly as possible so she could use what little time she had left with Jose to find some closure. She couldn’t spend the rest of her life feeling like her heart was cut out of her chest every time something reminded her of him.

The teen—he called himself Ajaya—cupped a canned cola with shaking hands and looked everywhere but into anyone’s eyes. “I lost my parents in an uprising when I was ten. I was sent to a school for orphans. The people who took me, they target boys like me, ones with no family.”

Mr. Brown didn’t even glance up from his iPad tablet as the kid poured out the heart-tugging story. “You speak English well. You must know the odds tell me that’s unusual for a child in your circumstances.”

“I had very good teachers at the orphan school.” He took a slurp of his drink. “I had hopes of working at the embassy. Of traveling. I did not expect to travel this way. I did not go with those men by choice.”

“How did they take you?” Still, the CIA agent didn’t show even a hint of sympathy, just total absorption in recording the information.

Mr. Brown played the distracted academic well. Meanwhile, Mr. Smith crossed his arms and tucked himself more tightly in the corner, watching, listening for the least hint of a lie. And that was also why she’d been allowed to listen in. She’d been in there. She had access to more of what went on. The teen’s eyes kept flicking to her, as if questioning why she was here, but he was wise enough not to ask.

Ajaya’s throat moved with another long swallow, his coffee-dark eyes deep wells of fear. “They pretended to be maintenance people there to fix the electricity. They made me unconscious and took me away. Next I woke up in the back of their van. But they did not work alone. They had help.”

Finally, Mr. Smith straightened, weathered creases in his face digging deeper as he frowned and looked directly into the young man’s eyes. “Help? From who?”

“From one of my teachers at the orphan school where I lived.”

***

Annie Johnson closed and locked the door to her classroom.

Most people lived for the end of the workday. Not her. She only came alive during those eight hours she spent at her desk and in front of the board—with her students. But today had been especially rough, with her eyes drawn back to those two empty desks, knowing more of her students had been snatched away by pirates and there wasn’t a damn thing anyone could do about it.

She swept the cloth up over her head and started for the door, fighting back the frustration. The hallway here at the orphan school didn’t change year after year. Not really. The same bulletin boards, just different artwork and poems, same teenage themes.

Same threats.

Dropping her keys into her pocket, Annie hitched her book satchel over her shoulder and started down the dimly lit hallway. She’d come here to teach believing that she was smarter than the rest of the people on staff. Beyond her two advanced degrees, she’d traveled the world.

How arrogant she’d been.

In over a decade at the school she’d learned so much more from these kids, children who’d seen a lifetime of loss and pain before they reached eighteen. She wanted to save them all but had come to accept no one person could carry that off.

However, for the hour or two they each spent in her class every day, she could give them an escape. She could transport them to another world when she taught literature. That’s how she lived her life these days, one hour at a time. Her dreams came in smaller pockets of time rather than grandiose plans to save the world.

She stepped out into the fading sun, the dusty wind stirring her skirt around her calves. The teachers’ quarters were a short walk away, a dorm-like setup where each staff member had a two-room efficiency apartment. Her dreams were definitely more scaled down these days.

She rounded the corner of the clay building—and slammed into another wall. Or rather she slammed into a person. A man, one of her fellow teachers.

“Sam,” she gasped. “You startled me.”

Samir Al-Shennawi had moved here from Egypt a year ago to teach history. And from day one, he hadn’t hidden his interest in her.

“Annie,” he answered, not budging. “I’ve come to walk you to your quarters. You should not be out alone.”