Tasha sighed as they entered their room. They had followed the Merc to a large compound outside Talish. They hadn’t stopped as the car turned into the walled, gated house and had simply driven past. A quick check with ‘The University’ confirmed it was Kangka’s estate.

Dan wanted to return and infiltrate the house to look for the Griffins, but she’d rejected that idea. The place was a fortress, and she didn’t want to risk the exposure until she was sure the Griffins were there. They would have only one chance to snatch the doctors. If they got it wrong, they would have tipped their hand and wouldn’t get another chance. She didn’t think the Griffins were there anyway. Too much risk. Kangka would want some distance between himself and the Griffins to maintain deniability in case something went wrong.

On the way back to their hotel, the guilt began to squeeze her heart again. When she was focused on the mission, she could keep the pain at bay, but at night, alone with her thoughts, her burden became almost unbearable.

They showered. Even the sight of Dan’s sculptured body as he removed his shirt couldn’t lift her mood. She claimed the bed as he dragged his chairs in front of the door. This was their third night in this room. If Kangka’s goons hadn’t broken down their door yet, they weren’t likely to, but she said nothing. It was probably Dan’s way to avoid touching her.

She sniffed, her nose stopped up from her silent weeping. She was coming apart. Even Roger’s death hadn’t hit her this hard. Maybe it was because there was a possibility what had happened in Russia wasn’t her fault, while this time there was no doubt.

She felt the bed move and spun with a gasp as she grabbed for her weapon hidden under the pillow.

“Easy,” Dan whispered, grabbing her hand to protect himself from being shot. “I didn’t mean to startle you.”

“What are you doing?”

“I heard you crying.”

“I’m sorry.”

“No, don’t be. Is it Derrick and Rich?” She nodded as she sniffed again. “Why are you tearing yourself up? I told you it wasn’t your fault, it was mine.”

“You tried to warn me, but—”

He placed his fingers against her lips. “Don’t.”

“I can’t get past it, Dan. I should have known.”

“How? How could you have known?”

“You knew.”

“I told you, I didn’t know either.”

“You suspected.”

He shook his head in the dimness. “No.”

She stared at him in confusion. “What do you mean, ‘no.’ If you didn’t suspect them, then why did you try to stop Rich?”

“It doesn’t matter.”

“It does matter. It matters to me. I’ve played it over a thousand times in my head, and I don’t know what I missed. What did you see, or hear, or suspect? Please, tell me.”

“Nothing. I didn’t see or hear anything.”

Again, she stared at him. “I don’t understand.”

“It doesn’t matter, Tasha. What matters—”

“It does matter. Do you know what I was doing when Derrick was killed? I was lying in my bed fingerfucking myself while I listened to him fucking that bitch. Maybe if I’d paid a little more attention instead of fucking around, they would still be alive.” He stared at her a moment, an emotion playing across his face she couldn’t read. “Please, I have to know. What did I miss?”

He sighed. “You didn’t miss anything. That’s what I keep telling you. You’re amazing. What you did in the Grand Orkut Imports office today was like magic. You were three steps ahead of me, and everyone else, from the beginning. If there was something to see with those women, you would have seen it.”

“So how did you know?”

“I didn’t,” he snarled, then softened. “I didn’t know. I just...” His voice trailed off.

She waited, sensing he was wrestling with himself.

“I’ve never told anyone this,” he finally said, his voice faint and his eyes downcast.

“You can tell me,” she whispered. “Nothing you say will ever leave this room. How did you know?”

“I didn’t, but…what happened to Rich and Derrick almost happened to me.”

“I don’t understand.”

“My last mission. I was sent to Mexico to extract the crew of a downed C-130.”

She nodded. “I saw it in your file.”

He looked at her with haunted eyes. “What you saw is a lie.”

“A lie?”

He nodded. “A lie. I lied in the debrief.”

Her blood ran cold. “What happened? Start at the beginning.”

He swallowed hard. “Last year, there was an earthquake in Mexico, remember?” She nodded but said nothing. “The U.S. sent a C-130 loaded with relief supplies. It was an all-female crew manning the plane. On the way back, the plane went down. Officially, it was engine trouble. In reality, it was taken down by the Mexican drug cartel. The U.S. didn’t want to publicly admit that some spic with a shoulder-fired missile could take down one of our planes, but I heard the radio traffic. The pilot was Major Gretchen Kork. She radioed that she saw the missile trail when the shit was hitting the fan.”

He stopped, but she didn’t say anything, letting him tell it in his own time. So far, his version matched with the account she’d read.

“She damned near saved that plane,” he continued. “Nobody knew for sure where they went down, but I was scrambled. We were racing the fucking drug cartel. By the time I arrived, they’d located the wreckage. It was in the middle of the godforsaken jungle. It was at least a three-day’s walk from the nearest road. We went in to get the crew out. When we arrived on scene, they had to lower me down on top of the fuselage because the surrounding jungle was so thick. I got inside. Major Kork and Sergeant Natalie Page, the loadmaster, were still alive. The co-pilot, Captain Melissa Chaney, was dead.”

He looked at her, his eyes far away, and he was clearly back in the jungle reliving the event. “The missile had taken off the wing between the number one and number two engines. It was amazing anyone was still alive. Chaney had been killed when a tree limb came through the glass and crushed her skull. Page had a broken leg, and Kork was beat all to shit, cut up from debris in the cockpit. But the fact that two of them had survived the missile and the crash was a testament to the skill of the flight crew.”

She nodded again, wondering where the lie came in. So far, his account was straight out of the debrief.

“I got Page in the basket and she was hauled up to the chopper. I was getting Gretchen—Major Kork—ready for evac when another missile took out the chopper. I saw it only a second or two before it hit. They never had a chance and the damn thing nearly fell on us. It was almost certainly taken down by the same people who took down the plane. Kork had managed to coax that bird well away from where she took the missile, so I knew they were coming, and they were close. If they reached us before we got help, we were dead. I made sure she could walk, and we got the fuck out of there.”

He paused as he watched her eyes. “We walked for five fucking days while the cartel looked for us. We were out of food, out of water, and were living off the land as much as we could. I gave Kork all the antibiotics I had, but the wound in her side was becoming infected. She was running a high fever, but she never gave up.” His eyes dropped. “She never gave up,” he repeated softly.

“We finally made Cacahuatal, a shithole of a town in the middle of the fucking jungle. She could barely walk, so I stashed her and went into a bar. There was no phone, no nothing.”

“That’s where you found Marina?”

He nodded. “I should have known there would be no fucking phone. Marina could speak a little English, and she told me there was no phone. I left and was trying to steal a truck when she showed up in one. She’d stolen the keys from someone at the bar. She said she would take us to Palenque, the nearest town with an airport, but we had to take her to the U.S. with us. I would have agreed to anything at that point. I loaded Gret…Major Kork into the truck. As we drove, Marina said she was the town whore, and she wanted to get away because the men were always beating her. She saw me as a way out. She knew the cartel was looking for us, but she thought I was the pilot of the downed plane. She didn’t realize until she saw Kork, and I explained to her that she was the pilot.”

He swallowed hard. Tasha could sense something was coming. So far, his story was exactly as she’d read it, but his face was beginning to twist with grief and his voice became more strained.

“It was only about sixty miles from Cacahuatal to Palenque, but it took us over two hours to get there. When we arrived, I sent Marina in to get a room at a motel. I gave her all the money I had on me, about a hundred bucks. It was dollars, but she made it work. Gretch…I mean Kork, was sleeping, so I carried her into the room.”

She noticed the deeper into the story he got, the more he wanted to call Major Kork, Gretchen. She guessed after five days in the jungle, dodging cartel thugs with guns, rank and protocol went out the window.

“While Marina went for food, I got on the phone and screamed for help. Command was surprised to hear from me. They thought everyone had been killed in the chopper crash. They’d sent in another rescue, but the wreckage had been picked clean.” He looked at her, his eyes welling with tears. “They dispatched a C-12 Huron for a medical evacuation. We had to stay put for a few hours and we’d be out of there.”

She hadn’t studied the report on the crash, but his story matched up with what she remembered. After a long moment of quiet, she prompted him. “That’s where you were ambushed?”

His lips thinned. “Yeah, but it didn’t go down like in the report.”

She felt a chill. “What happened?”

His breathing was shallow. “Marina came back with some food. I woke Gretchen up and she ate a little before she went back to sleep. It was a six-hour flight from the U.S. to Palenque and I hadn’t had a bath in days. I thought we were safe.” He paused. “I got in the shower…and Marina joined me.”

Tasha felt another chill. In the report, Dan had made no mention of the shower, only that three men had tried to take Major Kork, and she and Marina had been killed before he could stop them.

“Gretchen was in the next room, but we were in there, fucking our brains out, when the cartel showed up. I guess they threatened the clerk, and they got in with a key. I heard Gretchen shout, but when I tried to go to see what was up, Marina started screaming. She fought like a wildcat, but I clamped my hand over her mouth, and when the guy came running into the bathroom, I shoved her at him. He shot her, but it gave me enough time to get in under the gun. I got his gun and shot him. Two other guys were trying to drag Gretchen out of the room, but even as sick as she was, she fought tooth and nail. One guy took a shot at me, but the other shot Gretchen in the head. I got one of them, but the other got away.”

He looked down, his face incredibly sad. He didn’t continue, so she assumed the rest was probably as the report stated. He’d carried Major Kork to the truck, driven her to the airport, and when the plane arrived, he’d put her lifeless body on the plane himself, becoming violently agitated when they tried to take her body from him.

“The moment my feet touched the ground, she was my responsibility, and I let her down. Because I couldn’t keep my fucking cock in my pants, she’s dead. I swore then that I’d never let something like that cloud my judgment again.”

She nodded. He hadn’t known. In the bar, he hadn’t known, just as he’d said, but he remembered that day in Mexico. She could imagine how devastating it must have been to have gone through so much, to have gotten so close, and then through such a small error in judgement, have it all taken away.

“Dan, you didn’t know. How could you? Marina helped you. You couldn’t have known she would turn you in, that she was working for the cartel or, at the very least, tried to use you to her advantage.”

“I shouldn’t have trusted her so easily. Gretchen was in the next room, half-dead, and I was in the shower fucking the town whore. I couldn’t keep my cock in my pants for six hours. Six fucking hours, that’s all.”

She watched his eyes and could see the pain there. He’d blamed himself for Major Kork’s death for a year, carrying the burden of his guilt alone, and it was poisoning him.

“She fought so hard,” he said, his voice catching in his throat. “She never gave up. No matter what, she never gave up fighting to live. Even in the motel, she clawed and kicked, fighting for life to the bitter fucking end, and I got her killed.”

“If you’d been sitting in the room beside her, what could you have done? The men would have shot you the moment they entered the room.”

“I don’t know. Maybe nothing, but if I’d been on guard, I might have seen them coming. I could have been waiting inside the door and gotten a gun. I don’t know what I could have done, and I never will, because I was too busy shoving my cock into the bitch who turned us in.”

“Has it occurred to you that maybe she did that so you wouldn’t be able to fight back?”

He glared at her. “Of course I know that. That doesn’t change the fact I let it happen.”

She felt her heart go out to him. The Air Force Pararescue motto was These Things We Do, That Others May Live. They took their motto seriously, and he had obviously been devastated by his failure.

“In the bar, was it my fault that Derrick and Rich were killed?”

“No,” he said softly. “It was mine.”

“Why wasn’t it my fault?” she asked, her tone gentle.

“Because you couldn’t have known.”

“Just like you in Mexico?”

“That’s different. I was responsible for Gretchen. I knew we were in bandit country and they had been after us for days.”

“But you thought you were safe.”

“My first mistake.”

“Dan, not everything that goes wrong is your fault. I picked you for this team because I could see from the testing and your record you were perfect for this job. But sometimes bad shit happens to good people through no fault of your own.”

He said nothing as he stared at the floor. She turned his face toward her. “If Derrick and Rich aren’t my fault, then Major Kork can’t be your fault. You can’t have it both ways. I’ll be honest with you, I would have made all the same decisions you did. If I had been in the room with Major Kork, she would’ve still died because I probably wouldn’t have been unable to resist the urge to take a shower myself.”

He looked at her. “Maybe. But we were in there a lot longer than necessary to simply take a shower.”

She gave him a small shrug. “So? Maybe I would have stayed in there and let the water pour over me. Maybe I would have started a few minutes later and still been washing my hair. It doesn’t matter.”

She paused and realized she knew exactly how he felt. The situation, with only minor variations, had played out in Orkut as it had in Mexico. The only difference were the players. She turned his face toward her again.

“Listen to me. I know how you feel. I understand, I really do. Everything you just described, someone you were responsible for being killed. The no way of knowing. The being distracted by sex. It’s all the same, in Mexico and now. If Derrick and Rich aren’t my fault, then Mexico can’t be yours.”

He stared at her a long time. “If Mexico isn’t my fault, then what happened here can’t be yours.”

They held each other’s gaze for a long moment. “It’s hard to let go of the guilt, isn’t it?” she asked, he voice barely above a whisper.

“Very,” he replied just as softly.

“Maybe we can help each other?”

For the first time since Derrick and Rich were killed, his smile touched his eyes. “Maybe.”