A shadow fell across her face and a blocky form filled the doorway. “Yo, Deuce—you gonna grab some chow?”

“Hey, Grif. You go ahead.” Max had told the corpsman a thousand times to call her Max, but the closest he could get to ignoring her rank was the nickname she’d gotten the first time she’d set foot on the sand. Lieutenant Commander Max de Milles, US Navy Medical Corps. MDM, MD fast became MD2 and from there just plain Deuce.

“You sure?”

She could hear his frown, although his face was lost to shadow. “Yeah, I’m good. Just going to catch some sleep before my next duty shift.”

“Won’t be long before you can do that with both eyes closed instead of just one,” he said. “When’s your ride out?”

“End of the week.” She tried to sound casual, like it didn’t really matter, but she hated to even talk about the end of this tour. She’d always been a little superstitious—most surgeons were, but war had a way of honing everything down to the sharp, bright core, and superstition had become a religion. She’d learned pretty quickly on her first tour that talking about something was a sure way to jinx it. Or worse, bring your nightmares to life. Everyone knew the consequences of breaking the unwritten rules: never discuss the danger of going outside the wire, never brag about the girl waiting back home, never count the days until end of tour. If you did, you might mistake that buried IED for a rock, or log on to the Dear John email, or get the last-minute change in your separation orders.

“Man,” Grif sighed. “A few weeks on a ship and a day’s flight—you’ll be home before Labor Day.”

“You won’t be far behind me.” She didn’t want to make small talk. She didn’t want to hear about Ken Griffin’s high-school-sweetheart-now-wife or his three kids back in Kansas City, or how he was going back to his job as an EMT. She didn’t want to imagine him with his family or hear about his dreams—not when all that could end in a millisecond. After tending countless troops with shattered bones and battered bodies and devastated lives, she’d finally managed to wall herself off from the human beings who depended upon her. Her brain and hands functioned mechanically to fix their torn flesh as efficiently as ever, but her emotions had disconnected. When she failed, when she lost one, she no longer thought about the suffering of the husband or wife or kids back home. She just moved on. Until she fell asleep.

Grif grinned the soft, loopy grin he got when talking about his family. “Yep—maybe I’ll bring Laurie and the kids to New York City and look you up.”

“Sure,” Max said. Just shut up. Just…don’t say any more. Don’t you know it only takes a second, one misstep, to change everything forever?

“Right then.” His tone held a little uncertainty, a little concern. Grif was worse than a girl sometimes—his feelings played across his face like images on a marquee in Times Square. He worried and fretted and most of his anxiety was directed at her. Not because she was a girl, but because she never unloaded. Never got drunk and trashed her tent, never shot off her mouth about the fucking Taliban, never joined in movie night and hooted at the lousy porn, even though plenty of the female troops did. She burned inside like a boiler about to blow at the seams. She knew it and so did he. What he didn’t know about were the nights she walked outside the wire until the lights of the FOB faded and there was just her and her constant companion, death. Or how she sat in the sand in the still, dark desert with her bottle and watched the stars revolve overhead and dared the gods of war to come and get her. None ever did.

No one knew. No one ever would.

“I’ll email you my number,” Max lied. “You give me a call and we’ll meet for dinner.”

“Awesome. ’Night, Deuce.”

“’Night.” Max waited until he moved away, leaving a patch of black sky and a haze of dust in his wake, and reached for the bottle.

*

Juba jungle, Somalia

The tent flap twitched aside and Amina peered in. “A Skype request came through for you to call back soonest.”

Rachel frowned, closed her laptop, and tucked it under her arm. She wasn’t scheduled to use the camp’s satellite hookup and wasn’t expecting any communication from Red Cross headquarters. She joined the dark-haired interpreter, who had started out as her liaison with the Somali Red Crescent Society and had soon become a friend, on the walk through camp to the base station. “Who was it, do you know?”

“It was from America. A pleasant blond woman requested we have you call. She did not say why. Only that you’re to use official channels.”

“Oh.” Rachel was glad the weak illumination from the solar lights strung at intervals along the perimeter of the encampment hid her blush. She hated having attention drawn to her special status, one she tried very hard to downplay if not erase. Blending in at the field outpost with Somalis from the Red Crescent Society, the multinational delegates from the Red Cross, and the French medical team from Doctors Without Borders would have been a lot simpler if she didn’t have special diplomatic status on top of being one of the few Americans. “I’m sorry I’ll be using up someone else’s airtime.”

“No one here has anyone at home who can afford to have Internet, or if they do, they’re too busy to use it.”

Amina’s smile lightened her voice, and the affection in her nut-brown eyes and the teasing expression on her elegant face showed even in the almost-dark. Rachel was thankful for the hundredth time she’d found a friend who didn’t care about her family or her status. “I thought you said your fiancé was a techie.”

“He is, and he spends all his waking hours working with or playing on his computers—not Skyping me.”

“Then he’s crazy.”

Amina slipped her arm through Rachel’s. “Something tells me you could teach him how a betrothed should act.”

Rachel laughed. Amina had been educated in England and was far worldlier than the other Somali women on the Red Crescent relief team, but she doubted Amina would have made the comment if she’d known Rachel’s preference for partners. The subject had never come up—why would it out here in the jungle where there were so many more important things to think about, like how to stem the measles epidemic that was devastating the nomadic populations, or how to get food and shelter to the displaced herders and farmers in the wake of the famine and devastation brought on by recent tropical storms, widespread flooding, and attacks from marauding rebels.

Anyone’s sex life or, in her case, lack thereof, was way down on the list of pressing topics. When she and Amina spoke of personal things, she simply said she had no one waiting at home. Technically true. She doubted Christie was pining away and would have plenty of women to entertain her among her rich and powerful friends. Of course, to be fair, Rachel had told Christie not to wait for her, and although Christie had been gracious enough to protest, she was sure Christie had moved on as soon she’d left for Mogadishu. At least she hoped she had.

If the circumstances had been reversed, Rachel would have done the same. She’d dated Christie Benedict exclusively for six months because she found Christie’s company preferable to the alternatives. Women who moved in her family’s circles—or more specifically her father’s—rapidly lost interest when they discovered she had no desire to swim in the shark-infested waters of Capitol Hill or, worse, pretended they didn’t care while subtly urging her to use her influence to further their personal agendas. At least Christie had her own access to influence and power. She was beautiful, cultured, and good in bed. She should have made a perfect partner, but even in their most intimate moments, Rachel never felt a spark. Not a flicker of true desire, let alone passion. She’d observed her parents’ perfectly serviceable marriage for twenty-five years—far longer than needed to recognize the signs of a union sealed not by love and passion, but by mutual convenience. Her father needed a wife to complete his image, and her mother needed a husband to fulfill her desire for family and status. They probably even loved each other, in some way, but not in the way she wanted for herself. Not with a fire that burned in their hearts. So leaving Christie had been easy and a secret relief. No doubt Christie felt the same.

“I’m sure you can handle whatever lessons he might need,” Rachel said as they neared the headquarters tent, the largest in the encampment other than the huge hospital tent. The smaller two-person sleeping tents ringed the flat central area where they took their meals and met with villagers and nomads who ventured into the camp for medical care or other assistance. In recent weeks, the stream of Somalis in need of aid had grown into a river of sick, injured, and starving people.

Amina sighed. “He does not like me doing this work, but I feel I must.” She swept an arm toward the dense jungle, rapidly darkening into a solid wall of blackness. Out there somewhere, thousands of men, women, and children were homeless without food or basic resources. “Who else will help them if not us?”

“We’re here and we won’t leave them.” Rachel squeezed Amina’s arm. “When you tell him how bad it is out here and how important this work is, he’ll understand.”

“I hope so.” In the light slanting through the netting covering the door of the tent, Amina’s face brightened. “But you’re right. We won’t abandon them.”

“No,” Rachel said, lifting the netting aside, “we won’t.”

“Do you want me to wait and walk back with you?” Amina asked.

“No, I’m fine.” Rachel wasn’t worried about being alone in the camp—she knew all the team members, and despite constant reports of armed rebels in the surrounding jungle, none had ever been spotted by the guards posted around the encampment. “Get some sleep. I’ll see you at breakfast.”

“Good night then,” Amina said and slipped into the night.

Rachel crossed the sparsely furnished sixty-foot square tent to the trio of folding tables that made up the communications center—a few laptop computers, a satellite radio hookup, a shortwave radio for communicating with the ATVs, and three metal camp chairs stationed in a snaggletoothed row. The sidewalls were high enough to accommodate her five feet ten inches without her having to stoop. Squares of netting formed windows at regular intervals and allowed enough air to circulate to counteract the faintly musty smell of well-used canvas. The chairs were empty, as was the rest of the admin center. She was likely the last one up and about other than the sentries on the perimeter and the medical personnel in the hospital tent. Someone was on duty there around the clock.

Satisfied she was alone, Rachel settled onto a narrow metal chair, plugged her secure laptop into the outlet in the generator under the table, and connected to the sat line. The signal strength was good for once. Low cloud cover. She hurriedly brought up the scrambled video link and typed in her password.

The screen flickered, and a few seconds later her father’s face rippled into view and settled into the familiar lines of his craggily handsome face, thick dark leonine hair, and bristling brows. He wasn’t at the office—no seal preceded his connection. That might not mean anything—he often called her at odd hours from some place he was traveling. She didn’t know his itinerary. Or he could be calling from an unofficial location because he didn’t want their conversation on record. She’d long ago ceased asking or wondering.

“Rachel,” he said in his deep baritone.

“Hi, Dad.” She hoped she didn’t sound as wary as she felt. A call from her father was rare. Usually any contact came from his assistant, and those messages were relayed through Red Cross headquarters in Geneva or the local counterpart in Mogadishu. In the two months she’d been in-country, she’d heard from him once. “Is Mother all right?”

“Your mother is busy with a fundraiser at the museum at the moment and perfectly well. This concerns you, and I’ll be brief. I’d appreciate it if you’d hear me out before arguing.”

Rachel’s chest tightened. So it would be that way, would it? Her father preempting any discussion with an order. That used to work when she was fifteen, but she wasn’t fifteen any longer. They didn’t have much time for the call, and rather than protest and waste more of it, she just nodded.

“Your location is no longer secure. A team is flying in to evacuate you before morning.”

“What? What kind of team? From where?”

Her father sighed audibly. “Navy personnel from Lemonnier. The details aren’t important.”

Rachel stared at the image of her father, flattened and faded by distance and time. His eyes were still easy to read—hard and certain and unswayable. Some theorized he would be president one day. He would probably be tremendous in the role, but she didn’t even want to imagine what that would mean for her. “Why?”