The Way Home

Chapter 17

WHEN RABIA AWOKE IN THE middle of the night and her askar was not in his bed, she knew where she would find him. Bothered that she too often thought of him as her soldier but unable to think of him any other way, she walked quietly outside on bare feet and climbed the ladder to the roof.

As he often did, he lay on his back, a blanket beneath him, the stars overhead. His eyes were open, his thoughts as far away as the moon.

Two days had passed since the Taliban had invaded their home and he had hidden in the dark under the floor. He had not come out of the hole the same man who had gone in. He had become sullen and quiet. And she worried for him.

“Is this what Americans call the silent treatment?” She hoped to provoke him into talking to her.

He didn’t look at her. “Go back to bed, Rabia. You don’t want to be around me right now.”

If he were an Afghan man, she would have done as he had told her. But he was not. He was unlike any man she had ever known.

She sat down beside him. “Because you are troubled?”

When he said nothing, she gathered her courage and pushed again.

“Do you think the pain in your mind is more difficult to confront than the pain your body has endured? Do you think that the woman who cared for you through it all, who has survived years of war, is not strong enough to deal with what happened to you while you hid in that hole?” Concern for him made her bold. “Do you think I do not understand that it changed you?”

He closed his eyes. He looked so very weary. “What I think is that you almost died that day because of me. What I think is that I have to get out of here before they come back and do something worse than search your house.”

“This is not news. There has been risk from the beginning. Something else troubles you.”

He remained quiet for a long time. This time, she waited. She was good at waiting.

“I remembered,” he said, after what felt like an entire phase of the moon had passed. “I lay in that hole, in the dark, under the floor… and I remembered what happened to me. I remembered my name.”

Her heartbeat quickened. He blinked slowly, his gaze still on the sky. “Jeff. Jeffery Robert Albert.”

Jeffery. She rolled the name around in her mind. Then whispered it softly. “Jeffery.”

He reached for her hand. She entwined her fingers with his. “Say it again. Make it real.”

“Jeffery. Your name is Jeffery.”

The muscles in his throat constricted. “Eighteen-Delta, Special Operations Medical Sergeant, Albert, Jeffery Robert,” he said, as though he needed to hear it again and again and again. “Operational Detachment Alpha 364, 3rd Special Forces Group, C Company, 8th Battalion, 1st Special Forces Regiment.”

“I do not know what this means.” She only knew it was of major significance.

He pinched his eyes with his thumb and forefinger, and when he spoke again, he sounded very weary. “It means I’m Special Forces, Airborne. I’m a medical sergeant. It means my unit was deployed to Afghanistan four years ago. It means my convoy was attacked six months after we arrived. It means,” he said, finally looking at her, his eyes glassy with moisture, his voice gritty with anguish and anger, “that I’ve been missing in action for three and a half years.”

He looked away then, covered his eyes with his free hand, and roughly wiped away his tears. “Three and a half—” His voice broke, and he started again. “Three and a half years of my life are gone.”

She stared at their clasped hands, giving him his privacy and time to grieve and time to regain face. Giving herself time to digest this news.

She had thought, when she had found him, that perhaps he’d been captive for several months. She knew he had thought it, too. But this… three and a half years… this had to be devastating for him to accept.

Her heart felt as though it had started to bleed. For what he had endured. For what he had lost. War was loss on a grand scale. An abomination. Unending suffering. But one man’s loss in the midst of war was larger than life itself.

Below, the village slept, at peace in the night. Here on the roof, there was no peace, only troubled quiet and troubled hearts.

“Tell me, aska—” She stopped, corrected herself. “Tell me, Jeffery. Tell me what else you remember.”

He swallowed back emotions that she could not fathom enduring, and then, in a controlled voice, he started talking.

“We were on our way back from a patrol. We’d pulled off a major mission that put a roadblock in the supply lines running between Afghanistan and Pakistan. We’d confiscated a ton of documents, cell phones, and laptops and destroyed a huge supply depot. We were about to cross the border back into Afghanistan and home base when they hit us.”

He paused, and she knew that the horrors of his nightmares had finally broken free. “Our GMV rolled over an IED. Exploded before we could bail. The rig rolled.” He stopped. Squeezed her hand harder. “Simmons, Blanco—they were in the back. Dead. Their necks broken. Fisher was driving. He’d been hit. I told him to run. I’d cover him. They blew his head off.”

She clasped her other hand over his, enfolding it between both of hers.

“I don’t know how many came at us. Seemed like hundreds. My leg was broken in the rollover, so I couldn’t walk, let alone run. I took a bullet in the arm. Another in my body armor.”

He stopped. Drew a steadying breath. “So many dead. The vehicles all in flames. I knew I was going to die there. But I was going to kill as many as I could before they got me. I… I finally managed to crawl away from the GMV just before an RPG hit it. I don’t know.” He pressed the heel of his hand against his temple and rubbed. “The rest is still a little fuzzy. I must have gotten a hit in the head, knocked out. When I woke up, two of them were dragging me across the snow in the dark, my leg screaming in pain. I think I passed out again. The next thing I remember, I came to when they threw me in that hole.”

“The Taliban,” she said softly, hurting for him.

“No.” He finally looked at her. “Not the Taliban. The ISI.”

She shifted so she could see his face more clearly, wondered if his memory, so long in returning, was playing tricks. This could not be. “The Pakistan Intelligence Service? Why would they attack you? Pakistan is not at war with America.”

He made a bitter sound. “Aren’t they? Hell, we all know that Pakistan is in bed with the Taliban and Al-Qaeda. We tiptoe around it, keep it under wraps to maintain what little cooperation we get from our supposed ally. The truth is, there’s so much weapons commerce crossing over the border between the Pakis and Al-Qaeda, it’d make a Walmart look like a mom-and-pop store. That’s why the ISI attacked us,” he said, as if something had clicked into place. “We were putting a major crimp in their operations. They needed to stop us, or the Taliban would go to some other supplier for their guns. The Pakis were losing revenue because of us. So they dressed like Taliban to make certain no one could pin the attack on the ISI and let the Taliban take the blame.”

“Did they take you to Pakistan?”

“Yes. They kept me in a special place.”

A hole. A freaking black hole.

“Tell me,” she said urgently, and only then did he realize he was shaking.

“Most of the time, I was in isolation.” She didn’t need to know about the hole. About the two hundred fifty-five days he’d spent there in between the repeated interrogations, the beatings, the starvation.

“Sometimes I was in a cell.” Those were the good times. Often there was heat. Occasionally, he’d get meat. But any perk came with a price. “For two years, I was in the same encampment. Like a prison. Once they moved me south, I think. It’s still a blur.” For good reason. He was often unconscious from the beatings.

“How did you get away?”

There was the irony. “I don’t think they knew I’d picked up Pashto, which is what they mostly spoke. I overheard the guards talking one night about making a prisoner trade with the Taliban. The next morning, they loaded me and several Taliban prisoners into the back of a troop-transport truck. I knew then that this was my chance. It was the first time I was out of a cell or—” He stopped short of saying the hole.

“We didn’t travel far. They set up tents in the mountains—right where the foothills met the peaks. They kept me separate from the Taliban prisoners. Wasn’t long before the Taliban contingency arrived. I could hear through the tent walls that it was not a friendly meeting. There was a lot of tension. A lot. And a lot of heated negotiation. It finally got dark, and they were still talking. I knew it would be my only chance.

“It was surprisingly easy to take out the one guard they’d placed at the door of my tent. Guess they figured I was too weak and broken to be any threat. I dragged him inside, grabbed his gun, and snuck off. And I hobbled away as fast as I could go. After about an hour, I heard shouting and gunshots. I knew they were behind me. I tried to run faster. My leg gave out. I remember stumbling, falling, sliding down a cliff face—and that’s it.

“That must be when I hit my head… when I fell. I woke up totally disoriented, alone, not remembering anything. Dizzy as hell. I couldn’t move without throwing up or keeling over. But I started walking, stumbling, crawling… and that’s when you found me.”

He stopped again, wiped a hand over his face. “How can I remember this? How can I finally remember it so clearly, when—” He trailed off abruptly.

“When what, Jeffery?”

“When I don’t remember one thing about my life before the attack.”

The suffering for this man seemed to have no end. She did not know that she was crying until a tear dropped onto their bound hands.

Allah, help me. She had not meant to let it happen, had not even know it was happening, but she had come to feel too much for this brave, broken man whose ways she did not always understand but whose heart had touched her like no other.

She must leave him now before she brought dishonor to her father and her religion. She wanted too badly to offer him more comfort than was wise. She wanted to look too long upon his face, press her lips to his, and touch him in ways only a wife should touch her husband.

But then he whispered her name. And the need and the yearning in his eyes sent her heart beating wildly. They drowned out the voices of caution and conscience and constraint.

She lay down beside him on the roof below the stars and let him wrap her in his arms.

SHE WAS WARMTH and softness and a desperately needed constant in a world that felt like crumbling shale beneath his feet. He’d wanted his memory back. Now he had it—at least, part of it—and he’d been clinging to sanity ever since.

He buried his hands in her hair and kissed the top of her head when she laid her cheek against his chest. She was the one thing that held him together. She was the one thing that mattered in a moment that now seemed inevitable. She, who had given up so much for him, now offered the most selfless gift of all. And damn him for a selfish bastard, he was going to take it.

He knew what that made him, and still he took it. Couldn’t not take it as he ran his hand over the gentle curve of her hip, gripped the soft cloth of her nightgown, and slid it up to her waist—and died a little for the exquisite tactile sensation of his rough fingers stroking warm, pliant flesh.

For long, indulgent moments, he lost himself in the feel of her skin. In the tender kisses she pressed to his jaw. In the promise of her gentle hands that finally touched him as a lover.

Right, wrong, he couldn’t make himself care. He could only feel. For the first time since he’d climbed out of that hole in her kitchen, he quit thinking of the months of isolation in another hole—two hundred fifty-five days in that other hole—that had been both horror and haven because it provided sanctuary from the beatings and the mind games that had him begging them to do it. To just shoot him. Or hang him. Or poison him. Just do it, instead of standing him before a firing squad, or slipping a noose over his neck, or holding his head under water until he was all but drowned… day after day after day.

No more, no more, no more.

He would not think of that now. He was here now. He was with her now. He was safe now. And she, oh, God… she was a sweet, giving sanctuary that eclipsed egregious suffering, obliterated pain and despair, and, in this moment, made him feel new and relevant and whole.

Whispering his name like a prayer, knowing he needed to hear it, she knelt over him and lifted her gown over her head. Starlight and black night framed her slim shoulders and narrow waist, shadowed the lush flare of her hips. Moonlight kissed her breasts, and she shivered, her abdominal muscles clenching, her perfect dark nipples peaking. Her hair fell over her shoulders, silken and sweet-smelling and seductive.

She made him breathless, weightless in body and mind. She made him believe that in this moment, life was beautiful and good, as he crushed handfuls of her hair in his hands, then filled his palms with her breasts and indulged in the sweet mercy of such incredible softness.

“I need you in my mouth,” he whispered on a low groan, and pulled her slowly toward him. With his thumb and index finger framing her breast, he guided her nipple to his mouth and suckled.

Nothing tasted this good. Nothing responded so completely. Velvet-smooth, then diamond-hard. He groaned again and feasted, aware of another level of pleasure as she untied his trousers, opened them, and took him into her hands.

He arched his hips on a gasp and pressed his erection deeper into her touch, awash in her tremulous smile, her soft eyes, and the boldness with which she caressed him.

Too much. Too good. And still he needed more. He fit his hands around her waist and eased her on top of him. She melted over him like sacred oil, fragrant and priceless and healing, as she guided him inside her.