Radclyffe - Firestorm

“Boss?”

“In the back,” Mallory’s voice called her.

Jac found her sitting at a scratched wooden desk pushed into the far back corner of the hangar. A bulletin board was nailed to the metal sheet siding above it, and neat stacks of paper sat in several black plastic trays along the back of the desk. A straight-back wooden chair was the only other furniture besides the swivel captain’s chair in which Mallory now sat. She half turned as Jac approached and gestured to the chair beside the desk. “Have a seat.”

Jac settled as comfortably as she could on the uncomfortable chair, crossed her left leg over her right knee, rested her hands on her thighs, and waited. The ball was in Mallory’s court.

Mallory tapped a pencil on the faded desk blotter, its green surface covered with notes—mostly map coordinates, weather information, telephone numbers. Jac wondered idly if Mallory had made all those notes when talking to dispatchers about fire locations. She looked from the tapping pencil into Mallory’s eyes. The green was denser now, shadowed with questions. Her tank wasn’t all that tight, but Jac had no problem conjuring a mental image of her breasts beneath the thin cotton. She swallowed, looked away.

“You want to tell me again what happened out there?” Mallory finally said.

That wasn’t the question Jac had expected. “Between us?”

Mallory’s expression never changed, but the green of her eyes smoldered to almost black. “Anything you and I talk about is always just between us.”

“Sorry,” Jac said. “Force of habit.”

“What do you mean?”

Jac shook her head. “It’s not important.”

“Why don’t you let me decide?”

“Most people asking questions are in the market to publicize the answers.”

“Reporters, you mean?”

Jac foundered in the conversation. Already the discussion had taken a direction she didn’t anticipate and didn’t really want to go. But she found herself going there anyhow. “Don’t you read the newspapers?”

Mallory smiled. “I know who you are, if that’s what you mean.”

“Really? Who am I?”

“I see what you mean,” Mallory said after a minute. “That was an asinine thing for me to say, wasn’t it? Let me rephrase. I know who the newspapers say you are. I know who your father is. I don’t know a damn thing about you.”

“Well then, you’re the first person I’ve ever met who feels that way.”

“Actually, I misspoke. I do know something about you. You’re a damn good runner. And you know something about helicopter evacuation. Why is that?”

Jac’s head started to spin. Mallory’s questions weren’t linear. The conversation wasn’t what she expected. Neither was Mallory James. “I was in Iraq. I’ve seen a lot of helicopter evacuations from some pretty tight spaces.”

“Really. What did you do there?”

“I disarmed explosives.”

Mallory flashed on all the news images and photos she’d seen of the horrors wrought by IEDs. She imagined defusing one, how vulnerable a person would be in the face of such massive destruction. Giving herself time to absorb the information, Mallory carefully set the pencil down in the center of the blotter, lining it up at perfect right angles to the edge. Jac wasn’t the first vet she’d met; in fact, it seemed that a higher percentage of hotshots and smokejumpers were veterans than in many other professions. Maybe because service was part of their blood. She knew female vets, women who’d been bloodied in combat, but she’d never met anyone who’d been an explosives tech before. She only knew what she’d read about them. She almost smiled at that—more secondhand info. No wonder Jac was used to being judged by something other than herself. “Why did you choose to do that?”

“I have steady hands.”

“I noticed when you were cutting sutures for me. Not even the slightest sign of a tremor.”

Jac laughed. “I wouldn’t have lasted very long out there if I had one.”

“You’re also really good at sidestepping questions.”

“Survival skills. Although I’m not quite so good at that as I am at defusing improvised explosive devices,” Jac said, bitterness lacing her voice.

“So what’s the answer? Are you going to tell me it’s because you don’t fear death or because you don’t care if you die?”

“Is this line of investigation germane to my position here, Captain James?”

“I think it is. It makes a huge difference to me whether I can trust you to take care of yourself out there, or if you’re going to do something wild and crazy and get yourself or someone else killed.”

“I don’t have a death wish,” Jac said.

“That’s not quite the same as not caring if you die, though, is it?” Mallory was pushing and didn’t care. She’d meant what she said about needing to know if she had a cowboy on the team. But she wanted to know about Jac—she wanted to know her.

“You’re getting awfully personal.”

“What we do, all of us here every day, is as personal as it gets. And you still haven’t answered the question.”

“I did it because I could,” Jac said, realizing she’d never really answered the question in her own mind before. The job was there, she knew she could do it, and she wanted to be alone when she worked. She took a breath, decided not to second-guess her answer, and that was new for her. From the time she was twelve or so, old enough to understand who her father was and what that meant for her, she’d stopped having spontaneous conversations. He was a public person, and by extension so was she. She’d quickly learned to think before she spoke. Weigh her answers. Judge the impact of what she said. She almost never said anything that she hadn’t mentally prescreened. After a while she didn’t feel anything she hadn’t examined, judged, assessed. Except with Annabel, and look where that got her. Here. Sitting in the hot seat across from Mallory James. She wanted to tell Mallory something of herself with complete and total freedom. She didn’t ask why.

“Plenty of guys get shot over there, but warfare medicine—it’s awesome. Most live. But the ones who die—most of the time they die in explosions. The IEDs are inhuman. The worst thing any of us have ever seen. Indiscriminate weapons designed for the greatest degree of destruction. Completely without honor. I hate them, and I wanted to be the one to take them out.”

“The one,” Mallory murmured. “You alone?”

“Yes,” Jac said instantly. “Just me and the device. One on one. As personal as it gets.”

“Some people would say that fire is personal,” Mallory murmured. “But out there, Jac, you can’t fight alone.”

“I know.”

“And I have to be able to trust you to remember that.”

“I know.”

“What happened out on the trail today?”

“Ray fell, I found him. I rendered emergency care and waited for backup.”

Mallory nodded. “And what’s the story you’re going to tell the rest of the team?”

“What I told Ray I would. It doesn’t matter to me if a couple of the guys think I screwed up. It matters to him. I don’t know why, I only know it matters. He’s a good guy, I like him.”

“Why didn’t you signal for a spotter? You must have seen them circling every few minutes. That ravine is tricky—even with guide ropes. Which you didn’t have.” Mallory spoke levelly, almost offhandedly, but her eyes were searching. “Why didn’t you do the smart thing—the prescribed thing—and wait for backup up on the trail?”

Jac suppressed a shudder, her skin vibrating as if Mallory were running her hands over her the way she had Ray out in the field—examining, studying, weighing and measuring. Measuring her. She was used to being judged, but this time she wanted the opinion to be based on who she really was, not an assumption.