Shadow Hand Page 4

  “No disagreement there, except…” Cleo sank onto the bench behind them, looking like she was envisioning some grim possibilities. Ash sat too, her head drooping into her hands. So much for cockiness. She wished Cleo hadn’t shot down her good mood, but knew they had to face things squarely.

  “I was just wondering,” Cleo said after a while. “You moved me away from the explosion. Could you move yourself like that? I mean, if…”

  Ash raised her head. “You mean if I were restrained somehow? In prison? Or worse?”

  “Right.” Then Cleo went on, clearly trying to divert her, “Hey, how about we experiment now? I’ll try to restrain you, and you see if you can get away without a physical struggle.”

  “You’ll do anything to get your arms around me, won’t you?” The mounting desire that had been derailed by the momentary intruder came surging back.

  “Absolutely,” Cleo said, and didn’t say more because then, snoopers be damned, their arms wrapped tightly around each other, no brittleness at all in their eager bodies, and their mouths got too occupied savoring whatever skin was within reach to bother with words. Ash nearly managed to subdue the fear that this might be the very last time she’d ever have a chance to kiss Cleo, and hold her, and be held.

  They’d paused for breath by the time they heard the approach of people, maybe really coming, this time, to use the range. All at once Ash was three feet from Cleo and aiming toward a target, revolver in hand. She thought for a moment that she had moved herself away until she remembered what their relative positions had been. She’d moved Cleo away from her instead. She glanced sideways, gave a subtle shake of her head, and shrugged. One question, at least, answered; she couldn’t use her power to move herself. Not yet, anyway. It didn’t much matter as long as she could move an attacker away, but prison walls could be a problem.

  A few more practice shots to make things look normal, and then they left, walking slowly.

  “What are you going to do when this hotshot specialist gets here?”

  “Get out of here as fast as I can.”

  Cleo must have suspected that already, but she looked as though hearing it was a punch to the gut.

  “I can’t do it on my own,” Ash went on, “out here in the middle of nowhere. He may even arrive today. I’ll just say as little as possible, like, ‘I don’t know what happened, everything was a blur. Maybe it was one of those things you hear about people doing under extreme stress. Maybe it really was some super-strong explosive we’ve never heard of’—you know the kind of thing. And if I have to, I’ll pretend to go along with whatever they want, whatever tests they have in mind, and learn all I can from them. If he’s flying in, chances are he’ll need to fly me out to whatever headquarters they have for things like this. Who knows, they might even want to use me for some humanitarian cause that I can’t refuse, but if not, I’ll take off before they can get much of anything going.”

  There was another possibility she hadn’t mentioned. “They might want to talk to me, too,” Cleo said, “as a witness. Or something. From what Corporal Jones saw, they might even think it was me doing some fancy mechanical tricks.”

  “But it wasn’t. You can’t take the rap for me, any of it. And you can’t outright lie to them.”

  “Wanna bet? I’m good at it. I won’t tell them anything about what happened in the wadi. I’ll just say pretty much what you said you’ll say. ‘All a blur, don’t understand, extreme stress, yadda yadda yadda.’” Cleo looked behind them, then all around. “I’m surprised they aren’t keeping us apart so we won’t collaborate on what to say.”

  “No surprise to me. We’re being watched. Those two at the range? One of ’em is a file clerk at Headquarters. Look, she’s just walking behind that tent over there. Mighty short shooting practice. I’ll bet she never willingly touched a gun in her life.”

  Cleo began to look over that way, then suddenly, intently, stared into the too-bright sky. A few seconds later, Ash caught the pulsating soundwaves, too. A chopper. And another one quite a bit farther away.

  “Could that be your guy already?” Cleo asked. “Seems too soon.”

  Ash shaded her narrowed eyes. “That’s a medevac, with both patient transfer panniers filled. I hadn’t heard that there was any fighting today in this sector!” She started off toward the hospital landing pad, Cleo following.

  There was a crowd there waiting. Ash saw a nurse she knew. “What’s up?”

  “Village kids,” the nurse said bitterly. “Stumbled over old landmines while they were herding goats. I’ve seen this before, but it never gets easier.” She couldn’t say any more. Ash put a comforting arm around her.

  “That chopper has problems,” Cleo said urgently. “The rotors are out of sync. Just a little, but I know by the sound, and it’s getting worse.” People close enough to hear her looked up, and others caught the tension and looked too. By then the helicopter was jerking and shaking so much that anybody could tell it was in big trouble. A transfer pannier was even drooping at one end, some of its supports shaken loose. Could the bird manage to land safely? Would the pannier hold on?

  “Ash!”

  Her body tensed like a bowstring, and she and Cleo instinctively backed away from the crowd. She aimed her focus at the incoming aircraft, feeling power shoot from her like a bright arrow. In the turmoil all around, while emergency fire and rescue personnel swarmed through the crowd of onlookers, she stood straight and still, heat rising inside her, and Cleo stood with her. No one else could have seen the arm at Ash’s side reach forward slightly, fingers curving just enough that they could have held something precious, and fragile, if it had been there to hold. The late afternoon sun glaring onto the pavement cast a dark shadow of Ash and that hand, magnifying them to huge proportions warped by the angle of the light, but no one saw that, either, besides Cleo, or would have thought anything of it if they had.

  Everyone looked up in horrified fascination. Just two hundred feet above the earth the helicopter began to spin entirely out of control, falling fast—but at fifty feet it abruptly slowed, still wobbling, moved just the amount needed to hover over the landing pad, and settled onto the ground as though some giant hand had caught it and set it gently down.

  Ash looked down, saw her own huge shadow, and felt in danger of settling down onto the ground herself, but Cleo was right there to support her.

  Her nurse friend, still nearby, came to help. “That was…incredible!” she said. “I’m in the business of praying for miracles, and seeing them once in a great while, but that was something else! It would shake anybody up.” She did look rather oddly at Ash, but had to rush over to help unload a patient from a pannier. Ash caught a glimpse of a child cocooned in bandages, a girl with long, bloodied hair.

  The second helicopter, the daily Black Hawk transport to and from the major airfield near the capital city, landed at some distance from the first without anyone paying much attention. In a few minutes Ash recovered enough to walk away with Cleo, mingling with the crowd. As far as she could tell, they’d lost their tail, at least for the moment. They strolled around inside the perimeter walls as though just getting some mild exercise.

  “Cleo,” Ash said at last, “all that with the helicopter—it couldn’t have been rigged, could it? To test what I could do?”

  “No! That ‘copter was about to crash, I guarantee, and everyone in it was going to die, including the little girl being unloaded. There was a malfunction that unbalanced the rotors. I knew by the sound even before the flight got erratic.”

  Ash picked up on Cleo’s icy tone and knew her question had sounded—had been—incredibly self-centered. “I’m sorry. It’s just that…if I could keep that huge piece of machinery from crashing, could I learn to make one crash, instead? Maybe even bring down low-flying planes?”

  “I don’t know, could you?” The chill lingered in Cleo’s voice.

  “I don
’t know either.” Ash shook her head slowly. “I don’t know what I could do if it mattered enough to me. Like keeping you from blowing up with the jeep. But if that guy is really coming from some unit where they study this sort of thing—telekinesis, I guess they call it, or something paranormal, anyway—who knows what they might want me to do?”

  “Having second thoughts? You said you were going to see what you could learn from them, at least for a while.”

  “I am. I have to. But I’ve got to move on pretty soon. This guy may be my ticket, at least part of the way. Wherever he’s coming from, it has to be somewhere other than in the middle of endless desert. I agree to go along with what they want for a while, find out what, if anything, they can teach me, and then I get lost, disappear, hit the road, and figure out what’s really worth doing with what I’ve been given.”

  “Sounds like a bad case of save-the-world syndrome.” But Cleo didn’t sound so upset with her anymore. “Most of that makes sense, except assuming that you can scarper off whenever you decide it’s time. Not that I’d bet against you.” She laughed a little. “Did you read superhero comics when you were a kid?”

  It felt good to be joking around again. “Not much. My brother did, but I was more interested in the girlie magazines he hid under his mattress.”

  “Well, of course! But next thing you know you’ll find yourself in a skin-tight onesie, a mask, and a billowing cape.”

  “What, no sparkly bikini with boots? Just as well. And I draw the line at wearing a cape.”

  “It could have a have a big dark silhouette of a hand on it.” Ash flinched at that, but Cleo didn’t stop. “A Shadow Hand! And you could have cards printed with a black hand on them, to leave at the sites of your victories.”

  “Forget the costume. And the cards.” Ash got serious again. “First I’ll have to figure out where I can do the most good. I’m damned sure not going to be bringing down planes or helicopters, no matter what.”

  “That’s good to know, in case I get an urge to fly someplace myself.”

  Ash gave her the mock swat that comment deserved.

  They kept on, together, but Ash couldn’t help wondering whether they could ever be together again the way they had been before all this weird drama came along. She was sure Cleo wondered that, too.

  There was a limit to how long they could take to walk around the base, and somewhere along the line the clerk who had been sent to follow them picked up their trail again. By that time, they were approaching Ash’s tent, and there was no more good excuse for them to be hanging out together. Neither had approached the issue of what role, if any, Cleo could play in all of this.

  Through two years of being together in the jeep almost daily, carrying out missions that could go from routine to deadly in an instant, they had opened themselves to each other bit by bit. They’d grown closer, laughing, sharing memories, bonding, becoming more than comrades-in-arms, much more than friends. Those days and years were over now. The jeep was gone, and Ash was, one way or another, going. Even camaraderie seemed to be draining away.

  Cleo jerked her head sharply in the direction of the dutiful spy lurking behind a trash bin. “How about putting on a show worth watching? What have we got to lose?” Her tone was harsh, not disguising the emotion beneath. “How about I fuck you up against a wall?”

  “Don’t.” Ash’s voice felt rough, too, in her throat. “Keep it together until your tour is up and you’re legit to leave. I’ll probably have disappeared by then, and they may follow you to see if you know where I’ve gone.”

  “So I don’t get to know.”

  Anything more Ash might have said—not that she could think of anything—was cut short. Colonel Rogers was waiting at her tent. “Lieutenant, your contact is here, and wants to see you right away.” She glanced at Cleo, her expression sympathetic. “Maybe Sergeant Brown can help you pack your bags. I’ll send someone to pick them up. You’re being transferred for an indeterminate period.”

  “Ma’am, but I’ll be out of the service in eight months. Is that long enough to bother…?”

  “Lieutenant, I’m sure you’ve read the small print. You serve at the pleasure of the president. Your tour can be extended for purposes of national security.” She seemed about to say more, but instead turned aside to let them enter the tent alone.

  What did it mean that the colonel had come herself instead of sending a messenger? It did seem like she wanted to let Ash and Cleo have a few last minutes together.

  “Transferred!” Cleo folded what few bits of clothing Ash had unpacked when they’d returned to base and shoved them savagely into a duffle bag. Everything in the jeep had been destroyed, but most of their gear had been in a baggage truck ahead in the convoy. “How do they know already that you have what they want? Does this guy think he’s some kind of psychic?” She slumped onto the stripped bunk. “Maybe he really is.”

  Ash grasped both arms and pulled her up, squeezing hard enough it had to hurt. Something in the back of her head that wasn’t quite her own mind, something like the buzz that came with using her power, urged her to move away from Cleo. She tried to resist it. “Cleo, you’re the best, most real, true thing in my world, even though I have to do this. You know I do. Maybe someday…”

  But the colonel lifted the tent flap, Ash gave Cleo one huge damn-the-consequences hug, and then she left.

  The “guy” waiting in Colonel Rogers’s office turned out to be a dangerously attractive major, fortyish, strong and elegantly built, with hair as dark as Ash’s except for silver wings at her temples. Her well-cut uniform included a trim, mid-length skirt—as rare as it was impractical here in the desert where minor sandstorms weren’t rare at all. She looked like she should have been in an office at the Pentagon.

  Colonel Rogers made the introductions. “Mac, this is Lieutenant Ashton, Ash to her friends. Ash, this is Major Margaret McAllister. She and I were in training together, as well as on that trial medical mission I mentioned. We’re lucky she happened to be in the country on other business just now.”

  The major strode toward Ash, or appeared to, even though the office was too small for actual striding. Her energy made it feel even smaller. Ash saluted and then reached out to shake hands, but the major grasped both of her arms.

  “Lieutenant Ashton, I have never seen anything like what you did for that helicopter today! Magnificent work!”

  It was a statement of certainty, not a question. How did she know? Had someone seen and told her? That might leave some room for denial. Or had she seen for herself? Ash tried to play for time. “When did you get here, Major? I didn’t expect you so soon.”

  “I was in the other helicopter, the one that’s waiting for us right now for our first lap on the way to Berlin. I hope never to have such a heart-stopping view of tragedy in the making again, but your extraordinary save almost makes the experience worth it.”

  This wasn’t an interview at all. No questions to answer. Ash figured she might as well ask some of her own. “I was as terrified as anyone else, Major. What makes you think I had anything to do with that?”

  “I don’t need to think. I know. I have an instinct for these things. That’s why I have this job.” She turned to the desk and picked up a cup of coffee. “You’re wondering whether I read minds, right?”

  Something about the woman raised Ash’s hackles, but appealed to her anyway. Something about her also made Ash forget about deference due to rank. “Do you read minds, Major?”

  “No. Not word by word. But I know truth from lies, and I know when a certain energy is present. An energy you might call power. Yours, by the way, is off the charts.” She emptied the coffee cup and smiled like the Cheshire cat in Disney’s Alice in Wonderland. “Yes, there are folks in my department obsessive enough to make charts of these things. Those who can do; those who can’t make charts. And those of us in between, like me, sniff out new talent the way
a bird dog flushes pheasants.”

  “So you see me as a pheasant?”

  Major McAllister seemed to be enjoying the exchange. “Lieutenant, you’re from Montana, right? Do you hunt birds with dogs out there?”

  “We hunt bears with dogs.”

  Colonel Rogers tried to hide a smile. Major McAllister laughed out loud. “Bears! I like the sound of that. My bosses would rather I brought them pheasants, or rabbits—anything timid or malleable. Someone with an inner bear is going to make life interesting.”

  “As long as it isn’t boring.” Ash realized that she was tacitly agreeing to go along with this woman. Not that she had any choice. Yet.

  The helicopter with the damaged rotors was still on the hospital landing pad, so the bigger, long-distance Black Hawk took off from farther down the field. There were people milling around—mechanics, curious onlookers, MPs. When Ash looked down from a few hundred feet in the air, one slight figure stood out from all the rest. Cleo was gesturing and conversing with a group of mechanics, but as Ash’s gaze fell on her, she looked up, stood straight and rigid as a flagpole, and watched until the helicopter banked, turned, and rose high into the blazing sunlight, heading west until Ash could no longer even pretend that she still saw her.

  Chapter 3

  Early the next morning, Cleo strode purposefully up the Headquarters walkway, nearly running down a messenger Colonel Rogers had just dispatched.

  Once in the office, Cleo saluted, then got bluntly down to business. “Colonel, you’ve got to find me something to do. Something that matters. I’ll go crazy without important work to distract me.” By the colonel’s expression, she understood Cleo’s underlying anguish. Cleo forged ahead, slightly more diplomatically. “That medical mission you sent us…me…on was so rewarding that I’m spoiled for just hanging around the motor pool being the go-to advisor for every little glitch of a fractious jeep.” Drat, poor choice of words for someone who’d just allowed her own jeep to be destroyed.