Above and Beyond (Twist of Fate 4)

"What happened to you?" I asked. My heart was in my throat as I envisioned Zach and his team fighting off their attackers.

"I got jumped from behind, but I managed to keep the guy from gutting me too. He managed to stab me a few times, but not enough to take me down. I was still struggling from the results of the flash bang, but I knew enough to let my instincts take over. The guy and I fought but he came out the loser. I tried to get him to tell me how many others there were, but he died before I could find out. Then the ones who killed my guys came after me, but I was able to fight them off too. During the struggle with the last of them, we both ended up falling down a flight of stairs. That was how I fucked up my knee. Luckily, the other guy broke his neck. I lay there at the bottom of the stairs with just my knife for protection as I slowly bled out. The rest of my team found me that way and I was airlifted back to base. Kaminski, Teller, and Mac weren't so fortunate."

"And you blame yourself for what happened to them," I said, more to keep him talking than anything else. As badly as I wanted to tell him it wasn't his fault, I knew that would just make him angry. The reality was that he did blame himself and only he could change that perception.

"Kaminski had just gotten married and had a baby on the way, Mac was a father of five, and Teller was the sole support for his two younger sisters after they'd lost their parents in a car crash the year before. Yeah, it was my fucking fault because I had more than one chance to get them out of there."

"What would've happened to you if you'd gone against orders?" I asked.

Zach shrugged. "Disciplinary action. I probably would have been demoted, maybe dishonorably discharged."

"You said it was a setup," I said softly. "If those men wanted to make an example of you and your team, would they have even let you get out of there?" Zach glanced at me, clearly confused by the question. "If they were using the journalist to bring in American soldiers, whether it was to kill you or take you hostage, don't you think they would've had every escape route planned? So even if you'd changed course, isn't there a chance it wouldn't have done any good?"

Zach shifted his eyes away and stared back at the ceiling. There was a tic in his jaw and instead of rubbing my hand with his finger, he started tapping it. "I don't know," he finally said after several minutes.

"Would you have died in their place, Zach?"

He jerked his head in a nodding motion just once. I didn't continue because I could already see the wheels in Zach's mind turning. Instead, I laid my head on his chest and just held on to him as best I could. It was a long time before his body relaxed and the tapping on my hand stopped and returned to a gentle, rhythmic caress. My own body began to release much of the tension that had been there from the moment I'd woken up to Zach's whimpers.

Rain beat against the roof of the warming hut. I'd hoped to find some dry wood when we’d first gotten to the warming hut, but between Zach's injury and the turning weather, there hadn't been time. Now the wood would be too wet to make a fire. While the mylar blanket was keeping us from freezing to death, it was far from keeping us warm. I’d spent the evening trying to be so brave for Zach that he wouldn't have to worry about anything but resting, but as one hour had passed into another and then another, my worst fears had started to come to light. It was one of the reasons I'd still been awake when Zach had started to succumb to the nightmare that had evolved into a full-blown panic attack.

"Zach," I whispered. On the one hand, I didn't want to wake him if he’d fallen asleep, but on the other, I was terrified about what to do next. I’d had plenty of training for events like this, but I'd always had a certain amount of resources available to me. The helicopter had gone up so quickly that I literally hadn't had time to do anything but grab a few vital items.

Zach's free hand moved to my back so his fingers were running up and down the length of my spine. Although we were both nearly completely naked, there was nothing sexual in the move and I didn't take it as such. It was meant to comfort, and that was exactly what it did.