She got up, went into the bathroom, and turned on the cold water. Splashing it on her face took her breath away, refreshed her. She washed away all the tears, and when she felt like she could talk without sobbing, she dialed Rick’s number. It went straight to voice mail, and she hung up without leaving a message.

Had he blocked her number? That didn’t seem like something he would do. He would face her head-on. So either his battery had died or he had his phone off for some reason. She would try again in the morning.

Her gaze fell to the laptop on her desk. On impulse, she sat down and opened the lid. She chewed on her lower lip, then opened a search engine and typed, “How to apply for an Army hospital position.”

Hours later, her résumé updated and her references lined up, she accessed the government jobs board and typed “Fort Campbell” into the search engine.

Chapter
Twenty-eight

SYRIA

Rick stood at the village limits in Syria’s Idlib province and looked at the shell of the building. His nose itched with the smell of burning rocket fuel and RDX high explosive from the warhead. The remaining fuel in the missile had nearly doubled the effect of the main warhead, amplifying and spreading the destructive force at impact. The concrete building next door had collapsed in on itself. Concrete lay in chunks, and exposed steel rebar stuck up out of it, twisted in weird angles. One of the concrete slabs had completely crushed a car.

He looked down at his civilian clothes, feeling odd and out of place in them and a bit annoyed at the lack of pockets and load-bearing equipment. He rubbed his chest, his fingers running over the ballistic vest atop his shirt.

They’d been in the country for a week, trying to find the terrorist leader Gamal Khalil, who had dispatched five suicide bombers into US-owned hotels in Egypt and Kuwait three weeks ago. Fifty-two people had died in the mass attacks, including fourteen Americans.

Rubbing his eyes, he went farther into the building and found Emma “Selah” Peña sitting across from Naeem Qassim. The missile engineer had offered intelligence on the terrorist leader Gamal Khalil after Khalil used his technology to bomb a civilian hospital.

Jorge Peña stood guard next to the table, watching over his wife as she interviewed Naeem. Emma wore a long-sleeved, floor-length dress and a hijab. She had been born in Afghanistan, but when her father aided the Americans in 2001, it put her family’s lives in danger. When she was ten, they fled the country and relocated to Texas. In the culturally diverse American school, she discovered her gift for languages, and her parents couldn’t get her lessons fast enough. She graduated college at twenty-one with a degree in international affairs and fluently spoke six languages.