Honor Reclaimed (HORNET #2)

Chapter 21

CHAPTER 21

KABUL

“Paulie, wait!”

Quinn froze half way out the shelter’s front door as his surroundings snapped to sudden, vivid clearness.

What the fuck? Where was he? What was he doing? And what had Zina just called him…?

He spun and found her standing under the archway between the foyer and the dining room, chewing on her thumbnail.

“What did you just call me?”

“Um, Paulie.” As if realizing she was gnawing her nail to the nub, she winced and folded her arms over her chest. “You’ve been insisting that’s your name since you got back this morning.”

“Paulie?” It felt like a foreign word on his tongue. Yeah, it had been his at one time, but he hadn’t been Benjamin Paul Jewett, Jr. or Paulie in nearly twenty years. Hadn’t even thought of himself by that name since he legally changed it to Travis Benjamin Quinn, after his maternal grandfather and his adoptive parents.“No, I’m Quinn. Call me Quinn.”

Her eyes all but bugged out of her pretty face. “Okay. I have to ask, are you all right? You’ve been acting…strange and insisting I call you by a different name for the last several hours. That’s not normal and I don’t want you around my girls if—” She seemed to search for the right words. “If you’re not healthy.”

“If I’m crazy, you mean?”

“I kind of think your whole team is crazy, so that’s not saying much.” She shook her head, huffed out a breath, and turned to go back into the dining room. “Just try to avoid the girls as much as possible, okay?”

“Not a problem.” He’d rather shoot himself in the foot than deal with a flock of teenage girls.

He stepped outside and sucked in a lungful of cool, dry November air.

Fucking blackout.

He knew stress was a trigger and should have expected it after his visit to Bagram this morning. Commander Bennett hadn’t welcomed him with open arms. In fact, Bennett’s response basically boiled down to “thanks, but I know about your brain injury and I don’t really trust a thing coming out of your mouth. Good seeing you again, though. Have a nice day.”

Now he got what it must feel like to be Seth, to have everyone around you think you’re crazy. And without being free to reveal how he came across the information about the nuke, he probably had sounded off his rocker.

Maybe he was.

Paulie?

What was that all about? Some kind of regression? His doctors had mentioned something about lapsing into fugue states, but they’d said it was a possibility . They’d also given him a lot of other possibilities throughout his recovery, starting with their first prognosis that he’d be a veggie for the rest of his life. Well, he’d shocked the hell out of them when he opened his eyes a month later, pulled out his IVs, and tried to get out of bed to find Gabe and make sure he was okay.

So fuck the docs and their possibilities. They even admitted they didn’t know much about the area in his brain that had been damaged when his head had an up close and personal encounter with the car windshield. He knew himself and even in a fugue state or whatever the blackouts were, he wouldn’t return to the hell that had been his childhood.

Zina had heard wrong. Simple as that.

Unable to settle, he went back inside and made his way to the war room to check in with Harvard. Thank Christ the kid had been glued to his computer all morning. Last thing Quinn needed was another witness to his unraveling sanity.

Sure enough, Harvard was still in the exact position Quinn had left him in, hunched over his screen. Only now, his hair stuck up from multiple passes of a frustrated hand. “Hey. Any luck locating Siddiqui?”

“None,” Harvard said with a shake of his head. “And, believe me, I have all of my digital ears to the ground.”

“Where the fuck is he? He’s running for president. Shouldn’t he be out campaigning or some shit?”

“No, too early. The campaign won’t start in earnest for another few months.”

And in that time, he’ll secure himself a nuke. “Fuck.”

“Hey,” Harvard called as he turned to leave. “What’s going on with you?”

Quinn stopped dead in his tracks. Shit. Had Harvard been witness to the blackout after all? He schooled his expression into a blank mask before facing the kid again. “What do you mean? There’s nothing going on.”

“Don’t give me that everything-is-fine act. I got enough of that from my parents when I was growing up.” He took off his glasses and rubbed his eyes with his thumb and forefinger. When he slid his glasses back in place, he nailed Quinn with an exhausted glare that aged him well past his twenty-four years. “I’m young. I get it. But for fuck’s sake, I’m not a child. I’m just as much a member of this team as you are and I know Gabe sent you to Bagram this morning. What was that about?”

So he wasn’t talking about the blackout. Relief left Quinn lightheaded. “All right. Point taken.” Gabe hadn’t wanted to tell the men about the possibly of the bomb—didn’t want to divide their attention while they were deep in enemy territory—but Harvard wasn’t up in the mountains and he needed to know. “This doesn’t go beyond this room.”

“Absolutely.”

Quinn shut the door. “In the Zak Hendricks’s reports, he mentions Siddiqui is angling to buy a suitcase-sized nuke. The deal is supposed to go down soon. Probably within the next few days.”

“Which is why you went to Bagram,” Harvard said, nodding. If the news rattled him, he didn’t show it. “You wanted help dealing with the bomb.”

“Yeah, but things didn’t go as planned there. I couldn’t tell them where I had gotten the information and they weren’t about to take my word for it. Now, it’s a possibility they’ll still check into it, but I feel like this is all on us.”

“We’re not an anti-terror unit,” Harvard said with a weary sigh. “But we can’t sit back and do nothing. Shit.” He straightened his shoulders and turned to his computer. “All right. Let me get back to work. I’ll call you as soon as I have a lock on Siddiqui.”

“Thanks.” Quinn left the room and came face-to-face with a handful of giggling girls, led by Tehani. His blood went cold.

Jesus Christ. He’d rather face off with a thousand Taliban fighters than these four pre-pubescent kids. Especially since Zina told him to avoid them.

He tried to step around them, but Tehani blocked his path no matter which way he moved. The other three girls held their scarves over their mouths and giggled. Tehani’s head was unabashedly bare, sleek black hair hanging loose around her shoulders.

“Hand-some,” she said slowly in English and pointed at him, which set the other girls off again. “Pr—pretty yel-low hair.” She patted the top of her head.

“Uh…” He scanned left and right. Dammit, where was an enemy ambush when a guy needed one? “Thanks?”

Tehani grinned. “You… make…good husband.”

Whoa. Yeah. Definitely time to make a fast exit. He was starting to sweat and he had no doubt they could smell the fear on him.

Again, he tried stepping around her. “I have work to do.”

She said something in Pashto. He knew bits of the language, enough to pick out the word “protector,” and guilt sank its claws into the back of his neck. He stopped several paces away and faced the group again.

“Nobody’s going to hurt you as long as I’m around, okay?”

He didn’t think they understood him, but it didn’t matter. Tehani grinned and the other girls jabbered excitedly behind his back as he strode away.