Raw Deal (Bite Back) Read Online Free Page B

turn—he’d have me hauled back to base without even a chance to say goodbye. He could have a squad waiting right now.
    But putting it off wasn’t going to help, and being late was unthinkable. That wasn’t just my military training; I didn’t want to give them any reason to feel they had to come hunting for me. I slipped out, locking the door behind me.
     
    Twenty minutes later I was downtown where the colonel had told me to meet him, in front of the Denver Art Museum.
    He was right on time, appearing suddenly around a corner and moving with that deceptively quick stride of his. He was wearing dark pants and shirt, with a pale summer blazer.
    “Colonel.” We weren’t in uniform—I wasn’t even in the army now—and I still wanted to salute, damn it.
    “Sergeant.” His eyes flickered at my twitchy arm. He was calling me by my old rank. It was a compromise; either Amber or Farrell would have sounded odd. Or maybe it was a subtle reminder of our relationship; I wasn’t in the army, but I sure as hell still worked for him.
    To my surprise, he bought tickets and headed inside. I followed him into the museum’s galleries. At that time of the day, there was little chance of being overheard if we kept it down, so maybe it was as good as any other public place.
    I’d left school early and joined the army. It wasn’t an impulsive decision, more that a whole bunch of circumstances had pushed me that way. I’d vaguely hoped to get into something exciting, but I hadn’t even heard of the unit that offered to transfer me from my basic training to a special program. That intrigued me. When I got there, the instructors told me they’d watch me walk out within a month, if they hadn’t kicked me out before then. That motivated me.
    I loved it. I spent ten years in Ops 4-10, the unit that almost no one, not even the regular army, knew about. We did the high-risk tasks where the US couldn’t be seen to be involved, where other channels had failed. Where there was no hope remaining. We acquired strategic information, extracted people and destroyed organizations in areas where, if we were caught, the US would deny all knowledge of us and leave us to our fate.
    There was plausible deniability all right; we didn’t officially exist.
    The colonel had been the commanding officer. He was damned good at that. I’d been damned good at my job, too, until one night I wasn’t. I’d lost my entire team, and nearly lost my life. In a way, I had lost my life, and was left with this—a tightrope walk between hunting down creatures people didn’t believe existed, and being locked up as one.
    “How have you been feeling?” he asked.
    “I’m fine.”
    Lie.
    I couldn’t say anything else. Anything other than ‘fine,’ and the scientists would start to cover their asses, telling the colonel that I could go crazy and rampage through malls killing children. The colonel must have stuck his neck out to get me out of the cell in the first place, but he would have no choice but to put me back if the scientists got nervous. And once back, they’d never let me out again.
    I handed him an envelope of expenses and written reports as a distraction. He slipped it in his folder and passed me back an envelope which would contain a check for my last expenses.
    I knew he wouldn’t be happy with my answer. He tried the long silence way of getting me to talk, but I’d been there, done that. I’d walk silently through the whole museum and look at every exhibit until his time was up, if necessary.
    “It’s been a year,” he said eventually. “And only a few months since the last job blew up on us. I’m not sure ‘fine’ quite covers it.”
    A year. I knew that. I knew it in my bones, in the itch of my throat when I looked at it in the mirror, or in the panic of my nightmares. A year ago, I’d lost my squad, one by one, in the dark jungles of South America. I’d survived. They’d actually bagged me as a corpse—no one could have survived