“Thanks,” she said. “Watch your eyes, Lieutenant, I’m turning it on.”
The fact that she’d thought to give him a heads-up was interesting, too. Dunk had given Jim and the other the instructors a variety of warnings about working with civilians, and the most dire involved the use of NVGs—night vision goggles. Be ready, the former senior chief had said, for some numbnuts to flip on the headlights and completely blind you.
Apparently, Ashley DeWitt didn’t fall into the typical SEAL World numbnuts subset.
And yet again, she was surprising Jim as he watched her through squinted eyes. He’d expected her to lead the way down the road in the direction that the van had driven off—at a walking pace so that he and his freaking knee braces could keep up. Instead she used the beam of the light to explore the area at the side of the road. She even shone the light up into the branches of a big banyan tree.
He laughed, and she glanced over at him so he said, “I have no idea what you’re looking for.”
“It’s going to rain,” she informed him as—right on cue—thunder rumbled. And yes, it was louder—the storm was closer—this time. “I was hoping this tree would provide at least a little shelter.”
“Shelter…?” Jim echoed.
She used the light to examine a rather impressive lump of a bench-sized tree root before somewhat gingerly sitting down on it.
“What…?” Jim laughed. “Wait…”
“Exactly,” she said, looking up at him. “That’s my plan. We wait.”
He found himself pointing down the road. “You don’t want to…?”
“Potentially put more miles between us and the camp?” she finished his question for him. “Nope.”
Now he was surprised for a different reason. “Wow, I didn’t peg you as a quitter.”
“I didn’t say quit,” Ashley said. “I said wait. We know we’re five miles from the camp, and we also know the GPS will go off in three hours. I’m banking on the fact that at least one of the other team leaders will go crashing off in the wrong direction and put himself more than five miles from the camp, which means that his team—not mine—will win the black-tank loser’s prize.”
“Sitting still means you definitely won’t win the, you know, winner’s prize,” Jim pointed out.
“Please sit down,” she told him. “I’m turning off the flashlight, both to conserve batteries and to keep mosquitos from being drawn to us.”
As he sat, she plunged them back into darkness as she continued, “I feel pretty confident that the winner’s prize is not within our reach. Realistically. I mean, come on. But not-losing—not coming in dead last—that we can do. With a little luck. Especially when that also means you don’t have to walk any miles tonight.”
“You need to stop worrying about me. I’ll be fine.”
He heard her turn toward him, even though he was surely as much of a dark faceless shape to her as she was to him. She asked, “You really expect me to believe that your knees won’t hurt after five miles—”
“My fucking knees hurt,” Jim snapped, “every fucking minute of my fucking life, regardless of whether I’m sitting still or walking.”
And… scene.
Except there was no curtain, and the frogs and locusts were still screaming their relentless chorus with that basso profundo thunder descant coming more often now. Could a descant be basso profundo, or did it always have to be a soprano line? Jim honestly didn’t know and he filed it under Things he’d Google later, when he was back in his RV icing his knees.
Meanwhile, Ashley’s silent response to his bratty baby-man outburst continued to rack up time on this conversation’s scoreboard.
When she finally spoke, it was to say, “I’m so sorry.”
“Oh, Jesus!” Her use of her favorite word pissed him off all over again. “You don’t have to be sorry for my freaking knees! What you should be sorry for is your bullshit acceptance of some deluded belief that just because you’re a girl you can’t win this thing!”
She countered his loud-and-angry with a voice that was super calm and in control. “I’m a woman, not a girl.”
“Yeah, no, sorry,” he said. “How did you say it?” He spoke in an obnoxiously bad imitation of a high-pitched little girl’s voice, complete with an Elmer Fudd-like speech impediment. “A wittle girl like me will never win a game against all those big stwong boys. Wealistically. I’m just too weak and dumb. I mean, come on.” Back to his real voice. “What the hell was that…? You know what you don’t have? You don’t have upper body strength. Big deal. You have a giant brain and legs that can run forever—”
“And a companion who just admitted he’s in constant pain—which I already knew. I could tell just from looking at your face,” she said, but her voice was still calm, contained. “That was me, doing what I thought a team leader was supposed to do—be aware of my teammate’s limitations. Because I also know that you’re lying, and your knees will hurt worse after walking five miles. I said we couldn’t win this thing, but if I were alone, trust me, I would already be running.”
“Then run,” he said. “I’ll keep up.”
“No,” she said. “But I will let you sit here in the dark. Flashlight’s going on,” she warned as she stood up. “Move into the road. I’m going to run out about a mile, and then I’ll come back. It’ll take me about fifteen minutes.”
Jim stood, too. “Yeah, I can’t let you do that. There’s really only one unbreakable rule for this particular exercise. Separation of team leader and instructor is that one giant no-can-do.”
Ashley stared at him in disbelief.
He shrugged and hit her with her favorite word. “Sorry.”
It was then, with diabolical timing, that thunder clapped almost directly overhead, and the skies opened up in a deluge.
“You told me to take the flashlight,” Ashley shouted at Jim over the roar of the rain as he pulled her closer to the main trunk of the banyan tree. “You tried to talk me into leaving you here! And now that’s not an option…?”
The branches overhead helped only a little, and she had to close her eyes because the rain was streaming down her face. Without a hat, it was like standing in the bathtub with her face aimed up at the shower head.
“It was actually a good idea,” he shouted back. “I wanted to see if you’d do it. And since you didn’t want to, I didn’t have to shut it down. Until you did, and then I did. Shut you down. Because yeah, we’ve gotta stay together. We can definitely run—I can keep up.”
Ashley opened her eyes to look at him and had to use her hands to shield her face from the rain. “You’re serious.”
He was still holding the flashlight and it made his eyes look very blue. “Yeah. Navy SEAL…?”
It was then, as their gazes were locked with the rain pouring down around them and on top of them that Ashley realized… She may not have had a map, but she had a Navy SEAL.
“What would you do?” she asked him. “If you were in charge.”