Free Guarding the Soldier's Secret by Kathleen Creighton

one.”
    “You had one crash?”
    He shook his head. “Not then. The operation went as planned, just the usual small glitches, nothing we couldn’t handle.” He paused long enough for Yancy to hear everything he wasn’t saying. “We went in...took care of our objective. We were in the process of gathering intel—interviewing members of the wedding, family, guests...confiscating whatever we could carry...and this woman comes to me. I realize she’s the bride—now the widow, I guess—which hits me harder than I expect it to, because she’s so young. The al Qaeda guy was at least sixty, and this girl couldn’t have been more than maybe eighteen...nineteen. And she’s obviously scared out of her mind. She begs us to take her with us. Says her family sold her to the al Qaeda guy in exchange for protection and she doesn’t know what’s going to happen to her now.”
    “Why did she come to you?”
    He gave her another look. “I speak both Farsi and Pashto. She heard me doing most of the talking during the raid.” He paused, coughed and straightened a little. “Anyway, I told her we couldn’t take her, obviously. We were deep in hostile territory and still had to be extracted for the mission to be a success. No way were we equipped to deal with hostages, prisoners, refugees—whatever. I mean, we couldn’t take her.” The look he gave Yancy now was steady, not asking for understanding, just stating facts.
    But she did understand, both the necessity of saying no and the pain it must have caused him to do so. She nodded, and he let go a breath.
    “I figured that was the end of it. But then, as we were making our way back to the choppers, here she comes running after us. Out in the open. I figure it was a miracle she didn’t get killed then and there, but it was a sure bet the people left behind in that village weren’t going to be happy with her.
    “It was my call—you know, I figured she might have some intel that would make it worth the risk of taking her with us. But she’d delayed us just long enough. We started taking fire at the extraction point. I took one in the leg.”
    He says it so matter-of-factly.
    Which wasn’t a surprise to Yancy; she’d heard the same tone and the same stoic acceptance from countless other soldiers she’d interviewed over the years.
    That’s when I knew I’d been hit...
    I realized my arm was gone...
    Don’t remember much...
    My buddy next to me...
    She wondered if she would ever understand the kind of courage it took to face that kind of horror every day.
    “We all made it to the chopper,” Hunt went on. “But we were taking some heavy fire. A couple other members of the team had been hit, and they were worse off than I was. We got off the ground, but it was obvious right away we weren’t going to make enough altitude to get out of shooting range. There’d been five going in. Now there were six, thanks to me, and the chopper had evidently taken a few rounds where it hurt. It was pretty clear either a couple of us had to get off the chopper, or we were all going down.
    “Zahra knew something was wrong, and when I told her what the deal was, she didn’t even flinch. Just said, ‘I know where to hide.’ And she pointed down. We were flying over some pretty rugged terrain, but the pilot managed to find a place to put us down.”
    “ Us? Why did you have to stay? You were wounded!”
    He gave her a long look, then said quietly, “Simple logic, Yankee. We needed to lighten the load. Couldn’t very well leave a girl alone in the wilderness in her bridal clothes, not after I’d already compromised her by taking her along. There were five team members in the chopper, two with life-threatening injuries. My wound wasn’t life threatening. The two uninjured didn’t speak Pashto and were needed to keep the injured alive until they could get back to base. Do the math.”
    She shook her head, though she knew he was right. “So, they put you on the ground and left you