Free The Traiteur's Ring by Jeffrey Wilson Page A

a very small walk-in closet where Ben kept his medical gear and a short treatment table where he would hook up electrical stimulation and heating units to treat his fellow SEALs for the aches and pains that came with their hard life. He also had a small, compact X-ray unit that sent images to a lap top computer. The entire X-Ray unit sat just outside the box in the main room of the barracks, completely unshielded by lead. OSHA would have them all locked up, but as far as he knew they didn’t make site visits to bum-fuck Africa for safety violations. And, anyway he had only snapped a few pictures since they had been here, and the unit was a good ten feet from the nearest bunk.
    Auger hopped effortlessly up onto the treatment table, and Ben turned sideways to be able to fit between the table and the wall.
    “Let’s see,” he said and began to unwind the gauze dressing that covered the bullet hole above Auger’s left knee.
    “No problem,” Auger said.
    As he peeled away the last layer of gauze, Ben’s eyes widened. Above Auger’s knee – where he remembered the ragged bullet hole from yesterday – he saw only a small pink discoloration, soft and almost imperceptible. No cut, no hole – nothing. Ben pressed his fingers over the spot.
    “Feel that?” he asked.
    “Sure,” Auger said. “But it doesn’t hurt or anything,” he said and turned his leg slightly so he could see. “Hey,” he said. “Where’s the cut?”
    Ben shook his head and pursed his lips. “No cut,” he said absently. He had seen lots of strange things during his fifteen years with Gammy in the Louisiana bayou, but certainly nothing stranger than this.
    “Jesus, Ben,” Auger said. “You need to patent that paste shit and sell it, dude. We could retire to an island somewhere, open a dive shop, and live a life of style.” Auger leaned back on the table.
    “Why the hell would I take you with me?” Ben asked as he pressed his finger deep into the tissues behind Auger’s knee. “That doesn’t hurt?” he asked. He pressed even harder in the area where he thought the bullet fragment should have ended up.
    “Nope,” Auger answered.
    What the hell?
    “Let’s just get an X-ray to make sure we didn’t leave something in there,” Ben said.
    “Sure,” Auger said and hopped off the table.
    Ben positioned his teammate against the wall outside the box and turned him slightly before positioning the X-ray plate at the level of his knee. He turned on the lap top which sat on a small desk made out of boxes, opened the radiology program, and plugged the cable from the X-ray plate into the USB port. After a moment the screen announced it was ready, and Ben aimed the X-ray cone at Auger’s knee and pressed a button while telling him to “stay still.” Then, he sat down in front of the lap top, vaguely aware of Auger leaning in over his shoulder. The image slowly constructed itself on the screen in sections.
    “That my knee?” Auger asked.
    “Yeah,” Ben said absently as he stared at the image. The bones looked pristine, but more importantly, there was no bullet fragment. In fact, he saw not even a hint of the little hazy “dust trail” of tiny fragments that always followed a bullet into the soft tissues. Nothing. Nada.
    Ben pressed a thumb into his temple as he stared at the stone cold normal image on the screen. He knew damn well there had been a hole in Auger’s knee yesterday. Hell, he had pushed his own fingertip into it. After his deployment-heavy years in the teams he knew damn well what a bullet hole looked like and ricochet or not, Auger had one only twenty four hours ago. Even if he allowed himself to believe the magic witch-doctor paste could heal the wound, where the hell was the fragment that had torn into Auger’s leg? There had been no exit wound, so it had to be inside his leg.
    Had to be, but wasn’t.
    On a whim, Ben looked up at Auger. “Stand back at the wall again.”
    “Everything okay?” Auger asked. Ben could