Cutting Edge: The Edge - Prequel Read online

  Cutting Edge

  The Edge - Prequel

  CD Reiss

  Cutting Edge

  A prequel to the Edge Series

  © 2018 Flip City Media Inc.

  A world of thanks to my fellow authors, Rebecca Yarros and Sarah Fergusen, whose lives have been shaped by love for men and women in military service. Their patience in explaining military culture resulted in as much accuracy as you see here. The mistakes are probably plenty and all mine.

  This book is dedicated to the men and women of the US military.

  I wish I’d known more about what you do, not so writing this book would be easier, but because it’s my duty.

  Contents

  Part I

  Part II

  Rough Edge

  Also by CD Reiss

  Part One

  Eight days

  Chapter One

  NOVEMBER, 2004

  THE AIR OVER FALLUJAH, IRAQ

  18 HOURS TO OPERATION PHANTOM FURY

  Not jumping.

  I chanted two words to myself over and over.

  Not jumping.

  The Phrog’s dual rotors buzzed like a swarm of bees. My knuckles were striated in white and pink, and my palm already ached in the center. I kept my eyes on my boots and focused on the pain, feeling it in three dimensions as the shooting ache ran from my right wrist to my shoulder. That helped. Focusing on pain always did.

  “How you doing, Major?”

  I barely heard Ronin over the angry swarm and the shouts of the paratroopers, but I couldn’t ignore him. That was as good as an admission of the terror I felt. He’d use my fear as a weapon for good-natured but annoying mockery. Any woman with thirteen years in the military could take a ribbing, but none of us had to like it.

  He was on the other side of the cargo bay, right next to the rear dock. I looked at him and released my hand long enough to give him a thumbs-up, but I couldn’t do that without seeing the open bay door the paratroopers were jumping from.

  My stomach twisted when I saw the rectangle of clear blue desert sky and watched the marine sergeant smack a soldier on the helmet before she jumped and disappeared.

  Ronin laughed. He was a loaner from Intelligence, temporarily attached to my unit in the First Medical Brigade. He was an ass, a friend, and an occasional bunk buddy since we’d met in basic training.

  “One day you’re gonna have to jump,” he shouted.

  I kept my hand up long enough to give him the finger, then I clutched the edge of my seat again.

  “Cork it!” Lieutenant Jackson shouted to him, her eyes intent under her thick, black glasses. Jenn was a nurse practitioner and my best friend in the unit.

  Ronin smiled at her. She had a silver bar to his butterbar. He couldn’t do shit.

  The sergeant smacked himself on the helmet and jumped out.

  Next stop: Combat Support Hospital—Balad Base.

  The door was closed, and the helicopter whipped around, pressing my back against the fuselage.

  * * *

  We arrived at the CSH, combat support hospital, in the brightest part of the day. Sweat had a way of burning right off you between noon and two in July in Iraq, and what didn’t burn off, the wind took away. But in November, the dusty landscape of the airbase sat in contrast to the temperate air. I was on my third deployment, and I’d seen every season in the Middle East. Fall was my favorite.

  “They have eighteen surgeons.” Our CO, Colonel Brogue, briefed us in the truck to base. “Six are US Army. Two are Aussie. Ten are Air Force.”

  We were a team of sixteen medical officers: Two general surgeons. Two doctors. Eleven nurses. And me, a psychiatrist. Brogue had gone ahead of us and come back. He’d been a medic in Bosnia and Kosovo and now ran our medical unit. We’d all been reassigned to Balad ahead of a push into Fallujah—because nothing creates an unmanageable number of casualties like a push into battle.

  “Do they have their own psych team?” I asked.

  “Not at present.” Brogue was in his sixties with tight, white hair and a chest built like a cinderblock wall. Old school. He thought real men didn’t need mental health specialists but could probably have used one himself. “It’s all you, and we’re headed into a major offensive. We need you focused on keeping the surgeons sharp.”

  Not healthy. Sharp. Welcome to the army in wartime.

  “Yes, sir,” I said.

  I saw Ronin in my peripheral vision, nodding. I wondered what he was doing here, but he’d never say until he had to.

  We blew by corrugated metal trailers used for housing and more permanent plywood structures that had been there when the base was run by the Iraqi Air Force.

  As everyone got off the truck, I said to Brogue privately, “I’d like to meet the surgeons first. I’d like to have an idea of how they handle stress before the choppers start landing. Can we set up intakes?”

  “Army guys, sure. Air Force has to go through their command.”

  “Got it.”

  I got out of the back of the truck. We were in front of a tin hangar with tents being erected on each side. The gravity of the situation became clear with the sight of those tented areas. The hospital wasn’t big enough for what was coming.

  The sky was crystalline blue, heavy and thick, the only pure thing in a messy world. It connected all of us equally under its sapphire bowl.

  Its presence disconcerted me, and yet there was hope under it.

  * * *

  He was the last of the six army surgeons. Captain Caden St. John. Accepted a commission after finishing Officer Candidate School in November 2001. Desperate for general surgeons, the army had signed him to a three-year commission and a four-year service obligation. Field training at Walter Reed. He’d just started his second sixteen-month deployment. I was surprised he’d lasted this long. He was still a civilian as far as I was concerned.

  “Jenn.” I caught Lt. Jackson as she set up triage in one of the tents.

  “Yeah,” she grunted, moving the monitor on a crash cart.

  I helped her move the cart. “I’m looking for Dr. St. John?”

  “The hot one?”

  “By ‘hot’ you mean…?”

  “On fire. He just got out of the OR.”

  Strange. Casualties hadn’t come in yet. I knotted my brow and headed for the changing room.

  Metal sinks. Empty linen hampers. One man in scrubs stood with his back to me, peeling off bloody gloves.

  “Dr. St. John?”

  “Yeah?” He slipped off his cap, revealing a full head of dark hair.

  “I’m Dr. Frazier from psych.”

  He pulled off his scrubs and his undershirt in one movement, and I had to bite back a gasp. I’d seen some pretty ripped soldiers, but he’d caught me by surprise. His waistband hung on his hips below two divots in his lower back. Surgeons didn’t look like that.

  “Psychiatrists don’t fucking knock?”

  “Surgeons don’t close the fucking door?”

  He turned at the waist—just enough to take stock of me. His jaw was sketched with a light beard, his lips were a full, dusty pink, his eyebrows arched, and his eyes… his fucking eyes were the color of the bowl that connected all of us.

  Were my nipples hard?

  Maybe. He didn’t linger on them though. He took inventory slowly and deliberately, giving equal weight to my feet, my legs, my torso, before landing on my face.

  “You wanted something?” he asked, turning around again and undoing the tie at his waistband.

  “There’s an offensive coming,” I said.

  “No shit.” He dropped his pants.

  His ass was too perfect for human eyes. I looked away.

  “I need t
o do a benchmark intake on your mental state. It’s going to get hairy around here real soon.”

  Smiling, he turned around, giving me the full sight of an enormous cock. He balled his scrubs and tossed them in a hamper beside me. I kept my focus off his dick and on his eyes, but they were doorways to the sky and I was afraid of heights.

  “I’ll be fine,” he said, picking up his camo shirt by the neck. The name tape said JOHN without the ST., and his rank was on his collar.

  “Captain,” I replied, “I’ll see you at my desk in one hour, ready to answer questions.”

  He smiled like a fucking civilian. His dimples went black with his beard, and his eyes sparkled as if the sky could rain without clouds. “Of course.”

  I put my right toe behind my left heel, spun, and about-faced before he could see his effect on my body.

  * * *

  With a football tucked under his arm, Ronin ran like an All-American. I waited until he spiked it in the end zone before I stopped him.

  “How are the intakes?” he asked.

  “Almost done. Now it’s just hurry up and wait.” I scraped my foot on the sand. It sparkled.

  “Broken glass?” he asked.

  “Mortar fire melts sand into glass.” I pointed toward the border of the base. “They shoot them over the wire.”

  He tossed the ball to his teammates. “Fun times.”

  “No joke.” I nodded, and he took two steps back toward the game.

  “Wanna hang out before the shit hits the fan?” he asked.

  We both knew what he meant by “hang out,” and I couldn’t. No reason not to really, except… I couldn’t. Not with the sky watching.

  “I have nursing and support staff to interview,” I said. “Maybe next war.”

  * * *

  My desk was two sawhorses with a slab of plywood laid across. I had a small, barely private office separated from triage by white canvas walls.

  Ronin didn’t have a desk. He stood at mine and handed me a metal box. “You should hang on to this.”

  “What is it?” I opened the box to find vials of clear liquid.

  “Synthetic amphetamine.”

  “We have plenty of the generic.” I went over the contraindications. To be used after rest, no food required, eight-hour spread.

  Ronin shrugged. “Works faster and stays effective longer. One shot holds twenty-four hours.”

  I folded up the sheet and stuck it back in the box. “What are you doing here anyway?”

  “I can neither confirm nor deny I’m even in Fallujah.”

  “I won’t tell then.”

  He smiled and left to do whatever it was he did.

  Fifty-nine minutes after I left post-op, Caden poked his head around the canvas flap of my office. He was fully covered in camo, thank God, and he’d shaved.

  “Major,” he said with a smirk, as if he found my title arousing.

  “Greyson’s fine.” I indicated the chair in front of my makeshift desk.

  He sat in it, slipping off his cap, which told me volumes. A gentleman by training. Strict, traditional upbringing. His behavior in the post-op room had been deliberate and against character.

  “Thank you for the show in post-op,” I said.

  “It’s a changing room. You can’t be shocked I was changing.”

  “It takes more than a penis to shock me.” Even a magnificent one.

  “A quality I admire.”

  The parentheses around his smile were no less effective without the beard.

  “The schedule says you were doing a hernia operation.”

  “Real quick. I just needed two surgical nurses and a gasser.”

  “And the patient?”

  “He’s fine.”

  “You couldn’t put it off for a few days?”

  “Why?”

  Why? meant why not? Like asking a four-year-old why he’d had the extra lollipop. Why not watch an extra hour of TV? Why postpone joy?

  Mental note: He loves it. Expect him to engage in risk-taking behavior and attempt to function even if performance is suffering. Expect him to push his limits in the OR.

  “In an emergency,” I said, taking out the five-page mental evaluation questionnaire, “we may have to administer psychotropic medications before we can evaluate their safety for you. So, we do this assessment before we need to.”

  I pushed the questionnaire toward him. He put his elbows on my desk and flipped through it.

  “About the changing room,” I said.

  “You see something you like?” He snapped up a pen and ticked boxes.

  “Why did you feel the need to express your dominance over a woman you didn’t even know?”

  Head still facing the page, he looked me with only his eyes. “I was getting changed.”

  “Denial is a river in Egypt, Captain.”

  He went back to the questions, reading and answering quickly. “Caden’s fine.” He showed me the page. “What exactly do you mean here?” He tapped the pen on a question. “Forty-seven. Part B. Does jerking off count?”

  Why was my neck going prickly? I talked about deviant sex acts with attractive patients all the time. Many transferred sexual feelings onto me, and I was trained to deal with it. This guy had disarmed me completely.

  “Sexual activity is with a partner. Masturbation is covered in question forty-nine.”

  “Ah.” He put the paper down and, on question 47b, ticked the box for “infrequently.”

  One. He hadn’t fucked the entire camp, male and/or female.

  Two. He’d made sure I saw which box he ticked.

  I watched him move over the last page, his answers marked with Xs that went from corner to corner without overshooting the boundaries. His hand was wide across the knuckles with long fingers and had a way of moving that was like a lucid, articulate speech pattern. Every stroke counted.

  What would those hands feel like on my body?

  Cool air came into contact with the sweat breaking out on my neck. I pretended to reread medication labeling while he finished, but I kept his hand in view over the edge of the page.

  He put down the pen and pushed the papers toward me.

  “Thank you, Caden.”

  “My pleasure.”

  I stood, then he stood. “I’ll let you know if I have any follow-up questions.”

  He transferred his cap from his right to his left and held out his right hand. “Nice to meet you.”

  That hand bridged more than a gap in rank. That. Beautiful. Hand.

  I took it, and we shook.

  He turned to leave but stopped at the flap just as I was sitting. “So you know, in the changing room? My ass was because I was annoyed that you came in. I showed you the rest because I want to fuck you.”

  My pussy clenched as if he’d kissed it. “That is highly inappropriate.”

  “I know.” He put on his cap and left.

  * * *

  No disciplinary actions. No insubordination. No complaints at all.

  Caden St. John had a year and a quarter left on his obligation. He didn’t owe the army time for his education. If he left at the end of his four years, he wouldn’t get a pension, but from his sweet reek of privilege, I got the feeling he wasn’t worried about that.

  I’d been active duty for almost thirteen years. The obligation I’d accrued for my medical training would be paid in two years. He’d be long gone by then. Not that it mattered.

  Not that it mattered at all.

  Seven and half months between the end of his obligations and mine.

  Why would I even do that math?

  From my trailer, I heard the transports rumbling. Boots stomped on the pavement. Rifles click-clacked, and men yelled orders.

  They were heading out.

  There was nothing I could do now. I’d prepared as much as I could. I tried to rest, lying on my back with my hands folded across my chest. In the space between sleep and wakefulness, when the dark part of my heart opened like a simply written birthday card,
I wished I could go with them.

  Chapter Two

  DAY ONE

  04:06:00

  Meal scheduling was suspended. The chow hall had laid out some basics to keep everyone going. The usual laughter and conversation at the long tables had also been put on hold apparently. Anyone staying still long enough to eat was working or filling out requisition forms. I was sitting with the brass, huddled at a round table by the soda machine.

  The tension of anticipation was butter-thick.

  “One good thing about an offensive,” Colonel Brogue said, fisting a hot burrito, then chomping off the end like a jerky stick. “Enemy doesn’t have the time or people to hit us. This base normally gets a mortar a week. Now it’s crickets.”

  “Any idea how long it could go? I calculated shifts for the medical staff, but it breaks down after forty-eight hours,” I said.

  “Gonna need more than that.” He balled up the burrito wrapper and got rid of it with a cocksure toss that landed right in the pail. He must have been a complete stud when he first got his commission.

  “I can extend it. Rotate in more rest. Four days sound right?”

  We walked out of chow hall and into the buzzing night.

  “These people are fighting for their lives. Our guys are fighting for fuck-all for anyone can figure out.”

  I’d heard this in my sessions. Wounded soldiers wondered what they’d given their bodies for. They were snide or angry, but few broke down. Your mental state was the measure of your worth as a soldier. Anger was acceptable. Weakness was not. They were a hard lot to heal.

  The colonel stopped between the motor pool and the hospital. Interior lights enveloped a swarm of activity, bleeding together in the open space between.

  “You’re from California, right, Major Frazier?” he asked.

  “My father was in the 101st Airborne, so we moved a lot. He and mom retired to San Diego.”