Read Under Fire: The Admiral for Free Online

up. “We were fucking lucky.” She
reattached the light to the hammock cord and he saw she was
soaked.
    “Lightning split the tree. The thickest part
of the trunk fell a few feet away. Branches are lying across
us.”
    “Should we get it off?”
    “In that?” She gave a quick tilt of her head.
“No.” She wiped water from her face and sat. “It’s adding more
protection from the wind.” She stopped and gave him a look. “Thanks
for protecting me. Don’t do it again. I should be doing that for
you.”
    He scooted closer and bumped her with his
shoulder. “You have a thing about protecting me.”
    “Yeah, I do.” She tried to move away but the
branches weighed the cover down and she had no place to go. “I’m
responsible for you. It’s my job to get you back. I don’t like the
thought of not doing my job.”
    “Ahh. Here I thought it was because you liked
me.”
    She said nothing.
    “I’m a big boy. You don’t need to be so
protective,” he said, losing the humor in his voice.
    “You ever lose a patient, Doc?” she said,
serious as a heart attack. “I mean one that you went over the
circumstances dozens of times thinking what you could have done
differently to save them.” She turned her head and watched him
intently. The green light gave her eyes an intense, feral quality.
“One that caused you to change how you made decisions.”
    “Yeah,” he said cautiously, wondering where
this was going.
    “And you know that sickening feeling that you
missed something. You could have done better.”
    He nodded. “But what’s that—?”
    “I’ve lost someone,” she interrupted. “Felt
all those things and I don’t want to go through it again.”
    “You lost a client?”
    She said nothing. She didn’t have to. The
look on her face said it all. They were silent a long time,
listening to the absurd sounds of the wind, rain, and coconut
bombs.
    “It wasn’t losing a patient that changed me,”
he said.
    “What?”
    “You asked if I’d lost a patient. I lost a
friend, Charlie.”
    She said nothing.
    “Car accident. Straightened me up. There
isn’t a day that goes by I don’t think of him.” And the woman
who saved my life. “What I could’ve done to prevent the
accident. Why I didn’t stop him from driving. How I could’ve been
killed that night.” He waited for her to share. She didn’t. She’d
drawn her knees up, hugging them like when she’d gone to sleep.
    He bumped her again. “Was yours in a plane
crash?” She chewed on her lower lip, considering the question, then
shook her head.
    “Car accident like you. In the middle of the
night, I came up on a car overturned in a runoff ditch filled with
water.”
    Was he in some altered state? Dreaming? He
scraped a fingernail hard over the back of his hand and felt pain.
He was definitely awake.
    “The car had bounced off one of those steel
power poles into the ditch. The inside was flooded, the engine
pushed into the front seat, trapping the guy. I couldn’t free
him.”
    Being shot at, the crash, and the bump on the
head combined could be causing him to hallucinate.
    “I could see house lights down the road. It
was before everybody had cells. To get help I would have to leave.
The guy in the car was fading in and out, slipping under the
water.”
    Gemma was . . . describing . . . his accident. He suffered a major outbreak of goose bumps.
    “I made the decision to stay, hold up his
head instead of getting help.”
    He went over the clinical stages of
hallucination. Emergence of warded-off memory, frequent
reality checks, last vestige of insight as hallucinations become
real, fantasy and distortion confused with actual perception,
boundaries destroyed. He took in a deep breath, smelled the
salt air and the jungle musk. He heard rain and wind. Felt her
warmth. He leaned. Felt her. This was not a hallucination. He
forced himself to take slow breaths before he hyperventilated.
“What happened?” The words rolled on a cough.
    She