Then there was only the black night. And calm and silence.
Chapter One
Bethesda Naval Hospital
Maryland
I jerked upright in bed, clutched at my neck, and doubled over as a god-awful pain ripped through me. I’d heard a man yell, just beside me, nearly right in my ear. I couldn’t draw a breath, I was suffocating. And a guy who wasn’t even there was yelling at me and I was dying. I finally managed to heave inward and suck in a huge breath.
I’d felt a mountain of frigid water crash down on me like the whale had closed down over Jonah. But I wasn’t drowning. I knew what drowning was, remembered it as clearly as if it had happened yesterday. I was seven years old, swimming with my older brother, Kevin, who was flirting with some young girls. I’d gotten tangled up in some underwater branches. It had been Jilly who’d jerked me out, smacked my back hard as I’d gagged and choked, until water gushed out of my mouth.
The dream wasn’t like that. It was as if I’d been hit by that water just a moment before there was, quite simply, nothing. Nothing at all. Just stillness, no pain, no questions, no fear, just an utter blank.
I swung my legs over the bed and stamped them hard on the ancient linoleum, savoring the sluice of pain that rumbled through my shoulder, my ribs, my collarbone, my right thigh, and other parts of me that were healing well enough so that gradually I’d dropped them out of my inventory. That delicious sharp pain brought me fully into my favorite hospital room, planted me firmly in the here and now, out from under water in a nightmare that had left me being nothing at all.
Still, when my feet hit the linoleum, the shock of the impact punched me back, and I nearly fell. I grabbed the bed railing at the head of the bed, took a deep breath, and looked around. My feet were still on the floor, flat on off-white linoleum that I’d come to hate in the past two weeks as much as those pastel green and tan walls. Leave it to the military to pick those colors. But you couldn’t hate when you were dead, so I was glad there was something there to prove to me that I was alive.
I’d been lucky, they’d told me. The blast hadn’t zeroed in on my heart or my head or anything vital. It was like I’d gotten hit by a two-by-four all over-a bit smashed here, a bone broken there, a muscle twisted out down lower. My feet and my back had escaped, with just faint bruises marching up my spine. The explosion missed my groin too, for which I was profoundly grateful.
I just stood there by my bed, breathing and savoring all the air that was here, all of it mine.
I looked down at my messed-up bed. I wasn’t about to fall back into that bed because I knew the dream still hovered, just beyond in the ether, much too close, waiting for me to sleep again. I wasn’t about to. I stretched, slowly and carefully. Still, every move brought a jab of pain from somewhere in my body. I breathed in deeply and walked slowly to the window of my hospital room. I was in the newer hospital, built in 1980, a massive building attached to the original hospital, built sometime in the 1930s. Everyone there complained about having to walk miles to get anywhere. I wished I could walk even a part of a mile, and complain with them.
I saw a few starburst dots of light from the five-level open parking building across the way. The parking building as well as half a dozen support buildings were connected to the hospital by long corridors. I couldn’t see more than a dozen parked cars from where I stood. Lights spiked up from lamps set at close intervals throughout the landscaped grounds. There were lights even in among the trees. My law enforcement instincts told me there were no places for a mugger to hide-too many lights.
There hadn’t been any lights at all in the dream, just darkness, wet darkness. I walked slowly to the small bathroom, leaned over very carefully, cupped my hands under the water tap at the sink, and drank deeply. As I straightened, water ran down my chin and dripped onto my chest. I had dreamed I was drowning and yet my throat felt drier than that wool-parched, blistering air in Tunisia. It made no sense.