Tap-Dancing the Minefields Read online

  “I’ll send you a little of everything.” Lev stepped close enough to rest his hand on Tankersley’s ankle. From any other department head in the mountain, that hand would be the same as stepping out of the closet, but everyone knew Lev got protective with his engineers. Of course, several of them didn’t appreciate his touchy-feely side, but after a few near misses with alien capture, they learned to appreciate some TLC. The nurse stepped around Lev and started preparing the stretcher to roll. He called some other helpers over and then nicely invited Lev to get the hell out of the way so they could take Tankersley to testing. If Clyde hadn’t known better, he’d swear from the look on Lev’s face that they were taking Tankersley out to execute him.

  The two nurses started pushing Tankersley out of the examination room, and Lev was left with his arms wrapped around his waist.

  “It’s a test, Lev. He’s probably right about this being nothing.”

  Lev glared at him. “Tell me, exactly how long were you out there in my living room?” Oh, yes. An angry Lev was a Lev on the offense.

  “Drop it, Lev.”

  Lev slowly turned red, although Clyde couldn’t figure out if Lev was embarrassed or angry. With Lev, he was never quite sure what the man was thinking. “You… you…,” Lev finally spluttered. Angry, then. Lev only ran out of words when he was really, truly furious.

  “Me… me…,” Clyde shot right back. He’d discovered around year one that it was better to lance the boil and just let Lev blow. Otherwise Lev’s slow burns were nasty enough to make entire departments put in for transfers. “Look, I didn’t interrupt you, did I?”

  The red color spread to Lev’s neck. “Oh my God. You were… the whole time?” Lev’s whole body practically vibrated with tension.

  “Well, for the tail end, anyway,” Clyde said with a shrug. Lev glared murder, but Clyde figured he’d gotten that look so often he had developed immunity. “Hey, that was me being polite. I could have barged in.”

  “Only if you wanted me to shoot you.” Lev shifted his arms so they were crossed over his chest.

  “Yeah, yeah. You keep threatening, but you never actually pull the trigger.” Clyde sighed. He had tried to take the moral high ground here, and he was still getting shit for it. “Look, I was worried.”

  “About what? Me having a friend?”

  “That was more than a friend.”

  Lev’s eyes narrowed.

  “And you have to admit that something’s not right with him.”

  “No—no, I don’t. Tank is a very nice young man. He’s not an alien. He’s not a psychopath. He’s not trying to kill me.”

  “Two out of three I agree with, but the jury is still out on number three,” Clyde warned. There were just too many holes in Tank’s story, and too many odd reactions. Clyde would feel a lot better about this when he could track down a few answers. Deborah was still sorting data, and her first career had been as a hacker before she went into data processing and then computer engineering. She was terrifying, so she sure as hell would dig something up on Private Tankersley.

  “Don’t start.” Lev poked a finger in Clyde’s face.

  Clyde shoved Lev’s hand to the side. “I am used to being surrounded by people who are smarter than me, including you, Lev. However, when it comes to relationships, you need a keeper. Look me in the eye and tell me you haven’t noticed that there’s something wrong with Tankersley.”

  Lev backed off a step, but the color faded from his face and he pressed his lips into a thin, stubborn line. Yeah, Lev had noticed. As usual, he’d just ignored the warning signs.

  “When Sadler tried looking up Tankersley’s background, she found her searches were rerouted. And whoever did it used a fluid wall.” Clyde waited for Lev to make that connection. Aliens routinely seeded the internet with the malicious coding that Sadler described as some hybrid of network-based firewall, malware, a proxy server, and a worm, all blended into one alien technology that could reroute data in ways no human could replicate or even fully understand. Sadler had picked up the trick a few years back. The aliens created a movable wall of sorts that protected information while allowing enough innocuous data through to make it look like the system was open. Sadler had briefed the CIA on the programming code, and Clyde assumed that any technology the US had reverse engineered had also been discovered by other governments. It meant someone else could have duplicated a fluid wall to hide Tankersley’s past. Clyde didn’t think that was likely because he assumed that if Sadler couldn’t program something, no human could. However, he needed to consider the possibility.

  A bit of the anger faded, replaced with confusion. “What?”

  “Fluid computer wall. Fluid, Lev,” Clyde said, allowing some of his own aggravation to color his tone.

  “Why?” Lev’s big old brain was starting to spin now.

  Clyde threw up his hands. “I don’t know, but I think it’s interesting. Even more interesting, Tankersley doesn’t deny anything.”

  Lev glanced toward the infirmary door. “He’s a nice young man.”

  “Maybe,” Clyde agreed. It actually bothered Clyde how nice Tankersley had been to Lev in bed. He’d said all the right things to make Lev feel good, he’d teased him and gotten Lev to laugh, and Clyde was really not ready to face what any of that might mean. “Tankersley told me he wasn’t going to go telling other people’s secrets.”

  “Is he an infiltrator?” Lev’s whole body stiffened. An uncharitable part of Clyde wanted to say yes, but he didn’t think that was true. Sure, Russia and India had both tried to get eyes inside the American program, but Tankersley didn’t fit the profile of a spy.

  “He’s too young for that kind of work. However, I think he was caught up in the middle of something. Terrorist cell, secret testing, secret training, alien experiments… I don’t know. I do know that Tankersley is not just a nice young man. I’ve spent twenty years around new recruits, and when they have injuries like that, they have two reactions. Either they show everyone every single bruise and brag about how tough they are, or they whine. I mean, they really whine. I’ve considered shooting one or two recruits just to shut them up.” Clyde wasn’t sure which reaction annoyed him more, but Tankersley’s sort of blasé attitude came after years of hard injuries in the field where no one had time to care.

  “Not everyone reacts the same way to stimulus,” Lev said, but he had that absentminded-professor tone that suggested his brain was busy mulling something else over.

  “Lev?”

  “What?” Lev’s gaze shot up to Clyde, his eyes wide. Yep, that was his guilty expression.

  “What did you just remember?” Clyde demanded.

  “Nothing.”

  Clyde sighed. Some days he missed having a team that actually listened to orders. “Lev, this is a serious situation. We have an unknown in the middle of our most classified military secrets. I do not have time for you to play keep-away with information.”

  “Tank is not plotting against us.”

  “But….” Clyde drew out the word, inviting Lev to share whatever thought he had rattling around in that oversized brain of his.

  Lev sighed. “But he has a very skewed understanding of engineering. He doesn’t have any vocabulary, and when he was looking at one of my disassembled parts, he muttered a word.” Lev made a face.

  “A word?” Clyde prompted him. A strange vocabulary alone wouldn’t make Lev look this worried.

  Lev leaned back against the wall. “When he touched the mind-alteration device, he said periculum.” Lev stopped.

  Clyde was getting a bad feeling about all this. “Lev?”

  “It’s Latin for ‘risk’ or ‘danger,’” Lev blurted out. “There was nothing to suggest that device was more hazardous than anything else on the table, but he gravitated to the one piece of truly malicious alien technology.”

  The back of Clyde’s neck itched. He needed to find out what was going on, and he needed to do it before any of this came home to roost. “Lev, I know you like hi
m.” And boy was Clyde avoiding thinking about how much Lev liked him. “But be careful. Even if Tankersley isn’t the bad guy here, he’s mixed up with something.”

  “But, Clyde….”

  “No buts. He’s going on report for failure to tend to injuries sustained during training, but for now I’m willing to let him go back to his duties. One mistake and he goes in the stockade. Am I clear?”

  “Crystal,” Lev agreed. Of course Clyde knew that meant he only had a 60 percent chance of Lev actually following his orders, but it was a start. He would probably have more luck threatening Tankersley.

  “Clyde, about what happened.” Lev stopped, and his arms were around his stomach again. Clyde really needed to convince Lev to join the poker game, because he could not hide his emotions. Maybe that’s why every asshole and prick of an auditor who came through gravitated to him—they could see how every word impacted Lev and tailor their bullshit to match. That last woman had nearly earned a one-way ticket out the front door without a coat. Clyde could have cheerfully watched her freeze to death after she’d spent two weeks mind-fucking Lev. The man had a soft spot that drew sadists like bees to sugar.

  “It’s your life. Just keep in mind that you’re fraternizing inside your own unit. If some political enemy gets wind of that, Tankersley will be court-martialed and you will get demoted. And if Sadler has to take over as head of engineering on top of her XO duties for me, she’s going to hunt you down and gut you.”

  “You aren’t bothered by….” Lev stopped, and his face was pinking up again. Clyde decided to put him out of his misery.

  “What? Your crappy taste?” Clyde rolled his eyes. “You have hundreds of men on base, and you pick a nineteen-year-old dishwasher with issues. Lev, I’m more worried about your taste in men than your sexual orientation.” Clyde slapped Lev on the shoulder and turned to head for his office. This was turning out to be the messiest transfer they’d had yet.

  Lev, however, had his normal need to talk everything to death. He followed after. “He’s twenty.”

  “Well, that makes it ever so much better.” Clyde’s office was in a secure area, so he ran his ID through the electronic slot and then strode down the corridor. Lev followed. The age difference actually bothered Clyde less than he’d expected, but he suspected part of that was because he thought of Lev as young. Lev’s brilliance meant that he’d joined the IF early and been sheltered from normal life. He hadn’t been screwed over by any ex-wives or gotten 3:00 a.m. hate-filled calls from children he’d disappointed. He still had a nineteen-year-old’s idealism. And, ironically, Tankersley didn’t.

  Lev kept the fight going. “I don’t want you to take this out on him.”

  Clyde spun around, nearly hitting a sergeant who had the bad luck to be passing him at the time. “Do I look like a vindictive man?”

  “Yes,” Lev shot right back. Clyde flinched. Okay, he really shouldn’t have asked that when Lev knew him so well. In his defense he tried to keep his revenge limited to people who deserved it, for example, terrorists, alien slavers, and sadistic auditors.

  “I’m not going out of my way to hurt some kid from New York.”

  “He’s not a kid.”

  “Trust me, I heard.” Clyde’s sarcasm had gotten ahead of his good sense, and Lev’s eyes narrowed. Clyde turned and started for his office again. He needed a little time away from Lev to get his balance back. Unfortunately, Lev chased him down the hall. “Not now, Lev,” Clyde warned. Of course he didn’t expect the warning to work. It never did with Lev.

  Clyde reached the elevator and pressed the Close button as fast as he could. Lev was faster. “If you have a problem with this, we need to clear the air.” Lev had his stubborn face on again.

  “I don’t have a problem with it. Now, the way you go running into danger the second you see a flash of alien technology gives me hives. Do you want to talk about that?”

  “I don’t want this to get between us in the field.”

  Clyde rubbed his hand over his face. Before this assignment, he never thought he’d miss living in a six-by-six hut with four other special-ops soldiers as they tried to take out a target, but he did. You didn’t mention that you hated the way your teammate scratched his junk or picked his zits or looked at your ass. You didn’t mention these things, and they slowly faded into the background where they could be ignored. But if you talked about them, that was light shining a big fucking spotlight on them.

  “We’re fine, Lev.” Clyde wanted to beg Lev to drop it, and he would if he thought it would do any good. When it came to Lev, Clyde had very little dignity left to protect. They’d lived together in a cell for six months, and every day they’d expected to die. Clyde had lost his marriage years before the slave-ship incident, and his kids thought he was an insensitive asshole who never put them first, but Lev was always there—always willing to cut Clyde slack and listen to him and provide a shoulder when the burdens of command got to be too damn much. “I have a lot of work to do. Sadler’s trying to figure out what someone is hiding. Maybe we can talk about this later.”

  “By later, you mean never.”

  “Yes, yes, I do,” Clyde agreed.

  “Clyde….”

  “Lev, not now. If I’m lucky, not ever.”

  “Because you have a problem with it.”

  The elevator opened, and Clyde headed for his office as fast as he could without looking like he was fleeing from a civilian engineer.

  “We have to talk about this.” Lev stormed after Clyde, slamming the office door behind him. Yep, this was hell.

  Clyde collapsed into his chair. “I could order you to leave, you know.”

  “Yes, and I’d ignore the order.” Lev stood with his arms around his stomach, his body fairly radiating fear and insecurity and distress, and yet he stood there ready to go toe-to-toe with Clyde. It was funny. When Clyde had first seen Lev, he’d thought the man was soft. Without a doubt, he had a soft exterior, but that just hid a spine of steel and balls the size of watermelons. Clyde wondered who would win if Sadler and Lev ever fundamentally disagreed with each other. Generally Lev stuck to the physical technology and Deborah handled the programming and function. But if they ever went at each other, that would be an epic fight. Most of the base would bet on Sadler, but Clyde wasn’t sure.

  “I don’t care if you’re gay, Lev.”

  Lev dropped into the other chair. “Bisexual.”

  “Gay, bisexual, antisexual, straight, omnisexual, or trisexual. I don’t care, Lev. Your life is yours.”

  Lev studied Clyde, and Clyde tried hard to look honest. True, he was a little bothered by the idea of Lev with Tankersley, but that had more to do with the possibility that someone had planted Tankersley in their unit.

  “Lev, I don’t care if you’re bisexual. You’re my teammate, and what you do in your private time does not change that. If you were a special-ops soldier, you’d know that. You’d know that I will have your six no matter what stupid thing you do.”

  “Are you implying that sleeping with Tank was stupid?”

  “Yes.” Clyde wasn’t going to sugarcoat his opinion about that.

  “You’re wrong.”

  “You two barely know each other. I won’t even fart in front of a girl for the first half-dozen dates,” Clyde pointed out. This all felt wrong on so many levels.

  “I doubt you ever met someone under the conditions Tank and I met.”

  “I can guarantee I haven’t.”

  “Then you know why I feel so close to him.”

  “Because of the sex…,” Clyde guessed.

  “Because I know how trustworthy he is. Even under the influence of an alien device, he was thoughtful and careful. And when I talk to him, he’s so damn smart, even if he doesn’t know it. I believe him, and I know he’s a good guy.” Lev sounded so sincere, but Clyde couldn’t give his trust that easily.

  “We’ll see once we get his real background.”

  Lev continued to stare at Clyde for some time, an
d Clyde just gave him time to sort out his thoughts. Eventually, Lev stood up. “You’re going to apologize once we get the whole truth.”

  “I doubt that,” Clyde said. Lev opened his mouth, probably to lecture Clyde again, but Clyde held up a hand to stop him. “But if it’s warranted, I will. Meanwhile, you need to make sure that both of you stay out of trouble until we figure out what sort of trouble is on the horizon.”

  “I’m not avoiding Tank.”

  “Fine, just make sure you avoid him in public areas.”

  Slowly, Lev nodded. Now that Clyde could trust.

  “Get out. Your friend has doubled my workload, and I plan to take my bad mood out on anyone who has the nerve to come within twenty feet.”

  “Okay, okay.” Lev stopped with his hand on the doorknob. “Clyde, thank you.”

  “For what? Not interrupting you midcoitus?”

  “You are such an ass.” Lev stopped. “But thank you for not making a big deal out of this.”

  “It isn’t a big deal, Lev. Now, you choosing the one man on base who has a questionable background, that’s a big deal, so go check on Tankersley while I try to clean up that mess.”

  Lev nodded and headed out the door, closing it softly behind him. Clyde glanced at the clock and wondered if he should call Sadler. No way would she go to bed without solving the mystery, and if she had solved it, her first call would have been to him. General Zeller was going to be just thrilled, especially since Clyde had asked for Tankersley’s transfer based on Lev’s recommendation. Yeah, there was plenty of shit rolling down this hill, enough for everyone to get splattered with it.

  Chapter Ten

  “HEY, HOW are you feeling?” Lev asked.

  Tank groaned and cracked one eye open enough to glance at the clock. Six a.m., so he’d had two hours’ sleep. “Like roadkill,” he admitted. Day two always hurt worse than day one. He knew that from a lifetime of getting the snot beat out of him.

  “Is it your back?” Lev leaned closer, a worried look on his face. Tank couldn’t help but smile at Lev’s concern. He reached out and stroked a finger over the back of Lev’s hand.