Backblast by Candace Irving (brene brown rising strong .TXT) 📗

with those massive arms and combat-honed reflexes, that was all it had taken. The translator was dead. And unless she found exculpating evidence—and soon—John would be found guilty. Despite their past and her current feelings for the man, she'd be forced to support that verdict.

Christ, what a mess. A mess that, ultimately, lay at her feet. John would have been better off having never met her in that off-post bar back in Germany. But he had. Not only had she used his attraction, she'd ruthlessly exploited it. And now, he was trapped in a compartment a deck away, alone and tortured by what he'd done.

What he believed he'd finally become.

Because of her.

But she wasn't the only one at fault. The Army shouldered a good deal of the responsibility too. Perhaps not as much as she did, but definitely more than John.

To the military, the mission was everything. And the way those missions were accomplished was through skills, to the extent that the military's entire branch and occupational specialty sub-structure was based upon them.

Need to blow up a critical bridge deep inside enemy lines? Task a Sapper team with soldiers who'd been weaned on rigging C4 and det cord since they were privates. Need to ferry an Army CID agent from a sensitive airstrip located on a patch of desert in the UAE to a US Navy warship while that ship was operating in the middle of the Arabian Sea? Task the pilot and crew of one of those mammoth Super Stallions currently strapped to the Griffith's helo deck to fly to that airstrip and bring her here.

Why?

Because she was no more qualified to fly that monster than she could drop an entire bridge into a river in ten seconds flat—while the enemy was crossing it.

In fact, there were a hell of a lot of skills that were critical to the Army and its innumerable missions that she didn't possess and never would. But she was an interrogator. Which the Army knew full well, because it had spent years teaching her to sit across a table, identify the appropriate interrogation technique and slowly but steadily run it—and the detainee on the other side of the table—into the ground, until he or she coughed up whatever information Uncle Sam had deemed vital.

John, however, was not an interrogator.

Oh, he might get lucky. And there was always the chance that he'd be able to clear the goalpost by brainpower, patience and combat-honed instincts alone. But the risk was always there. The risk that those same combat-honed instincts could just as easily become triggered and blow up in John's face…as they had this morning.

Why?

John simply wasn't trained to do what he'd been ordered to do aboard this ship. It was the same rationale as to why a US Army infantryman, carrying a loaded M4, should never be slotted into a line of civilian police officers at the local county courthouse during a belligerent stateside demonstration. The average infantryman simply didn't possess the knowledge, skills and experience to perform the riot control mission effectively.

Again and again, history had confirmed that conquering armies made for lousy occupying forces and even lousier police. Peacekeeping just wasn't in their skill set. And professional fortitude and personal control only went so far.

That wasn't to say that John shouldn't be aboard the Griffith.

Quite the contrary. Once Hachemi had reversed course and clammed up, John should absolutely have been brought in. Just as someone from the Griffith's audiovisual department should've rigged a camera to broadcast its signal beyond the steel bulkheads that formed that conference room. John should've been in the next compartment, watching the feed.

Assessing. Advising.

But he should never have been inside that compartment, let alone serving as the official face of the Army across the table. Because John was not CID; he was Special Forces. In that capacity, the Army had spent years teaching the man to execute two primary missions: kill, and teach others how to kill. Coldly, efficiently, effectively.

And in some singularly creative ways.

And then the Army had tasked John with honing those deadly skills, for over a decade—in combat, no less—until they'd become more than second nature.

They'd been branded into his flesh.

Muscle memory. The goal was to train a soldier to the point where he could draw on his skill set mere seconds from sleep…or when his back was to the wall and he was fighting the renewed horror of the deaths of no less than seven of his soldiers, two of their wives and a young sergeant's unborn child. Not to mention seven Pakistani women and an equal number of infants in a cave deep within the Hindu Kush.

The idea was to push at a soldier under increasingly severe stress until his innate skills automatically surfaced and the soldier just…reacted.

As John had.

As General Palisade and the general's entire chain of command had to have known John would react. So, why on earth had Palisade and that chain risked it?

What else was going on?

And why did she increasingly suspect that Riyad was privy to it?

And if the NCIS agent was aware of it? Did she keep the real meaning behind that private I saw red explanation to herself? At least for now?

Or did she inform her newly assigned, so-called partner of the dark depth of John's belief in his own culpability? An NCIS spook who not only openly wanted her off this case so he could investigate it alone, but had done his damnedest to sabotage her initial assignment before she'd even stepped aboard the Griffith.

Regan was still struggling with the dilemma when the door to her stateroom reverberated with a solid, triple knock.

The knocks settled it.

If Riyad was on the other side, she confessed right now. If not, she waited. Bided her time. At least until she and Riyad linked up for the translator's autopsy.

She hadn't seen or heard from the spook since he'd walked out during her interview with John just over an hour ago. If Riyad was still on his sat phone, that was