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The Heat of
Passion
by Tami
How did he get drawn into these missions? What in unholy Hell possessed him to agree with this? To agree with her? Maybe some long forgotten sense of duty and honor caused him to go along with this. He’d done the duty and honor thing before when he was drafted into the Army. He became the best in his unit. He knew a thousand different ways to disarm and kill the enemy before they could make a sound. The U.S. Army taught him to spot the enemy and annihilate him. No questions asked. Just follow orders. And for that, his country spat on him.
When he returned to the States, he found that all his comrades had died, Danforth being the last. After that, all he wanted was to drown his sorrows in a pint of beer and remember the good times. But Sheriff Teasle wouldn’t allow that. Teasle accused him of being a drifter. Then, Teasle hunted him down as if he were big game in that forest until he retaliated in self defense and wounded the man.
All that trouble just because he wanted a decent meal.
In prison, he kept to himself, only getting into fights when the need arose. Prison wasn’t so bad. He’d been in worse places. He’d been held captive and tortured in Vietnam. The dreams of his time there still haunted him.
Then, Colonel Trautman came and offered him a new mission: to survey an abandoned P.O.W. camp in Vietnam.
The country really hadn't changed much. It was a surprise that his contact was a woman. She had courage and he respected her for that. He offered to get her out of there when he left, but two seconds later when they started to move on, the enemy gunned her down in front him. Once again, in retaliation, he hunted the group of men down and killed them one by one. He vowed never to get close to another person again.
After he saved Colonel Trautman from the Russians in Afghanistan, he disappeared into the jungles of Thailand. He made a living doing odd jobs and ferrying travelers up and down the safer parts of the Salween River in an old PT boat.
That was when she came. Them really. They were a small group of missionaries who thought they could give the world a hug and stop the killing. But, all he saw was her from the moment he set eyes on her being meek, trying to hide behind a shelf. He didn’t know who they were and he didn’t want to know. He was perfectly happy in seclusion, living a mundane life.
The male leader of the group, Michael Barnett, introduced himself and asked for a fool’s errand: take them upriver so that his group could try and help the refugees of the genocide war going on. He absolutely refused. Even he didn’t go there if he could help it. A fool would be insane to go there. Upon being told that they were going there weaponless, he unequivocally said no. He was not going to be responsible for these people.
But then, she kept following him around. Everywhere he went, she was there. She said her name was Sarah Miller. It suited her. She looked like a ‘Sarah’ or an ‘Anne’. She’d come back after he told her to go home and get away from the death and destruction. Here it was hell. Here was where the damned were sent to fight the Devil’s war. She had no place here. None of them belonged here. He was here because war was all he knew anymore. In the world. Inside himself. There was no peace.
But, she had come back. Sarah. The name sounded like a breath of clean air that he had no right to breathe. He was broken and damaged by a war long ended. She was good and pure and sweet, thinking she was going to make a difference in a God-forsaken region. Like anything she did, anything that group did would help matters in the end. The world would not magically become perfect no matter how much they wished it. That the enemy would treat them like brethren if they could just make them see what was right. It wasn’t the way things worked out here in the jungle. Out here it was every man for himself.
She talked about having faith and believing. He didn’t have faith anymore. He survived. That’s what his life had been reduced to. Living day to day in a dangerous place, living off the land, living off what he knew from his army days. He was a man without a country, without a cause, without a reason. He didn’t care anymore and the only person that cared about him was dead now.
“Maybe you lost your faith in people, but you must still believe in something. You must care about something. Maybe we can’t change what is, but trying to save a life isn’t wasting your life, now is it?”
She challenged him with those words. He may have thought she was unwise in her endeavors of trying to amend the unchangeable, but he respected her conviction. It had been a long time since he saw someone stand up for what they believed in. She believed in this mission of hers, however dangerous and reckless it was. He agreed to take her and her group up the river.
She was the first to show any interest in his welfare in years. She was the only one on the boat not afraid to talk to him. He had to give her points for that. While Barnett preached peace and how they were going to go into Burma to fight a losing battle, she came up and started a conversation with him, against the other man’s wishes. He reminded her that she was the reason he taking them where no sane person would want to go and he would take them back the second she said the word.
After the Burmese pirates had threatened to rape her and kill the others, he’d shot them. Barnett screamed at him about his ethics, his conduct. What the fuck did he know about living in a war zone? Barnett was from Colorado on Thailand’s version of a safari trip. He wanted to immediately end their excursion and go back, but again Sarah had stopped him. She made her compelling case, appealing to whatever humanity was still left in him.
When he got word that they were kidnapped by Burmese soldiers, he didn’t go just because he had to take mercenaries to where he’d last seen them. He went because of her. Sarah. He didn’t want to imagine the things that could possibly happen to her: things worse than death, worse than rape. The Burmese soldiers had no sense of the word ‘mercy’.
He had teamed up with the mercenaries to save her. He had to. She didn’t belong here. She belonged somewhere else in a sundress, walking barefoot in a flower garden. He didn’t want her near someone like him, tainted by the things he’d seen and done. Yet, he ripped a man’s throat out in front of her for daring to try to rape her.
It had made him late for the rendezvous time with the mercenaries. They had saved the others in the group and left him with her. One man had stayed behind . . . School Boy, a nickname the kid had picked up in sniper training. All they could do was run, putting as much distance between them and the prisoner camp before dawn when they were discovered missing.
When he’d deemed it safe enough to rest, School Boy had left them to scout ahead but staying within shouting distance. That was when Sarah had curled against his side as if he could shield her from everything. He knew he should keep his feelings guarded, his heart hardened. But her sweetness was chipping away at the stone shell.
“What are we going to do now?” she asked.
“You’re going to make it. You’ll keep going. When we get out of this, you’ll go home like I told you to in the first place and forget about this place and me. Find something else to wrap your rose-tinted mind around, because being a humanitarian in this Hell? That calling must be a wrong number,” he told her.
There was no use sugarcoating the situation. It wouldn’t get any better. If they survived this, it wouldn’t be by the grace of God or whatever else Barnett preached. There was no changing the perspectives of mad men bent on genocide. There was no hope here. Only death.
Then he felt it, the lightest of kisses on his cheek. It had been so long since anyone had touched him, that he almost missed the fleeting sensation. He looked at her with surprise. Her lips were still parted. She was as dirty and sweaty as he was from running through the forest away from the soldiers. But, right then she was the most beautiful thing he’d ever seen.
He reached out to touch her to be sure she was real. His grimy fingers laced through her disarrayed hair, clenching his fist in it. Her head tilted back with the motion and she looked up at him with sky-blue eyes. Then, he was kissing her. It was nothing like the timid peck on the cheek that she had given him. It was ravenous. Pent up tension and restrained sexual desire that had been held in check for years unleashed in that one kiss.
She moaned and balled his shirt up in her small fists, holding onto him as he kissed her like no one had. Michael had made advances towards her before, but he was nothing like this man. If John Rambo wanted her to forget this place and him then he had failed his mission completely.
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