And that wasn’t going to happen in this lifetime.
Sam closed his eyes and let himself drift as Nils started talking about the tracking system that WildCard, the boy genius, had developed, about patents and interest in the project from the FBI.
FBI. The name cut through his drowse.
His eyes still closed, Sam started paying attention, listening to see if, in their discussion of the FBI, either of them mentioned Alyssa Locke.
God, he was pathetic.
But he was saved from being too pathetic by the shrill sound of his cell phone.
WildCard’s started shrieking a half second later.
They both grabbed for them.
Sam pulled up the antennae. “Starrett.”
It was Jazz. “Get in. ASAP.”
“What’s up?” Sam asked, but the connection was already cut.
Sam looked at Nils, whose phone was silent. Nils shrugged as he stood up, moving back to get the motor going and head in to shore. “Nothing for me.”
“Lieutenant Paoletti always did love you best,” Sam told him. “You’re going to be home in your own bed, with Meg in your arms tonight—while me and Karmody are getting eaten alive by mosquitos, crawling through some swamp, pretending to be terrorists while a platoon of Marines try to learn to tell their asses from their elbows.”
WildCard snapped his own phone shut, “Alli, Alli, Ox in tree.”
“It’s a training op,” Sam guessed.
“Gotta be, if Johnny didn’t get called,” WildCard agreed.
“Son of a bitch,” Sam said. “On a Sunday.” He complained, but the truth was, he loved getting called. Even when it wasn’t real.
Sure, they were probably going to end up in some stinking, bug-infested swamp playing make-believe games with inexperienced troops, but maybe they’d get to do a HALO jump in. They’d exit the plane at a dangerously high altitude and would sky dive down, not opening their chutes until they’d almost reached the ground. That was a rush and a half—and worth all the aggravation that would come before and after.
On second thought, maybe Lieutenant Paoletti loved Sam best.
But then Nils’s cell phone shrilled, too.
“They want us in fast,” he reported. “Maybe this is real.”
“Hang on!” WildCard gave that boat all it had, and like a rocket, they hurtled back to shore.
The adrenaline surge made Sam laugh out loud.
He didn’t need Alyssa Locke, because times like this were better than sex.
Well . . . almost.
As Stan went into the hallway that led to Lt. Tom Paoletti’s office, Kelly, Tom’s fiancée, was coming out. Her face was pale, and her movements clipped.
“Hi, Stan.” She smiled at him, but it was forced.
Great. He was here to ask his CO for a major favor, and his warm-up act had been a lovers’quarrel. Yeah, he was going to go through that door to find Tom in one hell of a bad mood.
Perfect.
“Everything okay?” he asked.
“Fine,” she said shortly as she kept walking. But then she stopped and turned back. “How can you stand working with him? He’s so stubborn!”
He nodded. “Yes, ma’am, that’s usually a good quality for a commanding officer.”
“He won’t let me pay for anything,” she fumed. “Clothes. I can buy my own clothes. And I can buy him presents, but I can’t buy him anything too expensive. Do you know how much money I inherited when my father died?”
Stan cleared his throat. “No, ma’am.”
“Lots,” she told him. “Piles. Mountains. Tom and I are set. We could both retire tomorrow and never have to work another day in our lives. Except he won’t let me add his name to my bank accounts until after we’re officially married. And you know what? I bet he’s not even going to let me do it then.”
It was really pretty amazing. Stan knew, not through his own experience but through watching his men, that the biggest source of conflict for a couple was money. But they usually fought because they didn’t have enough of it.
Kelly and Tom, however, were arguing because they had too much.
“Do me a favor and just ignore me,” Kelly said, and this time when she smiled it was much more natural. She was one of those sweet-looking little blondes. A real Gidget, girl-next-door type—at least on the surface.
But appearances often deceived. And Stan had once seen Kelly pull Tom with her into the ladies’room of a posh Washington, DC, restaurant while a very formal party was in full swing.
And it had been a full twenty minutes before they’d reemerged.
“I didn’t mean to rant at you,” she told him now. “Or to hold you up.”
“Yeah,” he said with a smile. “As if I’m in any kind of hurry to see him now.”
She laughed as she walked away. “Just don’t talk about money, and he’ll be fine.”
But Stan knew his CO and Kelly weren’t really fighting about money. They were fighting because Tom wanted to get married and Kelly kept finding excuses not to set a wedding date.
A woman who didn’t want to get married—it was one of the biggest mysteries Stan had ever encountered.
Or it had been up to about ten seconds ago. Ten seconds ago, Kelly had given Stan a big hint as to what her heel-dragging was about.
“She wants you to quit the Teams,” Stan said as he went into Tom’s office.
“What?” Tom Paoletti stared up at him from his desk. He was a big man with a ruggedly handsome face and warm hazel eyes that canceled out his rapidly retreating hairline. Retreating? Hell, his hair had damn near surrendered.
“Yeah,” Stan said. “Kelly as much as said it, right there, out in the hall. She said she inherited enough money from her father so that you could both retire tomorrow. That’s what this is all about, L.T. She doesn’t want to marry some guy who’s going to be gone for months at a time. Or die.”
Tom shook his head. “No. Stan, I know you’re usually right about these things, but this time . . . no. If there’s one thing I’m certain of, it’s that she’s okay with me being CO of this team.”
“Are you sure?”
“Yes,” he said. “No. Shit, I don’t know anything anymore, except . . . can we please not talk about this right now?”
“I’m sorry, sir,” Stan said. “I thought I was helping.”
“You were,” Tom told him, sorting through the piles of paperwork on his desk. “You are. I just need to file it away and think about it later, when the squad’s not hours from going wheels up.”
“Sir, I know we discussed my not participating in this particular training op,” Stan said. “But I’d like to go along.”
This op was mostly a test to see how quickly Team Sixteen’s Troubleshooters Squad could get in the air, across both the country and the Atlantic to the Azores.
Usually if something was up in that part of the world, a SEAL team based on the East Coast would be called in. But that didn’t stop the powers-that-be from testing readiness and the ability to move quickly and efficiently from one distant spot on the globe to another.
And while they were there, the squad would be participating in a training op with an SAS team from England.
It was a silver bullet assignment—a reward for the hardworking men in Team Sixteen. The SAS were always a kick to work with, full of new tricks, potent dark English stout, and their twisted Monty Python senses of humor. And—bonus—at this time of year there were few nicer places on earth than the Azores islands.
Still, Stan had originally opted to stay behind, in garrison along with Paoletti, in an attempt to get caught up with the paperwork that threatened to overflow his desk. The team’s XO, Lt. Jazz Jacquette, was in command of the training op, so his men were in good hands.
“I’d also like to call in a favor, sir. It has to do with Lt. Teri Howe,” Stan continued. “I’d like you to request to bring her along to work with the team, as support for this operation.”
Stan had the CO’s full attention now. “She�
��s Reserve,” Tom pointed out. “This operation is OUTCONUS.”
“She wants to do it, sir. I’ll take care of whatever paperwork is necessary to transfer her wherever she needs to go to make this possible.”
Lieutenant Paoletti was looking at him with that X-ray gaze that seemed able to penetrate a man’s skull and see his very thoughts.
“What’s going on, Senior Chief?” he asked. “Are you and Howe—”
“Whoa,” Stan said. “L.T. Reality check. Have you seen this girl? And my use of the improper girl instead of the more feminist and PC woman is intentional, sir. She’s very young.”
“And very beautiful. Yes, I’ve certainly seen her. She’s hard to miss. Nice as hell, too.”
“And to be honest, I’m not unaffected by any of that,” Stan admitted.
It was true. If it had been anyone besides Teri Howe ringing his doorbell, he wouldn’t have let them inside of his house.
He had a rule that he never broke. His house was off-limits to everyone he worked with. It was his sanctuary. But along came Teri Howe with her amazing brown eyes, and he broke his unbreakable rule without hesitating.
“She came to me for help with a serious problem,” he told the lieutenant. “I’m not going to go into details—it’s something you definitely don’t want to know about. But it would do her good to get out of Dodge for a few weeks.”
“She came to you?” Tom asked. “Why would she do that?”
“Let’s talk figuratively,” Stan said. “Say one of the female officers was being sexually harassed by, oh, say, a lieutenant commander. And say I saw this asshole grabbing this female officer’s ass—and say she knew I saw. And say I followed her out to where he’d cornered her in the parking lot and—”
“Damn.” Tom sighed and rubbed his forehead. “There are proper channels for this kind of thing.”
“Yes, sir, there are. But that doesn’t apply in this particular unique situation.”
Tom applied pressure to his eyes. Stan was definitely giving the man a headache.
Another sigh and Tom looked up at him. “You know, I could order you to tell me who this lieutenant commander is.”
“Aye, sir,” Stan agreed. “You could. But I know you’ll trust that I have my good reasons when I ask you not to do that. Besides, we were talking figuratively, remember?”
Tom gazed at him for many long seconds. But then he laughed. “You know what’s going to happen, don’t you? You’re going to marry Teri Howe before Kelly marries me.”
Stan laughed, too. That was just plain silly. “Right.”
“Yeah,” Tom said. “It’s going to be just like it was with Johnny Nilsson. I turn around, and wham, the kid’s married. How did that happen? I’ve been engaged for forever, I’m dying to marry this fabulous woman I absolutely adore, only I can’t seem to get it done. I swear to God, if you come back from the Azores and tell me you want to get married, I’ll—”
“That’s not going to happen,” Stan insisted.
“Throw you a party,” Tom finished with a tired smile.
“Muldoon,” Stan said. “I’m going to set her up with Mike Muldoon. Not that you heard that from me.”
He’d thought of it right away, when Teri Howe was lamenting the fact that she couldn’t get a date. Who would be more perfect for her than Muldoon—the Troubleshooters’own personal version of Dudley Do-Right? Honest, sincere, squeaky clean, and disgustingly handsome. Stan had no trouble imagining the two of them together.
Tom looked at him. More X-ray vision. “Okay. You better get moving if you’re going to do that paperwork. And somebody better tell Howe to get her gear together.”
“Thank you, sir.” Stan put the papers on the CO’s desk. “She’s all ready to go, and I have the paperwork right here.”
“Of course you do.” Tom smiled and signed.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Four
They were being hijacked.
The news came from the white-faced stewardesses who moved through the cabin, telling people in a variety of languages to remain seated and to please stay quiet and calm. There was a gunman in with the pilot, demanding they land the plane in Kazbekistan.
Gina held Casey’s hand, glad to have something to do, someone to talk to, to soothe, to keep from going ballistic. It was keeping her from going ballistic herself.
“Stay calm,” Dick McGann, the university band director, told the American students, although he looked as if his head were going to explode. “Stay quiet, stay in your seats.”
Gee, thanks for the news flash, Dick. As if they hadn’t heard the stewardess.
Casey was crying, but at least she was doing it silently now as the plane began its descent.
“We’ll land in Kazabek,” Gina told her friend, “and that’ll be that. This guy probably just wants a ride home. He’ll get off the plane and—”
“You really think so?” Casey’s eyes were hopeful.
Gina was praying it was so. She didn’t want to think about what might really be happening here. She’d taken a world cultures course last semester that had dealt primarily with the concept of terrorism.
She’d done a term paper on the psychological makeup of people who would willingly pick up a gun and take a roomful—or a planeful—of people hostage.
In order to do that, you had to be ready to be a martyr for your cause. To die.
And to kill.
Please, God, don’t let the gunman start shooting and make the plane go down and . . .
They landed. The wheels touched down with a lurch and a jerk, and thank God at least falling out of the sky was no longer an option.
Somehow she managed to smile at Casey. “Yeah,” she said. “Any minute now, he’s going to get off the plane. I’m almost sure of it.”
One of the big ironies of this situation was that Gina had used Kazbekistan when arguing the merits of this trip with her father. “It’s not like we’re going to Kazbekistan,” she’d said.
Um, Dad? Change of plans . . .
And, crap, if they were delayed too long here in Kazabek, she wouldn’t be able to call the Perfect Nose’s sister at the Hotel Ratskywatsky or whatever was written on that piece of paper in her pocket.
“Think positively,” she told Casey, told herself. “This is going to be over really soon.”
The plane stopped rolling right there, on the middle of the runway, some distance from the terminal—if you could call the rundown Quonset hut and two-story concrete block structure a terminal. Come to think of it, this entire airport was barely an airport. It was a concrete strip in the middle of a field on the edge of marshlands, near the sea.
Two of the stewardesses moved purposefully at the front of the plane, the third moving back through the aisle to speak to the passengers.
“Please stay in your seats,” she informed them. “The gunman has ordered us to open the door.”
“See? So he can get off the plane,” Gina whispered to Casey.
She could see out the window, see an awkward-looking cart with a disembarking ladder attached zooming across the concrete toward them. She could see it lurch to a stop. She could see . . .
Oh, God. Oh, tremendously powerful God . . .
“Don’t do it!” Gina shouted over the hush. “Don’t open the—”
The door opened.
And four camouflage-clad men carrying machine guns boarded.
Oh, God!
The chaos and noise was immediate, although most of it came from the intruders. They spoke loudly, in a language Gina didn’t understand, but their meaning was clear. Close the doors.
The stewardesses didn’t move quickly enough, and one of the men hit one of them—hard—in the back with the butt of his weapon.
A man in first class stood up as if to stop them and got savagely smashed in the head for his trouble. He went down, bleeding, and around Gina, everyone burst into tears.
She held on to Casey, who w
as sobbing uncontrollably. Dear God. Dear God . . .
Two rows up, she could see Trent, where he was sitting with Jack Lewis and Miles Foley.
He wasn’t bored anymore.
Helga Shuler was losing it.
It. Her marbles. Her mind.
It was probably early stages Alzheimer’s and it had caught Des completely by surprise. The worst of it was, he had no idea how long it had been going on.
Troubleshooters 03 Over The Edge Page 7