“Let’s go,” Lieutenant Starrett called. “Time out’s over. Let’s do this again, and let’s do it right this time.”
Muldoon looked about as relieved as she felt. Saved.
“See you later,” she said.
“Sure,” Muldoon said. “Ouch! I mean, do you, um, have plans for dinner?”
Teri hadn’t seen it, but she was pretty sure that Stan had stepped on the back of Muldoon’s boot. Hard.
“My only plan is to eat in the glorious basement of the hotel as usual,” Teri said. She included Stan in her reply, looking directly at him. “Maybe I’ll see you guys down there.”
“Great,” Muldoon said.
Stan said nothing. But he glanced at her. Just briefly.
She couldn’t begin to guess what he was thinking.
Which was probably just as well, since she wasn’t sure she really wanted to know.
“. . . let the passengers go?” Max was saying as Gina started awake. “Over.”
She was exhausted, it was hotter than hell with the sun pounding down on the plane, and the stench of humanity was close to unbearable. She couldn’t remember the last time she’d slept.
“Over,” Max said again, his rich baritone voice coming through clearly over the radio’s speakers. He’d been talking to her—and through her to the hijackers—nearly nonstop for more hours than she could count.
It was almost funny. She had talked more with Max than she’d talked to any other man—including the ones she’d slept with.
Trent Engelman was not the master of conversation, that was for sure, unless, maybe, he was talking about his new car or his microbrewery or his plans to get work as a musician with Wynton Marsalis’s touring band after graduation.
Yeah, right.
When Trent did talk, it was without listening. Gina got the feeling that when she spoke, Max listened with every cell in his body.
“Max, how old are you?” she asked now. Bob was dozing, anyway. And Max didn’t have to convince her to let the passengers go. “Over.”
He didn’t hesitate, the way some people might’ve at her non sequitur. “I’m forty. Over.”
Oh, man. Her own father wasn’t even forty-five.
“Are you married?” she asked.
His answer came back as quickly. “Nope.”
“Why not?”
“Because no one in their right mind would ever marry me.”
“Why? Are you hideous looking?”
He laughed. “Yeah.”
She smiled. “Warts and long, greasy hair?”
“Mostly it’s the fangs that keep the women away,” he told her.
She glanced at Bob. He was definitely asleep. Al was awake and glowering but he didn’t speak English. “Helga told me you’re really good-looking. I think the phrase she used was blindingly handsome.”
“Yeah, well, she’s good at telling people what they want to hear.”
“I didn’t want to hear that,” Gina told him, trying to get comfortable in her spot on the floor. She had to keep her legs crossed, tailor style, or her knees tucked in against her chest.
It wasn’t just that there was no room in the tiny cockpit. It was mostly the way creepy Al started drooling when she stretched out her legs. She alternated between wishing she were wearing jeans and being grateful as hell—because of the heat—that she had on her shorts. “I wanted you to be short and rumpled. Kind of like—you know, if they made a movie of this?—Richard Dreyfus would play you.”
She’d always had a major thing for Richard Dreyfus. Ever since she saw Close Encounters when she was ten.
“We’re getting a little off track here,” he said, his FM radio announcer’s voice like velvet in her ears.
“Bob’s asleep,” she said. “Will you meet me for a drink after this is over?”
That one made him pause.
And Gina knew. There wasn’t going to be an after, at least not for her. Max thought the hijackers were going to kill her. The senator’s daughter would certainly be the first person they’d shoot if commandos stormed the plane, that was for sure.
“They’re going to kill me, aren’t they?” She’d suspected it all along. She knew that her fate had been sealed from the moment she’d first stood up and told the hijackers she was Karen Crawford.
When Bob and Al and their buddies decided it was time to play hardball, she was going to be the ball. They were going to kill her, but first they were going to hurt her. Badly.
“No,” Max said now, “they’re not.”
She didn’t believe him. “I’m scared,” she whispered.
“I’ll meet you,” he told her, something different in his voice, something rough, something no longer so cool and collected. “All right? I will. It may not be until you’re back in New York, but I’ll meet you for a drink. No, for coffee. It has to be a cup of coffee. God damn it.”
Yeah, she was definitely going to die. He, like Helga, was good at telling people what they wanted to hear. “Max, after this is over, will you go see my parents?”
Another pause. When he spoke, his voice was relaxed again, but she knew he was working hard to get it to sound that way. “Hey, I really need you to stop thinking in terms of worst case scenarios.”
“Tell them it wasn’t as bad as they probably imagined. Tell them I wasn’t alone, that you were with me the whole time. Tell them because of that, I was okay.”
There was another long pause. Then, “How about you tell them that yourself? Because I’m going to get you out of there. Alive. In one piece. Trust me on that, all right?”
“Sure,” she lied. He could try to convince her all he wanted, but his hesitation earlier had told her all she’d needed to know. “But just in case . . . Thank you. For everything.” Gina cleared her throat, forced away her fear and self-pity. She wasn’t dead yet. “As long as Bob’s asleep, why don’t you give me a crash course in negotiating. Teach me how to talk these assholes into letting the women with babies get off this plane.”
The emergency exit over the starboard wing silently popped ajar under Muldoon’s expert touch, and Stan gave the hand signal to the surveillance team hidden among the dust and rocks a hundred yards away.
Two clicks over his radio headset was the ready signal, meaning Starrett and Jenk, WildCard and Lopez, and Cosmo and Silverman had all succeeded in quietly unlocking their various egresses onto the practice 747. They were set to rock and roll.
When they did this for real, Lt. Tom Paoletti would be the voice of God. He’d give the go command, his omnipotence coming from the surveillance teams’reports of the tangos’exact locations on the plane and from the information from the video cameras. Provided, of course, MacInnough had the cameras up and running by then.
Tonight. The cameras should be in place and working by tonight.
Tom Paoletti would give that go command from the negotiators’HQ, where Max Bhagat would be helping out. The chief negotiator would request that as many of the terrorists as possible gather in the cockpit to discuss some outrageous proposition that he had absolutely no intention of following up on. But he’d use his powers of persuasion and make it sound really good.
Then, on Paoletti’s go, the team’s snipers would take those tangos out, shooting right through the glass, as the SEALs in Starrett’s team burst into the passenger compartment with a flash and a bang and took out the rest.
It would all be over in a matter of seconds.
Go, go, go!
Stan went through their door with Muldoon in choreographed precision, adrenaline surging, his focus sharp. A target. In his kill zone. He eliminated it, clean and clear.
And then, just that quickly, they were secure.
“Karmody!” Sam Starrett yelled.
“Passenger casualties.” WildCard Karmody consulted his computer. He looked up and grinned. “Zero.”
“Okay,” Starrett said grimly. “Let’s do it again.”
“What, perfect’s not good enough for you?” WildCard asked. “Jesus,
Sam, we’ve been going practically nonstop since 0400.”
“What, doing it right once is good enough for you?” Starrett countered, his usually warm drawl clipped and cold. “And it’s Lieutenant, Chief. Next time you question my authority, at least make the effort to address me by rank.”
“Excuse me, Lieutenant Asshole,” WildCard shot back. “Maybe I didn’t go to officer’s school and take a class in how to be a hard-on 101, but it sure as hell seems to me that something needs to be said here besides fucking okay.”
Stan pushed his way forward. The look on Starrett’s face left him little doubt as to his lack of patience. They were all strung pretty tight here, Sam Starrett more than usual. On top of that, stress plus adrenaline plus a whole hell of a lot of testosterone made for some pretty aggressive and uncomfortable physical pressures.
WildCard put that thought exactly into words. “Man, you need to relax.” He laughed. “You need to get laid.”
“Shut the fuck up,” Stan ordered him. He turned to Starrett. “You want him off the team, Lieutenant?”
“Whoa,” WildCard said. “Senior Chief, I—”
Stan silenced him with a single dark look, then turned back to Sam Starrett. Come on, Lieutenant, you know what you have to do to be the kind of leader that Tom Paoletti was.
It was possible that every man there—and woman, because Alyssa Locke was standing there, too; she and her partner and the SAS guys were trying their best to be invisible—understood why Starrett had to get WildCard off his team.
Everyone but WildCard, that is.
“Yeah,” Starrett ground out. It wasn’t easy to kick your best friend off your team. But the man had called him an asshole in front of an audience. How could he do anything else? “Replace him with Knox.”
For the briefest split second, Stan was almost certain that WildCard was going to start to cry. But he didn’t. He also wisely swallowed whatever knee-jerk and probably profane exclamation had been on the tip of his tongue—the kind of expression a man could say to a friend, but not a commanding officer.
Instead he stood at attention, eyes straight ahead. “Lieutenant Starrett, sir,” he said in his best imitation of a real military man. “My sincerest apologies, sir. Request permission, sir, to stand in for Knox until he can be brought out here and up to speed.”
Starrett nodded curtly. “Fine. Let’s run this drill again.”
“How about we do it five more times, just the way we did it this last time, starting with the doors already popped, and then we head in for a rest.” Stan looked at Starrett, knowing that if he had his way, they’d run it fifty more times. “That okay with you, Lieutenant?”
Starrett nodded grudgingly. “Tonight we’ll do it again—in the dark.”
It would be easier across the board under the cover of darkness. If they could do this in broad daylight the way they’d just done, taking down the plane at night would be a walk in the park.
As Stan watched, Starrett moved farther away from the group, away from WildCard Karmody. Up until today he’d managed to be both leader and friend to this group of men, many of whom he’d gone through BUD/S training with as an enlisted man. But in truth, he’d left them—left WildCard—behind a long time ago, when he’d crossed over into officer territory.
And today reality had caught up with them both.
“Chief Karmody.” Starrett gestured with his head for WildCard to step aside, to speak to him privately. He lowered his voice, but Stan knew what he was saying. “You want to stay? Then you continue to address me only with respect.”
“Jesus, Sam—”
“That’s Jesus, Lieutenant Starrett,” Starrett corrected him coldly.
WildCard exhaled a disbelieving burst of air. “Even now? No one can fucking hear us—”
“You better put a sir on that, Chief, or I’ll have Knox out here so fast your head will spin.”
“No one can fucking hear us, sir.”
“I can hear you, Chief,” Starrett told him. “Let me give you a refresher course in the way this team works. I give orders, you follow them. This is not a democracy, there is no discussion unless I ask for one. You keep the wiseass comments to yourself or you’ll be off my team. And on report.”
“Well, that’s fucking lovely. Sir. Some fucking friend you are. Sir.”
“I am your friend,” Starrett said tightly. “But I’m also your commanding officer. If you can’t learn to separate the two and treat me with the same respect you give to Lieutenant Nilsson and Lieutenant Paoletti in a command situation, then I’m going to have to choose for you. And you better believe I’ll choose to be your CO.”
“Yes, sir,” WildCard said. “It’s more than obvious that you already have. Sir.”
“Get the fuck out of here,” Starrett growled. “Don’t make me sorry that I’m letting you stay.”
But it was Starrett who turned and walked away. Separating himself even farther from the rest of the team. Heading farther out into officer’s territory. All alone.
“Hey, Senior Chief!” Jenkins pulled Stan’s attention back to the rest of the team. “How about a little extra incentive for those five more times?”
Jenk gave him his best choirboy smile. Uh-oh. That was never good. The petty officer was trying, like he always did, to lighten the mood after an emotional storm. Look out. Someone was going to be in trouble. “How about we do each drill in the same number of seconds or less as we did this last time,” Jenk suggested, “and you get up during chow and sing karaoke?”
Stan. Stan was going to be in trouble. Sing karaoke. Goddamn Jenk. Jesus Christ.
But he looked at the tired and dusty faces of the men around him. With the exception of Starrett and WildCard, who both looked as if their best friend had just died, they all were starting to smile.
“Come on, Senior Chief,” Lopez said.
Stan nodded. “I get to pick the song.” What were the chances they’d have anything he knew and liked on tape? Slim to none. Still, if he left it to them, he’d be up there singing “Like a Virgin” or that teen pop song that Izzy liked so much.
Help.
“And if our timing’s not as tight?” Silverman asked when the whoops and laughter died back down.
Stan looked at them, one at a time. “Then I get to pick your songs.”
Instant energy. It was the kind of challenge this team couldn’t resist. Their timing would be as tight. No, it would be even tighter.
He was so screwed.
No one sat down in the observers’tent. No one but Helga, that is.
The pretty helicopter pilot—Helga was blanking on her name—stood leaning against one of the support poles, watching Stanley Wolchonok, her heart so painfully obviously on her sleeve. Oh, to be that young again . . .
The commander of SEAL Team Sixteen—his name was Lt. Tom Paoletti, Helga knew from consulting her memo pad—stood on the other side of the tent in that feet planted, legs widespread stance of the alpha male. It was an international phenomenon. Avi, her own husband, had stood the very same way as Tom.
Tom. Helga liked to think of the military men by which she was often surrounded by their first names. It was a great equalizer in a world filled with ranks and rates and big egos.
Tom stood talking to three men, all British. Helga flipped repeatedly through her pad, searching for who they might be.
No, they weren’t listed there. There was no mention of any involvement by Great Britain. She hadn’t met these men. Of that she was certain.
Almost certain.
Almost. Dammit.
Out by the plane, the SEALs prepared for another practice run of the hostage rescue. She could see Marte’s Stanley, smack in the middle of a group of strapping young men. They were laughing now.
He’d been right in the middle of things, too, a few minutes ago when they hadn’t been laughing. The observers’tent was too far away for them to have heard the conversation, but it had been pretty obvious there was a huge amount of tension out there.
/> And why shouldn’t there be? These few brave men were directly responsible for the lives of the 120 innocent people aboard the hijacked plane.
Helga had glanced at Tom Paoletti as the tension among the SEALs built, but he hadn’t moved an inch, hadn’t unplanted his big feet. He’d kept one eye on his men, sure, but it was obvious that he trusted them to solve whatever problems had come up between them.
Someone’s cell phone rang.
It was the tallest of the Englishmen. The too-good-looking one who fancied himself James Bond’s smarter, more handsome brother. Yes, she’d seen his type plenty of times before.
Troubleshooters 03 Over The Edge Page 22