Bring On the Dusk

by M. L. Buchman

  Claudia tried to read more into Trisha’s greeting of Michael, but it didn’t work. Trisha clearly liked Michael a great deal, but she loved her husband, even if he was the subject of her welcoming diatribe.

  Bill nodded a greeting as he sat beside his wife. “It’s been, uh, an education.” He easily blocked Trisha’s elbow shot to the ribs.

  Claudia had actually missed them. Not that she wasn’t instantly wishing she were back in the trees or lying happily in Michael’s arms listening to the shorebirds come awake in the Outer Banks sand dunes, but she did miss them.

  “So, what brings you two to Scotland? Where did you two go anyway?”

  “Michael took me somewhere lovely.” She smiled at him as she thought about Nell.

  “Oh God, she’s going all gooey on us.” Trisha finally leaned back and slowed down. “You two really are a good fit. How the hell did that happen, Michael?”

  “Don’t know, but I’m not complaining.”

  “No. No, you aren’t.” Trisha gave him a warm smile. “I’m glad.”

  It was one of the first times Claudia had heard warmth in the woman’s voice, yet another unexpectedly likable characteristic.

  “You were on the ground under four days,” Bill observed. Claudia kept forgetting how much he was like Michael. They were so different in size—Bill half a foot taller and his shoulders at least that much wider—that it was easy to forget they were both top Special Operations Forces soldiers with very similar training. Of course Bill would reconstruct the travel times that had led them to California and back to Scotland.

  “Two days, then we visited Peter.” Never saying “the President” in public helped make the ongoing mission discussions she’d had with Michael sound casual to any passing stranger. After meeting the President, she didn’t feel that awkward about referring to the Commander-in-Chief by his first name—at least not out of his presence.

  At their blank expressions, Claudia glanced over at Michael. His brow knit in concentration lines for a moment and then cleared.

  “Oh, it must be their first time.” He was kind enough to avoid mentioning that it was also Claudia’s first time as he described the meaning of a black-in-black operation to them.

  As expected, Bill looked appropriately grim, and Trisha looked as gung-ho and excited as always. So much so that Claudia wondered if they could involve Bill without Trisha. It didn’t seem likely, and the sand-drawn plans washed away by the Atlantic’s waves did require both of them.

  When the barmaid came over, Claudia ordered bangers with mashies and a pint of stout. Trisha tried to disgrace them by ordering an Irish stew, but the barmaid was cheerfully pleasant about being disdainful.

  “She’s had me trying everything,” Bill whispered confidentially. “Boiled mutton, neeps and tatties, elver cakes—which are made out of baby eels, by the way, though she didn’t tell me until after.” His shudder explained why he’d ordered a burger and chips with his lager. Michael simply nodded toward Claudia and held up two fingers.

  “So, Michael, what’s the gig?” Trisha barely waited until the waitress was out of earshot.

  He repeated his nod to Claudia, which caused Trisha’s expression to blank for a moment, and then, instead of looking surprised or defensive, she became much quieter. Okay, Claudia felt a bit better about including the woman.

  “Damn,” Trisha whispered half to herself. “This just got a whole lot more serious if they put you in charge. Who are they anyway? Wait.” She narrowed her eyes and then they popped wide.

  “Peter? As in—”

  “Yes,” Claudia cut her off.

  “Damn girl.” Trisha whistled at her. “You are hot shit.”

  Claudia laughed. “More like in it over my head.”

  “Yeah, I can buy into that. But still hot shit. So, is he really as handsome as on television?”

  “Yes,” she answered before she could stop herself. She could feel Michael’s smile without turning to see it. “But his wife makes you wonder why any men even look at us.”

  “Too perfect,” Michael commented dryly. “We like our women to be real.”

  “Like real flawed?” Trisha teased him.

  Michael opened his mouth, but Claudia stopped him with a light touch on his arm and a gentle shake of her head. “Don’t even go there. No way to win that one.”

  Trisha offered Claudia a pout for ruining her fun.

  * * *

  Claudia laid out where her thinking had gone so far, drawing pictures with her fingertip through a little salt she’d scattered on the scarred tabletop. Their conversation was easily masked by the increasing evening crowd and the growing tension of the televised match. Apparently not important enough to pack the bar, but exciting enough that no one was paying any attention to the four tourists at a back table.

  Bill’s plate was sparkling clean by the time he pushed it toward the center of the table. “Now that’s what I call good Scottish food.”

  “I’ll order you a Scotch egg next time. You’ll like that.” Trisha spoke absently as she returned to studying the latest sketch of Baku port in Azerbaijan. Actually no more than a vee that pointed east and a dot near the wide end along the lower arm. The capital city sat on a stubby peninsula that reached a couple dozen miles out into the Caspian Sea.

  “I was in Baku back in 2004 when I was just a baby SEAL,” Bill continued, as if this weren’t a complete revelation that made him the only one of their tiny team who’d ever been there. “My squad was sent over on a training mission with their navy. When the Soviet Union collapsed, Russia grabbed most of the Caspian flotilla. They’ve since geared up and are definitely the powerhouse fleet on the Caspian. Azerbaijan is number two, and they say number two tries harder.”

  Apparently Trisha had actually learned something about silence, or at least giving her husband room to speak his thoughts. Though he was about a dozen times more voluble than Michael, Claudia suspected that the degree of restraint still must challenge Trisha to the core. Bill sipped his beer and stared at the wall over Claudia’s head for at least a minute.

  “You were looking to bring in the Chinooks and a SEAL submersible. That would be a Havas boat, by the way. Very serviceable little craft.”

  “But?” Claudia prompted him.

  “But, that expands the operational crew by a dozen people or more.”

  “A dozen?”

  “Five crew on the Chinook. The delivery and maintenance team on the sub itself. They’re going to want to provide the pilot, even with me there. So, we’re looking at two subs to do this as they’re only two-person boats.”

  Claudia wanted to put her head down on the table and scream. She wanted to go fly against forest fires and make Emily come back and do this. She wanted…

  “So back to that training mission in Baku. Russia didn’t get the whole of the Caspian flotilla. Azerbaijan was able to grab and hold on to many vehicles that the Soviet Union had based at Baku, but that were manned by Azeri. That includes four miniature submarines, both Triton class. Two were dash-one, which is a two-man craft good for six knots at five hours.”

  “We’ll probably need something with a bigger range than that.”

  “The other two,” Bill continued as if she hadn’t spoken, “are dash-2Ms. Six-man wet sub. It can go twice the distance. Pressure-balanced, which means you can take it deep without having to decompress on the way back up. Has onboard air. I could check through channels, but I’d wager they’re still sitting at the naval base outside Baku. Their navy is still too small to afford throwing anything away. And if one went quietly missing, maybe they wouldn’t notice for a while.”

  “That’s good, Bill.” Michael nodded to him. “That puts us back to a four-person team.”

  “Yeah,” Trisha remarked dryly and waved for another round of beer. “Four people and a kajillion-year-old miniature submarine against the Russ
ian Navy on behalf of Iran. No worries.”

  Chapter 20

  Michael and Claudia spent most of the night sitting up in the small room they’d rented at a local B and B. Thankfully they’d had to walk a couple of kilometers to get there, which cleared their heads as well as worked off the heavy meal.

  The B and B was a three-story stone house dating back centuries. Purple lupines lined the neatly kept garden. It even had a little garden gate to admit them. The proprietor was right out of a brochure: pleasantly round, very cheerful, matronly gray, and offering a traditional breakfast with or without haggis. “Mostly just for the tourists, dearie. We don’t eat it ourselves.”

  Michael could tell that the room was exactly Claudia’s kind of luxury. Rich quilts on the dark-framed beds. Comfortable wingback chairs and a pretty little gas fireplace. She fit here as if it had been designed with her in mind.

  Michael could feel the beer, the meal, and even the accommodations slowing him down, but he often felt slow around Claudia. Actually, that wasn’t right. Claudia made him feel as if he was going exactly the right speed. Trisha’s mercurial shifts of thought left him exhausted. Someday he’d have to ask Bill why it worked for him, just out of curiosity. Trisha’s approach was to throw down a thousand ideas and see if any of them survived even cursory inspection.

  Claudia, thankfully, had an approach similar to his own for tackling these sorts of problems. Find exactly what was needed, and only then start looking outside the box to solve that. He also liked her low-tech approach. Always make do with the simplest item you could to solve the issue at hand. Bill’s suggestion of simply stealing an Azerbaijani naval asset had been exactly that. When it still didn’t have sufficient range, Trisha had started talking about ways to recharge the batteries in the middle of the sea at night.

  “When we’re done with it,” Claudia had answered, “we’ll steal a fishing boat to finish the trip out of sight. Or we’ll hijack a boat early on to tow it the first leg of the journey.”

  Low-tech—he liked it. But there were still too many pieces of the plan that weren’t there and the clock was running.

  Once they were in the room, Claudia dropped down into one of the chairs without even turning on a light, like a puppet with all of its strings suddenly cut. He’d been on the verge of trying to puzzle out what came next, but she looked so tired where a shaft of moonlight found her that he suddenly felt very protective. Exhaustion wracked her face, making her even paler than her fair skin usually was. The solid woman who was winning his heart was almost ethereal in the moonlight.

  For a half second she didn’t even look alive, and that scared the shit out of him. Then she moved and the fear slipped away almost unnoticed, but it left behind a very uncomfortable itch.

  When was the last time they’d slept? He traced back. He’d slept on the transatlantic flight, but he was guessing she hadn’t. Thinking back, the last place she’d slept, other than a couple hours from Denver to DC, was a third of a world away at the top of Nell.

  Well, the strongest woman he’d ever met had asked him to be strong for her. Right now, she was past functioning and it was up to him. She barely protested as he lifted her up and placed her on the bed. She struggled a little as he unclothed her, but stopped after he tucked her in. He nudged her onto her belly and began digging at the knots in her shoulders.

  “Ow! Hey! Ow!” She half rose. With a halfhearted glare, she flopped back down on the pillow.

  Right. This wasn’t some brute strong soldier fighting a cramp and needing the muscle seizure broken up in order to continue the march. No matter her strength, she was still a woman with a woman’s frame and musculature.

  He started much more gently. She released a soft sigh. Then a small hum of pleasure. By the time he shifted from her neck to her shoulders, the sound had changed to a soft snore. After a brief debate, he continued, knowing her muscles would loosen even if she wasn’t awake to be part of it. Deep sleep is what she needed.

  What she needed. He would think about that in a bit, but for the moment, he kept going.

  Working all the way down the glutes and calves, even working the muscles in the arch of her foot and between her toes. It felt as if she were turning to liquid behind him, each muscle and joint loosening. When he reached the end, he slid the covers back over her.

  With the lights off, the moon shone cold through the window, casting her face in chill relief. So deeply asleep that she appeared lifeless. Not able to stand the image, he finally placed his hand just in front of her mouth. He had to wait several heart-stopping seconds before a faint warm brush of air across his fingertips proved that she still lived.

  Again the image.

  He pulled over a chair to look at her, to watch her sleep beneath a handmade quilt in a bed that probably dated back as far as the house; it was old with ornate woodwork. He leaned back in the brocaded wingback armchair and felt the lacework doilies over the chair arms.

  He would watch over his lover.

  His lover.

  No. That was no longer sufficient. The passing thought in the trees had turned real, concrete until it was a solid thing inside him…lover.

  He was watching the woman he loved.

  As he watched her sleep, he tried to picture a future…and couldn’t. He’d always known he was going to die out here. If not this mission, then the next. He was a man who was born to die in the saddle, not in some VA home. He wasn’t going to live beholden to any man.

  That was one of his favorite parts of The Unit. They were self-selected for being independent thinkers who were willing to walk into the darkness. “Alone and unafraid” was one of their unofficial mottoes. One they trained hard to prepare for.

  She was one of his team, and his duty was to stand watch, to protect her as she requested. Well, first he would make sure that she survived this mission.

  And after that? What would be best for her after that? What would happen to her if—no, when—he died in action? She had a kind and generous heart. He could see that in how seamlessly she’d slipped into everyone’s life. The women of SOAR, Dilya, Emily, the First Family: each had welcomed her in with little question.

  No one invaded his life. No one. Not even his parents. Bill and Trisha were the closest friends he had, kept at a specific distance—this close and no closer.

  Claudia Jean Casperson did not stay where he placed her. She’d slipped in close under his guard when he wasn’t watching, past every roadblock. She had left no markers that he could use to retrace her route and brush out the footprints as if it had never happened. She was a part of how he breathed. Her scent of spring and the moonlight that even now had found another way to brush its light upon her sleeping form.

  Michael knew what was best for her.

  He would protect her as no other before. For Claudia Jean Casperson, he would do anything and bear the pain gladly.

  Not at the cost of his life, rather at the cost of his heart.

  * * *

  Claudia woke in the lap of luxury—a deep bed and heavy quilts. She felt better than she had in days. Out the window, sunlight was just slipping into the sky and casting its light on Arthur’s Seat, the high, green hill where the king was rumored to have sat ever so long ago.

  And she woke to the sight of Michael asleep in the chair facing her. His feet were propped on the foot of the bed and his head tipped over against the side of the wingback. She considered dragging him down into the covers, but she’d had an idea in the night. With a time difference of eight hours, she had to place the call soon.

  She slipped out of bed, dressed, and left the room to stroll the streets of Edinburgh while she placed her call. Breakfast wouldn’t be for an hour anyway. She found a turn that opened into Holyrood Park, which was deserted at this hour except for a few people who had caught the morning jogging disease from America.

  The cell number she was calling rang a number
of times before a sleepy voice mumbled, “What?”

  “Emily. I’m sorry. It’s only about 2100 your time. I didn’t think that would be too late to call.”

  “I’m visiting my parents in DC. It’s past midnight. Who the hell is this?” Then she heard Emily telling someone in the background to go back to sleep and the motions of her probably leaving the room, all of which made Claudia feel even worse.

  Emily’s voice echoed, from hard bathroom walls by the sound of it, when she continued. “Uh, I think my brain is starting to wake up. Captain Casperson?”

  “Yes. Sorry. I can call back in the morning…” But that would be six or seven hours from now, and the thought of waiting that long made her head hurt.

  “No. Go ahead. What can I do for you?” Emily’s voice was slowly growing clearer.

  “I, uh…” Claudia wasn’t sure what it was safe to say over the phone. “I wanted to talk to you about that fishing trip you mentioned. And I’d like to talk about it real soon. I could use some advice.” That should cover it if Emily was as sharp as her reputation.

  “The fishing trip?” Emily sounded perplexed.

  “Your friend Peter—”

  “Oh no! That bastard!”

  Claudia flinched as Emily cursed the President. Yep, Emily was that sharp.

  “He gave you one, didn’t he? I knew it. I should have lied and told him I thought you were a total screwup when I met you. I’m so sorry.”

  Claudia appreciated the sympathy. “I was hoping we could talk.”

  “Not over the phone.” Emily sounded wide-awake and absolutely sure of herself.

  “I know that. I was thinking I could catch a flight and—”

  “Where are you?”

  Claudia looked around, suddenly feeling as if she’d been beamed to a foreign land. She’d come to a stop among the park’s trees and could see the towering stone height of Edinburgh Castle beyond them.

  “I’m lost in the woods.” She blinked and focused on being rational. “Scotland, Edinburgh.”