Take Over at Midnight (The Night Stalkers)

by Buchman, M. L.

  He’d napped briefly in the sun, then woken to a dream image—Lola running the track that followed the inside perimeter of the soccer stadium. There was almost always someone running there because there was almost nothing else to do at Bati base between missions. You sure didn’t go into town unless you took an armed squad with you.

  So, he’d sat there, feeling too hazed to do more than watch, as she ran lap after lap.

  Lola had run like a goddess. Or maybe a nymph. Her hair blowing back, her step light and fast. He could have watched her for hours. He did, for at least a dozen laps. It had taken him a while to realize that she hadn’t come around again. He waited a while longer, then finally gave up and went to crash-land in his bunk.

  This time he wanted to see her up close. And D.C. was an awesome city to travel on foot.

  She shook her head. Nodded. And finally shrugged.

  “You’re a nutcase, Maloney.”

  He shot her his best smile. “The few. The proud.” And he snapped a regulation salute.

  “Okay, you’re not as nuts as a Marine, but you’re really, really close.” He didn’t need to turn around to know that they were still the spectacle of the moment. The lunchtime prep was less than half of the normal volume and almost no one was talking. They wouldn’t want to miss a word.

  “C’mon.” He snagged her elbow and led her toward where they’d dropped their gear, which was now cluttering up the middle of the butchering area.

  As soon as they were out of the way, Jamie and Sally moved in to start breaking down the beef into steaks, tenderloins, roasts, and the parts to be fresh ground.

  “You try to sleep after a long flight, you’ll end up twitchy and all out of sync. You gotta stay awake until nightfall if you wanta flip into the right time zone.”

  She shrugged again. “Okay, I guess.” She knew that trick. It was just a question of how to stay awake for at least another dozen hours.

  He aimed her at a bathroom. Again couldn’t help noticing the nice way she filled out those narrow jeans she wore. He definitely wanted to see as much of what lay beneath as possible. He’d had his hands down her flight suit against a helicopter and up her body in the darkness of the C-5’s cargo bay. But he’d actually seen very little of Lola LaRue’s skin except a brief moment in a wind-blown desert.

  “Gonna be a scorcher in another hour or so. Don’t bother with layering up.” Seemed like an efficient way to phrase his lust as she disappeared into the bathroom.

  Tim considered following her in. Reliving an early fantasy when he’d gotten Suzanne Sanchez back there during his fifteenth birthday party… and been caught by his dad with his pants half down and her skirt half up.

  He glanced up to see his dad watching him. Watching with that smile of his.

  Dad tipped his head toward the door for a moment, indicating that Tim should follow Lola in.

  Nope. Not with Dad watching. Not even if he’d had condoms with him and no longer needed the lecture he’d suffered through at fifteen about a man’s responsibilities.

  He turned for the other bathroom.

  He couldn’t hear the old man’s laughter in the noisy kitchen.

  But he could feel it.

  ***

  What Lola was wearing, or rather wasn’t wearing, was exactly to Tim’s liking. He watched her come across the kitchen toward him. Running shoes with short socks. Brilliant red shorts and a sports bra to match. Wraparound shades and her hair out loose.

  There was so much glorious skin that it was blinding. He couldn’t help but stare.

  Apparently neither could anyone else. Tim could feel the kitchen growing quieter and quieter behind him as he looked her up and down.

  He’d been right—the woman had the longest damn legs in the world. And they were amazing legs. The thighs rippled smoothly as she flexed and stretched, oblivious to all watchers.

  Tim turned around and glared at his family. They all grew very busy with their prep work, the volume rapidly skyrocketing to several times the normal mayhem of a working kitchen.

  Jimmy still gawked, but at that age, Tim remembered, it was impossible not to.

  Tim also decided they’d better get to running unless he wanted to embarrass himself completely.

  “Your shorts aren’t hiding much,” Lola whispered from close enough beside him that he could feel her breath on his ear.

  He swallowed hard. He should have followed her into the bathroom.

  “Let’s go!” She led him out the door, indicating he should lead the way. Tim tried to set up a steady trot though it was hard with his knees turned to Jell-O.

  Chapter 33

  Lola watched Tim’s tight butt as they headed down the sidewalk. Turnabout was fair play. She’d seen his body’s reaction to her and found it actually pleased her more than she’d care to admit. He wanted her. He wanted her so bad.

  She should have stuffed a credit card in the pocket of her shorts. Then they could just get a room and… Okay, she wanted him pretty bad herself too.

  She glanced at her own reflection in the front of a mirror-glass building. Almost didn’t recognize the woman who could want a particular man so much.

  Free of Tim’s family, and the constant stream of attention and friendly but persistent curiosity, she started to ease back into herself and settle into the run. She had no idea how they were going to do this. Cities were not made for running. Even Bati field was better than this, though the endless circling eventually got pretty old.

  Wide open spaces, country roads, field and pasture, that’s where you could run.

  Running in a city was about getting out of a trap. About getting away from someone.

  The scenery in this city wasn’t so different from any other if you were out for a run. Tall buildings. Bankers and lawyers and women in ridiculous dresses that were a cross between office worker and fashion model, which gave off more of a high-end hooker motif than anything else. They all hustled about as if what they were doing was so damned important.

  And Tim and his nice butt just ran through them so smooth and easy, as if they weren’t even there. He barely stirred the slightest wake in the crowd with his passage. Lola felt clumsy because men stopped and gaped at her, often completely in her path, and she had to keep circling around. One actually walked head-on into another, neither of them watching where they were going. At least she was looking good on the outside, however she felt on the inside.

  She and Tim jogged in place waiting for a light, then crossed the street. A half block later, she forgot about everything else.

  Looming large before her was the White House. Just there, across the street, through a black iron fence and a bit of lawn sporting a small fountain amid a bed of red roses. Impossibly white. Impossibly daunting. It seemed to rise up out of the ground as if it grew by magic. The seat of the most powerful ruler in the world, her Commander-in-Chief, stood just across the street.

  Lola ground to a halt trying to take it in. Every mission she’d ever flown had started here, in some form or other. Every military operation of the U.S. forces and most of the ones done by the UN and NATO forces had originated right here.

  Tim circled back and jog-trotted in place beside her.

  “Didn’t realize you’d never been to D.C. Kind of a showstopper, isn’t it?”

  All she could do was nod.

  “Okay, I’m going to change our route a bit. There are some things you have to see.”

  When Tim started off again, she followed along in his wake. They turned and crossed streets, and still the White House dominated the area. Sometimes lost in trees, sometimes in clear view. It was as if the building was the main rotor hub and the rest of the world was spinning around it. Roads radiated away from the hub like the main blades of a chopper, but you could feel them reaching far beyond the mere limits of the city. Lola just couldn’t get over the feeling that the
y extended south to New Orleans and east all of the way to her little airfield in Pakistan.

  Then they broke out onto the National Mall. The Capitol building shone to the left, the Washington Monument soared straight ahead, and in moments they were running along the Reflecting Pool, straight toward the Lincoln Memorial.

  As if he were teasing her, Tim led them right past the memorial. At her protest, he called back, “We’ll loop around to it,” and led her onto a bridge over a river.

  “Got a silver dollar?”

  “No. Why?”

  “Right about here is where George Washington chucked his silver dollar over the Potomac. Thought you might want to give it a try.” Clearly he was trying to lay it down as a challenge. She found herself half surprised that he didn’t produce a coin for her to try with.

  Lola looked from one bank to the other, glanced up at the “Welcome to Virginia” sign as they ran along under it, and decided against picking up his tease. Maybe with a golf ball in space, like that cosmonaut. The ball had remained in orbit for about two days, which would make it about a million-mile shot. That would clear the Potomac and then a bit. But trying to throw a silver dollar across a mile-wide chunk of river? Not so much.

  At the Virginia shore, Tim turned south. This time he slowed until they were running side by side.

  “Kind of makes you think, doesn’t it?”

  Then she saw the building and again ground to a halt, feeling like a tourist idiot, but she couldn’t help herself.

  The nearby roadway roared with morning commuter traffic. She could see it, but it seemed to flow in perfect silence. The waterfront park they were standing in was teeming with early joggers, cyclists, moms with baby carriages; they appeared frozen in place.

  Tim took her hand, and that was the only thing holding her steady.

  “That’s the Pentagon,” she managed a whisper.

  “Largest office building in the world. Did you know that you can walk from any office to any other office in seven minutes flat? That’s the coolest part.”

  The thing was so massive, an aircraft carrier parked in a sea of fishing boats, impossibly huge in both size and power. But an aircraft carrier at full speed could outrun most enemies. Not here. This building hadn’t managed to outrun the terrorist-controlled airliner.

  “Which wall did they hit?”

  “The one we’re facing.”

  Lola studied it carefully. “I was cutting classes in high school when the planes hit. You know, kicking around with a couple other girls who were trouble waiting to happen but had nowhere to go. Some were listening to their Walkmans. One girl had a small ghetto box. She’d tuned it to a Cajun station, and we all stood there pretending we were too cool to want to dance to the fast beat of Buckwheat Zydeco’s latest.”

  The building wall looked no different. She’d seen the diagrams, knew the shape of the hole in the wall, but the same company who had built it in 1941 had dug stone from the same quarry and refinished it to match. She couldn’t see the lines where old joined new.

  “I remember the radio bulletins.”

  Tim squeezed her hand in quiet sympathy.

  “It’s like I became so much smarter that day. Until then I’d been making a conscious life choice to not play the game. I mean, what was the point of playing if you knew you were going to lose?”

  Lola tried to stop her voice, but it all spilled out anyway.

  “The fact that Mama Raci would’ve beat the shit out of me was the only reason I hadn’t gone to whoring. Not yet. That day, between feeling all rebellious and the total emptiness of my wallet, it looked pretty good to an attractive, seventeen-year-old Lola LaRue. Since sex was the only power I’d ever have, I figured that maybe it was time for me to start using it.”

  That one day older had made all the difference in her life.

  “They killed all of those people too late for me to make anything of myself in high school, but I was the only one of those girls to finish and graduate. LSU let me in for reasons I still can’t fathom. ROTC got me some money and a ride into the Air National Guard. The rest came from a swim team scholarship and tips from being a bar waitress every weekend and weeknights when I didn’t have a practice or a meet.”

  Tim stood close in simple support. She just told the man she’d almost become a whore and still he stood by her.

  Funny. Her whole journey since then had all led back to here, to this starting point. To standing in front of the Pentagon on a beautiful summer day. Her life had changed because people had died here. Right here. For some reason, the attack on the headquarters of the Department of Defense in the nation’s capital had hit her harder than the Twin Towers. Harder than the jet that had augered into the Pennsylvania farmland.

  “I once spoke to a Colonel Jim Baker,” Lola recalled.

  She could feel Tim’s silence as he turned to look at her, though she couldn’t take her eyes from the massive building.

  “I met him at some conference a couple of years ago, right before I applied to SOAR. He’d gone out for a run that day, kinda like we are now, up the National Mall and back.” She glanced across the river and squinted toward the Capitol building made hazy by distance and the rising heat of the day.

  “He described it as being a day just like this. He’d circled the Capitol and was just jogging off the bridge when the jet came in.” Lola looked back and forth at the land and the highway. “He must have been right about here. It came so low, he said, that you wanted to duck. A roar of full power and they drove it into the Pentagon.”

  She and Tim both looked up into the sky, scanning, checking the vast expanse of blue for a predator, the worst predator, a human who is sicko enough to think that their god justifies murder. But the sky remained achingly clear.

  “His office was almost dead center and all his staff died instantly. His assistant—who had almost come on the run with him but changed his mind at the last minute—gone. His entire group ceased to exist.”

  Tim didn’t reach for her. Didn’t try to console. The ones who’d been through it knew better. You couldn’t. You just had to stand up on your own and face the Devil.

  When he spoke, his voice was barely louder than the wind and the morning traffic. “I signed up that day. I’ve always told my family I signed up as a cook. My family always had. Five generations in five wars we’ve been Army cooks. The story I tell them is that Army thinking put me in helicopters. That the story I tell everyone.”

  He pointed across the river.

  “I stood right over there.”

  Tim’s face must be a reflection of her own, grim, angry, betrayed.

  “And I watched it burn. I watched the tape of the towers going down. So I signed up for Army, real Army. Never mentioned to them that I could cook. I learned to shoot better than anyone I met before Kee Stevenson. I learned to fix helicopters. I learned to reach out and do my damnedest to make sure this never happens again.”

  He turned his gaze to face her, and she saw something more than just grim determination. What she saw on Tim’s face was an absolute commitment to the cause of protecting his family. A man of immense honor watching the world of his family across a vast field of inner conviction. She felt hollow to be standing beside him, knowing her own inner drive had only recently found first gear.

  Lola wished she could be like him. Wished she didn’t feel every action she took might be the wrong one for the wrong reasons. Wished for the certainty that she was serving someone, something, besides her own petty whims. Maybe she was finally getting a taste of it. Major Beale and Tim Maloney, they were teaching her more and more about herself and what drove her.

  “If this is what you brought me here to see, thank you.”

  His smile was slow in building. But when it came, there was no doubting the joy behind it.

  “Nope. Not what I wanted to show you at all. C’mon.” He settled bac
k into a medium run and Lola fell in close behind.

  “Damn fine butt, Mr. Maloney!”

  Even from behind, she could see the blush going up his neck until it hit his ears.

  Chapter 34

  Tim faded back until he was beside Lola as they crossed the bridge back into D.C. He guided her down the right pathways but wanted to make sure she had an open view when they arrived.

  He liked the feeling of running beside her. She did it so naturally. He always felt like a bulldozer struggling against a headwind when running. He did it by brute force. He’d grunted out twenty-milers with a fifty-pound pack with the best of them. Nothing was going to stop him.

  But Lola LaRue floated. She was a natural-born runner and a complete joy to watch. Even without the skimpy attire. Though the idea of resting his head on that sleek, tight belly on a lazy summer afternoon was definitely high on his to-do list.

  He kept her face slightly turned toward the river until in a single burst they were right on top of the Tidal Basin.

  It was perfect.

  She gasped aloud. But didn’t stop.

  No chest-blow impact of man-made objects. Instead the breeze that swept up from the Chesapeake, alive with the scent of the sea and possibilities, shook down a gentle pink shower of fluttering petals.

  Lola spread her arms and laughed aloud as she ran. Ran as if she could catch the beauty of three thousand blooming cherry trees. As if every one welcomed her personally with fluttering pink petals in a blue sky.

  She changed for him in that moment. He’d been enraptured since he’d first seen her in Poland. He’d been totally lost ever since she’d bloodied his nose with her helmet. Some combination of wild beauty and wilder vibrancy had captivated all of his attention.

  Now Lola laughed again. From the heart. A sound of pure joy. She didn’t shine—she radiated.

  As if he ran beside a goddess of old, the joy flowed over him, into him, until he too was laughing, unable to hold it inside.