At the Slightest Sound

by M. L. Buchman

  “Yeah…about that…” But he didn’t seem able to complete the sentence.

  “This next one could be bad,” Isobel broke her long silence. “We really need your help.”

  Chapter 13

  “Is this your official office?” Jesse didn’t know why he was complaining; the smells were incredible. But the first ribs of the BBQ Pit restaurant wouldn’t be served for hours. It was barely after Belle’s generous breakfast, but his stomach growled anyway.

  They’d taken over the same table close by the big picture window with a sweeping view of the dusty gravel parking lot. The window needed a good cleaning; the scuffed Formica table didn’t—it needed being tossed on the burn pile. The heat was already cooking up to a Texas May morning so everyone had a Coke or Dr Pepper with ice. A fan rattled away over the door, but it only added noise, not airflow to the restaurant. A faded sign on an empty coffee urn announced, “Hot Dr Pepper December to February only. If you have a cold and want HDP out of season: Leave! We don’t want your damn cold.”

  “It’s run by an Army buddy’s family,” Anton explained. “Hard to find a better spot to be this side of San Antone.”

  “If he had it his way, he’d rename it San Anton,” Michelle scoffed at her brother.

  “Military City / Michelle City. I know how you think. You’d love it, Missy.”

  Rather than booting his knee, she stuck her tongue out at him this time.

  The city was surrounded by two massive Air Force bases, multiple forts and camps, all joined together in Joint Base San Antonio—the largest joint base in the entire Department of Defense. The only oddity was that Jesse had ended up as an Army flier rather than an Air Force one despite being a local boy. Would he have been home more if he’d gone jet jockey? Maybe. Maybe then Daddy wouldn’t have been so alone on the ranch.

  He almost smiled. Hannah was a bad influence, now he was worrying at things. The Night Stalkers had kept him hopping about the globe, only rarely letting him get home to San Antonio. He’d hate leaving the Night Stalkers—actually, he couldn’t imagine that happening—but he felt torn about wanting to be home more as well. Even just the one night with Hannah out on the prairie had made him so homesick he almost felt ill. Just as well the barbecue wasn’t ready yet.

  Isobel was watching him with curiosity from across the table.

  He just shook his head. Whatever she was sensing, he definitely didn’t want to talk about it.

  Isobel looked at her watch. “I have one hour. Then I must leave. I have a shoot starting in Montana tonight.”

  “What is the sexiest Latina in film doing in Montana?”

  “I am going there to kick a cowboy’s ass, Jesse. You think I am no more than this?” Isobel waved a hand at her face and fabulous body. “Don’t make me prove it. Instead, think about who taught Ricardo how to fight.” Her eyes were narrowed with a sudden anger.

  “Delta Force I expect had a little to do with it.” Quite what made him need to tease dangerous women, he wasn’t sure. By Hannah’s surprised glance, she didn’t know either.

  Isobel shook her head. “All they did was focus the training I had already given him.” She thumped her bunched fingers against her breastbone.

  “Wa’ll. You might just have to prove it some. You said you’re what makes this unruly lot tick. Let’s see you do your stuff.” He winked at her and she froze for a moment, then laughed.

  “He likes living dangerously,” Hannah explained for him.

  “Just right for this crowd.” Isobel turned to the others who were debating which was the best of San Antonio’s many nicknames.

  Alamo City or Riverwalk City were no better than San Antone or Military City in his opinion. And The 210 for the city’s area code was just plain silly; only surpassed by Countdown City for the area code’s 2-1-0 nature. He wasn’t too lazy to call his city by its proper name and he didn’t know what everyone else’s problem was.

  “Fifty-six minutes,” Isobel announced. “Then you’re all on your own. So, do you want to keep telling stories or are we going to make a plan?”

  That statement cut across the conversation with enough effectiveness to show just how thoroughly the others had come to rely on her.

  Ricardo made a few comments debating which was preferable, but Isobel had decades of experience in ignoring her twin brother and applied them now.

  “I am so-o sorry to do this to you,” Isobel turned to Hannah.

  “But you’re going to do it anyway.” Jesse liked that her tone could dry clothes faster than Texas sunshine.

  “I am.” Isobel offered a graceful shrug of apology.

  “And here we are,” Hannah’s sarcastic tone had not abated in the last seventeen hours. She knew it, but couldn’t seem to turn it back off. Jesse crashing his helicopter in the Colombian jungle, just because he’d been shot down, had left her feeling equally untethered and also brought out her snarkiest side—at least snarkiest before this.

  There, at least they’d been able to walk and fight their way out of the jungle.

  Now they were taxiing up to the N’djili Airport terminal, outside of Kinshasa, Democratic Republic of the Congo. As the sunset clamped down on southern Africa, she was still unable to judge exactly how this had happened.

  “Camp Bullis Airport,” Isobel had begun many hours and a number of time zones before, on another continent in another hemisphere, “lies just five miles that way from this restaurant. In forty-five minutes, I will drop you all there. An Army helo will be waiting to airlift you to Lackland Air Force Base. There’s a Hercules C-130 on a cargo run to Hurlburt Field in Florida. Then a C-17 Globemaster III to Angola, and finally a civilian flight to Kinshasa.”

  When asked what was there, all she’d said was, “Remember Benghazi.”

  Nobody had needed another word.

  A trumped-up riot, a Department of Defense reluctant to release Delta Force assets when and where they were needed (Delta had finally hijacked a plane to get on site—arriving too late to save a pair of former SEALs turned CIA operatives), and the US ambassador to Libya (along with one of his aides) had paid for it with their lives back in 2012. Benghazi was a horror that didn’t want repeating.

  Hannah reset her watch to six p.m. local time.

  And that simply, another seventeen hours of her life had just been spent in airplanes. The final leg—aboard a Boeing 737 that might have once been a decent aircraft but was now a 1960s miracle of aviation longevity that should not have been allowed off the ground—was landing them in one of the most dangerous countries in the world.

  “What a place to come to,” Ricardo grunted as the cabin door opened and disgorged them into the rampant heat and humidity. In those aspects, it was all too familiar. But the smells on the air, the ones that were strong enough to overpower the baking tarmac, were wrong. Spices of sweet BBQ were replaced with the hard bite of piss and rotting garbage. The gentle aura of unprocessed sewage tainted the air briefly, until the sharp tang hit—hydraulic fluid leaking from the sagging 737 onto the baking pavement.

  “Any bets on whether it will make it off the ground again?” Jesse whispered in her ear. “Makes me want to take a wrench to her and help her out.”

  “Makes me want to slap a breaching charge on one of the fuel tanks and put the poor thing out of its misery.”

  Yes, less than two days out of Colombia, she was back in the Third World. So much for her mandated two-week medical leave.

  “Jesse?”

  “I know. Not exactly San Antonio, is it?”

  “Not so much.” He’d been as beaten and battered by the long flights and numerous time zones as she had, yet he didn’t sound grumpy.

  She knew she did. Her legs were grumpy from hard jump seats and the final flight’s cushions tortuously aged to neither look nor be comfortable. Her gut was grumpy. Her head was very grumpy.

  Most of all, her body was grumpy. One thing that any spec ops soldier could do was sleep on a flight. A pre-mission flight was the greatest knockout
pill of them all. Mostly because once they were on the ground and in a mission, there was no telling how long it would be until the next safe place to sleep.

  Ricardo slept. Anton and Jesse too. Even Michelle.

  But, except for minor catnaps, sleep had eluded Hannah, even though she’d already been running short from Colombia and then the Mexican raid and finally, the only bright light in the whole thing, sex with a genuine Night Stalker cowboy on a Texas prairie. And she no longer trusted her memory of that.

  Had it even happened? It had blurred into all the other crap that was going on and now if she was asked for her name, she’d be doublechecking her dog tags before admitting to even having one.

  The one thing that the flight hadn’t done? Knock her out.

  “Remind me how we got here?”

  “You got here because you’re amazing, girlfriend,” Michelle came up and slid a friendly arm around her waist. “I sometimes wonder what would have happened if I’d followed in Anton’s footsteps. Maybe if I was lucky, I could have grown up to be you.”

  “Gone military? How are you at following rules?”

  “Totally suck,” Michelle admitted cheerfully.

  “Then forget about the military.”

  “Ricardo said Delta is about not following the rules.”

  “Different kind of rules. Our job is to think about battle in ways that no one ever has. Whatever it takes to get the job done. Except half the time, some commander up the chain, who doesn’t understand what Delta can do, will put all of these rules on what is and isn’t allowed until we can barely breathe without betraying our orders.”

  “Wow,” Michelle sounded awed. “Bitter much?”

  Hannah worked for a smile but only managed it for Michelle’s sake. “Never. Not a part of who I am.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  Well, Hannah had really failed to sell her that bill of goods.

  “Bitter much about the luscious cowboy?” Michelle’s voice went low and implied all sorts of dark and nefarious acts.

  Jesse had veered off to chat with Anton as they were waiting to be processed through customs, which appeared to be mostly about stuffing a twenty-dollar bill inside your passport. Or was the Democratic Republic of Congo forty for the passport bribe? Usually a briefing officer would remind her, but there hadn’t been one in this case. She shot for a compromise of thirty and the official’s delighted look as he emphatically stamped her passport said that she probably could have gotten through with a five.

  Michelle, of course, breezed through with no more bribe than one of her angelic smiles and received an even more enthusiastic thump of the customs stamp.

  Her question about Jesse was surprisingly astute—and Hannah was not enjoying the answer.

  Jesse had crashed rather than rescuing her. He’d shot a drug-running jungle commando for putting on Jesse’s dropped cowboy hat (and thereby ruining a perfectly good escape plan). He’d somehow become the catalyst for her previously unknown ability to project sounds outside her body, and then revealed it to her commander…

  Yet for these and other offenses, she wasn’t the least bit bitter about him.

  “I’m not a bitter person.” Or was she? She hadn’t meant to be—though her life had certainly been conspiring to turn her into one. A stepfather who enjoyed rape. A military that was trying to overcome its deeply misogynistic roots with only limited success. A command structure that spent more time being politically correct than effective. “I certainly don’t want to be.”

  “Good. I don’t want bitter girlfriends.”

  “I’ll do you one better; I don’t have girlfriends.”

  “Uh-huh,” Michelle once again wielded her scimitar of disbelief. Then in answer, she slipped her arm back around Hannah’s waist. “Tell that to Isobel. She already likes you a lot. And trust me. After knowing her as long as I have, if you weren’t incredibly awesome—and she’d know—she wouldn’t waste her time on you.”

  “Me?”

  “Sure, this is Isobel Manella we’re talking about here. Everyone wants a piece of her. You’ve never seen anything like what happens when she goes out in public. Even with her empath power, it’s hard for her to know who she can trust. She trusts you; that’s huge!”

  Hannah was used to being trusted by her team, but not a whole variety-pack of other people.

  Ricardo would trust her because she was Delta. Michelle trusted her because of Isobel and whatever weird senses Isobel deployed as an empath. Anton barely saw her because he was so enamored of flying with a Night Stalker. Jesse…

  Jesse…just trusted her. From their first moment together in the jungle, with an entire phalanx of pissed-off guerrillas storming down on them, he’d trusted her implicitly.

  What the hell was a woman supposed to do with that?

  Chapter 14

  The Chief of Station met them at the airport himself. That was never a good sign. When the CIA station was so small in a country that the chief himself was driving the pickup car, it meant there would be little to no backup or support—not that Jesse really expected any in a place like the Democratic Republic of the Congo. It also meant that anyone who knew the US’s chief spook would now have their entire team on a watch list.

  “Sorry,” Chester Wilsworth apologized for the fifth time as he eased out of the airport and turned into westbound traffic, straight into the setting sun. “We’re all a tad shorthanded at the moment.”

  “How long has the moment been?” Jesse almost wished that Isobel was with them to see if the station chief was merely pompous or both pompous and stupid. He’d cultivated England English manners, but the accent was wrong in some way he couldn’t pin down.

  “Current administration, I must say. They seem to think that diplomats and intelligence services have nothing to do with foreign policy. Everything now is all military this and trade-war that. Leaves all of us in a bit of a pickle.”

  “I think you’ve watched too much Monty Python,” Ricardo called forward.

  “Educated Eaton and Cambridge. My first posts were London at the old Chancery Building—ugly bit of work, that, and the new embassy is little better. The architect they chose…let’s just say I’ve seen prettier war memorials. Sorry, I have a hard time switching off the old bonhomie. Sort of my trademark. Much like I suspect you are with that hat.”

  “He is beyond anything you can imagine,” Hannah called from the backseat.

  Jesse touched his black cowboy hat for comfort. He liked it even better now. Daddy had given it to him for his sixteenth birthday. Momma had woven the intricate hatband while he’d still been in the womb, not knowing she wouldn’t survive his birth to give it to him herself. And just last night, on the Texas prairie, Hannah had become the first woman to ever wear it. He knew that the old adage that about no woman wore a cowboy’s hat other than his chosen one was just a bunch of hooey.

  But a part of him didn’t want it to be hooey.

  At first it had been the sarcastic boots that had intrigued him—while he’d still been shaken enough from his crash landing that he thought her boots were doing the talking. Then there’d been little things, like her saving his life. But it wasn’t even the deep visceral connection that he felt with her that had snagged his attention.

  It was her.

  He’d never met a woman like her and couldn’t imagine he’d ever be lucky enough to again. The world simply wasn’t the sort of place that could contain two Hannah Tuckers. Jesse was off the market and knew it as surely as Belle did when she’d hugged him goodbye this morning and told him how proud she was of him.

  He never should have said he loved her. Hannah had been acting as if she hadn’t heard that two nights ago and that was just as well. But he knew she had because he’d just blurted it out like a damn fool kid looking at his first pony. It had just popped out of him and there was no denying it.

  Jesse glanced back at her, but she was now talking with Anton in the back row of the van. Michelle and Ricardo were in the middle mostly ignori
ng each other. He himself sat shotgun beside Chester.

  The six-lane highway out of the airport, three each way, let them race along past crop fields for several kilometers. Then it was like they’d been tossed into a hard chute wall by a bronc.

  The highway was no narrower, but after one yam field ended, the next one wasn’t green growing things. The drifting dust and garbage along the pavement were unchanged. But suddenly they’d entered a vast shanty town of one-story hovels—which might be too kind a word for them. The roadway struggled along manfully for a few more kilometers as traffic poured in from side roads.

  The congestion increased rapidly, the highway fast becoming less like a road and more like a stampede down a fast-narrowing arroyo with no gully-washer racing along behind to clean it out. It was narrowed to four lanes by the trucks that were parked in the outer lanes. Some appeared to be making deliveries, others were just eating their lunch. Their van struggled for at least five minutes as traffic compressed to one lane in either direction because apparently someone was selling decorative cellphone covers at a particularly good price and many folks had pulled over to make purchases out their vehicle windows.

  “Not quite the Interstate,” Anton grumbled.

  “Yes, Kinshasa is quite unique,” Chester agreed cheerfully as he burst out the far side of the blockage and sprinted along for almost a hundred meters before the next traffic snarl—this time with no apparent cause. “This is lighter traffic than usual; you’ve landed on a good day. Since the great slaughter—”

  “Slaughter? Can’t say as I know much about the DRC.”

  “Oh dear,” Chester sounded worried as he drove around a VW van doing the work of a forty-foot bus with perhaps thirty people on the roof and hanging out the doors, sometimes anchored by a single hand and foot—like a dalmatian puppy trying to pull the Budweiser beer wagon. “They had themselves a couple of civil wars here at the turn of the century—this century. One in ten people killed and all that. Five million dead, they had their own holocaust if you will, except the big killer was starvation and disease. Despite that, in the last twenty years the DRC’s population has almost doubled. Kinshasa city has more than tripled in size since then—bigger than London, New York, or even Mexico City. Electricity, sewage, and what-not are all quite sketchy. Yet three-quarters of the DRC’s economy comes from this city. Quite the hub of both the good and the bad.”