Girl Takes The Oath (An Emily Kane Adventure Book 5)

by Jacques Antoine

  The 28th led after two rounds, but the Johnnies, dressed in costume armor from various periods—mainly Cavaliers and Roundheads, but a couple of Trojans with crested helmets, a few men in togas, and the obligatory ballerina filled out the squad, as well as a mascot wearing a papier maché suit of armor and carrying an enormous broadsword—were rallying furiously.

  “You okay, Em?” Zaki said, doing his best impression of a casual greeting. She nodded, and touched his hand in greeting.

  “Don’t worry about me, big guy. I’ll be fine.” She smiled, hoping to dispel the excessively earnest expression in his eyes. When that failed, she tipped her head to the side, to get him to leave her in peace.

  “If you need us, McDonough and I will be over by the concession stand.”

  “Thanks, Zaki,” she replied, as if she needed to be told where the two of them would be at any particular moment, towering as they did over the crowd. What on earth did he think she could need them for, anyway? Still, the expression on his face drew a reassuring picture of the company’s sentiments toward her, even in what must have seemed a perplexing passage in their time together. However confused she might feel about the state of her own loyalties, theirs were steadfast, and she hoped not to be forced to disappoint them.

  A cheer rose from the crowd as the Johnnies won a match and tightened the score, and she took the occasion to walk the edge of the lawn. She’d worn a pair of CJ’s jeans and a light jacket, hoping to blend in with the town crowd, though she doubted the effectiveness of her disguise. Along the east hedge, a few close-cropped cadets who’d made the trip down from West Point lounged in lawn chairs, drinking beer and hooting at the action.

  “Whoa, Navy,” one of them called out to her as she passed in front. “Why don’t you come join us?”

  Emily looked down at the USNA on the t-shirt she wore under her jacket and smiled.

  “Where have you been all my life?” another said, pointing to his ARMY t-shirt.

  “Did you boys come all this way just to watch our little croquet match?” she asked. Out of the corner of her eye, she spied CJ and Dave Bajo coming her way.

  “After we lost the Army-Navy game, this was the next thing on the calendar,” the cadet with the t-shirt said. “C’mon, Hank, give the lady a seat.”

  “Give her your seat,” Hank roared, a bit inebriated.

  “It’s okay. I can’t stay.”

  “No, stay. Take my chair.”

  “Here, take mine, Navy” drunken Hank said, pushing himself out of a folding chair on unsteady legs. CJ and Dave came on the scene just as he lurched onto Emily, clutching at her to regain his balance.

  “Hey,” Dave shouted. “Hands off, asshole.” Before the other cadets could react, CJ stepped in, grabbed a wrist and spun Hank around.

  “We don’t tolerate fake drunks playing grab-ass, jerk,” she snarled.

  With a knowing smile, Emily watched her former roommate settle things—I guess those morning sessions have had an impact—until Dave tried to come to CJ’s “rescue.” The other cadets were cowed by the sight of a pretty girl manhandling their buddy, but once another man was involved, different passions came to the fore. In a flash, three less inebriated cadets had surrounded Dave, and Emily prepared to step in, however much she’d have preferred not to be seen brawling at a public event.

  “Straighten up, cadets,” another voice barked authoritatively, a familiar voice, one she wasn’t expecting, and wasn’t quite sure she was happy to hear.

  Still in fatigues, looking official enough to intimidate a few cadets on the verge of embarrassing themselves, even across the divide between services, and it didn’t hurt that he was obviously combat-fit—“Don’t dishonor the corps, you chuckleheads,” he snarled, and they stepped back, attempting some semblance of standing at attention, though Hank stumbled and ended up sitting in a few of the lower branches of the hedge. The other cadets helped their friend extricate himself, and Perry turned to Emily.

  “What the hell are you doing here?” Emily demanded, half angry, half overjoyed.

  “Don’t worry,” he said, once he’d managed to put some distance between them and the red-faced cadets. “It’s official. I got in to Hampton Roads this morning and hitched a ride on a chopper. Didn’t even have time to change.”

  A breathless moment followed as he scanned her face for a reaction, CJ and Dave watched, too.

  “Give us a little space, guys,” she said to CJ, and snaked her arm through Perry’s. “Let’s walk,” she cooed into his ear, and pulled him over to the shady side of front campus. With an eye on Zaki and McDonough, Emily plotted a wider loop around the back of a large elm. Here, the lawn had been sectioned off with tape and rented out to spectators who preferred a more genteel experience. Women in long, white dresses and ornate fans lounged on padded chairs sipping mint juleps with men in seersucker suits. Files of young people, like so many ants at a picnic, clogged the walkways carrying snacks and drinks to and fro. The bustle would provide as much privacy as a locked room.

  “So you’re not mad?”

  “How could I be mad at you?”

  “That doesn’t sound good,” Perry said, with a wry smile. “Can I assume you’re totally isolated?”

  “Yup.”

  “Your friends dropped you like a hot potato after NCIS put a little pressure on, right?”

  “A few, but I drove the rest away.”

  “You’ve gone to ground then?”

  A hand touched her elbow, and she swung around to see Ruochen Ma, the student with the hunted expression on her face. Glassy-eyed, she spoke in Mandarin.

  “You are in danger, Miss Tenno.”

  “Miss Ma, what is it?”

  “I have no time,” she said in a trembling hush. “I must go.” With those words, she scurried off. Emily reached for her, too late. She melted into the crowd and was gone.

  “What did she want?” Perry asked.

  “I don’t know,” Emily replied, scanning the lawn for her, or for something to account for her strange words. A roar from the crowd greeted the news that a pair of last second wins had just allowed the Johnnies to draw even in the match. Sudden-death overtime. Across the lawn, the midshipmen watched the two courts with dismay, while Emily looked with other intentions at the crowd. But she saw nothing obviously alarming. Zaki held his post by the concession stand, now joined by Stacie. CJ and Dave stood in the sun on the far side, and looked on with differing emotions. Emily recognized a few of the students she’d danced with at the Boathouse party, and standing at the top of the lawn she spied the other Chinese girl, Diao Chan, searching the lawns with an intensity similar to her own. And for once, Ruochen Ma was not glued to her side.

  ~~~~~~~

  “What does she want with Jiang?” Connie asked.

  “It’s something to do with a Chinese student,” Michael said. “A girl from Shenzhen who’s got her worried. She wants him to check up on her family.”

  “Can’t you do that for her?”

  “I already have. They have a small business supplying glass to the construction industry, which is pretty lucrative, given how fast that place is growing. Can we discuss this in the study?” Michael suggested, with an eye on Li Li and Stone, who sat at the kitchen table with cookies and milk, and ears cocked perhaps too sharply on this conversation.

  “Why is Emily even interested in them?” Andie asked, once the door clicked shut.

  “I’m not sure, but apparently my intel isn’t enough for her.”

  “What more does she want?” Connie asked. “And do you even know how to contact Jiang?”

  “I don’t think she knows what she’s hoping to hear. All she said was the girl may be in trouble.”

  “Is she at the Academy?” Andie asked.

  “No, the college next door.”

  “And Jiang?”

  “That part was easy. I left word with a bric-a-brac shop in Alexandria, and he called a few hours later.”

  “Is the girl in trouble,” Connie
asked, “or is she the trouble?” She mulled this thought over for a moment. “It sounds to me like Emily may be in trouble.”

  “Perry’s there with her,” Michael said.

  “What about Theo?” Andie asked.

  “He’s still in Kabul.”

  “I bet Perry can only stay a few days,” Connie said. “I need to get over there.”

  “She won’t like it,” Ethan said.

  “Don’t worry, I’m not gonna shoot anyone… not unless I have to.”

  Back to top

  Chapter Twenty One

  A Shadow on the Wall

  “You’re not chained to the Yard,” Perry said, as he pulled himself into a seated position on the sofa. “You still have some liberty and we have the place to ourselves.”

  Emily could sympathize—he’d called in every favor to get a week’s leave from the other side of the world, and would end up spending more than half of it in transit, on a hastily cobbled together array of cargo planes, commercial flights, a cruiser and a couple of Sea King utility helicopters—and lying next to him in his friend’s living room had plenty of allure. But she hadn’t driven her friends away in order to luxuriate in the fire his touch ignited in her body. The silence in her heart required her to silence everything else, to commune with it, and through it to comprehend her place in a universe larger than anything that could be experienced in Perry’s embrace.

  “I’ll see you in the morning, before you ship out,” she said, and leaned over to kiss him. It wouldn’t have been difficult to deflect his hands, reaching around to caress the small of her back, to tingle a cheek and make tremble the tiny hairs on the nape of her neck and the top of both legs. The kiss lingered, maybe a bit longer than she’d intended, and when she pulled away, her lips caught ever so briefly to his.

  Walking back home from the little house at the bottom of Revell Street, Emily tried to picture the day when she wouldn’t have to leave him, but as hard as she tried, she just couldn’t bring it into focus. All the trees on Shipwright Street had completely budded out, and most were already in full leaf. The cobblestones had mainly been paved over in this part of the historic district, and only peeked through here and there. The bricks of the sidewalks had been preserved more carefully, though tree roots had caused them to buckle and heave every few steps. In the distance, glimpsed barely out of the corner of her eye, a shadow flickered in the leopard shade. She assumed it was nothing, or perhaps Kano, and didn’t let it darken her mood.

  Skipping over the low spots, and cresting the peaks, she cut across on Conduit Street and turned up Main, passing a diner, a sushi bar and a new, upscale crêperie. Across the way, sitting in the window of the only decent pizza/ice cream parlor in town, she noticed Ruochen Ma, sitting with three other students, including Diao Chan, enjoying as un-Chinese a meal as Emily could imagine. She started to cross over, when the girls saw her, and the expression of terror on Ruochen’s face froze her for an instant. Whatever had frightened the girl, she tried not to draw attention to it, and waved a casual greeting to the group. Diao Chan smiled back and turned to show off her new, shoulder-length hairdo, while her friend trembled and shook her head in a tiny gesture, as if to say, “Please do not stop.” Emily nodded and walked on by.

  ~~~~~~~

  “You came,” Trowbridge said. “I had my doubts.”

  They had the basement study lounge in Bancroft Hall to themselves, unsurprisingly, for a Sunday evening at the end of a long weekend, and the plebes generally preferred to study in packs in the lounges on the upper floors.

  “I said I’d be here,” Emily replied with a frown.

  “It’s just that it was over a week ago, and the way things have been going, I thought you might have had a change of heart. You’re not afraid to be seen with me?”

  “Why should I be?”

  “I don’t know. But the way all your friends from the Twenty Eighth seem to be avoiding you…”

  “They’re not avoiding me. I’m avoiding them.”

  “And Tanahill and Carnot?”

  “I forced them to move out.”

  “Then why meet with me?”

  “Because no one’s likely to try to get at me by hurting you. I’m sorry if that sounds cold, but it’s a calculation I’m forced to make.”

  “You mean because no one would think you care about me?”

  Emily nodded, and tried not to make eye contact with him, at first. But in the end, she felt more uncomfortable avoiding it.

  “Can we talk about happier topics,” she said, “like your vector calculus problem?”

  “I don’t know why they want us to learn stuff like this. I just want to fly choppers, not design ’em.”

  “I know. It seems strange. But it’s not about becoming an engineer. They just want you to get into the habit of thinking about air the way an engineer does. Or a physicist.”

  “Sure, I suppose,” he said, sounding unconvinced. “Anyway, the problem is figuring out the turbulence and vortex at different pitch angles and turning radii. It’s a little like cavitation in water.”

  Trowbridge spread his books and notes across the table, and they pored over them together. Emily pointed to one drawing he’d done, apparently as a doodle, showing the air currents under a banking helicopter as if they’d been produced by cartoon angels blowing on them.

  “That’s not bad,” she said. “It reminds me of something one of the Johnnies was telling me the other day.”

  “You talk to those guys? I thought they were just a bunch of hippies and beat poets.”

  “Nah, they’re okay. Besides, I take human contact where I find it these days. Those guys study at least as much math and science as we do, and not just the math geeks. All of ’em have to read Einstein and Quantum Mechanics, even the hippies.”

  “You’re kidding.”

  “Weird, huh? It’s a fully-required curriculum over there. Everyone has to study everything.” She paused a moment to let that revelation sink in. “Anyway, this one guy was sitting near me in the deli on West Street, and he saw what I was working on, and he said it was like this vector analysis of a plucked string he’d just finished, you know, like on a guitar. It got me to thinking that your problem is also some form of wave equation.”

  “I suppose, if you treat the air like a string… but how does that help me? Wave equations are like impossible to solve.”

  “That’s just what this guy was explaining to me. You don’t have to solve it. Just recognizing it as a wave equation means you can start looking for wave-like aspects in your problem.”

  “Such as…” he muttered, still skeptical.

  “Harmonics, dummy. Don’t you play the guitar?” A light seemed to flicker behind his eyes.

  “Oh… yeah, nodes. If it’s harmonic, there should be nodes where the turbulence cancels out, like pockets of smooth air. That’s amazing,” he gushed suddenly, and began to scribble notes frantically. “This is genius, Tenno. I can’t believe you figured that out.”

  “One thing the hippies across the street understand better than we do is that questions can be useful even if you can’t answer them.”

  “Right,” he said, still preoccupied with his notes. “Whatever.”

  Just then, Bauer walked past the door to the lounge along with Gunderson, and after a double-take, poked his head in.

  “What on earth are you doing with her, Trowbridge?”

  “He’s been spending a lot of time with her, I hear,” Gunderson said.

  “She’s just helping me with some homework.”

  “If her own company won’t study with her, I don’t think you should either,” Bauer said.

  “He’s made his choice, Casey,” Gunderson said. “If he gets caught in the sweep, when NCIS decides to take her away, it’s his problem, not yours.”

  “It’s not like that,” Trowbridge protested.

  “Weren’t you the one telling me I need to pick my enemies more carefully?” Bauer asked. “It looks like you need to pick your fri
ends more carefully.”

  “I’m sorry about that,” Trowbridge said to Emily once the two of them were alone again. She remained silent for an uncomfortable moment.

  “They’re right about one thing,” Emily said, standing up to leave. “You do need to choose better friends.”

  “They’re really not so bad,” he said, though without the air of conviction such a statement would need to be persuasive.

  “I don’t care what they are. Have you forgotten that evening in Cumberland Court?”

  “No, and I’m sorry I wasn’t more help then.”

  “I didn’t need any help,” Emily said.

  “You sure didn’t. You still have those idiots off-balance, half-terrified that you’re gonna file charges against ’em at any moment. Why haven’t you, if you don’t mind me asking?”

  “I’ve got better things to do than waste my time with this,” she said, and stepped toward the door.

  “Wait,” he hushed in an urgent whisper. “There’s something else.”

  She turned to look at him, uncertain what to expect. When he didn’t speak right away she grew impatient. “Well…?”

  He motioned her back to the table. “It’s a message. Someone gave it to me for you, and I don’t know what to do with it.”

  “A message? What is it?”

  “I don’t know, exactly,” he said, fishing in his pocket for something. He pulled out a crumpled slip of paper and held it between two fingers, as if he wanted to minimize his contact with it. “Someone left this in my bag yesterday in Nimitz Hall. I didn’t know what to do with it.”

  Emily noticed her name scrawled on one side. On the other, she could make out a few Chinese characters. “And you want to give it to me?”