Miami Midnight

by Davis, Maggie;

  Chapter 22

  “I’ll check you past security at the gate,” Harrison Tigertail had said, “and take you down to the spooks’ flight area. It might take some time, the debriefing, and I don’t know when it started, so I’ll wait with you.”

  No, Gaby had told him. She wanted to do it alone.

  They stood in the parking lot of a Class A restricted area of Homestead Air Force Base south of Miami, and Harrison was reluctant to leave her.

  He raised his voice to shout over the mind-shattering roar of jets taking off from the runway just beyond. “Just don’t stray from the parking lot, hear? You don’t have a pass and this is a high security area.”

  Gaby tried to keep him from seeing the extent of her terror, but her knees were wobbling.

  “This was your idea, remember,” he said. “Still want to go through with it?”

  She nodded again, wordlessly, wrapping her arms around herself, holding down by sheer force some of her body’s desperate shivering. She’d chosen to make this effort to bridge that terrible gap between herself and James, and here she was, so riddled with nerves that she was in danger of falling apart! It was almost too much to be thrown right into the middle of all the dreams, the nightmares coming true. It took all of what was left of her control not to grab the big man beside her and start screaming that the engines of the military jets that rose into the stormy sky were the transparent circles of fire she’d seen before, in her dreams.

  But how did you talk of nightmares and dreams and voodoo spells to someone as stolidly matter-of-fact as Harrison Tigertail? Who, according to what he’d told her, had been doing impossibly dangerous things for more than a decade since he’d been back from Vietnam? And who talked about perilous top-secret missions as casually as others would talk about a perfectly ordinary part-time job here south of Miami?

  He looked down at her, squinting against the storm’s fading light. “Are you all right?”

  Gaby had steeled herself for this, told herself that perhaps she had known all along that under the layers of deceptions, fantasies, unbelievable illusions, there lay a deeper, final secret.

  She’d been right.

  The first thing Harrison had told her was that if a mission failed, if anything happened to them on their secret flights, the United States government would deny that any such operation existed. Even the pilot and electronic surveillance systems officer did not exist. There would be no record of their names. The Cuban government, if responsible for any incident like shooting them down, would issue a full denial also.

  “If anything goes wrong, nobody knows anything,” Harrison had said. “Those are the rules of the game.”

  Even the military jets they flew, A-6-E’s, were painted black, with no registration numbers on their body or wings, no forms of identification anywhere. The runways were top secret, restricted, separate from Homestead Air Force Base’s regular military operations. Two or three times a month James Santo Marin and Harrison Tigertail flew out of there with not even their families knowing what they were doing, on their dangerous, supersecret missions. A special operations branch of the CIA had recruited them for this years ago, when they’d been a top air reconnaissance team in Vietnam.

  Beside her, Harrison hitched up the groin pad he still wore over his flight coverall and shifted his helmet to his other arm. Just don’t make him more miserable than he already is, he’d warned her. He’s edgy, maxed-out from a bunch of night flights like this because he’s the only Cuban Spanish-speaker we got in the A-sixes to monitor their transmissions, plus all this on top of what Castaneda got him into. He’s pure hell to live with.

  “Jimmy’s going to kill me for this,” Harrison muttered now. He had finished his part of the debriefing for the mission they’d just completed. Now they were waiting in the parking lot outside the building where James was finishing his. “I should never have let you talk me into this. It’s a good thing this was the last sortie in this series.” He scratched the back of his neck. “But that don’t mean Jimmy ain’t gonna blow sky high when he sees you.”

  In the next few minutes, Gaby thought, James would cross the parking lot on his way to the equipment room where he would turn over his pressurized flight coverall, his helmet, and his other gear, and get into civilian clothes. She was shaking. She still hadn’t formed the all-important words that she was going to say. She only knew that she had to see James Santo Marin.

  Harrison held out his hand, testing for a few drops of rain. “Looks like we’re going to get that storm that’s coming. You sure this is what you want, honey? It ain’t too late to back out.”

  “This is what I want,” she said.

  He planted a hasty kiss on her cheek. “Okay, I’m going to get out of here then, because here he comes. All hell’s going to break loose.”

  The door in the low concrete building on the far side of the parking lot opened. A figure, silhouetted against the light, looked up at the darkening sky with its occasional flashes of silent lightning, then stepped outside.

  Gaby watched that familiar silhouette with a wild fluttering of her heart. She had almost forgotten that James moved like no other man she’d ever seen. In the oncoming storm’s light, the fluid grace of his body in the fighter pilot’s coverall of olive-green nylon, swinging his heavy helmet by its strap, revealed him as the man with whom she had somehow fallen in love, never so perfectly realized as in that moment: powerful, quietly confident, solitary, his dark head bent. A beautiful man, brave and strong. By some instinct she’d always known that. Even when she thought the worst of him.

  The storm framed him in clouds split with intermittent bright threads of lightning. Fighter jets were taking off on the runway just beyond. Under their fuselages their roaring engines were like wide mouths of transparent fire. The man coming toward her was almost mysteriously enveloped in glimmering dark brilliance. She stepped out of the shadows, his name on her lips.

  He saw her and stopped.

  His eyes were dark, unreadable shadows. He said, unsurprised, “Harrison told you.”

  A sudden gust of wind flattened Gaby’s skirts against her legs. She lifted a trembling hand to hold back her hair so that she could see. “Yes, that you fly together now, the way you did in Vietnam.” As always when she was excited, her words tumbled out in a rush. “Because the government called you back a few years ago to fly secret missions in a—a—”

  He didn’t supply the word she stumbled over. Instead, he stared at her as though weighing the improbability of finding her there, in the last place he expected her to be. “A-Six-E surveillance jet,” he said finally.

  “Yes, yes, those.” At least he didn’t look angry, she thought. Nor hating her, like the last time she’d seen him. “You fly to Cuba, out over the Bahamas sometimes,” she rattled on, “and then down along the coast of Cuba, Harrison told me, under the Cuban military radar to monitor—Is that right, monitor?—the sites on their coast where the Cubans could install missiles.”

  There was another coldly appraising silence. “It’s routine electronic surveillance.”

  It was far from routine. Gaby understood a little, now, about the pressure he had endured being involved in not one, but two, undercover operations that would have destroyed a weaker man. Harrison Tigertail’s descriptions of their flights alone were hair-raising, even to someone like herself. The Russian-built SAM missile sites on the coasts of Cuba were ready to fire at any time at an intruder like the black-painted surveillance spy plane James flew. They flew only a few feet above the water, under Cuban coastal defense radar, always in danger of the jets, so close to the surface, sucking up sea water into the intakes and inducing engine failure. Add to that the dark, the subsonic speeds, and the knowledge that at any time they could be discovered and shot down with no more acknowledgment than the deep official silence that both countries observed about such things.

  She dreamed it all, Gaby told herself. She saw them one night when they must have been in danger, and she woke up from that n
ightmare screaming. She wondered if James would believe her if she told him.

  “Why are you here?” he asked, his expression bleak. “Do you want to tell me what this is all about?”

  Inwardly, Gaby quailed. Was there no way to appeal to him? To break through his icy latino pride? “When Harrison told me why I couldn’t get in touch with you, that you were on a mission, I told him I’d come here if I had to.” Her voice cracked. “All this time you let me think you were a drug dealer!”

  “What else was I supposed to do? It was Castaneda’s undercover operation.” Lightning flared over them and she thought she saw something change in his carefully expressionless eyes. “Where’s your fiancé? Or are we going to ignore that?”

  “I kept falling in love with you,” she cried, “and hating myself for doing it!”

  He seemed to start. He had every right to be wary of her, she thought frantically. She’d been foolish, frivolous. Everything she’d done so far had only reinforced his opinion of her.

  “There was no need,” he said stiffly, “for you to come on base looking for me. If you want me to apologize again for my sister, I’m sorry about the troubles she’s caused you. I’ll also apologize profusely for Castaneda and the Santería crazies he involved you with.”

  “But I’m not angry with your sister!”

  “You should be.” He flung her an angry look from under black brows. “After all the hate for Anglos, she’s back with that idiot from Palm Beach again.”

  “Who? Not the one who—”

  “Right.” His lips tightened. “The one who backed out at the last minute because he had second thoughts about marrying a latina. Even a rich one.”

  Gaby clapped her hands to her mouth. Didn’t he see? she thought wildly. She tried not to burst out laughing. In the midst of the noise, the dark, the oncoming storm, James’s words about his sister fell together with alarming significance, another piece in a queer jigsaw puzzle. Ibi Gobuo’s Santería must have gone berserk in an excess of overkill! Crissette and David. Pilar Santo Marin and her Palm Beach socialite.

  Chango and Oshun.

  She stared at the man before her in his rakish tight-fitting fighter pilot’s suit, at a loss to tell him what she so desperately wanted to. At a loss, even, to know how to begin.

  The burden of the covert missions he flew with Harrison, on top of the Colombian drug dealers’ attempts to force their way into his businesses, was more than most men could have dealt with. The strain had been tremendous, and yet he had kept it all going without once breaking or betraying himself. Or the people around him.

  He had superhuman strength and courage, she thought, overwhelmed with admiration. He’d deliberately allowed people to think that he was a flashy playboy, a possible drug dealer, without once revealing what he was really doing for his country. She loved this proud, unbending man so much in that moment, her heart ached.

  She took a deep breath. “I think you are the most magnificent man I’ve ever known. If you don’t hate me, if you feel that you could love me...”

  For a second he looked as though he hadn’t understood what she’d said. Then he dropped his helmet on the asphalt and in the next moment she was in his arms.

  “Love you? God, you drive me crazy!” His mouth was over hers quickly, tenderly desperate with passion.

  When he broke the kiss, Gaby gasped for breath. “You looked as though you hated me,” she managed to say, “that night when you came to the hospital.”

  “You’ve had me bewitched, woman. I don’t know what in the hell I’ve been feeling. From the moment I looked up and saw you sitting at a table the afternoon of that fashion show, with a pencil behind one ear and your hair blowing in the wind, just like this.” He touched his mouth to a red-gold strand at her temple. “I thought you were the most adorable, wonderful woman I had ever seen. And I wondered why you looked so worried.”

  She wound her arms tightly around him, her cheek pressed to the slightly damp fabric of his flight suit. “I didn’t know how to write.” She laughed tremulously. “I was scared stiff.”

  He tipped her face up to him. “You didn’t know how to write?”

  “It’s a long story.” She pressed herself against his hard, lean length, loving him, yet terribly afraid. She was going to ask for his trust, and she was not sure he had any reason to give her that after the capricious way she’d treated him. “I love you,” she whispered.

  His arms tightened around her. “Ah, Gabriela darling, do you know the chances we took, coming together like a couple of crazy kids, to make love? The whole thing’s been crazy! There are things I can never make up to you. These stupidities you’ve had to endure at the hands of my sister. Those other lunatics with their Santería garbage.” He held her away from him, frowning. “The worlds we come from are too different.”

  She lifted her gaze, loving him more than she could ever have thought possible. It was true, some strange magic had brought them together and wouldn’t let them part, brought them back to each other time and again.

  “I nearly got you killed,” he reminded her. “Don’t forget that.”

  She smiled. “Your friend the babalawo would say it’s all part of something that he can predict on his computer.”

  He scowled. “It’s going to be a long time before I can talk to you about Castaneda. If I had known he was going to—”

  She put her fingers over his mouth to shush him. He kissed them, quickly, ardently. “Let me see them,” she said. “Put them on, I want to see what you look like.”

  “God, you know everything.” He muttered something about Harrison Tigertail under his breath. Slowly, he reached into the breast pocket of the flight suit and took out his eyeglasses. When he slipped them on he looked down at her, brows drawn together in the familiar proud scowl.

  She stifled a bubbling laugh. “Oh, they’re very ... impressive.”

  He kept scowling. “They eliminate night flying. I suppose Harrison told you that too. Which means the A-Six-E missions are over. At least for me.”

  “Yes.” She could see this was something he accepted, but not happily. She remembered the tension, the marks of fatigue he always carried, a man stressed, pushed to his limit. Now the gold-rimmed glasses made him almost ludicrously serious, reserved.

  She tilted her head to one side. “You look like a banker now,” she murmured. “It’s much better. It’s not as sexy, so I won’t have to fight off the women who want you.”

  “Gabriela...”

  “Marry me,” she said boldly. She saw the fire leap in his eyes as he reached for her. “You don’t mind my proposing, do you?” She laughed shakily. “You’re going to have to, anyway.”

  He froze, black eyes blazing. “My God.”

  “You said you would, remember? You called me at the newspaper and said—”

  “I know what I said.” He snatched her to him. “Are you sure?”

  She thought of the box she’d thrown away before she’d left the house. “The test showed positive.” She looked up at him anxiously. “I almost didn’t come here. I didn’t think I wanted to tell you. I didn’t want to trap you into—”

  “Trap me?” He rained hungry, half-ferocious kisses on her mouth, her nose, her chin. “I love you.” He breathed a hot, passionate caress into her neck, under her ear, his hands sliding down her waist to her hips, to pull her against him. “I’m glad you’re going to have my baby.”

  “You’ll be happy to know I’m no longer engaged to Dodd,” she said primly.

  “So is he, I hope.”

  “That’s not kind.” She quivered, totally distracted by his caresses. “It’s strange, but you know, I couldn’t let him touch me, even kiss me. Talk about bewitched.” She moaned as his teeth nibbled her ear lobe. “After I met you—” She stopped, unable to go on.

  Wind gusted out of the dark clouds and a bolt of lightning, silent, flickering close, lit the sky.

  “Darling, I love you,” he said hoarsely, “but I’m a Latin, and if I stand
around necking like this in the parking lot much longer it’s going to ruin me.”

  A sudden spattering of rain drenched them. He picked her up and spun her around, slowly, smiling his pure joy. She stared at him. With the storm light, the beginning downpour, the wind tousling his hair, James Santo Marin was as she remembered him that first night, coming out of the dark tempest lit by lightning. He was a man made for loving, vulnerable and passionate and proud. She felt a thrill that was part apprehension, part love.

  Gaby didn’t believe in such things, and she knew he hated them. If she mentioned some of the mysterious, bizarre happenings of the past few weeks that involved that even more bizarre belief, Santería, she knew how he would react.

  But, Gaby was thinking as lightning cracked and the rain began spattering them, pelting his hard, handsome face with crystal droplets, he had never looked more like a god.

  All rights reserved, including without limitation the right to reproduce this ebook or any portion thereof in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright © 1989 by Maggie Davis

  Cover design by Open Road Integrated Media

  ISBN 978-1-4976-1415-4

  This edition published in 2014 by Open Road Integrated Media, Inc.

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