The Men of Elite Metal: Platinum, Zinc, & Francium

by Rebecca Royce

  “All right.”

  She did as she had been told to, and seconds later, she did hear someone answer on the other end of the phone. A male voice, fortunately, since she didn’t want to have to wait while he was found.

  “Am I speaking with Chrome?”

  A pause. “Who am I talking to?”

  “My name is Sarah, I’m with Zinc, and um, we’re likely about to have a plane crash.”

  “Not a crash, exactly,” Zinc corrected.

  “Where are you Sarah?” Whoever Chrome was, he really cut to the chase.

  “Zinc said his phone will send the information to yours.”

  “Hold on. Checking.” A brief pause. “Yes, got it. What does he need?”

  Zach actually hadn’t told her what to say. She looked at the man piloting the plane. His expression seemed unreadable. Once, when they were young, she would have claimed she knew him extremely well. How true was it anymore? She hadn’t even known he was still alive. Well…does it matter right now, Sarah? “What do you need?”

  “Put me on speaker. You’re doing well, Sarah.”

  “Don’t patronize me, Zach.” She clicked the button to change the phone so Zach could hear Chrome and vice-versa.

  “The pilot Titanium contracted for the mission turned out to be working for what’s left of Red Wolf’s people. Titanium clearly has some problems on his end. I’ve eliminated the pilot, and in about thirty seconds, I’m going to have enough control over the plane I should be able to make our landing a bail out situation rather than a full on crash.”

  Chrome cleared his throat. “I didn’t know you were on a mission.”

  “Yeah, well, Titanium likes his secrets, and he keeps them close to his chest.”

  Sarah couldn’t help but hear the bitterness in Zach’s tone. The sneer forming on his mouth did nothing to lessen the effect.

  “Can’t get full control?”

  “I think an engine is totally broken. Whoever the pilot was didn’t plan on a return trip. What concerns me is he waited until we got on the plane to begin with. Anyway, we’ll deal with that shit after we’re on the ground. Basically, I need a retrieval.”

  “On it.”

  “Chrome?”

  “Yes?”

  “Thanks.”

  Sarah disconnected the phone. She happened to have a degree in psychology, among other things. Only she didn’t need the years of study to tell her there was much not being said between those two men.

  Either way, if the man called Chrome was sending help, she’d be grateful for it.

  “What do you need from me?”

  “See the button right there in the center console? Above the GPS? It says bail out. Do you see it?”

  She did. She also noted how the plane continued to descend. It had been at twenty-thousand feet when she’d called Chrome. It read fifteen-thousand now. She took a deep breath. Zach had asked her a question.

  “I do.”

  “When I tell you to, press it.”

  “That’s it?” She’d take on a whole slew of activity and responsibility if it would take her mind off what was about to happen. Whatever he’d said to Chrome, it boiled down to one inescapable fact. He was going to crash the plane.

  “Yep.”

  “I…” What did people talk about when they were so close to death? There had to be things to be said. “I had a real thing for you when we were younger. You had to know”

  “I didn’t, actually.” Zach smiled. “You were not someone I could look at in a physical way, even if I did think you were hot.” He shook his head. “Adam’s sister? He’d have killed me where I stood.”

  She’d always wondered if he noticed her. “Hot?”

  “Totally. Hot. Smart. Quiet. Sweet. And off limits.”

  For real? All the time she had spent in the dorm room of her boarding school, alone, and thinking about Zach’s blue smiling eyes, and he had thought she was hot and off limits. Well, that was the way the cookie crumbled, she supposed. Or the plane crashed, as the case turned out to be.

  Goosebumps broke out on her skin. They were really close to the water. She hadn’t considered she would die when she was on her knees at the mercy of a madman. In a fiery plane crash? There was a very real chance.

  And Zach looked cool as a cucumber. What the fuck was the matter with him?

  “Hit the button, sweetheart.”

  With a shaking finger, she pushed the button and closed her eyes. If she was about to die in the Gulf of Mexico, she didn’t want to watch it happen.

  3

  Zinc watched Sarah as she sat silently on the wing of the plane and stared at the clear blue sky. There wasn’t a cloud to be seen, which should have made for beautiful flying weather, had someone not had it out for them.

  Totally exposed to the elements, they ran the risk of severe sunburn if he didn’t find her shelter from the beating rays.

  Sarah didn’t seem particularly concerned. Her face passive, her eyes skyward, she seemed almost serene.

  “You don’t rattle.” He made it a statement, not a question. He’d seen her in not one, but two situations which would leave most people shaken to their core, and she didn’t seem to have missed a beat.

  “I do. Back there when you were crashing us into the water? Then was me freaking out.”

  “Could have fooled me.” A slight aura formed over her head, and he internally groaned. His fucking head. The pain was about to go from mild throb in his temples to full on migraine. Zinc reached into his pocket. He had a lone pill left on him, the rest were buried somewhere in the disaster inside of the plane. No matter, he didn’t want to take any medication, which might make him loopy until whatever rescue Chrome sent arrived.

  He stared at his phone. When they’d not died, he’d sent Chrome a text informing him they were floating in the sea. His former friend and commander’s only response had come a minute later.

  She’s Sarah Steele?

  Yeah, he must have finally been talking to Titanium. None of the stuff going on at the Metal compound was Zinc’s problem. Keeping the brunette beauty alive until he could place her under cover fell to him.

  “That’s the idea,” Sarah finally responded. “You can’t tell what I’m feeling or thinking unless I want you to. It’s why I’m good at my job. Or I was, until I got taken.”

  “Sweetheart, as a person who has practically earned an advanced degree on the subject over the last three years, you can trust me when I say your situation screams betrayal in every way I look at it.”

  She held his gaze when she spoke, “Zach, it’s time for you to start explaining. Start with the most logical beginning of your story and move from there. You’re alive, Adam’s alive. I want to know how, and why it was kept from me.”

  “Okay.” He nodded. “We got sent to Russia to try to stop a uranium and plutonium exchange with the Iranians. The whole mission stunk from the very beginning. Steele wasn’t supposed to be there, and key members of his team were missing. I was there, with Chrome. And a third team led by a man we’ll call Titanium.”

  “And you’re Zinc. I understand it. Metal. Adam would logically be Steele.”

  For more reasons than he would share with her. “I’d gotten engaged, and I actually asked Adam if he’d be my best man.”

  “I met Ally at your funeral. Your sisters introduced me.”

  He waited for her to comment more. Didn’t women usually follow declarative statements with things such as ‘I liked her so much’ or ‘she had beautiful hair’? He waited, and when nothing came, he continued.

  “Things went really badly. We had bad intelligence, and for a long time, our leaders thought it was from a particular traitorous CIA agent, except we know better about what happened.” Exactly who the person was didn’t fall to him to explain. Adam could tell her what he wanted her to know about his girl when they reconnected. “Anyway, things went to hell fast. We were set up. I have some memory loss of the actual explosion that got me. I remember Adam screaming. I tried
to move out of the way. Then I knew I was dying.”

  He hadn’t spoken about his death aloud in a very long time, and the migraine increased. Yet, Sarah’s steady dark gaze held his, and somehow, his mouth formed the words.

  “We had a big goodbye moment. Very…final. I think I was brave. I only know what happened after because I’ve been told. I didn’t actually witness any of it myself.”

  She reached out and took his hand. Her skin was soft in his. She was warm and alive, which reminded him he was as well. “I’m sure you were brave, Zach. It would be hard to imagine you being anything else after you rescued me from David and got the plane down safely.”

  “The island was no big deal, and the plane landed safely mostly because of the equipment and the money put in, which would make it mostly indestructible.”

  “Don’t push away your role. I didn’t give you the compliment to hear you become sheepish. False modesty doesn’t become you. And I’m not easily distracted. Please, go on. The rest you didn’t see firsthand.”

  “Right.” He nodded. Yes, she wanted him to finish. If she kept holding his hand the way she was, he’d tell her whatever she wanted to know. God, he was really pathetic. “Apparently, Titanium had a bad feeling about the whole thing from the start. He paid for a team to be ready to pull his men out if things went to hell. Only, he wasn’t specific with who was to be saved. To be fair, my team wasn’t supposed to be there originally. And his guys grabbed me and a couple of others who shouldn’t have been taken, because we weren’t Titanium’s team. I woke three months later in the hospital.”

  How much to confess? The hell of the headaches? When he’d not been able to find words correctly, saying banana when he’d meant television remote. Learning to walk again. Waiting for someone to tell him the whole fucking thing was a terrible nightmare.

  “Keep going. Was Adam killed too?”

  He scratched his head. “No, he and the others were sent away, their deaths faked, and they were given new lives by Uncle Sam. In the meantime, Titanium and his people went about figuring out who the traitors were. When I was healed enough, I was assigned a position as a member of his Ghost team. At first, we investigated the others, Adam, Chrome, anyone who might have been the reason it all went to hell. When they were cleared, we brought them in, although we hid our faces from them under masks. They called us the Ghosts. They got to have new lives, go after Red Wolf, make right the wrongs. We watched them, kept them in line.”

  “Hold on.” She let go of his hand. “You’re telling me I thought you were both dead, and so did everyone you guys loved. Adam was really running around somewhere for a while, having another life, until he rejoined with Titanium. And yet still, for all that time, he thought you were dead, and you let him think so? How fucked is that? It’s bad enough the whole world thought you two were rotting in the ground. You couldn’t have at least let him know he hadn’t lost his best friend?”

  “We were strongly prohibited from making contact. Although I did make an effort to try to stick out, to try to make him look and see me. It didn’t work.”

  She waited a beat, then said, “And the person who strongly stopped you from making contact for what, three years, was the Titanium fellow?”

  He could almost see her brain working. She tapped her fingers on her knee and pursed her lips. “That’s right.”

  “The same dude whose plane you crashed.”

  “Bailed out.”

  “Whatever.” She sighed loudly. “Sure you didn’t crash it to find a little revenge?”

  He snorted. She was funny. The very idea. “I wish I’d thought of it.”

  “I bet. Anyway, it must have been quite a reunion for you and Adam. Lots of manly not crying, and ‘I missed you, my brother’ going on?”

  The light pounded on his head, as if someone took a baseball bat and whacked him over and over again. Yep, the full-on migraine had arrived. “I actually beat him pretty hard. Broke his nose. The bone right under his eye. He had to have surgery.”

  She didn’t speak for a moment, and when he could manage to look—the sun was really a wicked weapon—it was to find her staring at him with a raised eyebrow. “Why did you do that?”

  “Because he left my body there for Titanium’s people to do whatever they did to me. Because he broke his promise to never leave me behind. Forgetting that a Marine never leaves another Marine fallen to the enemies, we had an understanding which went beyond those rules. He was family to me. And he left my not-so-dead corpse to be taken. And then for three years, I had to watch him live his life, move on, fall in love, and make things work, while I stared at him from behind my mask. And he never looked. Never got it. Never…The whole world moved on, Sarah, and I had to watch it all.”

  He let his voice trail off. No one understood. Even his fellow Ghosts felt different about their situations. Zinc closed his eyes. The migraine was going to win.

  A soft hand touched his forehead, and he winced, although he liked the human contact. He had so little of it. “You’re in pain.”

  “Almost all the time. Headaches. I’m lucky. Some of the others are a lot worse.”

  She kissed the side of his cheek, and for a second, he forgot about the mind splitting pain bearing on him as if his brain wanted to explode from the inside out. He opened his eyes to squint at her.

  “Listen, I get what you’re not saying. It blows my mind to hear you say Adam fell in love. He was always so against the idea. And you had Ally. She thought you died, and although I only know her very remotely through mutual friends on Facebook, she’s moved on. Fast.”

  Yeah, she had, and it burned. He’d really believed her to be the love of his life, had asked her to marry him. If she had died, it wouldn’t have been months before he found someone else. Years, maybe, if ever.

  Sarah kept speaking, “What you went through, it blows. Only, I’ll always be grateful Titanium’s people got it wrong and saved you, because you’re here with me. Living and breathing. I got to say things to you I’d never have if you were really in the ground, Zach. I mean, you would have lived your whole life and never known how I crushed on you when you were a teenager. What a sheer shame your not knowing would have been.”

  He loved the slight laughter to her edge. “Actually, your teenager fixation kind of made my day.”

  “Ah, above saving us from bad guys and crashing the plane?”

  “Bailed out.”

  She shook her head. “Whatever. You’re alive, Zach. I’m so fucking happy about it.”

  Those were the most beautiful words he’d heard in a long time. Not a single person had cared he was alive. He’d woken from a coma and been a mistake Titanium had to deal with. His life had moved on without him. With the exception of his teammate, Brad, he’d not had a person he trusted with him. The people he’d given his life for were under suspicion. Every day had been a solitary struggle.

  Sarah cared he was alive.

  There had to be something to say, only he’d gotten so far out of practice in talking about himself. “When I was in the coma, for three months, I dreamed.”

  She brushed his hair off his forehead. “About what?”

  “The summers we spent at the lake. One time after Adam and I had gotten back from hunting with the dads, we were sitting at the edge of the dock, and you ran over. You must have been…” He tried to recall exactly how old Sarah was then. She was so captured in his memory from then, from his dreams of the lake when he’d barely been alive, it was hard to put exact details to the images which had sustained him in sleep.

  “Fourteen.” She nodded. “I remember it well. Adam didn’t tell me to shove off and leave you two alone. I sat next to you, and we all had our feet hanging off the dock.”

  “Dogs barking in the distance with an eagle circling above our heads.”

  “I’d forgotten about the eagle. I think I was more focused on how close I got to sit to you, and whether or not you thought I looked pretty in my bathing suit.”

  He tweaked he
r chin. “I wasn’t allowed to. Except I did.”

  Her voice was soft. “Awesome. I’m glad we kept you company when you slept.”

  “Or maybe it was my own version of heaven.”

  The sound of a helicopter caught his attention and brought with it his headache, which rushed back on him. The ‘copter was unmarked, yet he recognized it as one of Titanium’s birds.

  “It’s a friendly.” He wobbled to his feet. “Ours.”

  “Good. We’re really not prepared to defend ourselves from anything else.”

  She made a valid point. He’d pulled off a couple of impressive near misses in the last twenty-four hours. Three might be pushing his luck.

  A voice came over a loudspeaker directed right at them, “Look at what you did to Titanium’s plane.”

  Brad—also known as Tungsten—called to them, and Zach shook his head. “Can never trust me with the expensive machines.”

  Sarah squeezed his hand. Even with the aura radiating around her, thanks to his brain injury, she looked solid, real. His. He gasped at the thought as it hit him. The world seemed to shift around his feet. Sarah Steele was all grown. Beautiful, capable, and strong in a way most people would never be. The day he died, rules had stopped applying to anything.

  So why couldn’t she be his?

  A ladder lowered from the hovering machine above their heads.

  “Seriously?” Brad called again. “Titanium is going to kill you. You crashed one of two airplanes in his collection which can’t be seen on radar. He’s going to have to commission another.”

  “Wasn’t me who set it to crash.” No, the betraying ass Titanium had sent with him for the mission had been responsible.

  “Man, he’s gonna be pissed.” Brad sounded almost gleeful about it. Then again, the man had his own issues with Titanium. “Wouldn’t want to trade places with you this time, brother.”

  Bring it on.

  Sarah watched Zach. He struggled against what had to be a nasty headache, blinking rapidly and rubbing the space between his eyes every few seconds before once again, shifting in his seat. They’d been airborne for a few minutes when Brad had passed a note from Chrome back to him. For the sake of transparency, he’d explained, he’d shown it to her.