Laughter hadn’t been part of her upbringing. Her life in Mexico had been hard. And she certainly hadn’t laughed since they left.
Papa had been a drug runner, a mule, who’d stolen the money from his own cartel for them to make the crossing. It had cost him his life.
Though Papa’s money was enough for the demanded price by a competing cartel’s cross-border trafficker, it hadn’t been enough for the coyote man guiding them. Almost to the border, he’d demanded a bonus payment of Taz’s eleven-year-old virginity. He’d collected it with his big hunting knife to Taz’s throat while her mother had looked on silently.
Mama hadn’t made a sound the whole time, not even as she helped Taz rinse her own blood off her legs. She’d only said two words about that moment—ever.
Once safely over the border, once they were clutching the identity papers of a recently deceased-but-unreported American mother and daughter—making her forever after Vicki Cruz—Mama had driven a hard knee into the coyote man’s crotch. As he’d lain writhing on the ground, she’d handed Taz the man’s big knife that she’d extracted from his sheath.
“He’s yours.”
Taz had cut off his dick, choked off his scream by ramming it down his throat, then slid the blade up into his heart. She’d held it there, twisting it deeper and deeper as his blood had streamed over her hands.
Mama had taken his share of their money back, and they’d disappeared into the morass that was Lincoln Park, San Diego.
Taz had taken his knife.
Mike’s “Ooo! Ooo! Ooo!” and Jeremy’s laugh snapped her back to the present.
Three hours to sunset.
Four hours to first possible takeoff.
Taz was on her feet before she knew what she was doing. She walked up to Jeremy, cutting Mike off mid-sentence.
“Come with me.” When they both started to rise, she turned to Mike. “You stay.”
Mike opened his mouth to protest. He was Jeremy’s protector and took that role very seriously despite his being just a civilian.
“Don’t worry. Just stay.” She didn’t know why, but it seemed…important.
Mike eased back onto his seat on a medkit can carefully. He’d been into it for some aspirin and salve for his blackening eye. After a moment, he smiled as if he knew things she didn’t. He tucked something in Jeremy’s back pocket even as Jeremy started to follow. Then he winked at her—and winced. But he didn’t make any “Ooo! Ooo! Ooo!” noises.
She led Jeremy away from the plane and the camouflage canopy. A quick climb up the face of the western slope, they arrived at a place she’d discovered when initially scouting the area for suitability. If they survived the first night, they’d return here and then fly additional sorties for as long as they lasted. No one, not even JJ, had spoken of it, but none of them expected there to be a second chance.
In the now.
Taz’s specialty.
Together, she and Jeremy stood on a shelf of rock notched into the cliff like a cave with no roof but the sky. It offered a sweeping view of this valley lost in the middle of Baja’s mountains. The peaks to the west shadowed them from the blaze of the late afternoon sun.
If she didn’t look too closely, the camo covering disappeared into the background. A step closer to the cliff and it was completely out of sight.
The easy roll of the desert floor stretched brown to the far hills. The river, dry in this season—in most seasons—was marked by a stripe of withered brush just waiting for its brief moment to flourish when the rare flash flood swept by.
“This is an amazing ecosystem,” Jeremy stood beside her. “You wouldn’t think that someplace so barren could harbor life. But there are snakes—which would totally freak out Mike so don’t tell him—jackrabbits, lizards, and the occasional kit fox. Even in this place—”
“Why did I bring you here?” Taz cut him off.
“If you don’t know, then I certainly don’t.”
Serving at the general’s command, she’d given all of herself to the “now” with no other thought allowed.
The now.
Then she knew exactly what she wanted.
She pulled his t-shirt out of where it was neatly tucked into his pants. Once she peeled it off over his head, he just looked at her wild-eyed.
He was slender, but fit. Not built like some soldier. No battle wounds. Except—
She traced her finger along a scar on his shoulder.
Jeremy looked down at it. “My sister. I was fourteen, she was thirteen, and I teased her about something. She finally got so angry that she threw a hammer at me. The claw caught me there and I needed five stitches.”
“What were you teasing her about?”
Jeremy blushed brightly. His brief glance at her chest and then the doubling of the blush on his fair skin answered that.
“Late bloomer?”
He nodded fiercely. “And we’re Vietnamese. She never got very—” then he looked down at her chest again and lost his words.
“I wasn’t.”
He nodded fiercely again, then shook his head, then realized he was still staring down at her chest. His blush surged once more.
“It’s okay to look.” She peeled her own t-shirt and sports bra.
Jeremy glanced down, looked at her face, inspected the sky, and then checked her out again before stammering out, “Uh, those are…um…nice ones. Not that I’ve seen a lot. But, you know, they look really nice on you. I mean…”
She let him keep stumbling along as she undid his pants, finally kneeling to remove his sneakers as well when he seemed too shocked to help. Taz had them both naked while Jeremy was still trying to describe how he had so little to compare her breasts to in real life, other than a graduation present from someone named Nancy that he described in some detail, though he’d certainly seen breasts in movies, of course, but that was different and…
Taz wondered what Mike’s smile had meant as he’d slipped something into Jeremy’s pocket—he had been into the medkit. She retrieved Jeremy’s pants from the ground long enough to unearth the twin foil packets. Mike was a good friend and more perceptive than she’d like.
When she held them up before Jeremy’s eyes, his verbal wanderings finally stumbled to a halt. His arousal was very prominent.
At a gentle push on the center of his chest, he practically fell. A step back, then his knees appeared to give out and he sat down abruptly on the pile of their clothes. Another small nudge against his chest and he lay on them.
She peeled open a packet, sheathed him, and knelt over his hips.
“You’re so beautiful,” he managed in a whisper.
That stopped her. “You just like seeing a woman’s breasts for the second time in your life.”
In answer, he raised a hand and slipped his fingers into her hair. She hadn’t remembered loosening it from its normal severe bun.
Jeremy toyed with it for a long moment before resting his hand on the side of her face and brushing a thumb along her check. “You feel amazing.”
“You think that feels good?” Taz slid her hips down on him.
51
Lieutenant General Jorge Martinez stood on the hard sand surface beneath the burning Mexican sun, but he didn’t feel the heat. It had taken him years, but the time had finally arrived and nothing else mattered.
“Former three-star general of the US Air Force,” he told the parched desert.
He wished it could make him feel good…or bad. Something.
But all he felt was anger.
Not at the Air Force. He’d loved the Academy, his thirty-five years of service, and his part of making it the greatest fighting force in the world. They were more effective than the rest of the world’s air forces combined.
No. There was nothing wrong with the tool. The problem was with the politicians who couldn’t be trusted to wield a butter knife without fucking it up.
Desert Storm, where they’d been sent in to kick Saddam’s ass—but only out of Kuwait. They should ha
ve taken him out in 1991, not 2003. Then once they’d finally gone in, the official Rules of Engagement had so tied their hands in Iraq and Afghanistan that they’d barely been able to act.
Known Prime Target in sights? Not even any risk of collateral civilian damage? Nope! Still need clearance from the politicos back in DC.
Taliban’s and al-Qaeda’s only ROE was kill. Fuckers didn’t even care who so long as it got the job done. That’s what America’s Rules Of Engagement should have been.
Taz had picked a fine spot. With his wife Consuela gone, Taz was the only person he truly trusted and he’d been right to do so.
This small valley in the center of the Baja California lay just south of the Sierra de San Pedro Mártir—the highest mountains of the entire peninsula. Despite the narrowness of the peninsula, just a hundred kilometers wide here, it was easy to get lost in these mountains. The nearest road that deserved a name lay thirty kilometers away. The nearest town even farther.
The valley, his valley, had just one dirt track leading through it sideways. To the west Taz had dropped a cliff on it, and to the east she’d blown a switchback off the face of a steep pass. Now the only way in and out was by air or scrambling scree on foot.
The woman was amazing. Not Consuela, but amazing.
Consuela had stuck with him through the Academy and followed him around the globe as he’d flown the old AC-130H gunships. He’d taken them into Panama and flown for Bush I into Kuwait against Saddam.
For nine years, the Spectre and Consuela Martinez had been the core of his life. Nine short years before she was knifed by a couple of coked-up yuppie punks needing the two hundred bucks she’d just gotten from the ATM for their next fix of Mexican nose candy. She’d lived just long enough to make sure they got life in prison.
When they were released on good behavior a mere six years later, his life had shifted paths. First he’d made sure they both died in pain far worse than Consuela’s, fully aware of why.
Then he’d started building.
If the American justice system was so broken, he’d fix it himself.
A year later he’d found his fury embodied in a ridiculously petite Airman First Class Vicki Cortez.
When the rules of engagement no longer made sense, it was time to make new rules.
It was the one thing he’d never been able to convince Drake of.
52
Taz braced her palms against Jeremy’s chest as the final shudders slammed through her.
Sweet Jesus but she’d needed this.
After he’d flailed uncertainly for a bit, she’d placed one of his hands on a breast and the other on her ass. He’d gotten the idea soon enough after that.
When she went to get off him, he didn’t let go.
Instead, he shifted his hand from her breast and pulled her down to lie on him.
“Oh,” he sighed in her ear when she finally gave in and lay against him. “This feels amazing, too. You’re so hard and soft. It’s just amazing. No, I already said that, but it is. I mean, you are. I can feel every muscle as strong as bone, but your skin is incredibly soft and smooth. Better than the leather on a custom SyberJet SJ30. And where your, uh, chest is on mine feels all soft and cushiony and—”
“Silence works, too.”
He was quiet for about five seconds. “I was never very good at that.” He tentatively slipped his arms around her back and waist, then squeezed her hard against him.
Again she tried to push off, but he kept holding her.
“Not yet. Please. This is too amazing…uh…incredible…good?”
Taz finally let herself simply lie against him.
As he cataloged—aloud—each sensation, she realized that was part of how he was processing the experience, storing it for future memory, so she let him go on. She had always taken Mama’s lesson of silence as guidance—until it was mastered. Now there was no way that what happened inside her could possibly ever reach the outside world.
Never show them even a hint of weakness, had been another of Mama’s favorite admonitions.
And she hadn’t.
Not once.
Not when Mama had walked into a grocery store during a gang heist and been shot for her mistake.
And not to the Air Force recruiter who’d spoken at her school’s Career Day. After his presentation, she’d simply walked up to him and said, “Where do I sign?” When he’d asked why the Air Force, she’d just repeated her request. He’d pointed; she’d signed. It was the farthest place she could imagine from where she was.
Oddly, each thing that Jeremy cataloged, right down to the cooling of their evaporating sweat and the offsetting warmth where their skin was in contact, made the sex more, rather than less real.
More important.
She finally let herself lay her ear on his chest and listen to his slowing heart and the soft rumble of his words as he stroked her hair and back.
This.
This must be what being alive felt like.
53
“I—”
“No! And not you either,” Lizzy aimed a finger at Holly’s chest.
“I have to be on that flight.” Miranda could feel a pain welling up in her chest but unable to find any other way out.
“No. You don’t. Are you a weapons specialist? A pilot?” Lizzy jabbed a finger toward the Ghostrider freshly landed from Eglin Air Force Base and now looming behind them on the Lackland Air Force Base tarmac in San Antonio, Texas. “That’s a plane of war, going on a mission of war. The flight you need to be on is home to the Pacific Northwest. I’ll make sure you get constant updates.”
Miranda couldn’t lose another person. Especially not her team. They were the only ones who really knew her. They were her—
Holly slid an arm around her shoulders and held her tightly in a sideways hug. It was all that kept her knees from going out beneath her.
“Get her out of here.” Lizzy’s words were soft but hurt just as much as if she’d shouted them.
Holly turned her toward the small Air Force C-21 Learjet that had taken them from Seattle to Aspen, then Catalina, LA, and finally here.
At the steps she turned and looked.
But it wasn’t the Ghostrider from Eglin that she saw. Or the KC-130 aerial tanker that would be ready to meet up and refuel the Ghostrider if necessary. Not even the pair of stealth Black Hawk search-and-rescue helos from the 160th Night Stalkers.
No, all she could see was the pair of F-22 Raptors. Just sixty-two feet long and forty-four feet from wingtip to wingtip, they were Mach 2+ capable stealth fighters. They would never show up on Mexican air traffic control radars. They could outrun, out maneuver, and outgun Mexico’s aging F-5 fighters.
And they could definitely kill an AC-130J Ghostrider—Jeremy and Mike’s Ghostrider— before it could possibly know they were there.
Miranda could feel herself closing down as Holly strapped her into her seat.
The strong acceleration as the pilots took off and punched for altitude made her world crash in about her.
Helpless.
Like her parents strapped down in the second row of their doomed 747. They were so far away that it seemed she barely remembered them.
Couldn’t find them.
It was the end.
All out of her control.
There was nothing but the image of the Ghostrider, the two Raptors, and the KC-130 tanker.
She had to trust Rosa’s and Pierre’s promises to bring them home safe. But how could she do that if she wasn’t there to make sure?
That was her job.
To investigate, verify, and report.
Except her job wasn’t to fight.
Even if she wanted to, she didn’t know how. All she could do was huddle in her seat like excess baggage.
Now it was out of her hands.
Ghostrider.
Raptor.
KC-130.
KC-130?
Why did she keep thinking about the KC-130 tanker? The Ghostrider could f
ly five hours and thirty-two hundred kilometers on a single load of fuel.
From Lackland Air Force Base they could fly the length and breadth of Mexico on a single tanking.
Fuel burn rates in cruise versus combat performance varied less on a C-130 than most other combat aircraft. A fighter jet burned an immense amount of fuel on afterburner or during turning combat. A C-130 Hercules was much more a steady-state aircraft with little variation of fuel burn rates except those based on altitude and payload changes. Even during an AC-130 gunship’s banking flight as it circled over a target to bring its weapons to bear on a single point below, its fuel consumption varied very little.
She ran multiple battle scenarios in her head. The results were actually fascinating. She’d never thought to graph fuel consumption of non-jet military aircraft over different scenarios. Its combat radius varied from its “ferry range” of straight-and-level flight by only…
Straight-and-level flight…
From Andrews Air Force Base…
“Turn the plane around! We need to turn the plane around!”
Holly jolted in her seat. She took one look at Miranda, nodded her head, and unbelted to head to the cockpit.
Even as she did so, one of the pilots reached back and closed the access door. It locked with a loud click. A moment later he was on the PA.
“I’m sorry, ma’am. But we’re under strict orders to return you to where we found you. We’re less than an hour out.”
An hour to Tacoma?
“Sorry, ma’am. General Gray’s orders.” And the microphone clicked off.
Holly eyed the door for a long moment, then sat across from her.
“An hour to Tacoma?” Miranda blinked out the window and indeed saw Elko, Nevada rolling by below them. “What happened?”
Holly glanced at her watch. “You’ve been pretty out of it for the last two and a quarter hours.”
Ghostrider: an NTSB-military technothriller (Miranda Chase Book 4) Page 19