Heart Strike (7 page)

Except Vito kept listing them until most of the panel was Post-its.

“Now take us out over the Gulf.” Using the compass—the only directional aid still uncovered—they turned west for the Gulf of Mexico.

Richie worked to add the habit of occasionally looking left and right to keep an eye on the engines. As Melissa turned the plane, he caught a bright flare off the right wingtip.

Reds, blues, greens.

The colors burst in the night sky as if their wingtip was exploding!

“What the—”

“Disney World,” The Priest said drily.

Then the perspective shifted. Not inches, but rather miles off their wingtip, Disney World was having their nightly fireworks show.

* * *

Melissa had never flown a plane as powerful as the Beech Baron, and it was a total thrill ride. It was near midnight and she was flying at two hundred feet, practicing engine-matching technique—when the two engines ran at slightly different speeds, it set up strange harmonics in the airframe.

The Gulf's night air was so clear that she could see forever. The lights of coastal cities danced all along the horizon. Small fishing boats were plying the waters, leaving wide phosphorescent wakes.

If she nudged one of the throttles even the tiniest bit out of sync, an irritating thrum was set up that soon pounded against her eardrums as if—

“Crap!”

All of a sudden, one of the distant cities had jumped closer.

Way closer!

She slammed the throttles in her right hand hard against full power, synchronization be damned. Left wheel, left pedal, and pray.

The plane was agile and twisted hard, clearing the massive oil derrick with plenty of room to spare, as long as you were measuring it in feet and inches rather than yards or plane wingspans. Once well clear, she leveled the plane, eased back the engines, and circled back for a closer look.

The Christmas-tree-bright drilling platform had multiple hundred-and-fifty-foot cranes, a helicopter platform, and a massive central derrick. She couldn't do more than gawk as she flew a couple laps around it. Her heart rate was still higher than the derrick.

“Wondered when you'd notice,” was all The Priest said to her and went back to instructing them on engine adjustments.

She gave it one last look and turned back to the lesson. Now that she'd seen one of the big rigs, she spotted dozens and dozens of the thirty-story-tall structures planted broadly across the Gulf like the sparse bushes a chintzy landscaper would put out in front of new tract home.

Then she'd discovered container ships, less well lit, lower to the water, but far longer.

The one cruise ship had been easy to pick out—lit up like a twenty-story-high amusement park.

Her hands had shaken for an hour afterward, making her landing less than clean.

Once they were landed and out of the plane, The Priest then led them along the line of U.S. Coast Guard C-130s. They were massive, four-engine cargo planes. She'd jumped out of plenty of Hercules, as the C-130 was known, but…

“We don't have to fly one of those, do we?” Melissa tried to decide if she was excited and terrified. She settled on the former. She'd jumped out of them any number of times, but felt a new appreciation for their huge size. Four stories tall, a hundred feet long, and with an even bigger wingspan. Each monstrous engine had a four-bladed propeller and each blade was taller than she was. To pilot something that big—

“At thirty million dollars each, I would guess that the drug cartels have very few aircraft like that. They also aren't very…” Vito's tone was drier than desert air, “…subtle.”

“But we don't get to fly them, do we?” Richie sounded as eager to fly one as she felt.

“The Coast Guard prefers their planes to remain undamaged.”

Melissa tried to tell if Vito The Priest was joking or not. If he was laughing, it was only on the inside.

He led them past the last plane, out through a security gate, and over to a long, two-story building made with five-foot bands of red-and-white brick. As they passed through the security gate onto the lawn surrounding the building, she could see that he was leading them toward an aircraft parked on the grass—a display aircraft. Approaching from behind the plane, it didn't look that big, but with each step closer, it grew. The night, even here with streetlights around them and both of her feet on the ground, was messing badly with her depth perception. By the time they walked beneath its wing, fully two stories above her head, she was feeling very small.

“However,” Vito spoke for the first time since she'd spotted the craft, “you might be asked to fly this one. The USCG retired the Grumman HU-16 over three decades ago, but these are still plentiful in the fleets of marginal and third-world markets. They can carry four tons over three thousand miles and don't need an airport to land in.”

“I've never flown a seaplane,” Richie commented.

That's when Melissa focused on the monster before her. It had a wide belly that looked like a boat hull and the wings had pontoons the size of Zodiac Special Forces boats hanging from them.

Melissa nudged Richie with her shoulder. “And all you can think to say is that you haven't flown a seaplane before?”

“Well I haven't.” Richie waved at it as if it wasn't bigger than the Victoria Harbour houseboat she'd grown up in.

“I also haven't ever flown a 747,” Melissa answered him. “And no, I'd rather not try one of those at the moment. I have flown seaplanes, but they were little ones. Maybe the size of this one's wing pontoon.”

She'd started in standard planes. After work, she'd hop on her bicycle and race out to Butchart Gardens where her brother was an arborist. They'd bike together for the last few kilometers to Victoria International and go flying. Afterward, they'd race the thirty klicks home along the Galloping Goose Trail.

They'd worked out a complex scoring system of who cycled fastest and how few corrections they'd received from their flight instructors to determine who had to shell out for gelato. The two of them would come zooming into the heart of Old Town, Victoria—fast, furious, and sweaty on their bikes—and spook the tourists ambling down the street with their Hudson's Bay bags.

On their fateful climb up Mount Rainier, they'd talked about taking seaplane lessons.

Her brother hadn't survived to take them, so she had taken them in his memory. There had been more tears than joy each time she'd climbed into the de Havilland Beaver floatplane and taken off out of Victoria Harbour. His dreams had always been simpler than hers. They'd each buy a houseboat to either side of their parents', raise families, and work and play in Victoria. She'd always been the one pushing every limit she could find.

Yet she'd been the one who worked in the provincial museum and he was the one who'd suggested the winter climb on Mount Rainier. That alone should have warned her somehow.

Despite the inner conflict, she'd always been thrilled by that moment of skipping the seaplane off the wave crests of the second-busiest marine runway in North America just the moment before taking the air.

A de Havilland Beaver could be comfortably parked under the wing of this monstrous Grumman HU-16 Albatross parked on the front lawn of the USCG headquarters building. At least the plane looked like it belonged there.

But the more this night progressed, the less certain she was that
she
belonged. She hadn't joined the Air Force. Her training in military weapons had been done over four long years before she'd even been allowed to apply for The Unit. And a Unit operator trained more hours in a typical two-week stretch than she'd ever flown…total.

Now she was looking up at this monster plane, well aware of the irony of an albatross around her neck and the plane model's nickname.

She had a private pilot's license with a floatplane certification in a single-engine aircraft. Why were they throwing her at this monster aircraft with wholly insufficient training?

“This doesn't make any sense.”

Once she'd said it aloud, she knew she was right.

“Richie.” She snagged his arm and pulled him aside. When Vito The Priest turned a curious glance her way, she pointed at his feet. “You. Stay!”

Then she towed Richie over to the fence line.

“What are we doing here? We're not trained military pilots. And don't shrug at me as if this was somehow normal.”

Richie started to shrug then apparently thought better of it. “We're Delta. Normal went out the window long ago.”

“That doesn't explain that.” She waved a hand at the massive plane.

He looked over at the plane, which even at a distance loomed above them.

“Well?”

Richie did shrug this time. “Since I fielded, I've sailed a seventy-foot yacht, stolen a Venezuelan federal police boat, bribed customs officials, driven a narco-submarine sixty feet underwater for two days with no idea if I could resurface it, and infiltrated Bolivian farms where I spent a lot of time working as an itinerant laborer in the fields.”

“Say what?” Melissa wasn't sure she'd ever been on a farm. She'd ridden her bike through farming country between downtown Victoria and the airport for flight training. The farms had looked pretty enough, though she suspected that was only because they were at a distance. Up close they smelled like cows and hard work. “Farming as a Unit operator?”

“And calling in defoliant airstrikes on the coca fields.”

Melissa clutched her fingers through the cyclone wire fence, rough with rust and sea salt.

Richie continued, “I never thought I'd do any of that from the relative safety of The Unit's shoot-house. Kyle and Chad were Special Forces. Carla was 4th Infantry and Duane was 75th Rangers. None of us were ready for it when it hit us. Twenty-four hours after OTC graduation we parachuted into a drug lord's hacienda fortress and took it down hard. OTC was prep school, but no matter what they do, it's just enough training to keep us alive when we hit the real world. It sure didn't prepare any of us. I guess we didn't have time to think about it, so we got our baptism fast. I've learned that if I roll with it, it generally all makes sense later.”

Melissa stared at Richie. He had the even temperament of a top soldier; reminded her of a particular major in the 101st Airborne who she'd seen on the sly for a while. Bennett took things as they came with an easy level of acceptance she'd never really understood. He'd had other issues—like thinking that if they got serious she'd be the one leaving the military, that and being something of a yawn in bed—but she'd liked the man even if she hadn't understood any of his attitudes.

She planned every step of the way. Perhaps it was the rock and ice climber in her.

Yet here was Richie, showing calm acceptance. Somehow he made it sound rational to simply learn what came next when it finally presented itself without worrying at it beforehand. And what did she know? She'd been out of training for barely twenty-four hours.

“I was way out of my depth on that first mission, but I had one distinct advantage.”

“What was that?”

“I had Kyle and Carla in the lead, like Q going along with Bond and the kick-ass Bond girl. I was way out of my depth coming from the 82nd's combat engineers, so I just copied them and did the best I could. All you've got at the moment is me—Q. Wish I could offer you more than that.”

Melissa tilted her head either way to loosen her stiff neck.

“Richie?”

“Yeah?”

She brushed a hand along his cheek. Not because it was appropriate—it totally wasn't—but because it felt so good.

“Richie, this girl is going to count herself lucky that you're the one I'm riding beside.”

He looked at her in wide-eyed shock.

“We good?” She nodded toward the waiting Vito.

Richie shook off his paralysis and hit her with another one of those super-smiles of his. But there was more to this smile. This time it included the man who had buried his face in her hair and sighed with pleasure.

Her body gave back an answering sigh, though she kept it quiet. Richie was so easy to like and to trust. Maybe too easy. Which was odd for her, as she was very slow to trust anyone.

As they turned back to face The Priest, Melissa did her best to ignore the part of her that wondered if he was better in bed than Major Bennett had been.

Unit Operator Melissa The Cat looked forward to finding out.

Priest Vito led them through the Albatross seaplane inch by inch, outside then in. When they arrived in the cockpit, he had them sit in the command seats; Melissa was deeply thankful that Richie was sent to the pilot's seat this time. The plane was poised to look out over rolling lawn and a big highway exchange with an overpass. From up here in the cockpit, the land looked far below, as if they were flying already.

The seats were heavy gray steel and the instruments looked primitive in comparison to the Beech Baron that had been their first plane this night. But once she got past the foreignness, it wasn't that different. The engine controls might be mounted in the ceiling above the windshield, but they were still pitch, throttle, and fuel mixture. The steering wheels looked more like a WWII jeep's than an airplane's: hard plastic, too thin to be comfortable, circular except for the top third which had been cut out so that it didn't block the view of the instruments.

For three hours Vito ran them through drills on the parked and silent aircraft until she could find every control and breaker in the dark…while blindfolded…and whistling “The Devil Went Down to Georgia.” And at the end of those three long hours it felt as if they'd been flying through a hurricane without ever leaving the grassy front yard of the Coast Guard station. She'd hit the wall and couldn't absorb another fact.

“Here.” Vito handed them each a manual about a mile thick. It had an exciting title:
Multi Engine.
“You'll want to get through most of this before tomorrow. You'll be multi-engine certified by end of week. We won't get you type-certified in most aircraft, but we want you to be able to survive a flight in almost anything.”

And then he walked away.

“Serious hard-ass.”

“Not exactly the fatherly type,” Richie agreed.

As they walked back across the lawn and toward the hangars where they'd left the motor-pool car they'd been given, Melissa thumbed through the manual—maybe it was only an inch thick. The dawn light was coming up just enough for her to see the manual clearly. Tons of fine print and a kajillion graphs; might as well be a mile thick.

She flapped it at Richie. “Please tell me they're just kidding me.”

“You're just sleep deprived.”

“Sleep deprived, plus I almost rammed an oil rig.”

“Yeah,” Richie agreed, “that was something. Nice job not killing us by the way.”

Melissa chewed on that the rest of the way back to the car. How much had Richie seen in the last six months that being only seconds from death wasn't worth more than a stray comment? Or was he still quaking in his boots and simply hiding it?

She strongly suspected the former.

Well, if he had learned to face death, so had she—high atop a mountain of ice. She had waited for hours to be rescued, tied to the mountain, unable to reach her brother; his safety line had run through her harness and she'd been the one anchored to the ice. Hoping hour upon hour that the wind's howl was masking his calls of reassurance from deep in the crevasse but, even at the first, knowing that was a lie. And soon realizing that her own rescue was equally a lie.

A lie until the moment she'd been snatched back from an icy sleep by Michael Gibson and an Army helicopter that had flown into the heart of the storm. That was the last time she'd allowed herself to give up on anything.

All the changes of the last forty-eight hours had simply stirred it all back up again. Melissa shoved it all into her past. Maybe, just maybe, this time she could finally leave it there.

At the car, she called to Richie, “Toss me the keys. I'll drive.”

Without any “guy” stuff, he handed them over and headed for the passenger door.

“Hey,” she called.

He turned back to look at her from just a few steps away.

A part of her wanted to put him in the “little brother” slot, even though hers had been older than her by a year. But Richie refused to go there in her head.

Either he was too damn good-looking or too nice. Or too Delta. And with the way their few brief contacts had felt, he definitely wasn't going into that “little brother” pigeonhole.

He'd been right there for her from the first moment she'd stepped into the hotel suite in Maracaibo. All through tonight's flights—both the real one in the Beech Baron and the phony one sitting in the parked monster of a seaplane. He'd ridden the controls with her every step of the way. She'd been able to feel every nuance of his touch through the connected flight controls just as thoroughly as she'd felt them when she'd leaned back against his chest.

Even now, he stood close and simply…

“How much longer are you going to wait?” she asked him.

“For what?”

“You aren't that naive.”

She could see Richie calculating, that Q brain analyzing rapidly. Maybe he was that naive. Maybe he—

His process complete, some light went on.

She half expected his jaw to drop in surprise. She'd never had a guy gawk at her the way he had when she'd arrived in that stupid Aruba T-shirt.

But he didn't this time. His eyes did widen for a moment, and then he smiled at her. “The nickname is Q, not James Bond.” A tease from Richie, his first.

“Which means what? Doesn't Q ever get the girl?” Now she was the one being surprised. She'd known Richie for less than twenty-four hours. Twenty-four hours, two continents, and three plane flights if she counted the jet up from Maracaibo. Being forward wasn't her style at all. Being the one who asked…well, this was the twenty-first century.

“Never.” But his smile wasn't going away.

“Poor Q.” Asking Richie…that should have been the biggest surprise of them all—but it wasn't. Not from the first moment when she'd leaned back against him and felt more right then than she had with any other man in her past.

“How about,” Richie started, “I wait long enough to
not
be standing in the middle of an Army base?”

“This isn't the Army; nothing here but a bunch of Coasties.”

“Well, we wouldn't want to shock them, would we?”

She could feel the wall coming down and the moment slipping away. Melissa could feel the protective shield of ice that she'd built up around her recrystallizing. Whatever the moment had held, it—

Richie took a slow step toward her and brushed a finger down her cheek. Such a simple gesture, it should have been meaningless, but it lay there on her cheek like a line of fire. Not wildfire, but rather a warm fireplace on a cold night.

“What are—”

“Shh,” he whispered and leaned in to brush his lips over hers. It was the gentlest of kisses—it bore no more weight than the fingertip that had brushed her cheek. But neither was it merely a test. Richie didn't offer a question with his kiss, nor a desperate hunger. Either of those she would have known what to do with.

Instead, the kiss was sweet, as she'd expect from him. But it was also complete unto itself, as if of course he'd be kissing her. He made it the most natural thing in the world.

Not knowing quite what else to do with the kiss, Melissa The Cat purred. Heck, her entire body felt ready to do the same though their only contact was the lightest of touches along her jaw and their lips.

“Sure you want to drive?” he whispered.

“Bet your bum,” she replied.

“Definitely Canadian,” Richie remarked and turned back to the passenger side car door.

She circled the car and decided that maybe she'd show him a thing or two about polite when they arrived back at the hotel.

* * *

Richie rode shotgun for the short drive back to the motel.

He watched Melissa drive, without watching her. She drove the way she flew, clean and precise. He'd felt how her hands had moved through their joined dual controls and tried to imagine he could do better…and couldn't.

It wouldn't have surprised him if Carla had done that, though her style would be totally different. But that there were two such competent women…well, anywhere, was no end of a surprise. He'd met smart women or strong ones or pretty ones…all he'd had to do to find that last type was to go to any soldier bar in any level of uniform.

The pretty ones flocked!

A couple years ago, before joining The Unit, he'd gone to his five-year high school reunion with his full dress uniform, his brand-new Airborne patch, and three stripes on his arm. His buddies had no clue what to do with that. Spackenkill High was almost exclusively IBM brats, the company's original and still-primary plant was less than a mile from the school. Almost everyone he knew had gone on to college and a whole section of his friends were in grad school or working at the plant.

But the geeky guy who was the head of backstage tech in the high school theater had become the ultimate magnet for women who flocked to the uniform.

Melissa didn't flock to the uniform; she was the uniform. To make The Unit took strength, skill,
and
brains;
and
a level of determination that no civilian could ever comprehend. That she was knock-out beautiful was just impossible, but still true.

The hotel was only a mile away, at the other end of the airfield. It didn't give him much time to think, but he spent it thinking hard.

He wanted to touch Melissa. To see if that incredible feeling, that even the least contact with her caused to ripple through him, promised more.

But he also wanted her to remain on the team with him. He wanted to be near her like no one before. If they started too fast, it was likely to end just as fast. He had observed that numerous times.

He remembered the electricity that had crackled between Kyle and Carla from the first second. It had been impossible to miss. Yet he knew that they hadn't so much as touched throughout the entire month of Delta Selection. The change in both of them when they finally did had been dramatic. And though the two of them had lived together through much of OTC, and they'd all fought together in Venezuela then Bolivia, it was only last month they'd traded vows.

Chad had stood best man. He and Duane had shared the “men of honor” role for Carla, figuring the two of them together had some chance of handling her. It had been a small, quiet ceremony in the same beautiful church in the heart of Maracaibo where he'd been drugged and Kyle had been kidnapped. He'd loved how it brought everything full circle. And Carla had looked astonishing in her wedding dress.

He'd never seen a woman who so outclassed other women—until Melissa Moore had stumbled into the hotel suite, blinking tiredly and wearing an over-tight “I (heart) Aruba” T-shirt.

Two questions, Richie.

One, do you want her?

More than Bond had ever wanted any of his many girls, except maybe Vesper Lynd in
Casino Royale.
Because that had been serious. Tracy didn't count. Because even if Diana Rigg had been hot, the fact that she'd said yes to Lazenby's Bond wholly disqualified them.

Two, what are you going to do about it?

Bond offered no answers.

So instead he'd go Delta—make it up as he went along.