When he made it through security on the base, the only thing he could think was it was damn good he hadn’t seen Connie Davis or he’d be in the brig right now for the thoughts of what he’d like to do to her.

  He could understand, kind of, why she’d want to be gone. She didn’t do well with people and there’d been a lot of people. But she’d left. She hadn’t stayed to honor Grumps’ memory. She hadn’t stayed for him. Hadn’t even said a goddamned goodbye. He’d imagined more. He’d trusted there could be…

  Thankfully, she also wasn’t the first person he ran into on entering the lobby of Grimm Hall.

  “Sergeant Kee Stevenson III, you are all smiles and glows.” He wrapped her up in a bear hug, lifting her feet well clear of the ground. She hugged him back and planted a big kiss on his nose.

  “Hey, put down my wife.”

  “No! Mine!” He told Archie as he hugged Kee again. “Damn! Wish you were the one coming with us.”

  “Can’t. We gotta get trained up on your fancy new toy. We hear that you proved it out at the Nevada Test Range and now we’ve gotta get up to speed.”

  He set her back down on the carpeting and extended a hand to Archie. “You caught a good one here, Captain. How’s the kid?”

  “You wouldn’t recognize her. Jeans, turtleneck, and iPod. Not sneakers, though, boots. I think it’s in case she ever has to make a long walk again, which she won’t, but Dilya doesn’t dare believe that yet. Hopefully not once a refugee, always a refugee. The music she likes is incredibly strange.”

  “Indie rock?”

  “Broadway show tunes. The kid is singing along all the time.”

  “Sweet!” He could imagine it, the Uzbekistani orphan they’d adopted singing about climbing every mountain and dancing in the rain, a commodity she’d rarely seen in her life until a few months ago.

  “We’re outta here.” Archie shook his hand again. “We’ll catch up with you in a week or so, wherever you are. Where are you headed?”

  “Can’t be soon enough. And no briefing yet on where we’re going. But they called us back in, so it’s probably time to get back on it.” John didn’t ask Archie about the wreckage the bullet had made of his shoulder. Didn’t need to. The man’s grip was strong and sure, and his shoulders were as broad and muscled as they ever were on his slender frame. He knew the man would never fly pilot again, but they were training him up as an air mission commander at which he’d be awesome.

  “Marriage looks good on the two of you.”

  And the bite was back in his gut, so hard he gasped at the sudden pain. Damn Connie Davis to hell.

  “Serious, you two. It does.”

  Kee put her hand on John’s chest and patted him there. He looked down into those dark eyes of hers.

  “John. I know it hurts.”

  He flinched. He couldn’t stop himself.

  “Yes, I spoke to her and she’s pretty screwed up about this. Walk softly there.”

  “Walk softly? Walk softly! Do you know what she—” He bit it off before it became a scream.

  Kee was nodding. She knew.

  “I’m not the one who needs to walk goddamned softly.”

  She kept her hand on his chest as he struggled to breathe normally.

  “I’m not the one.” And there was the problem. He feared that he wasn’t the one. But imagining Connie Davis with anyone else was as awful as imagining being with her and then having her walk out on him again.

  “John, I’ve got a message from her.”

  “Screw that! I’ve had enough goddamn messages from her.”

  Kee sighed and looked back at Archie, who shrugged.

  “Are you on her side? Both of you?” John’s anger burned.

  Kee shook her head. “No, the only side we’re on is our crew’s.”

  “Well, as soon as you’re back, she’s off the crew anyway. Problem solved.”

  In a second, Kee had her fingers dug into his throat and was pulling him forward, dragging him down to her foot-shorter level using as leverage his desperate need to keep his windpipe intact.

  “The goddamn message is from me then,” Kee snarled when they were nose-to-nose. “You know where to find her. Actually, it is from her because I don’t know what the hell it means and I don’t care. But I can see you damn well do.”

  Then she smiled like an angel, kissed his nose again, and let him go.

  He swallowed and knew it would hurt to speak. He swallowed again. It would hurt for quite a while.

  “And if you don’t have this straightened out by the time we’re back with the unit, I’m gonna kick your ass.” She snagged Archie’s arm and headed out the door. Called back over her shoulder as sweetly as pie, “And you know I can do it.”

  Yeah, he did.

  50

  The woman, so talented at disappearing, was suddenly everywhere. In the mess eating with the Majors—like there was a repulser shield, he couldn’t even step into the Mess Hall when she was there. Out working with the Raytheon crew, helping run orientation for the class that included Archie and Kee. When John finally gave up and went for a run that afternoon, he spotted the small figure sitting against the fence on the far side of Nightstalker Way. He could feel her track him as he looped out and around the airfield.

  When the C-17 showed up with their helicopters, they all loaded aboard.

  Major Beale stopped him at the foot of the ramp until everyone had moved past them. They started cranking up the engines, and still he and the major remained, despite the C-17’s loadmaster shuffling from foot-to-foot in his desire to close up the ramp.

  “John?” He didn’t like the sound of her voice. He knew this voice. It was her I’m-about-to-issue-a-command-and-if-you-don’t-do-it-I’m-going-to-tear-you-into-teeny-tiny-pieces-of-once-was-John voice.

  “Yes, Major.”

  “Fix it!”

  “Yes, Major.” He wished there were a question of what they were talking about.

  But there wasn’t.

  51

  John tried. He dug deep and tried.

  On the flight he signaled Connie over, and they went through their Hawk inch-by-inch.

  Even if he could bring himself to speak to her, his memory of Kee’s iron-strong fingers clamped about his throat kept him from shouting over the roar of the C-17’s engines. So they did it in silence.

  By the time they’d moved off the tail section and started on the twin GE turboshaft engines, they were working smoothly. John wasn’t ready to congratulate himself, but after thirty hours of complete avoidance, it was an improvement.

  Connie was at a complete loss. John was making her work but wouldn’t speak to her. She’d tried to be in places where they’d been comfortable together. To somehow make it okay. She’d eaten with the crew, and he’d never come to a single meal. She’d worked with the crew on the ADAS, and he hadn’t joined them.

  She’d finally decided to give him the space, to sit out at the fence. She’d started thinking this was their place. It was where they went to work things out. But they didn’t. He’d left the hangar, heading out on a run. She knew it was him despite the distance. Then saw the stumble when he spotted her. And watched helplessly as he altered his course abruptly away from where she sat, nearly running head-on into a parked Chinook.

  So she did what she did best. She kept her mouth shut, her mind on the mechanics, and her heart shut up in a steel casing. Five hours to review everything they could while in flight. Every system checked out. Every bolt was well seated. Every ammo case loaded.

  The silence had sapped her energy. She was dragging by the time they finished. Usually the quiet was her friend. A place where she found peace and purpose. A place where music came to her and filled the spaces.

  There was no music today, no harmony in their work. Only struggle and duty. When they finished, she lay down on the cargo bay deck and slept on the hard steel.

  She dreamt of falling from the sky.

  52

  “You are here as a part of my guard detail, Em.”

  Connie looked at the three Secret Service agents who stood at strategic locations in the hotel suite. Places where they were unobtrusive but would be the first to any door or window. Long before President Peter Matthews.

  They fit in well here, and the SOAR crews certainly didn’t. The plush furnishings still evoked the founding of the Grand Hotel Stockholm in the late 1800s. She considered touring the suite but felt too self-conscious under the Secret Service’s vigilant eye. She sat at the far end of the living room at the broad dining table. Most of the others were clustered down at the far end in the circle of sofas beyond the grand piano.

  Connie had never imagined a hotel suite like this one, never mind been in one. Everything was so perfect that she didn’t want to move for fear she’d mess it up.

  Major Beale’s latest protest filled the room from where she was busy chewing out their Commander in Chief.

  “Peter, you don’t go to an international peace conference in an allied country and drag along a pair of stealth-adapted DAP Hawks for guard work. Why are we actually here? In the Grand Hotel Stockholm, for crying out loud!”

  “For now, a joint training mission with the Swedish Special Forces, a way to say thank you to the Special Operations Group for their help in Afghanistan. Beyond that I’m not sure yet. I think we’ll know more tomorrow or maybe the next day—”

  “So we hang out while you do whatever it is you do here, Sneaker Boy?”

  “Look, Squirt…”

  Connie tuned it out. She could picture them as children, enjoying the argument for the sake of debate, of mental jousting. Connie couldn’t imagine anything more exhausting. Give her a game plan. A place and direction to go. That worked for her. When she thought about people like this, who had minds that worked like this, it made her tired. When she was around them, she was often pulled in—sucked in by the power and magnetism they projected onto those around them, willing or not.

  But it served no purpose. No matter what either said, it wouldn’t change the course of events.

  She was so sick of words. And they never were the right ones.

  John wouldn’t speak to her. And now Major Beale was shutting her out. To be fair, the major was shutting John out as well. But that didn’t make her feel any better about the arrangement. Clay, the copilot, did his usual: loud music on the headphones of his music player and a ragged novel folded back on itself so that the binding was broken past reading the title within minutes of his picking it up.

  She rarely spoke with Viper’s crew. Except Tim. Tim was funny, easygoing in a way Connie had always envied. He radiated a charm that swept up all those around him. He and John together were hilarious, always something fun going on. They were two particularly action-oriented guys, as different as possible from the President and Major Beale’s modus operandi.

  Now that she knew Tim, she understood something she’d missed way back when she’d first arrived at Bati. He’d made a pass at her. Thinking back, that’s what it must have been. Though she hadn’t seen it go by. He’d made her smile, at least inside, several times, but she hadn’t connected it to anything beyond him being nice. But the moment she and John had started being close, Tim had eased back so gracefully that she didn’t know he’d been being forward. Smooth operator.

  Smooth or not, now that she wasn’t talking to John, Tim wasn’t talking to her either. Of course, there they sat on the far side of the suite not speaking to the major or each other. Tim kept looking over at his friend, but John wore a black cloud over his head like a monk’s hood and was unapproachable.

  So she sat in the corner of the suite and stared out the window. It looked across the harbor at Old Stockholm. In the dusk, a small tourist boat slid into the harbor, mostly empty, not many people braving the winter night on the water.

  The snow lay on Stockholm like a thick blanket, and the palace shone in Old Stockholm across the water.

  The major was right: you don’t go to a friendly country and bring your personal army with you. A bad tactical move. And this had been touted as a goodwill visit crossing Scandinavia and culminating in Russia and Ukraine, which to her way of thinking, made it worse. Masking it as a training opportunity with SOG was plausible in itself, but that was counter-balanced by where they were sitting. The President of the United States didn’t typically invite two Special Operations Forces helicopter crews over for a beer and a chat.

  Nor would this help tomorrow’s conference much. Leaders from throughout the region were invited to the hotel for three days to discuss the peace process, and the President had come to participate and listen. A friendly ear, with his own personal fighting force, presently showing their teeth to the Swedish Special Forces.

  She sat up suddenly. Something wasn’t right. The hand the President was playing didn’t make sense. Unless he knew something. Something he wasn’t willing to share with the selfsame people he needed. What would make sense?

  A threat. There was a threat to—

  John sat down across the table from her. A quick glance showed that no one else in the room was paying them any attention. Except for Major Beale from the far end of the room, but she never missed anything. She did turn away abruptly when Connie spotted her. Great. Just great.

  John wasn’t merely making Connie miserable, he was also screwing up her career with one of the finest commanders she’d ever met.

  “What the hell is wrong with you?” She kept her voice low.

  John sputtered before croaking out in a hoarse voice, “Me? I’m not the one who screwed up.”

  “I don’t need you telling me what Kee Stevenson has already rammed down my throat.”

  “Your throat?” He massaged his windpipe. “What did she do to yours?”

  So Kee was on a rampage against both of them. She’d rammed Connie’s own words back down her throat until she’d nearly choked on them and apparently done something similar to John. Well, to hell with her, too.

  Connie had been fine. It was John who’d gone all weird over having sex. Too bad really, it had been great sex. There’d never been a chance that it would work out to anything more. Not for Connie. And when Grumps died, well… she’d…she’d been in the way, that’s all. In the way, so she left. Simple. Keep it simple and focus only on what she knew. She still flew.

  “So we’re good now? We simply fly together.”

  The color drained out of John’s face as his fists clenched.

  Before she could puzzle out his reaction, a deck of cards landed between them.

  “Enough planning. Time to play poker.” Major Henderson slapped John on the shoulder, and he flinched as if he’d been shot by a much bigger weapon than Mark’s palm. Crazy Tim took a chair on her left and, to Connie’s right, the President took a seat.

  Tim gave her a worried look, clearly taking his friend’s temperature accurately. With a brief shake of his head, Tim communicated that he didn’t know how to fix this one from the outside. It was sweet of him to think about it, but everything was fine.

  Maybe if she kept telling herself that, it would come true.

  Major Beale crowded down between her husband and the Commander in Chief. When Mark protested, she held up her hands in self-defense.

  “I won’t look at anyone’s cards. I’ll run drinks and such.”

  Dusty, Henderson’s gunner, squeezed along the wall to sit beside Tim. The card players had Major Beale back on her feet, running for sodas and sandwiches and a pizza and something called Swedish butter strips that Tim insisted on, until the table was well covered and she finally went on strike and sat back in her chair.

  The President started shuffling the pack.

  Connie tried not to feel weird every time she looked to her right and saw him only two feet away. Probably because the table was nearer the window, a pair of Secret Service agents flanked him on either side and a step behind. The big one, Adams, stood directly behind her chair, looking much more daunting than he had when riding in the back of the helicopter.

  “Is your stomach feeling better, Mr. Adams?” She couldn’t leave it alone. Never miss a chance to look down on another service or make them think you did.

  “Better than your wallet will by the end of the evening, ma’am. Thanks for asking.” He said it with a perfectly straight face, but Major Beale laughed for him.

  “You wanna try your luck, Frank? You can have my seat.”

  “Not a chance, Army. Not with your husband sitting at the table. I’ve seen him play.”

  Mark Henderson winked at her. Not at his wife, at her.

  53

  They’d agreed to start low, so John tossed a couple of dollar chips against Tim’s pair and the President’s possibly low three of a kind.

  Mark matched the play, unreadable as always to John. The President folded.

  John watched Connie carefully.

  She looked at him from across the table. Looked at him like a stranger, as if there wasn’t something between them. But there was. He knew it. Something that ran deep—so far down neither of them could see it, but there it lay nonetheless.

  And she’d blown off what they’d shared. We only fly together. What the hell was she tripping on?

  Well, screw her. Tonight she was gonna pay for it. She was going down.

  She matched his two and raised one more. Tim folded.

  John knew she was bluffing. Knew it for a fact. He saw the play, would have raised her—he was still a dollar shy of the table limit—but decided to force her to show.

  Mark studied the two of them, then set his cards face-down on the table. Tapped them a couple times, then tossed in his dollar chip.

  “I’m gonna pay to see what’s in your hand there, Sergeant Davis.” She turned over a broken straight. The major’s pair of kings went nowhere against John’s three nines.