At the Merest Glance

by M. L. Buchman

  “There’s— They just flew past the trawler’s track. It must have turned.”

  “No…” Michelle was gazing into the distance. “They just overflew the trawler itself.”

  “Oh God. Tell them to be careful.”

  Chapter 20

  “Any reaction?” Anton asked over the intercom.

  Ricardo still held onto his shoulders.

  Hannah was their eyes behind, with her head stuck out the cargo bay’s side door.

  “Movement on the bridge, but I’m guessing it’s mostly binoculars at this point.”

  Anton considered the crazy daisy chain that they were already running, Katie in contact with Michelle, Michelle linked telepathically to Ricardo, and Ricardo conducting Katie’s sensing ability to him as an extension. Then the back channel of his voice, Ricardo’s telepathy, and Michelle speaking to Katie.

  “Well, hell, what’s one more step? Jesse, pard,” he gave it the cowboy’s long drawl. “Why don’tcha fly us up high over that thar little boat and we’ll see what happens?”

  “What are you—”

  “Trust me.”

  Jesse swooped the bird around and punched them higher.

  Anton slipped his vision out of his seat inside the helo until he was hanging on just outside the helo. He didn’t look at himself, as that was always kind of unnerving.

  Instead he focused on the trawler and tried to time the angle.

  “Never tried anything like this.” And no matter what his brain knew about him being safe aboard the Mi-35 helicopter, for his heart this was the toughest stunt he’d ever tried.

  He waited until they were directly over the trawler. Then he “let go.”

  His vision plummeted toward the boat.

  Every instinct told him he was about to die. He was going to splat onto the deck from a couple hundred meters up and that was going to be the end of him.

  The acceleration sped him downward.

  At least he couldn’t hear the roaring of the wind, but that boat was getting bigger fast.

  Katie could feel Chas Thorstad directly below the helicopter. Like a hotspot. Perhaps he was pacing back and forth on the boat, making a bigger…signal?

  Suddenly that signal began getting stronger.

  Fast!

  Clearer and clearer!

  As if the helicopter—and Anton—were diving down directly onto the boat.

  “They’re crashing! Chas must have shot them down.”

  When the connection to Anton snapped, it was like a hard kick to the head. The pain was blinding until she found relief in passing out.

  Chapter 21

  Anton’s feet landed on the deck as easily as he landed on the floor beside his bed in the morning.

  “You okay?” Ricardo asked.

  “Sure. I just jumped my vision down to the boat. Seems to have worked. Any problems?”

  Ricardo was silent for a long moment. “Proceed with reconnoiter, just hustle.”

  “Yes sir, Mr. Bossman.” The fact that he’d outranked Ricardo when they were in the Army was something he didn’t lord over the man…too often. Besides Ricardo and Isobel were both natural leaders far more than anyone else on the team.

  He trotted up onto the bridge.

  “Seven baddies. Some serious hardware. Looks like mostly small caliber AK-47 knockoffs. But they have a couple of heavy machine guns of a type I don’t recognize.”

  “Need to brush up on your Russian weaponry.”

  “Not sure what it is, but it’s not Russian.” That earned him some silence. “No sign of Chas. Going exploring.”

  “Hustle, Anton.”

  He wondered what Ricardo wasn’t telling him, but he figured it would be better if he trusted Ricardo’s judgment on that at the moment.

  He sprinted down ladders and through cargo spaces as fast as his vision would go. He found Chas by himself down in a cramped galley area.

  A countdown timer rested on the table beside him, it had less than five minutes remaining—maybe that’s what was worrying Ricardo.

  Chas was talking to someone on a tablet computer. On his phone, he had a bank account pulled up on his screen—a Cayman Islands one. It had a pretty impressive balance.

  Then Anton looked at the face on the tablet computer.

  Didn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out what was going on.

  “He’s a mercenary. Waiting for his payoff.”

  Anton flipped back up to the bridge of the boat.

  He looked at the crew members. He hadn’t really looked at their faces in the shadowed bridge before. Then he leaned in close to inspect their weapons. At least he knew who they were, even if he didn’t know why.

  Then he recalled something he’d seen down in the cargo spaces as he’d run through them. He ducked back down to make sure he hadn’t imagined anything.

  “Oh shit!”

  He let the vision go and was once more seeing the view from the back seat of the Mi-35 Monsoon helo.

  Ricardo’s hands were no longer on his shoulders.

  “What have we got?”

  “We have seven very angry looking Chinese with 7.62- and 12.7-millimeter weaponry. They have a cargo hold with enough explosives to make a damn big hole in the ocean.”

  “Chinese? What in the name of Texas are they doing here?” Jesse had the helo circling ten klicks from the trawler.

  Ricardo answered him. “The Chinese have invested massively in African infrastructure. They’re gambling that as it grows from Third World to Developing Economy, the investment will be paid back a whole bunch of times over.”

  “So what’s the catch?”

  “The catch is 2Africa. This brand-new cable encircles the entire continent and ties them to the UK, Spain, France, and Italy. It connects African data and financial commerce to Europe, not China. Someone decided the solution was to destroy the cable stations to discourage the countries of Africa from signing on. And they’ve got the explosives to do it.”

  Then Anton looked down at the fuel gauges. “Uh, if we ever want to see dry land again, we’d better do something fast.”

  “How about the chin gun?”

  “Against a ship? Best I can do is chew up the deck some. That ship is solid.”

  There was a long silence, and all Anton could do was watch the fuel gauge.

  “We’ve got less than ninety seconds on the clock,” Ricardo said quietly. He was always the cool, collected one. “Jesse? Can you put us directly over their deck in that amount of time?”

  In answer, Jesse slewed the Mi-35 around hard and laid down the hammer. “I don’t suppose that there’s any point in reminding y’all that they have a lot of machine guns. Even this baby won’t take kindly to having a lot of holes put in her.”

  “I have a little present I want to drop on their deck without breaking it.” Then Ricardo was gone.

  “Why doesn’t this sound good?” Anton began trying settings randomly in hopes of finding the setting to fire the chin gun. “Ricardo, could you ask Katie what the words are for machine gun, chin gun, or bow gun? Any of those?”

  “Not gonna happen. Busy here,” and he was gone again.

  “What the hell does that mean?”

  Jesse grunted. “Don’t know, but I’m with you. Sounds like a case of laryngitis at a hog calling contest. Not good. Not one little bit of good.”

  Jesse had been cutting a wide arc, and now Anton saw why. Damn but Night Stalkers were so cool.

  The landing gear was up, and his belly couldn’t be more than two meters off the wave tops. If they clipped a wave, they would eat the ocean hard a few hundredths of a second later.

  But even under pressure, Jesse had thought to come in directly at the stern of the boat. People would naturally watch to the front and sides. It would require someone being on the ball to watch astern. Even then, they were unlikely to look so low for a helicopter moving at two hundred miles an hour.

  Anton might have come up with the idea, given a few minutes, but even with ten
years in a Black Hawk, there was no way he could fly this route.

  “Time?” Ricardo asked.

  Anton glanced at the radar and air speed. “Fifteen seconds.”

  He stopped looking for the chin gun. All he’d do if he found it now was alert the ship to their approach. He dialed in his best guess and watched the radar scroll down the last two kilometers.

  “At mid-deck, go straight up, but not until you reach mid-deck,” Ricardo called out.

  “My but he is in a fussy mood, ain’t he?”

  “That he is,” Anton did his best to copy Jesse’s lazy drawl. It was a pact among pilots that you only showed panic after you were already dead. Any sooner was just embarrassing and a general waste of time.

  “You’ll have less than five seconds to climb,” Ricardo continued with his string of cheery news.

  Anton tried to turn enough to see what Ricardo and Hannah were up to back there, but couldn’t get an angle down the narrow alley behind his seat.

  Despite the pilot’s pact, Anton hissed in a sharp breath as Jesse flew straight at the boat’s stern.

  Ten meters out, maybe more like five, Jesse carved a hard left, then reversed through a one-eighty to pass across the middle of the boat.

  He hesitated half a second directly over the ship.

  Bullets began glancing off their canopy windscreens.

  Anton tried the trigger.

  The chin gun barked to life.

  It poured out a stream of rounds. The first burst went up into the rigging. But when Anton pushed the weapon’s joystick forward, the rounds poured into the bridge.

  “Bomb’s away,” Ricardo called.

  Jesse climbed sharply, but Anton was able to hose the bridge for two full seconds, almost three thousand rounds.

  “What bomb?” He asked his question as soon as the chin gun spun dry and he could hear himself think again.

  Then he remembered the bomb that Ricardo and Hannah had removed from the Dakar beach house.

  “We didn’t have a trigger, so I reconnected their timer.”

  “Su-weet!” Anton loved this outfit. It had taken two Delta operators and a consultant almost half an hour to disarm the weapon. They’d rearmed it in less than a minute on a swerving helo. They were definitely his kind of people.

  Anton dropped his vision down to the boat.

  Too bad he couldn’t tap Chas Thorstad on the shoulder and wish him goodbye.

  But Anton wouldn’t forget the face of the Chinese man on the screen, or the symbol for the social media network he ran.

  Yes, the Chinese social media would be very upset about losing their chokehold on Africa.

  Seconds later the deck blew downward amid a blinding flash of light.

  Chas was thrown against the bulkhead. Injured, but conscious.

  He had less than a second to recover before the effects reached the lower hold and triggered the rest of the explosive cargo.

  Anton let go of his vision as it sheeted pure white.

  The view from above was little different.

  A blinding fireball shattered the ship from stem to stern.

  When he could see again, there was nothing left on the surface bigger than a pea patch. The ship had simply been obliterated.

  The shock wave tossed them hard, but Jesse had gotten them enough altitude that he’d had plenty of time to recover them from the hard tumble well before they plummeted into the ocean. Though that might have gotten a little closer than was really comfortable, they made it.

  He shouted back to Ricardo.

  “Woo-hoo! Tell the girls we’re coming home.”

  Chapter 22

  Katie had been woken to a blinding headache by the massive helicopter racing up to the beach, slowing sharply, and creating a small sandstorm as it settled nearby.

  Anton and the others had trotted over from the helo, laughing as they came.

  Even Ricardo had been smiling broadly as he called out, “Let’s get moving, folks, The police and the Army are bound to be here soon to fetch their helicopter.”

  Before she could rise, Anton had simply scooped her against his chest and carried her away.

  And now he looked so perfect here on his family’s North Carolina back porch steps. His elbows rested on the top step and his long legs reached all the way down to the grass. She sat a step down from the top, so that his fingers were sliding softly up and down her back.

  “Nothing in the world like Ma’s barbeque.”

  Katie would have to agree. Just as Michelle had predicted, Ma Bowman had loved her the moment she saw how happy Katie made her son. And she made an amazing pork barbeque.

  The others looked equally content.

  Beyond the gathering on the wide back lawn, the farm stretched away into the dusk. The air above the big kitchen garden to the right was a playground cluttered with swallows dancing through the evening light. A towering Magnolia grandiflora scented the night air with lemon, and a massive swamp white oak, Quercus bicolor, stood guard to the south. Between them lay the entrance to the fields and orchards.

  Isobel sat with Anton’s and Michelle’s parents. Ricardo and Michelle were playing with an energetic yellow lab puppy. Jesse and Hannah sat arm in arm on the porch swing.

  “You know what would make this perfect?” The effect of Anton’s touch gave her a definite answer to that, but she wanted to see what his idea was.

  “No.”

  Anton rose to his feet and held out a hand to help her to her feet. She was a little lightheaded from lack of sleep. They’d left Dakar behind within twenty-four hours of arriving.

  It had also taken the headache hours to clear, even with the aspirin Michelle had given her. Whether it had been caused by the speed of Anton’s “falling” away from her or the tag-team connection through Michelle and Ricardo’s telepathy, she wasn’t particularly interested in finding out. It would be a long time before she tried either one again.

  But she didn’t want the evening to end.

  “It would be perfect if you were to take a walk with me.”

  Definitely not the quiet bedroom she’d been thinking of. They still hadn’t made love, but she was too content to argue. Taking her hand, he led her at an easy stroll around the kitchen garden and out into a grove thick with magnolia trees and their heady scent.

  “You know,” Anton guided her around a set of beehives, “it just happens that I came into some money. I’m splitting it all ways with the team, which includes you.”

  “That’s sweet of you.”

  “Yeah, I thought so too. Isobel doesn’t need it of course, and is trying to refuse her share, but it’s only fair.”

  Katie shuffled to a stop as the moon came out from behind a cloud and sent glittering shafts of light down through the trees.

  Anton had given her so many gifts, including, some day, the gift of his family. She no longer doubted that the trail of her future lay alongside Anton’s.

  “Um, I don’t really need the money either.”

  “Says the woman living with one change of clothes in her backpack.”

  “Two. I have two.”

  Anton leaned back against a tree trunk and pulled her against him. She didn’t fight him a single inch of the way.

  “I actually have a lot of money. I just never want to touch it.” And she told him about her parents, her heritage, the slave ships. All of it.

  He kept his silence through her whole story. By the end of it she began to worry. She didn’t know how he’d react to her ancestors selling his ancestors. Or that her parents had been depositing a “paltry” ten thousand pounds a month into her account since she was four.

  “That’s a couple million pounds,” was the first thing Anton said.

  Katie froze. She’d been worried about the past history, but hadn’t given a thought to the possibility of parents’ money coming between them.

  “Personally, I think you should take it.”

  “Why?” She asked the question very fearfully. If she had it, and
they did marry, then he—

  “Seems to this country boy that if you don’t touch it, they win. Take their money, Katie. Do something with it. Buy a third change of clothes, buy a house. Doesn’t really matter. Maybe find some way to use it that would make your parents nuttier than a Reese’s Peanut Butter Cup. Seems like the least you can do for how they’ve treated you.”

  “That’s…” Katie could only blink in surprise. Anton was never quite what she expected. And to turn that burden around, turn it into something good? Why hadn’t she ever thought of that for herself? “That’s unbelievably brilliant! I really love you.”

  “I love you, too, Katie,” he brushed a hand along her cheek.

  “Just like that?”

  “Just like that.”

  She leaned her cheek against his chest and decided that he was right. Just like that.

  “You could even just give all that money away if it bugs you. You’d still have plenty.”

  “How much money did you come into?”

  “Four hundred thousand.”

  “Bloody hell.” That was more than she’d made from tracking, ever. “Divided by the seven of us, that’s almost sixty thousand apiece.”

  “No,” he kissed the top of her head. “I came into four hundred, and so did you and all of the others. Each. I just might have seen Chas Thorstad’s Cayman Islands bank account number before we sank his sorry ass. I cleaned him out this morning. Just before the Chinese cleaned out that billionaire jerk who bankrolled him.”

  “Four hundred…” She couldn’t even imagine that much in a lump. And it meant that Anton had just given two-point-four million dollars to his friends as if he were handing out…slices of sweet potato pie like his mum was back at the house.

  As if she needed even more proof of what a good man he was.

  “Look,” he whispered.

  She looked up at him, blending into the darkness except for a few spatters of moonlight.

  “No, out there.”

  She turned and the whole field under the magnolias was filled with fireflies flickering on and off.

  “They’re beautiful.”