Farber blinked up at her. “Sorry, we were just leaving. I’ve got some paperwork to do before the next classroom session.”
“I’m due at the range.” Charlie gave her an insincere smile as he stood.
Greg didn’t say anything. He just gathered his trash and left with Charlie.
Just like that, they were gone, leaving P.J. standing there, holding her tray like an idiot. It wasn’t personal. She knew it wasn’t personal. She’d arrived late, they had already eaten, and they all had things that needed to get done.
Still, something about it felt like a seventh-grade shunning all over again. She glanced around the room, and this time Harvard wasn’t the only one watching her. Alpha Squad’s captain, Joe Catalanotto, was watching her, too.
She sat and unwrapped her sandwich, praying that both men would leave her be. She took a bite, hoping her body language successfully broadcast, “I want to be alone.”
“How you doing, Richards?” Joe pulled out the chair next to hers, straddled it and leaned his elbows on the backrest.
So much for body language. Her mouth was full, so she nodded a greeting.
“You know, one of my biggest beefs with FInCOM has to do with their refusing to acknowledge that teams just can’t be thrown together,” he said in his husky New York accent. “You can’t just count down a line, picking, say, every fourth guy—or woman—and automatically make an effective team.”
P.J. swallowed. “How do the SEALs do it?”
“I handpicked Alpha Squad,” Joe told her, his smile making his dark brown eyes sparkle. It was funny. With his long, shaggy, dark hair, ruggedly handsome face and muscle-man body, this man could pull off sitting in a chair in that ridiculously macho way. He made it look both comfortable and natural. “I’ve been with Blue McCoy, my XO, for close to forever. Since BUD/S—basic training, you know?”
She nodded, her mouth full again.
“And I’ve known Harvard just as long, too. The rest of the guys, well, they’d developed reputations, and when I was looking for men with certain skills… It was really just a matter of meeting and making sure personalities meshed before I tapped ’em to join the squad.” He paused. “Something tells me that FInCOM wasn’t as careful about compatible personalities when they made the selections for this program.”
P.J. snorted. “That’s the understatement of the year.”
Joe absentmindedly twisted the thick gold wedding band he wore on his left hand. P.J. tried to imagine the kind of woman who’d managed to squeeze vows of fidelity from this charismatic, larger-than-life man. Someone unique. Someone very, very special. Probably someone with the brains of a computer and the body of a super model. “What FInCOM should have done,” he told her, “if they wanted a four-man team, was select a leader, have that leader choose team members they’ve worked with before—people they trust.”
“But if they’d done that, there’s no way I would be on this team,” she pointed out.
“What makes you so sure about that?”
P.J. laughed.
Joe laughed along with her. He had gorgeous teeth. “No, I’m serious,” he said.
P.J. put down her sandwich. “Captain, excuse me for calling you crazy, but you’re crazy. Do you really think Tim Farber would have handpicked me for his team?”
“Call me Joe,” he said. “And no, of course Farber wouldn’t have picked you. He’s not smart enough. From what I’ve seen, out of the four of you, he’s not the natural leader, either. He’s fooled a lot of people, but he doesn’t have what it takes. And the other two…” He shrugged. “I’m not particularly impressed. No, out of the four of you, this assignment should’ve been yours.”
P.J. couldn’t believe what she’d just heard. She wasn’t sure what to say, what to do, but she did know that knocking over her iced tea was not the correct response. She held tightly onto the glass. “Thank you…Joe,” she somehow managed to murmur. “I appreciate your confidence.”
“You’re doing all right, P.J.,” he said, standing in one graceful movement. “Keep it up.”
As he walked away, P.J. closed her eyes. God, it had been so long since she’d been given any words of encouragement, she’d almost forgotten how important it was to hear praise. Someone else—in this case, the commanding officer of Alpha Squad—recognized that she was doing her job well. He thought she was the one who should lead the team.
Out of the four FInCOM agents…
P.J. opened her eyes, realizing with a flash of clarity that the captain’s compliment hadn’t been quite as flattering as she’d first believed. She was the best candidate for team leader—compared to Farber, Schneider and Greene.
Still, it was better than being told that women had no place on a team like this one.
She wrapped her half-eaten sandwich and threw it in the trash on her way out of the mess hall, aware of Harvard glancing up to watch her go.
CHAPTER FOUR
“BLUE CALLED TO SAY HE’S RUNNING LATE. He’ll be here in about a half hour.” Joe Catalanotto closed the door behind Harvard, leading him through the little rented house.
“He went home first, didn’t he?” Harvard shook his head in amused disgust. “I told the fool not to stop at home.” Blue McCoy’s wife, Lucy, had come into town two days ago. After spending a month and a half apart, Harvard had no doubt exactly what was causing Blue’s current lateness.
And now Blue was going to show up for this meeting at Joe Cat’s house grinning like the Cheshire cat, looking relaxed and happy, looking exactly like what he was—a man who just got some.
Damn, it seemed everyone in Alpha Squad had that little extra swing in their steps these days. Everyone but Harvard.
Joe’s wife was with him in Virginia, too. Lucky O’Donlon was living up to his nickname, romancing Miss East Coast Virginia. Even Bobby and Wes had hooked up with a pair of local women who were serving up more than home-cooked meals.
Harvard tried to remember the last time he’d gone one on one with a member of the opposite sex. June, May, April, March… Damn, it had been February. He’d been seeing a woman named Ellen off and on for a few months. It was nothing serious—she’d call him, they’d go out and wind up at her place. But he hadn’t noticed when she’d stopped phoning. He couldn’t call up a clear picture of her face.
Every time he tried, he kept seeing P. J. Richards’s big brown eyes.
“Hello, Harvard.” Joe’s wife, Veronica, was in the kitchen. As usual, she was doing three different things at once. A pile of vegetables was next to a cutting board, and a pot of something unidentifiable was bubbling on the stove. She had paperwork from her latest consulting assignment spread out across the kitchen table and one-and-a-half-year-old Frankie in his high chair, where he was attempting rather clumsily to feed himself his dinner.
“Hey, Ron,” Harvard said as Joe stopped to pull several bottles of beer from the refrigerator. “What’s up?”
“I’m teaching myself to cook,” she told him in her crisp British accent. Her red hair was loose around her shoulders, and she was casually dressed in shorts and a halter top. But she was the kind of super classy woman who, no matter what she wore, always looked ready to attend some kind of state function. Just throw on a string of pearls, and she’d be ready to go. “How’s your father?”
“Much better, thanks. Almost back to one hundred percent.”
“I’m so glad.”
“Moving day’s coming. My mother keeps threatening to pack him in a box if he doesn’t quit trying to lift things she perceives as being too heavy for him.”
Joe looked up from his search for a bottle opener. “You didn’t tell me your parents were moving.”
“No?”
He shook his head. “No.”
“My father’s taking a position at a school out in Arizona. In Phoenix. Some little low-key private college.”
“It sounds perfect,” Veronica said. “Just what he needs—a slower pace. A change of climate.”
“Yeah, it’s g
reat,” Harvard said, trying to mean it. “And they found a buyer for the house, so…”
Joe found the bottle opener and closed the drawer with his hip, still gazing at Harvard. “You okay about that?”
“Yeah, yeah, sure,” Harvard said, shrugging it off.
Veronica turned to the baby. “Now, Frank, really. You’re supposed to use the other end of the spoon.”
Frankie grinned at her as he continued to chew on the spoon’s handle.
“He inherited that smile from his father,” Veronica told Harvard, sending a special smile of her own in Joe Cat’s direction. “And he knows when he uses it, he can get away with anything. I swear, I’m doomed. I’m destined to spend the rest of my life completely manipulated by these two men.”
“That’s right,” Joe said, stopping to kiss his wife’s bare shoulder before he handed Harvard an opened bottle of beer. “I manipulated her into allowing me to refinish the back deck two weeks ago. We don’t even own this place, and yet I managed to talk her into letting me work out there in the hot sun, sanding it down, applying all those coats of waterproofing….”
“It was fun. Frank and I helped,” Veronica said.
Joe just laughed.
“Can I convince you to stay for dinner?” she asked Harvard. “I’m making a stew. I hope.”
“Oh, no, Ron, I’m sorry,” Harvard said, trying hard to sound as if he meant it. “I have other plans.” Plans such as eating digestible food. Veronica may have been one of the sweetest and most beautiful women in the world, but her cooking skills were nonexistent.
“Really? Do you have a date?” Her eyes lit up. “With what’s her name? The FInCOM agent? P.J. something?”
Harvard nearly choked on his beer. “No,” he said. “No, I’m not seeing her socially.” He shot a look at Joe Cat. “Who told you that I was?”
Joe was shaking his head, shrugging and making not-me faces.
“Just a guess. I saw her the other day.” Veronica stirred the alleged stew. “While I was dropping something off at the base. She’s very attractive.”
No kidding.
“So what’s the deal?” Veronica asked, leaning against the kitchen counter. “Has Lucky O’Donlon already staked his claim three feet in every direction around her?”
Lucky and P.J.? Of course, now that Harvard was thinking about it, Lucky had been circling P.J.—albeit somewhat warily—for the past few days. No doubt Miss East Coast Virginia was starting to cling. Harvard knew of nothing else that would send Lucky so quickly into jettison mode—and put him back on the prowl again. He had to smile, thinking of the way P.J. would react to Lucky’s less-than-subtle advances.
His smile faded. Unless it was only Harvard she was determined to keep her distance from.
“P.J.’s not seeing anyone, Ron,” Joe told his wife as he slid open the door to the back deck. “She’s working overtime trying to be one of the guys. She’s not going to blow that just because Lucky gives her a healthy dose of the O’Donlon charm.”
“Some women find heart-stoppingly handsome blond men like Lucky irresistible,” Veronica teased. “Particularly heart-stoppingly handsome blond men who look as if they’ve stepped off the set of Baywatch.”
“There’s no rule against a SEAL getting together with a FInCOM agent.” Harvard managed to keep his voice calm. “I have no problem with it, either. As long as the two of them are discreet.” The minute he got back to base, he was going to track down O’Donlon and… What? Beat him up? Warn him off? He shook his head. He had no claim on the girl.
“Ronnie, would you please send Blue out here after he gets here?” Joe asked his wife as he led Harvard onto the deck.
As Harvard closed the door behind him, he looked closely at his longtime friend. The captain of Alpha Squad looked relaxed and happy. The undercurrent of tension that seemed to surround the man like an aura was down to a low glow. And that was amazing, since the meeting tonight was to discuss the fact that the frustration levels regarding this FInCOM training mission were about to go off the chart.
At least Harvard’s were.
“You’re not really that bothered by all the interference we’re getting from FInCOM and Admiral Stonegate, are you?” Harvard asked.
Joe shrugged and leaned both elbows on the deck railing. “You know, H., I knew this program was a lost cause the day I met FInCOM’s choices for the team. To be honest, I don’t think there’s anything we can do to get those four working effectively together. So we do what we do, and then we recommend—emphatically—that FInCOM stay the hell out of counterterrorist operations. We suggest—strongly—that they leave that to the SEALs.”
“If you’re quitting, man, why not just detonate the entire program right now? Why keep on wasting our time with—”
“Because I’m being selfish.” Joe turned to look at him, his dark eyes serious. “Because Alpha Squad runs at two-hundred-and-fifty percent energy and efficiency one hundred percent of the time, and the guys need this down time. I need this down time. I’m telling you, H., it’s tough on Ronnie with me always leaving. She never knows when we sit down to dinner at night if that’s the last time I’m going to be around for a week or for a month or—God forbid—forever. She doesn’t say anything, but I see it in her eyes. And that look’s not there right now because she knows I’m leading this training drill for the next six weeks. She’s got another six weeks of reprieve, and I’m not taking that away from her. Or from any of the other wives, either.”
“I hear you,” Harvard said. “But it rubs the wrong way. Doing all this for nothing.”
“It’s not for nothing.” Joe finished his beer. “We’ve just got to revise this mission’s goal. Instead of creating a Combined SEAL/FInCOM counterterrorist team, we’re creating a FInCOM counterterrorist expert. We’re giving this expert all of the information she can possibly carry, and you know what she’s gonna do?”
“She?”
“She’s gonna take that expertise back to Kevin Laughton, and she’s gonna tell him and all of the FInCOM leaders that the best thing they can do in a terrorist situation is to step back and let SEAL Team Ten do the job.” Harvard swore. “She?”
“Yes, I’m referring to P. J. Richards.” Joe grinned. “You know, you should try talking to her sometime. She doesn’t bite.”
Harvard scowled. “Yes, she does. And I have the teeth marks to prove it.”
Joe’s eyebrows went up. “Oh, really?”
Harvard shook his head. “I didn’t mean it that way.”
“Oh, yeah, that’s right. I almost forgot—you have no problem with her hooking up with Lucky O’Donlon as long as the two of them are discreet.” Joe snorted. “Why do I foresee a temporary transfer for O’Donlon crossing my desk in the near future?”
“You know I wouldn’t do that.”
“Well, maybe you should.”
Harvard clenched his teeth and set his barely touched bottle of beer on the deck railing. “Cat, I’m trying to be professional here.”
“What happened, she turn you down?”
Harvard pushed himself off the rail and walked toward the sliding doors, then stopped and walked toward the captain. “What exactly do you envision her role at FInCOM to be?”
“You’re purposely changing the subject.”
“Yes, I am.”
“I can’t believe you haven’t at least tried to get friendly with this woman. If I weren’t a happily married man, I’d be pulling some discreet moves myself. I mean, she’s smart, she’s beautiful, she’s—”
“What exactly do you envision her role at FInCOM to be?” Harvard enunciated very clearly.
“All right,” Joe said with a shrug. “Be that way.” He drew in a deep breath, taking the time to put his thoughts into words. “Okay, I see her continuing to climb FInCOM’s career ladder and moving into an upper-level position—probably onto Kevin Laughton’s staff. She’s worked with him before. He was the one who insisted she be part of this program in the first place.”
&n
bsp; Kevin Laughton and P.J. Now Harvard had to wonder about that relationship. Inwardly, he rolled his eyes in disgust. Everything became more complicated when women were thrown into the equation. Suddenly sex became an issue, a motivation, a factor.
A possibility.
Damn, why couldn’t P.J. just stay in the FInCOM office, safe and sound and out of sight—a distraction for after hours?
“I see her as being the voice of reason and being right there, on hand, so that when a terrorist situation like that incident at the Athens airport comes up again, she can tell Laughton to get the SEALs involved right from the start instead of waiting a week and a half and getting five agents and ten civilians killed.
“The U.S. has a no-negotiation policy with terrorists,” Joe Cat went on. “We need to go one step further and consistently deliver an immediate and deadly show of force. Tangos take over another airport? FInCOM snaps to it, and boom, SEAL Team Ten is there within hours. The first CNN report doesn’t bring attention to the bastards’ cause—instead it’s an account of how quickly the Ts were crushed. It’s a report on the number of body bags needed to take the scum out of there. Tangos snatch hostages? Same thing. Boom. We go in, we get them out. No standing around wringing our hands. And eventually the terrorists will realize that their violent action causes a swift and deadly reaction from the United States every single time.”
“And you think P. J. Richards will really reach a point in FInCOM where her opinion is that important?” Harvard let his skepticism ring in his voice. “Where she can say, ‘Call in the SEALs,’ and have anyone listen to her?”
“On her own? Probably not,” Joe said baldly. “She’s a woman and she’s black. But I do think Kevin Laughton’s going all the way to the top. And I think P. J. Richards will be close by when he gets there. And I’m betting when she says, ‘Call in the SEALs,’ he’s going to listen.”
Harvard was silent. Damn, but he hated politics. And he hated the image of Laughton with P.J. by his side.
“So since our goal has changed,” Harvard asked, crossing his arms and trying to stay focused, “do we still try to convince FInCOM to let us run training ops that extend past their current ten-hour limit? And what about our request to go out of the country with the finks? If you’d prefer to just stay here in Virginia—”
Tall, Dark and Dangerous Vol 1: Tall, Dark and FearlessTall, Dark and Devastating Page 105
