Wings of Gold Series

by Tappan, Tracy

  A soft knock sounded at the door.

  Max straightened, drew a shaky breath, then trudged over and opened it. Dr. Barr. She stepped back to allow the doctor to enter.

  Farrin looked Max over. “The helicopter is here to take you to Karachi.”

  Max smiled weakly. “Swell.”

  Farrin’s gaze turned sympathetic. “It’s the only way to get you out of here, I’m sorry. The area is too volatile right now to take you by ground transport. Are you…going to be able to get on board?”

  Max lifted a weary shoulder. “I keep telling myself that, statistically speaking, the odds of me being in a helicopter crash two days in a row are astronomical.”

  Farrin’s mouth slanted off-center. “That’s a good way of seeing it.” The doctor went quiet for a moment. “I…before you go, I have something for you. Lieutenant Hammond gave me this to give to you.” Farrin held out an envelope. “He told me that as soon as he knew he was going to be flying off with those other helicopters on a mission, he wrote this letter for you…um, just in case.”

  Max stared at the envelope with hollow-feeling eyes. “In case of what?” She barely pushed the words out of her mouth. She was fairly certain she didn’t want to know the answer.

  Dr. Barr’s lashes dropped briefly. “It’s a final letter, Max,” she said quietly, “to be opened in case of his death.”

  A swallow worked its way, inch by choking inch, down Max’s throat, and an incredible weight landed dead-center on her lungs. Her next breath was nearly impossible to draw in; grief was taking up too much space in her chest.

  “You should hold onto it,” Farrin said. “Although I truly hope you don’t have to open it.”

  Max stood in place.

  Farrin put the envelope in Max’s hand and gently folded Max’s fingers around it. “I’m so sorry,” the doctor said.

  Max’s head moved. Up. Down. She must be nodding.

  Farrin picked up Max’s duffel bag and backpack. “I’ll walk you to the landing pad.”

  Max trod slowly and heavily down the aid station’s main pathway, Farrin keeping pace with her. She could no longer feel the hand she had clutched around Kyle’s letter.

  They passed the barracks, and a couple off-duty Pakistan guards stopped talking to stare at Max. She made quite a spectacle with her dye-marker-stained skin still discolored a yellowish-greenish-vomity color, like she was just off the set of Sesame Street, maybe as Oscar the Grouch’s inbred cousin.

  As they cut through flag circle, the steady thump-thump of spinning rotor blades beat the air across the compound. Max’s knees went loose, and she must have stumbled, because Dr. Barr’s hand came to her elbow.

  “You’re going to be okay,” Farrin assured her.

  “Yes,” Max agreed. Because that’s what she always did. Agreed that everything was going to be okay. She forced herself to approach the waiting helicopter, then paused in the open side doorway.

  Kitty was already strapped into the other jump seat. She looked at Max with a basset hound’s features, droopy eyes and a saggy mouth.

  Tears scalded Max’s eyes, the sight of Kitty’s sorrow bringing back the memory of Steve Whitmore’s freckle-faced eagerness the day of the ambulance crash. There’d been so much of life ahead of him that now would never be lived. Max swiped her palm over her lips to hide their sudden quiver. Hoisting herself inside, she claimed her duffel bag and backpack from Dr. Barr, then sat next to her roommate and dumped the bags at her feet.

  “Safe flight, you two,” Farrin said. “Good luck, Max, and”—her eyes shifted over to Kitty—“I hope to see you back here soon, corpsman.” She moved out of the door to make way for the AW, who jumped in the back.

  “I need you to belt in, ma’am,” the AW said to Max.

  Max tried, but her hands trembled too hard around the five-point restraint. Sweat dampened her flesh as the sensation of being trapped inundated her. Nausea rose.

  Kitty reached over and completed the task for Max. “Are you going to be okay?”

  Max dredged up a tremulous smile. “Sure,” she intoned.

  Kitty sat back. “Any word on Lieutenant Hammond?”

  “No.” Max tried to add some courage to her half-smile, but couldn’t. She was probably suffering from basset hound face, too. “I have no way to get in touch with him, either. I don’t have his cell number. I gave him mine, but his phone is God knows where.” Last she’d seen, it was in the leg pocket of Kyle’s flight suit. So at best, it’d been ruined by the Mangla Dam.

  Max moistened her lips and fought to keep her voice steady. “First thing this morning, I got on Dr. Barr’s satellite phone and called the CO of the Bunker Hill, but he didn’t know anything about Kyle’s condition, and, of course, he wasn’t allowed to share Kyle’s contact information with me. So I gave him my cell phone number, and asked him to pass it on to Kyle’s Wolf Pack CO also, with a message to have Kyle get in touch with me. If…” If he’s alive.

  “Have you heard anything?” Kitty asked.

  “I…” Max blinked. “That was only a half hour ago.”

  Kitty shrugged. “You never know.”

  “Oh… Well…” Max grabbed her mini backpack and practically ripped it open getting her phone out. She’d turned it off to save battery for the long trip back to the States, and, argh! She was going to shake the damned thing; it was taking so long to boot up. Then—beep.

  Two text messages came up on Max’s screen: Robyn from the LA Times’ editorial desk wanted to know if Max could sub in for Craig’s column next month because he was having his gallbladder removed, and LA Fitness was reminding her that her gym membership expired this month.

  Her disappointment over the lack of news about Kyle was uncalled for. It’d only been thirty minutes—she’d said so herself. “Nothing.” She moved her thumb to close the screen, but with her hands still shaky, she accidently brushed over the camera roll button. Up popped the picture of Kyle she’d taken the day she created his false Rick Sagget biography.

  It hit her like the flat head of a shovel to her face…seeing him wearing that crooked, devil-damn-the-world smile. It was so quintessentially Kyle, the expression reflecting both the self-assured, cocky ladies’ man who he so often was on the outside, but also everything Max knew him to be on the inside, a connoisseur of life’s ironies, a seer of truths, and a bigger hero than he would ever know.

  Max’s next breath was a ragged, tear-filled gasp. Her heart alternately squeezed down to a spare lump, then ballooned to twice its normal size: a feeling of love, but when it was also agony. Are you alive, Kyle…?

  She broke.

  That’s it. Just. Done.

  Ever since watching Kyle’s boots tap together while he was hoisted into the MEDEVAC helicopter, Max had been a house on stilts in a hurricane. Now, as she gazed down at the face she loved so deeply, those stilts turned into toothpicks. Down she came, foundations plummeting off snapping supports. She hugged her cell phone to her breasts. “Pl-please don’t be dead, Kyle,” she cried.

  Kitty was instantly hugging her, a cheek pressed to Max’s shoulder.

  Max pulled her knees up, curling into a fetal ball as best she could, Kyle’s picture shielded against her body, her chin down on her chest. “Please…” she wept, “God, please!” Sobs tore out of her with shocking violence.

  Good ol’ unflappable Max.

  Yeah, right… See me now, Kyle—see me now! Max squeezed her cell phone in a tighter fist. And in her other fist… God, she still had the envelope—Kyle’s letter to her…his final letter.

  She let out a wail.

  You’re so fucking removed from it all.

  Do you see why? BECAUSE THIS IS UNBEARABLE!

  But also…but also…

  She pressed the envelope over her eyes. But also, she’d never felt love so powerfully as she did right now. Opening herself up to Kyle like she never had to any other person had, yes, bared her to pain as if she was an exposed nerve ending. But she never would’ve experience
d the profound joy of a deep and true love if she hadn’t swum out of her lonely lane, so to speak, and joined the splashing. Kyle had pushed her to do that, and whether he lived or died, she needed to try her hardest not to live her life on the outside looking in anymore. She needed to make that be Kyle’s lifelong gift to her.

  “Um…” The AW cleared his throat, his awkwardness palpable. “Excuse me, ma’am, but I need you to put on your helmet. We’re departing.”

  Max didn’t move, just kept her chin low, tears rolling down her cheeks. Please don’t be dead…please don’t be dead…

  Kitty somehow got Max’s helmet on for her.

  The helicopter took off, leaving wherever Kyle was—however he was—miles and miles behind.

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Eleven days later, Balboa Naval Hospital, Pulmonary Clinic, San Diego

  Kyle was dressing in the last of his clothes when the nurse poked her head in the exam room door.

  “Your friends are here to pick you up, Lieutenant,” she told him.

  “Okay, thank you.” And thank crap. He needed to get the hell out of here, get on the horn and make some calls, find out where Max was, and if she was okay. He hadn’t been able to find out much of anything about her for the eleven torturously long days since the accident. The only thing he knew for sure was that she’d been recovered from the Mangla Dam.

  He had a vague recollection of being half-awakened by the jarring movement of a helicopter landing. He’d hefted his eyes open for a few seconds, and found himself laid out on his back in the cabin of a Sierra bird. Someone on a stretcher next to him was being offloaded…then Tarzan’s face appeared.

  “…one helluva woman,” he was saying, “…dragged you up from the wreck, gave you mouth-to-mouth…”

  Helluva woman had to be Max. How is she? he’d wanted to ask. If Max had been able to help him, did that mean she was all right? But he hadn’t been able to draw enough breath into his swampy lungs to form words. And no one had known dick about Max where he ended up: first in Bagram, where he spent two days being stabilized—which later he learned had been touch-and-go—then in Landstuhl Army Hospital in Germany, where he’d spent a week relearning how to breathe.

  During the entire plane ride back to the States today, he hadn’t slept a wink for all the worries strung from one end of his brain to the other. Early this afternoon—although with his jetlag it felt like evening—he’d touched down at the San Diego airport. From there, the military had evac’d him straight here to Balboa Naval Hospital for his final check, and now at last he was done and could get down to the business of finding the woman he was desperately in love with.

  Kyle left his exam room and cut into the hallway. The place was standard-issue medical clinic, lots of uninviting antiseptic smells coupled with equally unappealing white linoleum floors and white walls, every few feet a poster or a flyer warning everyone to Wash Your Hands! Voices murmured conspiratorially behind closed exam room doors.

  “Make sure to telephone if you have any problems or questions,” the nurse called after him.

  “I will.” Kyle headed into the waiting room—and was instantly engulfed in a bear hug.

  “Damn, but it’s good to see you,” Eric exhaled. “How’re you doing?” Eric O’Dwyer—Kyle’s best friend and the person he’d called to pick him up—set Kyle out in front of him. “You look good.” Eric grinned. “Still making it to the gym on a regular basis, I see.”

  “He looks awful,” Nicole contradicted, striding up to stand next to Eric.

  Nicole Gamboa was a half-Hawaiian, half-Colombian knockout DEA Agent who’d worked with Kyle and Eric on the counterdrug operation in Colombia almost a year ago. Kyle and Nicole had started out as pissy adversaries—mostly due to Kyle being a dick to her—while Eric had ended up landing Nicole as his girlfriend. They made an attractive couple. Nicole’s toffee-colored skin and hair matched well with Eric’s black Irish good looks.

  Nicole edged her boyfriend aside so that she could give Kyle a hug. “If this is how a man looks after a helicopter crash,” she said, glancing again at Eric, “then you’re strictly forbidden from getting into one, Eric.”

  Kyle caught Eric’s grimace.

  Whenever there was a helicopter crash—especially one with fatalities—the other wives and girlfriends in a squadron got real squirrely about their pilot loved ones.

  “Why do you smell like gasoline?” Nicole asked Kyle.

  Oh, merely one of the many lingering perks of taking in a gallon’s worth of JP5 jet fuel into his lungs. “Let’s just say it’s a good thing I don’t smoke. Light a match near my mouth and my whole head is likely to go boom.”

  Nicole’s lips turned down in a frown. “Are you jaundiced, too?” Her eyebrows stabbed together, joining in on the frown. “Should the hospital really be discharging—?”

  “I’m yellow from leftover dye marker,” he cut in. “I was stained all over from floating in it.” At least for a while his green skin had fit with the theme of his dragon breath.

  Eric and Nicole both paused, as if they needed a moment to process everything Kyle had been through. He could tell by their expressions that they knew, try as they might, they’d never completely get it. Which was true.

  Nicole finally just sighed. “Dios mío, Kyle.”

  “Yeah, you said it. Let’s get out of here.” He’d had enough of hospitals to last a lifetime.

  The three of them went outside, exiting onto the third floor open air balcony running the entire outer circumference of the building. Balboa Hospital was a massive installation of three beige high-rises surrounding a courtyard where patients and visitors could find Dunkin’ Donuts, Subway Sandwiches, and benches to sit on. Building Three, where they were, mostly housed outpatient clinics.

  Before they walked more than a few feet, Nicole touched Kyle’s arm, stopping him. “I was sorry to hear about Steve Whitmore.”

  Mention of the name backed up saliva into Kyle’s mouth, heightening the petroleum flavor basting his tongue with every swallow.

  As Nicole met Kyle’s gaze with sorrow weighting her eyes, a breeze stirred a loose strand of her long hair, rippling it across her face. It caught on her lashes, and she tugged it aside. Nicole had known Jobs from the counterdrug mission, when Steve and Eric flew Nicole and her DEA partner on a fast-rope op. Kyle normally would’ve been the copilot on that mission, but he’d been too much of a nutjob at the time from just finding out he’d fathered a sick son.

  Kyle kneaded the back of his neck. “I don’t know how I’m going to learn to live with Jobs’ death,” he said. “The kid was my responsibility.”

  “Jobs wasn’t even on your aircraft, Mikey,” Eric reasoned.

  Didn’t matter, not in his mind.

  “From every report I’ve read,” Eric went on, “you were waylaid by those terrorists. There was nothing anyone on the op did wrong based on the intel and resources you had.”

  Kyle nodded. He didn’t mean the nod. Just wanted out of this conversation. He started walking again, aiming for the nearest stairwell. “Do you mind if we make a stop at a Verizon on the way to my place? I need to buy a new cell phone.” His old one was no doubt worming its way through a fish’s digestive tract in Mangla Dam at this very moment, seeing as it hadn’t ended up in his personal effects in Landstuhl. “I have to make some calls that can’t wait.”

  “Everything okay?” Eric asked, obviously picking up on the tension in Kyle’s voice.

  “Not really. I need to get in touch with the LA Times about the woman who worked with me in Pakistan.”

  “The reporter?”

  “Yeah.” Kyle ran a hand over his jaw, his cheeks still feeling sensitive from recently being de-whiskered. He’d managed to visit the barber at Ramstein Air Base before his flight out of Germany, and now his face was clean-shaven and his haircut official Navy reg. “While I was at Landstuhl, I was able to get an email off to her editor, but he didn’t know anything.” Edward Aubrey said only that Max had been
out on sick leave ever since returning from Pakistan, and she wasn’t checking in. Kyle hoped like hell she was checking in now, because sick leave was very much not the news he’d wanted to hear. What kind of heinous aftereffects from the crash was she dealing with? Had she been maimed in some way…? Kyle’s throat winched tight. I’m not going to let anything happen to you. He’d certainly fucked that one away.

  “Mikey,” Eric said, “you need to let the Navy PR people handle everything with the Times. Talking to them is against regulation.”

  Kyle skidded to a stop at the top of the stairwell. “Screw regulation, LZ!” he burst out. “This is about her. I need to make sure she’s okay. I need to…I need to…” He threw his arms out. “I need to ask her to marry me!”

  Wow. Kyle blinked once. He hadn’t realized he was going to say that until the words took it upon themselves to blast out of his mouth just now. But instantly he felt the rightness of them, his heart turning into a warm, gooey lump in his chest. Which was a really unmanly feeling, but, yeah…true, all the same. As much time as he’d spent in Landstuhl relearning how to make his lungs work, fact was he’d never breathe right again without Max in his life.

  Eric all but froze at the word marry, a brief, oh, shit expression crossing his face before he reined it in.

  Nicole darted a quick glance at her boyfriend.

  “Mikey…” Eric hesitated, like he was struggling with how to begin.

  “I know I sound insane,” Kyle admitted. “But I’m not.” Not this time. Not with Max.

  “Mikey…” Eric began again. “C’mon, man, your track record with women has always been… Look, your decision-making has never been particularly good in this area. Can you maybe admit you’re not thinking clearly right now, either? You almost died. That’s got to be coloring the situation.”