by Rachel Lee
“The trees are okay. All of it’s okay. It’s just that it’s a pain to do it alone, and it always makes me so damn blue.”
“Couldn’t you spend the holidays with your family?”
“I could, but then my deputy would be stuck here. He wants to visit his family in Georgia.”
Andrea nodded, understanding. As a bachelor officer, she’d always felt obliged to work through the holidays so men with families and others who wanted to go home could do so. She sent Dare MacLendon a glance from the corner of her eye. “You need a wife. Then she could do all the decorating and plan all the entertaining.”
“That’s usually how it works, isn’t it?” he agreed, never missing a beat. “A woman who marries an Air Force officer might as well enlist herself.”
“I hear it’s the same in corporate America,” Andrea said after a moment.
“Is that why you haven’t married?” MacLendon asked, taking her by surprise.
Andrea blinked, speechless.
He looked down at her, smiling faintly. “Yes, I asked a personal question. Are you going to answer me?”
Andrea glanced down at the terrazzo floor and then back up. “Truthfully, I just haven’t wanted to get married.”
Dare thought he could understand that, considering how Charlie Burke had treated his wife, like some beast of burden.
“What about you?” Andrea asked unexpectedly, her cheeks pink again.
“A personal question for a personal question, huh? I was married once, long, long ago. It didn’t survive my second tour. Maureen discovered that the reality of being a pilot’s wife didn’t live up to the imaginings.” Deliberately he returned his gaze to the artificial tree in the window. “Come on, Andrea,” he said, “let’s go get you your tree.”
“But I—”
Icy blue eyes glanced her way. “You want it, don’t you? Then buy it.”
Once again annoyed, Andrea followed him. She didn’t like being maneuvered into something, even if it was something she’d been about to do anyway. The man was clearly so used to ordering everyone around that he did it even when he was off duty. He most definitely needed a wife, one who didn’t have a docile bone in her body, to keep him in line. Overbearing, that was what he was.
Dare thoroughly enjoyed the next half hour. Watching Andrea trying to remain cool and distant because of her irritation with him, while at the same time she was so clearly enjoying herself, amused him. She kept her remarks to mono-syllables, but her hazy green eyes sparkled with pleasure as she selected delicate ornaments.
When her purchases were made, MacLendon insisted on carrying them out to his new truck himself and told Andrea he’d meet her at the toy store.
She was hovering over the stuffed animals, trying to decide which one would most thrill a two-year-old niece, when a hesitantly cleared throat drew her attention. Looking up, she saw a young man in jeans and a military survival parka, the one uniform item that was permitted to be worn with civvies. Focusing on the young, nervous face, Andrea struggled to identify him.
“You’re Jones, aren’t you?” she said after a moment.
“Yes, ma’am.” He shifted nervously from one foot to the other.
Andrea smiled. “Are you Christmas shopping, too?”
“No, ma’am. I’m here with some friends to see a movie. I saw you come in here and—” He licked his lips and looked down at the floor.
“Do you need to talk to me?” Andrea asked gently.
“Yes, ma’am.” The airman looked relieved. “I know you’re off duty, but…”
“But it can’t wait till Monday.”
“I don’t want anybody to know I talked to you,” he said miserably. “I heard some things.”
“Where are your friends?”
“They just went into the movie. I said I had to use the latrine.”
Andrea nodded. “Can you talk here?”
Jones glanced around. “I guess….”
He sounded so nervous that Andrea decided they’d better find a more private place. “You know the coffee shop around the corner? The one that’s so dimly lighted you can’t see the menu?”
Jones nodded.
“I’ll meet you there in a few minutes. I’m here with somebody, and I’ll have to tell him where I’ll be.”
“Yes, ma’am.” Looking immensely relieved, Jones scuttled off.
MacLendon had entered the store in time to see the encounter and, recognizing the young man’s nervousness, had hung back at a discreet distance. When Jones vanished around the corner, he approached Andrea.
“What’s up?” he asked.
She looked at him, her smoky green eyes puzzled. “I’m not sure. He’s got something to tell me, but he doesn’t want anyone to know about it. I said I’d meet him at the coffee shop.”
MacLendon nodded. “Go ahead. I’ll potter around here.”
“Thank you.”
Was she never going to call him Dare? he wondered as he watched her stride away. She walked with a boy’s easy gait, he noticed, but because she was a woman, it made her rear sway in a fashion that was definitely not boyish. Sternly, MacLendon called his eyes to order and turned them to the stuffed animals. Maybe little Jenny would like a stuffed koala.
Jones had picked the coffee shop’s darkest corner, and in his olive drab parka he was almost invisible. Andrea took a moment to locate him. When she slid into the booth across from him, he started like a frightened deer.
“Relax, Airman,” she told him. “I almost couldn’t find you, and I was looking for you. Nobody else will ever notice you.” Glancing at the waitress, she ordered two coffees and two crullers.
“What happened, Jones?”
He looked up, his expression anguished. “I feel like a rat fink.”
“Sometimes we have to be rat finks. It’s never fun.”
He nodded and drew a deep breath. “I heard a couple of guys talking at the barracks. They weren’t sure what to do about it, but I remembered those security briefings we get, about how it’s not up to us to make decisions about things, but to follow the rules.”
“That’s right,” Andrea said encouragingly. “If everybody makes up their own rules about the handling of classified information, pretty soon there are no rules at all. That’s why you always have to report a violation. Has there been a violation?”
“I think so.”
“Tell me about it,” Andrea prompted.
Just then the waitress brought the coffee and crullers, and Jones sat back, obviously still waging his internal battle. When the waitress left, he seemed to make up his mind.
“As near as I can tell, it happened at a missile site last week during the change of crew. The crew in the hole came up and were on the helipad before the relief crew even got off the chopper.”
Andrea drew a long, deep breath and expelled it slowly. “So the codes were unguarded during that time.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
Cupping her hands around her mug, Andrea looked down into the dark brew. Missile crews, two-man teams, spent a week at a time buried deep beneath the earth in the command capsule, or hole, as their crews called it. While there, they waited for the code from Cheyenne Mountain that would tell them to launch their missiles. In that hole with them were the codes that controlled the missiles. Andrea didn’t even want to think about what could happen if those codes were compromised and no one knew about it.
Despite a variety of security features, the codes had to be guarded continuously by persons with an equally high security clearance. The missile crewmen themselves fulfilled that function, which meant that one crew could not leave the capsule until the relief crew entered to take over.
“Jones,” she said, “you did absolutely the right thing in telling me. Now I’ve got to know who was talking about this so I can pinpoint the missile crew that was involved.”
Ten minutes later she rejoined MacLendon in the toy store. He didn’t ask what had happened, and she didn’t volunteer.
“I
’m afraid I need to get back to the base, Colonel,” she told him.
“Let’s go, then.”
Walking quickly beside him, trying to keep up with his much longer legs, Andrea flirted with the thought of how nice it was to be out with a man who didn’t question the demands of her job. On those rare occasions when she dated, she avoided military men simply because she couldn’t afford to stir up any kind of gossip in the tight-knit community that was an Air Force base. While she wasn’t dating MacLendon—that was out of the question—it was still a pleasant experience not to get any arguments.
Falling a little behind, she got a good look at his tight backside and long legs in those snug jeans, and it caused the oddest tightening sensation in her belly. She blinked and missed a step, astonished by her reaction to the view. She’d never looked at a man like that before. In fact, she’d always believed only men looked at women like that.
“Andrea?”
MacLendon drew up short and looked back.
“Sorry, I’m walking too fast for you,” he apologized when she caught up.
“No problem, Colonel,” she answered expressionlessly, thinking she was glad he had, because she wouldn’t have missed that view for the world. On the other hand, the world would have remained a distinctly more comfortable place without that sudden, unwelcome awareness.
Halfway back to the base, Andrea became aware that MacLendon was talking and she hadn’t heard a word he’d said.
“—always invite a group of bachelor officers,” he was saying.
“Colonel? I’m sorry, I was woolgathering and didn’t hear you.”
“I was talking about Thanksgiving.”
“Oh.”
“I was saying that I always invite bachelor officers from my command who don’t have other plans for the holidays.”
“Yes, s—I mean, yes.”
“Will you join me for Thanksgiving, Andrea?”
Something flickered in her hazy green eyes, and she looked quickly away. Her heart had just developed a disturbing tendency to leap into her throat.
“Andrea.” His voice had grown quiet. “Bachelor officers do what they can to get through the holidays. That’s all I’m saying. I’ve always made it a policy to share the holidays with any of my officers who don’t have family and aren’t going home. I expect there’ll be a half-dozen or so this year.”
She managed to look up, her Huck Finn face composed. “I like to cook Thanksgiving dinner, but it seems like so much trouble just for me.”
And impossible in the BOQ, he thought. “Then let’s cook Thanksgiving dinner together and tell war stories so we don’t get blue and lonely. Deal?”
She smiled suddenly. “Deal.”
Chapter 4
“What I want to know,” Andrea said to the two security policemen who sat across her desk from her later that evening, “is why you didn’t tell me the missile crew left the hole and came above ground to the helipad before the relief crew went down.”
Sergeant Nickerson stood off to one side, his lean, lined face expressionless as he watched the two young airmen exchange unhappy looks.
“Well, ma’am,” said the elder of the two, a buck sergeant named Wilson, “the codes were unguarded, but nobody went into that hole. We were both at our posts, and nobody could have gotten past us to go down into the hole. So nothing happened, not really.”
“Except that the missile crew violated security, several regulations, and their orders. Who set you two up as judge and jury, Wilson?”
“No one, ma’am,” Wilson answered miserably. “But you gotta understand.”
“I have to understand what? Make this clear to me, Wilson, because you’re skating on very thin ice right now.”
Wilson shifted uneasily in his chair. “Well, ma’am, it’s about Lieutenant Cantrell.”
“Who is Lieutenant Cantrell?”
“The commander of the crew that was in the hole, Captain.”
“The man primarily responsible for this escapade, I take it?”
“I guess so. You see, his wife was in an auto accident just a couple of hours earlier. I expect he was half out of his mind worrying.”
“Very likely,” Andrea said coolly. “I have to question his fitness to be in a missile crew if he can’t think any more clearly than he did in this instance. I imagine he reached his wife’s side all of five minutes sooner by leaving the hole before being relieved. And during those minutes the codes were uncovered, and all the missiles he was responsible for were effectively out of action, as surely as if they had been sabotaged.”
“Yes, ma’am, but Hart and I was there. Nobody got to the codes.”
“That brings me to another point,” Andrea said sternly. “You two aren’t cleared to guard them, yet you were effectively responsible for it during that time period. While I don’t doubt that you would have protected it with your lives, right now I’m doubtful about your judgment, as well as Cantrell’s. You should have told me about this immediately.”
“Yes, ma’am,” two voices mumbled.
“I’m afraid you’re both going to receive a written reprimand under Article Fifteen for this. Don’t give me cause to write you another one.”
After the two SPs left her office, Andrea looked up at Nickerson. “You have something to add?”
Nick shook his head. “No, Captain. You’re absolutely right about the gravity of what happened. I’ll see that those two yo-yos write a complete report on this.”
“And now,” Andrea sighed, “I’ve got to call Colonel Adams. Boy, is he going to love this.”
“Better him than us,” Nick said with a faint smile. “Are you still leaving Dolan in charge for the rest of the weekend?”
“What weekend? I think this little mess just put paid to that. How much do you want to bet Adams wants to handle everything right now?”
“I’m not a betting man, Captain.”
“Smart, Nick. Really smart.” Sighing again, she reached for the blasted phone.
Andrea was right: Adams wanted to handle it immediately, and his mood wasn’t improved by the fact that he’d just climbed into bed when Andrea rousted him out. She had to escort Wilson and Hart over to Colonel Adams’s office and wait while he questioned them. Then they had to wait again while he radioed the relief crew, who were still out in their hole somewhere in the barren reaches of wintry North Dakota, to confirm the cops’ story. Once he had the confirmation, Adams asked Andrea to send out a truck to pick up Lieutenants Cantrell and Morrell from their nice warm beds so they could personally explain their actions.
Though it was well past three when Andrea at last tumbled into bed, sleep stubbornly eluded her. She told herself she was just keyed up from all the activity and excitement, but some part of her acknowledged that she was more frustrated than excited. The simple fact was that she’d been enjoying herself immensely at the mall with Dare MacLendon. For the first time ever, she resented the intrusion of her job into her private time.
What might have happened if the evening had drawn to a normal close?
Aw, cut it out! she told herself, and pounded her pillow into a more comfortable shape. She’d avoided any entanglements of that kind in favor of her career for a long time now. Besides, nothing could or would happen, given that Dare was her commanding officer. It wasn’t that such things were forbidden by regulation, because they weren’t. Andrea was acutely conscious, however, of how a relationship with her commanding officer would appear. A woman simply couldn’t afford such appearances.
But a woman could, and did, lie in the dark and wonder what it would feel like to be held by a certain pair of strong arms against the warmth and strength of a certain body. And she could wonder just how much a person was supposed to sacrifice for a career.
By Monday morning the entire base was buzzing about the missile crew that had abandoned its post and was facing a general court martial. A good month for the legal business, Andrea thought glumly as she trudged her way to the Monday morning staff meeting. The J
udge Advocate General’s corps, or JAG, were probably tap-dancing with delight. If so, the lawyers were the only ones. It never ceased to amaze her how drastically a whole life could be altered by one moment of foolishness. It also never ceased to amaze her how fast gossip could pass among fifteen thousand people. Military communications should only be as effective as the base grapevine.
The officers around the conference table all sprang to attention when MacLendon entered the room. He looked gorgeous again, Andrea thought sourly, as she watched him make his way to the head of the table. This morning he wore a long-sleeved light blue shirt with dark blue shoulder tabs and necktie, and there was no question in Andrea’s mind that he’d had that shirt specially made to fit his broad shoulders and narrow waist. Nobody else in the room had a fit like that. Of course, nobody else had quite his build, either.
As she’d expected, her unit’s conduct in the affair of the missile crew was the first item on MacLendon’s agenda. His icy blue eyes showed no hint of warmth as he questioned her closely about how events had unfolded and how she had handled them. And finally he asked the question she’d been dreading.
“Why didn’t you tell me about this Friday night, as soon as you knew what was happening, Captain?”
Her chin lifted. “When I had ascertained the facts in the matter, sir, Colonel Adams was the commander most directly involved and the one who most immediately needed to be notified. As soon as that was taken care of, I wrote a report, which was on your desk by 0830 Saturday morning, detailing the conduct of my troops and my actions. I did not imagine that a couple of Article Fifteens needed your immediate attention.”
Dare leaned back in his chair, rubbing his chin, never taking his eyes from her. Not another soul at the table stirred, sensing a confrontation.
“I suppose,” Dare said presently, “that Colonel Houlihan would have agreed with you?”
“I believe so, sir.”
“Ordinarily I would agree that an Article Fifteen doesn’t need my immediate attention. In this case, however, something greater was involved, namely the possible compromise of the launch codes and the related conduct of airmen under my command. I don’t expect to hear about every brawl and AWOL, but a matter of this nature should be brought to my attention immediately.”
