At the Slightest Sound

by M. L. Buchman

  Jesse tried not to feel ill. He’d seen enough suffering in Afghanistan and Yemen to last him a long, long time. And here was more suffering that he’d never even heard about.

  “Care to tell us what’s going on?” Ricardo thankfully picked up a piece of the conversation.

  “As far as we can tell, same thing as was twenty-four hours ago.” Chester slalomed around a cluster of delivery bicycles rigged with massive boxes and small trailers to tow along everything from a vast stack of rusting personal propane tanks to a couch.

  “That’s not particularly helpful, pardner.”

  Chester Wilsworth twisted away from watching the traffic to look at him and almost rammed a stray cow seeking new grazing grounds. “Hang on! Who are you people?”

  “If you don’t know, I don’t think we’re in a place to share. Who did you think we were?” Jesse held onto the door handle in case he had to bail out as Chester almost ran them into the side of a delivery truck that didn’t bother even tapping its brakes before cutting into the traffic flow. It sent an unwary policeman scooting aside as if he had no purpose at all despite the small Stop sign he was holding.

  “You’re not SAD?”

  “The CIA’s Special Activities Division? No, sir. Nor your Special Operations Group. We’re…” Jesse didn’t know how to explain what they were.

  “We’re specialists,” Michelle spoke smoothly as she leaned forward. “Perhaps it’s safest for you if that’s all you know.” She ended mysteriously, but made it sound sincere. It was a good thing that Chester was too busy dodging a bus that was as crammed as the VW van had been or he’d have seen her teasing smile.

  “Well now. That’s rather curious, isn’t it. Of course, if you can help us, I don’t give a ruddy tinker’s dam who you might be.”

  “All we know is the ambassador’s in some sort of trouble.” And one thing they’d all agreed on back at the BBQ Pit was that none of them had any idea how to help the ambassador if he was in deep trouble—which apparently he was.

  Chester’s voice carried easily to the back of the van, but Hannah wished that it didn’t.

  “He what?” She turned from the dimly lit city to face forward. She couldn’t have heard right.

  “He went to Palais de la Nation, the Presidential Palace, five days ago to protest the president’s latest abuses. He was also hoping to convince the president to ease ties with the Chinese…they account for over fifty percent of DRC export trade. Hell, they built the bleeding palace with a Chinese loan. Wait until you see it, it’s a hundred meters longer than the White House including the East and West Wings. No long breezeways either, it’s a monster.”

  He went through describing what he knew of it: the open grounds, sitting on a grassy promontory pushing out into a curve of the Congo River, wrapping the presidential grounds on three sides. Brazzaville, the capital of the Republic of the Congo lay two kilometers away directly across the river.

  “They’re still allowing Gordon rare visitors. He is under house arrest no matter that they use the words ‘honored guest.’ I’ve told them that you five are ‘excited visitors’ from his hometown.”

  Hannah looked around the van but no one was laughing. Was she the only one who got the joke?

  “What’s his hometown?” she asked into the strange silence.

  She took stock. Six-five of black man and five-ten of redhead half-half siblings with accents that said New York. Ricardo’s Tex-Mex-accent far more sharp-edged than his twin’s lush tones. A Texas cowboy and—

  “Manchester, Georgia.”

  And Hannah could no more speak than breathe. Only four thousand people. She probably knew the ambassador’s kids from school.

  Someone else got the joke while she was quietly asphyxiating in the back.

  Anton laugh rolled out. “We got you covered if it was Texas, New York, and Tennessee,” his friendly slap on her back restored her respiratory system to functioning even if her head wouldn’t stop spinning. “But Georgia, brother, that’s a serious stretch.”

  Manchester.

  It simply wasn’t possible.

  She’d left behind mother, lecherous stepfather, her accent…her entire pre-Army life had been abandoned on the roadside of when she’d stolen her stepfather’s tricked-out Camaro, blasted into Atlanta on her eighteenth birthday, and abandoned it in the parking lot a few blocks from the Northside Drive Army recruiting station. By the time he’d reported it stolen, she’d already been signed, sealed, and delivered. Leaving the keys in it with the door unlocked had paid off as well—she heard later that someone had jacked the car that night and totally trashed it for her. It had probably been rude of her to call in and cancel his car insurance before she left.

  If Ambassador Gordon Whoever had turned out to be one of Larry the Lech’s drinking buddies, he could damn well rot in Kinshasa. She’d just keep a low profile and ride this one out. Just like she was doing with all this psi-chick nonsense.

  In twelve days, she could cycle off med-leave, go back into the field and forget about telepaths, empaths, flightpaths, and all those other paths. She’d get Gibson to assign her to the deepest darkest solo recon in history…and just never reemerge.

  Except Jesse. What the hell was she going to do with a man who said that he loved her before he even slept with her? It was ridiculous. That was the only reason men used the word—not like they understood what it meant. She was no expert on its proper usage either, but she knew that much. Yet over breakfast at his ranch, Belle had certainly implied that Jesse didn’t play the field, instead being a straightforward kind of cowboy.

  Which meant…

  “Wait! Gordon? Gordon Delaney?” The name surged up from the past with all the subtlety of an RPG-7 Russian grenade launcher.

  “Yes. That’s the chap.”

  Hannah buried her face in her hands. She really didn’t need this.

  Maybe she was imagining everything. Maybe she was still safely lost near the drug-smuggling guerrilla camp in the depths of the Colombia jungle.

  She looked up between her fingers.

  No such luck.

  Instead, as Chester Wilsworth lurched to a halt, she was looking out the windshield at a giant traffic robot. Bright silver metal more than a story tall, it towered over the exact center of the intersection. It had a bright red light in the center of its chest and its arms were extended straight toward them. Traffic cameras for shoulder epaulettes looked sideways and cool sunglasses which probably hid two more cameras seemed to stare straight at her.

  “What the hell!”

  It raised its arms, twisted at the waist, and then lowered its arms again. Now it revealed that both the palm and the back of its hands were covered in green LEDs and the red lights on its chest and back were now facing the other direction of traffic.

  “Aren’t they simply splendid? A local woman thought them up and produces them. The Kinshasans pay no attention to the police, but we adore our traffic robots, so we always stop when they say to.”

  Hannah buried her face again. The robots were so bizarre, that finding Gordon Delaney was the ambassador here seemed somehow inevitable rather than surreal.

  Chapter 15

  “So we just walk in? Someone please tell me we have a better plan.”

  The sun had fully set and darkness was firmly clamped down on the dim city in the time it had taken them to fight the twenty-five kilometers from the airport to the Palais de la Nation. Streetlights were non-existent in Kinshasa and it was only shop lights and the slashes of headlights that lit the streets at all. The massive crowds of the city churning along the street edges and shopfronts weren’t present here. The plaza where Chester had dropped them off in front of the president’s palace was a surprising sea of tranquility.

  Jesse looked up at the towering bronze of the chubby Laurent Kabila that commanded the plaza. Kabila had become the nation’s third president by bloody coup, overthrowing a three-decade dictatorship.

  In turn, Kabila oversaw a massively corrupt and
bloody regime until he’d been gunned down by one of his bodyguards. Rule passed onto his son, who managed to stretch two five-year terms into an equally bloody eighteen-year rule.

  Despite the recent election of a new president—who had won the election under very suspicious circumstances—the lionized third president still loomed above them in portly bronze. As Chester had dropped them off, he’d pointed out that the body was rumored to be that of Kim Jong Il with a curiously Asian-faced Kabila bust put on top.

  The North Koreans’ most successful export was propaganda, often in the form of bargain-rate massive statues of African dictators who all looked suspiciously Korean. Jesse recalled one crew chief telling him about a trip to Senegal. The husband-wife-and-child trio of the fifteen-story tall African Renaissance Monument looked so Korean that it was sometimes called the Korean Renaissance Monument. It commanded the skyline of their largest city, Dakar. Senegal was such a patient society that they were more amused than angry about the family’s features.

  “Anyone have a better plan?” Ricardo grumbled.

  “Yeah,” Michelle stared up at the looming statue. “Go back to the airport and go home. You’d need a major armed team to take down this place.”

  “And Gordon would be dead before they even reached the gates,” Hannah spoke for the first time since Chester had dropped them off.

  “Gordon?” Jesse looked down at her in surprise, but she didn’t meet his gaze.

  “High school. Drop it.”

  Jesse wasn’t ready for the sharp pang of jealousy that shot through him. He wasn’t the jealous sort, except apparently about Hannah Tucker. High school? He’d known nothing about where that had been or what she’d done there—certainly never have thought she was a Georgia girl. Sports? Theater? Nerd? Friends? Boyfriends? He’d fallen for a woman who, for all he knew, hadn’t existed before the moment they met at his crash site in the Colombian jungle. That was…wrong.

  “You and me, Hannah. We’ve got some catching up to do when this is over.”

  “So not,” she whispered back sharply.

  She couldn’t have struck him more deeply with a hard slap to the face. So that’s the direction the wind blew from. Well, he didn’t need more pain in his life.

  “I think—” Ricardo started.

  “Well that’s new,” Michelle teased him.

  “I think,” Ricardo repeated firmly. “That Hannah is right and that’s why we were called in. We’re the only team that can walk in here, get past the guards who would check us for weapons, and still have tricks up our sleeves.”

  Jesse again looked to Hannah—and she still wasn’t meeting his gaze.

  “You’re killin’ this cowboy, lady,” he whispered it then wished he hadn’t when he saw her downcast nod.

  Hannah didn’t want a past.

  And she’d honestly never given much thought to the future. And now that she suddenly had both, she didn’t know what to do with either one.

  Focus on the moment! That’s how a Delta Force operator survived. From this instant, a hundred different branches could occur. The president’s guard could shoot them on sight or this could be a cakewalk. The US Ambassador to the DRC could actually be the Gordon Delaney who— She couldn’t go there.

  The secret to survival was flexibility. How was she supposed to be flexible when she no longer was certain of who she was? Or even what she was capable of. Sonic blasts that knocked her out? What part of the real world did that have to do with?

  The only path is through!

  “Let’s do this.” Her voice sounded harsh even to her own ears, but she couldn’t do anything about this.

  “Cowboy, keep your damn mouth shut,” Ricardo had taken charge and she wasn’t complaining. “Even these boys will recognize a Texas accent from movies. In case the ambassador’s guards have a good ear, who here can fake a Georgia accent?”

  Hannah winced, but operationally he was right to ask. She shifted her tone, “Not just Georgia, darlin’. Ambassador Delaney’s from the same tiny, shithole town.”

  “I don’t know anything about you, do I?” Jesse’s surprise sounded hurt.

  She shook her head. He didn’t. But then again, she didn’t either so they were even on that one.

  “Whatever the lady wants.” He bowed ever so slightly and shifted without moving. He had been standing close beside her with Anton on his other side. Now he stood by Anton and a canyon lay between them.

  “I—”

  “We’re going to be suspicious if we stand here much longer,” Michelle pointed out as she leaned a friendly shoulder against Hannah’s. It didn’t make her feel any better.

  “If we get separated,” Ricardo muttered as they circled around the towering Kabila, “try to pair off: Anton with me, Michelle and Hannah together because I’m counting on you to keep Michelle alive—she’s a non-combatant. Jesse, you can apparently operate your sound trick with Hannah from either group.”

  It made sense strategically, split the telepaths so that the two groups could communicate. But she liked the idea of being separated from Jesse even less than the idea of being with him.

  “Jesse stick by me,” she managed as they waited to cross the Ave de Lemera over to the palace gates. The guards were already eyeing them suspiciously.

  He looked surprised and comforted at her request.

  “We need a pilot with each team, just in case.” She didn’t know why she needed to slash at him, but it seemed that she did.

  She saw the last of the cowboy disappear behind the Night Stalker shield. It was the first time she’d seen him do that—not even under fire in Colombia. Hannah hated it, but didn’t know what to do about it.

  Chapter 16

  Her Georgia accent turned out to be pointless at the gate, because none of the guards spoke English. Thankfully, as a former French colony, that was the language of business and Michelle offered a fluent charm with that impossible ease she seemed to bring everywhere with her. Hannah’s own high-school French couldn’t begin to keep up, picking out little more than the gist of the conversation. She’d operated almost entirely in South and Central America, which gave her strong Spanish and Portuguese, but she’d had little reason to go into French Guiana, the only Francophone country in South America.

  But she was able to feed small bits of information to Michelle and hear her slip them in as naturally as everything else.

  “We’re big supporters of the Blue Devils soccer team.”

  Michelle didn’t even blink at that, just spun it straight into whatever babble she was spinning.

  “The Ambassador was a star striker all through high school.”

  Like so many African countries, soccer was huge here. They started asking her questions about his win-loss record and his best games.

  Hannah hated that she knew all the answers though it had been over ten years in her past.

  Michelle eased the whole team through the security arch of metal detectors and guards waving wands at belt buckles. All the while she kept them talking about high school soccer in rural Georgia as if it was the most exciting thing since stealth technology. It was as if she wielded a magical cloak of invisibility.

  Hannah definitely needed lessons in how to do Michelle’s thing rather than splattering her emotions across every available surface. She never used to do that. No one could read her…until the goddamn cowboy.

  “I’m starting to think that you’re the problem, not me,” she whispered to Jesse as they were escorted along the front walk toward the massive Palais de la Nation. It was an imposing three-story structure with full-height columns running along the entire facade—like a cage. The high-domed center bulged toward them like the curve of the White House Residence, but the two wings felt like a vulture’s, preparing to sweep down and crush them.

  Jesse simply looked down at her. No sign of Jesse Johnson in his cold blue eyes. Without the cowboy hat, she might not have recognized him.

  “My life made sense until you came along.”

 
; “Please accept my apologies, ma’am.” And they were back to that.

  “Seriously, Jesse,” she stopped him with a hand on his arm and the rest of the group moved ahead without them.

  He looked down at her hand. She jerked it away, just in case the scream she could feel building inside decided to burst out as some amplified blast that leveled the palace. Maybe next time the backlash would kill her outright instead of just knocking her out cold. Definitely not the way she’d ever imagined going down.

  “I don’t know what to do with all of this. Every time I touch you, it feels so right. Every time we make some amplified sound together, it shatters something inside me.”

  Some of the softness came back into his eyes and she had to look away, letting her gaze drift over the grounds.

  “You said you love me, Jesse.”

  “I shouldn’t have done tha—”

  Hannah held up a hand to stop him. “This isn’t one of those if-I-don’t-know-what-to-say-then-that’s-the-answer situations. I don’t even know how to feel, never mind what I feel.” She could feel him staring down at her from under the brim of his cowboy hat for a long moment before making some decision.

  “Wa’ll,” the cowboy was definitely back. He took her hand and tucked it around his elbow. “Then I s’pose that we’ll just have to figure things out as we go along. Somewhere along the way, we’re bound to stumble on a chicken or an egg and then we’ll know where to start from.”