On Your Mark

by M. L. Buchman

  “You know,” Jim whispered softly.

  “Yes?” Her voice was a smooth, liquid tone that she didn’t recognize at all. It was the tone of a woman’s voice in the movies before she made love to a man. Which sounded like a very good idea. She slid her hand down his stomach to see what his body’s thoughts were on the subject.

  “We’re going to be incredibly late if you don’t get that fine ass of yours moving right quick.” Between one heartbeat and the next, Jim rolled out of her reach and she was watching his fine white ass as he strode for his bathroom.

  She lay there for a long moment in disbelief, then rolled out herself and regathered her clothes and her sidearm.

  “I’m sorry, Malcolm,” she paused to rub the dog’s belly with her toes. “But I’m going to have to kill your master. Just thought you should know.”

  Malcolm considered for a moment, then flopped onto his back so that she could keep rubbing his belly. She continued for a few more moments, then smirked at the half-open bathroom door as she headed for her own shower. If the man thought he was going to sway her choices and beat her that easily, he had another thought coming.

  Day Three and Jim was done in. Even Malcolm was dragging and he never dragged.

  It wasn’t last night. He’d never woken up feeling so alive. He missed his first chance to keep Reese beside him because the woman went from asleep to full speed in about two seconds flat. He was a morning person too, but there were some limits.

  But he’d had his chance when she came back for her sidearm. He found it there in the middle of the second round of the night’s gymnastics. During the first he probably could have grabbed onto a hot exhaust manifold and not have noticed the burn—Reese felt that incredible.

  When she slid back in beside him, he’d had his chance to imagine what it was like waking up next to Reese when she wasn’t running off like a house afire. Damned nice! For all her hard edges and abrupt lane shifts, when she gave, she did it at full throttle as well—racing was definitely the right metaphor for Reese Carver. A breathtaking display of physical ability fueled by raw heat. Last night she’d seared his memories with her body until no one else’s remained.

  And this morning, when she strode across his hotel room wearing nothing but a smile… Well, nobody got that lucky and he wasn’t sure why she’d decided it would be him. It really was a pity that they’d run out of time and he’d had to yank himself away from her. He had rather hoped that she’d join him in the shower, but he knew some women preferred to do such things in private and he hadn’t wanted to pressure her.

  “We gotta find a way to keep her around,” he told Malcolm.

  The dog barely looked up at him. It was their last stop of the day and they’d done their duty. The Downtown Manhattan Heliport was fully secure. They’d patrolled from the front steel gates along FDR drive, throughout the small parking lot, inside and out of the terminal building, the narrow driveway along one side of the pier, and around the various helicopters waiting to whisk the protectees back from where they’d come.

  “Now just the ride home, boy.”

  Malcolm sighed and plopped his butt on the sidewalk by the front gate to await the Motorcade already en route from the UN.

  The lead route vehicle came by, slowing down only long enough to exchange a wave with the head of the detail waiting at the gate. That meant the rest of the Motorcade was less than a minute out. Jim spotted the flashing lights far down FDR well before he could hear the sirens. He and Malcolm were done except for the ride home.

  “Looking forward to putting more fur on the First Lady’s seat?”

  Malcolm looked up at him. Absolutely.

  “Looking forward to a four-hour ride back to DC with Reese Carver?” Jim asked himself.

  That sounded mighty good as well. Maybe on the way back she’d stop at a store for Fritos and root beer. Still odd not being the driver. Except for trading shifts on the long-hauls—they’d often do four hours on/four hours off for the entire duration of the Kandahar run—he wasn’t used to the passenger seat.

  Felt as if he was doing that in many ways with Reese Carver, hanging on for dear life in more ways than one.

  He could hear the sirens now.

  “Hang in there, buddy.”

  He wasn’t sure which of them he was talking to. Neither was Malcolm.

  Reese liked that Jim had not asked why she didn’t join him in the shower. It meant that he was deliberately messing with her head and the game was still on. She was down with that.

  The New York trip was in the home stretch—the final drive from the UN back to the Marine’s white-top helos waiting on the pier. The three women in the back were talking softly and even Detra in the right-hand seat was quiet. It had been a long couple of days for everybody and they’d all be ready to be done with it and get back to DC.

  They emerged from the last tunnel two hundred yards from the heliport.

  Up ahead she spotted a man and his dog leaning against the heavy steel corner post of the front gate. She’d give a lot to know what he was thinking. Which was a surprise. Normally she didn’t give a damn. Actually, that wasn’t right—normally she knew. Men were predictably interested in sex and power games. Yet even if Jim had been an enthusiastic lover, he’d been a very thoughtful and thorough one. He’d made sure it was about her as much as about him. Maybe he’d done that just to confuse her. If that was his intent, it had worked.

  The six-motorcycle V was keeping the FDR’s right lane clear. She followed the Lead Car closely, not liking the tightness of the space as they emerged from the tunnel, a tall concrete wall to her right slowly tapering down as the Motorcade climbed.

  At a hundred yards out, they were just close enough to make out Malcolm’s coloring, white-and-brown, but not yet close enough to separate out the small black police vest that also served as his harness.

  That’s when she spotted a flicker of movement off her left side.

  Before she had even fully registered it, her NASCAR instincts had crashed her foot into the floor and had her heading right until she was nearly into the four-foot vertical wall that separated the highway from a parallel lane of merging traffic. The Suburban’s big V-8 engine roared to life and they accelerated sharply.

  Detra started some question from the passenger seat, which Reese ignored.

  She barely had time to see the massive grillwork on the twenty-four-foot delivery truck arrowing in on her before it clipped her back end.

  For half a second, terror slammed into her as her rear tires broke traction and went sideways. She bounced the right rear fender off the concrete wall. They’d have been pinned, perhaps crushed, but she reached the end of the barrier and was able to swing into the open merging lane. If she hadn’t accelerated when she did, the truck would have rammed squarely into her door.

  There were screams from the women in the back—high and panicked, like the screams of her father’s tires as they broke free on the Charlotte Motor Speedway.

  Then Reese recovered. They weren’t going two hundred miles an hour, out at the performance limits of a racing stock car. This was a big, tough, four-wheel drive Suburban doing its best to climb from sixty to seventy miles an hour. She snapped the steering wheel right, then left to regain control.

  The black BMW Lead Car that had been immediately in front of her veered into the left lane to clear a path for her, then the driver slammed on his brakes—smoking his tires.

  In her side mirror, Reese could see the BMW take the blow. The big delivery truck plowed into the rear of the BMW—forty thousand pounds versus four thousand. That Secret Service driver had just bought himself a long stay in the hospital and her eternal thanks.

  The rear of the BMW disappeared in a cloud of debris before the car was flipped up and over backward. It buried its nose through the truck’s windshield.

  Lurching to one side, the truck caught a wheel and tipped over, skidding along the road, throwing showers of sparks in every direction. The passenger compartment of
the BMW was battered aside and spun into oncoming traffic causing a chain reaction of swerving cars, squealing brakes, and crunching metal.

  Reese kept her foot in it as they crossed eighty miles an hour.

  Congestion ahead—the police leading the Motorcade no longer clearing the path but rather blocking it as they slowed in surprise. She jumped the curb separating traffic from a two-way paved bicycle lane. She barely missed taking out two cyclists and a line of park benches along the sidewalk. With a sharp swerve, then a counter, she was able to avoid the cyclists, then the fire hydrant on the divider.

  In a final glance back, Reese could see that Halfback—the heavily armed Suburban that had been on her tail—was also tangled up in the mess and now lay flipped onto its roof. Despite that, agents with MP5s and AR-15s were already out of their vehicle and surrounding the truck. At their lead was the fierce black woman who led former First Lady Matthews’ detail. Her jacket was shredded and she was limping badly, but her weapon was out as she led the way.

  Focus ahead.

  The police motorcycles, unable to jump the curb, remained on the main lane of the FDR as Reese raced past them to the heliport’s entry along the bike path. At the main gate, guards had their weapons up and one was waving her through.

  Estimating the traction and the limits of the heavy Suburban, she waited as long as she dared.

  Then she stood hard on the brakes to dump half her speed. At eighty, they’d just roll over for what she was planning.

  Detra was shouting over the radio to have the helos ready. Not Reese’s concern.

  When the speedometer hit forty, Reese turned hard to the right, slapped the transmission down into second, and punched the gas.

  The rear wheels broke free.

  She counter-steered into the sliding drift, watching the big heavy stanchion on the far side of the main gate looming large and heading squarely at her own door. If she hit it too hard, there was nothing to stop her from plowing through it and dumping them all into the East River.

  Holding the line, she suffered only a glancing blow that served to finish the drift.

  Now headed down the pier at ninety degrees to where she’d been a moment before, she punched the gas, barely dodging around a hot dog vendor’s cart. Down to thirty miles an hour but still in second gear gave her plenty of power when she goosed the engine.

  A glimpse of Jim in the main parking lot, yelling toward the gate alongside the terminal that separated the parking lot from the narrow driveway onto the pier. They got it open just in time for her to barrel through without having to drive into it and risk hurting someone as she blew the inner gate off its hinges. The driveway between the terminal building and the edge of the pier was meant to be taken at five miles an hour—she didn’t ease off the gas until she was nearing the helos.

  One last time, she cranked the wheel and stomped down on the parking brake. The big Suburban went into a sideways slide along the pier toward the waiting Sikorsky White Hawk. She stopped under the edge of the spinning rotor disk—with a low dip of seven-foot-seven, her six-foot-two Suburban was clear. It might have given the pilot a heart attack, but Reese had trained on this. She’d managed to place herself so that the rear passenger doors of the Suburban were facing the helicopter’s side door from less than ten feet away and any attack from the street would be shielded by the bulk of the Suburban.

  Detra was gone out the passenger door and Reese could hear the women being unloaded from the rear and rushed unceremoniously into the waiting helo.

  But all Reese could see was Jim and Malcolm racing down the pier toward her. He had his sidearm out—double-handed and aimed at the ground—and was swinging his head side-to-side watching for any renewed attack, but he was headed straight for her.

  She didn’t know if she’d ever seen such a welcome sight.

  Chapter Six

  Unknown.

  By the end of the day, Jim wanted to beat anyone who said that word.

  “Unknown” had been the conclusion of everything. Was the truck driver a solo actor? A terrorist? A psycho? Or had he merely fallen asleep at the wheel? The BMW Sweep Car’s driver and his right-seat fellow agent had busted up ribs and arms but had survived. There wasn’t enough of the truck driver left to identify. First, his head and torso had been shattered by the nose of the BMW ramming through the windshield, then a fire had broken out. The spilled gas from the broken BMW finally found an ignition spark as the First Lady’s helo lifted well clear and headed to JFK to meet the waiting Air Force jet.

  The man who owned the truck had reported it stolen thirty-six hours earlier and had been found in a bar next door to his shipping business, enjoying a pint and a roast beef sandwich. He, for sure, hadn’t enjoyed the rest of his night. His original load of fifteen thousand pounds of exercise equipment for a new gym had still been aboard but was a complete write-off. Despite his apparent innocence, he and his company would be on a terror watchlist for a long time to come.

  Another group of agents were scanning traffic cameras hoping for a clear shot of the driver’s face, but with little luck.

  Other than battered metal, the Suburban had come through unscathed. He, Reese, and every other agent who’d been on the scene spent the entire night in the New York Secret Service office in Brooklyn going through every step of the thirty-seven seconds from the moment the truck had veered across FDR drive until the Sikorsky White Hawk had lifted its wheels off the pier.

  When finally released, he and Reese had collapsed into a bed together, with Malcolm—the only one who’d slept that night—sprawled happily at their feet. Jim had held her close as she once more recounted each action, each motion, every nuance of what she’d done and felt.

  “For just an instant, when everything broke loose, I saw my father. Saw his car right there in front of me. Except this time there was no helmet hiding his face. It was as if he was trying to say something, but I couldn’t hear it.”

  She doodled a finger on his chest.

  He’d seen it all unfolding.

  The big truck swinging wide ever so briefly, as if gathering momentum for its slash across the lanes of the FDR. Or perhaps to get away from the rushing phalanx of the Motorcade’s sirens and lights. A moment of inattention, bouncing a tire off the low divider between directions of the FDR, then overcorrecting? There was no way to be sure.

  Reese sliding free after banging off the wall and the Lead Car braking to take the hit.

  Jim had known what Reese would do—had known what he’d have done in the circumstances—but didn’t get to see it. He’d had to trust in her abilities as he turned to search for, and clear, anything that might slow her down.

  The guards manning the inner gates were listening intently to their radios, unaware that five tons of armored SUV would be racing down on them in mere seconds. Unwilling to clutter the command frequency, he raced from the main gate toward the team manning the gate out to the pier. A quick hand signal had Malcolm following in a tight heel position, but on his right side, away from Reese’s path.

  He’d signaled and yelled for the agents to open the inner gate. They’d made it in time for Reese to race through.

  He had ducked through himself moments before they slammed it shut and raised their weapons.

  “Defend,” he’d shouted, though they already were, and raced after Reese.

  He’d almost choked as she slid the Suburban sideways beneath the spinning rotors of the helicopter. It was one of the slickest moves he’d ever seen…until last night when he’d watched the video of her passage through the main gate at speed.

  “My dad,” he told Reese as he held her in the dark until she finally wound down, “said that you’re a crappy driver until you’ve driven your first hundred thousand miles. I didn’t believe him, of course, until I had. Then I understood what he meant. I’d finally laid down enough miles to notice anything that wasn’t normal. I’ve logged over a million now, and there’s no way in hell I could do what you just did.”

  He
could feel her shrug.

  Everyone had been as impressed as hell when they’d seen the video, judging each slide so perfectly in an unfamiliar vehicle. She’d probably shaved five, maybe ten seconds off what any other driver could have done. But each time someone had commented on it, she’d shrugged it off.

  “I wasn’t the impressive one. It was the Lead Car driver who really did something, putting his life on the line without hesitation. All I did was drive.”

  “All you did was drive? You had one job, he had another. Even the very best drivers say they couldn’t have done better; why aren’t you letting that in?”

  Again the shrug.

  Reese lay awake a long time after Jim fell asleep.

  He’d let her replay every instant of the incident until she was sure she wouldn’t have done much different with a month’s practice and planning.

  Some way to prevent the necessity for the Lead Car driver’s heroic act? None that she could think of.

  Should she have worried about the truck in the other lane as they emerged from the tunnel? There was nothing to indicate that she should have.

  Any race you finish alive is a good one. Any you complete with your car still running is a victory. How many times had Pop said that to her and her brother? But her brother had broken Pop’s first rule shortly after Pop had.

  He’d taken to racing motorcycles at a young age, and died attempting to jump a small ditch during the Dakar Rally in Argentina. A negligent moment—just five days after Pop died—not enough lift or maybe a crumbling edge…and he’d been flung headfirst into a tree. At least the death had been instantaneous. Pop had stayed conscious long enough for the ambulance to arrive, but hadn’t even made it off the track.