The Phoenix Agency_The Sum Is Greater

by M. L. Buchman

  A Sikorsky MH-60 Black Hawk was five tons of helo that could carry another five of fuel, armor, weapons, and personnel. It was the country two-step bird of the Night Stalker fleet. He enjoyed the contrast. Heavier controls, more buffered from the sky, but still more tightly connected than a massive Chinook. Those pilots sat in seats that were practically Barcaloungers and were all about the heavy-lift mission. Their dance wasn’t even a line dance—it was the papa bear leaving his winter den and none too happy about it.

  Outside the windscreen, night was settling over southwestern Texas. A hand rested on his shoulder. He knew the feel of it now—didn’t even need that deep feeling of connection to know it was Hannah. Together they watched the last of the sunset coloring the sky in descending shades of red-gold. He’d hoped to get her out on the prairie tonight, for just this moment.

  Jesse sighed to himself, but Hannah must have felt it because she squeezed his shoulder in sympathy.

  Her voice whispered over the headset intercom so softly that it was as if she was nuzzling his ear. “It’s beautiful.”

  “Sure is, isn’t it?” D’Antoni tromped right over any tender moment like a bronc throwing a greenhorn.

  Hannah faded away and her hand was gone. Instead of her presence fuzzing his thoughts, he’d never felt so clear about anything more than this moment. Flying, Hannah nearby, the Texas sunset. Somehow all of these elements seemed to mean more than ever—they all belonged together in some way he’d never be able to explain but he thought that maybe, just maybe, Hannah would understand.

  “Where are we going?” Jesse asked D’Antoni.

  “We’ve got a rodent problem. Border Patrol has been trying to plug a rat hole under the Tex-Mex border with no luck. We don’t normally take on such small problems, but this one has been eluding them.”

  “Whoa,” Jesse eased down on the collective with his left hand and pulled the cyclic’s joystick toward his lap to slow them down. “You guys are going in to take down immigrants? You can just drop us here and we’ll find our own way back”—though they were deep in the near-desert of the southwest Texas plains by this point.

  His family ranch had many immigrants who worked there. Some seasonal, some had been there for generations. He knew how much of the US economy depended on them—both the legal and the illegal. Stopping them wasn’t the answer, legalizing them was. Seasonal work permits, family passes, something. Taking a mercenary Black Hawk and ramming it down the throats of civilians working hard for a better future was not a “proportional response.”

  “Different kind of rodent problem,” D’Antoni didn’t reach out to take the controls and push them ahead. “The Los Zetas cartel is running drugs across the border for forty kilometers north of Laredo. The cartel has perforated the border and the DEA can’t plug the holes fast enough. Getting permission to operate south of the border from the Mexican government hasn’t done them any good. When they try, it mostly gets more Mexican cops and judges killed. We’re private, so we can go after the source directly.”

  “The source?”

  “We’re going after the head of the cartel. We’re gonna yank him, wrap him up tight, and hand him to the DEA Stateside.”

  “The head of the Los Zetas cartel with one helo, four people? Two of them not even military? How crazy are you folks?” But Jesse was easing the controls forward and the Black Hawk regained speed. Taking down drug runners, he had no problem with.

  “Six people now. Besides, we aren’t stupid and we don’t endanger our action team—though it’s gonna take some work to get used to a Delta woman. We have some more assets in place under deep cover who are already on this one. This morning we got the extraction signal for tonight.” Then D’Antoni toggled the control that isolated the cockpit intercom from the rest of the helo. “Besides, have you ever found a woman who would stay behind merely because you asked her to?”

  Certainly not Hannah Tucker.

  Hannah had slipped into mission mode when the cargo bay door slammed shut. Sitting in the back of a tin toy called a helicopter—that was usually described as “ten thousand parts that just happened to be flying in unison,” until some crucial one decided to fly off in some other direction—there was nothing to do but wait. A lone red nightlight in the ceiling of the cargo bay was finally taking over from the failing light outside the windows.

  All a Delta could do was sit and wait for the pilot to do whatever it was he did. She could see Mark Halloran slide into the same Delta Force operator headspace. Silent, appearing relaxed, yet gearing up internally to unleash whatever would be required.

  And on the other side of the helo, Faith and Kat. Despite being dressed in basic camo, light boots, and armored vests, they looked like they might be chatting away in the living room over tea and moon pies.

  Halloran was leaning against the aft bulkhead beside her.

  She peeled back one side of her earphones and yelled at him over the scream of the twin turbine engines, “What the hell?” She nodded toward the women.

  He peeled one side of his own headphones back. “I know. It’s definitely surreal. But Faith is better than a radio. No comm failure—if another, stronger telepath isn’t attacking us.” His pride in his wife shone out of him.

  “There are psi-type bad guys?”

  “Yes, ma’am. There’s a whole world going on here that most folks don’t see. All hush-hush so that we don’t freak regular folks out.”

  “Too late for me. Already freaked.”

  “I grew up with it, so I can’t tell you much. There was only ever Faith for me. Tried to leave her so as to protect her. All it did was make us both miserable.”

  Hannah wondered if she was actually still freaked by the reality of what she was. Seeing two such normal women who appeared to accept their own skills so easily almost made it seem nothing special. If she didn’t really think about it, her “gift” was somehow okay. The thing that was making her miserable about Jesse was not being with him, so she didn’t know what to make of that either.

  “So how did a woman barely bigger than Faith ever make Delta Force?” By Mark’s tone that fact was much stranger than creating sounds outside her body.

  “You know that being Delta is mostly about perseverance and determination. The former is how I survived my past. The latter is how I’m making sure that I never go back there again.”

  Mark offered her a fist bump. “Shit, woman. You’re gonna fit right in here. Ain’t no such thing as a Phoenix woman who isn’t Delta-level determined.”

  She nodded and pulled her headset back into place blocking the worst of the engine and rotor noise. Mark did the same and they both settled into doing what a Delta operator did best—they waited.

  Fitting in somewhere.

  There was a hell of a concept.

  7

  “DEA promised us a gap in border surveillance as long as we stay low,” D’Antoni was working the radios and Jesse was ignoring them. Comms were part of the copilot’s job, but it was the first mission Jesse had ever flown where he didn’t know who was calling the shots. They wouldn’t have an air mission commander for the op—D’Antoni had made it clear they were on their own once they crossed the Rio Grande. But there was someone out there making sure the gap was waiting for them in border security.

  “How low?”

  “Low,” was all D’Antoni answered.

  “You need a digital terrain map for that. And an ADAS would help, but I’ll do what I can.” At least the FLIR infrared system was top-of-the-line; that was a good start.

  “What’s an ADAS?”

  “Advanced Distributed Aperture System. It’s a set of three-sixty-degree cameras mounted outside the airframe with full infrared and digital enhancement vision. It lets me see to all sides as if the helicopter was invisible from inside the cockpit.” He nosed down until the Black Hawk’s wheels were twenty feet over the scrub. The bird wasn’t integral to his reflexes, so he was reluctant to go much lower while flying at a hundred and eighty miles per hou
r through the darkness. They were well out into the trackless lands, only the occasional ranch house lit up to enliven the view. A couple times he had to climb up past thirty feet to clear a tree, but he managed to pull that down as his reflexes settled in, able to volley around the scrub more confidently rather than climbing over.

  “Is this where Night Stalkers usually fly?” D’Antoni sounded unimpressed.

  “I can push down another five feet as soon as I shed the rest of my Little Bird reflexes. I haven’t flown a Hawk in a couple months.”

  “No need to push it.”

  Jesse found a dry arroyo heading in the right direction. It wasn’t wide enough to tuck the whole helicopter into safely, at least not with where his reactions were tonight. But he was able to drop the entire body of the helo down into it so that only the rotors would be showing above the ground as he raced along. The dry tang of creosote made it past the air conditioner as they crossed into even more arid country.

  A movement inside the cockpit forced his attention aside for a split second. D’Antoni reaching for the controls. It was an instinctive move…one of a copilot fearing that the pilot-in-command was out of control.

  D’Antoni caught himself and drew back, but it made Jesse smile.

  Somehow Gregorio, D’Antoni, and the Hallorans had just made his life so much more complicated. At last he saw his chance to get a little payback and couldn’t resist smiling in the dark.

  He wasn’t flying too high for the head of Phoenix—he was flying too low.

  Jesse was flying down in the zone ruled by the Night Stalkers—flying NOE—nap of Earth. There were no other helicopter pilots as good as a Night Stalker, not in any army.

  D’Antoni might be a fine pilot, but anyone who hadn’t been through the two years of Night Stalker training—only offered to the very best, hand-selected pilots with a minimum five prior years of rotorcraft service—simply didn’t belong on the same scale.

  “Yep!” Jesse pulled out his best Texan as he arced hard through an S-curve in the arroyo. “I’m always tellin’ the Hawk pilots they fly too high. It’s not the helo’s fault, even if it is clunkier than a stumblebum old poke of a plow horse—bless its rotors. You wanta get good and proper low, you need a Little Bird on the job.”

  D’Antoni was doing a good imitation of looking relaxed in his seat, but Jesse now knew that was his tell. When top soldiers were really stressed, their bodies went absolutely still and quiet. D’Antoni could be mistaken for a stone statue at the moment.

  Jesse shot out of the end of the arroyo like a pinball fired into play—hard. For one blink of the eye they were above the slow, muddy flow of the Rio Grande, then—like a fast ricochet off a spring bumper—he was nosing over a bluff and into Mexico.

  He could get to enjoy this.

  “ROE is simple,” D’Antoni spoke up over the intercom. “We’ll be landing one mile west of el Hambrón’s compound.”

  El Hambrón? Hannah couldn’t believe that these guys were taking on The Wolverine of the Los Zetas cartel with something less than a brigade force. Were they impossibly arrogant or merely suicidal? Unless… Her Delta experience had taught her the effectiveness of a small, highly-trained team, but so few outside of Delta understood or knew how to execute that. Maybe Phoenix was good enough to leverage the asymmetric power of a tiny force.

  “Mark and I will dump out and support Troy and Rick—those are the two from our team I mentioned were running the main part of this mission. Jesse, you and the women will remain with the helo unless we shout, then be ready to come fast. These guys may be investing in top radio gear, but they won’t hear Mark and Faith on any wavelength.”

  Hannah considered the logistics of swinging a five-foot-long sniper rifle in the helo’s cargo bay—a space barely four feet high—and shooting D’Antoni in the butt right through the pilot’s seat. Deciding that discretion was better than death and disorder, she “tapped” Jesse on the shoulder.

  He must have heard the soft ping close by his head and known it was her. He half turned to face her, then stopped when he figured out why she was tapping him. Damn but having a man understand her was a real charge.

  “Yep! That sounds like a fine plan you got there, pard!” Jesse drawled it out.

  Now she considered which one of the two pilots she’d be shooting first.

  “You go right on ahead there, Mr. D’Antoni,” Jesse continued. “I jes’ cain’t wait to see how long you survive if y’all try to leave a Delta warrior behind.”

  Okay, maybe she wouldn’t be shooting Jesse after all.

  Kat and Faith laughed, which encouraged her even more.

  “I was thinking she could make sure that everyone on the helo stayed safe,” D’Antoni reached for high ground, but Jesse cut him off at the knees before she could.

  “If you want your best force forward, I’d suggest you stay back here and run the protection detail yourself. We’ve got a pair of Deltas in the back—ain’t no one no how up to their standards. Not you and not me.”

  Hannah wondered what planet Jesse had grown up on, because it certainly wasn’t one she was familiar with. What sort of man ever recognized that a woman had skills? Not only skills, but good ones, unique from his own. She’d enjoyed watching him fly. There was an artistry to it that made her sorry she hadn’t seen him fly in his beloved Little Bird. His final, tumbling flight had been hidden by the thick jungle canopy—a flight she’d reached the clearing too late to see.

  “Goddamn it!” D’Antoni punched the console hard enough to make her flinch.

  A flinch that Hannah redirected to yank her Glock free. She aimed at the back of D’Antoni’s head in case he went for Jesse. In her peripheral vision, she saw Halloran reach for his own.

  “Don’t.” She said it softly and Halloran seemed to think better of his choices.

  Faith and Kat stared at her aghast. Kat braced to leap into harm’s way, but hesitated at Hannah shaking her head no. Once the initiative was lost, control of the aft cargo area was hers.

  D’Antoni punched the console again. “Why the hell can’t I get it through my head that these women are so capable?”

  Hannah hesitated, then swung the sidearm up so that it was aimed at the ceiling of the cargo bay.

  Halloran relaxed and something passed between him and Faith that had her easing down as well. Kat was still so tightly strung that she almost leapt out of her skin when Faith rested a hand on her friend’s shoulder.

  D’Antoni half turned, having witnessed nothing of what had just happened behind his back. “You game, Hannah? We could use another shooter if there are problems.”

  And just that fast, he’d switched his thinking around. Even by the flexibility of Delta standards, that was impressive.

  “I don’t seem to recall there being much else of interest planned this evening,” she tucked the Glock away.

  “Hey!” Jesse sounded truly hurt. It had been obvious, before the meeting with Phoenix Agency came up, that they would have had sex this evening. And now he was hurt because… Hannah barely managed to suppress a giggle.

  “Later, Outlaw. I promise.” She surprised herself at how much she was looking forward to it as well.

  Jesse wished he had a terrain map. He wanted to sneak as close as he could to el Hambrón’s compound, but still keep a hill between that and his landing location to deflect any possible noise. Instead he circled wide to survey the terrain out at the limits of Phoenix’s FLIR night-vision package.

  He could use a map to what Hannah was thinking as well.

  He’d like to compare it to his own, because he was thinking some seriously wild thoughts. He’d never been a one-cowgirl type. He didn’t play around when he was with one, but he never settled for long either.

  Yet he knew for a cold hard fact that Hannah’d had his back when D’Antoni had tried to punch out a perfectly innocent Black Hawk console. He knew it because of the stony silence over the intercom. No protests, no exclamations of surprise from the others. Just Hannah�
��s soft-spoken command, Don’t. Probably to Halloran. Three to one back there, and he’d bet on Hannah being in complete control.

  What was it about him? Why had he never fallen for a strong woman? The bonuses were obvious now that he’d done so. He flew with the Night Stalkers—always a team effort, but each pilot exercised maximum autonomy, especially in the Little Bird. A tight team with his copilot, when he flew with one. With the 160th SOAR, Jesse had flown into awful situations, knowing they had his back just as he’d had theirs. People, good people, had been lost along the way. Others had been saved.

  However, he’d always been the loner. Happiest out on the rare solo mission with just his Little Bird for company. Between the jungle and tonight with Hannah Tucker, he’d finally discovered what being in a tight team truly felt like—and he never wanted anything else ever again.

  But he was Night Stalker and she was Delta. That didn’t bode well for the future.

  The future.

  He hadn’t so much as slept with her, yet there was no question about it. The future—their future—needed a terrain that included the two of them flying together, and not just when the odd coincidence put one particular Delta woman aboard his aircraft.

  He didn’t find his hill, but rather another dry arroyo—deep and wide enough to swallow the whole helo this time. It ran close behind a low ridge. The channel would reflect all of his engine and rotor noise upward. El Hambrón’s compound lay less than a kilometer away by the time he landed. Even if someone did hear and came to check things out, very few would think to look down rather than up for a helicopter.

  “Slick!” D’Antoni offered high praise and held up a hand for a high-five, which Jesse acknowledged with a hard slap. Then the Phoenix operative was bailing out one side of the cockpit as the door on his other side opened.

  He knew who it was by her short height and the starlight catching her blonde hair.

  There wasn’t even a thought before he leaned out to kiss her. It was awkward with the full helmet and their relative positions, but it was every bit as intense and incredible as that first kiss in the jungle. That kiss might have helped Hannah create the blast of noise that drew off the NERC guerillas, but that wasn’t why he’d pulled away so suddenly. It was because a first kiss was not supposed to feel like he’d been with that someone his whole life. The timeless quality of it, like he was kissing his lover, his best friend, and his life’s partner all rolled into one had shorted out every one of his circuits.