That Carla clearly liked Melissa made Richie smile all on its own. Carla was the smartest person about other people he’d ever met. He’d observed that her rapid judgments were consistently more reliable than a month of his own study. Richie was always trusting someone he shouldn’t, whereas Carla trusted no one who hadn’t earned it ten times over.
Richie hadn’t doubted his attraction to Melissa. Been surprised by it. Been shocked beyond wildest geek-boy fantasies that it was returned. But to have Carla confirm that Melissa was as wonderful as he thought made for a comfortable feeling. It also made him just that much more attracted to her. The candlelight caught in her hair, which was down and brushing over her shoulders. And the dark blue, sleeveless blouse he’d helped her pick out—from among the “I (heart) Aruba” T-shirts at a nearby market stall—made her eyes shine.
She and Carla had their heads together and were talking happily about something. He tried to tune in but could only catch snatches. Ah, their Bahamian arrest and incarceration told in grand-story style. There were other things that had Carla glancing over at him and smiling at him with a warmth she’d never displayed to him before, but he couldn’t hear those at all.
Duane and Chad had picked up on the table of girls’-night-out ladies. The women were dressed up high—beach style but very well tended. Richie demoted the waitress back to forty-sixty against and felt a little sorry for her.
Thirty-seventy after he saw Chad’s non-reaction when she arrived with their food. Personally, he thought Chad’s meter was off; Richie liked the look of the waitress more than the studied beauty and overeager expressions of the group of women. Then he noticed that Duane, on the other hand, in his own quiet way, was charming the waitress. Perhaps that was what the two of them had been whispering about earlier—Duane asking Chad to clear the field so that he’d have a shot.
When the waitress leaned in to deliver his meal, Richie whispered quietly to her, “His name is Duane. He’s quiet, but he’s a great guy.”
The waitress studied him closely for a moment, then flashed him a smile with a, “Thank you, sir. Hope you enjoy your meal.”
Moments after she was gone, Melissa leaned in and kissed him on the cheek.
“What?”
“You’re just such a great guy, Richie. I honestly don’t know what I’m going to do with you.”
“Well, whatever it is, I doubt we’ll have a chance to do it before six a.m. tomorrow.”
She grimaced and nodded.
No chance this meal was going to break up before midnight. He’d had five hours sleep in the last three days; she’d had about eight in the same time span. They both knew that they’d need every second of sleep they could get tonight, which left him with no way to deliver on the hours of attention he’d promised.
“Sorry,” he whispered.
“At least you finally got me a good meal.” She stuck her fork into a large shrimp dripping with a bleu cheese–shiitake sauce.
That’s when he realized that she was left-handed. He ate his meal with his right hand, she with her left. They could still hold hands while they both ate.
How cool was that!
Chapter 10
The flight to Maracaibo took less than an hour in the old floatplane.
Richie flew as pilot this time, and Melissa was fine with being copilot as she was still groggy.
After dinner the night before, they’d made it to the hotel, taken one look at each other, then collapsed onto the bed fully clothed. She’d remembered curling up against him with her head on his shoulder and her hand resting on the doubloon he still wore beneath his shirt. The next thing she knew, the phone was ringing with a harsh wake-up call, and they were stumbling downstairs for breakfast. She still didn’t feel awake despite the tea and food and now an hour in the air as copilot. She’d never quite made the crossover to the American habit of coffee—especially not with how the Army brewed it—but she’d welcome a jolt right about now.
As Richie started the descent, she glanced back at their passengers.
In the first row of the two that remained, Carla and Kyle shared one of the side-by-side pairs of seats. She was asleep on his shoulder, which still didn’t jibe with Melissa’s image of Carla Anderson. The woman had a reputation of steel, something Melissa had certainly experienced upon her arrival in the Maracaibo hotel room an age and a half ago. But she looked so soft and feminine asleep against Kyle’s shoulder. The two were now dressed in worn camo pants, black T-shirts, Carla had an aged bandana tied about her throat, and they wore heavy boots that might have once been Army boots.
The rest of them were similarly dressed. Chad and Duane were crashed out in the second row of seats. Chad had taken the pair behind Kyle and Carla; Duane stuck in the single seat across the aisle. Typical Chad. Both were looking much the worse for wear even if their clothes were fine. She would put money on the waitress being happy this morning, but she wondered if the dressed-up girls’-night-out ladies would ever try such a stunt again.
Chad looked so…pleasant when he was asleep. She wagered on hair-trigger reflexes, so she didn’t suggest maybe they should roll him out the cargo door and into the Caribbean Ocean while they had the chance.
Kyle noted her attention, looking up from a well-thumbed Stephen King novel that he’d been pretending to read—he was on the same dog-eared page he’d been on when she’d last looked back early in the flight. He nodded to her as if to say, “I trust you with the flight. Good job. Welcome to the team.”
She returned the nod carefully. How did the man communicate so much so easily? No wonder he was the team’s leader; it was impossible not to respect him. And the rumors about Kyle Reeves among the training cadre said The Unit hadn’t seen a soldier like him in years.
Mister Kyle.
All the things they could have called him, and that was the name they’d planted on him. It spoke volumes.
Wild Woman certainly fit Carla. Duane The Rock and Chad The Reaper both made perfect sense. She could see the easy violence that lurked just beneath Chad’s surface.
Then there was Q…which didn’t begin to describe her feelings about the man flying the plane. It also didn’t describe the man—did his team really see so little of who he really was? Q was only a small portion of him. But he also wasn’t Casablanca’s dark Rick any more than he was the goofy ice merchant Kristoff in Frozen. Besides, Kristoff had loved Anna, not Elsa.
Melissa shook her head to clear it.
She was obviously losing it if she was trying to cast Richie as some movie hero.
The poor old Twin Otter looked even more battered on the inside than the outside. The drug runners had used her hard and the Coast Guard had certainly never fixed her up. Mechanically, she was sound as a rock though.
“We need to name her,” she said over the intercom without preamble.
“The African Queen?” Richie was, typically, completely in tune with Melissa despite the lack of clues she’d given that she’d meant the airplane.
“Too Humphrey Bogart. Enterprise?”
“Possible,” he agreed. “We could stencil NCC-1701-TO for Twin Otter along the fuselage. But…” And his voice took on that teasing tone that told her he was about to say something that at least he thought was very clever.
“What?”
“She is a floatplane.”
“She is,” Melissa agreed carefully.
“There’s only been one other truly famous floatplane,” he teased.
But it was enough of a clue that she got it.
“Spruce Goose,” they said in unison.
“Except she’s metal, not spruce,” Richie, of course, had to clarify.
“True.”
He clicked on the radio. “Maracaibo flight control. This is the Tin Goose, tail number YV-triple five-R. Requesting entry into the pattern for landing.”
One thing about Ri
chie. He could always make her laugh.
* * *
Richie was surprised by the airport every time he came to Maracaibo—and flying as pilot of the Twin Otter, he had an unprecedented view.
In a country he knew to be mostly filled with lush jungle, the airport had a barren and desolate feel. At the midpoint of its lone runway, a central terminal building had Jetways to service a half dozen jets and room to park half a dozen more.
To one side of the terminal was a large hangar for military aircraft which held only a few aircraft and a pair of helicopters. He wondered how many of even those few aircraft still functioned—an air force was very expensive to maintain in both dollars and skilled manpower.
The thing that wasn’t obvious from the ground was an area close behind the military hangar. It was a jumbled parking area where a dozen small jets and many little planes had been pushed together in an area that might normally service one or two passenger jets. It unnerved him, an unusual sensation for a Unit operator. How many of those were seized drug-runner aircraft and what had become of their pilots? Suddenly the Tin Goose stopped being such a lark and he wondered what had happened to the crew that had flown her to the States. And how many had died right here and had their plane stuffed into a forgotten corner of this airfield.
To the other side of the terminal was a well-maintained parking area which boasted a number of sleek private jets in pristine condition. Didn’t take much to figure out who owned these: drug lords and oil barons—Venezuela was awash in oil with more proven oil reserves than even Saudi Arabia. Number One reserves in the world and not friendly to the United States.
Beyond that stood lines of decrepit hangars—a warren that grew worse and worse the deeper Kyle directed them into it. Toward the far end most of the hangar doors looked rusted or broken open, which didn’t matter as the aircraft within were often in worse condition.
At the far end of the last row, Kyle could easily pick out their hangar. It was big enough even for the tall Twin Otter. It looked no less disreputable than the hangars around it except for two factors.
It had doors that looked as if they worked, and there was a large and shiny new padlock keeping them closed.
Once Duane and Chad had jumped out and opened the doors, he could see a pair of immaculate, late-model, black Toyota Forerunners were parked inside the hangar.
He killed the engines, went through the shutdown, and then they pushed the plane back into the hangar, the wings easily passing over the top of the tinted-window SUVs. They rolled the big doors shut and the interior was cast into dark shadow. It was so dim that even removing his sunglasses revealed little detail.
Tiny shafts of sunlight snaked in through rust holes in the hangar’s side walls, making blinding pools of brilliance and casting the other shadows even deeper.
“Man”—Richie looked around—“I feel like a drug runner already.” Because that was the plan.
They had a former kingpin drug-runner’s plane that they’d just “stolen” from the U.S. Coast Guard. They’d just come in on the well-flown Bahamas-Aruba-Maracaibo drug route. High-security hangar in the most remote corner of a relatively quiet airfield. Top vehicles.
They were definitely going to draw the wrong kind of attention, which is exactly what they wanted to be doing.
“Was our trip to the Bahamas just to setup the mission?” Melissa asked from close beside him. She sounded pissed. By the dim light filtering in through all of the cracks and rust holes in the hangar’s side cladding, he could see that her looks matched her tone.
“I don’t think so. I don’t think anyone even mentioned the name of the country before I thought of taking you there. As far as I can tell, it’s something that we did that just happened to come out to our advantage. Our Bahamian arrest record will be there for anyone who cares to look, but I don’t think Vito or anyone set us up.”
“And you didn’t either? This isn’t some Richie-Q-genius operation where you saw what was going to happen twenty moves ahead of everyone else?”
He glanced around to make sure the others were busy elsewhere at the moment, then took her arm.
She tried to pull away, but Richie held on because she didn’t try very hard.
“Please believe me when I tell you that I had very, very different plans for that night.”
“Promise?”
He wished he could see her more clearly. But they were in the dim shadows and she was backed by sunlight patches, making her little more than a dazzling silhouette.
Her voice was suddenly so tentative, not something he’d heard before. It was as if the Ice Queen had just let down some barrier that he hadn’t known was even there. He wished he could see what that looked like but he couldn’t.
He brushed his thumb over her lips, to remind himself of that moment, their last before the arrest when she had lain mostly naked and very willing on the bed before him. “I promise.”
“Okay.” She blew out a breath hard. “I’m not good at trusting men…but okay.”
He wanted to ask why. It was like she didn’t trust herself about what was happening between them, which, at the moment, was no more than a lot of unassuaged lust. Which made no sense at all. In Richie’s experience, women—especially military women—knew exactly what they wanted and how to get it. Melissa—being Delta like Carla—had that in a quadruple dose. Some niggling voice inside him said not to push, again. Better yet, change the subject. He didn’t usually think of such things before he spoke, but he’d learned to trust that quiet voice the few times it showed up around Melissa.
“There’s something else you said.”
“What?”
“The twenty moves ahead of everyone else thing.”
“Yes, what about it?”
“Do I really do that?” he asked in his most innocent voice.
“Do you what?” Her last word came out as a shout that echoed about the inside of the dim hangar and got everyone else’s attention. “You don’t know that you’re the smartest person in any—”
Then she caught on that he was joking.
Too close for a punch, she side-fisted him square in the chest.
Right on the doubloon that hung there, which kind of hurt.
Which hurt quite a bit.
But it was totally worth it.
He could hear Chad whispering to Duane, “And when did he grow a sense of humor?”
Richie had a sense of humor. He knew he did. Because he could remember every single time he’d made Melissa laugh.
Even when he didn’t intend to.
* * *
Melissa stood in the shadows as Richie moved off to inspect the hangar and did her best to reel herself back in.
Never show weakness.
That’s what a woman had to do to survive in the military. Showing any hint of weakness, caution, or hesitancy was seen as an instant target for military jerks. They waited for the least sign of a woman not being good enough and pounced on it. Another guy could screw up repeatedly and get away with it, but a woman couldn’t do it once without being labeled a burden or danger to the unit.
A hundred times she’d thought that she should have gone Canadian military. But a hundred and one times she’d remembered the man atop the mountain. And later, finding Michael Gibson had done nothing to diminish the images she’d built up in her head. The man was scarily impressive.
Richie was equally impressive in his own way, and she’d wager that she’d discover he was even more competent, rather than less, as she learned more about him.
But he also caused her to show vulnerabilities that she didn’t like having revealed. She’d heard her own voice and how it had sounded as she begged him to promise that what she’d been feeling in the Bahamas had been real.
She didn’t grow attached to men, especially not military men, and definitely not so quickly. But that one moment be
fore the Royal BDF knocked on the door had been the most romantic of her life. It hadn’t been just about sex. It had been about a man who thought of her and her heart first. How could such a small gesture have been so important? Yet she could still feel where his fingers had brushed over her lips and promised they were only at the very beginning of what was to come.
No weakness, she admonished herself and turned to inspect their new setup.
One glance around and she couldn’t help muttering, “Well, that sure doesn’t work.”
“What doesn’t?” Duane stood close beside her in the shadows; he’d somehow moved close without triggering her Delta training.
She studied him, trying to read what he was thinking. He had a good face, solid and friendly. But not expressive. His reserve ran miles deep, making the man an enigma. However, Duane didn’t radiate the hatred that Chad sent her way at every opportunity. He stood with his arms crossed over his broad chest—not in denial or rejection, but rather as if he was simply more comfortable standing that way.
Melissa waved about the hangar.
“What’s wrong with this picture?”
Duane studied the space, slowly turning a full circle. A frown crossed his expression and he turned a second circle. “What am I missing?”
“I worked for three years in a museum building exhibits. You have to get out of your own view because you know too much. You have to think like a patron coming to the exhibit for the first time and present a believable world. Create a context for them to subconsciously accept. Now imagine you aren’t a Delta operator but a client looking to hire a new outfit to transport your deeply illegal product.”
The frown cleared from his face and he grunted. Then he snapped his fingers, a sharp sound that echoed inside the steel hangar.
Melissa could see everyone’s heads pop up from wherever they were occupied around the space. He circled a finger in the air over his head, indicating he was a rally point. In moments the whole team was gathered around them. They were all looking at Duane.
Heart Strike Page 14
