Heart Strike

by M. L. Buchman

  The fish-guy was big, but Richie felt bigger. Not that he was taller, but that he looked so dangerous that he simply took up more space. Melissa had never seen Richie looking this way—a third variation. This was completely the Unit operator, as if he’d wholly shed his charming side. She hoped not. Though he was speaking, which meant that Richie’s sharp mind was in full gear when he was in this mode.

  “Afraid y’all was gonna say that.” The big man put on a sad face but then continued jovially despite how often his wide eyes tracked down to Richie’s rifle. “That’s why I brought my expediter. She said she would take care of any little problems.” He eyed the alleyway between hangars carefully as if finally considering his lines of retreat.

  The woman pulled a single sheet of paper from her portfolio and held it out to Melissa.

  She took it with her right hand, keeping her left free in case she needed to grab the Colt. Old trick, fill up your adversary’s hands, and then attack. She was too well trained to fall for that one.

  “This”—the woman’s voice was as smooth and classy as her attire—“is a contract for immediate flight to Miami, including deadhead return. I have left the fee blank…for the moment.”

  “We don’t—”

  Melissa cut Richie off with a hand sign. She inspected the woman more closely; then she leaned out past the doors to look both directions along the hangar alleyway. With Richie at the door, Duane would have his eye on the camera feeds from outside, and he’d called out no warning.

  No one else was in their dusty corner of the hangar area. The truck was a flatbed with a large crate strapped to it; the driver had not climbed down but sat with both hands visible on the wheel. Nowhere for other people to hide unless they were already in place in other hangars.

  Life is risk, the trainers used to say. You don’t win an engagement from an armchair.

  “Let’s see the box.”

  “Absolutely.” The big man clapped his hands together and turned for the truck. “Now we’re getting somewhere.”

  But it was the woman that Melissa was watching. The careful nod of acquiescence—an assessing moment—before she too turned toward the truck.

  “What?” Richie whispered. “We don’t want to be flying fish to Miami.” His first words addressed directly to her since the hotel room.

  “I don’t think that’s what she’s about.”

  But when they reached the truck—Kyle and Carla rolling up to take clearly military stances with Chad and Duane remaining hidden—and pulled back the tarp, she saw the man had spoken accurately.

  “That’s one damn big fish,” Kyle observed.

  He was right. One meter of sword and three more of fish; it was a monster. Blue above, silver below, the swordfish lay in a deep bed of ice.

  “My baby is eleven hundred and three pounds,” the big man crowed. “Not a record by a long ways, but a record for this old boy, I can tell ya. I have pictures, but my man will want to see it before it dries out.”

  “Richie.” She’d get even with him for giving her the silent treatment. “Check it. I want to know exactly what we would be carrying.”

  He groaned but pulled out a flashlight. First, he opened its mouth and bent down to inspect its gullet. She didn’t see any signs that it had been sliced open and packed with drugs—of course, that could be on the underside.

  Apparently satisfied with what he could see, Richie began shoving his hands and arms deep into the fishy ice to make sure the crate had no false bottom.

  The guy hovered, clearly anxious about his fish—probably too thoroughly real to be an act.

  But the woman stood back, cool and sleek.

  Melissa jumped back off the truck and waved over Carla but had her hold one step back as Melissa moved up to the expeditor.

  “Miami, one fish, deadhead return. One passenger, I assume.” Melissa waved her hand at the fisherman who was now handing Richie his pole case for inspection.

  Richie opened it and checked inside. “A Daiwa Saltiga 6500H on a Melton pole. Sweet.”

  It looked as if the fisherman had just died and gone to heaven. The two of them rambled off into some fishing tackle nerdvana. Not a word to her or anyone else on the team, but he was glad to talk fishing. Her first instinct had been right; she should have pushed him out of the plane over the Everglades and fed him to the alligators or crocs or whichever got to him first.

  The expediter woman didn’t answer right away. Instead she turned her head to inspect the four of them. The tilt of her head said that she hadn’t missed the hangar’s security cameras either.

  “May I see your plane?”

  Melissa nodded.

  Carla was looking at her strangely, but Melissa led the woman inside. Without comment, she circled the plane and the two SUVs. At Melissa’s signal, Chad and Duane stepped sufficiently out of the shadows to be seen. Like Carla and Kyle, they held onto their rifles so that those were in plain view as well.

  Melissa snagged her own from where she’d propped it against the back of the door as she passed by and slung it over her shoulder.

  The woman finished her brief tour and returned to where Melissa stood by the narrow opening between the hangar doors.

  “There will be two passengers,” was all the woman said. “I’ll come back on the deadhead return with you.”

  “Twenty thousand.” Melissa kept her tone casual. But she wanted to dance around, pump her fist in the air, and yell, “Bingo!” No mere expediter would ever waste the time to fly the route back and forth. This was an inspection trip for Moore Aviation. She’d been ready for weeks of waiting for a contact, already had several more steps she’d thought of during last night’s “condom” flight. And here she was on the second day.

  “Ten thousand,” the woman countered.

  “A Lear would cost him thirty-five, minimum. Plus five for stinking up the cabin with his fish.”

  “Twelve.”

  “Seventeen.”

  “Fifteen.”

  “U.S. Cash.”

  “Half before.”

  “Half after.” Melissa closed the deal.

  The woman reached into her portfolio again and handed across an envelope.

  Melissa handed both the envelope—which she’d just bet already had seventy-five hundred-dollar bills in it—and the contract to Carla as if it was her job to deal with such things.

  “Take care of these.”

  Carla studied her a moment, then guessed Melissa’s intent correctly. She riffled the envelope, then pulled out a lighter and set the one-page contract on fire.

  “We depart in ten minutes,” the woman said crisply and stepped back into the sunlight.

  “What the hell, Moore?” Chad came up as Duane slipped outside to keep an eye on the truck with Kyle and Richie. The heat of anger still burned in his voice. “A fucking fish?”

  Carla spun to look at her. Clearly the light bulb had just gone on for her. “This isn’t about the fish.”

  “Nope,” Melissa agreed and turned to prep the plane for flight, leaving Chad to grind his teeth all he wanted. It was about the expediter.

  * * *

  Richie had been worried about U.S. Customs pulling up a report on their plane when they landed in Miami and finding that it was listed as stolen from the Coast Guard. But they didn’t, so Vito Corello must have taken care of that somehow.

  It ended up being an uneventful five-hour flight to Miami, getting a fish through customs, refueling, and five hours back.

  Mr. Fish—no names were ever offered and none were ever given—checked his fish about every three minutes for the whole flight up and gave a jovial farewell in Miami.

  The expediter remained absorbed in the paperwork in her portfolio or on her equally slim tablet computer for the long hours—or at least she appeared to be. Richie suspected that she didn’t miss a single
thing in the whole flight—not a course correction or an altitude adjustment.

  Duane sat quietly in the rearmost seat, guarding their backs while he and Melissa flew. The other three had remained behind in Venezuela.

  Once back in Maracaibo, the woman had wordlessly handed a second envelope to Melissa and walked away, declining the offer of a ride.

  It was sunset as they gathered once more in the hangar. A last flight struggled aloft through the hot Maracaibo twilight. The hangar smelled of rust and hot engines.

  “Great, so we just made the CIA fifteen grand,” Chad complained. “What else did we do?”

  “Only eight grand,” Richie estimated. “After fuel, landing fees, and ten hours operating time allocated to the Twin Otter’s next service, it’s only eight grand. Maybe eighty-five hundred, and that doesn’t account for the pilot’s time which—”

  “And we achieved what?” Chad aimed the question at Melissa like a dagger.

  Richie was about to step in between them, but Melissa never gave him a chance.

  She went toe to toe with him. “Because, asshole…”

  So much for the polite Canadian, Richie thought. Melissa angry was an impressive sight and once again, her Delta-ness, which slipped out of mind so easily when looking at the beautiful woman, stood front and center and her name was Fury.

  “That woman is not just an expediter of fish. Haven’t you ever heard of a test? We just had a test and got paid for it. The next load will smell less and be worth far more.”

  Something Richie hadn’t figured out until they were well aloft, but Melissa had seen at first glance. Melissa wasn’t a phony; she was too good. And she’d told him that she knew Colonel Gibson—he wasn’t the sort of person that people knew about unless he wanted them to. During his own passage through the Commander’s Review Board at Delta Selection, the man hadn’t spoken a single word.

  Chad shook his head like a bull balking a step before a red cape, his face going dangerously blank.

  Carla swept an arm through Melissa’s and tugged her back out into the fading sunlight, probably because it was clear the Melissa and Chad were gearing up to go head to head, a very bad thing between Delta operators.

  All Richie had seen when the man and woman had arrived was an idiot who’d spent fifteen hundred dollars on a fishing pole that wasn’t significantly different from a two-hundred-dollar one. A true pro might notice the difference, but likely not their rich boy from Jackson, Mississippi. And if he was a true pro, he’d probably be fishing with the Shimano Stella 10000…not that Richie had ever fished, but he’d read an interesting review while waiting for his last physical.

  And then to spend fifteen grand on an airplane to ferry the fish to Miami. You couldn’t even mount a saltwater fish’s actual skin. What the taxidermists did was cast a mold and build a hand-painted fiberglass copy for the guy’s wall, which was…nuts. Richie’s own family was very well-off, Dad was a top salesman, had the plane (mostly paid for by IBM), and they lived in the nicest neighborhood Poughkeepsie had to offer. But they weren’t stupid about it.

  Then Richie refocused on what had just happened here.

  “Hey, Duane.”

  When his friend had joined him to help stow the plane, Richie whispered to him, “What’s up with Chad?”

  Duane readied himself to lean into one of the landing struts to roll the plane back into the hangar. “Woman gives him an itch.”

  “Well I don’t want him asking her to scratch it.” Even as he said it, he knew he was wrong, was missing something. But Richie still didn’t want Chad anywhere near her.

  “Different kind of itch, buddy. More the kind between the shoulder blades.” Duane slapped Richie right on that spot. “I don’t see it, but you know Chad and women. Let’s get this plane put away. Hungry and tired doesn’t begin to describe it.”

  Chad’s opinion surprised Richie to no end; it wasn’t at all what he thought was going on. But the jealousy angle hadn’t fit after the confrontation at the hotel. He’d thought about nothing else for the whole flight to Colombia and back, barely remembered the flight, and was just glad he hadn’t crashed them while he’d been so distracted.

  But this? It made perfect sense…even if it didn’t make any sense at all.

  He tried to see where Carla and Melissa had gone, but they were out of sight.

  It was foolish to ignore that kind of itch coming from a Unit operator, but Carla’s reaction was quite the opposite. Carla had clearly decided to befriend Melissa, and based on Carla’s initial reaction, it wasn’t because Melissa was also a woman.

  Richie trusted Carla implicitly, but he also trusted Chad just as completely.

  But Chad’s opinion that Melissa was trying to take over? It didn’t make any sense at all. Which left Richie having no idea what to think.

  Damn it! He was right back where he’d spent the whole flight, chasing his own tail in circles and feeling stupider than when he started. On top of that, he’d punched one of his teammates in anger. That too was new territory for him. Neither the Richie Goldman that he knew nor a Unit operator functioned from a place of anger.

  Chad strolled by him and Richie stopped him.

  “Sorry for the, uh…” Richie rubbed his own chin.

  “Nothing but a love tap, bro. Sorry for busting up your fun.”

  Richie shrugged.

  But he could see that Chad was still on the lookout.

  Until he figured out what to think, Richie would be as well.

  * * *

  “Why did you stop me?” Melissa barked at Carla as she was escorted around the end of the hangar and out onto the dry grassy lot beyond the hangars.

  The grasses were brown, the bushes low, and the dirt showed through in bare patches. It was about as attractive as the worst sections of Fort Bragg, which was a pretty low standard. Fort Bragg—the home of The Unit among many others—was generally acknowledged as one of the ugliest Army bases anywhere.

  “Because I don’t know how good a fighter you are, but I’ll bet Chad is better.”

  Melissa tried to jerk her arm free, but Carla was far stronger than she appeared.

  “Look.” Carla towed Melissa right along by her arm. “I don’t know what’s going on with you two, but Chad is the most lethal fighter we’ve got. He didn’t earn the nickname The Reaper by being Mister Nice Guy.”

  It rankled. It was another thing that Melissa knew she wasn’t. She wasn’t the best shot or the most dangerous fighter or the super-geek or… “What the heck am I doing here, Carla?”

  “How the hell would I know? Someone decided you were supposed to be here on this team and—”

  “Gibson.”

  Carla stopped cold as if she was the one who was suddenly Elsa the Ice Queen and now frozen in place.

  “He’s a Delta Colonel.”

  “Michael”—Carla blinked like an owl—“Gibson. Damn the man.”

  “He’s the one who saved me and helped recover my brother’s body five years ago; I only just found that out during OTC graduation. He’s the reason I went Army and eventually Delta, though I didn’t know it was him.” Yet another thing she hadn’t had time to think about yet. That list of things she hadn’t had time to absorb was getting longer by the second. Gibson, the new team, Chad hating her, stolen planes, drug running, and that mixed look of need and wonder in Richie’s eyes that had felt like a miracle but now was nowhere to be seen.

  “And Gibson is the one who sent you to join our team?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “Did he say why?”

  Melissa lowered the tone of her voice. “‘I have recommended that you be assigned to our top South American team.’ That’s all he gave me. And he said he was sorry he hadn’t been able to save my brother, who was dead the moment he fell into that crevasse.”

  Carla let go of Melissa arm and strode away,
kicking her way through the thick clumps of grasses but clearly headed in no particular direction. Then she kicked her way back.

  Melissa was tempted to follow her. She could think of several things she wanted to kick right about now.

  “Well, he always was a deep one. If he sent you to us, there must be a reason.”

  “Because tall, blond Canadians blend in so well with South American drug runners?”

  “I’m guessing that’s not it.” Carla’s half smile showed in the distant runway lights that were finally overtaking the last of the day’s light. “So what’s special about you?”

  “Nothing. Trust me on that. I’m a good enough soldier to make The Unit, which has to say something.”

  “Says a lot,” Carla agreed, which helped Melissa to calm down a little.

  “But they never gave me a specialty. I often led the teams, but not the way Kyle does—he makes it look so damn easy that I often can’t see him doing it. The primary attribute the training cadre always mentioned was that I was the second woman to make Delta. And just so you know, I totally despised Carla Effing Anderson the entire time.”

  Carla’s laugh was bright and merry. “God but you are Canadian. From now on it’s Carla Fucking Anderson to you.”

  Melissa rolled it around in her head for a moment before replying, “I don’t know if that’s going to work for me.”

  Carla’s repeated laughter made her feel a little better. “No specialization, huh?”

  “Not that I know about. Not breacher, not sniper, not candlestick maker.”

  “Well then, my friend”—Carla slipped her hand around Melissa’s waist as if they’d been friends forever, or maybe sisters—“we’ll just have to wait and see what we discover. At least we know one thing.”

  “What’s that?” They started strolling back to the hangar arm in arm.

  “You’re the face of this charter company from now on. You picked up on that woman way ahead of any of us; I was on the verge of booting her narrow ass. And you did that negotiation perfectly; you couldn’t have played it better. That was well done. Really well done.”

  Melissa felt a little like the Incredible Hulk, flickering back and forth between the Ice Queen and a Delta Force heroine.