Bring On the Dusk (21 page)

He nodded.

She waited, but that was all either of them offered.

Michael was also very quiet. In one of those states that was unnaturally quiet rather than his usual silent self.

“Therefore, your trust of President Madani of Iran is based on prior experience that all three of you are aware of but not discussing—meaning it is from a prior black-in-black operation.”

No one corrected her assumption.

The President nodded as if such convoluted processes were the norm. Maybe they were in his world. Not in hers.

“And so you, Mr. President, involved Dr. Darlington who called in his wife, a CIA analyst, to perform background and authentication research. You also are shifting the USS
Peleliu
‘just in case' by sending her on a high-speed run through the busiest seas on the planet.”

Again the pleasant nod from the President.

“And this is a well-contained, black-in-black operation by what definition?”

That sobered the expressions around the table.

Perhaps sarcasm hadn't been the right approach. She tried again.

“I know I'm the new person here, but how much farther has this proliferated? How reliable are the Iranian security teams that might have overheard President Madani and the First Lady speaking? Has it spread through to CIA's assistant researchers? Who in the 5D is cleared for this level of operation if we need an asset? Can we recruit Lieutenant Bill Bruce if we need another Delta asset? How big do these operations get, and how in the world do you keep them secret?”

She bit down on her tongue to stop herself. Here she was, questioning the integrity of the country's leader, but she had to know.

“Crap!” President Matthews dropped back in his chair and his wife settled beside him cradling the once-again sleeping girl. “I wish Emily was here. She ran four of these things, and she knew how to make them work. When I assigned them to her, they never failed.”

Claudia smiled, feeling oddly relaxed for the first time since boarding. “Don't you love it when there's no pressure?”

That won her a look of chagrin from the President.

“She was an amazing strategist.” Michael's tone held nothing but respect.

“And you and Mark were her tactical geniuses.”

Michael nodded his agreement to her assessment.

The President looked back and forth between them, then he shifted. That was the only way Claudia could think to describe it.

Up until this moment, he'd been casual and easygoing. So much at ease that Claudia found it difficult to believe that he was the President of the United States, Commander-in-Chief of the planet's best military force.

No longer.

Now he looked at her with deeply assessing dark eyes, studying her in the same way he probably studied his adversaries across the table at a G8 summit meeting. For a full minute, the silence stretched and it was hard to meet his frank scrutiny. When he finally turned aside to look at Michael, the pressure on her didn't ease.

Again that silent question she couldn't read, not even after she saw Michael's confirming nod in her peripheral vision. Then the Commander-in-Chief was facing her once more.

“You don't know me or my people, Captain Casperson, but I do know them. We also know you very well, far better than we did forty-eight hours ago. I'm about to do something that you're really going to hate.”

“Oh great!” She couldn't stop it. It just came out. It earned her a smile that did nothing to soften the cabin's unexpected pressure-cooker atmosphere.

“I can guarantee you that the inner circle of this operation is presently the four people around this table plus two in Washington. The head of my wife's personal protection detail is the woman who originally recruited the man who has headed my detail since before my nomination. If my wife wanted a private moment with President Madani, then I can promise you that it would have been truly private; she's very good at what she does.”

Claudia was used to the high stakes of military actions. But now she'd crossed into something “other.” She was now inside the Bubble, as the President's tight area of personal security was known. She'd wandered in unaware. But if there were truly only the six of them…

“Oh shit!” she said aloud and no one even blinked. She now understood the question that the President had just asked Michael, but could see no way to avoid the answer.

“Here's the part you're going to hate, Captain.”

She knew it!

Claudia tried to hold her breath, only to discover she already was. She had to blow it out and gasp back in to keep from passing out.

“From this moment forward”—the President tapped the table between them for emphasis—“no one will be authorized to expand the scope of this operation without your express permission. Not me, not Michael. I'm going to trust my instincts and pull this from Michael's tactical hands and put it in your strategic ones. You are under no obligation to report who your team members are to any other person, not to the other members, not even myself. It will be up to you how you compartmentalize that information, both up- and down-channel. Are we clear?”

At first all she managed was a nod. Then, digging deep, she sat up as straight as the seat and the table allowed and offered him her best salute. He returned it as smartly.

Then he shifted back to being the man she'd first been introduced to. He did it so effortlessly that he left her stumbling along behind. “So, Claudia, where were you when I blew apart your and Michael's vacation? Emily wouldn't say over the radio when I had our pilot ask, something about erasing it from her memory.”

They dropped the First Family at the U.S. Air Force Academy, unloading their passengers in the shadowed corner of a heavily guarded hangar.

They hadn't returned to discussing the mission for the remaining two hours of the flight.

When the First Lady discovered that they hadn't had breakfast, she'd gone to the galley herself to serve them: toaster waffles with blueberry syrup and steaming mugs of coffee. That was just fine with Claudia.

“When does the public get to see your daughter?” She'd hit the perfect note. It was straight from the Lieutenant Commander Boyd Ramis playbook of how to deal with impossibly awkward moments. She'd have to remember to thank him. No, because she'd then have to explain how she'd met the President, and Boyd was on the wrong side of a black-in-black operation. She'd get the hang of this eventually. Claudia just hoped it wouldn't be too late by the time she did so.

“Not just yet,” Genevieve Matthews replied in her softly French-accented voice. “We are perhaps too much enjoying keeping her to ourselves. But you are right. She is the first Presidential birth in the White House since 1893. It must be soon.”

“She is such a beautiful little girl.”

“That is her name.” The First Lady cooed at her daughter as she slept. “Adele for my mother just as I am named for my grandmother, Gloria for Peter's mother, Sebiya Matthews. Sebiya means ‘little sister.' A young friend of ours said she once had a cat named that. She looked both so sad and yet pleased when she told us about it that we gave our own girl that as a second middle name. It sounds so beautiful. And I think Dilya was really touched.”

“Dilya.” Claudia was clearly going nuts. “Adopted daughter of…”

“Kee and Archie,” the President acknowledged when she couldn't finish the sentence. “Little scamp was here with her father and grandmother right after the birth. You know her?”

Clearly
not!
“A little bit.” She wouldn't mention that the Secret Service was presently storing a folding bow and some arrows that were to be a gift to Dilya.

“Great kid.” The Commander-in-Chief was smiling—no, grinning—at even the mention of her.

“That girl,” Claudia felt compelled to remark, “was never a kid. And growing up on a Navy assault ship, she isn't getting any younger.” Then she heard her own tone. “Not being critical. Just an observation.”

“I understand what you are saying.” The First Lady shook her head. “I keep telling Archibald that it is not so good a way to raise his child. He is here in Washington so much, he should bring Dilya here full time. Perhaps you”—she addressed her husband—“can convince Kee she should work here as well. I think that just perhaps our protection details have need of another sniper on one of those teams of theirs.”

“Maybe.” The President clearly liked the idea.

After some thought, the First Lady startled and took her husband's hand.

“Oh, Peter, this we must do. Little Addie doesn't need a nurse much longer, but she needs a babysitter, an au pair.” She clapped her hands together. “It will be
parfait
! Dilya will go to local school and meet others her age, and she can help me. Then, when her parents must travel, she can stay with us.”

By the time they landed at Colorado Springs, Claudia decided that in addition to respecting her Commander-in-Chief, she also rather liked Peter Matthews and his wife.

Minutes later they were aloft and bound for DC.

Her brain was crammed with ideas and questions. The exhaustion of missing so much of last night's sleep was the last thing that mattered. She had an upcoming meeting with the CIA and the White House Chief of Staff.

How in the world was she supposed to command an operation half a world away when she had no idea of what the assets were or the people involved?

When the jet's landing gear squealed on the runway at Andrews Air Force Base, she jerked upright and checked her watch.

Impossibly, she'd just had three solid hours of sleep.

It still didn't make her feel one bit better.

After the lengthy meeting with the Chief of Staff and his wife aboard the echoingly empty backup of Air Force One in the hangar at Andrews, Claudia's need to get away had hit its limit.

Michael drove her along the Potomac to the Marines' HMX-1—the group who flew the Marine One helicopters for the President—where she “commandeered” a utility helicopter from General Arnson by using the simple technique of begging. After serving three tours as a Marine flier, she'd gotten to know the commander enough to borrow an old Black Hawk they used as a trainer. She needed to go somewhere private, and she needed to straighten some things out in her head.

Michael sat silently in the copilot's seat while she flew and the insane jangles of the last twelve hours slowly drained out of her.

“Just twelve hours?”

She could see Michael nod in her peripheral vision. “I'm sorry.” His voice was a soft caress over the intercom and the beating of the rotor blades.

“For what?” She flew south down the Chesapeake Bay, enjoying the setting sun and the dark blues and soft grays it brought out in the water.

“For how our trip ended. Dilya will be upset that I didn't get you to a beach for sand castling. Kid was right. You never know when the phone will ring.”

“You like her too?” Dilya was more adult than many of the soldiers she'd served with.

“Yes.” Michael's voice was sad. “Even that first day when Kee brought her in half starved to death, that girl was clearly smarter than most of us. But you're right, that girl was never a child.”

“What about you, Michael?” She took a vector off the Langley and Norfolk TACANs just for practice. She managed to verify her location within two hundred feet of where her GPS reported her. “Do you want children?” Where in the hell had that question come from? She knew she was just avoiding the larger issues at hand, but now that she'd asked, she found that she did want to know.

His silence stretched a long time. It was actually comforting in its familiarity. Far too many words had been thrown at her in the last few hours.

“I never expected to live long enough to have them.” Again, that odd sense of wonder in his tone as he discovered something new about himself. “But…I think…that I do. Especially—”

“What?”

This silence was different. This was his strong, silent-guy silence, and she wasn't having anything to do with that.

“What?” She pushed him again.

“Especially since I've met someone I'd like to have them with.”

Okay, that she hadn't been ready for. She considered asking “Who?” just to tease him. But Michael was such a straight man that he'd probably answer, and she really, really wasn't ready for that.

They continued south in silence past the Virginia border and over the Outer Banks islands of North Carolina. If she could fly forever and not run out of fuel, she'd be tempted, but regrettably running away had never been her style.

Finally, about an hour south of DC, she brought the helo down out of the sky and settled it in the dunes twenty miles north of where the Wright brothers had first flown in the Kill Devil Hills.

* * *

Michael had watched the last of the sunset bleed from the sky while they flew. Acknowledging that he wanted children had opened some hole in him. For twenty years he had thrown himself at every dangerous situation as if it were a game. Roll the dice, dive in, and prove that he could walk out the other side when not another soul could.

He'd hunted terrorists from Baghdad to Tokyo. Had walked the streets of Somalia and crawled through the opium fields of Myanmar's Golden Triangle. He was the man to get it done.

At ten, he could scale anything. At fourteen, he had discovered and measured the tallest redwood Titan there was, and told no one but his parents. They, in turn, had checked the height with a trusted friend to verify it was the tallest without revealing Nell's location. The day he'd signed up for the U.S. military, his parents had made Nell their last climb to honor his find. They were in their mid-fifties by then, and the big trees were getting beyond them. He hadn't been back to the top of Nell until he took Claudia.

But now she'd made him think about children, a possibility he'd never considered before. With Claudia such things seemed possible, even desirable. He was still younger than his parents had been when they'd had him.

Did that mean he'd retire from the service like Emily and Mark? That was wholly unimaginable. But he was certainly at the very senior end of being a field operative. SOAR pilots often flew right through their forties and fifties, but Delta was a younger man's game. He didn't want to leave the field, perhaps no more than Emily and Mark had wanted to.

Maybe he could make the same shift that Archie Stevenson had made. After his injury, he'd shifted to an Air Mission Commander role, even though his wife had remained in forward operations. If the President did pull him back to the White House as a full-time advisor, would Michael be willing to step into a similar role for the 5D? Could he, as Archie often did, design a mission that would send the woman he loved into harm's way?

Perhaps that was too high a price.

But to have children by Claudia? It was an opportunity that he'd definitely have to think about at some length.

She settled them in the dunes above a moonlit beach that stretched wide and empty in both directions. He followed when she climbed out of the helicopter and strolled down the beach and toward the ocean. She began shedding her clothes, first shoes, then socks, so that she walked barefoot on the shining white sand. Her T-shirt, pants, and underwear soon followed, scattered as if they were bread crumbs for him to follow. How could he not?

The woman's bare skin and light hair glowed beneath the quarter moon rising out of the Atlantic until she might well have been a goddess of old brought to life before him. He had never seen such beauty as Claudia strolling forward into the waves. And that she shared that beauty so freely with him humbled him.

Yet one more feeling that was new to him.

He was the best tree climber, the best ROTC student, had consistently been promoted at each rank on the first day he was eligible. Had managed to unravel the Delta training until he was always the maximum performer, the heart of each team he served with, and now their most senior officer ever to serve in the field.

But Claudia humbled him.

She outflew Emily Beale. She thought as quickly as any Delta operator in a crisis situation, a skill she'd proven several times in Somalia. And she'd taken to skywalking as if born to it.

Of course the President had seen that in her, giving her command of the present operation. He had been on the verge of making precisely that recommendation. He knew his own strengths—flexibility and reaction. He was only beginning to know hers—clear-sightedness and always thinking. Everything he did by instinct, she did by being smarter than everyone around her.

Only when the first wave broke warm over his shoes and soaked his pants up to the knees did he realize that he was following her mindlessly. He trotted back up the beach above the waves' reach and shed his own clothes. Then he followed her into the waves glittering in the moonlight.

They floated and swam in the warm Gulf Stream waters of North Carolina. He cataloged the time by the movement of the stars and moon across the sky because he couldn't help himself. He wanted to hold and cherish each precious hour he spent with her, even if it was only to swim in companionable silence.

Emerging from the water, she was lit as if by a thousand sparkles of light, each water droplet catching the moon and accenting a curve, a moment of motion. Unable to resist, he reached out and touched her incredible skin for the first time since he'd touched her hand on the Gulfstream. He had to prove to himself that she was real. He could feel her, but he still wasn't quite sure about the reality part. He'd had as many fantasies as the next man, but none matched Claudia in the flesh.

In answer to his touch, she turned and flowed into his arms. She lay her head on his shoulder and simply stopped there as if they were caught mid-moment in an infinite slow dance. The warm spring evening felt chilly on his drying skin, but neither of them moved to dry themselves off or get dressed. She simply leaned into him.

When his body's inevitable reaction to her occurred, she still didn't move from his arms. He'd never been so unself-conscious around a woman.

“I need you to be strong for me, Michael. I don't know how to do this.” Her voice was weary and soft as moonlight.

That she would ask such a thing of him made him feel stronger than perhaps he ever had before. He scooped her up in his arms and carried her back to where their clothes lay scattered. He set her on the pile of clothes and fetched the light jacket he'd been wearing to drape over her shoulders. Then he sat beside her and simply held her with no idea of what to do next.

“You are the most capable person I've ever met, Claudia. And that's saying something as I've known and flown with some exceptional people. You are the best of them.”

She patted his chest, keeping her head on his shoulder, her damp hair against his cheek. “That's sweet of you to say, my lover.”

He was going to protest that it was the truth, but her last words tied his chest up in knots. He had made love to many women, or at least had had highly consensual and enjoyable sex. A few had even called him their lover. But never before had it meant so much. He wanted to explain, to insist, to spill forth words until he was wrung dry, but he couldn't think of where or how to begin. So he kept it simple.

“You are the very best…my lover.” And merely saying the words aloud anchored the feeling like a grapple even deeper within him.

Again she patted his chest.

Well, what she needed most right now wasn't his adoration, but his strength. That's what she'd said, and he knew her well enough to believe her. For that, he damned well did know where to begin.

“Okay.” He kissed her atop her salt-damp hair to gather his own strength and stave off something of his body's need for hers. “Let's start with the beginning. First, what assets do we know, positively, that we need?”

Claudia's tight embrace, as close as she'd ever held him even during sex, told him that he'd done something right.

“We know we need Trisha and Bill.” Her voice sounded a little more like the confident woman he knew so well.

It was the most surreal mission planning session he'd ever held—in this case, literally. He'd done them in The Unit's headquarters just a couple hundred miles inland from here at Fort Bragg. He'd met teams in bombed-out Belgrade, in a cardboard hut in a Shanghai ghetto, and an upscale Brazilian condo. He had never before planned one while sitting mostly naked with a beautiful woman filling his arms on a moonlit beach.

Claudia eventually stood and pulled on her jeans. He did his best not to be disappointed, though she continued to wear his jacket unzipped, offering him the occasional heart-stopping glimpse of skin-colored moon shadow. He shrugged into his pants and T-shirt.

She began drawing in the sand. “This is the Caspian Sea, two hundred miles long and seven hundred north to south. Azerbaijan is in the west, sitting on top of one of the largest oil and gas reserves on the planet and friendly to the United States; Iran south, Turkmenistan to the east. Up north, Kazakhstan and then Russia completing the circle back to Azerbaijan.” A third of the way up from the bottom, she slashed a sideways line across the narrowest part of the sea.

“The Trans-Caspian Gas Pipeline,” Michael acknowledged.

“Proposed,” she amended.

“Proposed. And deeply opposed by both Iran and Russia on a supposedly environmental basis. Iran actually wants the pipeline to run overland through their country for the taxes, and Russia wants ships to pay large tariffs to use the thirteen locks of the Volga-Don Canal system.”

He knew he was simply repeating their briefing, but that was how the process worked: reinforce the familiar, then build on that to create the next layer of the known.

They never did build a sand castle, but about the time that dawn graced the deep Atlantic, he did help her remove his jacket.

They made slow, gentle love as if they weren't surrounded by a dozen drawings of an impossibly dangerous mission plan against a friendly foreign power. A mission that if it went wrong was going to kill them and start a war, a big one. A mission plan that would soon be erased by the incoming tide.