Defender (26 page)

He smacked the book against his palm for emphasis.

She plucked it from his fingers and fanned herself. “Am I about to get another martial arts lesson from Mars, god of war?”

He hooked a warm, muscled arm around her waist and ducked into a more private corner out of the human traffic flow. “I’ve learned you’re more than capable of protecting yourself. You know, they say Amazons hailed from a place that’s now part of modern-day Turkey.”

“Amazon, huh? I think I like that nickname best of all. I take it that means you haven’t come with a pair of bodyguards for my journey home?”

He didn’t laugh. “I’m sorry for what I said back in your room at Incirlik.”

“You already apologized shortly after you dragged me out of the water.” But it felt good hearing it again. She needed for him to value her strength, a hard-won strength.

He pulled her in closer. “But I didn’t explain why I mean it. I wasn’t just spouting off some bullshit because you scared the hell out of me.”

Love for him tumbled through her all over again. Jimmy didn’t admit vulnerability lightly—or eloquently. “You were scared?”

“Damn right I was. Then I saw you kick that bitch’s butt. God, Chloe, you were as amazing that night as you are playing the piano.”

“You were mighty darn amazing yourself with the guns and crawling into the water.” His confidence in her strength stirred her more than any moving Brahms ballade or passionate Rachmaninoff offering. Jimmy was all the best melodies strumming over her emotions at once. “So you think I have a serious future as an Amazon warrior?”

“I’m not sure my heart could take your going pro with that, but if it’s what you really want, I’m a hundred percent on board.” His head fell to rest on hers. “I love you, Chloe. I love the way you calm me with your music and voice and lavender soap. I love the way you fire me up with your temper and conviction and smoking-hot body. I especially love the way you can absolutely take care of yourself. Damn it, I just love you.”

She cupped the back of his head to anchor herself in this moment, since Jimmy had a way of sending her soaring. “That’s a wonderful thing, because I happen to love you, too.”

“So you told me seven days ago when you nearly had your way with me in the cargo hold in front of my crew.”

“Oh, I did, didn’t I? I just want you to hear why I mean it.”

“That sounds good to me. How about you tell me at length over supper sometime back in Atlanta?”

“You’re making a trip to Atlanta, are you?”

“I’ve got some leave time built up. Let’s spend a couple of weeks hanging out, making love, watching that ‘Tribble’
Star Trek
episode. Figure out how to make a cross-country relationship work.”

“That would be time very well-spent. Given we’re both such determined people, I’m sure we can come up with the perfect plan.” She grinned up at him, staring her fill until she realized they’d stood there so long the backstage crowd had dwindled. She tapped the tab of the long zipper on his flight suit. “So you flew today.”

He grinned back. “I sure didn’t hitchhike.”

She walked her fingers down his arm, tugging him along in an unmistakable invitation. “I think you need a shower.”

“We, my Amazon maestra.” He squeezed her hand, his boots picking up the pace toward her quarters waiting with a fresh bar of lavender soap. “From now on, we’re one helluva team.”

Turn the page for a preview of
the next Dark Ops Novel by Catherine Mann
HOTSHOT
Coming May 2009 from Berkley Sensation!

HONDURAS, PRESENT DAY

Major Vince “Vapor” Deluca didn’t need to ask if there were Harleys in heaven. For him, hogs and planes both transported him from this world to brush the edge of paradise.

Not to mention both had saved his hell-bound ass on more than one occasion. And right now, he needed some of that heavenly salvation—on wings rather than wheels—in a serious way if he expected to pull off this potentially explosive mission.

Flying his AC-130 gunship at twenty-five thousand feet, Vince peered into a monitor at the increasingly restless crowd below in the rural Honduran town. With the help of his twelve crew members, he monitored the citizens pouring out of the hills to cast their votes in the special election, an election that could turn volatile in a heartbeat. The politics of this country were precarious and warlords were determined to stop the process. Local government officials had requested U.S. help with crowd control, using any means possible to keep the peace.

Vince cranked the yoke into a tight turn, flying over the voting place, a white wooden church. The sensors bristled along the side of the aircraft to scan the snaking crowd lining up. His sensors were so good the guys in back were able to study faces, gestures, and even guns worn like fashion accessories.

He knew too well how mob mentality could unleash an atomic
Lord of the Flies
destructive force.

His fists clenched around the yoke. “Okay, crew, eyeballs out. Let’s score one for democracy.”

“Vapor,” the fire control officer, David “Ice” Berg, droned from the back, as cool and calm as his name implied, “take a look at this dude in the camera. I think he’s the ringleader.”

Vince checked the screen, and yeah, that guy had whacko written all over him. “He seems like a hard-core cheerleader yelling and flapping his arms around.”

Copilot Jimmy Gage thumbed his interphone. “Those gymnastics of his are working.” Jimmy’s fists clenched and unclenched as if ready to break up the brawl mano a mano. He’d earned his call sign Hotwire honestly. Vince’s best bud, they’d often been dubbed in bars the Hotwire and the Hotshot. “The crowd’s getting riled up down there. Hey, Berg, do things look any better from your bird’s-eye view?”

“Give me a
C
for chaos,” Berg answered, dry as ever.

Vince worked his combat boots over the rudders while keeping his eyes locked on the screen scrolling an up-close look at the ground. “Roger that. All Cheerleader Barbie needs is a ponytail and a pair of pom-poms instead of that big-ass gun slung over his shoulder.” A riot seemed increasingly inevitable, which was not surprising, since human intel had already uncovered countless attempts to terrorize voters into staying home. “Barbie definitely bears watching, especially with those ankle biters around.”

He monitored the group of children playing on swings nearby while adults waited to vote. Conventional crowd-control techniques could sometimes escalate the frenzy. This mission called for something different, something new. Something right up his alley as a member of the air force’s elite dark ops testing unit. In emergency situations they were called upon to pull a trick or two from their developmental arsenal and pray it worked as advertised, since failure could spark an international incident, or, worse yet, harm a kid.

Today, he and his dark ops crew were flying the latest brainchild of the nonlethal weapons crowd. A flat microwave antenna protruded from the side of the lumbering aircraft. The ADS—Active Denial System—had the power to scorch people without leaving marks. Testing showed that as it heated up the insides, people scattered like ants from a hill after a swift kick.

Uncomfortable, but preferable to a lethal bullet.

Jimmy made a notation in his flight log. “Careful with your bank there, Vapor. Getting a little shallow.” Once his pencil slowed, he glanced over at Vince. “Barbie might be providing a distraction for someone else to make a move.”

Valid point. He increased the bank and smoothed the action with a touch of rudder. “Good thing there are thirteen of us to scan the mob, because we’re going to need all eyes out.”

A string of acknowledgments echoed over Vince’s headset just as Barbie grabbed the butt of his rifle and—
slam
—the past merged with the present.

A group of misfit teens festering with discontent. Four hands hauling him from his Kawasaki rat bike. Screaming. Gunshots.

A girl in the way.

Sweat stinging his eyes now as well as then, Vince reached up to adjust his air vents for like the nine hundredth time since takeoff. How could they make this airplane so high-tech and not get the damn air-conditioning to work?

“Time’s run out for Barbie.” The rattling plane vibrated through his boots all the way up to his teeth. “Crank it, Berg.”

“Concur,” the fire control officer drawled from the back. “Let’s light him up.”

“I’m in parameters, aircraft stable, cleared to engage.” Vince monitored as a crosshair tuned in on the infrared screen in front of him and centered on the troublemaker. He hoped this would work, prayed this guy was a low-level troublemaker and not one of the area’s ruthless mercenaries. He didn’t relish the thought of the situation escalating into a need for the more conventional guns aft of the nonlethal ADS.

That wouldn’t go well for the “get out the vote” effort.

“Ready,” Berg called.

“Cleared to fire,” answered Vapor.

“Firing . . .”

No special sounds or even so much as a vibration went through the craft. The only way to measure success was to watch and wait and . . .

Bingo.

Barbie started hopping around like he’d been stung by a swarm of bees. His AK-47 dropped from his hand onto the dusty ground. The crowd stilled at the dude’s strange behavior, all heads turning toward him as if looking for an explanation.

Jimmy twitched in his seat. “I halfway wanna laugh at the poor bastard, except I know how bad the ADS stings.”

“Amen, brother.” Before integrating the ADS onto the airplane, they’d tested it on themselves. It was disorienting and unpleasant, to say the least, but not damaging.

He was willing to take that searing discomfort and more to power through developing this particular brainchild, a personal quest for him. He could have been on the side of the evil cheerleader today if not for one person: a half-crazy old war vet who took on screwed-up teens that most good citizens avoided on the street. Don Bassett had never asked for anything in return.

Until this morning.

Vince relegated that BlackBerry e-mail he’d received minutes before takeoff to the back of his mind. “No time to get complacent, everybody. Keep looking. I can’t imagine our activist with the automatic weapon is alone.”

The system had the capability to sweep the whole group with a broader band, but he hoped that wouldn’t be necessary, as it would likely shut down voting altogether.

Badass Barbie shook his head quickly, looked around, then leapt toward his AK-47 lying in the dust.

Berg centered the crosshairs again. “I think he needs another taste.”

Vapor replied, “Roger. Cleared to fire.”

“Firing . . .”

The rabble-rouser again launched into some kind of erratic pep rally routine.

“Stay on him.” Vince eyed the monitor, heart drumming in time with the roaring engines. “Run him away from the crowd.”

Berg kept the crosshairs planted on the troublemaker as he attempted to escape the heat. The wiry man sidled away. Faster. Faster again, until he gave up and broke into a sprint, disappearing around a corner of the building.

Hell, yeah.

Vince continued banking left over the village so the cameras could monitor the horde. As hoped, the crowd seemed to chat among themselves for a while, some looking up at the plane, discussing, then slowly re-forming a line to the church.

Cheers from the crew zipped through the headset for one full circle around the now-peaceful gathering. Things could still stir up in a heartbeat, but the pop from the ADS had definitely increased the odds for the good guys.

God, he loved it when a plan came together. “Crew, let’s run an oxygen check and get back in the game.”

His crew called in one by one in the same order as specified in the aircraft technical order, ending with Vince.

He monitored his oxygen panel. “Pilot check complete.”

With luck, the rest of the election would go as smoothly, and they would be back in the good ole U.S. of A. tomorrow night.

Five peaceful hours later, Vince cranked the yoke, guiding the AC-130 into a roll, heading for the base, where he would debrief this mission and lay out plans for their return home.

And contact Don Bassett.

Vince finally let the message flood his mind. He couldn’t simply ignore the note stored on his BlackBerry. The e-mail scrolled through his head faster than data on his control panel.

I need your help. My daughter’s in danger.

That in and of itself wasn’t a surprise. Bassett’s only daughter had been flirting with death before she even got her braces off. Her parents kept bailing out Shay’s ungrateful butt. What did surprise him, however, was Don asking for help. The dude was a giver, not a taker. Meaning that for whatever reason, he must be desperate.

Not that the reason even mattered. Whatever the old guy wanted, he could have. If not for Don Bassett’s intervention seventeen years ago, Vince wouldn’t need a motorcycle or airplane to transport him from his fucked-up world.

Because seventeen years ago, he’d led the riots.

Seventeen years ago, one of his fellow gang members had been gunned down by cops just doing their jobs.

Seventeen years ago, he could have been looking at twenty-five to life.

* CLEVELAND, OHIO, TWO DAYS LATER

“Suicide hotline. This is Shay.” Shay Bassett wheeled her office chair closer to her desk. Tucking the phone under her chin, she shoved aside the steaming cup of java she craved more than air.

“I need help,” a husky voice whispered.

Shay snagged a pencil and began jotting notes about the person in crisis on the other end of the line.

Male.
Teen?

“I’m here to listen. Could you give me a name to call you by?” Something, anything to thread a personal connection through the phone line.

“John, I’m John, and I hurt so much. If I don’t get relief soon, I’ll kill myself.”

His words clamped a corpse-cold fist around her heart. She understood the pain of these callers, too much so, until sometimes she struggled for objectivity.

Shay zoned out everything but the voice and her notes.

Voice stronger, deeper.
Older teen.
Background noise, soft music.
Bedroom or dorm?

She scribbled furiously, her elbow anchoring the community center notepad so the window fan wouldn’t ruffle the pages. “John, have you done anything to harm yourself?”

“Not yet.”

“I’m really glad to hear that.” Still, she didn’t relax back into the creaky old chair in spite of killer exhaustion from pulling a ten-hour shift at the community center’s small health clinic on top of volunteering to man the hotline this evening. “Can you tell me what’s wrong?”

His breathing grew heavier, faster. “The line for one nine hundred do-me-now is busy, and if I don’t get some phone sex soon, I’m gonna explode.” Laughter echoed in the background, no doubt a bunch of wasted frat boys listening in on speakerphone. “How about you give me some more of those husky tones, baby, so I can—”

“Good-bye, John.” She thumbed the Off button.

What an ass. Not to mention a waste of her precious time and resources. She pitched her pencil onto a stack of HIV awareness brochures.

The small community center in downtown Cleveland was already understaffed and underfunded, at the mercy of fickle government grants and the sporadic largesse of benefactors. Different from bigger free clinics, they targeted their services toward teens. Doctors volunteered when they could, but the place operated primarily on the backs of her skills as a nurse, along with social worker, Angeline, and youth activities director, Eli.

Bouncing a basketball on the cracked tile, Eli spun his chair to face her, his blond dreadlocks fanning along his back. “Another call for a free pizza?”

“A request for phone sex.” She pulled three sugar packets from her desk drawer.

“Ewww.” Angeline leaned her hip against her desk, working a juggling act with her purse, files, and cane.

Only in her fifties, Angeline already suffered from arthritis aggravated by the bitter winters blowing in off Lake Erie. Of course that was Cleveland for you, frigid in the winter and a furnace in the summer.

Forecast for today? Furnace season. The fan sucked muggy night air through the window.

“I apologize for my gender.” Eli kept smacking the ball, the thumping steady as a ticking clock.

“Who said it was a guy?” Shay tapped a sugar packet, then ripped it open.

Angeline jabbed her parrot-head cane toward Shay. “You called the person John.”

“Busted.” She poured the last of the three sugars into the coffee, her supper since she’d missed eating with her dad. No surprise. They canceled more plans than they kept.

Angeline hitched her bag the size of the Grand Canyon onto her shoulder. “Always testing the boundaries, aren’t ya, kiddo?”

Not so much anymore. “Calls like that just piss me off. What if someone in a serious crisis was trying to get through and had to be rerouted? That brief delay, any hint of a rejection, could be enough to push a person over the edge.”

“You’re preaching to the choir here.” Angeline’s cell phone sang with the bluesy tones of “Let’s Get It On.” “Shit. I forgot to call Carl back.”

Eli tied back two dreads to secure the rest of the blond mass. “Apparently we’re in the phone sex business after all.”

“Don’t be a smart-ass.” Angeline stuffed another file into her bag that likely now weighed more than the wiry woman.

“Nice talk. Why don’t I walk you to your car?” He slid the neon yellow purse from her shoulder and hooked it on his own.