Defender (4 page)

“Captain Jimmy Gage,” he clasped her hand, his flight glove rasping against her tender skin.

When he didn’t so much as crack a smile or say anything more, she rushed to fill in the awkward silence. “Thank you for saving my life.” She’d said those words so many times to different doctors, and she was grateful. “I don’t know how I’ll ever be able to repay you.”

“No thanks necessary. It’s all in the job description.” His sports glasses hid any hint of emotion, as if to provide an extra layer of invincibility.

She struggled for something else to say, not ready to sound the final note on a sonata that didn’t feel played out. “What’s with all the different jersey colors on the navy folks? So far, I’ve seen yellow, purple, white, blue, red, and green.”

He shuffled from boot to boot, his head cocking toward his crew mates as if eager to leave before he finally settled into a military stance that shouted duty and mannerly protocol. “Each color stands for the different job held. That makes it easier to find the right person in the overpacked crush.”

“Interesting.” Oooo-kay. Brilliant reply. Her summa cum laude diploma wasn’t anywhere in sight today. She rubbed her hands along her arms. “The wind’s really whipping.”

“Do you need a fresh blanket?”

Blanket? If only she’d managed to secure one faster in the airplane. Her skin warmed from more than the setting sun.

“I’m all dry. You can use that megastar boom mic of yours,” she tapped the helmet/headset dangling from his grip, “to let everyone know my wet T-shirt peep show is over, and it doesn’t look like rain. Livia Cicero has already generated enough hype from her posters. Those guys don’t need to see the intimate Livia for real up close and exposed.”

She glanced over, and sure enough, the Italian diva’s cluster of admirers had swelled near the USO’s signature banner. A pair of backup dancers—Steven and Melanie, a girlfriend/boyfriend duo—circulated to keep the crowd happy while waiting. Unless Livia did some speed-signing, the show wouldn’t get started on time.

Jimmy Gage ducked his head into her line of sight, his shoulders blocking the view of the star and her fan club. “Did you need anything else, ma’am?”

Ma’am? She’d been the Little Mermaid earlier.

She wasn’t sure what she’d expected in speaking to him. A polite exchange and a quick laugh, maybe? He’d been so steady and reassuring earlier. Now it seemed her hottie savior had cooled off. “Nope, just had to say thank you for saving my life and covering me up before everyone in the plane saw my rack.”

A tic twitched in the corner of his eye. Because she’d said
rack
? “Ah, come on. You have to admit it was a serious tension buster after what we’d been through.”

“What
you’ve
been through.” He nodded his head slowly, his features tightening. “Right. You’ll have to pardon me if I’m not finding the whole peep show quite so mood-lifting.”

Okay then. Way to go throwing a wet blanket over the rest of the day. “Well, uh, fair enough. I have to hit the stage now. Gotta warm up my background singer doowops.”

She started to turn when an even heavier wet blanket—metaphorically speaking—hit her. How could she have forgotten such an all-important detail? Just because some flyboy crossed her path?

Chloe faced him again, wind tangling curls she still hadn’t figured out how to tame. “I really”—
really
—“hate to ask this. But after the show, could you help me navigate this place and find the ship’s doctor?”

His irritability morphed to alert attention. “Why didn’t you tell us straight up you’d been hurt during the explosion? We’ll find the ship’s doc right now. The show can do without you.”

“No, no, really. I’m not hurt. I, uh . . .” God, it was hard enough talking to a new doctor about something as personal, as intrinsically private, as her organ transplant surgery. She definitely couldn’t share it with this standoffish stranger, even if he’d saved her life. “I have bad allergies, and if I don’t take care of them by tonight, I won’t be able to sing tomorrow. I packed plenty of medication,” antirejection drugs and an assortment of others, “in my luggage, which has all been sent to our lodgings onshore. I had enough for a couple of days stashed in my purse, but my bag is now either ashes or at the bottom of the sea.”

“You have allergies?” He peered at her over the top of his shades, irritation returning clear as day.

She liked the sunglasses in place better than his unshaded eyes, after all. “Never mind. If you’re too busy to help me, I’ll ask someone else.”

“Not a problem.” He held up a hand with a beleaguered sigh. “I’ll be waiting for you after the show.”

It felt disloyal to be torqued off at the guy who’d just saved her life, but Jimmy Gage was one uptight dude.

She couldn’t have stopped the words bubbling out if she’d tried. She didn’t try. “Well, who shot your cat?”

“Shot my cat?”

“Who pissed you off? I’m really sorry to be such a bother.”

“A bother? A
bother
?” He stepped closer, his scowling eyebrows sinking below the top of his sunglasses.

Silently, she held her ground, refusing to be afraid.

Besides, it wasn’t like he could hurt her with so many witnesses around.

“Listen, Shirley Temple,” he batted aside a blond curl snaking on the wind toward his face, “my crew and I are a little short on time right now because you and your show people just had to have a fancy escort and fanfare. You couldn’t simply arrive covertly and do your performance.” He was practically nose to nose with her, the scent of aftershave, salty water, and something unmistakably masculine teasing her nose. “We’re in the Middle East. It’s dangerous. People could have died out there today because you and your group put yourselves—and thereby us—in unnecessary danger.”

She started to shoot right back at him that how they arrived wasn’t
her
decision. And she’d given up a prime performance in Atlanta to be here on this boat, entertaining troops like him who put their lives on the line for their country. She deserved thanks, not—

Except she wasn’t here for gratitude. She’d traveled across the globe to repay a debt to another soldier who’d saved her life with a donor card. In honor of that dead servicewoman’s sacrifice, Chloe would keep her angry words to herself.

She scavenged for her dignified conductor’s calm and hoped it wasn’t totally negated by her go-go getup. “I apologize on behalf of us all for any risks or scheduling problems we caused. Thank you again for what you did for me earlier and for escorting us safely to the USS
Roosevelt
.”

She turned and walked away. Not that she had any idea where the performers were supposed to gather backstage. But she would hook up with Livia over by the stage rather than lose face by wandering around asking for directions. And she absolutely would not look back to see if Captain Jimmy Gage was watching her walk away.

Forget him. In spite of his offer, she would find someone else to direct her to the ship’s doctor for her medicine. Chloe turned her attention to the stage and her upcoming performance.

She only had to get through the next three hours, and then she would never have to worry about crossing paths with Jimmy Gage again.

THREE

Jimmy gripped the steel bars and clanked down the ship ladder for his flight debriefing belowdecks. The distant sound of music above offered a reminder of how he’d lost it with Chloe Nelson.

On a normal day, he would have been able to keep his anger in check. Yeah, he’d meant what he said about resenting how they’d all been put at risk for the sake of a showy arrival. And hell yeah, he knew he’d been curt because this mess with Chuck reminded him of his own unresolved crap from Afghanistan, the way he’d failed Socrates. But most of all, his brain roiled with thoughts of what even the smallest delay could cost Chuck. If his own rescue had come a few hours later, he would have been headless.

No one would die on his watch ever again.

Jimmy’s boots thudded against the metal floor. He simply hadn’t been able to scavenge much sympathy for Chloe Nelson’s allergies. Not with what Chuck must be going through. And especially not after how he’d seen his sister fight a crippling battle with leukemia with such a fearless spirit. He’d dedicated his air force career to carrying on that same spirit.

He may have promised to help Chloe after her show, but he didn’t have the time or inclination to dissect why he found the cranky mermaid look so damn sexy.

Jimmy strode deeper into the belly of the ship. What a freaking mess with all the pipes and wires running across an already too-low ceiling. Even if he asked for directions, sailors had a different name for everything, like how they called the ceiling the overhead.

Then there was that funky smell: eau d’aviation fuel and military surplus store. Every space below was jam-packed and musty. Being in a cramped plane was one thing, since it only lasted a few hours, but to live that way for months on end? Definitely different strokes for different folks.

He turned down a passageway and stopped short before slamming into a hulking SEAL. “ ’Scuse me.”

“No worries, sir.” The special ops warrior disappeared around a corner.

Jimmy looked left, then right, about ready to flip a coin. He could have sworn the map pointed him this way. He turned around and went back through an opened hatch.

Success.

He charged ahead into the small metal cavern that would serve as their secured meeting space, the first to arrive. After his flight debrief, he would hook Chloe up with a doctor and label this one of life’s odd encounters.

His boots thunked metal as he made his way across the room. A hand clamped on his shoulder. He looked back to find Vapor—with a big smile on his ugly mug.

“Shit, Vapor, you’ve really got to stop sneaking up like that, or I’m gonna have to rename you Casper.”

“All those names you like to come up with for me, and you still can’t find a decent biker one.” Vapor thumbed up toward the music. “So, are you looking to tap that?”

No need to badger Vince by asking who he meant. Jimmy knew his chitchat with Chloe Nelson wouldn’t have gone unnoticed. “No mixing business with pleasure.”

“Since when?”

“Since about five fucking minutes ago.”

“Someone missed his morning java.”

Jimmy scanned the room for somewhere to sit. By himself. He often wondered if the furniture in these places was put in while the boat was under construction and never replaced. Everything looked the same: sturdy metal painted gray.

Smooth ducked into the room and toward the simmering pot on a corner table. “Maybe he’s holding out for the star, the Cicero lady.”

Cicero? He thought of her signing autographs, aloof in a sultry way, her hair somehow looking deliberately tousled even though she’d been dunked in the ocean. Not his type. Too . . . Just too.

Something about Chloe struck him as more real.
Irritating
, but real.

He eyed the coffeepot. Sludge sounded good right about now.

Vapor pulled up alongside him, mumbling, “Where are the doughnuts? Don’t they know aviators need doughnuts? It’s a ritual, for God’s sake. This break with tradition could doom our next flight.”

“Go look for them out there. Your nose must be failing you.” Jimmy pointed past the flat screen monitor suspended from the ceiling toward the door. Once he found food, Vapor would be too occupied to harp on the backup singer. The guy never seemed to get full.

The squadron commander filled the hatch, not scowling exactly, but certainly not smiling. “Can we quit the
Match.com
meets
Top Chef
routine long enough to take care of some minor international security issues?” Lieutenant Colonel Scanlon pushed deeper into the room. “Our contact from the National Security Agency has flown over from Turkey to update us on the latest about the boat explosion. A fighter ferrying him in from Incirlik Air Base landed on the deck while you were busy chatting up the showgirl.”

Putting Chloe Nelson into the past wouldn’t be as simple to accomplish if his crew kept this up.

Scanlon hefted his flight bag on a long, narrow table in front of a row of chairs and pulled out a file. “I don’t know about you, but I would like to get Agent Nunez’s take on why we had to interrupt our mission for some deep-sea fishing.”

Silence hung heavy while they took their seats. Jimmy could overlook the boss man’s grouchiness. They all did. Scanlon’s wife had died only six months ago. He wasn’t a ray of sunshine, but he was getting the job done at a time in his life when no one would have blamed him for reaching for a bottle of antidepressants.

Vapor scrubbed his bald head. “I was kinda hoping the boat incident could be blamed on one of those swabbies setting off a cherry bomb in the head.”

The boss sat scrolling through messages on his BlackBerry while talking. “A mechanical failure would be the best case scenario, gentlemen.”

Vapor pinched off a piece of the Styrofoam on his cup and pitched it into his empty drink. “Too bad their engine mechanics didn’t have me to help work out the kinks on their new model.”

Nobody liked to mention the big
T
word, but being on guard against terrorism was a part of their daily life, especially in this region of the world.

Jimmy cracked his knuckles. “Or it was a bomb. There are plenty of people on the south side of the Med who don’t like us.” And how ironic was that for him, given he actually had distant relatives from the area? Relatives who could end up popping him if things on this op soured. “Sorta hard to sift through all the crazies. I am assuming no Peoples’ Brotherhood of American Haters has taken responsibility, so really, it’s just all a guess. I say we carry on like there are bad guys out there and really watch our six.”

Smooth tapped his boot in time with the throbbing pulse of the music from above. “True that, true that. The day has been a big bite in the ass, and to add insult to injury, we’re missing all those smokin’-hot babes in the show. If it started raining on those costumes—”

“Watch your mouth, Romeo.” The words fell out of Jimmy’s mouth before he could stop and think how they would only fuel more talk about him and the backup singer.

Footsteps rattling out in the corridor saved him from further razzing.

The clanking grew louder, closer, until the open hatch filled with a female ensign standing beside the other new-comer, who was not in uniform.

A gray-haired man who looked to be local and about sixty years old waited in the opening. His dark clothing appeared to be some kind of groundskeeper’s garb, complete with dirt staining the cuffs of his loose-fitting pants.

The ensign swept a hand into the room. “Here we are, Agent Nunez.”

Agent?
Jimmy straightened in his chair, his eyes following the old Turkish man while the ensign continued talking.

“We’ve set up the video equipment you requested. I’ll be right outside in the hall if you need anything else.”

“Thank you, Ensign,” a distinctly American accent came from the guy’s mouth. He walked into the room confidently, briskly, carrying a laptop computer under his arm.

The ensign stepped out and closed the hatch behind her, sealing them in with the “gardener,” who was apparently Agent Nunez.

“Pardon my appearance, gentlemen, I came in straight out of the field.” He cocked a silver brow. “Literally and figuratively. I’ve been collecting data in and around Incirlik, where three of the soldiers disappeared.”

The more the man spoke, the more the years peeled away from his appearance. Wrinkles relaxed from his face, and his movements were quick and efficient as he connected his laptop to the projector. Nunez had either gone prematurely gray or dyed his hair, because the man before them now couldn’t be older than forty.

This guy was good.

Nunez fired up the screen with a blazing white light, the slide changer gripped in his dirt-stained fist. “As you know, service members in the Middle East and Eastern Europe have been going missing, eleven to date.” Slides clicked with official military photos, somber faces from different services. All in uniform with an American flag in the background. “Seven bodies were recovered, and four were listed as still MIA or AWOL.”

No way in hell was Chuck AWOL. Even the suggestion made Jimmy fighting mad. He forced his hands to stay loose while he listened to the agent.

“Those numbers have changed.”

Oh shit.

A new slide came onto the screen of a Turkish side street. “We found a dead army sergeant an hour ago in an alley, made to appear like a bar hookup with a prostitute gone wrong.”

Not Chuck. Thank God. But still someone’s friend or son.

“The other three are still missing. We don’t believe these are random terrorist kidnappings but rather an organized network attempting to gain top secret operational and technological information. There is also a chance that they are attempting to turn some of those captured into spies for their side.”

Nunez clicked a button, and Chuck Tanaka’s photo filled the screen. “Lucky for us, Captain Tanaka is assigned to your dark ops test squadron.”

Jimmy forced his eyes to stay front, even as his fists went numb from clenching.

“Thanks to the nanosensor your unit implanted under his skin for testing, we’ve been able to narrow the search to this region and begin gathering preliminary data. The sensor monitoring his biometrics shows he’s still alive.” The agent paused long enough for a collective exhalation of relief.

“Thanks to the information periodically transmitted via low-power signal to cell phone towers, to satellites, and finally to a control center, we’ve been able to discern the captain has been drugged, and we know what those drugs are. Sadly, the low power of the nanosensor and the experimental nature leaves our information far from perfect.”

A few more weeks, and they could have had that tracking device perfected, damn it.

Nunez clicked the PowerPoint slide to a small grid on a map. “We have his location narrowed down to a five-mile area. Contact with the sensor is spotty without a GPS-quality position indicator. Are there any questions thus far?”

Lieutenant Colonel Scanlon stroked a thumb over his BlackBerry. “We’re with you so far. Please continue.”

“Thank you, Colonel,” Nunez answered, appropriately dropping the
lieutenant
part of the commander’s rank in conversation, a protocol quirk of military lingo.

Nunez pushed a button on the podium, and the slide changed to an expanded map of Turkey. “With CIA paramilitary operatives already in place and your newly acquired CV-22 tilt-rotor, we plan to combine your latest aerial surveillance technology and the ground intelligence. We’re confident we can trace the enemy’s chain of command and launch a rescue mission.”

Scanlon slid aside his BlackBerry with the barest hint of impatience. “With all due respect, you’re not telling us anything we don’t already know. I sense you’ve got another shoe to drop in your presentation, Agent Nunez.”

“Right you are, Colonel.” The image on the screen shifted to an image of the USO boarding a C-17 back in the States. “The explosion today threw a monkey wrench in our plans. The troupe was supposed to make a one-show stop at Incirlik Air Base before heading on to Iraq and Afghanistan. Now, however, due to raised security concerns, they will be staying at Incirlik until authorities can trace the source of the explosion.”

He clicked to the next slide, a promotional photo featuring a lineup of females performing. Chloe Nelson’s blond mess of curls shone like a beacon from the back row. “Waiting for the USO group to leave Turkey risks too much time for Captain Tanaka, and as of now, no one is willing to cancel the tour altogether.”

Jimmy could see what was coming like an unavoidable crash before Nunez even continued.

“I propose your crew continues to act as their official escort to Turkey, to provide protection for them on that newly extended leg of their trip.” The crash landing just kept powering closer and closer. “This also offers an even more plausible cover story for your stay in Turkey.”

Impact.

The music swelled overhead as if to taunt him.

So much for adios to the Little Mermaid.

Four hours later, Agent Mike Nunez sat strapped in the back of the CV-22 with the USO troupe, the plane bound for Turkey. His groundskeeper persona was now dead to him.

No grieving necessary, though. He’d died more times than he could count. That was his job.

He changed names and identities for undercover ops so often, his body had become a hull to be retooled for each assignment. A hull with one helluva brain packed with intelligence and the skills to keep himself alive for the next rebirth.

Right now, he only needed the brain. The body could hang out in the camo they’d loaned him after he took a quick shower to get rid of the gray coloring sprayed on his hair.

He wasn’t overly enthused about his exposure to the USO troupe as he sat with them in the aircraft’s cargo hold, but ultimately he had confidence in his ability to change his appearance enough that anyone in this cavernous hold could walk past his next persona—Miguel Carvalho—and not recognize him as the dude sitting here now.

But he wasn’t depending only on his own skills.