Wait Until Dark (The Night Stalkers) (19 page)

The call came and John packed quickly to leave.

He could now. He’d had the days to mourn, though the grief was still a constant companion. The younger kids had made Christmas morning what it was supposed to be, and the grown-ups had managed to enter into at least some of the spirit of it.

Good old Paps had moved himself into Grumps’s chair so that it wasn’t an empty space in the room. “Good enough for him is good enough for me.” Nori had gotten all sniffly and sat in his lap for a long while despite being a girl grown.

And fate and the Army had allowed him to be there one more day for the burial out in the old family plot and the wake that followed.

Mama stopped him as he headed for the front door. He hugged her hard but she didn’t let him go.

“Paps is waiting, Mama.”

“Let him wait a minute.”

“Army’s waiting.” Once the call came, every fiber in his body shifted into action mode.

“They can wait a damn minute, too.”

You didn’t argue when Mama dug in her heels.

“I was so angry when your father died.”

John felt the gut punch land. His bag slipped from nerveless fingers to plop on the kitchen floor. His next breath ached as his lungs dragged for air.

“Even angrier at him for dying before you were born than that drunk driver who killed them both.”

He tried to turn away, but she rested a hand lightly on his cheek to stop him.

“Paul had been crazy about me from the first moment we met. Might’ve married him anyway if we’d met first. Grumps and Liza raised good boys. You know why we all call him Paps.”

John knew, even as his mother repeated the rarely spoken truth.

“So you wouldn’t have to choose which to call your father.”

John closed his eyes. He couldn’t face her.

“Why are you telling me this? Why now?”

Mama pulled him close and held him. Held him until he remembered the smell of home. Held him until he felt less frantic inside.

She leaned back and looked up into his eyes.

“Sometimes it does a body good to be reminded. Think about that the next time you find yourself really stuck. Think about the two good men you had as fathers.”

He kissed her cheek, “And the one good woman.”

“Damn straight!” She pushed at his shoulder. “Now get outta my kitchen, boy. You’re holding up the whole operation.”

He retrieved the bag and made it to the door and turned back to look at her. To look at the strength of a good woman.

“I love you, Mama.”

She didn’t turn from where she faced the empty stove. “Love you too, honey. Now scoot.”

John caught a flight just across the river at the Oklahoma National Guard’s Camp Gruber Maneuver Training Center, and three hours later he was pulling into Fort Campbell. His sadness had been replaced. Replaced with a seething anger that had grown over the last three days until it was a hard ball inside his gut that he didn’t know what to do with. It sat there and burned. His mama had packed him a great lunch for the road and he’d thrown it out right after they dropped him off. He couldn’t even eat the damned candy bar they’d offered him on the flight.

When he made it through security on the base, the only thing he could think was it was damn good he hadn’t seen Davis or he’d be in the brig right now just for the thoughts of what he’d like to do to her.

He could understand, kind of, why she’d want to be gone. She didn’t do well with people and there’d been a lot of people. But she’d left. She hadn’t stayed to honor Grumps’s memory. She hadn’t stayed for him. He’d imagined more. He’d trusted there could be…

Thankfully, she also wasn’t the first person he ran into on entering the lobby of Grimm Hall.

“Sergeant Kee Stevenson III, you are just all smiles and glows.” He wrapped her up in a bear hug, lifting her feet well clear of the ground. She hugged him back and planted a big kiss on his nose.

“Hey, put down my wife.”

“No! Mine!” He told Archie as he hugged Kee again. “Damn! Wish you were the one coming with us.”

“Can’t. We gotta get trained up on your fancy new toy. We hear that you proved it out at the Nevada Test Range and now we’ve gotta get up to speed.”

He set her back down on the carpeting and extended a hand to Archie. “You caught a good one here, Captain. How’s the kid?”

“You wouldn’t recognize her. Jeans, turtleneck, and iPod. Not sneakers, though, boots. I think it’s just in case she ever has to make a long walk again, which she won’t. The music she likes is really strange.”

“Indie rock?”

“Broadway show tunes. The kid is singing along all the time.”

“Sweet!” He could just imagine it, the Uzbekistani orphan they’d adopted singing about climbing every mountain and dancing in the rain, a commodity she’d rarely seen in her life until a just a few months ago.

“We’re outta here.” Archie shook his hand again. “We’ll catch up with you in a week or so, wherever you are. Where are you headed?”

“Can’t be soon enough. And no briefing yet on where we’re going. But they called us back in, so it’s probably time to get back on it.” John didn’t ask Archie about the wreckage the bullet had made of his shoulder. Didn’t need to. The man’s grip was strong and sure, and his shoulders were as broad and muscled as they ever were on his slender frame. He knew the man would never fly pilot again, but they were training him up as an air mission commander at which he’d be awesome.

“Marriage looks good on the two of you.” And the bite was back in his gut, so hard he almost gasped at the sudden pain. Damn Connie Davis.

“Really. It does.”

Kee put her hand on John’s chest and patted him there. He looked down into those dark eyes of hers.

“John. I know it hurts.”

He flinched. He couldn’t stop himself.

“Yes, I spoke to her and she’s pretty screwed up about this. Walk softly there.”

“Walk softly? Walk softly! Do you know what she—” He bit it off before it became a scream.

Kee was nodding. She knew.

“I’m not the one who needs to walk goddamned softly.”

She kept her hand on his chest as he struggled to breathe normally.

“I’m not the one.” And there was the problem. He really feared that he wasn’t. But imagining Connie Davis with anyone else was almost as awful as imagining being with her and then having her walk out on him again.

“John, I’ve got a message from her.”

“Screw that! I’ve had enough goddamn messages from her.”

Kee sighed and looked back at Archie, who just shrugged.

“Are you on her side? Both of you?” John’s anger burned.

Kee shook her head. “No, the only side we’re on is our crew’s.”

“Well, as soon as you’re back, she’s off the crew anyway. Problem solved.”

In a second, Kee had her fingers dug into his throat and was pulling him forward, dragging him down to her foot-shorter level using as leverage his desperate need to keep his windpipe intact.

“The goddamn message is from me then,” Kee snarled when they were nose to nose. “You know where to find her. Actually, it is from her because I don’t know what the hell it means and I don’t care. But I can see you damn well do.”

Then she smiled like an angel, kissed his nose again, and let him go.

He swallowed and knew it would hurt to speak. He swallowed again. It would hurt for quite a while.

“And if you don’t have this straightened out by the time we’re back with the unit, I’m gonna kick your ass.” She snagged Archie’s arm and headed out the door. Called back over her shoulder as sweetly as pie, “And you know I can do it.”

Yea, he did.

The woman, so talented at disappearing, was suddenly everywhere. In the mess eating with the Majors. Out working with the Raytheon crew, helping run orientation for the class that included Archie and Kee. When John finally gave up and went for a run that afternoon, he spotted the small figure sitting against the fence on the far side of Nightstalker Way. He could feel her track him as he looped out and around the airfield.

When the C-17 showed up with their choppers, they all loaded aboard.

Major Beale stopped him at the foot of the ramp until everyone had moved past them. They started cranking up the engines, and still he and the Major remained.

“John?” He didn’t like the sound of her voice. He knew this voice. It was her I’m-about-to-issue-a-command-and-if-you-don’t-do-it-I’m-going-to-tear-you-into-teeny-tiny-pieces-of-once-was-John voice.

“Yes, Major.”

“Fix it!”

“Yes, Major.” He wished there were some question of what they were talking about.

But there wasn’t.

John tried. He dug deep and tried.

On the flight he signaled Connie over, and they went through their Hawk inch by inch.

Even if he could bring himself to speak to her, his throat was too sore from Kee’s iron-strong fingers to shout over the roar of the C-17’s engines. So they did it in silence.

Even before they’d moved off the tail section and started on the twin GE turboshaft engines, they were working smoothly. John wasn’t ready to congratulate himself, but after thirty hours of complete avoidance, it was an improvement.

***

Connie was at a complete loss. John was making her work but wouldn’t speak to her. She’d tried to be in places where they’d been comfortable together. To somehow make it okay. She’d eaten with the crew, and he’d never come to a single meal. She’d worked with the crew on the ADAS, and he hadn’t joined them.

She’d finally decided to give him the space, to sit out at the fence. She’d started thinking this was their place. It was where they went to work things out. But they didn’t. He’d left the hangar, heading out on a run. She knew it was him despite the distance. Then saw the stumble when he spotted her. And watched helplessly as he altered his course abruptly away from where she sat, nearly running head-on into a parked Chinook.

So she did what she did best. She kept her mouth shut, her mind on the mechanics, and her heart shut up in a steel casing. Five hours to review everything they could while in flight. Every system checked out. Every bolt was well seated. Every ammo case loaded.

The silence had sapped her energy. She was dragging by the time they finished. Usually the quiet was her friend. A place where she found peace and purpose. A place where music came to her and filled the spaces.

There was no music today, no harmony in their work. Only struggle and duty. When they finished, she lay down on the cargo bay deck and slept on the hard steel.

She slept and dreamed of falling from the sky.

“You are here as a part of my guard detail, Em.”

Connie looked at the three Secret Service agents who stood at strategic locations in the hotel suite. Places where they appeared unobtrusive but would be the first to any door or window. Long before President Peter Matthews.

They fit in well here, and the SOAR crews certainly didn’t. The plush furnishings evoked the founding of Stockholm’s Grand Hotel in the late 1800s. She considered touring the suite but felt too self-conscious under the Secret Service’s vigilant eye. She sat at the far end of the living room at the broad dining table. Most of the others were clustered down at the far end in the circle of sofas beyond the grand piano.

Connie had never imagined a hotel suite like this one, never mind been in one. Everything was so perfect that she didn’t want to move for fear she’d mess it up.

Major Beale’s latest protest filled the room from where she was busy chewing out their Commander-in-Chief.

“Peter, you don’t go to an international peace conference in an allied country and drag along a pair of stealth-adapted DAP Hawks for guard work. Why are we really here? In the Grand Hotel Stockholm, for crying out loud!”

“For now, a joint training mission with the Swedish Special Forces, a way to say thank-you to the Special Operations Group for their help in Afghanistan. Beyond that I’m not sure yet. I think we’ll know more tomorrow or maybe the next day—”

“So we just hang out while you do whatever it is you do here, Sneaker Boy?”

“Look, Squirt…”

Connie tuned it out. She could picture them as children, enjoying the argument for the sake of debate, of mental jousting. Connie couldn’t imagine anything more exhausting. Give her a game plan. A place and direction to go. That worked for her. When she even thought about people like this, who had minds that worked like this, it made her tired. When she was around them, she found herself pulled in. Sucked in by the power and magnetism they projected on those around them.

But it served so little purpose. No matter what either said, it wouldn’t change the course of events.

She was so sick of words. And they never were the right ones.

John wouldn’t speak to her. And now Major Beale was shutting her out. To be fair, the Major was shutting John out as well. But that didn’t make her feel any better about the arrangement. Clay, the copilot, did his usual—loud music on his MP3 and a ragged novel folded back on itself so that the binding was broken past reading the title within minutes of his picking it up.

She rarely spoke with
Viper’s
crew. Except Tim. Tim was funny, easygoing in a way Connie had always envied. He radiated a charm that swept up all those around him. He and John together were hilarious, always something fun going on. They were two very action-oriented guys, as different as possible from the President’s and Major Beale’s modus operandi.

Now that she knew Tim, she understood something she’d missed way back when she’d first arrived at Bati. He’d made a pass at her. Thinking back, that’s what it must have been. She just hadn’t seen it go by. He’d made her smile, at least inside, several times, but she hadn’t really connected it to anything beyond him being nice. But the moment she and John had started being close, Tim had eased back so gracefully that she didn’t even know he’d been being forward. Smooth operator.

Smooth or not, now that she wasn’t talking to John, Tim wasn’t talking to her, either. Of course, there they sat on the far side of the suite not speaking to the Major or each other. Tim kept looking over at his friend, but John wore a black cloud over his head like a monk’s hood and was unapproachable.

So she sat in the corner of the suite and stared out the window. It looked across the harbor at Old Stockholm. In the dusk, a small tourist boat slid into the harbor, mostly empty, not many people braving the winter night on the water.

The snow lay on Stockholm like a thick blanket, and the palace shone in Old Stockholm across the water.

The Major was right. You don’t go to a friendly country and bring your personal army with you. A bad tactical move. And this had been touted as a goodwill visit crossing Scandinavia and culminating in Russia and the Ukraine, which to her way of thinking, made it worse. Masking it as a training opportunity with SOG worked okay, but that was counter-balanced by where they were sitting. The President of the United States didn’t typically invite two Special Forces helicopter crews over for a beer and a chat.

Tomorrow’s conference didn’t help much. Leaders from throughout the region were invited to the hotel for three days to discuss the peace process, and the President had come to participate and listen. A friendly ear with a personal fighting force of his very own showing their teeth to the Swedish Special Forces.

She sat up suddenly. Something wasn’t right. The hand the President was playing didn’t make sense. Unless he knew something. Something he wasn’t willing to share with the very people he needed. What would make sense?

A threat. There was a threat to—

John sat down across the table from her. A quick glance showed that no one else in the room was paying them any attention. Except for Major Beale from the far end of the room, but she never missed anything. She did turn away a little abruptly when Connie spotted her. Great. Just great.

John wasn’t merely making Connie miserable, he was also screwing up her career with one of the finest commanders she’d ever met.

“What the hell is wrong with you?” She kept her voice low.

John sputtered before croaking out in a hoarse voice, “Me? I’m not the one who screwed up.”

“I don’t need you telling me what Kee Stevenson has already rammed down my throat.”

“Your throat?” He massaged his windpipe. “What did she do to yours?”

So Kee was on a rampage against both of them. She’d rammed Connie’s own words back down her throat until she’d nearly choked on them and apparently done something similar to John.

Well, to hell with her, too. Connie’d been fine. It was John who’d gone all weird over a little sex. Too bad really, it had been great sex. There’d never been a chance that it would work out to anything more. Not for Connie. And when Grumps died, well… she’d… She’d just been in the way, that’s all. In the way so she left. Simple. Keep it simple and focus only on what she knew. She still flew.

“So we’re good now? We just fly together.”

The color drained out of John’s face, and his fists clenched.

Before she could puzzle out his reaction, a deck of cards landed between them.

“Enough planning. Time for a little poker.” Major Henderson slapped John on the shoulder, and he flinched as if he’d been shot by a much bigger weapon than Mark’s palm. Crazy Tim took a chair on her left, and to Connie’s right, the President took a seat.

Tim gave her a worried look, clearly taking his friend’s temperature accurately. With a brief shake of his head, Tim communicated that he didn’t know how to fix this one from the outside. It was sweet of him to even think about it, but everything was fine.

Maybe if she kept telling herself that, it would come true.

Major Beale crowded down between her husband and the Commander-in-Chief. When Mark protested, she held up her hands in self-defense.

“I won’t look at anyone’s cards. I’ll just run drinks and such.”

Dusty, Henderson’s gunner, squeezed along the wall to sit beside Tim.

The card players had Major Beale back on her feet, running for sodas and sandwiches and a pizza and something called Swedish butter strips that Tim insisted on, until the table was well covered and she finally went on strike and sat back in her chair.

The President started shuffling the pack. Connie tried not to feel weird every time she looked to her right and saw him just two feet away. A pair of Secret Service agents flanked him on either side and a step behind. The big one, Adams, stood directly behind her chair, looking much more daunting than he had when riding in the back of the helicopter.

“Is your stomach feeling better, Mr. Adams?” She couldn’t leave it alone. Never miss a chance to look down on another service or make them think you did.

“Better than your wallet will by the end of the evening, ma’am. Thanks for asking.” He said it with a perfectly straight face, but Major Beale laughed for him.

“You wanna try your luck, Frank? You can have my seat.”

“Not a chance, Army. Not with your husband sitting at the table. I’ve seen him play.”

Mark Henderson winked at her. Not at his wife, at her.