Chapter One Hundred One

In flight

Monday, August 30, 6:36 P.M.

Time Remaining on the Extinction Clock: 41 hours, 24 minutes E.S.T.

Maj. Grace Courtland sat hunched over her laptop watching a white dot move across the satellite image of the southern United States. The dot kept just inside U.S. airspace, cruising fifty miles north of the Mexican border as it crossed Arizona and New Mexico; then it cut across the Texas midlands and out over the Gulf of Mexico south of Houston.

She tapped her commlink. “Bug, have you gotten through to the FAA yet?”

“Just finishing with them now. The jet filed a flight plan for Freeport, Grand Bahama Island. The FAA have records of the same jet making the run twice monthly for the last few years.”

“That’s it, then. Brilliant, Bug.”

Grace sat back and closed her eyes. It was going to be a couple of hours yet until touchdown, and there was nothing much she could do until then. She’d eavesdropped on the command channel while Joe infiltrated the Deck, and her heart had been in her throat the whole time. Partly because of the oppressively huge stakes they were playing for and partly for Joe.

Joe.

Early this morning, after making love, she had told him that she loved him. She’d said the words that she swore that she would never say to anyone as long as she wore a uniform. It was stupid, it was wrong, and it was dangerous.

Later that morning she hadn’t said a word to him. She was too embarrassed and too frightened of the damage their pillow talk might reveal in the light of day. And then, of course, everything started happening.

Grace wished she could roll back the clock to this morning so she could take back those words. Or, failing that, to have had the courage to stay all night and talk with him later that morning. Instead she had fled—the one act of cowardice in a life filled with risk taking.

That morning, when she’d said those words, Joe should have given her the pat lecture on the dangers of getting too close to a fellow combatant. It was never smart and it usually worked out to heartbreak of one kind or another, and that included the very real possibility of getting drummed out of the DMS and shipped back to England with a career-ending reprimand in her jacket. She’d never work in covert ops again, not unless she wanted to gallop into battle behind a desk.

She felt sick and stupid for saying those words.

What made it worse . . . so very much worse, was that Joe had said them back.

I love you, Grace.

She could hear the echo of those words as if Joe was whispering them into her ear as her pursuit craft tore through the skies.

I love you, Grace.

“God,” she said, and Redman—her second in command—glanced up.

“Major . . . ?”

She shook her head and closed her eyes again.