A body had been kicked down the stairs of the hijacked plane.
Stan went into the terminal building to find the negotiator’s room grimly silent.
Lieutenant Paoletti turned to meet him, gesturing with a twist of his head for the two of them to step out in the hall.
“Shots were fired about fifteen minutes ago, and again about ten minutes ago,” the lieutenant informed Stan. “The tangos opened the door just now, dumped this body.”
“Is it the girl?”
“We don’t know yet,” L.T. told him. “Scooter and Knox are out there on surveillance, but even with high-powered glasses, they can’t give a definite ID. The tangos wrapped some sort of blanket around the girl’s body—that’s assuming it is the girl. Bhagat is trying to raise them on the radio, trying to negotiate getting a vehicle out there to pick up the body. Meanwhile audio and visual are still out in the cockpit.”
“Does Max want to wait till nightfall to send us in?” Stan asked.
“No,” L.T. said. “He’s got seven different people advising him to wait, but he wants to go now anyway. He knows damn well that that body is a ‘come get us’ message.”
“So let’s go and get ’em, sir,” Stan said. “Let’s be done with it. I want to go home.”
The lieutenant sent him a sidelong glance. “To pick out furniture for the house?”
Oh, Christ. “News spreads ridiculously fast around here.”
Paoletti held out his hand. “Congratulations, Senior Chief.”
“Hold up, Lieutenant. There’s a long road between getting laid and getting married.”
Paoletti was visibly taken aback. And Stan instantly understood. “No,” he said. “Tom—don’t get me wrong. That’s not what I’m ... that’s what she’s doing. I mean, she thinks she loves me... .” The memory of her standing there, telling him so in front of the entire team, still shook him to the core. “Jesus, what’s she thinking? Where’s it gonna go? At the risk of sounding as if I’m boasting, because you know me—I’m not—I think she’s blown away by the, uh, shall we say, the physical nature of the relationship. She’s not real experienced, and trust me, in a week or two, she’s gonna be—”
“Blowing you away,” Paoletti finished for him. “Because if she means what she says, she’ll prove it. The sex is a great part of the package, believe me, I know, I’ve been there, but it’s just a part of it. It’s her face, her smile, her knowing something’s wrong and talking to you in bed at night until you cough up the problem, even when she’s exhausted. It’s her eyes. You look in her eyes and she’s not afraid to let you see that you’re her world. It’s her taking care of you and needing you to take care of her, too.” He laughed. “Stan, trust me, your life is never going to be the same.”
“I hope so,” Stan said quietly. “I’m not convinced she’s thought it through and that’s really what she wants, but Christ, Tom, I hope so.”
“Alyssa!”
Alyssa turned around with a defensive set to her shoulders and a coolness in her voice and face that made his heart sink. “Lieutenant Starrett.”
Damn. He’d thought they’d gotten beyond frosty and formal the last time they talked. Unless her response to his declaration of undying love was this cool get lost.
But this wasn’t about them. This was about getting his team ready to go.
And the gods, in a last-ditch attempt at ultimate irony, had aligned the planets and put O’Leary into the path of a bullet, thus making the impossible happen. Alyssa Locke had become a member—temporary, yes, but still a member—of his, Sam Starrett’s, SEAL team.
And maybe there were some devils at work, too, because—and what were the odds of this ever happening—Sam was actually glad to have her.
The woman could shoot.
He and his men were going to kick their way onto a plane in which five men were in possession of deadly weapons. And he knew that because Alyssa was one of his two snipers, there were at least two fewer tangos that he and his team were going to have to tango with.
It wasn’t as if she was going to be in any danger. It wasn’t as if Lieutenant Paoletti had assigned her to muscle her way onto the plane alongside of Sam. If he had, Sam would’ve fought him, kicking and screaming. That he would’ve flat out refused.
But using Alyssa as a sniper—that was something he could agree with.
No, it wasn’t easy to shoot another human being—to shoot to kill. There were people who argued that women weren’t up to that task. They claimed a woman would choke in a sniper situation.
But Sam had no doubt that Alyssa would do her job, that she had her own way of coping with the elimination of a human target. Of course, maybe she was like him, and she just threw up afterward and then went out and got drunk.
But probably not.
Right now part of his job as CO was to make sure the other members of the team had as much faith in their snipers as he did. So he spoke loudly and made sure he was overhead. “L.T. told me you volunteered—”
“If you have any problem with it, you need to talk to—”
“I don’t.” Jesus, would she just relax? “I just wanted to tell you I’m glad you’re here and to thank you.”
She nervously moistened her lips, clearly surprised. Jenk and Cosmo were surprised, too. In the past, Sam had laughed at Alyssa’s desire to be in the action, at the front lines, every chance he could get. “You’re welcome,” she said.
Sam nodded. Lopez and Muldoon were watching, too. “So you want the welcome to the team handshake or the welcome to the team kiss? I figure since I’ve never really had the opportunity to give the welcome kiss before I should take advantage of—”
“I’ll take the handshake,” she said. Her face was straight, but she was fighting a smile. He saw it lurking at the edges of her mouth.
He took her hand and shook it. He wanted to hold on to it inappropriately long, to kiss her palm or even suck one of her fingers into his mouth, but he didn’t because the team was watching.
There was a time when he would have done it because the team was watching.
And she knew it.
“I won’t let you down, sir,” she said.
“I know.” He nodded at her. Turned away.
“Sam.”
He turned back, surprised she’d used his name.
“Stay safe. Take head shots.”
He smiled, touched that she cared. “I will.”
She stepped closer. Lowered her voice. But it still wasn’t low enough to keep Jenk and Cosmo from overhearing if they really wanted to. “After we’re done here ... Well, I was thinking, um, that, well, that you’re someone I’d really like to get to know better. And I was wondering if maybe you’d like to have dinner with me.”
Sam glanced at Jenk, who was pointedly not looking at him. He looked back at Alyssa, into the warm swirl of hope in her eyes, and he was afraid to open his mouth because he didn’t think he could form any coherent words. He was afraid that a mindless howl of joy would escape, embarrassing her to death.
“In a restaurant,” she added, as if he wasn’t already aware that she’d fucking invited him to dinner in public.
So he just breathed for several long moments and nodded his head, hoping that she could see the party going on inside of him by looking into his eyes. And when he finally could speak, he uttered the understatement of the fucking millennium. “I’d like that.”
“Good.” She smiled and headed for the roof.
He did his best to walk away, too, without doing a dance.
And then he stopped dancing, even in his mind, because his radio squawked. It was Lieutenant Paoletti.
“We’re done waiting,” L.T. said. “There’ve been more shots fired on the plane. It’s time to go in.”
Des was more than half expecting Helga to be surprised to see him. But she opened the door quickly at his knock and let him in without a murmur of protest.
He didn’t know whether to laugh or cry. The place was covered with sticky notes. Reminders, comments, lists of names.
“Man,” he said.
She nodded. “It’s a mess.”
He pulled her close for a hug. “How bad is it? Do you remember talking to me on the phone?”
“Of course.”
“Really?”
She pulled away from him, showed him the page of her notepad.
“Des is coming here. You told him you’re losing your marbles. He has something important to tell you,” was written on it.
“I figure since I wrote this, I must’ve spoken to you on the phone,” she said. “How else would I have told you?”
“What year is it?” he asked.
She pulled a note from the headboard of her bed. “It’s 2001. Most of the answers are here. Of course, if I spend all my time reading them, over and over, I manage never to leave this room.”
“I bet it’ll be better at home,” he said.
Helga nodded. “It makes sense that it would be.”
“We’ll go to the doctor,” Des said past the lump in his throat. “Maybe there’s some new medicine.”
She nodded. “That’s not what you came here to discuss.”
“No.” He sat down on her bed, rubbed his forehead. God, where to start. “Do you know who I work for?”
There was a gleam in her eye. “You mean, besides me? You’re with intelligence, no?”
“Not exactly. I’m part of an organization even more covert than Mossad or ... But that’s not important. What’s important is that my immediate superior is a man with political aspirations that have seriously clouded his judgment. And no, I’m not going to tell you his name.”
She sat there, watching him, and he had to wonder how much of this she was going to remember. Maybe it didn’t matter if he used his superior’s name. “Over the past few days, I’ve discovered some information about our hijackers that raises the stakes.” He took her notepad and a pen from the bedside table. “I’m going to write some of this down for you, because I need you to remember. How many hijackers are on that 747?”
Helga looked at her Post-it notes. “Five.”
“No,” Des said. “There are six. In addition to the five men that we all know about, there’s also a woman. She’s rigged with explosives under her coat—a suicide bomb.”
“Oh, my God,” Helga breathed.
The approach to the plane went down exactly as they’d rehearsed.
The SEALs moved in from the rear, from the aircraft’s blind spot.
Stan was with Muldoon, leading the way—a relatively easy task despite the fact that it was broad daylight. He knew exactly where the blind spot was, where the tangos could and could not see them. There was no need even to crawl—extra Marines had been brought in during the past twelve hours, and they were guarding the perimeter of the airport, making certain that no one unauthorized could see the movement on the runway.
Yeah, the last thing they needed was the hijackers getting a warning signal via mirrors from someone watching from the brush, tipping them off to the fact there were SEALs crawling around on the outside of the aircraft.
Big Mac and his two-man team were already out there under the plane, having taken advantage of the freedom of movement allowed by those extra Marine guards. They were attempting to get audio and video back up and running.
Once under the aircraft, the take-down team would begin the far more dangerous and painstaking task of gaining access to the front and rear emergency doors.
From here on in, they’d communicate via hand signals only.
Stan looked at Lieutenant Starrett and nodded.
Starrett nodded back, a glitter in his eye, clearly as glad as Stan was finally to be doing instead of waiting.
“They’re all members of an extremist group,” Des told Helga. “Their goal is simple—to die. They don’t expect Osman Razeen or anyone to be freed by hijacking this plane. They only want to bring as much attention to their cause as they can. And the best way they know to do that is to take as many American lives with them as possible.
“I’ve found out that their plan is to wait until the rescue team is on the plane, and then blow it and everyone on board to hell,” Des told her grimly. “Apparently the bomb has a fail-safe in the event that the woman wearing it is killed in the takedown. There’s a sensor that reads the woman’s pulse. If it doesn’t pick up that pulse after thirty seconds, it goes into a three-minute countdown. Which isn’t even close to the amount of time we’d need to evacuate all those people from that plane. They don’t just want this thing to blow up—they want us to know it’s going to blow and be unable to stop it.”
“How did you find out this kind of detail?”
“I had a little conversation with the designer of the bomb.”
“Do ...” Helga took her notepad back from him and flipped through the pages. “Do Max Bhagat and Tom Paoletti know about this?”
“No.”
It was blazing hot on the roof of Terminal A.
A fly buzzed around Alyssa’s face, but she ignored it. She watched her target through her scope and breathed, listening to Max Bhagat’s voice through her radio headset, hearing what her target could hear in the cockpit of that 747.
Persuasive and smooth, like an FM radio announcer, Bhagat was keeping both her and fellow sniper Wayne Jefferson’s targets up by that radio.
Bhagat was talking to them as if they were friends. Fellow caring human beings.
Alyssa wouldn’t have been able to do that. Not knowing they were murderers. Rapists.
She’d heard a rumor that Sam had been in the negotiators’ room when the girl, Gina, had been attacked. Rumor had it that he’d thrown up. Tossed his cookies right in the wastepaper basket.
Alyssa believed the rumor.
Poor Sam. He pretended to be so tough, but she’d seen him get sick like that before.
She tried to imagine what it must’ve been like to be Sam and have to stand there and listen to that girl getting beaten. Raped.
And then she thought long and hard about what it must’ve been like to be the girl.
She kept her crosshairs aimed in the middle of her target’s forehead, waiting for the clicks over her headset that signaled the SEALs were in place, waiting for the word from Tom Paoletti: Go.
“No one knows but me and now you.” Des rubbed his face. “I’ve been ordered to sit on this information. My superior believes that the destruction of the plane and the death of so many Americans—including a team of Navy SEALs—will make the U.S. and Israel even more strongly united against terrorism. If I come forward with this, my career is over.”
“But by leaking the information to me ...” she said, still a very smart woman despite the disease that was ravaging her brain. “My career has already come to an end.” She looked at him. “Order me not to tell.”
“I order you not to tell.”
“Phooey to you. I’m not going to let those people die.” She picked up the phone. “Who do I call with this?”
“Yeah,” Des said. “That’s where we’ve got a little problem. Landlines are down and my cell phone’s been dead since last night. Short of hitching a ride to the airport and flagging down Max—”
“What are we waiting for?” No-nonsense to the bitter end, Helga grabbed her purse and her notepad and headed for the door.
Sam Starrett clicked once into his headset microphone as he gave the hand signal—ready.
The SEALs on surveillance would be watching him and they’d report to Lieutenant Paoletti in the negotiators’ room that Starrett and Karmody were in place and ready to go.
He thought about Alyssa up on the roof, lying there in the hot sun.
He thought about Alyssa in his bed.
In his life.
WildCard was looking at him oddly and Sam realized he was grinning like a stupid-ass fool.
Wouldn’t that be just his luck? To be too distracted to do his job, and get his ass killed.
God, don’t take me now, he prayed. Don’t pull some ironic shit here and have me die today.
And then he helped God out a little by refreshing his grip on his weapon and focusing on the job ahead, waiting for the other members of his team to signal that they were ready, too.
“We need to get to the airport immediately.”
Teri turned to see Helga Shuler and her assistant hurrying toward her.
“Can you take us?” Mrs. Shuler asked.
“I’m sorry, ma’am,” she said. “Not without proper authorization. I’d need to receive orders to—”
“Do you have a radio?” Mrs. Shuler asked. “Can you get in touch with either ...” She looked down at a pad of paper she was carrying.
“Lieutenant Paoletti or Max Bhagat,” her assistant supplied the names.
“Is there a problem?” Teri asked. “Is this some kind of an emergency?”
“There’s a bomb on the hijacked plane,” Mrs. Shuler said with a grim certainty. “There’s a sixth terrorist on board—a woman. Once the SEALs take the plane, she’s going to set the thing to blow. Everyone on board will die.”
Teri stared for two or three seconds. Then she leapt for the radio.
Her vision was blurred.
Both of her eyes were swollen, one of them nearly all the way shut.
Her lip was split, her entire mouth cut and bleeding from her own teeth.
Her wrist was broken and each breath she took—both in and out—made her sides burn with pain.
She was bleeding. Her head, her nose, between her legs.
She lay there, beaten and naked from the waist down, her shirt torn, her shorts gone. Her uninjured hand covered what little she could manage to cover, and her knees were pressed tightly together —as if that would keep the next one from pushing her legs apart and pushing himself inside of her.
She’d known what was coming when Bob told Al to hurt her. She’d expected it, braced herself for it. Planned to endure it.
As long as she could keep breathing, as long as she was still alive, she was winning.
And finally it was over. Al had spit in her face and climbed off of her and she knew that she’d won.
Except she hadn’t.
Because Bob had dropped his pants. And it wasn’t over. And it was worse, far worse because he’d made her believe that he was her friend.
There was blood on the walls. Sprayed in a pattern. Someone—the pilot, she thought—had tried to stop them from hurting her and had died for his efforts. They’d shot him—the pilot—and he’d lain there beside her, half of his head blown away, for countless long minutes until they’d dragged him away.
She didn’t want to look at that pattern of blood anymore, and she closed her eyes as she listened to Max’s soothing voice over the radio, as she breathed and tried to convince herself that breathing still meant that she’d won.
“Helga Shuler is standing right in front of me,” the pretty young helicopter pilot said into the radio, obviously working hard to sound rational and calm. “She has information that it’s imperative Max Bhagat and Lieutenant Paoletti receive ASAP. Over.”
The transmission wasn’t very good, and Helga couldn’t hear what the person on the other end of the radio had to say, but whatever it was, it didn’t make the pilot very happy.
“No, sir, I will not keep this channel clear. I’m not going anywhere until I connect with Max Bhagat or Lieutenant Paoletti. I repeat, it is imperative I speak with either of them or with Lieutenant Jacquette or with Senior Chief Wolchonok or with Lieutenant Starrett, or God! Let me speak with Petty Officer Jenkins! I’m not picky here! Over!”
Des touched the girl’s arm. “We can be at the airport in three minutes if you fly us.”
She looked from Des to Helga, and Helga could see that her career was flashing in front of her eyes. But still, she nodded. “Get in.”
Alyssa lay on the roof, watching her target, listening to Max Bhagat.
He was talking about money. An offer, he said, from an outside source. They were willing to pay twenty-five thousand dollars, U.S., he said, for each passenger who walked safely off the plane.
Yeah, he’d caught their attention with that one.
She wasn’t listening so much to the words anymore as to the tone of his voice. The rise and fall of the phrases. Every so often he’d say over or come back, and there’d be a pause.
And then he just paused, without an over, and she knew before she heard the word, that it was coming now.
Jefferson shifted slightly, too, as in tune with it as she was.
Tom Paoletti’s voice. “Go, go, go!”
She squeezed the trigger.
Go, go, go!
The door opened and Starrett turned his head away as the flash bang exploded.
And then he was inside, facing a tango, weapon in hands, in his kill zone.
He fired.
She heard a crack, heard what sounded like a single loud explosion from the cabin, then Max, shouting, his voice distorting over the radio speakers. “Gina, stay down!”
She opened her eyes to see that she’d been sprayed with blood.
Al, who’d been in the co-pilot’s seat, was sitting there still, but he wasn’t going to hurt her anymore.
Bob had been pushed back and down, against the door, his eyes sightlessly open, a neat hole in the middle of his handsome forehead.
“If you can hear me, please God, I hope you can hear me,” Max was shouting over the sounds of gunfire and screaming from the cabin, “stay down, Gina! Stay down!”
She crawled to the microphone dangling down near the floor and keyed the thumb switch.
“Max,” she said through her broken lips, “can you bring me some pants?”
Teri connected with Lieutenant Paoletti as the airport came into view.
Helga was in the co-pilot’s seat, radio headset on and ready, and as soon as she heard Paoletti’s name, she began to speak. Clearly. Concisely. In her gentle Danish accent. Reading from her notebook.
“This is Helga Shuler. I have sources with Israeli intelligence who have informed me that there is a sixth terrorist on board the hijacked plane. A woman rigged with a suicide bomb. You must abort, repeat abort. Over.”
“It’s too late to abort,” Paoletti said, and Teri’s heart clenched. “Please stand by with your information, over.”
Too late. They were too late. Stan was already on that plane, and her world was about to end.
She could see the hijacked aircraft out on the runway, see the snipers and other personnel on the terminal roof.
Teri headed for the runway.
Stan went in fast, Muldoon to his left.
He both heard and saw Muldoon fire, neatly taking out one of the terrorists.
The noise was intense, both in the aircraft’s cabin and over his radio headset.
Five tangos had been eliminated within seconds of the flash bangs.
He could hear Sam Starrett’s voice shouting for the passengers to stay down, to stay in their seats, nobody move fast, nobody move.
Stan was still in adrenaline mode, his senses relaying information to his brain at warp speed. He caught sight of movement from the corner of his eye, and he turned.
And the world went into slow-mo.
A woman.
Standing up.
Right near the bulkhead, mere feet from where he and Muldoon had come in.
Muldoon’s back was to her.
Light glinted on metal.
A handgun—she was pulling it free from her coat.
She was wearing a fucking overcoat while everyone else was stripped down to their T-shirts.
Stan pulled up his weapon.
And saw that—Jesus!—she had a baby in her arms.
He could fire and stop her cold, but not without hitting the baby.
He hesitated, and his hesitation—just those few brief seconds—cost him dearly.
He was dead.
Her handgun was out and up and there was nothing to do but step in the way to prevent her from hitting Muldoon.
He saw her fire, and realized. It was a doll she was holding. He was going to die for a fucking plastic doll. And as she moved, he saw beneath her overcoat that she was rigged to blow, wired with some kind of bomb, loaded down with C-4.
And he pulled his own gun higher even as he felt the impact of her bullet and he fired back a double burst. Head shots. Praying there wasn’t some kind of automatic trigger that would take them all instantly to hell.
The woman went down and Stan grabbed her.
Teri landed the helo next to the plane.
“Are you nuts?” Des shouted. “This thing’s going to blow!”
“Then you better run away,” she told him.
Helga was on the radio, reading aloud her information about the bomb, broadcasting to the SEALs.
To Stan, who was somewhere on that plane with a bomb that could go off any second.
She switched her radio to the channel Paoletti had said the SEALs were using.
Starrett couldn’t fucking believe his ears.
“The bomb has a fail-safe,” a woman with an accent not entirely unlike the famous Dr. Ruth’s was saying over his headset, after Lieutenant Paoletti had dropped the less than welcome news that there was a bomb on board.
“There is a sensor designed to read the pulse of the woman who has the bomb,” Dr. Ruth said. “After thirty seconds without reading that pulse, it will go into a three-minute countdown, repeat, three-minute countdown.”
“Have we located this woman?” Starrett shouted. God was doing it. He was pulling an ironic on him. Sam never should have agreed to have dinner with Alyssa Locke.
But then, over his headset, he heard the most beautiful words spoken by one of the most beautiful voices in the entire beautiful world.
It was the senior chief, the team’s miracle man. “I’ve got the bomb.”
Alyssa Locke stood on the roof of Terminal A, her heart in her throat.
Someone—it looked like Muldoon—had triggered the emergency slide on their side of the plane.
“The woman is dead.” Senior Chief Wolchonok’s voice was only one of many coming through her headset, but it was the only one she was paying attention to. “I’m exiting with her out of the port side of the aircraft.”
“Let’s get these people off the plane! Starboard side!” That was Sam’s voice now, his lazy drawl transformed, his voice rapid-fire and nearly accent-free. “Move!”
Three men had come out of the terminal and were running toward the runway. Tom Paoletti, Jazz Jacquette, and Alyssa’s boss, Max Bhagat.
Jules Cassidy was down there, too, in a truck, no doubt waiting to give Bhagat a ride to the plane and win brownie points for being there and ready. He pulled alongside of them with a screech of brakes and they all jumped aboard. He zoomed out onto the runway.
Toward the plane and the bomb.
Alyssa looked at Jefferson.
Who nodded. They headed down the stairs and toward the plane as fast as they could run.
“Get Mrs. Shuler out of the helo,” Teri shouted at Des. “Move back, move away.”
He didn’t need to be told twice. He nearly picked the woman up and hustled her off, hurrying in the direction of the terminal.
She could see Stan then. Coming down the slide. Carrying a body.
He was covered in blood—not his, please God.
But he staggered as he reached the ground, staggered again when he shouldn’t have staggered, and she knew.
“Stan’s been hit,” she reported. “I need the hospital corpsman—Jay Lopez!—on the port side of the plane now! Stan, how bad is it?”
“Teri? Shit, you’re not supposed to be here.”
“Glad to see you, too, babe. Muldoon, get your butt down that slide and help the senior chief. He’s wounded! And someone get me the new coordinates for the U.S.S. Hale. Now!”
Stan was already dead. He’d known that the moment he’d stepped in front of that gun.
Except he was still moving. Still walking.
It was the adrenaline that kept him going.
He didn’t have much of a plan other than getting the bomb off the plane until he saw that helo sitting there on the runway like a gift from God.
Three minutes wasn’t a lot of time, but if he could get the bomb and himself onto that helo, he could pilot that thing far enough from the plane and terminal to keep anyone else from getting hurt.
And then it was more than the adrenaline that kept him going. It was the adrenaline and his knowing that he could fix this. It would be his last fix, but it would be a good one.
But then he’d heard Teri’s voice, and he knew. She was on board that helo and getting her off wasn’t going to be easy. She wasn’t going to leave him, and because of that, she was going to die, too.
“Teri, get the hell out of here. I can fly that thing.”
“Yeah, you can do a lot, hot stuff,” her voice came back, “but I’m the one who wears the wings in this relationship. Lopez, where the hell are you? We’re counting down and I’m in the air the second Stan is aboard.”
Muldoon was beside him, then, helping him carry the body. “Senior, you’re wounded.”
“Get back!” The timer was running. Two minutes and fifteen seconds and everyone near this thing was dead.
But Muldoon didn’t back off. He took most of the woman’s weight from Stan and helped him move faster.
And then Tom Paoletti and Jazz Jacquette were there, too. And Lopez. And then Stan wasn’t carrying anyone anymore. He was being carried.
Onto the helo.
They were in the air, then, and he was shouting. This wasn’t part of his plan. Teri wasn’t supposed to be there. Or Muldoon. Or Jacquette. Or Lopez, who was starting an IV on him right there, tearing open his shirt.
“Lieutenant Howe, can you fly this thing a little faster?” That was Jazz Jacquette’s sub-bass voice. He was good, but there was no way he was going to defuse a bomb like that one in under three minutes.
“Believe me, sir, I’m doing the best I can. Stan, you still with me?”
“Teri,” he said. The adrenaline was wearing off and his whole world was pain. Pain and a bomb that was going to blow in a matter of seconds. “Gotta ditch the bomb! Don’t want you to die, too—”
“No one’s going to die. Lieutenant Jacquette is watching the timer. What’s the countdown, sir?”
Jacquette: “Can you get me over the open ocean in fifteen seconds?”
“You bet.” Teri. “I’ll be flying nice and low. Let me know the minute the bomb hits the water. I’ll take us up and out of here. Stan, no one’s going to die, do you hear me? No one. We get rid of the bomb and our next stop is the hospital on board the U.S.S. Hale.”
“Teri,” Stan said, having trouble breathing, afraid she was wrong.
“Bombs away,” she said. “Any time now!”
“It’s in the water,” Jacquette shouted. “Go!”
Gina lay on the floor of the cockpit, aware of the door being forced open.
Someone came in. Someone in uniform who took one look at her and began shouting for the lieutenant, shouting for medical assistance.
And then another man came in. He was wearing a white button-down shirt and a tie, and he had a blanket that he used to cover her.
“I’m so sorry,” he said, “that we didn’t get here sooner,” and it was so strange to hear that voice, Max’s voice, coming out of a real mouth, in a real face.
It was a good face. Blurry, but good. What she could see was older than she’d pictured, with deep lines of fatigue around his eyes.
He had tears in his eyes, and she knew that seeing her like that, broken and bleeding, hurt him badly.
“At least you got here,” she said. “I’m pleased to finally meet you, Max.”
He laughed at that, but then started to cry. As she watched, he composed himself, wiping his eyes and even managing to give her a smile. “I’m going to get you off the plane now.”
He was ready to pick her up in his arms, but she didn’t want him to remember her that way forever. First impressions were important, after all, and she was already at a serious disadvantage.
And dammit, she wanted to see something besides pity in his eyes.
“No,” she told him. “I want to walk.” And as she said it, she realized it was true. She did. She wanted to walk off that plane. “Will you help me walk out of here?”
“Yeah.” He nodded and helped her to her feet, the muscle jumping in his jaw as his repositioning the blanket around her forced him to get another glimpse of her battered body.
He stood on the side of her unbroken wrist, slipping her arm over his shoulders, his arm around her waist, supporting her.
And she walked. Out of the cockpit. Out of the plane. One step at a time.
The force of the explosion pushed them forward and up, and Teri wrestled with the controls.
And then they were home free.
Heading toward the U.S.S. Hale.
“What’s the status of the patient?” Teri asked.
No one answered her.
“Lopez?” She couldn’t keep her voice from sounding sharp.
“Make sure we have a medical team ready,” Lopez finally said. “The moment we touch down.”
“Teri,” Stan whispered.
“No,” she said, suddenly terribly afraid. “Don’t say it. Look, I’ve got my flack jacket on. There’s nothing you need to tell me now that you can’t tell me later.”
He said it anyway. “Love you.”
“Yeah?” she said. “Well, screw you, Senior Chief. If you love me, dammit, you stay alive!”
And then there it was. The U.S.S. Hale. Right where it was supposed to be.
She landed the helo and Stan was taken away, and then there was nothing left to do but pray.