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  The Sum is Greater

  a Phoenix Agency romance

  M. L. Buchman

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  Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

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  About the Author

  Also by M. L. Buchman

  1

  “You call this here mess an extraction?”

  Jesse looked over at the sarcastic pair of boots that were addressing him. These boots had real personality to them—black army boots that had been battered and worn in ways that took a lot of time and would never pass a barracks inspection—so he did his best to address them respectfully.

  “Sure I would, if y’all call this being right ways up.” He was still harnessed into the seat of his Little Bird MH-6 helicopter, but the boots appeared to be buried in a red dirt sky—literally dirt, and it was definitely red. The legs strapped into them dangled downward—dimly lit by a combination of moonlight and the wash of the small cabin light he’d turned on.

  The night was quiet except for the lazy ticking of hot metal cooling slowly.

  A face bent up to look at him. It was a slim, fresh face with long blond hair that rose in a tangled wave toward the dirt-y sky rather than dangling downward as it should have. The eyes were hidden by night-vision goggles. Blue eyes would go well with that face. Hazel too.

  He wondered if the eyes would be more or less sarcastic than the boots.

  “Well, you’re alive. That’s something.” Sarcasm levels roughly equal.

  “It is my preferred condition.”

  “As opposed to being dead?”

  “Absolutely.” Something was puzzling Jesse about this whole conversation, but he was having trouble putting his finger on exactly what.

  “And the upside-down part of this lame excuse for an extraction?” The face smiled at him—just a frown turned upside down. That was Momma talking, but he was fairly sure she wasn’t here. Actually, Momma had died on the same operating table where he’d been born, but he often held conversations with her in his head. At least when he was younger he had. The echoes of them had stuck with him.

  He looked around. Nope, she wasn’t here—another proof that he was still alive. He didn’t expect to meet her until he hit the pearly gates that Sunday school had promised him. Also, the way he’d always imagined her, she didn’t have one of those smooth Tennessee accents. Unless they’d relocated San Antonio while he was otherwise distracted, which was a possibility. But…

  Oh! He’d missed that he was the one who was upside down, dangling from his seat harness—rather than the boots hanging from the red dirt sky. Which actually made far more sense now that he thought about it. Then he remembered having his helicopter’s tail rotor shot out and the tumbling fall. The skidding, rolling (a couple times end-over-end he seemed to recall) crash landing came back on instant replay and he wished it hadn’t. Near-death experiences weren’t much more fun in memory than while they were actually happening. He slapped the seat harness release and crashed down onto his head. Thankfully, in a crumpled Little Bird, that wasn’t very far.

  It would have hurt less if he’d still been wearing his helmet.

  Oh. That explained the problem he’d been puzzling at when the sarcastic boots arrived—though he’d forgotten about it until just now. He’d taken his helmet off—after the crashing and rolling bit had been done with—and set it atop the cyclic joystick just the way he always did at the end of any mission. Then the helmet had taken off like a rocket and banged into the ceiling. Except it wasn’t the ceiling anymore because his helicopter was upside down. Gravity, not a mysteriously jet-powered helmet trying to launch into orbit. Made much more sense now that his world had righted itself once more.

  He untangled himself, found his helmet, and crawled out of his helo to face the sarcastic boots and the smiling (or frowning) visage that he expected to find at the other end of the equation. The projection of tactical information on the inside of his helmet’s visor had died along with his helo. He tossed the helmet back inside, then folded his hands over the rifle slung across his chest with the stock folded.

  Now he was sitting in the dirt—rather than crouching under it—much better. Standing didn’t work so well however because his knees were proving their uncertainty with the sudden change in orientation. To pass the time, he inspected the boots. Right-side up made them look far more sensible—at least as sensible as non-cowboy boots ever were.

  He eased the collar of his flightsuit against the pounding humidity of the jungle. Now he could hear the jungle even if he couldn’t see where it lay beyond his tiny pool of light. Animal noises, lots of them, sounded from one tree to the next—though they tapered off even as he listened.

  Back to the boots. Legs in jungle camouflage now rose from them in a perfectly normal manner. But then the whole image went sideways again.

  “Several possibilities,” he said aloud. “Either I knocked my head right hard, the moonlight is playing some strange tricks on this country boy, or you’re a person of the female persuasion.” He’d been told to extract a Delta Force operator doing deep recon in the Colombian jungle. But Delta didn’t have women that he knew about.

  “Door Number Three.”

  “Okay, ma’am. I guess I’ll take your word for that.” What he could see for himself by the limited reach of the dim cabin light supported her claim. A vest filled with multiple magazines and a pair of handguns—one in the unusual gut-center holster of a Delta operator. An HK416 sniper rifle over the shoulder. Eyes still hidden by the NVGs that cast a light green glow on her cheeks—atypically, it tinted her skin glorious-elf rather than ghoulish-zombie. The long blonde hair brushing past the operator’s shoulders wasn’t a giveaway either, as Delta Force often wore it that way—frequently with beards as well, though maybe not in her case, what with being a woman and all.

  That’s when he remembered that he had a backup set of NVGs himself. He reached up and found them in the pouch beside his upside-down seat. Definitely female was the first thing he noticed when he pulled them on—armed to the teeth, but no male operator had curves like that.

  “Can you walk?”

  “Maybe,” he wasn’t sure that it was something he wanted to test at the moment. His knees were still shaking from just how close he’d come to dying in the last few minutes. “Why?”

  “Because the guerillas who shot down your helicopter are bound to be coming to see who came with it. They’re very heavily armed as a habit and I expect you wouldn’t be real glad to meet them. This group is particularly twitchy because they aren’t supposed to be here…which is why I’m here. Except I don’t want to be here anymore, which is why you’re here. However, we can just sit here jawing if that’s the way you want go down.” Sarc
asm levels were high. Wasn’t that supposed to be “confidence levels were high?” Maybe not.

  He was right about the Tennessee, though. Reese Witherspoon would look good in that accent. Of course Reese looked good in just about anything.

  “We’d best be moving along, you hear?”

  “Oh. Right. Hang on, ma’am.” He crawled back into the helo.

  The FARC had been seriously bad news. The guerilla revolutionary army of Colombia had financed itself with drugs and kidnapping and were never known for kindness to strangers—especially not military ones. When the FARC leaders had made peace with the government after fifty-two years of fighting, certain elements were very upset. The worst of them had formed the Nuevo Ejército Revolucionario Colombia—New Revolutionary Army of Colombia or NERC.

  “How are you at counting to thirty?” Jesse called back to Ms. Could-pass-for-Reese-in-military-gear. Jesse knew he couldn’t trust his own abilities at the moment, just in case he had been concussed.

  “Just fine. Why?”

  “Start counting.”

  He yanked the safety pin and pressed the trigger on the self-destruct charges on the Little Bird and then patted it on the console hanging from the floor turned into ceiling.

  “So long, buddy,” he whispered to his helo and crawled back into the open. Jesse made it to his feet and felt much steadier than his first attempt.

  “Five,” she announced.

  “Which way do we go?”

  She pointed west into the darkness; the direction he’d flown in from.

  “I have a suggestion,” he took a deep breath to steady himself, which was of depressingly little help. No time for another one.

  “What’s that? Ten.”

  “Let’s run.”

  Hannah cursed, grabbed the pilot’s upper arm, and broke into a sprint. He wasn’t particularly steady on his feet, but his long legs helped him keep up.

  She should have realized that he knew enough to destroy something as sensitive as a Night Stalkers helicopter. The US Army’s 160th Special Operations Aviation Regiment flew very specialized and valuable equipment—none of which could be allowed to fall into the rebels’ hands. But he might have been a little clearer in warning her before pulling the pin.

  “Fifteen!” She should be counting down, not up.

  They sprinted back up the furrow his crash had dug through the small jungle clearing. When she’d seen the RPG take out the tail rotor on her ride home, she’d never expected to find anyone alive. Any normal, merely human pilot would have signed paid-and-delivered with that kind of damage. But he wasn’t any mortal human, he was a Night Stalker. Somehow he’d salvaged the situation enough to live to tell about it. Hadn’t crashed his sense of humor either—something far too rare in men.

  “Why this way?” He seemed to be finding his stride and she had to hustle to keep up with his long legs in their race for the tall trees.

  “Ten!” She was counting in the proper direction now. “They won’t expect you to backtrack toward the people who shot you down.” She aimed straight for the NERC camp, which lay less than a kilometer away. It was the best deception she could come up with. The guerillas would rush blindingly to the crash site, hoping for a hostage. Not finding one, they’d assume the pilot had continued to run away from the point of attack. They’d never guess that they’d be hiding out on the same side of the clearing as their own camp.

  “Toward?” His voice came out in a squeak.

  “Five!” She did her best to reinforce that it was far too late for questions.

  “My hat!” The pilot spun on his heel.

  Because she hadn’t let go of his sleeve—four—as they sprinted, she was spun around and almost flew aside. Three. Her grip held and she continued the spin to drag him back in their original direction despite his greater height and mass—two—and slammed him to the ground behind a tree.

  One.

  The jungle blew up!

  White light sheeted into the trees, which chopped it into searchlight beams momentarily brighter than sunlight.

  No need for her NVGs, she pulled them off—a massive fire now lit the entire clearing brilliantly as the helo’s fuel torched off as well with a second gut-punching thump!

  Silhouetted against the glow were a half dozen NERC who had rushed into the clearing from just fifty meters past their own exit point. The force of the explosion was enough to tumble the guerillas to the ground, but they’d been too far away to do her the courtesy of dying.

  Hannah unlimbered her rifle as a secondary explosion breached a fuel tank and the helo really shredded. Two of the NERC were down from shrapnel. In moments she’d shot the two standing farthest away—one male, one female. Didn’t matter. Their troops were typically a third female, and most of them made the men look mild.

  As soon as the roar of the explosion had washed by—while bits and pieces of helicopter were still whistling by, catching tree trunks with harsh thwaps—the Colombian jungle roared awake. Birds, parrots (a whole separate class of animal way cooler than mere birds—she loved to watch them play when she was stuck immobile in some strategic hiding spot), shrieking monkeys (a whole class of animal she could do without), even a roaring jaguar (a beast she never wanted to meet in person), created a cacophony that would mask any sound. Not that her silenced rifle made much more than a soft click when fired.

  Hannah took advantage of the distraction to drop the next two farthest guerillas. They’d think the shooter was over on the opposite side of the clearing, taking out the nearest targets.

  There was a sharp clack of metal close beside her. The pilot had just unfolded the stock of his FN-SCAR combat assault rifle.

  “No!” She slapped down on the barrel as he fired.

  Instead of sheeting out a gout of muzzle flame to tell the rebels their exact location, the round blasted into the dirt close in front of them. Both of them spent the next few seconds spitting out the blown-back powdery dirt—thick with the taste of loam and the high iron content that turned it rust-red.

  “Not without a flash suppressor, you idiot, unless you want them to see us,” she shouted over the ongoing jungle madness. “Don’t you have any survival instincts?”

  “Sorry, ma’am,” he reached into a thigh pocket and slipped on a suppressor that would also nearly silence the weapon. “S’pose I’m still just a touch rattled.”

  “Lie still. Don’t do anything until I say.”

  They lay in silence and watched as the lone remaining NERC wandered about the clearing. He checked his comrades. The two who had gone down during the explosion weren’t getting back up. Then he found the first of the bodies, each with two holes in his head and one in the heart. That captured his attention.

  Jolting up, he began scanning the firelit far side of the clearing just as she’d planned.

  Hannah could feel the pilot staring his question at her.

  She just shook her head. Some itch kept her from dropping the last man. The guerilla had no night-vision gear, so there was no chance of him spotting them.

  Then, a flashlight’s beam swung by less than three meters beyond their barrels. It was soon followed by a NERC patrol.

  This was so not good.

  Jesse held his breath and wondered how much it hurt to die. He could hear the crunch of leaves beneath their boots. Whispered Spanish. Animals still screaming up in the trees…a whole world away.

  At a soft sound to the right, the flashlight beam—which had been arcing toward them—slashed away. There was nothing over there that Jesse could see, but it definitely held the guerilla’s attention.

  The guerillas flowed around them to both sides. The two of them were horribly exposed; no ghillie suits that snipers used for hiding themselves, not even leaves and branches piled over them. All he could do was lie still and pray.

  Somehow, in all his years of service, the enemy had never been so close he could touch them. Could smell them going past—from both the long sweaty day and the highly spiced meal that he must ha
ve so rudely interrupted by getting shot down.

  Jesse’s stomach had the temerity to growl—he really needed to remember to eat before a mission—but thankfully his fire chose that moment to find something else to blow up as the helicopter continued through the stages of its immolation. The guerillas were far more intent on what was going on in the clearing than right at their feet.

  Another light swung in from the left, but again veered aside to track a soft click barely loud enough to hear. Each time a light came toward their wholly exposed position, there was always some sound to distract them away.

  Their accents were so thick as they shouted above the ongoing explosions—both mechanical and arboreal—that he could only catch a word here and there. That, and his Spanish was much worse than his Farsi. Regrettably his Farsi sucked almost as badly as his Arabic. Helicopter pilots weren’t usually worried about blending in down on the ground and his last three deployments had been in Afghanistan.

  The Delta operator shoved her rifle down into the leaves accumulated around the tree they were lying beneath. He did the same. It hid the potentially reflective metal, though they both kept their safeties off and their hands on the stocks.

  Once it was obvious that the guerillas were all in the clearing and cautiously searching the far tree line for “the pilot’s escape route,” he risked a whisper.

  “The ghosts are definitely on our side tonight.”

  “Ghosts?” She didn’t take her attention off the guerillas. There was now a full platoon-strength force of thirty bad-asses in the clearing. About a quarter of them were some of the bad-assedest—most bad-ass? fiercest-ever?—women he’d ever seen, if he didn’t count the Tennessean Delta operator at his side. Taking them on would definitely be a no-win scenario.