The Phoenix Agency_The Sum Is Greater Read online

  The first village of any sort was a depressingly long way downstream—if the NERC hadn’t come along in their boat, she and Jesse would still have been walking at this time tomorrow night.

  The only sound loud enough to hear was the occasional roar of an airborne Minigun—which showed that the Night Stalkers were still looking for them. Also that the NERC guerillas were being surprisingly willing to die in hopes of shooting down another helo as the Night Stalkers wouldn’t be firing until someone fired at them.

  A town of several dozen houses and a dock with several boats had her easing down on the throttle and creeping along. She didn’t want someone recognizing their boat and wondering why someone other than a NERC guerilla was driving it. There were a couple boats at the dock that might catch her, especially as she didn’t know the river and was bound to hit something bad.

  “How’s our fuel?” Nerves made her skin prickle. She could feel hidden eyes watching them slip by in the dark. But no searchlight blasted forth to illuminate them. Maybe they could steal some fuel from the boats at the dock if they had to.

  “We’re good,” Jesse’s whisper reminded her of lying side-by-side at the edge of the clearing and their soft-spoken introductions. There had been an intimacy that—that she wasn’t going to think about right now. Or ever. It was just crazy talk.

  A few miles past the town there was nothing but the dark river winding its way to the ocean. All she could hear was the engine’s steady throb until it blended into the background. The resulting silence was as oppressive as the heat.

  “Tell me something about you I don’t know, cowboy.”

  “Wa-all,” he drawled out the overdrawn Texas version of the word “well.” “I’m thinking right hard about when I can try kissin’ you again, ma’am.”

  “If I need to make a big noise, I’ll let you know.”

  He mumbled mostly to himself, “Finally meet a beautiful, competent woman, and she thinks I’m just useful as a dadgum APU.”

  Hannah yanked the throttle back to idle.

  Jesse nearly smashed himself like a bug on the inside of the windshield as the boat slowed sharply and settled hard into the water. It began drifting in the slow current. “What the… For cryin’ out loud.”

  She grabbed him by the lifting loop on the front of his survival vest used for winch rescues. But he was so strong and solid that, when she yanked on it, she ended up pulling herself out of the driver’s seat.

  Jesse didn’t hesitate.

  Hannah’s momentum was on the move and he helped it along. He scooped a hand under her butt. He finally got to answer the question that had been about the only thing that let him keep up with the crazy pace she’d set through the jungle: Hannah Tucker’s behind felt even better than it looked.

  His arm around her back included her rifle. Their chests were held apart by his own rifle and both of her handguns slung between them. But leaning in just a little was enough to let them kiss.

  It hadn’t been a fluke of crisis in the jungle. She tasted fantastic. Chocolate Tootsie Pop and…fresh, like she was just coming to life. And she felt even better. He snugged her tighter into his lap. He’d known her for about four hours and he couldn’t get her naked soon enough.

  He wasn’t that sort of guy.

  Okay. Maybe he was. A little bit. If only because the civilian pickings were so damn easy for a Special Operations pilot.

  But the only thing that had ever supercharged him like this was flying a Little Bird. The tiny helo specialized in clandestine missions in tight places. It was fast, sleek, and maneuverable—and the parallels to the woman in his lap were obvious enough that she was irresistible.

  There was no way to undo her shirt without removing her vest. And he wasn’t willing to risk letting go of her enough to do that. His flightsuit had a front closure and she had that zipped down to where his FN-SCAR rifle hung across his solar plexus. Her hand slipped inside the heavy flame-resistant layer and her fingers dug into his chest as if to hold on while he worked his way down her chin and throat. Her skin was smoky—not like a fire, but like a mystery just waiting for him to—

  “Helos!”

  “Who cares?” She dug her fingers into his hair and pulled him so tightly against the base of her throat that he couldn’t even kiss her there.

  So he nipped her instead—hard.

  “Yow!”

  “We care,” he managed to extricate himself enough to look up. He yanked on his NVGs that he didn’t remember shoving aside, and there they were. He could tell by the formation that they were Night Stalkers—no one else flew helos in such tight groupings. That, and any local helicopter would likely be using their running lights to avoid collisions. The Night Stalkers were moving low, fast, and blacked out.

  “They’re already past us,” Hannah had leaned back in his arms, tipping her head back to look upside down at the sky. It was easy to imagine her arching over him as he—

  Focus, Jesse! He was, just on the wrong thing. His hand still cradled the finest behind ever born of woman.

  Still not focusing. He managed to look away from her throat and back to the sky.

  “I wish we had a way to signal them,” she was still arched against him.

  “We do. You do. Together. On one…One!”

  Jesse imagined that he was an APU for ventriloquist Hannah Tucker. Not some piddly ol’ Black Hawk auxiliary power unit, but one of the monster ones mounted on a C-17 Globemaster III jet transport. He pumped energy through the hand cradling her behind and the other that was over her breast despite the thick vest blocking his grasp.

  “Huh!” Hannah snapped as rigid as a fence post for a moment, then she collapsed bonelessly against him. Her head lolled back as if she’d fainted. He scooped her back against him, supporting her head. She had a pulse but she was definitely out.

  He leaned his head down to make sure she was breathing just as the sonic boom rolled over them like the crack of God’s own buggy whip. Five seconds since her grunt—which meant the sound must have boomed into existence about a mile away. If she’d made the sound straight overhead, that meant it should reach the departing helos right about…

  The helos stumbled in the sky as if slapped by a massive wind. Actually, more as if the pilots had yanked their hands from their controls to cover their ears, even though they’d be wearing helmets.

  Sure enough, they circled back to investigate.

  It would be nice if Hannah could make another, perhaps less horrendous sound, but she was still out cold. Then he remembered the IR flasher in the one of his flightsuit’s pockets. They’d been too far away for that to be of any use before, but now that they were headed his way…

  He set Hannah gently back into the driver’s seat. The boat was twisting slowly in an eddy current, with the engine still running at idle.

  Digging out the infrared flasher, he triggered it and aimed it skyward. Invisible without NVGs, it would be a brilliant strobe in the helo pilots’ view.

  Sure enough, in moments Patty had slewed her own Little Bird down to their boat. She hovered so that her skids were barely off the water and brushing against the side of the boat. That placed her rotor a few feet over his head, and the side-mounted sitting bench extending over the gunwale and into the boat.

  He lifted Hannah’s limp body onto the bench and buckled her in. He slung her rifle over his shoulder next to his, got a good grip on the bench seat, then kicked the throttle to full.

  “Go!” He shouted as he hauled himself onto the bench beside Hannah and the boat took off.

  Luck was with him!

  The boat raced downriver, straight enough to pick up significant speed. At the first bend it ran head-on into a tree so massive that the boat merely bounced off—now a crumpled and sinking version of its former self. Then the fuel blew and a nice fireball shredded the wooden boat into a thousand splinters.

  He strapped on a seatbelt as Patty carved a hard turn, low over the jungle. He grabbed the intercom headset that always hung just in
side the pilot’s door and tugged it on.

  “Hey, Patty.” Jesse wrapped an arm around Hannah’s shoulders to keep her from flopping around. Her head landed on his shoulder and stayed there as if she was just sleeping. He checked her pulse again, strong and steady. He resisted the urge to run his hand down any lower.

  “You crazy bastard, Outlaw!” Patty practically screamed in her thick Gloucester fisherman accent, almost incomprehensible to the Southern ear when she was upset. “You go and make a fireball when there’s a stealth jet that doesn’t even show up on my radar making sonic booms around here somewhere?”

  She thought a jet had made the blast, not him and Hannah. That was fine with him; there were some things he wasn’t comfortable revealing even to a fellow flyer and friend like Patty.

  “At supersonic speeds they’d be way over the horizon by now.”

  “You’d better hope so. You get me killed and I’ll come back and haunt you. If my Mick doesn’t get to you first for doing me in.”

  “No killing my gal,” Mick spoke from the other pilot’s seat with that half laugh of his. “Especially not when I’m sitting next to her. Who’s your buddy?”

  “The Delta I went in after. Got knocked out.” He buried his nose in her hair and squeezed more tightly on her shoulders. From his seat, he could see the other three helos forming up around Patty and Mick’s.

  It was a little disorienting to be sitting facing sideways on the bench mounted on the outside of the Little Bird rather than seated inside and flying it. But it was far less disorienting than racing through the jungle on a boat while dodging crocodiles and NERC guerillas.

  “What happened to your bird?”

  “RPG.”

  “I goddamn hate RPGs,” aw-p-gs Patty continued in her thick New England.

  More like rocket-propelled Gloucester.

  “They just suck so bad. Why did someone ever invent those? Flying would be so much better without them. How about you dis-invent those, Outlaw?”

  “Sure, just as soon as I get a new bird.”

  “Do we need to send in a salvage team for your old one? What did y’all do to that there poor thang?”

  “You’re always so cute when you try Texan. Leastwise it helps me understand your gibberish some. Y’all is plural, by the way. I’m a singular type person.”

  Or was he? He had a passed-out woman cradled against his shoulder and—And he was being utterly ridiculous. She wasn’t a woman and she definitely wasn’t with him. She was a Delta operator who had singlehandedly saved his sorry hide.

  “No. It was a total airframe loss; can’t believe I made it out. Then the bad guys were moving in, so I triggered the destruct charges.”

  “I did that once…kind of. I parked it in an active volcano. Sort of the same result.” There was a story he hadn’t heard. Of course, Patty—like the former swordfisherwoman she was—always seemed to have a taller story to go after any shorter one. “Well, you just sit back and rest easy. The carrier is in international waters, so we’ve got another hour to reach her.”

  Hannah stirred against him, waking. She finally sat up long enough to assess that they were flying. In silence they watched the last of the trees slide by, the beach, then they were over open ocean.

  “Feet wet,” Patty announced.

  Hannah made no effort to escape his embrace. Instead, she snuggled back against him and returned her head to his shoulder as they watched the dark ocean flashing by below and the brilliant stars shining above.

  Feet wet.

  He wasn’t just over the ocean. He was in over his goldurned head! Hannah wasn’t some buckle bunny from a rodeo or a Pacific Northwest bar gal from around one of the watering holes close by Fort Lewis-McChord where his 5th Battalion E Company was based.

  She was a top warrior. One who was fast consuming all his thoughts.

  And he was a flyer from a whole different part of the country. He was a Texan based in Washington State, she was a Tennessean based in Fort Bragg, North Carolina.

  He barely knew her, but already he couldn’t imagine letting her go.

  3

  The debriefing teams had, per protocol, kept them apart. Her report on the NERC had taken hours and hours. Hannah had made some notes, even captured some images, but most of it she’d stored in her own memory using methods that would allow her to perform accurate retrieval.

  All of which had been fine…until they started in on questions about a stealth supersonic jet.

  Her utter mystification had slipped for just a moment, and they’d hounded her about that. In that final effort, had she created a sonic boom? There’d been no chance to speak with Jesse. One thing she knew for damn sure; there was no way she was giving up ground on denying that one. She did not create magical, mystical sounds that traveled outside her body! They’d lock her up and throw away the key. Thankfully she could honestly answer that she hadn’t heard a thing. As to being passed out when she’d been rescued, she could only shrug.

  “I don’t know what happened. I wasn’t conscious at the time.” She’d thought that would stop their questions. Instead it got her remanded to medical, who recommended light duty for two weeks’ observation.

  The sun had been rising the last time she saw Jesse. They’d dismounted onto the deck of an aircraft carrier and been whisked apart before she had a chance to say hi, bye, or what did she have to do to get another kiss. Though if she was hammered into unconsciousness by a kiss, what might taking him to bed do? Kill them both?

  Now the sun was setting again. They’d fed her, but they hadn’t let her sleep or shower.

  The seaman apprentice leading her to a cabin said he had no knowledge of a Night Stalker named Jesse. It rapidly became clear that he was so rule-bound that he wasn’t even going to admit to having heard of the Night Stalkers of the 160th SOAR. Must be his first cruise out of Navy boot camp.

  Down four decks on steep-ladderways that she almost nose-dived down. Of course if she’d slept in the last three days, it might have helped.

  Might not.

  Her thoughts being preoccupied by a man was so unlike her that her entire inner balance—that utterly Zen state of kicking ass for a living—was all out of kilter.

  Gray steel, narrow companionways, more gray steel. The Navy needed a serious lesson in imagination. There was a story that the first thing the brand-new Delta Force command did, on the day they took over a decaying office building in the back corner of Fort Bragg, was to plant a line of red rose bushes along the walk.

  The Navy needed some of that.

  “How much trouble would I get in if I painted an art deco mural on one of these walls?”

  The seaman apprentice flinched.

  This was fun. Too bad Jesse wasn’t here. He’d appreciate the humor of the situation. Think up something funny to say next. Why had she thought that? She hadn’t laughed in a long, long time.

  “Are we ever going to get to a cabin? I need to—”

  In answer, the seaman led through a final twist in the passage, pointed at a steel door—gray—then he looked down and practically jumped out of his boots.

  Tucked in the corner of the turn, his back against her cabin door and his head tipped sideways against a wall, lay Night Stalker Jesse Outlaw Johnson. His extended legs were crossed at the ankles. His flightsuit was nondescript tan and she couldn’t see his face. But there was no question who it was because of the black cowboy hat that was pulled low on his brow.

  She managed to shed the seaman, then wasn’t sure what to do.

  Shy wasn’t her normal style. But squatting down to gently shake Jesse’s shoulder felt impossibly intimate. Of all the things he could have done, he’d chosen to sleep against the door of her assigned quarters. There was no lock, but he’d been too polite to invade her privacy by going in to crash out. Neither had he left a note telling her how to find him in the floating zoo that was five thousand sailors and flyboys aboard an aircraft carrier.

  Instead, he leaned against her door, snoozing
beneath his beloved cowboy hat.

  Well, if shaking his shoulder was too personal, what was a woman to do?

  She kicked his boot hard enough to awaken him.

  He startled, but didn’t raise his head enough to look her in the face.

  “Well, at least y’all are right side up this time,” he addressed her boots. Then he tipped his hat back enough to look up at her. “Morning, ma’am.” His smile was making all sorts of suggestions about the kinds of things he knew.

  Hannah wasn’t comfortable with any of them. Somehow he knew more about her from a single night tramping in silence through the jungle than multi-month boyfriends or multi-year teammates did.

  For lack of any better idea of what to do, she kicked the sole of his boot again.

  “Are you always this grumpy in the morning, Hannah?”

  “Only after ten-hour debriefs. How long have you been asleep here?” She reached over his head and twisted the door handle.

  “Yipes!” Jesse exclaimed as he tipped over backward to sprawl across her threshold. How more than six feet of cowboy could be so cute was beyond her. Then he raised a watch to his face as if lying on the deck of an aircraft carrier’s hallway was a normal thing. “About fifteen minutes.”

  Looking down at him, she could see his exhaustion.

  “They all riled up over you not hearing a sonic boom?” he asked, folding his hands over his sternum, apparently content to lie there all day as if he was out on his beloved prairie.

  Just what had he told them? She wasn’t ready to answer such things, especially not out in the hallway where they could be overheard.

  He struggled up to his feet to look down at her. It was the first time she’d stood toe-to-toe with him when there was enough light to really see. He wasn’t just a cowboy, he was a tall and handsome cowboy.