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  “He doesn’t mean flying; he means flying.”

  “Richieee.” Carla rolled her eyes at him. “What the hell are you talking about?”

  “Not me.” He nodded toward Smith. “It’s what he’s talking about. Flying.”

  It sounded as if Carla was grinding her teeth.

  He knew he wasn’t being as clear as could be, but Smith explained before Richie could figure out how to correct himself.

  “I’m talking about piloting a plane.”

  Richie pointed at Smith and nodded to Carla. “What he said.” Then he noticed that his pointing hand was just inches in front of Melissa’s nose. “Oh, sorry.” He pulled it back.

  Melissa grinned at him like he was being too sweet again. He was a Unit operator. Delta Force. A member of the most kick-ass military outfit there was. Sweet rankled deep and he didn’t—

  “Call the Air Farce,” Chad suggested. “The CIA must have some pull with those jokers.”

  It was the sworn duty of every service to look down on every other service they could. That was one of the things that Richie liked about being Delta—they got to tease everybody else while very few soldiers outside The Unit or DEVGRU even recognized an operator, never mind would dare teasing one if they did.

  Chad and Duane had restarted their card game, only paying indirect attention to the conversation. But Chad appeared to be losing badly, which was unusual for him, so his attention must be drifting. Maybe because he was still thinking too much about Melissa.

  Richie didn’t want Chad thinking about Melissa Moore. He didn’t want any other guy thinking about Melissa. He tried to recall if he’d ever been possessive about a woman before and couldn’t come up with one.

  “Don’t want the Air Farce,” Fred replied as pleasantly as if they were at one of Richie’s mom’s cocktail parties. “The Company needs Unit operators on this one. Preferably ones already deeply familiar with the South American drug trade. Which means this team. So, who here knows how to fly?”

  Richie raised his hand, as did Melissa a moment later.

  And that was it.

  It was a surprising moment for Richie. He knew he was the oddball of the outfit. Electronics, computers, figuring out how to drive a narco-submarine when nobody else knew…that was his niche in the team and he was glad to fill it.

  Yet here he had a skill, a—he searched for the right word, a, uh—military-type skill that none of his original teammates did. It just felt…weird. Carla could do everything better than most people, and Kyle could do anything…but both of their hands remained down. Just he and Melissa… He did his best to quash the idea of the two of them flying a little biplane together over the Grand Canyon with a dog poking its nose out into the wind. Stupid! That’s how he got around women. That’s why he—shut it down, Richie. Back to the problem.

  During the Operator’s Training Course, they’d all been taken out for orientation flights on small airplanes and helos—enough so that they would stand a chance of not crashing one in an emergency. They’d spent far more time figuring out how to disable them than pilot them. He hadn’t realized that he was the only one of the team who had already known how to fly.

  “Are you current?” Fred asked.

  “Yes,” he and Melissa answered in unison. They turned to look at each other then turned back to face Smith.

  “We are,” again in unison.

  Carla burst out laughing.

  Melissa turned to look at him. “Cut that out,” she hissed.

  “It’s not intentional. I just—”

  “I know.” Her voice little more than a whisper. “Just…stop it.”

  He nodded and she turned back to Smith.

  Richie had thought it was fun and funny that they were doing that. Apparently Melissa didn’t. Not even a little.

  “What are your certifications?”

  Melissa turned to look at Richie.

  He shook his head.

  But she kept her lips firmly pressed together.

  Finally he spoke, “Beech—” at the same moment she said, “Cessna—”

  He shrugged an apology and she looked away.

  Carla was still snickering at them. Richie wished she’d stop; it was getting on his nerves.

  “Cessna 172,” Melissa said clearly. “Instrument rating. And about fifty hours toward my commercial one. Also some seaplane time on a de Havilland Beaver.”

  Richie kept quiet, wondering if it was safe to speak yet.

  “Go already.” She didn’t turn to face him but he could hear the irritation.

  “Beech Bonanza V35,” he kind of blurted it out. “My dad’s plane,” he tried to explain to her back. He didn’t want her to be upset that his experience was in a somewhat more advanced aircraft. Even if both were small, single-engine planes, a Bonanza was a much hotter aircraft than a 172. Like a Lexus versus a VW beetle. One of the old ones. Though having seaplane hours was very cool and he was a bit envious of that.

  “VFR and IFR—that’s visual flight rules license,” he explained for the nonpilots on his team. “Which means you can fly when you can see. And an instrument rating which means—”

  “You can fly when you can’t see,” Chad cut him off. “We get it, Q.”

  Richie ignored him. “I have a lot of hours, just never did the commercial training. Dad’s an IBM salesman for high-end systems. He used to take me with him during summer sales calls—he flew himself place to place all over the northeast. He let me take over most of the flying. I did the necessary ground school but I never wanted to be an air jock for a living, so I didn’t do the commercial coursework. Sometimes I still go out with him when I have leave and we…”

  Everyone in the room was smiling at him.

  “What?”

  No one answered.

  “What?” he whispered it to Melissa’s back, hoping maybe she’d explain.

  She turned to look at him, then patted his knee. “You worry too much.” At least there was a smile on her face, though he wouldn’t mind it if she looked less amused.

  Chapter 3

  “That had to be a record,” Melissa groaned as she climbed out of The Company’s spiffy Cessna 560XL, which had no relation to her little Cessna 172 back in Victoria. The 560 was a comfortable business jet that was a vast improvement over flying coach or military. The CIA didn’t have it so bad.

  The mid-July heat and humidity of the Florida panhandle hit her like a sucker punch, far harder than it had in Venezuela two thousand miles closer to the equator. She wanted to stagger under the weight of it—the soup they called air was so thick that it was painful to breathe—but if she staggered in her present condition, she’d be as likely as not to go down. It would help if she’d slept more than three of the last forty-eight hours, but she hadn’t.

  “What record?” Richie asked as he climbed down beside her.

  “This morning I was on a whole new continent and I was only there for one meal.” And now she was in the roasting hell of Florida’s summer heat pounding off the pavement; everything more than a dozen steps away transformed into a shimmery mirage. The Gulf of Mexico, just a mile to the west, didn’t offer any cooling breeze, like the Pacific Ocean brushed across Victoria Harbour. Instead, it merely added a salty bite to the scorching heat.

  “You’re just a modern jet-setter,” Richie agreed happily and Melissa managed to resist poking him in the ribs. He’d said that he was glad to be out of waiting mode in that hotel room.

  She wished she was passed out in a hotel room. At the moment, a patch of pavement wouldn’t look so bad to lie down on, if it was out of this inferno.

  The Company’s plane had whisked the two of them from Maracaibo to the U.S. Coast Guard Air Station Clearwater on the panhandle’s inside coast in under three hours. Now it had dropped them off in front of a line of big hangars. Across from them, blinding in the su
nlight despite her sunglasses, were four monstrous fixed-wing C-130 Hercules in white livery with an orange stripe, and a row of Sikorsky Black Hawk helicopters in the same colors—Coasties called them Jayhawks, probably for their bright plumage. As a Delta operator, even during training, she was used to flying on the Night Stalkers’ versions of the Black Hawk, which were all painted pitch-black without even a unit designation on their sides.

  The flight had taken almost the same amount of time she’d been in Venezuela.

  It wasn’t quite that bad. She’d landed at eight a.m. and hadn’t left until after lunch, which was still ridiculously short for a new country and a new continent. She didn’t feel like a jet-setter at all; she felt much more closely related to a dirty dishrag.

  Over lunch in Venezuela she’d gotten to know the team a little. Most of it had been strictly social, rather than any mission recaps, as Fred had led them out to the hotel’s patio restaurant for lunch. At least the view had been good, overlooking the five-mile-wide outlet to the massive Lake Maracaibo.

  Richie had sat to one side of her, which had continued to frustrate Chad, and surprisingly, Carla had sat to the other. Richie had continued being thoughtful but awkward. Carla, even more surprisingly, had become polite and a little bit reserved. The change was so dramatic that Melissa hadn’t known what to make of her but had been too exhausted to pursue the matter.

  “We were going to start your training here in Maracaibo,” Agent Smith had explained, “but decided that was too obvious. So we’ll finish it here.” And then he hadn’t elaborated at all.

  After lunch, still stuck in the “I (heart) Aruba” T-shirt because they kept moving her along faster than her brain could catch up and send her somewhere to change, she’d been returned to the Maracaibo airport and flown out to Clearwater, Florida.

  She’d slept for the two hours of the flight and felt as if she could use a couple dozen more. Actually, she wished she hadn’t slept at all. That wholly insufficient amount of sleep had given her body a chance to report how exhausted she truly was. Now it was complaining bitterly about having to move around again.

  The pilot came down behind them and pointed them toward the farthest hangar, of course, shimmering in the heat rising off the long stretch of asphalt. At least she hoped the heat was blurring the air and not melting the landscape like some Salvador Dalí painting.

  “Why are we here again? I can’t remember.”

  “That’s because they didn’t tell us.” Richie reached out and easily plucked her duffel off her shoulder.

  The sudden lightness almost did send her to the ground, as she staggered against a weight that was no longer there. If she hit the tarmac, she’d probably fry like an egg by the way the late afternoon’s heat was re-radiating off the surface. She grabbed the duffel back—Melissa always carried her own load.

  Richie looked a little bummed, Mr. Helpful stymied in his quest to be Mr. Way Too Helpful. So she gave him a pleasant, “Oh.” Then thought to expand it with, “That explains why I can’t remember.”

  “I can conjecture.”

  “Go for it,” she said, because her mind certainly wasn’t working on such matters. However, it was busy noticing that, despite being the tech guy, Richie had lifted her duffel easily. No matter his long and lean build, he was Delta strong. The Unit’s Selection Process and Operators Training Course didn’t favor the bulky. Wide-shouldered Chad was the largest man she’d ever seen in Delta and even he was barely six foot. But just because Richie was slender didn’t mean he could have survived the training if he wasn’t powerful. It was just…unexpected.

  “The rest of the team is still in Venezuela. No word about breaking us up, so we’re headed back.”

  “Doesn’t matter to me. I haven’t actually been anywhere long enough to care in a while. A long while.” She was rambling. “Maybe since my brother died.” That was twice in one day; she typically didn’t mention him that often in a year. Definitely time to shut up.

  Richie bit his lower lip to cut off whatever he was about to say.

  She wished he wasn’t wearing his sunglasses against the late-afternoon light so that she could see what he was thinking. But she was wearing hers too, so they were even.

  “They want pilots,” Richie explained. “And we’re headed into trouble.”

  “How do you know about the trouble?”

  He paused while a departing jet shattered the afternoon stillness.

  “We’re Delta,” he said simply once her ears had stopped ringing.

  “Right.” She nodded in agreement. This wasn’t the Operator’s Training Course any longer. “Keep going. You’re on a roll so far.”

  He stopped her at the edge of the hangar’s inviting shadow, just five steps from blessed relief from the sun’s blaze as if he didn’t notice it.

  “What?”

  “Our team has been exclusively deployed to South America and solving the drug issues as close to the coca source as possible.”

  “Okay, which means what?” She was far too tired to put it together. “Wait a second.” Some part of her brain was working, and she didn’t like what it was telling her. “You think—”

  “Best bet is that we’re here for a brush-up course and then you and I will be flying drug-runner planes above the Amazonian jungle.”

  “That’s crazy!”

  One of the helicopters whined to life behind them, probably headed out for a pre-dinner beach patrol.

  But it wasn’t totally crazy. It was hard to remember that she’d crossed over from trainee to operator. It had only happened yesterday, and she still hadn’t caught up with the new way of thinking yet.

  “I’m not even licensed to take paying passengers between safe little American airports.”

  Richie grinned at her and turned for the shadows.

  “Neither am I. But I don’t think the drugs will mind.”

  * * *

  They did let Melissa sleep—for six hours. Richie had tried protesting that she needed more, but his attempts to protect her fell on deaf ears.

  He, however, hadn’t slept a wink. They’d been assigned a hotel room just off Clearwater Air Station’s field, overlooking the runway. Nothing fancy, a single room with two queen-size beds. When he’d started to protest, he’d been told that no one had told them the trainees were differently gendered and it was the only room available unless one of them wanted to sleep in the barracks at the airport.

  Melissa had been past caring she was so tired.

  Richie had cared a great deal because all of the thoughts he was having about Melissa The Cat Moore were wholly inappropriate for a fellow soldier.

  She’d face-planted onto the bed and hadn’t wiggled even a toe when he unlaced and pulled off her boots. At first he was glad that she’d landed facedown, because that T-shirt was killing him. Then he started noticing all of the other nice shapes he shouldn’t be noticing and went looking for a blanket to spread over her before he got any stupid ideas.

  He’d gone for a 10K run, found a weight room, and pumped iron for an hour, then showered. By the time they were due back on the base, he still hadn’t slept a wink. And he’d spent the entire time Melissa had been in the shower and changing with his back to the closed bathroom door. Why did they make the things so damn thin that he could hear her every motion through them?

  A quick meal and thirty minutes later, they were airborne for a nighttime flight over the brilliantly lit landscape of the central Florida panhandle. He took the right-hand copilot’s seat and Melissa sat as pilot. She looked cute even in the big headphone and boom-mic rig of the intercom and radio.

  And he needed his head examined.

  They were in a Beech Baron. It felt familiar; it was essentially the twin-engine version of his dad’s Bonanza. There were more controls and instruments for the second engine, but the rest of it was familiar. It was a six-seater, includi
ng the pilot, and as comfortable as most Beechcraft planes were. He’d always found the Cessnas and Pipers to be less cozy and more noisy.

  Close behind them sat an instructor who hadn’t identified his rank or his branch of the military. He was just Vito Corrello.

  “Priest,” Melissa had tagged him immediately, showing that she was less out of it than he’d thought. Father Vito Cornelius had been the priest and wise man in The Fifth Element—well, the wisest of a not very swift lot.

  Vito the pilot hadn’t reacted when they’d called him that, which told Richie plenty. Their trainer had to be from the U.S. Army’s Aviation Center of Excellence at Fort Rucker. If he was Coast Guard or Air Force, he’d probably have been much friendlier. But because he was Army and they were Army, he would feel honor bound to be a complete hard-ass. And being from Fort Rucker’s ACE, he would be doubly so.

  He was.

  They were barely out of the pattern and clear of the airport when Vito told them to cut the left engine’s throttle to simulate a failure.

  Richie reached out, taking a moment for a quick look at Melissa in the soft red light cast by the flight instruments setup for nighttime flying. She offered an infinitesimal shrug, so he pulled back the power.

  Neither of them had been at the controls of a multi-engine airplane before so they didn’t know what to expect.

  The Beech Baron stumbled. As if it had caught its left wing in the weeds though they were two thousand feet up. It twisted to the left and then headed into a leftward roll—which would be fatal at their low elevation.

  “Copilot!” Vito snapped out loud enough to make Richie jump in his seat. “Feather the prop.”

  Richie had to think for a moment to remember that meant him. He reached out and yanked on the appropriate lever.

  “Pilot! Right bank. Right rudder. Retrim.”

  He could feel Melissa’s instant response through their shared control yokes.

  “You, copilot. Get that engine checked out and restarted.”

  Richie went through the standard protocol for if it had been a single-engine plane while Melissa fought the plane back into normal flight. Fuel—the tanks had plenty. He checked that the “Fuel Boost” switch was on because that sounded promising.