Authors: M. L. Buchman
“Something’s got you on this one.”
“It’s just that she’s my best pilot. And I’m worried.” Sounded plausible enough.
“She?” Jim shot an elbow and Mark barely blocked it.
“Eat hot lead!”
“Ooo! Touchy, touchy!” Jim started laughing, then chopped it off. “One of yours? She? Tell me you’re not going there, Mark.”
“I’m not going there.” Only one kiss worth, and all that had earned him was a wrenched arm and a Coke shower.
“Don’t go there. You know that.” Jim looked around and then leaned in close. “And don’t be telling me this. I can’t know this. Stick around. I’ll hook you up with a cute midshipman. At least she’ll be in another service. Please tell me she’s not part of your squad.”
Mark did his best to look bland, but knew it didn’t work.
Jim let out a low whistle.
“You got it bad?”
Mark shrugged.
“Aw, shit!” Jim hung his head, staring down toward the deck.
They went back to college, roommates for crying out loud. How was Mark supposed to hide anything from him?
“I got it bad the first damn time I saw her. Not that she knows that. I stayed clear.” Until he’d blown it all thirty-six minutes ago.
“Shit.” Jim cursed much more quietly before looking up at Mark. “Okay, here’s what I know. Rear Admiral James Parker comes winging in here crack of dawn this morning. He was supposed to be rotated stateside for a couple weeks, then he’s back three days later. Goes straight to the captain’s office. No one’s seen him since. You and your girl hit the deck about two hours later. I know where you’re stationed, so the call to you had to be within five minutes of his arrival. Forty-five minutes after you smacked that puppy down,” he nodded toward Mark’s helicopter below, “trying to put a hole in our pretty deck, we get a call to scramble a Super Hornet two-seater for Ramstein to the head of the queue for passenger unspecified. Someone climbed aboard, I spotted a purple helmet, and we kicked them into the sky. That’s it. It’s all I got for you.”
Mark nodded and mumbled out, “Thanks.” He must really look miserable if Jim wasn’t teasing him more about that landing. He’d never bounced a Black Hawk before outside of training and emergencies. Only dumb luck and the angle of arrival had kept him from bouncing them right off the side and into the ocean. He kept his attention north by west, the heading for Germany.
“Are you sure about this?” Jim broke the silence.
Mark could only shrug. Suddenly he wasn’t sure about anything. Except one thing; he never should have kissed her. At least it would have remained his problem alone.
Jim stood up straight. Rather than the standard punch, he rested his hand on Mark’s shoulder for a long moment.
“Fly low, buddy mine. Way below the radar.”
Jim headed back inside, but Mark stayed watching the water and the sky.
Fly low? Didn’t have a lot of choice, did he? Emily Beale had just flown right off the edge of the map.
The entrance to the White House reminded Emily of her first day of basic training; thoroughly daunting. Her father had had to drop her two blocks from the security gate to save him the hassle of waiting around for her clearance. She sent the duffel back to the house with his car.
A light rain shower filled the air with sparkling light, making the September sky glitter like gold. It was the first precipitation she’d seen since rotating to Southwest Asia two months earlier, other than a couple nasty nighttime blizzards in the Hindu Kush.
The guards at the gate eyed her carefully as she kept tilting her head back to catch the shimmering raindrops on her tongue like summer snowflakes.
Let them laugh. If they’d baked their backsides in the Afghan summer… only they weren’t laughing. Somewhere closer to a lethal scowl. Deadly at twenty paces. No weapons required. Suddenly she missed her flight helmet and the silvered, pull-down visor, perhaps mirrored enough to deflect their glares. Perhaps.
Of course, she’d been glared at by the best and could handle it, even if these guys had been to the same school of scowl as Major Mark Henderson. He’d graduated top of his class, no big surprise. A mental image of him giving a graduation scowl instead of a valedictory speech almost made her laugh.
One of the many Henderson legends told of a young lieutenant who’d mistakenly turned his back, thinking the major was done chewing him out. The rumor of the scowl scorch marks running up the lieutenant’s backside was still passed down pilot to pilot, and it was hard not to laugh at the man, though he’d apparently been a good officer since then.
She shook her head sharply, scattering tiny raindrops in a sparkling arc from her damp hair. Why in the world was she thinking about the major? SOAR was done with her, and she’d never see the man again. Good riddance. If only that thought didn’t feel like a knife to her gut. Did some part of her secretly like Major Viper Henderson? That actually did cause her to laugh aloud. Even if she didn’t, clearly her hormones did.
The real White House checkpoint squatted at the end of a long, wrought-iron fence. Someone had dropped a single-wide trailer in the middle of the gate beneath a gorgeous beech tree. The trailer was unsightly on about thirty levels, right down to the off-beige color and the narrow, steel wheelchair ramps that were too steep to walk comfortably.
Four men in black suits cross-checked her ID in the computer, took a fingerprint, had her walk through a metal detector, made her check both her boot knife, not quite regulation but considered a necessity inside any zone, and the Swiss Army fold-up forgotten in her pants pocket. Felt half-naked without them. Not a good mental image in front of the burly detectives. Agents. Blacksuits. Whatever they were.
Actually, two did the work of messing with her and the paperwork. The other two stood back with a decent spread between them. All they did was watch her. Even a fast shooter would be unlikely to take down both before one could respond.
They clearly didn’t know why she was really here, bodyguard in disguise. Female aviator brought in to do their job because they’d failed to protect the First Lady. She’d best keep that role to herself unless she wanted the blacksuits to really despise her. And that nickname wouldn’t help either.
The briefing team had been in the dark as well. They had focused solely on her public role, a chef that the First Lady had used her influence to pull from the military because she’d been “cute” on CNN. The First Lady was notoriously whimsical, having her own lipstick-red limousine for example, and the story actually fit.
Captain Emily Beale now worked as a personal chef for the First Lady. No more, no less.
And it sucked. But, when you were all the way down, it took most of the fight out of you. Made it easy to roll with each punch to her ego.
Name. Birth date. Fingerprints. Her military ID meant nothing here.
The summer rain raised the ante to actual rainfall, beating down on the tin roof. The trailer both felt and sounded like a pressure cooker.
Last place of service. Fort Campbell, Kentucky. Let them probe all they wanted; they’d hit a dead end at a P.O. box at SOAR’s main office in Michael C. Grimm Hall. SOAR never disclosed where its teams had scattered across the face of the globe. More than a few times, she’d answered a personal forwarded phone call while stationed in hell and gone, and talked as if she were looking out at the bluegrass fields. Out of habit, SOAR pilots always knew the weather and time of day at Fort Campbell for just such an occasion. As 5th battalion, she also tracked Tacoma, Washington. Easy; when in doubt, cool and raining.
The sky darkened. A real D.C.-style thunderstorm rolling through. She’d forgotten what they sounded like when they pounded in.
Current commander?
President Peter Matthews, Commander-in-Chief, U.S. Military Forces. Chew on that one, boys.
Were they pushing her just for the fun of it? She probably had higher security clearance than all four guys in the trailer. Combined. Was more trusted by her country than they were. They might guard the country’s leader, she guarded the country’s security and, since becoming SOAR qualified, many of her darkest secrets.
Then they tried to confiscate her chef’s knives. The rolled, worn-soft leather bag was the only item she’d retained from her duffel. She’d spent most of a month’s salary on this set, and she wasn’t giving them over to any two-bit security guard. Okay. This was the White House. She wasn’t giving them over to any four-bit security guard.
Emily bucked her way up the chain of command until she faced Agent Frank Adams, rank unknown. He didn’t have the height or breadth of Major Henderson, but he had the same case of bad attitude. One that might put even the major in his place, truth be known. Though that might simply be the due to the soaking he’d received crossing over from the White House in the midst of a cloudburst.
Well, she’d learned a thing or two inside the zone herself. She planted her feet at parade rest, her dress blues perfect—well, as perfect as they ever were on her. The military really didn’t know much about clothes on a female form, especially tall and thin. Her silver captain’s bars polished and vertical on her collar points. Her black beret square on her head, insignia flash to the fore. Nonregulation hair bound back in a neat ponytail. The two-week-old, winged “Night Stalker” tattoo at the base of her spine well hidden, but she felt stronger for it being there beneath her hands clasped behind her back.
Mark had shown that she’d earned it, too, by how upset he’d been at losing her. Whatever snafu mangle she’d landed in, she had qualified to fly with SOAR’s Black Adders and had finally belonged. However briefly. If she’d hit the pinnacle of her career at twenty-nine, then she had. But she’d always have the marker of that achievement, that strength, rooted right at the base of her spine.
“I can’t cook without my knives. I’m supposed to be here to cook for the First Lady. If you must know, I’d rather be on the line with my crew, ramming my Black Hawk down some asshole terrorist’s throat, but since the Commander-in-Chief chose to give that the shaft, I’m here to cook. Now, you either let me and my knives out of this nuthatch of a single-wide, or I can about-face my butt out of here and you can explain my absence to the First Lady yourself.”
She bit her tongue hard. Keeping it in check had never been one of her strengths, but she’d be damned if she’d apologize. It had cost her rank more than once, which was fine by her. Too much rank, and they didn’t let you fly any more.
He looked pissed. Really pissed. And this wasn’t an Air-Force-base security grunt; this was the U.S. Secret Service, the baddest asses in the whole world. Even more extreme than Special Forces, some argued, because they functioned right out in the open, no cover of night, no battle gear. Even the D-boys respected them. And Delta Force operators didn’t give respect to anyone who ranked less than several levels above incredibly amazing. Michael’s handshake and muted “Thanks!” after she dragged him off the cliff ranked as perhaps the highest compliment of her entire career. Right up there with Henderson’s, “Nice flight.”
In the blacksuit world, this guy might be the toughest of them all. Mr. Agent Frank Adams, Rank Unknown, looked it, with his rough features and big hands clenching and unclenching into surprisingly massive fists.
So okay, she’d apologize a little.
“Sir.”
But that was all he was going to get.
First Lady Katherine Matthews’s private kitchen on the third floor of the White House combined a chef’s dream with a thorough undercoating of disaster. Emily couldn’t stop turning around to see everything.
The decorator’s motif shone in lush cherry wood and mirror-polished brass. A ring of the finest nonstick pans, cast-iron pots, and copper saucers dangled from iron hooks above a dark cherry-and-maple striped cutting block big enough to seat a party of eight comfortably. A pro-level gas range to die for, plus a griddle, an indoor grill, and a pair of wok burners. The very best kitchen machines lined a long slab of marble for baking. A windowed door led out to a sunny porch on the back side of the third floor of the residence.
Emily swung the door open, far heavier than she expected. It took a moment to figure out why. Inch-thick glass, a rude reminder that bullets, or bomb-laden model airplanes, just might come traveling this way. There was a nice place for an arrangement of herb planters. She’d get a few starts, though she had no intention of being here long enough to harvest. Better to buy plants already in full leaf.
In the cabinets, she unearthed gorgeous china in a frilly, feminine pattern of fragile delicacy, but with the bold colors suitable to a person of power. Cool and smooth to the touch, a perfect glaze over the tracery.
The pattern clearly stated part the First Lady and part President Peter Matthews. But there was no chance she’d start thinking about him.
Further exploration revealed place settings to provide quiet service for two or an unannounced crowd of two dozen. That told her one thing about her duties; be flexible, Emily. Very flexible. She froze with her hand still on the burnished-brass cabinet handle. Too flexible.
She stood in the White House.
In a kitchen.
To cook!
This world was so far from the Black Hawk cockpit she’d exited under nine hours earlier that she had to lean against the counter as a vertigo-like wave threatened to take her out at the knees.