Guardian (31 page)

“Absolutely, Flyboy.” Sophie looped an arm around her grandmother’s shoulders for a hug. “Thanks, Nanny.”

“Well, honey, your man does have one fine backside.”

Sophie watched her lanky husband lope inside, the ice-cream churn tucked under his arm. Love, contentment, and more than a little anticipation shimmered through her. “Yeah, Nanny, he sure does.”

NELLIS AFB, NEVADA

“I’ve lost my edge, Colonel.”

The admission burned its way up Captain Chuck Tanaka’s throat, each word like acid on open wounds inside him. But he was an ace at embracing pain, and he’d be damned before he would endanger anyone else by taking the colonel up on his offer to put Chuck back in the action.

F-16s roared overhead, rattling the rafters in the gaping hangar. Colonel Rex Scanlon stood beside him as airmen prepped for deployment to the Middle East with immunizations, gas masks, duffel bags full of gear. Close to two hundred warm bodies going to war.

Including his crew. His old crew from the top secret test squadron.

Pilots Jimmy Gage and Vince Deluca lined up with loadmaster Mason Randolph standing in a long, long line for a gamma globulin immunization along with an
assload full of other shots to prepare them for the diseases overseas. He remembered well how the huge needle left a lump that made for uncomfortable flying. Back when he’d been their navigator. Before his injuries grounded him for life.

These days he was the squadron mobility officer. He ensured all deploying personnel were up to date with training, shots, equipment.

In a nutshell? He rode a desk and pushed paper.

Musty gear and a low hum of chitchat filled the hangar. All familiar. Jimmy, Vince, and Mason shuffled forward, flight suits down around their ankles in boxer shorts while the doc shouted, “Next.”

“Tanaka?” Scanlon leaned forward, staring him down from behind black-rimmed glasses. “I need you on this mission. You’re the man. You have the skills.”

Not the skills he wanted, not the job he wanted. Better just to exist.

Chuck took a folder from an overeager airman and signed off on the bottom of a form. One more ready to deploy. Around them, uniformed men and women carried large green deployment bags stuffed full of equipment picked up at numerous stations. Security cops were posted throughout, watching and talking into radios. Off to his left, a dozen more who’d completed drawing equipment sat on the floor fitting the ballistic plates into their body armor. Another group checked over their weapons, disassembling and putting them back together.

His fingers twitched with muscle memory from performing the same tasks countless times. In the past. Speed mattered, and he couldn’t trust his hands or his feet any longer.

Chuck slapped the folder closed. “I figure I’ve given
my fair share to Uncle Sam. He won’t mind if I sit out the rest of my commitment to the air force at my desk, rubber stamping paperwork.”

Scanlon scrubbed his face, sighed hard, his eyes too full of the hell that went down when they’d both been in Turkey two years ago. “Without question, you’ve sacrificed more than your fair share for your country. But this op, this enemy, these people…” His jaw clenched, and the pity shifted to something harder. “This is our chance to even the score for what they did to you and those other servicemen they kidnapped.”

Hunger. Mind games. Torture. Chuck’s grip tightened on his clipboard.

Thankfully, his thoughts were broken by another airman thrusting a folder at him. He opened it and took a few minutes to calm himself by reading the checklist before signing at the bottom. He embraced routine and monotony through the days and sweated through the nights.

Chuck passed the folder back to the airman and waited until he stepped away before meeting the colonel’s gaze dead on. “A very wise nun in the Hawaiian orphanage where I grew up always told me holding grudges is bad for the soul.”

“In case you didn’t notice, I’m not laughing.”

Neither was Chuck these days. But he was getting by. Surviving one step at a time, as he recovered from the ass kicking he’d taken overseas at the hands of a sadistic bitch bent on prying secrets from servicemen, then selling the info to the highest terrorist bidder.

She hadn’t gotten jack shit from him about the covert test missions he used to fly or the cutting-edge equipment he developed in the dark ops squadron. But he’d paid a heavy price for keeping those secrets.

“Pardon my bluntness, Colonel, but have you taken a look at me lately?” His eleven broken bones had healed as well as they ever would, and he was lucky to be on his feet again. Reconstructive surgery had taken care of most of the scars. External ones, anyway.

His ex-girlfriend claimed he was still an “emotional cripple.” Whatever the hell that meant. “Sir, I know exactly what I’m worth these days, or rather how little. You’re not fooling anyone here. Offering me a mission is the equivalent of a pity fuck. Sir.”

Scanlon’s thick eyebrow hitched upward through two shouts of “Next” before he pulled the clipboard from his hand and gave it to Chuck’s assistant, a surprised master sergeant.

The colonel guided Chuck away from the bustle and behind some pallets loaded for the deployment. “Chuck, this mission could be the backbreaker for what some of the intel spooks think is a major attack here in the States. Our equipment, equipment you helped test, is the only way to exploit the one hole we have been able to find in their organization—”

“Not interested,” he interrupted, desperate as hell to stop the colonel from taunting him with what he could not have anymore.

Scanlon continued as if he’d never been interrupted. “You’ll go in undercover as a blackjack dealer on an Italian cruise ship next week. You won’t be going in alone. I’ll have your back, and David Berg will be running the surveillance equipment on board the
Fortuna
. Think about it. At worst you’ll get some sun and great food. And at best, you’ll bring down a terrorist cell.”

Hunger for the chance to fight back gnawed at his gut. “You don’t need me as the front man.” Maybe…“Why
not let me operate the gadgets? Nobody runs the packet analyzer and translator algorithms as well as I do. It’s more art than science.”

Shit, he was already envisioning himself there. “Forget I said that. I’m exactly where I should be—”

Pop!
A gunshot blasted from the other side of the pallets. A chunk of wood splintered into the air.

Chuck jerked hard and fast, looking over his shoulder even as he knew it had to be some dumb ass who’d slipped a round in his weapon, then seriously screwed up with an unintentional discharge. He looked across the hangar—

And stared straight into the cold, emotionless eyes of a gunman who looked too damn much like one of their own firing wildly into the clusters of airmen.

So fast. Shouts and more pops. Bullets. From the gunman and the security cops, but no one could get a decent aim as the guy ran and bobbed. The gunman turned toward Chuck’s old crew. Fired. Jimmy spun back as a round caught him in the shoulder. The gun tracked Jimmy for another—

Chuck drew his sidearm before he could think and centered on the uniformed gunman’s chest.
Pop. Pop. Pop.
He squeezed off three shots, center of mass.

Everyone and everything in the hangar went unearthly still. The only sound was a haunting echo of Chuck’s shots.

The gunman crumpled to the ground a second before the acrid scent of gunfire bit the air.

Chuck’s fist clenched around the familiar weight of his 9 mm. The hangar seemed to freeze frame, imprinting itself in his brain. Cops with weapons drawn. Others with their fists wrapped around the butt of a gun. The unarmed huddled, hugging their heads protectively.

Slowly, sounds of sirens outside pierced his consciousness
and snapped the frame back into motion. Security cops swarmed the downed gunman. His old crewmate, Jimmy, sat up, clutching his shoulder with blood pouring between his fingers while the rest of the crew checked him over. No one else had opened fire, but the edgy need to stay on guard seared the air as three other injured held on to a bleeding leg or arm. No one dead, though. Thank God.

Chuck scoured the hangar. Adrenaline coursed through him, his pulse pounding in his ears. The gun felt right in his hands. Taking out an enemy felt even better.

The colonel secured his unfired weapon back in the holster and stared at Chuck’s smoking gun, now pointing upward. “Still think you’ve lost your edge, Tanaka? Because from where I’m standing, it appears you just stopped a massacre.”

Chuck lowered his weapon slowly, the inevitable flooding his veins with each slug of his heart. “That same old nun also told me gloating is as dangerous as grudges.”

“Fair enough, Captain. I take it then you’ll be joining Berg and me at the morning briefing?”

He nodded once without taking his eyes off the unconscious gunman.

“Good, good.” Scanlon righted his black-framed glasses. “Meanwhile, you may want to brush up on your blackjack skills.”

Chuck thumbed the barrel of his weapon, an undeniable thirst filling him. The need to get back in the fight. The need to defend his comrades.

The need to avenge.

There were still a lot of blanks to be filled in, but then that’s what briefs were for. He didn’t need to hear any more well-executed persuasive arguments. He already knew.

He was going all in.

“Who wants eight the hard way?”

“I’ll take that. Gimme twenty on eight.”

“Come on, little Joe from Ko-ko-mo!”

Jolynn Taylor parted the pervasive smoke with her body, winding around slot machines and frenzied gamblers. Her eyes stung, and she tried to blame the moisture on the thick cigarette haze. She wanted to be as far away from this sleazy, sometimes dangerous world as she could get.

Why hadn’t she just ignored the message and stayed in Dallas rather than racing all the way to Genoa, Italy? Security for intercontinental flights was hellish right now after that attack at the Nevada military base last week.

Sure, her father was recovering from a heart attack. But he employed plenty of people to care for him while he recuperated at a local rehab center and then in total luxury on one of his cruise ships. He was the one who chose to live overseas floating from port to port, Italy, Greece, Croatia…

She slipped between an aging Italian contessa playing the slots and a newlywed couple plastered together by the one-armed bandit chanting out their desire in French. The casino’s nerve-tingling clamor contrasted in her mind with the quiet sterility of a sickroom…her father’s sickroom, which she couldn’t avoid much longer. Nothing short of hearing he was at death’s door could have drawn her back into his seedy realm.

Bells chimed and lights flashed as she elbowed through the crowd in search of her cousin, Lucy, the director of operations. Once she dropped off her luggage
and got the latest lowdown on her dad, she would drive over to his rehab center.

“Hello, love.” A Brit with slicked-back brown hair held a pair of dice in one hand and palmed her leg with the other. “Be a dear and blow on my dice. A pretty bird like you could change my luck.”

Jolynn offered him her best insipid drawl reserved for soused morons who put on fakey accents. “Wish I could help you out, sugar.” She moved his hand firmly. “But I can’t be giving anyone a house advantage.”

She tapped her laminated security pass, resisting the urge to tell him to “sod off.” Forging ahead, she passed a young couple walking from machine to machine, silver mining for loose coins.

The ship’s lounge singer took the stage and started off her next set with a morose Italian ballad to some moony-eyed guy, which only darkened Jolynn’s already bottomed-out mood. She wanted no part of her father’s world. Yet she missed him with an ache as annoying as the blister developing on her heel.

Jolynn shouldered through the press of overheated bodies until she escaped the circle of gaming tables into the hollow center designated for dealers and the pit boss. The open area provided a clearer, and calmer, vantage point from which to scour the area.

She pivoted, only to pitch forward. Her feet tangled with someone crouched near the blackjack table. Her arms pinwheeled before smacking the floor, halting her gangly tumble. Jolynn’s body bridged the huddled individual’s back. A man’s back. Pressed against him, she could feel every whipcord muscle of his slim physique. His musky male scent pleasantly distracted her from the casino’s smoky odor.

“Excuse me.” She walked her fingers along the carpeted floor, inching up and using the man’s broad back as her final boost. “I didn’t see you down—”

“
Ooof
. Careful. That’s my kidney.”

His protest tickled her ears, his American accent bathing her in familiar sounds of home. Jolynn skimmed her hand over his spine to his shoulder, enjoying the sinuous trek a little too much. “So sorry. I was preoccupied and didn’t look where I was going.”