Heart Strike (18 page)

It was when they all came together that everything came apart.

He was missing something.

Something basic. Simple.

The kind of thing that Melissa would see.

Except she didn't. There were actually many things Melissa didn't see. She didn't see how amazing she was. She'd picked up multi-engine piloting so fast that he'd felt like a klutz beside her. Melissa The Cat had handled Mr. Fish Man and his expediter so smoothly that it should be taught in a Delta class. She greeted Richie with a warmth that astonished him every time.

Or was Chad right and that just another game she was playing?

Did Melissa Moore's true identity begin and end as Elsa the Ice Queen? Had her heart died along with her brother on that icy mountain top?

Had she even had a brother?

He didn't know what to think.

Richie wanted to lie down beside her. Pull her into his arms and just hold her—protect her from whatever demons were chasing her.

But then he remembered Chad's anger. He'd never seen Chad angry. Not the moment he'd killed the guards for trying to stop them at the Bolivian coca plantation. Not even when they'd taken out murderers or rapists during their first mission as a team.

Grim? Sure.

Pissed? Not until Richie had faced off against him in the hotel. Though it wasn't until the airplane hangar that Richie understood why Chad was acting the way he'd been.

Richie didn't know what he was in the middle of, but he didn't like it. As quietly as he could, he slipped out of the room. Down the hall, he found Duane's room and tapped dit-dah-dit lightly on the door for
R
.

“Yo.”

Richie entered slowly, then waited for Duane to confirm that it hadn't been a trap and reholster his weapon.

He took one look at Richie's face, then moved over to the far side of the bed and hooked a thumb beside him. Richie kicked off his boots and lay down on top of the covers.

Despite the long flights, he didn't go to sleep for a long time.

And despite all of his thinking, he ended up feeling dumber, not smarter, by the time he was done with it.

“Three days.” Carla was doing one of her rage-around-the-hangar things. “Three days and that bitch hasn't reappeared. And do we have a way to reach out to her? I ask you. No!”

Melissa watched her. Not caring. Not moving. She'd found a corner and stayed in it except when she was doing calisthenics to avoid losing her mind.

When Richie had walked away, Melissa had known she was screwed. She really was the Ice Queen inside.

She'd started taking long walks at night, despite the dangers of the Maracaibo streets after dark. But each time she'd returned to the room, he hadn't come back, wasn't there waiting for her. When a knock had finally sounded on the hotel room door the third night, she'd been far too angry to answer.

By then the Ice Queen was fully in place and would stay there until she could figure out how to get out of this outfit—if she could make it out alive. Maybe she'd stay frozen forever.

Perhaps she'd join Mutt and Jeff wherever they'd been assigned to. It was possible she'd been wrong to join The Unit in the first place. Even that thought just made for a colder core anchored deep in her chest.

All she knew was that this team was broken and she wanted no part of it.

Only Carla still tried to break through Melissa's ice shield. Melissa felt bad about rebuffing her, but it was easier to keep her shields up against everyone. It made it easier to ignore Richie's confused looks. He'd be palling around with Chad and Duane, then he'd look her direction and go all quiet and sad.

Not her problem.

She
wasn't the one who'd walked away.

Unable to stand Carla's continuing rant, which echoed off the hard steel walls of the hangar until she thought her head was going to explode, Melissa stepped out through the doors into the blast of sunlight. The heat was a hammer blow after the cool interior of the hangar.

She almost plowed into the expediter who was standing just a few feet beyond the opening. This time she had switched her wardrobe like a negative of her prior self—pristine-white slacks and a black top that flowed loosely over her narrow frame despite the fine tailoring. The sunglasses and portfolio were still firmly in place.

“Your teammate is a very passionate woman,” the expediter said as Carla's rant continued, mostly muffled by the barely parted hangar doors.

“She is,” Melissa agreed. An effort to move the woman a little farther from the door didn't succeed. Melissa reviewed what she could recall of Carla's rant; she was fairly sure that nothing critical had been revealed.

“She does not seem to like me very much.”

Melissa did some quick thinking about how to fix that. “It's, uh, just that times are a little tight. One swordfish doesn't support this operation for long. We had hoped for something more.”

“And if I were to suggest a delivery to the Bahamas?”

Melissa cringed and at the same time tried not to hope too hard. It was obvious that the expediter had found their arrest record. So that was probably a good sign. She'd been checking them out. Still, being rearrested by the Royal Defence troops would not go well.

“It wouldn't be my first choice.”

The expediter nodded as if checking off the answer on her list and moved to the next topic. “Your plane's tail number has an interesting history.”

“It does.” Melissa decided to brazen this one out. If she denied any knowledge that it once belonged to a dead Venezuelan drug lord before it had been captured and impounded by the U.S. Coast Guard, she would look stupid and in over her head. But no one had told her exactly what information the USCG had released.

“Your Coast Guard has it labeled as ‘stolen' in their database.”

The woman wasn't a minor player. Not if she had someone on the inside who could check secure databases for her. So The Unit's mission was looking better even if the team itself was a shambles.

“Yet the FAA simply lists it as belonging to Melissa Moore—a former U.S. Army sergeant discharged for gun running—who I can only assume is you.”

Melissa nodded and tried to think of where to go with that.

“It was more gun smuggling,” Richie said, moving up from behind Melissa. “She was only the point of acquisition. Others did the actual transport.” He left the sentence open-ended, implying that he'd been the actual smuggler. Then he slipped a hand around her waist and kissed her on the cheek.

She was surprised, even shocked. But before she could even think not to show anything, her body had already reacted—leaning into Richie and giving out a soft sigh. Was it her evasion training—the second letter of her SERE course—or was it…

Think later! Focus on now.

The tail end of Carla's latest rant was still winding down in the background, which meant that Richie hadn't been sent out to look for her.

Melissa wanted to believe that Richie had come looking for her because…
Because you're imagining things, Melissa. He was merely playing the role; he'd noticed you leave and then heard voices.
She hoped that Richie at least had a good explanation of their aircraft's origin.

He made a hand sign that looked like a payoff. “I had a friend make a little change in the aircraft's official record. As long as it isn't the Coast Guard itself checking ownership, we're clean.”

Melissa had forgotten all about the Aruban Customs official.

The expediter nodded again. Another check on her list. Then she offered her first-ever smile. “Shall we go inside and appease your friend?”

“Do we get a name this time?”

“Analie Sala. I look forward to doing business with you.”

* * *

Richie rather enjoyed watching Carla choke mid-sentence when the three of them entered the hangar. It wasn't easy to fluster her, but she just stood there for several seconds with her jaw down; then she blushed so fiercely that even her naturally dusky skin colored deeply.

He did wish that he'd managed to find Melissa alone. Who knew that a team he was so close to could be such a hindrance? In the hangar, they were always together. At meals, Melissa had taken to eating elsewhere, and the few times Richie had started to follow, Chad always seemed to have a question for him until she was out of sight. His various attempts to knock on her hotel door had elicited no response. There'd been no light shining under the door anyway. He'd hesitated to use his own key to go in and confront her.

So when she'd left the hangar alone, he'd followed her as quickly as he could while avoiding Chad's attention, just in case he had something else to ask. And found her with the expediter. Which was great news, except that it totally sucked.

He'd stepped into the copilot-business-partner-lover role easily, and the way Melissa had melted against him had almost stopped his heart. She simply felt so right that Chad had to be wrong about her.

Introductions were finishing. Once again he'd have to get Melissa alone later.

And once again, Melissa was being magnificent in her role as the boss of their crew.

“The cargo”—Ms. Sala of course never specified exactly what it was—“needs to be moved tonight.”

Richie looked at the coordinates that Ms. Sala had provided and let out a low whistle. They were headed up the Orinoco River, deep into the Amazonian rainforest.

“Maybe we'll get to see an Orinoco crocodile.”

Melissa looked at him strangely. So did the expediter.

“They're very rare now. It would be great to see one.”

The laugh that went around the group seemed to ease the last of the tensions—even the expediter joined in. He hadn't been trying to be funny, but it seemed to have worked anyway.

On everyone except Chad and Melissa.

* * *

“I don't want to talk about it.” Melissa didn't like the feeling of everyone sitting so close behind them on the Twin Otter for such a private conversation. She and Richie were the only two on the headset intercom and there wasn't a chance that their voices could be heard over the roaring of the dual Pratt & Whitney turboprop engines and the heavy wind noise of their flight. But still, everyone was right there just a few feet behind them.

Hell, Richie was right there next to her, less than two feet away as they turned south out of Maracaibo and headed toward the Orinoco River.

“Tough.”

She twisted to look at Richie, at least what little she could see of him. He was flying copilot in the right-hand seat but had the controls. He'd become the lead pilot for the team; how had she ended up in his seat now?

Because she'd been so pissed at him, she hadn't cared and had simply taken the seat without thinking.

She'd kept her hands in her lap and off the flight control yoke. They were headed south over deep jungle. The setting sun was to the west, shining in through his side window, and made him little more than a silhouette.

For days he'd been the odd nerd—sad but nerd.

Now she was flying with the Unit operator. One who had found his voice.

“O-kay,” she said carefully.

“I hate being apart from you.” That was pure Richie.

“Your choice.” And she was so numb that she no longer knew how she felt about that.

“Can we mark that off as I was being really, really stupid when I walked out of the hotel room?”

She considered that for several miles. “No, I don't think so.”

“Crud! I was afraid of that.”

A Unit operator who said
crud!
Richie the warrior would never say such a thing. It was just as bad as her thinking “Effing.” They were a sad pair.

“Okay, I've been thinking.”

Not a big fucking surprise
, but she didn't say it out loud. She was surprised though, by her internal language. She wasn't merely ticked off—No! She was royally pissed and hurt, and the chill inside her was seeking a target. If she could, she'd freeze Richie's ass from here to eternity. It was better to keep her mouth shut.

“Carla is the smartest woman about people I've ever met before you. And she really likes you.”

“She warms up pretty easily.”

“Wrong! You have no idea how wrong.” Richie was shaking his head. “Not even a little bit close. We were a full week into Delta Selection before she spoke the first time to Kyle, like three words. I don't think she said another word before the final hike, even to him. It wasn't until our second or third month together in the Operator Training Course that she spoke about anything other than the training. She's the ultimate outsider.”

Melissa couldn't imagine such a thing. And if that woman had lacked a voice, she'd certainly found it now. Carla was at such complete ease with the team, and they with her. Melissa had circled back a few times to observe them during meals where she'd felt so unwelcome. There was no hesitancy, no caution, all of them visibly far more at ease without Melissa's own disruptive presence. They all teased each other, but they also really listened to one another.

Carla had spotted her once, hiding back among the market stalls, nodded slightly acknowledging Melissa's choice, and returned to the conversation without giving any sign to the others of Melissa's nearby presence.

This was the outsider who spoke to no one?

“Not no one. She's the center of—”

“No one,” Richie insisted. “She's the center of the group
now
, but not back then. Yet when we compared notes, she's the only one who picked five for five.”

There was no need to explain. It had been the last questionnaire of hundreds they'd had to complete during Delta Selection. After the forty-mile rucksack march but before the Commander's Review Board, they had each been required to list the candidates they would want to serve with—in order. Three out of the five Melissa had put at the top of her list had made it into OTC. And Carla had somehow picked five for five.

“On top of that, we all chose her as Number Two,” Richie continued, “because Kyle was simply the best. He chose her as Number One.”

Melissa remembered the same comparison among her fellow graduates. She'd rated a pair of Number Ones, a couple of Twos, and a Five. Carla really was that good.

“Carla saw us more clearly than any of us saw ourselves. I'm stupid about people; I'm aware of that blank spot. To compensate, I rely on others.”

This was Richie the brain boy in full regalia. But she could hear what it was costing him to reveal these truths about himself.

As the sun set, the
Tin Goose
reached the far southern shore of Lake Maracaibo. Soon thick, dark jungle was rolling along beneath the plane. They continued a long way in silence before he spoke again.

“I just wanted to say I'm sorry for doubting your motives. I should have listened to Carla.” A few more miles. “I hope that my screwup isn't permanent.”

“What about Chad?”

“I don't know. I've given it a lot of thought, about three days' worth, and I still don't know. But what I feel for you just can't be imagined. And then I saw that you looked as miserable as I felt. I don't think the finest actress could do that.”

She rested her hands on the control yoke for the first time in the flight. Melissa hadn't wanted the connection to Richie that it gave her, but now she did. He flew with a smooth confidence; after so many flights in the last week, the big plane felt normal. Familiar.

“Are you feeling what I am?” he continued. “I couldn't ever get you alone to ask, and you wouldn't answer your door—though I guess I can't blame you for that. Probably just as well, because I finally realized that the question was irrelevant. I found what I feel, which is so right when I'm with you that nothing else matters.”

As apologies went, it was a pretty good one.

But somehow having
Carla
be her recommendation to a lover grated on her nerves. She understood this was Richie. But…