OUTSIDE LYNCHBURG, VIRGINIA
The explosion came out of nowhere, powerful and blinding.
One moment they were circling the open field, centered on Larson’s GPS coordinates, and the next flames swallowed her world. The instrument panel lit up and alarms blared just as the turbines went out, and they were falling from an altitude of one thousand feet.
From the copilot’s seat, Monica saw Danny drop the collective lever with his left hand while pitching the cyclic forward to increase airspeed. The freewheeling unit, a centrifugal clutch mechanism, disengaged the main rotor automatically when engine rpm dropped below rotor rpm. Driven solely by the upward flow of air through the blades, the Black Hawk entered an autorotation descent.
“Incoming!” shouted Stark as bullets hammered the exterior of the Sikorsky helicopter.
Hagen and Ryan opened fire toward the tree line. Larson was on the radio.
She grabbed her MP7A1 and rushed to the main cabin, joining Ryan, shoulder to shoulder. She focused her fire on the muzzle flashes at the base of the forest on the north side of the meadow.
Danny put them on a steep descent, quickly gathering forward airspeed. In an ideal autorotation, the chopper would move forward at a shallow angle as the pilot selected a clearing to set the bird down. But given the barrage of ground fire they were taking, landing anywhere on the field would place them in the middle of a deadly cross fire. So Danny glided over the treetops, away from the enemy’s line of sight, toward a dry ravine a quarter of a mile away.
But the angle of descent was too steep, and she saw a sea of green rushing up toward them.
“Brace for impact!” Danny shouted as he tried to clear the top of towering pines, smoke rapidly filling the cabin.
The Black Hawk trembled as its belly trashed the canopy. Branches scored the craft’s underside, bending metal, ripping the rear landing gear in a burst of splinters and sparks.
Monica lost her footing and almost went out the window, but Ryan grabbed her with one arm while holding on to an overhead pipe as the helicopter trembled.
Its belly sank in branches, the scraping noise deafening, threatening to rip the craft apart.
She grabbed on to the same overhead pipe as Ryan, dreading plummeting through the trees in a helicopter with its whirling blades. But somehow they pulled through, breaking free of the forest’s grip, dropping over the ravine.
Danny aligned the chopper with the dry riverbed before flaring it. He used the kinetic energy stored in the rotor to decrease the rate of descent as they dropped ten feet above the rocks. The Black Hawk flared, landing far softer than Monica had anticipated.
Stark was out even before the helicopter had settled at an angle on the uneven terrain, its blades still rotating, smoke billowing from the side of the engines. He already had the phone to his ear, barking orders she could not hear.
Larson and Hagen jumped after him, followed by Ryan and Monica. Danny was last, ditching the headphones and clutching his MP7A1.
* * *
Controlled hard landings can be a bitch, thought Stark, deciding that Danny had saved their ass again. As he jumped out of the plane, he speed-dialed the White House.
“Colonel?”
“We need a new chopper standing by and two UAVs with Hellfires and the pilot on my radio now!”
He hung up before the NSA could respond. The time for idle chitchat was long since over.
“Chief, you got that?” whispered Stark, looking toward the clearing.
“Roger,” Larson replied.
The beauty of a team working together was just that … it just worked.
* * *
Monica watched Stark split them into three groups of two, she and Ryan to the left, Hagen and Danny to the right, and he went up the middle with Larson, who was still on the radio.
“Get inside, hide, and wait for my signal!” shouted the colonel.
She was about to ask, “What signal?” but in classic Stark fashion he was already gone.
Annoyed at this cryptic man who seemed to be always right, Monica followed Ryan into the forest. They scrambled up the angled terrain, over loose rock and dirt, cruising through waist-high vegetation leading to the massive pines they had just escaped. Moving through in practiced synchronization, they covered each other while advancing from tree to tree. One looked ahead while the other shifted to the next column of bark, peering through the darkness. The massive canopy swallowed the sun, and the barrier of rising trunks behind them blocked the remaining daylight.
They paused, having gone deep enough, letting their senses adjust to the sudden darkness. Their night-vision goggles were stowed away back in the Black Hawk.
Slowly, his face materialized, green eyes staring at her, a hand on her shoulder. It was a gesture of recognition, support, and probably also affection. It was at once the touch of a close friend and of a soldier telling another soldier, “We’ve got this.”
And suddenly Monica was back at that bar in Scottsdale, dancing with the Delta sniper after he had taken out those bikers, each larger than him. She remembered his smile, the way he’d looked at her. For a moment she had forgotten all of the rotten relationships in her life, including those she’d had while in the military, to L.A., to her early FBI career. Ryan Hunt swept them all aside as she glided with him on that dusty dance floor. The training school had been brief, as had their short-lived romance. But what they’d lacked in time together they had more than made up in intensity—a fervor that had reignited in Afghanistan.
Lady Luck had thrown them together in Kandahar, her as an FBI ASAC as part of a in-country joint counterterrorism task force with the CIA and the DIA, and Ryan … well, doing what Ryan did in those days and continued to do today: follow Colonel Hunter Stark on special assignments around the world.
Their second round had been longer but just as passionate, including an unforgettable night in a remote mountain cave overlooking an al Qaeda encampment. It had been terribly dangerous and it had been the most memorable and thrilling night of her life, even after Stark caught them at the end of the act.
A week later she had returned to Quantico and Ryan was gone to wherever his team was assigned to next.
But now the former Delta sniper was back, almost six years to the day, massaging her shoulder, those same damn eyes on her now as they had been in Arizona.
Before she realized what she was doing, Monica put a hand over his and smiled.
Ryan pulled her closer.
She wanted to resist but didn’t—maybe couldn’t—letting him kiss her, softly, like in the old days. The taste of him brought her back to that motel in Arizona, to Afghanistan, to steep mountains, narrow goat trails, and dark caves; brief moments of passion lost in between fierce battles.
* * *
Stark finished surveying the grounds, spotting Hagen and Danny already in place to his far right while he and Larson took up the middle. But he couldn’t see his left team.
Where the hell are Cruz and Hunt?
Frowning, he whispered to Larson, “Chief, I’ll be right back.”
The large chief kept his eyes on the objective by the clearing while giving him a slight nod.
Stark moved in a deep crouch, silently, shifting from tree to tree.
He spotted them right away and sighed … soldiers; all soldiers would have sex at the drop of a hat when they were deployed. It had to do with fear, aggression, and lack of sleep.
Stark understood it, but he just couldn’t allow it, certainly not now and not here.
* * *
“Ryan … what the fuck … are you doing?” Monica mumbled, lips brushing his. “The … enemy is just … around the—”
“When you two are done,” hissed Stark, standing next to them, camouflaged face as stoic as ever.
Monica looked back and frowned. Ryan just stared at the colonel, who added, “And if it’s not too inconvenient, I need you to move your ass another thirty feet, hold tight, and actually guard this flank. But stay well clear of the tree line. Think you can handle that?”
He was gone before either one could reply, vanishing like a ghost.
“Dammit,” she mumbled while Ryan cleared his throat.
“Let’s go,” she added, half embarrassed and half angry, pushing the moment aside while leading the way.
Once again they shifted in the forest, quietly but swiftly. Her eyes had already adjusted to the murky surroundings, her boots sinking in the bed of fallen vegetation. They reached the desired spot, a few rays of light forking through the clearing thirty feet away.
They stopped, but this time she directed him to an adjacent trunk. He frowned before moving over to it, back pressed against the bark as they waited for whatever it was they were supposed to wait for.