CHAPTER 2
“Tal! Good to see you again,” Sloan Kennedy said, walking into her office at Artemis Security. She smiled as Tal rose from her chair and walked around the desk, opening her arms to Sloan.
“Been too long,” Tal agreed, her voice emotional as they hugged. She released her and stood back, giving her an intense study. “You’re thin.”
“Yeah,” Sloan said with a grimace, turning and shutting the door. “I can’t say that Somalia does one’s spirit any good.”
Snorting, Tal gestured to the chair in front of her desk. “Have a seat. I can’t argue with you on that one. I haven’t seen your report on that mission yet. What’s the bottom line?” Tal sat down, picking up a thumb drive and placing it next to her laptop.
Sloan took the thumb drive, pulled the laptop off the desk and settled it into her lap. “Somalia is a tough place,” she muttered, shaking her head. She inserted the drive and opened the laptop lid. “Bottom line is that our Delos medical team got in there, did their job, and we got them out. It was dicey. The local warlord wanted to attack us, but he needed the village chieftain’s loyalty, so he backed off. We worked seven days rendering medical, dental, and optometry care to a thousand villagers.”
“Did you get any sleep?”
She grinned crookedly. Lifting her head, she devoted her attention to Tal. They had been good friends since they’d met in Bagram six years earlier. “Not much. I took care of the little girls, women, and all the babies. The rest of my medical team, all guys, took care of the men and boys.”
Tal leaned back, assessing her employee. Sloan Kennedy was five feet ten inches tall. Tal was six feet tall. That was what originally drew them to one another—their height. When they met at the canteen on base, they immediately gravitated to one another, trading sour stories about how their height wasn’t an advantage at all on an Army base that was ninety-percent men. They stood a head taller than most women, and therefore, were the first to be spotted in a crowd and the first to get hit on.
“The village chieftain is a good man,” Sloan said. “In fact, he asked Delos to send in a team every three months to his village.”
Grimacing, Tal muttered, “That is dicey. Those Somalian warlords know that our volunteers come out of Europe and North America—and they hate us for a variety of reasons.”
Rubbing her chin, Tal assessed her friend. She had shoulder-length straight brown hair with gold highlights among the strands. Sloan wore a set of old, whitewashed jeans, and a gray crewneck sweater that brought out the color of her large, intelligent eyes. She rarely saw her wearing earrings, but today she had on a set of small silver ones. Hiking boots were something she was used to when she was slotted into Special Forces A teams for nearly six years. Still, she looked feminine, if thin.
“Before we go into the mission room, I need to talk to you personally about something that has to do with this next assignment,” Tal said, seriously.
Frowning, Sloan looked up, hearing the concern in her friend’s alto voice. “What’s wrong?”
“Maybe nothing,” Tal said, shrugging. “But maybe something. Wyatt chose another operator for this op, but I told him I wanted to insert you, instead.”
“Oh?” Sloan said, raising her brows. “Wyatt’s pretty good with assigning people and matching them up with a mission.”
“Well,” Tal hedged, giving her a concerned look, “this is personal…and truthfully? You may not want this upcoming task, Sloan. You need to know right now that if this is asking too much of you, you can turn it down right here and now after you hear me out. Okay?”
Intrigued, Sloan sat back, closing the lid of the laptop, her spare hand across it. “Now you got my curiosity up. What’s going on?”
Tal picked up a folder beneath her hand and opened it. “You know that part of the report you send to Delos is a bottom line assessment.”
“Right.” Sloan could see the turmoil in Tal’s green eyes. She had been her friend for a long time—and she wasn’t one to miss important details. Sloan had her own psychic sense of things, and she felt as if Tal was really bothered by something in whoever’s report she had in hand.
“This report came from the Canadian Doctor’s Mission in Sudan three months ago. The head of the team, Dr. Lacey Reeves, was the one who wrote it up. We use a medical, dental or optometry team’s report and compare it to the report by our operator who was with the group. In this case, the operator was a helicopter pilot out of Port Sudan. It reads well and is thorough as we expect them to be.” She held up a hard copy of the doctor’s report. “But on this one? It shifts, and that’s what has me concerned. In her report, Dr. Reeves noted that the Delos helicopter pilot who ferried them to and from this village had the smell of beer on his breath one of the five days that he was with them in that village.”
“Drinking isn’t allowed in that country for starters,” Sloan said.
“But it’s also against Delos’ flight rules. When one of our operators, pilots or anyone employed by us, drinks on the job, that’s grounds for dismissal.”
“Why are you telling me this? Why aren’t you processing this through Human Resources?” Sloan asked, stymied.
Tal dropped the report on the desk, leaning back in her chair, and studying her. “Because it involves someone we both know,” she murmured. “Ordinarily, I’d send an HR representative to give this individual a chance to tell their side of the story. But I know more about this pilot than some of the other employees whom we hired.” Her lips quirked. “And, Sloan, on top of that, it gets even more personal. It involves you. The pilot in question is Dan Malloy.”
Sloan’s mouth dropped open. Her eyes widened. “Dan? Does Dan work for Delos?
“Yes,” Tal said gruffly. “Since I run the security side of this company, I’m not always aware of all the people that HR has hired. The potential employees go through different channels here, and in this case, Dan is a helicopter pilot, so his potential employment goes to the air wing division here at our company. I wouldn’t necessarily know anything about it. And,” she sighed, “I didn’t.” She flicked her hand toward the file. “Dr. Reeves’ report came in, and Wyatt gave it to me to read. He knew that we hired him, and Wyatt approved giving Dan the pilot position at Port Sudan. There, Dan is to fly volunteer medical teams in and out of Sudanese villages that are Delos Charities’ responsibility. He’s been doing this for two years. Now, this.”
Shock thundered through Sloan. “I-I lost track of Dan when he walked out of my life at Bagram.”
“Yeah,” Tal said, sympathetically, “I remember that—clearly. You two had been going together a good year and a half before that crash where he got wounded. You were the one that saved his life.”
Rubbing her brow, an avalanche of different emotions plowed through Sloan. Her voice became strangled. “I lost track of him after he left me, Tal.”
“I remember how hurt you were. Holding you while you cried. It took you nearly six months to get over him walking out on you without any explanation. Lame, if you ask me.”
Her heart remembered, and unconsciously, Sloan rubbed that area beneath her gray sweater. Even now, years later, she could still feel Dan’s mouth hotly against her own, remember how he brought her intense, pleasurable orgasms, the laughter she shared with him afterward, lying in his arms, feeling safe—loved. Swallowing against a forming lump, Sloan worked to put all those treasured memories and emotions back into that box deep in her heart once more. Mouth dry, she whispered, “Yeah, it was a pretty intense time. I’m glad you were there. You understood.”
“It was a hard time for you,” Tal agreed, her voice low with feeling. “Do you ever remember Dan drinking beer before or after a Night Stalker flight?”
“No…never. Like me, he enjoyed a beer over at the canteen, Tal, but he was careful, and he never did it within twenty-four hours of a flight.”
“What do you mean by that?”
“He knew his flight schedule. He knew when he was on duty. There’s a strict rule no pilot can drink alcohol twenty-four hours before a flight, and he adhered to that. I never once smelled beer on his breath.” Her arched brows dipped. “That doesn’t sound like Dan at all.”
“Based on what you’re saying, you’re right,” Tal said, seeing the worry in Sloan’s narrowed gray eyes. “I’m having HR look into his personnel record. I’ve asked for them to inform me if alcoholism runs in his family.”
“I don’t think so,” Sloan said, searching her memory. “His dad, Allan, is a truck driver for a meat-packing company in San Diego.”
“What about his mother?”
“She left her husband and Dan when he was nine years old. She said she couldn’t take it anymore. I don’t know what that meant. Dan just seemed bummed out by it, but he wasn’t willing to say anything more. I’m not a shrink, but I think he felt abandoned by her.”
“Was she an alcoholic?”
“He didn’t say. He mentioned that his mother was very up and down emotionally. One minute she was crying, the next, super busy, rushing around and wearing herself out.”
“Bipolar?”
“Could be,” Sloan agreed. With her deep medical background, she was well aware of the symptoms for such a diagnosis. “Dan refused to say any more to me about her, but I could feel the hurt around him.”
“Well,” Tal sighed, “I’m not sure I’d ever get over that, either.”
“Right,” Sloan murmured. “In Dr. Reeves’ report, did she say whether Dan was flying and drinking?”
“No, what happened is he ferried in a volunteer Canadian medical team to a Sudanese village. They stayed there five days. Dan was with them all the time because he has passable Arabic and would often act as interpreter when they needed one. Very few people speak English out in these villages.”
“Yes, that’s for sure. So, Dan was drinking while there in the village then?”
Tal handed her the report. “Read it?”
Sloan leaned across the desk, took the report, and focused on the paragraph Dr. Reeves had written:
“Mr. Malloy woke people in the nearby huts one night with shouts and screaming. He emerged in the morning with bloodshot eyes, looked sleep-deprived, and was not in the best of moods. That same day, we smelled beer on his breath, although he never acted drunk. He continued to help us, continued to translate and do his job well. When I asked him if everything was all right, he got irritable and said he was fine. On the fifth day, he seemed more like himself once more. Other than the one morning, we never smelled alcohol on his breath again. He flew us back to Port Sudan without any incident or issues. It was a safe, quiet flight.”
“I don’t know what to make of this,” Sloan murmured.
“Did Dan ever drink when under stress or pressure?”
She snorted. “Hell, Tal, being a Night Stalker pilot was big-time stress all the time. You know that.”
“Yeah,” she grumped, “but I just wanted to hear it from you.” She shook her head. “I don’t question Dr. Reeves’ report at all. Ordinarily, HR would send out a rep to get Dan’s side of the story. But I knew you were coming in off this Somalia mission, and I wanted to give him a fair shake in this. The only fly in that ointment is that you may not want to be around him again because he walked out on you.”
Sloan shook her head, sadness threading through her. “I lost track of him, Tal. I had no idea where he was in the world. He never contacted me again after he left me.” She swallowed hard.
Tal sat up, resting her elbows on her desk, holding Sloan’s troubled gaze. “That’s why I wanted you on this mission. He’s a known quantity to you. And while you’re on the mission, maybe you can find out what’s going on with him? Find out why he drank beer in that village? Because Wyatt’s gone through all the other medical reports by other volunteers he ferried monthly, and there’s never been a mention of that kind of behavior by him in any of them.”
Sloan couldn’t stop her heart from leaping into the mix. There was no one else like Dan Malloy. That time they’d spent together had been the happiest of her life. And as high as they had flown with one another, after that crash on the mountain, everything changed with her and Dan. He became a shadow in her life. Three months after that, he told her that he couldn’t see her again and that it was over. No explanation. Could her heart stand a second round with this man?
“I worry that he won’t want me around,” Sloan slowly admitted. Rejection was a bitch, and she still wasn’t completely over it to this day. She had fallen in love with Dan even though she’d never said those words to him. Maybe, because he hadn’t known the depth of her feelings for him, it had been easier for him to walk away.
Sloan looked up. “Okay, I’ll take the mission, Tal. Dan’s a good person, a hero in my eyes. He deserves a fair judgment call on this. If I’m on the mission, it will give me ample time to observe him. When you’re around someone 24/7, sooner or later, their spots show.”
“It’s going to be hard on you,” Tal warned. “That concerns me a lot. I don’t want you to be his punching bag in any way. I’m not asking that of you.”
“Oh,” Sloan said wryly, one corner of her mouth hooking upward “I don’t allow anyone to abuse me in any way. Besides, Dan was never that way with me. Was he closed up tighter than Fort Knox? Yes. But most men are.”
“Hmm,” Tal agreed, “Wyatt and I have had a lot of passionate talks about this topic. These guys think they have to stuff down their feelings all the time—and they don’t.”
“It’s about trust,” Sloan said quietly. “As Dan began to trust me, he opened up. That’s how I found out about his mother leaving.”
“Then, there’s hope,” Tal said. “Even if you aren’t lovers any longer, I’m hoping there will be a friendship there to replace it. It’s a bridge to build on. Maybe, as you work with him, you can find out what’s going on inside his head—or at least what happened that one time.”
Sloan knew they couldn’t have a drunk pilot flying a Delos aircraft of any kind, and Tal had a right to be worried about that report by Dr. Reeves. “Can you give me the rest of the mission info?”
“Yes. Come with me. I’ll get a hold of Wyatt, and we’ll go to one of the mission planning rooms and walk you through it. I just needed to know if you even wanted the op in the first place.”
As Sloan followed Tal down the hallway, she felt so many emotions that it nearly overwhelmed her. A part of her heart shrieked with joy to see Dan again. The unhealed part told her not to take the mission. A third part was saying: be careful what you wish for.
Wyatt gave Sloan a big, welcoming smile, a kiss on the cheek, and a bear hug. The three of them sat down in one of the mission planning rooms, with Wyatt at one end of the table, laptop open.
“Now,” Wyatt began, “this is a continuation of what’s going on presently in Sudan between Delos and one of our arch enemies, Zakir Sharan. He’s that billionaire out of Punjab, Pakistan. Tal and Matt, in two different missions in Afghanistan, killed his two sons, Sidiq and Rastagar. Neither son was worth a hoot. One was in the opium trade, and the other was in the kidnapping and sex-trafficking trade. Good riddance to both, but the flip side is that Sharan swore lifelong blood vengeance against Delos. He intends to attack our charities everywhere in the world, Sloan. I know you didn’t know this before, but he’s a serious player and means what he says. He just sent an Al-Qaeda captain against Kitra, a Delos charity, in Sudan. Luckily, we had a security force within the walls of Kitra and also had a security operator, Nolan Steele, assigned there, to protect the only American at that charity, Teren Lambert. Things turned bad, but the officer that Sharan had sent to kill her, was killed, instead.”
“So?” Sloan murmured “Sharan is trying again? Targeting another Delos charity in Sudan?”
Beaming, Wyatt drawled, “Your mama didn’t raise any dummies, did she?”
Chuckling, Sloan shook her head. “No, indeed, she did not, Wyatt.”
“Well, this is a Class-A assignment.” He drilled a look into her eyes, gauging her response. A Class-A assignment meant it was a life-and-death mission. It meant she could die. “That’s the first thing you need to know about it.”
Unruffled, Sloan said, “Tell me more? Who’s the perp?”
“An Al-Qaeda soldier known as Fahd Ansari.” Wyatt took a photo and put it up on the screen at the end of the room. “He’s Pakistani, thirty-five, five feet nine inches tall, and roughly a hundred and forty-five pounds. Brown hair, brown eyes. He works for Sharan. The NSA and CIA have picked up cell phone traffic between Sharan and Ansari. He’s been hired to disrupt the air supply routes from Port Sudan to all of the other Delos charities that are located in that country. Ansari is an explosives expert—and he’s good at what he does. He’s the one who helped devise a bomb in a printer that was on board a UPS cargo jet years ago.”
Already, Sloan didn’t like the enemy. He was wiry as a whippet, a lean jaw, and a long face with high cheekbones. “He’ll get access to Sudan with a fake passport and visa, plus a fake name?”
“Correct. That’s why you need to recognize this coyote on sight,” Wyatt said. “He’s familiar with aircraft. He was a mechanic in the Pakistan Air Force, worked on their helicopters—all Russian models. The gist is he knows his birds and if circumstances were right, could place a timer and explosives in our Delos CH-47 Chinook that Dan flies.” He threw another photo up on the screen, showing the desert tan CH-47 with a red and yellow fuselage stripe running from nose to tail on it. “Here’s the hangar where it’s based.”
Sloan looked at the two-story corrugated aluminum hangar. As far as hangars went, it was poorly constructed. “And the Delos helo stays there unless used?”
“Yes.” Wyatt put up another photo showing the inner area of the hangar. “On the left side of the hangar is Dan’s office. He has an office assistant, a Sudanese woman named Samiah, who has been working with him for the last year. She takes care of scheduling the medical groups that come over to volunteer their time to these Delos charities.”
Nodding, Sloan noticed the hangar floor was neat and clean. She expected that from Dan. He was a stickler for perfection when it came to flying. He had close ties with his mechanics at Bagram and had an eye for any issues on his MH-47. Dan had never been what she would term a lazy or sloppy pilot. No pilot got into the vaunted, world-famous Night Stalker squadron if they weren’t the cream of the Army aviation crop.
“Security?”
Snorting, Wyatt gave her a grim look. “There is very little. It’s a poor country where a security guard can be paid off in the blink of an eye.
“So? How is Dan to keep his bird safe from Ansari?”
“You need to discuss that issue with him. We’ll provide money for security, but it’s up to you and Dan to decide what that will be.”
“What’s my job then?”
“You’re his shadow. He’s technically a PSD to you. You’re his private security detail.”
“He won’t like having a bodyguard.”
“No, but he’ll like it even less if Ansari gets lucky and plants a bomb on board his bird.”
Sloan didn’t want to go there. She couldn’t conceive Dan Malloy dead. Except for the crash that one night, he’d had an unblemished flight record. “What’s his flight record after that crash?”
Wyatt quickly went through his Army personnel file. “Clean.”
“Dan and I split up before the investigation was complete. He blamed himself for the crash.”
“The Army said weather conditions were responsible.”
“There was a thunderstorm in progress when Dan came in to land. My captain tried to waive him off, saying conditions were not safe, but he came in anyway because a much larger group of Taliban was following us. He was trying to rescue us.” She grimaced.
Wyatt studied the official entry for the crash. “It was a judgment call on Dan’s part, but the Army isn’t pointing their finger at him saying it was pilot error.”
“I knew how worried he was about that investigation.”
“Why do you think Dan walked away from you?” Wyatt asked, his question posed gently.
A wall of pain settled within her heart and Sloan felt close to tears. “I honestly don’t know. He was in bad shape emotionally after the crash. He cried. I’d never seen Dan cry before. But he didn’t cry for himself. He felt guilt-ridden about losing his copilot, Andy. That weighed on him the most. He was the godfather to Andy’s kids. Dan knew the family well.”
Tal sat up. “Do you think he walked out on you because of the pain he was carrying?”
Sloan traded a frustrated look with her friend. “I think it could have been part of it. We got along well. We always had. But the three months after the crash, we fought a lot. He wasn’t himself. I gave him a lot of room, but it wasn’t enough. I was trying to help him up over the shock of the crash.”
“Maybe you’ll get a chance to find out more?” Wyatt wondered. “Might be in the cards for you two to get back together again if you can figure out why he did what he did.”
Shaking her head, Sloan whispered, “No, Wyatt, that’s not going to happen. Dan could have found me after we split up. He had my number. He could have texted me any time. I’m not willing to lay my heart out to him again and then have the same thing happen. Once learned, Cowboy.”
Wyatt perked up a little when she called him by his well-known nickname. It fit. He was born and raised in Texas. “You’re both older now. Mature. Maybe this mission will give you both a chance to bury the hatchet.”
“I can’t take that kind of pain again,” Sloan told them, her voice low. “But I will always try to be there for Dan. He’s not a bad person, just somehow…messed up inside. And whatever it is, I can’t fix him. I’ll be his shield, his eyes, and I’ll protect him. That’s the best I can do.”