“Is your room okay?” the senior chief asked as Teri came out of the elevator and met him in the hotel lobby. “You’re facing the inside courtyard, right?”
“Oh,” she said, trying to remember which side of the hall her room had been on. “I didn’t have time to do more than throw my bag inside and wash my face, but yeah, I’m overlooking the swimming pool.”
She smiled at him, happy to see him, glad she had a full ten hours before she had another shift. She suspected Stan didn’t have that much down time and still couldn’t quite believe he’d chosen to spend some of his spare free moments with her. “The room has running water, so how can I complain?”
The Kazabek Grande was a hotel that had clearly seen better days.
Of course, all of Kazabek had seen better days.
“Don’t drink it. Bottled water only. And put that flack jacket on. What, do you think carrying it’s going to do you any good?”
“It’s so heavy. And hot.”
“Put it on anyway. And don’t take the elevator again,” Stan instructed as they crossed the lobby. “Electricity here comes and goes—there’s not enough to power the whole city at once. I was told the Grande goes black for at least four hours a day, usually starting just after sunset, but it can happen any time, and if you’re on the elevator ...”
Her room was on the seventh floor, the restaurant near the lobby, and the heliport was on the roof. If she was going to have to trudge up and down the stairs wearing that heavy jacket ... “This assignment is going to be great for my thighs. What a perk.”
Stan looked at her in obvious disbelief. “Yeah, like you really need to lose any weight. What is it with women these days? I was thinking earlier that I was going to make sure you had dessert tonight—even if I had to force-feed you.”
“Gee, that sounds like fun.”
He looked at her sharply, and she realized she’d said the words not quite aloud but pretty darn close. Had he heard? She didn’t know for sure, but she suspected he had.
She should hold his gaze. She should smile, maybe wiggle her eyebrows at him. Make it clear that she was flirting—or at least she would be flirting if she weren’t such a social reject.
She held his gaze and even somehow managed to smile, but Stan looked away. He’d definitely flirted with her on the plane. What had happened between then and now?
He cleared his throat. “We’ve, uh, taken over half of the restaurant as our mess area. You can go down there any time you’re off duty to get something to eat. If the kitchen’s closed, there’ll be wrapped sandwiches—not the greatest setup, but it’s the best we can do for now.”
He held open the door to a stairwell and stepped back for her to go first.
Down? “But ...” Teri pointed across the lobby, completely confused. “The sign says ...” That the restaurant, which boasted nightly karaoke, was up on the mezzanine level.
“They moved it,” Stan told her.
She went in, waiting for him to lead the way.
“This is the east tower,” he told her as he headed down the stairs. “The Grande has four connected towers arranged in a square around the lobby and the courtyard with the pool. We’re garrisoned in the west and south towers—you’re in the west, right?”
Teri nodded.
“Me, too. Just make sure you find the west stairwell when you want to go back up to your room. The floors to the different towers don’t all connect. The restaurant’s down here, in a ballroom in the basement beneath the east tower.” His voice echoed. “It’s in a room that doesn’t have windows. In Kazabek, hotels tend to lose business when their customers are killed by flying glass. And glass tends to fly when a car bomb goes off out in the street. Which it does here with an annoying frequency.”
“God.”
He stopped, hand on the knob to the door leading out to the basement level. “Teri, you’re not supposed to be here. You can decide you’ve had enough at any time, and no one will think any less of you for leaving.”
She loved it when he looked at her like that, direct and to the point, right into her eyes. She also liked the way he’d looked at her on the plane—as if he’d wanted to kiss her.
But then he’d called her Lieutenant, clearly pulling back from any kind of intimacy. Yet now she was Teri again.
Which was it, Stan?
She didn’t dare ask. Didn’t dare call him by his first name, either. He was Senior Chief or Senior and calling him anything else seemed much too disrespectful. Besides, maybe he was as confused by this energy that seemed to buzz between them as she was.
“I’m not leaving. I just had one of the best days of my life,” she admitted.
It had started this morning—God, had it really only been this morning?—when she’d found the nerve to ring his doorbell and ask him for help.
No, that had been yesterday morning. Traveling all the way around the world had compressed the end of Sunday, and they’d arrived in K-stan late Sunday night California time, but Monday afternoon, K-stani time. It was nearly 1800 now and it had been way more than twenty-four hours since she’d slept. No wonder everything seemed a little blurry around the edges.
He nodded. “Well ... I’m glad.”
And still he stood there. Just looking at her. In the privacy of the stairwell. Where no one could see him if he gently touched her hair the way he’d done in the transport plane. Where no one would know if he kissed her.
Teri’s heart pounded nearly as much as it had when he’d casually asked her to meet him in the lobby before dinner.
She wanted him to kiss her, to touch her again.
Please, Senior Chief, force-feed me dessert.
Yeah, that would really work. She was going to have to do it. She was going to have to call the man Stan.
After all, he had asked her to dinner. And she knew he liked her. He’d told her as much himself.
But he turned away before she got up the nerve to say or do anything at all. He opened the door. Held it for her.
“Let’s get something hot to eat before the power goes out and the kitchen closes. If I have to have another sandwich, I’m going to cry.” He smiled at her, if not with his mouth then certainly with his eyes. “And if you tell any of the squad that I was whining, I’ll deny it.”
Teri laughed, walking beside him into what, even in its heyday, must have been a cheap imitation of opulence. Shabby now, the hotel ballroom was musty and dark, with candles on every table, presumably in place for when the power went out.
The tables were covered with cheap plastic cloths, the chairs didn’t match. The acoustic tile in the ceiling was missing in places, with pipes and wires showing through.
Buckets were scattered around, catching drips from the leaky plumbing.
And yet it was exotic.
Or maybe the fact that she was walking into it at the senior chief’s side was what made it seem so alluringly foreign and filled with romantic potential.
He held out a chair for her at a table and she slid into it, looking up to smile her thanks. Her mother would have purposely sat in another seat and scowled.
She slipped off her flack jacket. Surely she was safe in here.
Stan sat down across from her instead of next to her. “Good, Muldoon’s right on time.”
Teri turned, and sure enough, Ens. Mike Muldoon was crossing the worn carpeting, looking around the room.
The senior chief stood up.
Muldoon smiled, but then hesitated midstep as he saw Teri sitting at the table. Still, he kept coming, but his smile now was a little forced and nervous.
“Hey,” Stan greeted the younger man. “Have you officially met Teri Howe?”
“Uh, no, Senior, not officially.”
“Ens. Michael Muldoon,” Stan said. “Lt. (jg) Teresa Howe. You guys both went to MIT.”
And with that, Teri knew.
Stan had asked her to dinner in order to set her up with Muldoon.
This dinner invitation wasn’t really a dinner invitation.
And the way he’d touched her on the plane, God, now that she stopped to think about it, that had really been nothing more than a comforting pat on the head, hadn’t it?
Oh, Lord. She was such a fool.
Teri supposed she was lucky he’d overheard her inappropriate comment, “That sounds like fun,” when Stan—completely innocently, no doubt—had teased her about force-feeding her dessert. Lucky because the sheer humiliation and embarrassment distracted her from the disappointment.
She got to her feet as Muldoon shook her hand, glad to have something to do besides shrinking back in her chair and wishing she were trapped all alone on the elevator.
“To be honest,” Muldoon told her, with an apologetic smile that made his handsome face even more handsome, “I went to MIT for only one semester.”
“That’s more than I ever did,” Stan said. “Come on, sit down.”
He sat first, opened his menu.
And as much as Teri wanted to make her excuses and run, she couldn’t do it. If Stan didn’t already know that she’d been hoping for more from him than friendship and an intro to his cute friend, her leaving would give her away.
Besides, friendship with Stan Wolchonok was better than nothing.
Wasn’t it?
“So,” she said to Muldoon, mostly because Stan glanced at her, because he expected her to say something. “When were you at MIT?”
“About seven years ago,” the ensign told her. “First semester of my freshman year. But then my father got sick, so I transferred to a school closer to home.”
Mike Muldoon was three years younger than she was. He was also almost impossibly handsome. Big eyes that were an even deeper shade of blue than Stan’s. Golden brown hair that was thick and wavy, with a lock that fell attractively over his forehead—perhaps a touch of the rebel despite the squeaky-clean length in the back. His jaw was square, he had cheekbones to die for, and a nose that could have come directly from a Greek statue.
“Where’s home?” she asked because Stan obviously wanted her to ask.
“At that time it was Florida,” Muldoon said. “Before that, Maine. Kinda one extreme to another, you know? How about you?”
“Cambridge, Massachusetts,” she told him. “From birth till college graduation.”
He gave her another of those beautiful smiles, this one a little shy. Was this guy for real? “That must’ve been nice,” he said.
Nice. Teri glanced at Stan, who was watching her. She didn’t want to tell Mike Muldoon that it hadn’t been nice, that she’d lived those last few years counting the days until she could leave home for good.
She forced a vague smile, then looked down at her menu, tired of small talk, tired of disappointments, tired.
“Go vegetarian tonight,” Stan recommended, taking over the conversational ball. “Remember that the refrigeration cuts out for four hours every day. We’ll be having our own food brought in. Starting tomorrow, hopefully.”
A waiter came, clearly overworked, bringing bottles of water and breadsticks, and they ordered. Teri asked for exactly what Stan was having and he smiled at her. God, the way her heart raced when he did that was pathetic.
“Is there a reason we’re not being billeted over at the airfield, Senior?” Muldoon asked. “I had a chance to look around out there, and there are two separate buildings that aren’t being used. It wouldn’t take much to clean them up and—”
“There’s a very big reason,” Stan said. “A GIK terrorist splinter group stole missile launchers from the K-stani army.”
“Whoa.” Teri sat back in her chair. “How do you steal a missile launcher?”
“From the K-stani army? Apparently pretty easily. They got two of ’em.”
“Wait a minute.” She tried to make sense of it. “Are you saying that if we set up living quarters in one of the buildings at the military airfield where the team built that mock-up of the 747—”
“We’d be an obvious and easy target,” Stan finished for her. “Yes.”
She looked from Stan to Muldoon and back. “And we’re not a target here?”
“Think of it this way—a missile launched at an isolated building on a remote airfield versus a missile launched into the heart of Kazabek, where the civilian casualty rate would be outrageously high ...” Stan shook his head. “Even factoring in the dangers of being in the city, we determined we’d be safer at this hotel.”
“Okay,” Muldoon said. “I’m going to sleep really well tonight.”
From across the ballroom came a sudden blast of music and they all jumped. The volume was quickly adjusted, but it had caught the attention of everyone in the room.
As Teri watched, a skinny man climbed onto a wobbly makeshift stage. He started to sing “New York, New York” in a voice that shouldn’t have been allowed within fifty feet of a microphone.
“Oh, Christ,” Stan said, with complete and utter despair.
The man was singing in the local dialect, which had too many syllables to fit the notes.
It was beyond absurd and she met Stan’s eyes. Disbelief, horror, and amusement were combined with the warmth of his somehow knowing that she, too, was dangerously close to losing it.
“Welcome to hell,” he told her.
She had to clench her teeth to keep from laughing. Or crying.
“He’s not that bad,” Muldoon protested. “It takes a lot of nerve to get up in front of a crowd of strangers like this.”
“Excuse me, Senior Chief.”
It was Chief Wayne Jefferson—small, black, energetic, and well-known for his skills as an expert sharpshooter. He and Chief Frank O’Leary— tall, skinny, and laconic to the point of near-coma—were the team’s snipers. The two men couldn’t have been less alike.
“We’ve got a snafu with some of the rooms. Silverman, Jenk, Scooter,” Jefferson listed on his fingers, “Cosmo, Horse, and Izzy all got rooms facing the street. I just spent an hour using sign language and baby talk with the hotel manager, getting them reassigned—and their new rooms all face the street. Normally I wouldn’t bother you with this, Senior, but these men are tired as hell. I need to get them into their rooms now, and I recognized that my urge to grab this bastard and rip his smug racist smirk off his motherfucking face wouldn’t speed up the process.” He glanced at Teri. “I beg your pardon, ma’am.”
“Good call, Chief.” Stan stood up, looked from Muldoon to Teri. “You’ll have to excuse me. This could take a while. If the food comes—eat. Don’t wait for me.” He turned to Jefferson. “Find me Lt. Johnny Nilsson. And then come back here and get yourself fed.”
Jefferson was staring at the karaoke man in disbelief. “I don’t think so, Senior. I’ll be getting mine to go.”
“Nilsson speaks the local language,” Muldoon told her as Stan and Jefferson headed toward the door. “He flew out yesterday with L.T.—Lieutenant Paoletti.”
“Yeah,” Teri said. “I’ve met him. Nilsson, I mean.”
The awkward silence that fell was daunting. Silence, that is, except for the sound created by the Karaoke Man, who hit an impossibly flat note and held it out impossibly long. Ouch.
Muldoon fidgeted in his seat. He was even more uncomfortable now that they were alone.
She prayed for Stan’s swift return. How long could it take to get rooms reassigned in a hotel that was only filled to one-quarter capacity?
“So what’s the deal with the rooms? Inside facing instead of outside ... ?” Teri asked, searching for something, anything to say. Stan had asked her about her room, too. You’re facing the inside courtyard, right?
“Outside rooms—” Muldoon leapt upon the topic, obviously desperately glad to have something to talk about. “—rooms that have windows looking onto the street—are dangerous. This is a city where drive-by shootings and sniper attacks happen regularly. In a room facing the street, you need to put your mattress up in front of the window to protect against stray bullets, maybe even sleep in the bathtub. Which is about as comfortable as it sounds.”
God, there were people in this city trying to raise children. How on earth did they ever let their kids go outside to play amid the continuous threat of death and destruction?
“Those inner rooms—the ones that face onto that courtyard—are significantly safer than the others,” Muldoon continued. “It’s one of the two main reasons Uncle Sam uses this hotel for billeting troops.”
Teri nodded. “And the other reason—let me guess—is not just the heliport on the roof, but the fact that it’s one of the tallest buildings in this part of the city. When we’re on the roof, only a few people are going to be shooting down at us.” As opposed to some of the other hotels, where they’d be surrounded by taller buildings on all sides.
“You got it.” He relaxed enough to reach for a breadstick, snap it in two. “There’s only one other building that’s taller in this part of the city—and we’ve got Marines posted on that rooftop. The only real potential threat comes from the east-facing windows of the top two floors of that building—and we’re working on getting men stationed in those areas as well. Until then—well, you got the instructions about swift landings and immediate takeoffs, right?”
Teri nodded as she took a sip of the bottled water the waiter had brought. Whenever approaching the hotel, she was to set the helo down fast. Like her passengers, she was to disembark as quickly as possible, running in a zigzag pattern across the roof to the stairwell. Boarding and takeoffs were similarly done. And once in the air, she was to fly like a bat out of hell, as swiftly away from the taller building as possible.
She’d done it three times today already.
Teri put down her glass to find that they’d slipped, once again, into a tense silence.
“I’m not good at this,” Muldoon blurted. “I apologize.”
“No,” Teri said, “don’t. It’s not—”
“Women look at me and they expect—”
“—what you think,” Teri talked over him, but he wasn’t listening.
“—me to be someone else, someone cool and, I don’t know, charismatic, and I’m not, I’m just an engineering nerd and I suck at this and, God, I end up disappointing all but the ones who just want sex, and they end up disappointing me.”
Whoa. Teri could tell from the look on his face that he’d surprised himself with that outburst as much as he’d surprised her.
“Excuse me,” he said, his face starting to turn red. “You probably didn’t want to know that.”
“I didn’t ask Stan to set us up,” Teri told him. Stan. She could do it, she could use his given name—just not to his face. “He did that completely on his own.”
Muldoon cringed. “Oh, God, now I’m really embarrassed.”
“Don’t be—I thought maybe you’d asked Stan to introduce us, so ...”
“No,” he said. “I didn’t.”
“Obviously.” She couldn’t keep a giggle from slipping out.
He pushed his chair back from the table. “Excuse me. I have to go die now.”
She grabbed for his hand. “Please don’t leave. You can’t imagine how glad I am that you said that. No one’s ever honest, and I’m always second-guessing them, and God, I hate it. I mean, just a few minutes ago, I was thinking one thing and you were thinking another, but we were both wrong. And now we know—and we don’t have to be nervous anymore.”
Mike Muldoon was holding Teri Howe’s hand.
Christ, that was fast.
Stan stood in the doorway of the restaurant, back in the shadows, watching them. He’d been waylaid in the hall by Lieutenant Paoletti, and he hadn’t been able to resist walking back with the CO toward the restaurant and looking in to see how things were going.
Apparently things were going pretty damn well.
Teri leaned closer to Muldoon and said something, and they both laughed.
She pulled her hand free, but the touch was perpetuated by the way they smiled into each other’s eyes.
Fuck.
Hey, Yente. This was what you wanted, wasn’t it?
No.
Yes. Look at them. They were so freaking cute together.
And Teri wasn’t afraid of Muldoon. Her shoulders were relaxed—it was obvious she liked him. Which made sense. Muldoon was a great guy.
Stan had to back off on the envy overdose.
Which was easier said than done—but he’d done plenty of difficult things before. As hard as it was going to be, he could do this, too.
Stan had watched Teri all day today, and he’d made note of the way she’d practically flinched when some of the more, shall we say, exuberant men said hello to her. She’d tensed up, as if she were preparing for battle. Bracing herself for attack.
She needed someone steady, like Muldoon, in her life.
She’d needed more from Stan than a quick fix—he could certainly see that now. By taking her away from San Diego, he’d provided nothing more than a geographic cure.
Teri Howe’s problem wasn’t Lt. Comdr. Joel Hogan.
Teri Howe’s problem was Teri Howe.
How in the hell was he going to fix that?
His cell phone rang.
“Sorry to bother you, Senior Chief, but there’s a problem.” Jenk delivered the news with his usual good cheer. “Gilligan’s stuck in the elevator, and the hotel maintenance crew won’t let us get him out ourselves.”
Amazing. And the power hadn’t even gone out yet.
“He’s going to have to wait in line,” Stan told the kid. “I have to wrangle some asshole at the front desk first. Find Sam Starrett and WildCard Karmody,” he ordered, thinking aloud as he walked swiftly to the stairs. “Tell them to bulldoze over the maintenance crew—to just keep agreeing with them—and get Gilligan the hell out of there anyway. And if I’m not there by the time he gets free, tell Karmody to do his best imitation of me and slice Gilligan into little quivering pieces. What the fuck is he doing getting into an elevator, goddamn knucklehead? Go.”
“Aye aye, Senior Chief.” Jenk signed off.
Fucking Gilligan. Christ. Tonight was off to a roaring start.
Ray Hernandez was going to die.
Gina’s mother was a trauma nurse, and she’d taught all of her children enough first aid for Gina to be certain that unless Ray got to a hospital soon, that blow to the head he’d received from the butt of the hijacker’s gun could very well prove fatal.
That is, if he wasn’t dead already.
A blow like that had probably broken his skull.
Yeah, Ray was going to die. But maybe he was one of the lucky ones—because the way it was looking, they were all going down. At least by being unconscious, he wasn’t scared anymore.
And it was inevitable, really. One by one the hijackers would go through them, smashing their skulls. Starting first with the boys, demanding Karen Crawford step forward.
But Karen couldn’t step forward. She was still back in Athens.
“Karen Crawford,” the too-handsome hijacker—the Backstreet Boy with the pleasant voice and pretty face—said again.
“She’s not in our group.” Dick McGann wept. “I assure you, if she were ...”
He’d throw her to the wolves. No doubt about it.
“I will count to three,” Backstreet said. “One.”
They probably all would. Gina couldn’t even say that—if Karen Crawford were here—she herself wouldn’t be pointing her out to the gunmen right this very moment.
“Two.”
Gina had always thought of herself as strong and principled, but it was easy to be strong and principled without guns held to your head.
The presence of those guns changed things a whole lot.
“Three.”
No one moved.
Backstreet sighed wearily.
Gina had thought the shorter, more ferocious, snarly pantherman was the leader, but now she saw Backstreet give him a signal. Go ahead.
Pantherman pulled back the butt of his gun, ready to pulverize Trent Engelman’s pretty head.
And Gina yanked herself free from Casey and stood up, stooping to keep from hitting her own head on the overhead luggage compartment. “Don’t!” The word was out of her mouth almost before she realized what she was doing. What the hell was she doing?
She was looking at Backstreet, but she could see Trent from the corner of her eye, his face incredulous. She could also see Mr. McGann gaping at her, too.
“I’m Karen,” she said. Her voice shook, so she said it again. Louder. “I’m Karen Crawford. Please don’t hurt anyone else.”