Page 57 of Peace Under Fire

“Both those cars are waiting for us?” Mandy asked in surprise. As the plane closed in on the vehicles, she could see a horde of huge men dressed in black, hanging around the SUVs.

“Tex sent a full team of six, plus equipment,” Jacob said, still staring out the window. “Add in the three of us, and we’ll need two vehicles to accommodate everyone.”

Mandy sat back in her chair. Nerves were suddenly firing left and right. Her stomach started churning. Her scalp tingled. She wiped her sweaty palms on her thighs. Maybe she should just stay in the plane and wait for Jacob and Brick and the rest of the men to find her sister and bring her back.

Of course, that meant abandoning her sister—again. And Jo was the reason she was here in the first place. All the objections she’d raised about Tex’s men going after her sister without her were still true. She needed to be there. Unfortunately, that knowledge had no effect on the anxiety presently eating her alive.

And then the plane stopped moving. The engines shut down. A mix of rumbling and squealing sounds came from outside the cabin.

“Relax, they’re just moving the disembark staircase into place,” Jacob told her, apparently sensing her anxiety, but not the reason behind it.

Brick and Jacob unsnapped their seatbelts and stood.

“Wait for me here,” Jacob said. He shoved aside a fabric curtain behind the rows of seats and disappeared into the back of the plane.

She heard some scraping and bumping sounds coming from back there. By the time she’d unbuckled her seatbelt and forced herself up onto surprisingly weak legs he was back.

“Here.” He thrust a sandwich, water bottle and orange into her nervous hands. “You need to eat.”

Was he crazy? There was no way she’d be able to force anything down her tight throat.

“We should make use of the head before we meet the boys,” Brick declared.

Turned out, the head was the bathroom. They traipsed to the back of the jet, passing a pair of cushiony couches, and a tiny—and by that she meant closet-sized—kitchen. The ice chest Brick had bought for their trip was shoved against the tiny fridge. Her scarf was sitting on top of it. Somehow that struck her as odd, that her scarf would be warming the top of the cooler, rather than her neck.

They took turns in the narrow bathroom and then walked back to the front of the cabin in single file. Jacob picked up the collection of food and water that she’d discarded on one of the chairs and shoved them into her hands. Good lord, the man was determined to make her eat and drink.

The plane’s captain was waiting for them at the cabin’s hatch, which had been opened and secured to the side. “Watch your step on the way down. The stairs are slick. We’re going to top off the fuel. But we’ll be waiting for you in this same spot once you’ve finished your business in town. Give me a call—” he handed Jacob a business card— “as soon as you’re headed back to the airstrip. I’ll arrange for our departure.”

Mandy glanced at the pilot’s face, expecting to find suspicion or wariness. How often did he ferry clients into the middle of nowhere for some mysterious, top-secret meeting where he was supposed to wait for his passengers to return—even though his clients didn’t have a solid timeframe of when that would be?

There was no suspicion on his face though. Just professional competence. Maybe such trips happened quite often when you were catering to the rich and pampered.

She was so focused on the big, shadowy figures moving forward to meet them, that she barely noticed the steep, steel staircase as it shuddered and clanged beneath their footsteps.

“Relax,” Jacob said in a low voice, leaning toward her when she joined him at the bottom of the stairs. “They’re here to help you, not judge you.”

How in the world had he pinpointed what had her so anxious? But even more importantly, why did it matter what these men thought of her? They weren’t important to her. Once the plane took off for Los Alamos, she’d never see them again. Raising her chin, she drew her shoulders back and forced confidence into her stride.

There was something familiar about the first man who strode forward to greet them, but she couldn’t quite place him thanks to the black, non-reflective clothing that concealed his features.

“Aren’t you flying sweet these days,” the man said in a voice as gritty and growly as Jacob’s usually was.

Now his voice she recognized. She’d heard him in the halls of the condo complex. Jacob called him Grumpy, which had to be a nickname.

“It’s better than arriving at Norfolk’s terminal to find you assholes waiting for me with your oh-so-creative signs congratulating me on my gender reassignment surgery and reminding me that I’m court ordered to stay two-hundred feet away from the local sheep farms,” Jacob retorted, with a hard thump to the guy’s shoulder.

“Alpaca farms,” Grumpy corrected, with a wicked grin. “You know,” he shrugged, “they’re taller.” He offered Jacob a fist bump, then pulled him into a loose embrace punctuated by a round of vigorous back thumps.

“That was you boys?” Someone in the middle of the group of men asked. “Man, that was classic. A damn legend. They’re still talking about it at SEAL school.”

“It was the big, red X through the alpaca’s face. That’s what really set that shit up,” Grumpy said, thumping Jacob’s back even harder.

What was it about these lethal, tough men and their insistence on showing their affection by trying to beat the breath out of each other? She’d watched these rituals countless times in the parking lot or halls of the condo complex. Back pounding, shoulder punching, fists to the chests.

Macho, Neanderthal interactions.

They were using their fists, too, not the flats of their palms, going for maximum bruising. She rolled her eyes. Men.

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