Page 25 of Gryphon

However, unable to brake the parachute, Major Ingrid Eklund punched the sand hard with both feet to ease the impact on what she’d correctly assessed as a broken neck. A step to either side wouldn’t have triggered the old Teller mine—but she struck dead center above it.

The last thing she ever did was land on Daughter’s Island. Nothing readily identifiable as human remained in the three-point-one meter blast crater.

It was the first Swedish Air Force pilot death since 1996.

Kapten Liisa Salo received no medal for the hardest thing she’d ever done. She hadn’t, after watching Major Ingrid Eklund be blown to pieces, destroyed the Russian lighthouse and its lone keeper with a Hellfire missile.

She didn’t know, but her restraint changed nothing. The Russian lighthouse keeper had stepped out onto the back deck of his house to watch the jets pass over, not a common occurrence over his remote border island.

He held a cup of morning tea heavily laced with vodka in one hand. The tea for the December chill. The vodka to grease the wheels of murder he’d been pouring into his first-ever novel. Half the pages on the pad of paper in his other hand were already covered in a first-rate murder mystery. The victims? His treacherous wife and the supply boat captain she’d run off with last week without telling him to his face.

Though he stood two hundred and fifty-two meters—the length of four ice hockey rinks—from the center of the explosion, the signal mirror from Ingrid’s emergency kit spun into his neck and severed the left carotid artery. Unable to finish pouring out his ire upon the page, nonetheless the writing pad he carried was well soaked in blood before he died.

20

“Missed your beauty sleep?” Tad dropped into the chair beside Jeremy, facing her. Only an empty chair kept her company on this side of the restaurant’s table.

Holly considered drowning Tad in his bowl of muesli, but the filmjölk yogurty stuff the Swedes used instead of milk was probably too thick to kill him.

Tad laughed. “Yep, that’s about how Ma looked anytime Pop said it. Like he didn’t have the sense God gave a chicken some mornings. Course he also always told her she was the most beautiful woman on the planet, so it musta balanced out enough to keep him alive.”

If he was asking to be murdered, she’d definitely consider it…after having her coffee.

Instead she glared at Mike’s back two tables farther into the restaurant.

Last night Mike had locked the hotel room door on her and refused to answer. She’d fetched a second key from the desk and been almost angry enough to kick the door down—and far too angry to speak—when she discovered he’d thrown the deadbolt as well. Angry enough that she’d left a single boot print beside the lock, but her heart hadn’t been in it. Which was probably a good thing because, if she’d gotten in, there would have been bloodshed.

Mike never presented a clear target; his most annoying trait. Instead he slipped past her guard in ways she could never quite pin down. Thinking to check out Tad’s story, when her role was team guardian. Giving her shit about Tad and at the same time not chatting up Klara Dahlberg. She knew what sort of man she was sleeping with—except he wasn’t. And it was starting to seriously piss her off.

She’d ended up on the crap couch in Miranda’s room as the hotel was full with all the investigation folks from the crash site—only place for twenty kilometers in any direction. Fjällberget was a locals’ ski slope, not some fancy resort.

It was the first time they’d slept apart since…

Holly really didn’t want to think about this. Because if Mike wasn’t the sort of man she knew he was, what the hell kind of a chap was he? And what did that make her?

She focused on her coffee, which didn’t help. If she drank it instead of staring at it, would it make any difference?

The last time they intentionally slept apart, other than when one or the other was out on a different part of an investigation, she’d been the one to lock Mike out of their room. That would’ve been the US Air Force dorm at Groom Lake back when Andi Wu had first joined the team two years ago. All the evidence had said he was hitting on the cute new Chinese girl while sleeping with Holly herself.

But he wasn’t.

Turned out Andi’s interests didn’t include men at all. And Mike had only been trying to help her get through a bout of PTSD Andi hadn’t wanted to admit to. Bastard had honored her request, leaving Holly to draw all the wrong conclusions.

Which didn’t explain last night.

Or did it?

Not wanting to learn anything new, Holly risked another look at him anyway.

Mike sat, not with the cute ski patroller who’d done yeoman service until the last body bag was off the mountain and the last investigator off her slopes. Mike sat with Miranda (both of their backs to her). Opposite them sat the head Swedish SHK investigator and the president of the airline. Rolm Lindgren looked as rough as she felt, which meant she ranked right down there with a dingo’s bum.

Still, Tad would at least choke a bit if she shoved his head into his muesli for pointing it out.

Miranda’s couch had been comfortable enough, not that Holly had managed a second of sleep on it. She had not been batting her eyelashes at Tad Jobson. They’d just been…trading war stories. It was a relief to talk to someone who she could share with at that level. Didn’t know she’d missed it until she did.

Like why it was so funny that a drunken Marine Corps major had driven an up-armored Lexus into an obstacle course mudhole. He didn’t have to explain that the heavy up-armor meant the windows only rolled down inches—enough to let mud in but not people out. And that the little window-breaker hammer he’d been beating the inside of the window with didn’t touch bullet-resistant glass rated NIJ III against multiple 7.62 mm rounds. He’d have gone down with his car if the Marines hadn’t been quick about hauling his ass back out.

The punchline wasn’t the Marines and all the explanation. It was that in his drunken state he’d accidentally taken the Navy base commander’s personal vehicle after a lusty fling with the guy’s wife. His career had, literally, turned to mud in that instant.

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