Page 60 of Gryphon

He should have asked Holly, she had basic piloting skills, but he simply wasn’t in the mood to hash out his life at forty thousand feet. Forty-one thousand. They were eastbound traffic after all. Christ! He was becoming as anal in his thoughts as Miranda.

He’d take Tad any day. Let Holly rot in the rear along with the NATO two-star. Major General Sandor Kurbanov had placed a few calls of his own, then insisted on accompanying them by the simple expedient of climbing aboard and settling in one of the seats.

He still wasn’t used to seeing a two-star without his entourage. The few times he’d been in the Pentagon, he’d witnessed the two-stars moving down the hall. It quickly became clear that colonels and one-stars served only one purpose, to flutter along in the wake of two-star generals. Of course, they in turn hustled along behind the threes and would faint if they were permitted in the presence of the fours. Mike wondered what the pecking orders were that defined the size of a general’s entourage—it was always bigger than Kurbanov’s none.

Oddly, the sole four-star he knew, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, shunned having any entourage whenever possible. Was that a sign of Kurbanov’s importance?

Tad slid into Miranda’s empty seat as if it wasn’t completely wrong. Mike hadn’t been able to shift across the aisle. It didn’t actually matter as the M2 only required one pilot and the two control suites were identical on either side of the cockpit. But he still couldn’t do it.

Tad took over the radio work with the ease of long practice, far more than Mike ever had.

Mike made a few nudges to the autopilot as it took them up to cruise altitude…at forty-one thousand. Next stop? Two hours down line. The Swedish general they had given a lift from Storuman back to Stockholm had arranged for them to refuel at Pápa Air Base in Hungary.

The M2 could have made the Stockholm to Tbilisi, Georgia, jaunt in a single passage, barely, if the direct route lay open. But Belarus, Ukraine, and Russia all lay between the two far corners of Europe. They all had exclusive no-fly airspaces—and a shooting war he wanted nothing to do with. It added nearly a full hour of flying time and another including the descent, refuel, and climb out, to jog clear of them. For the first time since the end of the Cold War, direct flights from Europe to China had become fantastically expensive to avoid Russian airspace. Direct from India to North America had ceased entirely, having to route through Europe or Singapore.

“Pogo stick,” Tad rumbled over the intercom. “Go up and down a lot in this little jet.”

“Well, the team,” he didn’t quite manage to say we, “is West Coast based out of Seattle. Fairbanks to Phoenix, this baby covers everything except Hawaii very neatly on a single tank.”

“I bet. Sweet little machine, no offence, babe,” he patted the top of the cockpit console. “Haven’t been to Seattle. How’s the pickin’s there?”

Didn’t the guy think about anything other than women? It was…exactly how past-Mike had been. Well, crap! Was that what future-Mike counted on with his planned return to Denver? Meandering through the fields of single women for a night here and a weekend there?

He hoped not.

Yet it sounded a little too close to reality.

“Have to set your sights higher than that.” Mike wished he knew which one of them he meant that for.

“Says the man with the golden ticket.”

Mike glanced over at him.

Tad didn’t look over before he scoffed, “My mama didn’t raise no blind boy. What is it with you two? Easy to see how bad she wanted to do it—”

Mike reached to cut off the intercom so that he didn’t have to hear this.

“—but this boy had to near enough boot that pretty ass of hers to make her go talk to you.”

Mike returned his hand to his lap, turning his attention forward. Through the darkened windscreen, he saw the lights of the Polish coast through the broken cloud cover. He glanced east, past Tad. Fifty miles over that way lay Kaliningrad. Holly had done the bravest thing he’d ever seen, jumping out of a plane little bigger than this one to rescue Miranda.

Never talked about it, of course.

Today she’d wanted—and not wanted—to come talk to him. And when she had, all they’d done was argue. He resisted the urge to glance aft.

Nope, he had no idea what was with you two either.

46

Holly wished she knew why Mike had asked for Tad’s help in the cockpit instead of hers. Probably some crazy third-level motive she’d never guess: team indoctrination, feeling out his fit on the team, something to do with deciding if he was good enough for Miranda, or…

Or deluding herself. She’d pissed him off but good. But he’d get over it. Here he was, after all, following the mission through.

“No way is he leaving the team,” she confirmed aloud.

“What makes you say that?” General Kurbanov’s English was clear but stilted in the way only Slavs and other Eastern Europeans managed. It was the first comment he’d made that didn’t sound like an order. Weirdly for a flag officer, he was less voluble than a house mouse.

“Our pilot thinks he’s quitting the team. Not a chance.”

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