Page 1 of Mending Fences

1

“Hey, Fin. Get your butt in gear.” Frank Stick Stokman stood a foot taller than herself, even if she hadn’t been sitting down—and way into her personal space. Guy just had no clue.

“Don’t give me any ideas.” Captain Finella Hyland raised her book, facing the cover toward Stick. This edition of Thomas Harris’ Hannibal Rising included Hannibal Lecter’s greedy eyes looking out from the steel prison mask. The mask covered Lecter’s mouth and chin so that he couldn’t bite off anyone’s face, though the chances of getting Stick to hear this Back off! message weren’t great.

The old saying, you can’t keep a good woman down, needed an update for Stick; you must put that annoying man down. In fact, she’d be glad if someone extended that concept across much of the male population. Most were far too convinced of their own mandate as God’s chosen gender—Stick would gladly be their self-proclaimed king. Thank goodness she outranked him. She was also Irish, which put mere mortals at a distinct disadvantage. Thanks for that, Great Grandma! The first Hyland to cross the ocean to North America.

Besides, she had far more pressing problems than Stick.

First and foremost, the two of them had been shipped thirty hours from the primary Night Stalkers base in Fort Campbell, Kentucky, to land on a warship floating off the Horn of Africa. More, she knew that the USS Peleliu had been decommissioned a decade ago—yet inexplicably here they were. The barely audible thrum of the engines said they weren’t doing much more than station keeping. But time would answer that shortly and one thing being an Army pilot had taught her was patience.

Her second problem, still more pressing that Stick, was this book—he ranked as merely annoying. She wasn’t bothered by Hannibal’s origin story, even though she wouldn’t count herself as a horror fan. But it was the only book dumped in the corner of the pilots’ ready room that she hadn’t read.

She’d just finished Nelson Mandela’s autobiography, Long Walk to Freedom. She’d finally gotten around to reading that because Mom had been an ex-pat schoolteacher in South Africa for thirteen years before she returned to North America and became, well, Mom. Mom and her job managing an apartheid-era schoolgirl field-hockey team was hard to imagine. However, that the team had been good enough to travel throughout South Africa also said plenty about the genes Mom had passed down to Fin—be the best.

No, the problem with Hannibal Rising lay far deeper than Stick’s shallow brain could ever delve—it was a prequel. Written last but set before the other three books in the series. Whenever she stumbled on a series written out of order, the quandary emerged: read it in chronological order or written order? No sign of the others in the tiny dump-off library that the flight crews left for one another. Well, that answered that question, but she was never comfortable with it. Besides, she was committed now; once she started a series, she always had to finish it.

She read another paragraph to annoy Stick; turnabout was fair play after all, before giving him any of her attention. “What’s your problem, Stick? Not getting enough roughage in your diet?”

“Hey, I eat both essential food groups: steak and potatoes. Biscuits too when I’m cornered.”

She fought back the smile. He consistently overreacted to even the tiniest sliver of encouragement; not a chance it would be coming from her. Still, she liked funny, just not on Stick.

“We’ve got a briefing for our familiarization flight in ten and a pre-mission brief in an hour,” he prompted, as if she was the dense one.

Finella raised her left eyebrow at him in question.

“So, get yourself ready already.”

She sighed. One of the many problems with Stick? He wasn’t the most observant of guys. He was a good enough gunner and copilot…in the air. Out of the cockpit, he ranked bottom five in situational awareness, even if the other four contenders happened to all be Kens from the Barbie movie. “Where are we, Stick?”

“Pilot ready room,” he offered in a seriously duh tone. To prove his point, he waved a hand at the comfortable chairs and big screen displays for briefings. That it was also the ship captain’s Flight Deck level office simply made it weird. But what did she know about Navy ships; she was an Army helo pilot.

“And where are the briefings held?”

He squinted at her hard. He must really be out of it. Thirty hours transit from Stateside and eight hours in the sack, she was just fine. His brain must be running even slower than normal.

“And what am I already wearing?” she tried to give him a clue because that’s what pilots did for their crew, even when they were being utter dweebs.

“Your flightsuit?”

“Perfect. So, logically, you’re the one who’s late because I’m already here and you’re only just arriving. You’re early, but I’m even earlier, so you’re late by comparison.” His eyes crossed at that. She decided to throw him a rescue line, “And what are you wearing?”

He looked down at his jeans and flannel shirt, like hick was an In Thing these days. “Well, shee-it.” Said like the cowboy she knew he wasn’t, but there was no accounting for people from Seattle.

“So, I’m not the one who needs to get his butt in gear. Get it together, Lieutenant. Now!” She let her command voice out to play. It always shocked folks coming from a five-foot-oh woman with real curves. Guys missed that she was Irish—well, Great Gran Finella had been, before she’d married a French-Canadian. But as her namesake, Fin owned it. Attitude came pre-packaged in her DNA. Thanks again, Great Gran.

Stick spun around to head down the ladder and go change. In the process, he banged his forehead hard on the top of the hatch—and plummeted to the deck. She could walk through standing tall; he missed by four inches. Halfway to laughing, she saw the blood.

Her call had the ship’s medics on him in under two minutes. Scalp wound, so more blood than damage. Most of which she’d kept in place by pressing the pages of Hannibal Rising like a pressure bandage to his forehead to staunch the flow until the medics had arrived. He’d knocked himself out cold and didn’t complain about having Hannibal Lecter shoved against his face, but it also put paid on her reading the blood-soaked book. When the medics offered to cart it away to be burned as hazardous medical waste, she didn’t argue. Definite message there that horror was not one of her genres. Perhaps she’d take the hint and give her must-read-the-whole-series rule a pass. Just this one time. Seeing a bared section of Stick’s skull before the blood had welled up was a little too close to the fiction that had staunched it.

Major Justin Roberts and the company’s Air Mission Commander Kara Moretti arrived just as the medics were bundling Stick onto a stretcher.

“What did you do to your copilot, Captain Hyland?” Now that’s what a cowboy should look like. Six-two of blond-and-blue Texan complete with a white Stetson who walked like he was still on his home prairie rather than a warship in unfriendly territory. Pity about the ring on his finger.

“Wish I could be the one to take credit for it, sir.” She’d called for retribution upon annoying men but hadn’t intended it to happen quite so punctually—or thoroughly. Had she developed a cool new superpower? “But the man attempted a much-needed lobotomy all on his own.”

“Assessment?”

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