Page 42 of A Very Happy Thanksgiving
“None of us do,” Havana added. “I’m not a wealthy man. I don’t have much to leave for my daughter, but I can try to protect her home. Our home. We don’t have another planet to live on.”
“I thought we were going to Mars?” Marc said, trying to lighten a mood that had suddenly turned heavy.
“Not any time soon.” Havana was still dead serious. “Look into the logistics—we’re nowhere near ready for that, and maybe we never will be. Right now, we can’t even create a self-sustaining biosphere here on Earth, and when you add in Martian dust storms that would pit the surface of any glass habitat and turn it opaque…”
“Shame, I can think of several people I’d like to send there.”
“I’d settle for going home,” Serena said. “Is there any news?”
Katie checked her phone again. “Nothing yet. The pineapple’s smoking.”
Dammit. Marc flipped the slices with a fork and moved them away from the flames. When he’d been forced onto that boat, he couldn’t deny feeling terrified, but this wasn’t so bad. Quite relaxing, actually. He felt a little guilty that folks were wasting resources on the nationwide manhunt, but as Serena had reminded him earlier, they hadn’t started this. No, they were just making the best of a difficult situation.
Much the same as Marc had in Nebraska. He’d been in charge of the grill back then as well, and caramelised pineapple had been Phae’s guilty pleasure.
Fuck, he missed her.
CHAPTER 16
Phae
Okay, Kopassus did have some good qualities. They were proficient at sourcing vehicles. For the second time in a week, I found myself in freefall, this time with Emmy Black at my side instead of Jez. Jez was far, far below, waiting by a pair of jeeps that were growing rapidly larger by the second.
I glanced across at Emmy. Was this a contest? Were we seeing who would pull their ripcord last? Because my record was two hundred and eighty-nine feet, and I’d gotten chewed out royally for that by Priest.
But no, we were being sensible today. Emmy rolled her eyes behind her goggles and deployed her parachute at a sensible fifteen hundred feet, and I followed suit, drifting the remainder of the distance at a leisurely pace before I touched down next to Jez. Heath fought his way out from under my deflated canopy.
“I gotta start disembarking more conventionally,” I muttered. Like Priest, I preferred to be in an airplane rather than out of it. “What’s the plan? Any breakthroughs?”
When we tossed ourselves out the door at nine thousand feet, the team still had eighty-seven Couch2Castle properties left to check. Eighteen sub-teams were moving carefully between them, ascertaining whether the guests might be engaged in any extracurricular activities. And by that, we meant terrorism, not filming a porn movie, as was apparently happening in one rustic bungalow in Raja Ampat. I wasn’t sure whose faces would’ve been redder, the actors’ or Kopassus’s. Probably the latter. Sin’s dog walker worked in the adult entertainment industry, and nothing fazed her, not even an unruly Malinois. Sin said hiring a professional dominatrix to exercise Saint when we were busy with work was the best move she’d ever made—Saint wasn’t even allowed to cross the threshold without sitting first, and she walked beautifully to heel now. All props to Madam Olana and her endless ability to deal with brats. The woman had the patience of a Buddhist monk and also a high pain threshold, judging by the corsets and high-heeled pumps she wore.
Jez pulled a face. “Not a breakthrough exactly, but a development.”
“Well?”
“Caroline Fortier showed up in Raja Ampat.”
“What? Tell me she wasn’t sipping cocktails at a beach bar.”
“Two Dutch tourists found her stumbling along the beach, crying.”
“And? Was she injured? What was her story?”
“She had a bunch of bruises and a split lip, and she said the people who took her kept her tied up and blindfolded before they dumped her out of a boat an hour and a half ago. Rix is on his way to speak with her.” Jez checked her watch. “He’s in a helo, so he should get there soon.”
“Did she identify any of the abductors?”
“She didn’t see them, apparently.”
“How about voices?”
“All totally unfamiliar.”
“And do we believe that?”
“The cops are treating her as a victim rather than a perpetrator.” Jez wrinkled her nose. “But she conveniently lost her iPad too, so…”
“So we carry on as we are and hope Rix comes up with something?”
