“You’ll not talk me out of this, mate,” Andy replied, doing his best to come across as resolute and unshakable.
What O’Conner did next was something that caught Andy by surprise, something he or anyone he knew who didn’t have a death wish would never have attempted back in Belfast. Stepping forward until he was all but in Andy’s face, O’Conner reached up, gently placed his hand on Andy’s gun, and ever so slowly turned it aside. Never once did either man avert his gaze, not even when Andy recognized the look in the American’s eye for what it was. “We have plans for dealing with the Sealion. He’s ours. You’ve done your duty, Andy.”
“I told you fucking Legoland would fuck it up,” Tommy growled after Andy had hung up the phone and informed him and Spence that Ed Telford had been apologetically advised by his contacts within the SIS that the Sealion had managed to elude the trap they’d set for him. “McDonnell and that sorry lot he’s got working for him would fuck up a wet dream. And don’t waste my time giving me that Insha’Allah bullshit.”
Leaning back in his office chair as far as he dared, Andy knitted his fingers together as he rested his hands on his stomach. “We did everything expected of us,” he replied calmly. “To have done anything more would have been…” Pausing, a memory suddenly flashed before his eyes, the memory of another time and place when he’d found himself face to face with someone who had, in their own way, become just as dear and important to Andy as the two people who were so much more to him than just employees.
Realizing he was wasting his time, and far too enraged to do anything but get himself into trouble but arguing a lost point if he stayed there, Tommy grabbed his ancient tweed jacket and stormed out of the office. Spence, who’d been watching this scene play out, waited several minutes before speaking. “I know you were right to take a hands-off approach to this whole affair,” she murmured reassuringly. “And it didn’t turn out near as bad as Tommy seems to think. They did, after all, track down and seize all the computers the Sealion had managed to slip into the country, didn’t they?”
“So I’ve been told,” Andy replied as he sat regarding Spence from across the room as his thoughts drifted from one forbidden topic to another. “Still, Tommy does have a point.”
“You did everything you could,” Spence countered.
To this, Andy did not reply. Instead, he came to his feet. “I think I’m going to call it a day,” he declared without ever taking his eyes off Spence. “Why don’t you wrap up what you’re doing.”
“I’d love to, but you know how it is. I hate walking away from something I’ve started without finishing.”
Again, Andy didn’t answer as his thoughts once more reflected upon a single moment when he’d found himself confronted with something he had, until that day, done everything in his power to forget.
Ever so slowly a small voice managed to work its way past the mental fog that had filled his head. “Are you feeling okay?” Spence asked.
After giving his head a quick shake, Andy forced a smile. “Never been better. Now,” he announced as firmly as he could, “you are to save whatever that is you’re working on, shut down your computer, and call it a day, young lady.”
“And if I don’t?” Spence asked coyly.
“I won’t be able to take you to dinner.”
Since her caper in Milan, it had been near impossible to get a rise out of the fetching young woman seated across the office from where he was standing. When he saw the way Spence responded to his last comment, Andy found he could not help but smile, for Karen Spencer was fast becoming something that he hoped would fill a need he had once come close to filling.
Stopping just before he entered the gate bridge and boarding his flight, Andy glanced over his shoulder. The red-haired American was gone, but not forgotten.
ABOUT THE AUTHORS
After graduating in 1974 with a B.A. in history and a commission as an officer in the U.S. Army, HAROLD COYLE served on active duty for seventeen years in Germany during the height of the Cold War, in Korea on the staff of the Combined Field Army (ROK/U.S.), as an instructor at both the U.S. Army’s Armor School and the Command and General Staff College, and as an adviser to the Army National Guard. He also served in the Gulf during Desert Storm. In 1991 Coyle left the service and took up writing full time, penning works that include Team Yankee, a New York Times bestselling novel about modern armored warfare, and historical fiction such as Look Away. You can sign up for email updates here.
JENNIFER ELLIS started writing four years ago, before anyone told her that it was dangerously addictive. By the time she found that out, it was too late. She graduated from the Royal Military Academy at Sandhurst more years ago than she cares to remember, before embarking on what she laughingly calls a “diverse and eclectic career path,” a path that took her from the jungles of Central America through the bogs and hedgerows of Northern Ireland to the mountains of Bosnia and Kosovo, then onwards to the sandbox of Iraq (fleetingly) and, most recently, to the dusty plains of Afghanistan. Along the way she has also transitioned from being a regular army officer to becoming a civilian consultant and army reservist specializing in cybersecurity. Jennifer currently works for a global security corporation, has contributed to various government advisory bodies, occasionally deploys to hot dusty countries and, in her spare time, she writes. You can sign up for email updates here.
BOOKS BY HAROLD COYLE
Team Yankee
Sword Point
Bright Star
Trial by Fire
The Ten Thousand
Code of Honor
Look Away
Until the End
Savage Wilderness
*God’s Children
*Dead Hand
*Against All Enemies
*More Than Courage
*They Are Soldiers
*Cat and Mouse
*No Warriors, No Glory
*Pandora’s Legion (with Barrett Tillman)
*Prometheus’s Child (with Barrett Tillman)
*Vulcan’s Fire (with Barrett Tillman)
*Cyber Knights, in Combat, Vol. 3
*Breakthrough on Bloody Ridge, in Victory: Into the Fire
*Published by Tom Doherty Associates, LLC