She looked up from her coffee.
"Lately, I don't know why, I've kind of felt the need to know a little more about self-defense."
He smiled, and she matched his expression.
"I'd be happy to show you."
"Might take a few weeks for me to stop gimping around." He touched his bandaged leg.
"I'll wait."
He sipped at the coffee, then decided if he had anymore, he was going to have to have a bladder transplant. He put the cup down. "I wonder how it's going. They are supposed to be done about now."
"I'm sure they'll call as soon as they can."
"I'm sure. And I am confident that Colonel Howard will execute his mission."
She smiled again.
"What?" he asked.
"Nothing. I was just remembering something from a long time ago."
"Yeah?"
"Between my junior and senior year at John Jay, I moved to an apartment with two other students. My brother Tony had lost his job, so his wife and two kids moved in with my parents while he went to Maine to find work.
Things were a little crowded at home. We lucked into a rent-controlled place that actually had heat and windows that would open. Building is probably a parking lot by now, but it was perfect for three girls away from home for the first time.
"Anyway, one of my roomies was an Eye-tie like me, that was Mary Louise Bergamo, from Philadelphia; the other was a tall, lanky black woman from Texas, a volleyball player, Dirisha Mae Jones. She was the funniest person I ever met. She was always coming up with these little homespun homilies she'd gotten from somewhere. One night we were drinking cheap wine and making a lot of noise and she defined ‘confident' for us.
" ‘Well, girls, listen here. There's this black man, name of Ernest, who is married to this here beauuutiful woman, Loretta, but Loretta is gone up and leave him ‘cause Ernest got fired from his job — even though it wasn't no fault of his own.' "
Michaels grinned. Her imitation of her friend's Texas accent was pretty good.
Toni continued: " ‘So Ernest gets up one morning and puts on his best tie and his only white shirt and his Sunday-go-to-meeting pants, and leaves the house to go to this job interview. Ernest knows he don't get this job, his woman is gone leave him. He also know the good old boy doing the hirin' don't particularly care for men of color, so he got to be sharp.
" ‘By now, though, it's lunchtime. On the way to the interview, Ernest stops at Rick's Pit Barbecue, where he orders a double helping of pork ribs and a beer to wash ‘em down. So while he's waiting for Rick's boy James to dish up the ribs — which are drenched in about half a gallon of hot, greasy barbecue sauce, and which are the absolute best ribs anywhere in East Texas, and pretty much in Central or West Texas, too, and that's sayin' something — while he's waitin', Ernest walks on over to the phone and calls up Loretta. Says to her, "Honey, shake out your blue dress — we gone go out dancin' tonight to celebrate my new job."
" ‘Now, a man that eats ribs wearing a white shirt he knows got to stay clean, that's a confident man, girls."
Michaels laughed.
"I like seeing you do that, Alex. Laugh. You don't do it enough."
Michaels felt a little stab of something through the pain medication. Something in her voice. She liked him. It made him feel a little uncomfortable, but not too uncomfortable. "There have been better times for it. So, what happened to them? Your roommates?"
"Mary Louise went to law school — Harvard — then home to go into practice with her father's firm. She was on the team that took the State versus Pennco Housing to the Supreme Court last year and won."
"And the woman from Texas?"
"Dirisha joined the Woman's Pro Volleyball Tour right after she graduated. Played for three years, was on the Nike Team that won the Four Woman Outdoor Championships a couple of times. She retired from the circuit, wrote a book about her adventures, got a job as a sports columnist for The New York Times. Got married a few years ago, had a baby, a boy. Want to guess what she named him?"
"Come on."
"Yep. Ernest."
"You're making this up."
She raised her hand, made the scout sign. "Not a word, I swear."
He chuckled again. She was right. He needed to laugh more.
Right now, though, he was a little nervous. Where was Howard? He should have called by now. He looked at his watch.
Even if it all went as smooth as silk on silk, Michaels was going to have to do some fast and fancy dancing to keep Carver from going for his throat when he found out. If they went through all this and failed to retrieve Plekhanov, well, he was definitely going to be in crap up to his eyebrows.
If this operation failed, he'd sure as hell get a lot of time to practice his laughing, probably a long, long way from anything connected to Net Force. Though he didn't think he'd feel much like yuk-yukking it up for a while.
"She's at top speed now, sir," the pilot yelled. He had to yell to be heard over the Huey's rotor and wind noise. All those action vids where they showed people having normal conversations inside a big chopper with the doors open, like two aristocrats sharing tea in an air-conditioned Rolls Royce, were pure fantasy. Those vids were produced by somebody who had probably never even seen a helicopter close up. Even the radio chatter in the headphones was hard to hear.
"How long?" Howard shouted.
"Two, three minutes," the pilot yelled back. "There's the edge of the tank farm ahead, to the right. And there's the river. I'm going to take us right over the main road."
The ten men assigned to this craft carried H&K subguns and holstered side arms—9mm Brownings, along with Cold Steel sheath knives. They wore plain coveralls, but they also wore flak vests and generic Kevlar helmets and boots. The gear was all over-the-counter commercial — the subguns were from Germany, the pistols from Belgium, the vests Israeli, the knives Japanese. This was not supposed to be a stand-up fight, and if any gear got left behind, it wasn't going to point to the United States.
The troops did wear dog tags, but that didn't matter — they weren't leaving any personnel behind. Either they all left or they all stayed.
"There's the truck!" Fernandez yelled.
"And there's trouble," Howard said.
A convoy of military-style vehicles, three of them, was fast approaching the dead truck from the other direction. The lead vehicle was a Jeep-clone with a light machine gun mounted on it amidships, and a figure in camo manning the weapon. The second vehicle was a police car with a flashing blue light. The third vehicle was a large SWAT-style van, also with a light blinking atop it. Even over the roar of the noise in the copter, they could hear the sirens.
"Well, shit," Fernandez said.
Howard yelled at the pilot. "Will my headset reach C2?"
"Yes, sir, it should."
Howard trigged his com. To the commander of the other copter, Howard said, "C2, this is Alpha Wolf, do you copy?"
"Alpha Wolf, we copy your trans."
"C2, I want you to stand away, repeat, stand away. Circle back and we'll call if we need you. No point in giving them two targets."
"Yes, sir."
To his pilot, Howard said, "Put it down, Loot. Between our truck and the incoming."
"Yes, sir."
Howard's stomach lurched as the bird dropped toward the road. He felt his skin tighten. "Nobody fires unless fired on! Deploy in a staggered grid and stand ready."
Howard looked at the uprushing road. No cover, but he wouldn't start blasting in the middle of an oil-tank field if it was his property. He was banking on the Chechen force commander's surprise and sense of responsibility. If it was Howard running some out-of-the-way post, and he got a call to investigate a shooting in the middle of the night, and an unmarked copter put down and disgorged armed and unidentified troops, he would hesitate before opening fire — as long as they didn't shoot first. There would be some important questions he'd want answers to: Who were they? What were they doing there? Could they be his own, doing some covert deal? Before you started blasting, you needed some information. It was one thing to shoot at some criminals in a truck you thought might have a hostage, but if you cut your own troops down, that would be bad for your career. If you riddled a bunch of oil tanks with AP rounds and created knee-deep pools of the stuff, that would also be bad. In the Chechen's place, Howard would be making some fast calls, trying to figure out what the hell was going on.