"Yes?"
"Ms. Munrough, you're wanted at a briefing in the seventh-floor conference room… um… they asked me to tell all the top management that there's a nine o'clock meeting up there this morning."
"Thanks," Jenna said, breathing a sigh of relief. A meeting. Even at Firehawk, home office life was a succession of meetings. The bureaucracy must go on. The king is dead — long live the bureaucracy.
She checked the time on her cell phone. She could get a cup of coffee to go and still make the meeting.
As Jenna rounded the corner going into the coffee room, she found herself face-to-face with Lucy, her friend from special projects who had alerted her to the nuclear weapon.
Lucy flashed a glance that asked, Did you have anything to do with Harris getting killed?
Jenna replied with one that asked, Are you kidding? Of course not. Did you?
Lucy just shook her head, nervous to be accused by Jenna's expression.
"Did they find the thing?" Jenna asked under her breath.
"Yeah," Lucy said nervously as she poured her coffee. "How was your weekend?"
"Fine," Jenna lied for the benefit of a couple of people who came into the coffee room. "I just hung out… did some laundry… watched a lot of television. How about you?"
"I was down at the White House on Saturday. Avoided the television, myself."
"I know what you mean," Jenna said, taking her coffee and heading toward the elevator that would take her to the rarefied atmosphere of the celebrated seventh floor.
The conference room was filled with all the top home office people, the department heads, and some of the people from Raymond Harris's staff. She recognized Aron Arnold, the pilot whom Harris had recently brought in from Cactus Flat as sort of a fair-haired boy.
Jenna knew Arnold's history with Troy Loensch, though he had little to say about him. She knew of their inauspicious first meeting, but that they had flown together with the HAWX Program.
The mood in the room was one of expectation. With Harris out of the picture, everyone was curious to know what the board of directors might have in mind for Fire-hawk's future.
This question was answered moments after Jenna set her cup on the table and slung her purse strap over the back of her chair.
An unassuming, middle-aged Hispanic man entered through the door at the opposite' corner of the room.
"I'm Jose Turcios." He smiled. "But most people call me Joe."
With that, he went on to explain that he had been with Firehawk for nearly a dozen years, running special projects and field operations around the world.
"I'm honored to tell you," he continued, "to tell you that the board has named me to succeed Raymond Harris as CEO of Firehawk. They are big shoes to fill and I'm just a size ten."
He paused for the few chuckles that came in reaction to his poor attempt at levity, and continued.
Conspicuously absent in Joe Turcios's comments was the increasingly vitriolic diatribe about the evils of ineffective government that everyone had grown used to hearing from Raymond Harris. Maybe it was that Turcios just had a different style, or perhaps it was simply that the events of the past seventy-two hours simply spoke for themselves.
"The future at Firehawk is promising, and it will obviously be a busy one," Turcios added. "Now that Firehawk and our PMC partners at Cernavoda have the added responsibility of managing the executive branch of the federal government, there will be plenty to keep us busy… but I don't want to allow that to detract from our core business of conducting air operations."
For many of the people in the room, who had aviation backgrounds, this was a welcome comment. Even though most were indeed part of the home office bureaucracy, few wanted to think of themselves as bureaucrats.
"With this in mind, I'd like to officially announce that we are going to expand and add additional resources to HAWX, our High Altitude Warfare, Experimental, Program. The future belongs to those who own the technology of the future, and I intend for this to be Firehawk. With that in mind, I'd like to introduce the new head of the HAWX Program. Some ofyou have met Aron Arnold. He's new to the home office but not to Firehawk….."
As the meeting broke up, Jenna noticed Arnold coming toward her.
"I don't believe we've been formally introduced, Ms. Munrough," he said, extending his hand.
"Might as well call me Jenna. I've seen you around. You're in from Cactus Flat, I hear."
"Yeah, I was there until the general invited me to join him back here a couple of weeks ago… and you can call me Aron."
"So, I guess you'll be headed back out to Cactus Flat, Aron?"
"I'm not much of a home office guy." Arnold shrugged. "By the way, I had a chance to fly with Troy Loensch out there. I hear that you were in his Air Force unit over in Sudan?"
"Yeah. I flew with him over there. That's where we first met Harris."
"Too bad about what happened to Loensch," Arnold said. Jenna couldn't detect whether he was being sympathetic or just making conversation.
"Too bad for sure," Jenna replied. She detected no trace of emotion, but then, Arnold struck her as an emotionless individual.
"Helluva way to die… lost at sea and all. I was out there at Cactus Flat when the word came in that he had gone down," Arnold said. "We crewed together on a few Shakuru flights before it happened….. Actually, that's one thing I wanted to talk to you about."
"What's that?"
"How long has it been since you've been in the cockpit of a high-performance aircraft?" Arnold asked. Jenna felt herself jump slightly.
What was he asking? What was Raymond Harris's fair-haired boy asking? Did he know? Did he expect her to answer that just two days ago she was in a cockpit shooting Sidewinders at Raymond Harris?
"It's been a while," she answered noncommittally. "Why?"
"Because from what I've heard… and seen in your resume, you're the kind of pilot we need at HAWX. I'd like to ask you to consider transferring from Herndon to the HAWX Program."
"Y'all are inviting me to come out to the desert and fly high-altitude stuff?"
"Exactly. I'll talk to Turcios and we'll work it out. Are you interested?"
"Tell me more," Jenna said, unslinging her purse and setting it down on the conference room table.
"We have a lot of new stuff coming on line out there," Arnold said. "I figured you wouldn't mind trading a desk chair for an ejection seat."
"What the hell," Jenna said thoughtfully. "I think this probably would be a good time for me to be getting out of Washington for a while."
Chapter 60
Limping slightly, Troy made his way up the tree-lined street as the sun hung low in the western sky. The pain in his leg from the injuries he had suffered on that mountaintop in Nicaragua was exacerbated by the hard landing in the Catoctins, but it wasn't as bad today as it had been on Sunday.
He probably should have cooled out for another couple of days, bunking anonymously at the YMCA and slinging pizza dough anonymously at Mr. Mahmud'sbut he was anxious to see Jenna Munrough. He convinced himself that it was to assure himself that she was all right, that she had survived, but he knew that he longed to feel her touch. He admitted to himself that he was in love with Jenna.
It was a different kind of love than he had felt for Cassie. Back then, it was a simpler schoolboy-schoolgirl sort of love — after all, they were in school, in that insulated and insular world where things are so much less complex. With Jenna, it was a relationship founded on mutual respect. Long before they liked one another, they grew to have a professional respect for each other as pilots. Gradually, respect had grown into friendship, a kind of laughing, joking, disarmed friendship.
From friendship, there followed a mutual lust that had become a component of this friendship. Watching Jenna scream past in her F-16 as he floated earthward in his parachute harness, Troy had felt a powerful surge of longing. Strangely — for him — he longed not so much for his own survival, but for hers. He imagined that this was the moment when a religious person would have said a prayer. Troy longed for them both to get through this ordeal, and to be together. As he crashed into the dogwoods and bundled up his parachute, he thought of their last quiet moment together, that last calm moment before the phone call that catapulted them into the skies over the Washington metro area. He was surprised to find his mind riveted, not on the thrill of sex, but on the way that her soft, smooth shoulder rose and fell rhythmically as she slept. He remembered having watched that for a long, long time. He remembered the two tiny moles behind her shoulder and how he had found himself almost hypnotized by the sound of her breathing.