Air Battle Force (16 page)

“Yep.”

“New boss, new town—lots of tension, huh?”

“You know it.”

She waved her hand and snapped her fingers. “I can take away all that tension for you, just like
that
.”

“How?”

“How about a dip in the hot tub and a massage. Care to join me?”

“A hot tub, huh? That sounds like fun.” He'd never done anything like this before, and he had no idea what was in store—but he knew it involved copious amounts of money. “What does a dip in the hot tub and a massage with you go for?”

“Follow me and I'll show you around first.” Daren believed that she had practically pushed him away from the bar and down a long hallway, but in fact he'd moved perfectly well on his own.

Amber led Daren into a room with a king-size bed, a pillow-backed couch, a bathroom with a large double-headed shower, and a TV with a VCR bolted to the ceiling, tuned to CNN. Somehow Tommy the bartender had already placed a large bottle of ice-cold Pellegrino with two chilled glasses on a coffee table in front of the couch, where Amber now led Daren.

Exactly when Amber poured him a glass of Pellegrino, Daren couldn't tell, because she did it so seductively and so tantalizingly that he wasn't watching the glass. “I want you to just sit back, relax, and unwind,” Amber said. She took a sip and sat next to him. “I'm here for whatever you'd like to do.” She gazed at him as she drank.

“First time in a brothel?”

“Definitely.”

“It's simple: We're here to make you feel good and make sure you have a good time,” Amber said.

“I saw the sex menu—nearly fell out of my chair.”

“Oh, that's for the tourists mainly,” she said with a smile. She got up, walked behind him, and continued massaging his shoulders. “But don't go by that. It's whatever you want tonight. If it's just a back rub, I'm pretty good at that. If you think you might want to try the hot tub or the shower or a full-body massage, we can do that. If you'd like the whole round-trip ticket, we can do that, too.”

“This back rub is good for starters. What do you get for a back rub?”

“I do this for tips,” Amber said. “But I specialize in massages—hands-free, whole-body massages.”

“ ‘Hands-free' massages? What's that?”

She crossed around in front of him, stepped between his knees; her hands went to the back of her gown at her neck, and she undid something. The gown fell away like a wisp of vapor.

“Ohhh . . .”

This had to be part of the sales pitch, the gab, the come-on. Okay, Daren figured, he'd let the pro do her thing.

Amber's hips were swaying, her humongous breasts seemingly tracing their own separate orbits in front of him. “What do you say, baby?”

“I say that's the best damned sales pitch I've ever seen.”

“Thank you.” She poured herself a glass of Pellegrino, took a sip, moved around behind him again, then continued her back rub, using her elbows on the knots she found. She brushed her bare breasts against the back of his neck while continuing with her massage. She was good, Daren thought,
very
damned good. “You're a sweet guy”—Amber let her hands roam across his chest, delicately pinching his nipples under his shirt—“and you definitely got it goin' on.”

“Thanks, Amber.”

“Are you in the military?”

“Yes.”

“A flier?”

He nodded.

“Things are getting busy out there at the base, but it still seems like an awfully lonely place.”

“Is that part of the sales pitch, too?”

“Anything I can do to keep you here a while longer, I'll do.” She let her breasts touch his neck again. “Anything at all.” The law of diminishing returns said get him the hell out of there before she lost too much more money on him that evening. “What do you say, flyboy? A relaxing hot tub, my deluxe full-body, hands-free massage, a nice shower—one hour, two hundred dollars. Anything else you think you'd like, just tell me, and we'll renegotiate.”

Her instincts were right. “Maybe some other time,” Daren said. He downed the last of the Pellegrino. “You could be a first-class masseuse in any hotel in San Francisco or Hawaii, Amber.”

“Thank you,” she said. Her eyes glistened with humor. “I am first class, that's for sure. You need to find out for yourself someday.”

“Maybe I will.”

“You don't think highly of the world's oldest profession?”

“I never thought about it before now.”

“It's a job like any other—your attitude determines what you get out of it,” Amber said as she put her gown on again. “The reality is, I make a lot more money than you do, I work fewer hours, I live my life the way I want, and here in Nevada no one messes with me. I'm an independent contractor. There are thirty-seven legal brothels in the great state of Nevada, and if Battle Mountain bores me, I can pick up and work in any one of them tomorrow without a problem. I have lots of boyfriends and girlfriends, and I'm never alone if I don't want to be. As long as I stay clean, off the booze and off the coke, I'll be okay. Oh, and did I mention? I make a hell of a lot more money than you do.”

“Chasing the almighty dollar.”

“Damned right I am,” Amber said. “There will come a time when the money won't matter, and then I'll get out.”

“Hopefully before you catch some STD.”

“You fly military jets and drop bombs with thousands of guns, missiles, and fighters after your ass trying to blow you out of the sky—and you think
my
line of work is dangerous? Give me a break. Besides, I get more medical exams and blood tests in one month than you do in two years. And we don't mess around with the DC here—I check my clients out very carefully, each and every time, or they don't get to ride the pony. And everyone wears a raincoat—even my boyfriends, the ones I've known for years. How do you flyboys put it? ‘Managed risk'? That's what I do. That's what we all do.”

She gave him one more of her patented seductive looks. “Please don't be judgmental, of me or of yourself. I'm happy—you should be happy, too. Learn to enjoy life. That's why I'm here. If having sex with a pro bothers you . . . well, there's lots of things I can do with you to please and entertain you, even if you don't want the whole round trip. A nice hot tub, a massage, then . . . we'll talk about what comes up?”

Daren laughed at the old joke despite himself. He certainly never expected to meet someone like her in a place like this.

“You look worried about something.”

“New job, new boss . . . old flame.”

“You mean your new boss in your new job is an old flame? Jeez, no wonder you're tense, baby.” She continued to massage. “So who left whom?”

“She left me. Moved onward and upward. I kinda moved . . . sideways.”

“Now you work for her? Ouch.”

“Yeah.”

Amber moved her hands down over his shoulders and across his chest in a last-ditch effort before dumping this guy and moving on to the next prospect. “You have nothing to worry about, tiger. I have a feeling the wrong one got promoted. Now she realizes she needs you back. But she's hoping you'll drag the old luggage along with you, because then she'll have emotional control as well as pull rank on you. Don't do it. Don't go in there carrying a torch.” She leaned over and nibbled on his ear. “Let Amber take some of that heat. Give it to me, tiger. Right now.”

Daren felt the serpent stir, but his mind was not on the task Amber had in mind. “You're a sweetheart, Amber. Maybe some other time.” He got up and left a few twenty-dollar bills on the table.

“I hope to see more of you,” Amber said, giving him a head-to-toe appraisal and one more smile. Daren smiled in return, gave her a similar once-over, nodded in approval, then left.

It was not quite dark outside yet. Daren's car was parked across the street at the truck stop. When he paused outside Donatella's on the side of the dusty chip-and-seal road to wait for traffic to pass, he thought that this had to be one of the more interesting and yet otherworldly places he had ever visited in his Air Force career. He'd certainly been in more remote places, but . . .

When he finally snapped out of his musings, he noticed that the traffic he'd been waiting for still hadn't passed by him. He looked up at the driver to see if whoever it was was waiting for him to cross.

And realized with surprise that he knew the person behind the wheel—it was none other than Rebecca Furness, his new wing commander. Oh,
shit
. . .

Nine years earlier both Mace and Furness had been assigned to the 394th Wing of the Air Force Reserve at Plattsburgh Air Force Base in upstate New York, flying the RF-111G Vampire reconnaissance-strike aircraft. At the time Rebecca was a highly decorated major. Daren Mace was a lieutenant colonel, newly assigned as the bomb wing's maintenance-group commander. As Reservists, they both had lives outside the Air Force—Rebecca ran a small air-delivery service, Daren did fix-it jobs for a biker bar in town. Somehow—perhaps because they were both loners who craved respect and recognition from their peers but could find it only in each other—the two developed a mutual attraction, and then a passion.

Just a few months after Daren joined the unit, the wing unexpectedly deployed to Turkey. Russia had invaded the Republic of Ukraine, a fledgling member of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. The president of the United States at the time distrusted the military and didn't want to chance starting a war, no matter what the risk to the nation, so he decided to send a single reconnaissance unit to Turkey, simply to monitor the conflict and help Turkey keep an eye on its feuding neighbors. Rebecca and her fellow fliers weren't supposed to do any fighting—they were there in Turkey simply for show, to try to prove that the United States was committed to helping its allies even though the president really didn't want to get involved.

As it turned out, Rebecca and her squadron became the heroes of the war, leading a joint Ukrainian-American-Turkish air armada that managed to temporarily blind and deafen the entire command-and-control system in southwest Russia. Russia had no option but to stop its offensive and withdraw its military forces from Ukraine and other neighboring republics.

From then on, Rebecca Furness's rising star became a shooting star that seemed unstoppable. She was given the choicest assignments available and promoted at every possible opportunity. It was Rebecca's example that designed the shape of the United States Air Force's structure for the next decade: drawing down the size of the active-duty force and giving more and more war-fighting responsibility to Reserve forces. She was quickly promoted to full colonel and became the first female wing commander of a combat strike unit, the 111th Bomb Wing of the Nevada Air National Guard, flying the B-1B Lancer supersonic bomber from Reno-Tahoe International Airport. Following successful action against Chinese and North Korean forces after the reunification of the Korean Peninsula, as well as her efforts over Russia and the Balkans, Rebecca was promoted to brigadier general.

Daren's career wasn't at all meteoric—in fact, it was virtually stagnant. Although he crewed with Rebecca in the RF-111G and was responsible for the successful planning and execution of the raid on the Domodedovo underground military command center south of Moscow, he kept his “black cloud” reputation for always being in the middle of the action when things went bad. When the RF-111G program was canceled a short time after the Russia-Ukraine conflict, Daren continued to be steered into quiet, out-of-the-way assignments. He was eventually promoted to full colonel without any fanfare. He did manage to complete all the service schools required for him to assume command of a flying unit, including the Air War College, the Joint Forces Warfighting College, and the Industrial College of the Air Force. But he still lacked operational command experience.

Now he stepped over to the passenger-side window of her GMC Yukon, and she rolled down the window. “Holy cow, Rebecca,” he said. “What a surprise.”

“Daren Mace. Yes, it is a surprise.” She glanced over his shoulder at the flashing black-cat sign in front of Donatella's. “I see you're not hanging out at biker bars anymore. Getting the ‘lay' of the land?”

Daren suddenly realized what she meant, and he couldn't stop his face from falling in shock. “I . . . no, I didn't . . . I mean, I went in, but I didn't—”

“It's okay, Colonel,” she interrupted. “Paying money to have sex with strange women is perfectly legal in Lander County—pathetic and sad, but still legal.” She rolled up the window and sped off.

This assignment is starting off just great, he thought ruefully. Just great.

It was not far to the base from Donatella's. Daren Mace liked to show up at a new assignment several days early and wander around anonymously to get the overall layout and a sense of the pace, the tone, and the mood of the place. But he quickly realized that this place didn't have a pace, a tone, or a mood—in fact, it didn't have very many paved roads, a front gate, or even very many human beings for that matter.

The government had been working on Battle Mountain Air National Guard Base, outside the town of Battle Mountain in north-central Nevada, for three years, and they had virtually nothing to show for it. All he could see were a few sterile-looking multistory buildings scattered across the high desert plain. There was a runway out there, of course: twelve thousand feet long, he knew, three hundred feet wide, stressed to take a million-pound aircraft, but he couldn't see it at all. He remembered reading the Internet articles about the world's biggest boondoggle—a twelve-thousand-foot-long runway in the middle of nowhere, with no air base around the monstrous strip of reinforced concrete. The control tower's location didn't give a clue as to where the runway was, because there
was
no control tower.