Flash of Fire (20 page)

Jeannie gave her a side hug. “You're doing great, honey. But I thought it was us making all the difference in your life.”

Denise shook her head and mumbled, “Vern” from behind her blond shield. Then she peeked out as Jeannie and Carly burst out laughing and offered a soft smile of chagrin.

Then she looked tentatively at Robin.

“I'm not great with people either, Denise, so we're fine.”

“Oh no.” Denise shook her head and then had to pause as she shoved handfuls of hair out of her face. “You're great with people.”

“Then tell me why I don't have any friends.” And Robin knew it was wrong the moment the words were out.

The three women looked at her in shock.

“Told you I was lousy with people. I'm just not used to having friends yet.” She reached out and took Denise's hand, unsure of which of them she was trying to reassure. “It's not something I have any experience in.”

“Okay.” Jeannie's easy laugh resurfaced. “You're really good with people when they aren't your friends.”

That got a round of snorts and giggles.

“Did he say anything else?” Robin asked once they'd all returned to their sandwiches.

Vern had clambered out of his seat, pulled Mickey after him, and they'd both moved forward. So much for plan C. What was plan D going to be? Jumping out of the plane and hoping that he did too so that they could shed their guardians?

“I don't want to hurt you.” Denise was looking at her and Robin forced her attention back to the women.

“It's okay, Denise. We all heard it.” Jeannie set down her sandwich and looked straight at Robin.

Uh-oh!
She already knew she wasn't going to like this.

“He said, ‘I tell her I love her and this is what I get?'”

“He said that to all of you?”

“More the entire bar,” Denise noted. “He seemed quite upset and he was shouting rather loudly.”

Robin felt ill and wished she'd eaten less egg salad. Perhaps taken some hemlock or arsenic instead. A man tells her he loves her, the first one to ever say it for reasons other than getting her into bed, and what did she give him?

“Was it romantic?” Jeannie asked.

“Mickey always struck me as having a romantic side,” Carly put in.

“I guess.” Romantic had always made her gag.

Looking at their faces, she could see that it wasn't enough. She had to tell them the story. One of the things she was learning about having friends, sometimes you owed them.

No, not sometimes; you always owed them honesty. Well, they'd been honest with her…so she took a deep breath, managed not to look at the man standing with his back to her, and began. “He made these great pancakes on the campfire beside the river…”

“Good choice of setting,” Carly noted.

“I told him they were amazing. He said the recipe was a secret…”

“So he could give it to you but he'd have to kill you?” Denise tried to guess ahead.

“That was my guess too. He said that it was a family secret and he'd have to marry me.” Robin's voice felt lost and dreamy even if she didn't want it to be.

Denise nodded matter-of-factly. “Would have melted me.”

Jeannie sighed, and Carly rested her hand on her heart.

“Then I told him it was never going to happen. I'm not the marrying sort.”

“What did he say next?” Denise asked as the other two held their breaths.

“He said, ‘I love you, Robin.' Just that simple. Said it like he meant it.”

Mickey stood with the others. His back was to her, but she could feel his attention on her.

There was no collective, girlish sigh.

Robin would have found that easy to discount.

Instead the three women looked forward to the men who had said those words to them. They were soft, quiet, ridiculously mushy looks.

Robin hoped to hell that her face didn't look like theirs but decided that no form of honesty required her to say that.

* * *

“What the—” Cal was looking back over Mickey's shoulder.

One minute they'd been talking about whether or not an investment in more advanced night-vision gear would create any significant advantage, and the next minute everyone was turning to look at the women and putting on their goofy-happy expressions.

Mickey turned slowly to see Robin watching him.

There was something at war on her features. A softening, for a moment, that wasn't really her in some way.

Then it was erased and there was the Robin he knew. Ready to do battle with all comers. Ready to do battle but with a smile that welcomed him as well. Maybe they didn't need to talk. Maybe they just needed to give themselves a little time and space.

He looked at the guys around him. Goners, every one. Except Mark, whose spouse was on the way to visit her childhood friend the President of the United States. Mark just looked at the ceiling and shook his head sadly.

Mickey turned back in time to see Robin completing her assessment of the three women and shaking her own head. Then she looked right at Mickey.

They rolled their eyes in sync and totally busted up the tableau with their laughter shared across the length of the cabin.

It was a good moment.

Mickey hoped that there were a lot more of them to come. But there were going to be some serious talks before they did.

“Korea.” Mark opened the meeting. They'd gathered in the nose of the 747 Dreamlifter cargo jet as it flew out of night and toward morning, still high over the Pacific.

Robin moved up close beside Mickey. Not close enough to brush shoulders, but close enough that, she supposed, if someone was looking at them from the outside, they might appear to be standing together. She wanted to test her comfort level around him. And it was pretty damn comfortable despite the last twenty-four hours. Enough so that she wished she hadn't tried the experiment to begin with.

Mark looked at her the same way he had when she'd showed up late to the line on that first fire-call morning. Like he was trying to assess quite why she was worth the trouble.
Crap! Back to square one? Fine!
She could deal with it.

“There's a wildfire that first swept southward out of North Korea across the DMZ and into the South.” Mark tapped a tablet computer. A map of the Korean Peninsula showed once he'd logged and retinal scanned in.

Robin hadn't seen that kind of security outside of…the military. Suddenly those nondisclosure forms and government clearance checks she'd filled out just a few weeks ago took on another meaning.

“An attack?” Vern was the only ex-military here other than Mark and herself. Emily had said something about him flying U.S. Coast Guard helicopters.

“Not unless they sacrificed three villages of their own to do it. It's in the Taebaek Mountains, which run along the eastern, Pacific-side seaboard of both countries. Maximum height is only five thousand feet with an average around three, but very rugged country. Thankfully with low populations.”

They all were quiet at that. They'd just come off a weeklong battle in an open stretch of forest that had few places for fire to hide and even fewer cliffs to accidentally run a helicopter into. And it had been a total bitch. A big fire in this kind of terrain was going to make the Dawson City Burn look like a cakewalk.

“The winds have gone through a shift due to a major low-pressure system moving up from Southeast Asia.”

“How major?”

“Not bad, just a Category Three.”

“That's called a hurricane, Henderson.” Robin felt ill. She joined the AANG well after Katrina, but that disaster was scorched into the stories told by all the people who had been in the service at the time. The Arizona Army National Guard had been heavily deployed in the aftermath.

“They call it a typhoon in the Pacific,” Denise put in.

“Doesn't make me feel any better about it,” Robin told her.

“Category Three is well over half the speed our Firehawks can fly.” Vern was still taking the lead. “Oh joy.”

“That's right up near my never-exceed speed,” Mickey noted about his slower Twin 212.

“The problem”—Mark's tone made it clear that it was time to stop interrupting him—“is not the storm. It's the wind shift that is preceding the storm by several days. They're predicting that the typhoon will turn inland across China, so that's not our issue. The problem is that the northerly winds of the approaching storm's east flank are driving the fire back across the border into North Korea.”

“Great, now it's their problem again. Perfect.” Robin dusted her hands together. “Our mission is complete.” She couldn't let Vern have all the fun of poking at Henderson. Maybe if he hadn't demoted her back to square one, she'd have cut him some slack. But maybe not.

“There are two areas where South Koreans were allowed into North Korea,” he ground on as if she hadn't spoken. “One is a North Korean industrial enclave manned by South Korean labor, which is still legal. That is to the west of the present fire and was briefly closed by a cross-border wildfire in 2015. The other is the Mount Kumgang Tourist Region, a massive park which extends up to the scenic Diamond Mountain.” He traced a large area of rough mountains on the screen. “This area attracted over a million South Korean tourists before the North Koreans shot a tourist and the South closed that border.”

“Fussy.” Mickey shot for the joke. His timing was good, but it still fell a little flat. She'd had been on the verge of saying something similar, but her timing would have probably been worse, so she appreciated Mickey beating her to the punch.

Then Robin figured out that was exactly
why
he'd done it, to save her from…herself. Should she be thankful and angry? Or should she be creeped out that any man could read her so well? But if he could do that, then how come he didn't know that she was not the marrying, one-man-forever kind of woman? And her unmarried mother had raised her just fine, thank you very much.

“That”—Mark did not sound amused—“is a lot of South Korean tourist dollars that dried up. However, the North continues their attempts to reopen the region in the hopes that the South will come back. However, if that region burns badly, then there will be no draw at all. UN sources fear that it could destabilize the Korean situation even further. The North Koreans need that tourist income desperately and have made several offers to the South Koreans to reopen it. They're staunchly refusing ever since the shooting. But again, if it's burned, then any chance for that extra bit of connection will be erased. That's why the UN is bringing us in to stop it.”

“Still seems like a weird call, going to so much trouble to get us there.” Robin shrugged. “But if they want someone to kick this fire's ass, I'd say that we're the ones to do it.”

* * *

We are
, Mickey acknowledged. But it still didn't make any sense, so why was everyone else buying into it? They were dispersing back to their seats. He leaned up against the small counter over the refrigerator and trash bin, staring out one of the round windows.

A haze of green far to the west would be Northern Japan. They'd be descending soon onto the central island of Honshu.

The problem with MHA going to protect a North Korean economic zone as a favor for the UN was…the instructions hadn't come from the UN. They'd come from the President himself. The President didn't order firefighters into foreign countries. He especially didn't order former Night Stalkers to…

Mark and Emily
weren't
Night Stalkers anymore. Or were they? Undercover as firefighters, they could go almost anywhere…even North Korea.

What had sounded like a lark on an Alaskan riverbank suddenly sounded less so. There were strange things that happened when people were on the “other missions” separate from the bulk of the MHA's forces. Things they didn't talk about or even hint at.

Vern—no. Vern
and
Denise in…Honduras?

If those other teams had only flown to fire, it wouldn't have been an issue. They'd have talked about the fires.

Mickey scanned the forward compartment. Last winter he'd gone to Australia to fight bushfires, but everyone else in this aircraft cabin had been in Honduras. The year before that, Jeannie and Cal, Carly and Steve, and Mark and Emily had been sent off somewhere else for a month. And Jeannie and Cal had come back a month later than the others.

That meant that she and…

Robin was standing right in front of him and eyeing him in curiosity.

“Looking pretty thoughtful there, Mickey ‘Blue Eyes' Hamilton.”

“Looking pretty enough to be thinking about, Ms. Robin Harrow.” His mind had clearly decided that backing down wasn't an option.

Her smile was soft, acknowledging the challenge, but he wasn't up for a battle at the moment.

“Mickey?” That wasn't her battle voice.

“Yeah.”

“It's the sweetest thing anyone has ever said to me.”

“That I love you?”

“Yes, that.”

Mickey nodded. It was there between them now. He wished it was as easy as trying to crash the gate at the White House like Mark had, but this was Robin Harrow. He longed for some action to take, but for the moment, there was nothing he could do but wait.

“I don't know what to say to it.”

“There's nothing you have to say.” Though he ached to hear it back. Wasn't it supposed to be the woman who said such things? Yeah it had been, in the past, and he'd never believed a one of them. Even still he didn't. The women in his past had said it too easily. Saying it to Robin had torn out his soul to flop like a dying fish on that riverbank. “It's simply there.”

She studied him for a long moment, then nodded, as much to herself as to him.

“You ready for this, Robin?” Mickey wasn't sure if he was asking about his being in love with her or the upcoming wildfire.

“You know what they say?”

“Born ready.” They spoke in unison, but there wasn't much joy in it.

“There's something odd going on here, you know,” he said.

“You mean other than you saying…what you said?” Robin narrowed her eyes. “There's a fire, surprising locale, we're going to fight it. What am I missing?”

Mickey looked up over her shoulder. Henderson was shaking his head in a clear,
Don't!

Crap!
“Never mind.”

Robin glanced over her shoulder at Henderson's retreating back. Then back at Mickey.

What?
she mouthed.

He shook his head. Henderson didn't even bother to turn to double-check, that's how much trust he was giving Mickey. If he had turned to double-check, Mickey might have found the nerve to tell Robin what he was thinking. But facing the trust that Mark had shown him by the river, he couldn't betray that.

Unable to help himself, he reached out and took Robin by the upper arms and pulled her in. She didn't resist. She even leaned into the kiss he placed on her forehead.

With his nose buried happily in her bangs, he mumbled just a tiny bit louder than the engine noise, “Just because it's a Tea Cup doesn't mean it isn't also an MFDD.”

Then he headed for his seat by Vern before he could do something neither of them was ready for. How was it possible to want a woman so badly?

* * *

When is a Tea Cup also a Mighty Furrow of Death and Destruction?
Robin wobbled a little bit before turning back for her seat.

Jeannie had saved a place beside her and Robin slid in.

“That looked like progress.” Jeannie kept her voice soft.

“Huh? Oh, Mickey.” She'd almost forgotten that tentative bridge reborn between them, her mind now filled by the back blast of what he'd just said. There was some secret that Mark was holding on to that Mickey was in on, and he'd just done his best to warn her about it. Or at least he thought he had, but she wasn't getting it.

Then she tuned back to what was behind Jeannie's well-meant question. Being held by him for a moment and that kiss upon her forehead. She wanted to curl up against him and just hide there to wash away all the pain this day had brought—actually yesterday because dawn was breaking outside the windows and she'd barely slept on the flight. Pain that they had caused each other, so how was it possible that her chosen sanctuary would be curling up against him of all people?

“Yes,” she answered Jeannie. “Yes, I think it was progress. I still don't know what to do about it or what I want to happen, but at least we spoke to each other.”

Jeannie rubbed her upper arm as it if was paining her. “Just wait until he saves your life. It puts a whole different spin on things.”

Robin looked at her, but Jeannie was off in memory somewhere.

Cal had saved Jeannie's life; that was something Robin hadn't known.

Mickey had just warned her that sometimes something that looked as smooth as a Class III Tea Cup could actually
be
a Mighty Furrow of Death and Destruction.

“Shit!”

“What?” Jeannie turned to her.

“I just figured out that we're not going to Korea just to fight a wildfire.”

Jeannie smiled and patted her arm. “Welcome aboard, Robin. I'm glad you're with us.”

“Right. But by the end of this, will
I
be glad?”

“By the end, sure.” Jeannie spoke with the supreme confidence of a survivor as the captain announced they were beginning their descent.

Jeannie dropped her hands back into her lap to check her seat belt and Robin managed a good look at the spot Jeannie had just been rubbing on her upper arm.

“Great.” Robin offered all the sarcasm she could muster.

“During,” Jeannie continued as she settled back in her chair and folded her hands tightly in her lap, “maybe not so much.”

Maybe not so much
, Robin reiterated to herself but found little comfort as she looked away from the distinctive scar on Jeannie's arm.

Robin knew what a bullet wound looked like.