Kathleen Creighton - Secret Agent Sam

Sam laughed, then wished she hadn’t. The laughter served to ease some of the tension that had tied her belly in knots, but without that tension holding her together, she suddenly felt loose and shaky inside. Fighting to keep the shaking out of her voice, or at least camouflage it, she waved Tony toward the steps and turned to walk beside him. “The DC-3 is probably the most reliable aircraft ever built. This one’s been restored, of course. She’ll probably outlast both of us.”

As she followed the photographer up the steps, she felt Cory fall in behind her. Felt his eyes on her. Of course she did; she was conscious of every movement he made-always had been. And the worst part of it was knowing he’d know that. He’d know exactly how aware of him she was, no matter how earnestly she chatted with Tony about the history and merits of the DC-3 aircraft. He’ll know, no matter how I try to hide it. He always knows what I’m feeling. Damn him.

How, exactly, was she feeling?

I can’t think about that right now. I can’t think now.

I thought I was ready for this. Dammit.

At the top of the steps she moved aside and gestured for Tony and Cory to pass her. “Go ahead and get settled in. I just have a couple of flight details to go over with Will. Shouldn’t take but a minute. We’ll be underway shortly.”

To be truthful, she was feeling on the verge of suffocation as she stepped back through the doorway. At the top of the steps she paused and lifted closed eyes to the merciless sun and hauled in a great gulp of the syrupy air as if it were pure oxygen. After a moment, when her head seemed to have stopped swimming, she clattered down the steps and headed for the shimmering terminal buildings. Halfway there, in spite of the heat, she broke into a jog.

Inside the stuffy cabin, Cory was putting himself through the necessary mental fortifications to deal with the awful heat. It was an exercise he’d learned long ago, and one that had gotten him through far worse circumstances than these. Mind over matter, that’s all it was. Mind over matter. The air was only unbreatheable if he thought it was.

Seeing Samantha again was only unendurable if he let it be.

Originally designed to carry around thirty passengers, the restored cabin had been reconfigured to hold maybe half that many. The furnishings were spartan, but the seats were wide enough to accommodate even Tony’s massive shoulders, and set far enough apart to afford a lanky six-footer like Cory adequate leg room. By mutual and unspoken agreement, he and Tony selected seats across the aisle from each other about halfway up the sloping cabin and set about stowing their bags in heroic silence.

Having secured his precious cameras to his satisfaction, Tony again took off his sunglasses and hooked the earpiece in the neck band of his shirt. He took off the bandana, wiped his face and neck with it, then sank into his seat with a heavy sigh.

After a moment he sat up again restlessly and looked over at the man in the seat across the aisle from him, the man who was most likely the best friend he had in the world, and who he admired and respected probably more than any other living human being. Nevertheless, and in spite of the fact that the man had a good five years on him, Tony more often than not felt a big-brotherly need to look out for and protect this man. And, at the moment, he felt a strong urge to throttle him.

When looking over a couple more times failed to get his attention, Tony tried shifting around and clearing his throat-not too subtle and a little bit childish, sure, but in Cory’s case, it usually worked.

This time, however, Cory went on staring straight ahead at nothing, absolutely still but in no way relaxed, neck and shoulders rigid with tension.

Tony leveled a black scowl at him. He considered himself to be normally a good-natured soul, but his aggravation levels were rising rapidly. They were rising because he was trying to work himself up to doing something completely alien to his masculinity and that he was resisting with every macho bone in his body. And he was becoming royally ticked at his buddy for making all that necessary.

He was about to do something guys, in his experience, simply don’t do, which was ask a guy friend a personal question.

“So,” he said, after clearing his throat a couple more times and finally hitching himself around in his seat in the heavy, flopping manner of a landed marlin. “What’s with you and Amelia Earhart?”

Cory jumped as if he’d been a million miles away-which he probably had been, mentally-and threw him a frowning look. “Who? Oh-you mean-”

“You know damn well who I mean.” Tony jerked his head toward the tumble of buildings beyond the wavy window glass. “What’s the story?”

Cory took off his glasses and went to polishing them on the tail of his shirt, an activity Tony recognized for the delaying tactic it was. “You heard her. I’m just a friend of her family. Her father’s…actually.” He put the glasses back on and pushed them up on the bridge of his nose. Since his nose was slippery with sweat, they slid right down again.

“Friend of the family, my foot,” Tony said, and was rewarded with a sideways look and a lopsided grin.

“Your foot?”

Tony shrugged and grinned back. “I don’t know, my mom used to say that. I guess it was the best she could do, since Gramma wouldn’t let her swear. Anyway, you get my drift. You and I go back quite a ways, too, buddy. I was best man at your wedding, in case you’ve forgotten. What’s maybe more germane to this discussion, I was there during your divorce. I stood by you-”

“Not too much standing involved, as I recall, unless you consider perching on a bar stool-”

“Hey, I was there, that’s what counts. Ready and willing to lend you a shoulder if you needed one.”

“The way I remember it, you were the one needing a shoulder-not to mention a ride home, and on one memorable occasion, at least, bail.”

Tony gave an affronted snort. “Don’t try to sidetrack me, Mr. Wordman. Whatever was between you and Amelia Earhart had to be something major. Hell, you know me-when it comes to understanding women, I’m no Dr. Phil, and even I felt it. Out there. Just now. The way the sparks were flying back and forth, it’s a wonder you two didn’t set the damn plane on fire.”

Cory didn’t reply, just gave him a hard, steely stare, a look that normally would have had Tony backing off. This time it didn’t work, and after a moment Cory put his head back against the seat and closed his eyes.

It took a long, slow ten-count before Tony succeeded in throttling back enough to press on in a calmer, quieter voice. “Look, man, you know me, I don’t butt in where it’s not my business. But this isn’t exactly a picnic in the park we’re going on. I mean, here we are, heading into a place that’s supposedly so dangerous no commercial airline or boat or bus service is even willing to take us there, supposedly to interview a major terrorist who, if he had his druthers, would probably just as soon kill us as look at us. If you’ve got history with the woman we’re trusting to get us in and out of there alive, I think I ought to know about it.”

There was a long, suspenseful silence, during which Tony watched, with a sinking feeling in his gut, the little muscles working in the side of Cory’s jaw, and wondered if he was going to have to start looking for a new best friend.

Then, to his great relief, Cory straightened abruptly and said, “You’re right, you do.” Tony let out a silent, careful breath.

He waited, heart thumping, while Cory glanced over his shoulder toward the terminal buildings, again took off his glasses, rubbed his eyes. Put the glasses back on. Leaned toward him across the aisle and spoke in a soft, conspiratorial way, although there was no one else around to hear.

“You know I was a prisoner in Iraq, right?”

“Yeah, sure-about ten years ago, wasn’t it? Special Forces went in and got you out in the middle of the Second Iraq War. Didn’t you win the Pulitzer with some of the articles you wrote about it afterward?”

Cory nodded in a dismissive way. “So you probably also remember there was another guy rescued same time I was. Tomcat pilot-he’d been shot down over the no-fly zone between the two Gulf wars. Given up for dead. They’d had him for eight years, and nobody knew.”

“Holy jumpin’ jeezits,” Tony exclaimed, whacking the armrest with an open palm, “I remember that! I was working in Richmond at the time-I think it was maybe my second or third big assignment-they sent me to Andrews to cover his return. Had all us media people corralled away from the action behind a chain-link fence so we wouldn’t interfere with the big family reunion. Never got one decent shot. Let’s see…I seem to remember he had a wife…a daughter…”

Cory nodded, took a breath and let it out. “He did. And that pilot out there, Samantha Bauer-” he dipped his head toward the windows “-Amelia Earhart, as you call her…”

“Don’t tell me,” Tony said, in the same reverent tone with which he’d first spoken of the airplane they were sitting in.

“Yep,” said Cory, in a voice like the echoes of doom. “She’s the Top Gun’s daughter.”

“I met her in the White House rose garden,” Cory said, following a gleefully profane exclamation from Tony.

He could still smile, remembering that day, but carefully, tentatively, with great care not to jostle the memories too hard. The turbulence of seeing her again had shifted and tumbled them-and the feelings that went with them-inside the compartment he’d stuffed them into years ago, and right now he feared if he opened that door too wide and too suddenly they might tumble out and bury him.

He spoke rapidly to get past the danger.

“There was a reception for us-for him, really-Lieutenant Bauer-I was more or less an afterthought. The guy was a genuine hero, and you know what the media does with heroes.”

“Aren’t you the media?”

“That’s why I get to bad-mouth-it’s like family. Anyway, you’re not the media when you’re part of the story.”

“But you wrote those stories.”

“Yeah, mainly to get through it. Get past it. I wonder, sometimes, how it would’ve been if I hadn’t had that outlet. I know Tristan had a tough time of it-of course he’d been gone a lot longer than I was. They only had me a few months. Him they’d had for eight years.”

“Hard to imagine. Impossible, maybe.”

Cory nodded, the knots in his belly relaxing a little. He was always more comfortable concentrating on someone else’s story. “It was tough on his family. They’d assumed all along he was dead. Jessie-his wife-hadn’t remarried, though, which was one good thing. What a mess that would’ve been. Still, it was hard-they had a lot of readjusting to do. But it was hardest, I think, on Sammi-on Samantha. She was just a kid, a ten-year-old tomboy when she lost her dad. That’s how he remembered her-how he described her to me, when we were together in that Iraqi prison. He talked about her all the time. A tomboy with ponytails. With bandages on her knees from playing soccer.” A smile fluttered like a leaf on the gust of his exhalation. “Let me tell you, that’s not what he came back to.”

Not even close.

Oblivious to nuances, Tony whistled. “I guess not. She’d have been what, then-eighteen?”

“Yeah. In college. A grown-up woman, the way she saw it.”

“Still just a kid, though,” Tony said in a musing tone, then threw Cory a quick frown as it finally hit him. “What, you’re telling me you had something going with her? I never figured you for a cradle robber, man. You must have, what, ten or twelve years on her?”

“It wasn’t my intention,” Cory said, putting his head back with a sigh. “Believe me. Well-” the smile this time was brief and wry “-not at first, anyway. Not that I didn’t fall for her. That happened probably the first minute I laid eyes on her.” He threw Tony a look and shifted uncomfortably. “Well, you’ve seen her.” He glanced toward the window and his heart gave a jolt as he saw the tall wavery figure in khakis and a baseball cap striding toward them across the scorched grass.

Alerted by what he saw in Cory’s face, Tony, too, turned to look out the window. After a long moment he said in a reverent tone, “I can see how she’d get your attention, yeah. Even dressed like that I can see it.”

“It wasn’t about her looks, though.” Cory waggled his shoulders, uncomfortable even with the thought. Blond hair, brown eyes, long legs…great legs…okay, sure, she’d had all that. So had any number of other women he’d met in his lifetime and over the course of his career, in one variation or another. But Sammi June-Samantha-there’d just been something about her. So much…more.