DANGER ZONE
by
Mal Olson
Adrenaline Kicked Romantic Suspense
Short Story – apx. 6,700 words plus bonus excerpts
COPYRIGHT © 2012 by Mal Olson
All rights reserved. No part of any of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission of the author.
~**~
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales, is entirely coincidental.
DANGER ZONE
The plane shimmied. Even with a ninety percent hearing loss, Benjamin Thigpen, special consultant to Homeland Security, detected a faint droning whine.
“Attention, please. We are experiencing severe turbulence. Please fasten your seatbelts as we begin our final descent into Milwaukee.” Thiggy read the flight attendant’s lips while the seatbelt sign at the front of the Boeing 757 seconded the motion to fasten up.
“This could be a rough one,” he said, speaking to the young woman dressed in United States Air Force dress blues in the seat next to him.
She looked up from the book she’d been absorbed in since they’d left D.C., glanced out the window at the sea of white curtaining the window, and then turned a pair of extraordinary eyes on him. Eyes the color of a stormy ocean, perhaps the color of a tempest-tossed Lake Michigan if one could see Lake Michigan as they prepared to land at Mitchell International in a near blizzard.
The plane bucked. A vibration buzzed Thiggy's forearm where it pressed against the armrest. He sensed the reduction in thrust and a slight forward tilt as he watched the young woman’s face to read her reply. It wasn’t a hardship. Flawless creamy skin. Thick dark hair with golden highlights. And as if he hadn’t noticed immediately, midnight black lashes framed her navy blue eyes.
“Don’t worry, I’m sure the pilot knows what he’s doing,” she assured. The aircraft bobbled. When the woman with knock-out eyes shifted, he noticed the silver wings on her uniform. An Air Force pilot. Probably an Air Force Academy graduate, definitely a commissioned officer, who had toughed out training as extreme as Thiggy’s basics—at least before he’d progressed to the ranks of Delta Force. This woman had endured land survival, water survival, and pilot training. Yeah, she’d been through hell, but she’d also touched heaven.
All of which probably accounted for her calm, deliberate movements when she slid the tray against the seat in front of her and moved her chair to the upright position. Her composure went a long way toward convincing him they weren’t about to crash and burn.
But he hadn’t been tossed around in the sky like this since the day his buddy had loaded him into a basket attached to a Pave Hawk, and he’d fled Afghanistan’s Korengal Valley. It was the day he’d realized his world had gone silent.
Slightly less harrowing than evading surface to air missiles, today’s decent was still a nail-biter. The passenger jet with one-hundred-and-eighty-two souls aboard rode out the storm, the air speed dropping, the rate of descent increasing. The speed brakes engaged. The flaps. The landing gear deployed and locked into place. Thiggy told himself the pilot would have preset the brakes for “max auto” to cope with the slick runway.
While they buffeted through the altitude changes into the land of horizontal snow and zero visibility, visions from the past flooded his mind. The sensation of whipping about like bait on a snagged fish line. A rocket’s red glare lighting up the sky. The Pave chopper gyrating, bouncing, and wobbling like a toy piloted by a six-year-old with a remote control.
He slammed back to the present when the plane’s wheels nicked the tarmac, clung to the snowy strip for a few seconds, thudded, and then hop scotched.
They slid at an angle, free style, probably for mere seconds, but it seemed like an eternity. Runway lights streaked across the whiteout, creating glowing trails like time-lapse photography until streams of gold and green and red finally morphed into recognizable beacons lining the runway, and the 757 jerked to a halt.
The first lieutenant joined Thiggy in glancing around the cabin. The cargo storage doors had held. Like shell-shocked zombies, everyone aboard sat unmoving, still strapped into their seats. When he and the Air Force officer faced each other, he noticed her smooth, strong fingers were entwined with his.
“I think we ricocheted off a hunk of ice or something on the runway,” she said. “That little maneuver wasn’t the pilot’s fault.”
Thiggy nodded and concentrated on bringing his heart rate back to normal while the plane slowly taxied to the terminal.
He wondered if surviving the ordeal bound him to the first lieutenant in some celestial way. Were they now kindred souls? At the very least, surviving the rock-and-roll landing together should merit the exchange of email addresses.
Shaken passengers waited for the seatbelt sign to go off then scurried to retrieve their bags from the overhead bins. Thiggy waited while those in the front half of the plane jammed the aisle. He waited for the harried voyagers to push forward. Then he waited for an opportune moment to make his self-sanctioned move on the woman with navy blue eyes.
He stood, as did the airwoman. About to reach for both of their carry-ons, he found himself eye-to-eye with her. In her heels, she nearly matched his six-foot tall frame. He knew she didn’t need his assistance with fetching her bag. The way she stood, tall and straight, said she didn’t need assistance with anything.
Not that he was intimidated by independent, strong women who could fend for themselves. Which made the thought flit through his mind that she could probably hold her own in a little uno on uno combat. Again, something he tended not to worry about at the swap-email-address-stage, but maybe something he’d ponder at the swap-saliva-stage. Moot point, because his encounters with beautiful females seldom progressed to the deep, wet kisses phase.
But…hmm…was that drool he felt trickling down his chin?
Once he retrieved his bag, only one piece of luggage remained in the storage compartment. He slid it forward. “This must be yours…ah, ma’am?”
“Katrice. Katrice Kennedy. Thanks.” She reached for the olive duffle. Sturdy zipper. Locked with a mini padlock. Unusually heavy for its size.
Their eyes held for a moment before she noticed the bag.
“Wait, this isn’t mine.” She stared at the nametag.
Thiggy looked up and down the aisle at the thinning crowd. “It’s the only one left.”
“Someone must have grabbed mine by mistake.” Her glance shot toward the exiting passengers. “Oh—that man in the trench coat—” She raised her voice, “Sir—”
A look of panic tainted her until-now calm, cool, and collected face. She hurried toward the front, bringing along the duffle. Thiggy, not having succeeded in his email plan, decided to play shadow as they followed the guy who had mistakenly taken Katrice’s bag. Get the bag, get the email. While they merged with the swarm of people filing out of the plane and into the concourse, he concentrated on how he’d execute his next move once they straightened out the bag mishap. Would you care to join me for a drink?
But wait a minute. He had an assignment at the Milwaukee Art Museum, not to peruse the Georgia O’Keeffe collection or a dazzling Impressionism display, but to follow up on the security operation he’d masterminded. He mentally sighed. Maybe he and the Air Force officer were destined to be merely ships that passed in the night after all.
On the other hand—he glanced at his watch—it was nineteen hundred. Even though he’d drafted Operation Safe Passage, he wasn’t due at the debriefing with the Joint Terrorism Task Force until after the president of Shirak
istan made his visit to the Milwaukee Art Museum and then safely departed. The “after” burned his butt, but there wasn’t a damn thing he could do about it since he'd been relieved from active duty because of an injury he'd sustained on his previous assignment. On the bright side, he had an hour give or take.
“Hey—he’s getting onto the escalator.” Katrice craned her neck, pointing to the young man who stood out above the crowd. “That’s got to be my bag.”
“Excuse me, Sir!” Thiggy charged after the guy, whom he recognized as the college-age male who’d been seated in front of him during the flight. Caucasian, towering somewhere between six-and-a-half and seven feet tall, unruly reddish-blond shoulder-length hair secured in a ponytail, wearing an 80’s style trench coat. Yeah, recognizing details was ingrained in Benjamin Thigpen’s MO thanks not only to his Delta Force training, but to his life before the military as a Shadow Wolf.
Thiggy scrambled, and Katrice followed, pushing through a boisterous group of teenagers wearing Music for Youth badges, some carrying musical instruments.
By the time they squeezed through the mob and began their descent, Trench Coat Man had hit the ground floor and was shoving through the crowded lobby toward the exit.