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She squared her shoulders as if she were going to go toe to toe with him and deny her feelings. But he knew better. Something flickered in her eyes—a kind of stricken look, and that look made him want to coddle her. Hold her and tell her that everything would be all right. It would, but they seemed like empty words right now. Dealing with the possibility of death wouldn’t be new to her, but the reality of death was an eye-opener.
She squeezed her eyes closed and several tears rolled down her cheeks. Dean pulled her against him, and she shivered, melting into him. His heart rolled over and more feelings crowded in on him as he rubbed the back of her neck and kissed the top of her silky head. There was so much that had been left unresolved between them. They would need to deal with this moment in time first, but what about the past?
Would they, could they dredge that up?
It might be inevitable, because the moment he’d heard about her close call, all of those old feelings had torn through him again, sent him rushing to her side.
Sometime…soon…they would have to talk about how she broke his damn heart.
* * *
Somewhere in the Pentagon
An Air Force colonel stepped into the staff conference room and moved to General Michael Harkness’s side, bowing low to whisper, “Sir, you have a call.”
The general frowned and nodded, then excused himself momentarily from the rest of the Joint Chiefs of Staff as he stood and left the long maple conference table.
In a secure room on a scrambled line, he nodded to the colonel, who put through the call from the Director of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives.
“Roger? I’m in the middle of some—”
“I wouldn’t be calling if it wasn’t of utmost importance, Mike.”
He remembered Roger’s tip on those RPG launchers that had threatened several bases. “Okay, let’s have it.”
“We have been following thefts of firearms from military bases, and they’re going to be dumped on the streets of LA.”
“Oh, Christ. What are we talking about?”
“M4-A1 carbine, fully automatic. Thirty rounds in three seconds, cuts through a tank like it’s paper.” There was a heavy sigh on the other end of the line, and the general knew what it took to alert the military. Guns were bad, but he had a feeling in his gut that it was only the tip of the iceberg.
“How many?”
“Not sure. But that’s not the worst of it.”
“No, of course not.” He rubbed his temple. The other shoe was about to drop. “Give it to me.”
“Decommissioned and dismantled missiles from a large group of rebels in the Sudan who stole them from the Russians. They’d been deemed too inaccurate for use and were already in pieces and loaded onto trucks to be transported to the destruction site,” he said as if he still couldn’t believe the threat to LA. “We stopped them, and the pieces were destroyed, yet during the final count, the components for four were missing. All personnel guarding the weapons were killed.”
“I don’t want to know but spell it out.”
“MRBMs.”
Medium range ballistic missiles. They had a range of one thousand to three thousand kilometers. A good thousand miles.
“They were their first versions of laser guided missiles.”
The general jotted down a few words and handed it to the colonel.Get me an expert on Russian weapons.Rubbing his temple, he said, “And the launchers?”
“I don’t have to say that those are not as closely guarded and are easily adaptable.”
“Of course.” He searched in his pocket for an antacid, but he must be out. “Goddammit. A launcher could be constructed by an MIT grad with a flatbed trailer.”
“There’s more. It’s filtered up the channel from LAPD SWAT. They discovered some missile parts, military grade C4, and some of those M4-A1 carbines in a warehouse full of white supremacists.”
“Thanks for the headache.”
“All in a day’s work, Mike. I don’t envy you this task.”
