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“After we exfil with Sky,” Cal continued, “we’re driving thirty miles south, out of the mountain jungle area. A Night Stalker Army Black Hawk helicopter will meet us at this pre-arrange GPS point. We’ll hand over the SUV to another driver, a local CIA agent, who will be coming off that bird. He’ll drive the SUV back to San Jose, switch out the license plates, wipe it down, get rid of any prints, and hand it back to the rental car company.”
“And then,” Lauren said, “we get on board and fly out to meet the U.S. carrier off Costa Rica’s coast, who just happens to be taking part in some war games in that area.” She grinned. “Great timing, isn’t it?”
Cal nodded. “Yeah, luck broke in our favor.”Finally.
“I hope those Night Stalkers know how to land on the deck of a Navy carrier,” Alex said.
“These are the best black ops helo pilots in the world,” Cal assured him. “They’re trained to land and take off on damn near anything. They’ll take us safely to the carrier, no problem. From there, we get Sky to the Navy medical unit to be examined and taken care of. They can handle surgery if necessary.” Cal hoped like hell it wouldn’t be necessary, but he had no idea what shape Sky was in. Or that she was even alive.
“What about Alexandrov?” Alex growled. “Are we going to take him out?”
Cal saw the medic’s face grow closed, and he saw the banked rage in Alex’s eyes. “No. Our objective is to find Sky and extricate her.”
“What if,” Lauren said, “everything goes to hell in a handbag?”
Alex scowled and looked at her. “What is a handbag? Is that American slang for a woman’s purse?”
Lauren groaned. “I’ll explain later.”
“Is it like a bag with grenades in it?” Alex pressed, struggling to understand. He was in a mission meeting. He needed to grasp everything now, not later.
Jack snickered. “Alex, it’s like a woman’s purse. I think women carry everything in it, and hell, maybe even hand grenades. Who knows? Nothing would surprise me as to what they’re carrying in it.”
“Oh, get a life, Driscoll,” Lauren muttered, giving him a dark look. She saw Alex’s brows go down. She felt sorry for him. “Alex, it’s slang for Murphy’s Law. Do you know that one?”
“No,” he muttered. “More slang?”
Cal grinned. “Murphy’s Law is a SEAL maxim, Alex. It means if anything can go wrong, it WILL go wrong.”
“Oh… that… yes, we call that contingency planning. But you call it going to hell in a handbag, instead?”
Lauren groaned.
Driscoll howled.
Alex gave them a boyish grin. “Then I am right?”
Cal kept his face neutral. He understood the hapless medic was playing catch up. “It’s Murphy’s Law in disguise, Alex. If you can’t remember Murphy, then yes, it’s contingency planning because no mission goes according to plan.” He saw the combat medic brighten, having grasped the concepts.
Jack wiped his eyes. He gave Alex a look of respect. “You’ve got it, Alex.”
The medic nodded. “Good. You know, when I get a chance, I do write down all these slangs. I memorize them and remember they are a code for another definition. It is like,” and he lifted his eyes to the ceiling, in thought for a moment, “like a stenographer writes in shorthand when a boss dictates a letter to her? Yes?”
“Yes,” Lauren said. She admired Alex’s tenacity. And his desire to understand American slang. “But we have a fall back. We have military lingo. Some of the concepts you know because you were an operator with that drug gang in Peru. You just know it by another name.”
“Yes, I am catching up,” and Alex gave her a warm smile.
Lauren didn’t want to be affected by the sudden warmth radiating off Alex. He was so simple and straight forward for a man, it always caught her off guard. She was used to dealing with men who had layers of complexity. Being a farm boy in Ukraine, maybe Alex’s simple way of living was preferable. She found herself appreciating his honesty. What you saw was what you got with Alex. There were no hidden agendas. He was easy to read, unlike the other operators she knew.
“Okay,” Lauren said to Cal, “if we screw the pooch on this mission, all bets are off?”
Cal nodded and saw Alex’s brow furrow. “Screw the pooch,” he told the medic, “means the mission is completely compromised and we have to fall back on Plan B, C, or D. The rally point is our last chance to egress, to get out of dodge.”
“I was having visions of this slang,” Alex said, his face turning red. “It is quite sexually suggestive. But what does it have to do with mission compromise?”
Driscoll nearly rolled out of his chair, howling with laughter once again. Lauren couldn’t help herself, her lips quirking into a smile. Even Cal’s mouth pulled into an unwilling sour grin.
“It has nothing to do with sex,” Cal told him, trying to remain respectful. “It’s a mission gone sideways. It’s corrupted or broken due to unknown issues suddenly arising and we have to be flexible, create a new extraction plan in the moment, in order to get Sky out of there alive.”
