The ship of his once inevitable relationship with Cassie had long since sailed, and he was glad to have said bon voyage.
Chapter 18
Troy popped open his laptop. The sun was going down, and he had about forty-five minutes to kill before the Golden West Courier van arrived with baskets of letters and parcels from the sprawl of state office buildings in the city. He had been on the Valley route for a week, making stops up through the San Joaquin, culminating in an end- of-the-day run from the state capital to Los Angeles.
After nearly six months, he had come to really enjoy his job, which offered plenty of solitary flying time in airspace with generally good flying weather. To break the monotony, he and the other four Golden West pilots rotated routes. Last week he had been on runs up to Santa Rosa, Eureka, and Redding, and next week, who knows? The variety was nice.
He flicked idly though his e-mails.
There was one from his mother, responding to his response to her
Why haven't I heard from you in two weeks? e-mail.
There was an urgent e-mail from a man in Nigeria who desperately needed Troy's help in transferring eight million dollars to a bank account in Andorra.
There was another one that asked Any chance we can hook up? in the subject line. He didn't recognize the name. Who in the world was jmm@fhcoherndon.com? Troy was about to delete that one, thinking it was just a come-on to a soft-porn site, but he decided at the last moment to take a look.
The jmm was Jenna Munrough.
She and Hal Coughlin were going to be in Las Vegas, attending some sort of convention, and she was inviting him to come up and join them for a day or two.
Jenna Munrough. As the months had gone by, Troy had thought less and less of her, and even less of Hal, and of their days with Task Force Sudan.
Could he hook up with them? The Golden West run to Las Vegas was an overnighter because of packages that the casinos needed flown to Los Angeles at the start of the business day. Troy hadn't been on this route for a few weeks. The guy who was due for it next week owed Troy a favor, so the answer was yes.
Would he hook up with them? If for nothing else, he was curious to hear about what they were doing. They could get together for dinner, hang out for a few hours, and that would be that.
Should he hook up with them? During their weeks in the desert, he had started to develop what chicks call 'feelings' for Jenna, and she had expressed as much toward him. Evidently, she and Hal were still an item, so what should he do?
What the hell? Troy decided that he'd do it.
Five days later, he was climbing into an orange-roofed taxi from the Desert Cab Company at the McCarran Airport General Aviation hangar. He had stashed his gear at the cheap motel where he usually stayed, had combed his hair, and was headed for the Mirage, where Jenna and Hal were staying.
'Great to hear your voice, Loensch,' she said affably as Troy reached her on his cell phone from the cab.
'Umm, good to hear yours. You sound the same,' Troy said. Memories came flooding back at the sound of her voice.
'I don't know whether to take that as a compliment or an insult.' She laughed. 'Where are you?'
'Stuck in traffic on the Strip near the Tropicana. Where are you?'
'At the Mirage… I'll meet you in the lobby by the big fish tank.'
In the late afternoon, traffic on the Las Vegas Strip moves at a snail's pace, but at last, Troy was walking through the wall of glass doors at the Mirage Hotel.
The lobby was a swirling sea of humanity. There were hard-core gaming types, convention-goers intent on shedding business suits to become swingers for the night, and swingers who came out only at night. There were bachelor partiers and bachelorette partiers. There were beautiful people, and the inevitable beautiful people wannabes.
But Troy saw no Jenna Munrough.
He found the fish tank and scanned the crowd. He walked to the opposite end of the fish tank and was wondering if there might be another fish tank.
'Hey, Loensch! Y'all just walked right past me.'
It was Jenna's voice. Troy turned. He saw no one he recognized.
'What's the matter?' Jenna said in mock anger. 'Y'all walked right past me like I wasn't there. Is that any way for ya to treat your old buddy, Falcon Two?'
Troy was speechless. He heard the voice, but it was not coming from a pilot with short-cropped hair and a dusty olive-green flight suit.
Her voice was coming from lips the color of rose petals. Her hair, once scraggly and spiked, now flowed to her shoulders in sensuous waves. Her flight suit was superseded by a shimmering black cocktail dress, her dog tags by a jeweled pendant.
'Jenna,' Troy said, feeling himself starting to go red in the face. 'Umm… you look great…'
'How 'bout a hug for Falcon Two for old times' sake?'
A whiff of her fragrance and the feel of her hair against his cheek, and Troy could not imagine this gorgeous woman as the pilot he remembered as Falcon Two.
'Hey, Loensch, good to see you.'
Troy turned at the sound of Hal's voice. He was more or less as Troy remembered him, though he had traded his flight suit for an open-collared sport shirt and a blazer that looked expensive. The last time that Troy had seen his face was that day when he was dangling from a parachute harness over the Denakil Depression, and Hal had flashed past in his F-16.
'Let's go eat,' Jenna said, taking Troy by the arm. 'We got reservations at Carnevino over at the Palazzo…. you still like steak, don'tcha, Loensch?'
She seemed taller, Troy thought as they walked toward Las Vegas Boulevard. It must be the four-inch heels.
She seemed unusually friendly, and so too was Hal. It must be that whatever had happened in their final weeks together in Sudan had erased the old animosities that had once hung over them.
'Guess you guys must be rolling with the high rollers,' Troy said, looking at the menu after Hal asserted that their expense account would be picking up the tab. The dry bone-in rib eye was priced at about double Troy's typical weekly expenditure at Safeway.
Hal and Jenna laughed and said that they'd landed in a good situation, job-wise.
'We're working for a company called Firehawk?' Jenna said, framing the statement as a question as if to ask whether Troy had heard of them. 'Consulting company in Herndon, Virginia?'
'I've heard the name,' Troy said. It sounded only vaguely familiar. 'What is it that you do?'
'It's a private military contractor, a PMC,' Jenna said. 'It's like an NGO, a nongovernmental organization, like Doctors Without Borders, but military.'
'What does it… do you… actually do?' Troy asked.
'It's like a private security firm… only a lot bigger,' Hal said. 'It's almost like a… Well it is like a private army.'
'Is that legal?' Troy asked.
'You can't swear allegiance to a foreign army,' Hal said. 'Doesn't mean you can't work for a private company.'
'Now that Congress has curtailed overseas deployments, warfighting is gonna be outsourced.' Jenna shrugged. 'The Germans and the French have been doing this for years. The Bundestag won't let German forces
