Condor

Chapter 3

3

Holly could always sleep on a flight.

Any flight.

Loud engines.

Cold steel decking.

Crammed up against a pile of combat gear.

No problem.

Her years as an operator for the Australian SASR had taught her that. Special operations meant never knowing when you’d get sleep next, so sack out while you could.

The habit had followed her just fine to the Australian Transportation Safety Bureau when she’d had to leave the Special Air Service Regiment abruptly. And still when she’d opted for a year’s exchange program with the NTSB because getting completely out of Australia had suddenly seemed like a really nifty idea. Not hard for anything to seem that way when your life had been totally flushed down the shitter.

But could she sleep here?

Now?

Mike?

No way!

First, she’d seen his taste in women—witnessed it on too many investigations over the six months that the team had been together.

Mike wasn’t a blonde hound or a tall-and-willowy dog. He was plain and simple just a complete female hound dog.

The 737 stewardess. The captain of a UPS cargo jet. One of the eyewitness passengers from that broken Bombardier commuter jet and one of the air traffic controllers from the same crash—after the passenger had bought a bus ticket home, but still.

Not that she’d ever actually caught him in a hotel with one, but he sure eased up to them like an old dog, despite being a young dog.

The man was as deep as a puddle on smooth tarmac. and too…pretty.

Lousy excuse.

She liked the pretty ones. Better them than the Spec Ops operators whose egos were even more built up than their muscle tone. beyond imagining. Like, of course she’d want them because she was the lone Sheila on the team.

They’d learned fast quite how wrong they were.

It had gotten better toward the end, but not much. An enlightened Australian elite warrior was roughly as evolved about women as Captain Kirk in the original Star Trek series—on a good day.

The “pretty” ones were still nice to look at, and their egos were far more manageable.

Besides, she liked Mike Munroe, as much as she liked any man. His Mr. Suave wasn’t just in his looks. He was sharp, funny…

And she was losing her mind.

No way on earth was she that desperate.

Not that she wasn’t up for a pleasant tumble now and then, but she’d rather swim with a great white shark than be another notch on Mike’s brag shelf.

If anyone other than Miranda had asked, Holly could laugh it off.

But Miranda wasn’t some s**t-for-brains. She just saw the world in a different way. Strange and incomprehensible ways that allowed her to walk straight into the center of an airplane crash, point at some insignificant fact that no one else saw, and eventually prove it to be the solution’s key.

So what was she seeing that Holly had missed?

That question was a game that Holly used to play whether doing survival training in the Outback, rock-and-ice practice up in the Snowy Mountains of New South Wales, or on assignment as Libya ate itself alive during Gaddafi’s downfall. By constantly asking what was she missing, she saw so much more than most people.

Libya had been a fine time.

Muammar al-Gaddafi had finally pushed both the West and his own people too far. To give the rebels a fighting chance, NATO had sent in jets to bomb military installations. The attacks were so visible that the protests from other Western governments against them had been almost as loud as the bombs themselves.

So, they’d sent in the black ops warriors instead.

No one knew how many elite teams were on the ground, not even the teams themselves. Hers had almost taken on a squadron of French GIGN in Sabha before they figured out they were on the same side. Neither team imagined that anyone else would probe so far in-country.

Once they’d decided not to kill each other, they’d had a good time disabling, and occasionally destroying, the old MiG-25 Foxbat interceptor jets that had been based there. Gaddafi’s Air Force had started out much larger than the rebels’…and ended up much smaller thanks to their efforts. They’d worked four of Gaddafi’s six air bases. The rebels had controlled the other two.

There’d also been a French dragoon who she’d done a lot more than talk explosives with.

But she’d just been a young nipper back then. Now Libya was nine years in her past and her world had changed.

Her job was no longer about some game of survival—identifying and taking out military threats before they took out something themselves.

The daily challenge now was the slow-and-steady of analyzing wreckage and unraveling what had happened to it.

Crash investigator was the “new” her. Even after a year with the ATSB and six months more with Miranda at the NTSB, it still hadn’t fully replaced the “old” her. Or had it? Could that be what she’d become?

Holly tucked aside the edge of the scratchy wool Air Force blanket and rested her forehead against the cold steel clarity of the C-130’s cargo deck.

This was real.

The humming vibration was familiar.

Despite the two previous times that Miranda and their team were called to military air-crash investigations, it was her first time flying aboard a military plane in over a year.

All too familiar.

Like she was back home, in so many ways.

The accents were American and her teammates were crash investigators rather than black ops warriors.

But it was home.

Except she could never go back home.

It was a kindness that Command had merely let Holly fade away. Nobody wanted the embarrassment of court-martialing one of the nation’s most elite warriors. They said it wasn’t her fault, but she knew better.

Frankly, if she’d been in command, Holly would have taken herself off into the Outback and put a round through her thick skull.