Black Sun

“You call this quiet?”

He nodded. “Up here there’s no one yapping at you to do this or explain that. No traffic, no horns, no jagged, random noises.”

He smiled to himself, apparently pleased with his reasoning. “Yeah,” he said. “To me this is quiet. And straightforward. Go from point A to point B and back again. Try not to get shot down while you’re doing it.”

She had to laugh. She guessed that qualified as quiet. “I’m sorry about the other night,” she said. Since their night on the balcony she had avoided looking him in the eye. That wasn’t her way.

“You mean ditching me to talk to Arnold Moore on the phone?”

“Yeah,” she said. “That and …” The words were hard to come by. She decided to be direct. That was her way.

“I wanted to kiss you,” she said. “I haven’t felt that close to anyone in a long time and I wanted to kiss you. It’s just that there’s someone in my life already. Someone back home, waiting for me. I think.”

For a second Hawker didn’t react. Perhaps the whole conversation seemed too absurd to him. People were trying to kill them even as a cataclysm of some kind loomed up ahead. And she was talking about her almost-fiancé, who maybe even wasn’t her friend anymore. This was why she hated relationships; somehow they always made her feel foolish.

And then she wondered if maybe he didn’t care. Maybe their almost-kiss had just been a way to pass some time. Like watching the storm and drinking the rum. His world was so different from hers. Was it foolish to even talk like this to someone who didn’t know where he would be next week, next month, next year? She was worried about home. He didn’t have one.

“Basically I’m supposed to be engaged right now,” she said in explanation. “I’m supposed to be home pla

“Maybe you should be,” he said, finally. There was some pain in the statement, but sincerity, too.

“Maybe,” she said.

“Does he know what you do?”

“He was my first partner,” she said. Hawker raised an eyebrow.

“My second year in the NRI I got a field posting. Marcus was the guy they teamed me up with. He was a few years older, a lot less naïve, and just as ambitious.”

“Sounds like instant attraction,” he said.

“We kept it professional for about eight months,” she said, somewhat defensively.

He smiled. “You don’t have to do this,” he said. “This isn’t twenty questions.”

She wanted to. She thought it might clear the air, at least for her. “They always tell you it’s dangerous to mix business and pleasure, that it dulls your edge or makes you sloppy. But that wasn’t the case. There was a high from it, the work, the relationship, the partnership. If anything it made us sharper, made me feel invincible.”

“Fourth stage of tequila again?”

“Better,” she said.

“What happened?”

“I pushed like I always do,” she said. “And because he was the same as me, there was no voice of reason to hold us back. An operation we were on went bad. He took a bullet in one kidney and a second bullet in the leg. He rehabbed for almost a year and then when he was healthy enough to come back he decided not to.”

“What about you?”

“Not a scratch on me.”

“Lucky as always.”

“I guess,” she said. “I took time off to help him get better. But back then, seeing me made him angry. A sort of reverse version of survivor’s guilt. Eventually he asked me to leave. To just go away and let him be. So I did.”

Hawker was silent, listening and sca

She nodded. “Becoming a civilian was sort of disorienting: too much routine, not enough to worry about. It felt good to have someone to talk about it with. Things progressed from there.”

“So why wouldn’t he be waiting for you? I mean has he gone insane or something?”

She laughed. “I think I wrecked it by coming back. We started arguing, things got out of hand, and I decided to make the arguments as harsh as I could. He didn’t deserve that.”

She understood Marcus’s objections on an intellectual level. She was making a leap that he could not. But she still wanted his support and when it hadn’t been there, she had lashed out.

“I felt guilty about leaving,” she said. “But I’m painfully aware that I have avoided every opportunity to go back. I could have gone back after you rescued me. I could have gone after we found McCarter, slapped him in cuffs, and dragged his ass home.”

“But you didn’t want to.”

“Remember how you said I wouldn’t like ‘normal life’?”

“I was just talking. It didn’t mean anything.”

“I think in some ways you were right.”

“Look,” he said, “I don’t believe in trying to convince anyone to do anything. But assuming the world doesn’t blow up, this mission is going to end in a few days, and when it does, I’d get out of this madhouse if I were you.”

“You’re on his side?” she said, surprised.

Hawker shook his head. “I’m not talking about him, I’m talking about you. If you have a chance at something good in this life, something worth going home to most of the time—whether it’s him or someone else or just being home and safe and surrounded by friends—you should grab it and never let go.”

She stared at him in shock.

“I’m not saying go bake cookies,” he explained. “Run for Congress, like you said. Kick some ass up on Capitol Hill. God knows they could use someone like you.”

“It sounds like you’re saying ‘pretty good’ should be enough for me?” The words came out as if she were challenging him, but she hadn’t meant them to sound that way.

“I’m saying I’d settle for half decent and no one trying to kill me.”

“And what if I don’t want to settle at all?”

“Then maybe it’s not leaving that made you feel guilty,” he said. “Maybe it was wanting to leave in the first place.”

His words hit close to the mark, closer than she’d been able to get on her own. Prior to Moore’s call for help there’d been no reason for her to go anywhere, but in a way she’d already begun to feel trapped. Had she just run to the NRI to escape that? Based on some glamorous selective memory of how good life had been there? Maybe Hawker was right: Maybe she was throwing away a chance at happiness, whether it was with Marcus or someone else. She wasn’t sure, but suddenly she didn’t want to talk about it anymore.

“And what about you?” she asked, changing the subject. “Is there some gun-toting mercenary girl waiting for you out there?”

“Lots of them,” he said, as if it were an admission. “One in every port.”

She laughed, half hoping it was true. It sounded like a simpler arrangement “Good for you,” she said, as sincerely as he had earlier. “Now, how about telling me where we’re going?”

“Take a look out the window.”

Danielle turned and gazed through the curved glass. Beneath the plane she saw nothing but darkness; endless miles of unlit jungle and impassable terrain.

And then she caught sight of a flash. A fleeting glimpse of silver, as if someone had flipped over a giant mirror and then hidden it away.

She couldn’t say what it was. In fact she’d never seen anything like it before. It seemed to have come up through the trees.

She continued to stare into the darkness as the plane droned on, looking, searching. And finally she saw it again. This time it moved, traveling through the darkness like a snake in the grass. It slithered, disappeared, and then reappeared, traveling with a calm precision that exactly matched the movements of the plane.

It took another sighting for her to realize what it was. She looked up. The full moon had risen to a spot almost directly above them. Its light was being reflected off a narrow river below.

“You’ve seen this before,” she said.

“Not here,” he said. “But on one of those long, quiet flights we were talking about.”