Free Jayhawk Down by Sharon Calvin Page A

she’d been. Hell, Harp was more jaded than he was.
    His pulse didn’t spike but his interest did. After a cursory look at the attached file he sent it to his printer. A more detailed profile was on its way to his office via courier.
    “Scott, this came in marked ‘urgent,’” his admin said, placing a package on his desk.
    He absently thanked her, his mind and hands already tearing open the sealed box. It was just like Harp to coordinate her email with delivery of the goods.
    He slid out the inch-thick file and flipped it open. A candid photo, enlarged and a bit grainy, lay on top. His soft whistle escaped before he could censor his reaction. Valerie Wooten wasn’t beautiful, at least not the movie star or magazine model kind of beauty, but she’d get noticed by any male with a heartbeat wherever she went.
    Her exotic looks—courtesy of a Lebanese mother and Greek father, he read—made for a groin-twitching response. Guilt made him glance at a photo cube on his desk before realization punched the air out of him.
    Before departing for her new assignment, Harp had pointedly replaced the five-year-old picture of his deceased wife with a group shot from the party celebrating his JTTF appointment. It didn’t stop his mind from conjuring the glossy studio portrait of the woman who still haunted his sleep.
    Scott flipped Ms. Wooten’s picture over and concentrated on the report. Fluent in five languages, she apparently considered Arabic her native tongue, along with English and Greek. He shifted in his chair when he reached a paragraph about her husband’s death in a London bombing.
    No wonder she’d reacted so decisively when she’d overheard what sounded like a planned bomb shipment. He scanned the next page. She’d inherited her husband’s shipping business, and when her father retired, combined the two into an international shipping conglomerate worth—holy shit, ten
billion
dollars?
    He turned back to her picture. Forty, single, and filthy rich in a male-dominated business. Take a step back, Scotty-boy, she had to be a bitchin’ ball-buster.
    His private cell phone vibrated on his desk, distracting him from the woman in the file. “Yeah?” he answered without saying anything that could get one of his agents or informants in trouble.
    “I don’t know if we’ll be able to pull this off, but you’d better give the Coast Guard a heads up. We’re supposed to hijack one of their helicopters.”
    Scott swore and had already begun searching for a local contact before his undercover agent finished speaking. “How soon?”
    “Tonight, if all goes well. Or badly, as far as the crew is concerned. I’ll do my best to minimize injuries, but I can’t risk anything too obvious, or we’ll lose track of the payload schedule.”
    Cold invaded Scott’s gut. “Have you confirmed they have it?”
    “Not yet, but I don’t think we can blow this chance. It may be the only opportunity we have any hope of controlling. I have to go. I’ll try to contact you after we make the grab.”
    The phone went dead and Scott punched the number on his office phone for the CO of the local air station. Somehow, he didn’t think the Coast Guard would take very kindly to having one of their helicopters snatched. He added a fervent prayer for the unknown crew. This operation had the potential for making, or ending his career. He could only hope it didn’t cost someone’s life in the process.
    The Gulf near Sarasota, FL,
Wednesday, 21 September, 1820 hours
    Caitlyn banked the Jayhawk into the wind and squinted at the setting sun. They’d been flying a ten-mile grid for the last thirty minutes without a single sign of any boat, wreckage or bodies in the water. A growing suspicion took root in her gut. This would be the third false Mayday for their air station in two days. Anger boiled her blood. Every time a crew scrambled, there was the chance a real emergency went unanswered.
    “Anybody see anything of note in the water?”