Hell on Wheels (Black Knights Inc. #1)(6)
Which was lovely, just lovely.
So fine. He didn’t like her. As far as she was concerned, he could just take his opinion of her and stuff it where the sun never shined. He didn’t have to like her in order to help her.
And why she was even mentally chewing over the state of his rather glaring lack of regard was beyond her. Because to tell the truth, she didn’t particularly like him either.
He was too solemn, too remote, too…something.
She could never determine just exactly what that something was—which was extremely irksome. But she’d have to deal with it, or ignore it, because she’d made her decision. She was here.
And speaking of here, where the heck was her escort? She tapped her fingers and glanced around impatiently. “Do you own one of their custom bikes?” she asked, just to have something to talk about because, yeah, waiting to see Nate was driving her crazy.
Big Red made a noise vaguely reminiscent of the bellow a mildly annoyed grizzly bear might make, and she didn’t know whether to take that as a yes or a no.
Great. Just great. This is turning out even worse than I imagined.
***
“So we got our very own helo. Guess now we need our very own helo pilot.” Frank “Boss” Knight, boss of Black Knights Inc., said as he glanced across the scarred expanse of his desk at Nate “Ghost” Weller.
He couldn’t help but search the guy’s impassive face for any signs of PTSD. Frank had been doing that a lot in the past three months, but no matter how hard he looked…
Nada.
No fidgeting hands or darting eyes or tapping toes.
But he knew, just because the guy didn’t show any of the more obvious outward signs of the disorder didn’t necessarily mean he didn’t have it. Nate had been tagged Ghost because he was so damned stealthy in the field. But ever since Grigg Morgan, Nate’s all-time best friend and ace spotter, died—especially considering the way Grigg died—and wasn’t that just one more happy thought Frank would rather not have today? Nate’d given new meaning to the nickname. Now he was Ghost because he was a walking dead man. No emotion. It wasn’t like the guy had been a big bowl of jolly to begin with, but now? Damn…
“What about Colby Ventura?” Ghost said. “He’s not with the Army anymore.”
“Really?” Frank lifted a brow, jotting down a quick note on his legal pad, excited by the prospect. “Yeah, man, Ace would be a great replacement.”
And as soon as he said the words, he winced and glanced at Ghost. Gone was the detachment. Now the man’s eyes were bright and his jaw so hard Frank wondered if, when he finally opened his mouth, there would be anything left but nubs and stumps where his teeth had been.
Grigg had been licensed to fly helos, and this was just one more tough reminder that Grigg was gone. He wished like hell they hadn’t lost him, but they had. Because despite all the precautions they took against it, the possibility of violent death came part and parcel of the job.
Still, that knowledge didn’t make the loss any easier. Not for any of them. But especially not for Ghost. Those two had been connected at the hip since graduating together from Marine Scout Sniper School in Quantico. The dynamic duo or, in certain circles, the deadly duo.
Ghost had barely given himself time to heal from the wounds he’d sustained during his torture by those Lebanese militants before he’d gone back and tried to hunt down every last man who’d dared to lay a hand on him and Grigg—and hadn’t that been a pretty mess for Frank to clean up?
He shuddered, remembering all the fast talking he’d had to do.
Kissing ass certainly wasn’t his forte and it always left a decidedly foul taste in his mouth, but he’d done it for Ghost—the best damned sniper on the planet.
Fortunately, Ghost’s search was for naught, because someone had beaten him to the punch. Those Hezbollah boys had been dead to a man—not surprising, really, considering the Syrians didn’t take too kindly to Lebanese militants operating on their soil. And the fact that the f*ckers met messy ends didn’t break Frank’s hardened heart one little bit, and not just because they’d deserved it for what they’d done to Grigg and Ghost, but because it’d saved Ghost from perhaps making one of the greatest mistakes of his life.
The Knights broke, bent, and flagrantly ignored most rules, with the exception of one. Pure and simple, revenge had no place in their operating procedures. Should they ever kill outside a sanctioned mission, they’d be no better than the men they hunted. “We should also probably start the search for a communications specialist,” he added quickly, hoping to wipe that killing look off Ghost’s face. As frightening as his stony detachment could be, this was even worse. “That last job in Brazil would’ve gone a whole helluva lot smoother had any of us spoken Portuguese.”
“What about the ex-Mossad agent?” Ghost managed.
The Mossad agent…Great. One more thing for Frank to worry about today. Usually when General Fuller asked him and his boys to do something, they hopped-to with a salute and a resounding Hoo-ah! But hiding this Israeli had required a few negotiations. And, all in all, it wasn’t such a bad deal. Because now they found themselves the proud owners of a slightly less-than-new UH-60 Black Hawk.
Okay, perhaps that was putting it a touch mildly.
In truth, the chopper was a mess. It took a sound beating back in ’89 when the U.S. invaded Panama and sat in a warehouse collecting dust ever since. But if anyone could get the twenty-something-year-old beast up and running again, it was Rebecca “The Rebel” Reichert—their resident wunderkind mechanic and his personal weakness.