No Fortunate Son (Pike Logan, #7)(7)
A fifth-generation Texan, he was also a lieutenant colonel in the Texas Army National Guard. A veteran of both Afghanistan and Iraq. Never mind that his military specialty was public affairs, and that he’d not once heard a shot fired in anger. Not once left the perimeter of Balad and Bagram Air Bases. The fact that his job was no more dangerous than a publicist at a corporation was irrelevant. He was a war hero. A veteran. And that title had proved decisive.
Currently, he was on temporary duty with the Texas Adjutant General at NATO Headquarters in Brussels, helping craft some deployment schedule or other thing. He’d promised to call at lunch, and given the seven-hour time difference, that meant she could take it on her way to work.
They turned onto Guadalupe Street, the dome of the capitol coming into view, and she began to wonder if she was going to miss the call. Paralleling the University of Texas, she started to tell her driver to turn onto MLK Boulevard and circle the school when her phone rang.
She said, “Finally! I thought I was going to miss you. Headed into work?”
“Yeah. Unfortunately, the general bumped up a meeting, so I’ve only got a second. How’s life in the music capital?”
“Still ticking. Usual fights. That * Reese is talking about investigating our stock purchase into Dell again. Nothing I can’t handle.”
She heard him say, “What the hell,” then, “Hang on, honey, there’s some sort of accident. These cops are death on cells while driving.”
The phone went silent, then she heard her husband’s voice as if spoken from a distance. The other party was muffled and inaudible.
—“Officer, you speak English?”
—“Huh. Sorry about that. No insult intended. I never expected to hear that accent. Can I get through here?”
Her husband’s voice grew strident, the cell signal strong enough for Rachel to sense the fear.
—“Hey, what the hell are you doing? Don’t . . . no, wait!”
She heard him scream and she began shouting into the phone, causing her driver to whip his head toward the backseat.
Her husband didn’t respond. The only sound coming over the line was a car door slamming.
* * *
Airman First Class Curtis Oglethorpe bounced his beat-up jeep down the road, pushing it faster than was safe. Well, safe for the jeep, that is. As for Curtis, he needed to get off the lonely highway leading from Soto Cano Air Base to Tegucigalpa, the nearest city to his miserable station.
An air traffic controller for Joint Task Force–Bravo, he’d paid his roommate to take his shift, which wasn’t exactly kosher as far as the chain of command went. But then again, Curtis never found the rules worth following. Far from it, he was what was known in military parlance as a shitbag. The guy who could always be depended on to disappear whenever extra duty came around. Which gave his father no small amount of fits.
The son of the current secretary of defense, Curtis had been given everything—the proverbial silver spoon jammed up his ass from birth—and had done everything in his power to reject it. Not out of any pride in making his way on his own, but simply out of laziness. When he’d failed out of Dartmouth—a school that had been no mean feat to get him into in the first place—his father had had enough. He’d told Curtis in no uncertain terms he was joining the military or getting cut off.
Being a little bit of a coward at heart, Curtis had agreed, searching out the least “military” occupational specialty he could find, eventually settling for air traffic controller in the Air Force. The recruiter had told him it was all gravy, with nothing but stateside assignments and nine-to-five work, then he’d been shipped off to JTF–Bravo in the stinking jungles of Honduras, controlling flights targeted against the drug trade, along with a multitude of other taskings.
Not his idea of the cush life promised by the recruiter.
The work was grinding, and the base grew tiresome within a month. He’d spent every waking moment he could haunting the bars in Tegucigalpa, searching for some companionship. In that, he’d failed, with the women seeming to smell the broken promises in his DNA. He’d started hunting Honduran women in Internet chat rooms and had found one who had taken a liking to him. So much so she’d agreed to meet him in Tegucigalpa at a place called the Bull Bar. The catch was he had to come tonight. Which meant he had to get out of his shift. Which also meant he had to get off the two-lane highway that led to the city.
JTF–Bravo was a small place, and if he passed anyone coming back from Tegucigalpa, they’d recognize his jeep. Then realize he was supposed to be on duty right now. And that wouldn’t be a good thing.
The old jeep groaned down the road, the suspension complaining at every pothole, the rusted holes in the body whistling with the wind. Curtis fought the vehicle, straining to keep the four wheels on the rutted blacktop at a speed that caused the jeep to become nearly unstable. He began to pass houses, then side streets, then entered the city itself, breathing a sigh of relief.
He wound through the small town to his rendezvous at the Bull Bar, the fear of getting caught now replaced with the hormones of getting laid. He parked out front and took a quick look in the mirror, smoothing back his longer-than-regulation hair, then sauntered inside.
It was fairly early, the sun still in the sky, and the bar looked old and worn without the cloak of darkness. But Curtis cared little about ambiance. His head on a swivel, he looked from the bar to the tables, finally settling his eyes on the mechanical bull in the corner. He saw nothing but a couple of males at the bar sipping whiskey out of highball glasses.