Chapter Three

Midnight had come and gone without a word and Caitlin accepted with surprise and disappointment that they weren't taking the mission. She'd gone to bed without packing the small bag of additional clothes, toothbrush, toothpaste, liquid soap, aspirin, chocolate and tampax that she usually took on missions. Whenever she'd forgotten any one of those items, she'd had cause to regret it; none were things easily available in the jungle, desert, mountains or wherever Airwolf had cause to roam.

When the phone rang shortly after five AM, she'd awoken instantly, expecting bad news. No one called in the wee hours of the morning, or even in the hours just before and after dawn, with exceptionally good news or for anything but a reason that would startle the sleep out of one's brain anyway. Better just to be wide-awake when answering.

"Cait, it's Hawke."

She mumbled out a garbled 'Good morning' that sounded more like German than she could have managed if she'd ever learned to speak German. Her mind may have been awake but the coordination between mind and mouth was still somewhat sluggish.

"Change of plan; thought we'd go looking for flowers."

It took her a few seconds to remember Mathilde's code name, and she felt an odd annoyance at Hawke's apparent insouciance.

"Okay," she answered tentatively. "What's the plan?"

"Can you be at the airfield by 0630?"

She squinted at her bedside clock, threw the bedclothes over to one side to begin the faltering slide out of a warm and very comfortable bed.

"Ah," she said, stumbling over a pair of boots that had somehow walked out of her closet and dropped themselves at the side of her bed. "Yeah. I can do that. Want me to bring coffee or something?" She wondered if anything was open at this hour.

"If you can, yeah. If not, don't worry about it. Oh, and don't use any scented soaps or stuff."

He rang off before she had chance to ask what had changed his mind; he wasn't likely to volunteer any such information. She headed for the bathroom to shower, hoping the water would jar the rest of her body into a functioning human being. It was one thing to get up early for a job when you expected to do so; something else entirely to go to bed expecting just another day of shuttling people around Southern California for whatever purpose was sufficient to justify hiring a helicopter charter.

In the shower, she tried to remember what she'd read in the briefing folder. Something about this mission had set Hawke on edge to the point where he'd said no; well, almost said no. Something else had either changed his mind or maybe it just took him a long time to make the decision.

She hesitated to even think the word 'spooked' but Vietnam was a graveyard of the ghosts of Hawke's past, without even considering the invocation of his missing brother. And despite Dominic's professed view of Archangel, Briggs had been straightforward about the likelihood of finding St. John, with or without the help of this Mathilde who needed rescuing. 'Orchid,' she reminded herself, though after they rescued her, the woman probably wouldn't return to that assignment so it might not matter that they knew her real name.

It was just unlike Hawke to leave someone in danger, unusual for him to even consider doing so. Caitlin well understood that the Firm had more options than most. Hawke's refusal didn't mean that a rescue attempt wouldn't be made, but they flew Airwolf for more than just Hawke's deal with Archangel; they flew her to help people in trouble and this time they'd come close to walking away from what they did best and it bothered her.

She'd been ready to go after the briefing at Knightsbridge yesterday. Even Dominic had seemed ready to go, despite his pronouncement that flying a helicopter 5,000 miles was waste of fuel and, that flying a helicopter 5,000 miles to Vietnam was obviously the wrong aircraft for the job when what was clearly needed was a bomber or a squadron of bombers.

It came back to Hawke: what had made him balk and what had made him decide to go. She quickly toweled off, nubs of the terrycloth cotton stimulating her skin into waking up, even if her body was still in zombie mode. Well, she'd have somewhere between seven and fifteen hours in the air to try to weasel the reasons out of him, and knowing Hawke, she'd need every minute.

Shortly after six AM, she pulled into the back entrance of Van Nuys Airfield, the one closest to the helicopter hangars, feeling pretty pleased with her organizational skills. In less than an hour, she'd managed to find all of the items on her 'emergency travel bag' list, found her briefing folder, and she'd remembered to pack sunscreen since she couldn't quite recall the weather conditions in Vietnam. That she'd packed sunscreen pretty much guaranteed rain.

She was also in possession of two thermos bottles of coffee – Thank God for truck stops, the most American of resources and open all night – a bag full of donuts and other pastries, six wrapped sandwiches, and some fresh fruit to complement the freeze-dried food that Hawke stored at Airwolf's Lair. Meals-Ready-to-Eat, Hawke called them. Meals-Ready-to-Excrete, Dominic said, usually with an accompanying story about the C-rations he'd eaten in the War. She'd also purchased a dozen bottles of water, and had colored slightly remembering her initial attempts to convince Hawke and Dominic to bring thermoses or other reusable containers of water on long trips. 'Oh, we reuse them all right,' Dominic had said with a belly laugh, laughing only harder when she'd finally realized what he meant.

Light filtered out of the hangar into the still dimly lit dawn and Caitlin noted, without surprise, Hawke's Bell sitting on the tarmac. He'd have to have been at the hangar to call her; she wondered if he'd slept at all. She began lugging her bag and provisions from the car.

"Hey," he called, sounding typically Hawke, neither happy nor unhappy, just a bland neutrality that kept the world at bay. "Need a hand with that?"

"There's some more coffee and water in the back seat," she said, arms full, unsurprised to find no sign of any other provisions near where Hawke had left his own ditty bag inside the Bell. He seemed to exist without food or water when he was on a mission, eating and drinking only when necessary or when reminded. Little wonder he remained as lean and muscled as he was. She tried to suppress a blush at the visual image her brain provided, felt a stirring of attraction that was ill timed and certainly not reciprocated. She immediately reached for the proven anti-arousal: trying to imagine her parents having sex. The thought was cold water over her libido and left her gagging

"You okay?" Hawke asked brusquely, dumping the bottled water in the back of his helicopter near the other provisions.

"Uh huh," Caitlin answered brightly, maybe a little too brightly because he peered at her with a strange expression. "I'm glad you changed your mind about the mission."

Hawke pulled away, physically and emotionally, the distance was immediate and obvious to anyone who knew him. "Yeah," he said, noncommittally.

She trailed after him as he went back to the hangar.

Okay, Caitlin thought, definitely going to have to work a lot harder to get anything out of him. The best she'd hoped for was a defensive response – a prickly, 'what makes you think I changed my mind?' -- but she wasn't entirely surprised to get deliberate non-reaction. The sound of another car approaching, Dominic's by the familiar sputtering engine noise, was a timely change of focus.

"We can get moving early," Hawke muttered, walking out to meet Santini.

Caitlin checked her watch: 6:10 AM. Sure, they weren't too eager for a mission. It had been a few weeks since anything came to them from the Firm, a few weeks of fluctuating business demand at Santini Air. She leaned over to check the work schedule and frowned: a flight lesson scheduled for the afternoon that could easily be rescheduled, and two charters, one for tomorrow, the other the day after. It wasn't a good time to turn away work.

"I'll ask Fairbanks if he can take the charters and the lesson. He's been a little slow and I owe him one," Santini said from the hangar doorway.

"You gonna ask him now?" Hawke said dubiously, with a glance towards a row of darkened hangars.

"Naw, I'll call him from the air," Santini said, with a broad grin. "By the time we get out of here and pick up the Lady, Bill will probably be opening up."

"Let's go," Hawke said, turning without another word and heading outside.

"Good morning to you too," Santini replied, one eyebrow raised in mock exasperation. He turned and beamed a smile at Caitlin. "And how are you on this bright morning?"

She smiled back, following him as he headed for the door and pulled it closed, padlocking it without thought, actions automatic from long practice.

"Somewhat relieved that we're going," she admitted.

Santini nodded his head, looked quickly in Hawke's direction to gauge distance. "Yeah, I was wondering about that too." He waited until Hawke got into the Bell, started her engines, the rotors beginning their majestic sweeps of air. "Don't know what the Ice Cream Guy said to him this morning, but whatever it was worked."

Caitlin filed that away as another piece of evidence to use in querying Hawke later and headed to the Bell.

"Let's go rescue a lady named after a flower," Santini said, with exuberance as he climbed into the co-pilot seat.

Hawke gave him a long-suffering look and a sigh worthy of a basset hound, and Caitlin stifled a grin as she buckled into the back passenger area. Here we go, she thought, as Hawke lifted the bird off the ground. Hang on, Orchid; we're coming to get you.

Almost eight hours later, over the vast blue emptiness of the Pacific Ocean, it was hard to maintain the enthusiasm that had jettisoned her off that morning. Flying Airwolf was a joy and a delight, and it was Caitlin's particular joy and delight right now, keeping her airspeed steady and her horizon level with the soundtrack of Dominic's snores and Hawke's steady breathing as accompaniment. She understood as never before, the need for autopilot on long overseas commercial flights, how the pilots could go quietly out of their minds as boredom doubled on itself, relieved only by heart- pounding momentary adjustments when the winds of the dubiously named Pacific Ocean reminded pilots that Nature was in charge.

Airwolf didn't carry the autopilot found on those long-range jumbo jets, but she adjusted for wind gusts and wind shear, which at 300 knots might have otherwise been fatal to the aircraft and her crew. Caitlin found her body moving in a two-step with Airwolf as she battled turbulence that exceeded what she was used to dealing with over terra firma. Collective, cyclic, right rotor pedal to decrease pitch, left rotor pedal to increase pitch; she'd entered a zone where she wasn't consciously responding to the movements of the air, she felt the movement and she and Airwolf responded together. Zoning, Hawke called it. Flow, she'd heard it called by a psychologist who spoke at her college in Texas. Over land, this almost hypnotic state might be dangerous; slipping from a frontal lobe awareness to something that seemed more right brain might not give her enough time to make an urgent adjustment for a mountain peak or tall building. Over the limitless expanse of the ocean, it was a restful and productive state.

She could have spent hours in that calm trance-like state except for the fact that Airwolf, like a baby, required regular feeding. No space for extra fuel tanks with the full load of armament they were carrying. Hawke had set an alarm, an audible reminder for refueling stops, and it rang, jarring Caitlin from her happy partnership with Airwolf. She checked coordinates and reached for the briefing folder that provided her with the call signals for the tankers that Marella had arranged.

She knew Hawke was awake before he even moved, sensing his emerging consciousness as something alive and wary.

"Want me to take the refuel?" he asked quietly, pulling his helmet back over his head.

Midair refuels were not Caitlin's favorite thing and though she was normally reluctant to walk away from a challenge, aligning Airwolf's refueling port with the hose from a tanker was more of an art than a skill, despite Hawke's assurances to the contrary. She justified it to herself that it was Hawke's turn to fly anyway; her turn for a nap; they were taking three-hour shifts for the grueling long distance flight. Typically Hawke, the schedule was Hawke, Caitlin, Hawke, Caitlin, Hawke.

"Sure," she said, waiting until his left hand was on the collective, his right on the cyclic, before she released control of the aircraft to him, raising her wrist to check her watch as she did so. 1400 hours, California time. Haiphong, fifteen hours ahead of them, would be 0500. Archangel and Marella would already be in Bangkok, probably grabbing some sleep before beginning their series of meetings and negotiations.

With nine more hours of flying time left they should arrive at 1400 hours tomorrow, Haiphong time. Damn, midday. Maybe they should have left at noon instead of early morning.

"Are we going to take a break in Manila?" she asked.

Hawke's slight turn of his helmet was so slight she wasn't sure he'd heard.

"We could get some rest, time our approach to Haiphong so that we arrive after dark?" she suggested, still mostly a question, unsure if he had something planned already.

"There's an atoll in the South China Sea," he replied. "Not far from Hainan Dao, Chinese resort, not too far off Haiphong. We'll wait there. Just have to avoid the Chinese naval base."

Caitlin wasn't sure if she was relieved that Hawke had a plan or was peeved that he wasn't bothering to keep the rest of the team informed. That atoll near Hainan Dao might be closer, but it didn't sound very friendly.

"Anything else you want to share?" she asked, trying to sound casual and in doing so, she was sure that she was giving away her slight annoyance.

"Nope," he answered, and there was a slight hint of humor in his tone, just enough to give her hope of pulling an actual conversation from the man.

"Why'd you change your mind about taking this mission?"

This time he actually turned and gave her a frank look. "Who said I did?"

Caitlin frowned, confused. "If you knew last night, why'd you wait until the last minute?"

Hawke shrugged. "Couple of reasons. Archangel's worried he's got a leak at Knightsbridge."

Caitlin whistled before she even thought about it, which sounded weird, a thin wail amplified by the microphone built into her helmet. She stopped herself before saying 'you're kidding,' because Hawke didn't kid about much, and certainly not about something like this.

"He think he's got a leak at Santini Air, too?" Dominic's voice interrupted.

Caitlin turned to look. Dominic's face was as angry as his voice, but hurt lurked in his eyes, as if stung that Hawke hadn't trusted them with this detail until now.

"No, but there was a chance that someone might have been watching us, Dom," Hawke replied. "As far as anyone in the Firm knows, we didn't take this mission."

"You said a couple of reasons," Caitlin said, doggedly pursuing Hawke now that he'd given them an opening. "What else?"

He shrugged again. "Archangel made a better case today than he did yesterday."

She eyed him, considering whether or not he really had made the decision before he talked to Archangel this morning. Didn't sound like it, but it didn't sound as if she'd get much more from Hawke on the subject. Except…

"Someone knows we're taking this mission," Caitlin said thoughtfully. "Unless Marella arranged these tankers before they left last night, someone else had to coordinate the refueling for us."

Hawke sighed, said nothing.

"Marella didn't arrange the refueling?" Caitlin interpreted, astounded by the inference. "He can't possibly think she's the leak."

"I didn't say that."

"But you're thinking it," She accused, outraged on behalf of the other woman. "Are you out of your mind? There's no way in hell that Marella would betray Archangel! Are you crazy?"

Dominic muttered something in the back but Caitlin couldn't hear him over the rush of fury in her own ears.

"Kind of jumping to conclusions, aren't you?" Hawke said, with a sharp bite of annoyance. "No one said or implied that Marella was even involved. Archangel trusts her. He took care of the tankers himself."

"Paranoid son-of-a…" Dominic's muttering trailed off into incoherence but his tone was pure disdain.

She retreated into silent contemplation of this unknown threat, something that had Archangel cautious enough to cover his tracks personally on the rescue attempt. Not even the midair refueling pulled her attention away and sometime during her period of reflection, Airwolf rocked her to sleep.