Disclaimers in part I.
0340 Zulu/1740 Local
Officer's Club, Marine Corps Base Hawaii
Mac, Sturgis noted with pleasure, was a big hit among the wives of the regimental command staff. The women were gathered in a corner of the bar chatting, listening to "Azaki" spin tales of her life in Bahrain as a young girl. He would have bet good money that she was actually telling her grandmother's life story.
He, on the other hand, had made at least two more enemies at lunch. The deputy Operations officer, a captain who had been wounded as a corporal during the Persian Gulf War and gone on to college through ROTC after making it to the enlisted rate of sergeant, had made an off-color remark about the name Ibrahim insinuating that anyone who shared a name of any spelling with the 16th President of the United States was someone to distrust. He had made the comment to a lieutenant on the procurement and planning staff. The lieutenant had laughed and told a joke about a Catholic, a Jew, and a Muslim in which none of the three came off well. Sturgis had taken it upon himself to declare the statements offensive and unbecoming to officers, then made the gathering all the more difficult when he stuck to his professed beliefs and didn't eat.
In the plus column, that prompted the only other Muslim in the group to thank him profusely afterward for having the courage that comes with higher rank. "I have to tell you, sir, it was only because of Colonel Richards that I could stand Colonel Water's scrutiny, and I was worried that after he left last week I'd cave," young First Lieutenant Samir had said. "I even went to the Imam when I heard the colonel was leaving to report Colonel Waters. Major Yassin, sir, you've really done a good deed today."
Even tonight at the O-Club, a current of inappropriate language and humor ran under some of the byplay, and not just from the Colonel and the two other offenders. What Sturgis couldn't understand was why anyone put up with it. Admiral Chegwidden, and all the other CO's he'd ever had, would have quashed that kind of language without a second thought and probably written up official complaints for the service records of the offenders, as well. Even when the chief wrongdoer was the commanding officer, there was a hotline for this kind of thing – but the only complaints had been registered through the Chaplains' Office – not even the regimental chaplain, at that – and those, with the exception of Lt. Samir's, unofficially. There was more going on here than just the evident behavior; these men – and they were all men, interestingly enough – were all highly trained combat soldiers but they were afraid of their commanding officer, especially without an executive officer to shield them from the worst of it. He and Mac would have a long talk at the airport before she flew off to brief Harm.
Colonel Waters chose that moment to arrive, late due to an unexpected staff call at PACFLT HQ. At the same time, the women around Mac changed their arrangement to allow for those who had been standing to sit and vice versa. Thus, the first person the regimental commander saw was a woman who would have taken any man's breath away.
It was funny to watch from Sturgis' point of view until he remembered that he was supposed to be acting as Harm would act in similar situations. Sturgis begged out of a conversation with two junior officers to move toward the woman everyone knew as his wife. He was just in time to see the colonel paste a smile that might have been a "flyboy" grin on his face; the JAG officer steeled his face not to crack into a big grin when Mac answered in her thick Farsi accent, knowing that Waters would be thrown off by that.
The colonel moved in slow motion toward Mac, straightening his uniform jacket and thinking that perhaps he could have a moment to introduce himself quietly, like many other men over time who had found the Marine Lieutenant Colonel enchanting. "Santa came to Hawaii early this year, I see," Waters said, sliding the last few feet to stand just within Mac's personal space.
"And he came from BUPERS, not the North Pole, bearing the gift of an intelligence officer for you." Mac leaned away a fraction, noticeable more in the set of her shoulders and head than anything else.
He puzzled that through. "Oh, ah…Mrs. Yassin. I expected you to be…" Colonel Waters wasn't really sure if he should say what he expected; the wives were close enough that he didn't want to say something that would get back to an ambitious husband. He didn't know the major was now standing behind him.
Mac smiled at him, knowing that only Sturgis would see the steel in her gleam. "Dressed differently, perhaps?"
"Yes," the colonel accepted. Damn, she might be a foreigner and a security threat, but she was fine looking. It somehow wasn't fair that Yassin got her and he got…other men's disregarded wives to play with for a while before the men decided to reclaim them. Maybe Yassin was ignoring his wife, too.
The undercover officer smoothed the dark emerald velvet of her dress and played with the long netting of the veil on her matching hat. "You know, Colonel, assumptions are dangerous." The gold band on her left hand gleamed in the recessed lighting of the bar; she covered it as she waited for the man to make the next move. Somehow, it seemed right to give off the "I might be interested" vibes.
Score! the colonel thought. "Let me buy you a drink, Mrs. Yassin." He gestured at the empty place in front of her. "Draft Sam Adams, please," he added to the bartender.
"I'll accept that offer in about…" she looked at her watch, "…twenty minutes. Dr. Pepper, and please, it's Azaki." She extended her hand.
"Azaki it is." He turned the offered hand into an excuse to kiss her wrist. "Why twenty minutes?" he asked with feigned interest, mostly to prolong the encounter.
Azaki Yassin smiled at him; there was nothing feigned in his obvious attraction to her. "The fast will be over for the day."
With the smile belonging to Major Yassin's wife, the man would be doing a lot of night drills and duty. "You're sure I can't get you something stronger in twenty minutes?" Waters took out his wallet and extracted three singles, setting them on the bar beside her.
"No, thank you," Mac replied, looking up to meet Sturgis' eyes. "Dr. Pepper will be fine."
Sturgis accepted his cue, stepping up to stand beside her barstool . "Good evening, Colonel Waters. I see you've met my beautiful wife." He leaned in to kiss Mac lightly and slipped his arm around her possessively.
The bartender set the beer on the bar top as the colonel replied. "Yes, Major, I have. I owe you a soda, Azaki. Excuse me, major, ma'am." He nodded to the couple and took his beer off to greet some of the other women.
Mac nodded toward the women with whom the Colonel now stood and murmured her observations to Sturgis. "They are terrified of him. It's like there's a force field around him that repels them."
"What makes women do that?" he murmured back against her hair.
"Experience and bad vibes," Mac answered with a grimace and a shudder, knowing that Sturgis would understand only part of that reaction; with the vague outline of a plan forming in her mind, she also hoped that anyone who saw her shudder would wonder why a married woman would make such motions in her husband's arms.
"He strikes me as the tyrannical type who expects his power to be alluring." He started when she wriggled as though trying to escape him, but read in her eyes that she had a reason that she couldn't explain in the circumstances. So he tightened his embrace a fraction.
"He's a snake oil salesman," she hissed back with a wink dropped at him when no one was watching. Then she pushed away from him and asked with a raised voice, "How long do we have to endure this?"
Too long was their mutual answer nearly three hours later as they watched his new colleagues stagger out to the parking lot in various states of inebriation. The women, they noted, had not consumed nearly as much alcohol as the men, probably in anticipation of this exact occurrence.
"By the way, 'zaki, what did you tell the colonel when he kept pressing a drink on you?" Sturgis asked, maintaining the pretense of trouble between them in the acid tone of his voice.
Mac answered in a near shout. "That we're trying to have the baby you keep telling me it's my duty to give you!"
"I'll bet that went over well, given the way he leered at you all night." He added venom to his tone, escalating the fight.
"He did not leer at me! You told me I should wear the hat instead of the scarf and you picked out this dress! Don't blame me when your attempts to help us fit in better go wrong." She started to walk away from him.
He grabbed her arm, lightly so he wouldn't hurt her for real but with enough momentum to spin her around. "You know, until you figure out that you can dress normally everyday, you're always going to go overboard on special occasions. You flirted with my commanding officer shamelessly and frankly, I'm glad you won't be around the next two days so I don't have to worry about you getting any other ideas."
Colonel Waters overheard the whole thing through his alcohol-induced haze as he walked the short distance from the Officer's Club to his quarters, a house really much too big for an officer who had never married. Perhaps Mrs. Yassin would be no different than a dozen other officers' wives, Navy, Marine, Army, and Air Force, who had been impressed enough with it to meet the physical requirements of a relationship in the past year when the major's wife returned from wherever it was she was going.
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0700 Zulu/0200 Local
Harm's Apartment, North of Union Station, Washington, DC – 3 December 2002
Ordinarily, Harm had no trouble falling asleep. Sometimes he had trouble staying asleep, when the worst of his nightmares came and woke him, but falling asleep was rarely a problem. Tonight, though…
It was Mac's fault, he decided. "Damn her for not calling," he growled, pouncing out of bed to get a glass of warm milk in hopes that its soothing qualities would allow him at least three and a half hours of sleep before he had to be up and getting ready for his thankfully non-stop flight to San Diego out of Dulles at 8:35. "And damn the admiral for sending me somewhere other than to her."
Thinking of San Diego, he remembered that he had wanted to arrange a visit to La Jolla for New Years to take Mac out to meet his mother and Frank. Amazing that somehow they had never met in person, although he knew that the two most important women in his life had talked on the phone a number of times over the years. He heard his mother in his head, asking her favorite question since the first time he'd mentioned the Marine in casual conversation. "Harm, sweetheart, do you love Mac?"
He answered the voice out loud, something he'd never done on the phone to Trish Burnett, or, for that matter, in so many words to Mac or anyone else. "Yes, Mom, I do. I love Sarah more than any human being ought to love another human being." Harm heard himself put voice to the deepest feelings he had ever had and realized that the truth would comfort him far more than warm milk. With a long sigh, he fell back into bed, clutching a pillow close to him and breathing the most precious words in a mantra that lulled him into dreamless slumber. "I love you, Sarah Mackenzie. I love you."
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1845 Zulu/1045 Local/1345 EST
San Diego International Airport, San Diego, California
Mac felt much more normal than she had in five days as she dialed a familiar number into her cell phone and waited for someone to answer. Once again, the world could see her as Lieutenant Colonel Sarah Mackenzie, USMC, and even if the respite were brief, it was nice to be herself again.
"JAG Headquarters, Petty Officer Tiner," the young man's voice answered on the fourth ring.
"Good morning, Tiner. It's Colonel Mackenzie. May I speak with the Admiral, please?"
"Yes, ma'am. Just a moment."
Mac waited exactly 13 seconds before the audible click of a phone line being taken off hold let her know her commanding officer was on the line. "Good morning, Colonel."
"Good morning, sir. Just checking in as ordered."
"You've read the file?"
"Yes, sir. I have to say, what Harriet was able to pull together was really quite interesting to read. This Lieutenant Colonel Rutter certainly has seen his fair share of action." Then she laughed, because more than half of what was in Harm's undercover identity's file had been only slightly amended from their case files.
In Falls Church, Admiral Chegwidden knew the cause of her hilarity. "Hasn't he, though," he agreed dryly. He had personally suggested three of the episodes just to remind his senior investigators that he had a long memory and a tolerant disposition; his own personal favorite was the twist on the Watertown episode. "Tell me about Eugene Waters," he commanded.
"Sir, if we can't get him on discrimination, we can get him on conduct unbecoming and adultery."
"Really? With whom?" That hadn't come up in anything the Commandant or Colonel Richards had relayed.
"Me, sir, if he had his way." She told him about her new plans based on Colonel Waters' reaction to her. Then she added her own womanly instincts. "I suspect, sir, that there are probably a number of wives who are or have been in Hawaii recently who could give a detailed description of his quarters. And maybe not just Navy and Marine wives, either. He's got contacts all over the Honolulu area and probably frequents the O Clubs at Hickam and Pearl, too."
The admiral considered this for 9 seconds before he spoke. "Mac, where's a logical place for Rutter and Yassin to have crossed paths stateside?" He obviously trusted the lieutenant colonel to know her cover story as well as she knew her own true biography.
Mac chewed her lip for a moment, thinking through the billets to which Ibrahim and Azizah Akilah Yassin had been assigned during their seven-year marriage. "Well, sir, Rutter's last assignment was as S–2 of the 15th Marine Expeditionary Unit. I suppose they could have met during a combat command intelligence course at Dam Neck while Ibrahim was on staff there," she said, referring to the Navy and Marine Corps Intelligence Training Center (NMITC) in Dam Neck, Virginia. "It would be logical for someone of Rutter's background to have gone to school just before his posting."
"And the timing fits, just about three years ago. Okay, Colonel, adjust the cover file and I'll make the call to NMITC from here. You'd better give Commander Turner the heads up before you and Commander Rabb leave for Hawaii."
"Um, sir, if I may, what are you suggesting?" She really didn't think AJ would go where he appeared to be leading, but he did.
"That you and Lieutenant Rutter had a short, torrid affair three years ago and that there's still a flame flickering."
Mac let out an audible gasp. "Why, sir?"
"Because if I'm reading Waters correctly, competition – or perceived competition – will make him move all the faster. And Rabb just might be able to nudge the colonel into moving on other fronts if he thinks he can eliminate one threat and throw suspicion on another in one fell swoop."
"Dear God, sir!" She shook her head to clear the thoughts that ran through her mind: Sturgis and Harm having to fight it out, one killing the other in the name of justice, her watching helplessly…
"Mac, I promise that nothing will go that far. We just need to get the man with his hand in some cookie jar, and at this point, I don't particularly care which one."
He'd regret that statement later in the month.
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1905 Zulu/1105 PST/1205 Local
Over Colorado, Continental United States
Commander Harmon Rabb was one unhappy sailor. It was bad enough that he was going to San Diego rather than Hawaii, where he could look after Mac. But to have had his non-stop flight push back from the gate on time, then sit on the tarmac at Dulles for almost 90 minutes before rolling into the takeoff line was torturous. It left him too much time to brood, and he couldn't even pull out his cell phone and talk to Mac in the mean time. His options were to look out the window at the mountains – which, he had to admit, were pretty with the recent Thanksgiving snowfall glinting off the tall peaks – or to try to escape into a Tom Clancy novel featuring Jack Ryan and friends.
He opted for the novel, and marveled yet again that he'd never actually read anything other than The Hunt for Red October until Mac had goaded him into replacing the book he so cleverly tore in half back in…was that just August? It seemed longer ago than that, the sub and the missile and Bud's accident. Since then, he'd read through the series, starting at Mac's suggestion with the newest, a prequel to Patriot Games called Red Rabbit, and working his way through Patriot Games, a reread of Red October, The Cardinal of the Kremlin, and Clear and Present Danger. He was currently halfway through The Sum of All Fears and he was glad that he'd only seen the first movie of the four made. The movies, he was sure, contained less than half the actual story simply because putting 600+ pages on screen didn't usually work very well.
At least, he realized an hour later as the pilot announced the beginning of their descent, Clancy had indeed distracted him. He kept reading, finishing up with Cathy Ryan's vow to make whomever had set up her husband pay for their malfeasance just as the nose wheel settled on the ground in San Diego. Mac would – had – done that for him. Of course, he mused as he slid the book into the briefcase at his feet, Mac was much more like Domingo Chavez than Caroline Ryan, M.D., in her skills. Ninja and all that stuff.
Twenty minutes later he stood in the concourse, wondering if he should be looking for a sign or something bearing his name. Then he grunted with the realization that no one would be able to get past security, so he might as well go on out to the main terminal. Harm pulled out the handle on his small rolling suitcase and picked up his briefcase for the trek. Mindlessly, he trudged up the ramp and past the busy TSA agents who couldn't pay attention to deplaning passengers as well as embarking passengers. He looked up and glanced around.
Mac just stood and waited for him to notice her, leaning casually against a pillar near the escalators to baggage claim. She watched him scan the crowd, saw the amazing change in his face when he locked onto her gaze. She didn't even have time to move; she was in his arms, uniform or no, before she could think beyond, he's here!
"Mac!" he whispered against her hair, wondering if he were having a dream.
"Harm," she smiled back, trailing a finger down his cheek. "I guess you missed me."
He threw back his head and laughed, pulling her more tightly against him. It wasn't a dream. "I did, and I really don't care that I'm making a spectacle of us right at the moment." They were both in uniform, after all, and his summer whites – still an option for this part of the country, thankfully – didn't exactly give him the kind of subdued presence that her Marine green did.
"Well, I don't either, but we don't have much time."
He pulled back to look at her but left his arms loosely around her. "I know. I'm just glad you managed to get here to see me, however briefly. I was really hoping to get to Hawaii to help you and Sturgis – "
"Harm," she said with a brilliant, knee-weakening, heart-flipping smile as she put a finger to his lips, "you are going to Hawaii."
Confusion settled in his gaze. "I'm supposed to be meeting someone here for a joint service undercover operation…"
"That was the admiral's idea of a joke. I have everything you need to know and we have a private location at which to prepare you for your assignment."
"Oh." He smiled down at her. "How private?"
"I'm not sure. I just got in two hours and seventeen minutes ago and I've been waiting for you ever since." That wasn't quite true; she'd noticed the address and played a hunch, discovering in the process that Admiral Chegwidden really did have quite a sense of humor. "And you have a report date of 5 December for your assignment, so we'd better get a move on. Any checked luggage?"
"Just what you see here."
"Then let's go." She had already gotten the rental car in her name, meaning that Harm wouldn't be able to drive it for the duration; he didn't object to it, strangely, and she commented on that as she pointed the convertible north toward their destination.
"I can't drive and look at you at the same time," he said, giving her a Flyboy smile as his hair ruffled in the wind. He had taken one look at the lowered roof and tossed his white cover into the trunk.
"Does that mean I'll be stuck doing all the driving for the rest of our lives?" she shot back, glad she'd remembered to tuck a Third Marine Regiment ball cap into her luggage, even if it wasn't the regulation cover for her current uniform.
"Nope," he replied. He stretched his arm across the seat to rest it behind her head. "Just when it's been…"
She smiled, knowing he was doing complicated math in his head that she could just toss into the conversation on a whim.
"One hundred one hours and 50 minutes since I last saw you."
"Close, Flyboy. You forgot the time zone change. One hundred four hours and 53 minutes."
"And the last three hours and three minutes were the worst." You just couldn't deflate an ecstatic Harmon Rabb, Jr.
