The sound an approaching engine grows louder, and Koda goes to unlock the back gate that leads to the runs. Beams from a pair of headlights sweep across the small parking lot, and Wanblee Wapka’s big pickup makes a three-point turn then backs slowly, coming to a stop between the two rows of kennels. Overhead, stars still spangle the western sky, swinging low over the Paha Sapa. The hills bulk huge and dark below them, distinguished from the arching darkness above only by the wash of moonlight along their flanks. A white shape passes overhead, almost too swift for sight, and Koda shivers in the dawn breeze. Owl.
Owls are messengers from the spirit world. But she needs no additional omen to know that death is near them—herself, Kirsten, her father, Tacoma, all of them. Her vision has told her that, and the preliminary reports from the scouts have confirmed the forces now converging on Ellsworth in numbers far greater than any they have encountered so far.
The driver’s door opens, engine still running, and Wanblee Wapka steps behind the truck to open the tailgate. “Let me give you a hand with that, chunkshi.”
Together, with Kirsten assisting, they lift the mother wolf and her cub up into the bed of the truck. Wanblee Wapka slides the carrier back toward the cab and ties it down in place, giving the knots an extra pull to secure them. To Koda he says, “Don’t worry. I’ll have them in their new home before the sun is over the trees. I’ll see that there’s food available for the first few days, just until Ina here gets the lie of the land.”
For answer, Koda walks into his arms and hugs him fiercely. “I wish that I could come with you, Ate. That we could.”
“I know,” he says. “But you’re needed here, both of you.”
“Mother—”
“Hey, I’m a diplomat, remember?” Laughter runs through her father’s voice. “I’ll have the peace treaty ready to be signed by the time you come home.”
“Oh, yeah,” she says wryly. “The droids’ll just be the warm-up.”
His arms tighten around her. “Wakan Tanka nici un, chunkshi. Toksha ake wachingyankin kte.**” He releases her then, turning to Kirsten. “Chunkshi,” he says, pulling her into a hug. “Take care of each other.”
The fleeting startlement in Kirsten’s face gives way to a blush, and she shyly returns the embrace. “We will. Thank you, Ate.” Her brow creases briefly. “Ate—is that right?”
“It’s exactly right,” he answers.
Almost too low for Koda to hear, she says, “Dakota and I—can you see—?” She drops her eyes, leaving the question in the air.
“I see that you are meant to be together, Kirsten. It is something you have chosen, time and again. But no, I do not see what is on the other side of this battle. There is a cloud over it, and what is beyond I don’t know.”
Then, with a last squeeze of her arm, a hand on Koda’s shoulder, he is gone, the red points of the truck’s taillights vanishing as he turns onto the road that will take him out the main gate. Koda takes Kirsten’s hand in hers, feeling the chill of her skin. In the east, a faint haze of rose and gold washes the hills. “You’re cold,” she says. “Let’s go inside.”
CHAPTER THIRTY SEVEN
WHAT A MAN will do for love.
Manny stands just inside the shadow of the hanger, his harness strapped and buckled, his helmet in the crook of his elbow. By main force of will he banishes what he knows is a sappy, lovestruck grin from his face. At least, he banishes it for a moment. His watch shows his copilot/navigator due in less than three minutes, and it costs him an effort o refrain from tapping the toe of his boot against the runway apron. It will not do to show eagerness. He has flown a couple times before with Ellen Massaccio, an experienced and careful pilot; he has no reason to believe she will not be prompt today. That gives him a few more moments to contemplate the object of his affection as she sits on the tarmac, her silver skin gleaming in the spring sun, her slender form made all the more enticing by months of abstinence and flying helicopters.
For Manny, his Tomcat is not a male of any species. She is a she, a lady sleek and sure and deadly, a lioness stalking the high cloud savannah, her fur silvered by moonlight. She is, as she was originally, Tom’s Cat, the brainchild of Admiral Tom Connolly, the last and most perfect in a series of his brainchildren. After forty years of refinement and the shift from pure naval deployment to air defense, the craft is still the fastest, meanest fighter in the world. And Manny is as enamored as he was the first time he set eyes on her, as desperate in his forced estrangement as any deserted lover. Their reunion will be sweet.
At least I didn’t out and out grovel to get to fly this mission. Not quite, anyway.
All right, he had almost groveled. He had been prepared to and would have, if Kirsten had not shown immediate understanding when he had asked for the assignment. Instead, she had merely agreed that his request to go was reasonable and pointed out that for a single day on Base, at least, she was unlikely to need more protection than Andrews, Koda, Maggie, a three- pound Sig Sauer and Asimov could provide. Put like that, the Colonel had agreed that he should be the one to fly recon. Somewhere in the back of his mind, there lives the nasty suspicion that he would have copped the assignment anyway, given that he knows the country better than any of the other surviving pilots and can navigate by sight or with an AAA map if he has to.
Nothing wrong with taking out a little insurance, though.
Or a little self-satisfaction.
“Yo, Rivers!” Manny turns to the sharp rap of bootleather on concrete. Massaccio carries her helmet tucked under one arm and a sheaf of paper in her free hand. One, incongruously, is a folded map which flops back and forth, flashing the Triple-A logo, as she waves it under his nose. “Tell me, Manny my man, that we are not actually going to have to find Offut by following the highway signs.”
“Okay,” he says amiably, “we are not actually going to have to find Offut by the highway signs.”
“But?” A scowl appears between Massaccio’s blonde brows.
“No buts. We’re going to fly straight south till we pick up the main fork of the Platte east of Scottsbluff. Then we’re going to follow it till we get to the Missouri. That will bring us within sensor range of Offut. Straightforward as it gets.”
“Riiiight,” she drawls. “No GPS, no air control.”
“Cheer up, Ellen,” he answers, grinning. “If Lindbergh could do it, so can we.”
Fifteen minutes later, Manny looses the throttle on the shuddering bird as it idles at the end of the airstrip and sends it streaking down the mile and a half of runway. The force of it presses his back and shoulders into the padded ejection seat, jams the back of his head against the lining of his helmet. The rush that takeoff always brings starts somewhere around his solar plexus, a tightening pressure almost like the oncoming climax of sex, rises up his spine until his head seems unbearably light and the howl of the engines rises in his ears and the airstrip and the buildings lining it streak by under him until the nose leaves the tarmac and the lift of the wings carries the Tomcat into the blue air, and they are floating free. The earth falls away behind to become an abstract pattern of green and brown veined with deep-cut watercourses. The Cat becomes almost an extension of his own spine, his own limbs, as he pulls back hard on the stick, sending her into an almost vertical climb, then levels off and banks hard left, steering their course out over the creased and folded basalt of the badlands.
They skim along above the bare rock barely a mile high, low enough for visual contact with the ground. The barrens give way almost immediately to prairie, long empty expanses pale green with new grass. Some of it is pasture; some of it, he knows, is fields plowed and left fallow through the winter, now reclaimed by native vegetation. At widely spaced intervals, he can make out the parallel rows of small patches of growing crops, and he keys them into his topography display. “Infrared giving you anything back there, Massaccio?”