Tom Clancy's HAWX

Chapter 16

"This is really awkward, Troy," Cassie Kilmer said nervously.

"Let me give you some space." The man in the coral-colored polo shirt smiled as he put on his sunglasses and stepped out the front door onto busy Sepulveda Boulevard.

Across the office, Yolanda Rodriguez watched him leave, then glared back at her keyboard, pretending that she hadn't been watching.

"Well, shit, Cassie, this is a little awkward for me too!" Troy said, looking at Cassie in disbelief.

"You were gone for two years," Cassie said angrily. "And back only twice in that whole time."

"That was my job… we talked about it—"

"What was I supposed to do?" Cassie interrupted angrily. "You had your job and it was your life. What was I supposed to do? Just put my life on hold while you were off somewhere living your life? You can't just go off and expect me to stay here all frozen in time like a state of suspended animation or something. I'm a person too. I'm entitled to live a normal life."

"How was I supposed to know you had this guy?" "Enrique is not just a guy."

"Excuse me, how was I supposed to know you had this `not just a guy'? Why didn't you at least tell me, so I don't come walking in here and make an ass out of myself."

"I didn't… y'know… I didn't know you were coming back," Cassie said, glancing at the large ring on her left hand. "Enrique and I didn't become officially engaged until… you know…"

"So you thought I was dead and you jumped into bed with In-Reekie?"

The inadvertent, giggly yelp emanating from Yolanda's desk indicated both that she had in fact been eavesdropping, and that she was well aware that Cassie had been in Enrique's bed long before she received the report that Captain Troy Loensch was missing in action and presumed dead.

"I'll run these down to the FedEx drop box," Yolanda said, standing up and grabbing a stack of important-looking orange and purple envelopes.

"I cried when I heard the news," Cassie said sadly, tears forming in her eyes. "I cried all damned night when I heard that you weren't coming back. I cried for you and I cried for me. That was when I realized that it didn't matter… you were gone from my life a long time before that… and I realized that I should have moved on long before. I'm glad that you're all right… but I'm still moving on. There's nothing left for you here, Troy. There's nothing left in my heart for you."

"Hey, but Cas—" Troy started to say.

"There's nothing more to talk about, Troy," Cassie said emphatically. Her body language as she stepped toward him read not as a move to be close, but as pushing him toward the door.

Troy realized that it was neither possible nor desirable to beg her to reconsider. She wouldn't, and he didn't want it.

He left the real estate office wishing he could kick a dent into an expensive panel on Enrique's Porsche, but the punk had already driven off

As he walked down Sepulveda, back to where his mother's car was parked, Troy thought about everything that had happened to him over the past months. They were the kinds of experiences that people describe as life-changing, but Troy couldn't tell. Everything in his life, every point of reference, had changed, so he couldn't really tell whether he had changed, or if it was just a case of everything changing around him.

His nearly three weeks of wandering in Eritrea with Jenna Munrough had been like a bad dream, punctuated by experiences like that night at the well when they shot the two men, and the two desperate days of being chased by the local militia. When they had reached that Doctors Without Borders compound at the end of their wanderings, they had finally learned why the American helicopters never came.

After the calamity over Dhuladhiya Island, in which eleven American aircraft were shot down attacking the sovereign nation of Eritrea, the United Nations had pulled the plug on the operation and the United States was given forty-eight hours to withdraw its forces.

The fears that the Joint Task Force base at Atbara would be overrun were finally realized, but by that time only a few dozen Americans remained. They never made it home.

Troy Loensch had made it home.

The Doctors Without Borders people had gotten him and Jenna across the border into Djibouti, where the American embassy had arranged for a flight back to the United States.

As Troy climbed into his mother's Chevy Equinox, he thought about how strange it was to no longer be strapping himself into an aircraft. During his two years overseas, he had rarely driven a car, spending much more time in the air than on a highway. In Sudan, he hadn't driven at all. After four days back home he was only just reacclimating himself to Los Angeles traffic.

He didn't know whether he would ever be back in a cockpit.

So much had happened while he was on the run in Eritrea that he felt like Rip Van Winkle. When he and Jenna landed at Dulles Airport, they were met by Air Force personnel who whisked them to a military hospital to be checked out, rehydrated, and treated for dysentery. They expected to be promptly shipped back to the Intelligence, Surveillance, and Reconnaissance Agency and the 55th Wing, but instead they were given a thirty-day leave and told that their next assignments were not yet known.

As they began to catch up on the news from their lost weeks, they discovered that in the wake of the Dhuladhiya disaster, Congress had passed legislation terminating overseas peacekeeping operations by the American military.

As Troy and Jenna were being checked out of the hospital after two days, they were each handed a packet offering them a bonus for accepting an early discharge. The termination legislation carried a steep decrease in the Pentagon budget, and the Air Force had decided to stay ahead of the curve and to reduce manpower wherever possible.

"How'd it go with Cassie?" Barbara Loensch called from the kitchen when she heard her son slam the front door of the family's Northridge bungalow.

"Oh, all right… we decided to call it quits," Troy answered. He thought about telling his mother the whole story, but decided it was pointless.

"Quits? That's too bad… I thought she was, y'know, a nice girl."

"Oh yeah, she's a nice girl," Troy said, pretending that he meant it. "But y'know, it's just not gonna work out. We're completely different people than we were back in college."

"Yeah, I suppose… sometimes I think that your father and I are completely different people than we were back then."

"You and Dad?"

"So, have you decided whether you're going to take that offer from the Air Force?" Barbara said, changing the subject.

"I dunno." Troy shrugged, grabbing a can of Hyper-X energy drink from the fridge. "They gave me a month to decide. The money's good if I take the discharge."

"Why would they pay to get rid of a good pilot like you?"

"They just have a whole lot less to do in the world now."

"What will happen in those places like over in Africa where you were?"

"They'll just fall apart," Troy said sadly. "Like what happened in Sudan. The Al-Qinamah just swarmed into that base where I had been. Killed a bunch of people. That was after we lost so many pilots that night when I got shot down."

"That was terrible," Barbara said. "Terrible that it had to happen like that."

"It was like getting stabbed in the back," Troy said angrily, slamming the remainder of his energy drink. "They gave the Joint Task Force the authorization to bomb those arms boats, but the State Department, some dude that was at the meeting, decided to try to do some diplomatic intervention and bad guys got wind ofit. They had two days to set a trap… and we got trapped."

"I can sure understand you not wanting to go back," Troy's mother said sympathetically.

"On top of that, they want to pay me not to go back," Troy said. "That's a pretty sweet deal… I just don't know what I'm gonna do next."