Tom Clancy's HAWX

Chapter 20

"Golden West eight-six-four, climb and maintain heading and flight level one-five-zee-ro," crackled the voice in Troy's headset as he climbed out over a California coastline tinted gold by the rays of the late-afternoon sun. Beneath him, the ocean was a deep cobalt blue.

"Roger, this is Golden West Eight-Six-Four, climbing and maintaining," he replied. "Good day."

One thing about his job was that it gave him plenty of time to be alone with his thoughts and with the voices in his head.

More and more, the voices themselves were becoming his circle of friends. Cassie had left him — an old wound, healed but with permanent scarring. He and Yolanda saw less and less of each other, getting together every few weeks — then every few months — only to be reminded that they had little in common.

The voice of the woman in his headset reminded him of the voice of the woman in his head. Since Las Vegas, Jenna's voice bounced frequently into Troy's mind. He heard the Ozark drawl telling him he was an asshole for leaving Hal Coughlin on a mountaintop to die, and he heard it tell him that she craved the warmth of his body.

It seemed that his relationship with Jenna over the past months and years had been a series of unfinished conversations, a relationship that had not yet really formed into a relationship. From the night at the well in Eritrea to the night at the bar in Las Vegas, it was a series of conversations that ended in midsentence without reaching a conclusion. Maybe that was why his mind played and replayed them over and over, each time continuing them to an alternate, imaginary finale.

With Cassie, it was an intended life together of many decades that ended unexpectedly and suddenly on the second lap, like a multicar pileup on a NASCAR track. With Yolanda, it was mutually satisfying, mutually understood shallowness. With Jenna, it was an ambiguous something that was never truly defined, but that might have been defined any number of ways.

After Las Vegas, they had exchanged e-mails. On the surface, they ignored both the fact that something had happened in Las Vegas, and that nothing had happened — although innuendos flowed freely between the lines.

What had happened — or not happened — in Vegas had not stayed in Vegas, but over time, the e-mail traffic grew less frequent. Troy hadn't heard from Jenna in weeks.

That night, when Troy opened his laptop and saw the @fhcoherndon.com suffix on an e-mail, he thought for a moment it was Jenna. As he took a second look, though, he noticed that the From line read rhh@fhcoherndon.com, not jmm@fhcoherndon.com.

Who? What?

Troy clicked on it.

As a word to describe Troy's reaction to an e-mail from Harris, two years after Dhuladhiya, surprise would have been a serious understatement. How should he respond to such an invitation from his old commander? He recalled Jenna suggesting such a thing, but he had given it no more than a passing thought since Vegas. Troy started several replies to Harris and deleted them all. He decided to sleep on it, and he woke up deciding, "Why not?"