got what it takes, at the end of an eight-week period you’ll be awarded this patch. If not, I’ll be calling you in, writing you up a new set of orders and you’re out of here. Do you understand?”
“Yes ma’am,” the men murmured in a subdued chorus.
“Good,” Cam said, relief flowing through her. She gathered up the patches and placed them back in her briefcase. “Now, I need an X.O.—executive officer.” She looked at Morales. “You’re it, Chief Morales.”
“Me?” Gus hooked a thumb toward his chest, surprised. He saw a hint of approval in Chief Anderson’s green eyes.
“Why not you? You’ve got more hours in helos. You’ve had advanced drug flight interdiction training. From this moment on, you’re my X.O., which means you get a lot more duty and a lot less free time to party in Tijuana. Are you up for it, Chief Morales?”
Straightening in his chair, Gus took a deep breath. If he carried out his duties well, he just might go from a CWO2 to another pay grade. He could barely conceal his excitement. “Yes, ma’am, I’ll take it. Thank you. I hope I won’t let you down.”
Cam smiled thinly. “The only way you fail, Chief, is by not trying.” She looked at the other two pilots, whose sulky expressions indicated their current mood.
“Okay, let’s roll,” she told them. “Get on your feet, gentlemen, and let’s go out and meet our ladies.”
Chapter 4
Gus could hardly wait to get his turn in the Apache with Chief Anderson. The rest of the day was spent studying special manuals of flight interdiction operations back in their tiny H.Q. office while she took each of them for an introductory flight. Gus was still champing at the bit when he saw Luis Dominguez come back from his hour-long stint. The Mexican was looking disgusted. His brow was beaded with sweat and the underarms of his flight uniform were dark with perspiration. Chief Anderson escorted him to the office and ordered Zaragoza to come with her next.
The moment Dominguez was alone with Gus, he started bitching. “That woman is loco! Crazy!”
“Why?” Gus asked, placing his hand across his manual to keep his place. Luis’s face was dark with frustration. He started to reach for the pack of cigarettes he kept in the left thigh pocket of his flight suit and then thought better of it, remembering the orders that this area was now off-limits to smoking. Cursing, he glared around the simple but clean facility.
“She put me through a flight test of maneuvers I’ve never done before!” he fumed, crossing his arms and glaring down at his unopened flight manual.
“Isn’t that what the introductory flight’s about? To find out what areas we’re weak or strong in?” Gus asked Luis mildly.
“Bah! The witch had me trying to do things I wasn’t taught in school. I failed miserably. She sat in the back seat with that clipboard across her knees, rating me on every damn movement I made in the Apache.”
“Did she say you failed?”
Luis blew out a long breath. “She let me know every time I did something wrong! I heard her voice in my helmet every minute of that damned flight!”
Gus shrugged. “School doesn’t fully prepare us for what we have to do out here, Luis. No matter what squadron we got sent to, we’d have a lot to learn. It’s called advance training, amigo.”
“Oh,” Luis sneered, lifting his upper lip, his canine teeth showing, “and I suppose you’re looking forward to getting graded on every flight maneuver out there?”
“It’s inevitable. It’s part of our learning curve. How can Chief Anderson develop a proper training program for us if she’s not familiar with our abilities and skills?”
Getting up, Luis shoved the chair away in disgust. Pacing the room, he growled, “I can hardly wait until she flies with all three of us. It will be like the Spanish Inquisition. She’ll peel off our hides, one at a time. It’s shaming. It’s cruel. At least the inspector pilots back at Fort Rucker did it on a one-to-one basis. She’ll enjoy shaming us.”
Grinning, Gus said, “Luis, you never had this reaction to any of your instructors at Fort Rucker.”
“None of them were women, that’s why!” Standing, he glared out the window and tapped his boot on the floor.
Gus smiled to himself. He knew Chief Anderson was going to put him through his paces and then some. However, he wasn’t worried, because he felt intuitively that she would be fair.
“This wasn’t a flight test to see if you get to stay or not,” Gus reminded him. “If you screwed up out there, look at it this way—you have only one way to go. Up.”
“Bah! I need a smoke.” With a snort, Luis headed out the door and down the hall to the back door.
Sitting there, Gus closed his eyes and pictured Anderson in his mind. She was tall and womanly, curved deliciously in all the right places even though she wore that drab and loose-fitting flight uniform. He liked her face, liked the sprinkling of freckles that made her look younger than she probably was. Her face was oval, with huge green eyes that he could easily read, although Gus wasn’t sure she realized how much her emotions were revealed in them. Oh, Anderson tried to keep a poker face, but Gus felt he had an edge because he could see her feelings clearly in those evergreen eyes of hers.
He liked the fact that although she worked in a man’s world, she kept her reddish-colored hair long, wearing it parted in the middle. He liked the way it curled slightly around her attractive face. He longed to ask her personal questions. Maybe he’d get the chance on the flight, but he didn’t think so. She was all-business.
Gently closing the manual, after marking his place with a piece of paper, Gus got to his feet. Glancing at his watch, he realized it would be another forty minutes before Chief Anderson came back and asked him to sit in that cockpit and fly the Apache. A thrill raced through him. He loved flying that helicopter. And he sensed that Anderson was one helluva pilot at the controls of that combat machine. Gus could barely rein in his eagerness to learn the finer techniques of flying from her.
After pouring himself another cup of coffee, he stood at the window and pondered another reaction he was having to Anderson. She was a woman. Not just any woman, but a very unique one in the highly skilled role of combat helicopter pilot. That excited him. Enthralled him. Made him very curious about her. Who was she really? Where had she been born? What had happened to her as she was growing up to push her into this line of work? Was flying a passion with her or just a job?
So many questions and no answers. At least, not yet, he thought, grinning a little as he lifted the cup to his lips.
As he stood there eyeing the small, sun-baked military airfield and the many red roofs in the distance that showed where the sprawling city of Tijuana began, Gus felt a twinge in his heart. Frowning, he wondered where it had come from. Unsure, he turned and went back to his manual. The more he read, the more he would be prepared for what Chief Anderson would put him through. He didn’t want to fail her. He wanted to at least scrape by with a shred of her respect for him intact. After all, she’d chosen him as X.O., and he didn’t want to start off by having her questioning her choice.
Cam’s heart wouldn’t settle down as Chief Morales flawlessly took the Apache off the ground and rose to an altitude of five thousand feet, heading in the direction of San Diego.
The shaking and shuddering of the Apache always soothed her fractiousness when she felt uptight or nervous. Now, as she sat in the piggyback seat above and behind the pilot’s cockpit, with the late afternoon sun shining through the Plexiglas and the cooling air-conditioning sweeping around her, Cam smiled for the first time. She settled the clipboard on her lap, the pen in her gloved hand shaking with the vibration of the aircraft.
“Memorize this route, Chief,” she told him over the cabin intercom, moving the mike a little closer to her lips. Pulling down the