Chapter 32
Erin knew something was up the moment Rafe asked Blaine, “Feeling a bit grounded lately?”
“Yeah, a bit,” Blaine answered, looking at the other man curiously while he tapped edgily at the steering wheel. “Why?”
“Thinking a flyover might be a good start.”
Erin watched Blaine go very still, but could also feel the sudden alertness in him. “You have access?”
Rafe nodded. “We can have. We have somebody here with a small fleet, who owes us a favor. If you think you can manage without all the armor and weaponry.”
Blaine’s half grin and nod were confident. “Yeah, I’ll manage. I’ve done it before.”
And it hit her what Rafe was talking about. An aerial search. A flyover. As in Blaine doing the flying.
The search part made perfect sense. The Blaine flying part had her once more weighing the risk against the hoped-for result. If they could find where Ethan was hiding, wouldn’t that be worth…everything?
I just don’t get shot at anymore.
She remembered his words, when he’d told her he was still flying, but teaching now. That made it different.
Ethan made this different.
“—too bad Walker had to start that other case, but Foxworth committed to it, so it’s done. We’ll need Cutter on the ground, but you need an observer.”
“Without all that armor and weaponry, I can fly and observe both,” Blaine said.
“Hello?” she said, not bothering to mask the tinge of sarcasm in her voice. Both men looked back at her. She pointed at her face with two fingers. “Eyes? Twenty-twenty vision?”
Blaine stared at her. “But… I thought you hated flying.”
She couldn’t blame him for that, so reined in the temper that had flared at being left out of this too often. Ethan was her son, and she would do a lot worse than climb into a helicopter to look for him.
“I hated you flying,” she corrected. “Because I always worried. But this is way beyond worried already, so can we get moving?”
“Yes, ma’am,” Rafe said, sounding as if he’d just been given marching orders. And that made her smile, inwardly at least.
That didn’t mean she wasn’t nervous about it.
Because she was. And she was going to have a twenty-minute ride to the airport to stew about it.
But then Cutter stuck his head over the back seat to nudge at her.
Again, as if he’d sensed her tension. She didn’t hesitate this time to stroke his head, and felt anew that soothing calm.
Blaine started the engine and headed back to the road, while Rafe began making arrangements on the phone.
She could only hear his side of the conversation, but she couldn’t help but notice that once the name Foxworth was mentioned, the pace picked up immediately, and faster than she could have ever guessed, arrangements were made.
When Rafe put down the phone, all he said was, “It’ll be ready and waiting when we get there. They offered a copilot, but it’d be a couple of hours and I didn’t think you’d want to wait.”
“No,” Blaine said firmly, “no more waiting.”
“All right,” Rafe said. “You’ll need to be in touch with air traffic, although my guy with the bird says it’s not heavy in the area. As long as our fellow Marines just five miles away don’t lose track of the base boundaries.”
“If they do, I’ll deal,” Blaine said.
Rafe shifted his gaze to her. “I’ll be back in the area by the time you get airborne. Any possibility you spot, I’ll head Cutter that way, and he’ll let us know quickly if Ethan’s there, or ever been there.”
She no longer doubted the clever dog would perform exactly as described. And whoever those kids were, they were no match for one of the best snipers in military history. Or one of the best pilots.
The private helicopter, a sleek, blue-and-white number she thought she might have seen now and then flying along the coastline, was already out on the tarmac and waiting for them.
Blaine and Rafe were talking about the make and model, something about an Airbus, but she didn’t pay much attention except to notice how big it was.
“Seats up to seven plus the pilot,” said the man in a polo shirt bearing a logo that was the same helicopter they were standing next to, with the name Southwest Air Tours beneath it.
Rafe had told them this was Matt Russell, the man who’d started this business two decades ago with one much smaller craft and grown it to a fleet of eight and a reputation for safety and efficiency that was unmatched in the area.
“I’m liking the enclosed tail rotor,” Blaine said. “They’re a lot quieter.”
“Fifty percent,” said the man proudly. Then he considered Blaine. “Mr. Crawford here tells me you’re a great pilot.”
“I won’t hurt her,” Blaine promised, patting the side of the craft as if it were alive.
“Wouldn’t matter if you did, if it’ll help Foxworth,” he said. “I owe them…everything.”
“How is your daughter?” Rafe asked.
“She’s doing great. She’ll graduate this year, and she wants to go to work for you guys.”
Rafe’s mouth quirked. “Might just happen.”
The man got into the helicopter with Blaine and started pointing out various controls. After the crash refresher and Blaine pronouncing himself ready, the man gave Rafe a rather fierce handshake, then walked back toward the office and hangar. Erin asked, “What happened to his daughter?”
“She was kidnapped,” Rafe said. “Along with three other girls, by a sex-trafficking ring. Foxworth got a lead and had an in, and ended up bringing her—and the others—home safely.”
Erin just stared at him for a moment. Then, softly, she said “No wonder he just handed a gazillion-dollar helicopter over to you.”
Rafe just smiled, and the quiet satisfaction in it made her remember what Blaine had said about him being happier with what he did now than anything else.
“Go,” he said simply. “Let’s find your son.”
She clambered into the helicopter. Rafe retreated to the Foxworth vehicle, where Cutter was watching with apparent interest. She took her seat beside Blaine, noticing that the craft was built for visibility.
Big windows at the sides, and with the front glass sweeping down to below floor level on each side of the trim control panel, giving a full view downward.
That was going to be her job, to utilize every bit of that visibility.
She felt a new vigor pulsing through her. In fact, she felt more energized than she had in days, because this felt…real. So much more than blindly driving around looking with no clue to actually follow.
And it felt good. Doing something felt so much better than just…waiting. She needed to think about that a little. And the fact that after last night she just couldn’t imagine going back to life without Blaine.
But now they had to find their boy, so all she gave him was a quick nod. He didn’t smile, just nodded back as he said, “Here.”
He was holding out a pair of heavy-looking headphones. She took them, listened carefully as he pointed out the controls, then put them on. It was a bit awkward, since she wanted to keep one ear clear for the Foxworth phone, but she managed to finally achieve a balance of sorts.
She watched as he readied the aircraft. He was talking to someone she couldn’t hear, and guessed it was the control tower at the small but busy airport.
She watched his hands, the hands that had driven her mad last night, on the controls she remembered him explaining to her.
More than once, since she couldn’t quite believe it involved not just both hands but both feet as well.
The throttle she got—it was like the ones on motorcycles.
But that the same stick was also the pitch control —the collective?
—threw her. And the main control, the cyclic, boggled her even more.
Throw in the antitorque pedals, and she was thinking flying an airplane had to be easier.
A plane wants to fly, it’s designed that way. A helicopter wants to tear itself apart.
It had been a ten-year-old Ethan who’d told her that, with such a tone of glee she’d wondered for a moment about his sanity.
But Dad’s so good it wouldn’t dare.
He’d added that with a blissful pride that had made her grab the boy and hug him, never mind his protests. Their lives had been good then. But just over a year later…
She shook off the painful jab. Focus. You have to focus like you never have.
You can’t rebuild until you have all the pieces.