Hard Line - Pamela Clare Page 0,14
she’d grabbed his hand.
Hva’ fanden? What the fuck?
He sat back, irritated with himself. “You should have said something.”
“I’m sorry. I thought it was just … low air pressure. I didn’t know.”
She’s never done this before, remember?
She looked up at him, clearly worried. “What about you? You need oxygen, too.”
“I’ll be fine for a little while. Jones and Segal are trying to fix the problem.”
If they couldn’t find the cause, they would have to share O2.
“What were we talking about? You were telling me something.”
“You asked about my time with the Huntsman Corps in Afghanistan.”
“Yes. Right. I remember. Did you see combat?”
“Our job was to go after high-value al Qaeda and Taliban targets, which meant we got into a lot of firefights.”
“That sounds scary.” She seemed more alert now.
“Fear comes from not knowing. Training offsets fear. If you know how to react and have confidence in yourself and your comrades, there’s less room for fear.”
Of course, terrible things still happened. They’d lost men on his last deployment, good soldiers blown apart by an IED. But Samantha didn’t need to hear about that—or how far he’d gone to avenge his friends.
“I can’t imagine having people shooting at me.”
“I can’t imagine working with a giant telescope. I’d be afraid I’d break it.”
She looked at him as if he were crazy. “If you know what to do, it’s not scary.”
“Exactly.” He couldn’t help but grin.
She’d made his point for him.
Her eyes crinkled, her smile hidden behind her mask. “I see what you did there.”
Jones and Segal made their way back to the front.
“It was a bad regulator. We found a spare.” Segal sat, buckled in, put on his mask.
Jones did the same. “It should be working now.”
Thor took Samantha’s mask for himself, letting her keep his. “If you feel tingling, dizziness, confusion—anything at all—tell me right away. You’re essential personnel on this mission. We need you to be clear-headed.”
“Right.” She raised her seatback upright once more. “Thanks—to all of you.”
Jones turned, looked back at her, a smile on his face. “That’s why we’re here. Our only job is to get you safely in and out.”
“Is that what private security companies do—keep people safe?”
That wasn’t the whole story, but close enough.
“We’re not hired to fight, if that’s what you’re wondering.” He saw on her face that’s exactly what she’d wanted to know. “If the person we’re protecting is attacked, we fight back. Most of the time, we act as a security team for traveling CEOs and government officials, though we helped in a hostage rescue recently.”
“I’m sorry I called you mercenaries. Do people ever shoot at you?”
“Oh, hell, yes.” Jones chuckled. “I took a round to the chest in Mazar-e-Sharif.”
Segal cracked open a bottle of water. “A lot of Cobra boys got hit on that one.”
That operation had happened shortly before Thor joined the company. But this conversation wasn’t helping Samantha. “There won’t be any bullets flying when we land. The cold is the only real threat to us on this operation.”
While Thor answered Samantha’s questions about the selection process for Sirius, Jones and Segal drifted into a discussion about the movie The Thing and the possibility of finding space aliens or dinosaurs frozen in the Antarctic ice.
Samantha stared at Thor. “Only six guys make the cut each year?”
“That’s only if they can find six guys who qualify.” Thor would forever be grateful that he’d made it. He wasn’t sure where he’d be otherwise. Two years on the ice had helped him put Afghanistan behind him. It had saved him. “The year I joined, only five men made it. The last was cut at the end after losing his temper.”
“That’s really strict.”
“When you’re out on the ice for four months at a time with one other person and a team of sled dogs, you can’t afford to be emotional. They only take people who can keep their heads in a crisis.”
“You must be very level-headed.”
He was—most of the time.
Jones pivoted in his seat. “This dude is ice cold. You’re talking to the great-great-grandson of a god. He’s a direct descendant of Odin, you know. That’s what the official Danish genealogical records say. I’ve seen the PDF.”
“Odin? The Norse god?” Samantha looked up at Thor.
“Yes. Obviously, it’s not true.”
“Ask him about the time he denned with a mama polar bear, because that’s real.”
Thor laughed at the shock in Samantha’s eyes. “He’s exaggerating. I—”
The pilot’s voice cut him off. “I just got a report that a plane lifted off from Vostok a short time ago. Radar shows