“No,” Ryan said, drawing a look of astonishment from his chief of staff. “Marine One to Andrews, Air Force One to Manhattan, motorcade to the UN, that’s an hour altogether. Two hours on the ground, plus the return trip. Tell her I’ll be back in four hours. In the meantime, I want an update on Father Pat’s status while I’m in the air.”
“Yes, sir,” van Damm said. “We will help him, Mr. President. It’s just going to take some time.”
“You’re damn right we’ll help him,” Ryan said. “If I have to find John Clark and walk up to the prison door with a couple of ax handles and bust him out ourselves.”
“Again,” van Damm said. “Something you might not want to mention in front of the press.”
The three Asian cuties were not regulars at the Boondock Bar, but neither was Major Goodloe “Oh” Schmidt, United States Marine Corps. Tucked in off Kalakaua Avenue and within spitting distance of Waikiki Bay, Boondock’s was Schmidt’s kind of water hole. It was loud, with lots of buddies to watch his back, and an abundance of handsome women. Schmidt was relatively short and completely bald at thirty-seven years old.
Major Reed “Skeet” Black, Schmidt’s classmate from the Naval Academy, stood at the bar with him, nursing a Hefeweizen. His sandy hair was cut short. A hint of a Celtic tattoo encircled his right biceps and peeked from the sleeve of his Rogue CrossFit T-shirt. Schmidt couldn’t stand wheat beer, but it was good to see his old buddy, so he kept his feelings to himself. The men had gone to flight school together, then Hornet school in Pensacola. Both had seen action in Iraq and Afghanistan, and then run Tomahawk Chase — following cruise missiles after they’d been fired from Navy ships and submarines. Schmidt had gone back to Pensacola to pass on his knowledge to the new “studs”—what he and the other instructors called students — while Skeet Black rushed and won a coveted slot in the Navy’s Flight Demonstration Squadron, better known as the Blue Angels. Eventually, both men ended up in the seat of F-35B Lightnings, Schmidt testing Naval ordnance at China Lake — and Skeet working for the Marine Corps’ F-35 program out of the Pentagon.
They were both still flying airplanes when most pilots their age and rank were flying desks. That said something.
Two weeks earlier, they’d been temporarily assigned to the CVN 76, the USS
Like Skeet would ever divulge any secret. You had to talk to do that, and Skeet Black wasn’t much of a talker. That was fine with Schmidt, because he preferred to do most of the conversing.
The problem was that the girls who were crowded around the wicker bar seemed to be even more turned on by his silence than they were by Schmidt’s war stories.
“You fly jets?” the girl nearest Schmidt asked, grinning like a gap-toothed Lucy Liu.
“I’m a pilot, yeah,” he said, giving Lucy one of his patented grins. He’d locked in on her from the beginning. She wasn’t drop-dead beautiful, but cute like a farm girl, a little bit out of her element at the bar — exactly what Schmidt preferred. She said she and her friends were college students at U of H Manoa. All of them were from California. All of them second-generation Americans from Taiwan. Flawless English with plenty of idioms — check. He’d approached her at the bar, not the other way around — check. Not too hot — check. Schmidt had a super-cool job, but his looks were more Goose than Maverick and he knew it. All that tallied up to the girls being friendlies. In truth they were a little young for him — but he was sure as hell thinking like a young man — which was to say not thinking very much at all.
Skeet just sipped his beer and shook his head in that amused and slightly disgusted way of his.
“That must be so dangerous,” the girl said, clicking her glass against his. “What kind of plane?”
“The fast kind,” Schmidt said, grinning again.
“Have you ever had to punch out?”
Schmidt took a drink of his second Jack and Coke of the evening. He always stopped at two before switching to beer. “You mean eject? Hell, no. I get on something to ride it, I stay on for the duration.”
Gap-toothed Lucy grinned coyly at that. “You must go all over the world.”
He gave a humble nod. “We see some cool stuff.”
She moved closer, shoulder to shoulder, pushing him sideways a little. “Like, what do you see?”
“Stars, ocean, people who want to kill us.”
“Do you ever have to fly at night?” one of the other girls asked. “I think that would be a deal-breaker for me.”
“It’s not bad at all,” Schmidt said. “The ship leaves a glowing trail behind it. Kinda beautiful, to be honest.”
She touched his chest with the tip of her index finger, running it down a couple of inches. “How’d you get your nickname? ‘Oh’?”
