“We ’bout ready to get this thing airborne?” he asked, his voice breathless and light, trying to hide the urgency in it. “Those bullets are getting a little too close for comfort.”

“Starting the engines now,” Sam replied, tight-lipped, as her fingers manipulated the switches and first one engine, then the other coughed and fired, shaking the plane with their powerful vibrations. Still going through preparations for takeoff, she spared Tony a brief glance. “Buckle up if you’re staying, pal.”

“Right…” He pulled his harness tight and squirmed himself into the seat, then looked up and through the windshield. “Uh…Captain?”

“Yeah?” Sam said absently, her eyes on the oil pressure gauge. Then, something in Tony’s voice got through to her and she looked up, too. Her heart seemed to freeze in her chest.

The rain had stopped, as if someone had turned off a faucet. And she could see, far down the landing strip, a dozen or so men wearing camouflage pants, running, zigzagging toward the plane, firing automatic rifles as they came.

She swore, one sharp, succinct word, as something-a mortar shell or grenade-exploded in the flooded field near the men, sending geysers of muddy water into the air.

“Uh…might want to get this thing in the air while we’ve still got a runway,” Tony muttered, sounding strangled.

“Can’t get the rpm’s up ’til I’ve got oil pressure,” she said grimly, as her heart pounded and her eyes flicked between the gauges and the advancing gunmen. Al-Rami’s men, she assumed, and those incoming shells must be the government’s troops. If even one of them hit its target, the runway would be cut in two. She needed a thousand meters of it for takeoff.

“Come on…come on…” With agonizing slowness, the oil and fuel pressure and temperature readings came into line. Sam’s eyes burned in their sockets as she watched them. Her neck muscles felt like wire. The plane shook and bucked like a tethered bronc as the rpm’s rose…

Then… “Okay!” The word gusted from her on an exhalation. “Here we go…”

With her teeth tightly clenched and her right hand light and steady on the controls, she sent the plane forward, straight toward the oncoming gunmen. She didn’t even wince when she heard bullets clang into the plane’s metal skin, just tightened her jaw, held the plane steady on course and increased speed…and knew a moment’s sheer jubilation as the men on the runway in front of her broke and scattered like chickens, some diving head-first into the muddy water alongside the strip.

“Yee-haw!” Tony crowed, but Sam was too busy, now, for celebrations. Her eyes were on the approaching jungle…coming up fast…coming closer…closer. Her hand was on the throttle…in-creasing speed…faster…faster. And then…at last…Lift off!

She felt her body press into her seat and her heart shoot through the roof of her mouth as the DC-3’s nose swept up and over the treetops. It climbed steadily toward the lowering gray clouds, and the growl of the two big engines was the most beautiful sound she’d ever heard. Then they were in the clouds, swathed in filmy gray-white mist…bucking with the turbulence…then above them, where the air was smooth and the sun was shining.

As the warmth and brilliance of it sliced through the windshield, nearly blinding her, Sam eased back in her seat and drew a careful breath. She allowed herself, now, to look over at Tony, and saw that he’d put his head back against his seat, too, and that his eyes were closed. His bulldog face looked bunched and tense, as if his skin held in emotions almost too turbulent to contain.

“Hey-you can go tell Cory we made it,” she said softly, and a smile burst across her face like a sunrise.

She was drifting with the drone of the DC-3’s engines, allowing her mind the luxury of numbness, although her body was still chilled and quivering with adrenaline hangover, when Tony slipped back into the copilot’s seat a short time later.

Pulling herself together reluctantly, she shifted and threw him a glance, and though she cleared her throat, her voice was gruff when she asked, “How’s everybody doin’ back there?”

“Hangin’ in,” Tony said, remembering without being told to fasten his seat belt. “Esther’s asleep. Hal looks like he is, and somebody just forgot to tell him to close his eyes.”

“Cory?” The word came with a little hitch in her breathing she couldn’t control.

He shrugged and lowered his voice just a bit. “Hard to say. I know he’s gotta be hurting. Lost an awful lot of blood. That tourniquet’s been on there a long time, too-that can’t be good, but he’d probably bleed to death if we loosen it up.” He let out a breath. “He says he’s doin’ okay, but…you can’t always tell what’s goin’ on with him.”

“Tell me about it,” Sam said softly. She felt weighed down, suddenly: exhausted, worn-out, depressed. Where only a short while ago she’d been soaring on waves of euphoria, now she wallowed in troughs of futility and despair. And there was frustration with herself and anger, too, because depressed and weighed down wasn’t who Samantha June Bauer was, and for sure not the way she ever wanted to be.

After a long silence, during which her pride wrestled with an unaccustomed and overwhelming need to talk to someone, she drew a deep breath and said, “Tony?” And then, in a voice edgy and tense with all she was feeling, including the anger: “What am I gonna do?”

“You’re doin’ it, all you can do, anyway. Getting him to a hospital the fastest-”

She shook that off with an impatient gesture. “I mean about us. Cory and me.”

After a cautious pause and an uneasy glance, Tony shrugged. “You love him. He loves you. I don’t see the problem.”

“Yeah, but…” She let out a short, sharp breath, fighting to keep her voice steady. “All of this-none of this is real. All our problems-everything that was wrong before-it’s all still there. Nothing’s changed, not really.”

There was another pause while Tony appeared to be thinking it over. Then he said, “Well, I know one thing you can’t do.”

Sam threw him a hopeful look. “What’s that?”

“Live without each other.”

Damn. In spite of all her efforts, the tears she’d been fighting so hard welled up anyway. She blinked them furiously away before they could fall. “Yeah, but unfortunately I still have a career and a…a lifestyle I really love, and that isn’t what he wants. And he still won’t share himself with me emotionally, and that’s not the kind of relationship I want. Okay? So…I’m asking you-his best friend. What do I do?”

He shifted in his seat, clearly uncomfortable with the role of counselor she’d thrust upon him. “Like I said. I think you guys need to talk.”

Too upset to let him off the hook, frustrated almost beyond her ability to control it, Sam growled, “Yeah, but he won’t. Don’t you understand? Not about himself, not the things that matter. And I don’t know how to make him, Tony.”

He was quiet for a long time. Then, looking straight ahead at the hazy horizon, he said slowly, “Yeah, but…I think you’re gonna have to.”

“What if I can’t?” she whispered, wretched and in despair.

“You need to get him to tell you about his parents.”

Something in his voice made her look over at him. “He told me they died.”

He turned his head, and his exotic whiskey-gold eyes looked straight into hers-briefly, before he turned back to the horizon again. “Get him to tell you how they died. Make him.”

She stared at his profile, and it was like something carved in the side of a mountain. Quivering with frustration and dawning realization, she said slowly, “You know, don’t you? You told me you didn’t, but that’s not true. You did look it up. You know what happened. Oh, God. Tony-” she clutched his arm and it came in a rush “-please tell me, please, it’s important, I have to know, please.”

He shook his head, his jaw implacable, unyielding as stone. “Yeah, you do, but like I told you-it’s his story. He’s the one who needs to tell it.” He unbuckled himself and eased out of the seat, looming over her briefly as he stood, and again, for one moment his eyes arrowed straight into hers. “You have to make him tell it, Sam.”

The dream came gently, like a parent creeping in to kiss a sleeping child good-night.

It’s my mother’s face bending over me, laughing and beautiful…her hands are cool as she brushes my cheek…then she hugs me, and her cheek is smooth and soft, and she smells like flowers and sunshine.

I feel my father’s shoulder, hard and bony under my head…his breath tickles my forehead and I giggle as his voice growls deep inside his chest: “And I’ll huff and I’ll puff and I’ll BLOW your house down!”

Then, as it always did, in his dream everything turned dark. All around him was darkness, and his mother’s face swam toward him and then retreated…drifted around and came back, then floated away again, always out of reach, bobbing like a cork on the ocean.

She’s not laughing now, but she’s speaking, saying something to me, and her eyes look scared so I know it’s something important, something urgent, but I can’t hear what it is because of the noise…

There’s a loud and terrible noise, a howling sound and a banging, banging, banging…someone’s pounding on the door, and I hear a roaring, growling voice saying, “I’ll huff and I’ll puff and I’ll BLOW your house down!” And I don’t want to open the door, because I know something terrible is on the other side. It’s the Big Bad Wolf, and he’s pounding, pounding, pounding on the door and yelling at me to open it, and I know I must not open it, but I do anyway.

And the Big Bad Wolf has my father’s face.

Cory fought his way free of the dream, clawing his way toward consciousness by sheer will, and woke chilled, sweating, and desperately nauseated. He felt hands on his shoulders, and clutching at one of them, managed to utter one word: “Sick…”