Arctic Fire (2 page)

“You’re incredible,” she whispered as she turned to go.

He watched her walk away sexily, reliving their moment. He loved her caramel skin; those full lips; the erotic gleam flashing in
those dark, exotic eyes; the way her long black hair shimmered in the sun; and that amazing passion she so naturally exuded. He’d been taken by all of it many times—for a night.

Regret rose in his expression when he thought about how Lisa had been the only one to ever really touch his heart, but how he hadn’t delivered on his promise to marry her. How that bothered him…but not enough to make it right, because here he was wanting this woman.

But Jack was taking care of Lisa. He was making it right, at least for now. Troy pictured Jack knocking on Lisa’s apartment door back in New York and holding the baby in that nervous way, and he almost smiled. Jack was the best brother anyone could have, even if he wasn’t blood.

Troy’s regret faded quickly as he strained to catch one more look at the Spanish angel before she disappeared into the crowd.

Then his gaze flashed to her father and uncle. They knew what he was thinking, and he knew how much they hated it…but to hell with them. They were trying to get him killed.

“Go on, gringo,” her uncle muttered gruffly as he pulled the gate open just enough for Troy to pass through. The people hanging on the fence began shouting and screaming in anticipation as soon as he did. “Get in there.”

Troy handed the bouquet to a little girl in a tattered dress who was standing by the gate. Then he patted her gently on her small head and stalked into the ring with just the rusty sword at his side.

Troy Jensen was only twenty-eight years old, but he’d already done more than most people would in a lifetime. He’d conquered the Seven Summits by climbing the tallest mountain on every continent, including Everest. He’d circumnavigated the globe in a sailboat, alone, twice. He’d slipped into remote areas of Russia and Mongolia to fly-fish for taimen—the world’s largest and rarest trout—risking lengthy prison sentences by illegally crossing
several remote borders. And now he was entering this makeshift ring in the slums of Nuevo Laredo to fight a frothing, wild-eyed bull in front of several hundred bloodthirsty spectators—all of whom, he figured, were betting on the bull.

Back home in Connecticut, people were whispering that he was obsessed with the edge, that maybe he even had a death wish.

So Troy knew it had come as no surprise to anyone when he’d called a week ago to tell his mother, Cheryl, that he wasn’t coming to Greenwich next month for Thanksgiving because he’d joined the crew of an Alaskan crab boat. She was the
Arctic Fire
, and she was sailing out of Dutch Harbor for the season. The tiny port lay west of mainland Alaska on the Aleutian Islands, which stretched across the Bering Sea toward Asia like a lion’s tail.

Dutch Harbor was little more than an isolated outpost. It was one of those glaring examples of why the global positioning system had been invented. Still, every autumn it served as the starting gate for the most prolific crab hunt in the world.

Troy was looking forward to hunting king crab on the Bering Sea. It was the deadliest job on earth, and it would be another box he could check on his daredevil list. But first he wanted that Spanish angel’s kiss…and everything else that went with it.

He gestured to the massive midnight-black bull as it snorted furiously and tore at the bone-dry soil with its hoof. “Bring it on!” he shouted to the animal as the crowd roared. “Show me what you got!”

And it did. It rushed him as soon as he yelled to it, picking up speed fast for such a huge animal.

Troy dodged the long, sharp horns as the beast thundered by. But his expression turned steely as a cloud of dust swirled past an instant later. Plunging the rusty blade into the bull’s neck with a kill thrust was going to be harder than he’d anticipated.

But that was fine, he told himself as he watched it wildly shake its head and turn to charge again. He didn’t like easy; he
never had. Nothing easy was really worth fighting for. His father, Bill, had taught him that a long time ago.

As the bull tore at the ground again, Troy noticed a man hanging on the fence of the small ring. The man was trying hard to blend into the crowd around him, but he couldn’t. Everything about him looked authentic—except his teeth. They were too straight and too white. It was a tiny disparity hanging along that crowded fence, but Troy had been trained to pick up on tiny disparities.

He nodded subtly to the man, who nodded subtly back from behind his sunglasses.

Troy’s eyes flickered back to the bull, which was starting its second charge. That man hanging on the fence could turn out to be so much more dangerous than this bull. The animal’s agenda was obvious, and its actions were reasonably predictable. But the man on the fence could turn out to be a wolf hiding inside a suit of soft sheep’s wool. He might say all the right things when they met later, but he might not mean any of them.

Troy was going outside the chain of command, which was strictly forbidden. But he was convinced that Red Fox One had gone insane, so he believed he had no choice. He believed he had to ignore his orders because the country had to come first no matter what. Those were his father’s words too. And the orders from Red Fox One clearly did not put the country first. They were crazy orders from a madman who could not be obeyed.

One of the bull’s horns nicked Troy’s chest as the animal blew past again. It tore his shirt wide open and drew a long, thin swath of blood, much to the crowd’s delight. He’d been thinking about those orders from Red Fox One. And he’d been trying to decide whether or not to trust the man who was hanging on the fence. Those distractions had nearly cost him his life.

“Come on, Toro,” he muttered as he blocked out everything around him the way he’d been trained to do. So it became just the
bull and him, and all other sights and sounds faded to nothing. “Come on, you bastard!”

“Tri-State Securities,” Jack Jensen belted out angrily into the phone above the bedlam of the trading floor.

He was in a terrible mood. In the last ten minutes his bond portfolio had gone down over a hundred grand. He was short on a few big positions, and out of nowhere the Fed had flooded the financial system with cash. Bond prices were up across the board as interest rates plunged, and he’d been forced to bend over and grab his ankles while the situation unfolded on him out of nowhere. Now it was just a question of when to stand up and where to run.

“What do you want?” he demanded sullenly. Too late he recognized the caller’s number.

“To remind you about this afternoon, son,” came the gruff response.

Jack took a measured breath. He’d been hoping like hell Bill had forgotten about what was on tap for later. “Yeah, OK.” But that had been a pipe dream. Bill Jensen never forgot about anything.

“Three o’clock at the house. That leaves us two hours to get to the airport and get prepped.”

“I’ll be there,” Jack agreed grudgingly, worried that Bill might hear the dread creeping into his voice.

“Wheels up at five. That way we’ve got plenty of daylight left.”

“Yeah, yeah,” Jack mumbled, eyeing a pretty blonde woman on the equity desk who was shouting orders over the bulkhead at her trader.

He wanted to ask her out, but she was from a well-heeled Greenwich family and that could prove risky. She might find out that he hadn’t actually been born with a silver spoon in his
mouth. That the spoon had slipped past his gums a few months later. She might consider him an imposter at that point, and that would be a nightmare.

“Five o’clock, I guess.”

“Don’t make it sound like your execution, Jack.” Bill chuckled. “There’s nothing to worry about. It’s a daylight tandem jump, for Christ’s sake. You’ll be hooked to the instructor. You’ll be as safe as a baby kangaroo in its mother’s pouch. All you’ve got to do is enjoy the ride down. The instructor does all the work.”

Bill had definitely heard his fear. “Yeah, sure.” And he was enjoying it.

“Next month you’re doing a night solo with me.”

“The hell I am.”

Bill laughed. “Just get to the house by three.”

“I’ll be there already.”

“You better post, son.”

“
OK
. Look, I gotta take this call.”

Jack hung up abruptly, then leaned back and rubbed his eyes. There was no other call coming in. He just didn’t want to talk to the old man anymore. He hated to think about being hurled out of a perfectly good airplane fifteen thousand feet above the ground, even if the instructor was going to do all the work on the way down. Heights scared the hell out of him.

“Was that your dad?” Hunter Smith asked.

Hunter and Jack sat next to each other on the Tri-State trading floor. They’d prepped together, joined the same fraternity at Denison, and then become bond traders in New York City after graduation. They’d been best friends for a long time.

“Yeah, that was Bill,” Jack muttered. “Why the hell did I pick up the damn phone?”

“It wouldn’t have mattered if you hadn’t. He still would have found you.”

Jack managed a wry grin. “You’re right, Hunt. He probably would have sent his marines over here if I hadn’t answered. He’s gonna make me jump out of the plane one way or the other today, even if it kills him.”

“And the irony is
you’ll
be the one who gets killed.”

“Thanks for reminding me.”

“Why do you think he wants to get you up in the sky so badly?” Hunter asked, grinning.

Jack winced as he checked one of the four computer screens staring back at him from the bulkhead. Now he was down over
two
hundred grand. It was wild how fast Wall Street could slam you. “He likes seeing me scared out of my mind.” Thankfully, his portfolio was still up over four million bucks for the year. “It gets him off, especially when he knows he’s the one who’s scaring me.”

“Maybe he’s just trying to build a bridge between you two after all this time,” Hunter suggested. “It makes sense.”

“That’s not it. He couldn’t care less about building a bridge between us. He told me he’s having the whole thing recorded.”

“People always do that when they skydive. What’s the big deal?”

“He’s gonna grab that CD right after we land, pop it in the TV in his den as soon as he gets home, and laugh his ass off while he watches me scream bloody murder all the way down.” Jack shook his head. “Then he’ll show it to all his blue-blood buddies this weekend so they can see what a coward I am at fifteen thousand feet and get a good laugh too.”

Hunter shook his head. “You’re being too hard on him.”

“Bullshit.” Jack stared at the blinking screens in front of him. It was time to stop the bleeding. He wasn’t risking any more of that four million bucks of profit he’d killed himself making all year for Tri-State. “I’m not being hard enough on him.”

“Come on, Jack. It’s not that he wants to see you scared.”

“You know, you’re right, Hunt.” As he dialed a trader who could save his ass, it occurred to Jack that he was jumping from this bloodbath the same way he’d be jumping from the plane later on: panic-stricken. Hopefully he’d make out better then. “It’s not that.”

“Good man,” Hunter said encouragingly. “Now you’re getting somewhere.”

“It’s that he likes thinking Troy’s a better man than me,” Jack muttered softly enough that Hunter wouldn’t hear. “He loves Troy and he hates me. It’s that simple.”