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  If anything went bad and Bethany Anne was going to be seen or had been seen, the guys would pop the teeth in and wear the contacts. He handed Pete a shoulder holster and the 9mm Glock the team used as one of their core choices. Pete took each with a little reverence and suited up. Finally, John pulled a black team t-shirt that went over the vest and a linen suit jacket to help hide the pistol. Not that the suit jacket hid it super well, but it was better than nothing. All of them had carrying licenses.

  John looked over at Bethany Anne and nodded once. Bethany Anne winked with the eye that Pete couldn’t see and watched John get in the car and drive off. She knew he would probably drive around the corner and watch through the brush. What Pete understood was that Bethany Anne’s security was now his responsibility.

  It wouldn’t be much of a trip. She wanted to talk with her air and ground team and she wanted to fly in Shelly. The fact that it would be hard for anyone to hear them was a huge plus. She called and told Bobcat to grab William, Shelly and to plan on flying out over the water for up to a couple of hours. She had barely had the request out of her mouth before Bobcat was issuing orders and telling her that they would be there ‘very shortly if not faster’.

  He really loved flying that chopper.

  Sure enough, she could hear the black hawk coming in before she saw anything. Pete caught it a few seconds later. His Were hearing was pretty damn good. They waiting until the Black Hawk was down before William stepped out to give her a hand in and then he got back on board and Pete was the last on board.

  Pete, she reasoned, was coming along alright.

  Bobcat didn’t wait around, he took off and headed over the park before heading out over the water. No need to get Bethany Anne’s neighbors upset enough to fabricate more stories about her eccentricity.

  She wasn’t bothered with rumors. Whatever they made up couldn’t possibly be a better story than the truth.

  She loved flying. If she had been granted one super power, it would have been flight.

  The four of them wore the flight headphones which allowed talk and reduced the craft’s noise. Shelly was purring even better than the last time. She had taken the second seat up front and looked over her shoulder at William, “She sounds great! How did the engine fit go?”

  William smiled behind her, “Shelly’s good with these new engines. Just likes her engines like she likes her men…” William shut his mouth so quick Bethany Anne heard his teeth click. He got a little white in the face. He was used to being a crass mechanic, not the aeronautical engineer to a Vampire Business Mogul. If she decided to ‘fire him’, he would probably just be pushed out the helicopter and his body lost to the waves below.

  “I’m sorry William, did I miss the rest of that comment? Hard, beefy, lean and mean?” She smiled at William’s obvious discomfort. Not this again! She couldn’t get the best out of her team when they weren’t comfortable around her. She spoke up.

  “Stop me if you’ve heard this one. A vampire bat flies back into his cave after a big night…he has blood all over his face. Perches himself on the roof to try and get some rest. But before too long the other bats smell the blood, and start to gather around him. They ask feverishly where he got the blood from. Knowing that they will not let up till he tells them ‘OK, follow me!’. He flies out of the cave, across a valley, over a river into a dark forest. Deep in the forest he stops, all the other bats gather round in an excited frenzy. ‘OK’, says the bat, ‘see that big oak tree over there?’. ’Yeah, yeah’ reply the other bats, drooling in anticipation. ’Well I fucking didn’t!’”.

  Bobcat busted out laughing and she heard Pete snickering behind her. William smiled and his face was a little less red now. Bobcat could see Bethany Anne’s concerned face looking behind him and guessed what was going on so he started the next joke. By the time Pete finished the next one the whole chopper was laughing and smiling.

  “Ok, as much as I like jokes, we need to have a small meeting on the state of our equipment. How are the SUV’s doing William?”

  By now, he had forgotten his earlier slip and could almost deal with Bethany Anne as just another person so long as he didn’t look her in the face. Beauty did have a way of making his mouth want to stop working properly. He took out a notebook he kept with him to write down notes and decided to review them as he spoke. “We now have five purchased and all of them have been checked out. Two are out for upgrades to the glass, engines and suspension. These will become your rides.”

  “Wait a minute, what are you guys doing for the other three?”

  Bobcat spoke up, “I’ll take that one. At the moment, the other three are getting the engines but only partial on the glass. If the team needs to roll down the windows for firing while driving, we can’t full up armor them. Well, that’s not true. The guys over at Texas Armoring can do it, but they are so booked it’s at least three to six months in the queue right now.”

  Bethany Anne considered that. She had no problem throwing money after a problem to get it expedited, but she wasn’t aware of any reasons that they needed to have anything done beyond what Bobcat had planned right now. The whole point of the meeting was to start the process on how these decisions were going to get made. “Ok, I’m good with that. However; check with Texas Armoring. I really liked the ride we had up in New York. We might as well put three on order for the future. See if they can give us a couple of windows that allow the team to shoot out of. Well, don’t be so crass as that when you explain it. I don’t want to give them the idea we drive around in running gun battles all of the time.”

  “But your expecting it?”

  She nodded from the front seat, “Yeah, I’m expecting it. I’m not going to be able to not piss off some powerful people, so they are going to attack. We need to have protection when we run into an ambush and superior firepower is our response. Which is the reason for this flight.” She turned back around to William.

  “William, what’s it going to take to upgrade Shelly to be able to slap some sense into a target before the team gets there?”

  He thought about that for a second, “Well, there are some conversion kits Sikorsky puts out for these Black Hawks. They tend to call them Battlehawks. Colombia has a version they call the S70 - ‘Arpia III’ that have rockets and forward firing gun pods. That’s the level 1 kits, they don’t require as much modification to the bird. There is a level II and Level III kit. I’ve printed the level II specifications from a website online. Hold on.”

  William grabbed a sheet that had been folded into quarters from his back pocket and opened it up. He had found the specs on the defense industry daily website.

  “Here we go: The Level II kit would add guided weapons, including optical and laser guided anti-armor missiles like TOW, Spike, and Hellfire, and emerging laser-guided rockets. The baseline under consideration would mount 12.7mm/.50 caliber gatling guns on the inboard pylon pair, and either missiles or a 19-rocket launcher on the outboard pylons. This will include laser-guided missiles and rockets, and combat optics are upgraded accordingly; the baseline configuration’s AN/AAQ-22E BRITE Star II turret or L-3 WESCAM MX-15Di include laser targeting, as well as surveillance. The armed kit will be integrated with the helicopter’s flight and weapons management systems, which will link to a day/night capable helmet-mounted display. A helicopter with this kit retains its full cabin capacity for 11 soldiers, but its ability to carry that many on a specific mission will depend on the weight of the weapons it’s fitted with. Owners may also choose to devote some of its space and weight limits to mounted and/or in-cabin ammunition and weapons, extra fuel on board, 2 door gunners with 7.62mm gatling miniguns, etc. As equipment is added, troop carrying capacity will decline.”

  He folded up the paper. “They go on to talk about a level III that was tested with the Israeli’s, but I’m not comfortable with that yet. I figure Level II is good enough and if we want better we need to look at an attack chopper, not a conversion at that time.”

  Bethany Anne could se
e his point. However; while she could get away with flying a Black Hawk around Miami, she sure as hell couldn’t get away with an attack helicopter. “Thank you, William. Bobcat you have authorization to pursue the Level II package for Shelly. Get back with me before any purchase for a final decision and rope Dan into the conversation to see if he has any operational needs. We might need this done for an Op in Central America.”

  “That’s going to be a hell of a trip for a helicopter. Not a good choice with us stopping for fuel everywhere. It will be obvious we are up to something.”

  “No worries, I’m going to go look at an Amels SEA AXE. It is a 220 ft support yacht. There’s one available, possibly, in Miami in two weeks. It’s coming over here from Europe right now. It will hold Shelly, all of our small equipment and a 40 foot speedboat, even a submarine. I have Nathan checking out the owner now, he is a sheikh or something. Probably doesn’t need money, but we will see if he has anything we can use as leverage to pry that boat from him legally.”

  The “illegally” part was understood. They weren’t the guys in the white hats. They would do what they needed to do and Bethany Anne would compensate as best she could. The story of how she purchased the house next to them got around the team. The fact that she paid half a million over the going rate made the action more palatable to some on her team. They weren’t the government who could and would just take it under imminent domain. See how well the government paid if you had any complaints when that happened.

  “Ok, next.”

  Bobcat took it from there, “The Gulfstream is in good shape. Ecaterina brought a representative for retrofitting it to your liking two days ago. I understand that the insides are getting redone?”

  Bethany Anne nodded, “Yeah, we need to consider branding here. All of the businesses are going to be officially pulled together. What we are doing is going to get noticed, so we might as well play it up. The general and Nathan are going to go through our businesses and see what we need to fix and what we need to support. The G550 is going to be the corporate jet until you get us something better. I want you to keep looking. I know the G650 is horribly backordered. See if there is something we can do with a retrofit. We need something with a corporate feel but military capabilities.”

  “Not giving me a challenge there, are you?” Bobcat smiled. He knew William was listening in rapt attention. This was the shit he lived for.

  “Well, if it isn’t doable, I didn’t buy out the right guy and hire the right engineer. What do you two say?”

  William piped in, “It’s going to be as sweet as sugar and as hot as spice. We’ll come up with a plan that will do you proud. That’s for damn sure.” Williams mind was already racing on ideas. If they took a 737 and found some …

  “Pipe down a second back there, Billy.” Bobcat reined in his engineers racing thoughts. Bethany Anne was curious.

  “Hey, that reminds me. I saw your info from Ecaterina. Is your name William or Billy? Isn’t Billy a nickname for William?”

  Bobcat laughted. “Actually, it’s all Williams fault. Back in the army, he was always telling the other mechanics that ‘they were getting their shit backwards.’ So, someone finally had enough of Williams lip and and told him his parents couldn’t even name him correctly. That Billy was a nickname for ‘William’, you weren’t supposed to name your kid the nickname up front. I don’t remember what happened to the guy, but his comment struck a cord from all of the people William had made fun of and the name stuck.

  She smiled. How ironic that your nickname was a name for your first name that was a nick name? She gave Bobcat some coordinates. “Take us over to this area, there are a few key’s I want to check out.”

  He located the coordinates and locked them in. He pulled the zoom factor up a bit to see both Europe and the eastern coast of America. Seemed to him that if you were coming from Europe, you might just go right through that area on your way to Miami. Curious, that.

  He dialed the magnification back closer and just kept his thoughts to himself. Whatever would be, would be.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  Constanta, Romania

  Stephen was acclimating to the new technology quickly. Although he had been asleep for most of the computer and Internet revolution, he had the centuries of knowledge to make the connections quickly. It felt as if he was born in the wrong time.

  At one time, he loved his books. He spent four decades collecting the fine works of the time, rare copies of books that would be worth millions today. Unfortunately, he hadn’t been very careful with a female. For once, it had nothing to do with his vampire situation and everything to do with chasing two women at one time. The first woman saw him with the second woman and by the time he got back home, all of his beloved books were ashes in his fireplace.

  He learned from that lesson never to have a lover in the same city as another. Now, with this Internet his rule would have to change again. How these men could cheat and get away with it he had no idea. He, however; was thinking that dates were good enough. Plus, there was this Tinder app he found fascinating. Ivan had caught him just going through the descriptions one after another. He almost blushed when Ivan winked and smiled knowingly at him.

  Ivan had been changing his sleeping patterns to become closer to Stephen’s. Stephen would go to sleep at about 3:00 AM and wake up at 9:00 AM. Ivan couldn’t quite match him yet, but he as going to sleep about 1:00 AM and getting up at 10:00 AM.

  The bell rang for the front door and Ivan called that he would get it. He hadn’t said hello to the person before Stephen could smell a vampire at the door.

  This was a surprise. His daughter, Gabrielle, had come to visit.

  Constanta, Romania

  Gabrielle had heard the rumors that Petre’ had been killed. Not that she was terribly upset about that. She felt Petre’ was a bad choice to have been turned and nothing the waste of space had done had changed her opinion of him.

  However; that another vampire had killed him, on purpose for his actions spoke of Michael. Gabrielle had never met the ultimate Patriarch. However; if there was any vampire-on-vampire killing for Petre’s sins, then it could travel back up to the maker which was her father, Stephen. She had traveled through and found Petre’s house a mess. It had suffered through a fire, some vandals and the weather. She had talked to the local pack who spoke of another female vampire and a Wechselbalg who had killed Petre’. She feared for her father’s safety.

  She took another train and then a taxi to get to his door. She noticed that there was recent human traffic around the outside of the house. She could smell a man and she thought some scent of her father, but it was a different scent than what she remembered.

  She heard the steps coming to the door and a voice saying that he had it.

  The door opened and a most handsome man stood there, staring at Gabrielle before shaking his head and smiling at her. A very fetching smile was on his face.

  Gabrielle returned the smile, her dimples complimenting the mischievous smile on her face.

  The man opened the door a bit more, “My goodness! To what do I owe the pleasure of a beautiful woman showing up at Stephen’s door this time of the night?” She could hear his heartbeat beating a little faster. The song of his blood and the smile on his face was so captivating. She had to smile at the flattery. It wasn’t often it came without any political machinations behind it.

  It took Gabrielle a few seconds to register that there was another man behind this one who opened the door. She reluctantly pulled her attention away from the greeter and found herself staring at a very young and dashing man.

  Her mouth just dropped open and she barely spoke out the word, “Papa?”

  The door opened wider to let Stephen step closer to Gabrielle, “My loving daughter, it has been too long!” He wrapped her up in a tight hug. Gabrielle could do nothing in her shock, she barely put her arms around this strong man who was holding her up in the air.

  He set her down and brushed the hair out of her eyes.
“Why don’t you come inside and let’s talk, you, Ivan and me!

  Ivan barely registered that they had come inside before he closed and locked up the door. In a stupor he followed the two. My God, he thought, what dimples!

  “You are fed, Gabrielle? We would not want to use my technology instructor.” Stephen turned towards Ivan who had followed the two into the living room in the back. “Gabrielle, please meet Ivan Romanov. He was sent by Bethany Anne to come and get me up to speed with technology these last few weeks.”

  Ivan stepped over to Gabrielle. She was a little short for a woman at 5’2” and had dark hair and an Olive Spanish skin color. Her dark brown eyes lit up as she took his hand. He seemed back in control now. “Pleased to meet you, Gabrielle. Would you care for anything? There is food of course and we do have some blood if you need some? I have learned that Stephen prefers it warmed a little, it would be nothing for me to do some for you.”

  Gabrielle was trying to parse all of the information in the short introduction. Ivan knew about vampires, there was blood in the house and her father was so young! This man in front of her was certainly not a new vampire. “No, thank you very much.”

  “Then I will leave you two to catch up.” Ivan turned to Stephen. “I’m going to retire a little early tonight. I’ll see you maybe before you sleep?”

  Stephen didn’t miss the covert glances his daughter was giving Ivan. It looked like these two were smitten with each other. Ah! Life was so very, very good. “Thank you, Stephen. We will catch up with the application training tomorrow?”

  Ivan smiled, “Yes. I’ll catch you up on Facebook and Twitter. You will enjoy it tremendously.” He nodded to Gabrielle with a smile and walked out of the living room towards his area of the house. Gabrielle could hear when he closed his own door. She turned around to her father.