“A Corvette?” Flynn asked, surprised.

She nodded. “There was this oil company exec who wound up being transferred from Houston to Prudhoe Bay. Seems he couldn’t bear to leave his baby behind. Or even wait for it to be shipped by sea.” She shook her head in regret. “Man, I hate to think about what that beautiful car looked like after its first winter up here.”

“Weren’t you tempted to ‘lose it’ in transit?” he asked mischievously. “Just to save such a nice sports car from getting all banged-up and rusty, I mean.”

“Oh hell yes!” Van Horn smiled to show she wasn’t serious. “The only trouble was I couldn’t quite figure out how to pull the Corvette off our plane without anyone noticing.”

Flynn nodded slowly. “I see. So essentially you’re telling me that you’re a wannabe air pirate.”

Van Horn leaned back in the booth and stared at Flynn appraisingly. “I’m a woman with many talents.”

For just a moment, he envisioned the curvy Laura Van Horn in skintight leather leaning against a red Corvette. His pants suddenly felt too tight and he realized he really had been stuck out here in the icy boonies for way too long. “Uh, yeah,” he said hoarsely. “Sure.” He was grateful that there was a table between them as he tried to change the image in his mind.

Van Horn took pity on him and changed the subject again. “So what’s the deal with the guys in this security unit of yours? I know the military’s gone all gung-ho on ‘jointness’ these days, but that’s a pretty wild grab-bag assortment you’ve got there—Army, Air Force, and Army National Guard, right?”

Glad to be able to focus on work, he nodded. “I keep hoping to snag a Marine, a Coastie, and someone from the Space Force so I can make a full set.” He shrugged. “No joy there, yet.”

“And are they as good at causing trouble as you are?” she asked curiously, smiling slightly to take the sting away.

Flynn laughed. “Like you wouldn’t believe!” And then, before he knew it, he found himself telling her funny stories about the assortment of military-grade-A oddballs, misfits, and overall “square peg in a round hole” types he’d found himself saddled with the day they all flew into Barter Island. Everything from M-Squared’s elaborate pranks that almost always backfired on him to Private Vucovich’s failed effort to set up an illicit moonshine still in one of the radar station’s unused storage sheds. “Fortunately, no one was hurt when it exploded,” he finished. “But Vucovich did find himself spending a couple of very cold and very lonely hours picking half-fermented potato slices out of the snow.”

“Oh, holy crap,” Van Horn choked. She dabbed at the tears of laughter in her eyes. “I sure wish I’d been there to see his face when that contraption blew sky-high!”

“It was truly a sight to behold,” Flynn admitted. “It was all there, everything from the agony of defeat to the thrill of seeing a ten-foot high ball of flame billow above the tundra, and knowing it was all his doing.”