And trotting through the doorway onto the galley carpet, his massive golden head held high, his amber eyes scanning Tyler’s throat with silent, predatory discipline…
Was Barnaby.
An eighty-pound retired military working dog.
A Belgian Malinois whose dark muzzle bore the jagged white scars of combat operations across sixty miles of subterranean bedrock.
Barnaby trotted straight across the galley, stopped directly beside Mason, sat squarely upon his haunches in textbook mechanical symmetry, and let out a soft, contented sigh as his heavy golden tail gave one single, definitive thump against the floorboards:
thump.
Mason reached down with both hands, his face burying into the thick golden fur:
“Barnaby…”
Mason whispered, his small shoulders relaxing for the first time in two hours: “Mommy brought Uncle David’s doggie.”
Vice Admiral David Mercer stepped to the center of the forward galley.
The seventy-four-year-old four-star Admiral snapped his polished leather bridge shoes together with an audible CRACK against the floorboards, looked at the trembling airline captain groveling in the aisle, turned forty-five degrees toward me, and brought his white-gloved right hand up to an unyielding, razor-sharp military salute:
