A flight attendant stopped at her side in the aisle. “Captain West?”
Amanda looked up at her.
“The captain says for you to tune in to frequency 129.8 on your headset.”
“Thanks.” She changed the frequency and waited.
“Captain West?” It was Secretary Reynolds. “Where’s Cross?”
“I don’t yet know, sir.” Amanda had been racking her brain for hours, but couldn’t imagine where the hell Kunz would put Mark.
“You have to find him.”
Amanda’s heart raced. “I intend to, sir.” For personal and professional reasons. She knew what was coming and, God, but she didn’t want to hear it.
“He’s too skilled, his expertise and knowledge too valuable to be loose and in enemy hands.”
Dread filled Amanda’s stomach. But it didn’t stop the inevitable.
“Damn it, I hate this,” the secretary grumbled.
He hated it? She was about to lose it. Yet, here it came.
“Extricate or eliminate him, Captain West.”
The order every operative with high-level security clearances knows is standard operating procedure in the interests of national security, but prays never to hear.
She had to talk around a fist of bitterness stuck in her throat. “Yes, sir.” She swallowed hard, prayed harder that she wouldn’t be put in the position of having to eliminate Mark. Her stomach flopped over and a vinegary taste of rebellion flooded her throat to her mouth. The idea alone had her nau-
seated and coming unglued. God help her, even in the case of national security she wasn’t sure she could kill him.
“Hold on, Amanda,” Secretary Reynolds said. “You’ve got a patch coming through from tactical. I’m monitoring.”
Lieutenant Douglas. She stiffened. “Yes, sir.”
“Captain West?”
“Go ahead, Lieutenant.”
“We have a visual confirmation on a corpse who appears to be Thomas Kunz.”
“Great.”
“No, ma’am, not so great,” Douglas said. “The field surgeon’s pulled a quick exam. This Kunz has evidence of a number of plastic surgeries, including having the shafts of his leg bones shortened. He’s a double, ma’am.”
It figured, damn it. “What about detainees or other doubles?”
“Sensors picked up four detainees buried in a box on the grounds. We got them out and they’re dehydrated and hungry but otherwise unharmed. No doubles have been retrieved.”
Buried in a box? Hope lighted in her. “Was one of the detainees Captain Cross?”
“No, ma’am. I’m sorry.”
Disappointment rippled through her and settled in. “Anything else to report?”
“Intel is going to remain light, ma’am. Every scrap of paper in the compound has been burned. A team’s seeing if there’s anything they can recover now.”
“Thanks, Lieutenant. Keep me posted.”
“Yes, ma’am.” Douglas signed off.
Secretary Reynolds spoke up. “You have your orders, Captain.”
Mark wasn’t there. She had orders to extricate or eliminate him. Panic seized her stomach.
Okay. Okay, stop. You can’t
afford this, Princess.
She’d figure out later what
this
was. Right now she had to think.
Think like Kunz.
She refused a beverage offer from the flight attendant. Amanda had met Kunz, talked with him, and had more insight on him than anyone else in the government—except maybe for Gaston. But Kunz didn’t fear Gaston. He did fear her and he hated that fear. Kunz had to get rid of her and he would use Mark as bait. Payback for injuring and killing his men, while escaping with his chopper—as he had wanted her to do. If he hadn’t, he would have nixed the plan, since he certainly knew about it courtesy of Mark’s double. Kunz would play on her emotions and use them against her to destroy her. Not just her emotions, but her fears, too. Her
fears.
He would put Mark in a situation that would somehow reflect
her
darkest fears.
She thought about it all the way back to New York, then to Washington, and even more on her way to Providence Air Force Base in Florida. Somewhere over Carolina the obvious smacked into her. She didn’t fear situations. She feared a place. Or at least Kunz thought she did.
A place he believed she wouldn’t think about until it was too late.
Suddenly certain where Mark was, she got out of her seat, rushed up to the cockpit. “I need your radio, Captain.”
“You have clearance?”
She reeled off her authorization number. “Tower Chief,” she said, then followed with her ID information. “I need an emergency secure patch to Colonel Sally Drake, action officer, S.A.S.S.” She reeled off the number, knowing it’d be relayed to the colonel at Providence in Florida.
Within two minutes, the patch was in place. “Go ahead, S.A.S.S. Higher headquarters is monitoring.”
The colonel and either General Shaw or Secretary Reynolds. Maybe both. “Request emergency landing at the near
est airport to off-load all personnel aboard. I need the aircraft to get to North Carolina immediately, ma’am.”
The pilot glowered at her as if she’d lost her mind. “Did you say you intend to commandeer my aircraft?”
“Yeah. Shut up, will you?”
Colonel Drake’s voice sounded. “Purpose?”
Amanda shuddered. “Essential to extricate-or-eliminate order issued by Secretary Reynolds, ma’am.” She would already have been notified that the target was Mark Cross.
“Scale?”
“Ten, ma’am.” Drake’s worst ranking. Honesty forced Amanda to add, “if not higher.”
“Then you need backup.”
“No, ma’am. No backup.”
Drake hesitated. “Are you sure?”
“Positive, Colonel.”
“Permission granted. Report your coordinates and estimated time of arrival as soon as possible.”
“Yes, ma’am. The captain of this aircraft opposes surrendering possession, ma’am,” Amanda said in what had to be the most colossal understatement of the year. The man glowered.
A man’s voice interceded; one Amanda recognized. “Put him on the horn.”
The captain was monitoring the conversation through his headset. “He’s on, sir.” Amanda lifted a hand.
“This is Captain Barnard Whitmore,” he said, ignoring her rolling her gaze toward heaven at his formality. “To whom am I speaking?”
“Secretary of Defense Reynolds.” He rattled off his security code, which sent Whitmore into a lathering tizzy. “Park the damn plane and turn it over to Captain West immediately. That is an order, Captain. Do you have any questions?”
His face turned green in the cockpit lights and it had noth
ing to do with the reflection of the soft glow beaming from the instrument panel. “Yes, sir. No, no questions, sir.”
“Fine.”
Colonel Drake returned to speaking. “Amanda, Thomas Kunz isn’t dead.”
“I know, ma’am. He was sighted at the Middle Eastern compound earlier today. He must have bugged out. What’s supposed to be his corpse isn’t. No idea where he is now.”
Captain Whitmore intervened, his gaze fixed on the instrument panel. “You might want to take your seat, Captain West. We’re about to land.”
Amanda signed off and returned to her seat.
“What’s up?” Kate asked.
“We’re dropping you and the detainees off at the nearest airport. Colonel Drake is arranging transportation.”
“Okay.” Kate looked at her, gauging what to say and what not to discuss. “I’m sorry about Mark.”
“He’s still alive. At the moment, anyway.”
“How do you know that?”
“Kunz wants to kill us both. Or to kill Mark and make me feel it’s my fault—because I failed to save him. Unless I’m totally off, Kunz has only one way to accomplish that.”
“How?”
“By stashing Mark in the place Kunz thinks I fear most.” It’d be his final “in your face, I won” act. Actually, it was the only sensible possibility she’d been able to think of. If she proved wrong, she would feel as if she’d killed Mark.
“Guilt is a bitch, and Kunz does love playing mind games. If Mark, God forbid, is dead, you will take it personally and, I suspect, hard.”
Amanda nodded. “So will you.”
“I love him. You’re in love with him.”
Was she? Hell, she probably was, but it might take wild horses and a syringe of Sodium Pentothal to get her to admit it.
Kate’s blue eyes went from sober to haunted, proving she had her own demons to face and fight. “Where is that? The place you fear?”
“My box.”
Bewildered, Kate frowned. “What box?”
“My tomb, Kate.”
Her mouth flattened into a grim flat line. “I’m going with you.”
“No, you’re not. He’s probably got Gaston outfitted with a satellite tracker. You have to get him disconnected and get the rest of these people back to Providence unharmed and debriefed so Special Forces can start tightening the noose on this maniac. I can handle it alone.”
“Can you? Really?”
“Kate, we’re survivors, you and me. We do what we have to do to protect total strangers. We always have.”
“True, but—”
“But nothing,” Amanda interrupted. “It’s who we are and what we do. So how much more will I be able to do for a man I’m crazy about—whether or not I want to be crazy about him?”
Kate stilled and looked deeply at Amanda. Finally, she answered. “Gauging on Drake’s one-to-ten assessment scale, I’d say about forty-seven.”
“At least forty-seven. Frankly, I’m not fond of the feelings, so I’m shielding.”
“Honey, if this is shielding, you’re hovering at the hundred mark.”
Amanda issued a frown meant to freeze out further comments and then checked her weapons. Her instincts said that if Mark was still alive inside that tomb, Kunz had no intention of letting her just walk up and dig him out.
He’d have a surprise waiting for her. No doubt about it. And if she wasn’t careful, it would be a deadly surprise.
A
lone on the C-5, Amanda put through a secure radio patch to Colonel Drake. After the initial information exchange, she asked for the location of the nearest landing strip with C-5 capability.
“It’s too far from the drop zone, Captain,” Drake said. “I’ve contacted our friends who man the zone. They recommend you use the highway.”
It was an isolated area, traffic would be minimal or nonexistent.
“If you’ll verify your ETA, we’ll have that section closed off.”
“No, ma’am. Not necessary.” Amanda adjusted the flaps, banked right twenty degrees, following the flight plan. “The area could be wired or crawling with company.”
“So you’re going in solo in a C-5. That’ll make quite an entrance, Captain.”
Drake’s disapproval was evident. “Back-dooring it, ma’am.”
“I’m sending in backup.”
“If you do, I guarantee Captain Cross will be D.O.A.” Dead on arrival got Colonel Drake’s attention in a huge way. Her husband had been D.O.A. after a home invasion three years ago where she, and not he, had been the intended target. “I know the enemy, Colonel, and in this case, it isn’t me.”
“Scale?”
“Ten, ma’am. But more manpower won’t affect the value rating or the odds for success.”
“Anticipated survival rate?”
“Fifty percent.” Amanda felt sweat bead on her neck, roll down her nape and soak her collar.
“Anything we can do to increase it?”
Amanda paused and decided to be totally candid. “Only one thing comes to mind, ma’am.”
“Name it.”
Amanda licked her lips, then said softly, “Pray.”
Black clouds drifted between Amanda and the waning moon, and the humidity hung in the air as thick as honey.
She’d landed the plane on the highway in the recommended stretch, disembarked, and disappeared into the woods. The cemetery was about two kilometers due north. Whomever Kunz had waiting for her would expect her to arrive from the drop zone. Hopefully, the shift in ingress would give her a small advantage, however short-lived.
About a quarter kilometer out, her night-vision gear failed. She removed it, checked the compass on her watch and kept moving. Without clear sight, she had to move more slowly than she liked and to rely heavily on her other senses.
Smells were potent and plentiful: earth and decaying leaves, trees and wet grass. It had rained earlier that day. Maybe Mark had been able to punch through the wall of the tomb enough to get water. But it seemed unlikely Kunz would
copy Reese’s mistake and bury an arrow with Mark to show one-upmanship.
Did Kunz collect anything he would bury with Mark?
She mentally reviewed his dossier and found the only things he collected were intelligence to black market and the lives of other people. Lives he stole and destroyed, like Harding’s and Sloan’s and the women they had loved.
Mark flooded Amanda’s thoughts.
Poor guy would be dehydrated, obsessed with wanting a drink of water. Remembering that thirst had her reaching for her canteen and taking only a small sip. When she rescued him, he would need it all, and coming from this direction, she wouldn’t pass the artesian well for a refill.
Finally, she made it to the edge of the cemetery. All was quiet. Normal night sounds: an owl’s soft hoot, crickets chirping, frogs croaking, the light wind whispering through the leaves. No scents of skin or soap or sweat or anything people-related that didn’t belong here. No unnatural visuals apparent in an intense, though unassisted-by-technology scan conducted in the dim moonlight.
The absence of signs of a trap had her edgy and hyperalert. Kunz had something in store for her here.
Something, somewhere.
Had he rigged the tomb itself? When she punched through the wall, would it detonate a bomb that would kill Mark? That would be a coup de grâce for Kunz. He would love to see Mark dead and her survive to carry the guilt for killing him the rest of her days.
Mind games.
The bastard loved them. She eased from tomb to tomb. Utter stillness surrounded her and doubt attacked. What if she was wrong? What if Mark wasn’t here at all? She’d been so sure, but he could be somewhere else, dying because she’d made a mistake.
Her stomach coiled in knots, her throat bitter and tight, she
lifted a hand and touched the brick of her tomb, let her fingertips glide over its rough surface, unsure whether to hope that she was right or pray that she wasn’t.
The mortar was wet.
A flood of emotions coursed through Amanda: relief, fear, joy, anger, confirmation, vindication and stark terror. All were intense and all simultaneous, sending supercharged adrenaline rocketing through her body, electrifying every nerve, every cell.
She pulled in three slow, even breaths and centered her emotions, then let her training kick in.
A visual inspection of the tomb netted no signs of explosives, wires or anything else that could cause lethal consequences. Remembering Kunz’s trip wires four inches below the surface at the Middle Eastern compound, she dug into the soft earth with her bare fingertips but found nothing.
Still, her instincts warned her that neither Kunz nor Reese would ever make the rescue this easy.
Unless Mark was already dead.
But her same instincts told her both of them would see to it she did the killing, if at all possible. The guilt would be a bigger burden for her to carry than just being too late. At some distant point in time, a woman could forgive herself for being too late. They would want to insure she never forgave herself, and that she never forgot what she’d done wrong.
Dropping to a crouch, she pulled her tool bag out of her gear, removed a hatchet. The blade gleamed in the moonlight.
She smelled cloves.
The hair on her neck stood on edge. Paul Reese smoked clove cigarettes. She hadn’t seen any cigarette butts on the ground around the tomb, but the scent was distinct, pungent and unmistakable.
She stood up—and a man leaped from atop the tomb, knocking her off her feet. The hatchet slipped from her grasp
and landed in the dirt with a muffled thud. He landed on top of her, nailing her shoulders to the ground. His elbow jabbed into her ribs. Her breath swooshed out on a painful groan, and before she could recover, he straddled her and pinned her arms in the dirt above her head. Her heart bouncing off her ribs and into her throat, she looked up into a face she had learned to hate. “Reese.”
“I’m going to kill you, Amanda. You’re too late to save your lover, and now I’m going to kill you and bury you with him.”
Mark couldn’t be dead. He couldn’t. Damn it, she’d dared to risk caring about him, loving him. He couldn’t be dead!
Emotions poured through her, as hot and heavy as lava. She couldn’t lock them away. Not this time. “How amorous—and typical of you, Paul.” She crimped her fingers, clawing in the dirt, seeking the hatchet, but it was too far away. Disappointment rippled through her, and she fought down a wave of panic. “But you’re a liar. I don’t believe you have the balls to go one-on-one with Mark, much less to do what it would take to kill him.”
“A .38 is a hell of an equalizer.”
“Not in a liar’s hands.”
“Stop calling me a liar. Do you hear me?” A muscle under his eye ticked. He raised a fist and punched her in the jaw. “Stop it.”
Pain exploded in the entire side of her face. Even her eye seemed to throb.
“You slept with me to get inside GRID. What does that make you?”
“Desperate to stop you before you destroyed any more lives.” She bucked and he lost his seat atop her. She twisted, slammed a foot into the back of his head at the base of his skull. His head jerked, but he’d been braced, ready for the blow, and that prevented his neck from breaking.
He rolled, caught her by the arms and seized the advantage. She fought back, doing her damnedest to reclaim it. They tumbled in the dirt, slammed fists to flesh, traded punches and jabs and kicks until both were huffing, winded and covered in sweat and blood.
Amanda couldn’t sustain hand-to-hand combat against him much longer. He was well trained, larger and stronger. More importantly, he was intimately familiar with every survival technique she’d been taught and some she’d never before seen used. The longer this played out, the greater the odds Reese would win, and she and Mark would wind up dead.
Marking her time, she backed off, parried, and finally got an opening. She stopped, dropped and rolled, snagged her hatchet and then bounced to her feet. Knowing he expected her to come at him with the hatchet, she feinted and thrust hard with a series of kicks that had him sprawled in the dirt. He hit his head on a rock and from the way he shook it, she knew he was seeing double. Before he found his balance, she had him pinned. “Where’s Kunz?”
He smiled, his mouth red-rimmed with blood. “He’s not dead, Amanda. He’ll be along after you soon.”
She’d be along after him sooner. He’d deliberately allowed her to escape with Mark’s double so he could fake his own death then disappear until the heat on him cooled and he could rise like a phoenix to press on with his slimy business of selling and stealing other people’s lives. “I asked a question and I want an answer, Reese. You can respond or wear a Mohawk. I don’t give a damn which, you sorry excuse for a human being.”
Reese laughed and groaned simultaneously. His right wrist was broken and, gauging by the gurgle in his breathing, he’d suffered a few broken ribs. “You thought you had him. He never evacuated, Amanda. He was there all the time.”
“In Texas?” She couldn’t believe it. “Do I look stupid,
Reese? The FBI has crawled over every inch of that compound. There’s nothing left to it.”
“Apparently, you’re all stupid. He isn’t
in
the compound, Amanda. He never was.” He laughed again, deeper. “He’s
under
it. None of your ace investigators looked under it. You, of all people, should have thought of that. You ran the maze of tunnels yourself in Afghanistan.”
Oh, hell. She had to warn Colonel Drake. But first, she had to secure Reese. Her legs were shaking now; she didn’t have the stamina for another round with him. Amanda stood up. “Move and I’ll kill you.” She moved to her gear to get some rope. He was going to die for hitting her, but he was going to tell her every damn thing he knew about GRID and Thomas Kunz first.
Prone on the ground, Reese eased his left hand to his waist, pulled out a snub-nosed .38 and drew down on her.
Amanda caught the flash of the metal in the moonlight, reacted instinctively, and threw the hatchet. It sank deep in the center of Paul Reese’s chest.
The gun fell harmlessly to the ground. Reese slumped forward, chest to knees, and then swayed to the side until he lay bent on the ground.
Shaking, Amanda retrieved her hatchet, checked for a pulse and felt nothing. Reese was dead.
Mark.
She returned to the tomb, hacked away at the mortar and soon punched through a small opening. “Mark? Mark, are you there?”
“Amanda?” He sounded afraid to believe.
Her throat went thick and a hitch caught in her chest. “It’s me,” she said, her voice a husky rasp. “I’m here.”
Oh, God. He was still alive. He was here and alive!
“Water.”
Remembering, again feeling that insatiable thirst, she swallowed hard. “I know. I’m hurrying.” Tears flooded her
eyes and she swung harder, faster, with renewed force. Mark was alive. “Get as far away from the hole as you can. I’m using a hatchet.”
“Don’t miss.”
She laughed through her tears, her vision blurred, her nose still stinging. “I won’t.”
Finally, the hole was large enough and she passed the canteen through to him.
“Thank God.” He snagged it, and the sounds of him chugging down water echoed.
A lump in her throat, she worked with renewed fervor. Finally, the hole was large enough and he climbed out.
When he stood on the ground before her, she stilled with the hatchet in hand and just stared at him. In an odd twist, her first thought was to wonder. Was he really Mark? Or was he another of Mark’s doubles?
Kunz had been good enough at mind games to pull off a double-switch. Of course he had been.
But had he done it with Mark?
Her nerves wired tight, she opened her mouth to investigate. Yet before she could say a word, Mark smiled and it touched his eyes. “In plain sight,” he said, then opened his arms to her.
She dropped the hatchet, stepped into his arms and curled hers around his waist, then breathed in deeply. The familiar scent of his skin filled her, melted the fear of his being anyone else, and it drained away. She smiled and hugged him hard, relieved and happy from the heart out. “In plain sight, baby,” she said, passing him back the canteen without drinking from it.
He drank deeply, then found her mouth and they kissed without restraint or pretense, ignoring the pain of bruises and battles, the dirt caking skin, the sweat and the thirst for water, taking total joy and heart in quenching their thirst for something longer-lasting and more real: the first touch of the reunion they had feared would never be.