“That’s because you’re aboard a ship.”
Miki felt him lift her hand and kiss her open palm. The brush of his mouth made muscles tighten throughout her body. “Max, whatever we did on that island—” She swallowed hard. “I just want you to know that I don’t hold you to anything. It was isolated, we were alone, and everything was upside down. People say things they don’t mean in a case like that. They do things they don’t usually do.”
She felt his hand tighten. “You’re saying that you don’t remember what we did?” His voice was harsh.
“I mean that it’s not important. I don’t want you to think you need to explain or make excuses. We’re both adults. Things happen, that’s all.”
After a long time he nodded. “Okay. If that’s what you want.”
Miki looked away. It wasn’t what she wanted, but she was determined to play this lightly, to give him all the space he needed to walk away. “Funny, I keep thinking that you were hurt. But you were hurt. I remember now. And there were other people with us. They followed you, and one of them came after me. I think something happened to my hair.”
Max gave a crooked smile. “You burned it, honey. I think everyone on board this ship has heard the story by now. You’re the hero of the hour.”
Miki felt a constriction in her chest. She loved it when he called her honey. It made her bones melt and turn sloppy. “Everybody? What kind of ship is this?”
“A Los Angeles-class U.S. submarine. We’re headed home, ETA noon tomorrow.”
Miki wondered why she didn’t feel more relieved. She was alive and healthy, sans a little blond hair, but that was a good trade-off for still being the first part.
“What’s wrong? You don’t look relieved.”
“No, it’s fine. Great, actually.” It was awful, Miki thought suddenly. She didn’t want to go home until she had this thing—whatever it was—sorted out. Was it love, lust or medical insanity? More important, did he feel the same?
Just ask him, a voice whispered.
“Max, what I told you before—it was a lie. There’s no other man, no wedding.”
“Honey, wait. I want to tell you something.”
She cut him off. “No, let me tell you first. I changed my mind. I don’t want you to forget what happened. Things are still a little spotty, but I know what happened between us was important. It felt important, maybe the most important thing in my life. And I want you to feel that, too. So I’m not releasing you.” She swallowed hard. “I never want to release you. And I’ll make you feel guilty as sin if you try to walk away from me. Now.”
Something came and went in his face. Then his eyes did that little narrowing motion, filling with dark emotion.
And he kissed her, at first gently and then hungrily. “I remember. And I don’t want to be released. You’re still sick, so you’re going to have to take it easy. There will be all kinds of questions and a few government people you need to talk to. That shrug of yours is turning out to be interesting, and they may want you to make another one, just for testing. You’ll have some experimental yarn, all you want and any kind of equipment. I know it’s a chore but—”
“Free yarn? Hey, you can have my house and my car for free yarn. Especially that fiber you had in your pack. So this would have military importance?”
“More or less.”
“Because of the way my shrug affected you?”
“More or less.” He spoke carefully. “There are things I can’t tell you, Miki. I’d rather leave it at that and not have to lie.”
She looked at him a long time and then nodded slowly. “Okay.”
“Okay? No more flurry of questions? No demands for complete disclosure?”
“I figure you’ll tell me if you can.”
“You’ve changed,” Max said quietly. “Hell, I’ve changed, too. I never thought emotions could run so deep. Maybe I couldn’t trust myself to care until now. If you give me some time, I think I can work this out, maybe find a way for us to have time to be together. That is, if you want those things.”
Her only answer was to smile slowly, circle his neck and pull him down while she kissed him, her mouth hungry and hot, holding nothing back.
She couldn’t think of a thing she wanted more.
Paradise felt like this, she thought dizzily. Rocking on a boat, locked in a kiss with a man who could give lessons in flamethrower sex.
She was going to enjoy every minute of it.
Code Name Bikini
by Roberta Helmer
CONTENTS
CHAPTER ONE
CHAPTER TWO
CHAPTER THREE
CHAPTER FOUR
CHAPTER FIVE
CHAPTER SIX
CHAPTER SEVEN
CHAPTER EIGHT
CHAPTER NINE
CHAPTER TEN
CHAPTER ELEVEN
CHAPTER TWELVE
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
CHAPTER NINETEEN
CHAPTER TWENTY
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
CHAPTER THIRTY
CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO
CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE
CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR
CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE
CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX
CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN
CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT
CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE
CHAPTER FORTY
CHAPTER FORTY-ONE
CHAPTER FORTY-TWO
EPILOGUE
CHAPTER ONE
Northern Afghanistan
Winter
DARKNESS.
Wind and death.
Trace O’Halloran didn’t move. Cold dug under his Kevlar vest as he watched the rugged road below him.
Something moved over the snow-dusted ground near his feet. Another rat.
Red eyes glowed in the faint green light of his night-vision goggles. Only rats could survive in this godforsaken mountain pass in winter.
It was Christmas Eve. Back in the States, families sang hymns and parents assembled dollhouses to surprise wide-eyed children while snow fell in the soft hush.
But here on a rugged plateau in Afghanistan, the cold was merciless and wind cut with icy fingers. Frostbite was unavoidable if he didn’t find shelter soon. But the mission came first.
Trace leveled his gaze on the road three hundred feet below his hiding spot. He didn’t think about the fresh wounds across his left wrist or the blood that darkened his forearm, courtesy of a difficult high altitude, low opening—HALO—jump.
Abruptly he felt movements in the night. Leaning forward, he read a change in energy patterns. A three-truck convoy crawled through the darkness. Their Korean-made trucks were guarded by soldiers wielding Soviet RPG-7 shoulder-launched missiles.
An equal-opportunity war, he thought grimly.
And this was his target. The convoy carried covert German communication technology extorted from a weapons designer based in Singapore. Not surprisingly, the man had disappeared before he could reveal his blackmailer. In the hands of a trained technician, the new device could track a massive quantity of U.S. communications. Through the application of mathematical predictive models, government assets could be located and areas of vulnerability tapped within minutes. In enemy hands the system could inflict catastrophic damage, and Trace’s job was to see that the hardware never reached its destination.
Truck lights carved the darkness. The convoy stopped with a screech of brakes. Agitated voices cut through the cold, still air.
The men in the Korean trucks were ruthless
and well trained. They would shoot anything suspicious on their trek to an isolated mountain stronghold sixty miles to the north. But Trace didn’t intend to be noticed until he was ready. As he glanced at his watch, his skin burned. Frostbite was setting in.
Ignoring his pain, the SEAL fingered a button on the device in his left pocket.
Something moved down on the road. The first truck pulled sideways and two soldiers jumped out. Arguing loudly, they pointed to a paper flapping in the bone-chilling wind.
Right on schedule, Trace thought. Nice to see technology working right for once. His maneuver had lured them exactly where he wanted them.
Dark fur brushed his arm. Ears raised alertly, a black Labrador retriever held his down position behind a rock, awaiting Trace’s next order. The big dog had trained with Trace for months to prepare for this mission, and Trace sensed the dog’s eagerness to go to work.
Not yet, Duke.
His hand settled on the dog’s head. The Lab watched every movement, waiting for the next touch command.
As the wind keened over the rocky slope, Santa Fe and Christmas cheer were a universe away. Trace couldn’t even remember his last Christmas at home. His last two leaves had been cut short because of security alerts. As part of a top-secret government team, code-named Foxfire, Trace trained hard and kept personal attachments next to nil. That was the price of admission for special operations work, but the conditions had never bothered Trace, not when the stakes were so high.
Other people might call him a patriot. But for Trace the job boiled down to very personal terms—protecting family, friends and a way of life from enemies without honor or scruples. If doing his job meant taking a bullet, he was more than ready to pay that price with his own blood.
A silent alarm vibrated at his wrist.
Showtime.
Silently, he pulled a small box from his Kevlar vest. The dog sniffed, then gripped the box’s metal handle between his teeth. When Trace touched the Lab’s collar in a pre-arranged command, weeks of training kicked in. Duke skirted the rocks, turned and then headed for the road below.
Be safe, Trace thought. Stay low and move fast. He didn’t have to project the commands. Duke would do exactly as trained.
Trace leveled his scoped assault rifle and measured his target. A third hostile soldier jumped down, shouting at his teammates. Trace took out the nearest truck’s tires and front windshield with a four-second burst.
The insurgents scattered. Gunfire hammered the air above Trace’s head. His next volley drilled the middle truck’s gas tank. Under the explosive flare of an orangered fireball, he jumped a boulder and dropped into a narrow wash that snaked toward the road.
Hidden by walls of sand, he followed the curve of the wash, a shadow swallowed by the greater darkness of the night. One short tap on a small transmitter alerted his backup team that the encounter had begun. Now he had only minutes to complete his objective and head for the extraction point.
He sprinted to the bottom of the wash and found the big package exactly where he’d left it a day earlier, buried beneath a foot of sand. In seconds Trace had opened the canvas to reveal a blood-spattered body dead for barely ten hours. He rechecked the uniform pockets, then hefted the dead weight over his shoulders.
Hidden by the mayhem of the explosion, he carried the body closer to the road, placed it in the sand and then raced along a second trail barely visible in the light from the burning truck.
It was time to draw fire and alert the convoy to the body. If all went as planned, the insurgents would find the communications gear and codes planted on the body and begin using them. Everything they picked up from U.S. sources would be carefully constructed disinformation.
Trace wasn’t crazy about using human remains for a mission, but their local allies had provided unidentifiable bodies of insurgents killed in a violent skirmish earlier that day. Now they were dressed and outfitted as American soldiers.
Automatic weapons fire punched the air to his left, and a tracer round whined over his head. For every round he could see, Trace knew there were three others invisible in the darkness. The SEAL followed the rocky slope away from his service dog, who bounded toward a nearby overhang. Once Trace was certain the body had been discovered, he turned into the open and made a clumsy run toward the highest ridge, his movements calculated to draw maximum fire.
The maneuver worked. Down the hill, dark shapes raced toward him, rifles level.
Kevlar was good, but it wouldn’t stand up to repeated bursts from an AK-47. That’s where the ceramic plates in his vest took over. But a glancing blow hit him with deadly force and knocked him off his feet.
Calculating the speed of his pursuers, he primed a grenade and lobbed it over his shoulder. Rocks shot up, clawing at his back and neck while gunfire burned near his face and tore through his glove. His excited pursuers clustered at the top of the slope below, shouting in delight when they saw Trace fall.
A second burst of fire drilled up his arm, but he didn’t move, feigning a fatal wound.
His heart pounded.
Sweat streaked his face.
Footsteps raced behind him. He calculated strike force, distance and probable accuracy as the wind howled over the rocks, and then his fingers closed around another grenade. He yanked the pin and lobbed the deadly metal sphere hard, generating a wall of noise that masked more enemy fire.
The blast was deafening. Sand flew into his eyes and mouth. Another round tore through his right deltoid.
Trace’s vision blurred. More shrapnel from enemy fire tore into his chest and neck. He stumbled and then plunged forward, the wind in his face as he hit the cold sand. A chopper crested the mountain, the whine from its engines blessedly familiar.
Another explosion ripped through the night, and the lead truck vanished in a red fireball.
The big Lab had accomplished his mission, planting his C-4 charge under the last truck while the insurgents were distracted by Trace’s clumsy run.
Nice job, Duke.
Pain raked Trace’s chest. He stumbled as blood gushed thickly over his Kevlar vest, every muscle stiff, every movement strained. Over his head the mountains seemed to darken, blurred between cold wind and night sky.
And then he died.
CHAPTER TWO
SOMETHING WAS wrong.
The air was too clean, too calm. There was no acrid smell of cordite and no rumble of distant artillery.
White curtains danced slowly in a warm wind. The smells of bleach and floor wax filled his damaged lungs.
Wounded. Hospital?
“Nice to see you’re finally awake.” The voice was vaguely familiar. “You look pretty good for a dead guy.”
Trace cracked open one eye. Even that small movement hurt.
Hell, everything hurt, but he couldn’t remember why.
“Very funny.” Trace managed to lift his head. “You look like shit, Houston.” He smiled slightly. “Maybe life with my sister doesn’t agree with you.”
“Kit, hell. I wish I’d been home with her. Instead I flew overnight from Singapore to get here.”
Trace tried to sit up and grimaced. “Where’s here?”
His superior officer, Wolfe Houston, stared at him thoughtfully. “Military hospital. Germany. You’re in ICU, pal. Ryker has been spitting bullets waiting for you to come around.”
Ryker. The head of his top-secret government operations team. That much Trace remembered.
He didn’t move. His throat felt raw, as if he’d swallowed a convoy’s worth of gasoline fumes, which he probably had. Slowly the fragments began to return. He’d used all his grenades, and then he’d stumbled across the ridge in clear sight, drawing fire to the location of a second, cached body left where they were meant to be found. More false codes were planted on that second body.
As AK-47 bursts followed a blast from a shoulder-launched missile, Trace had gone down, knocked out cold. Duke had to have jumped the rocks, dragging him to safety while the helicopter drew fire
. A second chopper would have shot in low to pick up Trace and Duke.
Otherwise the SEAL wouldn’t be here in one piece.
As the rest of his memories returned, his head began to pound. When he sat up, his left arm felt too heavy. “How’s Duke?”
“Your dog is A-Okay. He just ate two steaks and ran a mile before breakfast. I wish I could say the same for you.” Houston’s expression sobered. “You were in cardiac arrest, completely flatlined when our people got you aboard. It took almost two minutes to revive you. Duke didn’t leave your side once.”
Trace managed a lopsided grin. “Duke did good. He saved my butt after that last volley. I remember he dragged me to the extraction point, not much after that. But…some-thing’s different.”
“You were dead, O’Halloran. Of course you don’t remember much.”
No, something else was wrong. Trace shook his head. “My reflexes are off. I can’t pick up any energy trails. Everything is quiet.”
“Your chips are all disabled. Precautionary measure, according to Ryker. He told the medical team to close down all your Foxfire technology until you’re fully recovered.”
Trace stared at the ceiling, trying to get used to the deafening silence inside his head. “I like knowing who’s behind me without having to look around. When will I be reactivated for duty?”
“Get well first.”
In war, soldiers fought with all kinds of ammunition. Recently the array of weapons had changed drastically. As part of the Foxfire team, the two men used focused energy as a tactical weapon. Thanks to mental training, physical conditioning and selective chips developed in a secret facility in New Mexico, their seven-member team had changed the definition of military combat.
Code Name: Bundle! Page 56
