Match Play

by Merline Lovelace

  Any defection would definitely have to be a package deal.

  That thought stayed with Dayna throughout the banquet and the pairings that followed. By the luck of the draw, she was teamed with Eleanor Tolbert. A longtime member of the Ladies Professional Golf Association, Eleanor was one of its biggest money-winners. She and Dayna would have been the team to beat in scratch golf, but this was a charity event so handicaps were used to level the playing field. The ranker the amateur, the higher her handicap and the more strokes deducted from her final score.

  Wu Kim Li drew one of those high-handicapped amateurs for her partner. An Irish neurosurgeon, as it turned out, with little time for golf but a wild enthusiasm for the sport. Flame-haired Brianna Kilkenny towered over her partner during the media barrage that followed the drawing. Unwilling to stand in anyone’s shadow, Wu adroitly sidestepped and took the cameras with her.

  To Dayna’s intense satisfaction, the links draw put her and Eleanor on the same course as Kim Li and her partner for the initial qualifying rounds. They weren’t in the same foursome and would tee off at different times, but she would make opportunities to connect with the girl while Mike worked the father.

  The two agents reconvened in Dayna’s suite after the banquet.

  A cold, damp fog had rolled in off the bay. Rather than up the room’s thermostat, Dayna put a match to the kindling laid in the brick-and-tile fireplace. The neatly stacked logs soon caught the flames. Snapping and crackling, they filled the sitting room with a pine-resin scent.

  Mike had studied the course layouts Dayna had given him earlier that afternoon. He’d also annotated a detailed map of the St. Andrews area. Together, they went over emergency escape routes and formulated options for detaching Wu and his daughter from their watchdogs.

  “Assuming they really want to defect.”

  “Yeah,” Mike agreed. “Big assumption. We’ve got the next week to find out if it’s true.”

  “If it is, I don’t think Kim Li will want to pull a disappearing act until after the tournament. She’s too competitive.”

  “That’s my assessment, too. We can move sooner if we have to, but for now we’ll plan to whisk her and her Papa Wu away immediately following the trophy presentation. We’ll use the crowd and the media to run interference with their handlers. I’ve coordinated with our counterparts in the CIA and British Intelligence. They’ll provide back-up, transport vehicles and escort to our departure point.”

  He thumped a knuckle against the air base just northwest of the town of St. Andrews proper.

  “One of the crews from the USAF detachment at RAF Leuchars will fly us back to the States. I figure I’d head over there before your practice round tomorrow and bring the detachment commander up to speed.”

  Dayna hesitated. She hated to introduce the subject of her failed romance, but Hawk needed to know it might present a complication.

  “Before you talk to the detachment commander, you should be aware that I used to date one of his pilots. Captain Luke Harper.”

  Mike cut her a surprised look. “I remember the hype about you and some flyboy. He’s here, at Leuchars?”

  “He is. Matter of fact, I bumped into him this afternoon.”

  Bumped, as in locked lips. To Dayna’s profound disgust, the memory of Luke’s mouth on hers sent heat seeping into her cheeks. She fought to keep her expression neutral but Hawkeye hadn’t earned his code name by missing subtle signals. Nor had he stayed alive as long as he had in this business by shrugging off even small, seemingly innocuous incidents as mere coincidence.

  “Are you sure it was a chance meeting?”

  Like Hawk, Dayna had learned the hard way that training and experience were no substitutes for gut instinct. She went with hers now.

  “I’m sure. I was a last-minute entry in this tournament. Harper didn’t know I was coming to St. Andrews and he doesn’t have a clue I work for the government. The problem is, he isn’t supposed to be here, either.”

  When she indicated he flew the super-secret Stealth bomber, Hawk grasped the implications immediately. The material he’d studied on the flight up from Algiers had included a brief detailing of the antiwar movements in Britain and the sensitive issue of the presence of U.S. nuclear-capable bombers on British soil.

  “If the media gloms on to his presence and tries to resurrect your old affair, it could jeopardize both his mission and ours.”

  “Lightning and I discussed that,” Dayna replied. “Our initial assessment was that the air force has sufficient measures in place to keep their operation at Leuchars under wraps, but…”

  She blew out a long breath. The unexpected encounter this afternoon had forced her to reevaluate the situation. St. Andrews was a small university town, crammed at present with newshounds from around the world. Any one of them could sniff out the story of her old flame.

  “You’d better lay out the problem when you meet with the detachment commander in the morning,” she told Hawk. “Get his take on the threat to his operation.”

  “Will do.” Those too-keen eyes studied hers. “What about the threat to ours?”

  “I’ve been thinking about that, too. If the media does latch on to my old romance, we could use the hype to deflect attention from our efforts to get close to the Wus.”

  “Something to consider,” Hawk agreed, “but you don’t sound too thrilled about letting this character back in your life. Just say the word and I’ll take him out of the picture.”

  Lightning had already made that offer. Once again, Dayna turned it down.

  “No need. The meeting this afternoon caught me by surprise. I’ll be prepared if it happens again.”

  She was still trying to convince herself of that some four hours later.

  Lifting her head, Dayna glared at the digital alarm beside her bed. When she saw the hour, she let loose with an expletive that would have earned her a warning if she’d muttered it during the tournament. Still swearing, she dropped her face into the goose-down pillow.

  This was ridiculous. She was playing a double game of golf and deception tomorrow. She’d have to make every stroke count while keeping tabs on Wu Kim Li. She needed sleep.

  “Get out of my head, Harper!”

  Chapter 3

  Why couldn’t he put the woman out of his head?

  Luke shifted restlessly in the mission commander’s seat of his bat-winged B-2. The pilot whose performance he’d been evaluating occupied the left seat, breathing easier now that he’d completed most of his check ride.

  Outside the cockpit a star-studded night sky stretched to infinity. Inside, the instrument panel gave off a muted glow shielded by specially screened and darkened windows.

  “Thirty-two thousand and holding steady on course niner-three-six,” the other pilot reported.

  Luke acknowledged their position and rolled his shoulders to relieve the strain of his seat harness. They’d been in the air for seven hours now, a mere hop compared to their normal missions. Tonight’s training run had taken them out over the Atlantic for an in-flight refueling. They would return to base before dawn, gliding in with the same stealth that made the B-2 invisible to the world’s most sophisticated radars—and to antiwar protestors hoping to obtain photos that would prove beyond any doubt the bomber’s presence in the U.K.

  The B-2 crews and support personnel were every bit as determined to remain as stealthy as the two-billion-dollar aircraft they flew. Hence the night-only takeoffs and landings and the fiction that their detachment was part of an exchange program at Leuchars.

  So far the ploy had worked. Would it still work if the paparazzi sniffed out the fact that Dayna Duncan’s old flame just happened to be in St. Andrews?

  From past experience, Luke knew how the media rooted around for personal tidbits to salt into their coverage of otherwise impersonal sporting events. He and Pud had once provided just the mix of glamour and romance the tabloids loved.

  The nickname tugged his mouth into a lopsided grin. Pud, short for
the puddles he’d teased her about paddling around in. The teasing had lasted only until she’d taken Luke for his first white-water run.

  The experience had been as exhilarating as any he’d every experienced. It had also scared the crap out of him. When they’d gone over Horseshoe Falls, his stomach had dropped right through the bottom of the fiberglass kayak. He could still hear Dayna’s joyous whoop, still see her hair flying under her helmet and wet suit molded to her curves as they…

  Well, hell! There she was again. Front and center in his thoughts.

  Resigned, Luke checked the instruments and gave up trying to shove the woman out of his head.

  She was still there, hovering around the edges of his mind, when he finished his mission debrief. Slinging his flyaway bag over his shoulder, he exited the debriefing area and was headed for the crew room to change out of his flight suit when one of other pilots hailed him.

  “The old man wants to see you, Harper.”

  Nodding, Luke detoured to the suite of offices tucked in one corner of the massive hangar. He figured the colonel was waiting for an update on the check ride just completed and prepared a rundown in his mind.

  “You wanted to see me, sir?”

  Colonel Don Anderson waved him into the office. Big, barrel-chested and as strong as a Brahma bull, Anderson had been part of the initial B-2 cadre. In the decade since, he’d racked up more hours than most pilots did in a lifetime. Customarily gruff and to the point, Anderson jerked his chin at the stranger seated in the chair angled in front of his desk.

  “Harper, this is Mike Callahan. He’s with the government. Callahan, Captain Luke Harper.”

  The stranger rose and offered his hand. His square-shouldered bearing suggested he’d spent at least one hitch in the military. The embroidered sharpshooter’s patch plainly visible above his visitor’s badge indicated he wasn’t someone to mess with.

  “Harper.”

  Callahan’s grip stopped well short of bone-crunching but something in the man’s narrow-eyed, assessing look stirred an instinctive and wholly atavistic response in Luke. Without warning, the skin on the back of his neck prickled.

  “Callahan’s got all the necessary security clearances,” Anderson said. “I want you to show him our operation. Bring him back here when you’re done.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Wondering what this was all about, Luke stashed his flyaway bag with the colonel’s exec and walked Callahan toward the hangar bay.

  “I don’t know how much the colonel told you about our detachment—”

  “He indicated you’re one of several recently established forward operating locations. Before that, B-2 crews flew combat missions from your home base at Whiteman AFB, Missouri. Must have made for a helluva long haul.”

  “It did,” Luke admitted. “It also made for a surreal life. A pilot could roll out of bed, kiss his wife goodbye, fly a thirty-to forty-hour combat mission against heavily defended targets halfway around the world and return home in time to take out the trash the next morning. Even with forward basing, we spend a lot of time in the air.”

  Callahan’s glance dropped. “I don’t see a ring. No one to kiss goodbye in the morning?”

  “No one special,” Luke replied, ruthlessly suppressing the image that leaped into his head of a laughing, loving Dayna. He’d had his chance with her and blown it. It was just his own tough luck he hadn’t found anyone else in the years since.

  “So how long does it take to prepare for one of these marathon missions?” Callahan asked.

  “If we’re lucky, we get three or four days advance notice. That gives us time to study the target, plan our ingress and egress routes and adjust our sleep and eating patterns to maximize our alertness in flight.”

  “I can see sleep, but eating?”

  “The air force shelled out big bucks to dieticians to determine optimal liquid intake and the best ratio of carbs versus protein to sustain long periods of activity.” Luke had to grin. “All those experts finally concluded we’d found an optimal mix in our traditional bomber dogs. Hot dogs doused in chili,” he explained. “We warm them in the cockpit heater.”

  Shouldering open a door, he led the way into one of the two cavernous hangars the Brits had turned over to the B-2 detachment. The aircraft Luke had just flown occupied center court, being serviced by the ground crews.

  “Our birds remain undercover at all times while on the ground. We want to keep their advanced design and special ‘low-observable’ characteristics away from prying eyes. In flight, they’re damned near invisible. Pretty slick, aren’t they?”

  And then some! Mike Callahan had jumped out of plenty of planes during his stint as an army Ranger but he’d never seen anything as lethal as these black boomerangs. They were immense, with a wingspan of at least a hundred-and-fifty feet, yet their flat fuselage and long, sloping cockpits made them appear saucer-thin from the side. The darkened cockpit windows seemed to follow the two men like a predator’s eyes as Harper led the way across a hangar floor painted and buffed to a bright sheen.

  “The B-2’s unique bat-wing shape and the special coating used on its skin are designed to deflect radar waves.” Harper slapped a hand against the cowling of one of the four powerful engines. “And these babies are so quiet they wouldn’t wake your grandma from her afternoon nap if we flew over her house at a hundred feet.”

  A slight exaggeration, Callahan guessed wryly, although Harper’s description of how the engines dispensed their exhaust across the top of the wings to shield the aircraft from heat-seeking missiles below brought the seriousness of its mission into sharp focus.

  As he listened to the pilot explain the details of his unit’s operation, Mike assessed the man behind the uniform. Rogue had stated unequivocally that any feelings she’d once harbored for Harper had died years ago. She was also confident that his presence at RAF Leuchars wouldn’t throw her off her game. Mike trusted her judgment on that. Like him, she’d competed in countless nerve-bending competitions. She knew better than anyone else what would—or wouldn’t—impact her performance.

  The question that now had to be answered was whether her presence would impact Harper’s mission if the press IDed him as Dayna’s former lover and came sniffing around the captain. Mike had discussed the situation with his commander when they’d met earlier. The more he saw of the B-2 operation, the more he agreed with the colonel’s decision to take drastic measures to shield the detachment from prying eyes.

  From the pride in Harper’s voice as he described his bird and its mission, Mike guessed the pilot was not going to like those measures.

  That became instantly apparent when the two men returned to the colonel’s office. Responding to Mike’s subtle nod, Anderson dropped the ax.

  “I told you Callahan here works for the government. His sources told him that you once had a romantic relationship with one of the golfers competing in the Women’s International Pro-Am Charity Golf Tournament at St. Andrews.”

  Harper was quick. Surprise blanked his face for mere seconds before giving way to wary comprehension.

  “That’s right. Dayna Duncan. I didn’t realize our one-time relationship was a matter of government interest.”

  Harper leveled a hard stare in Mike’s direction before turning back to the colonel.

  “I can see the complications to our detachment’s mission,” he conceded reluctantly. “Someone in the media is bound to recognize me and start snooping around to find out why I’m in the U.K.”

  Anderson didn’t waste words. “Then you’ll understand why I’ve arranged to have you reassigned to the 3rd AF Executive Support Unit, with detached duty here at RAF Leuchars, effective immediately.”

  “What?”

  “You’ll act as liaison with the British VIP support section across base. That way, if asked, you can say with absolute honesty that you’re attached to the RAF unit. You’re still current on the C-21 Learjet, which is one of the aircraft they use to transport VIPs, so it shouldn’t
be a difficult transition.”

  “To hell with difficult!”

  Harper’s disgust at being relegated to the status of a flying cabdriver overcame his ingrained respect for authority and rank.

  “I’m scheduled for a run over a heavily defended target in two days and you’re going to pull me to haul VIPs around the capitals of Europe?”

  Anderson hadn’t earned his eagles without learning how to use them. Even Mike felt the ice when the colonel leaned forward.

  “I’m well aware of the schedule, Captain, and yes, I’m pulling you.”

  Harper clamped his mouth shut over further protests but a muscle ticked in the side of his jaw.

  “Since you’ve just come off a mission, I want you to take twenty-four hours to decompress. Report to the Brits’ Executive Support Section tomorrow morning. They’ll have a desk waiting for you.”

  An expression of acute pain crossed the pilot’s face. “A desk,” he muttered under his breath.

  Anderson wasn’t much happier about losing one of his best pilots, but he tried to soften the blow.

  “Sorry we have to go this route, Luke. You know the security of our unit has to come first.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “That’s all.”

  Dismissed, the pilot speared Hawk with an angry look and departed.

  “Damn,” Anderson muttered when Harper had cleared the room. “I hate to lose him, even temporarily. He’s one of our best.” His glance was almost as disgusted as Harper’s. “I want him back as soon as you complete your mission. Make sure everyone in your chain of command understands that.”

  “Will do.”

  Hawk contacted Dayna as soon as he was clear of the base. Although dawn was just beginning to break, he knew she’d be up and preparing for her practice round. Succinctly, he briefed her on Luke Harper’s change in status.