by Rachel Lee
She was just about to drop the scanner and aim the Beretta when the man lifted his head. Dani gaped at the screen in disbelief, blinked twice to make sure what she was seeing wasn't a mirage.
It wasn't!
With a wild whoop, she abandoned both the scanner and her concealment and charged full tilt at the prone figure.
"Trish!"
Fifteen yards away, Jack registered the name but didn't take his finger off the dock's trigger until their uninvited guest lurched to her feet.
"Dani!"
The newcomer threw herself forward, laughing and crying at the same time. The two women collided and wrapped their arms around each other in a ferocious bear hug. Total chaos ensued, with more exclamations, more hugs, and both sisters firing questions like bullets.
"How did you find me?"
"It took some doing. How'd you get away?"
"I had one of the guards take me outside the cave to go potty, and I decked him. Are you part of another government task force? They gagged me, dragged me off kicking and fighting, just moments before one hit last week."
"No, no task force. How many kidnappers are there?"
"Ten that I saw." Her jaw tightened. "They wore ski masks whenever they came into the caves, but I'm pretty sure I can identify at least three from various tattoos, broken teeth and the names the others let slip. Those bastards are going down."
Standing in the shadows, Jack could only admire the woman's astounding resilience. She'd just decked an armed guard and scaled a sheer cliff in the dark, yet she was ready to go back and take them all on. No wonder Dani and her stepsister were so close. Their old man had molded them into hard, tensile steel. Remembering the colonel's efforts to do the same with him, Jack smiled and shoved his Glock into its holster.
The movement caused Patricia's head to whip around. She stabbed a swift, narrow glance into the shadows.
"Who are you?"
"Jack Buchanan."
"Formerly U.S. Air Force," Dani supplied. "Now a private pilot."
Enough light was filtering over the peaks for both the hostage and her would-be rescuer to get a good look at each other. While Jack noted a tumble of mink-dark hair and high, sculpted cheekbones, Patricia took in his bare chest, unsnapped jeans and unlaced boots.
Her gaze zinged back to Dani and performed a quick inventory of tangled red hair, a T-shirt pulled on wrong side out and sockless feet shoved into hiking boots.
"Well, well," she murmured, fixing Jack with a longer, considering glance. "This is interesting. I don't recall Dani mentioning you before. Just how long have you two known each other?"
"Long enough." A wicked grin pulled at his mouth. "We're on our honeymoon."
"What?"
"It's a long story," Dani interjected hastily. "One we don't have time to go into right now."
Patricia sobered instantly. "You're right. The guard I conked has no doubt come to by now and sounded the alarm." She did a quick scan of the plateau. "How did you get up here, drive or climb?"
"Neither. We flew. Jack's plane is tucked under those trees over there."
Her sister's jaw dropped. "You landed a plane here? On this mountaintop?"
"Hey, it wasn't my idea."
Patricia closed her mouth, opened it again, looked around once more. Knocked completely out of her cool, she shook her head.
"We...we heard a plane buzz the cliffs earlier, but we thought... That is, the kidnappers thought it was another government search plane. They figured it would touch down at the airstrip north of here, and sent two men to check it out. That's why I climbed up instead of down. I was afraid I'd meet those two on the way back. But I never dreamed...never imagined..."
"Why don't we talk about it later?" Jack suggested, shepherding them toward the Stearman. "I need to dump some fuel and you need to—"
"Oh, hell!"
Dani's exclamation stopped him dead. His stomach did a swift roll as she glanced down at her wrist.
"Is that gadget telling you what I think it is?"
She nodded, her face grim. "We've got more company."
"How long?"
"I'm guessing rive minutes."
Swiftly, he calculated the odds. Eight, maybe ten heavily armed men against one Beretta, one Glock, the rifle slung across Patricia's shoulders.
Well, he'd been in tighter spots. One in particular would remain burned in his memory for a long, long time. Daniel Flynn had extricated Jack and six other crew dogs from that disaster. He would extricate the old man's daughters from this one.
"Good thing the Canary doesn't have to warm up to sing," he said, breaking into a run.
Patricia shot Dani a perplexed look. "Canary?"
Dani didn't have the heart to go into details. Three or four more steps, and Trish would be able to discern for herself the size and shape of the bright yellow biplane. And its age.
Sure enough, her first glimpse of the aircraft brought Patricia stumbling to a halt. Utter disbelief blanked her features.
"That's how you got up here?"
"That's it," Jack confirmed cheerfully, kicking aside the brush piled in front of the nose. Two quick heaves moved the rocks away from the wheels. Tramping over the various items of clothing still scattered under the wing, he thrust one chute at her and the other at Dani.
"Okay, ladies. Squeeze into the rear cockpit and strap yourselves down."
Dani guessed she might—might!—erase the memory of their takeoff, say, sometime in the next century.
Thanks to its many overhauls, the Stearman's 220-horsepower engine coughed a couple of times, burped once and revved up to full power. The ensuing roar shattered the dawn. Frantic birds thrashed out of the bushes. A startled deer bounded across the far edge of the escarpment. And Dani was sure she heard shouts. Close by.
Too close.
Wedged tight in the rear seat, she squirmed around for a better angle. As Jack taxied out from under the trees, she kept the Beretta aimed at the spot where Patricia had flung herself over the edge. Beside her, her sister leveled the semiautomatic rifle at the same spot.
Jack took the Stearman right to the edge of the escarpment, so close that the tail rudder fanned sky as the plane swung around. Patricia sucked in air.
The Stearman lurched into a roll. Gathered speed. Bumped across the rocky surface.
Dani sensed immediately the plane was too heavy. She was sure they'd blow a tire. Or bust a strut. And they were moving too slowly! Craning, she tried to see around Jack's bulk to gauge the distance still remaining.
A burst of gunfire from Patricia's semiautomatic rifle almost shattered her eardrums. She whipped her head back around, saw two men dive for cover and another duck back down below the edge of the plateau. Calmly, she took aim with the Beretta.
The bastards never got off a single shot. The two sisters maintained a steady hail of fire, keeping them pinned while the Stearman bumped and lurched toward absolute nothingness. Suddenly, the ground dropped away beneath the plane's wheels. Sheer momentum kept the biplane moving forward. Five yards. Ten.
Then it sank like the proverbial stone.
Patricia gave a small shriek, dropped her rifle with a clatter and wrapped her sister in a stranglehold. Dani couldn't breathe, couldn't hear for the roaring in her ears, couldn't see a thing except the tendons cording Jack's bare shoulders and neck as he worked the controls.
It probably took only a few moments until he brought the nose up and they were flying straight and level, but those were the longest damned moments of Dani's life. Patricia's, too, judging by the stream of rather colorful invective she let loose. Buchanan didn't help matters by twisting around, giving them a thumbs-up and grinning.
Incredulous, Patricia shouted into Dani's ear, "The idiot looks like he actually enjoyed that."
"He probably did."
"Where did you find this guy?"
"In a bar in Oklahoma."
"And you married him?"
"No. That's just the cover we're using here in Mexico."
Shoving back her wildly whipping hair, Patricia eyed Jack's naked back. Her gaze slid from his broad shoulders to her sister's inside-out T-shirt.
"So does he perform as well in the sack as he does in the air?"
"Better, actually."
Scrabbling around with her boot, Dani found the radio headset and slipped it over one ear so she could communicate with Jack via the intercom without shouting herself hoarse. With the other ear, she listened while Patricia recounted the details of her harrowing weeks in Mexico.
The morning ground haze gradually dissipated, but as they headed north a bank of gray clouds drifted up to obscure the sun. The Sierra Madres wound and twisted below them, too close at times for Patricia's comfort. Her ragged nails gouged canvas on more than one occasion until the mountains began to flatten into rolling foothills.
Dani had just convinced herself they were home free when she caught a high, faint whine. Frowning, she coiled around to squint at the sky behind.
That small black speck was probably a hawk.
Lord, please let it be a hawk!
She tracked it for another few minutes. That's all it took to determine the black blob was, in fact, a small plane. And that it appeared to have vectored in on them. Sighing, she repositioned the headset and keyed the intercom.
"How far to the U.S. border?"
"Another twenty minutes or so. Why?"
"We've got company. Six o'clock and closing fast."
Jack twisted around and squinted at the aircraft.
"Could they be part of the gang who kidnapped you?" Dani asked her sister urgently.
"They could. I heard them talking about a plane they kept at that airport north of the caves." Her lip curled. "They bragged about buying another one with my ransom money. Supposedly, they equipped it with more armament than a Sherman tank."
Dani relayed the information to Jack, who absorbed it with a tight jaw. He eyed the horizon ahead and made an instant decision.
"Hang on. We'll cut into those clouds and alter our course to see if they follow."
They did.
The Stearman emerged from the billowing white mist and dropped so low it almost skimmed the foothills.
A moment later, the small turboprop swooped out of the clouds and dived after them. Small bursts of red shot from its wing. Tracers cut through the sky not fifty yards behind the biplane.
"Damn! They're firing on us."
Jack jerked the stick, sent the bright yellow Canary into a steep climb, and flew back into the cloud bank. While he coaxed the Stearman to every ounce of speed she had in her, Dani reached for the radio switches.
It was time to call in the cavalry. Or in this instance, the United States Air Force.
A quick flick of the switches dialed up a special frequency that broadcast to all Air Force bases within radio range. The closest, she knew, was Laughlin, just a few miles across the Rio Grande.
"Laughlin tower, this is Charlie-echo-mike-three-two-two. Do you read me?"
Her heart hammering, she waited for confirmation. Static crackled through the headset for what seemed like forever. Finally, the calm voice of the controller cut through the screechy noise.
"This is Laughlin tower, three-two-two. We read you loud and clear. How did you obtain this frequency? "
Dani ignored the sharp query and cut right to her message. "This is Captain Danielle Flynn, United States Air Force, transmitting a code forty-five. Do you copy, Laughlin? Code forty-five."
There was a short, startled silence. She could imagine the reaction in the tower. Only agents assigned to the Office of Special Operations could transmit a code forty-five, and then only in the most dire emergencies.
"We copy. Code forty-five. Stand by while we verify."
Swiping the condensation from her eyes with her forearm, she threw a look over her shoulder and saw only a reassuring wall of gray mist.
"What's the nature of your emergency, three-two-two?"
"We have a bandit on our tail, firing at us."
"State your present location, altitude and speed."
Jack supplied the information, which Dani relayed to the tower. They were still over Mexican airspace, but closing on the border fast. Laughlin tower confirmed their position.
"Be advised we have two F-16s from Cannon transiting our airspace. We've received authority to divert them to perform an intercept. They'll meet you at the border."
"If we make it that far," she muttered, switching to intercom mode.
The murmured comment broke through Jack's fierce concentration. He'd put himself in the place he'd learned to go during aerial operations, a small, enclosed capsule where his mind received input from dozens of different sources, processed the data with the speed of light and directed instant action. Wrenching himself out of the capsule, he took a deep breath and keyed the mike.
"We'll make it, green-eyes. This baby's got some tricks left in her that will surprise you. So do I, for that matter. I intend to demonstrate a few when we get down."
His reward for that bit of outrageous bravado was a choking laugh. "Thanks for the warning, flyboy."
"Just trying to stick to my end of our bargain and keep you apprised of my plans," he drawled. "You two strapped in good and tight back there?"
"Yes. Why?"
"Looks like the cloud bank is thinning up ahead. It's show time, ladies."
Dani aged at least two lifetimes in the ten minutes or so before the F-16s swooped down out of the clouds.
In those heart-stopping, eye-popping moments, Jack performed every aerobatic maneuver in the book and, she was convinced, invented a few new ones. He put the Stearman on its tail, on its nose, on all four wing-tips. He rolled it, banked it, looped it, stalled it and somehow managed to keep it out of their pursuer's gun sights.
When the F-16s appeared, the bandit tucked tail and ran like hell. Patricia whooped and wrapped her sister in another stranglehold. Jack did pretty much the same when they finally glided onto the runway at Laughlin.
Dani exited the cockpit in a graceless stagger and fell off the wing into Buchanan's arms. Oil spray coated her face. No self-respecting rat would have nested in her tangled, wind-whipped hair. Yet the gleam in Jack's eyes made her feel like she'd just come up with the winning Power Ball ticket.
"You make one helluva combination copilot, flight engineer and tail gunner, Flynn. Your old man would have been proud of you."
"He would have been proud of you, too," she said softly. "Consider any and all debts paid in full."
Dragging his head down, she closed the account with a long, lip-locking kiss. When Jack raised his head again, his eyes had deepened to molten gold.
"Funny," he growled. "I have a feeling the tab's just starting to run up."
Before she could probe that interesting comment, he set her on her feet and reached up to help Patricia. Her sister's knees wobbled, but she managed a shaky grin.
"Thanks. There were a few moments back there when I wasn't sure if you knew what you were doing."
"Well..."
"Stop! Don't shatter the illusion! Let's just agree you're one fine pilot."
The F-16 pilots echoed Patricia's sentiments when they touched down some time later. They climbed out of their jets and strode across the concrete, their parachutes flapping at the backs of their knees.
"That was the damnedest aerial maneuvering I've ever seen," a tall, tanned major exclaimed. "Where did you learn to fly like that?"
"Same place you did."
"You're Air Force?"
"Former Air Force. I strapped on an F-117 for a few years before I traded it in for an open cockpit."
"Hell, man. You ought to think about going back into fighters. We're training a whole new generation of pilots. You could sure teach them a thing or two."
Dani agreed. So much so that she left Jack in a borrowed shirt, surrounded by representatives from the CIA, the Border Patrol and the State Department, and slipped away to make a private, very personal phone ca
ll.
It was late afternoon before the government agencies had finished with them. Early evening when Patricia finished wolfing down her first full meal in weeks, pleaded an urgent need for a bubble bath, and retreated to a suite in the luxurious hotel where she insisted her company put them all up. With what the company had saved in ransom, she declared, they could also supply her and her rescuers with a new wardrobe.
Ever efficient, she even called a local department store and arranged for a selection of designer sportswear to be delivered first thing in the morning. That done, she retreated to a mound of scented bubbles.
Dani opted for a steamy, bone-melting shower instead of a soak. Wrapped in the hotel's thick terry robe, she knocked on the door to the connecting suite.
"It's open."
She pushed through and smiled at the sight that greeted her. Jack lay sprawled on the king-size bed, his hands laced behind his head. Showered and shaved, he wore only a strategically placed towel.
"I've been waiting for you."
Her glance grazed the interesting bulge under the towel. "So I see."
He waggled his brows. "Care to try your hand on the stick?"
Groaning, she shucked her robe. "That has to be the sorriest pun I've ever heard."
"Give me time," he said with smug confidence, rolling her naked body under his. "I can do worse."
He could.
And he did.
Laughing helplessly at his completely outrageous, incredibly erotic aeronautical metaphors, Dani rolled, banked and performed a series of aerobatic feats that left her limp, sweaty and exhausted.
Boneless and replete, she sprawled across his chest while his fingers lazily combed the dark red hair spilling over her shoulders.
"Jack."
"Mmm?"
"I made a call this afternoon. To my boss."
"I bet he wasn't real happy with you for going into Mexico without authorization."
That qualified as the understatement of the millennium. Dani had hung up the phone feeling remarkably akin to pancaked roadkill.
"He did have a rather strong opinion on the matter," she admitted. "Once he calmed down, though, he agreed to pull a few strings."
"Is that right?"
His voice held only lazy curiosity. Suspecting that was about to change, Dani raised her head.
