Hot As Ice
Merline Lovelace
They called him Project Iceman. The U-2 pilot who, incredibly, hadn't aged since the day his top-secret mission went south into the Arctic Ocean…forty-five years ago. Biologist Diana Remington had the duty of monitoring the scientific marvel, but her OMEGA objective was to learn from the fiercely guarded flyboy what had happened during that fateful flight.From his buzz cut to his June Cleaver ideal of women, Major Charles Stone should have riled Diana's defenses. Instead, she ached for all that he'd lost…and welcomed his heated touch despite the rules–and the risk. Because someone seemed determined to let sleeping spies lie–forever….
Diana could only imagine what it would be like to wake up in an alien world, without friends or familiar landmarks.
Steeling herself, she fought the urge to lift a hand and stroke his cheek. He hadn’t asked for comfort or condolences, and probably wouldn’t appreciate either.
“Why don’t we sit down, Major Stone?”
She took a single step, only to come up short as two palms slapped the wall beside her head. His arms caged her. His body formed an immovable wall.
“I want a few answers first.”
“All right. But just so you know, this type of primitive behavior went the way of the poodle skirt.”
Stone remained silent for so long Diana had to fight the urge to fidget. He was too close and too…too male. To her surprise and considerable annoyance, her skin tingled under her silk long johns, and the queerest sensation gripped her belly.
Hot as Ice
Merline Lovelace
www.millsandboon.co.uk (http://www.millsandboon.co.uk)
MERLINE LOVELACE
spent twenty-three years as an air force officer, serving tours at the Pentagon and at bases all over the world before she began a new career as a novelist.
Be sure to watch for Once a Hero, the next book in the exciting new CODE NAME: DANGER series, feturing Jack Carstairs, code name: Renegade, coming soon in Silhouette Intimate Moments.
Merline enjoys hearing from readers and can be reached by e-mail via Internet through Harlequin’s Web site.
This is for my dad, who flew high and flew proud.
Contents
Prologue
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Prologue
“I hear her!”
The figure swathed from head to foot in bright orange Extreme Cold Weather gear whooped with joy. “She’s punching through!”
His companion spun in a circle, searching the endless, unbroken surface of the polar ice cap. A dozen different shades of white dazzled his eye, shielded though they were by protective goggles. The blue white of the ice. The downy, cloud-soft drifts of glistening snow. The hazy, gray white of the sky that merged with the horizon.
“I don’t hear anything!”
“Listen!”
The frustrated listener threw back his hood. He risked losing an ear to biting wind that dropped the outside temperature to almost thirty below but was too eager to care at that moment. Then he, too, gave a shout of glee as a series of sharp cracks rifled through the air.
Suddenly, a scant forty yards away, the ice cap erupted. Huge white slabs pushed upward. Groaning, they rose straight into the air before toppling over with a crash. A moment later, the tip of a black conning tower poked through the crack.
“How do you like that! She’s right on target.”
Both men grinned. Sophisticated navigational equipment had guided the USS Hawkbill from Hawaii, but good old-fashioned muscle power had provided her surfacing site…a large X shoveled in the ice.
The two oceanographers raised their hands and clapped fur-lined mitts in a jubilant high five. After months at the remote laboratory one hundred and sixty-five miles north of Point Barrow, Alaska, they were ready—more than ready!—for a fresh infusion of supplies and outside conversation. Still grinning, they watched as the submarine’s conning tower rose a foot. Two feet. Ten.
The hulking body of the sub appeared, rolling great chunks of ice off its sides. When the hatch atop the conning tower opened and a hooded sailor appeared, the two men rushed forward.
“Boy, are we glad to see you!” the senior scientist shouted. “We’re down to the last battery for the underwater observation buoy.”
“We brought the spares you requested.” Bulky and awkward in his protective gear, the seaman climbed down the iron rungs riveted to the conning tower. “We’ll start unloading immediately.”
“We’ll help. Jack, bring up the snowmobile.”
Eager to get the valuable equipment unloaded and hauled back to the collection of huts connected by air-heated tunnels that formed the United States Arctic Oceanographic Research Station, the lead oceanographer threw an impatient glance over his shoulder.
“Jack! The snowmobile!”
His partner didn’t move. Frozen in place, he gawked at one of the huge slabs of ice tossed up by the sub.
“What’s got into you, man?”
His breath clouding on the frigid air, the senior scientist stomped across the ice. Irritation creased his forehead under his ski mask.
“Why are you just standing there? We’ve got a hundred tasks to get done before we… Oh, my God!”
His eyes bugged. Disbelief rose up in great, choking waves to close his throat, cut off his breath. Stumbling to a halt, he gaped at the helmeted figure staring back at him through five feet of ice.
Chapter 1
An early June breeze frisked through the streets of Washington, D.C. Trees decked in bright chartreuse dipped and swayed like synchronized dancers in the afternoon sunshine. The hundred-year-old chestnuts lining a quiet side street just off Massachusetts Avenue, deep in the heart of the capital’s embassy district, whispered the same playful song. Their rustling branches almost obscured the facades of the Federal-style town houses that marched along either side of the brick-paved thoroughfare.
The town house halfway down the block presented a dignified front very similar to its neighbors. Three stories, with tall windows sparkling in the summer sunlight, the elegant one-time residence boasted a discreet bronze plaque beside the front door. The plaque confirmed that the dwelling now served as the offices of the president’s special envoy…a nebulous position created years ago as a reward for a campaign contributor with a yen for a fancy title and a burning desire to rub elbows with the political elite.
Only a handful of Washington insiders were aware that the special envoy also served as the head of OMEGA, an organization so covert that its agents were known within the highest government circles only by their code names. Just as OMEGA represented the last letter of the Greek alphabet, this organization represented the U.S. president’s last resort in a crisis. Its operatives were activated only when other, more conventional agencies like the State Department, the CIA, and the military, couldn’t respond to a crisis for legal or political reasons.
The president himself appointed OMEGA’s director. With great reluctance, he’d recently named a new chief, as the current head had requested an extended leave of absence. After directing the agency through three administrations, Maggie Sinclair had decided to take some time off to complete a ground-breaking book on infant phonetics. She also planned to add a third child to the large, chaotic household she shared with her husband, her two daughters, an overgrown sheepdog and a bug-eyed, blue-and-orange striped iguana with an appetite for paper and plants.
Her husband fully endorsed her decision and had recently resigned his own position as the U.S. ambassador to the World Bank. While Maggie worked on her book, the wealthy, sophisticated Adam Ridgeway had decided to try his hand at full-time fatherhood.
Every agent not currently on assignment or otherwise detailed had gathered in OMEGA’s third floor control center to wish them well. Ignoring the soft chorus of beeps and blips emitted by the electronic communications consoles, they toasted Maggie and Adam as they began the latest phase in their hectic, adventurous marriage.
“The betting is you’ll be back within a month,” a lean, lanky operative with the code name Cowboy predicted. “One or the other of you. Hunting terrorists or illegal arms dealers is a lot easier on the nerves than raising kids.”
“You should know,” Maggie retorted. “Most couples would have the sense to stop after two sets of twins.”
“What can I say?” Nate Sloan grinned. “This ole boy doesn’t shoot blanks.”
Amid the hoots and groans that followed, Elizabeth Wells calmly made the rounds to refill champagne glasses. The gray-haired, grandmotherly woman had served as personal assistant to the director of OMEGA since its inception. She was loved and respected by all for her many talents, not the least of which was her deadly skill with the 9mm SIG Sauer pistol she kept within instant reach at her desk downstairs.
Maggie waited until Elizabeth finished topping off the glasses to step forward. The irreverent grin that had both irritated and inflamed her one-time boss tugged at her lips as she tipped him a quick look.
“I’ll admit I’m looking forward to spending more than two nights in succession in the same city, not to mention the same country, with my husband.”
The answering gleam in Adam’s blue eyes was for Maggie alone. She melted inside, and the muscles low in her belly clenched in delicious anticipation.
“As the president stated when he approved my successor,” she said a little breathlessly, “I’m leaving OMEGA in good hands.”
Her glance shifted to the operative standing quietly to one side.
“Nick is one of our own. Adam and I would trust him with our lives. We have trusted him with our lives.”
Nick Jensen, code name Lightning, strolled forward and lifted Maggie’s hand to his lips with a charm that fluttered every female heart in the room.
“It was my pleasure, Chameleon.”
Straightening, Nick included her husband in his glance. Despite the differences in their ages and backgrounds, the camaraderie between the two men showed clearly in the smiles they exchanged.
“I’ll never forget that breakfast on the veranda of the Carlton Hotel.”
“Nor will I.” Grinning, Adam clapped a hand on the younger man’s shoulder. “I believe the bill for that journey of gastronomic discovery ran to three figures.”
Maggie caught the curious looks the other operatives traded. Only she, Adam, and the couple who’d adopted Nick knew that this cool, imperturbable agent had once roamed the back streets of Cannes.
Surveying him now, Maggie found it hard to believe that a skinny, half-starved pickpocket with the improbable name of Henri Nicolas Everard had once graciously offered to serve as her pimp. Or that the bone-thin street tough kid would grow into such a hunk!
His boyish shock of red hair had softened over the years to a burnished gold. The wide, muscled shoulders covered in whisper-soft gray cashmere could have belonged to a linebacker. In fact, he’d traded his shorts and beat-up soccer shoes for a football uniform when Page and Doc Jensen had brought him to the States.
Fiercely loyal to his adopted country, Nick Jensen had been educated at UCLA and Stanford. After graduation, he’d parlayed his early, ravenous hunger into a string of world-class restaurants that had made him a millionaire many times over. The outrageously expensive watering holes attracted movie stars and princes. They also allowed Nick to roam at will between the glittering world of the superrich and the dark underworld of terror and intrigue.
Which, in Maggie’s rather vocally expressed opinion, made the tall, wickedly handsome operative the perfect choice for acting director of OMEGA. Happy to be leaving her team in such capable hands, she lifted her glass.
“Bonne chance, Nick.”
“Thanks, Chameleon,” he said in the rich baritone that gave no hint of his French roots. “I’ll need more than luck to manage this crew.”
“You’ve got that right.”
Nick’s gaze traveled over the small crowd. He’d gone into the field with most of these operatives at one time or another, had depended on their unique talents to get him out of some decidedly uncomfortable situations. Now he’d be the one to send them into harm’s way.
He rolled his shoulders under his hand-tailored jacket. Nick hadn’t asked for the director’s job, wasn’t sure he wanted it. He’d been his own man for so long that he’d balked at the idea of assuming responsibility for the dozen or so highly skilled and very independent OMEGA agents. But as Maggie so bluntly put it, the order to put your life on the line went down a whole lot easier when it came from someone who’d done just that countless times.
“Just don’t take too long to write your book,” he urged. “I’m opening a new restaurant in Lima in a few months, another in Acapulco later this year.”
“Strategically placed to cover the Pacific drug routes,” Adam murmured approvingly.
“Among other activities.”
Maggie’s brown eyes sharpened. She might have one foot already out the door, but the other was still planted firmly in OMEGA’s control center.
“What kinds of activities, Lightning?”
He’d opened his mouth to relay the rumor of a high-seas pirating operation based in the Chilean capital when a shrill buzz cut through the air. Everyone in the control center spun around. In a room crammed with the latest in high-tech electronic wizardry, only one device broadcast that particular signal.
“I’ve got it!”
Mackenzie Blair, OMEGA’s chief of communications, leaped for the central console. Slapping her left hand down on a flat surface, she snatched up a receiver with her right. Instantly, a complex double helix appeared on the screen above the console. Like colorful snakes performing some exotic mating ritual, the two strands writhed and danced for several seconds before confirming Mackenzie’s DNA signature. Only then did the unscrambler built into the receiver activate.
“OMEGA control.” Shoving a strand of her thick, unruly sable hair behind her ear, she listened for a moment. “Yes, sir. She’s right here.”
Turning, she offered the receiver to Maggie. “It’s the president. He wants to speak to the director.”
Maggie caught herself just in time. With a wry grin, she gestured to Nick. “It’s for you, Nick.”
“So it is.”
He strolled across the room. OMEGA’s chief of communications hesitated for the merest fraction of a second before handing him the receiver. Hiding a frown, she stepped aside.
Maggie Sinclair, code name Chameleon, had hired Mackenzie fresh out of the navy over the objections of some of OMEGA’s older heads. Even more to the point, Chameleon had given her new Communications chief a blank check to procure the latest in high-tech gadgetry. She’d even sent Mackenzie into the field to experience first-hand the challenges of communicating with headquarters while dodging bullets or burrowing into burning desert sand to escape detection. Mackenzie considered Maggie her mentor, her role model, her friend. She still hadn’t recovered from the shock of hearing that her idol was turning over OMEGA’s reins for an indeterminate period.
And to Nick Jensen, of all people. An unabashed, unapologetic sensualist. An epicure, whose sophisticated palate demanded the finest wines, the freshest delicacies, the most glamorous dinner companions. In Mackenzie’s mind, those qualities tended to blur the fact that Nick, code name Lightning, was also one of the most experienced operatives in the agency. She’d wasted two years of her life on a man with similarly varied, if decidedly less discriminating, appetites. Her ex had forever turned her off too-handsome, too-charming rogues.
Still, when OMEGA’s new director pinned her with an intent stare, it took her a moment to get her breath back. And to realize he wasn’t looking at her, but through her.
“Where’s Artemis?”
Her glance flicked to the computerized status board projected onto the far wall. One of her unit’s main challenges was keeping track of OMEGA’s agents twenty-four hours a day. A single glance confirmed the status of Dr. Diana Remington, code name Artemis.
“She’s at John Hopkins, teaching a class on antipeptide antibodies…whatever those are.”
“Contact her. Tell her I want her in my office in thirty minutes.”
Mackenzie’s brows lifted at the preemptory order. It hadn’t taken Lightning long to shift from operative to director mode.
“Aye, aye, sir!”
A glint appeared in Nick’s dark eyes. Deliberately, he planed the brusque edge from his voice. “While we’re waiting for Artemis to arrive, get the Field Dress folks working on Arctic gear for her. Also, pull up everything in the computers on the U-2.”
“The spy plane?”
“The spy plane.”
Adam Ridgeway smiled as another “Aye, aye, sir,” rifled through the control center. Sliding a hand under his wife’s arm, he squeezed gently.
“Strange how much that woman reminds me of one of my very best agents,” he murmured.
“She should,” Maggie replied smugly. “One of your very best agents personally trained her.”
She took a last look around the control center, then set her champagne aside. Laughter danced in her eyes when they locked with her husband’s.
“Let’s blow this joint. The new team has work to do, and we’ve got a book and a baby to make.”
A half hour later, Diana Remington faced Nick across an expanse of polished mahogany. In her ivory silk blouse and navy blue suit with its slim, calf-length skirt, she defied the stereotypical image of a molecular biologist. In Nick’s considered opinion, she looked even less like an undercover operative.
As her code name suggested, however, Remington’s silky, silvery blond hair and elegantly tailored suit belied her unique talents. Artemis was the Greek name for Diana, the Roman goddess of the hunt. The modern-day incarnation seated across from Nick was every bit as skilled as her mythical counterpart at tracking and bringing down her prey. This time, it appeared, her prey had already been found.
Diana’s green eyes were wide with astonishment as she stared across the table at Nick. “They discovered what in the ice?”
“The body of an air force pilot.”
“One of ours?”
“We think so. There are no identifying labels of any kind on his flight suit or helmet. That’s a significant factor in itself. Additionally, the age of his equipment helped pinpoint his identity. All evidence indicates he’s Major Charles Stone, whose plane disappeared from radar screens at 2235 Zulu on November 2, 1956.”
Diana let out a low whistle. “He’s been lost for more than forty-five years?”
“Apparently so. No trace of him or his plane were ever found.”
“Didn’t the air force mount a search and rescue operation when he went down?”
“They couldn’t.” Nick’s dark eyes held hers. “His aircraft had just entered Soviet airspace when it disappeared from radar.”
“Oops.”
“Exactly.”
The tip of Nick’s twenty-four karat gold Mount Blanc pen tapped the cover of a plain manila folder. The pen was a gift from Maggie and Adam. The folder contained the data Mackenzie Blair had hastily milked from the OMEGA’s supercomputers.
“If this pilot is in fact Major Stone,” he continued, “he was flying a U-2, known in the air force by the nickname of Dragon Lady. It’s a high-altitude, all-weather surveillance aircraft developed in the early fifties to collect data on Soviet ICBMs.”
“I saw something about it on the History Channel a few weeks ago,” Diana said. “Isn’t that the plane Francis Gary Powers was flying when he was shot down over Russia in the early sixties?”
“It is,” Nick confirmed. “Although the U.S. insisted the U-2’s were only collecting weather data, the Soviets put Powers on trial for espionage. He was convicted and sentenced to ten years in prison, but exchanged after serving only two. The incident gave Eisenhower a political black eye and put Kennedy at a real disadvantage in the court of world opinion when the Cuban missile crisis came along.”
Diana leaned back in her chair and played with a strand of her shoulder-length blond hair. Far too busy to waste time primping in the mornings, she’d be forever grateful to the savvy stylist who’d talked her into a wash-and-go spiral perm and a few age-defying highlights.
Not that she worried unduly about her age. At twenty-nine, she was one of the youngest biologists at the prestigious Harrell Institute, a private, nonprofit consortium of scientists chartered to help define medical and moral standards for genetic research.
It was her other job that had carved the character lines at the corners of her eyes, she thought wryly. OMEGA tended to plunge its agents into situations that sent the pucker factor right off the charts. From the expression on Nick’s face, she had a feeling his first official act as the new director of OMEGA would definitely have that effect on her.
Sure enough, Lightning tapped his shiny gold pen once, twice, all the while shooting her a considering look. When he tucked the pen into his suit pocket, Diana braced herself.
“The president is scheduled for a summit meeting with the new Russian premier next month. He isn’t particularly anxious to reopen an old, embarrassing chapter in U.S.-Russian relations prior to the meeting.”
“No, I can see he wouldn’t be.”
“Nor does he want to unnecessarily inflame certain right-wing groups in this country who still see Russia as the evil empire and are looking for any excuse to resume the Cold War. If the Soviet Union shot down Stone, as they did Powers, relations between Russia and the U.S. could get real tense, real fast.”
“No kidding,” Diana murmured.
“That’s why you’re heading north. Your civilian credentials give you the perfect cover to take part in the recovery operation. If the team of other scientists already en route to the Arctic Circle succeeded in breathing life into this iceman, we want you there to—”
“What!” Diana bolted upright. “They’re going to thaw this guy out?”
“They’re going to try. Apparently the body is perfectly preserved.”
“It can’t possibly be that well preserved! Cyrogenics isn’t my specialty, but I know frozen cell technology hasn’t advanced far enough yet to undo damage caused by forty plus years buried in ice.”
“The Dragon Lady flew at such high altitudes that their pilots wore the equivalent of space suits. Dr. Irwin Goode, who worked the U-2 program during its inception, thinks the pressure suit may account for the remarkable state of Major Stone’s body.”
Since Goode had been awarded the Nobel Peace Prize some decades ago for his pioneering work in the superoxygenation of living microbes, Diana refrained from arguing the point.
“Is Goode part of the team headed for the Arctic?”
“He is. So is Dr. Gregory Wozniak, who, I’ve been informed, recently cloned an ice-age mouse found in a cave in northern Siberia from a single strand of its fur. If Goode and company can’t revive Major Stone, Wozniak wants to try cloning him.”
Diana shook her head, both repelled and excited by the possibilities. Tremendous advances occurred in the field of genetics every day. Just last year paleoarcheologists had unearthed a frozen, stone-age mammoth and had hopes of crossing its DNA with that of a modern-day elephant. Still, for every step forward, there were a number taken back.
“Best I recall, Dr. Wozniak’s clone lived all of two days,” she said slowly.
“If this one lives two hours, you’re going to be right there beside him, holding his hand.” Nick’s gaze drilled into hers. “The president wants everything about this man kept absolutely secret until we ascertain the facts surrounding his plane’s disappearance. In the remote chance they actually bring Major Stone—or some version of Major Stone—back to life, we want you to act as his handler.”
“But…”
“He’ll be confused, frightened. Your job is to get next to him, Artemis. Win his trust, find out what happened all those years ago.”
“All right. When do I leave?”
“An air force C-21 is standing by at Andrews, fueled and ready for takeoff. I advised the pilot that you’d be there in an hour.”
“An hour!”
Diana gulped down an instinctive protest. She had planned to have dinner with Allen tonight. She’d already cancelled twice this week.
She consoled herself with the reminder that Allen McDermott was a brilliant, dedicated scientist in his own right. Although he knew nothing about Diana’s work for OMEGA, he understood that the pressures of her job at the Institute often required her to back out of their dates at the last minute. Allen would understand.
She hoped.
Flipping the folder shut, Nick slid it across the desk. “This file includes a complete background dossier on Major Stone—his academic reports, military records and a psychological profile. By the time you reach the Arctic, you’ll know all there is to know about the man.”
Diana had plenty of time to digest the file while a sleek, twin-engined C-21 ferried her to Eilson Air Force Base, just outside of Fairbanks, Alaska. There she boarded a four-engine turbo-prop C-130 Hercules equipped with skis.
When she finally climbed out of the 130, air chilled to a lethal twenty below by howling winds slashed at the eye and mouth slits in her ski mask. Dazzling blue-white light shimmered on the vast sheets of snowy ice, almost blinding her. Clumsy in her five layers of thermal underwear and outer Extreme Cold Weather gear, she waddled to the similarly bundled driver who zoomed up on a snowmobile just as the C-130 touched down.
“Welcome to the Arctic, Dr. Remington. Climb aboard and we’ll get you out of the wind.”
Huddled behind the driver, Diana skimmed across the packed snow to the collection of modular, boxlike buildings that constituted the U.S. Arctic Oceanographic Research Station. Once inside, she stripped off the bright orange cold weather jumpsuit and most of her layers.
“Diana!”
Greg Wells hurried forward to greet her. Short, bald, and radiating unbridled excitement, he was the world’s leading expert on cyrogenetic regeneration. Diana had met him before at conferences and wasn’t particularly impressed.
“Dr. Goode and I were thrilled to hear you were joining us,” he said, pumping her hand. Without giving her a chance to do more than catch her breath, he swept her down a narrow corridor crowded with boxes and equipment. “I know you’re anxious to view the find. He’s right in here.”
A few moments later, Diana stepped into a frost-coated storage annex and almost fell over her boots. She stumbled to a halt, mesmerized by the body stretched out on a metal table.
He was naked, bathed in harsh white light from head to toe, and absolutely the most magnificent male specimen she’d ever seen.
Chapter 2
“It’s been ten days.”
Frustration added a grating whine to Greg Wozniak’s voice as he glanced around the small group of scientists, researchers, and intelligence analysts crowded into the oceanographic station’s mess.
Several day’s growth fuzzed the cheeks of the men. Red rimmed their lids and traced fine lines through the whites of their eyes. Shoulders slumped under layers of wool shirts and thermal underwear.
They were all tired, all showing signs of sleep deprivation and disappointment. The initial burst of excitement that had sustained them through days and nights of constant experimentation and vigilance had seeped away.
“We brought Stone’s body temperature back to normal range almost a week ago,” Wozniak reminded the group unnecessarily. Shoving his coffee mug aside, he pleaded his case for the third time in as many hours. “We’ve pumped every possible combination of drugs through the Iceman’s veins.”
“He has a name,” Diana put in coolly.
Ten days of constant contact with the short, ro-tound cyro-geneticist hadn’t improved her opinion of him. Wozniak shrugged and picked up the threads of his argument.
“We can’t use the paddles on Stone’s heart many more times or we’ll completely destroy the muscle. I think it’s time to officially declare him dead and let me get on with the cloning process.”
Across the table from Diana, Dr. Irwin Goode wrapped thin hands around his mug. Liver spots darkened his fragile skin. His fingers trembled. She’d heard the Nobel Prize winner speak at a convention some years ago and was saddened to see how much the brilliant scientist had aged. If his body had succumbed to the march of time, however, his mind still functioned with razor-edged sharpness.
“Major Stone’s brain showed evidence of low level activity after the first shock,” the silver-haired Goode reminded his younger colleague calmly.
“Not enough to restart his biorhythms.”
“But enough to allow an early determination that he’s not completely brain dead. As you’re well aware, the law as currently written doesn’t allow cloning live human subjects without their consent.”
“I know!” Wozniak groused. “It’s just my luck Stone doesn’t have any close relatives left alive to authorize the procedure.”
With some effort, Diana bit back a sarcastic comment on his warm, caring humanity.
“We agreed on one more attempt,” Goode reminded him. “If the current combination of proteins and acids we’re pumping into him don’t produce cell activity, we’ll reevaluate the protocol.”
“Pull the plug, you mean,” Diana muttered.
Behind the lens of his rimless glasses, Dr. Goode’s eyes held a look of mild reproof. “I mean we’ll reevaluate the protocol.”
She bit her lip, embarrassed by her unprofessional remark. After ten days of intense, around-the-clock trial and error, they were all on edge. And just about out of options.
In her heart of hearts, Diana didn’t hold out any more hope of reviving Stone than the others. Yet every time she touched his now warm skin or peered through a microscope at tissue samples to search for signs of protein regeneration, she seemed to lose a little more of her scientific objectivity.
In ten days, Major Charles Stone had become a personal challenge to her, almost a quest. Her years of study, her countless hours of research, all seemed to have led her to this remote, isolated Arctic station.
To him.
Metal chair legs scraped as Diana shoved away from the rickety table. She wasn’t ready to give up on the pilot yet. She couldn’t. With a nod to her colleagues, she left the small, boxlike room that served as mess hall, card room and conference center.
The recovery team’s arrival had severely crowded the already cramped station. To make room for the extra supplies and equipment, the obliging oceanographers had shoved their computers against walls and moved their acoustical sounding devices into the long, snakelike tunnel that connected the collapsible sheds.
Generators hummed as Diana picked her way past stacked boxes and various pieces of gear. The hot air pumped through the double walls kept the temperature inside the station at a toasty sixty-five degrees, so the occupants didn’t have to pile on too many layers. Boots, snug leggings and a wool plaid shirt worn open over thermal silk long johns provided Diana with sufficient warmth and a measure of mobility.
Before entering the storage shed where Major Stone lay suspended between life and death, she ducked into the cramped side room the recovery team had converted into a lab. She’d already checked the latest cell samples once this morning but wanted another look.
Hooking a stool with her heel, she dragged it closer to the long, flat counter filled with racks of test tubes and culture dishes. As Dr. Goode had as much as admitted, they were down to their last hope. They’d tried every possible protein and nucleic acid combination within the range of Major Stone’s molecular sequencing. If this combination didn’t work, if the protein and nucleic acid didn’t bind…
Flicking the switch on a laser scanning microscope, Diana slipped a slide with the latest sample under the lens. The air force had spared no cost to lease and ship in the powerful scope Dr. Goode had requested. It was one of only three in use anywhere in the world outside heavily funded and usually guarded research facilities. While Diana squinted at the hugely magnified cells, the microscope’s computers whirred through the two hundred thousand plus known protein sequences to verify the sample’s profile.
Mere seconds later, the screen blinked a complex code. With a click of the mouse, Diana sent the code to the computer’s built-in chart function.
“Damn!”
The line charting this combination remained flat and straight. Major Stone’s protein profile hadn’t changed by so much as a gnome.
Swallowing a sharp stab of disappointment, she removed the slide and started to push away from the counter. Only then did she notice the faint, almost indiscernible bluish tint at the edge of the sample.
Her breath caught. Snapping the slide back under the lens, she refocused the dual eyepieces at the edge of the slide.
There it was! A complex protein strand that had bonded with traces of nucleic acid! Unless the sample had become contaminated, the bonding was new. So why did the computer spit out the same, dead profile?
Frowning, she reset the computer and ran the entire sequence again. When the identical code came up, she swore softly.
“That can’t be right.”
Her first instinct was to consult Dr. Goode. Her second, to jab down on the stem of the functional black chronometer strapped to her right wrist.
Before Diana had left D.C., OMEGA’s chief of communications had outfitted her with a special transceiver designed to resist the extreme Arctic cold. The device looked like an ordinary twenty-dollar watch, the kind you could buy at any Wal-Mart. As Mackenzie Blair had demonstrated, however, this particular watch contained a hermetically sealed transciever that could send and receive signals from a highly classified defense satellite with bell-ringing clarity.
One quick jab on the stem activated the system and established an instant link.
“Control, this is Artemis. Do you read me?”
Mackenzie’s cheerful reply came through a second later. “I’ve got you, Artemis. Go ahead.”
“I need you to access the PIR-PSD through OMEGA’s computers.”
“Repeat, please.”
“The Protein Information Resource-Protein Sequence Database.”
“Ooooh-kay.”
“It’s the largest protein database in the world. Just type PIR-PSD into the computer and you’ll go right to it. Tell me when you pull up the home screen.”
Chewing on her lower lip, Diana waited for OMEGA’s chief of communications to plug into the international information source.
“I’m there,” Mackenzie announced a few seconds later.
“I’m going to feed you a long string of numbers. Type them in exactly as I give them to you, then hit the button that says request profile.”
“Fire when ready, Artemis.”
With meticulous care, Diana read the long series of numbers from the current sample. Mackenzie repeated each digit as she entered it into the computer.
While the PIR-PSD digested the information, Diana’s heart thumped painfully. Had the astronomically expensive electron microscope given erroneous readings? Would they have to start over, repeat the thousands of sequences within Major Stone’s profile range? Could they keep his organs functioning long enough to…
“I’m getting some kind of a code here.”
“Read it to me. Slowly!”
Diana typed the code Mackenzie fed her into the microscope’s computer and switched to the chart function. Instantly, the flat line shot upward.
“Ohmigod!”
“Something wrong, Artemis?”
“No! Something’s right! Very right!”
Here they’d been within hours of pulling the plug on Major Charles Stone, and his protein had already begun to regenerate. If this chart was anywhere near correct, he’d almost reached sufficient levels to sustain life.
Trembling with excitement, Diana advised Mackenzie she’d report back later and slid off the stool. She should notify Goode and Wozniak and the others, have them verify the anomaly. She would, as soon as she checked on the major.
He lay stretched out on the metal table, atop a computer-controlled aqueous gel mattress to cushion his body and vary his position at timed intervals. He was still naked, although the team had draped a folded sheet over his midsection. Video cameras mounted on tripods observed him from four different angles. IVs snaked from his arm, heart monitor leads from his chest. Electrodes measured the almost imperceptible brain activity that had so excited the team at first. A whole wall of monitors recorded both visual and digital data.
Her heart still pumping pure adrenaline from the chart reading, Diana stepped to the table. Major Stone lay supine, broad shouldered, superbly muscled. Fine brown hair arrowed down his chest, whorled around his navel, and disappeared beneath the folded sheet. The same tobacco brown hair lightly fuzzed his arms and legs. His buzz cut was a darker shade, and right out of the fifties.
As a biologist, Diana appreciated beauty in all life forms. Stone wasn’t handsome in a classical sense, she decided. His features were too rugged, his jaw too square and blunt. She had to admit, though, his raw masculinity shot her scientific detachment all to hell. That, and the fact that she had absorbed so many details of his life by now that there was no way she could view him objectively.
According to the extensive background dossier Mackenzie had compiled, Charlie Stone had lost his parents during the Depression and was raised by an aunt. He’d worked at a variety of odd jobs while in high school, but still managed to letter in baseball and football. From the many comments in his high school yearbook, he’d won as many cheerleaders’ hearts as he had games.
When World War II broke out, he lied about his age to enlist in the Army Air Corps aviation cadets. He’d flown P-51 Mustangs in Europe, and F-86 Sabre jets six years later in Korea. He’d been engaged for a brief period to an army nurse, but the affair fizzled when she mustered out of the army and went home. Stone had then been selected for test pilot school and moved to Edwards Air Force Base, California, where he flew with the likes of Chuck Yeager and future astronaut Deke Slayton.
He was from the old school. Tough. Tested. The kind of brash, fearless flier who pushed himself and the aircraft he tested to the edge of the envelope. He’d racked up hundreds of hours in various experimental airframes when the CIA had “requested” him from the air force to help shake out the bugs on the supersecret U-2. A little more than a year later, he’d dropped out of the sky.
“I wonder what you’ll think of your world if…when you wake up.”
She laid her hand on his arm, comparing the feel of his skin to the temperature displayed on the monitors. Despite the chill air inside the makeshift laboratory, he was warm to the touch.
“It’s not the same world it was in 1956,” she said, willing him to hear her voice, hoping he’d respond to the stimulus of human contact. “From what I’ve read about the Cold War era, I think you’ll find it’s better. Then again, maybe we haven’t come as far as we like to think we have.”
She stroked his arm gently, dredging up images from his time. Eisenhower facing off with Kruschev. Sputnik. Polio victims imprisoned in huge iron lungs. I Love Lucy and Howdy Doody in grainy black and white. Chrome-laden Cadillacs with sharklike fins. Or did all that chrome come later?
She’d have to pull up the interactive time capsule Mackenzie had compiled. The gee-whiz program provided visuals and audio on everything from popular foods of the fifties to Hit Parade favorites crooned by the likes of Patti Page and Frankie Laine.
“We’ve conquered polio,” she told him, “but Lucy and Ricky still reign supreme on late-night TV. You can catch them just about… Yikes!”
She jumped back, almost choking in surprise as the arm she’d been stroking jerked straight up.
Disbelieving, Diana gaped at the upraised limb. Was it just a reflex? A response to the stimulus of her touch?
Her heart pounding, she dragged her astonished gaze from his arm to his face and nearly jumped again. His eyelids twitched. She was sure they’d twitched.
“Major Stone!” Her voice spiraled to an excited squeak. “Can you hear me?”
His forehead creased in a frown.
“Major Stone!” Her pulse hammered so hard and fast she could scarcely breathe. “Open your eyes.”
Deep grooves bracketed his mouth. The muscles of his neck corded, making Diana’s own throat ache painfully. From the corner of one eye, she saw the bank of monitors light up like a Christmas tree. A shrill beep sounded, stretched into warning buzz. Another alarm pinged. Within seconds, a whole chorus was chirping away.
The alarms brought one of the research techs rushing through the door behind her. “What’s going on?”
“He’s waking up!” Diana threw over her shoulder. “Get Dr. Goode. Immediately.”
She whipped back around and felt every ounce of oxygen leave her lungs.
He’d opened his eyes! Wild confusion filled their blue depths.
“It’s all right.” Reining in her galloping excitement, she infused her voice with deliberate, soothing calm. “You’re safe. You’re at the U.S. Arctic Oceanographic station.”
His eyes narrowed, dissected her face, her red-and-brown plaid shirt, her jeans. When he brought his gaze back to hers, his throat worked. A sound halfway between a groan and a croak escaped.
“Don’t try to talk yet.”
He jerked his arm again and grabbed a fistful of her shirt. Astonished by his strength, she let him drag her down until their faces were only inches apart. With an effort that was painful to watch, he swallowed and tried again. Finally, he forced out a single syllable.
“Who…?”
“Who am I? My name is Diana Remington. Dr. Diana Remington.”
She heard the sound of running footsteps behind her. Greg Wozniak barreled through the door. Excitement and his dash down the hall had turned his chubby face brick red.
“Is it true? Is he waking up?”
“See for yourself.”
Diana started to edge aside. The hold on her shirt kept her tethered to the table as Major Stone’s gaze shifted to her colleague.
“I… I don’t believe it!” Wozniak breathed, almost as inarticulate as their subject. “How…? When…?”
Diana waited until a huffing Dr. Goode had joined them to relate the astounding sequence of events.
“It happened so fast. Without warning. I was in here checking his vitals when his arm jerked. A few seconds later, his eyes opened.”
Goode’s glance was riveted on Stone. Little of the excitement Diana and Greg Wozniak were feeling showed on his wrinkled face.
“I don’t understand it. The sequence profiles showed no indication that his protein was beginning to regenerate.”
As much as Diana wanted to share the results of the test she’d had Mackenzie run using OMEGA’s computers, she couldn’t break her cover. “The microscope must have been giving us faulty readings.”
“Impossible,” Goode stated emphatically. “I calibrated it myself.”
“Well, one of the solutions we fed him obviously worked.” Still pinned against the table by Stone’s grip on her shirt, Diana made the introductions. “Major Stone, this is Dr. Irwin Goode, a Nobel Prize winner in bionetics. He worked with the U-2 spy plane program years ago. And this is Dr. Greg Wozniak, who…”
She broke off, gasping, as Stone’s biceps flexed again. With a sharp tug, he yanked her down. She ended up sprawled across his body, with one hand planted square on his naked chest, the other scrabbling for a grip on the metal table. Ice blue eyes lasered into hers.
“Not…spy,” he rasped with savage intensity. “Wea…ther flight.”
Oh, Lord! In her excitement, she’d forgotten that the U-2 program was so highly classified during Major Stone’s time that not even Congress knew about the intelligence gathering flights over the Soviet Union. It had been a CIA show from start to finish, back in the days when the agency called all the shots without any pesky laws or Congressional oversight to curb their operations.
From the information Mackenzie had put together on the U-2 program, the operation was classic CIA. The pilots stripped down to the skin before climbing into their flight suits. They carried no personal items, wore no identifying insignia or rank. Even their aircraft was unmarked. If forced down over enemy territory, they’d been instructed to deny any attempt at intelligence gathering and admit only to collecting weather data.
Which is exactly what Major Stone was doing now.
“It’s okay,” she said, trying to lever up a few inches. “The U-2 program is no longer classified.”
He didn’t let go. If anything, his scowl grew even fiercer.
Diana’s OMEGA training had included brutal and highly effective techniques for breaking just about any hold, but she figured smashing Stone’s wrist bones against the edge of the metal table wouldn’t exactly win his confidence.
“It’s okay,” she repeated, ignoring the fact that her breasts flattened against his chest and her mouth hovered only inches from his. “We’re on your side.”
His jaw worked. “Wea-ther flight.”
Oh boy! He obviously intended to stick to his oath to keep all aspects of his mission secret.
Admiration for his courage gripped Diana. He had to be confused, disoriented. Had to be wondering how in the world he’d arrived at a remote oceanographic station. Yet he wasn’t about to admit to a thing except his cover story.
“You can trust us,” she said softly. “We know you’re Major Charles Stone, United States Air Force. We know you were detailed to the CIA in early 1955 to test and put into operation a new, single-seat, high-altitude reconnaissance aircraft. We also know you were flying that aircraft when it disappeared from radar at 2235 hours on November 2, 1956. What we don’t know is why it went down, but we’re hoping you’ll tell us that.”
He stared at her, his features taut and grim. After what seemed like a lifetime, his grip on her shirt loosened. She eased up a few inches.
She didn’t say anything for several moments, wanting to give him time to digest what he’d heard so far before she dropped the bomb about his forty-five year snooze. She looked to her colleagues, then back at Stone, only to discover that his glance had locked on something just over her shoulder.
“What…the…hell?”
The harsh, rasping exclamation ripped from deep in his throat. Diana took a quick look behind her, saw the digital clock mounted on the wall. The time, day, month, and year flashed in iridescent green. Dragging in a deep breath, she faced the Iceman again.
“Yes,” she said slowly and clearly. “That’s the correct date.”
Chapter 3
It was a plot! A crazy Commie scheme to confuse him. Disorient him. Make him spill his guts. It couldn’t be anything else!
Desperately, Charlie tried to shatter the ice that seemed to have crystallized inside his brain. Images shimmered against the white haze in his mind. Sounds came and went. Sharp cracks. Long groans. Like icebergs crying when they broke free of a glacier. With each image, each sound, fear rose in black, billowing waves.
Thrusting it back with a silent snarl, Charlie reached into the void and grabbed onto the fragments he could remember with both hands. He’d taken off from his base in Turkey. Flown a routine mission. Just entered Soviet airspace when…when all hell broke loose. He’d jerked the stick, had tried desperately to bring his plane around and escape Soviet airspace before he bailed out.
The fragments shifted, grew clearer. He remembered the suffocating lack of oxygen, recalled fumbling for the ejection handle. And the cold. God, the cold! It tore at his eyeballs, sliced into his skin. Then the bone-wrenching jolt of his parachute. After that, nothing.
He must have come down in Siberia. Or splashed into the Bering Sea and been fished out by seal hunters or fishermen. They’d no doubt turned him over to the Soviet authorities. Nothing else could explain the absurd tale the woman still sprawled across his chest was concocting.
As if she’d crawled right into his skull and had decoded his every thought, she confirmed his point of impact. “All indications are that you went down in the Arctic Ocean, Major Stone.”
He was so shaken by her uncanny ability to read his mind, he barely grasped the incredible story she spun for him.
“Immersion in the freezing Arctic water reduced the need for oxygen in your brain at the same rate your circulation slowed. In effect, you went into a state of deep, permanent hibernation. Your pressure suit protected your body from decomposition.”
Sympathy glimmered in the green eyes so close to his own, but Charlie refused to acknowledge it, just as his scrambling mind flatly refuted the soft statement that followed.
“You’ve been lost in the ice for forty-five years.”
She was good. Damned good. She looked so sincere, sounded so American! Charlie’s lip curled.
“Helluva…story, blon…die,” he rasped, his throat raw and aching. “Too bad…I’m not buying it.”
“It’s true.”
“Yeah, and…I’m Joe…DiMaggio.”
The Commies knew just how to wring a man’s head inside out. Charlie had flown during the Korea War. He’d lost buddies, had heard tales about the POWs who’d disappeared into China. Only now, three years after the war had finally ended, was the truth beginning to seep out.
The Soviet masters of both North Korea and China had perfected a technique the CIA labeled brainwashing. According to highly classified reports, they’d programmed American POWs to betray their country, burying the traitorous impulse so deep in their psyche that no one, even the POWs themselves, knew it existed.
The CIA had proof, had shown Charlie and his fellow U-2 pilots the case file of a lieutenant who’d returned home to lead a quiet, ordinary life as a Frigidaire salesman until something or someone had triggered him. Without warning, the former officer had walked off the job, retrieved his hunting rifle, and calmly put a bullet through the powerful senator who was making a whistle stop campaign appearance in town that afternoon. To this day, the lieutenant had no idea why he’d killed the charismatic presidential candidate.
Charlie wasn’t about to let this green-eyed blonde play with his head.
“I know it’s hard to believe, Major Stone,” she was saying calmly, “but I’m telling you the truth. You’re at an American oceanographic station one hundred and eighty miles north of Point Barrow, Alaska. And the date is really June 2002.”
The woman—what had she called herself? Remington. Dr. Remington—pushed against his chest with the flat of her palm.
“If you’ll let me up, perhaps my colleagues and I can convince you.”
Charlie wasn’t about to admit he didn’t have the strength to hold her if she fought him. He was shaking like a kitten, so weak the mere act of uncurling his fist took every ounce of strength he possessed. Sweat popped out on his skin, chilling him instantly. Only then did he realize he was stretched out flat on a table, as naked as a skinned coon. Tubes and wires snaked from his arms, legs and chest.
His gaze narrowing, he followed the tangled umbilical cords to the bank of equipment they sprouted from. Another wave of shivers rippled along the surface of his skin. As one of the first test pilots selected for the U-2 high altitude program, Charlie had been poked and prodded and subjected to just about every experiment known to man. Yet he’d never seen equipment like this.
Setting his jaw, he reached across his chest. With one vicious tug, he ripped the IV from his arm. Drops of blood and intravenous solution sprayed around the room.
“Hey!” The short, balding man beside blondie jumped back. “Careful with those bodily fluids! They’re as dangerous as a machine gun!”
Charlie’s throat closed. What the hell had they pumped into him?
The woman—Remington—shot her companion a look of disgust. “If you’re worried about AIDS, Greg, the first case wasn’t documented until 1981, twenty-five years after Major Stone dropped out of the sky.”
The man reddened, but kept his distance. “Who knows what he picked up in the ice? There has to be some reason for the anomaly in his protein regeneration.”
None of what they were saying made the least sense to Charlie, but one thought surfaced crystal clear through his swirling confusion. No one was going to stick anything else in him—or take any further readings—until he figured out what the hell was happening here. Setting his jaw, he swung his legs to the side of the table and pushed himself up.
His head buzzed. The ring of faces around him blurred. Gritting his teeth, Charlie blinked to clear the swirling haze and proceeded to yank off every telemetry lead.
“Major Stone!”
“Don’t hurt yourself!”
“Careful with the equipment.”
His fierce glare silenced the instant chorus. Chest heaving, Charlie gripped the metal table with both hands. His breath rasped on the cold air, the only sound in the lab until the blonde broke the tension.
“Why don’t we make you more comfortable? I believe some clothes would be in order, and a move to the living quarters. Is that agreeable to you, Major?”
Stone’s gaze roamed the makeshift lab, taking in the monitors and cameras, before locking with hers again. A curt nod signaled his acquiescence.
To the fierce disappointment of everyone on recovery team, Diana included, Major Stone lived up to his name and made like a rock. Once installed in a hastily cleared bunk room and outfitted in borrowed clothing, he crossed his arms and refused to answer questions or respond to the team’s revelations. Nor was he ready to accept that he’d awakened in the second millennium A.D.
The team tried their best to convince him, presenting printed material, digitized images and TV shows beamed in by satellite over the station’s system. The major’s eyes narrowed to slits as he stared at the flickering images, but he kept all thoughts to himself.
At one point, Diana thought they’d finally gotten through to him, but Dr. Wozniak’s excited explanation of the cloning process and impassioned request for a DNA sample produced another severe case of lockjaw.
No one, he declared ominously, was going to produce a test tube duplicate while he was able to prevent it.
“It was bad enough when he thought we were trying to worm information on the U-2 program out of him,” Diana reported to OMEGA’s new chief some hours later. “After we sprang the fact that he’s been on ice for more than four decades, he shut down completely. My guess is he thinks we’re playing mind games with him in an effort to get him to talk.”
“So he hasn’t said anything about his aircraft or what happened to it?”
“Roger that, Lightning.”
“His mental condition sounds pretty stable. How’s his overall physical condition?”
“Incredible. Absolutely incredible.”
If Nick noticed the husky note in her voice, he chose not to comment on it. “Do you still have him under close observation?”
“In a manner of speaking. We’ve moved him into living quarters and posted a research tech outside his door…just in case he decides to depart the station.”
“Well, keep me advised on his progress.”
“Will do, Lighting.”
She started to sign off, hesitated. “Did you dig anything up on Greg Wozniak?”
“Not yet. We’re still looking into his financial holdings. They’re nothing if not diversified. In addition to his lucrative research grants, he owns a chain of sperm banks and a piece of several companies that manufacture cyrogenic equipment. But his real money appears to come from wealthy clients who pay him six figures or more to freeze a part of themselves for future cloning.”
“Have any of those clients availed themselves of his service?”
“None that we’re aware of.”
“So Stone would have really been a feather in Wozniak’s cap professionally, as well as a walking advertisement for his business. No wonder he was so eager for the recovery team to declare the major legally dead.”
“Eager enough to somehow falsify the protein profiles?”
Suspicion was an ugly little worm, one every undercover agent learned to live with. This particular worm had been turning and twisting in Diana’s mind since she’d discovered the faulty readings.
“I don’t know.”
“Keep an eye on him,” Nick advised. “In the meantime, we’ll dig deeper.”
“Roger that.”
Signing off, she arched her back and hooked her hands behind her neck to relieve the kinks.
Lord, she was tired! Even without the strain of the recovery operation, she would have found it difficult to sleep in the bright, perpetual haze of an Arctic summer. After ten days, her internal clock was still struggling to adjust. She knew she wouldn’t get much more rest tonight than she had the previous nights. Charlie Stone would invade her sleep, just as he’d dominated her waking hours.
Wondering what he was doing right now, she tugged off her boots. Was he studying the magazines they’d left in his room? Flipping through the switches on the satellite-fed TV? Prowling his eight-by-eight room?
She had her answer not two minutes later.
She had just bent over a stainless steel sink to splash her face with bottled water when the snick of a door opening brought her twisting around. Despite her dripping lashes, she recognized the major’s wide-shouldered, narrow-hipped form instantly.
“Major Stone!”
She bobbed upright, blinking the water from her eyes. He looked so different in borrowed tan work pants and an ill-fitting blue shirt that stretched at the shoulder seams. His boots were his own, she noted in a quick sweep, the same high-topped brown lace-ups the team had studied and analyzed as part of the recovery effort.
“How did you…?”
“How did I escape my guard?”
His voice was still rough, still raspy, but there was no mistaking the lethal edge to it.
“He wasn’t a guard.”
“You could have fooled me.”
He crossed the room in two swift strides, backing Diana against the wall beside the sink.
“He’s just a research technician,” she said as calmly as she could with his blue eyes blazing down at her. “There to help you if you wanted anything. You didn’t hurt him, did you?”
“He won’t show any bruises, if that’s what you’re worried about.”
His balled fists and threatening stance didn’t intimidate her. She could take him down if she had to. What bothered the hell out of her was the fact that his proximity was causing every nerve in her body to snap with an almost electrical intensity.
“What do you want?” she asked coolly.
“The truth. Who are you?”
“I told you. My name is Diana Remington. I flew up here, along with Drs. Goode and Wozniak and the others, when your body was recovered from…”
“Don’t hand me that crap about being buried in the ice for forty-five years again!”
“It’s true.”
His reply was short and decidedly scatological.
“What will it take to convince you?” she asked. “How many documents or videos do you need?”
“Documents can be faked. So can those whiz-bang movies you showed me.”
“Why in the world would we go to so much trouble?”
“You tell me, blondie.”
Angling her chin, she met his belligerence head on. “I’m not a Communist propagandist trying to get into your skull and play mind games. The Cold War is over. We won. The Wall came tumbling down.”
“What wall?”
Too late, she remembered that the ultimate symbol of the Cold War, the Berlin Wall, hadn’t been erected until years after Stone went into the ice.
“Never mind. All that matters right now is that the U.S. halted top-secret U-2 overflights of Russia in 1960, right after Francis Gary Powers bailed out. You don’t have to guard your identity or that of your unit with your life. They’re history. You’re history,” she added more gently.
A muscle worked in the side of his jaw. “What brought Gary’s plane down?”
“A surface to air missile.”
“Bull! The Dragon Lady flies too high and too fast for Soviet SAMs to reach her.”
“Maybe in your time, but by 1960, the Soviets had significantly improved their missile capability. So had the U.S., for that matter.”
“How do I know you’re telling the truth?”
“You can pull up information about Powers’s trial on any computer. Or look him up in the encyclopedia,” she added, remembering just in time Stone’s reaction to the station’s desktop PCs.
In his day, computers were gargantuan monsters that filled an entire room. He’d regarded the smaller, exponentially faster versions of the old vacuum tube models with both suspicion and an awe he’d tried his damndest to disguise.
“Powers served two years in a Soviet prison before being exchanged,” Diana said briskly. “I think he wrote a book about his experiences before he died in a helicopter crash in the seventies.”
For an instant, just an instant, she glimpsed a desolation as bleak as the vast Arctic emptiness in his face. Stone had lost both parents while he was still a kid. With no brothers or sisters, he’d made the military his family, his fellow aviators his kin. Now most of them would now be gone, too.
Diana could only imagine what it would be like to wake up and find yourself alone in an alien world, without friends or familiar landmarks. Steeling herself, she fought the urge to lift a hand and stroke his cheek. He hadn’t asked for comfort or condolences, and probably wouldn’t appreciate either.
“Why don’t we sit down, Major Stone?”
She took a single step, only to come up short as two palms slapped the wall beside her head. His arms caged her. His body formed a solid, immovable wall.
“I want a few more answers first.”
“All right. But just so you know, this type of primitive, caveman behavior went the way of the poodle skirt and the Studebaker.”
It took him a moment to process her acidic comment. When the meaning registered, a look of almost comical dismay crossed his face.
“Are you saying my Golden Hawk is obsolete?”
“It is if it was produced by Studebaker.”
“Well, hell! I’ve only made two payments on that baby.”
With each passing moment, Diana felt less like her mythical incarnation of a huntress and more like the legendary Cassandra, the deliverer of doom and evil tidings. Not only had she broken the news his buddy had died, but now she’d hit him in one of an American male’s most vulnerable spots…his car.
She gave him a moment or two to mourn before prodding gently. “What else did you want to ask me?”
Shaking off his gloom, he pinned her with a hard look. “What’s your connection to Irwin Goode?”
Surprised, she answered truthfully. “I suppose you could say we’re colleagues, although that would be stretching matters considerably. Actually, he’s way out of my league. He won a Nobel Prize for his early work in bionetics. Even today, his pioneering study of the effects of certain toxic agents on red blood cells is standard college-level textbook reading.”
Stone remained silent for so long Diana had to fight the urge to fidget. He was too close and too…Too male. Nothing at all like Allen.
The thought popped into her head before she could stop it. She flushed, feeling disloyal to her steady date of some months and more than a little irritated by Stone’s sledgehammer impact on her senses.
“Did you know Dr. Goode back when you were flying the U-2?” she asked.
He opened his mouth, snapped it shut again. Evidently he still wasn’t ready to admit he actually flew the supersecret spy plane. With a sigh, Diana tried to move away again.
“I’m not done with you, blondie.”
“I’ll tell you what,” she said with a determined smile. “If you refrain from calling me blondie, I’ll refrain from tossing you flat on your back.”
A speculative gleam entered his eyes. “Do you think you can?”
“I know it, pal.”
For a moment he looked as though he intended to put the matter to a test. His gaze made a slow slide from her face to her throat, then lingered in the vicinity of her breasts. To Diana’s surprise and considerable annoyance, her nipples tingled under her silk long johns, and the queerest sensation gripped her belly.
Oh, for heaven’s sake!
In today’s parlance, Stone certainly qualified as a world class hottie. But as much as Diana might admire his sheer animal magnetism, muscle alone had never particularly turned her on. Unlike the athletic, popular Stone, she’d been the serious, studious type in high school. She’d come out of her shell a bit in college, and discarded it completely when Maggie Sinclair recruited her to work for OMEGA. Yet she’d always found that brains, not brawn worked better when it came to wiggling out of the most desperate situations.
And, she reminded herself sternly, brains, not brawn, had attracted her to Allen McDermott. They enjoyed a comfortable, mutually satisfying relationship, one that stemmed as much from their similar tastes and shared professional interests as from any physical need.
But she’d never felt a need quite like this one, a nasty little voice in her head whispered.
Not with Allen.
Not with anyone.
Ruthlessly, Diana suppressed the insidious urge to rise up on tiptoe and give Charlie Stone his first kiss in more than forty-five years. She was here to do a job, one that demanded all her concentration. She’d be no use to OMEGA or to the major if she didn’t maintain a level of detachment.
“If you’ve finished with your questions,” she said coolly, “I have a few I’d like to ask.”
His arms dropped to his sides, and a steel mask descended over his face with an almost audible clank. “I don’t trust you enough to give you any answers.”
“Well, that’s honest. Let me know when you change your mind, will you?”
“Yeah,” he replied, heading for the door. “I will.”
Charlie made it out the door with his shoulders squared and his back straight, but his insides felt as though he’d just gone ten rounds with heavyweight champ Rocky Marciano.
Everything he’d seen since he opened his eyes hit him like a hard, bruising right to the gut. Everything he’d heard had rocked him back on his heels. Sheer willpower alone had kept him from grabbing his so-called rescuers by the throat and choking the truth out of them.
He didn’t want to believe them! Christ, just the thought that he’d been on ice for the past forty-five years made his stomach cramp.
He braced himself against a packing crate, unable to stop the shakes, unable to blank out the terrifying memory of his plane nosediving straight down. Desperately, he tried to pierce the blackness that had claimed him mere seconds later. Had he come down inside Russia? Was this all an elaborate KGB scheme to get him to talk?
No. Even the KGB couldn’t cook up something this fantastic.
Slowly, Charlie’s vision cleared. The disbelief he’d so stubbornly clung to these past hours was fast giving way to grudging acceptance. He wasn’t ready to admit it. Not yet, anyway. Until he found out what the hell had happened to his aircraft and why his life support system had failed, he wasn’t about to admit to anything.
Particularly not to blondie.
Man, oh man! They sure didn’t build biologists like her where he came from. If she was a biologist. None of the scientists he’d ever worked with came equipped with luminous green cat’s eyes and a tumble of silver-gilt hair, not to mention those long legs displayed so temptingly in her curve-hugging pants. Those pants certainly left little to the imagination, and his worked overtime until a muffled thump from inside his room broke into his thoughts. With a grunt, he entered the room and opened the metal locker.
The young research tech hopped out, glaring at Charlie over the tape sealing his mouth. More tape bound his wrists and ankles.
“Sorry, kid.”
Freed of his bonds, the technician stomped out. A moment later, Charlie heard him hammering on a door farther down the corridor. In an angry voice, he recounted the details of his incarceration.
Êîíåö îçíàêîìèòåëüíîãî ôðàãìåíòà.
Òåêñò ïðåäîñòàâëåí ÎÎÎ «ËèòÐåñ».
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