Code Name: Blondie

CHAPTER FOUR

MIKI AWOKE WITH SAND in her mouth.

She was flat on the ground, her clothing still damp. Her hands were behind her back now, aching in plastic wrist restraints. How much time had passed since her fall?

She tried to free her hands, and instantly felt hot canine breath on her face, a silent warning. Miki tried to clear her fuzzy thoughts, remembering her escape and the pursuit. Her wrists hurt, but by wriggling slightly she could relieve the pressure. Tilting her head back, she looked up, searching vainly for familiar constellations. With the clouds gone, the darkness was alive now, filled with glittering white specks that dotted a sky untouched by any other light. None of them meant a thing to Miki. She barely recognized the constellations back home in New Mexico.

She was on a beach somewhere. That much she knew, but nothing else. Wincing, she glanced carefully around and froze at the sight of the pale shape stretched out nearby.

A really huge dog. Some kind of retriever.

Now you’ve stepped into it, Miki thought. Fired, wrecked, ditched, then lost and half drowned. A hysterical laugh bubbled up inside her, but she cut off the sound, remembering Dutch’s final order.

Stay smart and stay alive.

The dog gave her no choice. She shuddered at the thought of sharp teeth lunging at her throat. Guard dogs were taught things like that. They could kill in seconds, according to Miki’s best friend, who trained service dogs for police and military units. Now Miki wished she’d paid better attention all those times Kit described how she trained her dogs.

If she ever got back.

Blocking a wave of hopelessness, she watched a dark shape feather across the moon. She recognized the leaves of a palm tree, and that meant she was still in the tropics. Given the silence, it had to be someplace remote. Since she’d come awake there had been no lights, either at sea or from passing planes.

Very remote, she thought grimly.

Her head began to ache, and she remembered bumping it back in the cave. Now her whole body throbbed along with her head, but pain or not, she had to do something before the creep in the wetsuit came back, even if one escape effort had failed.

But that left the dog. If she moved very slowly, she could try to make her way back to the water, since dogs couldn’t carry a scent over running water. She remembered hearing Kit say that.

Carefully, Miki eased onto her side. The wind rushed over her face, but she was certain the dog couldn’t hear her anyway. Her confidence growing, she moved another few inches.

Still no warning growl.

Her pulse hammered as she moved again, her face against the wind. She heard a sucking noise and sand skittered over her feet. The sound came again, and the blackness materialized into a column. Miki realized the man was back, her worst nightmare in the flesh. Over the slam of her heart she heard a soft groan that seemed familiar. The noise came from what appeared to be a large object.

Dutch?

Recognition made her try to stand. Had he actually found Dutch out in the dark water? She could barely believe it.

Her urgent questions were cut off by cold gloved hands at her mouth. “No noise,” he whispered. Kit felt him bend down, checking that her restraints were in place.

Then sand squished and he drove her across the beach. She felt sand give way to dirt, the waves sounding muted behind her.

A light flickered and disappeared and his low voice came at her ear. “Four steps down.”

The first drop took her by surprise and she stumbled, her ankle twisting. Gloved hands caught her and she slammed against a hard chest.

A door hinge whispered. Light flared, blinding her. She could see the creep for the first time, his body covered by a black wetsuit and black gloves. He was carrying a pair of heavy night-vision goggles, and in the light his eyes snapped with command, somewhere between blue and gray. Miki couldn’t seem to focus, but when he undid her restraints and set her down, Dutch was at her feet, sickly white. A long gash ran down his right cheek.

“You got him,” she whispered, kneeling beside the pilot. She didn’t look up, gripping Dutch’s cold fingers. “Thank you. I didn’t think anyone could do that.”

“Don’t thank me yet.” He tossed a silver thermal blanket over Dutch and tucked the foil around the man’s motionless body. As he moved his light, Miki saw that they were underground in some kind of small room. Near her feet were a large metal case and half a dozen tins that looked like MREs. The dog sat beside the case, ears erect, body alert. Spotting her sodden camera bag on the floor near Dutch, Miki reached out, but the dog seized the handle in its teeth and tugged it out of reach.

“Hey! What do you mean by—”

“No noise.” The man looked at his dog. “Sit.”

Instantly the powerful body dropped, Miki’s camera bag still between his front paws. The dog nosed the bag and suddenly flattened on the ground, his hackles rising.

The man spun around. “Target?” he said softly. “Alert.”

Target? All Miki had in the bag were clothes, a few sundries and her camera equipment. Everything was likely to be ruined from the seawater.

The dog sniffed the ground, sniffed Miki’s satchel, then laid one paw across the leather bag and didn’t move.

“Confirm.”

The dog sniffed her bag again, and the motion made something shift inside an inner pocket. There was a small pop and fragrance blossomed, filling the cramped space. Miki realized it was her best French perfume, the same fragrance she’d worn since she was seventeen, taken everywhere as a good luck talisman. Unfortunately, she’d been in a rush that morning and had shoved the bottle into an empty lens pouch rather than wrap it carefully the way she usually did.

Judging by the sharp odor, the bottle had just broken.

The dog sneezed loudly. For some reason this made the man angry. He flipped off his penlight, then opened the trap door, letting the dog race up the small wooden steps.

Miki started to blurt another question but one cold look stopped her. Her captor looked furious. Silent and controlled, he pulled a plastic bag from a black tactical vest near the metal case. His mouth set in a thin line as he opened the camera case, saw the overturned and now lidless perfume bottle. Quickly he closed the lens pouch and then zipped the bottle inside.

“What are you doing with my stuff?” she hissed. Since when was it a hostile act to wear nice perfume? Miki’s irritation swelled when he dropped her lens case and camera inside a larger plastic bag, then locked everything inside the metal case.

“Hey, you can’t—”

“No noise. No perfume or scent of any sort. You understand that?”

Miki stared at him, cold, tired and furious. The man was unhinged. Sure, he’d saved her and then gone back for Dutch at considerable risk to himself, but he’d also cuffed her. Now he was the perfume police? Maybe he was one of those neatness freaks she saw newspaper stories about, people who wash their hands fifty times a day and don’t let anyone touch their personal belongings.

The sudden sound of Dutch’s labored breathing made Miki forget about her expensive perfume. The pilot didn’t open his eyes as his lungs moved in strained bursts. Even to her untrained eyes it was clear that he was in bad shape.

“He needs a doctor,” Miki whispered.

Her rescuer raised two gloved fingers, tapped her mouth and shook his head.

Clearly, noise was another one of his problem areas.

She decided it would be best to play along. Right now he was her only contact with civilization, even if he appeared to be two tortillas short of a combo meal.

But he looked competent as he knelt to check out Dutch, cleaning the gash at the man’s stubbled cheek and unbuttoning his shirt to check for other trauma. Miki thought the pilot’s chest looked odd, slightly concave, and the deep bruises streaking his ribs made her breath catch.

Deftly the man checked Dutch’s pulse, eye reflexes and temperature, then put away his black case and medical supplies. Oddly, he never removed his black gloves.

Too weird, Miki thought. At least Dutch appeared to be stable now. She retreated to the far wall, waiting tensely. Though her nursing skills rated a negative ten on a scale of one to five, at least she could provide some kind of moral support to the pilot.

Over her head paws scraped against the trap door, and Miki heard a dog’s muffled sneeze. Was the dog bothered by perfume, too?

Hit by a sharp wave of dizziness, she closed her eyes and prayed she wouldn’t throw up, wincing as her stomach continued to gurgle and churn. She’d swallowed seawater nonstop after the crash and now her feet and ribs ached. Exhausted, she leaned back against the underground wall, her eyes closed despite her efforts to keep them open.

It felt as if a week had passed since they’d left the beachside hotel in Bora Bora, with Vance muttering and complaining about every delay and expense. Now he was dead, his body lost somewhere at sea. Miki shivered, aware of how close she and Dutch had come to dying with him.

A scraping sound brought her around with a start. The small room was quiet, both candles out. “Hello?” she whispered into the darkness.

There was no answer.

She rose and felt her way along the wall past Dutch’s cot. Fumbling, she found the four steps beneath the sloping entrance. With shaky fingers she searched for the metal door, pushing upward until the hatch squeaked, rising slowly to reveal a gray bar of predawn sky above angry clouds.

But before she could savor her little taste of freedom, a dog’s face appeared at the door’s edge. He sniffed intently, and his mouth curled, baring his teeth.

Miki shut the door quickly. The creep was gone, but he’d left the dog as a guard. Probably he kept the poor Lab underfed to make it hostile. She hated people who were vicious to animals. If he hurt the dog in any way, she was going to make him very sorry.

Assuming she was still alive by then.

CHAPTER FIVE

ENGINE TROUBLE.

A plane crashes at sea. Two survivors in the wrong place at the wrong time. Coincidence?

“FUBAR.” Max spoke softly, scratching Truman where he liked it best, behind both ears. The Lab had been edgy from the first moment Max had carried the woman out of the water. But then had come her escape and now the perfume accident. The woman could have slept with Cruz in the last five hours, but Truman wouldn’t be able to pick up a trace due to the perfume’s mix of volatile oils, sterols and alcohol overwhelming his keen sense of smell.

Max had found the woman slumped over beneath the ridge after she fell and hit her head during her escape.

Once she was secured, he’d thoroughly searched the plane wreckage and floating debris, but found nothing useful beyond camera equipment in a watertight bag and some clothes. He’d checked the identification he’d found on Dutch, and the passport and U.S. driver’s license looked genuine, though good forgeries could be deceiving. The woman’s ID had eluded him in the limited time he’d had to search at sea. He couldn’t risk using a light after full dark. It would have shone like a neon sign against the water. Why couldn’t women just carry their IDs in their back pockets the way men did?

Shaking his head, he moved behind a line of trees and fingered his satellite phone. He couldn’t chance a real transmission this close to Cruz’s island, but three short bursts would let Foxfire HQ know that he was safe and his reconnaissance was proceeding as planned. Longer communications would wait until he accessed secure equipment at sea. He’d have to deal with his two new arrivals according to his own judgment for now. Since both were possible hostiles, Truman would keep them contained underground where they couldn’t do any harm.

Neither one carried weapons or communication devices—Max had checked carefully before bringing them back to shore. The pilot was in poor condition, his lung compromised, but Max’s mission was clear. He had to stay quiet, stay out of sight and track the stolen weapon guidance system. Cruz wasn’t going to escape a second time—not on Max’s watch.

At least Truman had recovered from the initial shock of the perfume cloud on his hypersensitive nose. Max opened a zipper on his vest and pulled out a bag. Immediately, the Lab pushed closer, sniffing the plastic eagerly until Max gave him the beef treat inside. The dog was superbly trained, his medical enhancements as sophisticated as those that Max had been given, but a dog was still a dog. Beef treats were special.

When his own stomach growled, Max dug into a different pocket and pulled out a fat gray bar that looked like chalk. Tasted like chalk, too, Max thought wryly. The components were carefully selected by the Foxfire medical team to provide minimum bulk and maximum nourishment for high-energy work. Max didn’t particularly mind that the bar would be his major food source until he finished up his work here.

He wasn’t used to fine living or creature comforts. He’d never had a normal life as a child since he’d spent most of his boyhood in institutions. Not until he was adopted at the age of ten did he find out how it felt to have a normal family—if you could call his spit-shine admiral father “normal.” He smiled at the thought of the bossy, demanding man who’d taken him in, taught him discipline and given him pride in his successes. Work was his life now, just like the Admiral’s.

He still called his adoptive father “Admiral” and he knew the grizzled old veteran was probably worrying about him right now, though he’d never admit it.

A faint line of pink marked the horizon to the east. Max figured he had thirty minutes until full light, which would give him time to swim out to the derelict Japanese gunboat that rode atop a nearby reef. The support people at Foxfire had managed to slip in a radio transmitter and emergency water, along with food stores and ammunition. If necessary, Max could hole up there indefinitely, keeping Cruz’s island under covert surveillance.

No one had counted on two civilians plummeting out of the sky in the middle of the op zone. But as a SEAL, Max was trained to expect the unexpected, so the show would go on. He wouldn’t worry about the woman with the expressive eyes or the body that was tempting in all the right places, even buried beneath soggy jean shorts and a baggy Hawaiian print shirt.

Come to think of it, why was she dressed like a college student on spring break? How could a college student afford the expensive camera and lenses that he’d seen in her leather bag? He’d have to search for her ID again later while she slept.

First he had to swim to the reef and complete a secure transmission back to HQ. After that, he’d stockpile more medical supplies, transferring them from the beached gunboat to the underground bunker. If the pilot took a turn for the worse, Max wanted to be ready. He was no surgeon, but he’d had training in field medicine and Izzy Teague would brief him on what to expect from lung complications.

After a final scratch and a touch command to his new best friend, Max slipped on his breathing gear and headed back to the water.

“YOU’VE GOT WHAT?” Lloyd Ryker, the head of the Foxfire research program, sounded worried.

“Two civilians from a ditched Cessna, sir. Vehicle ID number Alpha seven—one—niner—four—two—zero. The pilot’s passport reads Jase Van Horn, and the woman called him Dutch. He’s in bad shape, sir.”

Ryker muttered a few choice words. “I’ll put our tech man on when we’re done. He’ll handle the medical end. What about the woman?”

“Not much to tell. Blonde hair, maybe five foot ten. Speaks English like an American and seemed pretty strong for a woman.”

“No ID?”

“None that I could find, sir.”

“And there’s been no sign of your target?”

“Not yet.” Max sensed Ryker’s growing tension that Cruz hadn’t been sighted.

“Did your friend show any scent alerts for these two?”

He meant Truman. “Nothing that was clear. He was edgy, and he checked out the woman briefly, along with her bag. Before he got very far, a bottle of perfume broke inside her case. That pretty much blew any hope of a clean scent.”

“Accident?” Ryker snapped.

“Unclear.”

“No weapons on either of them?”

“No, and no communication devices,” Max said tightly.

Ryker drummed his fingers loud enough for Max to hear over the static. “They could be civilians, but you are to treat them as hostiles until we have confirmation of their aircraft number and passports. We’ll have an answer by your next check-in. What happened to their Cessna?”

“I drilled the pontoons and sank it, sir. Figured we didn’t need any floating debris to trigger alarms.”

“Good. Keep focused out there. Here’s your tech contact. You’ve got ninety seconds. I won’t risk detection.”

“Copy, sir.”

Static crackled. “You’ve got a possible lung compression there? Give me the vitals,” Izzy Teague said briskly.

When Max finished his report, Izzy was silent. Paper rustled, then Foxfire’s techno wizard cleared his throat. “There’s good news and there’s bad news. Your man there is in bad shape, but he appears stable. That could change fast, of course. For now, just keep him warm and hydrated, and watch for signs of infection. Keep me updated, if possible.”

“Will do.” Max watched the sweep hand on his luminous watch. “Time’s up.”

“Give ’em hell. Oh—give your friend a nice scratch from me.” Izzy was careful not to mention Truman by name in case the message was picked up. He was chuckling when he cut the connection.

Quickly, Max stripped down the phone and hid it in a false compartment inside the ship. Then he sealed extra medicine inside his watertight kit for the swim back. His watch vibrated, signaling that it was time to leave, and Max knew he was cutting things close if he hoped to miss first light.

With his swim fins over one arm, he climbed the rusted companionway of the old gunboat, wondering what tales the walls could tell of Japanese sailors sent out to this remote island to watch for enemy activity. The ship’s log indicated that a storm had run the ship onto this reef and put it out of operation. The captain had committed suicide, shamed by his carelessness.

Shadows moved along the companionway as Max made his way to the middeck. He understood the weight of duty and self-sacrifice. There were worse ways to go out than falling on your sword.

But Max wasn’t about to let his own mission run aground.

As he slipped on his mask and breathing gear, he focused on the woman. Maybe she was the pilot’s daughter. The age difference was about right, and she seemed genuinely concerned—assuming this wasn’t one more part of an elaborate act.

He smiled as he went backward into the water. If she was lying, he’d know soon enough.

There weren’t many ways to keep secrets from him.

WHEN MAX REACHED THE beach, Truman was waiting. The dog looked up, wagging his tail but holding his down position above the well-hidden bunker.

There were no signs of footprints or boat draglines along the sand, and Truman would have signaled any visitors. With the perimeter secure and full light due any second, Max opened the trap door and headed underground.

The pilot was breathing fitfully, and the woman was curled up on Max’s cot, her Hawaiian shirt tugged around her shoulders and her arm propped against the wall of the little room. Every time the pilot made a noise, she gave a jump, then sank back into deep sleep.

Max checked the pilot’s vitals as Izzy had specified, frowning at his low temperature. Silently, he covered the man with another blanket. Pulse and heart rate were in acceptable limits, which was good news.

Time for work. The kind of work that the Foxfire team did best. He studied the sleeping woman, considering his best avenue of approach.

Not the hands. After too long in the water the skin usually became risky to read due to contamination. Not the legs or chest, since he didn’t want to risk waking her yet, and moving her clothes would almost certainly wake her. That left the face and neck. Swimmers always tried to keep both above water, which would help him pull a better impression.

Silently he pulled the soft leather glove from his right hand. Breathing deeply, he rested his fingers at the nape of her neck. He made a preliminary scan, checking for the most reliable scent and steroid markers.

With each biochemical marker, his senses tightened, drawing him deeper. His eyes narrowed and his breathing slowed as he focused. The tactile scan wasn’t magic and it wasn’t superhuman, but it might have appeared that way to an uninitiated observer. What he did was the result of medical enhancements and a third-generation sensory biochip, courtesy of the crew of eggheads that Lloyd Ryker kept on tap at the Foxfire lab. Max had trained hard to master a huge range of human steroids, hormones and man-made chemicals. When carefully recorded, they presented a picture of the subject’s recent activities, where they took place and the emotions that were present at the time.

To a civilian it would look like witchcraft, images pulled from thin air. But every scan had its price, demanding absolute focus as well as psychological risk. Like Truman, Max’s amped-up senses were vulnerable to every stray chemical, whether human-based or manufactured. For his own protection, gloves were required gear, keeping his senses clear for mission work. At the beginning he had missed casual skin contact; now it was his normal mode.

He felt the hairs stiffen at the back of his neck as cool air brushed his palm. It felt odd to have his hands free. It also felt damnably sensual.

Frowning, Max shoved that thought from his mind. Skin was skin and a woman was a woman. There was no big deal about either.

Through his sensitized fingers he picked up the faint sweetness of her spilled perfume and the tang of sweat, some of it his own. Even without touching her, he knew he’d find a welter of female hormones layering her skin. If somewhere in those tangled scent layers he found Cruz’s markers, something Max had been keenly trained for weeks to pick out…

In that case, he was under orders to extract all possible information via any means necessary. No questions would be asked later, as long as he succeeded in his mission. Ryker had made that clear.

And Max was committed to success. This was his first mission since the incident in Malaysia that had taken his jump partner’s life and left Max in a surgical ward for eighteen hours. This time, failure was not an option. He had too many debts to repay—and too many demons to silence after the harrowing, predawn raid that had taken seven lives.

In the darkness the pilot shifted as if he was in pain. When his blanket fell, Max straightened it, careful to use his covered hand. In the narrow space every movement seemed loud, each rustle of fabric sharp. Even breathing seemed intimate.

It was strange how often you came to feel a physical connection with your subject, Max thought. When the hormones came into focus, you picked up fragments of over-the-counter sleeping pills or antihistamines, hair dye and sunscreen. In a wave that seemed to come out of nowhere, you knew your subject better than you knew your own friends or family. People thought your smile was just a sign of polite interest or concealed boredom. They didn’t suspect that you were picking up their medical history, reading their whole life in a simple handshake.