Читать книгу Hot As Ice - Merline Lovelace, Merline Lovelace - Страница 10

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.