Code Name: Blondie

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.”