Eye of the Beholder

“You!” Someone propelled her forward with a rifle butt between her shoulder blades. “Stand here in front of the door.”

Glenna stumbled to obey them, grabbing the edge of the doorway for balance as she glimpsed the still form below her. A whimper rose in her throat, but she suppressed it. She couldn’t fall apart, she repeated to herself. She couldn’t.

She squinted against the blaze of afternoon sunlight, straining to fill her lungs with tropical air that was thick enough to spoon. Through shimmers of heat, she glimpsed a squat gray building with a glass tower and a drooping wind sock. A chain-link fence separated the runway from the rest of the airport. As she watched, a white van—an ambulance—rolled slowly through the gate and approached the plane.

Her heart had been slamming against her ribs in an exhausting sprint for the past eight hours. She hadn’t thought it was possible for her pulse to speed up…yet it did.

This was the first sign of outside help since the plane had landed on this godforsaken spot. It wasn’t much—what good could some paramedics do against maniacs with guns? Yet at least it was something. It meant the passengers and crew weren’t completely alone. And if the hijackers allowed someone to give aid to their first victim, then maybe there was hope for the rest of the hostages.

There was a sudden spate of conversation from the hijacker with the phone. The ambulance came to a stop twenty yards from the plane.

So near. So impossibly far away.

Glenna hadn’t realized she had swayed toward the open doorway until a rough hand at her elbow jerked her back. Once more, the muzzle of a gun was shoved under her jaw.

She blinked against the tears that she couldn’t quite control. She didn’t know the name of the island they had landed on. She couldn’t understand the demands the hijackers were shouting. But she did know that unless a miracle happened within ten minutes, she would be the next to die.

She had heard that a person’s life flashed before their eyes when they faced death.

It was true.

But rather than seeing what she had done in her twenty-nine years of living, she saw what she hadn’t done.

Oh, God. There were so many things she hadn’t yet done. She had always assumed there would be time. Someday, she was going to put the past behind her. She would take the chance to live like everyone else, maybe even love.

Love? How could she think of love at a time like this?

Yet if she didn’t think of it now, then when would she?

If only she had another chance, she would do things differently. She wouldn’t always have to be the strong one, the sensible one, the one in control. She would savor every moment of the time she was granted.

Please, God, let it be more than ten minutes.

Someone began to pray aloud. Seconds trickled past. Despair rolled through the fuselage in a choking wave. Fear was a smell in the air. Hope was as distant and unattainable as bedtime stories with knights in shining armor and happily ever after. Glenna swallowed a sob. She had left the fairy tales of childhood behind a long, long time ago.

This was reality.

There were no heroes.

Barely a leaf rustled as Master Sergeant Rafal Marek moved through the undergrowth. On his belly, using his elbows and knees, he inched toward the chain-link fence that marked the perimeter of the airport. Ignoring the sweat that trickled down his temples and the insects that whined around his head, he brought his binoculars to his eyes and focused on the plane.

The wide-bodied jet sat in isolation at the very edge of the tarmac. Black skid marks on the pavement showed where the pilot had desperately tried to bring the aircraft to a stop on a runway that was never meant for a plane that size.

Flight 481 had left Jamaica at dawn and had been scheduled to land in New York eight hours ago. Instead, it had been diverted to this crumbling strip of asphalt on a map speck in the Caribbean, its tanks so empty it was running on fumes. At this point it was unknown how the hijackers had gotten past the security measures in place at the airport and on the plane. Rafe suspected someone had been bribed or coerced into looking the other way. But how this had happened wasn’t his concern. What happened next was.

“Three in the cabin, two in the cockpit.” The voice crackled through Rafe’s earpiece. It was Captain Sarah Fox, relating what she could see through the windshield of the ambulance.

Rafe adjusted his earpiece and activated the attached microphone. “Weapons?”

“I can see two automatic weapons that look like Kalashnikovs,” Sarah said with her usual brisk efficiency. “The target in the doorway has one handgun, possibly a .45 calibre.”

“Seven minutes left to their deadline,” Flynn announced, laying his hand briefly on Rafe’s shoulder.

Rafe lowered the binoculars and glanced to his left. He hadn’t heard a whisper of sound as Sergeant Flynn O’Toole had approached. For a large man, Flynn could move with uncanny silence, a useful trait in their business. They had watched each other’s backs on more missions than he could count.

“We need to move in six,” Rafe responded. “Is everyone in position?”

Flynn melted into the shadows of a fern grove. One by one, the rest of the strike team from Eagle Squadron, Special Operations Delta, reported in. Rafe couldn’t spot them any more than he could see Flynn or Sarah. Good. The longer their targets were unaware of whom they were dealing with, the better the chances of this succeeding.

Usually the team planned a mission more thoroughly before embarking on it. They liked to consider every possibility, account for every potential flaw, and then practice the sequence of action until they could do it in their sleep. But the situation was deteriorating too rapidly to risk a prolonged standoff, so they didn’t have the luxury of practice time.

Worse, they were operating with no support. The Rocaman government hadn’t wanted to allow the U.S. military onto their soil in the first place, despite the fact that all the hostages were American citizens. The foreign secretary had done some heavy-duty arm-twisting, and eventually the locals had grudgingly agreed to permit Delta to send a small contingent, yet it was understood the team was on their own. There would be no backup. They would have to think on their feet, but then, that’s what they were best at.

The hijackers were demanding the release from an American prison of a convicted Central American drug lord, as well as ten million cash in American dollars and enough fuel to allow them to disappear. The negotiations were a farce—there was no way in hell any government was going to give in to those demands. Unfortunately, it looked as if the hijackers had realized that. They had already shot one hostage. In less than seven minutes, they would undoubtedly shoot another.

Rafe moved his binoculars to the body on the tarmac. White shirt, gold-on-black epaulets. Obviously the pilot. Hard to guess which had done more harm, the bullet or the four-meter drop from the plane door. The man’s chest was moving, so there was still a chance he might live if he could get medical attention.

The ambulance rolled another few feet closer to the plane, halting once more when threats were shouted from the open doorway. Rafe didn’t believe the hijackers would agree to let anyone tend to their victim, but the team hadn’t expected them to. The primary purpose of the ambulance was to provide a distraction.

Rafe moved into a crouch, stowed his binoculars in his rucksack and took out the wire cutters. One link at a time, he snipped an opening in the fence. He had readied the grappling hook and checked the sweep of the minute hand on his watch, preparing to go into action, when he caught a movement at the open door of the plane.

The hostage in the doorway was being repositioned by her captor to serve as a shield. Rafe retrieved his binoculars and focused on the woman.

She was right on the edge of the four-meter drop—one slip of her high heels and she would certainly fall. Good thing she didn’t look like the hysterical type. In fact, even with her business suit wilted from the heat, and her auburn hair straggling out of its clasp, she gave an impression of coolness.

She must have been one of the passengers traveling first-class. Classy was a good word to describe her. In other circumstances, with those clothes and that upswept hairstyle, she would exert the natural authority of royalty. Her elegant height and her body language marked her as someone more accustomed to giving orders than to following them.

Rafe adjusted the focus on the binoculars, zooming in on her face. Her chin was angled upward. The gesture was likely due more to the pistol that was pressed under her jaw than to defiance. Still, she didn’t look beaten. There were signs of spirit in the tight set of her lips and the angle of her brows.

She turned her head to the side, as if searching the surroundings. He knew she couldn’t see him behind the concealment of the foliage, but as her gaze swept past, he felt a jolt of reaction at the raw terror in her eyes.

He reconsidered his initial assessment. On the surface, she appeared in control, but it was the deceptive calmness of a charge of Semtex. There was a hell of a lot more to this lady than the elegant exterior she presented to the world. And she was no fool. She had to know that in a matter of minutes, she could be sharing the pilot’s fate.

Urgency gave an added push to Rafe’s pulse, but he breathed deeply until it steadied. Even in the best-case scenarios, there was always a risk of civilian casualties. That was the reality of high-stakes hostage rescues. He needed to keep his head clear if he wanted to do his job.

He was a soldier. That was his profession, that was his life. This was a mission. She was a stranger, no less and no more important than any of the other thirty-six hostages who remained on board the plane.

Yet as he looked at the woman across the heat shimmers that rose from the pavement, his reaction wasn’t that of a soldier. It was the reaction of a man. He wanted to save her. He wanted to protect her and erase the terror from her gaze. More than that, he wanted to learn what she kept hidden beneath that layer of control.

What would her lips look like when she wasn’t pressing them into a tight line? How would her cheeks move when she laughed? And her voice…what did it sound like?

Who was she? Why was some nameless redheaded hostage stirring feelings he’d had no problem controlling until now? He knew better than to let a woman distract him, especially a woman who looked like that.

“Thirty seconds,” Sarah said.

Rafe forced his thoughts back to business. He stowed the binoculars, pulled the black hood of his assault jumpsuit over his head and carefully pried apart the edges of the fence.

Glenna took shallow, panting breaths, trying not to inhale the smell of her captors as another one of the hijackers pressed close to her back. The ambulance was inching forward again. Despite the shouted commands of their leader, the men were peering past her in order to see what was happening.