Behind Enemy Lines (25 page)

“You did good, kiddo,” he whispered into her hair.

Her arm crept across his waist, and she snuggled a little closer against his shoulder.

“Now what?” she whispered back.

“Now we sleep. The other guys will take turns on watch first. We’ll be here all day, so settle in and get as comfortable as you can.”

Her arm tightened slightly around him. “I can’t think of anyplace else I’d rather be right now,” she whispered.

He squeezed her in return but didn’t answer. His heart and head were in too much turmoil at the moment. And he had no bloody idea what he was going to do about either.

He fell asleep without finding an answer.

It was hot and muggy when Annie woke up. Her wristwatch proclaimed it to be late afternoon. Tom’s shoulder under her head had been replaced at some point with a balled-up sweater. It smelled like Tom. She inhaled the spicy, masculine scent.

She started to roll over, but halted abruptly. She hurt from head to foot. Even turning her head caused stabbing pains to shoot down her back and across her shoulders.

Against her volition, she moaned.

Tom was beside her in an instant. “Where does it hurt, Annie?”

“Everywhere,” she groaned. “Where’s everyone else?”

“They’re out having a look around. Doc will be back in a little while. Are you injured?”

“No. I’m just not in good enough shape to do what we did last night.”

“Ahh. You’re in luck. That affliction falls within my limited medical expertise. I’ll be right back.”

He crawled away and returned in a few moments with a canteen and four white pills. “Take these.”

“What are they?”

“Muscle relaxants and painkillers.”

“They won’t knock me out, will they?”

“No. We need to be alert in the field. This medicine’s made specially for us.”

She took the pills and washed them down with water from a canteen Tom produced. After she shuddered away the bitter taste, she grinned at him.

“So. The truth comes out! You guys aren’t superheroes after all. You use painkillers to keep you going!”

Tom grinned back at her. “You won’t tell anyone, will you?”

“Your secret’s safe with me, Clark.”

“Thanks, Lois. Those pills should hit in about two minutes.”

“Actually, now that you mention it, I am starting to feel a bit better.”

Tom repositioned himself at her feet and reached for one of her calves. “This’ll help, too.”

He grasped her leg and very gently rubbed her calf with a circular motion. Gradually he built up the pressure until it was almost, but not quite, painful.

“A massage helps break up the lactic acid buildup in the muscles,” he commented.

Melting warmth flowed outward from where his hands caressed her. It started as relief from pain, but evolved into exquisite pleasure.

“I don’t care if it paralyzes me. That feels wonderful. How long did you say your men were going to be gone?”

Tom chuckled. “Not that long, I’m afraid.”

“Drat.”

Silence stretched out between them as Tom worked his way all the way up her right leg and then started on her left foot.

Apparently his truce was progressing rapidly toward a full-blown peace treaty with her. She wished she could talk to him about it, but it would have to wait until they reached safety. She wasn’t about to draw his attention away from keeping them alive.

“What’s the plan, Tom?”

He crawled up to her side. “For you to roll over so I can loosen up your back.”

His hands settled lightly on her shoulders and began to work their magic. She was putty in his hands by the time he spoke again.

“The guys are out picking spots to set explosives tonight. We’ll wait until almost daybreak tomorrow and light the place up.”

“Why wait so long?”

“People are the most tired between four and five in the morning. It’ll create the most confusion to do it then.”

Talk about confusion. Tom’s hands were doing things to her that had nothing to do with sore muscles. Liquid heat was building low in her belly and spiraling outward at an alarming rate.

There was a slight rustling at the edge of the netting, and Tom whirled away from her, a pistol suddenly in his hand.

Tex poked his head into the tent. “Hi, honey. I’m home.”

“Shut up, Tex,” Tom growled.

Tex grinned and crawled inside. He shrugged out of a gillie suit made of the same material their tent was. He picked grass out of his hair and boots.

“So, how’s it looking?” Tom asked.

“It’s gonna be a right pretty fireworks show.”

And it was.

Tom woke her up about a half hour before the charges had been set to detonate. Tom’s men had peppered the airport with grenades, incendiaries, booby traps, and C-4 explosives.

When the first flash went, they were perched at the top of the embankment and ready to move. Moments later a secondary explosion shook the ground as a million-gallon fuel storage tank went up in flames.

“Too bad it was almost empty,” Howdy commented blandly.

Annie thought the white-orange mushroom cloud rising into the night sky was spectacular enough. And it had the desired effect. Sirens went off, and fire trucks careened across the runways. Silhouettes of men scurried back and forth, black specks against the roaring flames of the fires.

A dozen more explosions went off, and the chaos was complete. Annie wriggled through the hole in the hurricane fence around the runways that the guys had cut earlier. She jumped to her feet and took off running after Tom’s tall shape.

If she got out of this nightmare alive, she was never going to run another step as long as she lived.

Doggedly she pressed on. They hugged the far side of the runway away from the ramp where the fuel tank and several airplanes were on fire.

Shells started exploding randomly. Apparently one of the airplanes had been loaded with ammunition. Streaks of light zipped every which way, and several more airplanes caught on fire.

Annie was so engrossed in watching the show and running at the same time that she all but tripped over Tom, who was stretched out on the ground in front of her.

He grabbed her leg and yanked her to the ground.

Now what?

“Stay down flat,” he hissed.

She was about to ask why, when a beam of cruelly bright light passed over their heads.

Mac swore from in front of them. “Dammit! The tower’s got a floodlight. Should I take it out?”

“No!” Tom answered sharply. “You’d have to wait until it was pointed at us to hit it, and then they’d know there were snipers out here and what direction we were shooting from.”

Annie risked a glance around. They were about three-quarters of the way down the runway. A bunch of airplanes were parked directly across from them.

“Get out the nets,” Tom ordered.

Annie didn’t know much about this kind of work, but this couldn’t be good. Tom expected them to hunker down right out here in the open.

This time the nets lay directly on top of their bodies. There was no room to maneuver.

Tom murmured from beside her, “Don’t move unless you absolutely have to, Annie. If you have to scratch your nose, move at the speed of a snail. Literally. Quick movements are easy for the enemy to spot.”

The ground was cold, and before long, dew had seeped into her clothing, chilling her through. Her muscles cramped with inactivity, and she was downright miserable in a matter of minutes.

To make matters worse, the sun was rising, and it was getting light out. Black smoke billowed overhead from the fires, and it was torture trying to suppress the coughing fits a lungful of it caused.

Annie lay still and watched the airfield burn. She prayed for her and the team’s safety and tried to breathe between gusts of smoke. The morning warmed up around them, and her damp chill was replaced by steamy, hot discomfort.

They’d been immobile for several hours when, out of the clear blue, something painfully obvious dawned on her.

It looked for all the world like a Huey helicopter was parked not too far from their position.

“Tom, do you have a pair of binoculars?” she whispered.

“Yeah.”

“I need them.”

“You’ve got to be kidding.”

“No, I’m serious.”

He sounded dubious. “This’ll take a while.”

She waited impatiently until he eased the binoculars out of a pouch and over to her. The action took a good two minutes to complete. She mimicked his extreme slow-motion movement and inched the binoculars up to her face.

She focused the lenses and scanned the airfield. Sure enough. It was a Huey. The tail number indicated it was from the same manufacturing year as the equipment she’d been trained on.

She tried to glimpse the instrument panel, but couldn’t get a clean look at the whole console. But what she saw looked reasonably familiar.

“What’s up, Annie?” Tom murmured into his throat mike.

“There’s a Huey helicopter over there. I know how to fly it.”

“And?”

“Why don’t we go take it and fly out of here?”

“Are you out of your mind?” Tom demanded in a stentorian whisper.

Tex interjected. “Yeah, I see it from here. It’s only about a hundred feet beyond the runway. That’s about four hundred feet from our position.”

“It would be way too dangerous.”

Annie argued quietly, “If we can get into that bird unseen, I ought to be able to fly my way out of the airport.”

The other team members jumped into the discussion. Two things emerged from the whispered argument. One, they couldn’t stay here for long or they’d be discovered, and two, Annie’s idea was as good as anything else they could think of.

With a heavy sigh Tom asked, “Annie, are you sure you can fly that helicopter? We’re dead meat if we climb into it and you can’t start it.”

“Yes, Tom. I’m sure.”

And there it was. The moment Tom had been talking about. Could he believe her now or not? Annie listened in agony as the silence stretched out. She could practically hear Tom wrestling with the decision in his head.

“I know what I’m doing, Tom. I’m telling you the God’s honest truth. My neck depends on this one as much as yours does.”

Of course, she was assuming the helicopter wasn’t broken or out of gas or otherwise unflyable.

The silence lasted a few more seconds.

“Howdy, do we have enough ammo to blow up some planes and create another diversion?”

“Yeah. One more diversion. But that’s it.”

“Then pick your target wisely,” was Tom’s only reply.

The sniper slithered off into the grass, as stealthy as a snake.

Tom’s voice interrupted her amazement at Howdy’s silent departure. “Annie, how much time are you going to need in the seat before you can get off the ground?”

She reviewed the engine start procedures in her head, weeding out the unessential preflight checks. “Ninety seconds.”

“We ought to be able to hold them off for that long. Okay here’s the plan….”

Annie couldn’t believe they were actually going to do this. They’d just laid all of their lives in her hands. What in the heck had she been thinking to volunteer for this crazy stunt? But before she could talk into her mike and call the whole thing off, an explosion rocked the ground.

She clicked the stop watch feature of her wristwatch and risked lifting her head to see what had happened.

Howdy had picked his diversion well. He’d shot a grenade down the intake of a fully fueled fighter jet. Flaming JP-4 fuel spewed all over the far end of the ramp, and the plane’s ammunition was starting to ignite and fire off in random directions. Annie took off running.

It was arguably the fastest four-hundred-foot sprint ever recorded by a woman. She crouched down beside the Huey’s door and reached up to open the latch.

It was locked.

Oh, God.

Chapter 14

T
om skidded to a halt beside her. He took up a crouching stance and started firing.

“Let’s go, Annie,” he urged between bursts of gunfire.

What was she going to do now?

The SIG-Sauer pistol. She fumbled at her belt and pulled the gun out. She shot out the door latch and all but cried in relief as the door swung open.

She leaped into the seat and took a fast look around the cockpit. Everything critical to flight was in relatively the same place she was used to seeing it. She started flipping switches as fast as her hands would go.

Ping. Ping, ping.

She ducked.

A spray of bullets flew into the cockpit, piercing the tempered glass windshield on the copilot’s side, leaving three small round holes with spider cracks spreading outward in jagged radials.

She sat upright again and flew through the engine start sequence. The overhead rotor started to turn sluggishly in an arc overhead.

“Hurry, hurry,” she begged the helicopter.

The back door slid open. She reached for the pistol at her belt. It was Dutch and Mac.

The two men stood in the rear door of the Huey and took turns firing while the other reloaded. They were laying down a veritable curtain of lead. At that rate, their ammunition wouldn’t last long.

But then, if her plan failed they wouldn’t have long, anyway. Thirty seconds were left on her stopwatch of the ninety that Tom had promised her.

She only prayed there was a reasonable amount of fuel in the Huey’s tanks.

Dutch and Mac fell back into the helicopter’s interior, and Doc and Tex took their places in the door.

The RPMs started winding up on the engine, and the tail rotor began to hum. The fuel gauge wound up. A full tank, thank goodness.

Howdy materialized in the doorway.

Where was Tom? She wasn’t leaving without him. She looked out her door, and he wasn’t anywhere to be seen.

The overhead rotor revved up to full speed, and she flipped on the radios and remaining navigation equipment. None of it would be properly aligned, but she could glean enough information to get them north to the ocean.

“Tom!” she called into her throat mike. “Come on! Let’s get out of here!”

She started violently when the copilot’s door slammed open. The dark-skinned face and red beret of a rebel soldier appeared, along with the muzzle of his rifle.