The statement was so casual, Jack wasn't at all sure he had heard correctly until Dahlia met his gaze, her eyes wide.
"Well, so much for not being personal." She swallowed. "I've never told anyone but my mom about it." She glanced at the sky, then changed the subject. "Feel the shift in the wind? And see how the clouds are beginning to billow up?"
He nodded, willing to allow her the change in topic. He'd come here expecting to have nothing in common with her, and he'd spent much of the first day thinking there wasn't. Instead their shared experiences kept piling up, and with it, the attraction that was constantly on his mind. Each reminder that he was here only to do a job carried less and less weight.
"Thunderheads like that one can grow into monsters in less than an hour, and sometimes they dissipate just as fast."
His attention returned to the cottonwood near the wind-mill. The car he had been watching was gone.
Then, coming out of the shadow of one of the shallow dips in the land, he saw it. Headed toward them, still more than a mile away. "Damn."
Without asking why he swore, Dahlia glanced down the slope. The car that had been parked under the cottonwood was moving.
"We have two choices." Jack was already reaching inside the van for one of the weapons that lay on the floor. "Run or stay. It could be our guys from yesterday or nothing."
Fear bubbled up, overriding everything else—even Dahlia's need to study this storm, a great candidate toward proving or disproving her theory. She headed for the car.
"Let's go," she said.
"Not today."
"It's not worth that." She pointed at the weapon.
"Running makes us the victim, and I'm done with that," he returned, pinning her with one of his fierce looks. "You agreed to do things my way, remember?"
She had, but at the time she hadn't thought it would actually come to this.
"Remember?" he repeated.
"Yes," she admitted reluctantly. Her attention returned to the shotgun, which he was checking to make sure that it was loaded. It was, both barrels. "And if they don't scare off?"
"Somebody will be going home in a body bag."
The matter-of-fact statement chilled Dahlia, and she believed him.
"Jack, we don't have to do this. There's nothing to prove today." She stepped in front of him. "Come on. Let's go."
Jack never even looked at her, simply watched the approaching vehicle with the same predatory expression he'd had yesterday when they were nearly cornered in the shopping center.
She touched his arm. Living steel, and no more responsive to her touch than metal would have been. Her imagination lit with gruesome possibilities. She wouldn't be able to live with herself if he got hurt because of her. "Jack, please."
"I want you in the van," he commanded. "On the passenger side and out of sight."
She looked at him, then the oncoming car. She didn't know which one scared her more. "No."
At last he looked at her, and she wished he hadn't. His eyes glittered, the brilliant blue as cold as the compressed ice of a glacier. "Get in the car, Dahlia."
"You stay. I stay."
"Damn it, woman!"
The noise from the approaching vehicle became louder as it climbed the crest of the hill, warning them they were out of time. Jack thrust her behind him, the line of his back taut, rigid.
He faced the road, his stance aggressive, the shotgun held in a way that made her sure he could have it up and ready to fire in less than a heartbeat. Then she realized he also held the handgun.
The car came close enough that she could hear the rumble of its motor. "Go on by," she whispered. "Just keep going."
If Jack heard her, he didn't so much as twitch. Like the car from the other day, this one was white or beige, so dirty it was impossible to tell for sure. She stared over Jack's shoulder waiting for that glimpse of the driver that would tell them whether this was friend or foe.
The sound of the motor changed, and her heart felt as though it would pound right out of her chest.
Closer it came. Since they were mere yards from the road, in another instant they would know whether the car would stop or go on by. Dahlia held her breath and silently urged the vehicle to keep going.
Finally she looked at the driver. A man with sharp features and a thin face. The man from the first morning with Jack. The man who had delivered the plant to her house. The man in the electronics store.
A man who would have been positively ordinary if she had seen him under any other conditions.
* * *
Chapter 9
« ^ »
The man looked straight at them. He lifted a hand from the steering wheel, and Dahlia flinched, expecting to see a gun. Instead, he saluted. She began to shake. With fear. With relief. With anger—that perhaps most of all.
Slowly the vehicle continued past them, then down the slope, kicking up little puffs of dust as it went.
"It was him." She came to stand beside Jack, who remained focused on the car.
"Yeah."
She gazed across the prairie, criss-crossed with only a few roads that were mostly empty except for the occasional windmill and cattle. A sudden gust of wind reminded her of the storm bearing down on them. "Where do you suppose his buddies are?"
"That is the question," Jack agreed as he holstered his handgun and hung the shotgun behind his shoulder.
The vehicle continued on, and they watched until it was no more than a speck several miles away.
When he finally looked at her, his expression was nearly as implacable as it had been minutes earlier, and there was no mistaking the glint of anger in his blue eyes. He took a step toward her, and she stood her ground, mostly to prove to herself that she could.
"You gave your word, remember?" He jutted out his chin and leaned his face toward hers. "You'd do things my way, remember?"
"I—"
"There's no 'I' to this." He set his fists at his waist, mostly to keep from throttling her, she suspected. "There's us."
"With you making the rules." Her own chin jutted. She didn't like playing follow-the-leader any more now than she had as a child, when her sister Rosie made the rules.
"Rules you agreed to." His glare became even more fierce. "That was the last time there's going to be a debate about what you're going to do."
"We can discuss it," she said.
"No … we … won't." He glared at her. "This isn't a committee, damn it, and we're not going to make any more decisions by committee, got it?"
"I'm not exactly stupid. And I won't be treated like some neophyte who can't add two plus two."
He thrust the shotgun into her hands. "Fine. If you've got the knowledge and the skills … and the will … to use that and keep the two of us alive, go for it."
Her glance fell to the weapon, the metal cold and heavy against her hands. She hated how it felt.
"There's an easy target." Jack pointed at a clump of rabbit brush some fifty feet away. "Go for it. Of course, it's not a man who has his own weapon." He paused until she looked at him. "Who will shoot you if you don't shoot him first."
"You really believe that?"
"I know it."
"Personally?" Remembering the other day when that man had pointed a gun at her, she hadn't actually believed it. She still wasn't sure she did.
"You asking for my résumé again, Dr. Jensen?" His voice had gone all soft, but the steel in his tone reinforced his anger.
She shook her head.
"The next time I ask you to do something, it's not because I get off on some power thing of ordering you around." His expression eased, if only slightly. "I want you safe, Dahlia. Got it?"
She nodded again, and silently admitted he'd hit on a key point. Did she have the will to use a weapon, even to save her own life. What if the guy had shot at them instead of merely saluting? What could she have contributed other than being in Jack's way and giving him one more thing to worry about?
Meeting his angry gaze, she decide
d that … maybe … he had cause to be mad at her. And she'd learned a long time ago the art of getting along when she clearly wasn't going to win.
"Thanks." She handed the shotgun back to him.
An eyebrow raised, he took the weapon from her. "For what?"
"Being here. Being willing…" If anyone had asked her if she really believed being prepared to do violence prevented it, she would have emphatically said no. She didn't want this, and the logical part of herself that she valued most of all wanted to hate his Neanderthal reaction to the situation. In spite of that she liked—loved, if she was honest with herself—knowing that he would protect her. When he had thrust her behind him, she reveled in the idea that he was willing to put his body—his life, if it came to that—between her and the danger he perceived. That woman was a stranger to her, and right now she was thoroughly appalled.
Her throat clogged, and she had to clear it before gesturing toward his weapons. "I don't think I'd have the will to shoot anyone."
"Then you should never pick up a weapon."
"Yes, well—"
"Go study your storm, Dahlia. Don't think about this." Easier said than done, but she retreated toward the van, shaken by his anger and relieved by his willingness to let it go. She double-checked her equipment and the steadily growing rows of measurements being fed into the database. Wind speed, dew point, temperature, barometric pressure, and what she was most interested in—the sferics, intense radio signals, that showed cloud-to-ground lightning strikes. The task required her concentration, but she had done it so many times she found herself watching Jack.
The car may have been out of sight, but it clearly was not out of Jack's mind, because he paced and frequently brought the binoculars to his eyes. The shotgun hung across his back and, like the shoulder holster for his handgun, emphasized the breadth of his shoulders. Had he been wearing army fatigues, she would have been sure she had fallen into a war zone somewhere.
"Have time to answer a question?" he asked a few minutes later, appearing at the side door and peering down at her, his warrior expression from earlier mostly gone.
"Sure."
"How do you think the guy found us?"
She had to think about that for only a moment. "It wouldn't be that hard if he has any computer savvy. If he found a way into the department intranet site, he'd have schedules, storm tracking, monitoring station locations, the computer model for the forecasts, all of it. Once you're in, there are no passwords except on your own research data, which makes it easier to share the information we all need access to."
"How many monitoring stations are there?" Jack asked.
"A half dozen. Two are in the mountains along the Peak to Peak Highway. The other four are scattered from the Pawnee Buttes south."
"So, our guy probably had a very good idea of where we were headed, especially if he looked at the computer model."
"That would be my hunch, too," Dahlia said.
Jack chuckled, his smile erasing the last of his harsh warrior expression. "You, Madam Empirical Evidence? You're admitting to a hunch?"
The chuckle, like the dimple that creased his cheek, was deep, sexy. This, she admitted to herself, was a man she liked despite everything. Too much. She smiled back. "Maybe this once."
A gust of cool wind drew her attention back to the approaching thunderhead. It cast a shadow that stretched toward them, and in the span of a few minutes had become huge—a storm that had the potential to drop torrents of rain or hail or even form a tornado. Dahlia called in her position over the ham radio to her contact in the Sky Warn net, and advised them of the storm's size, location and trajectory.
Jack glanced behind them. "This is the kind of storm you need?"
She nodded. "Yes. Everything says this is the one. The humidity, the wind, the warm day we started off with. This one is going to give me some great data." She adjusted one of the monitors. "There's already lightning inside this cloud. We should be seeing some good cloud-to-ground strikes any second."
"It doesn't rain first?"
"Sometimes." She ran a finger across the screen, tracking the numeric values that told her precisely what was happening inside the thunderhead. "With our semiarid climate, we often get lots of lightning and virga—rain that doesn't make it to the ground. This storm is going to produce rain, and lots of it."
Over the next hour the storms grew, one thunderhead after another, the smaller ones merging together and gaining towering height and breadth. When the first flashes of lightning came, accompanied by deep rumbling thunder, Dahlia caught Jack's glance.
"Our patience has paid off. This couldn't be any better. Our lucky day."
Jack faced the gusts of wind, feeling anything but lucky. He had tracked terrorists and faced down enemy troops. Either was preferable to storms the size of the one bearing down on them. They were still miles away, to the point he could see the cloud structures from the bottom, where rain fell in gray vertical striations, to the glistening white tops thousands of feet in the air.
Over the course of his career he had trained thousands of hours, had rehearsed a hundred different scenarios, and he knew how to track his enemy, identify the killing zone and move into a battle with the odds on his side. All that meant nothing against the thunderstorms building into giants that he didn't understand.
"Talk to me, Dahlia," he said, realizing he knew damn little about the storms he feared. Know the enemy. Storms were exactly that—a force he had feared since he was a small boy. "You can even use some of your six-syllable words, if you want."
She looked at the storm cloud, then glanced at the computer monitor. "What you're looking at is a supercell—not just one, but several. These formed with the weather front that moved through a couple of hours ago."
"How is a supercell different from your run-of-the-mill thunderstorm?" The name was benign enough, but the approaching storm looked anything but.
"See the mushroom shape at the top?"
She pointed toward the top of a cloud that thrust ahead of the main body. Its edges were smooth and upswept compared to the rest of the formation.
"The anvil at the top of a thunderhead is an indication of the kind of power and turbulence going on within the storm. The structure underneath that is the main storm tower. It acts like a chimney, drawing up warm air from underneath. At the top it's cold enough to form ice."
"Hail?" he asked.
"In this case, highly likely."
It looked to Jack as though the storm was traveling at a pretty good clip—at least twenty miles per hour. It wasn't headed directly toward them, but the closer it came, the more ominous it looked.
"This storm is going to be a good one, but it won't stick around for long." Dahlia's attention had returned to the computer monitors. With a couple of strokes to the keyboard, different images appeared on the monitor.
The wind gusts grew steadily stronger and the flashes of lightning were much closer together. Thunder rumbled in a nearly continuous cannonade that reminded him of a squadron of Black Hawks racing across the sky. He would have preferred the Black Hawks, even if it meant they were heading into a battle.
"Would you look at that?" Dahlia's voice was filled with surprise and a certain satisfaction. She pointed at the thunderhead as she picked up the transmitter for the ham radio. After identifying herself and their location, she said, "A group of clouds are merging into a single supercell and is headed northeast at about thirty miles per hour. A wall cloud has formed and is lowering."
"What's special about a wall cloud?" He understood which part of the cloud mass she referred to—a black low-hanging cloud that looked like a suspended ceiling hanging from the bottom of the clouds.
"It's where tornadoes are likely to form," she returned, "one more sign of a very intense storm."
He glanced sharply at her. "Tornadoes. I thought you were here because of the lightning."
She waved a hand toward the storm. "Today we might get both."
"And we're in the path," he
concluded.
"Close, but in no danger. Yet."
Yet. He hated sentences that ended with that word. Shards of lightning streaked across the sky, one after the other. The accompanying thunder rumbled like an awakening giant. If he had heard thunder more continuous, he didn't remember when.
As he watched over the next several minutes, the wall cloud sank toward the ground until there was only a sliver of light between it and the horizon. To him the cloud seemed to have a life of its own.
Jack brought the binoculars to his eyes, which brought the storm cloud visually close. From beneath the blackest part of the storm rain poured, and he became aware of another sound, a continual roar separate from the thunder.
"Hear the rain?" he asked.
"It's not rain, it's hail."
In front of his eyes, the storm undulated like a living monster that crackled with lightning and reverberated with thunder. The clouds above where they stood convulsed to some internal rhythm and brought ever closer the scent of rain. The churning clouds made him sure that at any moment a tornado would form directly above them. Dahlia's apparent lack of concern did nothing to reassure him. Maybe she simply hadn't noticed.
"Those swirling clouds above us—tornado material?"
She glanced at the formation. "Scud," she returned. "Part of the mammatus clouds. Scary looking, but not usually dangerous."
She ran her hands up and down her arms. Her attention refocused on the computer monitor in front of her, and she commanded, "Jack, get in the van this instant, and make sure your feet are in, too, off the ground."
The urgency in her voice alarmed him. Casting a last glance at the turbulent sky, he climbed into the back of the van and sat down next to her, setting the shotgun on the floor. Wind gusted through the van, carrying a bite of cold. He pulled the door of the van closed.
FRIEND, LOVER, PROTECTOR Page 12