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 laceups 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 be
havior 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.
Thoughtfully, Charlie recrossed the small room and flipped the latch on his own door. Any determined six-year-old could kick through the flimsy panel, but at least the noise would provide some warning. That done, he dug into the pile of flight gear he'd retrieved from the lab before paying his unannounced visit to the woman next door.
His fingers stroked the white helmet that screwed onto the collar of his flight suit, lingering on the metal opening where his oxygen tube had connected. The rubberized rings sealing the opening had crumbled away, but the helmet itself had gone into the sea intact. So had Charlie's leather belt with its holstered .45 automatic and sheathed knife.
Sliding the Colt from its leather nest, he took it apart and checked every component. It was in excellent condition, all things considered. Thoughtfully, he reassembled the weapon, snapped the magazine in place, and chambered a round.
As he'd told blondie, he wasn't ready to trust her...or anyone else in her world.
Chapter 4
Diana soon discovered that winning Major Stone's trust had become a game, one played by two skilled opponents who made up the rules as they went along. The contest began the very next morning when he showed up at the mess hall. The research tech detailed to watch him trailed at his heels, wary and still more than a little disgruntled after his incarceration in the metal wall locker.
Diana was already at the mess, nursing her first cup of coffee and relating the essence of her conversation with the major the previous evening to the other members of the recovery team. She broke off as the subject under discussion appeared at the entrance to the mess.
All eyes turned to the new arrival. Stone had been fed the station's regular menu—such as it was!— since he'd ripped out his IV yesterday, but this was the first time he'd ventured into the common area itself.
Clearing her throat, Diana broke the s
tartled silence. "Good morning, Major Stone."
He stood on the threshold, surveying the motley crew. The oceanographers had racked up months of station duty, with limited bathing facilities and out-of-whack internal body clocks. As a result, most of them sported scraggly beards, bags under their eyes and layers of mismatched clothing. The recovery team had only been on station eleven days now, but looked almost as bad.
Wishing she'd taken time to do more than splash her face, drag a comb through her hair and throw a baggy brown sweater over her leggings and long Johns, Diana scooted her chair over a few inches.
"Why don't you come in and join us?"
He claimed the seat next to hers and listened intently while she introduced the men he hadn't met yet, including the oceanographer who'd first spotted him.
"You about gave me a heart attack," the scientist admitted wryly. "I don't think I'm ever going to forget the sight of you staring back at me through the ice."
"Thanks for digging me out."
He said the words slowly, as if he still wasn't entirely sure he was grateful for being rescued.
"Yeah, well, it's gotta be tough, what you're going through. I'm just glad the recovery team managed to, uh, defrost you."
"So am I." His glance made a circuit of the table, lingering briefly on Greg Wozniak and Irwin Goode before focusing on Diana. "I think."
With a bland smile, she reached behind her and poured a cup of the thick black sludge that the station crew loosely defined as coffee.
"Here," she said, sliding him the mug. "This is guaranteed to warm up any unthawed parts."
He accepted the cup and downed a quick swallow. The bright yellow box on the table snagged his attention.
"What's in that?"
"Breakfast."
While various crew members looked on, Stone slid a cellophane-wrapped frozen waffle from the box. He turned it over and over, examining its rocklike consistency.
"They're not bad," Diana assured him. "Want to try one?"
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