Match Play
Page 16
“What do we do?” Kim Li cried again, panic infusing every syllable.
Dayna glanced over the bridge wall at the dark water below.
“We swim,” she told Kim Li.
“Swim? No! No! I cannot!”
Dayna’s eyes locked with Luke’s.
“We can,” he said.
Ignoring the girl’s frantic protests, they hauled Kim Li toward the low wall edging the bridge.
Dayna stripped off her jacket. The river below was dark and running fast with the tide, but clear of boat traffic. Kicking out of her shoes, she prepared to launch.
“You haven’t forgotten how to swim parallel to a swift current?” she threw at Luke.
“How could I?” He reinforced the retort with a grin. “I was taught by an Olympic gold medalist. Up you go.”
That last was directed at Kim Li. She bucked out of his hold. “No! I do not…I cannot…”
Scooping her up, Luke tossed her over the low wall.
“Nooo!”
Her scream ended when she splashed into the water and went under. Dayna sliced in not three feet away.
Chapter 17
The River Eden’s rushing tidal current carried them to the wide, swirling estuary of St. Andrews Bay.
A British Coast Guard cutter plucked them from the bay almost within sight of the Royal and Ancient Golf Clubhouse. The patrol boat then swept around the headland and deposited the three blanket-wrapped swimmers on shoreline contained within the boundaries of RAF Leuchars.
The cutter’s captain had radioed ahead. When his passengers scrambled ashore, they were bundled into a waiting vehicle. The car whisked them directly to the USAF C-21 parked on the taxiway.
Luke shed his blanket and saluted the British air commodore standing at the aircraft with Colonel Anderson, Hawk and a visibly shaken Dr. Wu. Sobbing, Kim Li fell into her father’s arms.
Jilly edged around them to greet her friend. “Nice look, Duncan. I especially like the orange kelp draped over your left ear.”
Swatting away the seaweed, Dayna lowered her voice to an urgent whisper. “How did it go with Dr. Wu?”
“He more than lived up to his end of the deal. Even before he learned he wife was safe, he used hand gestures to let Hawk and me know there was a camera buried in one earpiece of his glasses and a mike in the other. We made sure Colonel Anderson got the message. And he made sure Dr. Wu got a clear shot of the modified B-2 before I tripped over my own feet. The last bit the Koreans heard or saw before the doc’s glasses shattered on the asphalt was silly, clumsy me squealing an apology.”
“You, my friend, are most definitely OMEGA material.”
“So I keep telling Hawk.”
Her glance shifted to the operative hustling the Wus onto the sleek executive transport.
“Maybe he’ll get the message after we turn the Wus over to their new handlers and I ask Uncle Nick to break the news that I’m joining your ranks.”
“Does your uncle Nick know about that?”
“Not yet.”
“Your mom and dad?”
“Nope.” Laughter sparkled in her blue eyes. “Want to come home with me and provide backup when I tell them I’m following in their footsteps?”
“No way!”
Maggie Sinclair, code name Chameleon, would take her eldest daughter’s foray into the world of spooks and spies in stride, as she took everything else. Adam Ridgeway, Dayna suspected, would rattle Washington, D.C.’s marble monuments.
“You’ll have to tell them all by your lonesome. You’ll also have to help Hawk with the Wus. I’m not flying back to the States with you.”
“When did you decide that?”
“This morning, right after a certain sky jockey informed me he…”
The whine of the jet’s engines drowned out the rest of her sentence but Jilly got the gist. So did Hawk when Dayna told him about her change of plans.
“You sure about this?” he boomed over the engine’s piercing shrill.
“Absolutely.”
Luke joined them then, shouting to be heard over the decibels that magnified with every revolution. “What’s going on?”
“Not me,” Dayna yelled.
With a last wave for Hawk and Jilly, she dragged him to the edge of the tarmac.
“You didn’t give me a chance to counter your offer when you reopened negotiations this morning.”
“Counter?” His hazel eyes darkened. “Don’t even think it, lady. You sealed the deal.”
“Wait. Hear me out.”
Easier to say than do with the jet revved to full power and its exhaust whipping her wet hair into a whirlwind.
“The B-2s are home-based at Whiteman AFB, Missouri, right?”
“When they’re not forward deployed.”
The jet began to taxi, thank God. Dayna didn’t have to bellow to be heard.
“You’ve only got a few months left on this assignment. Then you’ll rotate back to Whiteman. There’s a new swift-water training center on the Moose River. I can teach there, as well as in Virginia and work my ops for OMEGA in between.”
“I don’t know they’ll send me to Whiteman. It could be the Pentagon. Or Armed Forces Staff College. Or Pilot Instructor School.”
“Wherever it is, we’ll make it work.”
Luke wanted to crush her against him and shout hell, yes, they’d make it work, but the past held him in too tight a fist. He’d chosen his military career over Dayna their first time around. Even if he’d made that choice with her dreams as much or more in mind than his own, he knew now the decision had been dead wrong.
That Dayna was willing to work around his military commitments despite the past hurts filled him with a love so fierce he ached with it. Still, he gave her one last out.
“You sure you can live with a man in uniform for the next ten or twenty or fifty years?”
Laughing, she hooked her arms around his neck. “I’ll grin and bear it, flyboy. As long as I get you out of uniform on a regular basis.”
ISBN: 978-1-4268-1273-6
MATCH PLAY
Copyright © 2008 by Merline Lovelace
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