The Heart's Command Page 8

  Buchanan didn't rise to the bait, however. Nor did he defend his rapid descent from hotshot fighter pilot to fertilizer spreader.

  "A hundred thousand's a good chunk of change," he agreed. "What, specifically, would I have to do to earn it?"

  "Specifically, you would have to fly me down to Copper Canyon, hang loose until I locate my sister, and fly us both out."

  "Seems to me the United States government would be pulling out all the stops to rescue the daughter of a Medal of Honor winner," he said slowly. "Not to mention the Mexican authorities."

  Frustration rose, so thick and bitter Dani could almost taste it. After three weeks of stomach-clenching tension, three weeks of working with the State Department, the CIA, the Mexican authorities and a host of hostage negotiators, three weeks of increasingly desperate measures, she'd run out of alternatives. And out of patience.

  "The U.S. has exercised every diplomatic option in the book. The Mexican government mounted several massive search efforts. Five days ago, a joint U.S.Mexican commando force stormed what they thought was the kidnappers' hideout, only to discover they'd departed the scene less than an hour before. The bastards have a source, apparently. A high-level source. One who tips them off to the government's every move."

  She leaned forward, her elbows digging into the stained tabletop.

  "This time," she vowed fiercely, "there'll be no leak. No warning. No advance notice of any kind. I want to fly down tomorrow, if you can get your plane ready." Her gaze drilled into his. "I'll pay you half up front. Half when we land back in the States. With Patricia."

  Still he didn't grab at the offer. Exercising every ounce of self-control she possessed, Dani waited him out.

  "Why me?" he asked when her nerves had twisted tight. "Why not a professional, a soldier of fortune with a small private army to back him up?"

  "Because you owe my father. Big time. And because, according to him at least, you used to be one hell of a pilot. It'll take all your skill and then some to put us down in those mountains and fly us out again. More to the point, the resort's in a remote area. A private army, no matter how small, can't go in without tipping off the kidnappers again. So it'll be just you and me, Buchanan. A couple of newlyweds, joyriding around Mexico on their honeymoon."

  "Newlyweds?"

  Actually, Dani had considered and discarded a number of covers. The area they were going into was a mecca for archeologists, paleontologists and bird watchers, not to mention American developers eager to exploit its stunning natural beauty. She'd decided against assuming any of those occupations, however. Past experience had taught her the most effective covers were the simplest.

  A point she kept firmly in mind when Buchanan's mouth curved. It wasn't a pleasant smile, or a particularly flattering one. Yet something crackled in the air between them, and the tension that had tied Dani in knots for so long now took an unexpected twist.

  "So what's the answer?" she snapped, annoyed she could feel anything even remotely resembling a sexual response to this man. "Yes or no?"

  "No."

  The laconic reply tightened her jaws. She waited for him to elaborate, felt a rush of fury when he merely fiddled with his beer.

  "That's it?" she demanded. "No sorry 'bout that? No list of reasons why you can't aid the daughter of a man who risked his life to save yours?"

  "That's it."

  "Dad wasn't wrong about people very often," she said, scorn dripping from every syllable. "Obviously, he missed the mark with you."

  She reached for the medal and pushed away from the table. Buchanan's hand whipped out. The hold on her wrist held her suspended half in and half out of her chair. He leaned forward until his face was mere inches from her own.

  "I'll bring your sister out, green-eyes. I owe the old man that. But as much as I appreciate the offer to honeymoon with you, I fly solo."

  "Not on this mission, Buchanan."

  "I do it my way or not at all."

  Her jaw locked. Any of the personnel she worked with would have recognized the expression that settled over her face, and instantly found important work that needed doing in another part of the headquarters.

  "Not on this mission," she repeated, yanking free of his hold. "We do it my way or you don't get paid."

  "Then I guess I don't get paid."

  His chair legs scraped the floor. Digging some crumpled bills out of his jeans, he tossed them on the table and tipped two fingers to his hat brim.

  "See you around, Flynn."

  He sauntered past her, moving with a cocky, confident stride. And, Dani was forced to admit, with a lazy grace that was all his own.

  "Yes," she murmured, gripping her father's medal to her chest. "You'll definitely see me around."

  She was at the patch of flattened weeds that passed for the local airstrip when the sun broke over the horizon the next morning.

  She'd dressed for traveling, in sturdy hiking boots, jeans and a short-sleeved, red T-shirt. A Washington Redskins ball cap confined her shoulder length auburn hair back in a ponytail. Her leather carryall contained a change of clothing, a few toiletries and a nylon wind-breaker... along with a few essential tools of her trade.

  Leaning against the fender of her rental car, she sipped the coffee she'd picked up at the only gas station in town. The streaks of red and gold shooting across the sky smoothed some of the jagged edges of the tension that had gripped her for weeks now. The Panhandle had a wild beauty all its own, she decided. Acre after acre of wheat fields turning amber with the dawn. The black, low-lying mesas to the north. The Coldwater River cutting a silver curve to the south.

  Too bad the current resident of this particular patch of Oklahoma hadn't contributed much to its natural beauty. Shaking her head, Dani scanned the weedy airstrip. A faded windsock hung limply atop a rusted pole. A dilapidated shed marked with a hazard sign was loaded, she guessed, with barrels of insecticide. The Quonset hut that served as a hangar was definitely World War II vintage.

  So was the plane tucked inside.

  Dani had done her research. She was well aware that the Stearman N3N biplane inside the hangar had been built in 1940 and performed yeoman service as a trainer for navy pilots. Nicknamed the Canary for its bright yellow paint scheme, this plane and hundreds like her had been sold as excess after the war. Many had then embarked on long second careers as crop dusters.

  She was also aware that the Stearman was an extremely stable platform, easy to maneuver, capable of taking off and landing on dirt roads or grassy pastures. Still, the idea of skimming the tops of the rugged Sierra Madres in the back seat of an open cockpit, kept aloft on rickety canvas wings separated by wooden struts, had her sucking down another deep gulp of caffeine.

  She'd reached the dregs when Buchanan finally drove up. She could see him coming for a good half mile. His pickup raised a long rooster tail of red dust. Dumping the cold sludge, she crumpled the cup, tossed it inside the rental car and folded her arms.

  When he climbed out of the pickup, the canvas light bag he hauled out of the truck gave her a fierce satisfaction. She'd had her doubts about Buchanan during the long hours of the night, but it was obvious he'd come prepared to fly. Aviation maps stuck out of the sides of the bag, and he'd thrust a brown leather bomber jacket through its handles.

  He wouldn't need the jacket to conduct aerial spraying in this heat. He was on his way to the high, cool elevations of the Sierra Madres.

  "Morning, Buchanan."

  He stopped in front of her. In the dusty dawn, he looked even more disreputable than he had in the bar. And considerably more annoyed. Under the thick black bristles, his jaw had locked tight.

  "Maybe you didn't hear me last night. I fly solo."

  "I heard you."

  His glance shot to the leather carryall at her feet, then back to her face.

  "We're wasting time here," she said, preempting the argument she saw forming. "Patricia's mom died just a year after my dad. Trish is all the family I have left. You're not fly
ing down to Mexico without me."

  "Oh yeah?" He rocked back on his heels. "Just out of curiosity, how do you plan to stop me?"

  "Well, I could call a friend of mine at Altus Air Force Base, just south of here, and have him run an intercept. Or I could call another friend at the FAA and have her pull your certification. Or," she added calmly, "I could take you down right now and have done with this cat and mouse game we're playing."

  Damn! She was serious. For a moment Jack actually considered accepting her challenge. The mood he was in this morning, he wouldn't mind a tussle in the dirt. Particularly with Danielle Flynn. The woman had stirred more than his interest when she'd strolled into MacIver's place last night.

  This morning, she all but tied him in knots.

  Those snug jeans wrapped around her hips and rear like a thin coat of paint. Her cotton T-shirt hugged her slender curves in a way that left little to the imagination, and Jack possessed a very vivid imagination when it came to leggy redheads. Deliberately, he squelched the image of Flynn flat on her back in the grass, her legs tangled with his, her green eyes flashing fire.

  So she had the neatest, trimmest butt this side of the Red River? So the mere thought of rolling around in the grass with her got him hard? She was Dan Flynn's daughter.

  Even without the old man looking over his shoulder, Jack wouldn't move on the woman. His brief contact with Captain Flynn was making it painfully apparent that she'd inherited more from the colonel than her dark copper hair. Jack wasn't about to get up close and personal with another stubborn, hardheaded female. The last one had wrung him inside out before she decamped with a high school band instructor.

  A band instructor, for God's sake!

  Shaking his head in disgust, Jack invited Danielle Flynn to attempt whatever actions she considered necessary or appropriate. He was going to Mexico. In his plane. Without her.

  He was halfway across the grass strip when the ear-splitting report of a pistol stopped him in his tracks. Directly ahead of him, the windsock whipped around wildly on its pole.

  That got his attention, Dani thought in smug satisfaction. Thumbing the safety on the Beretta, she strolled up to join him. Buchanan's eyes were glacial when he turned to face her.

  "Was that little demonstration supposed to impress me?"

  "No. It was supposed to show you that I can take care of myself."

  He studied the Beretta for a long moment. It was a new model, a 9000S, with a fiberglass reinforced techno-polymer frame and two special steel rail inserts for the slide. Compact, lightweight and easy to field-strip, with a magazine that packed twelve lethal 9 mm rounds or ten Smith & Wesson .40 calibers.

  Evidently Buchanan knew his way around weapons enough to appreciate this wasn't an ordinary side arm. His face registered suspicion and a grudging respect.

  "What do you do in the Air Force, anyway?"

  "I'm an undercover agent with the Office of Special Investigations. I'm pulling a headquarters tour at Bolling Air Force Base outside D.C. right now, but I've spent most of the past eight years in the field."

  His eyes narrowed. "Any particular reason why you neglected to mention that particular bit of information before now?"

  "As a matter of fact, there is. I'm not going into Mexico in my official capacity. This isn't an Air Force operation. The politics of the situation won't allow it. This is just me, Buchanan. And you. Now I suggest we load up and get this show on the road."

  With a self-assurance that said the matter was settled, Dani slipped the Beretta into the holster strapped to her ankle and plowed through the weeds to the Quonset hut. She didn't realize she was holding her breath until she heard a muttered curse and the thud of boots behind her.

  She let out a tiny sigh of relief. She would have gone into Mexico alone, if necessary. She'd planned to do just that if she couldn't convince Buchanan to honor his debt to her father. She was congratulating herself on maneuvering him into doing exactly what she'd wanted him to when his deep drawl sounded just behind her ear.

  "It'll be tough, but I guess I can force myself to share a bed with you for a few nights in a mountaintop resort."

  "Don't get any ideas. The honeymoon bit is strictly for cover."

  She tossed her carryall into the back seat of the Stearman and turned, only to find herself caught between the canvas-covered fuselage and a large, immovable male.

  "Maybe we need another demonstration," he suggested with a nasty glint in his eye. "Just to lay out the rest of the ground rules."

  "Buchanan..."

  She could have taken him down. She'd been taught every defensive and counterdefensive move in the book. But something held her still.

  Maybe it was the faint, tantalizing tang of coffee on his breath. Or the tingle just under her skin when his bristly cheek scraped hers. Or the sudden, feminine curiosity that leaped to life all up and down her spine. Whatever it was, it kept Dani motionless as he planted his palms on the fuselage and bent his head.

  The moment his lips claimed hers, she realized her mistake. Jack Buchanan subscribed to the fighter pilot school of kissing. He didn't make a slow pass over the target. Didn't perform a careful aerial assessment before engaging the enemy. He swooped in, guns blazing, delivered a full load of armaments and left his designated target with her head spinning and her knees ridiculously weak.

  Lord, the man could kiss! Dani fought the urge to rise up on tiptoe, hook her arms around his neck, return fire. Instead, she kept her shoulders against the canvas and her hands fisted at her side. When he raised his head, it took everything she had to infuse her voice with cool disdain as she threw his words back at him.

  "Was that supposed to impress me?"

  A grin flashed across his face, transforming the rugged planes and angles into something dangerously close to handsomeness.

  "No, but it sure goes a long way to making up for the buzzing in my ears from your pistol shot."

  Dani refused to admit that the buzzing in her ears had nothing to do with the shot. She wouldn't give Buchanan the satisfaction. Besides, she wasn't about to let this man distract her. Not with her sister's life hanging in the balance.

  Still, she couldn't decide whether she was more relieved or disappointed when Buchanan tossed his flight bag into the front seat and kicked aside the wooden chocks.

  "Let's roll this baby out and get her fueled, green-eyes. This looks to be one helluva flight."

  Chapter 2

  Dani had never flown in an open cockpit plane before. Six hours into the flight, she was pretty confident she never wanted to repeat the experience.

  Granted, skimming along at fifteen hundred feet was incredibly exhilarating, with the air rushing, silky soft, in her face and scattered cumulus clouds puffing up like mounds of whipped cream in the ocean of blue all around her. The Stearman's 220-horsepower engine purred like a kitten, so the noise wasn't bad. And flying at little more than eighty miles an hour, Dani could swipe the occasional oil spray from her goggles, lean into her shoulder harness and see the patchwork of farms, towns and cities below in precise detail.

  Unfortunately, the Stearman's slow speed, ability to fly well below radar and capacity to land on any semi-level surface—all of which made it the perfect aircraft for this mission—also made for a long flight. Once they were out of the Oklahoma Panhandle, Texas rolled by beneath the double wings for hour after hour. The flat, dusty plains around Amarillo. Lubbock's cotton fields. Midland-Odessa's Permian oil basin, with black metal derricks bobbing up and down like giant grasshoppers as far as the eye could see.

  At the first refueling stop, Dani unhooked her harness, climbed out and made a dash for the bathroom to get rid of her coffee. The messages scrawled above the urinal raised her brows. The sink was so filthy she figured her own germs were safer than any she might pick up from touching the faucet. She returned outside and waited patiently while the airstrip manager drooled over the Stearman.

  At the second stop, there were no bathroom facilities of any kind, crude
or otherwise. Nor did an airstrip attendant make an appearance. A cell phone call to the number painted on the fuel tank gave the location of the key and permission to pump away. Buchanan left two bills folded under a rock to pay for the gas.

  Thankfully, their third stop was a city airport just outside Fort Stockton, with a real tower and a restaurant. Dani climbed out of the Stearman on rubbery legs as a knot of people gathered to admire the biplane.

  "She's decked out in navy colors," an old-timer said with a catch in his throat. "Just like the trainer I soloed in at Pensacola in '43."

  "Glad to see you didn't gut the old girl's front cockpit and fit her with a fertilizer hopper," another commented. "From the nozzles you've installed under her wings, I'd guess you disperse chemicals and seed?"

  "Not just seed. I also spray dry material to speed up snowmelt on golf courses and small grainfields," Buchanan explained. "Had a contract last year to clean up an oil spill along the Lower Colorado."

  "No kidding? That was you? You did a damned good job, from what I heard. Used MT-64 dry microbial pellets, didn't you?"

  Left completely behind by the abrupt transition into the technicalese of aerial applications, Dani heeded her stomach's rumblings and made for the restaurant. She was halfway through a heaping platter of enchiladas and french fries, both swimming in scorch-your-eyeballs Texas chili, when Buchanan finally joined her.

  "That looks good," he told the waitress. "I'll have the same. And iced tea."

  Grimacing, Dani watched him dump six packets of sugar into the quart-size jug of tea that was delivered a few moments later. She refrained from commenting on his sweet tooth, but did remark that she hadn't realized agricultural aviation had taken on such a variety of dimensions.

  Buchanan slanted her a cynical glance. "I'm not surprised. I formed the impression last night that you don't hold the profession of crop dusting in high esteem."

  "Not as high as flying fighters for the United States Air Force," she admitted. She played with her fork, eyeing him curiously. "Do you miss it?"