A vivid handprint bruise on her cheek.
His grip tightened around the M9.
Gasping, the willowy pilot stumbled across the threshold and stopped short, eyes widening. "Colonel?"
"You're all right?"
"Yes, sir." She grabbed the back of the chair for balance, short blond hair clinging to her sweat-soaked temples. "But everyone needs to leave. Fast. Ramon Chavez is heading this way, and he's gathering troops for a last-stand attack."
Jostling in the backseat of a dusty old Humvee, Sara hugged her daughter tight against her. Keagan drove, Lucas in the front passenger seat, Nola Seabrook sitting on the other side of Lucia. There wasn't time to fear entering the real world anymore.
She was too busy watching out the back window to make sure Ramon hadn't caught up with them yet.
Apparently he'd been tracking them almost from the start. She had to pull herself together for her child. Her daughter had survived the spider bite without incident, but being yanked from her bed and a sound sleep had her clinging to her mother as she hadn't done since toddler days.
Lucas's missing pilot—Nola Seabrook—had spilled her explanation quickly, in succinct and horrifying detail. When Ramon had stumbled on her outside the compound, she'd pretended to be an escaped prisoner of Padilla's. She'd had three choices. Kill Chavez, but all his information would die with him. Or she could risk a fight to overtake him and even if she won, she would have to keep him prisoner during their trek to safety.
She'd decided her best bet lay in playing along until they reached town when she would choose her time to fight.
Problem was, just when she'd overheard his plans to gather remaining troops, Chavez had seen through her story and had attacked her. No rape, but she'd barely escaped and couldn't overtake him. She could only race to the safe house.
Everyone in the apartment would have to scatter, fast. The CIA operatives went in different directions, while Max Keagan took care of everyone else.
Sara, Lucas, Lucia and the returned pilot were going with Keagan to a nearby private airfield where he promised transportation waited for them. They would only have to fly for ten minutes since they could cross the winding river, whereas Keagan and the others would travel by boats. In actuality, Ramon's compound wasn't far from the base, but Padilla had taken out so many bridges he'd crippled land travel.
Ten silent and tense minutes later, they reached the tiny rustic airfield on the edge of the jungle. How strange to be flying with Lucas again, but in such radically different circumstances than their first date in the glider.
She stopped watching behind them—and looking into the past—long enough to assess what lay ahead. The parking lot was empty except for an abandoned truck she doubted would run and an old man lounging in a rocker on the front porch with a newspaper and a bottle of tequila. Parked to the side waited a lone, ancient plane—small, silver and rusty.
As long as it flew, she wouldn't complain. Humvee screeching to a stop less than ten feet from the aircraft, Keagan put the vehicle in Park, the engine idling. "That should get you to base if you fly low enough to stay out of Padilla's radar. I've already cleared it with the old man. He says it's ready to roll, and it's faster than the water route the rest of us are traveling. There's a chart on the front seat." He extended a hand. "Be safe."
Lucas shook his hand and clapped him on the back with the other. "You, too. And thank you."
Sara pried Lucia's vice grip from her waist so she could reach for the seat belt, her eyes still scanning. Was the old man staring at them too intently? She tensed. Was he reaching inside his shirt pocket for a gun or a simple cell phone?
She started to call out— The man tucked a cigar between his lips before striking a match.
Relax, and move. Sara unbuckled her daughter, bracing for the last leg of their journey. She threw open her door, outside noises increasing—the hum of the engine, a dog barking on the porch.
Gunfire stuttering in the distance. She couldn't get Lucia out of Cartina fast enough.
Chapter 13
Damn. Damn. Damn.
Lucas wrenched open the rusty door on the tin-can aircraft Keagan swore would take them the rest of the way to the Cartina National Airbase. Seabrook dived inside and began assessing the controls. He scooped Lucia from Sara's arms and shoved her into the craft then lifted his wife by her waist.
He couldn't miss the barely banked fear in her eyes—only a fool wouldn't be afraid. But he also saw her trust. He gave a quick squeeze of reassurance, all he could take time for with sporadic gunfire sputtering in the distance. Could be nothing.
Could be Chavez.
Lucas climbed into the miniscule cockpit with none of his usual anticipation. He enjoyed the hell out of flying, becoming airborne like the birds he'd fed and watched since childhood.
Although this ancient bird might not make it off the ground—a 1950 Cessna 195, high wing, taildragger.
Behind him, Sara and Lucia settled into the small bench seat, Captain Seabrook buckled into the copilot's seat beside him.
"Papa?"
Lucas jolted. Talk about a cold splash reminder of the stakes here.
"Yeah, beetle?" he answered while orienting himself with the archaic control panel of a craft he'd never seen before.
"I thought you said your plane was as big as a little house. This looks like a doggie house."
God, he loved the kid's spunk. Not many children would still be holding strong after all they'd been through. Of course Lucia would have a warped sense of normal after her bizarre upbringing. The drive to protect doubled, surging through him. What unseen scars would she and Sara carry?
Something he wouldn't be able to fix if he didn't get them out of here alive now. "This isn't my plane. It's one we're borrowing to get us to my plane." He gripped the throttle. "You need to buckle in, first, though, so I can fly."
"Gotcha," his daughter chimed.
His daughter.
His grip on the yoke tightened, his fingers damn near as numb as his brain. Shake it off.
"Hey, Seabrook, do you remember how to start one of these?"
She shook her head, sweat tracking down her grimy face and darkening her normally blond hair to muddy brown. "Sorry. The last time I ran emergency procedures on a Cessna 195 was like...never." She skimmed her hands over the panel and controls. "My father was only a kid when this plane was made. But hey, I'm sure you'll have the whole squadron studying these, too, at our next safety summit."
Ah, a dig at what the squadron called his micromanaging at safety briefs. Normally she wouldn't have made such a comment, but these weren't normal circumstances. "A capital idea, Captain. Are you volunteering to lead the discussion?"
"Sorry, sir." A smile dented her exhausted, grubby face, in spite of the increasing gunfire, not closer, but more frequent.
Even the old man was packing up his tequila and heading inside his wooden office. Time to get this rust bucket off the ground.
"No problem." He couldn't help but think the comment was actually damned funny—more of Sara's influence that he be human. "Let me study it for a second."
Seabrook pointed. "I remember that's the throttle."
"Yeah, I got that." More gunfire stuttered. Closer? He couldn't be sure. "If there was a key, you'd think the old man would have given it to us."
"Uh, is that a start button?" She pointed again.
"Well, look at that. It certainly is. All right, let's see if we can remember how to do this. We need to open the gas tank. That must be this here." Training and instincts took control of his hands as he sank into routine. "Then we make the mixture rich by pulling out this knob. So we've got gas and air, and now we need spark."
Lucas pressed the start button. The engine coughed twice and finally roared to life. He pushed the mixture knob in...waited...prayed....
The engine smoothed.
He increased the throttle. The engine revved, yes, louder, yes, until with a tiny jolt the aircraft rolled out of its parking spot, rattling. Yesss. Only fifty feet to get a feel for the craft before he reached the dirt stretch.
Since he couldn't see over the nose of a taildragger aircraft, he swung the tail back and forth so he could look out the side windows for a view of the end of the runway, increasing speed.
Thirty knots.
The vibration increased, harder until he wondered if the whole thing would shake apart in his hands before they left the ground. He held the plane together with the force of his will and finessing of the yoke.
Fifty knots. Come on. Come on, damn it.
No one spoke. He regulated his breaths, in and out. The tail lifted off before the nose, finally giving him a clear view forward.
Seventy knots.
Now! He lifted the nose. Prayed again. The Cessna soared upward, skimming over brush, higher over an adobe steeple, then cresting above the tree line.
The exhales from his passengers swirled in the dusty cockpit. Behind him, Sara snorted with laughter.
Was she hysterical? Adrenaline overload? She was certainly due a meltdown, but he didn't want her to spook Lucia. "Everything okay back there?"
"Wonderful. Simply wonderful." She laughed harder, then lowered her voice to male decibels. "Oh, I can fly anything. Just call me Chuck Yeager, oh, and is that the start button?"
His mind winged back to their first date in the glider. His mouth twitched. "I'm flying this plane, aren't I?"
Seabrook chuckled beside him. "You told her that?"
He shrugged.
The Captain turned to look over her shoulder. "We're pilots. We brag. It's what we do." She pivoted back to the front. "You were trying to impress her, weren't you?"
"Duh." Trying to impress her in the past and present. Although it hadn't escaped his notice she still hadn't said yes to staying with him now, either.
Except this time, he damn well wouldn't let anyone harm a hair on her head.
Seabrook shook her head, eyes forward on the tree-filled horizon. "The Colonel said 'duh' like a regular dude. They're never going to believe this one back at the squadron."
Ramon kicked aside a rocking chair in the living room of the abandoned apartment.
He'd arrived too late. They'd wasted valuable manpower and blasted their way into this village for nothing.
After that blond bitch Nola had jumped him—a blow to his ego he couldn't afford to share with his men— she must have alerted everyone here. At least she hadn't taken him down.
Still her fighting skills weren't average. He recognized a warrior when he fought one. If she'd come here then she was everything he'd suspected and more. She wasn't with Padilla. She was some sort of spy or soldier.
But where was Sara?
Padilla's people hadn't been the only ones in his compound and they swore they didn't have Sara. Those old instincts of his that had kept him alive in early days insisted that his contacts in Padilla's camp were telling the truth.
Padilla didn't have her. But the U.S. government had been looking for her recently. The logical assumption? Somehow word had leaked that she was still alive.
More proof that his country needed a return to the old days when traitors weren't just shot. They were tortured as an example that Cartina's business stayed inside Cartina's borders.
Ramon lifted the half-empty coffee cup, stomping through the abandoned apartment. Two bedrooms and an empty office. Things looked normal enough. Perhaps his tip-off could have been wrong about this being a safe house belonging to the United States, but his source was rock solid.
Search deeper.
Ramon stepped into the first bedroom, a single bed, dent in the pillow small, covers askew, a food tray on the bedside table with a half-eaten meal. He sniffed. Not rancid. He touched the remains of the burrito—cold. Could mean nothing, perhaps a bad housekeeper.
