Pilot Error (38 page)

"Come on, Yank," she yelled impatiently, as if it were Luke's own fault he was not yet free. In her absence, Luke had piled the debris on the cave's floor into a makeshift step, but it had still proven impossible to pull himself to the surface without the friendly push that she'd gotten from him. "Put a little muscle into it. We don't have all day, you know."

Dirk groaned under the strain of his exertions, the veins in his neck stretched taut like violin strings. Flat on his belly, he wiggled back a few inches... and Luke's hand and forearm came into view. Their grip was so tight that the skin on both men's wrists looked twisted, white, and bloodless. Micki flung both hands into the hole as his shoulder appeared and grabbed two fistfuls of his camo splashed t-shirt. She added her strength to the fight, pulling and straining with Dirk, and Luke came out up to his waist.

Using his free hand, Dirk grasped Luke's belt and completed the rescue, spilling them both onto the side of the sand dune in a spent heap. For the next few moments, all three of them lay panting and exhausted beneath the crisp morning sun, then Micki was on her knees at Luke's side. He had one arm flung across his face to protect his abused eyes from the sudden glare, while the other—the one Dirk had used to haul him out—rested limply at his side.

"Are you okay?" she asked gently.

Rising to sit with his elbows resting on his knees, Luke nodded. A flick of his head was a wary indication of Dirk. "Are you?"

She pulled him to her for a quick hug, meeting her former lover's watchful gaze over his shoulder. "Yes. Dirk's going to take us to Hamilton."

"And we should get moving," Dirk told her gruffly. Without a word or a glance at the man he had just rescued, he stood, dusted the sand from the seat of his trousers, and headed down the slope toward the waiting speedboat.

"Hey, wait a minute," Luke called. He was up giving chase before Micki could intervene. Striding along side Dirk, he said, "You've got a hell of a nerve, buddy."

Reaching the tapered bow of the sleek speedboat, Dirk ignored him and pushed the hull free of the sand.

"Hey! I'm talking to you, Jurgensen."

"Yeah, well, I ain't listening. Don't feel you owe me any favors."

"Son of a bitch!" Luke grabbed Dirk's shoulder, spun him around, and punched him in the face.

It knocked Dirk right on his butt. He stayed there on the wet sand, rubbing his jaw and glaring up at his adversary. "I hope you're prepared to finish what you just started, Hardigan."

"Oh yeah, I've been waiting for this."

"Stop it! Both of you!" Reaching the two, Micki bit her tongue against further chastising Luke, since his reaction so precisely mimicked her own sentiments. True, Dirk had just saved him from a long slow death, and a little gratitude for that, if nothing else, should be in order. But it was only because Dirk tackled her from behind that had kept her from slugging him in much the same way.

"That was for my little brother," Luke announced in a less-than-grateful tone. "And for the wine cellar." In a swift change of temperament, he offered his right hand to the man on the sand. "This is for hauling my butt out of that hole."

Slowly, Dirk accepted the hand and allowed Luke to pull him to his feet. They stood eye to eye for a moment, glaring, leaving Micki to wonder if there was going to be a fist fight or a handshake.

Before either could happen, chaos erupted. Bullets slammed into the ground around them, making the sand dance and the ankle deep water quiver. All three turned to see a group of open top Jeeps coming over the sand dune. Standing in the back of the lead vehicle, with one arm in a sling and the other bracing a rifle against the roll bar to anchor him in place, was Reynolds. With an ugly laugh, he opened fire again.

The trio jumped for what little cover there was along the sides of the fiberglass speedboat; Dirk on one side, Micki and Luke along the other.

Throwing himself over the gunwale and going straight for the helm, Dirk yelled, "Get in!"

The outboard spluttered into life, giving rise to the fear that maybe they were not yet in deep enough water. What if the prop got stuck in the sand?

It occurred to Micki, as she and Luke clambered into the boat and kept low to the deck to avoid another burst of gunfire, that Reynolds was simply toying with them. There was no way he could repeatedly miss his target at this range, even handicapped by the sling. He was just taunting them before he killed them.

"Stay down," Luke instructed her.

There was a pause in the gunfire, during which he lifted his head to squint into the sun, toward the approaching Jeep. That must have been agony on his injured eyes, but he gave no sign he noticed.

"They're too damn close, Jurgensen," Luke shouted over his shoulder. Bent double, he turned to the helm to see why Dirk had not put the motor into forward gear. "Get us out of—"

He stopped abruptly, mid-sentence. Horrified, Micki watched Dirk slip from the helm toward the deck. Equally as stunned, Luke managed to catch him and lower him to a somewhat softer landing between the seats. Micki crawled to Dirk, and it was only after reaching him that she saw how effectively his black shirt hid the gaping holes and the splattered blood across his chest.

Reynolds wasn't such a hopeless shot after all.

"No," Micki gasped as tears filled her eyes. She took Dirk's head in her lap, realizing that despite the trauma of the last three days, she was still capable of feeling compassion for the man who had been an integral part of the last three years of her life.

First Ray, then Fizz, now Dirk. How many more before the nightmare ended?

Somewhere behind her, Luke was yelling for her to keep her head down. The boat clunked into gear. Momentum threw her sideways as it swooped away from the beach at full speed. Chased by Reynolds' angry shouts for his men to open fire, Micki's attention was on the man dying in her arms.

"It's okay," she said soothingly, when Dirk tried to speak and no sound came out.

He coughed, spitting up blood, and tried again. Micki leaned closer so she could hear him over the roar of the outboard, the movement drawing Luke's distracted gaze in a series of sharp glances.

"Files," Dirk croaked faintly, his eyes wide and scared and locked on hers.

"I have the flash card thingy, it's safe." Aware that Luke was watching her, but unable to tell if he could hear what was being said, she tapped the tiny, barely felt lump in her bra as way of a visual explanation. "Just hang on," she said, her focus still on Dirk. She took his blood-covered fingers in her hand and squeezed tightly. "We'll get you to a hospital."

The boat zigged and zagged, tossing them on the pitching deck, as Luke did his best to evade the gunfire still erupting sporadically from the beach. Micki fought to hold Dirk still to ease his agony, but another bout of more intense coughing made his face contort with pain.

"Dirk?" With the wind whipping her untamed hair and the spray of saltwater on her face, Micki fought back her tears. "Don't you die on me, you hear?"

Dirk opened glazing eyes and looked up at her. Slipping his hand from hers, he lifted it to her cheek. "All I... ever wanted," he said laboriously, "was for you to... love me..."

Then, with a starkness that Micki knew she would remember for the rest of her life, he was gone; his hand dropping back to the deck and his head lolling gently to one side with the motion of the boat. The wetness of the red smudge he left on her cheek was as sweet and tender as a whispering kiss.

Micki pressed her lips together in an effort to hold back her cry of despair. How many more? Another of Luke's tight, sweeping turns sent a wall of white foam into the air and had her clutching for a desperate handhold.

"Hang on!" Luke called, a tad late. "Damn, we've got company!"

As bullets whizzed into the ocean around them, Micki dared raise her head to look. A line of three more boats was closing fast. Reinforcements. Then, as suddenly as it had begun, the gunfire from behind them stopped.

Micki glanced over her shoulder, and saw Reynolds and his men clamber for the Jeeps, turning tail. "They've stopped shooting."

Luke grinned. "No wonder. Look!"

She followed his nod toward the boats approaching from around the rocky headland to the south. A heartfelt sense of relief thundered through her as they drew close enough to read the white lettering on their blue hulls. They were reinforcements, all right, but not for Reynolds and his thugs. Her radio call, made yesterday from the smuggler's cave, had apparently been treated as more than a prank.

It was the Hamilton Harbor Police.

"Put down your weapons and put your hands in the air." The instructions that came over a loud speaker in a welcomed British tone were directed at the group of scrambling men onshore. Luke cut their boat back to idle and let it jostle on its own wake as one of the police boats drew alongside. The remaining two sped straight for the beach like cowboys on horses headed for a roundup.

It was over. Help had arrived. The nightmare was finally finished.

As Luke began to talk to the concerned policeman on the boat alongside them, Micki slowly rose to her feet, and found she was shaking so hard she could hardly stand. Horrified, she regarded Dirk's body, lying still and pale between the seats. There was blood everywhere; on the deck, on her hands, on her clothes. So much blood.

She backed away in a move that took her astern, until a single shot, fired from behind her, drew her dazed attention. Reynolds' Jeep had turned around and was now making a run for it, ignoring the warning shot fired by one of the dozen harbor cops spilling onto the beach to arrest those men who had wisely given themselves up.

Luke called her name in a raw, shouted warning that did not penetrate the fog of shock that had engulfed her. It was unthinkable that Reynolds might get away, even though he motioned to his driver to head up the sand dune, and began blasting at the Harbor Police as she watched. This could not be happening.

In her peripheral vision, Micki saw Luke scramble toward her, almost knocking the policeman beside him into the water in his haste. At the same time Luke moved, the gunfire ceased. In slow motion, she watched Reynolds make one last vengeful move. Throwing down his emptied assault rifle, he pulled a handgun from the belt of his trousers, and swung around to aim it directly at her.

Luke's voice was a roar. "MICKI, GET THE HELL DOWN!"

A single gunshot, fired from the stolen Beretta, erupted over the sound of lapping waves and the putter of idling boats. Luke tackled her just as something hard stung her in the left temple and bright light flared behind her eyes. She went down unexpectedly with Luke on top of her.

The back of her head collided with the deck and something darker exploded in her skull with the impact. Through a fuzzy haze of pain, Micki watched Luke talk at her, but his urgent words made no sense. The world had taken a swift and unexplainable turn into a jumbled hodgepodge of images and sounds.

She looked away, suddenly sleepy. Luke shook her, and she wished distantly that he'd just leave her alone. Dirk's body, the centerpiece of an oozing red puddle on the polished white fiberglass deck, was the last thing she saw before the darkness tunneling her vision pushed in.

Her head hurt like hell.

Coming back to consciousness was like surfacing through layers of varying pain; the closer Micki got to full awareness, the more the agony in her brain grew. The best thing was to sink back down to where the ache was farther away, and stay there for a long, long time.

She heard a whimper and distantly wondered if it could be her own.

"Micki?" The voice was coming from up top somewhere. Up top. Where the pain waited. "Come on, Jacinto, I know you're in there."

The memories came flooding back in a rush; Luke, the Cessna crash, Reynolds, losing Fizz, the cave, Dirk. Swirling like blood in water, they pushed her closer to the surface of full consciousness. It was like swimming up through an ocean blanketed with a slick of black oil.

Fighting, Micki broke free. The ache sluiced over her, potent enough to nearly send her spiraling downward into the safer depths again. But there was warm pressure on her hand and that comforting voice, buoying her where she was and refusing to let her sink. "Micki? Can you hear me? Come on, darlin', give me a sign."

Could she hear him? What a stupid question. Of course she could hear him. Why did he think she was there, floating in the pain, if not to communicate?

It took two tries before her voice would work, but finally she remembered what it took to make the words audible, if not totally articulate. "Don't... call me that."

Her companion chuckled lightly, and she felt him lift the hand he held for a quick kiss. "That's my Micki."

"You wish." Her voice was slurred, and her eyes, it seemed, just didn't want to open. When she forced her lids apart, the first fuzzy thing she saw was a military uniform. "Luke?"

"It's Tex, Micki." Her eyes lifted, and focused in time to catch his welcoming smile shading a little more toward concern. He sat forward in the chair pulled close to her bedside, as if he had been there, keeping a watchful vigil, for an unspecified but lengthy amount of time. "You recognize your old buddy, don't you?"