This was ridiculous. She was playing a double game of golf and deception tomorrow. She’d have to make every stroke count while keeping tabs on Wu Kim Li. She needed sleep.
“Get out of my head, Harper!”
Why couldn’t he put the woman out of his head?
Luke shifted restlessly in the mission commander’s seat of his bat-winged B-2. The pilot whose performance he’d been evaluating occupied the left seat, breathing easier now that he’d completed most of his check ride.
Outside the cockpit a star-studded night sky stretched to infinity. Inside, the instrument panel gave off a muted glow shielded by specially screened and darkened windows.
“Thirty-two thousand and holding steady on course niner-three-six,” the other pilot reported.
Luke acknowledged their position and rolled his shoulders to relieve the strain of his seat harness. They’d been in the air for seven hours now, a mere hop compared to their normal missions. Tonight’s training run had taken them out over the Atlantic for an in-flight refueling. They would return to base before dawn, gliding in with the same stealth that made the B-2 invisible to the world’s most sophisticated radars—and to antiwar protestors hoping to obtain photos that would prove beyond any doubt the bomber’s presence in the U.K.
The B-2 crews and support personnel were every bit as determined to remain as stealthy as the two-billion-dollar aircraft they flew. Hence the night-only takeoffs and landings and the fiction that their detachment was part of an exchange program at Leuchars.
So far the ploy had worked. Would it still work if the paparazzi sniffed out the fact that Dayna Duncan’s old flame just happened to be in St. Andrews?
From past experience, Luke knew how the media rooted around for personal tidbits to salt into their coverage of otherwise impersonal sporting events. He and Pud had once provided just the mix of glamour and romance the tabloids loved.
The nickname tugged his mouth into a lopsided grin. Pud, short for the puddles he’d teased her about paddling around in. The teasing had lasted only until she’d taken Luke for his first white-water run.
The experience had been as exhilarating as any he’d every experienced. It had also scared the crap out of him. When they’d gone over Horseshoe Falls, his stomach had dropped right through the bottom of the fiberglass kayak. He could still hear Dayna’s joyous whoop, still see her hair flying under her helmet and wet suit molded to her curves as they…
Well, hell! There she was again. Front and center in his thoughts.
Resigned, Luke checked the instruments and gave up trying to shove the woman out of his head.
She was still there, hovering around the edges of his mind, when he finished his mission debrief. Slinging his flyaway bag over his shoulder, he exited the debriefing area and was headed for the crew room to change out of his flight suit when one of other pilots hailed him.
“The old man wants to see you, Harper.”
Nodding, Luke detoured to the suite of offices tucked in one corner of the massive hangar. He figured the colonel was waiting for an update on the check ride just completed and prepared a rundown in his mind.
“You wanted to see me, sir?”
Colonel Don Anderson waved him into the office. Big, barrel-chested and as strong as a Brahma bull, Anderson had been part of the initial B-2 cadre. In the decade since, he’d racked up more hours than most pilots did in a lifetime. Customarily gruff and to the point, Anderson jerked his chin at the stranger seated in the chair angled in front of his desk.
“Harper, this is Mike Callahan. He’s with the government. Callahan, Captain Luke Harper.”
The stranger rose and offered his hand. His square-shouldered bearing suggested he’d spent at least one hitch in the military. The embroidered sharpshooter’s patch plainly visible above his visitor’s badge indicated he wasn’t someone to mess with.
“Harper.”
Callahan’s grip stopped well short of bone-crunching but something in the man’s narrow-eyed, assessing look stirred an instinctive and wholly atavistic response in Luke. Without warning, the skin on the back of his neck prickled.
“Callahan’s got all the necessary security clearances,” Anderson said. “I want you to show him our operation. Bring him back here when you’re done.”
“Yes, sir.”
Wondering what this was all about, Luke stashed his flyaway bag with the colonel’s exec and walked Callahan toward the hangar bay.
“I don’t know how much the colonel told you about our detachment—”
“He indicated you’re one of several recently established forward operating locations. Before that, B-2 crews flew combat missions from your home base at Whiteman AFB, Missouri. Must have made for a helluva long haul.”
“It did,” Luke admitted. “It also made for a surreal life. A pilot could roll out of bed, kiss his wife goodbye, fly a thirty- to forty-hour combat mission against heavily defended targets halfway around the world and return home in time to take out the trash the next morning. Even with forward basing, we spend a lot of time in the air.”
Callahan’s glance dropped. “I don’t see a ring. No one to kiss goodbye in the morning?”
“No one special,” Luke replied, ruthlessly suppressing the image that leaped into his head of a laughing, loving Dayna. He’d had his chance with her and blown it. It was just his own tough luck he hadn’t found anyone else in the years since.
“So how long does it take to prepare for one of these marathon missions?” Callahan asked.
“If we’re lucky, we get three or four days advance notice. That gives us time to study the target, plan our ingress and egress routes and adjust our sleep and eating patterns to maximize our alertness in flight.”
“I can see sleep, but eating?”
“The air force shelled out big bucks to dieticians to determine optimal liquid intake and the best ratio of carbs versus protein to sustain long periods of activity.” Luke had to grin. “All those experts finally concluded we’d found an optimal mix in our traditional bomber dogs. Hot dogs doused in chili,” he explained. “We warm them in the cockpit heater.”
Shouldering open a door, he led the way into one of the two cavernous hangars the Brits had turned over to the B-2 detachment. The aircraft Luke had just flown occupied center court, being serviced by the ground crews.
“Our birds remain undercover at all times while on the ground. We want to keep their advanced design and special ‘low-observable’ characteristics away from prying eyes. In flight, they’re damned near invisible. Pretty slick, aren’t they?”
And then some! Mike Callahan had jumped out of plenty of planes during his stint as an army Ranger but he’d never seen anything as lethal as these black boomerangs. They were immense, with a wingspan of at least a hundred-and-fifty feet, yet their flat fuselage and long, sloping cockpits made them appear saucer-thin from the side. The darkened cockpit windows seemed to follow the two men like a predator’s eyes as Harper led the way across a hangar floor painted and buffed to a bright sheen.
“The B-2’s unique bat-wing shape and the special coating used on its skin are designed to deflect radar waves.” Harper slapped a hand against the cowling of one of the four powerful engines. “And these babies are so quiet they wouldn’t wake your grandma from her afternoon nap if we flew over her house at a hundred feet.”
A slight exaggeration, Callahan guessed wryly, although Harper’s description of how the engines dispensed their exhaust