“Red storm rising,” Jake warned, pointing to his right out the Plexiglas window of the Bell Longranger he was piloting.
“What?” Kai looked up from the air map she was studying. They were flying at five thousand feet, a good two hours south of Alice Springs. It was nearly 0800, the morning air smooth and the sky cloudy.
“Sandstorm,” Jake warned. “Again.” He frowned and looked at the wall of red dust rising well over ten thousand feet—and coming toward them.
“Dude, that is some serious dust in the air,” Kai muttered, her gaze narrowing. She hadn’t forgotten about the sandstorm at the canyon. “The meteorologist at the weather desk didn’t say anything about this….” She dug under a bunch of papers resting on her lap to reread the weather forecast for the Alice Springs–Adelaide flight route.
“Listen,” Jake said, giving her a glance, “when I was stationed over in Saudi Arabia, these sandstorms could blow up out of nowhere. There’s no way, usually, to forecast them on any given day. They kick up when a cold front’s coming through, and we’ll be flying through a low later today. That sandstorm is the front of the weather change.”
“Rotten,” Kai muttered, staring out the window. To her left, the sky was a light blue, with long, gray strands of altostratus clouds below. Her gaze settled on Jake for a moment. His profile was so strong and masculine. He was handsome, not matter how much she tried to ignore that fact. This morning he wore a short-sleeved, white cotton shirt and a pair of dark blue chinos. His chin was nicked from shaving and she felt an urge to touch the small wound in a soothing gesture, but squelched that unexpected response. It wasn’t much of a cut, but for whatever reason, Jake suffering any kind of pain bothered Kai.
“What do you do in a sandstorm if you’re piloting a helo?” Kai asked him. “I know what I’d do if I was in an F-14—avoid it.”
Grimly, Jake studied the threatening wall of sand. It stretched from northeast to southwest like a huge, impenetrable red barrier slowly advancing upon them. “That’s right. Avoid at all costs. These storms follow the line of the cold front that can be hundreds of miles in length and there’s no way for a helicopter to get above it or fly around it. Usually you land and wait it out. The grit can get in the rotors and cause a lot of problems.”
“Aren’t Aussie helos somehow prepared for this?” Kai waved at the curtain of sand. It was a good thirty miles away from them, but given the direction they were heading, it would eventually overtake them.
“Probably are,” Jake said. “For example, the Apache I fly has titanium-edged blades. Even when I was flying in Saudi Arabia on top secret missions, we’d have to replace those blades about once a week, because the sand is silica, and penetrates any metal over time. Then you have pitted blades and you’re going to have in-flight problems with stability, for starters. It goes downhill from there real fast.”
“Oh…” Kai frowned. She picked up the thermos of coffee stowed in a net pocket beside her seat. Their flight was smooth this morning, nothing like yesterday, during the heat of the afternoon. She could pour a cup of coffee now without spilling a drop.
“Want some?” she offered.
“No…” Jake’s attention was on the wall of the storm. It was a deep red color, the colder air scooping downward and lifting the crimson sand off the floor of the desert, then whipping it upward on a fast, rising thermal of super cooled air. The front of the wall looked like the endless curve of a wave that was continuing to ascend and was finally going to come down and crash upon the beach, only it never would. The crest would churn endlessly high in the air, slowly rotating ahead of the major wall of the storm. The winds in that frontal crest were rough, and dangerous to all aircraft.
Kai sipped her coffee after she’d stowed the thermos back in the side pocket of her seat. “Have you flown in a sandstorm before?”
“Yeah…once. We were on a mission to protect an Army Special Forces A team of ten men who were hunting down terrorists. They were pinned down and needed air support in the middle of this sandstorm, and we had to fly even though we shouldn’t have.”
Looking at the grim set to his square-jawed face, Kai realized the memory was a brutal one. “Pretty rugged?”
Giving a sharp bark of laughter, Jake said, “Rugged is a good word. We were able to supply them the firepower they needed to break free of the jam they were in. They made it by foot to a mountain, where they lost the enemy, then they hunkered down to wait out the rest of the sandstorm. After it rolled by, a Blackhawk went in and extracted them.”
“What happened to your helo?”
“The blades were so badly pitted from us flying thirty miles into that storm and out of it that it was rough getting away alive. I wasn’t sure we’d make it back to base. The controls were loose and I thought we would crash, but we made it back to the base okay. They removed all those blades immediately. When we looked at them in the hangar later, they were so pitted that I didn’t know how they’d held that bird up.”
Eyeing the sandstorm, Kai said, “Then we need to set down.” She began searching the map for the nearest airport.
“Yeah, that’s the long and short of it,” Jake said, glancing over as she ran her long, slender fingers across the map. How beautiful Kai looked this morning. He hadn’t slept much on the bed he’d made on the floor, and not because the carpet was hard or uncomfortable. Just being in the same room with Kai was an aching torture for him.
He’d tossed and turned all night. The air-conditioning had been on and it had muted the sounds of his restlessness. Knowing Kai lay sleeping in the bed about five feet away ate at him. Jake wanted to be up on that bed with her, beside her, holding her…just holding her, as he had so long ago. As he’d done just a few days ago. He had gotten up at last and quietly taken a shower, then dressed and left the room. But not before looking down at Kai, who was sleeping the sleep of an angel.
He would never forget what he’d seen this morning. The image was branded forever on his heart. Kai had worn a pale lavender nightgown and she’d been lying on her back, one hand near her head, her fingers slightly curled. Black and loose, her hair had formed a beautiful halo about her head and shoulders, emphasizing her coppery skin, her softly parted lips and high cheekbones. Jake had stood there absorbing her beauty into his heart like a thief. He’d felt guilty standing there, slobbering like a rabid wolf, but couldn’t help himself. He had been rooted to the spot, hands just itching to reach out and caress her thick, silky hair, to softly touch her smooth cheek once more.
Kai lay there like an innocent, the covers down to her hips, exposing the ripe curves of her breasts, which rose and fell slowly with her breathing. In that moment, Jake saw the real Kai Alseoun. Not the embattled survivor who had clawed and scratched her way out of her dangerous childhood. Not the combat warrior who had, until very recently, rode and tamed the most powerful fighter jet in the world. No, he saw the woman herself. The person who was open and vulnerable, with no walls erected to keep her tender emotions protected. Oh! How he’d wanted to simply step forward, sit on the bed and tell her what a fantastic woman she was, how much he admired, respected and loved her.
Swallowing hard, Jake looked away from Kai as she studied the map. Love. Yeah, well, that’s what it was. She was the first love of his life. And when she’d been wrenched unexpectedly out of it, Jake had thought he’d die of grief, his love for her had been so deep and true. Now, so many years later, he was finding that the love he’d held then had matured, grown and was now so powerful he couldn’t ignore it. Jake didn’t know what to do with that realization. It was the wrong time. The wrong place. Wrong everything.
“Jake…”
He heard the tension in Kai’s tone. Looking in her direction, he saw her staring out at the cloudy sky. “What?”
“I see a helo coming at us—fast. They’re on our six.”
That was bad news. The “six” position was the tail of their copter, a place where enemies could sneak up to get a shot at them without them shooting back. That wasn’t a good sign. “Get the binoculars. Check it out.” His mind spun with questions—and options. There was no way Marston’s men could fix a Huey overnight and get it airworthy. Or could they? And how could they follow them? Of course, Jake knew that the Longranger was the only other helo there at Yulara, and anyone could walk in and see that they’d filed a flight plan for Alice Springs. That had been a mistake, Jake realized now. He should have lied about their destination. Damn. There was nothing they could do about it now. Lesson learned, Jake told himself. He watched as Kai drew the binoculars from the case that sat between their seats. Dreading what she might see, he glanced over at the approaching wall of red sand. It was much closer. Threatening.
“Damn!” Kai rasped. “It’s them, Jake!”
“Are you sure? Same color scheme? The same Huey?”
“Yeah, I’m positive.” Kai watched as the helicopter continued toward them at a rapid rate. “Blue-and-yellow paint scheme. The same bastards.”
“What about the tail numbers?”
Kai searched, and as the Huey turned slightly, she read them off to Jake. Pulling the binoculars away, she said, “It’s the same damn helo. How’d they get it fixed so fast?”
“I don’t know. It doesn’t matter. What matters is they’re stalking us and we’re helpless in the arms department. I wish we had an Apache. We’d have seen those dudes stalking us a long time ago. We’d have rockets and a chain gun to blow them out of the air. Right now, we have next to nothing.”
Kai stowed the binoculars. She quickly grabbed her pistol from the canvas bag that sat behind her seat. “Well, we know what he’s going to do. He’s going to get close enough to start firing at us. And I’m not going to sit here and let that happen.” She slammed a clip into the butt of her pistol. Placing a bullet in the chamber, she turned and studied the door on her side of the aircraft.
“Did you see rocket launchers on the Huey?” Jake asked. His gaze moved across the dials in front of him. They had half a tank of fuel left.
“No…nothing outwardly that I could see.” Grimly, Kai watched the chopper, which was a thousand feet above them and hurtling down toward them. Her pulse leaped. “They may have an elephant gun this time. I sure wish we had that Remington right now. My pistol is only effective at close range. If they have a rifle, they have a much longer reach and we’re dead meat. I’ll never be able to hit them with a bullet, but they’ll sure as hell hit us….”
“Yeah, I know,” Jake said worriedly. “Get on the satellite phone. Call Mike. Tell him we’re under attack again. Give him the details. If we go down, he’s got to know our coordinates so they can send a team from Adelaide to search the wreckage….”
“That’s no consolation,” Kai muttered. She eyed the storm, which was less than five miles away from them. Grabbing the phone, she dialed in the number.
Jake divided his attention between the Huey, which was now diving directly at them, and the wall of sand. They were bracketed between two evils and had nowhere to escape to. What should he do? If he flew into that sandstorm, they could be in real jeopardy. What if sand got into the rotor area? The silica could jam up the oiled mechanism and cause all kinds of problems. Furthermore, he had no sophisticated instruments that could fly him successfully through a sandstorm. He would for all purposes be flying blind. Worse, vertigo could occur, and he would have no sense of up or down, right or left. He had to rely on his instruments, and the ones aboard the Longranger weren’t fine enough for the job.
Hearing Kai get off the phone, he saw her tuck it into her canvas bag.
“Mike’s on it. He’s calling the Royal Australian Air Force base in Adelaide to get us help.”
“Too little, too late,” Jake muttered, perspiration popping out on his brow. Glancing from the approaching Huey to the wall of the storm again, he growled. “By the time they get here, it will be all over, Kai. Those jets scrambling from Adelaide have got at least thirty minutes of air time before they reach us.”
“You’re right.” Fingering the side of the fuselage, Kai found there was a small window that could be pushed open and closed. Large enough for her to shoot through? “What are your options?”
“We’ve got to duke it out with them. I can’t go into that storm, Kai. We could crash.”
“That’s what I thought,” she muttered. The Huey was coming down fast. “Okay, do what you gotta do. Want me to call out his position to you?” She knew Jake would need another set of eyes to help him avoid any gunfire. He had no instruments to help him locate their stalking enemy. Looking over at him, gripping the pistol in her hand, she saw that his face was set, his golden eyes dark and filled with frustration. About now she’d like to be in the seat of an F-14 Tomcat with her RIO—radar information officer—calling out the coordinates to put a lock on this bastard and blow him out of the air.
“Yeah, let me know where he is. I’m going to try maneuvering first. A Huey’s a lot more nimble than a commercial helicopter, though, so I don’t know how far that will get us.”
“I’m more interested in the weapons they have on board. If they’ve got a rifle, we’re in real trouble.”
“Yeah, I know that, too.”
“Okay, here he comes. He’s about one mile out, eleven o’clock on your port….”
In that instant, Kai heard a pinging sound behind them. “He’s firing at us!” she yelled.
Instantly, Jake took the copter into a steep, sliding bank to the right. He had no idea how well or poorly the Longranger could handle air to air combat. It certainly wasn’t designed for it! Gripping the collective and cyclic, he felt the harness straps bite into his shoulders and hips as the helo groaned and banked.
Cursing, Kai called, “He’s following us down! And I can see a rifle sticking out the window. He’s got a rifle!”
“Hang on,” Jake yelled. He kicked the Longranger out of the sliding bank. They’d lost two thousand feet of altitude, and the wall of the storm was nearly upon them. Not wanting to lose much more altitude, he saw the Huey flash past them. It had built up too much diving speed to bank as quickly as he’d just done. Good!
Heart pounding, Jake felt rivulets of sweat leaking beneath his arms and trickling down his rib cage. His breathing was raspy as he forced the copter higher. If he didn’t get air between him and the Huey, Marston’s men could pounce on them and fire from above. Not wanting to give them that opportunity, Jake shoved the throttle to the firewall. The Longranger shrieked and he felt the entire airframe shudder as the blades spun, clawing upward through the sky,
Kai was thrown around by the maneuver, but in the process she saw the Huey below them. “He’s down a thousand, about four o’clock on your starboard. And he’s going to try and make up the altitude.”
“Yeah, he’ll do it, too,” Jake muttered. Gaze glued to the altimeter, he wished this commercial helicopter could climb as an Apache could. His combat helo could leap through the sky like a cougar running full tilt. But this copter wasn’t created for combat; it was an excellent commercial aircraft, but not made for this kind of jockeying around in the sky. Jake didn’t know the limits of the airframe or what kind of punishment this Bell could take—but they were going to find out fast.
“He’s coming around on you!” Kai shouted, rising up out of her seat to keep a bead on the blue-and-yellow Huey. “Less than five hundred feet…”
Ping, ping, ping.
Gunshots riddled the cabin.
Ping, ping, ping, ping.
Glass exploded around Kai. She gave a yell and threw up her left hand to protect her eyes. The window on her side of the helo was blown out. Bullets tore through the cabin. Wind roared in, whipping the map off her knees and sucking it out the window. Anything that wasn’t stowed was flying around in the cockpit.
“Damn!” Kai yelled. Instantly, she felt the Longranger lurch to the left. Straps bit into her shoulders and, disoriented for a moment, she gasped. The Huey flashed past them, barely out of the rotor range.
Kai’s heart pounded and rage tunneled through her. “Get close to them!” she snapped at Jake. The door was riddled with bullet holes. When the Longranger jerked upward, the engines screaming in protest, her door was suddenly sheared from its hinge, torn off by the maneuver and wind speed.
When Kai saw the door snap off the airframe, she gasped. She now hung by her harness alone, over nothing but air and the ground far below. Scrambling, she slapped her left hand against the frame and pushed herself back into her seat as Jake banked the aircraft once more. The wind was ferocious. Although she wore aviator glasses, which protected her to a degree from the roaring blast circling within the cabin, her eyes still watered badly. Jerking her head up, she frantically searched for the Huey.
“There! Jake, get close enough for me to fire at them, dammit! I’m not going down without a fight! They’re a thousand feet above us, at ten o’clock, to port.”
The Longranger groaned. The blades grabbed for air and thumped hard, each rotation causing a thick shudder to ripple through the aircraft. It was vibrating like a wounded beast as it moved closer and closer to the Huey.
Kai unsnapped her harness and shoved it away.
“What are you doing?” Jake yelled. “Get that harness back on!”
“Screw it.” Kai situated herself in the door frame. Four thousand feet below her was the desert, a red blur. Her gaze was pinned on the approaching Huey. Jamming her left boot against the copter frame, she pressed her back against the opposite side. Bracing with her right foot, she effectively jammed herself into the space where the door had been. The good news was she had a clear shot at the approaching Huey. The bad news—she had nothing to hang on to when Jake maneuvered the Ranger. Kai knew she could be torn out into space and fall to her death.
Breathing hard, she yelled, “Closer! Dammit, get closer! I want this son of a bitch!” Air slapped and pummeled her, tearing remorselessly at her eyes. The Huey was coming directly at them. She saw the two men in the cockpit—the same bastards as before.
Raising her pistol, she gripped it in both hands to steady it. This was a game of sky chicken. Kai recognized it for what it was.
“He’s coming right at us! Ten o’clock. You have to jump him, Jake! On my word, I want you to bank toward him! It’ll give me the shot I need!”
That was an insane maneuver! Jake didn’t say that, though. Instead he split his attention between flying the Longranger and watching the approaching Huey. Scared to death that Kai would get yanked out the door by his sudden maneuvers, or that a bullet would find her, he clenched his teeth. No! Kai couldn’t be killed! She just couldn’t be! His heart ached with a fierce refusal to allow anything to happen to her. All he could think about was going after the Huey and knocking it off balance. But Kai was right. If he followed her advice and suddenly lurched toward the Huey, it would spook the pilot and he’d bank in the opposite direction. When he did that, Kai could get a clean, close shot at them.
Gripping the cyclic and collective so hard his knuckles whitened, he yelled, “Tell me when!”
Seconds flew by. The wind was punching at Kai’s body like a boxer, and she had to use all the strength in her legs to keep herself jammed tightly into the door frame. She saw the Huey coming at them like a shark ready to eat them alive. Her hands gripped the pistol tighter. Raising the barrel, she sighted on the red-haired copilot, who had his rifle sticking out the window—pointed directly at them.
The distance closed swiftly. Two thousand feet. Fifteen hundred. A thousand. Kai’s mouth grew dry as the Huey’s nose loomed closer. The wind shrieked around her. The Longranger was screaming with the strain of climbing upward to meet the assault.
Five hundred feet.
“Now!”
Kai felt the Longranger lurch. Gravity pulled at her with invisible hands, trying to jerk her out the door to her death. Wind slammed at her as the helicopter arced and moved directly into the Huey’s face.
Kai saw both men’s jaws fall open at the unexpected maneuver. She saw the pilot react, his mouth stretched in a scream. Taking aim, she waited for a split second as the Huey came closer and closer.
Kai felt the sickening shudder of the Longranger. Air punched and grabbed at her repeatedly, making it difficult to breathe. Hands sweating, she gripped the pistol with all her strength. Train the barrel…train the barrel…She followed the cockpit of the Huey as it suddenly changed position.
In that instant, Kai squeezed the trigger. They were so close! She saw the black blades of the Huey rotating closer and closer. The Longranger was moving drunkenly, like a wounded dragon. The smell of burning oil filled her flared nostrils as she squeezed off round after round.
When the Huey banked sharply, Jake followed it down with his own banking maneuver. He knew they were close, within each other’s rotor circumference, and that there was a real possibility of their blades colliding. He heard the pop, pop, pop of Kai firing her pistol. Great Spirit, let her be accurate! Gravity tore at him. The straps of his harness bit savagely into his shoulders as he followed the Huey downward.
The two helos were now plummeting like rocks, the copter below them. Grim satisfaction soared through Jake for a second as he heard Kai give a cry of triumph. He couldn’t see the Huey, or even look at Kai—he had to fly this bird for all it was worth. He felt the strain on the engine; they could vibrate apart at this speed, no question. He knew the Bell wasn’t built for combat maneuvers like this. The blades were pounding, pounding, pounding, the reverberations thumping like fists through his body. Unable to breathe, he gritted his teeth and held the bird on course.
Kai kept firing. She emptied one clip into the Huey and, with a cry of triumph, saw the bullets land with deadly accuracy. The Plexiglas on the pilot’s side exploded inward. She saw blood splattering the cockpit glass on the copilot’s side.
Suddenly, the Huey lurched and began an uncontrolled free fall. Kai leaned out to watch, the wind pulling mercilessly at her. She threw her pistol back into the cabin and held on with both hands to the airframe overhead.
“He’s going down!” she cried. “He’s going to crash!” She watched as the Huey began to turn in wide, wobbling circles. She’d hit the pilot with one or more bullets. He was the only one who could fly, apparently; the gunman in the copilot’s seat was just that—not a pilot, just a murderer.
“Die, you sons of bitches!” she shrieked. Hands gripping the airframe, Kai leaned out to see the Huey explode beneath them. Then the Longranger lurched upward and she was thrown back into the cockpit. Landing in her seat, she flailed momentarily until she managed to grab the armrest and hang on until Jake leveled out the chopper and put it in hover mode.
Gasping for breath, she scrambled upright and, with shaking hands, fastened the harness across her shoulders and lap once more. Glancing over, she saw Jake looking out of his window at the explosions below. Grinning, she said, “We nailed them!”
Adrenaline was pumping through Jake as he watched the Huey burn below them. Wrenching his gaze away, he looked at Kai. Her hair was torn out of her braid, tendrils curling around her glistening face. Her blue eyes were narrowed with St. Elmo’s fire, a kind of lightning that would dance around a ship’s mast during a thunderstorm. She was a warrior through and through just then, her eyes fierce, her mouth curved ruthlessly in a smile of triumph.
Shakily, he asked, “You okay?” Those bullets flying through the cabin could have gotten either one of them.
“Yeah, I’m fine…and you?” Kai looked at Jake. If she’d ever had doubts that he was a combat pilot, those doubts were gone now. His face was sweaty, his golden eyes slitted like those of a hunter after his prey, his tensed body flushed with adrenaline.
“Yeah, I’m good. But we’ve got problems. I think we took a bullet in the fuel tank. We’re losing too many pounds of fuel too fast….”
“I lost the map,” Kai said, “but I know that thirty miles from here there’s a dirt strip near a cattle station that had fuel. We could set down there….”
“Yeah.” Jake looked at the approaching sandstorm. It was a few miles away, coming on like a relentless freight train that threatened to run them over. “I think we can make that. Do you recall the coordinates?”
Grinning, Kai pushed loose strands of hair off her damp face and away from her eyes. “You bet I do.” She rattled them off, then, heart pounding, reached back and gripped her pistol. From her pocket, she pulled another clip of ammunition and slammed it into the butt of the firearm. Looking around the sky, she muttered, “I wonder if there’s more of them?”
“No way of telling….” Jake concentrated on getting them to that cattle station before they ran out of fuel. “But we need to stay alert.”
“I’ll call Mike.” Kai leaned back and picked up the satellite phone out of her bag. The wind was still whipping through the cabin. There was nothing they could do about it now that the door was gone. Punching in the numbers, Kai waited. When Mike came on, she practically had to shout over the shriek of the wind. Reassuring him that they were all right, she gave him the coordinates of where they were hoping to land the Longranger. Once he got the info, Kai knew he’d cancel the military jets out of Adelaide, put a new mission into motion to pick them up, plus contract Australian aviation authorities about the Huey crashing. Mike would have to do a lot of interfacing with not only the aviation department, but the police, as well. Maybe, if there was anything left of the two men, they could find some sort of identification on them—fingerprints or otherwise—that might give a clue as to who the hell they were.
Jake was never so glad to see a silver-green grove of eucalyptus appear on the horizon, indicating the main house of the cattle station was nearby. Below, they saw thousands upon thousands of cattle foraging across the desert, as well as drovers on horseback here and there. Aiming the Longranger toward the small dirt strip on one side of the complex, Jake set the helo down—just in time. He pointed to the fuel gauge before shutting the engine down. “We had fifty pounds of fuel left.”
“That’s not much,” Kai said tensely, looking at the indicator. She’d never been so glad to be on the ground, if only to stop that buffeting wind. Looking through the cockpit Plexiglas, she saw several men on horseback riding toward them at high speed. “Well, I’m sure they weren’t expecting us to drop in.”
Jake grinned sourly and flipped off the engines. “No, but I think they’ll be glad to help us.” The blades slowed; the shaking and vibration began to ease off. Wiping his sweaty brow with the back of his hand, he watched the men galloping toward them. Within the next ten minutes, he knew, the sandstorm was going to hit.
Pulling the vest that held the crystal mask a little tighter around her, Kai climbed out of the helo. Jake opened the door on his side and got out in turn. The first of the four riders was a large man with a gray beard and a floppy, sweat-stained brown bush hat. He was riding a big, rangy bay gelding at least sixteen hands high.
Moving around the front of the helo, Kai joined Jake. “What kind of story are you going to tell them about the missing door?”
He turned and grinned at her. “They’re going to see bullet holes in the fuselage, too. But we’ll tell them as little as possible.”
“Mike said he’d be getting a Perseus flight crew out of Adelaide to come for us as soon as the sandstorm passes by. They’ll be flying a Blackhawk helicopter.”
“Sounds good to me. Well, let’s go meet our station folks. I know they’ll give us food, water and shelter.” Looking up at the wall of the red storm approaching, Jake added, “This is a helluva way to spend a morning….”