LITMIR.BIZ

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bag and suddenly flattened on the ground, his hackles rising.

      The man spun around. “Target?” he said softly. “Alert.”

      Target? All Miki had in the bag were clothes, a few sundries and her camera equipment. Everything was likely to be ruined from the seawater.

      The dog sniffed the ground, sniffed Miki’s satchel, then laid one paw across the leather bag and didn’t move.

      “Confirm.”

      The dog sniffed her bag again, and the motion made something shift inside an inner pocket. There was a small pop and fragrance blossomed, filling the cramped space. Miki realized it was her best French perfume, the same fragrance she’d worn since she was seventeen, taken everywhere as a good luck talisman. Unfortunately, she’d been in a rush that morning and had shoved the bottle into an empty lens pouch rather than wrap it carefully the way she usually did.

      Judging by the sharp odor, the bottle had just broken.

      The dog sneezed loudly. For some reason this made the man angry. He flipped off his penlight, then opened the trap door, letting the dog race up the small wooden steps.

      Miki started to blurt another question but one cold look stopped her. Her captor looked furious. Silent and controlled, he pulled a plastic bag from a black tactical vest near the metal case. His mouth set in a thin line as he opened the camera case, saw the overturned and now lidless perfume bottle. Quickly he closed the lens pouch and then zipped the bottle inside.

      “What are you doing with my stuff?” she hissed. Since when was it a hostile act to wear nice perfume? Miki’s irritation swelled when he dropped her lens case and camera inside a larger plastic bag, then locked everything inside the metal case.

      “Hey, you can’t—”

      “No noise. No perfume or scent of any sort. You understand that?”

      Miki stared at him, cold, tired and furious. The man was unhinged. Sure, he’d saved her and then gone back for Dutch at considerable risk to himself, but he’d also cuffed her. Now he was the perfume police? Maybe he was one of those neatness freaks she saw newspaper stories about, people who wash their hands fifty times a day and don’t let anyone touch their personal belongings.

      The sudden sound of Dutch’s labored breathing made Miki forget about her expensive perfume. The pilot didn’t open his eyes as his lungs moved in strained bursts. Even to her untrained eyes it was clear that he was in bad shape.

      “He needs a doctor,” Miki whispered.

      Her rescuer raised two gloved fingers, tapped her mouth and shook his head.

      Clearly, noise was another one of his problem areas.

      She decided it would be best to play along. Right now he was her only contact with civilization, even if he appeared to be two tortillas short of a combo meal.

      But he looked competent as he knelt to check out Dutch, cleaning the gash at the man’s stubbled cheek and unbuttoning his shirt to check for other trauma. Miki thought the pilot’s chest looked odd, slightly concave, and the deep bruises streaking his ribs made her breath catch.

      Deftly the man checked Dutch’s pulse, eye reflexes and temperature, then put away his black case and medical supplies. Oddly, he never removed his black gloves.

      Too weird, Miki thought. At least Dutch appeared to be stable now. She retreated to the far wall, waiting tensely. Though her nursing skills rated a negative ten on a scale of one to five, at least she could provide some kind of moral support to the pilot.

      Over her head paws scraped against the trap door, and Miki heard a dog’s muffled sneeze. Was the dog bothered by perfume, too?

      Hit by a sharp wave of dizziness, she closed her eyes and prayed she wouldn’t throw up, wincing as her stomach continued to gurgle and churn. She’d swallowed seawater nonstop after the crash and now her feet and ribs ached. Exhausted, she leaned back against the underground wall, her eyes closed despite her efforts to keep them open.

      It felt as if a week had passed since they’d left the beachside hotel in Bora Bora, with Vance muttering and complaining about every delay and expense. Now he was dead, his body lost somewhere at sea. Miki shivered, aware of how close she and Dutch had come to dying with him.

      A scraping sound brought her around with a start. The small room was quiet, both candles out. “Hello?” she whispered into the darkness.

      There was no answer.

      She rose and felt her way along the wall past Dutch’s cot. Fumbling, she found the four steps beneath the sloping entrance. With shaky fingers she searched for the metal door, pushing upward until the hatch squeaked, rising slowly to reveal a gray bar of predawn sky above angry clouds.

      But before she could savor her little taste of freedom, a dog’s face appeared at the door’s edge. He sniffed intently, and his mouth curled, baring his teeth.

      Miki shut the door quickly. The creep was gone, but he’d left the dog as a guard. Probably he kept the poor Lab underfed to make it hostile. She hated people who were vicious to animals. If he hurt the dog in any way, she was going to make him very sorry.

      Assuming she was still alive by then.

      CHAPTER FIVE

      ENGINE TROUBLE.

      A plane crashes at sea. Two survivors in the wrong place at the wrong time. Coincidence?

      “FUBAR.” Max spoke softly, scratching Truman where he liked it best, behind both ears. The Lab had been edgy from the first moment Max had carried the woman out of the water. But then had come her escape and now the perfume accident. The woman could have slept with Cruz in the last five hours, but Truman wouldn’t be able to pick up a trace due to the perfume’s mix of volatile oils, sterols and alcohol overwhelming his keen sense of smell.

      Max had found the woman slumped over beneath the ridge after she fell and hit her head during her escape.

      Once she was secured, he’d thoroughly searched the plane wreckage and floating debris, but found nothing useful beyond camera equipment in a watertight bag and some clothes. He’d checked the identification he’d found on Dutch, and the passport and U.S. driver’s license looked genuine, though good forgeries could be deceiving. The woman’s ID had eluded him in the limited time he’d had to search at sea. He couldn’t risk using a light after full dark. It would have shone like a neon sign against the water. Why couldn’t women just carry their IDs in their back pockets the way men did?

      Shaking his head, he moved behind a line of trees and fingered his satellite phone. He couldn’t chance a real transmission this close to Cruz’s island, but three short bursts would let Foxfire HQ know that he was safe and his reconnaissance was proceeding as planned. Longer communications would wait until he accessed secure equipment at sea. He’d have to deal with his two new arrivals according to his own judgment for now. Since both were possible hostiles, Truman would keep them contained underground where they couldn’t do any harm.

      Neither one carried weapons or communication devices—Max had checked carefully before bringing them back to shore. The pilot was in poor condition, his lung compromised, but Max’s mission was clear. He had to stay quiet, stay out of sight and track the stolen weapon guidance system. Cruz wasn’t going to escape a second time—not on Max’s watch.

      At least Truman had recovered from the initial shock of the perfume cloud on his hypersensitive nose. Max opened a zipper on his vest and pulled out a bag. Immediately, the Lab pushed closer, sniffing the plastic eagerly until Max gave him the beef treat inside. The dog was superbly trained, his medical enhancements as sophisticated as those that Max had been given, but a dog was still a dog. Beef treats were special.

      When his own stomach growled, Max dug into a different pocket and pulled out a fat gray bar that looked like chalk. Tasted like chalk, too, Max thought wryly. The components were carefully selected by the Foxfire medical team to provide minimum bulk and maximum nourishment for high-energy

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