Dangerous to Hold (35 page)

Alex herself oversaw the distribution of the pitiful supply of arms and ammunition. A few grenade launchers her grandfather had bartered with the Chinese for. A Pakistani shoulder-
held rocket launcher, still in its protective Cosmoline coating. The miscellaneous collection of rifles.

She told herself that the gunships hovering somewhere far overhead would make the difference. That their firepower was swifter, surer, more devastating. The thought gave her little comfort.

 

When the first, distant
whump-whump-whump
came out of the sky, Alex thought the attack had come. Desperate determination and an icy calm overlaid the churning fear in her stomach. Following Nate's terse order, she took a defensive position on a low, rolling hill at the rear of the camp, just above the stream. Katerina crouched beside her, unspeaking, a pistol in her hand and a flat, unreadable expression on her face.

A dark-painted helicopter skimmed out of the darkness from the east. Its searchlights swept the camp like flashlights swung from a giant hand. They illuminated a lone figure standing in the middle of the square. His rifle to his shoulder, old Gregor squinted along the barrel at the hovering aircraft.

“No!” Nate raced out of the darkness, into the undulating circle of light. “No! It has UN markings!”

Although Gregor didn't understand the words, Nate's urgency communicated itself, and he lowered the rifle. They stood together while the hovering helicopter settled in the dusty square.

When Richard clambered out, his eyes wide and his body jackknifed to avoid the whirling rotor blades, Alex recognized him at once. But she didn't recognize the long-legged brunette who jumped out behind him and was promptly swept against Nate's side in a bone-crushing squeeze. The woman whipped off her glasses and waved them in the air as she and Nate ducked away from the rotor blades, talking urgently.

As she strode across the square, Alex caught snatches of the woman's comments. “Blew the hatch…small explosion, nothing to worry about… Right behind us, about fifty strong. Heading right for the camp… This is no cattle raid, Cowboy.
I'm going back up in the helo. Richard and I devised a few small surprises that might delay them a little.”

Nate whirled at Alex's approach. “There's no time for long introductions, sweetheart. Things are moving too fast. But you know Worthington.”

Alex sent the young scientist a quick smile. “Hello, Richard.”

“Hello, Sandra. Sorry it took me so long to get here. We had…uh, an unexpected delay.”

The tall, confident brunette in lumberjack's clothing stepped forward. “I'm Nate's partner. I've been hoping to meet you.” Her generous mouth quirked. “You wouldn't know it to look at me right now, but I'm a great admirer of your work. Look, I've got to get back in the air, but maybe when this is all over, we can talk.”

As drawn by the woman's vitality and confidence as she was unsettled by the easy camaraderie between her and Nate, Alex nodded. “When this is all over, we'll definitely talk.”

The brunette flashed Nate a cheeky grin and a thumbs-up, then headed for the helicopter. “Come on, Richard. Let's get this hummer up and see if those little canisters work as well from the air as they did from the bottom of a silo.”

The helo lifted off in a wash of swirling air and whining engines. Her stomach twisting, Alex turned to Nate.

“Tell me what we face.”

In brief, succinct phrases, Nate related the bald facts. Small, separate groups had slipped out of Balminsk, avoiding surveillance. They'd converged some twenty miles from the camp. Were heading this way. The gunships were in the air, closing fast.

“It's going to be tight, but we should be able to keep the attackers occupied until the real firepower arrives.”

“Nate—”

Whatever she would have said was lost in the sudden, distant boom of an explosion.

Nate whipped around, his eyes searching the impenetrable darkness. When he turned back, his eyes held a wry smile.

“That was one of Petr's booby traps. A satchel charge. It'll cause more confusion than damage, but at this point, confusion will work for us as well as anything. Get Katerina, Alex, and take cover. This could be an interestin' half hour.”

 

Ever afterward, Alex would remember the events of the next few moments as a blur of confusion, shouts, and sudden, gripping fear.

She was halfway across the square when another explosion sounded, then another. She whirled, watching Nate freeze beside Dimitri as they strained to peer through the darkness beyond the barricades. And Petr, his bald head shining in the moonlight as he held a rifle tucked in his armpit.

Oh, God, she would remember thinking. Has it come down to this? Have all her grandfather's hopes for Karistan, all her own plans, come down to this last, desperate hour?

Another explosion. And then the sound of drumming hooves.

Alex raced across the square to Katerina, her stomach twisting at the blank emptiness on the girl's face as she calmly, mechanically, loaded a magazine clip into an automatic rifle. No fear. No terror. She'd done this before. Many times. She was so young, yet she'd seen so much death. And was about to see more.

As she closed the distance to her cousin, Alex thought of her father. Of the way Daniel Jordan had stood by his principles in the face of the hawk-eyed chieftain's vitriolic scorn. He'd insisted guns weren't the answer for Karistan, but he'd had no other.

Once again, the forces that had pulled at Alex for so many years ripped at her soul. Who was right?
What
was right?

Pulling Katerina behind the shelter of an overturned van, Alex slid a hand in her pocket and gripped the silver bridle bit in a tight, hard fist. Her knuckles nudged the small black box.

When Katerina turned her head and met her cousin's eyes,
Alex's disparate worlds seemed to rush toward each other like two comets hurtling through the heavens.

When Nate shouted a warning and Alex slewed around to see him standing tall and commanding, in charge of a battle he had no stake in, no responsibility for, her separate worlds collided.

And when a lone rider hurtled out of the darkness and soared over the barricades a few heart-stopping moments later, she knew what she had to do.

“Hold your fire!”

Her command rang through the camp, echoing Nate's.

For a few moments, no one moved. They were all caught up in the drama of watching the rider yank his mount's head around and bring it to a dancing, skidding, shuddering stop.

When the uniformed man dismounted, the scar on his face stood out in the moonlight, as did the cold expression on his face. He searched the shadows, then fastened his gaze on Nate.

“I am Cherkoff. I have ordered the men of Balminsk to hold outside the mine field you have planted while I come to speak with you.”

Nate walked out into the center of the square. Slowly, deliberately, he measured the stiff figure.

“No,” Nate replied, “you come to speak with the
ataman.
”

Alex heard the soft response as she came up behind Nate, Katerina at her side. The splinter of private joy his words gave her helped shatter the tight knot of pain at what she was about to do.

“The
ataman
is here,” she replied.

Cherkoff turned to face her, his dark eyes piercing, his shoulders rigid in his brown uniform with red tabs at the shoulder denoting his rank.

“You have something my father wishes to possess.”

“No, I have not.”

A muscle twitched at the side of his jaw. “You don't understand the depths of my father's hatred.”

Alex swallowed. She understood it. Her grandfather had passed her the same hatred.

“Why have you come?” she asked him. “And wearing that uniform?”

“I wear it,” the major said slowly, as though each word were dragged from his heart, “because it is a symbol of what was before.”

His hand lifted to the leather strap that crossed one shoulder, holding his service holster and pistol. His fingers brushed a gleaming buckle.

As Alex watched, her breath suspended, he lifted the strap's end, undid the buckle and removed the holster. Opening his fist, he let the weapon fall to the ground.

“It's time to put this past behind us. I would speak with you about the future, and about this device you hold that so incites my father's fury.”

Katerina stepped forward. “I have the device which you seek. You will speak with me.”

“A
ll right, let's get down to some serious negotiations here.”

Maggie pushed the black glasses up the bridge of her nose and shrugged off the weariness of a long night and frantic morning. Folding her arms on the scarred surface of the table, she waited while the two officials who'd been standing by in Germany ever since the crisis over the decoder first surfaced took their seats. They'd arrived just moments ago, aboard the transport that would take Maggie and Nate back to the States. Before that plane lifted off, the parties gathered in the dim, shadowy tent needed to reach agreement.

The State Department representative, a big, burly man in a crumpled navy suit and white shirt, looked Maggie up and down.

“Just who are you?” he asked coolly. “And what authority do you have to participate in these negotiations?”

“She's Dr. Megan St. Clare,” Alex supplied from her seat next to Maggie's, her tone several degrees colder than the official's. “She's here at my request, and that of my cousin,
Katerina Terenshkova. As is our technical advisor, Dr. Richard Worthington.”

A thin, well-dressed woman in her mid-forties seated beside the State Department official peered across the table. “Richard Worthington? From MIT?”

“Well, I, uh, consult with several institutes.”

The woman, a midlevel bureaucrat with the Nuclear Regulatory Agency, frowned. “This is highly irregular, you know. Negotiations like this are quite sensitive. We don't generally allow outsiders to participate.”

“You are in Karistan,” Alex reminded her with a lift of one brow. “You're the outsider here. My cousin and I will decide who does and does not participate.”

The woman blinked, then sat back. “Yes. Of course.”

The burly State Department rep, who looked as though he'd be more at home roaming the back streets of D.C. than the corridors of the granite federal building in Foggy Bottom, frowned.

“Before we begin, I understand you have a certain device which we'll take possession of.”

Alex turned to Katerina, who dug into the pockets of her skirts. She pulled out the decoder and dropped it on the table with a loud clatter.

The officials winced.

“Here, take it,” Maggie urged, pushing the thing across the table with a cautious finger. Since her hours in that dark silo with Richard, she didn't want anything associated with nuclear matters within her sight. Ever again.

She picked up the papers torn from Alex's sketch pad, which were now filled with the figures they'd hurriedly put together in the small hours of the night.

“All right, here's the bottom line. We estimate that the total cost to dismantle all nuclear weapons in Balminsk and Karistan at approximately three billion dollars.”

“What?”

“That includes a system to verify the warheads' destruc
tion, and compensation for the enriched uranium that will be extracted.”

“Now see here, Dr. St. Clare…”

“It also includes approximately ten million dollars,” Maggie interjected ruthlessly, “to establish a science and technology center here. The center will bring in outside expertise—researchers, technicians, and their support staffs.”

“Perhaps a hundred men or more,” Katerina murmured, her eyes gleaming. “My aunts will be most pleased.”

A wave of red crept up the State Department rep's bull-like neck. “This is absurd.”

Richard cleared his throat. “Uh, no, actually, it's not. This is exactly half what the United States offered the Ukraine less than a year ago as inducement to sign the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty. The Ukraine had fewer missiles, as I'm sure you're aware, giving the Karistanis the advantage of 6.4 times the throw weight.”

The woman across from Maggie jerked her head up. “Dr. Worthington! We don't negotiate treaties dollar for dollar based on throw weight. It's highly irregular!”

“There is more,” Katerina added. “The major, he has the thoughts about con…con…”

“Conventional arms,” Nikolas supplied, coming forward out of the shadows at the back of the tent to stand behind Katerina's chair.

She sent him a slow, provocative smile over one shoulder. “
Da!
Nikolas will talk with you about such conventional arms, so we may protect our borders when the missiles are gone.”

“Now wait just a minute…”

The blustering official faltered as Nikolas Cherkoff placed his hands on Katerina's shoulders and leaned into the light. His scar livid against his cheek, he bared his teeth in a smile.

“No. No more waiting. We have waited long enough for peace in this land. We will proceed.”

 

Several hours later, Maggie stepped out of the black tent and wiped an arm across her forehead. “Whew! That was
almost as nerve-racking as being trapped in a hole with Richard.”

“I can imagine,” Alex replied, her eyes on the two stiff-backed bureaucrats who were stalking toward the aircraft that squatted like a camouflaged quail on a flat stretch of plain just outside camp.

A ripple of sound inside the tent caught Maggie's attention. The young scientist gave an indignant sputter, Katerina a teasing laugh. For a crazy moment last night, when she first saw Richard approached by a young woman with a cloud of dark, curling hair, a sultry smile and a chest that drew his eyes like a magnet, Maggie thought—hoped!—that Katerina might go to work on Richard's endocrine system. But either the physicist's hormonal serums went out of whack only with older women, or Katerina wasn't interested in awkward young scientists. After a brief greeting to Richard, she'd never taken her eyes, or her hands, off Nikolas Cherkoff, and the young scientist had stuck to Maggie like gum on the bottom of a shoe.

Maggie sighed, deciding she'd just have to take Richard in hand when they got back to the States and introduce him to more older women.

Why did her life seem to grow more complicated after each mission? If she wasn't collecting German shepherd-size blue-and-orange-striped iguanas, she was taking charge of organizing a brilliant physicist's love life.

Hearing Cherkoff's quiet voice, Maggie turned to Alex. “Do you think your cousin and the major will keep the peace between Balminsk and Karistan?”

“They will, if Katerina has anything to say about it, and my cousin is a most…persuasive woman.” She paused, and gave Maggie a tired smile. “I don't know how to thank you for your help last night. And this morning. I thought I drove a pretty hard bargain with my suppliers when I negotiated for materials, but you made me realize I'm still in the minor leagues.” Her smile became a little forced. “Nate told me
you were good. One of the best, he said, although he failed to specify at what.”

Maggie caught the faint, almost imperceptible hint of acid in her voice, and decided to ignore it. Until Nate and Alex worked out whatever had driven him away this morning, she wasn't going to get in the middle.

“No thanks are necessary,” she said with a grin. “Unless…”

“Yes?”

“Unless you might have a dress or two in your tent that would fit me. One of your own designs, maybe, that I could purchase at a reasonable price.”

Alex gave her a quick once-over. They were about the same height, although Maggie carried a few more inches on her curving frame than Alex did.

“I think I might just have something.”

“You wonderful person!”

“In cashmere.”

Maggie groaned with pleasure.

Alex's eyes sparkled in response. “Dyed a shade of burnt orange that will pick up the glossy highlights in your hair and always remind you of the steppes at sunset.”

Maggie tugged off her glasses and tucked them into the pocket of her plaid shirt, staring at this Alex. No wonder Cowboy had disappeared to lick his wounds this morning. If he was hit as hard as Maggie suspected he was, it was going to tear him in two to leave this vibrant, glowing woman behind.

“Thanks, Alexandra. I'll admit I wasn't looking forward to flying back to the States and facing my boss for a mission debrief wearing this outfit. It's going to be tough enough without feeling like I just crawled out of…of a silo.”

At the mention of flying, the smile faded from Alex's eyes. She lifted a hand and toyed absently with one of the small tassels decorating the yoke of her swirling fitted greatcoat.

“You're leaving this morning?”

“In a couple of hours. Richard wants time to inspect the missiles on Karistan's soil before we leave.”

“Is Nate going with you?”

Maggie gave her a level look. “Yes. And Three Bars Red, evidently. Nate asked me to have the pilot rig a stall for him. He said that you weren't satisfied with the stud's, er…performance.”

Maggie had to bite her lip to hold back a grin. The memory of Nate's choked voice when he'd told her just which stud Alexandra had decided to accept on behalf of Karistan was one she'd always treasure.

“It's not his performance that's the problem,” Alex replied in a tight, small voice, then gave herself a little shake.

“Red's already covered half the mares in Karistan,” she continued. “We just can't seem to keep him in the pastures and out of the tents. Not if he gets a whiff of anything sweet. He destroyed my aunt Feodora's latest
pysanky
—Easter egg—when he…”

Alex broke off at the sound of muffled thunder from outside the camp. Frowning, she glanced over her shoulder. The thunder rolled closer, then separated into the pounding tattoo of hooves drumming against the earth.

It happened so quickly, Alex had no time to react. One moment she was standing in the open square beside Maggie, staring at the barricades still ringing the camp. The next, Red came soaring over the low wall, ears flat, nose stretched out, legs tucked. He landed with a fluid grace and flowed into a smooth gallop.

Nate was bent low over the stallion's neck, his eyes on Alex, one hand gripping the reins.

In the same instant Alex realized what he intended, she knew she couldn't stop him. Instinctively, she stumbled backward, without any real hope of getting away.

Nate leaned lower, his arm outstretched. It wrapped around Alex's waist with the force of a freight train and swept her up as Red thundered by. Her thick coat padded most of the
impact, but her bottom thumped against a hard leg, then a hip, before he dragged her across his thighs.

She grabbed at his jacket and wiggled frantically to find purchase.

“Are you crazy?” she shouted, gasping for breath. “What is this?”

“Just a little circus trick I picked up from Peter the Great. Hang on, sweetheart.”

Alex did, with both hands, as Red slewed to one side and then the other, weaving through the tents with the agility of a world-class cutting horse. He cleared the barricade at the opposite end of the camp with the same flying ease.

Her hair whipping her eyes, Alex caught a glimpse of Petr's startled face behind them. And Dimitri's grinning one. She heard a distant shout, a surprised oath, and then nothing but the sound of Red's steady gait and the wind rushing in her ears.

Nate didn't slow, didn't stop to let her find a more secure seat. Holding her against his chest with one iron-hard arm, he took Red across the steppes.

When at last he drew rein beside a low outcropping of rock, Alex had regained some of her breath and most of her equilibrium. Still, she was forced to cling to him with both hands as he kicked a boot out of the stirrup, swung his leg over the saddle horn and slid off Red with her still banded to his body.

She shoved at his shoulders with both hands, leaning back to look up at his face.

“Were you just trying to impress me with a last demonstration of your horsemanship?” she panted. “Or is there a point to this little circus trick?”

“Oh, there's a point. Which we'll get to in a few moments. After we straighten out a couple of things between us.”

Alex wasn't sure she cared for the hint of steel under his easy tone. It was as hard and unyielding as the arms that held her.

“First,” he said, “you want to tell me just what Katerina
was doing with that decoder? I just about blew it when she pulled it out last night.”

“I gave it to her.”

His eyes narrowed. “Why, Alex?”

“I closed my ears to what the women were trying to tell me,” Alex admitted, still breathless and shaky. “When I saw you caught in the middle of the feud that my grandfather had helped perpetuate for so long, I realized I was trying to hold Karistan to his vision, instead of shaping it to theirs.”

“I'd say you did some pretty fair shaping this afternoon. I just talked to two very uptight bureaucrats at the plane.”

She managed a smile. “With Maggie's help. I still can't quite believe I haggled over nuclear warheads like a horse trader bringing a new string to the bazaar.”

The knowledge that she'd just bought Karistan a future went a long way toward easing the ache in Alex's heart. Not all the way, but a long way.

“What's the second thing?” she asked, staring up at Nate's lean, sun-weathered face. Alex knew that the little pattern of white lines at the sides of his eyes would stay in her memory forever. And the gold-tipped sweep of the lashes that screened those gray-brown eyes. And the small half smile that lifted one corner of his lips. “What else do we have to get straight between us?”

“I love you, Alex. With a love that doesn't know any borders, or states, or cultures. I want to bind your life to mine, but not your soul. That has to stay free. That's what makes you unique. And wild and proud and too damn stubborn for your own good. It's also what makes you the woman I can't live without. I figure I've got about two hours until I have to go back to the States to wrap up some loose ends, but then I'll be back. And when I come back, I'm staying. We're going to do some serious flyin' across the steppes, my darlin'. For the rest of our lives.”