Diana Palmer Collected 1-6: Soldier of Fortune / Tender Stranger / Enamored / Mystery Man / Rawhide and Lace / Unlikely Lover. Diana Palmer
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what they tell him until they get off the plane. All they want is a free ride. Once they’ve had it, they’ll leave.”
She gnawed on her lower lip. “Aren’t you worried?” she asked.
“They aren’t holding the syringe to my neck.”
His indifference shocked her. She was terrified for the stewardess. Horrified, she forced her eyes back to her lap. For God’s sake, what kind of man had she married?
He closed his eyes again, ignoring her contemptuous stare. He regretted the need to shock her, but he needed time to think, and he couldn’t do it if she was talking. Now he had sufficient quiet to put together a plan. They wouldn’t hurt the girl if their demands were met. But glitches sometimes happened. In case one developed, he had to think of a way out. There were two men, but only one was armed. And obviously, they hadn’t been able to get anything metallic through the sensors. That was good. They might have a plastic knife or two between them, or a pocket knife like the one Dutch was carrying—a knife that had special uses. His was balanced and excellent for throwing. And he had few equals with a knife. He smiled.
Dani glanced at Dutch with mingled hurt and curiosity and rage. He was asleep, for heaven’s sake! In the middle of a hijacking, he was asleep! She sighed angrily. Well, what did she expect him to do? Leap up from the seat like one of the heroes in the books she read and deliver them all from the terrorists? Fat chance!
A hijacking. She sighed, nervously fingering her purse. She wondered how the poor stewardess felt. The woman was doing her best to stay calm, but it couldn’t have been easy. Knowing what was in that syringe, and how quickly it would work if she were injected with it…Dani shuddered at just the thought. In her innocence she’d never believed that there were such fiendish people sharing the world with her.
Dutch opened one eye and closed it again. Dani gave him an exasperated look and clasped her hands to still their trembling. The taller of the hijackers had something in his hand that looked suspiciously like a grenade, and as the plane grew closer to Cuba, he began to pace nervously.
The shorter hijacker, the bald one who was holding the stewardess prisoner, moved into view. He forced the stewardess into the front seat, which was just one ahead of Dutch and Dani, and sat beside her, with the syringe still at her throat.
He was tiring, Dutch mused. And the other one was getting a little panicky. His dark eyes narrowed thoughtfully. He’d bet his life that the grenade was plastic. How else could they have cleared airport security? One of the magazines on covert operations ran advertisements for the fakes—they were dirt cheap and, at a distance, realistic enough to fool a civilian. Which Dutch wasn’t.
He’d wait until the plane landed in Cuba. If they were granted asylum, fine. If not, he was going to put a monkey wrench into their act. He owed it to Dani, sitting so quiet and disillusioned beside him. She still believed in heroes, although God alone knew what she thought of him right now.
When the plane landed in Havana the shorter man stayed beside the stewardess while the taller one went into the cockpit. He stayed there only a few minutes, and then burst out the small doorway with wild eyes, cursing violently.
“What is it? What is it!” the smaller man demanded.
“They will not let us disembark! They will not give us asylum!” the taller man cried. He looked around wildly, clasping the forgotten grenade in his hands and ignoring the horrified looks and cries of the passengers. “What shall we do? They will give us fuel but not asylum. What shall we do? We cannot go back to Mexico!”
“Cuidado!” the older man cautioned sharply. “We will go to Miami. Then we will seek asylum from our backers overseas,” he said. “Tell them to fly to Miami.”
Now, that was interesting, Dutch thought as he watched the taller man hesitate and then go back into the cockpit. He had a hunch that the gentlemen with the stage props were Central American natives. But obviously they had no wish to be connected with any of the Central American countries. And that talk of comrades overseas sounded very familiar. As almost everyone knew, there were foreign interests at work all over Central America.
The taller man was back in a minute. “They are turning toward Miami,” he told his companion.
“Bueno!” The short man sounded relieved. “Come.”
He forced the stewardess to her feet and dragged her along with him as he urged the tall man toward the cockpit. “We will explain the demands the pilot is to present to the American authorities,” the short one murmured.
Dutch’s eyes opened. “How much courage do you have, Mrs. van Meer?” he asked Dani without turning his head. His voice was low enough that only she could hear it.
She tensed. What in the world did he mean? “I’m no coward,” she managed.
“What I have in mind could get you killed.”
Her heart leaped. “The stewardess!”
He looked down at her. His eyes were dark and quiet and his face was like so much granite. “That will depend on you. When we approach that airport I want you to distract the man with the syringe. Just distract him. Force him to move that syringe for just a fraction of a second.”
“Why do anything?” she asked softly. “You said that they’d leave—”
“Because they’re desperate now,” he said quietly. “And I have no doubt whatsoever that one of their demands is going to be for automatic weapons. Once they have those, we’ve lost any chance of escape.”
“The authorities won’t give them weapons,” she said.
“Once they’ve used that acid on a couple of people they will,” he said.
She shuddered again. She could taste her own fear, but Dutch seemed oddly confident. He also seemed to know what he was doing. She looked up into his eyes with returning faith. No, she told herself, she’d been reading him wrong. All that time he’d been quiet, he’d been thinking. And now she trusted him instinctively.
“You could be killed,” he repeated, hating the words even as he said them. How could he put her in danger? But how could he not take the chance? “There’s a risk. I won’t minimize it.”
She sighed. “Nobody would miss me, except maybe you and Harriett,” she said dryly.
He felt odd. She didn’t say it in a self-pitying way. It was just a simple statement of fact. Nobody gave a damn. He knew how that felt himself, because outside the group nobody cared about him, either. Except for Dani. And he cared about her, too. He was suddenly vulnerable because of her, he realized.
She looked up at him with wide gray eyes that had seen too little living to be closed forever.
“There’s a chance I could manage it alone,” he began slowly.
“I’m not afraid,” she said. “Well, that is, I am afraid, but I’ll do whatever you tell me to.”
So Gabby wasn’t a freak after all, he told himself, gratified to find Dani so much like his best friend’s wife. This little dove had teeth, just as he’d suspected.
He smiled faintly. “Okay, tiger. Here’s what I want you to do….”
She went over it again and again in her mind in the minutes that followed. She chewed her lower lip until it was sore, and then chewed it some more. She had to get it right the first time. The poor stewardess wouldn’t have a second chance. If they failed—and she still didn’t realize how Dutch was going to get to that man in time—the stewardess would die.
She agonized over it until the captain announced that the plane was on its approach to Miami. He cautioned the passengers to stay calm and not panic, and to stay in their seats once the plane was on the ground. He sounded as strained as Dani felt. That hand grenade was the most terrifying part of all, and she wondered how Dutch was going to prevent the second man from throwing it.
The plane circled