Hot As Ice

The alarms brought one of the research techs rushing through the door behind her. “What’s going on?”

“He’s waking up!” Diana threw over her shoulder. “Get Dr. Goode. Immediately.”

She whipped back around and felt every ounce of oxygen leave her lungs.

He’d opened his eyes! Wild confusion filled their blue depths.

“It’s all right.” Reining in her galloping excitement, she infused her voice with deliberate, soothing calm. “You’re safe. You’re at the U.S. Arctic Oceanographic station.”

His eyes narrowed, dissected her face, her red-and-brown plaid shirt, her jeans. When he brought his gaze back to hers, his throat worked. A sound halfway between a groan and a croak escaped.

“Don’t try to talk yet.”

He jerked his arm again and grabbed a fistful of her shirt. Astonished by his strength, she let him drag her down until their faces were only inches apart. With an effort that was painful to watch, he swallowed and tried again. Finally, he forced out a single syllable.

“Who…?”

“Who am I? My name is Diana Remington. Dr. Diana Remington.”

She heard the sound of running footsteps behind her. Greg Wozniak barreled through the door. Excitement and his dash down the hall had turned his chubby face brick red.

“Is it true? Is he waking up?”

“See for yourself.”

Diana started to edge aside. The hold on her shirt kept her tethered to the table as Major Stone’s gaze shifted to her colleague.

“I… I don’t believe it!” Wozniak breathed, almost as inarticulate as their subject. “How…? When…?”

Diana waited until a huffing Dr. Goode had joined them to relate the astounding sequence of events.

“It happened so fast. Without warning. I was in here checking his vitals when his arm jerked. A few seconds later, his eyes opened.”

Goode’s glance was riveted on Stone. Little of the excitement Diana and Greg Wozniak were feeling showed on his wrinkled face.

“I don’t understand it. The sequence profiles showed no indication that his protein was beginning to regenerate.”

As much as Diana wanted to share the results of the test she’d had Mackenzie run using OMEGA’s computers, she couldn’t break her cover. “The microscope must have been giving us faulty readings.”

“Impossible,” Goode stated emphatically. “I calibrated it myself.”

“Well, one of the solutions we fed him obviously worked.” Still pinned against the table by Stone’s grip on her shirt, Diana made the introductions. “Major Stone, this is Dr. Irwin Goode, a Nobel Prize winner in bionetics. He worked with the U-2 spy plane program years ago. And this is Dr. Greg Wozniak, who…”

She broke off, gasping, as Stone’s biceps flexed again. With a sharp tug, he yanked her down. She ended up sprawled across his body, with one hand planted square on his naked chest, the other scrabbling for a grip on the metal table. Ice blue eyes lasered into hers.

“Not…spy,” he rasped with savage intensity. “Wea…ther flight.”

Oh, Lord! In her excitement, she’d forgotten that the U-2 program was so highly classified during Major Stone’s time that not even Congress knew about the intelligence gathering flights over the Soviet Union. It had been a CIA show from start to finish, back in the days when the agency called all the shots without any pesky laws or Congressional oversight to curb their operations.

From the information Mackenzie had put together on the U-2 program, the operation was classic CIA. The pilots stripped down to the skin before climbing into their flight suits. They carried no personal items, wore no identifying insignia or rank. Even their aircraft was unmarked. If forced down over enemy territory, they’d been instructed to deny any attempt at intelligence gathering and admit only to collecting weather data.

Which is exactly what Major Stone was doing now.

“It’s okay,” she said, trying to lever up a few inches. “The U-2 program is no longer classified.”

He didn’t let go. If anything, his scowl grew even fiercer.

Diana’s OMEGA training had included brutal and highly effective techniques for breaking just about any hold, but she figured smashing Stone’s wrist bones against the edge of the metal table wouldn’t exactly win his confidence.

“It’s okay,” she repeated, ignoring the fact that her breasts flattened against his chest and her mouth hovered only inches from his. “We’re on your side.”

His jaw worked. “Wea-ther flight.”

Oh boy! He obviously intended to stick to his oath to keep all aspects of his mission secret.

Admiration for his courage gripped Diana. He had to be confused, disoriented. Had to be wondering how in the world he’d arrived at a remote oceanographic station. Yet he wasn’t about to admit to a thing except his cover story.

“You can trust us,” she said softly. “We know you’re Major Charles Stone, United States Air Force. We know you were detailed to the CIA in early 1955 to test and put into operation a new, single-seat, high-altitude reconnaissance aircraft. We also know you were flying that aircraft when it disappeared from radar at 2235 hours on November 2, 1956. What we don’t know is why it went down, but we’re hoping you’ll tell us that.”

He stared at her, his features taut and grim. After what seemed like a lifetime, his grip on her shirt loosened. She eased up a few inches.

She didn’t say anything for several moments, wanting to give him time to digest what he’d heard so far before she dropped the bomb about his forty-five year snooze. She looked to her colleagues, then back at Stone, only to discover that his glance had locked on something just over her shoulder.

“What…the…hell?”

The harsh, rasping exclamation ripped from deep in his throat. Diana took a quick look behind her, saw the digital clock mounted on the wall. The time, day, month, and year flashed in iridescent green. Dragging in a deep breath, she faced the Iceman again.

“Yes,” she said slowly and clearly. “That’s the correct date.”

Chapter 3

It was a plot! A crazy Commie scheme to confuse him. Disorient him. Make him spill his guts. It couldn’t be anything else!

Desperately, Charlie tried to shatter the ice that seemed to have crystallized inside his brain. Images shimmered against the white haze in his mind. Sounds came and went. Sharp cracks. Long groans. Like icebergs crying when they broke free of a glacier. With each image, each sound, fear rose in black, billowing waves.

Thrusting it back with a silent snarl, Charlie reached into the void and grabbed onto the fragments he could remember with both hands. He’d taken off from his base in Turkey. Flown a routine mission. Just entered Soviet airspace when…when all hell broke loose. He’d jerked the stick, had tried desperately to bring his plane around and escape Soviet airspace before he bailed out.

The fragments shifted, grew clearer. He remembered the suffocating lack of oxygen, recalled fumbling for the ejection handle. And the cold. God, the cold! It tore at his eyeballs, sliced into his skin. Then the bone-wrenching jolt of his parachute. After that, nothing.

He must have come down in Siberia. Or splashed into the Bering Sea and been fished out by seal hunters or fishermen. They’d no doubt turned him over to the Soviet authorities. Nothing else could explain the absurd tale the woman still sprawled across his chest was concocting.

As if she’d crawled right into his skull and had decoded his every thought, she confirmed his point of impact. “All indications are that you went down in the Arctic Ocean, Major Stone.”

He was so shaken by her uncanny ability to read his mind, he barely grasped the incredible story she spun for him.

“Immersion in the freezing Arctic water reduced the need for oxygen in your brain at the same rate your circulation slowed. In effect, you went into a state of deep, permanent hibernation. Your pressure suit protected your body from decomposition.”

Sympathy glimmered in the green eyes so close to his own, but Charlie refused to acknowledge it, just as his scrambling mind flatly refuted the soft statement that followed.