Hot As Ice

Signing off, she arched her back and hooked her hands behind her neck to relieve the kinks.

Lord, she was tired! Even without the strain of the recovery operation, she would have found it difficult to sleep in the bright, perpetual haze of an Arctic summer. After ten days, her internal clock was still struggling to adjust. She knew she wouldn’t get much more rest tonight than she had the previous nights. Charlie Stone would invade her sleep, just as he’d dominated her waking hours.

Wondering what he was doing right now, she tugged off her boots. Was he studying the magazines they’d left in his room? Flipping through the switches on the satellite-fed TV? Prowling his eight-by-eight room?

She had her answer not two minutes later.

She had just bent over a stainless steel sink to splash her face with bottled water when the snick of a door opening brought her twisting around. Despite her dripping lashes, she recognized the major’s wide-shouldered, narrow-hipped form instantly.

“Major Stone!”

She bobbed upright, blinking the water from her eyes. He looked so different in borrowed tan work pants and an ill-fitting blue shirt that stretched at the shoulder seams. His boots were his own, she noted in a quick sweep, the same high-topped brown lace-ups the team had studied and analyzed as part of the recovery effort.

“How did you…?”

“How did I escape my guard?”

His voice was still rough, still raspy, but there was no mistaking the lethal edge to it.

“He wasn’t a guard.”

“You could have fooled me.”

He crossed the room in two swift strides, backing Diana against the wall beside the sink.

“He’s just a research technician,” she said as calmly as she could with his blue eyes blazing down at her. “There to help you if you wanted anything. You didn’t hurt him, did you?”

“He won’t show any bruises, if that’s what you’re worried about.”

His balled fists and threatening stance didn’t intimidate her. She could take him down if she had to. What bothered the hell out of her was the fact that his proximity was causing every nerve in her body to snap with an almost electrical intensity.

“What do you want?” she asked coolly.

“The truth. Who are you?”

“I told you. My name is Diana Remington. I flew up here, along with Drs. Goode and Wozniak and the others, when your body was recovered from…”

“Don’t hand me that crap about being buried in the ice for forty-five years again!”

“It’s true.”

His reply was short and decidedly scatological.

“What will it take to convince you?” she asked. “How many documents or videos do you need?”

“Documents can be faked. So can those whiz-bang movies you showed me.”

“Why in the world would we go to so much trouble?”

“You tell me, blondie.”

Angling her chin, she met his belligerence head on. “I’m not a Communist propagandist trying to get into your skull and play mind games. The Cold War is over. We won. The Wall came tumbling down.”

“What wall?”

Too late, she remembered that the ultimate symbol of the Cold War, the Berlin Wall, hadn’t been erected until years after Stone went into the ice.

“Never mind. All that matters right now is that the U.S. halted top-secret U-2 overflights of Russia in 1960, right after Francis Gary Powers bailed out. You don’t have to guard your identity or that of your unit with your life. They’re history. You’re history,” she added more gently.

A muscle worked in the side of his jaw. “What brought Gary’s plane down?”

“A surface to air missile.”

“Bull! The Dragon Lady flies too high and too fast for Soviet SAMs to reach her.”

“Maybe in your time, but by 1960, the Soviets had significantly improved their missile capability. So had the U.S., for that matter.”

“How do I know you’re telling the truth?”

“You can pull up information about Powers’s trial on any computer. Or look him up in the encyclopedia,” she added, remembering just in time Stone’s reaction to the station’s desktop PCs.

In his day, computers were gargantuan monsters that filled an entire room. He’d regarded the smaller, exponentially faster versions of the old vacuum tube models with both suspicion and an awe he’d tried his damndest to disguise.

“Powers served two years in a Soviet prison before being exchanged,” Diana said briskly. “I think he wrote a book about his experiences before he died in a helicopter crash in the seventies.”

For an instant, just an instant, she glimpsed a desolation as bleak as the vast Arctic emptiness in his face. Stone had lost both parents while he was still a kid. With no brothers or sisters, he’d made the military his family, his fellow aviators his kin. Now most of them would now be gone, too.

Diana could only imagine what it would be like to wake up and find yourself alone in an alien world, without friends or familiar landmarks. Steeling herself, she fought the urge to lift a hand and stroke his cheek. He hadn’t asked for comfort or condolences, and probably wouldn’t appreciate either.

“Why don’t we sit down, Major Stone?”

She took a single step, only to come up short as two palms slapped the wall beside her head. His arms caged her. His body formed a solid, immovable wall.

“I want a few more answers first.”

“All right. But just so you know, this type of primitive, caveman behavior went the way of the poodle skirt and the Studebaker.”

It took him a moment to process her acidic comment. When the meaning registered, a look of almost comical dismay crossed his face.

“Are you saying my Golden Hawk is obsolete?”

“It is if it was produced by Studebaker.”

“Well, hell! I’ve only made two payments on that baby.”

With each passing moment, Diana felt less like her mythical incarnation of a huntress and more like the legendary Cassandra, the deliverer of doom and evil tidings. Not only had she broken the news his buddy had died, but now she’d hit him in one of an American male’s most vulnerable spots…his car.

She gave him a moment or two to mourn before prodding gently. “What else did you want to ask me?”