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Kent’s muscles ached and his head pounded as he fought to keep the plane’s nose up against the battering of powerful air currents. If they went into a nosedive, they’d implode onto the side of that mountain. In order to maintain any semblance of control, he had to hold the plane’s glide even as he lost altitude. The best he could do was keep her level while the thermals bucked them around like a bee-stung bronco.
The fuel was gone. Whatever took out the avionics and wounded the engines had also damaged the fuel lines. His Challenger 350 had bled out in mere minutes. He could just barely buy that something might go wrong with one of the engines—some tiny little something overlooked. But both of them at once? Uh-uh! Not a snowball’s chance in Hawaii. He took better care of this baby than that.
Kent’s gaze darted toward his instruments, but the panel remained dark and dead, even though the RAT—ram air turbine—must have kicked in as an alternate source of electricity. Something was seriously bent about this flight emergency. There was nothing within normal range about it.
At least it was daylight so he had visual on where they were headed. If he could spot a valley with a decent stretch of level ground and navigate toward it, they stood a slight chance of actually landing without becoming a pile of wreckage—a nonsurvivable pile, anyway.
Somehow, he had to radio in a mayday. Get their position out to someone who could send rescue. But there was no way he could release the stick with even one hand in order to use the radio. Unless... He glanced sideways.
The passenger in the copilot seat gripped her chair arms in clawed fists. Her torso quivered, and her gaze was fixed straight ahead, but at least she wasn’t hysterical. Not hardly. She’d kept her cool and managed to get Mags buckled into a seat under terrifying conditions.
“Any chance you know how to operate a two-way radio?” His voice came out strong but muffled by the oxygen mask.
Seconds ticked past. Was she frozen in shock? Then she slowly turned her head his way. Brilliant green eyes, clear and sharp as a cat’s, fixed on him.
“Y-yes. W-we use one in the hospital for medivac emergencies.”
“Put out a distress call. Frequency, one-two-one-point-five.”
She did as he had asked. Her hands, her whole being, seemed to center and go steady as she set the frequency and put out the call. Evidently, she was the kind that calmed when given a task in an emergency. Good characteristic. She performed the mayday drill once...twice...three times. Dead air met every attempt. Those green eyes sought him again.
“I—I don’t think the radio...” A spasm visibly gripped her throat. “The radio is dead.” The sentence came out in a high squeak.
Kent’s jaw clenched. “This has to be sabotage, pure and simple,” he muttered fiercely between his teeth.
But who? Why? Terrorism? Unlikely on a small plane in the middle of nowhere. Terrorists wanted to make a big statement, spread as much fear and death as possible with a highly public act of chaos. What then? Did someone want to kill one of his passengers badly enough to take the life of everyone aboard?
Fury surged through Kent, shooting adrenaline to the taxed muscles laboring to control an out-of-control airplane. He and his passengers were going to survive, if only to give him the chance to throttle whoever was trying to kill them.
Responding to his iron grip, the plane steadied even as a promising furrow in the mountainside appeared off to his left. He followed his instinct and turned her nose for what could be a navigable valley.
“Hallelujah!” His outburst drew a startled stare from Jade Eyes.
A long, semi-flat stretch of ground appeared in the near distance. Scattered pine trees set up potential hazards, but he’d just have to do his best to miss them. They were coming in too fast, but this was the most optimal valley for landing that he’d spotted since the crisis erupted. It was either bring her down now or crash in harsh terrain with no chance of survival.
There would be nothing graceful about this landing. With no engine power, he had no reverse thrust or flaps to help slow them down. Getting on the ground without flipping over or hitting anything major would have to be enough. Now it remained to be seen if they’d have to come in on their bare belly. If electrical failure were absolute, they’d have no wheels.
Kent barked orders to his unofficial copilot, instructing her how to let down the landing gear. A welcome rumble under the plane’s belly answered her tentative responses to his instructions. The instrument panel was not receiving any of the auxiliary electricity, but the landing gear was. Another anomaly that suggested sabotage focused on his engines and his instrumentation.
Kent hauled in a deep breath and let it out as the ground loomed up at them. “Get your head down, Jade Eyes!”
“What did you call me?” Those brilliant eyes flashed, and her nostrils flared.
“Get! Down!”
The woman bowed her back and hugged her knees as the wheels kissed the earth. The plane rebounded into the air like a gazelle, then slammed down again. Up. Down. Up. Down. The odor of burning rubber invaded the cockpit. Stretched and strained metal screeched like a dying thing, competing with the terrified screams from human throats.
All the peripherals faded as Kent’s consciousness melded with his tortured plane. Any chance of survival depended on his skills and instincts as a former Special Forces pilot and the grace of Almighty God.
If the former failed, in about 30 seconds they’d all be meeting the Lord face-to-face.
TWO (#u263a1f91-3beb-5ca2-9b2d-2c6ee9580b21)
A long groan hauled Lauren to consciousness. Who made that sound? A moan passed between her lips. Oh, she’d made that sound. No, the first groan had been in a male timbre.
Lauren lifted her head, and pain sparkled through her muscles. A spot on the top of her head throbbed. What had happened? Bits of something skittered out of her hair. Glass? Twigs? Needles? Maybe all three. A shredded pine branch drooped forlornly in front of her face, nearly tickling her chin.
She drew in a deep, pine-laden breath and examined herself. Glass littered her short-sleeved, pullover top and jeans, and glinted in the sunlight beating through the shattered windshield. Scratches on the bare forearms that had protected her head oozed small beads of blood, but the injuries weren’t serious.
Lauren shivered. The sun had power, and yet she was chilled. If she had to guess, the temperature was somewhere in the fifties Fahrenheit. A stiff breeze whimpered through the cockpit.
Cockpit!
She stiffened, muscles grumbling at the sudden movement. She’d been in an airplane crash. Where were they? Clearly, on the ground somewhere in the mountains. Dusty greenish landscape stretched in front of her, punctuated by some brown, man-made looking structures in the distance. The whole vista was framed by dark cliff walls.
Had they crashed near a town? Was help on the way? Watery haze coated her vision, but she blinked it away. Nothing approaching human life or technology, like a car or ambulance or fire engine, raced toward them from the structures. Except for the tick of cooling machinery somewhere in the plane’s bowels and the lonely keen of the wind, silence reigned.
Was she the only survivor? Mom! A shudder ran through Lauren as her hands fumbled for the clip of the seat belt. The masculine groan came again. Gingerly, she turned her head to find Kent Garland slumped in his seat. Blood trickled from somewhere beneath the sable-brown hair just above his ear, but his eyes were open.
Amazement flooded her. Somehow this man had landed the plane. She had no recollection of the event, but that was not surprising in cases where someone was knocked unconscious.
“Help!” a male voice called weakly from the passenger area. Other voices began making unintelligible noises that communicated fear and pain. They all sounded masculine. Was her mother all right?
Garland grunted and lifted his head. His gaze clashed with Lauren’s. She sucked in a breath. A woman could float away in those cloud-gray depths.
“We’re down.” His lips stretched in a grimace. “Time for evac and damage assessment. You up to helping, Jade Eyes?”
His words were spoken with a teasing lilt, but a sharp pang streaked through Lauren, trampled quickly by anger. She swallowed the knee-jerk response. This man couldn’t know what he had said.
“Don’t call me that, Mr. Garland. My name is Lauren Carter.” She couldn’t help it if her tone was frosty.
“Okay, Lauren.” A smile twitched one side of the pilot’s mouth, but his gaze remained grave. “Call me Kent. Are you all right?”
“I—I think so.” She cleared her throat. “I’m a physician’s assistant. If you have a first-aid kit, I’ll do what I can to treat the injured.”
The pilot’s eyes widened. “That’s the first good news I’ve heard since...well, a while.” The barest hint of private pain flickered across his face, and then his expression went flat. “Let’s get to it.”
He threw off his seat belt and wriggled free of the forward control panel that had crumpled inward significantly, but not enough to trap him. “I seem to be in working order.” He stood tall and lifted one slacks-clad leg and then the other.
Lauren levered herself to her feet. Other than adrenaline-withdrawal tremors flowing through her body and perhaps bruises she would feel more intensely later on, she seemed to be in working order as well. Except maybe for that bump on her head. She touched her fingertips to a throbbing goose egg on the crown of her head. The skin didn’t appear to be broken. Judging from the momentary loss of consciousness, she probably had some level of concussion. Hopefully mild. She needed to be able to function.
“Mom!” she called out. No answer and no tawny-gray head popped up anywhere above the seats.
Lauren pressed forward, but the pilot stepped in front of her just as a bulky executive lunged to his feet and lumbered toward them, head down like a charging rhino.
“We’ve got to get out of here.” Hysteria edged the man’s tone. “We’re going to blow up!”
More passengers began struggling to their feet, echoing the terrified thought.
“Hold it!” Kent’s authoritative voice sliced through the panic. “We are down safe, and we are not going to blow up. Stay in your seats. When it comes to evacuation, we’ll do it together. Let’s get our bearings first.”
The panicked rhino plunged to a stop, chest heaving.
“How do you know we’re not going to explode?” cried another passenger, voice high and tight.
“Simple. It takes fuel to fire an explosion. We don’t have any.”
Lauren bit her lower lip. That explained the necessity of a crash landing, but not what blew up and caused the fuel dump and the instrument/radio failure. That was something she wanted an answer for ASAP, but not while people were teetering on the verge of hysteria.
At the rear of the plane, a blistering tirade of profanity burst from one of the three Peerless One brokers. He was standing tall, holding his cell phone toward the ceiling, shaking it and cursing it.
“What seems to be the problem, sir?” Kent asked briskly.
“No cell service, that’s what.” The pit-bull-faced man scowled like a juicy steak had just been ripped from his jaws. “I was meeting with an important client tonight, and now I can’t let him know our incompetent pilot has crashed this tin can you call a plane. I’ll lose the account!”
“Get a grip, Dirk,” said one of the other Peerless One executives. “It’s amazing that we’re alive.”
Still scowling, the man named Dirk plopped back into his seat and silence fell, except for a few sniffles and groans.
Lauren gazed around Kent’s shoulders, searching for her mother. Anxious faces stared back at her above freshly rumpled three-piece suits. The elder statesman of the group was stirring and coming around to consciousness. But the spot where her mother had sat appeared to be empty. Of course, a seatback largely blocked her view.
Lauren’s heart sought to pump out of her chest. “Where’s my mother?”
Kent began moving up the aisle, nudging personal items under seats with his foot. “I’ll look for her. Not much room to go very far. Would you please check on my copilot?”
Lauren’s breath snagged. She’d forgotten about the critically injured woman. What kind of a physician’s assistant was she? Apparently, the kind that was a daughter first.
She stepped into the first set of seats, bent over the slumped woman and felt for a pulse. It was there, ragged and faint, but at least Mags was alive. Gently, Lauren lowered the seat back as far as it would go and padded each side of the woman’s head with one of those little airliner pillows. That should give the injured woman some support for her back and neck. Moving her could be tricky if she had a spinal injury.
“What is Mags’s status?” Kent’s voice called back to her.
“I would say concussion—probably severe—but the bleeding on the external head wound appears to have stopped. I’ll take a closer look in the near future and suture the cut, if necessary, but that’s about the extent of what I can do without expert diagnostic equipment. If she has a subdural hematoma—a brain bleed—she will need surgery, and I can’t... I’m not...”
Lauren inhaled sharply against a surge of frustration. A subdural hematoma was life-threatening. There certainly was no X-ray machine or other diagnostic equipment around here, much less any surgical tools with which to perform a craniotomy, even if she were qualified to perform one, which a PA-C was not. They needed expert help. Fast!
“Just do your best,” Kent responded. “That’s all any of us can do. Your mom’s right here!”
Kent’s call brought Lauren’s head up. Her mother’s pixie face peeped around her seat, pale but composed.
Mom flapped a hand. “Sorry, dear. I guess I passed out.”
Lauren grabbed for the support of a seatback. Now she could testify it was no cliché that knees did go weak when major relief hit. “It’s okay, Mom. Are you hurt anywhere?”
“Just my pride...I think. Well, no. I’m pretty sure that seat belt gave the old college try at cutting me in half. My tummy hurts, but I’m sure it will pass.”
Lauren didn’t like the sound of that. Mom could have anything from a ruptured spleen to kidney damage. Or maybe just some bruising and tissue abrasions, but that was best-case scenario. And again, there didn’t seem to be any emergency facilities nearby. Perhaps no life at all. She gazed over her shoulder through the shattered windshield and scanned the barren landscape beyond. If that was a town out there, it appeared to be deserted. Hopefully, appearances were deceiving.
She turned toward Kent, who eyed her from the rear of the plane. “Are we going to get people as comfortable as possible here, or could some help be available in that nearby town?”
Garland exhaled a brief chuckle. “I’m fairly certain no one is home in whatever is left of that old mining burg, but I’m going to go check it out. If there’s decent shelter or any kind of supplies, we might move in there until help arrives.”
Voices streamed questions about who might be coming to rescue them and when and how, but the pilot lifted a silencing hand. “All unknowns at this point. I’ll go check out the town while you allow our resident PA to check out your injuries.” He nodded toward Lauren. “The first-aid kit is in the galley.”
“What about your head wound?” Lauren asked. “I should look at that before you go hiking.”
Striding up the aisle toward her, Kent shrugged a shoulder. “Just a nick from flying glass. Look after these fine folks first.” He brushed past her, opened a bin, and pulled out a leather bomber jacket that looked like it had seen better days.
Lauren pressed her lips together. Stubborn macho man. So not her type. Then why did her pulse speed up as he shrugged the coat over broad shoulders?
Frowning, he turned his attention to the main exit behind the cockpit. The door panel looked like an accordion. Fat chance it would open. Lauren’s insides curdled. The way the body of the plane was twisted and bent, how stable was it? Could something give way at any time?
Kent sent her a sidelong look, as if he’d heard her thoughts, and headed back down the aisle. “I’m going to use the emergency exit over the wing.”
With practiced movements, he pulled out the panel and leaned it up against a sidewall.
“One of you fit this back in after I hop out.”
Kent glanced around the cabin, gaze lighting briefly on Lauren. His face was an impassive mask, but in his eyes lurked a grim shadow. Then he hauled himself through the opening.
A chill wind blew through the cabin, and a couple of the executives hopped up and hastily stuffed the door panel back into the opening. The pilot’s disappearance triggered a burst of complaints from the passengers about the cold and demands that Lauren take a look at them immediately. Everyone claimed to have one pitiful condition or another.
“I’ll get to all of you,” Lauren said firmly, “but first I’m going to do a little triage and see who is most critically injured, other than the copilot, who is as comfortable as I can make her at the moment.”
The only executive not trying to whine himself to the head of the line was the elderly one who had finally come fully awake. He gazed around quietly, rubbing the back of his head, and looking thoroughly unhappy.
Her mother smiled and shrugged. “You can see me last, dear. I’m all right.”
The others might be high-powered wheeler-dealers who lived each day on the rush of stock trades and business deals, but actual physical danger or discomfort rendered them dependent children. Sighing, Lauren hunted up the first-aid kit.
What was that pilot not telling them? He had said nothing about contacting the outside world. He sure hadn’t indicated rescue was imminent. His instrument panel was dead. The radio, too. Surely, he’d filed a flight plan before they’d taken off. When the aircraft didn’t arrive at its destination, search parties would look for them. Right? They would be found. Lauren’s gut tightened. But what if they weren’t?
* * *
Insides hollow, Kent stood on the ground and surveyed the remains of his business jet. This narrow valley was sure no landing strip. As soon as he’d hit ground, rocks and potholes and the odd pine sapling that he couldn’t avoid had begun doing things to his plane that never should be done to fine machinery.
He’d slewed once so badly that his left wing gouged the earth, and they’d done a doughnut before finally straightening out. A good chunk of wing tip remained embedded in the ground somewhere along his landing path. And the landing gear was chewed up but good. The forward wheel was missing entirely, and the rear two were in shreds. The twisted body of the plane rested mostly on bare metal struts. Those were only the most obvious structural issues.
His jaw clenched against a sting in the back of his eyes. His jet was less than a year old. A real beaut! His pride and joy. Every nickel he had in the world was tied up in his baby, and now look at her!
Kent cleared his throat and inhaled a deep breath. At least he and his passengers had survived the crazy descent and landing. He should be thanking God, not wallowing in angst. Besides which, he had a mystery to solve. What happened to bring them down in the first place?
“I’d like to be the first to thank you for getting us on the ground safely.”
Lauren’s voice drew his attention, and he lifted his head. She stood framed in the broken window of the cockpit, hugging the first-aid kit to her chest. Kent’s pulse rate skipped into overdrive. She looked vulnerable and tense, but calm and determined and...well, flat gorgeous. Wavy strands of auburn hair had come loose from her thick ponytail and framed a heart-shaped face. The strong chin and elegant, aquiline nose suggested the courage she’d already displayed, but the soft curves of her full mouth and delicately shaped eyebrows lent appealing femininity.
“Earth to Kent.” Her small, teasing smile sent a pleasant shiver down his spine.
