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 the airport and went down, landing roughly this time, bumping around as it went toward the terminal. Dani got her first glimpse of Miami and thought ironically that she sure was getting to see a lot of the world!
As soon as the plane came to a halt, Dutch touched her arm and looked down at her. Dani closed her eyes on a brief prayer.
The man with the syringe had just moved back into the cabin. He looked taut and nervous as well. The stewardess looked as though she’d given up all hope of living and had resigned herself to the horror of the acid. Her eyes were blank.
“Uh, senor…?” Dani called, getting halfway out of her seat.
The short man jumped at the sound of her voice and his arm tightened around the stewardess. “What you want?” he growled.
“I…Oh, please…” Dani clutched the back of the seat and her gray eyes widened as she fought to make the words come out. “I have to go…to the restroom, please….”
The short man cursed. He called something in another language to the man in the cockpit, who looked out, angrily.
“I have to!” Dani pleaded, looking and sounding convincing.
The tall man muttered something and the short one laughed curtly. “All right,” he said after a minute, during which Dani aged five years. “Come on, then.”
She slipped over Dutch, and while she was moving, his hand went slowly to his inside jacket pocket.
Dani moved into the aisle and started carefully toward the restroom on the other side of the man with the syringe. Two more steps, she told herself. Her heart pounded, and she kept her eyes cast downward in case the man saw the terror in them and reacted too quickly. One more step. Please don’t fail me, she said silently to Dutch. This is insane, I’m only twenty-six, I don’t want to die, I’ve only just gotten married!
One more step. And she stopped and swayed, putting a hand to her temple. “I’m so sick!” And it was almost the truth. She deliberately let herself fall toward him.
It
