Hot As Ice. Merline Lovelace

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.

      “You’ve been lost in the ice for forty-five years.”

      She was good. Damned good. She looked so sincere, sounded so American! Charlie’s lip curled.

      “Helluva…story, blon…die,” he rasped, his throat raw and aching. “Too bad…I’m not buying it.”

      “It’s true.”

      “Yeah, and…I’m Joe…DiMaggio.”

      The Commies knew just how to wring a man’s head inside out. Charlie had flown during the Korea War. He’d lost buddies, had heard tales about the POWs who’d disappeared into China. Only now, three years after the war had finally ended, was the truth beginning to seep out.

      The Soviet masters of both North Korea and China had perfected a technique the CIA labeled brainwashing. According to highly classified reports, they’d programmed American POWs to betray their country, burying the traitorous impulse so deep in their psyche that no one, even the POWs themselves, knew it existed.

      The CIA had proof, had shown Charlie and his fellow U-2 pilots the case file of a lieutenant who’d returned home to lead a quiet, ordinary life as a Frigidaire salesman until something or someone had triggered him. Without warning, the former officer had walked off the job, retrieved his hunting rifle, and calmly put a bullet through the powerful senator who was making a whistle stop campaign appearance in town that afternoon. To this day, the lieutenant had no idea why he’d killed the charismatic presidential candidate.

      Charlie wasn’t about to let this green-eyed blonde play with his head.

      “I know it’s hard to believe, Major Stone,” she was saying calmly, “but I’m telling you the truth. You’re at an American oceanographic station one hundred and eighty miles north of Point Barrow, Alaska. And the date is really June 2002.”

      The woman—what had she called herself? Remington. Dr. Remington—pushed against his chest with the flat of her palm.

      “If you’ll let me up, perhaps my colleagues and I can convince you.”

      Charlie wasn’t about to admit he didn’t have the strength to hold her if she fought him. He was shaking like a kitten, so weak the mere act of uncurling his fist took every ounce of strength he possessed. Sweat popped out on his skin, chilling him instantly. Only then did he realize he was stretched out flat on a table, as naked as a skinned coon. Tubes and wires snaked from his arms, legs and chest.

      His gaze narrowing, he followed the tangled umbilical cords to the bank of equipment they sprouted from. Another wave of shivers rippled along the surface of his skin. As one of the first test pilots selected for the U-2 high altitude program, Charlie had been poked and prodded and subjected to just about every experiment known to man. Yet he’d never seen equipment like this.

      Setting his jaw, he reached across his chest. With one vicious tug, he ripped the IV from his arm. Drops of blood and intravenous solution sprayed around the room.

      “Hey!” The short, balding man beside blondie jumped back. “Careful with those bodily fluids! They’re as dangerous as a machine gun!”

      Charlie’s throat closed. What the hell had they pumped into him?

      The woman—Remington—shot her companion a look of disgust. “If you’re worried about AIDS, Greg, the first case wasn’t documented until 1981, twenty-five years after Major Stone dropped out of the sky.”

      The man reddened, but kept his distance. “Who knows what he picked up in the ice? There has to be some reason for the anomaly in his protein regeneration.”

      None of what they were saying made the least sense to Charlie, but one thought surfaced crystal clear through his swirling confusion. No one was going to stick anything else in him—or take any further readings—until he figured out what the hell was happening here. Setting his jaw, he swung his legs to the side of the table and pushed himself up.

      His head buzzed. The ring of faces around him blurred. Gritting his teeth, Charlie blinked to clear the swirling haze and proceeded to yank off every telemetry lead.

      “Major Stone!”

      “Don’t hurt yourself!”

      “Careful with the equipment.”

      His fierce glare silenced the instant chorus. Chest heaving, Charlie gripped the metal table with both hands. His breath rasped on the cold air, the only sound in the lab until the blonde broke the tension.

      “Why don’t we make you more comfortable? I believe some clothes would be in order, and a move to the living quarters. Is that agreeable to you, Major?”

      Stone’s gaze roamed the makeshift lab, taking in the monitors and cameras, before locking with hers again. A curt nod signaled his acquiescence.

      To the fierce disappointment of everyone on recovery team, Diana included, Major Stone lived up to his name and made like a rock. Once installed in a hastily cleared bunk room and outfitted in borrowed clothing, he crossed his arms and refused to answer questions or respond to the team’s revelations. Nor was he ready to accept that he’d awakened in the second millennium A.D.

      The team tried their best to convince him, presenting printed material, digitized images and TV shows beamed in by satellite over the station’s system. The major’s eyes narrowed to slits as he stared at the flickering images, but he kept all thoughts to himself.