skipped across the ground, but each second brought them closer to their wildly firing assailants.
One horseman set his course directly for their propeller, as if determined to drive his horse directly into it. Maybe he would, leaping off his steed at the last minute.
Hood stood, hauled himself onto the top biplane wing where Calloway had been, and aimed the shotgun above the arc of the spinning propeller. He dare not fire through it, lest he chew off their propulsion.
The gunman spotted him and aimed his rifle. They were just yards apart. The rifle fired and the shotgun bucked and the pony tumbled, the rider’s rifle flying. Lead sizzled past the curator’s head. The aircraft vaulted, the undercarriage bouncing as they clawed over the careening horse, wheels given a quick spin. They were past, bounced, and jumped up in the air again, engine howling. Another horseman came galloping alongside, taking aim at Beth. Hood pivoted, fired, and the bandit threw up his hands and pitched backward.
“Yee-hah!” Calloway shouted. Her cheek was bleeding.
Hood allowed the wind to push him down into his cockpit again. The horseman had tumbled into the dust, to his immense satisfaction.
This was more exciting than museum meetings in New York!
The others hadn’t given up. They were riding hard behind, bullets peppering the wings. Hood stood, bracing with his knees, and broke the shotgun open to reload. When it snapped shut he aimed backward over Calloway’s head and fired. Bam, bam! Buckshot sprayed. Three more swerved, leaning like drunken men, and then the ground was falling away as the Curtis strained, reaching for the sky. They swept over the tents, men still shooting, red flag snapping in the wind.
A cliff loomed.
“Bank!”
They cleared it by inches.
Finally they had enough altitude to pivot back toward the west. Far below, horsemen milled in frustration. Hood could see the specks of bodies he’d dropped.
He didn’t feel guilt; he felt relief.
“Nice shooting!” She pounded him on the back. He turned. She was grinning beneath her goggles.
“Couldn’t you have picked a quieter place to land?”
“I’m not that lucky. But you are, maybe.”
“Are you hit?”
“Scratched, but they didn’t get our gas, or our engine, either. We’re going to make it to Lhasa, Ben.”
He put a finger to her cheek, wiping blood away. The wound had coagulated. “I wish we had that bottle of scotch.”
She laughed. “Me, too! It could stretch our fuel!”
T hat dusk they came down on little more than fumes into the valley of the Kyi-Chu. The sun had sunk behind the encircling mountains, the golden glow of the roofs of the Potala winking out. A few lamps burned but Lhasa was still unelectrified, dark and remote. There was an airstrip, however, and the Curtis touched and taxied to rest next to two other derelict biplanes, a British aluminum transport with no wings or engines, and a stone corral of yaks.
Was Raeder still here? And what would Hood do if he was?
How many men had he killed today?
Hood and Beth dropped to the ground, shaken, exultant, exhausted. There were bullet holes all over Calloway’s biplane, and shell casings littered his cockpit floor. Thwarting death makes you feel alive. Besting men makes you feel strong. And her wire-and-chewing-gum crate was a tough little bastard after all.
He smiled. It was primitive. Elemental.
Beth watched him as he walked around the airplane. Her hair was a ragged mess after being crushed by the flying helmet, her face smudged with soot and blood, and her fingers still smelled of fuel. But her eyes were very, very bright.
He came to stand close. The barrels of his guns still jutted from the cockpit. No one had come out to the grass strip to greet them. They could hear the river running in the distance.
“Now you’ll see this Tibetan woman you left?” she asked.
“Maybe. I’m dreading it, actually. What am I going to say? I think I’ll ask the British what they know and decide how to approach Raeder.” He stared toward the river. “Now that I’m here, I’m not exactly certain what I’m supposed to do.”
“Save the world, right?”
“Yes. Or didn’t we agree you can only save yourself?” He put his finger in one of the bullet holes. It was a miracle they hadn’t been disabled. “And you, Miss Calloway, have gotten me this far. You’re a good pilot.”
“You’re a good shot.”
And then, because she’d finally tired of waiting for him to initiate things, she kissed him.
It took him by surprise, but then women were sometimes inexplicable. So he kissed back, enjoying the taste of her, and suddenly restless for release after the trauma of the last few days. She broke with a little gasp, her eyes wide as if surprised by herself, and he leaned in to kiss her neck.
“You smell like gasoline,” he whispered.
“You smell like gunpowder.”
He laughed, kissing her ear, her nape, the hollow under her neck in front. He opened a button on her shirt and nuzzled part of her shoulder. Her hands were pulling on him and he let his own roam over her rough clothes. She was the opposite of the society princesses and glamour models he grazed through, and a hundred times more desirable because of it. She was real. He lifted his face and she kissed him fiercely, cupping his head with her hands, eyes moist and urgent.
Then the two of them were down on the grass as the moon rose over the mountains, fighting out of their clothes. He tarried while peeling hers off, enjoying how she allowed his hands and mouth to explore. She made little sounds, not the tough aviatrix but only a woman hungry for connection. And then they fused.
This one meant something.
They kissed more tenderly, still locked together. In fact, he was so busy kissing that he didn’t notice the dozen Tibetan soldiers who materialized out of the dusk and surrounded them and their plane, peering down at their pale bodies in the moonlight.
“Benjamin Hood?” one finally interrupted in British-accented English.
Ben started and jerked around. Beth shouted and snatched at clothes to cover herself.
“What the hell?”
“Apologies, Doctor. But you are under palace arrest.”
21
Hood’s Cabin, Cascade Mountains, United States
September 5, Present Day
A kiss is just a kiss, the old song went, and Rominy had been perfectly prepared to tell Mr. Jake Barrow not to take any liberties, thank you very much. But he kissed her at midnight at the end of the most traumatic day of her life, after explosion, chase, wine, inheritance, and Nancy Drew mystery madness at the hour she felt most vulnerable and puzzled. He smelled smoky, with a masculine scratchiness on his firm jaw. She kissed back-where was her discipline?-and somehow it advanced to the inevitably awkward comedy of unzipping the sleeping bags and dragging the pads and struggling out of clothes.
So they did it, poor Benjamin Hood’s creepy disconnected finger left forgotten and alone on the shelf above. Too weary to make it explosive, too tentative and clumsy to make it sublime, but a release nonetheless. It left her warm, and worried that she’d made a mistake. Stay away from men, that’s my advice. So why did it feel so right? They fell asleep, his arm across her until he rolled over, and she didn’t wake again until the approaching dawn had turned the windows milk-gray.
She blinked sleepily, looking at unfamiliar shadows, stretching stiffly on the sleeping pad. Jake’s breathing was heavy but so far he didn’t snore. Point for Barrow. There were also the sounds of field mice or worse skittering
