Broken Promises (6 page)

Patrick finally nodded and lowered his gaze.

The lieutenant slipped out of the cockpit, pulling the door tightly closed behind him before he swiped a hand on his hip. A muffled sound came from within, followed by a thump against the door.

“What’s going on in there?” Jasper asked with raised brows.

The other man quickly shook his head. “Nothing, sir. We loaded some cargo at our last stop. Classified material, so the captain is keeping it with him, but it makes the cockpit…cramped.”

Callie wanted to ask why the captain didn’t come out to welcome them aboard, but perhaps that simply wasn’t done on a military transport.

The tiny cabin was dark and cramped, much of the available space taken up by wooden crates stamped with what looked to be random letters and numbers in a thick black paint. She knew the lettering wasn’t actually random, that it no doubt meant something to whoever was having the boxes transported. Would anyone care if she indulged her curiosity and peeked inside one of them? These boxes were obviously not as sensitive as the cargo the captain was keeping his eye on personally, but she certainly didn’t want to be accused of tampering with government property, so she discarded the temptation.

“Why we haven’t departed yet?”

Jasper moved to a dirty window and looked out. “I don’t hear the propellers or the engine, but we’ve drifted quite a distance from the ground already.” He frowned. “What reason for the delay, I wonder?” He turned as the lieutenant was rushing to pull on a thick green vest.

Jasper lunged for him with a growl, but the man was already on his knees, yanking on the hatch. It slammed open but as the lieutenant tried to jump out, Jasper leaped over the open space and hit him. They came together in a tangle of arms and legs, crashing up against a pile of crates. The unmistakable sound of fists connecting with flesh and corresponding grunts of pain shocked her as the two men fought.

The sudden rush of air caused the ship to veer to the side and she screeched, flinging her hand out for whatever she could hold on to. But her fingers only grazed the plank of a large crate, and she lost her balance.

She fell and went sliding across the floor of the airship…headed right for the opening.

Her heart flew into her throat. There was nothing to grab on to, no way to change her trajectory. One more second and the belly of this beast would dump her out into the sky. It didn’t take much imagination to envision how fast and hard she’d drop with all the iron weighing her down.

Her hair whipped about as she met the opening. She threw out an arm but the opening in the floor was too wide to brace herself and she kept sliding.

A scream caught in her throat as she was suddenly yanked to a stop. Halfway out the hatch already, she hung upside down, belly digging into the wooden edge of the opening. She saw the trees and fields below her…far below.

Heart pounding so fast she feared it might fail her, she scrambled for purchase to pull herself back in. Whoever had hold of her ankles helped from behind.

“I’ve got you, my lady,” Patrick said.

As he pulled her back from the opening, Jasper was there too. He grabbed her by the shoulders as soon as she was clear, and together they shuffled well out of the way of the hatch on their knees.

“Callie.” His voice broke and he held her so tight, it was difficult to breathe. She shook her head and took deep breaths, too shaken to speak.

He looked at Patrick and pointed to the unconscious lieutenant lying on the floor across from them. “There’s a length of rope. Tie that bastard up for now. We’ll get him up and talking once I check the cockpit.”

“You think he did something to the captain?”

Callie’s gaze narrowed on the lieutenant. The man’s nose had been bloodied, and his eye was already starting to swell. She blinked and looked a little closer. Something else was wrong with his face, but Jasper had probably hit him pretty hard and he would be black, blue and swollen all over in another few hours.

“I think after all the commotion, if we still
had
a captain, he would have been out here to see what the hell was going on.”

Callie shivered. Just as she was about to drop her gaze, the lieutenant opened his eyes and grinned. Right at her.

And then he shoved Patrick out of the way and took a long dive right through the still open hatch.

Jasper swore and leaned forward. Callie heard a rustling sound, and when she edged closer to the opening and looked out, it was to see a wide green parachute unfolding from the pack strapped to the man’s back.

“What are we going to do?” Patrick asked.

“The only thing we can do for now. Let him go.”

The two men replaced the heavy door over the hatch. “Are you all right?” Jasper asked her.

She nodded. “What about the captain?”

He stepped up to the cockpit door and rapped hard on the worn, dark wood panel. There was no answer, and after another heavy knock, he reached for the door latch. “It isn’t locked, but I can’t open the door. I think something is jammed up against it from the other side.”

He pushed hard, and the door shifted inward just enough for one person to squeeze through. But not Jasper. Even twisted sideways, he wouldn’t make it. “Hello?” he called.

Nobody was surprised when there was no answer. The three of them shared matching looks of pained apprehension.

After peering through the opening into the cockpit, Jasper turned back to her with a frown. “It’s too dark to see anything in there, but we definitely don’t have a pilot anymore.”

Stepping forward, Callie motioned him aside. “Let me slip through. I’ll get in and open the door from the other side.”

He paused.

“Jasper,” she warned.

“All right.” He stepped aside. “But be careful.”

She didn’t deign to respond, even though the urge to tell him she was more than capable of entering a dark room by herself was strong enough to make her bite her tongue. She put her hands against the wood panel and twisted her body sideways as she shuffled carefully through the opening. As she pushed against the door, it shifted a little wider and she was able to step all the way inside.

It didn’t matter that the small room was almost completely dark, her artificial eye allowed her to see everything plainly, albeit in shades of shadow. Someone had pulled thick black coverings over the window in front of the captain’s chair. The pilot himself was not in his seat. It wasn’t until Callie turned and looked behind her to find what had blocked the door that she saw why…and realized what she’d heard earlier.

Her gasp must have been loud even with her hand pressed tight over her mouth. Jasper was shoving at the door from the other side. “What is it? Callie, get back out here right now.”

The pilot was collapsed facedown on the floor right by the door. It had been his body blocking the way. “Sir!” she cried out, hoping he wasn’t actually…dead. “Sir, are you all right?”

She knelt before him and reached for his hand, but her heart plummeted. He wasn’t breathing, and his skin was already so cold. Clearing her throat, she called, “Jasper, stop pushing against the door. I’m going to get it open. Just give me a moment to move the pilot’s body out of the way.”

Chapter Five

The three minutes Jasper was forced to wait on the other side of that door were three of the longest minutes of his life. He stood like a stone, every muscle clenched as he strained to keep himself in check. The last thing Callie needed was for him to make this more difficult for her.

He couldn’t see what she was doing, but he heard everything. Her harsh intake of breath—that must have been when she saw the body. Her whispered prayer for forgiveness, as if she were the one who’d done the poor man in. The shuffle of her feet as she took a few steps around him to get into position, and finally the slide of his body being pushed or pulled away from the door.

As soon as he was certain it was clear, he carefully shoved the door again. This time it swung wide. He rushed to her side. “Are you all right?”

She nodded, but her hand shook slightly as she brushed a lock of hair from her face. There was a dark splotch on the sleeve of her jacket that hadn’t been there before. He reached for her, but she shook her head and jerked her hand away. “Jasper, I’m fine. I’m not the one who was stabbed and left to die in here.”

That was when he saw the blood staining the knees of her trousers. She followed his gaze down and grimaced. “I knelt in it without realizing, but that doesn’t matter.” She turned back to the body. She’d moved the dead pilot into the captain’s chair. His hands had been placed neatly in his lap, but the hilt of a short-bladed knife stuck out of his chest.

Patrick remained in the doorway, looking pale and stricken. “We should have insisted on checking on him earlier.”

“And if we had, we might be dead as well,” Jasper said.

“But why?” Callie finally looked away from the pilot, her face shadowed, haunted.

“I don’t know, but at the moment it isn’t our concern.” He sighed at his own callousness when Callie flinched. “Patrick, help me move the body into the hold of the ship so I can man the controls.”

“What are you going to do?”

“We’ve been ordered to get ourselves to Manchester with the utmost haste, have we not?”

“Are you saying you can fly this thing?”

“We’ll find out, won’t we?” He didn’t tell her the one and only time he’d flown an airship was in a training mission almost ten years ago.

Moving behind the chair, he grabbed the body by the shoulders as Patrick crouched and lifted his booted feet. Suddenly, the younger man paused. “What is that over there?”

Callie bent over as well. “It looks like an old mantel clock. But what’s it doing under there?”

Jasper’s breath caught. Heart hammering, he ran around the pilot’s chair to her side and got down on one knee. An old clock was indeed tucked beneath the pilot’s steering panel. Three wires jutted from the back and disappeared into a hat box, of all things, which had been set beside it. That had to be where the explosive was.

The minute hand was ticking steadily. Backward.

“Good Lord, Jasper. Is that what I think it is?” Her voice broke.

He lunged for the clock, but she stopped him. “No. Oh God, wait.”

“Callie, we have to get it out of here.”

“If you pull on it, you’ll disconnect the wires going into the box. Isn’t there a possibility doing so could cause it to explode immediately, instead of when the timepiece finishes counting down?”

He wasn’t sure. He knew nothing about bombs. He’d hoped disconnecting the timer would simply stop the process altogether, but Callie could be right. He couldn’t take the chance.

“We have to get out of here!” According to the timepiece, they had less than three minutes to escape the airship before the bomb went off and turned it into a fiery deathtrap hurtling to the ground.

“Callie, Patrick. Go! Open the hatch and throw out the rope ladder. You get down that thing as fast as you can.” He stood and pushed her ahead of him back toward the door.

“But Jasper, we’ve drifted too high and there’s not enough time!”

“Go! Go! Go!” He turned to the controls but the lieutenant had not only murdered the pilot but sabotaged their ride as well. The panel was cracked, as if something had been smashed against it repeatedly. He flicked switches. Half of them didn’t work, and he couldn’t remember what operated what until a small indicator blinked red. It meant gas was venting from the balloon. Hopefully, that would increase the speed of their descent.

He leaned forward to reach another switch in the panel overhead and then gripped the control wheel, pushing and angling it down until he could feel the nose of the airship going into a gentle dive.

Patrick was out of the cockpit already, but Callie stubbornly lingered. “Go, Callie. Hurry.”

“Not without you!”

The seconds ticked by. He had to get her out. With a harsh breath, he shook his head. “Then help me with the pilot. We have to brace something against this control arm so the ship continues to dive. Hopefully we’ll make it close enough to the ground that we can jump before the bomb goes off.”

Callie blanched, but she nodded and lifted one of the man’s arms over her shoulder. Together, they wedged the body against the control arm before making a run for the door.

Patrick was opening the hatch and Jasper pushed Callie toward it. The airship had strayed farther from the landing site since the lieutenant parachuted out. It had also risen quite high into the air and, despite its slow downward trajectory, floated at least a few yards above the treetops.

Jasper helped Patrick unravel the ladder and they tossed it out, but it obviously no longer touched the ground—not that they had a choice but to climb down anyway. He clapped the young man on the shoulder. “Go on,” he ordered. “And hurry!”

Once Patrick had taken the first three rungs of the ladder, Jasper turned back to Callie. “It’s your turn. You can’t wait for him to get all the way to the end of the rope. You have to follow him now.”

“I know.” The terror in her eyes was all too visible, and she clenched both fists. He held a breath, but he knew even before she swallowed and nodded that she wasn’t going to let him down. “Jasper, I—”

He put two fingers over her mouth. “Not until we’re safely down on the ground, my love.” His hands on her shoulders, he pressed gently. “Now go. Please go.”

He held her hand and helped her out of the airship onto the ladder, faking calm and silently urging her to hurry. Vocalizing his urgency wouldn’t help. The last thing he wanted was for either of them to lose their footing and fall.

The seconds raced by faster and faster. The clock was ticking right inside his head. As soon as Callie was free of the opening, Jasper swung down to the ladder as well, but he feared it was too late. There couldn’t be much more time lef—

The sudden crack echoed in his ears, turning a bright day into immediate chaos. The force of the explosion sent the instantly flaming airship hurtling across the sky, along with the ladder all three of them were clinging to.

He’d been expecting it and held on easily. A glance down and he was relieved to see Callie did as well. Patrick swung by one hand, but he quickly reclaimed his grip.