In the meantime, here he was, Flynn thought gloomily, stuck in isolation—unable to communicate with anyone, not the surviving members of his team and not even his own family. At least the food was decent, for hospital food. Then again, that might only be an omen that they were fattening him up for the bureaucratic kill. What felt like endless hours of debriefings since he’d been flown here from the trauma center in Fairbanks had made a couple of things painfully clear: First, the U.S. intelligence community had desperately wanted to get its grubby hands on that Russian stealth bomber in an intact condition. And second, the spooks were really pissed that the superadvanced aircraft was now scattered in highly radioactive pieces across some desolate slope in the Alaskan Never-Never instead.

Flynn wasn’t sure anyone believed what he’d told them about the Russian colonel’s real plans to blow the hell out of strategic targets from Washington, D.C., to Barksdale Air Force Base in Louisiana. One of the CIA debriefers had even snidely wondered why Flynn hadn’t had the foresight to record Petrov’s demented ramblings on his smartphone as evidence. His quick, smart-ass rejoinder that he’d been kind of too busy “doing all that running and shooting and not dying shit” hadn’t gone over very well. His mouth quirked upward in a wry grin. It might be time he reread that book on how to make friends and influence people. Its lessons obviously hadn’t stuck.

There was a soft knock on his door. Flynn looked up warily. It wasn’t anywhere near lunchtime yet, which left only a series of unpleasant alternatives ranging from the next round of painful physical therapy for the injuries he’d sustained while ejecting . . . to another mind-numbing debriefing session where intelligence officers asked him the same damned questions over and over and over again, obviously hoping they could trip him up somehow. For just a moment, he was tempted to call out “Go away!” just to see what would happen. But then he shrugged. Anything, painful or not, was probably better than just lying here. And not, not, not thinking about the itch between his shoulder blades that he could not scratch.

The door opened.

And Captain Laura Van Horn came in. The attractive, dark-haired National Guard pilot grinned cheerfully at the surprised expression on his face. “Wow, Nick. I heard you’d had a tough time, but I have to say that you really do look like hell.”

With an effort, Flynn closed his mouth. “It’s camouflage,” he told her, smiling back. “I’m only lulling the sentries out there by looking helpless like this. That way I can catch them off guard when I make my move to break out of this joint.”

Van Horn came over and gently tapped the solid plaster cast encasing his chest and arms. “Pretty good camouflage,” she commented dryly.

“I may have gone a bit overboard,” Flynn admitted. He raised an eyebrow. “Which leads me to wonder just how you got in here. From what I can tell, I’m sort of off-limits to just about everyone.”