by Dees, Cindy
It was a demonstration of raw brutality Mike could do without. Faintly nauseous, he forced himself to sink into the cold detachment this line of work so often required of him. It was just a job. Someone had to do it, and as chance would have it, this moment had fallen to him. It wasn’t personal. Just work. He never failed to be surprised, though, when no one intervened in one of these scenarios. Welcome to hell.
Rather than watch any more arcs of blood sail through the air and land in modern art splats on the dusty street, he ranged his scope up and down the city block, then across the opposite rooflines. A glint of…something…caught his eye. He zeroed in on the metallic flash where no such thing should be, positioned on a rooftop near the left end of the street. His right thumb depressed the gun sight’s zoom button and the pinpoint flash of light raced toward his eye, growing exponentially in size. It came into focus.
Shit!
Two round black circles pointed at him, large over small, scope over barrel.
Another sniper!
And the weapon—a Sig 550 modified sniper rig with what looked like a Kahles telescopic sight—was pointed directly back at him. For a shocked instant, Mike’s one-eyed gaze locked with that of the other sniper, scope to scope.
* * *
Piper Roth dived for the flat roof below the raised lip of the storefront serving as a shield. Holy crap! Breathing heavily, she lay there, rough asphalt shingles burning her cheek. Who was that? Why hadn’t the other sniper shot her? Cautiously easing upward, she pressed an eye against her scope once more. The other shooter was gone.
Damn, damn, damn.
Grabbing the rifle, tripod and all, and slinging it over a shoulder, she leaped for the back of the roof. Crouched low. Dodged around a rusty rain cistern and slammed the rappelling clip, pre-tied to an escape rope, which was pre-tied to a leg of the cistern, onto a belt loop. A running jump off the roof, one-hundred-eighty degree twist in mid-air to catch herself against the wall with her feet, jarring herself from foot to hip. She absorbed the blow, pushing up and away from the wall in a giant, leap-frogging descent.
Her feet hit the ground. Thank God. A stumble, and she ripped the clip free. The rope. No time to retrieve it. No biggie. This observation post was blown anyway. Who was that guy?
Time for the rest of her emergency egress plan. Down to the end of the alley. A quick look out into the street, a block over from the action. Fortunately, the boulevard was deserted, compliments of the shots fired a few minutes ago. She took off running.
At the next corner, she slowed, breathing heavily, and peered around the bullet chipped corner of a building into the crossing street. A flash of movement disappeared behind a building, moving away from the scene of the beating. Could be a local fleeing for cover. Could be the other sniper.
Paralleling the guy’s path, she eased around the corner, hugging the dusty slivers of shadow for what scant cover they could provide. She glided forward slowly now. The sun was oppressive, blistering the street cruelly. All was as still as an old western town, moments before a shootout between gunslingers. Not even a puff of air passed through to stir a bit of dust. Hopefully, this game of cat-and-mouse wouldn’t come to that.
No help for it. What safety there was lay on the other side of the street. She started across the broad boulevard, sauntering without an apparent care in the world. People in this place smelled fear like they smelled supper cooking and responded to both like ravenous dogs. She was dressed as a man and needed to move like one. If her cover were blown and she was found out for a woman—she didn’t even want to think about what would happen to her.
She made the far curb and let out the breath she’d been holding. A narrow alley loomed between an occupied building and the shot up shell of what used to be a grocery store. She took off in a short sprint to the other end.
Another street. Another slow saunter across its Grand Canyon width, and another mad dash down a fetid alley—this one an informal trash dump for the area. Up and over a pile of foul refuse—plastic bags, chunks of concrete, and the contents of chamber pots.
The third crossing street yielded a glimpse of a running figure. Angling toward her. Dammit. She broke into yet another sprint and spurted several blocks forward. Paused. Looked left. Right. No alleys nearby. Just a shelled out apartment building, five stories high. It was a maze of partial walls and sudden openings. Not great, but better than nothing. She ducked inside the ruin.
* * *
Mike stopped in the middle of the street, looking around urgently. Where in hell had the other sniper gone? He’d completely evaporated. The guy had been standing right here, hesitating, and then he’d just disappeared.
He had to find the other sniper. It was his job to know everyone who walked these streets. Not to mention his life might depend on knowing all the players. Who else had a man in the area, and why had he been sent? Another government? A private operator? Was the other sniper only here to observe? Or was his purpose more direct? More sinister? Some of the baddest motherfuckers on the planet scrapped and fought—and sold their services—on these streets. Men who made Carlos and Osama look like Girl Scouts.
Nobody came to Khartoum for the weather.
The hull of a dead apartment building loomed before him. He picked his way over the ground floor of the building’s crumbling concrete remains, its steel bones exposed and twisted. No self-respecting sniper would trap himself on the top floors of a layout like this. He frowned. Unless there was another way down from the upper floors besides the wrecked central staircase he’d just spotted…
Too many questions rattling around his head. Not enough answers. He eased up the pocked concrete stairs, poked his head up cautiously, and glanced around the hollow shell of the second floor. It was too quiet up here. Too still. On a hunch, he descended the stairs he’d just climbed, as quiet as a panther. He raced across the littered, grafittied ground floor toward the back of the building. He was taking a gamble by giving up the front exit. It left an escape route for the other sniper.
He emerged behind the building and spied the remains of an iron fire escape dangling precariously from a few rusty bolts in the back wall. He sure as hell wouldn’t want to try it. He estimated the thing wouldn’t take more than a couple hundred pounds max. And with the other sniper toting around a heavy rifle and gear, that didn’t leave a hell of a lot of body weight to spare.
On fast, silent feet, he moved away from the building, far enough to have an unobstructed view of the fire escape. He crouched behind a rubble pile, carefully shifting a couple basketball-sized chunks of concrete to make a hole to peer through. Deep silence settled over the place. If the other sniper decided to head for the front exit, maybe he’d get lucky and hear the guy.
Mike waited.
And waited.
He thought he heard a noise near the top of the fire escape, but saw nothing. This mouse was patient. But not nearly patient enough. Mike had been known to wait a week in the same exact spot for the perfect shot to materialize.
The mouse got antsy after twenty more minutes. Amateur.
He watched in minor disbelief as his quarry swung lightly out onto the fire escape, half-crawling, half-shimmying down its ruined iron length. The guy was a hellatious climber, lithe and smooth, swinging from rung to rung like a gymnast. The rifle across the sniper’s back clanged into a handrail and the guy froze. Weighing options, no doubt. The sniper opted for speed over stealth. Mike watched, impressed, as he flung himself downward, taking three and four steps at a time. The stair trembled under the onslaught, its bolts squealing as it threatened to break free, but the sniper raced on grimly.
Mike chose his moment and pounced just before the guy hit the dirt. The other sniper’s shirt slipped through his hands as the guy lurched and vaulted the stair rail, sailing through the air, landing lightly on deeply bent knees. He was unlucky and his feet shot out from under him on the loose debris, but the sniper rolled and sprang back to his feet in one athletic motion.
Mike di
ved for the guy’s legs and was stunned to miss as his quarry’s jungle boots slipped through his grasp. Man, that guy was fast. He grunted as he hit the ground and was forced to roll to his feet himself. The other sniper was getting away! He shoved upright, ignoring his stinging palms, and gave chase.
Although the mouse was quick, Mike was stronger. As the sniper scurried through the streets of the Khartoum neighborhood, Mike gradually gained on him until he was so close he heard the mouse’s labored breathing, rasping fearfully. The guy rounded a corner and slipped, almost losing his feet. Mike put on an extra burst of speed and launched himself forward. His arms wrapped around the other sniper’s waist, his momentum carrying them both crashing to the ground in a tangle of limbs and rifles and nylon straps.
He knew the second he landed on top of his quarry.
The other guy was not a guy.
What the hell?
The sniper, a woman for Christ’s sake, thrashed beneath him, jabbing for his eyes and throat, her knee wrenching up toward his groin.
“Let…me…go,” she ground out in American-accented English between gritted teeth as she struggled.
“Not on your life,” he grunted back, straining to force her wrists away from his face. They grappled in fierce silence. Inch by hard earned inch, he won the day, his superior strength overtaking this woman’s steely determination. Vivid blue eyes glared up at him from a tanned strip of face covered in dirt. She yielded all of a sudden, the fight draining out of her so fast he accidentally slammed the back of her hand to the ground.
“Watch it. That’s my shooting hand,” she snapped.
“Who the hell are you, lady? And who do you work for?”
* * *
Piper glared up at the other sniper, furious at herself for letting him catch her. She should’ve been faster. Smarter. Should’ve known the city better before she went up on a roof to observe the action below. Much more coolly than she felt, she replied, “Perhaps we should get out of sight before we have this conversation?”
He shrugged. He was garbed like a native and had a dark enough tan to pass for one. She on the other hand was not the deep bronze of the man in front of her, and only thinly veiled as a man in her pants, boots, and hat to hide her long, feminine hair. She had a hell of a lot more at stake out here than he did.
She added, “With El Noor breaking the truce, death squads from both camps should be roaming the streets shortly.”
Another shrug from the guy sprawled all too suggestively on top of her. Bastard.
As the silence stretched out, she finally snapped, “Get off me.”
“Give me your word you won’t try to run.”
“Not from you, I won’t,” she retorted scornfully.
Grinning, he pushed up and back, gaining his feet and swinging his oversized sniper rifle into a firing position at his hip all in one move.
“What’re you gonna do? Blow my guts out with that thing?” she grumbled as she climbed painfully to her feet.
“Think of it as insurance against having to run around like a maniac any more in this heat.”
She rolled her eyes, glaring. “Your place or mine?”
His mouth twitched with humor. “Where’s your hidey hole?”
“Back by where that guy got beat to death.”
“Dharwani’s men are probably swarming all over there by now. My place then,” the guy answered.
“Lead the way.”
He snorted. “You first. Head for that building over there.” He lifted his chin, indicating where to go.
So much for making a break for it. He sounded American. Looked American with that blond hair and California surfer’s tan. Maybe he had the always-be-nice-to-girls mentality of one, too. Scowling, she picked up her fallen rifle and shouldered it. Following his directions, she clambered across a combination dump and graveyard behind the apartment building. Such was the breakdown of humanity in this place that the dead hardly got civilized burials. She’d only been here a few days and the place was so depressing she was starting to be affected herself.
Her captor directed her down several blocks of back alleys and narrow side streets to yet another two-story, thick walled, mud building. “Stop here.”
This was his hideout, huh? Not bad. It was close to the action, but sitting in the no-man’s land between warring factions.
He reached around her with his left hand to insert a key in a lock in a side door opening onto the nondescript alley. He kept his right hand on the trigger of his rifle and his eyes on her, though, giving her no opening. Cautious SOB. Of course, if their positions had been reversed, she’d have been no less cautious. She peered into the black maw beyond the door and couldn’t make out a thing.
“Upstairs.”
She was getting good and sick of that drill sergeant tone of voice of his, but he had a big damned gun pointed at her. She heard him lock the outside door behind them. She went up the bare, concrete stairs fast, forcing him to race up the stairs behind her.
She stopped just short of the door. “I assume you’ll go first so I don’t set off your booby traps?”
He took hold of her right arm. She jerked it away, but he was ready and maintained his grip and snapped, “Chill out. If I wanted to kill you, you’d already be dead.”
“I could say the same for you,” she retorted. “I had the shot first.” Not by much, but by enough. She’d just swung her rifle toward the odd movement on a nearby roof, just zoomed in her telescopic sight, just frozen in shock at the sight of another sniper when he’d swung his weapon her way and stared back at her. It was the nastiest surprise she’d had in a very long time.
He swung her through the door and up against the wall in one hard move. “I don’t appreciate having sniper rigs pointed at me a whole hell of a lot, lady.”
She glared back at him as he loomed over her. “And I don’t appreciate being chased all over a damned war zone. You forced me to expose myself a hell of a lot more than I wanted to.”
“You ran away.”
“You chased me.”
“What’s your name?” he demanded. “Who do you work for?” His hazel eyes blazed like arc welding torches, so hot they incinerated her from the inside out.“Who says I work for anybody?” she purred.
“Don’t bullshit me.”
“Who do you work for?” she retorted.
“Can’t you guess?” he growled, stepping even closer to her.
“You’re just a hired gun,” she accused. A big, hot, sexy hired gun.
His voice dropped in pitch and timbre, sliding across her skin like velvet sandpaper. “What does that make you?”
She stared up at him, and he stared back at her. It became a silent contest of wills, and the tension stretched tighter and tighter between them until it finally broke. He surged forward, plastering his mouth against hers as she all but assaulted him, wrapping her arms around his neck and a lustful leg around his hips. His hands grabbed her ass and lifted her against him. He slammed her back against the wall, and she moaned greedily.
She grabbed a handful of his sun-bleached hair and pulled on it, forcing his head back so she could suck at his neck. The salty sweat-and-man taste was sharp and savory on her tongue, and she devoured it hungrily.
Death had come calling this morning, and they’d cheated it. They were alive. Blood coursed hotly through her veins, laced with so much adrenaline she felt like she could fly.
“What’s your name?” he ground out. For emphasis, his tongue swirled inside her ear and made her one leg supporting her weight nearly buckle.
“Piper,” she gasped.
“You’re so damned hot, Piper.”
Said the pot to the kettle. She gasped as he lifted her entire weight with ease, spun away from the wall and sat her on the edge of his table. She flung open her knees as he surged between them, his hands moving restlessly across her back while his mouth roamed across her face, neck, and shoulders.
She could just eat him alive. “Tell me your name.”
<
br /> “No.”
Bastard. Her ammo vest fell away beneath his nimble fingers.
His shoulder holster dropped away beneath hers.
Her thigh knife and garter-sheath hit the ground as he felt his way across her hip.
Her hands slid down acres of man chest to his waist, and his ammo belt thudded to the floor. “Your name,” she gasped.
“No,” he ground out. Her bandolier of shells and flares slid off her shoulder and thunked onto the table behind her.
Taking her with him, he spun away, knocking a chair over heedlessly. She oomphed as he backed her into the refrigerator, then returned the favor by spinning him against the wall. A picture frame hit the floor and broke as he yanked her up against him.
She lifted the throwing knife out of his neck sheath and let it fall to the floor as her insides melted and her body molded to his. She wanted him inside her so bad she could hardly think.
Pocketknives, wrist knives, spare ammo clips, and spotter’s scopes clattered down around them.
He tore her tank top off over her head and she shoved her hands underneath his t-shirt. Lord, his skin was hot to the touch. His abs—holy God. They were slick with a sheen of perspiration, rippling with muscle, and hard as oak. She leaned forward to inhale the musky scent of his deodorant, exploring the male wonderland of his torso with her mouth and hands.
She tore at his zipper, eliciting a groan from him. “Tell me your name,” she demanded again.
“Ahh, God, no,” he groaned as her fingers went exploring.
Frustrated at his refusal to give her a name, she staggered a step back from him. Who was she kidding? She was going to have hot monkey sex with him right here, right now, even if she didn’t know his damned name.
They hopped around awkwardly together for a minute like one-legged kangaroos, yanking at each other’s pants and boots, finally managing to discard them. And then he swept her up in his arms and carried her swiftly into the bedroom.