by Cindy Dees
“Have you got eyes on Mahmoud plus two?” she called quietly.
“Affirmative,” Zane replied.
“I’m watching the young guys. When they’ve almost reached the barns, I’ll fire and draw them back here. If your three move before then, you fire first.”
“Ammo’s very thin,” he warned. “Only take kill shots if able.”
She smiled against the stock of her rifle. She was fully versed in ammo management. He was worried about her. “Roger. Will do,” she replied quietly.
She settled back into emotionless concentration on the scenario unfolding in front of her. She picked the spot where, when the young guys reached it, she would fire at them. She probably wouldn’t hit them at this distance, but she hoped to use the shot to check the accuracy of the weapon’s sights.
All those endless hours on the firing range rolled through her, with neural pathways and habit patterns built over hundreds of shooting sessions and thousands of rounds fired clicking into place. Relax completely. Breathe long and slow. Exhale and hold. One last gun sight correction; her finger touched the trigger...
The pair reached the spot, and she squeezed smoothly through the trigger. The sound of her rifle firing was deafening, shattering the morning’s silence shockingly.
The young men reacted violently, flinching and ducking and then racing back toward Mahmoud’s position behind the shed. She took note of the hole that appeared in the side of the barn. Slightly high and right of where she’d aimed. Duly noted. She would adjust her aim a tiny bit low and left.
She swung her rifle toward the shed, following the zigzagging path of the two terrorists until they disappeared from sight. She would love to be a fly on the wall to hear the discussion happening behind that shed right now. The terrorists had lost the element of surprise, and now they knew their prey was not entirely without teeth. That had to be a nasty shock to poor Mahmoud.
She waited with detached interest to see what he did next. She and Zane were badly outgunned, but they had excellent cover inside this house, and Mahmoud and his guys would have to come out in the open to use their assault weapons.
He and his guys would also be running around with only the ammunition they could carry. And ammo was heavy, which meant they had a finite supply of it and would have to be careful with their firing habits, too.
A drawback of a weapon like an AK-47 was that it could chow through a whole lot of rounds very fast. If Mahmoud’s guys didn’t control their fire tightly, they would spray a few impressive fusillades against the side of the house and then be clicking on empty.
From her and Zane’s end, this was purely a delaying action, buying time for that gunship to get here. Which gave them the tactical advantage.
If any of Mahmoud’s guys weren’t particularly experienced with combat, they were very likely to be excitable and fire off all their ammunition too quickly. She figured Mahmoud, Yousef and Hassan probably would keep their cool. But the younger two...they might be convinced to behave stupidly and unload their weapons all at once.
In Mahmoud’s position, she might order the worst shot of the young guys to go ahead and empty his AK-47 magazines against the side of the house just to gauge what kind of reaction she and Zane had to offer.
Sure enough, one of the young guys jumped out from behind the shed with his weapon held at waist height, one hand on top of the barrel to hold it down as it tried to climb.
“Incoming,” Zane bit out. “Take cover.”
She crouched on her chair behind the sink, making as small a ball as possible. The weapon cut loose, roaring like a dragon as the side of the house was peppered with dozens of rounds. Some of them penetrated the wood siding and missed wall studs, zinging past her to bury themselves in the far wall.
“They’re rushing from behind the shed to your left!” a voice shouted over the phone.
“Incoming!” she called out to Zane. “Left side of the shed!”
Two more men rushed around the corner just as the first round of fire ceased. Piper took quick aim, fully exhaled and pulled off a single shot.
Hassan, the driver, spun back behind the shed. The other guy, one of the young ones, lurched, obviously hit. He spun for cover more slowly than Hassan. But she knew as well as anyone that a single gunshot wound rarely took a combatant completely out of a fight. The other men would be tying a strip of cloth over the wound and telling him to get back in the fight right about now. Shock and adrenaline would mask any pain the kid felt.
“Hostiles on the move again,” Beau reported over the phone. “Looks like they’re spreading out.”
“I’ve got no visual,” she called back, loudly enough for Beau to hear. More quietly, to Zane, she asked, “Any visual?”
“Negative.”
They must be crawling around in some sort of swale that provided them with cover from the house.
“Position report?” Zane asked quietly from the living room.
“Where are they, Lambo?” she called.
“Straight line. About ten yards apart. Thirty yards from your position. They look to be taking up prone firing positions,” Beau replied.
She relayed the information to Zane, relieved that he was as disciplined as he was and prepared to wait out the bad guys with her. Amateurs would be firing away like crazy by now, panicked and burning through their ammo.
All at once, Mahmoud and his men started firing at them. They were, indeed, conserving ammunition, firing single shots and taking turns, keeping up a fairly steady barrage, one shot every fifteen seconds or so. Still, they were going to burn through their ammo quickly that way.
“ETA on that chopper?” she asked Beau.
“Thirteen minutes.”
“Still too long,” she replied tersely.
Beau announced, “Hostiles are advancing, but appear to be prone. Do you have visual to fire?”
“Negative,” she bit out. “Once they hit the front yard, though, the only cover they’ll have is the pickup truck.”
Another voice came on the line. Major Torsten’s. “That truck is only about twenty feet from the house. When they charge you from behind the truck, you’ll only have a few seconds to neutralize all of them, or your position will be overrun. Do you have an egress route?”
“Not really.”
“Can you create one in the next minute or two?” he asked. “Look for chemicals. Can you blow a hole in the back wall of the house?”
“I’m no MacGyver, but I’ll try.”
A quick inventory of the cupboards in the kitchen yielded enough chemicals to create a low-order explosion, but nothing that would punch through a wall.
“Wait a minute,” she exclaimed under her breath. “The guy who owns this house has a model train set. Don’t they use something fairly nasty as fuel?”
Rebel interjected, “Some model trains use nitromethane.”
“Now we’re talking,” Torsten said sharply. “Can you disengage to go look?”
“Zane. I’m leaving my position for a minute. Call if you see movement.”
“Roger. What’s up?” he asked without looking away from the window as she raced through the living room.
“Boss thinks we need an emergency exit. I’m gonna set up an explosion to create an impromptu door on the other side of the house.”
“Um, okay.”
She smiled a little at his apparent confusion. Welcome to working with the Medusas. They were trained to think and operate outside the box. And he—along with the jerks outside—was about to get a taste of what that really meant.
She ducked into the spare bedroom and found a gallon jug of model-engine fuel. Sure enough, it was volatile nitromethane. She carried it and the chemicals she’d brought from the kitchen into the bathroom. Working fast, she unscrewed the toilet tank from the seat and lifted it quickly. Water cascaded all over her feet and the floor as t
he tank emptied.
Working quickly, she plugged the bottom drain hole with duct tape she’d found in the kitchen, then ran a rag through the taped plug to act as a fuse. She tucked the other end of the rag in a bottle of flammable cleaning solvent and set the other containers of chemicals beside it inside the ceramic vessel. She pointed the open tank top directly at the wall. It was a crude-shaped charge at best and might not even work, but it was worth a try.
Worst case, she and Zane could jump out the bedroom windows. But that was a harder maneuver than it looked when armed, trying not to get hurt and needing to land, fall, roll and come up running. Particularly when one or more of Mahmoud’s guys were likely to be waiting for them to come out the windows.
“They’re closing in!” Zane called from the living room.
She raced back to the kitchen and resumed her position in the window. And just in time, too. The long grass on the far side of the yard was moving; five trails of moving grass were headed straight at the house.
“ETA?” she bit out into the phone.
“Hostiles? Twenty seconds. Gunship? Eight minutes.”
“We don’t have eight minutes. We’ve got maybe three,” she snapped.
“Roger. You know what to do. Just relax and let your training take over,” Torsten said calmly. All the faith in the world was packed into his voice, and it steadied her. Focused her on the job at hand.
She called to Zane, “You good?”
“I’m good.”
“Ops thinks they’ll cluster behind the truck and rush us from there. We’ll have a few seconds to take out whoever we can, then we need to retreat to the bathroom, blow the wall and run like hell for the trees. We’ll need to evade until the gunship arrives. Rendezvous when able even with the chicken barns, a hundred yards into the trees.”
“Got it,” he muttered absently. “I’ve got the right-hand field of fire. You’ve got the left.”
“Roger, I’m left,” she replied, making the reflexively ingrained response. She would shoot at whoever came around the left end of the truck. And if all the bad guys came from the same side of the vehicle, she would take the left-hand targets in the cluster.
She watched in total concentration as the trails of swaying grass converged and disappeared behind the truck. The show was about to get real.
Any second now.
She was glad she was in this with Zane. He’d been her rock through everything, and even now he made her feel safe. Protected. The bubble of caring and concern he’d surrounded her with in that kiss a few minutes ago still cocooned her. She still felt his arms around her, the bulwark of his big body shielding her from harm.
She trusted him. With her life.
And then she emptied her mind of even that thought. It was go time.
“They’re gathering themselves to charge,” Beau announced.
“Get ready,” she relayed to Zane.
Without warning, all hell broke loose. Two men rushed from behind the truck and two rushed around the front. Showing as little of herself as humanly possible, she fired at will at the rushing men. She knew without a shadow of doubt that she hit with multiple shots on multiple targets. But the bastards kept on coming.
When they’d almost reached the house and she and Zane were losing any sort of decent angle to fire without showing too much of themselves, he yelled, “Go now!”
She ran for the bathroom and used the cigarette lighter she’d found in a kitchen drawer to light the fuse. She spun into the hall, estimating that she had ten seconds—
It was more like three seconds. A tremendous explosion deafened her, slamming into her body like a physical blow. The whole house rocked violently, and she peeked around the corner. Debris was everywhere, and there was a ragged man-sized hole in the wall.
“Come to me!” she shouted.
Zane spun away from the living room window and sprinted toward her, waving her through the hole ahead of him.
“I’ve got the left,” she called as she jumped outside. Her sweatshirt caught on something and tore, but she yanked violently and pulled free, spinning left to clear that corner of the house.
She felt Zane land beside her and spin right.
They took off running at top speed, crossing the fifty feet or so of lawn in a few seconds and diving into the trees.
They separated to make harder targets of themselves and divide the force brought to bear against them. She dodged and zigzagged, using as many trees for cover as she could. She worked her way up the hill and then cut right, toward the prearranged rendezvous point.
A shot rang out on her right, but she thought it wasn’t aimed at her. She pressed on grimly, not bothering to look over her shoulder. Doing so would only slow her down, and seeing who was behind her wouldn’t make him go away or change where she was headed.
As she neared the rendezvous point, she slowed and veered left, higher up the slope into some heavy brush. The going was very slow through brambles and bushes, but the cover was excellent. Confident she wouldn’t be seen by her pursuers, she eased forward to approach the spot from above.
Peering out from the bushes, she scanned the forest around her both for Zane and for hostiles. Knowing he was out there, she would refrain from shooting at any movement she saw until she had a positive ID on the person.
She hunkered down to wait for Zane to show up, scanning all the while. Her brain raced, replaying the events of the past few minutes quickly, seeking information or mistakes by Mahmoud.
Why had only four men rushed around the truck to attack them? It wasn’t like Mahmoud had come around behind the house to lie in wait for them as they’d blasted their way out. Where had he gone? Had he headed for the barns...and Irv?
Crap. If Zane didn’t show up soon, she would have to head down to the barns to make sure Irv was all right. How much longer should she give Zane before she had to assume he was hurt or pinned down? Did she need to go rescue him?
Who to rescue first? The innocent civilian, or the man who’d saved her life and, not to mention, was her lover?
Her duty was to Irv. But her heart belonged with Zane. And Zane could help her rescue Irv. They would be more than twice as effective working as a team than her alone.
Dammit, she was trying to rationalize going after Zane first.
She wrestled with the decision a few more seconds, praying that he would show up and erase the dilemma, and then spotted movement below her. A man, creeping forward stealthily. Wearing a dark sweatshirt with the hood up—no help. She couldn’t see hair color.
Crouching, she eased around the bushes, heading off to her left. She’d moved maybe twenty feet when she spotted another man. This one stood still in the lee of a large oak tree.
And his hair was light brown touched with gold. Zane.
As she looked on from her perch above, the second man—the first one she’d seen—crept toward Zane.
She lay prone on the ground, propped her rifle on a downed log in front of her and took careful aim. The target, the height and build of Hassan, would pass in front of her about fifty feet away. His profile didn’t make for the world’s biggest target, but she was going for a head shot, anyway. A body shot wouldn’t stop a man like him. It would have to be an outright kill.
She tracked him until he was directly in front of her and paused for a moment, appearing to listen for movement around him. She pulled the trigger.
The shot rang out, and Hassan dropped. She couldn’t see if she’d hit him or not, for Zane took off running to her left, abandoning the rendezvous point. He had no way of knowing it was her who’d fired, of course. She leaped to her feet and paralleled his position, doing her damnedest to keep sight of him as he raced through the trees.
Whenever she could, she angled to her right, down the hill, closer to his path. If someone besides Hassan had been on Zane’s tail, it brought her into danger, too,
making a single target of both her and Zane. But she dared not lose him out here. She might never find him again.
She put on a burst of speed as she crossed a tiny clearing, jumping for the brush on the other side, the back of her neck twitching at being exposed like this.
She dived into the thicket and jolted as an arm snagged her waist, yanking her down violently. She reached for the knife in the back of her jeans, and her hand had just closed on the hilt when Zane’s face appeared in front of hers.
Oh, thank God. Relief that he wasn’t one of Mahmoud’s men made her knees weak for a moment. But in the next breath, her tension ratcheted back up. They were still being hunted out here.
And frankly, she’d had just about enough of that. She didn’t like being the rabbit. She much preferred being the tiger. And given how shot up Mahmoud’s men had to be, she figured this had to be close to an even fight by now.
Zane hand signaled that he’d heard one hostile behind them, farther down the hill.
She leaned forward, putting her mouth directly on his ear. “Time for us to go hunting.”
He nodded, and they moved out together.
Chapter 13
Zane liked the way Piper was thinking. He was pretty much over skulking around in the woods getting shot at.
Moving slowly, they circled back toward the barns and whoever might be behind them. Stealth was on their side now. Piper did something odd in front of him. She moved up the hillside purposefully, gazing from side to side as if she was looking for something.
After about three minutes, she tensed, then stalked forward slowly, her cheek pressed to the Remington rifle in a ready position. He did the same.
She stopped and he spared a glance down at the ground in front of her. Hassan’s sightless eyes stared up at the sky. A large kidney-red hole in the side of his head announced that he was very, very dead.
One down. Four to go. Although Mahmoud and his guys couldn’t possibly be at full strength. As they’d closed in on the house, the men he’d seen had all been bloody and injured.