He glanced at Jenk, who also appeared to be tied and gagged, at least at first glance. In case any of the naughty SAS boys peeped in through the windows.
“Ready?”
Jenk nodded. With his cheeks rosy from the chill in the air, and his eyes bright with excitement, he looked more like a kid who’d just put a frog in his teacher’s drawer than a deadly Navy SEAL. But that was part of his particular charm.
Ken squeezed the trigger of the pseudo-automatic. Two short bursts, aimed at the floor.
“Get down,” he shouted in Gordie’s accent. “Get on the focking floor! Yer dead—so dinna ye move!”
He counted out the seconds it would have taken him to bind and gag two men, and then, crawling on his stomach, pulling his weapon behind him, he pushed at the door, propping it so that it would stay open. With great drama, aware that all eyes were on him, he dragged himself down the steps and into the dirt, leaves, and fallen pine needles outside of the hut.
He was Gordie, he was Gordie, he was Gordie. Keep the accent up, keep his face down in the shadows.
“If you’re out there, boys, I sure enough now could use some help,” he called in a low voice. Gordie’s voice. Allie, allie, ox in tree, boy-Os. “I had a bit of a fall, and my ankle’s focked up good. I think it’s broken for real.”
Ah, shite, that last bit sounded far more like John Lennon than Gordie MacKenzie. Still, maybe Gordie sounded like John Lennon when he was in serious pain, because—jackpot!—here they came.
Four of ’em, silently slipping out of the brush and shadows like ghosts, coming to his aid. That meant two were hanging back.
And there it was again. Gilligan’s wild turkey. Which meant his teammates had pinpointed the locations of the other two SAS boys who were cautious enough to stay hidden.
Once these four got close enough to see his face in the twilight, the game would move to the next phase. The chaos phase. His favorite. Ken clenched his teeth so he wouldn’t smile.
“I’ve got two kills in the cabin,” Ken reported à la Gordie. “Which means there’s only three of ’em out there, with one weapon between ’em. Because I’ve got their other right here.”
He pulled it up into a firing position, and damn, Gordie was at least half right. His boys were pretty good, considering the fact they never should have left the cover of the brush in the first place.
Either they had great intuition or 20/40 vision, because he didn’t get a single shot off.
They fired, he was hit, and then he couldn’t get a shot off. The sensors in the uniform screwed with the computer in the automatic weapon, rendering it useless.
To him.
Although he was dead, his aim was still good, and he neatly tossed the weapon back through the open doorway of the hut.
Then Jenkins was there, popping out like a nightmare jack-in-the-box, weapon blazing. And just like that, the game was over for those four wee brave SAS laddies.
It was over for the two in the bush, as well.
And the sun hadn’t even fully set.
Ken went into the hut to cut Gordie free. “You lose.”
“You son of a whore,” Gordie accused as soon as the gag was out of his mouth.
“Actually, my mother’s quite nice. Kind of conservative. You’d like her. She attends church—”
“Is everything a focking joke to you?”
Kenny considered the question carefully. “No. In fact, I took this training op very seriously—enough to completely kick your ass in record time. Six SAS boys and the hostage dead—killed by friendly fire no less. The computer will make a special little note of that.”
“They didn’t kill me, they killed you.”
“Details, details. As in your boys missed an important one—such as the fact that I was wearing your uniform. If they really were the elite force that they’re supposed to be, they should have been paying attention. I would have made a point to know everything there was to know about the computer program that was running this show.”
“Sure,” Gordie grumbled, “and since you’re some kind of focking computer genius, you would’ve gone in and rewritten the program so that your opposition’s weapons wouldn’t fire. That’s called cheating, Karmody.”
“Not according to my definition, it’s not,” Ken said, still able to sound serene in the face of Gordie’s anger because he was right. “It’s called being prepared.”
“What about throwing your weapon to Jenkins that way? I saw you, you know. When you’re dead you’re supposed to play dead. That was cheating for sure. I’ll bet you do it because you know you wouldn’t win in a fair fight.”
Ken’s cool slipped a notch. “Yeah, gee, sorry, MacKenzie, you’re abso-fucking-lutely right. Of course we all know real terrorists never cheat. And we also all know that there’s never been a case of a tango—even one who’s been shot in the head—managing to squeeze off a few more rounds and killing his attackers after he’s as good as dead.”
A year ago, this was where Kenny would’ve followed up on Gordie’s insult by challenging him to a fair fight right there and then. Bare fists and no rules—let’s see who walks away and who crawls. Come on, dickhead. Hit me. Just hit me. . . .
But a year ago, he hadn’t yet made chief. With the higher rank came the responsibility to not be an asshole—particularly not in front of his men.
“I’m going to see that the results of this op are challenged,” Gordie blustered. “Your CO is going to hear about this from me.”
“From me, too,” Ken countered, managing to smile because he knew that Gordie was baiting him, and he knew that by staying cool he was completely pissing off the other man. “My team did one fine job today. I’m going to make sure Lieutenant Commander Paoletti knows all about it.”
Gordie made himself large. “My boys were supposed to learn something here today.”
Ken nodded. “Yeah,” he said as he stepped around MacKenzie. “Let’s hope they did.”
This book contains an excerpt from the forthcoming edition of Out of Control by Suzanne Brockmann. This excerpt has been set for this edition only and may not reflect the content of the forthcoming edition.
An Ivy Book
Published by The Ballantine Publishing Group
Copyright © 2001 by Suzanne Brockmann
Excerpt from Out of Control by Suzanne Brockmann copyright © 2001 by Suzanne Brockmann
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by The Ballantine Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto.
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Manufactured in the United States of America
First Edition: September 2001
eISBN: 978-0-345-44948-1
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