“Help!” Sarah shouted. Then she stood, letting the man see her. “Please! Help me! My friend, she isn’t breathing!”
Zhanna didn’t miss a beat. She immediately lay back on her back and splayed out her arms and legs. Sarah ran around the front of the boat she was hiding behind.
“Please, can you please help me?”
The thin, dark-haired man said, “Sorry. I can’t help. I’m sorry.”
Sarah thought quickly. “Can you please call for an ambulance then? Please?”
“No—I mean . . . Hold on, I’m coming,” the man said.
Sarah knew that would do the trick. She knew attention would be the last thing he would want to be drawn to this area right now. The man exited the boat and began walking toward her. As he came into the light, she could tell by the bulge in his pocket he was carrying a gun.
“Oh, thank you. Thank you!” Sarah said to him. “I don’t know what happened, she just collapsed.”
The man rounded the boat and saw Zhanna lying on the ground. Sarah moved in behind him, ready to knock him unconscious when the time was right. But she didn’t have to. As soon as the man knelt down, Zhanna brought her right shin to the side of his head with an impressive force for a woman on her back. The man toppled over and face-planted on the concrete. Sarah pushed out her bottom lip and raised an eyebrow, impressed.
Zhanna jumped to her feet and shrugged her shoulders. “What? I thought he was going to try to give mouth to mouth.”
Sarah pulled out her gun and spoke into her earpiece. “Kyle, where are you? We’re coming!”
She waited a moment to hear Kyle’s voice.
The only thing her right ear heard in return was music.
30
Where There’s Smoke . . .
Melanie fired the gun as soon as she brought it near Xander’s head. With no time to spare, Xander was able to shoot his left arm up to meet hers, and the gun went off right beside his ear. He couldn’t help but recoil from the painful sound. When he did, Melanie jumped from her foot pegs and drove Xander to the ground. He managed to get his hand on her wrist that held the gun, and he banged it as hard as he could against the hardwood floor. She punched him in the face, and through the smoke he grabbed for her, but he only came away with the wig. He slammed her gun hand against the floor again, and this time she let out a yelp as the gun skittered across the floor.
Now she was in trouble.
The white smoke was so thick at that point that his eyes began to water and his lungs began to burn. Xander reached up and grabbed her by the throat. She wrapped both her hands around his wrist as he squeezed, but there was nothing she could do. He was too strong. With the force of a car accident, Xander slammed her down to the floor beside him, removing her from her straddled position over him. When her shoulder smashed into the floor, all the air gusted from her lungs and she choked trying to find a breath. He held his hand to her throat as he rose to his knees and began to apply downward pressure, taking his grip from painful to excruciating.
“Where”—cough—“is Natalie?”—cough, cough. His lungs were on fire, and his voice didn’t sound like his own. The anger inside him was boiling over. Of course, Melanie couldn’t answer with her throat being smashed in his grip, but he didn’t let up. “Where?”
“Melania! Where are you?” a man shouted from the opposite end of the dining hall.
Xander released his hold on Melanie, took a deep breath, and rolled into the thickest of the white smoke. He didn’t know how many would be coming in after him, but he was certain they would be armed, and you can’t shoot what you can’t see. He unzipped his pocket, pulled out his Marfione OTF knife, put his gun in his pocket, zipped up his pocket, and pressed the button on the grip, releasing the blade from its sheath. All he could see was red. He turned over and dropped to his stomach. The smoke wasn’t quite as thick there. To his left, he could just make out Melanie, holding both hands to her throat, still trying to catch her breath from the squeeze of Xander’s grip. Back to his right, he could see boots. Three sets of them. The smoke swirled from the doorway and around the movement of the men who were entering the dining room. Xander put his mouth down to the floor, sucked in the cleanest air he could, then rose to a crouch, knife at the ready.
* * *
After hearing the gunshot below her, Sam pushed herself up off the half-headless gunman, commandeered his MP5 submachine gun, gave it a press check, and took a deep breath before making her way to the side of the rooftop deck. She wasn’t going to go barging into the dining room. She knew Xander could defend himself. And she knew she wouldn’t be able to see inside with all the smoke. The best thing she could do was scour the outside and make sure she at least kept as many bad guys away from him as she could. She jogged over to the starboard side of the boat, and just as she looked down over the edge, she heard another rifle shot from the distance, and the man below her went down instantaneously. Jack had that side of the boat covered for at least another minute as the boat floated by his position on the river’s edge.
Something moved in the corner of Sam’s eye. Her reflex automatically brought the MP5 to firing position, and just as another man pulled himself up on the roof, Jack put a bullet in him as well. Sam quickly looked down below that man and squeezed off a quick burst of rounds, dropping the gunman just below his ally. She then moved immediately to the other side of the boat where she saw the tail ends of two more men running around the corner to the front of the boat. They were moving toward the men she and Jack had just taken out. If they continued to run around to the other side, they would be dead in Jack’s range.
Sam shouldered her weapon, hopped the rail, and dropped down to the walkway, trapping the men between her own gun and Jack’s sniper rifle on the other side of the boat. She stalked toward them as they disappeared around the front. She glanced behind her to make sure she was alone. That was when she heard the blast of Jack’s sniper rifle again. She brought the butt of the MP5 to her shoulder, and as the second gunman rounded the corner back toward her, just as his face registered the shock of looking down the barrel of her gun, she put a three-round burst into his chest, dropping him face-first to the floor of the boat.
From above her, a man shouted down to her. She swung her gun in the direction of the wheelhouse and found a man—not the captain—holding a pistol on her. He had her dead to rights, so she released her grip on the MP5, and it hung down by her side from the shoulder strap.
The man extended his arms, making sure Sam could see the gun. “Keep your hands up. Who are you?”
Sam raised her hands, once again calculating her options.
From the front of the boat a man walked out of a door and shouted, “Hold it right there!”
In one motion, Sam spun toward the man at the front of the boat, took the MP5 in her hand, and as she fell onto her back she fired at the man who stood outside the doorway some thirty feet away. Before she could see if she had hit him, she looked straight up from her back, and as the man from the wheelhouse leaned over the rail to take a shot at her, she squeezed the trigger and a string of bullets blasted the man in the chest and neck. She had no time to do anything but jump to her feet and jump forward out of the way of the man’s body falling straight for her from the railing. A bone-cracking thud hit the deck beside her only a millisecond after she moved. She immediately turned back toward the man at the front of the boat, expecting to see yet another gun trained on her, but instead the yellow light from the side of the boat showed her a man on his side, crawling toward his gun that had fallen from his hands. She must have hit him somewhere in the leg because the arm that wasn’t reaching for the gun clutched at his right knee.
“Don’t move,” Sam warned. The man stopped reaching.
In a French accent, he pleaded with Sam. “Please. Please do not shoot me. I was just hired for security. I do not know the men who chartered this boat. Please, you must believe me.”
Sam didn’t believe him.
She walked toward him,
and he quickly reached for his gun. That was when Sam shot a hole in the man’s hand. His hand recoiled from the gun, and he let out a scream of agony that echoed across the river and bounced back to Sam’s ear from the riverwalk.
Sam moved over to him, kicked him in the side of the head, then put her boot to his wrist, trapping his injured hand against the boat’s wood-planked flooring. The man let out another awful scream. Sam leveled the MP5 at his head and cleared her throat.
“If you think this is pain, wait and see what I do if you don’t tell me where is the man is who’s behind all of this.”
The man looked up at Sam, searching her eyes for a hint of mercy.
He found none.
31
Getaway Clean?
Kyle frantically searched the dark, overcrowded, and overly loud nightclub. He couldn’t let Khatib’s men get to Adeline and her friend before he did. And he couldn’t continue to bowl over the people dancing in the club like he had been doing, or he would also have to deal with bouncers. He weaved his way through the sea of partiers like a boxer parrying punches. He came up on a woman with blonde hair, grabbed her shoulder to turn her around, and he only found a scowl from someone who looked nothing like Adeline. The way he was going about finding her was hopeless. The crowd was too large, and from the vantage point of being on the floor with them it was impossible to see more than three or four people in front of him. He needed a better spot to search from.
Against the wall on his right, a woman dressed in a black leather bikini was dancing on a raised platform. Kyle had no time to be concerned with how ridiculous this place seemed. Instead, he pushed past several more drunken partiers and climbed up beside the dancing woman. She took it as him wanting to party so she began grinding up against him. To avoid causing a scene, he let her dance as he scanned the room all around him. Up ahead, about thirty feet in front of him, in the soft glow of the neon lights, he noticed Khatib’s man push a woman into an area that disappeared around the corner.
The woman looked just like Adeline.
He was too late.
Kyle jumped down from the platform. The time for moving slowly through the crowd was over. As he pushed through, men and women alike were thrown to the right and to the left, and some to the ground. Kyle’s heart was pounding. He may have just let the President’s daughter be kidnapped, or worse, killed. He knew he wasn’t cut out for this. He should have listened to Xander, to Sam. He should have just let them take on this part of Xander’s life. He should have just stayed in his lane and watched over the King’s Ransom bourbon company. He knew he wasn’t much of a business man, but he had to be better at that than he was at this. At saving people. What happened in Syria had just been a fluke. Xander was going to be so disappointed in him—
When Kyle rounded the corner where he had seen Adeline get shoved, the butt of a gun came flying toward his face. Instinct made him parry to the left and the gun came down, grazing his ear, knocking his earpiece out before the gun banged against his shoulder. He immediately stepped inside the man’s reach, put his hip against the gunman’s, wrapped his right arm under the man’s outstretched arm and on around his neck, and twisted hard to his left, throwing the man onto his back. With the man’s arm still trapped, Kyle bent his wrist in a way that made him drop the gun; then he stomped down on the man’s head with the heel of his shoe, knocking him unconscious.
Kyle looked up from the gunman, and his entire body relaxed when his eyes found Adeline and her friend staring back at him. Adeline threw her arms around him, relief rushing to her face, as she now knew Kyle could be trusted.
Kyle asked, “Are you all right? Did he hurt you?”
Adeline let go of him and stepped back. “We’re fine, how did you know we were here at Wanderlust tonight?”
“Doesn’t matter, we have to get out of here, now!”
Adeline nodded and grabbed Karol’s hand with her left and Kyle’s hand with her right. Just like that, the three of them were lost in a sea of people. Kyle thought for a moment that the best way to keep Adeline safe might just be to stay right where they are. Right in the middle of the hundreds of sweat-drenched, alcohol-dazed people who were so involved in trying to get high, or get laid, that they hadn’t even noticed Kyle taking out the bad guy.
Taking out the bad guy.
Kyle liked the sound of that. Maybe he was pretty good at this, after all. The problem for him now was that he had no idea where to go. Here he was, in a place he didn’t know, in a city he didn’t know, and he of all people was the only thing standing between the daughter of the President and some crazy-ass terrorist with a hard-on for Xander. He knew there would be more men at the front of the club. That is where they saw him and Adeline run to. He remembered Sarah saying they would check out the back by the river. Kyle tugged Adeline toward the back wall where there was another hallway. A large bald man, built like the Incredible Hulk, stood guard. Kyle made his way up to the big man. He leaned down to hear what Kyle had to say.
Kyle shouted over the thumping music. “Does this lead out to the back?”
The man made no indication that he understood; he simply flipped his arm in a brushing motion, silently telling Kyle to go back the other way. Kyle then realized he was in France. He probably didn’t speak much English. But there is one universal language that everyone speaks.
Cash.
As Kyle dug inside his pocket, Adeline tugged sharply at his arm, then began to pound on his back. He looked back at her, but she was looking back over her shoulder. Kyle followed her eyes, and his heart sank when he noticed two men swimming through the crowd just a few feet from them. Kyle tugged at his money clip, pulled out the hundred-dollar bill on top, and stuck it out toward the massive bouncer. It may as well have been a key. The bouncer immediately took the hundred, lifted the rope, and Kyle practically lifted Adeline off her feet as he ushered the girls down the hallway.
The hallway seemed more like a cave the farther they walked into it. It was a half-circle shape with only a few dimly lit sconces every few feet on the wall. After about twenty feet, the music began to fade and Kyle could finally hear himself think.
“Where are we going? Who are these people?” Adeline asked. Her voice was shaky; fear had settled in.
Kyle continued to pull Adeline and Karol along. “It’s going to be okay. I have people with me outside. They’re going to help us get out of here.”
It was then that Kyle finally saw a door, marking the end of the tunnel. He looked back over Karol’s head and didn’t see anyone coming for them yet. Everything inside him hoped to see Sarah and Zhanna when he opened that door. He reached for the metal knob, gave it a twist, and when the door opened, a cool rush of air washed over them and along with it came relief.
That feeling of relief was short lived.
“Hold it right there!” a man told Kyle.
As the door shut behind them, Kyle hoped that the French accent meant the French police. But when he turned to his left to have a look, all he found was the end of two submachine guns, being held by two men who were clearly not police officers. Every muscle in Kyle’s body knotted up when he heard the girls scream.
A man dressed in all-black tactical gear nodded toward Kyle. “Don’t get any ideas. You play hero, you die.”
The girls screamed yet again.
“Shut up! Stop screaming or I’ll shoot you too!” the gunman shouted at Adeline and Karol.
That was when Kyle saw Sarah and Zhanna round the corner behind the men.
Sarah shouted, “Don’t move! Put your guns down!”
As soon as both men turned toward Sarah’s voice, Kyle didn’t hesitate. Gunfire erupted, and he pulled Adeline in the opposite direction of the men and straight down a set of stairs that opened to a concrete walkway by the river. Adeline was sobbing. Kyle’s heart was racing as he surveyed the boats tethered to cleats on the walkway. He pulled the girls toward the only boat that looked like it had enough motor to speed away, and after helping them over the r
ail on the bow, he untied the rope and pulled himself onboard. Kyle didn’t know a lot about boats, but he did okay on one in Syria when he had to, so he figured he could do the same here. As he moved along the side of the boat, it was clear it was some sort of fishing vessel. He pushed the girls inside the open door of the cabin, then stepped up into the captain’s chair. He searched the dash, and he audibly exhaled when he noticed the key still in the ignition.
“There’s a key!” He couldn’t contain himself. “Sit down, girls, I’m going to get us out of here!”
He gave the key a turn and the boat fired right up. Kyle looked back at Adeline and pumped his fist. She smiled through her tears and gave him a nod. Kyle glanced through the front window of the boat trying to see if Sarah and Zhanna were okay, but the back entrance to the club wasn’t visible from the water. He sent up a silent prayer for them, threw the boat in reverse, and backed out into the river. Darkness swallowed them as they moved away from the lights on shore and the boat groaned when he pushed it forward, leaving Sarah and Zhanna to fend for themselves. Kyle had seen Sarah in action, so he had high hopes that she would be okay. He felt his body relax. Even though he had no idea where they were going, at least they were safe.
“Uh, Kyle?” Adeline spoke up from behind him.
“Yeah?” He didn’t look back.
“What the hell is this thing?”
The relaxing of his body hadn’t lasted long. At the worried tone in her voice, he didn’t have to turn around to see before his body tensed up completely. He turned toward her. She had managed to find a light switch, and the light from the bulb shone directly down on a large metal trunk bolted to the floor. Kyle couldn’t see what Adeline was looking at down inside the trunk, but every single fiber of his being knew it wasn’t good.
Xander King BoxSet Page 63