Time to cut down on the variables.
“Quint. Get the hell out of sight. Get way back. Fast! Behind some cover, I don’t care what. Just—away.”
“Why, Holl? What’s going on?”
She turned and grabbed him by the open lapels of his shirt. Then yanked him in until they were nose-to-nose. His eyes weren’t wide in panic, no rapid breathing; he just didn’t understand what was about to happen.
“Snap to. Think like your plane just crashed. Emergency evac!” She shouted the last just inches from his face.
He blinked at her once more in surprise, glanced at the armed mercenaries over her shoulder…and finally his eyes shot wide. “You know them?”
“Their type. Seriously bad news. Move. Now!”
“Uh, right. Right!” He turned and practically plowed into Mike, who was rushing toward her.
“Take Mike with you. Both of you. Get to safety…wherever that is on this godforsaken island.”
Mike sidestepped Quint. “Holly? What are you talking about? They’re just—” She didn’t have time to deal with waking Mike up to what was happening. Civilians could be a real pain in the ass.
She cut him off with a rabbit jab to the gut.
The air whooshed out of him.
“Mike, since when did you turn stupid? This is me. Holly. That over there? That’s something unbelievably bad. Go. Now!”
To his credit, he didn’t say anything before getting in gear. Of course, she’d hit him a little harder than she’d intended, and he might not be able to say anything.
There was a scream like death close behind her.
She spun around, fully triggered. All of her Special Operations Forces training slammed into top gear—with no idea what had just happened.
Bad shit coming! Deal with it! Now!
Her training was screaming at her.
In the few second she’d been dealing with Quint and Mike, the other four members of the team had come up behind her.
The excavator by the tail had reached out its bucket, clamping it almost lovingly around the butt of the rudder still sticking up from the tail section. Then the hydraulic thumb swung down to take a vise grip. With a firm grasp—and a deafening roar of diesel power—it tore, twisted, then crushed the rudder down into the tail section.
The scream hadn’t been rending metal.
Wrong tone.
It had been…Miranda. “My plane! Holly, make them stop what they’re doing to my plane.”
The excavator’s claw disengaged, grabbed a section of elevator—the flat side-section of the tail assembly—and folded it into the fuselage as well. They were folding up the wreckage into a small ball for transport.
That’s when Holly figured out exactly where they were working.
The mounts for the two black boxes—the Cockpit Voice Recorder and the Flight Data Recorder—were at the epicenter of the excavator’s destruction. It was working to hide something. Something that they didn’t want found.
Thankfully the CVR and FDR were safely tucked away in her big flight bag—safe for now at least.
“Jeremy,” she grabbed his shoulder and shook him hard enough to make sure she had his attention. “Follow Mike. Take Miranda to safety.”
All safety being relative at the moment.
“And protect this with your life.” She pulled out the drive for the cockpit’s Quick Access Recorder and stuffed it down the front of his pants for good measure.
She grabbed Miranda’s phone, then gave them both a hard shove that would force them to either fall or run.
Arm-in-arm, they ran.
Holly plugged in a headset pair of earbuds so that she’d have both hands free.
As she was dialing, Major Jon Swift, who must have finished with shutting down the Learjet, walked past. Fucking oblivious, he headed straight toward the guard team’s leader, Captain Tiny-dick Deagle.
“Excuse me. I’m Major Swift of the US Air Force Accident Investigation Board. What do you think you’re doing?” She could barely hear him over the roar of the straining excavator as it continued its work of folding the tail section into the smallest possible volume.
She looked at the last two members of the team as they came up to her.
Andi Wu was five-two of American Chinese, but she’d been a top Spec Ops helo pilot before PTSD had slammed her out of the service. Taz Cortez topped out at four-eleven of pissed-at-the-world Latina. Being forcibly retired Air Force after decades in the Pentagon might have meant she was useless, except Holly had seen the street fighter in her.
They were both good.
“Either of you armed?”
Two headshakes. Meaning they had their fighting knives—with which they were both lethal—but no firearms.
“My left and right. Three paces out.”
She had planned on calling Miranda’s pal, Four-star General Drake Nason, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. He’d fixed any number of military problems for them. Of course, they’d solved several international crises for him. That’s why she’d grabbed Miranda’s phone, none of them had his direct number except her.
A glance at the military cleanup team had her selecting a different number.
She hit Call and tucked the phone into a vest pocket.
In a line, she, Andi, and Taz walked toward the leader. It was like a Charlie’s Angels movie that was suddenly far too real.
As they drew closer, Major Swift must have finally pissed off Captain Wankasaurus one time too many.
She wished she was standing behind Captain W. From there she’d be able to see how hard Jon’s eyes were crossing as they struggled to focus on the darkness of the Desert Eagle’s .50 cal barrel, hovering close by the bridge of his nose. Holly knew that a half-inch hole-of-death made you feel as if you should be able to see the bullet that was going to kill you, but you never could.
The phone started to ring over her earbuds.
Jon stumbled and collapsed backward onto the pavement.
Holly stepped over him.
Captain W. took one look at Holly, Andi, and Taz, then holstered his weapon, crossed his arms, and grinned.
Another ring.
“Now what do we have here? The Babe Squad?”
“Oh, yeah, honey. That’s exactly what we are.” She stopped way too close, well inside his personal space where an unknown should never be allowed.
“You got a problem I can help you with?”
“Oh, man, can you ever.”
A third ring.
There was a loud click as the phone was answered. “Hello, Miranda. What are you up to today?”
“Hi, Clarissa. Holly here.” She kept her voice smooth and sweet.
“Oh fuck!”
“Aw, I thought you’d be pleased to hear from me.” The chances of CIA Director Clarissa Reese welcoming a call from her even after Hell froze over were awe-inspiringly low. Before then? Not a chance.
“Don’t make me laugh. What do you want?”
“Could you hold please?”
Captain Wankasaurus was apparently done inspecting Holly’s breasts. He looked up to see what was going on with the whole phone thing.
The moment that he tipped his head to try and peer at the earbud hidden by her hair, Holly swung her arms upward. At the last instant, she crossed them at the wrists.
She yanked both weapons from Captain W.’s shoulder harness before he could even flinch. The monster Deagle hand cannon from his left holster landed into her crossed-over left hand, and the other weapon into her right.
Uncrossing her arms fast, she launched his weapons to either side.
In her peripheral vision, she could see that Andi and Taz had both made clean catches of the weapons she’d thrown. She’d just pray that they had her flanks.
At the full reach of her toss, Holly gave her wrist the extra snap to release the drop blade she’d restrapped to her forearm the moment she’d reached her checked luggage.
After making sure that Captain W. could see it, she r
ammed its point up into the flesh under his chin, drawing a slow trickle of blood. He went up on his toes and she followed him up with the knife.
Like finally recognized like.
Snapped out of mental stereotypes, he stayed perched on his toes. He knew as a Special Operations Forces soldier that if he came down, her hand wouldn’t move and he’d be ramming the knife into his own brain.
With her other hand, she pulled the air marshal’s Glock out of her back waistband—she’d honestly forgotten to return it when he’d gone out in the first wave, it just felt so natural there.
Due to changes in the grip design—they’d finally removed the damned finger ridges—it had a feel she wasn’t used to.
She fired three shots over Captain W.’s shoulder—close enough to his ear to really hurt.
The first went astray.
The next two found their targets.
They’d lightened the trigger pull a little, too, which was nice.
Then to be sure, she fired a fourth.
16
The shots rang so loudly—hard enough to hurt her ear over the phone—that they made Clarissa jump to her feet.
“What the hell is going on there?” Clarissa glared at the gathering around the conference table in her office, daring a single department head to question her breaking the no-calls-during-meetings rule.
There were very few numbers she’d answer during a meeting, but she’d learned to always answer Miranda’s calls. Miranda’s calls were always high stakes. That Holly was the one actually on the phone only escalated the severity.
Besides, Holly Harper was simply too goddamn dangerous to ignore.
“Just a sec more. I need to see if this wally is really as stupid as he seems. My wager? If I carve my way in to check, I won’t find a brain at all.”
Clarissa made no apologies to her staff. It was better to keep them on edge; it made them far more likely to make revealing mistakes of their own.
“So, Captain Wankasaurus, who sent you?” Clarissa wondered who the hell Holly was speaking to.
There was a grunt of pain, but no words that the phone could pick up.
“Now would be a good time to talk.”
A whispered, “Bitch!”
Holly made a resigned-sounding sigh, followed almost immediately by a squeal of agony—though the agony was definitely male.
It was a sound Clarissa knew well from when she’d been a baby agent running a CIA Black Site in Afghanistan. This Captain Wankasaurus person had just been kneed in the balls so hard that he wouldn’t be speaking for several minutes.
“Maybe I’ll carve him open later, to test my theory,” Holly continued calmly, “my wager stands.”
“What are you talking about? What’s going on?”
Holly sighed. “We have a crash of a civilian airliner on a remote Pacific atoll. We managed to survive it—most of us. Then a six-man team swooped in to do a little cleanup. Too well-equipped to be militia; too arrogant to still be in Special Operations. Made me think of you, Clarissa. So, why are you running a mercenary team to… No. Oh, fuck me!”
“What is it?”
“Andi, Taz,” Holly shouted loud enough to make Clarissa’s ear ring again. “Be careful how you secure the bastards. Assume the worst and you’ll still miss half.”
That said something worse than mercenaries.
Holly’s voice shifted from unfriendly to full snarl. “Why did you fly in an SOG team to destroy one of Miranda’s crash sites before she could inspect it? You’d better have a damn good reason for me not to hunt you down and cut your heart out. Do you even have one?”
“I don’t—didn’t.” Miranda’s team was something Clarissa kept a trace on, and last night’s report still had them in Washington State. But they must have launched to a crash site since then. Certainly nothing she’d launch a CIA Special Operations Group—SOG—squad to deal with. “How well-equipped?”
“They arrived in a C-17 Globemaster III with a shiny new Cat excavator for destroying the downed Airbus passenger jet, on less than five hours notice.”
That sounded like the kind of muscle the SOG could swing on short notice. They were the CIA’s extreme forces team. They were the enforcement arm of the Special Activities Center. SAC handled undermining foreign governments, assassinations, insurrections, and other particularly delicate missions. A six-man team was a major asset; that many together could take down an ISIS leader and his entire compound.
“I’m—” then she remembered that she had an audience at her conference table, “—I’m unclear about the origin of that at this time.”
“Well, Clarissa, if you didn’t send these muckabouts, then who did? And if this goes where I think it’s going, then you’ve got a major problem. I’m starting to think seriously that this plane crash wasn’t an accident. Which means that very, very soon you’ve got all the joys and blame for fifty-three dead US and Australian citizens landing on your desk. Along with a botched cover-up operation, I might add.”
“I, uh, appreciate the notification.” And if she ever did go after Holly herself, she’d remember to send more than a six-man team. How in the world had she taken down a whole SOG squad herself? Nobody was that good, were they? Though she’d called out to Andi and Taz, they weren’t warriors. No question it had been Holly versus six.
“Notification? Shit! I called to give you warning to start running so that I could have some fun hunting your ass. Not this time, I guess.” Holly utterly cheerful tone and Outback-thick Strine accent completely belied her words. “Well, if you could make sure that we’re not about to get a cover-up missile dropping down on our noggins, that would be half decent.”
“Okay. I’ll look into that. Thanks for the call.” Clarissa hung up and stared out her top-floor office window in the New Headquarters Building while she counted slowly to ten—twice.
There, just six miles away down the Potomac, lay the heart of power, Washington, DC.
There also, beneath the towering Capitol Dome peeking above the trees, sat the Gang of Eight. The majority and minority leaders of both houses of Congress and both houses’ intelligence committees. They were supposed to be notified of any covert operations—notified by her.
And, except on a few very quiet occasions, it required a Presidential finding to mobilize an SOG team.
Not this time.
Was it really an SOG team?
If anyone would know the difference, it would be Holly.
Clarissa turned back to the waiting group of ten department-level directors: one for each of the six continents, plus the directors of the Russia, Middle East, and China desks. The Deputy Director/CIA made ten.
Careful to give no sign, she returned to the table.
“I’m sorry for the interruption. We were discussing the threat matrix emerging in Costa Rica?”
As the Latin America director returned to her report, Clarissa watched the table.
Every department head was here. No one with less clearance physically could authorize an SOG team launch. The order had come from this table.
And one of them had just tried to kill Holly Harper.
The question was who hated Holly that much?
No, the real question was who had given orders to the Special Operations Group without clearing it through the President, the Gang of Eight, and most importantly her first?
That’s where the true threat lay.
17
Holly knelt on the SOG leader’s solar plexus to guarantee he wouldn’t be getting his breath back anytime soon. She frisked him, came up with two hidden carries, a garrote wire for cutting someone’s throat, several knives, a radio…and a set of zip ties. She bound his hands to the belt behind his back, then surveyed the situation.
Andi and Taz had done well.
They each had a knife at a guard’s throat and were covering the two other guards with their captured weapons. The excavator driver was wisely remaining in his little glass cab.
Holly made quick work of disarmi
ng and cuffing each one in turn.
“I saw the goddamn last-second arm cross,” Taz grumbled at her as Holly tied the last guard’s wrists and ankles.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Holly managed to say it with a straight face, though even after a lifetime of being an Aussie, it was a hard pull.
“I ought to shoot you with this goddamn thing,” Taz waggled the Taser 7 CQ at her.
“It seemed fitting; you were called The Taser for nineteen years inside the Pentagon, after all. At least it’s the newest model.”
Taz merely growled.
With the SOG team disarmed and secured, she looked up at the Cat 313 excavator.
Her first shot had only scuffed the paint on the excavator’s arm near the high first joint.
The next two had punctured the pair of hydraulic hoses controlling the bucket and thumb. Driven at six hundred pounds per square inch—forty-one times atmospheric pressure—the red, high-pressure hydraulic oil had fountained forth as the bucket and thumb clunked to uselessness.
With the fourth shot, she’d punctured the excavators’ fuel tank.
Unlike the movies, getting shot in the tank didn’t make a vehicle explode, but it did make it leak. A sheen of shimmering diesel fuel spread across the runway around the base of the excavator.
She waved her sidearm to get the excavator’s operator on the move. He didn’t climb down—he leapt and sprinted away. No obvious weapon, he was just the operator. But he kept running, as if there was somewhere to go on a desert island in the middle of the South Pacific. Maybe he’d figure it out when he hit the ocean.
Holly skipped a couple of shots off the machine’s big metal treads. The bullet fragments would be topping eight hundred degrees centigrade. The flashpoint of warm diesel was below sixty and didn’t resist much. The third one ignited the fuel vapor rising off the hot runway. As diesel continued to stream from the tank, the excavator was slowly enveloped in a ball of flame.
She yanked Captain Wankasaurus to his feet, nudged him up to the edge of the fire. By a firm fistful of his shirt collar, she held him forward off his center of balance over the edge of the flames.
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