Hot Intent (Hqn)

by Dees, Cindy

  “I’m ready,” she reported.

  “On my mark. Three. Two. One. Go!” Alex popped up from the front seat and sprayed gunfire at whoever was out there.

  She kicked the door open, rolled out onto the ground and to her feet in one motion and then ran like she’d never run before in her life. She dodged randomly from side to side as she went, but it barely slowed her headlong flight. She ran into the trees and dived behind the first good-size fallen log she came across.

  Propping the pistol on the log, she trained it on the clearing and searched frantically for a glimpse of the shooters or at least their positions. There. A muzzle flash from across the little valley. And another one from beyond the bullet-riddled cab. That guy would have a better angle to shoot at Alex, so she trained her weapon on him. Disbelief that she was engaging in a gunfight briefly passed through her mind, but she shoved it aside. Alex needed her.

  The cab’s front door flew open, and she shot at the assailant behind the cab. She saw a movement there like someone diving for cover, and she shifted her aim to the second shooter. She squeezed off two rounds at that guy until he ducked, as well. She swung back to the first shooter and sent another round in his direction for good measure.

  Alex raced from the car much as she had and almost landed on top of her as he dived across the log. She rolled aside at the last minute to avoid being summarily crushed.

  The swale went quiet. Carefully, she ejected her clip and counted bullets fast. Seven rounds left. One would already be in the chamber. Eight shots to live or die.

  Alex jerked his head at her to follow him and rose to a crouch. She mimicked him and was not surprised when he took off running up the hill. High ground was a sniper’s friend. They reached the top of the rise and Alex paused his headlong dash to crouch between two table-size boulders.

  She knew from games in the woods with her brothers that stealth was vital now. Alex leaned close to murmur low and urgent. “This is as defensible a position as we’re likely to find. You’re going to have to cover one direction while I take the other. We have limited ammo, so wait until you’ve got a decent shot to fire. Understood?”

  “Yes.” She couldn’t resist adding in a rush, “I’m so sorry I didn’t believe you. You were right. It’s all real. You’re not crazy.”

  “Uh...thanks. Now concentrate. Slow your breathing and focus.”

  A strange calm overcame her. Adrenaline was screaming through her blood, and she felt light and weightless. But her mind was crystal clear. Every leaf, every blade of grass, was vividly outlined as she peered out of the narrow gap in the boulders.

  Time seemed elongated, each second stretching out around her as she waited. Alex’s presence was warm and steady at her back. They could do this.

  “Incoming,” he murmured. “One’s circling to my left. Should come into your line of fire in a few seconds. I’ve got the second guy.”

  Her pulse increased even more, and it was already leaping in her veins like rushing rapids. She concentrated on the forest to her right, alert for the slightest movement. Any second now. She braced her shooting elbow on her upraised knee and used the two-handed grip on the pistol that her father had taught her for maximum stability.

  There. Was that a shadow in the trees? So jumpy with nerves that she could hardly sit still, she waited a few more heartbeats to be sure. Alex had said not to waste ammo.

  Could she do it? Could she pull the trigger and kill another human being? The words she’d heard so many times in her youth held entirely new meaning for her: kill or be killed. Her brothers and her dad hadn’t seemed to think it was a difficult choice at all.

  An image of sweet baby Dawn’s face flashed through her head. The little girl deserved to have parents. She’d already lost so much in her short life. Katie’s fist tightened around the butt of the pistol. She and Alex had no choice at all. They had to do whatever was necessary to stay alive out here.

  The shadow glided forward, moving away from her and slightly right to left. She would have to time it carefully for when the attacker was between trees. She picked a gap ahead of the guy and waited for him to reach it. She drew in a slow, deep breath the way her dad had drilled into her, and held it as the black-clad man stepped into the gap. She squeezed the trigger. The pistol leaped in her hand, startling her. The man fell or dived to the ground—she couldn’t tell which—but from above him on the hill like this, she still had a small sight line to target him.

  Alex shot twice behind her, quickly. After her shot, his target must have taken off running.

  She’d been a pretty good shot over the years. Assuming this weapon was sighted reasonably true, she could make the shot. She exhaled, held her diaphragm perfectly still, lined up the sight on the black, leather-clad lump and took the shot.

  A grunting cry from her target signaled a hit.

  Should she shoot him again or save her bullets for someone else? God, she wished she had more training.

  “Incoming, your left,” Alex bit out.

  She swung her attention and her knee to the left, setting up for another shot. A man burst out of the trees no more than a dozen feet from her, scaring the hell out of her. She fired twice, fast, almost instinctively. The guy slammed backward to the ground, but rolled over. She dived behind the rock as he fired back at her.

  She could hear him breathing in ragged gasps. She’d hit him for sure. Making a mental picture of the spot she’d seen him go down and using the gurgling rattle of his breathing as a guide, she rolled out from behind the boulders. She’d expected a small target, like the top of his head, and that was about all the guy gave her. Nonetheless, the shot was at a range of about fifteen feet, and her father had trained his kids thoroughly.

  Katie didn’t miss. The top of the man’s head exploded in a grisly eruption of red gore. She glimpsed a palm-size chunk of the guy’s skull fly up into the air, twirling end over end in macabre flight.

  She looked back to her right. Crap! The lump of the first guy was gone. “Splash number two,” she bit out. “Number one’s hit but on the move.”

  “Got it,” Alex replied tersely. He switched to Zaghastani. “When I say go, do it. You will use your tool.”

  His vocabulary was rough, but she got the idea. They were going to break out of this position and she should expect to shoot her way out. She backed deeper into the crevice until her back touched his, keeping her vision trained on the slice of forest still visible beyond the boulder. Alex eased away from her and she slid backward again until she connected with his back once more.

  She felt his body gather in preparation to leap, and she did the same. Without warning, he jumped up.

  A man shouted from what could not have been more than twenty feet away. She spun low out of the crack just in time to see Alex double-tap the attacker in the face, rendering the guy no longer human.

  Another man roared over the top of the boulder from behind them, practically on top of Katie. Terrified beyond any ability to think, she reacted instinctively, whipped up the barrel of her weapon and fired as fast as she could pull the trigger. The weapon jumped hard in her hand three times, but the fourth time it merely clicked. Empty. Crap. Those had been her last three shots.

  Her target yelled and crashed on top of her, knocking her down hard as his weight slammed into her. She grunted, her breath knocked out of her, and shoved in panic at the man. He was bleeding profusely from a neck wound, soaking her with hot, metallic-smelling blood. He twitched convulsively and then was still on top of her. She heaved for all she was worth and managed to pull her legs free of the corpse. Gasping for air, she scooped the pistol out of the guy’s hand as Alex gestured urgently from a dozen yards away for her to get moving.

  She leaped to her feet and ran for him. His weapon rose fast to point at her and she swerved hard out of his line of fire as he opened fire at someone behind her.

  Jeez! How many guys were out here, anyway?

  Alex moved out walking, but fast, placing his feet with catlike lig
htness. She tried to mimic him but it was damned hard work, and she was still trying to catch her breath. They half ran through the trees for maybe five minutes in silence. Well, he was silent. She panted like a hot dog and crackled leaves far too often for safety. Had they eliminated all the bad guys or not?

  The longer they went without being shot at, the more her heart rate dropped to something commensurate merely with strenuous exercise. But then her hands started to shake. And then her whole body started to shake.

  She popped out the clip of this weapon—a Russian make of pistol. What did that mean? Were these attackers freaking Russians? She yanked her attention back to the gun in her hand. Mike had brought a similar model of weapon home from a mission a few years ago. All her brothers had tried shooting it, and not to be left out, she’d insisted on trying it out, as well.

  She was relieved to count eleven bullets in the clip. Alex had to be getting low in his weapon by now, too. On cue, he ejected a clip and rammed a new one into place. She rested against a tree and took several blessedly deep breaths while he extracted the two remaining bullets from the first clip and pocketed them.

  She knew from experience that he usually had at least two spare clips on his person whenever he was packing a weapon. They were back in business for a little while, at least. Thank God for his paranoia and his associated obsession with preparedness.

  Hopefully, they would not need their remaining firepower.

  And...she was wrong.

  Alex froze abruptly in front of her. She peered over his shoulder and saw a man in a black leather jacket poised beside an SUV, wielding a sawed-off AK-47 alertly.

  The guy spoke aloud into a wireless earphone device and her jaw dropped as she identified the language he spoke to be Russian. Alex frowned faintly beside her, but she dared not break the silence to ask what the man had said.

  Alex backed up a dozen feet, placing the crest of the ridge between them and the man below. Alex eased down quietly behind a thicket of weeds and brambles, and she joined him. He lifted away a few leaves to reveal wet, black earth. In the soil, he drew a crude car. He pointed at his own chest and then drew an arc to the left. He pointed at Katie and then drew another arc to the right. He then drew two lines from the stick figures from him and her toward the man.

  He mouthed the words, “Field of fire,” and she nodded immediately. By flanking the shooter below, the two of them had to be careful not to end up shooting each other. Alex was lucky she’d grown up in a military family and knew about such things!

  “Shoot when I do,” he breathed. Without any further ado, Alex moved away from her. Lord, she felt naked out here without him beside her. Every tiny sound made her jump, and she felt as twitchy as a marionette on a string.

  When she deemed that she’d reached the position Alex had drawn for her, she inched forward toward the top of the ridge on her belly, pistol at the ready. Using the largest tree she could find, she stood up and peered out from behind the trunk.

  The shooter was looking off toward Alex’s position intently. Focused. Had he seen or heard Alex out there? The guy’s AK-47 swung up from his hip to a shooting position as she planted her forearm against the tree trunk to steady it, blew out her breath and lined up the sight on the front tip of her gun barrel with the sights mounted above the trigger. Oh, he was so not getting off a shot at her man.

  Screw Alex’s signal. Without hesitating, she went ahead and fired. She was sure she’d hit the bastard. Although he staggered, he didn’t go down. The man swung his weapon toward her and raked the hillside with a barrage of automatic fire as she dived behind the tree.

  Was the guy wearing a Kevlar vest under that bulky jacket?

  Alex opened fire from across the ridge, and the sweeping gunfire swung away sharply from her and toward Alex’s position. She wasted no time stepping out from behind the tree far enough to take aim and fire again, this time at the man’s head.

  She missed twice and was forced to duck back behind the tree as he sprinted toward the back of the SUV. She only waited a fraction of a second before swinging out from behind the tree again. The shooter was going to take cover behind the vehicle and possibly take to the woods beyond it. Their lives would be immeasurably more difficult with this jerk and his vastly superior firepower roaming around in the forest hunting them.

  Alex shouted something in Russian and the man shouted back as she took careful aim one more time on the guy’s head. She held her breath and squeezed off the shot.

  The man’s legs crumpled and he dropped to the ground. She held her position and scanned back into the woods in the direction she and Alex had come from. She heard Alex crashing out of the tree behind her. She turned in time to see him running fast and low, zigzagging as swift and nimble as a cheetah, toward the downed man.

  “Come down!” Alex called out in Zaghastani.

  She stepped out of the woods fully in time to see Alex extend an arm straight out from his body at a downward angle and fire two shots into the prone man’s head. It was brutal. Cold-blooded, even. She could shoot at an armed attacker who could shoot back at her, but she severely doubted she could’ve taken those shots. Alex had just executed that man. Shock and horror roared through her.

  He crouched, patting down the dead man’s pockets. He straightened, a car ignition fob in hand as she reached his side. “Did you have to kill him like that?” she demanded, appalled to her core.

  “Get in the car. I’ll drive.”

  She piled into the SUV as Alex punched the ignition button. The big engine roared to life. He steered the vehicle toward the fresh tracks in the grass at the edge of the clearing and they bumped down a rough driveway of sorts.

  “Buckle your seat belt,” he ordered without taking his eyes off the path ahead of them. How could he sound so damned calm? Didn’t he care in the slightest that he’d just murdered that man?

  As she clicked the seat belt across her body, she asked incredulously, “Aren’t you the slightest bit upset that you just executed a helpless man like an animal for the slaughter?”

  He glanced over long enough for her to reel away from the cold calculation in his eyes. “I never claimed to be a Girl Scout. You knew who I am, what I do, when you signed up for this. Deal with it or leave.”

  Just like that? “It’s not that simple—” she started.

  He cut her off sharply. “Yes. It is. This is my life. If you want to be part of it, don’t ask me to change. I can’t be someone else and survive. I have no choice.”

  She subsided against the cushions. Was it really that simple?

  “Check the back for weapons,” he bit out.

  She clambered between the front seats and into the back. She leaned over the bench seat, reaching into the far back to pull up a canvas tarp and peek beneath it. “Two AK-47s, a wooden ammo box and two pistols. I think they’re Makarovs.”

  Without waiting for him to tell her, she dragged all the weapons forward to the backseat. The ammo box was heavy and gave her more trouble, but she horsed it into the seat, as well. She rejoined Alex, panting.

  “Who were those men back there?” she finally asked as the SUV burst out onto the main road and Alex stomped on the accelerator. “Russian weapons. The shooter was speaking in Russian. Did your father order this hit on us?”

  Grimly, Alex fished out his cell phone and punched in a number, one-handed, as he drove. He jammed the phone to his ear and snarled, “I know it’s the middle of the damned night in Moscow. Did you order a hit on me?”

  It was as angry as she’d ever heard Alex. He listened in silence for a few seconds and then swore under his breath. “Check it out and let me know,” he snapped.

  “He denied being behind this, didn’t he?” Katie asked grimly.

  “Bingo.”

  “Do you believe him?”

  Alex shrugged. “I think he believes he can still convince me to work for him. If that’s true, he wouldn’t kill me.”

  “Would he have some thugs fake a hit on you to give
you credibility with the CIA?”

  One corner of Alex’s mouth turned up briefly. “There may be hope for you yet. You’re learning to think like a spy.”

  If that meant she was learning to be suspicious of everyone and not take anything at face value, she supposed he was right. “Could it have been someone else in the FSB?” she asked.

  Alex frowned. “I fail to see how they could have picked up our trail from that library so quickly. I could see the CIA picking us up that fast, however, particularly if they were already looking for us in the New Jersey area. But not the Russians. They only have a certain number of resources on short-notice call in the States, and Russian wet teams aren’t just cruising around New Jersey for grins and giggles.”

  “Why would the CIA send a team to kill you?”

  He was silent long enough she thought he wasn’t going to answer. But then he said grimly, “I am controversial within the agency. I have many detractors.”

  “Yes, but a hit team masquerading as Russians?” she challenged. “That seems like an awful lot of trouble to go to. I mean, they even spoke Russian to one another.”

  Alex frowned and did not answer. She gathered she’d asked the right question, then. He steered the SUV out onto the highway, pointing it to the north.

  “Now what?” she asked.

  He smiled slightly at her trademark question. “New York City for the moment.”

  As it became clear they hadn’t been tailed, she relaxed and took a look around the SUV for clues as to who their kidnapper and assailants had been. She opened the storage console between the front seats and peeked down inside.

  “Hey, look what I found,” she exclaimed. She reached down into the compartment and pulled out a cell phone. It was a high-end model like someone might own for personal use, not a cheap burner phone.