by Amy Gamet
“He’s a good guy, and he likes me.” She looked at her hands. “I guess I just needed a good man to like me.”
It made a strange kind of sense, and Logan felt some of his anger begin to dissipate. But he knew too much about Cowboy and his teammate’s relationships with women to feel that his sister's fragile heart was safe with that man. “He dates a lot of women, Charlotte.”
“I know.” She shrugged. “I guess I just wanted to be one of them.”
“Is that enough for you?”
“It's a little late to be worried about that now.”
There was just enough sadness in her voice that Logan knew his biggest fear for his sister in dating Cowboy had already been realized. She was falling for him, and Logan had the sudden desire to punch Cowboy squarely in the jaw.
“I know you worry about me, Logan. But I'm not a little kid.”
“You just said yourself you made a bad decision by marrying Rick. That he treated you like crap. How can you expect me not to worry?”
She nodded. “You're right. Go ahead and worry. But I still get to decide my own fate.”
He copied and pasted a line of code to a login screen. “I'm in,” he said. The row of security monitors changed from blank screens to live feeds.
Charlotte looked at them, eerily dark images from a ship that had lost its main power. “I think we are in one of the only rooms that has full power right now.”
“It makes sense. It’s not a luxury to have power in the security room. It’s a necessity. I can see in the control settings where they turned off the main power. There is clearly no problem with the system itself. It's just a ruse. I wonder what they’re hoping to accomplish.”
One of the monitors glowed much brighter than the others, and Charlotte moved toward it, her eyes trying to make sense of what she saw. There was a man on the ground, windows along one whole wall, and what seemed to be a long console. Was that the ship’s bridge? “Logan, come here for a minute.”
He stood and joined her at the screen. “Holy shit,” he whispered. “That’s the captain.” He picked up his walkie-talkie and called for Cowboy. “The captain has been injured. He’s on the bridge. He may even be dead.”
25
Cowboy, Harrison, Red, and Hawk ran to the bridge. The ship’s halls were nearly empty, the announcement for the guests to stay in their rooms seeming to have made quite an impact.
Cowboy was the first to reach the captain. Blood soaked the captain’s upper right shoulder all the way down to the middle of his chest. He looked dead. Cowboy felt his neck for a pulse, surprised when he found one. “Captain!” he called. “Captain, can you hear me?”
The captain’s eyelids twitched for several moments before they opened, his eyes unfocused and glassy. “The disco,” he said. “He’s in the disco.”
Cowboy looked to Jax, then back to the captain. “Who is in the disco?”
“Beaudreau. My first mate.”
“Did he do this to you?” asked Jax.
“Yes.”
“We need to get you to the infirmary,” said Cowboy.
“No. You go. Tell them I’m here, but stop Beaudreau before he hurts somebody.”
They were moving again, racing to the infirmary and sending help to the captain before heading to the nightclub. Cowboy couldn’t help but wonder if their elusive enemy had been there while he danced with Charlotte.
If you hadn’t been distracted, you might’ve seen something. You never should’ve taken up with her in the first place.
Not on the job.
Hell, not at all.
Now that this mission had gone south and HERO Force was here in the cold light of day, Cowboy could see it had been a mistake to be with her. Logan had been a lot less than happy to find out Cowboy and Charlotte were sleeping together. That much had been painfully obvious from the look in his teammate’s eye.
Cowboy moved along the darkened hallway, leading the pack, as the evenly spaced emergency lights gave the corridor the look of some futuristic time machine. Cowboy wished he could go back in time. Change the decisions he had made that would cost him to lose his promotion with HERO Force.
Would you really erase the time you spent with Charlotte if you could?
No way in hell.
Even though he knew better, he couldn’t make himself wish it away. Even though Logan might never forgive him, and Jax was surely pissed, too. Their time together was worth it, even if that made him a self-centered prick. He liked her.
He liked her a lot.
And given the chance, he’d do everything again.
He rounded a corner, the disco coming into view. Its sign was dark, as was seemingly everything inside. He couldn’t help but remember the last time he’d been here as he paused to let his eyes adjust as much as possible. He reached for his cell phone.
“Could be one man, could be a hundred,” Hawk whispered next to him.
Harrison pushed in front of them both. “Let me go first. I know this place better than you do.”
There was just enough light coming from beneath a distant door to cast everything in the faintest shadow. They moved as a unit, quiet and stealthy, as Harrison led the way to the employee area. When they reached the door from where the light came, he stopped. “Are we ready?”
Four thumbs up.
Harrison pushed open the door to a commercial kitchen with one motion, his weapon drawn. He never had a chance to fire. Six men were waiting, their weapons trained on the door. Four of them fell with Harrison, shot by Cowboy and Hawk. The next two were just a moment behind.
Cowboy sank to the floor to check on Harrison. One shot to the head and multiple shots to the chest. There would be no saving him, and Cowboy mourned in the second it took Hawk and Matteo to make sure the others were dead. He stood and reloaded his weapon. “Beaudreau and Abby aren’t here. We need to find the power. The computers. The second bridge where they’re running the show.”
They were close. You didn’t encounter six armed men if you weren’t getting hotter. Where was the electrical center of a dance club? It had to be powering the lights or the music.
Music began blaring from the disco. “The DJ booth,” said Matteo.
“Wait,” said Jax. “He’s baiting us.”
“We still need to go out there,” said Cowboy. He turned to Hawk. “You’re with me. You two go that way,” he said, gesturing to another exit from the kitchen to the dance floor. He pulled his cell phone out of his pocket and turned on its flashlight. When each team was positioned at an exit, Cowboy turned off the kitchen light, opened the door, and slid his phone out into the room.
Gunfire exploded.
Cowboy moved into the room, Hawk right behind him, staying low and heading for the corner from where the shots were fired. The light from his cell phone was just enough to reflect off the glass of a structure beside the dance floor. The DJ booth. He ripped open the door and froze.
Silhouetted against the light of the room were two figures, one big and tall, one smaller. The tall one held a handgun to the head of the other.
“Please, don’t hurt me,” said a woman in a proper British accent.
Princess Violet.
“Let her go,” said Cowboy, training his weapon on the other man as best he could in the darkness.
“You think you’re saving the day, but you are too late,” said the man.
“We found your bomb in the theater. There isn’t going to be any explosion.” Cowboy’s eyes were adjusting to the darkness, and he could just make out the features of Beaudreau and the princess.
The first mate laughed. “You took out one bomb, and you think you saved the ship!”
A sickening wave of dread mixed with bile in the back of Cowboy’s throat. More bombs. “How many?”
“Why would I tell you?”
“Because you want me to know. You want everyone to know exactly what you did.” Cowboy took a step closer to the pair.
Beaudreau’s elbow went higher in the air and the princess screamed.
“You come any closer and I put a bullet in her temple. I’d hate for her to miss the show.”
“How many bombs?”
“Twenty. There used to be twenty-one—a very lucky number—then one of my men had an attack of conscience.”
Cowboy thought of the murder scene Harrison had found. The murdered crew mate. “So you killed him and threw his body overboard.”
“That’s right. Just like I killed the prince.”
The princess screamed hysterically and fought back against Beaudreau, swinging and punching. Her first outburst knocked his weapon to the floor. Beaudreau met Cowboy's eyes across the darkness.
Cowboy fired directly into the other man’s head. The first mate went down, his head hitting the floor with a sickening smack.
The princess covered her mouth but kept screaming. Cowboy went and put his arm around her. “It’s okay now, your highness.”
“I want my husband. He killed my husband.”
“Shh…” He tried to soothe her but his own emotions were screaming. It had been his job to protect them both, and his fault her husband was dead.
He thought of the avalanche rolling down the hill, coming to destroy everything in its path. He’d made a decision that had brought his whole world caving in on him.
He thought of the love that was so clear between Violet and Hugo. Love like that deserved to live, and his actions had stomped it out.
A man called over the princess’s sobs. “Vi?”
“Hugo!” She dashed out of Cowboy’s arms and into the darkness. The lights came on just as they reached each other, her sobs of relief mixing with the prince’s calming tones. He had a large bloody wound on his forehead.
I could love Charlotte like that.
He shook his head to clear it. Matteo crossed to him. “Where was he?” asked Cowboy.
“The cooler.”
“Anything else back there?”
“Computers, walkie-talkies, a whole bunch of shit.”
“But no Abby?”
“Nope. No Abby.”
Cowboy nodded. “Come on, we’ve got to move. The ship is wired to blow up in less than an hour and we have to evacuate the ship.”
26
“Come on, come on, we need to hurry!” Cowboy’s voice was getting hoarse from yelling over the crowd. He was directing people to lifeboats, keenly aware of the passage of time. Assuming all the bombs were timed in synch with the one from the theater, they had exactly thirty-five minutes until they went off, destroying the ship.
“We’re not going to make it,” he said to Prince Hugo.
“The International Maritime Organization mandates cruise ships are able to accomplish a full evacuation in thirty minutes or less. We’ll make it,” said the prince.
Hugo stuck his head inside the door of the lifeboat. “When you hit the water, start the engine and taxi as far away from the ship as possible.” He lowered the third mega lifeboat into the water with nearly four hundred people on board.
“Lucky for us you knew how to work those things. Jax said you were in the navy.”
“La Royale. The French Navy.” He turned to his wife. “I want you on the next boat, mon chou.”
She grabbed his arm. “No. I’m staying with you.”
“I will work faster if I know you are safe.”
She shook her head. “You can tell me to bugger off all you like. I’m still not going.”
Cowboy moved to the next boat down, opening the door on each end and herding people on board. He checked his watch. Twenty-seven minutes left. He went back to the previous boat, gave them the same instructions Hugo had given the others, and lowered it into the ocean.
Hawk and Jax came up behind him with the captain on a stretcher. “I can walk,” grumbled the captain, and the men helped him board a lifeboat.
“How are we doing?” asked Jax.
“Twenty-five minutes and thousands of people still on board. Stay here. Pack them in tight. No empty seats. I’m going to start the next boat. Let me know when this one’s ready to hit the water,” said Cowboy. He grabbed Hawk and did the same thing at the next lifeboat.
The crowd was thinning quickly. Ten more minutes and one more round of mega lifeboats, and the last of the passengers climbed inside. Cowboy lowered it to the water as his eyes met Charlotte’s some twenty feet away.
She was beautiful, standing there, and her attention was solely focused on him. They hadn’t gotten the rest of their week. Her eyes seemed to be screaming it to him, as if he didn’t remember. They’d only had two days together, and it wasn’t enough. It wasn’t even close to enough.
He had to see her again, the consequences be damned. But first he had to get her, the royals and all of HERO Force off this boat. He opened the next lifeboat. “Get inside, all of you,” he said over his shoulder. “We are running out of time.”
A voice behind Cowboy stopped him cold. “You’re out of time already.”
Abby.
He turned his head to face her. She held a gun, but the explosives around her waist were what really drew his attention. The red digital timer just like the one on the bomb he had defused was centered like a belt buckle. Someone gasped loudly.
Cowboy held up his hands. “What do you want?”
“You ruined my show. We were supposed to get to Nassau right when the sun was setting. The explosions would’ve been beautiful, the beach loaded with tourists to take pictures. Think of it. The video would have gone viral before anyone could stop it.”
She looked at the royals, her expression full of hatred. “You two would be dead, along with thousands of Americans. Then maybe the world would pay attention.”
“To what?” asked the princess. “So much wasted life. To what end have you construed this horror?”
“The life you lead of excess and greed is an abomination. This boat is a testament to an offensive way of life. We are doing God’s will, showing the world what will happen to people like you.”
On the other side of Abby, the prince gestured to Cowboy, making a gun out of his thumb and forefinger. He was asking if Cowboy still had his weapon, which he did. He still had his hands up, and he curled in four fingers to give Hugo the thumbs up.
“The passengers on the lifeboats will be our witnesses,” said Abby. “They have their cell phones, I’m sure. Americans wouldn’t go anywhere without them. They will take videos of the explosion, this false idol going up in flames, with part of the royal family aboard.” She smiled. “Such a tragedy.”
Cowboy knew they had only minutes to evacuate the ship before the bombs exploded, killing them all.
Prince Hugo yelled loudly and Abby turned toward him. Cowboy reached for his weapon, knowing he had only seconds and a single shot to take her down.
Hugo charged Abby and she raised her weapon just as Cowboy raised his to shoot her.
Cowboy was faster on the trigger. He struck her twice in the back. She went down face-first onto the deck, her arms not even coming up to break her fall.
She was dead.
“Run!” screamed Hugo.
“Get in the lifeboat!” yelled Cowboy. “Now!”
Everyone scurried to get inside, the prince and Cowboy the last remaining. “Get in, your highness,” Cowboy said.
“Someone has to lower the boat into the water. There’s an inflatable chute for him to get into the boat once it’s down.”
“There’s no time.” Cowboy pushed the prince inside and closed the hatch. He started the lifeboat descending to the water’s surface.
He saw the chute the prince was talking about, a sealed and folded up package with cartoon directions. He looked at his watch.
Two minutes left!
He leaned over the railing to watch the lifeboat carrying Charlotte, HERO Force, and the royals until it touched down, then he ran as hard and fast as he could in the opposite direction the lifeboat was headed.
He cleared the last of the still-hanging lifeboats and hopped over the railing like a gymnast over a vault.
He seemed to hang in the air as the water rushed up to meet him. The deafening blast of the first explosion sounded just as he touched the water.
The surface tension made his entrance feel like he was crashing through steel, then there was only cold, pain, and disorientation. An old childhood story came to his mind as he swam to reach the surface, the golden light of the ship on fire above him.
Brer Rabbit and the briar patch.
The ocean was a death trap to most people, but it was home to a SEAL. He broke the surface and took a huge breath of air, the heat from the burning ship too close for comfort. He ducked back under water and swam toward the lifeboats, knowing he was saved.
They were all going to be okay.
27
Cowboy drove from HERO Force headquarters right to Logan’s condo and knocked on the door. It was sunny and warm, four days after they’d returned from the cruise, and he’d gotten up bright and early for his meeting with Jax.
To Cowboy’s surprise, Jax had nothing but praise for him on the mission, until he got to the part about Charlotte being there. Once Cowboy made it clear he hadn’t invited her on the trip, Jax was willing to let it go.
HERO Force was officially Cowboy’s responsibility. Jax would stay on working part time, but he’d no longer be calling the shots or going on the longer missions once they got their staffing up to where they needed it to be.
The hiring would be up to Cowboy.
Now he just needed to talk to Logan on neutral turf before they went back to the office with him as Logan’s boss. They had a new assignment he’d just heard about over the weekend, and everyone but Matteo would be going wheels up first thing Tuesday morning.
Matteo had a different assignment. Apparently Jax owed some Russian dignitary a favor big enough to marry off one of HERO Force’s men to the dignitary’s daughter for a month-long undercover op. Cowboy wasn’t sure about the details, but he was thoroughly amused by what he did know.
Logan opened the door to Cowboy and his face settled into an unpleasant expression.
“Can I come in?” asked Cowboy.