A rapid pair of shots and screams indicated she’d made good use of the bullets she had. Three shots and Honey tossed aside her weapon. Rafael grinned as he turned just in time to see her perform a graceful and wicked-fast roundhouse kick, her leg arcing up. Her boot struck the lantern jaw of the tall bald guy and he went down. Skinny tried to grab her around the waist and pull her off her feet, but she was ready and head-butted him right on the nose. He howled, backed away. Bled.
Rafael swung around, grabbed the barrel of Pockmark’s AK-47, and rammed it into his gut, driving him back against the racks. Shit cascaded down on top of them as they wrestled for control of the weapon. The guy couldn’t get off a shot at that angle, but he sure as hell tried. Rafael held firm. Pockmarks slammed him into the racks. Pain radiated up his spine as more electronics, computer crap, and wires rained down. He turned the tables, using the barrel of the gun as a fulcrum, and jettisoning the guy across the room. He retained the weapon and used it to efficiently get off several shots. Dropping Baldy, Skinny, and Scarface, all of whom had managed to stagger to their feet, in one fell swoop. The sweaty guy made it to one knee before Rafe shot him. They were all down – Rafe had punched Scarface in the eye, and Honey kicked Baldy and head-butted Skinny.
“How’re you doing, Winston?”
“Couldn’t be—Ow! Shit!” Pockmarks had recovered from his fall and now had a Ka-Bar in his hand. He danced toward her, backing her against the console, right beside Savage’s slumped body. Waiting until he was just close enough, she kicked out, striking him in the chest with her boot. He staggered back, then fell on his ass, but jumped up like a jack-in-the-box and came for her with a roar of rage and blood in his eye.
Rafael ran to help her, just as she grabbed one of the giant monitors off the console and brought it down on the bastard’s head with the dull
thud
of a watermelon hitting the pavement.
Chest heaving, she grinned over at him. “I never really liked that monitor, anyway. Now—” Several white-garbed operatives poured into the room, guns at the ready.
“Well, hell, guys. You just missed the party!” She took a quick inventory, then raced over to Pollack and dropped to her knees. “Ambulance?” she demanded, ripping at his shirt.
“Minutes away. Secure this garbage,” Rafael instructed their men, watching Honey from the corner of his eye. Activating the earpiece on his goggles, he contacted Savin, who was at HQ. “Ambulance and make it fast.”
“Stationed at the perimeter. ETA two minutes.”
“Take Nielson into custody,” he told the other man, his gaze still on Honey. “Check the bitch’s DNA. Out.”
One of the Garbage crew held up Savage’s limp arm. “Hey, Navarro? What do you make of this?” A small, electronic wristband blinked a red, steady beat and the numbers on the digital display were counting backward.
“Honey? Honey, where a—Oh, thank God!” A woman he recognized as one of the female hostages, the nurse, emerged from the elevator, her eyes scanning the huge room before she settled on Honey. Racing to her side, she was stripping off her down coat as she ran.
Honey looked up, stark relief in her face. “Oh, God, am I happy to see you, Kim! Pollack’s been shot at least twice.”
“Let’s see what we’re dealing with here, okay? Here, tuck my coat around him while I look.”
Rafael took a quick look at the device on Savage’s wrist, while his men secured the Black Rose tangos. They needed more body bags than handcuffs.
Fuck. A pulse-point detonator. “Clear the house,” he told the team leader, who nodded and got on his own mic. Rafael linked with Dolan. “Savage has a last hurrah planted somewhere, set to go off in less than thirty minutes. Alert team leaders. Over.”
A trigger that had been set off the moment Savage’s pulse stopped beating. But a trigger of what? He did a quick survey of the room and didn’t see anything that looked remotely bomb-like. No wires. No blocks of detonation material. But God only knew, the place was vast enough, filled with millions of dollars’ worth of high-tech computer equipment—it could be any-fucking-where.
Rafael crouched beside the two women. It looked as if Pollack couldn’t be moved. Honey wouldn’t leave without Pollack. Rafael wasn’t leaving without Honey. “Let’s get him, upstairs,” he said evenly, his heart pounding with urgency. “We’ll meet the medics when they arrive.”
Honey’s face was pale, her mouth pinched as she tore at the buttons on the old man’s shirt while trying to keep him covered with the coat. They needed to get out of here until Rafe determined where Savage had hidden the bomb now ticking down the minutes.
He made eye contact with the nurse. “How is he?” What he really wanted to say was, ‘can we move him?’
Honey’s fingers were bloody, and her fingers trembled. “He’s—”
“Shot and it hurts like blue blazes,” Pollack snapped, voice robust and annoyed. “But
he’ll
live. Give me some air and a shot of whisky, and I’ll be right as rain.” He reached up and brushed his arthritic fingers over Honey’s cheek as she leaned over him then whispered gently, “Don’t let your partner see you cry like a girl, sweetheart. Come on now, I’m fine. Kim’s here, you go be a super spy. Do whatever you need to do and don’t fuss.”
“I’ve been a super spy for hours,” Honey teased, touching his face with her fingertips. “We’re all done. The bad guys are being taken in for questioning, the Queen Bitch of the Universe is dead, and all’s well that ends well, right? That’s what you always used to tell me. I just want you fixed up because you know how I hate holes in things. Especially things I l-ove.”
Rafael put his hand on the small of her back as she dragged in a watery-shaky breath. “I want a nice glass of wine, a hot fire, and to beat your ass at chess, so don’t tell me you’re fine when you have—When you’ve been shot. You
will
be fine, but right now, let us take care of you, okay? Allow us to fuss. It makes us feel better, okay?”
He wasn’t fine. His lips were white, his skin clammy. The rule of thumb was ten minutes from injury to ambulance transport. It had been considerably more than that. Bullets were unpredictable, and there was the possibility that the bullet to his belly, chest, or wherever Savage had shot him, had bounced around inside him, causing even more damage. The nurse hadn’t even turned him to check for an exit wound. But they needed to get him, hell
all
of them, out ASAP.
“He’s lost some blood,” Honey’s friend told Rafe calmly, wrapping her scarf meticulously around his bleeding hand. “There’s a roll of plastic Honey uses to cover—A roll, top right hand drawer. Move it!”
Jolted into action, Rafael found a roll of plastic wrap in the drawer and brought it back. The nurse wrapped the sheet of wrap tightly around Pollack’s chest to keep air from being sucked into the wound. It would temporarily prevent the development of a collapsed lung.
The basement was suddenly a hive of activity, as the Black Rose agents were hauled out double-time and the paramedics came in. In minutes, Pollack was strapped to a gurney and on his way to the hospital house, underground at the T-FLAC facility twenty miles away, followed by the nurse. Rafael suddenly found himself alone with Honey.
Crouching beside her, he took her cold face in both hands, smoothing his thumbs over her cheeks to bring back some color. “You did good, Winston.” He kissed her softly, loving the way she kissed him back. Warmth seeped into her skin beneath his palms.
She lifted her head, her eyes looked bruised. “I want to go to the hospital—”
“Yeah, we will. But first we need to get out of here.”
“Navarro? Winston? We have a situation.” The disembodied voice of Dolan echoed against the concrete basement walls.
“Did you find her package?” Rafael demanded, shoving his goggles back over his eyes as he helped Honey to her feet.
“Fixed installation GTGM.” Dolan told them grimly. “Target heading is HQ. Secondary system, one kilometer south, aimed at the house. Called in C. K. Mitchell to take point on one. Her ETA is sixteen minutes. Which one do you want?”
Jesus. Not just a bomb. A ground-to-ground
missile
. Even dead, Savage had to have the last word. The bitch was still a menace. “House,” he said, meeting Honey’s eyes. They hastily grabbed whatever weapons were closest to hand, a couple of AK47s, pulled up the cowls to protect their heads, and pushed their goggles back in place.
The new coordinates popped up on the screen in her goggles, as Rafael told Dolan, “Confirm visual. Patch in Mitchell when she gets there.”
“I’ll rendezvous at your location. Move it, Navarro. This whole thing will be more of a clusterfuck if we don’t disarm these bastards. Out.”
“I know exactly where this is.” Honey wiped a trickle of blood off her cheek before repositioning her facemask. “Snowmobile’s in the garage.”
“How long till we get there?”
“Fifteen, maybe seventeen minutes at full throttle.”
“Better make it full throttle then. Haul ass, Winston. The clock’s ticking.”
They ran. It was quicker and easier to get out of the house than it was to get in, and in minutes, they were in the garage.
Honey yanked the cover off the Arctic Cat Z1 Turbo LXR parked on the other side of her truck. “Want to drive?”
“Jesus, Winston, you have
the
coolest damn toys. Hell yeah, I wanna drive.” He threw his leg over and adjusted the seat as she hopped on behind him, her knees snuggling his hips, her arms around his waist. “Garage door opens automatically,” she told him as he pressed the electronic starter.
The snowmobile, equipped with a turbocharged, fuel-injected, four-stroke engine, was a piece of engineering marvel and it almost flew out of the starting gate. The outside lights were on full, and the good guys were still rounding up the bad so there was a mass of activity around the house and through the valley. Choppers continued to fly low, strafing the area with lights, and the
whop-whop-whop
of their rotors made regular speech impossible. Fortunately, for her, Rafael was right in her ear.
Honey crossed her wrists around his waist and hung on as he pushed the small vehicle and shot out of the yard in a rooster tail of snow. Several guys in white LockOut saw them coming and leaped out of the way.
“How fast?”
“Never pushed it, but I’ve done one-thirty.” She tightened her grip as he slewed sideways to avoid the Garbage detail’s vehicle in front of the house. In the distance, she saw the red taillights of the ambulance Pollack had insisted he didn’t need. Stubborn. She shoved aside her worry for him; it was a sick ball in her belly. “Head northwest,” she said into the lip mic on her earpiece. “Over the ridge between those trees, then bear right when you see the river.”
Their time counted down in the small screen above her right eye. Her heartbeat kept time. The moon had disappeared, but the security lights and the helicopters made turning on the headlights unnecessary on the pristine white of the fresh powder.
He drove well, faster than Honey had ever taken the snowmobile, but his speed didn’t make her nervous. His hands were sure and steady on the handles as he aimed for the gap between the trees at breakneck speed, leaving a cloud of snow in their wake.
Rafael followed her directions, though he could see the GPS in the goggles. It was easier to look for landmarks than to wait for the computer to direct him, and the sound of her voice in his ear was alarmingly welcome. When he realized just how glad he was to have her behind him, to hear her, he laughed and shook his head.
Honey didn’t ask why he was laughing; it lifted her above the suffocating world of focus and stress that she’d been navigating for what felt like forever. She needed to hear his voice, to feel his solid strength beneath her hands even if it was just the hardness of his back and the taut muscles of his belly under the fabric of his LockOut.
He was alive. She was alive. Pollack—thank you God—was alive. If this missile didn’t blow everyone in a three-hundred-mile radius to hell in—she checked the countdown in the lens—twenty-two minutes, she’d be golden.
“See the lights? Head left.”
“Yeah. See ’um.”
Dolan waited between the trees.
Rafael pulled to a stop a few feet away and jumped off, leaving her to follow.
The missile was not that much taller than Rafael, and it reminded Honey of a sleek, black shark.
18:15:04
“Mitchell?” he said into his mic, striding forward, his boots sinking into the snow over his ankles. “Tell me what you see?”
The other bomb disposal tech didn’t bother with a greeting either, as she said calmly, “Tactical ballistic missile. Fixed installation . . .”
“What are we dealing with?” Honey asked Dolan.
“The warhead could include conventional high explosive, chemical, biological, or even nuclear—”
“Nuclear?” Honey asked, coming up beside Rafe as he took a black bag from a silent Dolan and unzipped it beside the lethal-looking missile.
Rafael shook his head, no, and she breathed a sigh of relief and went to stand beside Dolan, out of the way.
“Everyone cleared?” She watched Rafael crouch beside the weapon.