“Yeah, well, that was before Girard Virreau pulled a gun and turned traitor. I’m a bit more suspicious now.”
“Girard?” Nate seemed honestly shocked. “What are you talking about?”
They reached the bottom of the hill where the camel was hobbled. She pointed toward the insurgent camp while raising the KA-BAR so close to his throat that a drop of blood trickled down it. “Virreau’s in league with the terrorists over there. They’re holding Kick prisoner, along with another man. Give me one good reason I shouldn’t tie you up right now and leave you for the jackals.”
His Adam’s apple bobbed past the knife blade, producing another scarlet trickle. “Because I’m
not
a traitor. I didn’t betray Kick and his team in Afghanistan, and if he’s a prisoner, I’ll do anything you tell me, to help get him out of there.”
She narrowed her eyes. “What about that photo Kick was talking about? The one showing you taking money from abu Bakr.”
“Abbas Tawhid, you mean. Abu Bakr’s right-hand man.”
“So you admit it.”
“It wasn’t money in that packet. It was photos, and a list of names and places.”
“Explain,” she said impatiently. Time was literally ticking away.
“Tawhid’s mother came to the DFP camp with a raging infection. I saved her life. He let me name my reward. I asked for the lives of a group of aid workers who’d been kidnapped a few months earlier. He came through. I turned the information over to STORM Corps, and they were rescued.”
“Why didn’t Kick know about this?”
“Kick doesn’t work for STORM.”
“But Marc does.”
“Not every operator knows about every rescue mission. You have the SATCOM. Radio STORM and confirm my story.”
She pinioned his gaze with hers, searching for any sign of deception. She wasn’t a cop, but in the ER you had to develop a pretty good lie-radar. People were often stupid, preferring to hide the truth about an injury or condition and risk misdiagnosis rather than tell how they really got it.
All she saw in Nathan Daneby’s clear blue eyes was open sincerity.
“No time,” she said, hoping to hell she was right about him. She withdrew the knife and hurried over to the camel. “All right, then. Get on. We’ve got about eight minutes before this whole place blows.”
THE
boom of a massive explosion hurled Kick back to consciousness.
At the blast, chaos erupted all around him, tangos running and shouting in staccato Arabic. A nearby gunshot battered his eardrums, dialing down the sounds around him like a dimmer switch.
Kick’s head was spinning and his limbs weaker than they’d been since detox, but he’d been an operator long enough to know when action was needed.
Immediately.
Where the hell was he?
He shook his head to clear it, spraying sweat and blood, and realized he was lying down, inside a neat room. Brightly lit.
The cement hut.
He tried to sit up. But was jerked to a halt by restraints on his wrists and ankles.
WTF.
He bit down on a groan. His whole body felt terrible.
A low moan drew his attention. From the floor.
“Alex!” he called. “You all right, man?”
Another moan. “Is . . . this . . .” The words were tinny but at least the gunshot hadn’t taken out Kick’s hearing completely, thank God.
He had no idea what was happening, but they definitely needed to move. Now, in the first flush of confusion. “Can you get free?” he called.
“Not . . . tied,” Alex returned tightly. He sounded in worse pain than Kick.
No time to find out why. “Come get me loose. We gotta go.”
Alex lurched up and nearly collapsed on top of him. Ah,
Jesus
. Blood was all over his friend’s rag of a shirt, his arm hanging useless. Yet somehow he managed to untie one of Kick’s wrist restraints.
“What the hell did they do to you?” Kick asked as he frantically undid his other wrist and eased out from under Alex’s panting body. By that time he was panting himself.
“Shot,” Alex gasped.
Fuck.
Kick scooted down to free his ankles. “Where? Can you still walk?” Could
he
?
“Arm. I’m okay.”
A second explosion ripped the air outside, much closer, lifting one of the corrugated metal sheets off the roof and sending it sailing. The sound of the generator sputtered off, and the hut plunged into darkness.
Kick scowled.
Please, no.
This was feeling
way
too familiar.
This was
his
plan being executed. Which meant—
Rainie.
She hadn’t left to go find the Bedouin as he’d made her
swear
she would do if anything happened to him.
God
fucking
damn it! What in the freaking
hell
did she think she was doing?
He had to get to her, and now.
Gritting his teeth, he banded a supportive arm around Alex’s waist and made straight for the door. No guard was there to stop them, so he kept right on plunging on. Muscles screaming, he half carried Alex across the camp and away from the inferno of the burning munitions dump that Rainie—he assumed furiously—had somehow managed to blow up. At the last second he remembered to stumble past their prison hovel and grab the SIG from where, in anticipation, he’d hidden it this morning under a flat rock along the outside wall before his surrender.
“You doin’ okay?” he asked Alex, who mumbled something indecipherable back.
Hell, the man was doing well just to stay on his feet. As was Kick. He was light-headed and it felt like there were a million insects crawling through his veins. They were both stumbling every two or three steps, Alex’s breath coming in sharp gasps of pain and exhaustion. Luckily he didn’t weigh more than a child, so Kick was able to support him as they ducked and zigzagged between the various huts of the training camp, avoiding the tangos. He was making for the opposite side, and the rendezvous spot beyond that, which he and Rainie had decided on yesterday.
He prayed with everything in him that she’d be there, waiting.
They rounded a corner and suddenly crashed headlong into a familiar figure. In his foggy state it took Kick a second to recognize the smarmy count from the DFP camp. “Virreau!” he said, steadying himself and Alex. “Which way out?”
The count backed up a few steps and made the mistake of thinking about it. His second mistake was to raise the pistol clutched in his hand. The pistol a DFP doctor was forbidden to carry.
Suddenly the puzzle pieces clicked into place in Kick’s mind.
Holy hell.
Nate wasn’t the traitor;
this
man was.
“I’ve seen those boots before!” Alex accused in a halting rasp, staring down at them. Confirming Kick’s deduction.
Kick managed to beat Virreau to the draw, drilling the SIG into the skeet-shooting Eurotrash bastard’s forehead. “You’ve got
one
chance. Tell me who you work for and I’ll let you live,” he growled.
Virreau just laughed. Kick’s arm was so weak it was obvious to both of them he could barely hold up the gun. “You have no idea who you’re dealing with, Jackson. Kill me, and they’ll just find someone else to take my place.”
“I guess we’ll see about that,” Kick muttered. Debated whether or not just to shoot him and be done with it.
“You can’t stop these people,” Virreau said. “Besides, you’re already a dead man.” To Kick’s shock, he turned and started running back into the burning camp, toward what was left of the cement hut. What the hell—
The SIG wobbled and he let it drop to his side in disgust.
“So are you, buddy,” he mumbled. He hoped whatever it was the bogus count was going back into the camp for was worth dying over.
Shielding his eyes, Kick turned and started hurrying straight into the eye-stabbing glow of the setting sun. Earlier, he’d deliberately picked this angle for their escape, to make it harder for the enemy to spot them in the glare. Thank God it seemed to be working. They had no more cover, no rocks or bushes to hide behind. Totally exposed.
With one last surge of energy, he threw Alex over his shoulder, ignoring the man’s cry of pain and his own weakness and woozy head, and ran like hell toward the shelter of a shallow gully that would lead them to the rendezvous spot in a deeper wadi further out in the desert. No time to lose. The diversion had worked, but their captors would soon realize the ruse and discover their prisoners had escaped. Then it would only be a matter of minutes before they’d be on them.
He shot a quick glance up at the sky, hoping to see or hear a STORM aircraft swooping in from the north.
So far, nothing.
Sliding on his backside down into the ravine, he forced himself back to his feet, adjusted Alex, and struggled through the sand. Around one curve, then another, then they were clambering down the steep rocky trail into the wadi.
“Rainie!” he risked calling out. “Baby, where are—”
The words lodged in his throat at the sight that greeted them.
Oh, sweet fucking Jesus.
He lurched to a wobbly halt and let Alex slide down to his unsteady feet. They were both breathing hard, in pain and sweating profusely in the residual heat from the scorcher of a day. Alex landed next to the unconscious body of Nathan Daneby.
Kick slashed his gaze up, meeting Rainie’s pleading eyes.
No!
Abu Bakr had an arm around her throat. And a gun pressed to the pulsing vein in her temple. She looked . . . damn, he couldn’t read her expression.
Kick’s entire being burned with fury. This was
not
happening.
No. Way.
He’d come too far to lose her now. Not like this. Not to this animal.
Abu Bakr looked perfectly calm, standing there with a small metal case hanging from one hand, his gun in the other, threatening the woman Kick loved more than life. For one horrible moment he was transported back to that time in A-stan. The fucker had been just as calm then, after tearing Kick’s world to tiny shreds, brutally slaughtering the closest thing he had to family. He glanced down at Alex, who had rolled himself up in a ball, cowering on the ground next to Nathan. Was he remembering, too, the hideous fate he’d suffered at this man’s hands?
It would not happen again. To any of them.
It. Would.
Not.
He dragged up the SIG, aiming it between the snake’s flat eyes. But to his dismay, even holding it with two hands, it wavered like a mirage. He couldn’t keep his hands steady.
Abu Bakr didn’t even seem to notice. “So close,” he said almost approvingly, in that perfect American English that had haunted Kick’s nightmares for sixteen months. “You nearly got me. I couldn’t have done better myself.” The motherfucker smiled with false modesty. “Except, well, yes, I
did
do better. Didn’t I, Mr. Jackson.” It wasn’t a question. More like a gloating observation.
And the fucker knew his name. How? Surely, he didn’t remember that long-ago night . . . ? No, it must have been Virreau who’d told him.
Abu Bakr caressed Rainie’s temple with the barrel of the gun so she whimpered. “And I always will,” he said. “Because you’re a fool. Unlike you pathetic Westerners, I don’t let my emotions rule my actions.”
He was right. Kick was so angry black spots shot across his field of vision like falling stars. He swallowed down the urge to charge the bastard and rip his fucking head off with his bare hands. “Easy for you. Sociopaths don’t have emotions,” he gritted out.
The fucker actually smiled. The man was a sick, perverted agent, through and through, and that was for damned sure.
On the ground, Nate moaned. His eyes fluttered open and he grimaced in pain.
I’m so sorry, buddy. Sorry I doubted you for a single moment.
“You may be right about that,” abu Bakr said as he casually watched Nate rise on his elbow, blink, touch the back of his head, and try to figure out why he was sprawled on the sand, then struggle to sit up.
Alex clutched Nate’s arm and yanked frantically at it, trying to pull him back down on the ground.
Abu Bakr gestured at Kick with his gun. “You, I’ve already killed.” Then he waved it in annoyance at Alex. “And the pathetic Mr. Pig, as well.” He looked down and studied Nate like a kid might study a dung beetle. “But that one, no.” His finger moved, and his gun jerked to the sound of a shot blasting through the wadi.
Nate’s body gave a sickening shudder, and blossomed in a spray of scarlet.
“Nate!” Rainie screamed. Alex let out a yowl and scuttled over to Kick’s feet, babbling something he couldn’t understand.
Nate’s eyes met Kick’s in surprise, then grim understanding. Then they rolled back in his head and he fell back to the ground. And didn’t move again.
“
Nate!
”
Christ Almighty.
Kick desperately reined in the red-hot rage seething within him, and struggled to hold the SIG steady enough to take a shot at abu Bakr. But it was no use. He was too shaky. He couldn’t risk hitting Rainie.
Somehow he had to get her out of this.
Please, God. Please.
Alex continued to clutch at his leg, muttering.
“Let the woman go,” Kick demanded, battling to hold it together. “She’s done nothing. She’s innocent in this.”
The bastard chuckled. “Not
exactly
true. But in any case, the innocent are precisely who I’m after. It is the innocent who must die, in order to punish the guilty. She must die to punish
you
.”
The man was insane. He had to—
Suddenly, Kick heard a low buzzing sound in the distance. A plane?
STORM!
But Jesus, no. This wadi was too close to the insurgent camp. If they didn’t move, they’d all be injured or killed in the air strike. The one consolation being that abu Bakr would be, as well.
The terrorist’s cocky smile widened. “Right on time. So predictable.” He started to drag Rainie toward the camel—
their
camel, loaded with
their
belongings, including his sniper rifle—waiting at the ready nearby. “We’ll be going now.”