Cindy Gerard - Killing Time

Mike kept firing; burning sweat poured into the cuts on his face, fire seared through his side. It was dark, the nightscopes were difficult to focus, the distance was not desirable—the chances of them taking down the bird were growing slimmer with every minute, which meant Brewster and his boys would be on them as soon as the threat was over.

They were sitting ducks out here. UWD soldiers behind them, Satan’s spawn in front of them, wilderness in either direction. And him with a broken rib and, fuck, an empty magazine, he realized when he squeezed the trigger.

He quickly ejected the mag and rapid-loaded a second thirty-round clip. His last one.

“She’s about to lift off,” Taggart yelled, his focus and his shots steady on the Chinook.

“Keep firing!” Mike yelled.

“I’m out of ammo.” Cooper lowered his gun.

Pick a doomsday cliché, they were living it.

Eva, rock-solid steady, kept her eye glued to the scope and methodically fired again and again.

But it was too late. The bird hovered, then lifted, and spun slowly skyward.

“Fuck.” Taggart watched the flight lights as the chopper gained elevation.

Mike roared in frustration and emptied his magazine, knowing it was hopeless—until the engine cowling blasted off the bird in an explosion of sound and a huge, raging fireball. Smoke roared out of the damaged fuselage, billowing in a black, spiraling plume. The chopper listed sideways, spun, dropped, and corkscrewed down fast.

“No way.” Mesmerized, Cooper stood, shielding his eyes from the white-hot blaze of fire as the chopper fuel combusted, and twenty tons of electronics and metal slammed to the ground and blew anything within thirty yards into fireballs, dust, and rubble.

“No freaking way did we drop that chopper,” Cooper uttered again.

Stunned, Mike stared at what was left of the Chinook. No one on the ground nearby could have survived that explosion.

The La Linea lieutenants were dead. The woman with the empty eyes was dead. Lawson and Brewster—dead.

His satisfaction was undercut by disappointment. The sonofabitches had gotten off way too easy.

“Listen.” Eva touched a hand to his arm. “Hear that?”

Above the roar of the blaze, the ammo in the bird exploding, and the blood pounding in his ears, Mike finally heard what she had. The sound of choppers. A bunch of them.

Mike looked up and finally spotted the flight lights of four Black Hawks zooming in. Their searchlights flashed on, the wide beams sweeping the crash site like a scene out of a SWAT movie. The remaining UWD members had to be running for the hills.

“You’re right, Cooper,” he said, grinning because he knew who had to be in one of those birds. “We didn’t take it out. Gabe did.”

“Do you know how much freaking paperwork I’m going to have to fill out to explain how a ‘borrowed’ freaking Black Hawk and a ‘borrowed’ freaking flight crew somehow managed to fire off its mini and shoot a freaking Chinook out of the freaking sky? You said this was a training mission. You didn’t say a word about live fire!”

Mike sat on the bumper of one of several ambulances that had arrived at the UWD site on the tail of the Black Hawks, watching and grinning as Gabe patiently waited for the red-faced DEA officer to finish spitting out his tirade. All around them, ATF, DEA, DHS, and FBI agents worked the scene, some of them arranging a makeshift holding area for the UWD members who had been rounded up in the woods surrounding the camp.

Gabe had covered all the bases. There were even female agents on the ground, dealing with the shell-shocked wives, daughters, and sons of the compound.

Mike didn’t know yet how Gabe had managed to charge in and save the day, but he had no doubt the Archangel would be able to appease the infuriated agent.

“You should be lying down.”

Eva. Beside him. Safe and sound. That was all that mattered now.

“I should be right here.” He looped his arm over her shoulder and kissed her beautiful dirt-and-smoke-streaked face. “Besides, you heard Collins. He’s the paramedic. That makes him the expert, and he says my ribs are just bruised.”

“I don’t care what he says. I can see the pain on your face. You need to be horizontal. You need to rest.”

“Chica.” He nuzzled his nose around the shell of her ear. “If I get horizontal, it will be with you. And trust me. We won’t be resting.”

“This dipstick giving you a hard time, Eva?”

Mike groaned when Taggart and Cooper ambled over to the ambulance. “And to think I missed them.”

Cooper hiked a booted foot up on the ambulance bumper. “Just goes to show. Be careful what you wish for. You just might get it.”

Mike looked into the faces of the two men he had thought he would never see again. They were covered in grime and the satisfaction of a job well done. The same faces that had been full of accusation and hatred the last time he’d seen them eight years ago.

He felt a wave of emotion so strong, so massive, he didn’t know if he could contain it. Then he looked at Eva and knew he couldn’t. She wasn’t going to let him.

“Yeah. About that.” He lowered his head, groped for the words he needed to say. “Thanks.” He met Cooper’s eyes, then Taggart’s, and saw the same emotions welling up there. “Thanks for showing. Means a lot.”

Hell. It meant everything.

Taggart looked at his boot tips.

Cooper found a spot in the distance that suddenly demanded all of his attention before getting himself back together. “Yeah, well… Someone’s going to pay us, right?… Because we didn’t do this for old time’s sake.”

Mike burst out laughing, then regretted it when fire bit into his ribs. “There was some mention of money, now that I think about it. Right, Eva?”

She shook her head, disbelieving. “You three are the most stubborn individuals I’ve ever met when it comes to expressing your feelings.”

Then Gabe walked over and joined them.

“How you doing?” He studied Mike critically.

“Fit and fine.” Mike hitched his chin toward the DEA agent. “You settle him down?”

Gabe lifted a shoulder. “Once he found out his name would be leaked to the media in conjunction with taking down six of La Linea’s top-tier management, and in shutting down a major illegal gunrunning op, he decided the paperwork wasn’t such a hardship after all.”

“Something I don’t get.” Taggart crossed his arms over his chest. “I figure when we didn’t check in, you put it together that things had gone south. But how’d you know to bring the birds and the mini and all the alphabet guys?”

“We’ve got a connection at NSA. A friend picked up some cyber-chatter about a gun shipment out of Canada. On a hunch we relayed the info to border control, of which there are two in Idaho. Since Porthill carries the most passenger traffic and East-port carries the most trucks, it wasn’t difficult to pin down which route they were going to take.”

A line formed between Eva’s brows. “You mean there were more trucks on the way?”

Gabe nodded. “One truck, and the driver couldn’t talk fast enough—despite the fact that La Linea threatened to kill him. La Linea, guns, UWD? It only made sense there was a big deal going down, and that you were caught here in the middle of it.”

“The guns were in a refrigerated meat trailer, weren’t they?” Cooper looked smug.

Gabe regarded him with new interest. “And you know this how?”

Taggart glanced at Mike, who nodded. “You might want to look about half a mile north of the shooting range. They hid them in an abandoned mine shaft. Well, it used to be a shaft. Good luck finding a piece of anything bigger than a cinder.”

A slow smile built on Gabe’s face. “Nice work.”

“It was,” Taggart agreed wholeheartedly. “It really, really was.”

“So where’d you come up with the Black Hawks?” Mike asked. “There aren’t any military bases within five, six hundred miles of here.”

Gabe said nothing.

And just that quick, Mike knew.

“Sonofabitch,” he said with a grin. “Uncle’s got a little top-secret Spec Ops training facility out here in the mountains, huh?”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.” Gabe had his poker face on, a sure sign that Mike had hit the nail dead center. “I don’t mean to change the subject, but—”

“The hell you don’t,” Mike said on a laugh.

“But,” Gabe pressed on and shifted his attention to Eva, “I haven’t had a chance to tell you before now. We found your Deep Throat.”

The D.C. lunch crowd was long gone at two in the afternoon, when Eva and Mike stepped inside the little corner café. They’d returned from Idaho and what the press referred to as “the assault on Squaw Valley” two days ago. CNN had run an hour-long special on the operation last night, and the Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms, the Defense Intelligence Agency, and the FBI had received all the credit for the takedown. That was fine with Eva. Let them rack up the win in their column. She wanted her name kept out of it—so did Mike, Taggart, and Cooper. The fact that Gabe had managed to make that happen and keep the Black Ops, Inc. team off the radar as well, told her just how covert he and his teammates ran.