Goddess Rising (22 page)

Wes lifted the camera just as Sam made it up the second flight, someone on her team following close behind her. Sam stopped suddenly, two-thirds up the concrete stairs, just under the landing. She flattened herself to the wall, peering up and over the staircase, and with a tight hand gesture, signaled her teammate to stop.

Wes zoomed in. From his position, he could see two combatants waiting on the second floor, rifles trained on the entrance. They couldn’t see Sam, but they knew someone was coming, and she couldn’t see them, but she knew they were waiting.

Wes held his breath.

*

September—Wednesday Morning

Camp Swift, Bastrop County, Texas

S A M A N T H A

The intel they’d
been given at the start of the exercise indicated that the hostage was likely being held on the third floor. Only one way in—and that was up the stairs and through the open doorway, almost a certain death box.

They hadn’t been issued any smoke grenades for this exercise, nothing explosive. No obvious means for distraction or a cloud of smoke to hide behind. She’d have to find a way in there without getting killed first. Even if it was only death by paintball.

Stealth
. They had to use stealth and some kind of distraction. But what?

Sam sat with her back against the wall, remembering to breathe, her heart bouncing so hard it was almost hard to hear anything in the ruckus below.

“What do you want to do?” her teammate Vin Stephens whispered, crawling up beside her just under the landing. He was a junior from Nevada. Third-generation Army brat—born soldier. Good at poker—always seemed to have a stack of cards on him.

Yes!
Sam’s eyes widened.
That was it.

Sam turned to him. “You got a deck on you?”

Stephens shot her an amused look. “What, you want to play a hand right now?”

“You got mechanic’s skills, right?” she asked. “You do tricks and shit, right?”

“What’s that got to do with anything?” he asked in confusion.

“You think you can fling the cards hard and fast enough to distract whoever’s up there so I can get a shot in? I just need a fraction of a second.”

Stephens fished into his top left pocket. Yanked a pack of Bicycle playing cards out. “Worth a try.”

“I’ll go in low,” Sam told him. “You try to divert their eyes away from the door for a split second, and I’ll be able to take down at least one of them while their eyes are following the cards.”

“It’s not a frag grenade, but it’s better than nothing,” he muttered.

They moved silently up the stairs, careful to stay low and to the side. Sam popped her head up like a groundhog, saw no one in her immediate sight line and figured whoever was waiting for them had ducked behind the wall, waiting.

She knelt, one knee to the ground to steady herself, as Stephens stood up behind her. He flung a handful of playing cards fast, throwing them down the short hallway so they scattered like colorful birds, just like a magic show. Surprised, one of the combatants released a salvo of paintballs while Sam leaned around the corner of the landing. She shot the first guy she saw, just a hair of a second before he’d looked away from the card trick right back to the entrance where she was kneeling. Aiming over her, Stephens shot the second guy in his way.

“Clear,” he called, keeping his rifle up as he moved through the room. “Good thinking,” Stephens murmured as he moved toward the next room, his rifle moving in tight, practiced arcs.

“I owe you a pack of cards,” she answered, close behind him.

“Don’t sweat it,” Stephens replied. “I’ll just take all your money the next poker night.”

A little wave of pleasure made her grin, even as she kept her rifle up, following him as they approached the next staircase. She’d never been invited into anything with the ROTC boys, and Stephens was solidly inside that circle.

“Good job, Stephens.”

They both spun as Alejandro launched up the stairs behind them, weapon raised, his face focused.

“Wyatt’s idea,” Stephens answered.

Alejandro said nothing, looking over the two combatants who were playing dead. “Let’s clear this floor and get up to three.”

Sam took careful steps behind Stephens as they cleared the second floor. When they made it to the final staircase, Stephens turned and looked at Alejandro for direction.

“What’s the plan?”

“No other means in,” Alejandro replied. “It’s up or out.”

“That’s suicide,” Sam responded, looking up the doorway to the third floor. “We’ll be lucky if we get any shots off before they blow us away.”

“We’re here to get the hostage by any means necessary,” Alejandro responded, his expression hardening. “And this is a timed exercise, Wyatt—so shut up, follow orders, and
move!”

Stephens glanced back at her, uncertain.

Sam paused, trying to think of a way to avoid walking into a certain trap.

“I said, ‘
Go
,’ Wyatt!” Alejandro insisted, shoving her.

“Hear me out,” she replied, putting her hand up. “We pull a gun and the jackets off of one of the combatants,” she said, nodding toward one of the fallen behind them. “Stephens shouts, ‘
They’re coming
,’ and gets a few shots off using their gun. They’ll see their own paintballs and assume it’s one of their own being chased down the hall. They won’t shoot on him if he’s running into the room with his head down. It might buy us a couple seconds. Long enough for Stephens and me to take out at least one of them.”

“It could work,” Stephens whispered, nodding in agreement.

“Why can’t you just stick to the fucking plan?” Alejandro hissed.

“Because if we get taken out, we lose points. And if we keep standing around here arguing, we lose points,” she pointed out, keeping her voice calm and low. “This way, we at least have a fighting chance of taking at least one combatant out and assessing the situation before they unload on us.”

Stephens looked back and forth between them. “I agree; it’s worth a try.”

Alejandro’s mouth compressed into a fine line before he finally relented. “Stephens, you’ll play the combatant and go in first. I’ll shoot at the walls high with their paintballs. Return fire, but make it messy, like you’re panicking.”

“You got it,” Stephens nodded.

Alejandro jogged down the hall and grabbed a paintball rifle off a fallen combatant as Stephens yanked off his jacket and hat.

As soon as he’d changed into the enemy gear, Stephens yelled, “
They’re on my ass! Incoming—hold your fire! Hold your fire!”

Stephens shot several electric blue paintballs as he moved up the staircase. Alejandro responded by releasing a torrent of orange paint at the wall of the third floor, making a mess.

“Coming in hot!”
Stephens bellowed.
“Hold your fire! Hold your fire!”

When they made it up to the landing of the third floor, Stephens ducked and ran into the room, his rifle up as he shot his first combatant before taking hits to the arm and the leg. Not lethal shots, but certainly points deducted. Sam took advantage of their distraction to nail the two combatants surrounding the hostage they’d blindfolded and tied to a seat.

“Tend to Stephens,” Alejandro barked.

“They’re non-fatal wounds,” she argued, moving toward the hostage. “Mission is to retrieve the hostage.”

Sam was almost to him when a bright orange paintball buzzed right past her head. It was so close she could almost feel the wetness of the paint graze her cheek.

“I said ‘
tend to Stephens.
’” Alejandro repeated, his voice deadly.

One look into his eyes, and Sam knew he’d take her out. Just to teach her a lesson.

He could argue that she’d been shot by one of the combatants. And who would be her witness?

Sam looked at Stephens on the ground, playing dead, or at least terribly injured. The hostage was blindfolded and the enemy combatants lay silent, eyes closed.

Dead men tell no tales.

“Fine.” Sam turned away from the bound and blindfolded man, aware that Alejandro would take the prize of securing the hostage, guaranteeing he would make it to the next challenge, no matter what the team’s final score was.

Shit.

Damn.

As Sam leaned down and slung Stephens’s good arm around her shoulder to drag him out, he opened an eye, winking at her. Sam consoled herself with the realization that she’d at least gotten another ally in her corner besides Rita.

The hair on the back of her neck pricked up, and she realized suddenly they were being observed. Sam looked up, seeing Sasser and other ROTC leaders on a platform over the practice space. She caught the rounded, black eye of a lens, saw it lower down as Wes smiled at her from afar. He’d documented her every move.

So he’d also seen her back down. He’d seen her let Alejandro take the win.

Shit.

Damn.

*

September—Wednesday, Late Afternoon

Somewhere over Dime Box, Texas

W E S L E Y

The first helicopter
ride of his life was in a military Black Hawk, flying over seventy miles of speckled plains, from Camp Swift back to College Station. Wes grinned, leaning out the open door as much as he dared, trying to take some photos to remember the moment by. The setting sun glowed orange, casting the slopes below into dark grays and vermillion, the horizon giving way to twilight’s hazy darkness. Wes reveled in the 160-mile-per-hour gale-force wind that whipped against his face and through his hair. He loved the disembodied weightlessness of hovering over the earth at that incredible speed, the slipstream howling around him beneath the urgent
whip whip whip
of the Black Hawk’s blades.

He wanted to whoop and shout—nearly did—’til he caught Samantha’s dark eyes on him from where she sat, back against the fuselage, sandwiched between members of her team. As winners of the FTX, the First Squad got the initial ride out back to campus, and Wes had hitched a ride along with Colonel Sasser and his lieutenant, asking to use the short trip to interview the team. He figured out that he knew several of them, including Vin Stephens, who he regularly played cards with, but he could barely hear anything over the clattering and the wind at that altitude, so it was just as well. He’d rather sit back and enjoy the ride anyway. The trip was short, and when they touched ground near campus, the cadets vaulted out of the chopper like seasoned pros.

Riding high and feeling great, Wes strode after Sam as she moved toward the parking lot, already shrugging out of her army jacket. He’d only just managed to get a hand on her shoulder when she snagged it and twisted his arm hard, nearly throwing him over.

“Don’t you fucking touch me, you traitor.”

Wes yanked his arm back, rubbing his wrist. “What the hell are you talking about?” he replied, bewildered, his hand and arm throbbing with discomfort. It was a given that she’d be annoyed with him for doing a story on her, but he hadn’t expected her to nearly snap off his wrist because of it.

Samantha shot him a look of disgust as she turned and stalked off toward the parking lot.

“Hey!” Wes called, following after her. “What is your goddamn problem?”

“What’s
my
problem?” Sam whirled and jabbed him hard in the chest with her finger.

Wes grabbed her, jerking her closer to him. “Yeah,” he responded, starting to feel anger light a path up his stomach. “I thought we were friends. Why the hell are you so pissed all the sudden?”

“I thought we were friends too, until I realized you were just using me for coverage,” she answered, furious. “What happened to no more omissions, Wes? No more lies?”

“What the hell are you talking about?” he asked again.

Sam pushed him back. “You’ve been using me for something from the get-go, haven’t you?” A flash of hurt flashed across her features before she hardened before his eyes. “First you try to get into my pants, then when that doesn’t work, you use me to get a story.”

Wes’s eyes narrowed. “You’re the one who told me I needed to live up to something better,” he reminded her, his voice low. “Well, this is me, trying to do just that, Sammy.”