Secret Soldier (18 page)

“You can sit up front.” The pilot was patting the seat next to him.

Abigail clambered over as they pulled up and away. He handed her a headset and she put it on, watching in horror as all hell erupted below.

“Can we stay?”

“Sorry, ma’am, my orders are to take you to safety immediately after the drop.”

The other choppers joined in the fight. She stared back, her heart clamoring in her chest as she watched Spike run toward the buildings. He was under heavy fire. Then the chopper turned and she could no longer see him.

“Relax,” the pilot said. “Those guys are good. I’ll be coming back to pick them up in no time.”

She nodded, wanting desperately to believe it was that simple.

“So you’re a civilian?”

“Yes.” She didn’t feel like making small talk while Spike was risking his life. “Can I listen in on the radio?”

“Sure.” He set the dial to the right channel.

The chopper instantly filled with the sounds of people yelling all at once. Orders being barked out. Gunfire. Then Spike’s voice. “Fall back, fall back.” A small explosion, more gunfire. Her limbs began to shake.

Strange how she hadn’t really been nervous until now. And she was nowhere near the action.

“Probably sounds worse than it is.” He gave her a reassuring smile. “Want me to turn it back off?”

She nodded.

Below them, a covered army truck moved across the sand, toward the terrorist camp.

“Not ours,” the pilot said and radioed the information to Spike’s team.

He gave off a warning shot, but the vehicle didn’t stop. Then a comer of the canvas was pulled aside on the back and the strangest-looking weapon appeared.

“Grenade launcher.” The pilot took an evasive maneuver, but it was too late. The weapon was fired and the next second the chopper jerked back.

“Hang on. We’re going down,” he said.

She gripped the seat, fought her rising panic. The pilot tried to control their fall, but only partially succeeded: The ground was coming closer and closer, rushing toward her. They hit with a bone jarring impact. Then there was nothing but darkness and silence.

SHE WAS IN hell and the devil was trying to shake her soul out. Abigail opened her eyes and realized the shaking came from the truck moving at a good pace. She lay on the bottom between the terrorists’ feet.

One
of the men noticed she was awake and spat on her. “American whore,” he said, his face cold with hatred.

“Let her be.” The voice came from behind her.

She twisted her neck. Jamal. She scanned the rest of the truck. “Where is the pilot?”

“He didn’t make it.” Jamal’s dark eyes shone like stone, the expression on his face hard. “You shouldn’t have come to Beharrain.”

“I came to help.”

“Us or the U.S. military?’

“The children. Whatever else happened, I came to help the children.”

“I’m sorry, then, that this is how things turned out.” He looked away from her.

“It’s not too late.”

He didn’t respond.

“Where are we going?” she asked.

“To retrieve something precious. Rest. You are our ticket out of here now. I can’t have you die yet.”

She squeezed her eyes shut. They were probably going to use her as a hostage to get out of the country. She tried to move a little and bit back a groan. Every bone in her body felt broken. At least she could wiggle her fingers and toes, which meant she most likely didn’t have a spinal injury.

They rode for about half an hour before the truck came to a stop. The men got out, all but the one who’d been ordered by Jamal to guard her.

She had to get away. She eyed the man who sat too far away from her to even attempt to grab his rifle. And yet this was her best chance. He was only one man, once the others returned, it would be too late. If she could somehow get away from him and get behind the wheel of the truck… It was her only chance.

She moaned and whispered a couple of unintelligible words and hoped he would come closer. He didn’t move. She could hear the men shouting outside. She didn’thave much time. She curled on her side, then tried to grab for the wooden bench and pull herself to her knees. Pain shot through her leg.

The men were there then, up in the truck. They grabbed her roughly and carried her out of the vehicle. For the first time, she had a chance to see where they were-in the middle of the desert somewhere. Two buildings stood in front of her, completely buried in sand, only their doors visible. Secret bunkers. From above they would look like sand dunes.

Both of them had their doors open; Jamal’s men were pushing a small airplane from the bigger one. Her heart beat faster. She was hauled to the plane and dumped in the back. Pain and more pain. She fought dizziness and nausea, watching from the window as the men prepared the aircraft for takeoff. Where was Jamal? She looked at the smaller building, pretty sure she knew what they were going to bring out. Some kind of weapon of mass destruction.

A strange sound began, then grew. She watched the building’s open door. No, the sound wasn’t coming from there. It came from above. A chopper, she recognized at last, and then she saw it, too—a Black Hawk.

Men shot at the helicopter, rifles blazing, everyone running around. A couple were going for the back of the truck. They got the grenade launcher, fired and missed. Someone in the chopper returned fire, taking out both of the men.

What if they hit the airplane to make sure nobody took off in it? She tried to get out, but couldn’t. She was in the back, the doors in the front. She would have had to climb over the front seats. Unfortunately, she couldn’t move.

SPIKE SCANNED THE drop zone for any sign of Abigail. “Shoot only if you’re sure of your target. Dr. DiMatteo is down there somewhere.” At least, he hoped she was.

They had found the pilot of the downed chopper; he hadn’t survived the crash. Spike had just about gone mad when they couldn’t find Abigail. The tire tracks in the sand told the story. And led them here.

He gave the signal. Ropes went over the side. He dropped, took up position back to back with the rest of his team once they were on the ground, waited for the last man to touch down. Then they spread out to find cover.

She was alive. He refused to consider the alternative. If she hadn’t survived the crash, they would have had no reason to take her.

He checked out the back of the truck. Nothing but the bodies of the two men who’d operated the grenade launcher. Somebody was shooting at him from behind the door of the larger building. He returned fire, aiming carefully, and took the man down.

Why weren’t they bringing Abigail out to negotiate? They had a hostage. Why not use her? Unless, of course, she’d survived the crash, was picked up by the terrorists, but then hadn’t made it through her injuries. They wouldn’t have killed her at this stage of the game, he was pretty sure of that. They had little leverage. She was a valuable bargaining chip. But not their only one.

He swore, trying to figure out where they kept the bomb. It hadn’t been at the camp. The fight there had been over fast, and their search turned up nothing. The rest of the team was still going through the place, leaving
no
grain of sand uninspected, questioning the men they had capaued.

But now that he had seen these bunkers, he was pretty sure the bomb was somewhere here.

He kept low to the ground and, ducking bullets, ran to the cover of the plane, then inside the larger building. No gunshots had come from there. A quick scan confirmed that it was empty, nothing but an airplane hangar.

The terrorists had lost three men, as far as he could tell. They’d now withdrawn into the smaller building, defending the entrance. He figured there couldn’t be more than a dozen of them. The small truck couldn’t have carried more.

It was a bad situation. The terrorists were trapped with nothing to lose. He expected them to bargain with Abigail’s life first and then, if that didn’t work, bargain with the bomb. They would want to save the bomb if possible, although if that was the only option left to them, they would probably detonate it rather than surrender.

And that could not happen. Everyone in the immediate vicinity would die. And Tihrin was too close, the wind blowing in the wrong direction. A dirty bomb would cause untold damage in a densely populated area. Worse, a crisis would set political factions against each other once again. And if it came out that U.S. military was somehow in the middle of this, World War Three would begin.

He bad to get into that bunker and take control of the situation, and he had to do it now.

He stepped from his cover, gun blazing, and rushed the entrance. There were four men down there, two still standing. Then one, and then the way was clear. He entered, giving his eyes a few seconds to adjust to the semidarkness. Werner, Thompson and J.D. came in behind him.

The single room was small, seven by eight or so, a staircase in the middle, leading down. He could see nothing below. He snapped on his night-vision goggles. Better. Silently, he moved ahead, watching for anything suspicious.

He reached the landing. It connected to a long corridor ahead. Empty. There were two doors on each side, all of them closed. He stopped by the first. When the guys moved into a protective position around him, he kicked the door in.

It was a laboratory, complete with workbenches, containers of chemicals, burners, books and a jumble of lab equipment. He moved forward with caution to make sure no one hid behind the desks. All clear. He signaled to the others and they moved on.

The second room was some kind of a communication center, also empty. He kicked in the door of the third. Someone was firing at them. He jumped back into the cover of the wall and signaled to the others to hold their fire. They had to be close to the bomb.

The light came on in the room. He took off his night vision equipment.

“Come on in, gentlemen.”

He recognized Jamal’s voice and, after a moment of hesitation, stepped forward.

Jamal stood by a large crate, his gun aimed at the door. “Mr. Thornton. I should have known.”

Spike’s gaze settled on the crate. A small plastic bomb was attached to the side; he could see the numbers on the timer from the door. Nineteen forty-two, nineteen forty-one, nineteen forty…

“Where is Abigail?”

Jamal blinked. “You shouldn’t have brought her into this. Only an American coward would try to hide behind a woman.”

Spike had trouble sucking air into his lungs. She was dead. And it was his fault.

Jamal squeezed off a shot at him. Spike ducked on reflex. By the time he came up, the man had disappeared through the back door.

He wanted to rush after him, to kill the son of a bitch. But if they didn’t disarm the bomb, none of it would matter. “I need an explosives expert.”

J.D. shook his head. “Bomb squad is still at the camp.”

“Get them on the radio.” He swore. “Go get him.” He nodded toward the back door and walked up to the crate as the others rushed after Jamal.

Fifteen minutes and thirty seconds left. He set down his gun and swore again. It had to be a bomb. He sucked at disarming bombs. That was how he’d gotten his head split open in the first place and been saddled with his nickname.

He took in the crate, wedged the blade of his knife carefully under one nail head, then another, until he worked a board loose. If by some miracle the crate did not contain what he thought it did, he could walk away and let the plastic blow. He reached in, pushed aside the packaging material.

Damn.

He drew back and squatted by the crate, blocked the rage and grief from his mind, focusing on the wires in front of him. All three were red. He didn’t have a clue which one to pull. It was a funky homemade job. The bomb was small, but enough to set off the larger one in the crate. If he had more time, he could have gotten the big bomb out of the packaging and made it up to the surface with it before the TNT exploded down below. But he didn’t have twenty minutes. He had nine and a half.

He took out his knife, separated the wires. Everything he had ever learned about bombs rushed through his brain, flashes of memory from his FBI training, then the more intensive SDDU course. He had barely passed them. Truth was, he was scared of explosions. His hands shook. He swallowed. He had thought he was past this.

He checked everything methodically, what connected to what, and weighed his options. If he could
pry
the thing off the crate and take it into another roomhe pressed his face against the wood to see behind the small explosive device, used the tip of his knife to gently lift the edge. It didn’t seem to move. What if there was a sensor of some sort? No, the piece didn’t look professional enough for that. Did he dare to bet his life on it? He took a deep breath and pulled harder. And then he could see.

A blue wire came out back, through a hole into the wood, back via another hole and into the black box that housed the timer. An instant trigger, no doubt; He had less than a minute left. Where the hell was the bomb squad?

He had to cut one of the red wires on the front. The right one. Now. He checked the connections again. The middle wire. He rested the tip of his knife against it. God help them all if he was wrong.