by Paige Tyler
Wes snapped his head around to look at Noah, but before he could say anything Holden’s voice came through his ear piece. “We’re in position and ready to move.”
“On the count of three,” Wes said. “Three…two…one!”
Shoving the door open, he stepped onto the roof, bringing up his gun as he darted across, Noah right behind him. Sam and Holden would be approaching from the northernmost corner of the building.
As he moved around one of the support columns holding up the pergola, Wes took in everything at once—Chapman and other men arrayed around the roof, the controller on the table for the drones, and most importantly, Stavros holding onto a struggling Kyla, a hand covering her mouth as she fought to scream.
In the five seconds it took for him to evaluate the scene, Chapman and the rest of the men pulled out their weapons. Wes didn’t waste time telling them to drop their guns because it’d only get him and his teammates killed.
While Wes and his Teammates had the element of surprise, they had to worry about hitting Kyla when they opened fire. The men they were up against didn’t.
Wes dived to the side to avoid the hail of bullets coming his way, hitting the rough surface of the roof and rolling until he reached one of the couches. The thing didn’t slow down the bullets, but it gave him a measure of concealment, allowing him to pop up on the far side and put a .45 caliber through the closer threat to him. A few dozen feet away, Stavros was using Kyla as a human shied while he attempted to escape the rooftop.
Wes quickly moved toward them, only to get held up as another armed man in a suit turned his way and pulled the trigger. Wes put two rounds through his chest and was already going after Stavros and Kyla again before the man hit the ground.
From the corner of his eye. Wes caught sight of Chapman scoop up the controller for the drones and follow Stavros along with three other men. If Chapman was slowing down in the middle of a firefight to bother with the controller, that couldn’t be good. But Wes pushed that concern aside as he ran to catch up with Kyla. He’d worry about what Chapman and the drones after he rescued Kyla.
“I’m going after Kyla,” he shouted into his radio, running as bullets tore up the roof all around him. “Cover me.”
Wes had no idea if his Teammates heard him, but then the number of bullets coming his way tapered off, which mean his buddies were drawing attention away from him.
He nearly caught up to Kyla and Stavros when they disappeared into one of the stairwells along with Chapman and the other three men. Wes cursed. If Stavros thought he’d gotten away, he wouldn’t need a hostage any longer and he’d kill Kyla.
Wes hurtled through the door and down the first few steps, barely avoiding a hail of bullets from a man crouched down near the railing of the landing below. Wes didn’t stop to think, but instead, threw himself forward, covering the remaining distance between him and the shooter.
Wes swore he could feel the bullets slice through the material of uniform top and graze the left side of his ribcage as he landed on the man. The .45 caliber automatic in his hand recoiled as he put two rounds into the man at close range. He slowed long enough to reload, then he was running as fast as he could down the rest of the steps.
Glancing over the railing, he could see Stavros dragging Kyla with him even as she struggled to free herself. They’d already reached the bottom floor and would be bailing through the emergency exit. If Wes didn’t get to them before that, Kyla would be dead.
Wes still had another flight of stairs to go when Chapman and one of the other men shoved their way out the emergency door. Instead of immediately following, Stavros stopped and turned toward Wes, holding Kyla in front of him. Eyes locked on Wes, Stavros put his gun to Kyla’s head. The asshole was going to kill her right there in front of him.
He slowed at the top of the stairs, trying to line up a shot when the heavy interior door to the hotel swung open slamming into Stavros hard enough to send him stumbling forward into Kyla.
Wes didn’t waste the opportunity. He pulled the trigger on the Colt once, wincing as Kyla’s long hair flipped a little as the bullet skimmed past her head with only millimeters to spare before tearing into Stavros’s right shoulder.
Wes raced down the stairs, aiming for the kill shot as Kyla dove to the floor to give him space. But then the door to the lobby swung open the rest of the way and Owen stumbled in, blocking his shot before falling over Kyla. Hand clutched to his shoulder, Stavros shoved open the emergency exit door, disappearing from sight even as he left a bloody smear on the frame.
Wes ran toward Kyla, intending to pull her to her feet, wrap his arms around her, and never let go, but the moment she shoved Owen off her, she jumped to her feet and headed for the emergency exit.
“We have to get that controller away from Chapman,” she shouted over her shoulder. “There are three drones headed for the San Diego Convention Center. We maybe less than fifteen minutes to stop them.”
Cursing, Wes caught her arm in time to stop her from poking her head out the doorway and get it shot off.
“We have to stop them,” Kyla said urgently. “People are going to die.”
He tugged Kyla away from the door. “Stay here. I’ll go after them.”
He could tell Kyla wasn’t thrilled with that idea, but Wes didn’t give her a chance to argue, darting his head out for a quick look, then taking off across the parking lot at a sprint. The idea that Kyla and Owen would stay behind was dashed as soon as he heard footsteps pounding behind him. The urge to turn and tell Kyla to go back was powerful, but he knew it was a waste of time. Kyla wasn’t the kind of woman who stayed behind and played it safe.
It wasn’t difficult to figure out which direction Chapman had gone. The screams coming from the east side of the hotel were sort of a dead giveaway. But by the time he reached the parking lot on that side of the building all he saw was a handful of freaked out people and a large black SUV squealing onto the street heading toward the harbor.
Wes didn’t bother lifting his weapon as he slowed to a trot. The vehicle was already too far away and gaining ground fast. There was no way he could catch them on foot.
Shit.
Behind him, tires squealed on concrete, and he spun around to find Kyla’s green Prius sliding to a stop beside him, Andrew gripping the steering in his white knuckled hands.
“Come on,” Andrew shouted. “We can still catch them.”
Wes stared at the ordinary looking electric car. Chase after Chapman in this?
You got to be kidding me.
Kyla jumped into the front passenger seat while Owen headed for the back.
“What are you waiting for?” she asked Wes. “Hurry up!”
Wes shook his head, pretty sure he was going to regret this. “Get in the back,” he told Andrew. “No way in hell am I letting you drive.”
The engineering student didn’t argue, practically throwing himself into the back seat in a tangle of arms and legs. Wes jumped behind the wheel, dropped his Colt into his lap, and floored the gas before everyone was even buckled in. The resultant squawk from the tires wasn’t exactly impressive, but it wasn’t as bad as he thought it might be. For an electric hybrid, the car accelerated a lot faster than he thought it would.
“This car isn’t paid off yet,” Kyla said as he swerved left onto Front Street, then bounced the car a foot off the ground as they crossed the light rail tracks on the way to Harbor Drive. “You break it, you buy it.”
Wes didn’t say anything, weaving in and out of traffic as he sped down the wide street that ran parallel to the marina. From the cars parked haphazardly on the side of the road, it was obvious Chapman had come this way in a hurry. He couldn’t imagine they were going to be able to catch up, but they had to try.
Beside him, Kyla pulled out her phone and called Sam, telling him about the drone strike on the exterior of the convention center.
“How did you know we were coming out that side of the hotel after Chapman?” Wes asked, giving Andrew a quic
k look in the rearview mirror as Kyla told Sam they were going to need to figure how to evacuate the area around the convention center immediately.
“I was tracking everything on the hotel security cameras,” Andrew said, clenching hard to his seatbelt in a useless attempt to keep from bouncing off the inside of his door as Wes slid the Prius around a car stopped at a red light and floored it through the intersection. “I saw the bad guys getting away and figured you’d need backup.”
Wes had to admit he was impressed.
“I think I see them up ahead,” Kyla said, sitting up straighter in her seat. “In front of that red sports car. It looks like they’ve slowed down to blend in with traffic, but we still need to hurry.”
Wes glanced at the speedometer and saw that they were doing nearly seventy. He wasn’t sure they could go any faster, not without wrecking in this heavy traffic. But Kyla was right. They only had a few minutes until those drones reached the convention center.
“Kyla, I’m using your laptop to access the city’s traffic cameras near the convention center,” Owen called from the backseat. “I can make out some of the area in front of the place and see some uniformed cops. Noah, Sam, and Holden are there, too. They’re trying to get the crowd around the center to move back inside, but it doesn’t look like they’re getting much cooperation.”
Cursing, Wes floored the accelerator. The peppy little hybrid jumped forward, surging through a gap between two cars and into a clear stretch, beginning to quickly close the distance between them and the black SUV. They might just catch the bigger vehicle.
Police sirens sounded behind them at the same time one of Chapman’s men popped out of the sunroof of the SUV and aimed his MP7 machine gun at them and Kyla’s definitely-not-bulletproof Prius.
This was bad.
Really bad.
Wes took a quick glance at the rearview mirror and saw three patrol cars weaving through the traffic behind them. The rest of the vehicles were doing their best to get out of the cops’ way, but they were still too far away to stop Kyla’s Prius from being shot to crap.
The man let them get close before opening fire, forcing Wes and every other car in the vicinity to swerve violently. Wes leaned his left hand out the driver’s window and returned fire, but shooting at a moving target from a moving vehicle with his off hand was hard as hell and he didn’t hold out a lot of hope of getting off a clean shot.
At least he made the man duck down and stop shooting for a moment. But then he was back, aiming his weapon at them again. Stavros leaned out the rear passenger’s side window with an MP7 of his own. Bullets skipped off the asphalt around the Prius, some bouncing up to ricochet off the front of the car, one round cracking the front glass into a spiderweb maze of lines. Kyla yelped and Wes had no choice but to slam on the brakes to avoid getting them killed.
“They’re getting away,” Kyla said.
Wes ground his jaw in frustration. He didn’t want Chapman and the others getting away any more than Kyla did, but he didn’t want her getting hurt either.
He started to move closer to the black SUV only to slow again when Stavros and the other guy lifted their weapons. But this time, they didn’t shoot.
“What the hell?” Wes muttered.
Why weren’t the assholes trying to kill them? Things only got weirder when both men suddenly jerked back inside the vehicle like turtles in their shells.
“Oh, crap,” Kyla said.
Punching the button to roll down her window, she yanked off her seat belt and practically crawled out until she was able to look around. She didn’t seem to be interested at all in the SUV, but was instead looking up at the sky.
“Go left…now!” she shouted.
Wes reacted without thought, barely remembering to reach of and get a grip on her belt before he yanked the wheel so hard to the side they almost went up on two wheels as they bounced across the median and into the oncoming lane of traffic. He was still fighting for control of the vehicle when something exploded a few yards to the right exactly where they’d been a second ago. The back window on the passenger side shattered all over Owen as pieces of frag peppered then car.
“What the hell was that?” Andrew asked as Wes swerved back over the median and onto the proper side of the road.
“Chapman just dropped one of his drones on us,” Kyla said as she shoved her head back out the window and started scanning the sky above their car again. “And there are two more of them up there.”
* * * * *
WE HAVE TO get closer to the SUV,” Kyla said as she pulled herself back through the window and dropped into her seat. “Unless you want Chapman to drop another one of those drones on us.”
“Get blown up or shot,” Wes muttered. “Not great choices.”
She silently agreed.
Even though Wes didn’t seem too thrilled with her idea, he closed the distance between them and the other vehicle.
“On the bright side,” Owen said from the back seat, still picking bits of glass from the shattered window out of his hair. “At least we don’t have to worry about Chapman using the drones to kill all those people at the convention center. He’ll be too busy trying to use them to kill us instead.”
Kyla would have laughed if the situation hadn’t been exactly as dire as Owen had implied. She glanced at Wes to see him staring intently in the rearview mirror. She spun around to see that the cop cars had pulled way back, keeping traffic behind them.
“I don’t think the cops are going to come any closer,” Wes murmured, eyes back on the road ahead. “Not until they figure out where that explosion came from. I think the best we can hope for is that they’ll keep everyone else back, too.”
Kyla didn’t realize how close they’d gotten to the SUV until the bullets from one of those small machine guns plowed into the road right ahead of them and bounced off the windshield right in front of her face.
Crap. Her insurance was never going to pay for all this.
“Incoming!” Andrew shouted, jerking his head back in the window Kyla hadn’t even noticed him leaning out of. “Coming right at us from behind!”
Kyla was thrown back in her seat as Wes floored it, her perfect little Prius surging forward like it was turbo charged.
“Take the wheel,” Wes said before grabbing his gun with both hands and using them to steady the weapon as he leaned out the driver’s side window and started shooting at the man hanging out the SUV’s sunroof.
Kyla grabbed at the wheel in time to keep them from ramming into the side of the bigger vehicle. She’d just started to steer them away from contact when the drone blew up somewhere right behind them so close it lifted the back of the Prius completely off the ground throwing them around like marbles in a coffee can when the tires came back down hard. The sound the vehicle made as it bounced a few times convinced her that her car was never going to be the same
“Crap,” Andrew said as the car swerved all over the road and he craned his head out the window to try and find the last drone. “That was too damn close.”
“We got lucky the first two times,” Wes said, his hands back on the wheel as he tried to get the Prius back under control even as Stavros and the other guy with the machine gun started shooting at them again. “Kyla, please tell me there’s a way to stop that last drone that doesn’t involve it blowing up somewhere close to us.”
Kyla shook her head. “I wish there was a simple answer to this, but if there is, I don’t know what it is. If we back off, they can still hit us with the drone or send it to the convention center.”
“Can we jam the signals coming from the controller?” Owen asked as Wes started shooting out the driver’s side window again. “Or maybe hijack the signal to the drone and redirect it at them instead of us?”
Kyla turned around in her seat to look at him. “You’re an engineer and you seriously asked me that? Do you happen to have a transmitter hidden somewhere that’s strong enough to jam the control signals going to the drone? Do you have the encryp
ted operating frequency for that thing? Because that’s what we’d need to take it over.”
Owen looked chagrined for a moment, but then smiled, holding up her laptop. “But we do have this.”
“Goody, we can order a pizza,” she said. “Or maybe I can hack into a Google Maps satellite and have it snap an action shot of us before we get blown to bits.”
“Um, guys,” Andrew murmured. “While this conversation is fascinating, I should probably point out that I can’t find the drone now. So, if you’re going to do something, it might be a good idea to do it quickly.”
As if to put a punctuation on that idea, another bullet hit the front of her car, tearing its way out through the center of the hood. The impact of the round was so violent, Kyla was surprised the engine was still running.
She was about to point out once again there was very little she could do to the drone with her laptop unless they really did want her to crack open a Google satellite and have it take a picture of them right at the moment of their demise when an idea popped into her head.
“Give me my laptop,” she said urgently. “Hurry!”
“You got something?” Wes asked, swerving the car back and forth to make it harder for the guys trying to kill them.
“Maybe,” she said, focusing on booting up her computer and finding a wi-fi signal to use. “It was something Chapman said about the drones needing to maintain a GPS connection the whole time they flew. Some kind of safety feature.”
Out the corner of her eye, she saw the confused look on Wes’s face.
“You just pointed out that we don’t have a transmitter strong enough to jam the controller,” Owen said. “How are you going to block the GPS signal from reaching the drone?”
Kyla didn’t bother to look up, intent on typing as fast as she could. “I’m not going to try block the GPS signal. I’m cutting it off.”
The silence inside the car—in comparison to the sounds of random gunfire and roaring engines was deafening.
