by Paige Tyler
Sam caught Chasen’s eye across the chaotic battlefield. That was all it took.
“Take Wes and Lane and go help her!” Chasen shouted. “The rest of us will get the nuke.”
Sam took off running, heading in a direction he prayed would allow him to intercept Poppy’s path. Bullets tore up the ground around him, but he kept going, depending on Wes and Lane to cover him as he moved straight across the square. When he reached the first building, he kept going, ignoring common sense that told him to slow down long enough to look around the corner first. No matter how crazy it was, he couldn’t slow down. Poppy was out there somewhere, and she was in trouble.
He ran past several more houses, panic setting in as he started thinking that maybe he’d gone the wrong direction and misjudged how fast Poppy could run. Then he heard automatic gunfire ahead of him immediately followed by a feminine scream that was impossible to miss. Sam sprinted around the next corner only to almost get run over by Wes and Lane as all three of them slid to a stop at the sight in front of them.
Major Tae and about a half dozen of his soldiers were firing from the left side of a small playground at Adika Alatas and a bunch of his men who were returning fire from the right. Poppy was smack in the middle of everything, huddled down behind a rusted merry-go-round as bullets from both sides zipped over her head and the backpack she was still wearing.
Sam’s heart froze solid in his chest. The air he so desperately needed in his lungs wouldn’t come. Even though his fear for Poppy nearly made him vapor-lock, Sam’s feet carried him forward before he even realized he was moving. On automatic pilot, his M4 carbine came up and he started shooting at the people closest to Poppy—Adika Alatas and his men.
Two of them were down before anyone realized Sam and his buddies had shown up for the party. He was less than ten feet away from Poppy’s position when a blur of motion made Sam whip his head to the side just in time to see Adika Alatas charging at him at full speed, AK-47 assault weapon blazing away.
Sam didn’t have time to get his M4 around. So instead, he threw himself to the ground, rolling as bullets passed by so close, he swore he felt them. Then he was on his feet again, slamming into Adika, taking them both down hard.
His M4 got trapped between his chest and the other man’s hip, and he had no chance to get it free since he was focused entirely on keeping Adika from shooting him. Sam shoved the barrel of Adika’s AK away from his face just as it went off. The blast from the muzzle made his ears ring.
Cursing, Sam punched the man as hard as he could, raining down blow after blow while bullets flew all around them. He’d never minded a good brawl, even when automatic weapons were involved, but trying to fight while keeping an eye out for Poppy was nerve-wracking as hell.
Sam glanced her way when Adika slammed his knee into his side, practically caving in his ribs. The force of the blow sent Sam rolling across the ground and his weapon flying. Knowing he was screwed, he got up and lunged toward his M4 lying a few feet away. There was no way he’d reach it before he got shot, but he was damn sure going to try anyway. He only prayed Wes and Lane would get Poppy out of here.
Hitting the ground, Sam grabbed his weapon, twisting his body to swing it around in time. Pain bloomed in his chest as he squeezed the trigger of his carbine and got off a three-round burst in Adika’s direction. Then he was flying backwards, every ounce of air in his lungs whooshing out. Shot, it felt like he’d been kicked by a mule.
Sam barely felt it when he landed, which only reinforced the idea that he was in seriously deep crap. He lay there, fighting for air as pain migrated from the center of his chest and out into both arms. His vision went a little dim then. Damn, getting shot hurt.
Suddenly, Poppy was leaning over him, her hands pulling at his tactical vest, face consumed with worry. “Sam, are you okay? Talk to me!”
He gazed up at the woman he loved, abruptly realizing he should have told her that, but also wondering how she could possibly ask such a question. He’d been shot. Didn’t she realize he was dying? But before he could say anything, Lane appeared and dragged him upright.
“Come on. We have to go!” his buddy said. “Chasen has cleared the village square and is waiting for us. Stop screwing around!”
Sam couldn’t help but look around in confusion, wondering when the hell everyone had decided that getting shot counted as screwing around. But then he finally looked down and realized there wasn’t any blood on him. His tactical vest was shredded and the ballistic plate underneath looked as if something had exploded in the middle of it. Breathing still seemed like something that other people did right now, too, but he wasn’t bleeding. Or dead.
He looked over to see Adika Alatas lying on the ground motionless, three holes drilled through the center of his chest. Apparently, Sam had gotten his shots off in time. And unlike him, Adika hadn’t been wearing a vest.
There were several other bodies as well, both from the North Korean contingent and those who’d been with Adika. No sight of Major Tae, though. That wasn’t a good sign. Sam had the feeling the man was dangerous as hell.
“You okay?” Poppy asked again, her eyes glistening with tears she was clearly fighting to hold back. “When I saw you fall, I thought you were…”
“I’m all right,” he said, pulling her into his arms. “Just got the breath knocked out of me, that’s all. I was more worried about you. I’m glad you’re okay.”
Her hand tightened on his shoulders. “You came for me.”
“Always,” Sam said simply.
He would have kissed her, but Wes and Lane were looking antsy as hell. Both guys were motioning for him to wrap it up.
“I really want to kiss you right now,” he whispered. “But we have to move before Chasen leaves us behind.”
Poppy didn’t complain, running to keep up with him, holding onto the shoulder straps of her pack to keep it from bouncing too much. Sam considered telling her to dump it but knew she’d never do it. That pack—and the stuff inside it—were part of the reason she’d come on this mission. She couldn’t do her job without it.
A lot of gunfire was coming from the center of the village, but by the time they got there, it all but disappeared. Chasen was beside a small pick-up truck, motioning for them to hurry.
“Both groups have retreated, but they’ll be back soon enough,” Chasen said, pointing Lane toward the passenger seat of the big cargo truck where Dalton was already waiting behind the wheel with the engine running. “And I sure as hell don’t want to be here when they do.”
Wes took off running toward another small pick-up truck, this one full of bullet holes. Even the windows were shot out. Sam was about to lead Poppy in that direction, but she was already running for the back of the military cargo truck.
“I need to check the nuke and make sure it’s still in a safe condition after all the shooting.”
The truck was already moving and they had to run to catch up to it. Sam helped Poppy into the back, then hopped in after her. They barely made it in before Dalton stomped on the accelerator and the truck lurched forward. Chasen’s vehicle raced ahead of them while Wes and the other guys fell in behind them to protect their six.
“Crap,” Poppy said, her voice barely audible over their truck’s roaring diesel engine.
Sam spun around to see her staring at the ragged holes that had torn through the canvas along the sides of the cargo bed. It only got worse as he followed her gaze further and saw the matching holes in the side of the nuke.
“Should it be smoking like that?” Sam asked, frowning at the acrid smoke slowly filling the air.
“No.” Poppy crawled forward on her hands and knees only to fall over as the truck swerved violently and gunfire echoed around them.
Sam glanced out the back of the truck to see an absolute entourage of bad guys following them.
Shit.
Poppy ignored the shooting and continued over to the weapon on her hands and knees, yanking the backpack off her shoulder as she moved.
“At least one of those bullets hit something in there that didn’t like it,” she said, reaching into her bag for a small battery-operated drill.
“Is there anything in a nuke that doesn’t mind being shot?” Sam asked.
The smoking was getting worse. Maybe they should try and shove the nuke out of the truck before things got out of hand.
Poppy seemed to think about his question for a moment. “Actually, now that I think about it, no. There’s nothing inside a nuclear weapon that would take kindly to being shot.”
Before Sam could say anything more, she began unscrewing and unbolting covers and panels on the weapon he hadn’t even realized were there. He would have helped, but it didn’t look like she needed any. Something told him she’d done this before—a lot.
“Could this thing go high order?” he asked worriedly.
“You mean produce a high-yield nuclear blast?” Poppy replied, not taking her eyes off the weapon as she took off another panel, cursing a little as it sizzled in her hands from the heat building up inside the thing. She tossed it aside even as flames began to appear in the nuke. “Most likely not.”
He sagged with relief. “That’s good.”
“Depends on your definition of good,” she murmured, still not looking at him. “If the fire reaches the explosives around the pit, the weapon is will start releasing high levels of alpha radiation. If that gets into our lungs…well…let’s just say it won’t end well for us. If the fire progresses beyond that and gets completely out of hand, the HE could undergo a burn to detonate transfer. It wouldn’t create much of a yield—no mushroom cloud or anything—but we’d be dead, and the radiation scatter would make a good portion of this island, as well as the ones downwind, uninhabitable for the next decade or so.”
Yeah, that was bad.
“What do we do?” Sam asked, stunned she was so calm. He sure as hell wasn’t. And he was a SEAL. Getting shot at didn’t bother him but glowing in the dark was not on his list of things he wanted to do in this life.
“We have to strip the warhead down and get enough of the outer skin off to figure out what’s going on in there, then put the fire out,” she said.
Sam moved over to help and was immediately tossed aside as the truck swerved and the base of the nuke container slid halfway across the back of the cargo bed, only to slide back the other direction as they went around a curve on the mountainous road way too fast, nearly crushing Poppy against the side rails of the vehicle.
“Dalton, slow the hell down!” Sam shouted through the broken back-glass of the cab. “Poppy is trying to take the nuke apart to keep it from killing us all and you’re not making it any easier.”
“No problem,” Dalton called from the cab of the truck. “I’ll slow down so the people behind us can catch up and shoot us.”
Sam threw a quick look out the back of the truck to see that the bad guys had indeed caught up. Wes and the other guys were barely able to keep them at bay. Even as he watched, one of the vehicles chasing them caught up and slammed into Wes’s truck, nearly shoving it off the road. And based on the view Sam got as they went around another curve, going off the road this deep in the mountains meant a drop of a couple hundred feet. As if bad guys with guns weren’t enough to deal with.
Another curve had the truck tires squawking and the nuke sliding back Sam’s direction. Dalton might drive them off the edge of a cliff before the bad guys ever got a chance to shoot them. Or the burning nuke blew them up.
Sam ended up alternating between helping Poppy with the nuke and moving to the tailgate of the truck to shoot at the bad guys. Bullets tore through the back of the truck a few times, but Poppy was so focused on what she was doing, she didn’t seem to notice.
She’d gotten most of the access panels off the warhead to reveal all kinds of parts that didn’t mean a damn thing to him. But he could definitely see where several bullets had penetrated into the inner case of the weapon. Gray and yellow powdery material had come out and was scattered all over the place. That looked bad, but it wasn’t the part of the missile Poppy seemed to care about. Instead, she was focused on a stainless-steel cylinder the size of a long beer can. The thing had a hole in the side and was glowing a dull red, as well as belching sparks, flames, and smoke. The wires, circuit cards, and epoxy all around the metal can were smoking and burning like crazy. Poppy calmly reached into her pack and pulled out a tiny red fire extinguisher then sprayed the entirety of the mess. The stainless-steel can continued to spit fire, but everything else stopped burning.
“This is much better than I thought,” she said.
“What is it?” he asked, firing a long burst of automatic weapon fire at one of the vehicles that was getting way too close, then stumbling to her side as the truck slid around a curve and almost tipped over. The missile container and all the parts Poppy had removed slid, too, nearly crushing him again.
“This is a thermal battery,” she said, not looking at him as she started unbolting a bracket holding the metal cylinder down.
“A thermal battery?” he prompted.
She gave him a smile. “It produces electricity by igniting a pyrotechnical material inside, which in turn melts the electrolyte material. It was hit by one of the bullets, which inadvertently started it, creating a thermal runaway scenario.”
Thermal runaway sounded pretty bad to him, but he remained silent, focusing on keeping the missile from sliding around and crushing her as she removed the battery, then tossed it out the back of the truck.
“What the hell was that?” Holden shouted over the radio from behind them, their small truck swerving to avoid the smoking thing as it bounced down the road.
“It was a piece of the warhead,” Sam said casually into his mic. “But don’t worry. Poppy said it isn’t important.”
The shooting, swerving, and sliding continued as Poppy took a can of spray foam insulation out of her pack and squirted it all over the insides of the warhead. The goop started expanding, making a mess.
His confusion must have been obvious because she smiled again.
“The expanding foam will stabilize the explosives and lithium,” she explained, spraying more of the gooey stuff until it was oozing all over the place. “That’s the gray and yellow pieces you saw floating around in there.”
Sam would have asked what the lithium was for, but before he could, something slammed into the back of the truck and he found himself lying face down on the floor, weapon who knew where, as he was nearly crushed by the nuke.
He was so focused on Poppy and making sure she was okay that he didn’t realize there was trouble coming until Major Tae came hurtling over the tailgate of the truck, falling into the back of the vehicle like he’d been shot out of a cannon. The a-hole must have been riding on the hood of the vehicle that had rammed them like he was in some action movie. There was no other way he could have gotten inside with them.
Sam lunged to his feet, frantically looking for his weapon, at the same time tracking Tae before the guy had a chance to regain his balance. But the movement barely seemed to bother the big man. The North Korean soldier aimed vicious strikes to Sam’s chest and throat even as they both fell. The second they slammed into the metal flooring, Tae pulled his sidearm and aimed the gun at Sam’s head.
Cursing, Sam fought back, the two of them rolling around the back of the truck, bouncing off the side rails, the tailgate, and the nuke. All the while, Tae tried to get a clear shot as Sam spent his time trying to stop him.
Poppy ducked and dived, trying to stay out of the way.
Tae got off several shots, barely missing Sam, Poppy, and the nuke. Sam was finally forced to go for the man’s weapon, which left him wide open to a kick in the chest. Even though Tae was off balance and couldn’t get much force behind the move, the blow still hurt his battered chest like hell, making breathing seem like something that wasn’t worth the effort. It also shoved him halfway across the bed of the truck, giving Tae a chance to twist his weapon around in
Sam’s direction again.
Even though Sam knew he was screwed, he lunged forward anyway. Because going down without a fight, wasn’t an option. If he failed, Poppy would be next.
Tae hesitated for a moment, a smile stretching across his face. As if he wanted Sam to know just how much he was going to enjoy this. Then the big man lifted his weapon a little higher and started to squeeze the trigger.
Sam leaped forward even though he knew there was no way to get to Tae in time. But instead of getting a bullet for his trouble, he saw the North Korean stumble sideways as a white blur hit him in the side of the head. The man’s shot went wide as a burst of powdery foam engulfed his head.
Poppy had sprayed him with her tiny fire extinguisher.
Using the distraction to his advantage, Sam finished the fight, shoving Tae out the back of the truck.
Sam almost fell out with him, but he grabbed onto the top of the tailgate at the last second. That gave him a front row seat to Major Tae hitting the road and getting run over by one of his own vehicles, which ended up sliding right off the mountainside.
That seemed to take something out of the few bad guys still trying to catch them. A couple exchanged a few more rounds with Wes’s vehicle, but after that, the entire group gave up the chase. Seconds later, it was just them and one hastily patched-up nuke. The drive was almost pleasant now that they weren’t being shot at.
Sam looked over as a warm hand came down to cover his where it rested on the top of the tailgate. Poppy seemed frazzled but was still holding the small fire extinguisher she’d used to save his life. Maybe he’d get the thing bronzed.
“Is it over?” Poppy asked, leaning her weight into him a little. He was sore as hell from all the fighting but having her there against him felt nice. Really nice.
“We still have to get the nuke to the beach and signal the sub for a pickup,” he said softly, gazing at her and wondering how he ever got so lucky. “But yeah, I think the exciting part is over.”
