by Cindy Dees
Both men did exactly that.
And then the pistol discharged once more, flashing between their chests. Blood sprayed everywhere and she couldn’t help it. She screamed.
* * *
Jeff groaned as the round hit the meaty part of his upper right chest. It felt like the bullet broke his collarbone. But he knew a thing or two about pain. Gritting his teeth, he literally fell on top of the shooter, using his weight to smash the man flat.
The man struggled, swearing, beneath him. “Who in the hell are you, and why won’t you die?”
Jeff ground out as he grappled with the man, “I’m your worst nightmare. You got my guys killed. And now it’s payback time.”
“Jeff! No!”
He didn’t bother to glance over at Jennifer.
“This isn’t open to negotiation,” he snapped. “This man dies. Now.”
“Don’t do it, Jeff! You’ll have to live with it for the rest of your life.”
“I can do that. I already live with the faces of my men who this bastard got killed.”
“Huh?” Ordonez’s muscles slackened slightly in his confusion. Jeff wrenched the guy’s arm practically out of the socket and forced the man to roll onto his belly or lose his arm. Literally.
“Are you the bastard who’s been selling the satellite feeds?”
“No!”
“Don’t lie to me.” Jeff jacked the guy’s arm up against the resistance of ligaments and tendons until Ordonez screamed. To her credit, Jennifer didn’t interfere in his rather extreme interrogation technique.
“Let’s try that again, Sergeant. Did you sell those feeds?”
“Didn’t sell them,” the man panted. “Blackmail. They blackmailed me.”
“Who?”
“Venezuelan death squad got my family. Mother of God, ease off my arm!”
“Keep talking.”
“They’re holding my family hostage. Seven years, man. Seven years!”
“The Venezuelans managed to get this place double-wired and put you inside?” Jeff asked in disbelief.
“Not them. The Chinese. They wired the place. They probably leaned on the Venezuelans to turn me.”
“That’s all I need to hear. And now I’m going to kill you very slowly. And while I rip your limbs off one by one, I’m going to tell you the names of my men who died. The names of their wives and children, damn you.”
“Jeff—” Jennifer started warningly.
“Please!” Ordonez cried, cutting her off. “I did what I could. Diverted the most critical feeds. Protected the missions I could. I’ll talk. I’ll tell you everything I know. Names. Contacts. Money trail. Sweet Jesus, my arm! I’ll give you the Chinese!”
Jeff was tempted. But the faces of his men haunted him, their families’ grief at their funerals burned into his memory. But then another face intruded upon his rage. This one real and at a distance of about twelve inches.
“Take his offer, Jeff. This guy’s just a pawn. Go for the real killers. I’ll help you. Uncle Sam will help you. We’ll nail them all. But you have to let this man live.”
Jeff threw himself off the other man in disgust. Absently, he pressed a hand to his bleeding gunshot wound.
He jumped as Ordonez quickly lifted the forgotten pistol to his own mouth and pulled the trigger. But Jeff was too late. Dead, glassy eyes stared up at him from a pool of blood and gore. Jeff stared down in satisfaction. Finally. Justice was done.
And then the pain hit him. Damn, getting shot hurt.
Jennifer was swearing steadily and violently. She probably didn’t even realize tears were streaking down her face. He started to reach for her, but daggers of agony stabbed through his right shoulder.
He moved to put his left arm around her to guide her to the door, and that was when he noticed the panels of buttons and gauges going crazy.
“Uh, Jenn. We may have a problem. It looks like Ordonez breached the containment chamber.”
* * *
Jeff’s words shocked Jennifer out of her reaction to Ordonez’s death. On the one hand, she was glad the man who’d betrayed her and H.O.T. Watch, who’d shot Jeff, was dead. But on the other hand, it was back to her and Brady taking the fall for everything.
“Breached…” she echoed. She glanced up at the control panels and gulped. She was no nuclear engineer, but she knew enough to know that Jeff was right. They had a major problem.
“See this smashed panel? It looks like he opened an emergency pressure relief valve and has disabled the controls that would close it again. We’re about to have a major leak of radioactive steam. As soon as the ducting fails, if I had to guess.”
She stared at Jeff in dismay. “Can we fix it?”
“Don’t know,” Jeff muttered, studying the other panels. “Good way to cover his tracks. Make it so no one can come down here to find the double-wiring for a few hundred years.”
“We have to fetch Brady. Get out of here. Evacuate the island.”
Jeff nodded, now studying the nuclear reactor below them through the glass windows. “You go get Brady and leave.”
“You have to come, too!”
“How many people are still on the island?”
She frowned, thinking. “There’s a small town topside. Maybe five hundred civilians. Family members of the H.O.T. Watch staff mostly. Some support people. They won’t have cleared out, yet.”
“Get them off the island as fast as you can.”
“What are you going to do?” she asked suspiciously.
“Buy you some time. I think I can reach that valve and manually close it at least partially.”
Horrified, she blurted, “You can’t. You’ll get irradiated.”
“How did Spock put it in the Star Trek movie? The good of the many outweighs the good of the one?”
“No!”
“Go.”
“Absolutely not, Jeff. This is madness.”
“This is necessary.” He grabbed her by the shoulders and kissed her hard and fast. “I’ll join you on the surface as soon as I’m done. Leave the lights on and the doors unlocked until I come out, okay?”
He gave her a little push toward the doorway. When she resisted, he reminded her gently, “The locals are civilians. Women and children. Someone has to warn them. They deserve that much.”
It was a cruel gambit. He knew she couldn’t deny the validity of that particular argument. She talked fast. “There’s an elevator in the ops center under the big screens. It’s an emergency exit.”
He nodded, then said grimly, “I love you, Jenn. Now get out of here.”
He turned away and put his hands on the locked glass door leading down to the reactor core containment area. He gave a mighty heave and the door shattered as he ripped the handle off of it.
“I love you, too.” The words came out as a sob, but hopefully he understood them. “Come back to me, Jeff.”
“I promise.”
He was lying. But she loved him for it.
She turned and ran.
* * *
Jeff made his way quickly to the valve. It was a simple job, really. Grab the circular metal plate and rotate it from its open position to a closed position. A ninety-degree pivot. No big deal. Except the valve was three feet across and weighed several hundred pounds. Worse, the servos holding it open were exerting hundreds of pounds of additional pressure on the plate to hold it open.
Heat poured off the cement sarcophagus housing the reactor core behind him. It was filled with water, and the steam heat in here was nearly unbreathable. He didn’t even want to think about the radiation dosage he must be getting. This was suicide, and not in the figurative sense. But Spock was right. One life versus hundreds of innocent lives was no choice at all.
He placed his hands on the plate and yanked them back as the hot metal scorched his palms. He tore off his shirt, ignoring the stab of pain from his busted collarbone. Wrapping his hands in his shirt, he grabbed the valve again with his good arm and pulled. It didn’t budge.
He thought he felt the valve move a bit. He took several deep breaths, gathered himself and threw everything he was into closing that valve. He pictured Jennifer. Her laughter. Her passion. The love in her eyes when she didn’t remember to hide it from him. And he found the strength.
Slowly, slowly, the valve gave way. He trembled from head to foot, straining with the effort, blood and sweat and tears drenching him. But finally, it closed.
He staggered and fell to his knees, panting. He probably ought to get out of here. Even if he was a dead man, it would be nice to see Jenn once more before he kicked the bucket. He really had been looking forward to spending sixty or seventy years with her.
He pulled his broken body up the wall painfully and stumbled toward the stairs. One step at a time. Just one step.
* * *
Jennifer could hardly see through her tears as she and Brady ran for the ops center.
“This way, Jennifer.” Brady guided her to the elevator that would dump them out at Pirate Pete’s mail delivery service. It was a little-used emergency exit from the facility, but it earned its keep this day.
She stumbled out of the elevator and into the funky storefront. They stepped onto the beach. Chaos was the only word to describe the scene. In the flickering light of tiki torches, boats of every size and description were either pulling away from the pier or waiting to approach it and pick up passengers. Men, women and children milled around in consternation in the darkness while soldiers from H.O.T. Watch herded them into rough lines to board the boats.
“They’ve got to hurry,” she mumbled to Brady. “The leak will happen as soon as the radioactive steam melts the ducting.”
Brady nodded grimly and moved away to impress upon his men the urgency of getting everyone off the island now.
Jennifer sat down on the front steps of Pirate Pete’s and just stared. So, this was what the end of a dream looked like. Everything she knew and loved was going up in smoke before her, and there wasn’t a damned thing she could do about it.
It dawned on her that she was just sitting here, staring at her toes when there was work to be done. Her heart might be broken into a million pieces, but she’d never been the kind of woman who simply gave up. She’d keep fighting to the end. She owed that much to Jeff.
The thought of him made a sob tear at her chest. But she pushed to her feet, anyway, and dived into helping board refugees.
It took nearly an hour, but finally, the last of the civilians were off the island, and most of the soldiers, as well. Brady came over to her, looking nearly as haggard as she felt.
“Any sign of him?”
“Not yet.”
“Last boat’s getting ready to board.”
“I’ll stay,” she declared.
“Jennifer. You can’t. If he didn’t get that valve closed, you’ll die from the radiation.”
“He said he’d come back to me.”
Brady wrapped her in a hug, but she remained rigid against him, refusing to accept his comfort. “It’s time, Jenn. You have to let him go.”
“I can’t. I can’t!”
“I know it hurts. But you have to come away. It’s what he would want.”
She just couldn’t do it. She tore out of Brady’s arms and ran, stumbling through the heavy sand, back to Pistol Pete’s. Behind her she heard one of Brady’s men shout something about being ready to cast off. Brady yelled something back, but she didn’t hear his words.
She tore inside Pirate Pete’s and headed for the storeroom which hid the elevator. She jammed the button that would open the door. Odd. The door didn’t slide open. Either it wasn’t working…or the elevator was downstairs…which meant someone had called for it.
She heard Brady shouting for her outside but ignored him, frantically staring at the elevator door. “Don’t you give up on me, Jeff Winston,” she raged at the door. “You walk out of there right now!”
A whooshing sound startled her. With a slight pop, the elevator door slid open. At first she didn’t see anyone. But then she spied Jeff lying in a heap on the floor. She bolted forward. He was alive, but barely. And he was unconscious. There was no way she could pick him up by herself, adrenaline burst or no.
“Brady!” she shouted at the top of her lungs. “Help me!”
Not only did Brady careen into the storeroom, but a half dozen of his men came with him. They must have been coming to pick her up bodily and carry her down to the boat. Well, they could carry Jeff instead.
“Pick him up,” Brady ordered.
“Carefully,” she added frantically. The special forces soldiers grunted in surprise as they hoisted Jeff between them and hustled him outside. Jennifer hovered beside them as they jogged down to the pier with Jeff and boarded a rigid inflatable boat. The vessel pushed away from shore.
“Give me your phone,” she demanded of Brady. He passed her his cell phone without comment and watched as she quickly dialed a number.
“Gemma, it’s Jennifer. I need you to get to Kingston, Jamaica, as fast as you can with everything you’ve got to treat severe radiation poisoning. I’ll be there with Jeff in two hours.”
And they were the longest two hours of her life. Jeff never regained consciousness. The special forces medic on the boat cleaned and bandaged Jeff’s gunshot wound and set his broken collarbone. The guy also fixed Jeff’s dislocated shoulder and set up an IV drip to push fluids and painkillers into Jeff. But that was all they could do for him.
The hospital in Kingston added potassium iodide to the IV drip to protect his thyroid from the radiation. But the doctors were grim and uncommunicative after they finished testing Jeff with radiation dosimeters that went black when pressed against his skin.
Gemma and Leland arrived sometime after sunrise. Time had ceased to have any meaning for Jennifer as she waited for Jeff to wake up. He’d said he would come back to her. And he wouldn’t break his promise. He would wake up.
After a quick conference with his doctors, Gemma stepped into the room with her and stood quietly on the other side of Jeff’s bed. “Jennifer, I have to ask you something.”
She looked up in surprise. The doctor’s voice was surprisingly gentle.
“The good news is Jeff’s body mass allowed him to absorb more radiation than most people could survive. The bad news is the radiation has destroyed most of his bone marrow.”
Jennifer pressed a hand over her mouth. That was not good. “Is he going to die?” she whispered.
Gemma frowned. “We can try a bone marrow transplant. Leland’s a match and has volunteered to donate marrow for him.”
Jennifer heard the “or” in the doctor’s voice. “What’s the other choice?”
“I can give Jeff megadoses of the stem cell medication he’s already been using. It ought to grow new marrow for him.”
“But?” she asked cautiously.
“But after such large doses of the medicine, the changes to Jeff’s bones will likely be permanent. It has always been my premise that we would stop this experiment when we’d collected enough data on it, and that my test subjects’ bodies would return to normal in time.”
Jennifer frowned. “Why are you asking me this? Shouldn’t you be talking to Leland as Jeff’s next of kin?”
“Leland said I should leave the choice to you. It’s what Jeff would want. He loves you, you know. Intends to marry you.”
A sob threatened to escape Jennifer’s chest, but she fought it back. “Which option gives Jeff the best chance of surviving?”
Gemma shrugged. “They’re about a wash. Either way, Jeff’s in for a fight.”
Jennifer stared down at him. His smooth face offered her no clues as to which option she should choose. She glanced up at Gemma. The doctor was equally impassive.
Dammit, she made life and death
choices all the time in her work. This was no different. Weigh the merits and drawbacks, calculate which option offered the best chance of mission success, make the call and don’t look back.
Except this was Jeff. And she had to choose between giving him the normal life that she wanted for him or the enhanced life she knew he wanted…along with all the dangers and unknowns of that life.
It was no choice at all. She knew what she had to do.
Chapter 18
Jeff squinted against the glare of a painfully bright light.
“Jeff? Can you hear me? Can you open your eyes?”
He blinked his eyes open and smiled—or at least tried to smile—at the sight of Jennifer leaning down close to him. Her hand was warm and strong gripping his. Her hair fell down around him like a sable curtain and blocked out the worst of the glare.
“Hey.” It came out a harsh whisper.
There was a flurry of activity as Jennifer shouted that he was awake and a raft of doctors and nurses swept in to poke and prod at him, foremost among them, Gemma Jones. That woman had a sadistic streak a mile wide.
He rasped up at her, “Am I gonna live?”
“In spite of your best efforts to nuke yourself until you glow, yes.”
“People make it? Off the island?”
“Yes. And the nuclear reactor is fine. You contained most of the steam and there was only a small release of radiation. Nothing dangerous to anyone but you.”
He smiled as Jennifer elbowed the doctor aside. She looked anxious as she took his hand again. He tried to give it a reassuring squeeze but was stunned at how weak he was. “How long have I been out?”
“Almost two weeks.”
Wow. “Did I scream again?”
Jennifer smiled in warm communication with him. “Nope. No pain this time. We just had to regrow you a whole bunch of bone marrow.”
He frowned. “How?”
“Gemma’s miracle drugs. She injected your stem cells into your bones, and sure enough, they’re regenerating new bone marrow for you. Thing is…” Her voice trailed off.
“What?” he asked in alarm, looking back and forth between the two women. He was further alarmed when Gemma quickly herded the medical staff out of the room and left him and Jennifer alone.
