“Then why you two and nobody else?” But it was Cosky’s flat voice that asked the question.
“Because they have walked the other side and returned. You have not,” Jude said coolly.
“Walked the other side?” Zane asked, his attention skipping between Jude and Rawls with periodic trips toward Faith.
Rawls ran a hand over his head and shrugged. “He means Faith and I both died and then returned to our bodies, while the rest of you managed to avoid that particular nasty journey.”
“Died?” Zane shot a glance at Cosky. “Admittedly, from what Cosky and Kait said, Faith didn’t have a pulse back there in the tunnel, at least not until Kait did her thing. But you—” He shook his head, his green eyes almost regretful. “Sorry buddy, you had a heartbeat.”
“Did I?” Rawls turned his head to stare at Cosky. “I watched everythin’ you and Kait did from outside and above my body. Watched you two heal me. Felt myself sucked back into my body. That’s how I ended up with Pachico, he hitched a ride back into this world when you healed me.”
Silence fell, and every eye turned to Cosky.
“Hell.” Cosky stirred and shook his head. “I don’t know. I thought I felt a pulse, but it was faint, erratic. There one moment, gone the next. It could have cut out when I lifted my fingers.”
A memory slipped through Rawls’s mind.
“What the hell do they think they’re gonna do?” Pachico asked. “Bring you back from the dead?”
Cosky hissed. “I got a pulse.”
Pachico laughed again. “Wishful thinking on your buddy’s part. If you had a pulse, you wouldn’t be all floaty beside me.”
His heart had stopped beating several seconds before Cosky’s arrival on the scene, as evidenced by Rawls’s front-row seat in that silvery otherworld. He wouldn’t have been watching the drama, all disembodied there beside them, if his heart had still been beating—would he?
He frowned, the question a sharp itch. Hell, he couldn’t make the assumption that he’d been dead. Maybe Cosky had felt a pulse. Despite the fact that he’d spent several minutes there, he didn’t know much of anything about that eerie netherworld. Maybe a borderline pulse was enough to get the soul—or essence, or whatever the hell people called that transparent, incorporeal state—ejected from the corporeal body. And then there was Faith. She didn’t have any recollection of dying or playing voyeur outside her body, yet she’d still seen Pachico.
Who the hell knew what the rules were? As Pachico had complained, death didn’t come with a manual.
“Look,” Rawls said after a few seconds of uneasy silence. “All I’m sayin’ is that I was outside my body, in a transparent state, watchin’ everythin’ that was happenin’ there on the ground. I heard everythin’. Saw everythin’. At least until I was dragged back into my body . . . everythin’ gets hazy after that.”
“Take us through what you saw and heard,” Zane said calmly.
“Oh, for Christ’s sake,” Mac snapped, disbelief flashing across his face. “We’re wasting our time with this shit.”
Zane shot Mac another of those quelling looks. “We were all there. There’s no harm in comparing his version to ours.”
Cosky nodded in agreement.
Well . . . hell . . . Rawls rocked back slightly in surprise. They were actually taking his story under consideration . . . maybe.
With Faith’s hand still warming his palm and fingers, he briskly recounted what he remembered from that night, a week earlier, when he’d died. He skipped telling them about the weird snake of energy that had impaled his transparent chest and pulled him back into his body. From what he remembered of the conversation back then, as they circled his splayed, still body, they’d seen the energy as a glow, or a shimmer, but nobody had mentioned that weird tentacle. If they’d seen it, sure as hell someone would have mentioned it.
After he finished, an edgy hush seized the cavern.
“What he described is pretty much what I remember,” Zane finally said. He shifted to scan Mac’s and Cosky’s faces, as though looking for confirmation.
A round of uneasy agreements lit the tense silence.
“Which doesn’t mean shit,” Mac interrupted, although a troubled expression had settled on his face. “He could have heard everything we said.”
“While unconscious?” Zane asked with raised eyebrows.
“We don’t know that he was unconscious,” Mac fired back. “But hell, even if he did step out of his body like he claims, to play voyeur on us, that has no bearing on the damn ghost he claims tailed him back.”
Rawls locked his instinctive protest down. Arguing wouldn’t convince anyone that he was sane.
“Your belief holds no weight,” Jude announced in his habitually expressionless tone. “The biitei existence is not conditional on your acceptance.”
Another thick silence fell.
Once again Zane was the one to break it. “Biitei?”
Rawls turned to Jude, but the big Arapaho had stilled and was staring at the ground, his long, graying braid dangling over his right shoulder and swaying slightly. As paranoid as he was about the whole ghost thing, he must have decided to go back to ignoring the topic under discussion.
“Ghost.” Rawls finally translated the Arapaho word.
Jude suddenly straightened. “Wolf comes.”
As distractions went, it immediately shifted everyone’s focus—although from the censorious look Zane directed at him, the ghost conversation was far from over.
“Come,” Jude said, pivoting and heading toward the back of the cavern and the rock passageway that penetrated deep into the heart of the hillside.
“What the fuck,” Mac growled, slamming his hands down on his hips. “He could spend a few fucking words filling us in.”
Faith beside him, Rawls weaved his way between people as he headed for Jude. He had no clue how much range that amulet had. He couldn’t afford to let his ghost protection get too far ahead. But just before he joined the gray-haired warrior, a huge body dressed in camo stepped out of the darkness behind Jude and joined the older Arapaho in the mouth of the cavern.
Wolf.
Rawls picked up his pace.
After a brief conversation with his second in command, Wolf shifted, his dark eyes landing on Rawls. He beckoned him forward. When Rawls reached him, Wolf passed him a wad of leather.
“Don’t take it off,” Wolf said flatly, and brushed past him, advancing on Cosky and Kait.
Rawls unwrapped the leather and found a small weaving attached to a leather cord. The new amulet carried the same stacked starburst pattern as Jude’s charm, but in vibrant purple and blue.
Relief whooshed through him. He slipped the thin cord over his head and lifted his T-shirt, slipping the weaving beneath it. It rasped against his skin, itchy and annoying, but at least he didn’t have to count on someone else’s shield now. With this hiixoyooniiheiht he could protect himself and Faith and everyone else for that matter.
“Does it feel . . . I don’t know . . . weird? Strange?” Faith asked him, curiosity shimmering in her eyes.
“Just itchy,” Rawls said absently. He turned to find Wolf, Mac, Zane, and Cosky in a huddle maybe ten feet behind him.
“Can I see it?” Faith asked.
Rawls tugged the weaving up by the cord, dropping it into her hands when she reached for it. Since the cord was still around his neck, she had to lean in to inspect it, until she was so close her head was tucked beneath his chin and the sweet scent of her hair tickled his nose and libido.
To distract himself, he sought out Wolf again and found the huddle breaking apart.
“Listen up,” Mac said, stepping into the center of the hub and raising his voice. “We’re moving out. Wolf, Jude, and I will lead the way. Rawls, Cosky, and Zane will bring up the rear.”
As people stirred and lined up, Cosky headed toward Kait and lifted her to her feet. He held a water bottle to her lips, and once he was satisfied with her intake, he gave her a swift
hug and handed her off to Marion, who wrapped an arm around her waist. Zane kissed Beth and joined Cosky. They wove their way through bodies toward the back of the hub.
“It doesn’t feel any different,” Faith said, disappointment in her voice. She gave the rough starburst one final rub between her fingers and dropped it.
“How you doin’?” Rawls asked quietly as he tucked the weaving back beneath his shirt. He reached for her wrist to check her pulse. It beat steady and strong beneath his fingers.
She’d be safer in the middle of the flock, guarded by the front and back flanks. But, if her heart was even the slightest unstable still . . . procedures be damned . . . he’d glue her to his side.
“I’m fine. Honestly.” She pulled her wrist away and made a shooing gesture. “Go. Go.”
Rawls gave her one final, thorough scan from head to toe. Her color looked good. Her eyes clear. She was breathing with ease.
“I’ll be right behind you if you run into trouble,” he told her softly and leaned down, brushing her lips with his. Her mouth was soft beneath his. Satin smooth.
Intoxicating.
Stifling a groan, he forced himself to lift his head and step back. The soft cloudy look in her eyes followed him as he headed back to Cosky and Zane.
“Mac has a point,” Cosky told Rawls and Zane in a low voice, as they slowly followed Amy and her two boys through the hub and into the rock-cut passageway. “How the hell did Jude know Wolf was on the way?”
“You think he’s lyin’?” Rawls asked.
“No. Fuck. Wolf’s here, right?” Cosky slowed, letting Amy and her chattering son increase the distance between them. “But there’s something weird there. Jude showed up at our door before Mac’s nine-one-one hit the radio waves. He said Wolf had contacted him, warned him to get everyone into the tunnels immediately.”
Zane shrugged. “He’s Wolf’s second. Probably has the CO’s sat phone.”
Cosky frowned. “He didn’t have it on him when he showed up at the cabin. And he didn’t have it when he told us Wolf was here.”
Okay. That was odd.
“So what are you thinkin’?” Rawls asked, craning his neck for a glimpse of Faith, but the bounce of flashlight beams ricocheting off the rock walls blinded him.
“Hell, I don’t know.” Cosky scrubbed a hand through his hair and picked up his pace. “Just keep your eyes open.” But then he slowed again and glanced at Rawls out of the corner of his eye. “So this ghost? He around now?”
“Nah, we’re good.” Unconsciously Rawls’s hand climbed, grazing the slight bump lifting his T-shirt where the weaving burned slightly against his skin. “Where we headed, anyway?”
An odd silence greeted the question.
And then Zane gave a bemused laugh. “To the elevators.” At Rawls’s double take, he snorted. “I’m not shitting you. They have a helipad on top of this hill and two elevators from the tunnels to the helipad.”
Two elevators. It would be a hell of a lot quicker to the top of the mountain by elevator than stairs. But what the hell powered them this far from their compound?
“They have a chopper waitin’?” Rawls asked, although he was pretty certain of the answer.
“Two birds,” Cosky corrected him dryly. “And according to Wolf, his team neutralized our visitors and took out their helicopter.”
“Mightily accommodatin’ of ’em.” Rawls drawled.
“No shit,” Zane said, his voice a cross between suspicion and admiration.
But the same question weighted the air between the three of them.
Who the hell are these guys?
“What?” One rigid finger at a time, Eric Manheim forced his grip to relax around his cell phone.
“An unidentified squad of highly trained mercenaries slipped in behind my men and took them out.” His new—and widely acclaimed contractor—delivered the news evenly.
In the midst of a battle, either in the boardroom or out in the wilds of Washington State, one prepared for every foreseeable possibility. Considering his current contractor’s reputation, Eric couldn’t believe the fucking imbecile hadn’t prepared for this one.
“You didn’t post guards? Mackenzie and his crew got the jump on you?” Eric didn’t smooth the edge from his voice.
“Negative. The targets were holed up in their cabins. This was an unidentified team.”
Eric’s jaw tightened until his entire head throbbed. “How the fuck would you know? You said you never saw the men who struck.”
His soon-to-be-deceased contractor had the intelligence to remain silent.
Forcing himself to rein in his anger—strong emotions were so unproductive, often blinding you to the possibilities inherent in the moment—he regrouped, and looked for a means to salvage the mission.
“The Chastain boys’ signals are still broadcasting. They’re moving up the mountain. Likely there’s a second entrance into this tunnel system somewhere on top of the mountain and they’ll emerge there”—some of his anger slipped out—“along with those fucking SEALs. So how about getting your bloody helicopter into the air? Target them from above when they emerge from the tunnels.”
It was so damn simple he couldn’t believe the idiot hadn’t considered it himself.
“Our chopper”—this time the even tone tightened—“is no longer in play.”
Eric froze. “What the fuck does that mean?”
“It means it was taken out.”
There was a hint of a snap to the voice, as though the man it belonged to didn’t appreciate the scolding. Which was too bloody bad and justification for terminating his contract.
“By what?”
“Some kind of experimental aircraft.”
“The hell you say? You lost your helicopter and most of your men and didn’t find that news worth reporting?”
This time he didn’t bother to relax his fingers when they started to cramp. The pain gave him something to concentrate on, something to combat the urge to throw his coffee cup across the room and watch it shatter.
“I’m reporting in now. And FYI, these SEALs are hooked up,” his facilitator said, his accent thickening. “Much more than you indicated.”
Really? Really? The bloody fuckhole was blaming him?
In an effort to calm himself, he stared out the rain-beaded window of the penthouse’s breakfast nook. Central Park, in all its sprawling, wild glory, sparkled like a glistening emerald beneath the misting rain.
For once, the view failed to soothe him.
It was too bad there was so much time and distance between him and the man on the other end of the line. The bastard had talked himself into a painfully slow execution. His family as well.
“No excuses. I don’t care how you do it. Just get it done.” Eric cut the call, knowing the man wouldn’t be calling back.
“Problems, darling?” Esme asked, looking up from the business section of the New York Times.
With the rage still trying to break free, he focused on the beautiful woman who shared his table, his bed, his life, and his vision of a new world order. Her normally sleek cap of blond hair was slightly rumpled, her blue eyes soft and languid: a slight flush still rode the crest of her cheekbones. She looked like a woman who’d just climbed out of bed after a night of thorough loving—which she had. His hands unclenched as that unquenchable hunger she never failed to unleash in him stirred. Beneath the silk nightshirt obscuring her slender figure, she wore nothing but warm soft skin. His fingers tingled, itching to slide the shirt up and explore every inch of that sleek body . . . again.
But regrettably, duty beckoned.
Crossing to her, he leaned over to place a gentle kiss on her upturned swollen lips and then picked up her teacup.
“Looks like we’re in the market for another freelancer,” he said as he set her cup in the marble sink. “Perhaps it’s time to contact Coulson’s man. At least Coulson’s tactics produce results.”
“They escaped? Again?” She cocked her head slightly, her
hair fluttering around her ears.
“For now. But the signal’s still broadcasting. We’ll track them down.” He frowned, staring down at the brilliant diamond pattern etched into the teacup’s glass as unease brewed in his mind.
They were dealing with an unknown variable. And in his experience, unknown variables tended to prove disastrous. “It would appear that our SEALs are better connected than we realized. They have access to reinforcements, at least one experimental aircraft, and some major artillery.”
“Could the reinforcements be coming from Coronado?” Esme asked, reaching across the table to stroke his hand. He caught it and carried it to his lips.
“Possibly, but doubtful. Most of their buddies are out on deployment.” He’d made sure of it. “Besides, they couldn’t acquisition an experimental helicopter from the navy.” He shook his head and frowned. “Or the kind of firepower it took to shoot down team B.” He turned to stare out the breakfast window again as more of those uneasy chills peppered his spine.
His instincts were usually dead-on, and at the moment, they were clamoring that those damn SEALs had hooked up with someone with major resources and the ability to do serious damage.
If he wanted to survive the oncoming storm he sensed looming on the horizon, he needed to find out whom they’d climbed into bed with, and take immediate steps to neutralize the whole damn lot of them.
* * *
Chapter Fifteen
* * *
MAC SETTLED AGAINST the padded wall vibrating against his back. The average military-grade chopper could travel 150 knots an hour, and six hundred kilometers on a tank of fuel. They’d been in the air for five hours now, which meant this bad boy shuttling them to Christ-knew-where was far superior to any military bird he knew of. He estimated it was going faster than 150 knots an hour too. A hell of a lot faster—which made it one pretty sweet ride.
He smoothed his palm down the sleek, almost metallic sheen of the wall beside him. The surface didn’t feel like metal, or fabric, or anything he’d encountered before. He’d bet his pension on this craft being experimental.
Forged in Smoke (A Red-Hot SEALs Novel Book 3) Page 23
