by Bruhns, Nina
Like a switch had been flipped, the bright blue of the Egyptian sky filled the broad opening. Far, far below, the mottled browns of the desert landscape swept past, undulating like a mirage from the heat rising in a thick layer above the desolate sands.
She grabbed a handhold in the far wall, her heart standing still. But she could barely see the rushing landscape. She could only see those hard, expressive eyes.
This was it.
Good-bye.
Kick was still watching her, not paying any attention to the bustle of the other men around him. Reluctantly, he lifted his arms to her. How could she resist one last touch?
She stood up, taking careful, measured steps toward him, hanging on to the handholds. He came to her, as close as his parachute tether would allow. Enfolded her in his embrace.
“Damn, Rainie,” was all he murmured. “Damn.”
“Two minutes to—” The speaker crackled. “What the . . . Fucking hell. Tangos on the ground! Three o’clock!”
The pilot’s curse was their only warning. Suddenly there was a flash, then a distant rat-a-tat-tat sound. Like . . . machine gun fire? The plane tipped crazily, throwing them all off balance, slamming Forsythe into the wall.
Kick’s arms banded around her as they stumbled toward the open door. She screamed.
“We’re hit!” the pilot yelled. “Bail out!”
“Goddamn—” Kick recovered his footing and briefly loosened his grip on her.
More machine gun fire. And a huge boom.
The right wing blew into pieces. The plane tilted hard. Forsythe cartwheeled out the door.
She screamed again. “Kick!”
“Number one, gone!” Marc yelled as he pushed something out of the plane, then jumped after it.
“Rainie! Hold on to me!” Kick ordered.
She grabbed him around the neck. A nylon strap suddenly cut into her under the arms, cinching so tight she gasped. Something skidded past her legs and tumbled out the door as the remaining wing tipped wildly.
“Hang on! Tight!”
Then she was part of the sky.
Her stomach fell like a lead brick. Panic slammed into her. Air rushed past so fast she couldn’t breathe. Her chest ached. Her back and sides hurt where the strap bit into her flesh.
Oh, shit. Ohshit-ohshit-ohshit.
Something whizzed past, and a nanosecond later an explosion shredded the sky. Kick’s arms pulled her tight against him, pressed her nose into his jacket as they flew through the air, pivoting so she was under him. She wrapped her legs around his waist and clung to him for dear life.
Debris flew past. Kick swore again.
“My God, the plane!” she cried, peeking up and seeing only smoke.
He pivoted back upright, and suddenly they were yanked upward in a bone-rattling jerk. For a second it felt like she was being ripped apart, then everything slammed into slow motion.
“You all right?” Kick asked loudly as the parachute broke the speed of their descent, along with that of her heartbeat.
“Yes,” she said, and miraculously, it was true.
They were alive.
That’s when reality kicked her in the gut. What had happened to the others? She peered up over Kick’s shoulder in horror. The plane really was gone. All that was left of it was a spiraling-downward trail of smoke. She wanted to be sick.
“I need my hands to control this thing. Okay?”
She nodded against his neck, sucking in a horrified breath when he let go. But she didn’t fall.
She looked down, down, down to the ground. Flaming pieces of the plane were scattered over the stark landscape in patches.
Floating under them, a few hundred feet apart, she could just make out a shape, its colors blending into the desert sand below. A parachute! She prayed everyone had somehow gotten out. . . .
More staccato machine gun fire sounded. Followed closely by a guttural scream.
Kick swore even more harshly. “The fuckers are trying to pick us off. Hang on.”
Like she wasn’t already. He tugged on a cord and the chute veered off to the side. She battled back another scream. The last thing he needed to deal with was an hysterical woman. He tugged again, and they zipped in the other direction. She clenched her teeth, faint with fear.
More whizzing split the air where they’d just been.
Omigod! Bullets!
Twice more clusters of bullets whistled past them, and each time Kick managed to outmaneuver whoever was shooting.
Finally the machine gun went silent.
“Out of range,” he muttered. “About freakin’ time.”
“Thank God.”
“Too soon,” he said.
“What?”
“To thank God. You can do that after we get away from these fucks.”
“I thought we just did.”
“I meant on the ground,” he said grimly. “Do me a favor, sweetheart. Pray to God the tangos don’t have Jeeps.”
GODDAMN it. Goddamn it. Goddamn it.
It took all Kick’s concentration to hit the ground and not break both legs, or smash Rainie under him. He managed to run a few steps despite her awkward weight in front, and position his roll so his own shoulder and back took the brunt rather than hers.
When they tumbled to a halt, he used a precious few moments to catch his breath, ungrit his teeth from the pain of the collision, and release the makeshift harness holding Rainie’s body to his. This time he did thank God that he’d spotted the nylon strapping in time to save her life. He’d had to sacrifice one of the field packs, but he could live without food and a change of clothes.
He wouldn’t have been able to go on if she’d died up there in the explosion.
And yet, when he really thought about it, that might have been preferable to this. For both of them. Now he was stuck with her. In the middle of a fucking combat zone.
Goddamn it.
He struggled to his feet, pulled his goggles down around his neck, and did a three-sixty recon of the plateau where he’d steered them to touch down.
No tangos. Yet.
The place was like a moonscape. Familiar from A-stan and a dozen other desert venues he’d worked in, and yet distinctively savage in a way all its own. The endless sea of brown orange sand was punctuated by outcroppings of darker rock and boulders, and scored on three sides by deep wadis, or steep, dry riverbeds filled with golden dunes. Rugged hills dotted the plateau in all directions, from close by to all the way out on the horizon. The midafternoon air was hotter than Hades, three digits easily, the sun beating down like the devil’s furnace.
God, he loved the desert.
In an alternate universe.
“Anything broken?” he barked at Rainie, unharnessing himself and punching down the parachute.
After a short pause she answered shakily, “I’m in one piece.”
For now, anyway, he thought uneasily.
She obviously had no clue of the danger they were in. Whoever had gone to the trouble of shooting down that plane would be coming after them, hell-bent for infidels. Judging by where the shooting had come from, they had roughly half an hour before the hostiles showed up. Maybe less. He had to get her hidden before that. A woman in the hands of those animals . . . The images it painted in his head made him dizzy with fear as nothing else could.
Shit.
He had to focus.
And so did she, if they were to make it. But she was still sitting on the ground, arms wrapped around her legs with her face buried in her knees. He wished he could do the same. His whole body was rebelling. Screaming to shut down. On fire for want of the drug it had been deprived of so recently.
Man up, Jackson. No time for weakness.
“Come on, we need to move fast,” he ordered.
She didn’t react.
“Rainie, come on.”
She didn’t seem to hear him.
He grabbed her shoulders and shook her a little. “Rainie! We’re totally exposed here. I need you to get
hold of yourself. Can you do that for me?”
She looked up and blinked several times.
“You have to be Nurse Martin now. Strong. Competent. Unafraid. I know you can do it.”
She took a deep, shuddering breath, and her eyes slowly cleared. “Okay.” She glanced around and tensed up again. “But wouldn’t it be better if we stayed here? Waited for—”
“For what? For al Sayika to find us?”
She blinked again. “Who?”
“The tangos who shot down our plane.”
“Tangos?”
“Terrorists.”
She blanched.
“They’ll be coming for us next. Trust me, you do not want to be caught by these scumbags.” She swallowed heavily, glancing around again. He could tell she was utterly terrified. Didn’t want to move. “Come on, baby. Stay with me, okay?” He barely resisted yanking her to her feet. But he needed to be calm for her. A steadying influence. If he freaked, she’d shut down like a stadium after the game. Lights out, no one home.
She took another deep breath and let it out. “Okay. I’ll try.”
“Good girl.”
She seemed to rally. Glanced at him. “Are you hurt?”
“No more than I was.”
“Where are the others?” There was only the slightest wobble left in her voice. “They may be injured and need help.”
His chest squeezed. It wasn’t good news, but now wasn’t the time to start varnishing the facts. She needed to know she’d always get the truth from him. As fucked-up as it was. Her life could depend on her trusting his word. And his.
“Forsythe didn’t make it. He was thrown out of the plane with no parachute when the wing was hit.”
She gasped, her eyes filling. “My God.”
Kick agreed. He didn’t like the guy, but nobody deserved to go that way. “I don’t know about the others.” But he didn’t think the pilot had made it. Or Bill Henning.
“I thought I saw a parachute below us,” she said, dashing away the tears from her eyes.
“Lafayette. He jumped before us.”
“So he must be alive.”
“With any luck.”
But he’d heard the screamed curse when the tangos had opened fire on them. If Marc Lafayette wasn’t dead, he was hurting. Bad, by the sound of that swear word.
Or, there was an outside chance he could have been bluffing. Sound traveled a long way in the desert. His loud scream—the kind of giveaway that was drilled out of every rookie ZU NOC operator—may have been so the fuckers below would hear him, think he was injured, and go after him first. To draw the enemy off Kick and Rainie. To give him time to get her to safety. And hopefully locate the field pack with the SATCOM.
Best not waste that advantage.
He urged her to her feet and thrust the wadded-up parachute at her. “Hold this. I thought I saw one of the packs on the ground as we landed. Give me a minute to find it, then we need to make tracks.”
“I’ll help,” she said, and turned in the opposite direction.
“Stay close!” he ordered brusquely, but she was already searching around a scatter of low boulders a few yards away.
“Here!” she called moments later.
She’d found the duffel bag of rifles. Quickly, he pulled out the weapons. With nothing to break the bag’s fall, one rifle’s wooden butt had cracked in half on impact; another had a bent barrel. But the third looked to be in good shape. The Heckler & Koch PSG-1 sniper. Excellent. The cleaning kit had made it unscathed as well.
Using the bent weapon as a spade, he swiftly dug a hole in the sand and, after removing the firing pins, buried the two useless guns. Then he took the parachute Rainie was holding and stuffed it along with the rifle and cleaning kit into the duffel and hoisted it over his shoulder.
“All right, we’re oscar mike. Shout if I go too fast for you.”
“But what about the other man?”
“We’ll find him later. Right now we need to get ourselves a place to hide.”
She didn’t argue, though she sent a troubled glance in the direction the other parachutes had gone down, on a plateau on the other side of a wide wadi, a dozen or more miles away.
“Walk in my footprints,” he told her, and took off across the rocky sand.
“Why?”
He glanced back and saw her frown as she tried to match her stride to his. He took shorter steps. “So we only leave one set of tracks.” Mostly it didn’t fool anyone, but sometimes it worked. If they were dealing with amateurs.
“Why?”
He grimaced and faced forward again as he walked, working past the pain in his leg. “That way, if they catch me, they won’t be looking for you.”
Obviously she didn’t miss the implications on both ends of that statement. She stayed silent for many minutes after that. Not that he wanted to talk.
“Where exactly are we going?” she finally asked when he stopped to examine the terrain ahead.
Good fucking question. He was trying to stick to the rock ier, more hard-packed sand where it would be difficult to track them. They had a good shot at finding a decent hiding place in the myriad rock formations and cliff walls of the wadi that plunged down on three sides of the plateau they were on. Hopefully they could escape detection from their pursuers in the short run. But after that?
“We’ll figure that out later, too.”
“Then how do you know this is the right direction?” she asked.
“I don’t.”
That shut her up for another quarter mile of power-hiking before she broke down, breathing hard, and asked, “Kick?”
He sighed. “Yup?”
“Do you have even the remotest idea where we are?”
The corner of his lip curved in a humorless smile. That one he could answer. Because there was no doubt in his mind exactly where they were.
“In deep fucking shit.”
OF course, Kick actually did know from studying the maps on the plane where they were and what direction they were headed—in general terms. Navigating in unknown territory using only the sun and stars to guide him was pure instinct after being a NOC operator for over sixteen years.
And once they were able to stop and check the SAT photo he had tucked into his DCU jacket pocket, he’d know precisely where they were.
Oh, yeah, he’d come prepared. This was not the first time he’d been goatfucked on an insert. Far from it. And if there was one thing he was good at, it was learning from his mistakes.
In the same pocket as the photo he also had a geo-map of the area, a roll of American dollars, GPS finder, pocketknife, bubble-pack of chlorine tabs, and a couple of protein bars. Strapped to his ankle was his trusty SIG Navy—which they’d returned to him at the compound—and an extra clip. Never leave home without it.
What he didn’t know was what the hell he was going to do about the woman. There was a ticking clock running on this gig. NSA had picked up chatter that the attack on the Western embassies in Khartoum was imminent, within the coming week it was believed. Kick had to take out abu Bakr before the terrorists made their move. He couldn’t afford any delay.
But no way in flaming hell would he take a woman along.
Somehow, he had to find a place to stash her, locate Lafayette and find out if he was still alive, and then hunt down the damn field packs. Without the SATCOM he couldn’t call in a request for someone to get the fuck down here and take her off his hands. Or to call in the STORM air strike once abu Bakr was neutralized, for that matter. And if he managed to make it though this mission alive, it was a hell of a long hike back to Egypt. No radio, no ticket home . . . for anyone.
He also had to find water fairly soon, if he didn’t retrieve at least one of the packs. The human body didn’t survive long in this scorching heat without water.
Speaking of which . . . He turned to scrutinize what Rainie was wearing. Forsythe must have scrounged her some clothes at ZU headquarters. She had on men’s jeans and a white T-shirt under a long
-sleeved khaki work shirt that looked like military issue. Her sneakers weren’t ideal, but they’d do. She was still wearing his cap. Good.
“Here.” He pulled his sunglasses from his outer pocket. They were the flex kind, so the frames were unbent from his roll on the ground, but one of the lenses had popped out. He snapped it back in and slid them on her nose. “Did you put on sunblock when we did on the plane?”
“Didn’t think I’d need any,” she said, looking bleak.
Damn. Her face would burn to a crisp in this sun.
“Hang on,” he ordered, and fished a corner of the parachute out of the duffel. Silk was a bitch to rip, but he managed to tear off a large square, which he tied around her head and neck, Bedouin-outlaw-style, with just the reflection of the glasses showing beneath the brim of her cap.
She looked like a harem girl gone gangsta.
For the first time that day he smiled. Sexy. Very sexy.
The silk crinkled, like she was smiling back. And suddenly he was struck by the most inappropriate urge to lift her makeshift veil and kiss her.
The sun must be frying his brain. The woman wanted nothing to do with him, and he didn’t blame her.
He looked away. “I’ll get you home safe, Rainie. If it’s the last thing I do,” he told the horizon.
“I know,” she whispered.
And he would. He’d get her back to her comfy life without him in New York, or he’d die trying. That was a fucking promise.
But that wasn’t what had started his insides churning with uneasiness. Or the drug cravings, either.
It was her utter faith in him that those two words—I know—conveyed, and the overwhelming trust in her voice as she’d said them.
That nearly broke him in two.
“SHOULDN’T we be heading for higher ground?”
Before answering, Kick approached the blunt drop-off of the rocky plateau they’d been hightailing it across for fifteen minutes. Though he’d never show it, he was getting very nervous. For the past little while now, carried on the desert wind, he’d picked up the whine of an engine. At first elusive as a ghost’s whisper, now it was a small but steady hum, like a gnat circling his head. The louder it got, the more his blood pressure went up.
