The Defiant Hero

by Suzanne Brockmann

  He straightened up with a sigh. Using his foot, he kicked the sandy soil over the footprints, erasing them all the way to the edge of the yard.

  Sometimes even the very best of luck needed a little extra help.

  He’d gone into this thing because of his religious beliefs. He’d get out of it for the very same.

  Without another look back, the Bear shouldered his weapon and ambled toward the swamp.

  How had this happened? Two different vehicles filled with SEALs and FBI agents, and Locke managed to climb into the one with Sam Starrett.

  She’d had to do some fancy footwork to avoid sitting next to him. But now she was sitting dead across from him, his long legs stretched out, his big feet invading her personal space.

  They were part of the backup team. Another separate convoy of unmarked vehicles—mostly minivans and SUVs—were trailing about a half mile behind Nils and Meg.

  These vehicles—a van and a camper—however, were taking a different route. They were taking the instructions that Meg Moore was receiving from the Extremists in fragments, and they were attempting to predict a final destination. They were navigating a parallel route, hoping they’d circle around and come at the terrorists’ location from a different direction.

  Luck and guesswork played heavily into this strategy.

  And because of that, there was a strong chance they were just going to drive around all night, too far from the action to provide any kind of backup or support at all.

  “I would kill for a cup of coffee,” WildCard muttered.

  Starrett shifted in his seat.

  Locke didn’t let herself look at him. He was the reason she was so blasted tired. If she’d fallen right asleep the moment she’d gotten into bed, she would’ve had a healthy hour’s nap. Instead, no. Instead she’d stared at the ceiling, fuming, furious with Starrett for coming to her room, furious with herself for losing her temper and letting him see how upset he made her.

  She should have played it cool. She should have remained aloof. Yes, she’d slipped when she was drunk, but now reason and sanity had returned. Slamming the door in his face wasn’t the answer. Freezing him out was a far better strategy.

  She let herself look at him now, practicing her iciest gaze. He looked about as exhausted as she felt, but somehow on him exhausted was attractive. Didn’t it figure?

  He pointedly didn’t look back at her, as if he were still angry at her, too.

  As if he had a right to be.

  “I’m getting carsick from riding in this Kleenex box on wheels, and if I don’t get some caffeine,” WildCard said, “I’m seriously going to hurl.”

  Around Locke, the SEALs sprang into action, digging into their pockets. Apparently the petty officer wasn’t kidding—and they all knew it.

  “I’ve got a candy bar,” Jenkins reported, opening the wrapper. “That’s got a little caffeine in it, doesn’t it?”

  “I’ve got caffeine gum.” Jay Lopez tossed a piece toward WildCard.

  “Bless you,” Starrett drawled. He leaned forward to look at WildCard Karmody. “You mainline that gum if you need to. Do the Technicolor yawn, and you’re a dead man.”

  “Ditto,” Jenk said. “We’ve got a potential chain reaction situation. Sometimes it helps just to put something in your stomach. I don’t have a lot, but if anyone wants a piece of chocolate, help yourself.”

  Chocolate.

  Locke looked up and directly into Sam’s blue eyes.

  Chocolate.

  Heat flooded through her at the memory. Chocolate all over her body. His voice, soft and smooth as velvet, murmuring about how good she tasted. His mouth gliding across her as he took his sweet time and licked her clean. She’d finally broken down and begged him to give her what she really wanted, and then he’d done that, too.

  Exquisitely.

  She could see an echo of that night in the heat of his eyes, and despite her intentions, despite herself, she stared at him, mesmerized, horrified, hardly able to breathe.

  Finally, finally, Sam jerked his gaze away, freeing her.

  God help her.

  “Lopez, you got another piece of that caffeine gum?” Starrett asked. “I’m feeling a little digestively challenged right now myself.”

  A car was coming.

  Eve could see the headlights approaching from way down the road, lighting up the fog that hung in the air long before the car was in sight.

  She pulled Amy—or maybe it was Amy who pulled her—into the underbrush.

  The bugs were intense and they were probably hiding up to their noses in poison ivy. No doubt they were going to itch and scratch for days. But scratching was far better than not being alive enough to itch.

  Amy was scared to death. She was trying to pretend that she wasn’t, but all these days of staunch bravery were starting to wear, and she was fighting tears.

  “They’ll probably drive right past,” Eve said. “But if they do stop, don’t look at them. Do you know that sensation that you sometimes get—that someone’s watching you?”

  Amy nodded.

  “That’s why we want to keep our eyes down. Or closed. If they stop, we don’t move and we keep our eyes closed, all right?”

  “What if it’s a trick?” Amy asked. “I saw in a movie once where these people were looking for these kids, and they drove past in a car, and the kids thought they were gone, only the bad guys were also walking around, searching for them, and when the kids came out, the bad guys grabbed them.”

  “Then we’ll stay hidden,” Eve said. “We’ll stay right here after this car goes past.”

  It was moving slowly, and it was still way down the road.

  “Is that a plan?” Eve asked.

  Amy nodded. “Will you tell me again about Dunkirk?”

  “I will if you want,” Eve said, “but I haven’t finished the rest of my story—the part that happened after VE Day. After the war in Europe officially ended. VE stands for Victory in Europe, you know.”

  “There’s more to the story?” Amy said.

  “There is,” Eve said. “Remember, I was married—again—in May 1945.”

  “That was when you met Grandpa, right?” Amy asked.

  Eve smiled. “Shall I tell the story?”

  “Yes, please.”

  “With the war—at least our war—finally over, Nick and I didn’t spend much time celebrating. Like many people, we spent those first few days and weeks reading the newspapers, searching the lists of names of war prisoners returning to England.”

  “Nick?” Amy asked. “Reading the newspapers?”

  “Absolutely,” Eve said. “It had taken five years, but he learned to read—using the method Ralph had sent to me in his final letter. It was a miracle, but it wasn’t the particular miracle I was hoping for.

  “But then, on May 27, five years after Dunkirk, we found it.” All these years later, she could still feel the dizzying thrill. She’d never lost hope. She’d never given up, but after five long years, that hope was burning awfully low. But then, just like that, with eight little letters printed in the London Times, it blazed aflame. “R. Grayson,” Eve told Amy. “The name R. Grayson was there, on one of those lists of returning British soldiers.

  “I couldn’t get any further information from the war office. I didn’t know if R. stood for Ralph or Ronald or Richard. But they did tell me which ship this R. Grayson would be on. And I was there on the dock as the ship pulled in and the men began to disembark.”

  It was a day she would never forget. Not ever. The crowds were intense. The atmosphere one of a carnival. The sky was a shade of blue she’d never seen before.

  She’d anticipated the crowds and brought a sign with Ralph’s name on it. If he were on that ship he’d see it, see her.

  The men came off that ship in droves, most of them moving slowly, thin and malnourished beyond belief. Eve stood there, holding her sign until her arms ached. Until the crowd dissipated. Until she was nearly alone on the dock with that sky turning p
ink from the setting sun. And then there were only stragglers coming down the gangplank, and her hope again had nearly gone out.

  Nearly.

  He’d found her first. She hadn’t recognized him. Not until he stopped, about five feet away from her.

  He was terribly thin—frighteningly thin—his face gaunt. But his beautiful eyes were exactly the same.

  He had both of his arms and both of his legs. Not that she would have cared. Not that it would have made any difference at all.

  “Hi,” she’d said. What a stupid thing to say to the love of your life returning home from five years in hell. She supposed it was better than collapsing on the ground, overcome with relief. But not by much.

  Ralph did much better. “I never stopped loving you,” he said. “I want you to know that. Not a single day has passed since you came to see me in France that I haven’t thoroughly, completely, regretted the fact that I didn’t tell you I loved you, too. I’ve kicked myself one thousand nine hundred and seven days for that.”

  Eve couldn’t help it. She started to cry. She just stood there, clinging to her sign and crying.

  “That trip you made to France saved my life,” he told her, his voice so matter-of-fact. “Knowing that you loved me enough to come all that way was something I could cling to. It kept me sane through some pretty terrible times. I think it’s important that you know that, too.”

  He didn’t reach for her. And she was too afraid to reach for him. He looked so fragile, and he was taking such care to keep his distance.

  “You’re even more beautiful than ever,” he told her. “How old are you now?”

  “Twenty-one.” She laughed at that, right through her tears. She couldn’t help it.

  Ralph laughed, too. “How convenient.” But then he stopped laughing, stopped smiling. “That is . . .” He cleared his throat. “It’s been a long time, Eve. Five years. That’s . . . very long. Are you . . . Do you need my signature? Didn’t my solicitor send those papers? Is that why you’re here?”

  “He thought I was looking for him because I needed to finalize our annulment,” Eve told Amy. “He thought I needed his signature so I could get married. He thought I’d found someone else.”

  “Did you?” Amy asked.

  The car was almost upon them. “Hush now,” Eve said. “Eyes down. Silence until we’re sure there’s no one out there on foot.”

  “What’s Grandpa’s first name?” Amy whispered.

  “Ralph,” Eve whispered back.

  “I knew it!” Amy said. She kissed Eve. “I knew it! You lived happily ever after!”

  “We certainly did. Shh now!” She pulled the little girl close, holding her tightly, both of their heads down as the car slowly approached.

  Go past. Just go past, she ordered it silently, watching it only in her peripheral vision.

  But it didn’t go past. It slowed to a stop right out on the road in front of them.

  And it wasn’t a car. It was a van. Just like the one their captors had driven.

  “We’re almost there,” John reported to Lieutenant Paoletti over his radio as Meg approached the house. “Go slowly,” he told Meg. “And remember, whatever happens, don’t get out of the car.”

  From the car the place looked run-down and deserted—except for all the lights. “This has got to be it,” John continued into his microphone. “The house is dark but the yard is lit up like the surface of the sun.”

  “Tell them not to try to get close.” Meg’s heart pounded. God, if the Extremists saw even just one commando type crawling across their lawn, Amy and Eve would be killed immediately.

  If they weren’t already dead.

  She was going to find out soon if her daughter was dead or alive. Please, God, if something was going to go wrong, if she were going to die here tonight, at least let her find out that Amy was still alive. At least let Amy escape.

  She wanted to hold her daughter so badly, her hands shook.

  Meg’s cell phone rang.

  “This is it,” John told her from the backseat. “Meg, I need you to continue to stall. Our team is getting into place.”

  Stall. How? He was still talking on his radio, still describing the place in complete detail to his CO.

  The phone rang again. “I can’t pick up until you’re quiet,” she told him.

  He shut his mouth.

  Meg took a deep breath and answered the phone. “Yes.”

  “Bring him inside.”

  Stall. “Please,” she said. “I want— I’d like to talk to them first. To my daughter and my grandmother. I want to hear their voices, to know they’re alive and—”

  The line went dead.

  “They hung up,” she told John. “They just—”

  Boom. The sound was impossibly loud, even from inside the car.

  “Shit! Yes, confirmed,” John said into his radio. “We’ve had a single gunshot from inside the structure. Meg and I are unharmed.”

  Meg couldn’t breathe. A gunshot. From inside. “Oh, my God.”

  The cell phone rang.

  “Oh, my God.” She couldn’t even say hello, could barely hold the phone to her ear, her hands were shaking so hard.

  “It’s too late to talk to the old lady,” the voice on the phone said, “but if you want to talk to the little girl, you should bring him inside. Now.”

  Meg got out of the car.

  “Shit!” Nils said. “Meg—”

  She opened the back door. “They killed Eve,” she told Nils. “Oh, my God, John—”

  “Get back in the car, Meg,” he ordered her, trying to infuse her with his calm. This situation wasn’t out of control—not yet. But it would be if she didn’t get back into the car. “I’ll go in there, but you—”

  Shit.

  She was already moving toward the house, and he scrambled to follow her, to make it look as if she were pulling him with her.

  “What the fuck . . . ?” came Wolchonok’s voice over his headphones. “Get her out of there!”

  Nils couldn’t. She was just out of his reach, and then she was out from behind the car, and a clear target, easy to pick off by a terrorist shooter aiming from one of the darkened windows of the house.

  And then there was nothing to do but keep moving forward, pray, and try to shield her with his body.

  His MP-4 was locked and loaded. He kept it concealed under his coat—Razeen’s coat. “When the shooting starts, stay down, stay behind me,” he told her.

  She was crying, and his heart clenched. Those bastards. Those goddamned sadistic bastards. If wouldn’t surprise him one bit to find out that they’d kept Eve and Amy alive all this time—only to kill them now, in front of Meg.

  “When?” she asked as she led him up the brightly lit path toward the house.

  “If. I meant if,” he corrected himself, even though he knew damn well he was probably lying to her—for the very last time.

  Sam couldn’t believe it.

  The genius who was driving this camper was convinced they’d taken a wrong turn. He’d been arguing with the genius who was driving the van for about ten solid minutes. And then—even more brilliant!—they’d stopped the frigging things right there in the middle of the road and got out so that he and genius number two could both look at the same map.

  As highest ranking naval officer in both vans, Sam pushed his way out into the night. Was this how they trained ’em to keep a low profile at the Bureau?

  “What’dya say we just keep moving?” Sam suggested in his friendliest-toned good-old-boy—just in case any tangos were out there in the woods, listening in. They were just a bunch of stupid campers, lost as shit. “We’re bound to find our campground sooner or later. There just aren’t that many roads out here. What’dya say we get back into the vans before we start getting unwanted attention from the wildlife?”

  He gave them each a pointed look, praying that they’d catch his drift. Crap, nothing like standing around making a lot of noise.

  It rubbed even wor
se knowing that Nils and Meg were out there somewhere, about to walk into a nestful of K-stani terrorists, and here he was with Huey and Dewey, wasting time.

  “How about we give the map reading job to one of the Boy Scouts in the back,” Sam suggested. “I bet we got someone who’s got a navigation merit badge.”

  He heard the sound before Huey and Dewey did—something big, something human-sized was out there in the underbrush. He leapt in front of the FBI drivers, pulling his handgun free from his shoulder holster, ready to fend off an attack . . .

  From Little Red Riding Hood and her granny.

  They blinked at him as they emerged from the bushes, blinked at his handgun.

  “I guess scouting is much more intense now than it was back when my brother was a boy,” Granny said. “You did say you were the Boy Scouts, didn’t you? The Boy Scouts of America?”

  Sam looked at the old woman, looked at the little girl. “Amy?” he asked, hardly daring to hope as he lowered his weapon. It was. It had to be. And what was the old woman’s name? “And Mrs. Grayson. I’m Lt. Sam Starrett, ma’am, U.S. Navy SEALs. Please step into the camper. You’ll be even safer there.”

  Sam banged on the side panel. “Someone get on the radio to Lieutenant Paoletti. We need to get word to Nils, pronto, to abort, repeat, abort. The hostages are safe and sound! He should get Meg the hell out of there!”

  “We’re going in,” Nils announced over his radio, and the door to the house swung open.

  A man and a woman stood there, AK-47s in their arms. Both were dressed in desert print camouflage pants and jackets—the sleeves torn off. Desert print. Here in the middle of the Florida jungle.

  They were amateurs—the way they held their assault weapons verified that. Neither of them had had military training. But neither of them needed more than a heavy trigger finger to use that AK-47 to make Meg and Nils extremely dead.

  He was in front of Meg as they went into the house, and he hung his head, keeping his face in shadows, wishing he could stay right there, shielding her from them until this was over.