by Fiona Quinn
“Wonderful, brave heart.” She put her head back on his chest. “My heart.”
***
The searchlight on the helicopter took in the compound. Rooster and Meg didn’t move from the cocoon of each other’s arms as they leaned against the truck tire. The scientists, though, were out waving their arms and screaming, “Here! Here!”
Meg could see the feet of the men sitting on the runners, and she knew Panther Force had their rifles aimed. Rooster was on the phone with them. He shielded her as they were pelted by flying debris from the helicopter wash for the second time in as many days. As soon as the helicopter landed, before the rotors had stopped, the Panthers swarmed out the doors, dropped to the ground, and spread out. Rooster tapped her and they stood. They would be flying back to the hospital in Arusha. Nutsbe let them know in their last update that Randy was in surgery, and Rooster said that’s where Meg needed to be.
The Panthers would drive the scientists back to safety in the trucks. There were too many to fly out.
Rooster took Meg’s hand and put another on her head to make sure she didn’t stand up. They scooted to the door. Without letting go of her, Rooster reached out to shake the pilot’s hand. “Honey,” he said. “Appreciate the lift.”
“Ripcord. Glad to find you in one piece.”
Meg saw the American flag on his helmet and reached out to run her fingers over the symbol that always meant freedom to her, but took on a special significance in that moment. “Thank you,” she said.
“Glad to be of service, Dr. Finley.” He turned to look forward, calling information into his mouthpiece. She and Rooster strapped in for the takeoff.
***
“Ahbou, wait here for a second.” Meg walked into the orthopedics suite where they were finishing up a cast on Rooster’s arm.
“It’s broken?” Meg asked, thinking back to everything he had done with that arm since he’d been taken to the other building to make the video. Now that he was shirtless and under a light, she could see the horrible purple streaks crossing his arms and torso.
“Just a hairline. It’ll mend quick.”
Her eyes traveled along the bruises, trying to read what had happened. Long and thin, they must have been beating him with some kind of stick. She felt nauseated. Horrified.
“Meg.” He held out his free arm. “I’m fine. A few cracked ribs and a hairline fracture. I’m fine. Tell me about Randy.”
“His commander, Striker Rheas, is here. He said that Randy’ll get to keep his leg. He’s going to need rehab. There’s a lot of damage. But Striker promised they’d get him the best help possible. We’ll have to wait and see. The concern right now is that Randy lost a lot of blood. They’re not sure how that’s going to affect him.”
Meg felt Ahbou moving up beside her.
“There’s the hero.” Rooster smiled.
Ahbou ducked his head to hide his grin.
“Tell me what happened after we left, young man.”
Meg went over to draw two chairs closer to Rooster. She and Ahbou sat down. Meg chose the chair where she could hold hands with Rooster.
“As soon as the truck lights went over the hill, I jumped from the tree to check on Mr. Randy. He was not awake. I thought that to find the helpers and to bring them back it might be too much time. I drove the van over to him, and I put him in the back.”
“You did that, Ahbou? All by yourself?” Rooster asked, reaching over to squeeze Ahbou’s biceps and give him a nod of approval.
“My mother always told me that when you are scared, you will either have the strength of an elephant or the weakness of a sick calf. I was scared like an elephant. I dragged him up the back where there is a ramp for the dolly. I shut the doors, and I drove very fast. When I was too far away from the hotel to see it in the mirror, there was the explosion. I kept driving all the way to the clinic, and they called the helicopter just like for Mr. Robert. I got to fly with Mr. Randy here to the hospital.”
“Rooster, I talked to them about Robert, and he’s doing fine. They’re releasing him in the morning.”
“Good to know.” He sent her a questioning look then slid his eyes over to Ahbou.
Meg shook her head and mouthed, “No survivors.” She put a hand on Ahbou’s shoulder. “Did the doctors check to make sure you were okay? You ate? And slept?” Meg asked.
“Last night, they let me sleep on the couch, and they gave me some food. In the morning, Mr. Striker was there with me. He is a very nice man. He asked me about what had happened, and I told him everything about the bad men in the hotel. I told him about you going away in the trucks. And Mr. Rooster putting me up in the tree, then the explosion. He said thank you for taking care of his friend and wanted to know if my family knew where I was, but I have no family. My uncle was the last one.”
Meg pulled him closer. “I’m so sorry about your uncle, Ahbou.”
Ahbou nodded.
Meg waited for a clue what to say. She needed to make sure that Ahbou would be taken care of. That he’d be okay. “We need to make plans for what happens next for you.”
“Oh yes, the hospital was sending word to my school. But it is not an orphanage. They will look for an orphanage that might have room for me. Mr. Striker said I should not be afraid, he would make sure I was all right. Just like Mr. Rooster said to me when I was in the tree. And I am.” Ahbou stroked his hands down the hospital gown they must have given him, since Ahbou’s shirt went to stop Randy’s bleeding. “Mr. Striker said first he was going to find you and Miss Doctor Meg, then he would find a good school for me.”
“For certain we will find a good school for you, but you also need a home and someone to love and take care of you. As brave and strong as you are, you are still a child.”
Ahbou looked at his feet.
Meg took his hands. “Ahbou, will you come and live with me in Dodoma? I bet we can find a very good school for you there. One that will teach you all about engineering and water systems.”
Ahbou blinked at her.
“You gave my brother love and protection. You saved his life when you could have only thought of yourself. In that moment, you became my family.” Meg didn’t know if it was the right thing to do in Ahbou’s culture. But she gathered Ahbou into her arms to hug him. Ahbou leaned his body into Rooster’s leg. Rooster lowered his hand to Ahbou’s head and pressed a kiss into Meg’s hair. With the three held still in that tight circle, a silent promise was made and accepted.
A seal.
An unbreakable bond.
This is not
THE END
Please follow Rooster Honig and the Iniquus family
as they continue their fight for the greater good.
Would you like a sneak peek at the next book in the Iniquus chronology?
InstiGATOR
In a life or death game, all bets are off!
Christen Davidson, a helicopter pilot for the Army, just had her day go from horrific to something far worse. Fellow operatives are in danger. Christen is desperate to fly a rescue mission. Instead, she’s ordered to act as an asset in a high-stakes, international game. She didn’t join the military to play dress-up, but she can’t disobey, even though this assignment is far outside of her comfort zone.
Gator Aid Rochambeau, a retired Marine Raider, is an Iniquus elite operative who volunteers to act as security on the Davidson mission. Yet, as the job gets underway, he is unprepared for the psychic confusion that swirls through his system. New to his psychic experiences, he reaches out to fellow Strike Force member, Lynx, for understanding, only to discover she too is battling a strange vortex of information and sensation. The one thing they both understand is that lives are on the line.
For this mission, there is no place to run and nowhere to hide from the men who have their eye on a billion-dollar deal, and the only ones standing in their way is this improbable team. The gamble they’re making could mean life or death, but the reward could be so much more!
Enjoy this excerpt:
Chapter One
Christen
Tuesday, Forward Operating Base, Iraq
“Scramble. Scramble. Scramble.”
The PA system’s bright tinny voice yanked Lieutenant Christen Davidson from her curled-up sleep. She found herself standing on the unfinished planks next to her bunk before her eyelids could even pry open. As her feet hit the floor, she crisscrossed her arms and jerked her t-shirt up over her head. Her flight uniform lay draped over the headboard in such a way that there would be no fumbling as adrenaline, Christen’s drug of choice, shot excitement through her system.
She scratched her fingers through her short pixie-cut hair, the most she would do to make herself presentable. Vanity was a time suck. Christen’s time was spent piling special forces operators into the back of her heli and flying them into the fray. They depended on her. Missions and lives were at stake – they were her priority.
Perched on the edge of her cot behind the makeshift privacy curtain formed from a queen-sized striped sheet, Christen pulled on her clothes, yanked the laces of her flight boots, and quickly looped a bow. With a shove of the door, she shot herself into the daylight. The sun glared in her eyes as she ran full-tilt toward the command tent to get her orders.
Christen wasn’t normally awake this time of day and didn’t normally fly in sunlight. She was a member of the Night Stalkers, the Army’s 160th. She was one of the only female pilots in what had been, up until very recently, the only special forces unit that allowed women to apply. She’d earned her place. Anything the male pilots could do, she could do too—maybe better, maybe not. Everyone had their strengths and their weaknesses.
Christen’s strength was flying low altitude flights in the black of night, hugging the terrain, glossing over its surface, scaring the hell out of the people below her while hiding her customers from any enemy eyes that might be scanning the midnight sky. She’d trained long and hard, year after year. She’d logged hundreds of hours — every hour she could possibly fly, any thing she could find to fly.
These last five years, she had flown in every kind of weather, terrain, and impossible-to-survive scenario her commanders at the 160th SOAR(A) at Fort Campbell could contrive. Before this last deployment, she’d received her change of status. She was fully mission qualified. She could go on any assignment required of her – bar none. But daylight? —Christen looked up at the sun as she reached to pull the command tent door open— that’s not what Night Stalkers did. This was odd, something was off.
Christen stopped short when she saw her commander barreling toward her.
“Let’s move it, Lieutenant.” The colonel growled as he strode through the door she held wide. He thrust a clipboard of papers at her, then pointed toward the Little Bird helicopter across the field getting fueled. The tanker truck was positioned far enough away that if an enemy combatant wanted to set it on fire, it wouldn’t explode the whole Forward Operating Base, situated just this side of enemy-held territory.
A line of Delta operators formed to her left, with their long hair and bushy beards. The “quiet professionals”—latent death and destruction. Each one laden with weapons, fully geared up in their battle rattle. Christen wondered when they’d flown in. They weren’t on base when she’d gone to sleep. The Deltas stepped, one at a time, onto a bathroom scale and one of their group noted each man’s weight on their clipboard. Weight mattered to the speed and the dexterity of a helicopter’s maneuvers. If they were being that precise, this wasn’t a taxi ride.
Christen looked down at her flight plan, and blinked. What the… “What?” She held a hand up to shield her eyes and read her orders again. She flipped to the waypoints marked on her map and the GPS coordinates she knew were already loaded into her flight computer system. Wow.
“I’m not sending you out on a Sunday picnic.” Colonel Martin stabbed a finger into her shoulder. “You’re our precision flier. Guts forged out of steel, I told ’em. And now, you’re going to make sure I don’t regret putting my reputation behind you.”
It was uncharacteristic of the colonel to point to any one pilot — to lift them up, or set them apart in any manner from the rest of the Night Stalkers. Christen didn’t like it. She was a team player, period. She didn’t seek out and didn’t want flattery or recognition. She just wanted to do her job.
And with or without any added pressure, this was going to be one hell of a trick-shot. Christen’s gaze scanned down the fuel calculations. With her tank filled to spill--depending on the weight of the Deltas, and the opposing wind speeds--she had a little over a two hundred sixty-mile range. With the calculated hover time... Yeah, this was shaving it close. She turned the page to find the weather read-out, then glanced up again at the bright sunshine, not a cloud in the sky. Of course, here in the desert that could change in the blink of an eye – no matter what the weather report said. Haboobs came when they wanted to. These violent winds carrying blinding dirt and debris could choke an engine and put a bird nose down in the sand quicker than quick. Sunlight, though, totally sucked. She wished they’d let her do this at night when she was in her comfort zone.
Like a vampire, Christen thrived after the sun went down. The 160th Night Stalkers loved the pitch-black of moonless nights. With their FLIR—forward looking infrared systems—and their night vision goggles along with some rad computer systems, she could sweep over the terrain, almost undetectable, to deliver her customers to the required spot, arriving on time and on target in plus or minus thirty seconds. It was the precision that her customers demanded. The Night Stalkers were the air support for the United States Special Operations units.
The 160th had flown the Osama bin Laden mission which had been planned and trained for to the Nth degree. Even with the technical problems, that mission could only be seen as a success of vital importance. The 160th had also been the team that zoomed their way into the Hindu Kush Region of Afghanistan when the call was made for an immediate extraction after a SEAL team came under heavy fire during Operation Red Wings. The Night Stalkers in their CH-47 Chinook helicopters took off without a gunship escort, hoping against hope to extract the team in time. The Taliban shot down one of the Night Stalker’s helicopters with a rocket propelled grenade, killing the eight Navy SEALs and eight special operations aviators on board. The second helicopter was forced to leave the scene. It was a soul-crushing horror of a day. It was the day Christen swore she’d become a Night Stalker, dedicating her work to the memory of those fallen warriors.
Christen chewed on her upper lip, reading over her orders to fly straight into the center of a populated city. She visualized the scene in her mind. This kind of challenge was exactly what she’d signed up for. She reached around and hooked a hand behind the back of her neck as she processed the schematics. The road width with the apron of sidewalks and parking lanes on either side was marked on the satellite photo as thirty-one feet five inches. Her rotor diameter was twenty-seven feet four inches. Could she trust these calculations?
Whew! This was going to be one hell of a hairy mission. She’d never trained for this. Never imagined it. Wasn’t completely convinced it was possible. But damned, she was glad she was given the opportunity to try.
Typically, they’d sit down and plot this out meticulously. They’d practice, practice, practice until go-time, working to find any holes and plug them. But this time, she didn’t get to sit down in the wooden chairs and participate in the mission planning. They were spooling up with the pressure of some undefined time constraint. Papers slapped into her hands. There must be an imminent threat. A small window of opportunity.
Christen turned as her stick buddy, Nick Campbell moved up beside her and read their paperwork over her shoulder. A low whistle blew between his teeth. “How many customers are we taking in our bird?”
“We have four. The Deltas are checking their weight now to make sure we’re well below the max takeoff load. The Black Hawk will have the rest of the customers and the heavier fire power.”
“I guess we’re glad they’ve got our backs.” His gaze scanned over to the Black Hawk. “I hope they have all the fire power they can cram on there. I have a feeling we’re going to need it.” He tucked his helmet under his arm and grinned. “It’s a good day to die.” He raised a hand toward their clients and went to do his pre-flight checks.
Readers, I hope you enjoyed getting to know Honey and Meg. If you had fun reading DEADLOCK, I’d appreciate it if you’d help others enjoy it too.
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Acknowledgements
My great appreciation ~
