Where is he?
That brought the other reason for nerves: Xander’s safety. Could he be somewhere, chasing the wrong information and getting himself into something he can’t get out of? Sarah knew he could more than handle himself, but when it’s the Wild West, anything can happen. She desperately wanted to be there when something did go down. Another concern was that if he did have the right intel, and found his parents’ killer, there would be no bringing him into the CIA fold. Ever.
Snow had begun to fall around the van. Sarah worried that hanging around Dragov’s lair for too long would bring unwanted attention. She would give it another—
Sarah’s cell phone dinged with an incoming text message. Director Manning’s name appeared on her screen. She knew he would want an update, and she sure as hell didn’t want to give him this one. The one where the first time she made a move for the CIA, it was the wrong move. She didn’t even want to open the text. She looked up from her phone and followed a slow-falling snowflake filled with a ray of morning sunshine, all the way to the ground.
“Where the hell are you, Xander?” she asked the empty van.
“Come again, Agent Gilbright?” one of her team members answered back through her headset, which she apparently had forgotten to mute.
Sarah sat staring at the snow, zoned out with visions of Xander in trouble somewhere out there in the world. Visions of him pinned down and taking heavy fire, all in the name of revenge. A terrible weight pressed on her chest, and a terrible worry filled her heart.
“Agent Gilbright?”
Sarah erased those visions, cleared her throat, and swallowed hard as she nervously tapped her fingers against the steering wheel, biting her lip and shaking her leg.
“Nothing.”
32
A Moment’s Hesitation Will Be a Lifetime of Regret
Xander peered around the corner of the boat toward the compound. Approximately one hundred yards in front of him, all of the lights on the three-story concrete structure were lit. It reminded him of a prison. Each level of the compound had a full wraparound concrete walkway, and it now resembled an anthill with countless men carrying guns taking position on various points of the railing. The part of a human being that would panic in a dire situation like this no longer existed inside of Xander. The sheer volume of Black Ops missions the navy had sent their best SEAL on had squeezed that out of him. The still thick and warm air of the summer night seemed to hold them in the water. Their biggest advantage, the element of surprise, was gone now. Xander knew that to regain this element he would have to split off from his friends. That thought left an empty feeling in his stomach for them, especially Kyle, but he couldn’t be leaving him in better hands. Sam and Sean were as seasoned as any soldier could be.
“They’ll only be expecting three of us,” Xander announced.
“No way, X-man. We stay together,” Sean said immediately.
“The heat will be on the three of you. Can you handle that?” Xander asked, looking at Sam.
“Of course. It’s the only way to recover an element of surprise.” Sam understood. “We will be fine. Kyle will stay in the middle of us. We will go in the back from the beach side, so you will have to go around to the front. It is as good as suicide.” She looked at Xander with worried eyes.
“I’m not going in the front.”
“Then where will you go, X?” Sean asked.
“It’s most likely, since according to the blueprints there is no underground level, that he is on the top floor. So the three of you will make your way there.”
“But you don’t think everything is on those blueprints, do you?” Sam asked.
“Do you?”
“I don’t know. But I do know it will be covered in soldiers willing to give their lives for Khatib.”
Xander grabbed the bag from the boat and pulled out the last gun left, his SCAR Mk16 which he’d had fitted with a specially adapted silencer. “Good thing this puppy squirts out six hundred and fifty-four rounds per minute then.” He grinned at Sam as he loaded and locked it.
Sam didn’t return the grin. “Yes, but only a thirty-round clip.”
Shouts echoed over the beach as the militant soldiers prepared to defend the devil’s house. The rest of them readied their weapons as they crouched behind the boat. The waves crashed beside them and the water grew closer as the tide had begun to move in.
“The tide is gonna pull the boat out any minute now, so we need to make this quick,” Xander announced.
“That boat isn’t going to start, X. We’d best be thinking of plan B,” Kyle said.
Xander knew Kyle was right, and that was especially bad news. Not only did it affect timing to get back to the plane, but it made it much easier to be followed and attacked by Khatib’s soldiers. Even with GPS, it would be extremely difficult to make the kind of time on land in a truck that they could make in the water.
One problem at a time.
“Let me worry about that. We could have used their speedboat if you hadn’t cracked it in half.” Xander winked at Kyle.
Kyle only returned a stone face. The time for humor had passed. The enormity of the task in front of them had settled in, for all of them. “Okay, Sam, you take Sean and Kyle beachside, around back. They will be expecting this, so be ready. I’ll wait here until I see you’ve drawn some attention, then I’ll make my own way in. Listen carefully . . .”
Xander’s face took on a seriousness that even Kyle had never seen before. “Do. Not. Hesitate. If your instinct tells you to move, then move. If it tells you to shoot, then shoot. A moment’s hesitation will be a lifetime of regret. Sam, Sean, I don’t need to tell you that you are ten times the soldiers any of Khatib’s men will be. Use it. Kyle, believe me when I tell you, though you haven’t been through it, you are better trained than any of these men. That, I promise you. Know that, when the doubt creeps in. Let your training take over; let your mind rest. Got it?”
Kyle nodded. Sam and Sean followed with nods of their own. Sam then nodded back to Sean and Kyle, and they followed her to the front of the boat. Xander pulled a grenade from his belt and pulled the pin.
“Bullets only hurt when they hit you,” Xander told them as he chucked the grenade toward the front of the compound. Sand, smoke, and fire shot up into the night as the colossal blast of the grenade filled the air. The boom echoed through the silence, and as Khatib’s militant monkeys turned their attention to it, Sam, Kyle, and Sean bolted across the beach into the thick brush that would cover their run to the compound. Xander watched them until they disappeared. Worry for them formed like a storm cloud inside his gut. Then a thought that shook him to his core.
What if Khatib isn’t the one responsible for my parents’ death?
Then, an even more horrifying thought.
So what if he is?
Xander adjusted the strap on his gun. The grip of sadness wrapped its hands around his throat, and he could hardly swallow. Because he couldn’t let go of his rage, more of the people he loved might die. And to what end? Revenge?
Xander got to his feet and walked to the edge of the boat. It was too late to call them back now. How could he have been so selfish? How had this thought not sunk in until now? He felt a warm tear roll out of his left eye and down his cheek. Anger stirred inside of him. Not anger with the one he perceived to be his archenemy, but anger at himself for letting it win. Xander put his ass in the sand and took a deep breath. It was too late now. These feelings would do nothing to keep his friends safe. Another deep breath. For some strange reason the thought of that text popped into his head. The text from the night his house was invaded. The message from a still unknown source that had saved his life. Someone is in your house.
Tat. Tatat-tatat-tatat! Gunfire rang out from the back of the compound, snapping Xander out of his trance. A calm fell over him and all other thoughts left his mind. He sprinted from the cover of the speedboat to the same brush his friends had entered moments ago, but instead of turning right and sta
ying inside of it, he continued through to the other side. He could see lights on at the front of the compound, but the militants’ attention had turned to the beach, where Sam and company had begun their assault. There was only one other building close to the compound and it was across the street. It looked abandoned as there wasn’t a single light or sign of life coming from it. Gunfire continued behind him, and a growing sense that the dark building might not be empty grew in him as he moved toward it along the brush line.
Sam’s voice came to his ear from his comm system. “Xander.”
“Go ahead.”
“Xander, we are pinned down. There are more than we’d thought. We are taking heavy fire, we can’t move forward. We’re going to continue a distraction on this end. Use it to get where you need to go. But, Xander, you must hurry!”
Xander had never heard urgency like that in Sam’s voice before. She was always cool and collected.
“I’m coming back to you,” Xander replied.
“No. No! You coming this way will only hurt our chances. There is no penetrating them from this end. We are covered in the brush behind an old truck. They will be on us soon, but we’re covered for now. Do not come this way.”
“Get out of there, Sam. Go back to the boat and wait for me there. Do not let them get you. Pull back, do you hear me, Sam? Pull back!” Xander shouted into his headset.
“It’s too late to pull back, Xander. The only way out of this is if we are the only ones left alive. We will never make it back to the plane if we run now. Goddamn it, Xander, just make it quick!”
Xander heard her grunt just before she released the comm button. Seconds later he heard a blast come from the beach, and when he looked past the compound, he saw a mist of smoke and sand rise up in front of the lights of the building. She’d thrown a grenade.
Toughest bitch on the planet.
He ran on through to the end of the brush, and in front of him was a canal. The water running through it didn’t look very deep, but he figured he would certainly have to swim the twenty yards to the other side if he indeed listened to his instinct that the abandoned house wasn’t abandoned at all. He was just about fifty yards from the compound, as well as from the commotion on the beach just beyond the brush. He surveyed the dark building until a faint red light caught his eye at the back of it. He pulled up his Mk16 and looked through the scope. Sure enough, there was a soldier there, peering around the corner at the commotion, a burning cigarette in his hand. Xander instinctively hurried down the ten-foot incline into the canal and began his swim across. The water was near freezing, but he continued forward. He knew in the basement of that dark building was Khatib.
He could feel it.
“Xander!” a cry rang out through the sounds of gunfire. Xander stopped midstroke and waded for a moment in the middle of the canal. The gunfire stopped and silence fell around him.
It couldn’t have been. Sam would never blow her cover. Would she? Not unless—
“Xander!” This time it was unmistakable. It was Sam. The man he’d searched for in his mind and in reality for the last twelve years was only yards from his grasp. The release that Khatib’s death would give Xander would be almost too great to measure. He could completely repurpose his life. He could become the man that his parents had always wanted him to be.
But—
Xander turned from the dark compound and swam to the edge of the canal back toward his friends. They needed him. It was bad or Sam would never have given away her position.
She wouldn’t scream unless they’d taken her.
He scaled the ten-foot bank and ran back into the brush. He could hear a man shouting but couldn’t make out the words. He dashed through the thick, waist-high foliage, and just in front of him was the truck Sam had radioed him from.
There was no sign of them.
The shouting continued, and as he peered over the hood of the truck, his heart fell to his stomach. There on the beach, under the floodlights that beamed from the compound were his three friends lined up beside one another, in the grips of a group of gun-wielding tyrants. A man stood shouting at them in another language, waving his gun in their faces. Xander raised his rifle for a closer look. Through the scope he could see terror on the faces of his friends. One gunman seemed to be screaming directly at Sean; Xander saw Sean spit in the man’s face. The man stopped screaming and wiped the saliva from his face. Xander repositioned his gun, but before the shock of Sean spitting on the man had passed, the man pulled up his gun and squeezed the trigger.
Sean’s face disappeared.
Sam’s scream rattled Xander’s bones and echoed through the night. Instincts were all Xander had at this moment, and he put a bullet in the gunman’s head, then one in each of the other men standing beside him. The remaining gunmen holding Sam and Kyle turned them both toward Xander as a meat shield, and then moved them sideways toward the compound’s back door and out of Xander’s line of sight.
Xander pressed his com button. “Sam, Kyle, if you can hear me, just do whatever they say. Just stay alive. I will find my way to you. Just—”
Static erupted in Xander’s ear, and he tore his headset from his ear. The men had broken their coms. Gunmen above the beach on all three floors of the balcony turned their attention to the brush, and bullets began to rain all around Xander as he tucked back down behind the truck. His only chance was the shadows. He knew they would be coming into the brush at any second and he had to move. The only chance he had of saving his friends, and the afterthought of killing Khatib, was to methodically reduce the number of the opposition. The longer he took, the worse the odds became of his friends surviving. He would have to take some chances.
All around him bullets pelted the truck, sounding like a hailstorm on a tin roof. Xander looked down at his utility belt: two frag grenades, one flash grenade, and two smoke. He unclipped one of the smoke grenades and looked around the side mirror of the truck. Four men fired from different levels of the compound above him, and as he raised up a little higher he could see three men, guns pointing out in front of them, running into the brush after him. He pulled the pin on the smoke grenade and tossed it into the middle of the brush, about ten feet in front of him back toward the canal. A hissing sound filled the air and smoke began to rise from the ground like from a fire-filled chimney on a cold winter night. Xander took his gun in his hands and dove outward, belly to the sky. Before the men firing down on him could adjust their aim, Xander shot all four of them dead—one on the bottom walkway, two on the second floor, and one on the top—and then landed flat on his back. The three men in the brush turned the corner of the truck. Xander stayed low and crawled into the smoke cloud he had left for himself a moment ago. Branches cracked and leaves rustled as the men hurried their way through the waist-high thicket toward him. Xander knew they would think he had continued all the way out to the canal, so instead, he held his position right in the middle of the thick white cloud of smoke and crouched to a knee. They were just steps away now and from a sheath he had strapped to the right side of his right leg, he pulled out a knife. Rambo, as he affectionately called it. He took Rambo in his right hand and pulled it up to ready position with the back of the blade to the outside of his forearm. He listened as their footsteps grew closer.
Three . . . two . . . one . . .
The first of the gunmen came running blindly into the smoke. Xander sprang upward, taking the nose of the man’s gun in his left hand as he spun into him, sliding the blade of Rambo along his throat. He continued the spin, keeping the gun in his left hand, and 180 degrees later he drove the point of the blade, backhanded, into the Adam’s apple of the second man. Blood spewed from his throat as Xander immediately removed the knife, and with another 180-degree spin back clockwise it found a home in the neck of the third gunman. The momentum of Xander’s swing knocked the dying man to his back, and Xander lost a grip on the knife. The sound of the gunman crashing to the ground alerted the others, and they began to regroup at both sides of the
compound. They positioned a spotlight from one of the upper levels of the building in Xander’s direction. Through the dissipating smoke, Xander could see the olive-skinned, dark bearded man desperately trying to keep his blood from running out of his neck.
“It’s no use, you fuck,” Xander whispered as he plucked the knife from the man’s flesh. More footsteps and shouts started coming from the beach into the brush. Xander wiped the spatters of blood from his face that had sprayed him in the action. He was surrounded now, his only chance the canal.
* * *
Sam felt the rope tighten around her wrists. She concentrated on controlling her breathing, because with no vision she tried to tap into her other available senses to get a feel for where Khatib’s men were taking them. In case the time came, she might be able to use the scents and audible clues to help her and Kyle find their way out. The burlap sack the men had wrapped around her head was making this a lot more difficult. She had counted thirty-six steps—two right turns—a flight of stairs—and two more right turns since the moment she heard the door shut behind them after walking inside from the beach. Wherever they were now, it was much cooler than the first room that was upstairs. Where they were now was also a cramped space. She could tell because the voices of the men talking sounded very encapsulated. She first faked a stumble to the right. Her shoulder immediately rammed into a concrete wall. The man leading her grunted something and straightened her up. Next, she pretended to trip over her feet to the left. She fell against yet another concrete wall. She was in a hallway. A long hallway at her count. She was no longer in or under the three-story compound on the beach. They were leading her to another location.
They were leading them to Khatib.
“You okay, Kyle?” Sam asked, knowing she would pay for it. But she had to know. The man leading her thumped her on the back of the head with the gun and shouted what she assumed was “shut the hell up” in Arabic.
Xander King BoxSet Page 22
