Ky (In the Company of Snipers Book 13)

by Irish Winters

  Strapped into a harness, she could only stare out the window of what sounded like a very big helicopter. Gradually, the fog in her head lifted. She peeled the straps off her shoulders and clung to the window, her palms flat to the glass. “You’re killing them! Stop it! Please!”

  The chopper couldn’t drown out the sounds of the battle waging below. Zaroyin’s men were engaged in a gun battle, shooting down to ground level. Each staccato shot lit the dark with bursts of bright orange and white. Ky was somewhere in that maelstrom of snow, ice, and bullets below. He had to be, else why would the doctor’s men keep firing in one continual pattern?

  “They’re laying down suppressive fire while we takeoff,” he said tiredly. “It’s a precaution. That’s all.”

  “It’s murder! Ky’s out there. I know he is.” Her eyes filled with tears. “I’m not going anywhere with you. Let me off this thing!”

  Zaroyin signaled the pilot instead. The chopper’s erratic flight pattern forced her to sit. It bobbed back and forth as if fighting the weather. The comfortable padded seat beneath her might as well have been ice. She couldn’t take her eyes off the melee below. “I’ll fight you every step of the way!”

  “Do what you want. It will all be over soon.”

  “Where are you taking me?” she demanded again.

  He turned his face to the window, the coward.

  What the hell? A buzz of gunfire burst over Ky’s position, headed away from him instead of at him.

  “Ranger danger on your six,” Senior Agent Harley Mortimer chirped affably in Ky’s earpiece. “Get yer butts off the ground, boys, and join in. I didn’t come all this way to take Zaroyin out by myself. Let’s kick these bastards’ asses.”

  “Copy that,” Ky replied over the top of Tate’s identical comeback. Eagerly, he engaged, catching the nearest enemy shooter in a crossfire as, one by one, his TEAMmates provided location and status.

  “I’ve got you covered on your right, Ky. Keep laying it down,” Adam Torrey muttered between firing. “God, I hate dictators and liars. Let’s finish this.”

  “Coming at you front and center, buddy. Don’t shoot me,” the deep baritone of Maverick Carson chimed in. “I told China I’d be home for dinner. Do not make a liar of me, Winchester.”

  “Wouldn’t dream of it.” Ky aimed and squeezed off a barrage, advancing steadily instead of laying low. The FBI agents who’d flooded out of the bunker were now taking expert fire. Lots of it.

  Unpleasant duty? Yes. Unnecessary? Maybe. But to be in a battle to win it? To finally have a fighting chance against Zaroyin’s minions? To have the nation’s best sharpshooter brothers at his back every step of the way? Best damned feeling in the world.

  Ky took a half-second to scan his TEAM.

  “Damn you,” Gabe Cartwright hissed, his rifle aimed toward the rooftop as he squeezed off a few rounds, every fifth a tracer. “Do not shoot that shit at me one more time!”

  One of Zaroyin’s men pitched over the edge, never to shoot that shit again.

  The helo hadn’t taken off yet. There was still time. But it took twelve long minutes of steady payback before the enemy laid down their weapons. As senior agent in charge, Harley Mortimer assumed control of the scene.

  “Get in there, Winchester,” Harley ordered. “GO on. Get it done. Now. Before the Mounties show up, and we’re forced to turn over jurisdiction. You too, Tate. Give him a hand. Find that woman and let’s get out of here.” He turned to the other men on his team. “Wrap ’em and strap ’em, guys. Tend to the wounded first. Cover the dead. RCMP is due to land in”—a troop of men in dark uniforms thundered from the trees—“right about now,” he finished, the last words Ky heard as he scrambled into the bunker.

  The chopper overhead had grown louder. He was running out of time.

  The entry way opened to a T, gray walls everywhere. Ky pulled his goggles under his chin and nodded to the right. “TEAMshield won’t work in here. Use your walkie-talkie. Go right. I’ll go left.”

  “This place smells like a hospital.”

  “It may be one,” Ky said. “Keep sharp.”

  Tate shrugged one shoulder. “Someone’s watching. We’re on camera. I can feel them.”

  “Copy that.” Ky felt it, too, the nagging sensation that all was not well. By the time he’d reached the end of the hall, he’d encountered nothing but an open elevator at the L-shaped intersection. “You find anyone yet?” he asked Tate over his walkie-talkie.

  “No. You?”

  “Not yet.” Ky held his position, his head cocked and listening. The sound of a door closing happened somewhere to his right. Footsteps padded away. Ky raised his rifle, ready for the target. “Got someone.”

  “On my way.”

  Too late. Ky turned the corner as another elevator door swooshed closed farther down the hall. All he caught sight of was a gray lab coat. He picked up his pace to intercept but nearly ran into Tate. “Someone was just here.” He hit the stairwell next to the elevator, hoping to intercept him or her.

  Holy shit didn’t begin to describe the scene Ky and Tate encountered one level up. Row upon row of hospital beds, all occupied with unconscious men—or bodies—lined the expansive room. No privacy curtains. No walls. Just beds.

  “What the hell?” Tate hissed.

  “I think we found where they make the drones,” Ky whispered, his rifle snugged into his chest, the barrel down. He approached the first row cautiously, while Tate took the second.

  The bizarre scene screamed science fiction of the worst kind. The first bed held an unconscious man in a hospital gown, his eyes taped shut, his right arm strapped to a board, and various IV lines stuck in him. His stats were displayed on a nearby monitor. Various wires draped from beneath the gray blanket to another monitor. His head was shaved. A tan bandage showed behind his right ear.

  “They’ve got implants. Just like Eden,” Ky murmured, in shock at the size of this bizarre room. There had to be a hundred men laid out like corpses, the monitors quietly beeping away.

  Tate moved from bed to bed on the next aisle. “All these guys are drones?”

  “Sure looks like it.” Ky bumped the foot of the unconscious guy on the next bed with his elbow. “They’re all out cold.”

  Tate grunted. “Or they’re dead.”

  “Umm, please don’t do that,” a nervous voice called out from behind him. “They’re all recovering. They need their rest in order to heal.”

  Ky snapped his weapon onto the frail guy in gray scrubs standing at the elevator door and wringing his hands. “Who are you? Who are these men?”

  The guy wiped a nervous palm over his brow. “I’m, umm, Thornton, and these are my surgery patients. They’re... they’re in recovery. You need to leave.”

  Ky waved the barrel of his rifle toward the expansive room, his anger barely in check. “Did you do this?”

  Mr. Timid bobbed his head. “Yes. No. I mean, yes. Oh, dear. I mean we had no other choice. The drone technology failed to account for unquantifiable variants. None of these poor, poor men passed the beta test. The good doctor had to reverse the procedure. I assisted. It was the only humane thing to do.”

  Good doctor? Humane? Zaroyin? Those words didn’t fit together. Ky took a step toward this Thornton bastard. He was obviously distraught, but Ky had no intention of making things easy on him. He lifted the business end of his rifle to the guy’s face. “Which way to the roof?”

  Mr. Timid backed up against the closed elevator doors, out of Ky’s reach. “D-don’t hurt him. The failsafe wasn’t his idea. That other guy wanted proof the D781s were flawed. He did it. Not D-Dr. Zaroyin.”

  “What other guy? What D781s?”

  “Mr. B-Bick.” Thornton nodded so fast the skimpy hairs on top of his nearly bald head flopped up and down. “The mind-control things and the locators. He ordered them. Not Dr. Zaroyin.”

  “I don’t give a shit who ordered what,” Ky hissed. “How do I get to the roof?”

  “You’re too lat
e. You’ll never catch him.”

  “Where is it?” Ky bellowed, not going to wait one more second.

  “Stairs. End of the hall.” A trembling Thornton pointed the way.

  Ky ran with Tate on his heels. There was still time. He shoved the rooftop door open. Both rooftop gunners were dead, but the powerful rotors of the helicopter whipped a frenzy of snow crystals across the roof and into Ky’s face. He ducked into the wind, but the chopper had already lifted up from the landing pad.

  He ran for the Sikorsky’s skids, intending to grab hold and throw it off balance to keep it from gaining more altitude. He never stood a chance. The workhorse lifted vertically as easily as if no winter blizzard buffeted it. He’d never even made contact with one landing skid. Up it went into the overcast sky. Ky stood there until he lost sight of its landing lights.

  Shit! He flopped to his back, sick and angry. He’d lost her. Eden was gone.

  “Get off your backside, Winchester. Now. The Canadians are in control of this crime scene”—Harley barked from the stairwell —“and we need to vacate the premises. Alex is sending a Nighthawk. I brought the ballast to get you aloft. Be ready for pick-up within the hour. Can you do it?”

  Ky swallowed hard. A Nighthawk? As in, the savvy extraction system whereby a man harnessed himself onto a fast-rising helium-filled balloon, aka the ballast, in order to escape certain capture or death at ground level?

  He swallowed hard at the daring solution. Some insane engineer at McCormack Industries who’d never had to use the scary thing himself had dreamed up the latest get-out-of-jail-free device. The premise behind the Nighthawk was pure genius. It saved lives provided the UAV, the unmanned aerial vehicle designed to intercept the Nighthawk ballast, performed as planned. So far, no spec ops guy had been lost during a Nighthawk extraction, but damn. Ky’d never done one before. That meant a bone-chilling ride through one of the biggest blizzards of the century.

  He kept his opinion to himself. Yeah, he could do it. He could do anything.

  For Eden.

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Black Eyes, Eden called out psychically. Talk to me. I need to know you’re okay.

  He hadn’t spoken since their last conversation, and she’d grown more worried the farther east the helicopter flew. The co-pilot, one FBI Agent McCluskey, whom she didn’t know, refused to listen. No matter how hard she tried to convince him she’d been abducted, not once did he lower the black-tinted face shield on his helmet. “Take your seat, ma’am, before I make you,” he’d growled when she’d gone forward to confront him.

  “Do you have any clue who this man is or the trouble he’s caused? Do you realize you’re acting as his accomplice?” she’d asked, pointing at Zaroyin. “He’s a murderer, and you’re helping him escape.”

  “My orders are to bring you in. Now sit.”

  “Which makes you as dumb as one of his mind-controlled drones,” she shot back at him, her FBI attitude back in action.

  McCluskey’s chin clenched below the shield. His lips thinned. He pushed out of his seat and took one threatening step toward her. She didn’t intend to spend what was left of her life drugged and unconscious, so she took her seat again, pissed at her stupid boots, irritated at the ridiculous high-fashion get-up she didn’t remember getting into. Another violation of her privacy. But spitting mad that Zaroyin had caught her after all she’d done to stay out of his reach. Furious that she had no way to know whether Ky was dead or alive.

  She gulped a tear away, not going to break down in front of this, this... What would Tucker call McCluskey? An asshole? Yeah. That.

  Glancing cautiously at the doctor, she tapped her finely booted toes out of sheer frustration and reached across the void to another lost soul. Black Eyes, talk to me. I can’t do this without you, she demanded.

  Silence.

  “Here, you’ll need this.” Harley tossed Ky a balaclava, a white skull painted on its face. Good enough. Wasn’t that appropriate in a really sick way? Ky donned the face protection and his TEAMshield goggles. Damn, if this killed him, Alex would get a birds-eye view of his death.

  “Are you ready?” Harley asked, his brows knitted as he tightened Ky’s chest straps and adjusted the shoulder harness one more time. Tall and lanky with a streak of tease in him a mile wide, Harley looked more serious than Ky could remember.

  “Yeah. Let’s get this done.”

  Harley’s lips pursed. “You ever done this before?”

  “No.” Ky’s stomach pitched up his throat. And I’m never going to be this stupid again.

  “All you’ve got to do is hang on. Let the Hawk do its thing.” He peered intently into Ky’s face. “Remember to breathe. The air will get thin. Don’t panic. This is a short trip. You’ll be fine.”

  Ky nodded, adrenaline coursing up the length of his body, pushing him into panic mode. Harley needed to shut up before it took over. The Nighthawk ballast had already been inflated. It tugged at his harness from its lofty position somewhere in the snow clouds overhead. Ky didn’t waste time looking for it. He gave Harley a solid thumbs-up.

  “Be safe.” Harley returned a quick two-fingered salute and a final shoulder bump with his fist.

  Oh, shit. Lift-off. Ky fisted both gloved hands around the hard plastic harness tethered to the innocuous-looking white balloon somewhere overhead. The second Harley released the line from its anchor, Ky’s boots lifted off the ground. With his gear and rifle strapped to his chest, he was on his way into outer space.

  Adam Torrey, nicknamed The TEAM’s flying squirrel, loved HALO jumps. He got a kick out of jumping out of perfectly good C-130s. Ky closed his eyes. His heart thumped at the sudden acceleration of the craziest thing he’d ever done. What was Adam? Insane?

  The trip would be short, but only if the UAV intercepted the tether that held him to the ballast as it was designed to do. One big scary if. If the Nighthawk drone missed, he’d be that man lost in the stars, a meteor set to fall to earth when his shallow orbit decayed. By then he’d be dead, frozen stiff and asphyxiated. Not good.

  That Mother, Alex’s nosey admin assistant, remotely controlled the UAV from somewhere deep inside the sunny state of Virginia should’ve made him feel better. It didn’t. She was smart, maybe even a genius when it came to techie stuff in the office, but remote-controlling a military asset that she’d never seen much less used before? Damned tricky.

  His gut lurched. It might not be Mother behind the controls. It could be Alex, his technologically challenged boss. Even worse. Ky gritted his teeth as he gained altitude and growled into the wind, “What the hell am I doing?”

  Up, up, up, and holy shit! This was why he hadn’t joined the Screaming Eagles, the Army’s 101st Airborne Division, renowned for its air assault operations. Hell, no. Suspended from a balloon that, with the right conditions, could still run into a prickly pine tree and—pop! Send him to his death before he’d acquired enough altitude? No thank you, Uncle Sam.

  Yes, Ky needed to get to Eden quickly, but br-r-r-r-r-r. The higher the balloon lifted, the colder the atmosphere. TEAMwear wasn’t made for these frigid temps. He shivered and focused on looking up, not down. At this rate, he’d have hypothermia before interception.

  If...

  Yeah. There were a lot of ifs when a guy literally flew by the seat of his pants, when he was hanging on for dear life. What was I thinking? Ky hunkered into his safety harness and manned up. He wouldn’t be hanging like an idiot at the end of a clothesline if there were any other way. This is all about Eden, tough guy. Shut it down and get it done.

  TEAMshield interrupted his half-hysterical rant with a calm, “Intercept in five. Four. Three. Two—”

  Whoosh! Precisely on schedule. The stealthy UAV somewhere overhead in all those clouds hooked Ky’s tether with its extended nose-pincers and jolted him and his balloon with a rapid change in direction. Now he was really moving.

  “Shit,” he ground out between clenched teeth, the wicked cold of a rapid getaway tearing into him
. “How long before I l-l-land?”

  TEAMshield responded with the infinite patience programmed into her. “Touchdown in ten minutes, Agent Winchester. Shall I adjust the temperature of your TEAMwear until then?”

  “Do it,” he said.

  “Will ninety-eight-point-six Fahrenheit be acceptable?”

  “Yes,” he hissed to the sky. Just do it. Instantly, TEAMshield activated his internal heater and warmth spread through his TEAMwear suit. He wished he’d thought of that sooner. Swallowing hard, he ceased being a pansy. This insane idea might work.

  He summoned those pretty green eyes to mind. The scent of mentholatum. The taste of Eden’s sweet mouth. His heart calmed. Yeah. This would work.

  “Ring TEAMhome,” he ordered.

  “Dialing Mr. Stewart,” the feminine voice replied without a hint of emotional distress. God, she could be annoying.

  “Ky?” Alex barked. “Harley said you refused the oxygen. What were you thinking?”

  “The tank’s too heavy, Boss. They only had the one, and Chase needed it more than me.” Ky’s teeth chattered despite the added heat sweeping inside his suit. “He’s injured, remember?”

  “Son-of-a-bitch, who cares? He’s got ground support. You don’t. You ever hear of hypoxia?”

  Ky nodded despite the miles between him and his boss. Now was not the time to argue about something he couldn’t change and wouldn’t if he could. Chase had been in a bad way, blue-lipped and still unconscious the last time Ky saw him. Hypoxia only mattered if this contraption gained extreme altitude, which it was not designed for. “You do know Zaroyin’s headed south in a Sikorsky stud, don’t you, Boss? It’s fitted with super-sized sponsons for additional fuel. That bird won’t land for hours.”

  “Yes, Harley filled me in.”

  “Where’s Zaroyin now?”

  “Still headed east. That gunship’s high enough over the storm, and it’s caught a good tailwind. There’s no way you’ll catch it, but don’t worry. I’ve got everyone stateside working on this recovery.”