He’s on his hands and knees, looking at the ground. His breathing is labored. There’s something wrong with one of his feet—it’s black and blue and looks a bit flat.
Slowly, I move around in front of him. When he lifts his head and looks at me, I realize what the strange noise is. The man has the hollow metal part of a pen sticking out of his bloodied throat.
I snort. Guess he got a close-up look-see at Tabby’s temper.
He falls to one side, drags himself to the tunnel wall, props himself up and glares at me. I left my NVGs behind, but thanks to the LED strips spaced every few feet a few inches from the floor, I have enough light to see that the front of his white dress shirt is no longer white, but dark, garish red. He’s disheveled, drenched in sweat, and his skin has the waxy pallor of a water-logged corpse.
“So this is the infamous S?ren Killgaard,” I muse aloud, studying him. “I gotta say, you look like a bag of smashed asshole. And that”—I motion to his neck—“looks like it hurts.”
When he just stares at me, his eyes full of fury, I say, “Oh—forgot to introduce myself. I’m Connor Hughes.” I add deliberately, “Tabby’s man.”
His lips slowly peel back over his teeth.
The feeling is mutual, you piece of shit.
“Since it appears you can’t talk, I’ll keep the conversation short. I’m under orders from the United States government to bring you in alive if I can. The ‘if I can’ part being the important one.”
I let it hang there. We stare at each other. He glances at the rifle one of his guards dropped, only a few feet from his right hand. His gaze jumps back to me. I can see him trying to decide.
Pick it up, I think. Do me a solid and pick it up.
A cricket chirps nearby. Another one takes up the song. Somewhere in the tunnel ahead of us, a bullfrog croaks, adding a bass line to the chorus.
Then Killgaard snatches up the rifle and points it at my chest.
But this time he isn’t the one who’s a few steps ahead of the game.
His head snaps back as the bullet rips through his brain. It leaves a perfect, round hole right between his eyebrows. The rock wall behind him is painted in blood.
Slowly, his blue eyes still open, he slides sideways and slumps over, dead.
Into the silence I growl, “Checkmate, motherfucker.”
I lower my rifle and spit on the ground.
Then I turn and jog back the way I came, Killgaard forgotten as I rush back to the one thing in the world that matters more than anything else.
Tabby.
Forty
Connor
She’s in surgery for four hours. I’ve seen war, lost people I love, been through a lot of tough shit in my life, but those four hours are the longest and darkest I’ve ever spent.
SOAR picked us up right on schedule in the designated LZ. The Black Hawk has a capacity for eighteen fully loaded soldiers, and we were only six, plus one injured woman and one injured girl. Juanita was semiconscious when Murphy and Reid found her, dumped on the floor like trash in a storage room on the first level of the caves. The doctor at the hospital in Fairbanks says she’ll have a nasty scar on her back, but she’ll eventually be fine.
Physically, she’ll be fine. How she reacts mentally to her ordeal remains to be seen. Courtesy of Uncle Sam, her mother and all six siblings are being flown in, which hopefully will help begin the healing process. It’s always better to have your team by your side in times of trouble.
We’ve been debriefed by the CIA, which is exactly as bad as having all your teeth pulled by a medieval dentist. The four Marines who teamed up with us on the op—Murphy, Kasey, Reid, and Big Swingin’ Dick, a man of few words and one hell of a reputation—have gone back to Camp Pendleton, after receiving my thanks and an invitation to join Metrix once they leave the corps, should they be of a mind.
Now it’s only Ryan and me, pacing the halls of this cold, depressing, podunk hospital, doing everything I can not to do something I haven’t done in over twenty years since Mikey died.
Cry.
“Brother,” says Ryan, watching me from his plastic chair in the waiting room. His bulk makes it look like a piece of child’s furniture. “It’s gonna be okay.”
“Yep,” I say, and turn around and pace the other direction over the crappy, frayed brown carpet. The chairs are brown too. The walls are a lighter brown. Even the plants are brown. It’s like this place is one giant turd.
“She’s a fighter. You know that.”
“Yep.”
“She was conscious during the flight to the hospital. That’s a good sign.”
Conscious, but not speaking. She just gripped my hand and stared up at me, her green eyes huge, her pulse faint.
Her blood leaking all over the goddamned place.
“Yep.”
Ryan sighs, realizing that no matter what he says his pep talk won’t make me feel peppy.
After another half an hour, a doctor walks into the waiting room. He’s a different doctor from the one who attended Juanita. This one, although younger, looks tired and more than a little cranky. Because Ryan and I are the only ones in the waiting room, his glower is directed at us.