Somewhere in the middle of that black hole…Sabrina.
The Roman river goddess.
Hew handled the controls without conscious thought. His left hand gripped the collective, and his right hand was on the cyclic. The pedals under his boots adjusted the tail rotor output and yaw. And every movement was fluid, precise, and automatic.
This was where he truly felt alive. High in the sky, rotors chewing through the air like steel teeth, the smell of old grease and newly burned transmission fluid mixing with the faint scent of ozone.
Except tonight, there was none of the usual exhilaration. None of the usual euphoria.
This wasn’t a joyride.
This was Sabrina’s life he flew above, and he felt every inch of the thousands of feet that separated them.
Night-vision-compatible gauges cast a dim green glow across the dash. The headset was snug over his ears. And the rain of the past few days had finally moved on, leaving the sky dark and moonless.
But it felt like a storm gathered inside him.
He didn’t remember buckling into the harness. Didn’t remember going through the pre-flight checks. Hell, he didn’t even remember making the flight to the city's west side.
I’d say the bird flew herself if I didn't know better.
What he did know was that he’d been pedal to the metal and balls to the wall since they’d pinpointed her location.
Ozzie had made good on his promise. He’d hacked a military satellite and pulled up real-time infrared. Before the team had left for the hangar, they’d seen the heat signatures inside the bottling plant, knew they were dealing with four unfriendlies, and had decided they liked their odds.
While they’d been in the air, Ozzie had relayed that three of Sabrina’s captors had taken up positions outside the old factory, one in sniping position on the roof of an adjacent building, and two of the others squirreling themselves inside dilapidated outbuildings.
“That leaves just two inside the bottling plant,” Ozzie had said over their FHSS comms.
The handy frequency-hopping spread spectrum system, utilized by intelligence agencies and contractors worldwide, jumped between multiple frequencies per second. Even if someone tried to intercept it, they’d hear only random noise unless they had the exact encryption key and hopping sequence.
“Send the infrared images to Hunter’s tablet. We need their exact locations,” Hew had directed, flying high, fast, and far from the regular commercial jets’ flight paths.
They were running dark. No navigation or anti-collision lights. No tail numbers. They’d turned off their transponder—the electronic ID that aircraft broadcasted to local air traffic control and surrounding aircraft.
All completely illegal, of course.
But for the Black Knights, it was just another day on the job.
When Hunter brought his tablet to the cockpit, Hew blinked at the infrared images on the screen, noting especially the two people left inside the old bottling plant.
It hadn’t taken his years of service to realize the seated figure, glowing orange and yellow against a background of deep blue, was Sabrina.
She’d been slumped like a marionette with her strings cut. Her head dipped forward, her hands bound behind her back, her body curved in on itself as if she was trying to disappear.
Something in him had cracked at the sight. A soundless shatter that had left him bleeding out internally.
He had been ready to rain down hellfire on that entire bottling plant and everyone who’d dared lay a hand on Sabrina. Just land the chopper in the middle of the plant’s decrepit parking lot and go in balls out and guns blazing.
Cooler heads had prevailed, however. And he’d been talked out of his plan.
He’d desperately wanted to join his teammates in storming the castle and saving the princess. But they’d quickly reminded him in true Liam Neeson form that they each had a very particular set of skills, skills acquired over very long careers, and his were to drop them in, haul their asses out, and be ready to rain pain down on their enemies on the ground should things go pear-shaped.
“Makin’ my way to the rooftop.” Graham’s scratchy voice rasped through Hew’s headset, wrenching his mind back to the moment.
The whole team had fast-roped out of the chopper six blocks from the plant. Close enough to make hoofing it easy. Far enough away to keep the noise from the big bird's rotor wash to a minimum.
Graham’s objective was to ghost toward the sniper’s perch and take the bastard out of play one way or the other. For such a large man, the ex-SEAL was surprisingly stealthy.
