“Making contact now,” Graham said lowly. Then, louder, “Hands up where I can see ’em!” A pause followed by a grim, “Don’t do it! Don’t?—”
Crack!
Crack!
Crack!
Three shots echoed through Hew’s headset. Graham’s signature move. Two rounds to the chest. One to the head.
Hew held his breath and waited for the sound of return fire.
None came.
Graham had introduced the fucker to the Reaper before he’d even had time to aim.
Graham verified this a heartbeat later when he relayed simply, “Target one neutralized.”
No sooner had the words been transmitted than Hunter’s voice boomed over the shared connection. “Move in! Go, go, go!”
While Graham had gone for the sniper, the other four—Hunter, Britt, Sam, and Fisher—had flanked the perimeter. They’d cut through the high chain-link fence surrounding the property, quiet as church mice. And now they surged through the darkness.
Hew didn’t need to see them to know their blades were drawn and their guns were ready.
He wasn’t breathing so much and bracing, and then?—
The scrabble of bodies moving quickly. Shouts over the comms. The concussive boom, boom, boom, BOOM of suppressed rounds slicing through the darkness.
“Target two neutralized,” Sam reported, sounding only slightly breathless.
“Target three neutralized,” came Hunter’s immediate follow-up.
“Moving toward the plant’s front door now,” Britt added and Hew tightened his grip on the cyclic.
“Ozzie?” He stared unseeing through the windshield. “You got eyes on that last hostile?”
Ozzie's reply was immediate. “They must’ve heard the gunfire. They’re moving toward Sabrina.” Their resident hacker watched it all play out in infrared from his post on the second floor back at BKI. “Get in there, guys, before they do something to hurt h?—”
Whatever he said next was lost in the hell that exploded in Hew’s ears.
Shouts. Static. Sabrina’s name and then her scream cutting through the chaos like flares through fog. Followed by…
Silence. Silence. Silence.
Seconds beat by. Interminable ticks of the clock that had sweat sliding down his temples, had his heart shuddering inside his chest. He heard only the roar of the rotors, the rush of his own blood between his ears, and the sound of his breathing. Which, despite his training, was too fast. Too shallow.
“I’ll blow her brains clean through the front of her skull!” The voice—shrill and far away—was picked up by the teams’ comms.
It was the woman who’d called in the ransom demand—although the device no longer distorted her voice. The same woman who’d made the call giving them the location of the drop just five short minutes ago.
Ozzie had kept her on the horn, playing the part of concerned and attentive sucker. Little had she known that the Black Knights circled high above her head and slithered around the outside of her perimeter, preparing to flip the trap she’d laid for them back onto her.
“Your team is dead,” Hunter’s voice, low and deliberate, was crystal clear through the connection. “Unless you want to join them, I suggest you lay down your weapon.”
“You must be out of your goddamned mind!” The woman’s laugh echoed hollowly. “She’s my only ticket out of here.”
Hew imagined a muzzle pressed to Sabrina’s skull. Imagined the woman slicing through Sabrina’s restraints and forcing her to stand and become a human shield.
“The only ways you're leaving this place,” Sam’s harsh snarl matched the menace burning at the center of Hew’s heart, “is with us or in a body bag.”
