Brielle came over to stand beside him, her face twisting in revulsion. “Hard no to that. I can’t borrow from dead people. If you want me to pick up their healing and fighting skills, we’ll need to find one who’s breathing.”
Before he could say anything, Jake’s voice came over the radio with new instructions. With the AI computer’s scheme a complete train wreck, the new plan was much simpler. Everyone would head toward the center of the complex and find the nukes, then disarm as many as they could—however they could—before Harrington set them off.
A few moments later, they were running through tunnels now barely illuminated by the red glow of the facility’s emergency lights, Caleb praying they were able to find the nukes before Harrington hit that trigger.
* * *
The sound of their boots thumping against the floor of the tunnel might have been hypnotizing if Brielle wasn’t so worried about the occasional bad guy darting out of the shadowy tunnels to either side of them to take potshots at her, Caleb, Hudson, and Genevieve before disappearing again. It was like something out of a nightmare.
They’d probably only been running for five minutes or so, but it like felt much longer. That was probably because she expected a blinding flash of white light to fill the tunnels at any second. The anticipation made time creep by. Brielle clutched her 9 mm tighter in her hand as she glanced down at the map she held in the other. She was doing her best to keep track of where they were. It might be something nice to know if they had to get out of the tunnels quickly. But with the darkness, the constant twists and turns of the underground network, the eerie red lights, and the random bad guys popping out at them, reading the map was a little difficult.
“Okay.” McKay’s voice suddenly crackled through her earpiece, his tone telling her that whatever he was going to say was bad before he uttered a single word. “Misty was able to access Harrington’s security network but only long enough to figure out that he’s started the countdown timers on all nineteen nukes. We’re already under thirty minutes, and before you ask, Misty can’t get back in the computer system because Harrington took it completely offline. Unfortunately, there’s no way to shut down the nukes easily. There’s a chance he has a remote control with him, wherever the hell he might be. But short of that, you’ll have to get to each warhead and disarm it manually.”
Other than the random burst of gunfire audible over the radio, silence met McKay’s words, followed by a lot of cursing. Brielle silently echoed their sentiments. Everyone who’d come down into these tunnels had essentially volunteered knowing this would be a difficult task to accomplish. Now it seemed damn near impossible.
“Shit, he’s really going to do it,” Hudson whispered, his words barely loud enough to hear. “Harrington’s going to set these things off with his own people down here. Do you think they know?”
McKay’s sigh was audible. “It’s possible he hasn’t told them the countdown has started. The alternative is to accept that all of his people are willing to die to help him accomplish his insane plan, and I have to believe that can’t be true.”
Brielle wanted to think that there couldn’t bethatmany crazy people in the world, but unfortunately, she knew that wasn’t true. All it took was a psycho with a dream, and people would follow him right off a ledge.
“My team has found one of the nukes,” Harley announced a minute later, her words barely understandable over the near-constant barrage of gunfire from her location. “But we can’t get close to it. They have a lot of bad guys down here, and they’re toting some serious weaponry. Even Sawyer and I don’t stand a chance against machine guns.”
McKay immediately rerouted teams to get backup to Harley and Sawyer’s part of the complex. “We need to hurry up or things are going to get ugly,” he added. “The CIA has alerted the military. They’re calling up a squadron of F-22 fighters from Langley right now. If we can’t take out the nukes, they plan on bombing every single Harrington Group building in the New York area to destroy the laser towers. It won’t stop the nukes from collapsing the city, but it will prevent the destruction of the world’s nuclear weapons and all the fallout from that. We have to disarm those nukes, or the U.S. will be forced to bomb one of its own cities.”
Merde.
Brielle ran faster, keeping pace with Caleb. A second later, she let out a gasp as he scooped her off her feet and threw himself sideways into a small opening on the right side of the tunnel, shouting a warning to Hudson and Genevieve as bullets slammed into the floor and walls all around them.
They hit the floor hard, the air getting knocked from her lungs even with Caleb’s body protecting her from the worst of the impact. She twisted her head around to see down the narrow passageway across from them, trying to see how many people were shooting as Caleb dragged her to the side and wedged both of them behind a section of wall that jutted out enough to give them a place to hide.
Brielle peeked around the corner of their hiding place to see two men with machine guns and another three with assault rifles, all of them doing their best to kill her and Caleb. She panicked for a second when she realized she couldn’t see Hudson and Genevieve anywhere. Then she remembered that they’d been far enough behind her and Caleb to retreat when the shooting had started. On the upside, that had probably kept them from getting shot, but on the downside, that meant the four of them were split up again.
A single glance at Caleb out the corner of her eye let her know that he was seconds away from charging at their attackers, guns be damned. But then he looked at her, and Brielle swore she knew he was thinking about what would happen to her if he went down under the first hail of bullets and how she’d be left on her own. In that moment, she saw something that looked like realization flash in his eyes. A moment later, the tension left his body as he pulled back fully behind the small outcropping of rock keeping the both of them alive.
“We’re pinned down,” he shouted into the radio. “If we even pop our heads out, they’re going to whack us like a couple of moles.”
“We’re coming to help,” Genevieve called out. “Just hold on.”
“Don’t,” Caleb answered. “If you take a single step into this corridor, you’ll be dead before you can get a shot. You two need to go back the way we came and work your way around behind these guys. I need you to either take them out or at least make them duck for a few seconds.”
Neither Hudson nor Genevieve was very thrilled with that plan, but after a moment, they agreed to it.
“We’re on the way,” Hudson said. “But you two have to hold on for us, okay?”
Caleb didn’t bother to answer. Instead, he stuck his arm around the rocky outcropping they were hiding behind and fired half a magazine’s worth of ammo at the men across the tunnel from them. The number of bullets that came right back at them was terrifying, and Brielle pressed herself against Caleb as tightly as she could.
“Hudson and Genevieve are going to come back as fast as they can,” he said soothingly. “We just have to keep these guys off us until they do.”
As another burst of gunfire tore into the wall near them, Brielle resisted the urge to tell him that might be easier said than done. Instead, she pressed her face against Caleb’s muscular chest and hoped for the best.
“Um…I know this probably isn’t the best time to have a serious conversation, but there’s something I need to tell you,” Caleb said, something in his tone making her lift her head. “And please don’t think I’m telling you now because I don’t think we’re getting out of here. It’s just that getting pinned down like this has made me realize I should have told you way before this.”
She flinched as another bullet bounced off the wall so close to her head that she swore she could feel her hair flutter from its speed. Caleb gazed at her in concern, which only worried her more than she already was. That was saying a lot, considering they were currently hiding behind a piece of rock barely big enough to conceal a bunny—or at least it felt that way—waiting for an army of nuclear weapons to go off.
“What’s wrong?” she asked, for the first time praying this wasn’t going to be one of those bizarre “it’s not you it’s me” kind of conversations.
“Nothing’s wrong,” he said quickly, as if he’d read her mind. “It’s just that there was something I wanted to tell you after the briefing at the warehouse, but I didn’t get the chance, and I need to tell you before I go out of my mind. Even if it freaks you out.”
