The second henchman saw his companion fall and panicked, yanking his horse's head around to look back. The mistake was fatal. It gave Breakneck a stationary target for a heartbeat. He didn't hesitate. The second shot was a brutal punctuation mark. The man’s chest erupted in a spray of red, and he was gone.
Two.
But the chaos didn't thin. It shifted. The remaining two bodyguards tightened into Torres, and his directive was to take the King alive, making themselves harder targets, while the two remaining Hell’s Eight bikers, their engines screaming in frustration, turned their aggression into pure, kinetic menace. They couldn't shoot, but they could kill.
The second biker went low, weaving through the brush, trying to get under the helicopter's line of sight. He was a ghost, a flicker of movement between the trees, aiming to pop up and cause havoc at the worst possible moment.
Torres was getting closer to the treeline. The gap was closing.
Breakneck’s voice was a blade of ice in Blair’s ear. "Two bikes. One on your six, one going groundhog. I can't get a clean shot. He's yours, Beef."
Below, Beef heard the call. He saw the biker swinging back around for another pass. Beef didn't reach for a rifle. He drew his sidearm, his arm a rock-steady extension of his will as his horse galloped. He waited, timing the biker's approach, the roar of the engine growing louder. Then, in a space of seconds that felt like an eternity, he raised the pistol, aimed, and fired three times.
The first shot missed. The second hit the bike's front fender, sparking wildly. The third, a lucky shot, found the biker's thigh. The man screamed, his bike wobbling violently before it skidded out from under him and tumbled into a heap of metal and flesh.
One biker left, a brute with a skull-face bandanna, saw Beef take out his buddy. His focus was on a different, more terrifying target.
Blair.
Instead of trying to spook her, he turned his bike, aiming it directly at her path. He wasn't trying to make her horse stumble. He was going to hit them head-on, a two-thousand-pound missile of metal and bone, sacrificing himself to take her out of the chase.
It was the most amazing trust he’d ever seen between an animal and his rider. Blair didn’t swerve or make the decision. She let her war horse react. The big black saw the stationary threat, the unwavering line of the bike, and his instincts, honed by generations of survival, took over. He gathered his powerful body, and with a surge that lifted Blair clean from the saddle for a breathtaking second, he launched.
He flew. The bike roared beneath them, a blur of chrome and malice, as Jet cleared it by a hair's breadth. Before the biker could even process his missed target, Jet landed, and in the same, fluid motion, kicked out hard with his back legs. The blow caught the biker square in the head. The man was thrown from his bike like a discarded doll, his machine careening off into the brush without him.
But even as Jet’s powerful kick ended the threat, Breakneck was already scanning, his scope sweeping the edge of the woods. That's when he saw it. The new threat. It was a glint of metal from the treeline, a disciplined, calculated movement to protect the chaotic flight of Torres and his crew.
He didn't have time to acquire a perfect sight picture. He only had the glint and the instinct. He swung the barrel, trusting his gut, and fired blind.
At the exact same moment, a sharp crack answered his from the woods. A stinging line of fire clipped across Breakneck's shoulder, pushing him back into his harness. His own shot, a millisecond before, found its mark. Through the scope, he saw a puff of pink mist erupt in the shadows. The counter-sniper threat dissolved.
Without even registering the pain that demanded attention, he closed it out, his focus still on the ground. He wanted to take out at least one more bodyguard.
Something out of the corner of his eye caught his attention.
He swung his scope. The technical rolled into view from behind a stand of trees, engine screaming, suspension bouncing hard over the terrain.
It was there to kill.
The gunner stood in the bed, braced against the cab, heavy weapon already chewing at the ground where the Mounties were riding. Breakneck felt the cold shift settle in his chest. He was too far away to hit them, but the vehicle was closing fast.
Death sentence.
“Technical, nine o’clock, moving fast,” he said. It was a crudely mounted affront to warfare, a bastardization of a civilian truck mutated into a mobile weapon of indiscriminate violence. There was no discipline to it, no honor. It was a tool for butchers, designed to shred, not to strike. Welded to the truck bed was a DShK, a Soviet-era beast. The belt feeding into it was loaded with 12.7x108mm rounds. His mouth went dry. It would tear the Mounties and their mounts apart.
Threat compounded threat when he saw a second man, the RPG tube coming up before it fully cleared his shoulder. Saw the way the shooter waited, patient, disciplined, letting the helicopter commit just a little more before firing. As far as he was concerned, it was in the pilot’s hands.
The launcher coughed. A compressed, violent pop that was instantly swallowed by the roar of the engines.
The pilot reacted. He jerked up on the collective, hauling the bird into a stomach-lurching lift. At the same time, he jammed the cyclic sideways, whipping the helicopter into a gut-wrenching hard bank. The world dissolved into a violent, disorienting tilt. Gravity didn't just shift but became a malevolent force, slamming Breakneck into his harness. The horizon became a vertical line of dirt and sky.
Breakneck didn't fight it. He became part of the machine's violent spasm. He let his body go fluid, absorbing the G-forces, his muscles coiling to counter the lurch while his eye remained locked to the scope, a predator's gaze unshaken by the chaos of its own attack. The helicopter was a bucking, enraged animal, and he was the calm at its center, riding the fury, waiting for the split second of stillness he knew would come.
The gunner was his only priority right now.
The RPG streaked harmlessly underneath where they’d been a second earlier and detonated in the dirt behind them, the shockwave punching the air.
Breakneck was already back on target, the gunner in his sights, his fear for Blair and the pain in his shoulder buried in cold fury. He held his breath and squeezed.
