Jake narrowed his eyes at the dog. “No, don’t look at me like that. If you wanna give me a hard time like the rest of the guys, cool. But don’t go all pity puppy on me.”
The colonel’s jibe and previous admonitions played in a loop in the back of his mind, but they couldn’t stop his feet from veering in the direction of the carousel. He and Max approached, skirting the fencing outside the spinning Round-Up ride and cutting across the area set up below the Ferris wheel.
Any trepidation he might have felt about taking the detour dissipated when Cass lifted a hand in greeting. He smiled as she spun away from him. He picked up his pace, determined to have a few words with her before he retreated up the hill to the arena.
Jake was almost past the ride’s waiting area when he caught sight of something familiar. Tacked to a red-and-black warning sign listing the rules Ferris wheel riders were expected to adhere to was a Be Back Soon sign.
It’s clock hands were set to five o’clock.
Chapter Fourteen
“Chief, I think we have another.”
Instinctively, Jake turned his head from side to side, grateful to have someone else confirm what he thought he was seeing. But the call had come over the radio.
No one was there with him. Maybe he was seeing things?
Jake turned back to the Ferris wheel, locking onto the sign once again. Someone droned on about finding something at the dining area across from the main stage, but Jake could barely take in the information. Blinking rapidly, he tried to process what he was seeing. And hearing. A blast of chatter came through on the radio and things clicked into place.
Two bombs. They’d located two bombs, but only one of them was marked for imminent detonation.
His heart hammering, he spoke, cutting across the other transmissions. “Sir, I have five o’clock.”
There was a prolonged pause, then Aronson came on the channel. “Yes, almost five o’clock. Everybody fall back. Now!” He barked the last word with enough urgency to snap Jake’s momentary paralysis.
He and Max took off toward the carousel at a trot. “No, sir. I mean I have eyes on the sign. It’s posted at the Ferris wheel.”
“Fall back, Donovan,” Aronson ordered again. “We’ll deal with whatever you’ve found after the top of the hour.”
Jake didn’t break stride. Nor did he change direction. If there was a bomb planted at the Ferris wheel, Cass was too close for comfort. She needed to take cover.
“Come on, boy.” Jake and Max prepared to leap onto the spinning ride. His feet landed with thud loud enough to make her head swivel. Their gazes met, and they both started talking.
“You need to get down,” he told her.
“Troy Baker was released two months ago.”
“Get down,” he repeated. “Now.”
Breath coming fast and heavy, he reached the bench where she sat perched on the edge. When she didn’t move, he stepped into her space, closed his hand around her upper arm and pulled her from the seat.
“Hey,” she cried when her knees hit the corrugated metal.
“Bomb,” he growled into her ear as he lowered himself on top of her.
Cass craned her neck and snarled at him, but he didn’t care. The only thing that mattered was her safety. All he wanted was the chance to talk to her once all this was over.
“There’s a bomb between us,” she reminded him in a voice dripping with acid.
“The Ferris wheel is set to blow at—”
Before he could finish the sentence, the explosion split the still evening wide open.
The flash. The bang. The acrid smell of accelerant followed by a hailstorm of dirt and debris. He held her down until the last bits of fallout dropped. Then, as he was pushing up on his hands to let her rise, a bone-chilling screech rang out.
“What the—” He looked up as they spun past.
The bomb had been placed under the Ferris wheel’s landing platform and had blown out the rear of its base. He should have been relieved to see the blast pattern had spewed away from the midway, but he was too horrified by what he didn’t see.
