Warrior Mine: A Base Branch novel Page 4

  Hurry!

  Whether from her grogginess or the shock of the note’s content, she read it again. And once again, she looked around but saw no one. Adrenaline rushed her veins like football fans storming a World Cup field. With the click of a button she popped the trunk and placed the note deep in back for analysis. Next she slung the duffle. It clattered and the car’s chassis gave under its bulk. She screamed the zipper open on the bag.

  Over her black T-shirt she strapped her vest. She slung the M4 over her head and right arm. Sidearm in holster, she slammed the trunk and took off for the stairs. Khani beat them into submission with her powerful strides. One flight up, a large metal door blocked the way. To the right a silver keypad built into the wall. She tapped off the code, distinct to each member of the Base Branch, opened the door, and then threw herself through it.

  Down the sight of the assault rifle she cleared the entrance foyer. Elevators. Main entrance. Stairwell. Not much to behold. She sidled up to the hazy glass double doors, hating the exposure, also knowing no way around it. Millimeter by millimeter the door opened under her slow, steady force. Using one eye, the dull, drab corridor came into focus. Walls. Glass. But no bodies. Alive or dead.

  She flung the heavy thing wide and rushed across the hallway to the corridor to Tucker’s office. No bullets bit her rump and no one moved to gain better ground on her. All good there. Five silent, hungry strides brought her to his door. Like this was any normal day she knocked twice. “Commander Tucker?”

  Silence. From inside. From all around. Nothing moved.

  Khani shoved the door wide with her hip and confronted an empty room with the tip of her M4. The chair sat far back toward the wall. Above it hung a dull silver vent grating. Her insides—not prone to drama—danced about as though they’d never seen battle. And they hadn’t…not on their home turf.

  Khani bolted down the hallway, into the main corridor, and hooked a right at the prisoner’s wing. All the while she scanned the offices she blurred past, the conference and break rooms. All sat vacant. She skidded to a halt at the last chamber. Her fingers slammed in the access code, slipped as the sweat and nerves got the best of her, and she was forced to clear and reenter the digits.

  She inhaled one long, fortifying breath and opened the door.

  Or, at least, she tried to open the door. The damn thing only gave an inch. In that inch a streak of wet blood seven inches wide and nearly five feet long sliced across the floor, as though a body had been dragged. Khani heaved again, but only gained two inches. One of Tucker’s wingtips showed in the crack, along with the end of a pant leg. She ground her boots into the concrete and shoved with every honed muscle she possessed, knowing that the commander’s body blocked his own rescue.

  A chuckle started and grew into a cackle. She stopped and drew her pistol, but the noise didn’t change position to hide or jump at her. The vest added width to her chest, not allowing her access. So, smart or not, she shucked it and the rifle before slipping through the crack.

  Carlos Ruez sat chained with his balding head glistening under a layer of sweat. The cackle grew louder. “You see what happens…when your great leader…messes with me.”

  Khani cleared the two steps to Ruez and slammed her pistol against the side of his head. The laugh still rang in her ears, and when she saw Tucker’s prone frame laid out on the concrete, it roared. But the bastard no longer made the noise. Her father did, in the cold recesses of her mind.

  “Tucker, it’s Slaughter. If you can hear me, say something.” She slid on her knees to Tucker’s big shoulders. Gun holstered, she went straight to the carotid. She repositioned her hand. Pressed harder. And finally found a pulse. Weak, but there.

  She sat on her heels and looked him over. Blood soaked his lower back and pooled around his torso. The exit wound blew a nice hole in his shirt. She would hate to see what it had done to his flesh, but she’d have to. Looking left, she followed the track of red twenty feet to the far corner. Every two feet the line of blood-covered forearms and smeared handprints showed Tucker’s fight to save himself.

  Now it was her turn to fight for him.

  One hand on the shoulder, another on his hip, she pulled. He rolled like a rag toy, slack and life-less. But there was life left in this bloke.

  “Tucker, if you can hear me, I need your help. Just a little, all right?” She moved as she spoke, standing over him at the tops of his shoulders and securing her grip in the hollows of his armpits. “I’m going to lift your big arse. If you can hear me at all, when I get you up, lock your legs for as long as you can.”

  His lids fluttered. “Yep,” came dulcet between his dry lips.

  “Great job, Commander. Let’s get you out of here.”

  Khani hefted him to a sitting position. A groan rumbled beneath her hands, the most reassuring sign. Pain equaled life. She hugged him close, locked the tips of her fingers around his chest, and drove her legs and all the weight they held toward the sky. “Lock ’em,” she grunted.

  Bracing his back with her body, she grabbed his right wrist with her left hand, and spun around in front of him—like they twirled on the dance floor of a honkey-tonk, as Tucker had called it. She crouched, shouldered his right thigh with her right arm, wrapped his left over her other shoulder, and bore his body mass in a fireman’s carry. Her legs shook under his weight, but held firm. She’d never been so happy to be a member of the 300 Club in squat max.

  “All good, sir. Here we go.”

  “Slaughter,” he whispered, his head lolling beneath her pit.

  “Yes, sir.”

  The door was a bitch and a half, but she made it down the maze of hallways at a swift walk, leaving her vest and rifle by the interrogation room and hoping like hell she didn’t need them. Khani leaned their backs against the double doors and eased through them without a problem. She opted for the elevator to the lower parking garage with all the Base Branch vehicles.

  With another tap of her ten-digit code, she tugged the keys for the ambulance from the box and prayed her quivering legs would hold out long enough to get him inside the thing.

  “You still with me, Tucker?” She gritted the question in an effort to turn her mind outward, where it needed to be.

  Nothing.

  Thankful it was close to the door she veered right for five more grueling steps, unlocked the back doors, and opened them wide.

  “Damn it.” She panted at the nearly two-foot step up.

  A growl breached her clenched teeth as she boosted them through the door and over to the gurney. The judges would’ve given her a three on dismount. One of his arms and one of his legs hung off the edge, while she landed atop him in a knotted heap. With a wiggle and shove she righted them.

  The interior light illuminated his pale complexion. She clapped and spoke louder than her norm—unless she was pissed, and, now that she thought about it, she was bloody pissed. “Tucker! What the hell happened?”

  While she hoped for a response, but didn’t expect one, she extended the IV rod and combed the drawers and bins for the supplies she needed.

  “Commander, I’m putting in an IV drip, and then I’m going to wrap your wound to stem the bleeding.”

  Khani did as she said, glancing every few minutes at the clock that seemed to speed with her growing fear that she’d be too late. It might be far too easy to convince Carlos Ruez that Commander Tucker had died, because the Reaper hovered just over her shoulder, waiting for him.

  She fished her phone from a pocket only to have the thing slip from between her fingers and slide across the floor. For the first time in a long while she looked at her hands and found them slick with blood.

  “Tucker, who shot you? Why did they shoot you? Is everyone in danger?”

  While rattling off the questions, she soiled a towel wiping his blood from her hands and then snagged her phone from the floor and cleaned it also.

  “No.” His eyes remained closed and his voice, a nearly imperceptible rasp, hardly penetrated her eard
rum.

  “No, not everyone is in danger?” she asked, while depressing the speed dial for the Base Branch doctor.

  “No, she didn’t…want…to shoot.”

  “Who?” Khani leaned so close she could feel the waft of his shallow breaths on her cheek.

  “Don’t…kill her…or Carlos.”

  “Don’t kill who?”

  “Hello?” On the speakerphone, Doctor Williamson answered.

  “Operative: Lima. Echo. Oscar. Papa. Alpha. Romeo. Delta. One. Nine. Nine. Four.”

  “How may I be of assistance, Lieutenant Commander?”

  “I need a miracle, doc.”

  7

  The earth must have shifted a few million miles toward the sun during the night. Beams of light blazed through the tiny slits Vail managed to pry between his eyelids. They pierced through his cornea and lodged in his brain, calling forth tears. Moisture welled and overflowed hot on his cheek. The harder he tried to blink them away the more clouds gathered. He lifted a hand to wipe the bleariness away, but lost the will to move them somewhere between one and two inches from the scratchy cotton beneath his fingers.

  For a while he closed his heavy lids, content with the easy rock of the sea, though he inherently knew he wasn’t in water. He’d be at home in the water. Here, wherever here was, was far away from home and far too close to a memory. Sorrow, tight and unyielding, gripped his chest, weighting him, sinking him below the nonexistent surface.

  Ellie.

  I’m sorry.

  Ellie.

  Forgive me.

  All at once the pain ripped at his middle, a hungry wolf making a meal of him. His eyes shot wide. A wash of white assaulted along with the multiplying pack. White walls. White curtain. A four-strip rectangular fixture with blinding white florescent bulbs.

  “Welcome to the land of the living,” a voice came from across the gigantic room.

  Vail gave gravity his head, letting it loll to the left, away from a large window white with the fury of day. Not such a big room and not so far away. His lieutenant commander, Khani Slaughter, sat two feet away, long limbs knotted in the confines of a ridged recliner. The high-backed monstrosity looked more like a plastic box. Its footrest, wedged only a few inches from the frame, provided rest for nothing at all.

  “Is that what this is?”

  “Yep. As good as it gets.” Her mouth kicked into a half smile.

  He blinked, struggling to pull color into focus. Khani’s lips were always the craziest hue of orangish-red he’d ever seen, her eyes usually an electric shade of green or blue to really set her face alight. But his abused lenses refused to see color on her porcelain skin.

  “Well damn,” he muttered.

  She unfolded her legs and arms and he found color—albeit a hideous one—in the mint green of the scrubs she wore. His eyes worked okay. She just didn’t wear any make-up. He blinked again, locking his gaze on the tiny, ultra-white scars that tarnished her otherwise impeccable complexion.

  “What happened?” he begged.

  “Doc Williamson called it a class III hemorrhage.”

  Quite the evasion. He smiled and his skin seemed too tight for his face.

  “And you smile about almost bleeding to death. Men, I’ll never understand you. Not ever.”

  “I meant, what happened to you? Not me,” he swallowed against the raw dryness of his throat. “And men are easy. Eat. Sex. Sleep. How simple is that? Women…” His mind conjured Carmen Ruez. Her big, sad eyes. The small, round barrel of her gun. “Y’all are complicated. To put it mildly.”

  Khani crossed her arms and narrowed her gray gaze. “You happened to me.” Her head kicked to the side. “So, was it your eating, screwing, or sleeping that got you into this predicament? Or are you willing to admit that men are slightly more complicated than you thought?”

  “Maybe, slightly, but nowhere near as complicated as women.”

  The scratch worsened with every syllable he spoke, but too prideful for his own good, he didn’t say anything about it. He tried to ignore the rhythmic, stabbing throb in his side as well.

  “You stubborn man.” She poked the red call button on his hospital bed. In the seconds it took for someone to respond, she glared.

  A speaker behind his head crackled. “Yes?” a woman’s voice asked.

  “This is LTC Slaughter. The commander is awake and could use something for pain and some water, please.”

  “Yes, ma’am,” the nurse said.

  “You never tire of that, do you?”

  “What?” she asked Tucker.

  “Having people ma’am you.”

  “Not a bit. Is it that obvious?”

  “The side of your mouth twitches, like you’re holding back a smile.”

  “I suppose I am. It took a hell of a lot of work to earn that ma’am.” She folded her arms and settled back against the plastic. “You came from a military family. Probably heard and said, ‘yes ma’am, no ma’am, yes sir, no sir’ a thousand times a day. Where I came from…the words were nowhere near as civilized.”

  Khani’s clothes crinkled as she turned toward him. Instinctively he knew that was all she’d say about her past. It was more than she’d said over the last year she’d been working for him.

  “I’m wearing these obnoxious clothes and have not an ounce of make-up on my face because I found you face down with a bullet in your gut, hauled you over my shoulders, and lugged you here.”

  “Thank you,” he croaked.

  “Stuff it.” She waved a hand to shoo his words off. “Just don’t ever bleed on me again and we’ll call it good.”

  “Deal.” He nodded. “How bad was it?”

  “The shot? Not bad. Struck mostly muscle. Did nick your large intestine. Williamson performed surgery practically in the hallway. You were pretty out of it by the time we arrived. The blood loss was the biggest concern. He gave you a transfusion. Do you remember the shooting?”

  Again his mind called Carmen into the forefront. Her long tousled hair blanketed her shoulders, corkscrews weaving this way and that. The rage in her eyes directed full-force onto the chained bastard. Then they turned on him, the hatred shifting to pity. For him. For her. And finally, the shot. The air it stole from his lungs. The strength it zapped from his legs. The cold.

  “Yeah,” he squawked.

  “Where the hell is that nurse?” Khani slapped the fringe of her dark bangs from her forehead and shot to her feet. “Good, hold that thought. I’ll be right back.”

  He tried to call her back, but he’d completely run out of everything. Saliva. Energy. Brain power.

  * * *

  His eyes opened without melodrama. The same white room, ugly chair, and knotted Khani greeted him. But this time a half-melted cup of ice sat on a tray hovering over the edge of the bed. He stared with a wiggle of fingers. When they obeyed he moved to the wrists, rolling them and stretching his forearms. The things burned as though he’d walked a mile on his hand. And boy, hadn’t it seemed that way. It had taken extreme effort to gain only inches in his attempt to reach the door.

  All or nothing. Vail reached for the cup, levered the thing over his lap and then to his lips like it were a ninety-pound dumb bell. Sweet relief washed over his stale tongue, down his abused throat. He reached the end too soon. The ice sloshed forward.

  He cursed softly, but still Khani jumped, her right hand automatically going for her sidearm. “Go home,” he ordered. “You’ve done enough.”

  “Answer me one question, and then I’ll go,” she yawned.

  “Ask.”

  “Last night, you didn’t say much, but you said, ‘Don’t kill her.’ So, I’m assuming your shooter was a woman. A highly skilled woman breaks into the Base Branch’s US headquarters, places a bullet so the shot won’t kill you, escapes undetected, only to turn around and leave a note on my car, telling me to save you, but not let Carlos Ruez know you’re alive…why?”

  In the minutes leading up to the bullet in his belly and during the tr
udge across the never-ending floor, he’d thought a lot about the who’s, how’s, and why’s of that night.

  “Because Carlos has leverage over her. She attempted to get it back.”

  “But failed?”

  “Yes. He has the one thing she can’t live without.”

  “What?”

  “You said one question, Slaughter, and you’ve surpassed that limit.”

  “Fair enough. You need some rest almost as much as I do.” She stood and grabbed a red plastic bag.

  Vail hauled the cup back to the table and set it at the edge. “Do me a favor. Don’t let anyone interrogate Carlos until they release me, and have a courier drop his file and all related this afternoon. Also—”

  “Not to be insubordinate, but you’re in no position to give orders, Commander.”

  He hitched a brow, or he tried to. “See, that title says I give the orders.”

  “I see your sense of humor has returned.” She walked to the bed and placed a hand on his forearm. She felt a thousand degrees hotter than him. “You need to stay out of sight and recover. You’re looking at four to six weeks here.”

  “Those words hurt worse than the bullet hole.”

  “Trust me, I know.”

  He sighed as much as the burn in his side would allow. “One order then. Have dogs run the building. She had a detonator and said the building was rigged to blow. I don’t know if the threat is real, but check anyway.”

  “I’ll get it done before I go home.”

  “Well, looks like you have a Base Branch to run, LTC. Just keep me in the loop on this.”

  “You know I will.” She patted his arm, slipped behind the curtain, and then he heard the latch catch on the door.

  Six goddamned weeks. They’d be lucky if he relaxed at all. His brain certainly wouldn’t comply. Not even to his own directives. He appreciated Khani’s help. Was only alive because of it. But now he wanted to be alone with his thoughts. Like newbies fresh out of the recruiting office, they wouldn’t fall into an orderly line. One second he whirled about memories best left covered in dust. The next he envisioned beating Carlos Ruez to death with his fists. More than anything though, Carmen consumed his thoughts like no other woman had. Not since Ellie.