The Defiant Hero (56 page)
The phone rang again. “I can’t pick up until you’re quiet,” she told him.
He shut his mouth.
Meg took a deep breath and answered the phone. “Yes.”
“Bring him inside.”
Stall. “Please,” she said. “I want— I’d like to talk to them first. To my daughter and my grandmother. I want to hear their voices, to know they’re alive and—”
The line went dead.
“They hung up,” she told John. “They just—”
Boom. The sound was impossibly loud, even from inside the car.
“Shit! Yes, confirmed,” John said into his radio. “We’ve had a single gunshot from inside the structure. Meg and I are unharmed.”
Meg couldn’t breathe. A gunshot. From inside. “Oh, my God.”
The cell phone rang.
“Oh, my God.” She couldn’t even say hello, could barely hold the phone to her ear, her hands were shaking so hard.
“It’s too late to talk to the old lady,” the voice on the phone said, “but if you want to talk to the little girl, you should bring him inside. Now.”
Meg got out of the car.
“Shit!” Nils said. “Meg—”
She opened the back door. “They killed Eve,” she told Nils. “Oh, my God, John—”
“Get back in the car, Meg,” he ordered her, trying to infuse her with his calm. This situation wasn’t out of control—not yet. But it would be if she didn’t get back into the car. “I’ll go in there, but you—”
Shit.
She was already moving toward the house, and he scrambled to follow her, to make it look as if she were pulling him with her.
“What the fuck . . . ?” came Wolchonok’s voice over his headphones. “Get her out of there!”
Nils couldn’t. She was just out of his reach, and then she was out from behind the car, and a clear target, easy to pick off by a terrorist shooter aiming from one of the darkened windows of the house.
And then there was nothing to do but keep moving forward, pray, and try to shield her with his body.
His MP-4 was locked and loaded. He kept it concealed under his coat—Razeen’s coat. “When the shooting starts, stay down, stay behind me,” he told her.
She was crying, and his heart clenched. Those bastards. Those goddamned sadistic bastards. If wouldn’t surprise him one bit to find out that they’d kept Eve and Amy alive all this time—only to kill them now, in front of Meg.
“When?” she asked as she led him up the brightly lit path toward the house.
“If. I meant if,” he corrected himself, even though he knew damn well he was probably lying to her—for the very last time.
Sam couldn’t believe it.
The genius who was driving this camper was convinced they’d taken a wrong turn. He’d been arguing with the genius who was driving the van for about ten solid minutes. And then—even more brilliant!—they’d stopped the frigging things right there in the middle of the road and got out so that he and genius number two could both look at the same map.
As highest ranking naval officer in both vans, Sam pushed his way out into the night. Was this how they trained ’em to keep a low profile at the Bureau?
“What’dya say we just keep moving?” Sam suggested in his friendliest-toned good-old-boy—just in case any tangos were out there in the woods, listening in. They were just a bunch of stupid campers, lost as shit. “We’re bound to find our campground sooner or later. There just aren’t that many roads out here. What’dya say we get back into the vans before we start getting unwanted attention from the wildlife?”
He gave them each a pointed look, praying that they’d catch his drift. Crap, nothing like standing around making a lot of noise.
It rubbed even worse knowing that Nils and Meg were out there somewhere, about to walk into a nestful of K-stani terrorists, and here he was with Huey and Dewey, wasting time.
“How about we give the map reading job to one of the Boy Scouts in the back,” Sam suggested. “I bet we got someone who’s got a navigation merit badge.”
He heard the sound before Huey and Dewey did—something big, something human-sized was out there in the underbrush. He leapt in front of the FBI drivers, pulling his handgun free from his shoulder holster, ready to fend off an attack . . .
From Little Red Riding Hood and her granny.
They blinked at him as they emerged from the bushes, blinked at his handgun.
“I guess scouting is much more intense now than it was back when my brother was a boy,” Granny said. “You did say you were the Boy Scouts, didn’t you? The Boy Scouts of America?”
Sam looked at the old woman, looked at the little girl. “Amy?” he asked, hardly daring to hope as he lowered his weapon. It was. It had to be. And what was the old woman’s name? “And Mrs. Grayson. I’m Lt. Sam Starrett, ma’am, U.S. Navy SEALs. Please step into the camper. You’ll be even safer there.”
Sam banged on the side panel. “Someone get on the radio to Lieutenant Paoletti. We need to get word to Nils, pronto, to abort, repeat, abort. The hostages are safe and sound! He should get Meg the hell out of there!”
“We’re going in,” Nils announced over his radio, and the door to the house swung open.
A man and a woman stood there, AK-47s in their arms. Both were dressed in desert print camouflage pants and jackets—the sleeves torn off. Desert print. Here in the middle of the Florida jungle.
They were amateurs—the way they held their assault weapons verified that. Neither of them had had military training. But neither of them needed more than a heavy trigger finger to use that AK-47 to make Meg and Nils extremely dead.
He was in front of Meg as they went into the house, and he hung his head, keeping his face in shadows, wishing he could stay right there, shielding her from them until this was over.
There was no one else in the entryway, no one in the room off to the right. He’d expected the place to be crawling with Extremists. Was it possible . . . ?
There was no sign of Amy or Eve. No bloodstains, no bodies, nothing. Just a nearly empty house with two tangos.
The woman had her gun up and on them as the man shut the door. “Put the gun on the floor, and kick it over here,” she ordered Meg, who obeyed.
The man shouldered his weapon, and at a nod from the woman, he pushed Meg onto the floor to search her.
He wasn’t gentle and Meg cried out.
Nils clenched his teeth. It took every ounce of willpower in him not to react. He was Osman Razeen right now. Meg wasn’t his lover, his friend, his life.
The woman was looking at him, her eyes narrowed, and he shifted slightly, hiding his face even more while he let her see a glimpse of the cuffs on his wrists.
“Where’s Amy?” Meg asked, and got a backhand across her mouth for the trouble.
But she was tough. She’d come this far, and she wasn’t going to quit now. She struggled to sit up. “Where’s my daughter? I’ve done as you’ve asked. I’ve brought you Razeen. We had a deal and I’ve upheld my end of it!”
“She’s dead,” the woman said harshly. “They’re both dead.”
Oh, God, no.
As Nils watched, Meg died. The life left her face, the fight left her body. She went completely still.
He looked at her, willing her to look back at him. Willing her to move back and out of the way, or at least down flat onto the floor. He was going to shoot these motherfuckers and get Meg safely out of there, but he couldn’t start firing and hit them both—not with Meg right there in the kill zone.
“Osman Razeen,” the woman said in a Kazbekistani dialect. “I sentence you to death.”
She shifted her grip on her AK-47, split seconds from firing as Meg came back to life. She dropped to the ground and rolled out of the way.
Nils had his weapon up and firing, shouting for support from the rest of the team.
It was over in seconds. He’d pulled back and into the other room, shielding her with his body. If there were any other tangos in this building, they were going to come running at the sound of the gunfire.
The door was smashed in with a crash, and Wolchonok and Muldoon were the first inside, checking the fallen Extremists—making sure neither was going to pop back up, shooting.
Meg was crying and he dropped his weapon and held her tightly, crying for her, too. And for himself.
Her daughter was dead, but she’d chosen life. He knew it would’ve been easier for her simply to give up. To let herself be killed, instead of living with the pain and loss.
Nils knew she would never get over it. Not completely. But with his help and his love, she would get through it.
“I’m here,” he told her. “Whatever you need, I’ll get it for you.”
“Nilsson, report.” Lieutenant Paoletti’s voice came over the receiver in Nils’s ear.
“I need Amy,” Meg cried.
“Nilsson, dammit—”
“He’s here, L.T.,” came the senior chief’s familiar growl. “Both he and Ms. Moore are here and alive. They’re sharing a, ahem, private moment.”
Nils looked up to see Senior Chief Wolchonok standing in the doorway. “They killed them, Stan,” he told him quietly. “Both Amy and Eve.”
Wolchonok swore. “L.T., we’ve got some bad news. The hostages are dead.”
“Someone’s wrong,” Paoletti’s voice came back. “I’ve got Starrett in one of the backup vehicles saying he’s got Amy and Eve with him right now and they are very much alive. Hang on . . .”
There was a buzz and a click and then a very sweet voice came loud and clear over the line. “Hello, Mommy?”
Nils yanked the miniature receiver free, held it right up to Meg’s ear, leaning close so that he could hear, too.
“Mommy, this is Amy. Nana and I are all right. Are you all right?”
Meg gasped and looked up at Nils. “Oh, my God!”
He switched on his microphone. Held it close to her mouth.
“Amy?” she said. “Oh, my God!”
“Mommy, we’re okay. Nana and I climbed out of the window and onto the roof and we ran and ran and I’m so hungry and I knew you would be so worried.”
Meg laughed through her tears. “It’s Amy,” she told Nils.
“Are you all right?” Amy asked again.
Meg touched Nils’s face and smiled at him. “I am so totally all right, honey,” she told her daughter. “I am fabulously all right.”
She kissed him and he got his very first taste of happily ever after.
It was enough to convince him that he definitely wanted more.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Twenty-five
AMY SAT IN the camper next to Eve, eating a chicken salad sandwich that one of the FBI agents had packed for a snack.
The child’s hands were filthy dirty, but there was nowhere to wash, and Eve was too hungry herself to care.
First food, then Meg would arrive, then they’d be taken somewhere safe to wash and to sleep in the beautiful softness of a real bed.
“What about Ralph?” Amy asked with her mouth full.
Eve laughed. Ah, yes, they’d left poor Ralph standing there, on the dock. “He’d tried to be so casual,” she told Amy, “asking me if I’d come to get that annulment. As if I had traveled all that way and dressed up in my very best clothes to greet him as he set foot in England for the first time in five years because I wanted an annulment?”
Amy laughed. “Boys are dumb.”
“Boys sometimes are,” Eve agreed, “very dumb. I told him I had a box of over two thousand letters waiting for him, back in Ramsgate.”
Letters she’d written to him over the past five years. Letters she’d written even though she didn’t know if he were alive or dead.
She’d looked him in the eye then. She’d done this before, in France, but still, it hadn’t gotten any easier. “I love you,” she told him. “There never has been and never will be anyone else.”
He started to cry. Right there on the dock, Ralph broke down and wept. He took a step toward her. Just one move in her direction was all she needed. She threw down her sign and launched herself at him, and into his arms.
He wasn’t as fragile as he looked. He might’ve been thin, but his arms were still strong.
“He kissed me,” Eve told Amy, “and kissed me and kissed me, right there for all the world to see. It was glorious and I knew that no matter how hard the past few years had been, the future was going to be wonderful.
“He told me that I’d saved his life in Dunkirk. He said that his unit was finally captured, and the Germans who took them prisoner were ready to kill them right then and there. He was on the ground, on his knees, with a Nazi gun to his head when he started talking—about me.
“He spoke in German, telling the man who was about to kill him all about this girl back in Ramsgate, an American girl named Eve whom he loved with all his heart. He told the German soldier that although it was probably hard to believe, this girl loved him, too, and that she’d be distraught at the news of his death. He told this German all about how we’d met, about Nicky getting sick, about the warm feeling in his heart whenever he saw me.
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