Time Patrol (Area 51 The Nightstalkers) (5 page)

Roland’s training had kept him alive this long and he’d learned early in combat that there were no rules, no sporting, gentlemanly code of honor. There was alive or dead. An “honorable” death was still dead and Roland considered any dead a sucky dead.

The receiver in his right ear crackled, volume set so low not a sound escaped the inner ear.

“Beta on schedule, on Jane Eyre, heading to Wuthering Heights. On pace. Over.” Neeley’s voice was subdued, matter-of-fact.

“Roger. Over.” Roland’s whisper was transmitted by the electronics wrapped around his throat.

Wuthering Heights. It occurred to him that he’d never read the book. Of course, Roland had never read any novel. He’d tried one, a
Conan the Barbarian
novel someone had passed around on a deployment, but it had hurt his head. He’d read lots of weapons manuals, but those had pictures and, for him, a practical purpose. He only knew
Wuthering Heights
was a book because Neeley had remarked on it as they studied the map and satellite imagery of the woods.

“How’s it end? Over.”

Neeley had been with him long enough that she knew what he was referring to.

“Badly. Guy doesn’t get girl. Girl doesn’t get guy. No happily ever after. Over.”

There never was
, Roland thought, which was a very profound thought for Roland.

Teri Stevens wasn’t a big believer in happy endings either. The psychiatrist in Coronado had suggested running as a stress reliever, failing to see the irony, which might have made a less desperate person doubt his perception, but Teri had faithfully taken up the regime, and it
did
seem to take the edge off a little bit. She’d started on the beach, the same beach where he’d earned his “Budweiser” insignia when he’d graduated from SEAL training.

He’d made her memorize all the trivia about the insignia, and at first it had been exciting, to be part of this special group. A golden eagle clutching a trident and a flintlock pistol across an anchor. The informal “Budweiser” designation came from the fact current SEAL training had developed out of BUD/S, Basic Underwater Demolition/SEAL training. The anchor represented, of course, the Navy, parent service of the SEALs. The trident represented the ancient god of the sea, Neptune, or Poseidon, depending on which mythology flavor whetted the appetite, Roman or Greek. The pistol, if one looked closely, and she’d been forced to, was cocked, representing the SEAL’s ability to always be ready.

To go off, she remembered ironically. To go off. She should have paid more attention to that bit. And the eagle, lastly, represented the ability to parachute in from the air. The last bit of trivia she also found ironic in that the eagle, usually portrayed on flags looking upward, was looking downward on the insignia, to remind the wearer that humility is the true measure of a warrior.

That part hadn’t seemed to take hold in her ex.

Of course, he hadn’t always been that way. The first couple of years he’d been almost normal, as normal as someone who had made Special Operations their occupation of choice. But in 2005, on a deployment to Afghanistan, bad things had happened to a bunch of his SEAL buddies during Operation Red Wings, and he’d come back dark and bitter. He’d never talked about the greatest loss of life on one operation the SEALs had ever experienced. She’d read the books about it and saw the movie from the Lone Survivor, but still didn’t understand her husband’s role in it all.

They’d divorced a long, hard year later.

She’d stopped running on that beach when she was warned he was back from wherever it was he’d disappeared to. How “they” knew that, she had no clue, but within five minutes of the call she’d had her stuff in the car and was driving. She went about as north as one can go on the West Coast and still be in the States, then off the coast to an island.

And started running again.

After six months she was up to ten miles a day. She was also thirteen hundred miles away from where she had last seen the man who had begun his love with flowers and ended it with his fists and worse.

She turned from Jane Eyre onto Wuthering Heights. Her right foot slipped on the edge of a puddle and slid out from under her. With a splash she went to her knees in six inches of black water without an expletive or complaint. Years of fear can blunt and silence even the most instinctive reactions.

Teri got to her feet, stepped out of the puddle, and let water drain out of the pant legs.

While she was doing that, Roland moved his head two inches to the right, removing his cheek from the rifle stock. He opened both eyes. The fall was the unexpected, which was to be expected. It would shift the timeline. How much? Roland hated when the timeline got shifted on an op. But he was trained to adjust. As he’d learned in his first infantry assignment as a young private: The best plan works up until you make contact with the enemy.

Neeley chimed in. “Alpha on schedule, on Jane Eyre, heading to Wuthering Heights, moving faster than yesterday. Closing for the kill. Over.”

“Roger. Over.”

Teri began walking up the trail, letting each footfall squeeze water out of her socks and through her shoes. There was something to be said for a treadmill. But gyms required membership, and she was no longer a joiner. Even with the fake identification the Navy had given her, she kept her new name as tight to her as her skin.

She checked her GPS. The fall had thrown her pace off, and she’d become obsessive about keeping time. She stood still and pushed buttons, updating the setting. Still no cell signal.

It was only because she wasn’t moving that she heard the light patter of feet behind her.

She turned and saw her ex-husband, Carl Coyne, come around the curve from Jane Eyre, running on the balls of his feet, his stride long and loose. He wore gray sweats, a hood pulled low over his forehead, almost hiding his eyes. The sweats were soaked from the rain, but she knew his answer to that: The human body was waterproof.

She saw that look on his face, the familiar one, and knew she could never run far enough or fast enough. He was almost floating to her, easily skirting the puddle she’d fallen into. It was all for nothing, all the running, because his promise to destroy her had not been spoken as lightly as he now ran. That threat was a fuel that had kept him searching for the past six months with more ferocious determination than her trembling fear could propel her to hide.

She was surprisingly calm as he closed in on her. Running would only gain her a few futile seconds. Screaming would just startle the wildlife. She realized she was actually
almost
relieved to be done with the constant fear, to have it end in the way she’d always known on a very deep level was inevitable. Death and taxes and here came the former.

The moments were stretching out, the way they did when adrenaline surges and warps time, which should be an indication to all that perhaps time is not absolute, but a variable? Coyne was slowing to a determined walk, a narrow, double-edged knife in his right hand, a cluster of plastic cinches in his left; that last bit caused her to reconsider running.

Those cinches indicated the inevitable would not happen fast. Her previous almost-relieved feeling floated away with a gasp of terror as the realization of torture before death hit Teri, and what little sense of self she’d held on to died.

Carl stopped ten feet away and just stared at Teri, relishing the moment, his excitement palpable. It was getting dark even though it was not late, but daylight was different on this island that she had chosen for its remoteness and lack of a bridge. Teri should have known water would be no barrier to an ex-Navy SEAL. They lived and thrived in the water. Instead of protecting herself with a barrier, she’d enclosed herself in a prison.

The thick trees surrounding them made it even darker. Teri looked up to the sky as if there was an answer, but she saw only leaves and a few specks of cloudy gray. She felt sad, wishing that she could see the sun one more time. The Pacific Northwest was indeed a great place for vampires to make their home, but for a Southern Californian girl, it was oppressively depressing. An eagle flashed by overhead, and she wished fervently she could take wing with that bird, experience that freedom. Be anywhere but here.

Any time but now.

Teri looked back at him. As she gazed into those rage-filled eyes, she saw a speck of red in the left eye. Something she’d never seen in it before.

Carl took a step, closing the distance between them.

Unfortunately, Roland couldn’t make one hundred percent positive identification because Teri’s head was in the way of most of the target’s face, plus the hood was pulled down low. Roland did have a clear line of sight just past her head on the suspect’s left eye and could put a 7.62x51mm steel-jacketed NATO round straight through the orbital socket, through the skull, and take a nice chunk of brain matter out the rear. And Roland did have Neeley’s positive identification. However, Neeley did not have her finger on the trigger.

There were rules to a Sanction, and they were rules Roland took seriously, because they were the Cellar’s version of the Nightstalkers’ Protocols. Plus Neeley had insisted he take them seriously.

One could never be wrong on a Sanction because they were what Neeley had called a “No-Do-Over.”

Dead was not reversible.

Of course, it didn’t occur to Roland: Who the hell else would be out here trying to kill this woman?

Neeley had insisted, and Roland was a team player.

Roland shifted the rifle ever so slightly and his finger curved over the thin sliver of metal.

Roland had been following the rhythm of his heart ever since the woman turned the corner. Now he synchronized it with his shallow breathing as Carl stopped once more, five feet short. Blinking, as if the red in his left eye were a bug, distracting him.

For a moment, Carl seemed to flicker. Most would have attributed the anomaly to an overactive imagination.

Except Roland didn’t have one.

He noted it, knew the flicker was real, but kept his eye on the target.