Forged in Smoke (Red-Hot SEALs #3)(22)
They’d better watch their p’s and q’s and pray they didn’t take a hit. Even with the chopper on site, it would take a good ten minutes to evac the wounded to the nearest emergency room. And that was after the rotor warmed up and the bird climbed into the air.
Still, the Sikorsky MH-60T was their ace in the hole—few organizations could afford the thirty-million-dollar price tags these babies carried, which raised some serious inquiries as to who Wolf worked for . . .
Mac shook the questions aside, grim satisfaction rising. Party crashers wouldn’t expect an ambush from the air. Or a rescue for that matter. But since the beat of its blades could be heard for five to six klicks, the machine had to be shut down. Which meant a cold start when they needed it, and that meant several minutes of limbo.
Lives could be lost in those minutes—hell, forget minutes. Lives could be lost in seconds.
Shoving his unease aside, Mac turned in a slow circle, surveying their rendezvous site. Cosky had chosen the perfect terrain. The Jayhawk had dropped them into a bowl. Steep hills dotted with scraggly brush and smalls stands of Douglas fir rose from every direction. The single access point—a rutted dirt road—cut through the smallest hill to the north and dead-ended in the middle of the bowl. Once they climbed the hills and settled in on top, they’d have a bird’s eye view in every direction.
With a soft grunt of satisfaction, he relaxed slightly and turned toward Cosky. “What’s on the other side of those hills?”
“Acre after acre of trees,” Cosky said with a slow, sweeping survey from the right to left. “Besides the entry point, the closest road is an abandoned logging trail ten klicks to the east.”
“We’ll have eyes in every direction. Nobody’s slipping past us.” Zane signaled his approval with a hard thump to Cosky’s shoulder.
Mac slowly pivoted for one last scan of the surrounding hills and got down to business. As he started his third and final weapons check, Zane and Cosky silently followed suit. Once satisfied their weapons were good to go, Mac nodded toward Amy’s silent, tense figure. “Take positions and test her gear. Make sure the signal carries.”
During the flight out, Cosky had fitted her with a mic that fed into their headsets, but they hadn’t been able to test the device’s range. The ridge was a good three hundred yards uphill—they needed to make sure they could hear Amy’s conversation with her brother from their posts.
“Can I call Clay now?” Amy asked, her tone flattened by extreme patience.
“Not till I’m sure you’re hooked into our headsets,” Mac said with a quick sidelong glance at her rigid, athletic figure.
The tension in her limbs and shoulders announced her anxiety. This rendezvous with her brother and children had the woman tied in knots, a clear indication of how important her boys were to her. Mac’s chest tightened in sympathy. Amy rarely exhibited emotions. Hell, she was an old hand at locking down uncertainty or fear, an expert at projecting controlled competence. No doubt her ability to compartmentalize and bury her anxiety had been partly responsible for her meteoric rise through the bureau. Prior to her marriage she’d been on the fast track to taking the SAC’s chair of the white-collar crimes division in the Seattle field office.
Not that he’d gone to the trouble of checking the woman out—at least no more than was necessary when dealing with an unknown ally.
“Once we’ve taken our positions and tested your feed, I’ll signal you to call your brother,” Mac said, holding Amy’s shadowed gaze. He ignored the urge to assure her that everything would turn out just fine. He couldn’t promise her that. Nobody could promise her that.
Frowning, he swept Amy’s tense figure. The plan had been to let Amy handle the rendezvous herself while they provided cover from the ridge, but the woman was edgy as hell. It wouldn’t hurt to give her a partner, someone to step in if the situation went south. They could afford to lose the extra set of eyes; they’d still have plenty of scopes keeping watch from above.
“Cosky, stick around and watch her six,” Mac ordered, answering Cosky’s double take with a slight nod. “Zane, Jude—head up and into position.”
Amy squared her shoulders and pivoted until she faced Mac. “Jude should stay with me. Cosky should take to the ridge.”
The sympathy he’d been feeling for her withered. The woman liked countermanding his orders way too much. “Cosky stays.”
Her chin rising, Amy held his eyes firmly, which would have been admirable if her penchant for stubbornness wasn’t so damn infuriating.
“Look, Mackenzie. Clay’s a federal law enforcement agent and you and your men are at the top of every agency’s BOLO. You’re probably at the top of the bureau’s most wanted list by now. If he sees you, any of you, he’ll try to arrest you, that’s his job. It just makes sense that Lieutenant Simcosky should provide cover from the ridge, while Jude—who isn’t on a watch list—backs me up on the ground.”
Her arguments made sense. Except having Jude and Cos swap places left her under the care of a virtual stranger. A stranger whose competence was in question considering his lack of a field kit.
“Cosky stays,” Mac said. “End of discussion.”
“Mackenzie—”
“It’s Mac.” Where the f*ck had that come from? He didn’t care what the hell she called him. Suddenly off balance, he scrambled to get his head back in the argument. “Cosky wasn’t at the lab. He won’t be on any BOLOs.”