Forged in Smoke (Red-Hot SEALs #3)(52)
Bright light from the fixture above their heads spilled down a steep staircase. Rawls headed down the steps at breakneck speed. Luckily, the space was too cramped for the two of them to travel abreast, so he had to drop her arm, which allowed her to descend more cautiously. He’d already punched the access code into the second steel door that guarded the weapons locker and had it propped open by the time she reached the bottom.
After a quick glance at his face, which hadn’t lost any of its earlier tension, she silently preceded him into the concrete, steel-shelved room. But as soon as the door swung shut behind them, she turned to face him. With two steel, impenetrable doors between them and their would-be captors—or killers—they should be safe enough for a quick discussion.
“Is any of that blood yours?” she asked as Rawls pulled a canvas bag off the bottom rung of the steel shelving to her right.
“No.” He shot her an indecipherable look before unzipping the duffle bag and dropping the satellite phone inside. “The camp’s surrounded. I had to neutralize a few of our uninvited guests on my way back in.”
Neutralize?
Faith flinched and avoided examining that description too closely.
“Mac called for a rendezvous.” He straightened with the bag in hand and started filling it with guns and ammo from the shelves above. “Which you would have known, if you’d had your radio.” The glance he shot her was full of admonishment.
Faith grimaced. He was right. She should have brought the radio. If Rawls hadn’t come back for her, she wouldn’t have known she was in danger. She would have been merrily cooking away while a band of killers swarmed the compound.
The other women wouldn’t have been as ill prepared. But then, they had their own personal SEALs to provide protection. Or at least Kait and Beth and Marion did. Amy, on the other hand, was in the same predicament as Faith—only worse, since she had her kids to worry about as well. And from the micro amount of time Faith had spent with the family the night before, it was clear Amy’s youngest child was a handful.
“Amy’s going to need help getting her kids into and through the tunnels,” Faith said, watching Rawls add more guns and boxes of ammo to the canvas bag. They certainly weren’t going to run out of weapons or ammunition anytime soon.
“Mac was headed toward her last I saw.” Rawls stretched up on his toes to drag down an oblong black plastic box with a huge red X stretching from corner to corner across the plastic top.
“Mackenzie?” Her voice rose with incredulity. The bad-tempered, woman-hating, chain-cursing commander had raced over to help Amy and her boys? And under his own volition? Wow . . . just wow.
With a snort, Rawls shoved the black box into the duffle bag, added several devices that were similar to binoculars but mounted on plastic headpieces, and then zipped the bag up. “Mac’s not nearly as surly as y’all are convinced. Push comes to shove—he’s the first to jump between a civilian and a bullet. That goes a hundredfold for women and rug rats.”
Faith raised her eyebrows. “I find that hard to believe.”
With a light chuckle, Rawls lifted the duffle bag and slung it over his shoulder. “I’m not sayin’ he doesn’t make misjudgin’ him downright easy. But actions speak louder than words, and he’s over there protectin’ Amy and her rug rats right now.”
They’d have to agree to disagree on that particular cliché. In her opinion, words carried as much weight as action, and she had plenty of empirical data proving that Mackenzie’s loud and often nasty vocalizations marked him as a misogynistic jackass. Not that they had time for such an argument.
“I can carry something,” she offered, deliberately changing the subject.
“You sure can.” He handed her a heavy-duty metal flashlight and picked up a second one for himself. “I’ve grabbed some NVDs in case we need them, but the flashlights will do us for now.”
“NVDs?”
“Night vision devices. They’ll give our vision back if the torches go dark.” He paused to scan her frame, his gaze lingering on her face. “How you holdin’ up? That ticker of yours behavin’?”
She schooled her face into sincerity, held his gaze, and nodded. “It’s ticking away just fine.”
Which wasn’t a complete lie. At the moment it was beating normally. And he hadn’t asked about earlier incidents . . .
Instead of easing, the tension on his face intensified. He frowned. “How much Cordarone you got left?”
The pill count wasn’t something she could exaggerate. Not when he needed to know where the pill was in case her heart flatlined and she lost consciousness or couldn’t get to the tablet herself.
“I’ve got one left. It’s in my right pocket.” She offered him a tight smile. “I guess we can’t count on Wolf making a medicine drop under the circumstances.”
A moment of concern touched his face, but he quickly buried it. His blond hair flashed beneath the overhead lights as he shook his head.
“Not the original drop. But we’ve got the sat phone. After we rendezvous with the others in the hub, we’ll call him. Fill him in.” He offered her a reassuring smile. “Hell, knowin’ Kait’s big bad friend, he’ll probably grab the closest chopper and mount a rescue.”
It was doubtful the phone would work in the tunnels, let alone the hub—where the various tunnels intersected. The hub was a natural stone cavern seven hundred feet or so from where they currently stood. The rock would block the satellite signal, making the phone ineffectual.