Full Throttle (Black Knights Inc. #7)(84)
Uh, yep… And she would file that under Hell No.
“If things go sideways?” she stressed. “See, you think this plan is just as crazy as I do.” She grabbed his arm, giving it a shake, growing more and more desperate with each passing second. Desperate and scared. No, desperate and terrified. Her pulse pounded through her veins, burning like it was full of weed killer, and her brain buzzed like she’d wrapped it in a string of outdoor electric lights and flipped the switch. “So there has to be another way to—”
“Abby,” he stopped her with a finger on her lips. “This is our chance. And by the way, I love you.”
Um…wha?
Had she heard him correctly? Surely not, because in what world did those six words ever go together? By the way belonged in sentences that ended with I forgot to fold the clothes in the dryer or your mother called to see if you wanted to go to brunch next Sunday. By the way did not go with the words I love you.
But before she had time to dig a finger in her ear and ask him to repeat himself, he bent to press a quick kiss to her lips, his warm breath so sweet she almost wept. Then the brave, beautiful sonofabitch raised his sidearm, shouldered one of the machine guns, and stepped out into the road…
Chapter Twenty-two
Steady laid on the Kalashnikov’s trigger and sawed a continuous arc of hot lead across the jungle and road behind the beat-up pickup truck. Globs of mud jumped from the surface of the logging track, bark splintered on the trees, and leaves ripped to shreds under his steady barrage. The constant rat-a-tat-tat of the rusty Russian special was a deafening roar. Luckily, he’d learned long ago to ignore the distracting thunder of gunfire and concentrate instead on the task at hand.
“Now!” he yelled over his shoulder to Yonus and Abby. “Go now!”
He didn’t see them emerge from the brush, too preoccupied with dropping the weapon when the clip ran dry and quickly shouldering the remaining AK. But he could feel them race into the open. His heightened senses telling him they’d left the tree line as surely as if he’d seen them with his own two eyes. And that was more than enough impetus to have him squeezing the trigger, gritting his teeth against the bruising pressure of each recoil, and raining a Rambo-style path of destruction in a violent arc down the road in what he hoped was the direction of the remaining terrorists.
Was he scared to stand out in the open when he wasn’t sure where the enemy was? The quick answer was no. He was a spec-ops soldier, a strange breed of man who’d lived and worked so close to the edge that life-and-death situations no longer engendered in him the usual—some would say sane—emotional response.
But the thought of Abby catching a stray round? Dios mio. Now that filled him with the kind of terror he hadn’t experienced since his very first combat mission. Or, quite honestly, maybe ever. Never before had he had so much to lose. When he’d joined the Rangers, his parents had already been dead for five years, he’d just put his twin sister in the ground, and the one girl he wanted more than his next breath had soundly rejected him—or so he’d thought at the time.
But now?
Now he had so much ahead of him. In the midst of the chaos, he could see it so clearly. A big, white wedding—if Abby would have him. And a whole passel of kids—if she’d have them. A lifetime of loving and laughing and teasing and screwing. And it was the fear of losing it all to one misplaced bullet that made him dizzy with relief when he heard the truck’s passenger-side door groan open a second before the big engine turned over with a choked growl.
Okay, on to step two…
The second AK spit forth its final bullet, and he dropped it to the muddy road at his feet. Squeezing the trigger on his M9 with focused precision—Boom! Boom! Boom!—he aimed each bullet at the trees he figured the militants were most likely to be hunkered behind. And all the while he backed toward the truck’s tailgate.
He was maybe five feet from the vehicle when he saw movement in his peripheral vision…just a second too late. He felt the gaping black hole of the Kalashnikov’s barrel focus on his head before he had a chance to position himself to return fire. And in that split second, he had time for a million regrets. Starting with him not being around to call in the weekly order to have fresh flowers put on Rosa’s grave, and ending with him never hearing Abby tell him she loved him. With a sense of sad acceptance, he braced himself for the crack of the bullet—the last thing he’d ever hear. But instead, the faint and wonderfully familiar click of a jammed weapon sounded instead.
Sonofa—
He spun in an instant, his finger tightening on his trigger, but not before the terrorist standing on the side of the road grabbed the barrel of his AK and swung the entire weapon baseball bat–style, like he was frackin’ Babe Ruth or something. A blast of white-hot pain rocketed up Steady’s arm when the metal of the machine gun met the bones of his hand. He cursed as the Beretta flew from his fingers and landed some distance away in the muck and mire. He had no time to make a grab for his Applegate-Fairbairn tactical blade before the JI culo launched himself in the air, grabbing his shoulders, and knocking them both to the ground.
His breath whooshed from his lungs on impact with the roadway, stars spinning crazily in front of his eyes when his skull bounced off the track. But he still had enough wherewithal to dodge the blow aimed for his face—motherf*cker!—as he landed one of his own against the man’s ribs. The terrorist groaned but didn’t do much else. Steady didn’t exactly have a good angle. And then the two of them devolved into a writhing mass of arms and legs, both vying for position, both screaming and grunting, both trying for the knife still attached to his belt.