Hell or High Water (Deep Six #1)(44)
“Thoughts, gentlemen?” Leo asked, not surprising her in the least with his question. He was the only commanding officer she’d ever met who never made a decision until he listened to the opinions of his men. Probably one of the reasons why the eight of them had lasted nearly fifteen years running the kind of operations that usually claimed one in five.
Then it hit her like it always hit her, a two-by-four right between the eyes. There were no longer eight of them. There were only seven. Holy shit, the memory of Rusty turning to her from where he had landed on the floor in that hall after armor-piercing rounds cut through his ceramic bulletproof vest flashed in front of her eyes. Blood had been on his lips, flecking his face. More had already begun to pool around his body…
“Run, Agent Mortier!” he bellowed, swinging around to return fire. The thump, thump of his M4 discharging rounds at a mind-boggling rate was interspersed with the higher-pitched tat-tat of the rebels’ AK-47s.
I shouldn’t have done that, she thought, her mind racing through the chain of events that had brought her…brought them…here. I shouldn’t have shot the general. Though, given that he’d been dialing his phone, she didn’t see what other choice she’d had. But surely there was another way…
Her pistol jumped in her hand as she fired from around the relative safety of the corner, waiting for the right moment, a lull in the shooting, when she could drag Rusty down the hall with her. And it was strange, but everything seemed to be moving in slow motion. The plaster on the corner of the wall was crumbling under the barrage of steady gunfire, but she could count each chunk as it flew in front of her face. The clack of her pistol cycling a fresh cartridge into the chamber sounded particularly loud as her heart beat a steady lub-dub like a bass drum.
Good God. She’d just killed a man. She’d pulled her gun and placed a round right between his surprised eyes, and—
“Go!” Rusty bellowed again. And with that one word, time sped up. She couldn’t count the plaster chunks. There were hundreds of them. She couldn’t hear her pistol cycling rounds, not above the roar of the firefight. And her heartbeat wasn’t steady. It was thundering!
Turkey-peeking around the corner, she saw her chance. Now!
She ran the three steps to Rusty, sliding on the tile floor as she grabbed the strap on his body armor and pulled with all she had. Gritting her teeth, her muscles straining, her combat-booted feet scrabbling on the slick tile, she inched his immense weight backward.
Thump! Thump! Thump! His M4 spit forth a hail of cover fire.
Bang! Bang! Bang! In her free hand, her pistol pumped out hot lead. She was shooting blind at the corner the rebels were hiding behind. But she figured even if she didn’t hit any of them, it was enough to keep them there. And that’s all she needed. Just a little time. Just a couple of seconds…
“Leave me!” Rusty yelled again, even as he continued to lay on his trigger. “I’m done!”
“No f*cking way!” she screamed just as…click, click, click…her clip ran dry. She shoved the Sig into the back of her cargo pants and grabbed the other shoulder strap on his body armor. With a mighty heave, she pulled him around the corner.
The minute she did, the rebels opened fire and the wall once more began to disintegrate. The plaster exploded in powdery blocks, adding a chalky smell to air that was already rife with the scents of spent cordite and fresh blood.
Rusty rolled onto his stomach and angled his M4 around the corner to continue firing. He was racked by coughing, the sound wet and sickening. Chest wound. She could hear it. Even now his lungs were filling with fluid.
“I’m a dead man!” he told her.
“Not yet, you aren’t!” she yelled, retrieving an extra clip from her pocket. Grabbing her Sig, she ejected the old magazine and slammed in the new. And that’s when a round crashed into Rusty’s skull. Blood flew from his head and he dropped to the floor, immobile in an instant. Now he was dead…
“Rusty!” She screamed his name, the wall exploding under renewed enemy fire. She ducked down, her heart breaking into a million pieces, her stomach disgorging her lunch so violently it hit the wall across from her. And in those seconds when she was too busy puking her guts up to fire, the rebels closed in. The sound of their boots pounded down the hall in her direction. Getting her mutinous stomach under control and realizing she was left with no other choice, she spared Rusty once last look before turning and running for the back door.
“…like Morales seems to think,” Bran was saying when she suddenly found herself yanked from the past back into the present. It happened so fast, she suffered mental whiplash.
Holy hell. That memory always struck when she least expected it, hitting her like a freight train and leaving her emotionally broken and bloody. If she wasn’t mistaken, that was her stomach crawling up into her throat, ready and waiting to disgorge its contents all over the pilothouse. She couldn’t believe Rusty had survived his wounds long enough for Leo and his men to find him. She would have sworn on her mother’s grave that he’d died instantly with that last shot. And even though Morales had assured her time and again there was nothing she could have done differently, nothing he said could suppress her guilt at having left Rusty there. Still alive. Still—
“I say we sail on by them and see what we see,” Bran continued, and Olivia covertly sucked in a ragged breath, forcing herself to exhale past the vise crushing her chest. After she managed that, she swallowed repeatedly until her stomach resumed its usual position. Then she pushed the terrible memory back into its safe, separate mental compartment and slammed the door shut. And stay there!