Way of the Warrior (Troubleshooters #17.5)(6)
“Michael?” she wheezed, allowing her forehead to fall against the edge of the cubbyhole. The cool kiss of the metal was a reassuring caress but not nearly as reassuring as Michael’s bass-drum New Jersey accent.
“Harper?” His hard exhale sounded like a windstorm coming through the receiver. “Do you copy me? Am I coming in clear?”
If she wasn’t mistaken, that burning at the back of her eyeballs was the prick of tears she’d managed, up until now, to hold at bay.
He’d come to save her.
She knew he would.
Her relief was so immense, the muscles in her legs threatened to quit their job of keeping her upright. She blindly reached back, bracing herself with the help of one of the chairs pushed beneath the table. “I-I-I…” Okay. So, now was not the time to fall apart. But try telling that to her st-st-stuttering tongue. She swallowed and finally managed, “Yeah, I can hear you.”
“Good. Now open the damned door.”
? ? ?
It had been one ball-busting, gut-wrenching, head-spinning hell of a fight…
As Michael leaned against the door of the safe room, blowing hard, his heart pounding while he waited for Harper to open up, he glanced at the carnage he, LT, and Bran had wrought in the basement. Six Taliban fighters sprawled lifelessly around the dank-smelling room, staining the concrete floor with the growing pools of their deep crimson blood.
After fifteen years in the military, two wars, and over two hundred missions, he was used to seeing death. But when it came by way of a lead round traveling at nearly three thousand feet per second, it was never pretty.
There was a part of him that felt remorse for these men. For the poverty, dejection, and desperation that made them easy targets for brainwashing, radical militants. But that jab of sympathy hadn’t stopped him from doing his job and taking them out. Just as it hadn’t stopped him from doing his part in helping his teammates and the Marines cut down the more than four dozen—total guess there, since he’d lost count after twenty—Taliban fighters they’d come face-to-face with during their two-and-a-half-hour battle to retake the embassy after they’d fast-roped in from the helicopter they’d grabbed at the Air Force base. When it came to kill or be killed, he chose to kill every damn time.
And speaking of carnage and killing, he glanced over at LT.
“Y’okay?” he asked his lieutenant, tilting his chin toward the deep, bloody furrow in the guy’s left arm. If that bullet had been eight inches to the right, Leo “The Lion” Anderson might be pushing up daisies instead of standing beside him. Because even though each man from Alpha platoon was geared up in desert-tan camouflage Kevlar, it was well known that the TTP liked to use armor-piercing rounds. Armor-piercing rounds that had not been enough to puncture the reinforced steel skin of the safe room—evidenced by the pockmarks riddling the structure. And Michael had never really considered himself an overly religious man but, all the same, he sent up a silent prayer of thanks for that one glorious miracle. Figured a little ecclesiastical gratitude couldn’t hurt.
“Yeah. I’m okay,” LT said, lifting his slowly seeping arm while cupping his junk with his other hand. “But the boys may’ve retreated permanently.”
“Ain’t that a fact.” Michael barked out a laugh before quickly sobering again. Then a clanking sound told him Harper was working on the door’s locking mechanism, and his heart began pounding for a whole new reason.
Flexing against the sudden tension gripping his shoulders—and, okay, so he fully realized how ridiculous it was to feel tense now, in this moment. You know, considering all he’d been required to do in the last couple of hours—he turned to LT. “So I’ll wait in there with Harper until command calls and gives me the all-clear?”
“That’s affirmative.” LT nodded, his jaws pulverizing a piece of chewing gum.
Bran, who’d been busy slamming a new clip into his gas-operated, air-cooled Colt M4 and then checking the bodies of the Taliban fighters for any pesky explosives, walked over to slap a hand on Michael’s shoulder. The man’s brown eyes sparkled like he had an ace in the hole.
Michael made a face. “Okay, Captain Googly Eyes. Why don’t you just go ahead and spit out whatever it is that’s causing you to give me that look.”
“I’m just imagining what will happen once you’re in there with Harper,” Bran said.
“Oh, yeah? And what’s that?” Although, in all honesty, Michael had a few ideas. All of which included Harper naked, sweaty, and sated. Adrenaline did many things to a man’s body, but one of those things was…schwing!
“Just that she’s going to play you like a fiddle at one of those Blue Ridge Mountain hoedowns she probably went to when she was a kid.”
Rolling his eyes—mostly to deflect from the fact that he was scared shitless the guy was probably right—he opened his mouth to retort when, with a pop and an air-tight hiss, the door to the panic room swung open.
And there she was. Harper Searcy. Her face so pale it looked like she’d been snacked on by a horde of vampires. Her big blue eyes as round as the pepperoni pies served at Tony Boloney’s on the boardwalk back home. Her thin blouse…wet? Sweet Jesus. And her wildly curling cascade of red hair sticking up every which way like she’d repeatedly run her hands through it.