Mercy (Atlee Pine #4)(108)

Spector popped the cargo door on the SUV and opened a small duffel. She pulled out a small drone and its accompanying remote control.

“Ever use one of these?” she asked Pine.

“Yeah, for surveillance. In the hinterlands of Arizona, it comes in handy. How’d you score that?”

“It belongs to Buckley. He uses it to keep an eye on his property. He doesn’t like trespassers. I thought I could put it to better use, so I pinched it.”

“Good thinking,” commented Mercy.

“Okay, this remote has a screen, so you see what the drone sees. I want you to take up position behind the boulder next to the ledge where you were.”

“And then what?”

“I want you to fly this sucker straight down the road where they’re heading in right now. Keep it at about a hundred feet. It’s small enough, and it’s dark enough that they won’t be able to see it very well.” She pointed to the drone’s underbelly. “Now this is the key. When the drone is right over them, hit this button on the remote.” She indicated the button on the right. “I’ll do the rest.”

“You don’t have to do it all,” said Pine.

“I won’t. There are too many of them. They’re going to breach our outer defenses. When they do, well, it’s going to come down to hand-to-hand and whatever tricks we can come up with. But I’m betting on us.”

Pine looked at the sniper rifle. “You sure you don’t want me to do that part?”

Spector looked uncomfortable. In a low voice she said, “You know HRT?”

“The FBI’s Hostage Rescue Team? Yes, of course.”

Spector gripped the rifle. “Well, I was a sniper with them for two years. This is the same model rifle I used back then.”

She didn’t meet Pine’s gaze. At first. When she did look up, Pine’s eyes were boring into hers.

Spector licked her lips nervously.

“Then you better get in position. And good luck,” Pine said finally.

“Thanks, Agent Pine.”

She hustled off. Pine checked on Blum, and then had a brief word with her sister.

Pine handed Mercy her walkie-talkie and told her if anything came up to contact Spector right away. She added, “If this goes sideways . . . I . . . Look, I’m just so happy that we found each other.”

Mercy clipped the walkie-talkie to her waistband and looked down at her sister. She put a hand on her shoulder. “It won’t go sideways. We’ve got a job to do and we’ll do it. These assholes won’t know what hit them.”

Pine gripped her hand and squeezed it.

“I just have to get us down the tree, like you said.”

“But this time, I’ll help you do it, Lee.”

Pine hurried off with the drone and took up her position. She glimpsed Spector up on the ledge in a prone position; the tripod legs of the sniper rifle were deployed, and she was sighting through the night vision scope. It seemed the woman’s focus was complete.

HRT? thought Pine. They were the best of the best. It was good to know about the woman. And also troubling as hell.

Pine set the drone down and fired it up. Manipulating the controls, she watched as it rose into the air, then she directed it toward the road.

She guided it up to a hundred feet and drove it forward some more. Pine studied the illuminated screen closely. Threading across the screen was a cluster of heavily armed men. They were outlined in black and gray on the screen and were making good time, but there was caution in their movements. The lead man knelt down, scanned the ground, picked up a handful of loose dirt, and sniffed it.

The gas, thought Pine. The smell was still in the dirt.

The group moved forward. She thought she could make out Buckley. He was near the front, a shotgun in his hands.

She let the drone hover over the group for a few moments. Then she put her finger on the button Spector had showed her, said a silent prayer, and pushed it.

The darkness over Buckley and his men was ripped away as the drone’s searchlight exploded down on them like a sunrise of startling proximity.

A bare millisecond passed before Pine heard Spector’s rifle begin firing.

On the screen Pine saw a man shot and he fell. Then another, and a third. The rest scattered, trying to avoid the light from the drone that made them sitting ducks. But Pine moved the drone to keep them in the spotlight.

Spector’s rifle roared again and again. And more men fell.

Shit, thought Pine. That gal can shoot.

The next moment the drone was blown out of the sky by a shot from one of Buckley’s men. The darkness instantly returned.

But the damage had been done.

Spector scrambled down from the ledge as return fire hit all around her position, blowing off shards of rock with each impact. She met up with Pine.

“We need to fall back.”

“The road gets narrower up ahead,” said Pine. “We can funnel them into that.”

They raced away as shots continued to fly at them, and the sounds of running feet echoed off the canyon walls as their pursuers closed in. The gunfire became so intense that they finally had to stop running and duck down.

“Look out,” screamed Spector a few moments later.

A man appeared out of the darkness and charged forward, firing at Pine. She turned and shot him in the chest. He fell dead to the dirt.