Into the Fire (53 page)

Eden hadn’t answered. She’d just shot her a
no way
look, but then was saved—sort of—as she was gripped by another of those stupid practice contractions that made her feel as if her back was going to implode. The breathing helped, but only a little and she was getting very, very frightened that these weren’t practice, but instead they were the real deal.

It was much too soon for that. Two different doctors—one in Germany and one in Las Vegas—had given her a conception date within two days of each other, and a due date that was still three months away. All the books Eden had read had stressed the importance of carrying the baby at least until thirty-seven weeks. If Pinkie were born now, he’d need a special incubator in a special hospital. And even then, he might not survive.

But the thing that frightened Eden the most was that, throughout it all, even when she wasn’t contracting, Pinkie remained absolutely still.

“Are you ready?” Hannah asked, and Eden wasn’t, but she nodded, because she knew she’d never truly be ready for this.

Besides, she was in good company. Hannah had been a cop. Sure, she was deaf now and had a limp, but she was tough as nails. Tess, although barely conscious, was a member of Troubleshooters Incorporated. And Sophia just told Eden that she’d first met Tess while she was fighting terrorists in some country that started with a K and ended with a “stan.”

With Eden’s help, they were going to set themselves free.

As she went toward the door, she was reminded of just yesterday, when she’d approached the door to Hannah’s cabin, to knock on it, exactly this way.

Well, not exactly.
Time for that BJ I promised you
hadn’t been part of
that
script.

“Hey,” she called softly, as she rapped relatively quietly on the door. It wasn’t exactly part of
this
script, either, because if old Adolf truly was out there, he wasn’t alone. “Everyone’s asleep in here, the toilet’s clogged, and I need to, you know. Use it?”

She was hoping that Adolf would take that as the invitation that it was, and come into the room to “fix the plumbing”—wink, wink, nudge, nudge.

At which point Eden and Sophia would jump him—not in the way that he hoped for—and steal his weapon. They would knock him unconscious, as Hannah launched herself out into the hall and took out guard number two…

The deadbolt on the door clicked open.

Sophia signaled Hannah who, of course, hadn’t heard it.

The door—which opened out—opened only a crack. And there he was. Lovely, horny, hopeful Adolf. Proving that all around the world, men were men were men.

“We’re not supposed to unlock the door,” he told her.

“It’s okay,” she whispered back, forcing a smile, even though her back was starting to cramp. Please don’t let her have a contraction right now. “Everyone’s asleep in here.”

“We’re going to get in trouble,” someone in the hall said.

“Can you come in?” Eden asked, resisting the urge to throw up a little in her mouth as she added, “I want to hear more about the Freedom Network. I think it’s so cool that you get to wear that jacket and carry a gun.”

“See?” Adolf said to the other guard. “She wants to join the cause.”

Except, crap, there were two others out there with him. “Three guards,” Eden said for Hannah and Sophia’s benefit, inwardly cringing at how totally lame she sounded. “Aren’t I the dangerous one.”

The other guards peered in at her. “She’s a fornicator,” the disgruntled one said. “It’s wrong for a woman to want it.”

“Lock the door, Addy,” the other recommended. “You don’t know where-all she’s been at.”

Eden was looking into Adolf’s eyes and she saw exactly when his fear of breaking the rules trumped his desire to boldly go where he’d never been before. And before he could slam it shut, she threw herself against the door, pushing it all the way open, knocking into him and the others. “Hannah, now!” she stupidly screamed for a woman who couldn’t possibly hear her. “Sophia, help me
now
!”

C
HAPTER
T
WENTY-FIVE

T
hree guards.

There were three guards with three guns, and Sophia didn’t stand a prayer of wrestling one of those automatic weapons away from any of them, so she did what her father had told her never to do. She kicked a man when he was already down.

As her foot connected with the most tender place of the guard on the floor, Sophia could see Hannah out of the corner of her eye, leaping on top of the man who was still standing, and slamming him against the corridor wall before they both went to the ground. Eden, meanwhile, was entangled with the third guard—whose weapon went skittering across the cheap industrial tile.

But it was Tess who put an end to the fight. Tess, who must’ve crawled on her hands and knees through the open door, who picked up that weapon and aimed it unerringly at Sophia’s kick-ee.

“Everyone freeze!” she said, loudly enough to be heard. “Drop your weapons, hands in the air, right now—
right
now!”

She was sitting on the floor, with a blood-soaked bandage around her middle, hair still damp from her toilet dunking.

But the way she held that weapon was all professional business, and hands went into the air.

Not all of them, though. Hannah grabbed the rifle from the guard she was pummeling, and used it to hit him in the head. He finally slumped, as Sophia took possession of the third gun.

“Give me your jacket and your hat,” Hannah ordered the youngest one—it had to be Eden’s buddy Adolf. He was crying as he took it off, as Hannah quickly searched him, searched them all, briskly, efficiently. It wouldn’t do for any of them to have a handgun to use as an alarm.

“Drag him inside,” Hannah ordered, pointing to the man who was down, and then to the cell that they’d recently occupied.

“Lucas was right,” Adolf sobbed as he obeyed Hannah’s order, grabbing the unconscious guard beneath the arms. He spat at Eden as he pulled the man past her. “Fornicator! I hope your baby dies!”

Eden flinched, but she quickly recovered, flipping him the bird as she pushed the heavy door shut and threw the bolt. “Hey, loser. Fornicate
you.
”

Decker went in.

It wasn’t quite dark enough yet for the entire team to enter the compound, but a single man, accustomed to slipping through the shadows, could make himself invisible.

He clicked twice into his lip mic—a nearly inaudible message to Lindsey, who was staying behind to man the radio. He’d made it. The equipment the FBI had provided had successfully rerouted the energy flowing through the electric fence, allowing him access without any alarms being tripped in the Freedom Network’s security center.

And oh, yeah. It had also kept thousands of volts of electricity from surging through his body and cooking him from the inside out as he’d slipped beneath the fence.

That was always a bonus.

Decker quickly climbed the final fence, then took a deep breath. It was time to clear his mind of everything but his mission.

Tess. Sophia’s voice, clear but strained from stress:
She’s badly injured.

Dave. Desperate not to lead, unaware that he’d been quietly leading for years:
Thank God you’re here, sir.

Jim Nash. FBI Agent Jules Cassidy’s quiet confirmation:
Nash is dead.

Jo Heissman:
You’re safe with me, Lawrence. You don’t have to run away…

There was room for none of them, none of their incessant noise and sorrow and pain inside of his head right now, and Decker wiped them all away.

There was only the night.

And Tim Ebersole, who was finally going to meet the newly sharpened blade of Decker’s KA-BAR knife.

Adolf’s jacket fit well enough, covering Tess’s blood-soaked bandages.

Hannah gave his baseball cap to Sophia, to cover the eye-catching shine of her blond hair.

His weapon she kept for herself, and with it loosely cradled in her arms, heart pumping, Hannah went out the window first, into the not-necessarily-silence of the night.

It was dark and getting darker every second, which was a good thing, as she helped Sophia push and pull Tess and then Eden out of the school building-slash-jail. Way to get your kids to love to learn, Freedom Network. But then again, they didn’t want their children to learn. They wanted them to memorize rhetoric and lies.

And there they crouched, Hannah on point, still futilely straining to hear, as Sophia joined her in the shadows.

The compound was only dimly lit, which was good.

But people were out and about, which wasn’t. They were going about their lives, moving from their living quarters—tiny individual cottages and cabins and the larger more barracklike dorms—to the dining hall. They were socializing in the pleasant evening air, playing basketball, walking their dogs, chatting with neighbors.

Their plan was for Sophia to stay at Hannah’s elbow, acting as her ears, even as she supported Tess. For someone so petite and pretty, the blonde had it going on in the strength-of-will-power department.

As for Eden…

They had to find a hiding place sometime in the next two minutes—where she could safely—and as quietly as possible—breathe through her next contraction.

Hannah could see the tree line, distant from this part of the clearing. They were going to have to move from building to building, cottage to cabin. Although maybe heading for the forest wasn’t that wise of a plan. It was one of the first places security patrols would search when it was discovered that they were missing.

And it would be discovered—sooner rather than later. There was, no doubt, some kind of check-in procedure in place—a scheduled phone call to the security chief that the guards, now locked in the cell, would miss. Either that, or someone would bring dinner and take one look at the empty hallway…

Sophia tapped Hannah and pointed to Eden, whose face was already starting to contort with pain.

It was time.

All of the cottages and cabins had garbage sheds—small wooden structures out back, built to prevent animals from getting into the trash. Hannah knew from her visit here that they were not locked—only latched.

She peeked around the corner, where that basketball game was going on in the school yard. The players were far enough away.

She took a deep breath and Eden’s arm and, keeping her pace slow—just another lunatic fringe family out for an evening stroll—stepped out of the shadows.

Alarm sirens started wailing and Murphy leapt to his feet.

Izzy was right behind him. “What the fuck?”

“It’s coming from the compound,” Mark Jenkins reported, as they both followed Murphy out of the tent. Dave and Gillman were on their heels.

Murph stepped it up even faster, booking it for the Freedom Network fences, as Lindsey’s voice rang in his radio headset. “Decker! Sitrep!”

Decker’s voice came back, a dry whisper. “I’m secure. Whatever tripped the alarm—it wasn’t—”

“Jesus!” Murphy ripped the headset off as high volume feedback came through the earpieces.

His radio wasn’t the only one squealing.

“What the fuck?” It seemed to be Izzy’s mantra, but it was also the question of the moment.

“Turn down the volume,” Dave ordered.

“Mine’s down so far it’s off,” Jenkins said.

Lindsey came running after them. “There’s some kind of radio jamming,” she reported. “It’s coming from the compound, and it’s across all channels.”

“Fix it,” Dave ordered.

“I would if I could,” Lindsey told him. “The irony is that if Tess were here,
she’d
probably be able to override—”

“I’m not waiting,” Murphy announced, heading for the fences. Izzy was at his side.

“Keep trying,” Dave ordered Lindsey. “Call Cassidy. Have him cut all power to the compound. I want these radios working!”

“They definitely have generators,” Jenk pointed out as Murphy swung himself up and over the first of the fences, sticking the landing, as if it had been days instead of years since he’d last done anything like this on a regular basis.

Jenkins landed effortlessly beside him, still talking as they slid beneath the impotent wires of the electric fence—thanks to the equipment Decker had installed. “They’ll kick on when the power goes out. We can’t just flip a switch to get them to go off.”

“Then we’ll take them out the old-fashioned way,” Izzy said as he followed them over the third fence.

“Cut phone lines, too, if you get the chance,” Dave ordered as he landed far less gracefully, scrambling in the dirt. “Let’s try to even the odds. Stay in visual contact, and remember, there are children in here! Let’s do this, let’s go!”

They didn’t have a choice about hiding places. The alarms went off—no doubt someone had discovered the hostages were missing—and they’d hurriedly squeezed into this shed.

A garbage shed.

Eden released Sophia’s hand as the pain slowly subsided.

But the urge to gag at the horrendous smell wasn’t going to go away. Not anytime soon.

The shit had really hit the fan.

Sirens were still screeching as all across the compound brighter spotlights were going on, one by one, turning the place into the blinding equivalent of the surface of the sun.

As Eden tried to breathe through her shirt sleeve, Hannah pulled the door of the garbage shed closed, but a ray of light from outside came through a crack between two boards, illuminating the grimness of her face. There wasn’t enough room in there for them both to hide and hold their rifles ready for attack, so they’d laid most of the weapons on the floor. Hannah alone held hers, but it pointed straight up, at the shed’s plywood ceiling.

Sophia took Eden’s hand again, squeezing it in warning, and she realized that a two-man patrol had stopped mere feet from their hiding place. She could see their shadows through another crack in the shed wall.

“They had to come this way,” one of them said.

“They probably already made it to the woods,” the other complained. “We never get the good assignments.”

They turned away.

Thank the Lord, they turned away, except another contraction ripped through Eden, this one even stronger than any of the others had been so far. She clenched her teeth against the pain, trying desperately not to cry out—she
would not
cry out and give them away—but then liquid seemed to pour out of her, down her legs, soaking her dress and hitting the concrete flooring of the shed with an audible rush, and the two men turned back, their weapons raised.

“What in hell was
that
?”

The compound was crawling with Freedom Network security patrols.

The good news, as far as Dave could see, was that the women and children were being ushered into the church for safety.

Now, if only he had an operational radio, so that he could report that information to his team members.

He’d given the order to split up—there was no way they could move covertly as a five-man team, with so many patrols out and about.

Dave and Izzy had gone north, while Murphy, Gillman, and Jenkins had headed south, toward the gate and the most heavily populated part of the compound.

He should have thought to bring a leash for Izzy. The SEAL was moving so fast, Dave was hard-pressed to keep up.

He caught up, however, at the edge of a clearing, where there was nothing but grass—no cover of any kind—all the way to the first cluster of buildings.

“Fuck this, I’m going,” Izzy told him.

Dave shook his head. “Give Lindsey a few more seconds…”

“One,” Izzy counted. “Two…”

And like magic, the power went out across the compound, plunging it into darkness.

As Dave hurried after Izzy, he tried turning up his radio—and got that same jarring earful of squealing static.

Which meant that whatever the Freedom Network was using to jam their radio signals had its own power source.

It would take about thirty seconds, after the power went out, for the generators to kick in.

Thirty seconds didn’t seem like a very long time, but it was.

Decker didn’t have to move faster than a leisurely walk as he left the shadows and went into the church.

He’d spotted his target mere minutes after the alarms began to scream, shawl over his head, large for a woman. But it wasn’t his size that gave Ebersole away. It was the way he walked. Even the butchest of women just didn’t have that balls-a-swinging, cock-of-the-walk gait.

He didn’t have any guards with him—he probably thought his disguise was sufficient—which made it all the more simple.

Decker found him easily in the darkness, introduced himself, got the DNA evidence he needed, and left, all with plenty of time to spare before the lights came back on.

Eden’s water had broken, splashing onto the shed floor.

Hannah hadn’t heard it—Sophia had had to tap her arm to bring it to her attention—but the two men, outside, with the automatic weapons, apparently had.

They’d turned back, weapons raised and aimed. And Hannah knew that if they fired, the thin wooden boards would do little to protect them.

Power had gone out in the compound, plunging them into darkness, and putting the gunmen even more on edge. They had a hunting-size flashlight, though, which they immediately switched on, shining it directly at the shed. Hannah had to squint against the brightness, and she could just barely make out their faces, see their mouths.

“Open the door!”

“No, you open it!”

“No, shit-for-brains, I’m telling whoever’s in there to open the door!”

Sophia tapped Hannah’s arm, and she looked up into the other woman’s face. Her expression was one of horror as she held out her hand, and Hannah saw that it was covered with blood, and her vision tunneled because, God, if Eden was bleeding like that, she was in terrible trouble.

And then everything moved much too fast.

Somewhere a generator must’ve kicked in, because the lights came back in the compound. They were much less bright than they had been, but they made it easier for Hannah to see the guards’ faces.