Targeted (Hostage Rescue Team Series Book 2) (26 page)

This time Ken didn’t hesitate. Time slowed to a crawl, every movement and heartbeat a separate eternity. His hand contracted around the grip of his own weapon, intent on hitting her above the neckline of the Kevlar vest she wore. The sound of his ragged breaths was harsh in his ears. His heart thudded heavy and hard against his ribs as his finger tightened around the trigger.

The woman’s gaze never wavered. Her expression was set, determined as he started to raise his weapon.

He didn’t get the chance to fire. A bullet hit him in the chest just as his hand began to come up, throwing him off balance as it plowed into the Kevlar vest with the force of a sledgehammer. He staggered back a step, tried to keep raising the pistol into firing position. Pain flared bright and hot for just a moment before another round slammed into him, right through the bottom of his throat.

He dropped back, both hands flying to his throat as the blood spewed up, choking him. Wheezing and gasping, he struggled onto his side, his bleary gaze landing on the Beretta a few feet from him. Dimly he heard the sounds of the men rushing from the back. He reached out a trembling hand, his fingertips straining to find the grip of the pistol lying on the debris.

No air.

His vision went gray, his body spasming in a desperate fight for air. His mouth opened and closed, chest heaving as his lungs tried to suck in precious oxygen.

No use.

His muscles jerked once, then went lax as a loud buzzing filled his ears. His hand fell to the ground.

The woman reached him first. She was saying something, calling out to the men.
DeLuca.
He’d lost his chance to take DeLuca with him.

Through the haze of the pain and that buzzing he was vaguely aware of her kneeling beside him, her fingers pressing to the side of his throat to check his pulse. He could feel it growing weaker. Feel his body fading. The pain began to recede, everything going dark.

Carla and Eli. I’ll be with them soon.

Their faces swam before him, their expressions lighting up with pure joy when they saw him. Eli broke away from Carla and started running toward him, arms open and outstretched.

A tear trickled from the corner of Ken’s eyes.
I’m coming, buddy. Daddy’s coming.

And then everything went dark.

Celida looked up from where she was kneeling beside Spivey when DeLuca and Travers came barrelling around the corner of what had once been the hallway wall. Both men stopped short in the haze of dust and smoke when they saw her, weapons aimed at Spivey.

“He’s dead,” she said, her voice surprisingly steady.

DeLuca pulled out his radio. “Suspect down. Repeat, suspect down.” He lowered his weapon, staring at Spivey as Travers holstered his own weapon and came toward her. Celida pulled her fingers away from Spivey’s throat and stood, surprised at how shaky she felt all of a sudden.

“You all right?” Travers asked, real concern in his voice as he ran his gaze over her.

“Fine. He never even got a shot off.” He would absolutely have killed her if she hadn’t taken him out.

She wiped her hand against her pants, trying to clean Spivey’s blood off it. Her second shot had opened a gaping hole in his throat. She’d been forced to readjust for a higher shot when her first one hadn’t taken him down. He must have taken the security guard’s Kevlar vest when he’d taken the uniform.

She couldn’t think about all that right now though.

Travers reached for her arm but she pulled back and shook her head, turning her eyes on DeLuca. There was only one thing she was interested in knowing right now. “Did you make radio contact with the team yet?”

“Not yet. We’ve been trying to dig away the debris from the trap door. Thought I heard pinging down there.”

Trap door? They’d breached from beneath the building somehow? Her breath hitched at the thought of them buried down there, entombed beneath a small mountain of stone and debris. “They’re alive?”

“Someone is. I think they’re banging something against the roof of the steel tunnel to signal us.”

Hope expanded in her chest, huge and painful. Her heart hammered as she hurried over the debris to follow the two men. In what had been the manager’s office she found four others struggling to clear away the rubble from the trap door.

Her stomach twisted at the sight before her. The damage in here was bad, even worse than the rest of the bank.

She swallowed, terror gripping her as she took everything in. It seemed impossible that Tuck and the others could have survived the blast, let alone all the rubble caving in on them. Were they trapped in all the debris down there? She began clawing at the rubble, clearing everything she could, barely noticing the cuts and scrapes the rock opened up on her hands. All she cared about was freeing Tuck.

Her breath sawed in her ears as she struggled to move the debris. Sweat rolled down her back, down her temples. Some of the pieces were too big to move. The men struggled and strained to clear them, but it was no use.

One of them looked up at DeLuca, sweating and breathing hard as he spoke. “We need heavy equipment in here. No way we’re getting through all this, but I think I heard the pinging you were talking about too.”

They couldn’t wait for equipment, they had to dig them out
now
, and using heavy machinery could bring more debris down on top of them. Whoever was alive down there might be running out of air. “What about accessing them via the entry point?” She threw a worried glance at DeLuca, who pulled out his radio and keyed it.

“Grant, gimme a sitrep,” he commanded.

“Just accessing the tunnel now,” a male voice came back. “There’s a mound of rubble blocking the far end. We can hear someone at the other end but it’s pretty faint.”

“Well we’re not getting at them from here,” DeLuca muttered. “I’ll get crews in here to pull away the heavy stuff and in the meantime we’ll come to you and help clear the tunnel. Emergency responders standing by?”

“That’s affirm.”

“All right, we’re on our way to you.”

“Roger.”

Celida whirled and rushed back the way they’d come, not waiting for the others. She barely glanced at Spivey’s body as she ran back up the pile she’d climbed to get to him. There’d be a lot of bureaucratic red tape for her to deal with later and a mountain of paperwork to accompany it but she didn’t give a shit about any of that right now.

Nothing else mattered but finding out if Tuck was alive and then getting him the hell out of that tunnel.

When she emerged from the bank, fire crews were rushing toward her carrying their hoses. She jumped in the back of the SUV DeLuca and Travers climbed into. The drive was only a few minutes but it seemed to take forever. Cops and ambulance crews stood next to an opening in the sidewalk they’d cordoned off.

Bursting out of the vehicle, she ran for it. The group of men clustered around it parted and she faltered when she saw two men carrying another on a stretcher. She sucked in a breath when she saw Bauer laid out on it, clenched fists pressed to his eyes, his teeth bared in agony. Even from where she stood she could hear his low, animal growls of pain as they rushed him to one of the waiting ambulances.

Her gaze shot back to the tunnel entrance, her heart in her throat.
Tuck.

A cop held out his arm to stop her but she shoved past him and got her first look at the tunnel entrance. It looked like a regular manhole, with a metal ladder installed into the side of the access tunnel. Below that all she could see was blackness.

DeLuca and Travers came to stand beside her. DeLuca got back on the radio. “Grant, we’re here. What’s your status?”

“We’ve got more survivors.”

Celida wrapped her arms around her waist and prayed, her entire body locked in an agony of suspense.

“How many?” DeLuca asked.

“Five for sure. Still trying to locate the other two.”

Was Tuck one of the five?
Please let him be okay. Please, please, please
.

Another tense few minutes of silence passed and the waiting nearly killed her. Then Grant’s voice finally came through the radio. “We’re coming out with more wounded—we need three stretchers waiting.”

Celida spun around and ran for the closest ambulance.

****

Someone was calling his name.

A light slap to the side of his face. “Tuck. Tuck, you ugly bastard, say something.”

Evers. Evers was yelling at him.

He could smell dust and burned cordite.

“
Tuck
, come on, man. Look at me.”

Tuck peeled his eyes open, winced at the sudden flare of pain in his eyes as the beam of a flashlight blinded him. He tried to raise a hand to shield his eyes, found his arm was pinned. He looked down, found half his body buried by rock.

“Thank fuck. He’s still with us,” Evers called out. He started shoving at the rocks covering Tuck’s body.

That’s when the pain registered. Holy fuck, it felt like someone had beaten him all over with a sledgehammer. He sucked in a breath, wriggled to help free himself.

“Just stay still, man. Stay still until we can see how bad you’re hurt, okay?”

Tuck let his head drop back down, his helmet hitting with a soft
thunk
. “What happened?”

“You just about got blown to hell, buddy,” Evers answered as someone else ran over and started helping with the digging. Schroder, their medic.

“I think I did get blown to hell,” he muttered, wincing as one of them dislodged a big chunk of stone and rolled it off his right thigh. He remembered coming through the trap door, hitting Spivey with the EMP. He’d wounded him, then realized he was going to set off the explosives and tried to duck back into the tunnel. His last thought had been
this is it
.

He was extremely fucking grateful it hadn’t been.

Tuck took a better look around. Hell, it seemed like half the bank had fallen through with him. “Is everyone else okay?”

“Bauer’s hurting pretty bad, they already took him out. Think he fucked up his back. And Cruz got his bell rung pretty good. He’s kinda out of it right now. Other than that, I’d say we’re all damn lucky to still be breathing.”

Yeah, no doubt. When the weight pinning his right arm released, he bent it, fighting back a cry at the pain. Shit, that hurt.

“No, you lie still,” Schroder growled at him when he tried to sit up, planting a hand in the middle of Tuck’s chest and pressing to hold him down.

“I’m okay,” Tuck muttered.

“Yeah, we’ll see about that, and I’m trying to pay down more of my tab here, so just gimme a break,” Evers said, and finished clearing the rubble away from him. He started running his hands over Tuck’s body, checking for injuries. “Think anything’s broken?”

Tuck shook his head. “Just really fucking sore.”

“I’ll bet,” Schroder said as he gently palpated Tuck’s abdomen. “What about here? Any pain in your stomach, in your chest?”

“Nothing major. Let me the hell up, guys. Fucking Spivey’s still up there.”

“Doubt he’s breathing anymore, man,” Schroder said, his teeth a white flash in the darkness. “If it’s this bad down here, I can only imagine it’s worse up there.”

“Help me up,” Tuck snapped impatiently. Evers and Schroder both grabbed a hand and slowly helped haul him to his feet.

“You good?” Evers asked, bracing his body against Tuck’s as he winced. “Or you want us to carry you out?”

“Just help me walk, dammit.”

Evers started leading him down the tunnel while Schroder walked behind them, every step its own separate agony. His entire body was one gigantic bruise, and that was at the very least. A dull throb settled in the back of his skull and the insides of his ears hurt, too.

“Grant, we’re coming out,” Evers shouted down the darkened tunnel, his flashlight the only illumination.

“Roger that!”

“Grant’s down here?” Tuck asked.

“Other team came down to help dig us out. Apparently DeLuca and some others were trying from inside the bank but couldn’t get to us.”

“So Spivey must be dead then.” And all the hostages with him.

“Dunno. We’ll find out soon enough. Now shut up and lean on me until we get outta here.”

Tuck fell silent and did as he was told. Beat up as he was, there was no way he’d be able to crawl through all this mess on his own.

A faint light at the end of the tunnel appeared, getting brighter and brighter the closer they came to the entry point. Someone dropped down into the tunnel and started toward them. “You guys need a hand?”

Tuck opened his mouth to say no but Evers spoke before he could. “Gonna need help getting him up that ladder,” Evers called back.

When they reached the access tunnel Tuck recognized Grant standing there. “Hey,” he said.

“Glad you’re still with us, brother,” the other man said with a grin, then turned to call up the ladder to whoever was waiting above ground. “Last one coming up. Have a stretcher ready.”

The next few minutes passed in a blur of sweat and agony as they muscled him up the narrow access tunnel. Hands grabbed him from above and he looked up into Blackwell’s face, then DeLuca’s. He got several pats on the back and shoulders, all of which sent fresh flares of pain through him, and then he was weaving on his feet as they cleared the way for him.

He looked up, expecting to see a couple of EMTs bearing down on him with a stretcher, but his heart stuttered when the crowd shifted and Celida appeared. She stopped dead when she saw him, both hands flying up to cover her mouth and nose.

Then she dropped her hands and raced toward him, dark ponytail streaming behind her. He watched her face crumple a second before she reached him and a different kind of pain lit up in his chest. Beat up as he was, there was no way he couldn’t reach for her. He held out his arms just as her sob broke free and then she was plastered up against him, face buried in his throat and her arms tight around him.

He flinched at the embrace but held her close, startled and totally humbled at not only the public display of affection from her, but also the way she was sobbing into his neck. As though her heart had been broken at the thought of losing him.