White Hot (28 page)

Outside the cab, the air went abruptly and eerily silent. Clint whipped around. The tangos must have stormed the trolley and halted the explosion of fireworks. They wouldn’t be happy they hadn’t found the culprit setting them off. He itched to peek over the rim of the window.

Meanwhile the woman droned on. “—am aware of what has given rise to this incident, and I’ll do everything in my power to resolve the situation favorably.”

He returned his attention to her and gritted his teeth. Situation?
Incident?
That’s what the State Department called one man dead, seven brutalized hostages, and two people evading capture like rats in a—

“Wait,” the woman on the phone shouted. “I’m getting something for you from the Coast Guard vessel.” There was a pause, then she said, “
WMEC-39
has received and understood your message. They’ve come about, and are closing in. The captain says he’ll standby for my—”

Suddenly there was a loud pop coming from the forward deck, and a whistling whine whizzed out over the sea.

A surge of instant, icy horror flooded Clint’s veins. He knew that sound. Swearing viciously, he flung the phone aside and lurched up to the window, searching for a telltale tracer. There! A glistening thread spun through the sky from
Île de Cœur
’s bow in a graceful arc toward the approaching Coast Guard cutter.

Oh.

Shit
.

In dismay, Clint watched the end of the thread explode. Three seconds later, the cutter’s bridge burst into a fireball of flame.

Sam grabbed for the sat phone before it hit the deck and shattered. “What’s happening?” she cried, pulling it against her chest like a recovered football.

“
Fuck!
” Clint growled, and ducked down, spinning away from the window. His face was etched with a volatile mix of fury, disbelief, and a powerful emotion she’d never seen before.

“Clint, you’re scaring me.”

His eyes clashed with hers. The look in them scared her even more. “They blew it up,” he gritted out.

Her lips parted. She tried to sense the feel of an explosion somewhere on board…but nothing had changed. “Blew what up?” she asked in confusion.

“The cutter.”

“What?”

“Well, the cutter’s bridge. Obviously one antitank rocket isn’t enough to blow up a ship of that size. But taking out the wheelhouse—”

“Sends a hell of a message,” she completed, stunned that the hijackers would up the stakes this high. She stared
at him. The question was, who was the message meant for?

He swiped a hand across his mouth, then muttered, “Shit,” and jumped up once again to look through the window.

“Get down!” she said anxiously, tugging furiously at his pant leg. “Are you nuts? They’ll see you!”

He let out a grim laugh. “I doubt that. Things are about to get very—”

The last word was drowned out by a deafening explosion coming from the forward deck. The crane rattled and shook under them. She grabbed on to the console base with white knuckles until the worst of the shuddering stopped.

“My God!” She leapt up to join him, shaking like a leaf, and not from the shock waves. “What the hell was that?”

Below, the hijackers stood as motionless as the ashen citizens of Pompeii, apparently as stunned as she was.

“And then there were five,” he said, sounding grimly self-satisfied.

She glanced at him but was momentarily distracted when the crane’s metal claw and net swung past the window. The wind had really picked up. “What?”

“Remember I told you I sabotaged one of the rocket launchers I found on
Eliza Jane
?”

Right. She swallowed a sudden sense of dread as the Chinese commander snapped out of it and started barking orders, drawing her attention back to the deck below. At the shouts, the other hijackers sprang into action. One went forward to check on the men who’d been firing the rocket launcher, another surged up the ladder to
Île de Cœur
’s own bridge, presumably to monitor radio traffic, just as the man guarding the crew slammed out of the mess hall, teeth bared and machine gun clutched at the ready.

Well, better late than never.

Five
, Clint had said. So where was the fifth guy?

“Hello?
Hello
?” a teeny-tiny feminine voice said from somewhere nearby, barely audible. “Are you there? Walker, what’s happening?”

Sam started, realizing she was still holding the sat
phone, and apparently whomever Clint had been speaking with was still on the line. She pulled the phone away from her chest where she’d had a death grip on it, and grasped Clint’s bicep. “Your friend sounds worried.”

Hell, so was she. Clint seemed to think this development was a good thing, but she didn’t. Those men down there were angry.
Really
angry.

Clint barely glanced at the phone she held out to him with a tremulous hand, but did a double take at her, ending with a death glare when he realized she was standing next to him. He put a hand to her shoulder and shoved her down below the window. “Goddamn it, Samantha!” He made a noise of frustration. “Do you
want
them to see you?” He ignored the phone.

She barely refrained from gritting her teeth. Had she not just said the same thing to him?

“Hi,” she said into the mouthpiece, focusing her energy on trying to get them out of there instead. “We’re fine,” she told the woman on the other end. “For the moment. But Lieutenant Commander Walker is, um, busy.”

There was a pause. “Doing what, exactly?” came the clipped response.

Sam blinked, her fear temporarily abated by the woman’s tone. “This is Captain Samantha Richardson, commander of
Île de Cœur
. To whom am I speaking, exactly?”

Sam listened as the woman impatiently gave her name and went through her State Department credentials. Call her suspicious, but seriously, this woman could be anyone. How did the Coast Guard dispatcher know DeAnne Lovejoy actually was who she claimed to be?

She also noticed the background sounds on the phone had gone silent.

“What happened to all the noise?” Sam asked Ms. Lovejoy warily, and lowered herself to the floor, keeping her own voice at a whisper.

“Pardon?”

“The engine noise. You had to shout before when you were talking to Lieutenant Commander Walker.”

There was shuffling on the other end of the line. “We landed. On the
George Washington
. Look—”

She was cut off by the blare of a loudspeaker announcing an all-clear-on-deck in standard navy lingo. Then a youthful male voice cut excitedly over hers that the captain was expecting Ms. Lovejoy in the wardroom, ma’am, ASAP, and something more Sam couldn’t make out.

At that, all doubts evaporated from her mind in a cloud of relief. The USS
George Washington
was a Nimitz-class aircraft carrier stationed out of the navy base at Yokosaka, Japan.
Île de Cœur
had crossed paths with her several times on the leviathan’s patrol circuit around the Pacific Rim.

Wow.
Had someone actually sent the navy out to rescue her ship? Her father maybe? Had the Coast Guard notified Richardson Shipping and—

“Please, Captain Richardson, tell me what’s going on out there,” DeAnne Lovejoy interrupted her thoughts, clearly alarmed. “I’m getting reports that both you and the Coast Guard are under attack.” The woman’s concern was palpable, even over the phone.

“Yes, but probably not how you think,” Sam said, still keeping her voice as low as possible. The sounds of the antitank rocket explosions had subsided, and she could no longer hear the hijackers’ shouts. She shot Clint a questioning look, but he just returned another frown, so with an eye roll she tucked herself back under the console to please him, and quickly outlined for DeAnne Lovejoy what had transpired over the past few minutes, then answered the State Department officer’s few precise questions concerning the takeover and the crew.

“I’m worried about retaliations,” Sam told her. “Because of Clint’s sabotaged antitank launcher. Damn, I was an idiot for setting off those fireworks. I thought— Oh, hell, I wasn’t thinking,” she lamented with an edge of despair. “I saw the cutter turning about and knew I had to get it to turn back any way I could. I never dreamed something like this would happen.”

“Who could know?” Ms. Lovejoy returned, not unkindly.
“You did what you thought was best. No one will blame you for that.”

She gave a soft snort. “Yeah. Tell that to my father,” she muttered. Not that it mattered what the old bastard thought. Sam harbored no delusions. Her job was already lost, and with it any interest she held in her father’s eyes.

“Your father? Jason Richardson?”

The query surprised her. “Yes.” Could she be wrong?
Had
it been her father who’d pulled strings to call in the navy? “Have you spoken to him?” She cringed inwardly, hating how she sounded.
Needy.
Like she actually gave a damn.

“Uh, no,” DeAnne Lovejoy said, but with a circumspection that raised a red flag immediately in Sam’s mind.

“But somebody else did.” It wasn’t a question.

Sam heard a puffed-out breath.

“Yes.”

Her respect for the woman increased a little. “What did he say?” Sam asked, sitting up straighter. “He must be worried.” She grimaced.
Fool.
“About the ship, I mean.”

Ms. Lovejoy cleared her throat delicately. “Of course he’s worried. But he has the utmost faith in your abilities.”

Sam understood why Ms. Lovejoy worked in the diplomatic corps.

“That’s a lie and we both know it,” Sam said, deflecting the hurt before it could twist inside her even more. “Anyway, I’m worried, too. About the crew. That crazy Xing Guan has already killed one of them, and—”

Suddenly the cab door swung open with a loud smack. She whipped her gaze up.

Omigod
.

A gun was pointing straight at her. Held by the missing hijacker—the fifth man.

Her heart seized. She dropped the phone.

The douche bag smiled.

She whispered, “Oh, crap.”

Before the man had a chance to shoot, or even blink, Clint was on him. He’d been half expecting the guy.

He lashed out with a crushing slash to the man’s wrist, sending the pistol flying, then followed that with a combination of a chop to his throat and a powerful fist to his temple. The man went down like a rock, landing in a heap at Samantha’s feet.

She jerked her shoes away from him with a croaked curse. “Holy cr—!” Then darted a look at Clint, her expression a volatile mix of stunned and wonder.

He dragged the tango’s unconscious body fully inside the cab, and in a fluid motion snapped the guy’s neck. “Now they’re down to four,” he told her. “Time to make our move.”

“Wh-what?”

Her eyes were huge. With abject horror. At him, without doubt.

What the hell. Now she knew who he really was.

He picked up the dead man’s weapon. It was an old-school SIG P226 Navy—formerly standard issue to U.S.
Navy SEALS—and he wondered grimly how the man had acquired it. Now he felt even less remorse about killing the bastard. He slid the weapon into his waistband next to his own. The serial number could be traced and the owner’s unit notified.

Clint peered around the cab door. “Come on,” he urged, beckoning Samantha with a hand, but he couldn’t quite meet her eyes. “It’s clear.”

Her bottom lip was clamped between her teeth, and her face was pale as sea foam. She wordlessly scooted out from under the control panel, carefully avoiding touching the dead man.

“We need to go fast,” Clint warned, preparing to climb down to the deck at top speed. But he paused for a split second and studied her. “You going to be okay?”

She nodded. He could see she was struggling. But to her credit she wasn’t losing it. And the hell of it was, she still seemed to trust him. He didn’t have time to analyze the emotions that set to roiling in the pit of his stomach—and clutching at his heart.

And she could be pregnant with his baby
.

Jesus.
He really couldn’t think about this now.

After a final check to be sure the four remaining operators still had their attention elsewhere, he launched himself down the ladder, half sliding like one of Ma Bell’s finest, and landing in a squat on the balls of his feet. He slid in next to the king post and blended, glancing up to signal Samantha. She was already halfway down.