White Hot (31 page)

Her stomach recoiled, but she forced herself to look for the third remaining tango—as Clint called them—Xing Guan, the team’s leader. But it was impossible to see most of the weather deck because of the angle up from the trawler.

Suddenly she spotted Clint’s dark form gliding up the ladder to the quarterdeck from below like a ghostly shadow, his black clothes gilded by the reds and oranges of the sun.

Her heart stalled. Did he know the leader was not with the others?

Of course he did. Conducting dangerous missions was his job. He probably knew the exact location of every person on board
Île de Cœur
.

Including her. He’d halted with his back against the outside bulkhead, next to the mess hall windows, and she realized with a start he was looking right at her. Obviously she was shit at hiding.

She licked her lips and smiled up at him, pretending bravery.

His mouth flicked in a tense curve, but his eyes seemed to soften as he gazed down at her. No doubt her imagination. Still, it sent a rush of warmth through her cold, trembling body.

He lifted a hand slightly and twirled his forefinger in a sign reminding her to check the trawler for company. Had he been keeping track of her movements? To be sure she was okay? Her heart swelled a little more. No one had ever taken care of her like he did.

At his signal, she figured he hadn’t seen anything alarming on board the trawler from where he stood, so she nodded, crawled out from her hiding place, grimacing from the pain in her hip, and cautiously limped toward the bridge door.

Clint’s breath hitched as he watched Samantha slip through
Eliza Jane
’s wheelhouse door, pause to glance back and give him a plucky smile through the rain-spattered window, then disappear down the companionway to the lower deck.

Wait.
Had she been limping?

And where the hell was the gun?
He’d
told
her to put the P226 in her hand the moment she got on the trawler and keep it there until he joined her.

Damn.

He inhaled through his nose and let it out slowly, steadying his splintered nerves. He hated this. Hate, hate, hated not being down there to help in case she ran into trouble.

She wouldn’t, he told himself confidently. She’d be fine. Besides,
Eliza Jane
was the safest place to be right now. If
Île de Cœur
was wired to blow, Samantha’s best chance of survival was being off the ship. At least he could take solace in that.

Besides, he’d sworn to himself he would
not
second-guess her any longer. He knew he could rely on her. On her intelligence, her instincts, and her abilities. When her emotions
weren’t involved, she made excellent decisions. It was only when she was too upset to think things through that she went off the deep end. And that was not going to happen here. She had just one assignment for this final operation—getaway driver. When it came to rescuing her crew, Captain Samantha Richardson could be relied on one hundred percent to fulfill that mission.

He tore his gaze away from her and checked his watch. She’d made good time. Just under three minutes had elapsed from her jump.

Now the rest was up to him.

Gathering himself inward as his grandfather taught him long ago, he closed his eyes and stilled his mind and body in preparation for the hunt. When he opened them a moment later he was centered and ready.

Swiftly, he eased over to the double doors that opened onto the mess hall, and bent to glance in past the edge of the glass door. The large room was empty, no one sitting at the long tables. Okay. The crew was probably confined in the wardroom. Good. It would be easier for him to take down the guard in the smaller space of the officers’ lounge.

He crossed in front of the mess and moved stealthily along the rear bulkhead to reach the lounge, which had a door and a window overlooking the narrow poop deck. The window’s curtains were pulled closed, as they’d been this morning, except for a narrow sliver at the center. A few steps farther down, the door’s curtain had been left open, probably so the guard could keep tabs on what was going on outside. Clint made sure he kept well away from it.

After a quick glance around the ship to make sure he was not being observed, Clint leaned in to peek through the narrow crack in the window curtains.

Inside, the wardroom was unlit except for the last pink rays of sunset that painted a surreal glow over the littered interior and the seven humans huddled together on two couches, and the man standing guard over them.

It was the tango he’d identified as probably being the team’s sniper. But for now the thin, long-haired man held a
T-85 submachine gun in his hands. His emotionless gaze rested on the door. His expression was neither bored nor attentive, but cold and impassive, as though totally unconcerned with the fates of either his captives or his own dead team members.

Fucking sociopath.

Clint shifted his focus to the bound and gagged crew, arrayed along the two couches in the same order they’d been in this morning.

Second Mate Lars Bolun had again placed himself closest to the guard—deliberately, no doubt—but his back was partially turned to the man. One of Bolun’s eye sockets had turned a livid shade of violet. His bruised cheek was swollen to twice its size, and the nasty cut on his temple was crusted with layers of blood. But Bolun’s good eye was hyperalert and had already fastened on Clint when he met the second mate’s gaze. Bolun didn’t move an eyelash, but Clint knew he’d been waiting for this moment ever since he’d gotten those short glimpses of him and Samantha this morning.

Bolun slowly flexed his fingers, bringing his taped wrists into view. His steel-hard expression said he was ready for anything, if Clint could manage to free his hands.

Clint nodded and tipped his chin at Carin, who sat catatonic at Bolun’s side with her head resting on his shoulder. The second mate lowered and raised his eyelids once to show he understood he’d have to ease her away.

Clint didn’t have a lot of options, or time for finesse. His only real weapon was the element of surprise, and he intended to use it. Although by the look of the Chinese sniper, Clint would be hard-pressed to surprise the bastard.

He planned to initiate his attack from the inside corridor, not from here on the deck where he might be seen. So he pointed to the rear door, the solid one behind the guard, then held up two fingers, letting Bolun know he’d be coming in that way in two minutes.

Bolun’s cracked and swollen lip curled in a malevolent parody of a smile. Clint mirrored it back at him.

Oh, yeah.

That guard didn’t stand an igloo’s chance in hell.

Sam stood in the shadows of
Eliza Jane
’s pilothouse and anxiously trained a pair of binoculars on Clint’s back. She hadn’t let him out of her sight since coming up from the lower deck a minute ago, where, much to her relief, she’d confirmed she was alone on board the trawler. The fog was starting to thicken as the rain increased. She prayed it wouldn’t obscure her view.

She shifted on her feet. Her hip throbbed like Rammstein’s woofer. She’d found a first aid kit and thrown some disinfectant on the deep puncture wound a shard of her notebook lid had gouged into her lower hip, so now it stung like a wasp. But she’d live. She just hoped she could soon say the same of Clint and her crew.

The good news was, the fact that a guard had not been posted onboard
Eliza Jane
—the hijackers’ only means of escape—was evidence their control over the situation was slipping big-time. She was more than gratified that despite being badly outnumbered and essentially powerless, she and Clint had managed to throw them so far off their game. Well. Clint had, anyway. She wasn’t sure how much she had contributed to the effort.

And he was about to deal them their fatal blow. If everything went according to plan, moments from now her crew would no longer be captive, and they’d all be cruising away at full speed, alive, and with Clint’s top secret data card still in his possession.

Clint ducked away from the window and crouch-ran the few paces back to the mess hall doors, then slid unobtrusively through them and disappeared. Her pulse kicked up.

She checked her watch. Five minutes and counting.

Right on time.

Even so, her mind filled with quiet terror that something would go wrong and he’d end up captured, too…or dead. She couldn’t go through the agony of losing him again! It
had been bad enough the first time she’d believed Clint had been killed—and that was before she’d realized how far she’d already fallen in love with him. The idea of losing him for real now turned her stomach to a boiling cauldron of eels.

She wished like crazy she could see what was happening inside
Île de Cœur
’s wardroom.

She sweated in fear, breath held painfully in her lungs, and waited.

All at once she saw the two tangos on the forward deck drop what they were doing and turn around. As one, they peered aft along the weather deck.

What now?
The whole midstructure lay between them and Clint, so she was certain—okay,
nearly
certain—they hadn’t seen him. But what the heck were they looking at?

Staying well back in the shadows of the trawler’s pilothouse so as not to be seen, she carefully scanned what she could of
Île de Cœur
’s decks with her binoculars—which because of the angle and the thickening fog was barely anything. Fear and frustration kneaded together in her chest. Could the Chinese squad leader suspect something had happened with the hostages and be running aft to check it out?

If only she could see!

Her heart pounding in her throat, Sam watched and waited for Clint to reappear. And waited. And waited.

All the while fighting an awful feeling in her gut that something was about to go terribly, terribly wrong.

The radio crackled to life.

Sam jumped about ten feet in the air, her pulse going into hyperspace.
What the
—

A curse flew from her lips just as a static-y female voice scratched out from the two-way radio mounted above her head.

“
Eliza Jane
,
Eliza Jane
. This is the USS
George Washington
attempting to contact anyone aboard your vessel. Please acknowledge, over.”

Sam blinked up at the unit, torn by indecision whether or not to pick up the mike and answer. She recognized the voice coming from the ancient speaker; it was DeAnne Lovejoy. Sam desperately wanted to talk to the woman from the State Department and find out when help would arrive. But what if one of the hijackers was also listening in? She’d give away her position, and thus Clint’s plan, by answering.

The radio crackled again, and DeAnne Lovejoy’s voice came through once more. But this time the words were unrecognizable. She was speaking Chinese.

Startled, Sam darted a gaze back up at
Île de Cœur
’s forward deck. But the attention of the two hijackers hadn’t wavered. Their gazes remained glued to something out of Sam’s line of sight. Obviously, they hadn’t heard the radio call.

Oh, what the heck.
She grabbed the microphone.

“
George Washington
, this is
Eliza Jane
.” She dialed down the volume, in case the sound carried, and demanded, “Where the hell are you people, over?”

“Captain Richardson?” came the relieved response.

“Yeah, it’s me, over.”

“Are you and the Lieutenant Commander all right?”

“So far,” she returned. “But things may get interesting any minute now.” She searched the poop deck for any sign of Clint’s progress. “At least I’m hoping it will,” she murmured under her breath when nothing had changed. “When’s the cavalry arriving, over?”

There was a brief pause. “Ninety minutes.”

Sam swore. “Are you
kidding
me?” It would all be over by then. One way or another.

“I’ve been in contact with the Chinese government,” Ms. Lovejoy hurried to say, “negotiating for them to intervene with the, uh, pirates, over.”

Read: Trying to get them to call off their damn hit squad.

“Good luck with that,” Sam muttered, then pressed the “talk” button again. “Let me guess. They’re denying all knowledge, over.”

She thought she heard a sigh. “I remain hopeful of their cooperation, over.”

Right.
And there was some swampland in Alaska Sam could sell her, too.

“Any news of the Coast Guard cutter?” she asked, and skimmed the darkening sky with her binoculars. She’d been worried about them, praying no one had been killed. “Was anyone hurt?” A pale spiral of smoke drifted in the foggy sky toward
Île de Cœur
, but the burning vessel remained frustratingly blocked from view. Was it getting closer? Or was it just the wind blowing the smoke…

“Communications are still down,” Ms. Lovejoy said. She seemed to read her thoughts. “We’ll be there as soon as humanly possible, Captain Richardson. The commander has the carrier on afterburners.” She must have finally realized where Sam was, and abruptly said, “Wait…are you on the
Eliza Jane
? How did—”