AN: Part one of two here.


It took a certain level of experience – not to mention a healthy dose of gut instinct – to recognize the cut-off point between playing nice and protecting your own. SAS Lieutenant James Galindez, aka Wolf, had always been excellent at identifying that line.

He was seeing it now.

MI6 had issued strict orders to keep collateral damage to a minimum, but damn it, he wasn't a miracle worker. If protecting his men and ensuring the success of the rescue mission meant a body count, there'd damn well have to be one; so, he wasted no time on inner conflict when his first sight upon slamming the door open involved Eva Stellenbosch making a bloody, violent mockery of The Line.

His gaze flickered from Stellenbosch's raised gun to Cub, who was scrabbling at the fingers gripping his throat, face flushed with exertion.

Seeing that beast of a woman strangling Cub would've been plenty, but the drawn weapon sealed it. Sparing no time for hesitation, Wolf hefted his gun (much preferable to the anesthetic darts, which were like carrying a slingshot to a gunfight) and fired three bullets into her back.

Red spattered the floor and wall as she staggered and dropped to all fours. She made a weak movement as if to lift the gun, but Alex had the presence of mind to stamp on her hand and kick it out of reach.

Stellenbosch choked once, twice – a wet, nasty gurgle of a sound – and went limp amidst a spreading lake of blood.

Approaching, Wolf nudged her in the ribs with his boot. She didn't so much as twitch.

Satisfied, he stepped over her prone form on his way to Alex, who sat slumped against the wall, massaging his throat. His eyes were locked on the blood, watching it soak into the carpet like spilled punch.

"Gonna be alright?" Wolf grunted, offering him a hand up. His gaze lingered on the shadows marring Alex's neck. Five reddened imprints; no doubt it would bruise spectacularly.

"I've had worse," Alex rasped out.

Wolf didn't like the sound of that. Now was no time for an interrogation, though – they still had a threat to neutralize and a bunch of brats to haul to safety.

Gunfire cracked somewhere above, as if to punctuate his thoughts. A body plummeted past the window. Its ghostly uniform – cold weather camo – looked sickeningly familiar.

Where . . . ? The roof, it had to be. Hadn't Alex mentioned a helipad up there?

"Shit," Wolf breathed, and bolted for the door.

He was halfway down the hall before he realized he didn't know the way. He whipped around to ask Alex, mouth open to shout, and almost ended up braining the teenager with his assault rifle instead.

"This way!" Alex shot past, trailing a line of bloody boot-prints.

Wolf sprinted after him, adding 'quick on the uptake' to his growing mental list. The teen hadn't wasted precious time asking for a destination. No spy worth their salt would've needed to.

Maybe Double-O-Nothing wasn't a nothing after all.


A stairway, a door, a deserted hall. More stairs, these ascending to a trapdoor in the ceiling. On the other side he heard the growl of an engine and the all-too-familiar thwack of blades splitting air. Wolf held no fondness for helicopters, but this one he found particularly distasteful. If he didn't stop it, the target would escape. He couldn't let that happen, not when he was so close to fulfilling the objective.

Alex started to climb, but Wolf yanked him back. "Me first," he instructed curtly. "Unless you'd rather be a sacrificial lamb?"

"Not particularly."

"Sure seems like it," Wolf grumbled, grabbing hold of the handle. "It's a firefight and you don't even have a bloody weapon!"

"Not for lack of trying," Alex retorted, but he stepped aside and let Wolf take point.

Crouched low and weapon at the ready, Wolf hefted the door up one-handed. He almost dropped it again when a bullet pinged off the ceiling to his left. SAS training had hard-wired survival reflexes into him, though, and he jammed his gun barrel through the gap between door and ceiling without a moment's pause. He picked off the man who'd fired, and then a second, with lightning efficiency.

The cracks of his weapon firing were almost fully outstripped by the deafening rumble of the helicopter's engine and blades. It was still powering up, he noted – the blades didn't sound as if they were at full speed.

Wolf shouldered the door wide and sprang up, scanning his surroundings quickly before sprinting towards the helicopter. Two bodies – both victims of Wolf's trigger finger – littered the rooftop, but no SAS. As expected; the man he'd stationed up here lay in a snowbank four stories below, probably with a neat bullet hole through his head.

A shot thumped against the open trapdoor behind him. He tracked its source to the cockpit, where a bald man with tinted glasses was attempting to flip switches and aim his weapon at the same time.

Wolf returned fire. One, two, three shots. All close but not close enough. The wind from the rotors was wreaking havoc on his aim.

Grief directed one last parting shot in their direction, literally, and Alex narrowly avoided it as he emerged from the trapdoor. Then Grief dropped his weapon in favor of manning the controls, and something changed in the engine's sound quality. With a growing sense of horror, Wolf saw the runners begin to rise from the surface of the helipad.

He let out a stream of increasingly foul language, switching his aim to the rotors instead. Not enough time, not enough time!

A small blur darted past him, traversing the roof with startling speed, and Wolf barely had time to register Alex's presence before the teen caught hold of the nearest runner – still only at waist height, as Grief was proving himself an unpracticed pilot – and scrambled into the cargo hold.

No no no no oh fucking hell no.

The prospect of jumping aboard a helicopter steered by a madman was horrifying. Wolf had never failed a mission, though, and he couldn't stomach the thought of butchering his record with this. Besides, the kid was already up there.

Nothing else for it - he would have to follow.

No time to hesitate. The chopper's belly was head-high and still rising. Shit. Shit. He bolted across the roof and lunged at the nearest running board, barely flinging his arms 'round it in time. He scrambled to hook a leg over the runner before it picked up too much speed and height.

Skin-crawling terror enveloped him as the chopper cleared the rooftop and veered off towards the ski jump. Fifty feet of open air separated him from the ground, certain death imminent if he lost his grip or miscalculated even a titch.

He froze then, hugging the cold metal like a koala would a tree, lungs tight and heart jackhammering in his chest.

A hand seized his forearm from above, offering leverage, and he used it to heave himself upright and stand atop the runner. From there, it was a simple (albeit slightly frantic) process to crawl through the cargo door, grasping that hand like the lifeline it was.

He sprawled on the cargo area floor, still gasping for air, and met Alex's adrenaline-bright eyes. The boy seemed surprised at his presence; he likely hadn't figured on Wolf making a leap-of-faith onto his least favorite object with a motor. Wolf had privately coined all helicopters "aerial death traps" and Alex was well aware of this animosity.

No time to think about that now.

Wolf ruthlessly quashed the creeping terror which threatened to immobilize him. Instead, he ejected his empty gun clip, traded in for a fresh one, and rolled to his knees. He spared a glance at Alex – crouched, rummaging through the cargo nets for a weapon – before edging his way towards the front.

Grief, unfortunately, had taken note of his unwanted passengers. He angled his gun backwards and fired blindly, sending half a dozen bullets ricocheting around the cargo area. Alex ducked behind a wooden supply crate and, though he was peppered by splinters, didn't suffer any additional injuries.

Wolf wasn't so fortunate. A fiery line of pain jagged through his right thigh, and when he looked down blood had already begun to spider along the inside seam of his white fatigues. The wound looked perilously close to his crotch, but everything important felt like it was still intact. He'd sure as hell've noticed that.

This was no time to inspect or treat the injury, but the lack of breath-hitching agony or gushing fountains of blood led him to believe that it wasn't life-threatening. Ignoring the red beads dotting the floor and the trickle of wet, sticky blood down his thigh, he returned fire.

This time, the bullet clipped Grief. It had to've; there was no other explanation for the sudden shudder as the chopper rocked to the left, throwing Wolf off-balance. He landed on his back with surprising force and let out an involuntary grunt of pain. That was all he had time for before he realized he was sliding, still on his back, towards the wide open door – and beyond, hundreds of feet of nothing.

He latched onto a seat just in time. Both shoulders protested with twin stabs of pain as his body wrenched to a halt.

Numerous small debris avalanched past him. Gloves, a length of yellow nylon rope, boxes of spare ammunition. A coffee mug smacked him in the face as it tumbled past. One of his feet, scrabbling at open air in the hopes of finding purchase, sent it on a brief upward trajectory before it plummeted to shatter in the forest below.

The chopper bobbed again, then tilted at a thirty degree angle. Absurdly, Wolf wondered if this was what a buoy felt like during a storm at sea.

Just then, a policeman's-issue flashlight whipped through the air and slammed into the back of Grief's head. Kid's a good shot, he might've noted with approval if he weren't clutching the seat for dear life, too disoriented to think much more than fuck, fuck, fuck!

The chopper jerked repeatedly, swerving to the right, left, right, down. Then it leveled out for a few seconds. He took advantage of the opportunity to yank himself upright, get behind a seat, and put a bullet through the back of Grief's neck.

Grief slumped forward, blood spouting. His weight tipped the joystick, and the chopper hunched forward like a diving bird of prey.

Wolf slammed into the seat face-first with considerable force, but he ignored the pain. Vaulting the space to the cockpit, he shoved Grief's prone form off the control panel and seized the joystick. He righted them with a sharp yank.

Alex, who'd been rushing forward with the same intent, skidded in the blood pooling near the pilot's seat. He grabbed Wolf's shoulder to catch his balance, prompting another shudder from the helicopter.

Wolf opened his mouth to snarl a warning, but by then Alex had already released him and careened into the co-pilot's seat. More blood pumped sluggishly from Grief's decimated jugular, streaking across Alex's boots.

While Alex was preoccupied with avoiding Grief's bodily fluids, Wolf was focusing on a bigger issue. He gazed out through the blood-speckled cockpit window. Nothing looked familiar, and the tracks visible ahead of them were tiny, like a toy train set. How had they gotten so far so quickly?

The landscape stretched out beyond the tracks, lightly sloped now that the majority of the mountain was behind them. Its thick forest and bristling underbrush might have been breathtaking at another time – possibly in multiple ways, if his dislike for heights reared its ugly head again.

Right then, though, all it did was drop the bottom out of his stomach.

There was nowhere to land. They really, really needed somewhere to land - as soon as humanly possible.

"I don't suppose you can fly this bloody thing?" Alex asked, voice tight with stifled panic. The teen seemed to have reached the same conclusion as Wolf. His face, though pale, was remarkably composed.

Wolf notched another mental point for him as he shook his head.

"No. Controls are fucked up, anyway." He jiggled the joystick from left to right to demonstrate, careful to keep it at the same tilt; nothing happened. Turning around was not an option.

Alex's gaze followed his own to the panel above the joystick, where a neat bullet hole had shattered a gauge and severed a number of half-exposed wires. Even as they watched, smoke began to curl up from the damaged area, and a few sparks spat out.

An errant one caught Wolf's wrist, singeing skin and hair. He gritted his teeth and made a concentrated effort not to move his hand. Alex saw the flinch, though, and tugged his hat off, revealing sweaty fair hair. He draped the hat over both Wolf's hand and the joystick - no point in letting it happen again.

He vanished into the rear of the chopper, boots squelching.

"Any parachutes back there?" Wolf called out. The panel sparked again, peppering his jacket sleeve with pinprick-tiny burns. He raised his free hand to his face, brushing at the wetness trailing down his forehead. His sleeve came away smeared red.

"No!" Alex's reply was almost drowned out by the engine, the quality of which had shifted from a growl to a sickly, rattling whine. Wolf swore quietly. Even if he'd known how to land the damn thing and could find a convenient open field, they probably wouldn't make it to the ground without turning themselves into a giant fireball.

Something clattered in the back. He craned his neck, but Alex's body blocked his view. Items - what hadn't tumbled out during the firefight - started to pile up on the floor as Alex discarded them one by one.

Finally, long after Wolf had grown impatient (and increasingly nervous, owing to the engine's declining state of health), the teen returned with a length of thick rope. It looked strong enough to hold their weight, but the prospect of dangling from a wrecked helicopter on a rope didn't inspire much more optimism than dying in a fiery crash.

"Take us in low," Alex instructed. He knelt to tie the rope around a hand-hold by the rear door, securing it as tightly as possible. He knotted a small tool box to the end as an anchor and lowered it down. Then he picked something up, trampled over the detritus on the floor to reach Wolf, and presented him with a roll of duct tape.

They both wrapped their hands to minimize rope burns, saving a couple feet for the joystick.

A tense pause hung in the air before Alex took a steadying breath and said, "Okay, do it now."

Wolf angled them lower and lower until they were skimming above the treetops. Then he eased the speed lever down, praying all the while that it actually was the speed lever and not the radio volume or something equally useless.

He held the joystick steady while Alex taped it into place. Then he gingerly released it, and when they didn't go into a sudden nose dive, he exhaled the breath he'd been holding.

Alex accepted his hat back and crammed it on as they exited the cockpit and gathered round the doorway, crouching. Wolf picked up the rope and rolled it between his fingers, jaw clenched tight. An irregular patter of red drops dotted the floor beneath him, evidence that his thigh was not coping well with the constant jostling.

"You first," Alex insisted. The tilt of his chin exuded stubbornness on a level Wolf had only ever seen in his own family. The Galindez's were legendary for their tenacity, and their arguments even more-so. Now wasn't the time to be surprised that the kid had guts, though. The chopper gave another shudder, its engine sputtering ominously.

Wolf darted a glance below and swore. It came out strangled. This wasn't how he wanted to go out. He'd never expected a particularly long life, but twenty-eight was still too early for his tastes. Images of the ground rushing up to meet him, visible through the cockpit's bloody glass, flooded his mind, but still he couldn't move. His boots felt nailed to the floor.

He tried to hood the desperation in his eyes when he turned to Alex, but judging from the boy's face, he didn't manage it.

"Push me," he blurted.

Alex visibly wavered. Kicking a parachute-clad, healthy soldier out of a plane was one thing . . . but shoving an injured man, paralyzed with fear, whose survival relied on his ability to keep a tight grip on the rope? That was practically murder.

"For God's sakes, Cub. Fucking push me!" he snarled, fists clenching convulsively on the rope.

Brief hesitation, and then -

"I'm sorry." Alex slammed a hand into the gap between his shoulder blades. Wolf overbalanced and pitched forward, his breath frozen in panic.