Standard disclaimers apply. I don't own any of these characters, please don't sue.
-M-
The op started exactly the way they'd planned it.
It only took two cars to fully disrupt traffic. One asshole in the passing lane to slow it down, and one asshole in the driving lane, basically pacing the asshole in the left. The two German operatives perfectly replicated the driving conditions on almost every American highway in the entire US of A. Together, over the course of about twenty miles, they were able to put about thirty yards between the semi's convoy and the traffic behind it.
The traffic in front, they couldn't do quite as much about. Knowing roughly how heavy the semi was, Jill had calculated its safe stopping distance, and that's where the Germans rolled out the big guns. Two RMMV HX2 military trucks, one blocking each lane, trundling directly out of the treeline. They had their German contact, Kurt, to thank for knowing exactly where the German po-po had created their hiding places when looking for anything suspicious moving between the now-defunct border of Germany and Austria.
Behind the convoy, a third truck made its way out of the treeline. This one was smaller, basically a jeep with a fifty cal mounted on the back. No one was expecting the Turks to try to ram their way out the back – there was no way the semi could turn around in the restricted space.
Jack and Sterling had put soldiers on the ground as well, to get any trapped civilians safely out of the line of fire. Exactly as expected, the two lead cars of the convoy braked hard and took up defensive positions in front of the semi. Riley watched via satellite as the passengers of those cars got out and took cover, but they didn't open fire, and they let the men and women in camo start spiriting the few civilians in front of the convoy to safety behind the HX2s.
Riley would cheerfully have given up coffee for a month if it would have gotten her a second monitor. She was forced to toggle back and forth between windows to keep track of everything, first by satellite image, then by infrared.
Despite her limited view, she could see that the trailing cars had done the same as the lead cars, protecting the rear entrance of the semi. Those Turks also exited their vehicles, taking cover behind the engine blocks and readying themselves to lay down cover fire.
And then . . . they all just sat there, apparently with their thumbs up their asses, and stared at each other.
Riley watched tensely, listening to coms as the men counted off and moved into position. The infrared image showed them fanning out around the convoy, and she watched the two bright orange dots she knew were Jack and Tunne take up positions in the treeline to the west of the convoy.
Beside her, Saito leaned forward, studying the images. He didn't touch the bed, and he didn't touch her. "Hey, Ri, can you get me on a channel with just John?"
She toggled over to the appropriate window and made a quick adjustment, then gave him a nod.
Saito straightened and tapped his ear. "Yo, partner." He paused a second, then gave a half-laugh. His expression, however, was somber.
"Yeah, I know. I owe you gyoza and beer." Another pause. "Listen, don't forget I'm not out there to save your ass right now. You watch your back."
Riley did her best not to eavesdrop, focusing on the heat signatures of Team Archer as they moved in. On the main com channel, she could hear the echo of someone addressing the convoy in Turkish over a bullhorn.
Demanding an unconditional surrender, probably. Which no one believed was going to happen.
"I know, man. Do the best you can." Saito huffed out a sigh. ". . . back atcha." Then he turned back to her. "You can put him back on the main freq now. Thanks."
"No problem." She isolated John's coms and reassigned the broadcasting frequency, and right on cue, both the satellite and infrared images flickered. At nearly the same time, one of Riley's alerts went off.
"Looks like I'm up," she muttered, and toggled over to her connection with the satellite.
Oh no you don't, bitch. You're in my house now.
No matter how good this Hatice Iris was, she was on a shitty hotspot, and even if she had the skills, she just didn't have the bandwidth to go toe to toe with Phoenix.
"Hacker's taken the bait," Riley declared into her mic. "Sending the bogus data now."
-M-
In cover of trees, on the west side of the highway, Jack settled into position, easing behind the optics on the Haenel RS9. He'd rather have a Barrett, but beggars couldn't be choosers, and he was lucky he was handed decent gear at all. It wasn't a bad rifle, and he used it to scan the semi in detail, trying to find any seam or indicator of how the wood load could be opened.
There had to be some way to do it from the inside, and without heavy machinery, but the natural patterns to the stacked two by eights made it almost impossible to tease out.
On his right, Tunne was doing the same. He surprised Jack when he spoke, his voice low.
"Hey Mom. I know I shoulda called, but I got caught up playin' with my friends."
Based on the tone, he was not speaking to his actual mother. He was also clearly not on the main op channel.
"Damn right. Always nice to hear from you, but we're kinda in the middle of something." Just like Delta, Green Berets were trained not to engage in long conversations when they were behind the scope, and John had leaned up slightly away from the rifle.
He paused for a few moments, and Jack turned his head just slightly, sending a glare his way. "If that's Si, tell him to quit mother hennin' us."
John ignored him. "I hear ya. God knows this washed up has-been sure won't." He shot Jack an evaluative look. "I definitely drew the short straw on babysitting duty."
Dalton made a small adjustment to which finger he'd extended along the top of the trigger cage, and Tunne grinned despite himself.
"Listen, we're about to piss these fuckers right off. If any of 'em are still on the loose, they're gonna try for a cheap win. You two stay above ground, you hear me?"
Saito apparently agreed to John's terms, and then the other agent leaned up a little, and adjusted the com in his ear.
Jack gave him a sour look. "Who's babysittin' who here? Ain't that my line?"
Tunne sniffed, and gave the com one more wiggle. Then he settled back into position. "Dalton, I'm only gonna say this once. We're takin' this guy alive. Period. If you can't keep your shit together, I'm putting one in your vest and dragging you back to the kiddie pool. You copy?"
Jack put his attention back on the semi, which showed no signs of suddenly opening and expelling their target.
"Five by five."
A bullet to the head was a kindness he wasn't interested in dispensing. To any of them.
Whoever was on the bullhorn tried again to get a surrender, managing to actually sound pissed off this time, and there was no response from the semi. Jack estimated that only a few minutes had gone by, which could mean they were tryin' to come up with an escape plan. And there was no telling what kind of hardware they might have in that semi with them. Or in the cars.
Jack reached up for his radio. "Archer Archer, anybody got clear line of sight into those vehicles, over?"
There was a brief pause. "No, but their hacker is definitely trying to take away our eyes." Riley didn't sound terribly upset about it, and she'd replied on Phoenix coms, not the radio. "I'm still feeding her bad data. All she can see are six men on either side of the convoy."
There were three times that number of German soldiers, ready to pop gas and move in on the men in the cars.
Faking the satellite data was key to their plan. The colonel would think they simply hadn't had time to do more than rally the nearest garrison, and send the same limited number of operators they'd had back at the lock. If he was going to make a break for it, the driver of the semi would choose the west side, where the shoulder was both wider and more gently sloped. They had spikes in the tall grass ready to take out the tires, and then Archer would move in.
Once the men were well and truly pinned, the helo carrying Wolff and Weber, currently flying in circles a mile away, would be permitted to land, and they'd toss a walkie to Aydin. He could roll over and surrender or watch his men get slaughtered. Jack honestly didn't care which.
Either way, this encounter was ending with the colonel headed for a hole so deep and so dark that he'd beg someone to hang him up on the wall like he'd done to Mac.
The only part Jack didn't like was the part where Kadir Hakan and Clarice got to walk. Riley wouldn't let them out of her sight, but it still rubbed him all kinds of the wrong way. Both of them had laid hands on his teammates. His boss. His partner. His little girl. Just the thought of them getting another crack at the people he cared about made Jack's blood run cold.
These guys were too good to mess around with. If the hacker or the sergeant slipped their net a second time, the next time Jack saw them, it'd be from the wrong end of a sniper's bullet.
"Archer Archer, everyone west of the convoy, sound off, over."
Sterling and his boys started the round, and Jack let John handle their call-in. Last thing they needed was some hero breaking position before the colonel made his move -
"Jack . . ." It was Riley, on coms. "Four people just showed up on the heatmap - I didn't see where they came from. They're at your nine o'clock-"
That was all the warning Jack got before the hiss of an AT-4 rocket informed him the plan had just gone to shit, and the ass end of one of the RMMV HX2 military trucks went up in a fireball.
Immediately after, there was a second hiss, and the truck that had pulled in to block the convoy's rear took a direct hit.
The radio erupted with noise at nearly the same moment, and Jack sensed more than saw or heard Tunne break position to get a bead on the origin of the rockets' exhaust trails. Jack took a measured breath, let out half, and fired. He put two rounds into the cab of the semi, and confirmed blood spatter on the inside of the windshield. Then he abandoned the sniping rifle, yanking the sling of the MK16 over his shoulder as he sprinted after John.
"Somebody get those tires!" he shouted into the radio, then released the button and slammed to a halt against a half-grown tree, about ten yards from where Tunne had just taken cover behind some underbrush.
"Talk to me, Ri!"
The treeline wasn't terribly dense, but it wasn't old growth, and there were plenty of saplings and scrub that made it easy to hide, and hard to move quietly. The rockets couldn't have been launched from more than thirty yards away, but Jack couldn't hear a damn thing over the firefight that had just kicked up around the convoy. Even the com in his ear seemed muffled.
"They broke into pairs. Two of them are dead ahead of you, moving away. Another one's heading towards the convoy, the last one's – he's maybe twenty yards away, on your left-"
An extremely precise burst of automatic fire confirmed that statement, shredding the trunk of the small tree in front of Jack, and he and Tunne both hit the deck.
That was cover fire, not sniper fire. Someone was tryin' to slow them down.
Which meant that pair that was on the run likely had another couple roman candles they intended to set off. If they managed to clear either the front or rear of the convoy, one of the smaller vehicles would have room to bail, and this would turn into a goddamn car chase on the Autobahn.
Jack sent a short burst in the general direction the shots had come from, quite sure that whoever had been there was already on the move. He wasn't planning on hitting anything – he just wanted to control the direction of the movement. Jack had no decent cover for ten yards, and until he got a bead on the shooter, he was essentially pinned down.
Tunne wasn't.
Jack sent another quick burst towards the underbrush, then made eye contact with the Green Beret. He waved his hand in a quick loop, then gestured with two fingers towards the origin of the rockets.
Go around and deal with those fuckers.
He and John were the furthest back from the road, which meant the closest to the party crashers. They'd just announced their presence, but the two guys with the rockets would have to contend with the Germans coming at them from the road, and Tunne approaching from the south. All they needed to do was drive them far enough into the trees that they didn't have a clear shot at the convoy.
Tunne glared at him, clearly not happy with that plan, but then Jack saw the same thoughts cross his face. John scowled, but he gave a short nod and began a quick reverse belly-crawl. In seconds he'd melted into the underbrush.
Jack didn't even give him time to fully disappear before he sprinted the ten yards to his next piece of cover, and bullets chewed up the undergrowth around him. He felt a brief tug on his right side, his vest shifting, but there wasn't any burn associated with it, and he slid the last few feet behind the little copse of trees, and finally caught sight of motion, about fifteen yards out.
In his ear, his com popped. "Jack, he's at your two o'clock-"
"I got him," he muttered softly, then flinched back as a single bullet whipped past his face.
Whoever was out there with him, the guy was interested in ending this confrontation as quickly as possible. He knew he'd let one of them slip away, and he knew exactly what would happen to his buddies if John made it to their position.
"Surprise, asshole," he growled under his breath, and he tore a frag grenade free from his belt. Jack then fired off a burst one-handed at the downed tree his target was hiding behind, and armed and tossed the grenade with his other.
He watched it sail through the air, the arc good, and just before it cleared the log, he fired another burst as a distraction. Then he ducked back behind his skinny little trees and readied himself.
The grenade popped two seconds later, and Jack was instantly up and charging the position. Dirt was still coming down when he hopped over the log, and he spotted dark green camo, lying about four yards away.
Dalton put two into it, and the fabric gave in a way that told him it was empty.
He spun, realizing the only other place the guy could have scurried without him seeing was the little depression in the ground behind him, and he used the barrel of the MK16 to knock the raised sidearm away on pure reflex. It went off, and he felt the bite on the outside of his right shoulder. The soldier beneath him didn't miss a beat; he reached up and grabbed the MK16, which was still attached to Jack's body via its strap, and he pointed the barrel harmlessly over his shoulder before using it to yank Jack off balance. A well-placed foot levered him up and over, and Jack sailed through the air, landing flat on his back behind the Turk.
All the air in his lungs came whooshing out, and Jack got his eyes open in time to see his own MK16 coming down for his face. Jack blocked it, coughing and gasping for air, and the Turk attempted to wrap the strap around his arms and neck. Dalton reached up and unclipped the sling, and the weapon suddenly falling free tugged the Turk off balance. While his left hand was at his right shoulder, Jack yanked his tac knife from its sheath and he rolled, swiping it where the Turk's face should have been.
The blade passed through empty air, and then Jack was on his feet, crouched, staring at the Turk, who was in nearly the same position only a few feet away.
Jack recognized him instantly. If the sergeant did, he gave no indication; he knew the assault rifle had been thrown too far for either of them to easily recover so he calmly pulled his own knife. Jack swapped his from his left hand to his right with a feral grin.
"Was hopin' to run into you again," he growled, and then he lunged, again aiming for Kadir Hakan's face.
The Bordo Bereliler dodged effortlessly, barely shifting, and didn't take Jack's invitation to move in on him. Clearly the Turk knew that move. Instead, he swapped his knife into his left hand, and edged forward just enough to force Jack to give ground. It put them both onto firm footing, in a small clearing in the underbrush.
"Why is that?" the Turk asked, almost tonelessly, and his left hand flickered out deftly, seeming to move with an almost casual slowness despite the speed at which the blade sliced through the air. Jack obligingly gave more ground, knowing he was the one now being forced in a specific direction.
Away from the assault rifle. Away from where John had gone. Away from Hakan's fellow soldiers.
Quickly ending this confrontation was out. Now the Turk was interested in keeping him occupied, and he kept them in close enough quarters that Jack didn't have time or room to draw his own sidearm.
Which was fine by Jack. He didn't fucking need it.
"There's somethin' I didn't get to tell ya, back in Turkey last year."
Hakan simply stared at him, patiently waiting for his opening, and Jack let his knife trace a random little pattern in the air. He set his feet for another lunge and watched the Turk shift his weight slightly in response.
"I'm not really left handed."
The slightest flicker of confusion crossed his opponent's face, and Jack struck, feigning a right cross with his fist, rather than using the knife to slice, then following it with a left jab that didn't land, but did force the Turk's counter-attack to be lower, a body slice.
The type of armor Jack was wearing was ballistic armor, meaning it was designed to stop a bullet and spread the force of that impact across a wide area. Spreading force out over a wide area was not very useful when the force was being applied by the tip of a knife, meaning his vest was great for stopping even anti-personnel rounds, but shit at stopping a stabbing blade.
But the Turk wasn't positioned to stab – he was positioned to slice, and he wasn't able to slice through the kevlar. Jack trapped Hakan's left arm between them, using his own right arm to deflect the Turk's, and jammed his leg between the other soldier's, hooking the leg he'd forced the Turk to put his weight on.
But the Maroon Beret kept his feet, tangling his blade into the cut-resistant straps on Jack's vest, and Jack realized he was about to have his own weight off-shifted, just as he'd tried to do to the sergeant.
Jack couldn't help the grin as he slammed his forehead into the Turk's face.
Hakan fell back onto his ass, unable to keep hold of his knife, and Jack pressed his attack despite his own less-than-clear vision. His slice at the man's face was hastily deflected, and then Jack went for a chest stomp but came up empty as the slightly smaller man squirmed sideways at the last moment, trying and failing to push himself back to his feet. Dalton followed with a left backhand and connected, and the Turk rolled with the strike and came up just out of range.
Somehow, when he rose warily back to his feet, he was holding his goddamned knife, which was no longer tangled up in Jack's vest.
Dalton shifted his knife to his left hand, and Hakan wiped the blood out of his eye with the heel of his thumb. The head strike had cut the skin of his forehead, just over his right eyebrow.
"You've been practicing," he observed, his voice utterly unruffled in a way that weirdly reminded Jack of Samantha Cage.
Right. This asshole was Mac's shadow. The interrogator.
"Nah." Jack moved in again and this time it was the sergeant who gave ground, but not enough of it to let Jack pull his sidearm. "I don't gotta practice movie quotes. That shit's natural as breathin'." The Turk tried to take advantage of the tree roots behind Jack, force him to lose his footing, but he'd clocked them when Hakan had rolled, and danced nimbly around them.
"Is it," Hakan murmured, and this time the objective of the attack was definitely a stab. He didn't step in closely enough that Jack could catch his arm, so Jack dodged back and batted the man's wrist away, and Hakan yanked himself out of range of the retaliatory swipe.
"Yep. I'd'a gone with good ol' Bruce, but he was never much into knife fights. So you get the Princess Bride."
Granted, he couldn't even remember the name of the lead actor, but he'd seen the damn flick so many times the whole script was burned into his brain. Riley had loved that movie growing up – and not for the kissing parts.
No, it was the fencing fight between the Dread Pirate Roberts and Inigo Montoya. They'd re-enacted that fight on the living room furniture enough times that even Diane had probably memorized that scene.
Dalton and Kadir swapped positions in the clearing, mostly feigning, and Jack realized he'd officially lost any advantage that head strike had given him. The Turk was now fully recovered from the hit, and seemingly just as determined to keep him talking – thus occupied.
"And you are the hero in this narrative? You believe you've saved your princess?"
Jack bared his teeth. "Dude, you never shoulda touched her-"
"Is that what she told you I did?" the man murmured, and in the very next moment Jack missed losing his left eye by less than two millimeters. The Turk had taken a page from his book, mixing hand to hand with the knife tactics, and Jack had to take a deep slice to the outside of his right forearm to avoid a far more dangerous wound to his throat.
It burned, and Jack felt his fingertips immediately start to tingle. God damnit. He was baiting him. And he was fucking good at it.
"Hear that gunfire? All you did is piss her off, and it's your colonel out there payin' the price for your fuck-up," Jack snarled softly. Two could play this game. And if he was about to lose the use of his right hand, he needed to wrap this up in a hurry.
Hakan gave him a dry, crooked smile, one that Jack was unable to wipe off his face with another attack. Neither managed to draw blood, and both flinched as a rocket exploded, not far away.
"Angus said much the same. Tell me, did you reach him in time?"
Jack let his fury flash across his eyes, hoping to lure the interrogator in. The sergeant took the bait, but not the way Jack wanted.
The smirk melted off Hakan's face, and his voice was almost gentle. "It would have meant everything to him, to have you beside him at the end."
- instead of sittin' there all alone, on a semi-sinkin' ship, waiting for help that already shoulda been there –
I shoulda been there.
Guilt – and rage - blurred his vision, and Jack charged him with a roar.
The Turk was clearly expecting it, trying to goad him into that very foolish attack - but no one did it quite like they did it in Texas.
Jack put his head down and threw all his weight at the other soldier, using the roots behind him as a launch point, and exactly like he knew Hakan would, the man pivoted, intent on letting him pass by just like a rodeo clown facing down a bull. The Turk's knife would enter the left side of Jack's neck and sever every major blood vessel in reach, and then Hakan would yank back the blade and rip out the lot. Jack would die very quickly.
Not like Mac.
Even that thought wasn't enough to disrupt his body. It was muscle memory, borne of far too many brawls in far too close of combat. Like he'd done so many times, Jack shortened his next stride, then pushed off with his left leg, bowling into the other man slightly faster than expected, lower, and at an angle. The knife that was headed for Jack's exposed throat was knocked off target by the body blow, high enough that it just dragged through the hair on the back of his head, and Jack slammed Hakan into the forest floor, aiming for a spot three feet below the actual surface of the ground.
The Turk's head smashed into the dirt, and both his arms were knocked outwards with the force of it. Hakan brought them back up, an attempt to protect his own face and neck, and Jack then used his right hand – still gripping his knife - and drove it home, deep into the soft, unprotected tissue of Kadir Hakan's left armpit.
Hakan's eyes went wide, and blood stained his teeth as he barked out a short cough. Jack blocked a hastily thrown punch and leaned back only far enough to get the leverage needed to angle the knife and thrust again, and the body beneath him spasmed when the blade finally found his heart.
Remarkably, the Turk didn't show any sign of the pain, just blank, stunned surprise, and Jack felt his lips stretch far enough to split his face.
"Since you seem to like leavin' people to bleed, thought I'd show my appreciation." It came out between clenched teeth. "You can thank Riley for teachin' me that move."
Jack pushed himself up and off the Turk, using Hakan's ruined chest as a shove-off point, and stalked away from the dying man without a backwards glance. His radio was squawking in one ear, his coms in the other, and Jack clapped his left hand onto his freely bleeding arm, scanning the ground for his missing combat rifle.
He registered his name, somewhere in the chatter, and the first bullet struck just above the small of his back.
The second and third were progressively higher, and to the right, and the impact – then the pain – twisted him off his feet. He fell heavily onto his right shoulder, pinning his weakened right arm under his body, and Jack tried desperately to blink through the dim curtain that softly draped itself over everything.
He managed to suck down a sad little breath, then swallowed, and he was distantly surprised that he didn't taste any blood. Whether they were armor piercing or not, the rounds packed a hell of a wallop. He never heard the footsteps, but he picked out motion, someone approaching him. The shape stopped, then seemed to shrink, and Jack coughed and made a concerted effort to roll onto his back.
Whoever it was in the clearing with him helpfully shot him in the chest.
Jack grunted in pain, and a second round hit him, right in the gut. He tried to curl up, protect himself, but the next bullet went high, almost up to his collarbone, and he felt a lightning sharp pop as it shifted.
He heard someone yell, but it was distant. There was a constant, irritating buzzing in his ears, and he couldn't catch his breath.
Jack, ol' boy, you better get your shit together, or it's game over.
Something blocked out the sky, and Jack focused on a face, framed by dark hair that was pulled back in a light blue scarf.
A woman.
Her lips were moving, she was yelling at someone, and Jack drew another open-mouthed gasp, and took another round to the chest for his trouble. He felt his collarbone shift a little further, and then she was standing right over him.
She didn't shoot him again, she just loomed over him, still shouting, and finally sound started permeating back into his skull. It took him far too long to realize she wasn't speaking English.
And for some reason . . . that was just fuckin' hilarious.
Jack stared up at her, and he started to laugh.
It was Clarice. Aydin's hacker was fucking screaming at him, and all her rage, all her righteous fury –
Didn't mean a goddamn thing. She was going to yell herself hoarse, and then she was going to kill him, and he was going to die not having the slightest damn idea what her shitfit was all about.
She was probably talking on her own team's coms, actually. Trying to shout over the sound of her colonel getting screwed. Maybe passing along that he'd just killed their second in command. Jack wondered if he'd bled out by now, or if Hakan was still just alive enough to hear her.
She said something, then, a word caught his attention, and when she saw him refocus on her, she crouched over him, shoving the muzzle of her gun under his chin.
"You're going to pull the men back from the trucks," she snarled softly. "Radio them you've seen more rockets, and their position is not secure."
Jack managed a sarcastic grimace. "Tell you . . . what, honey . . . how about . . . you go to hell."
The hacker cocked her head to the side, then she deliberately dragged the barrel of the gun down his chin and across his throat, scraping his adam's apple before continuing on to his chest. When he didn't respond, she fired a round, point blank.
Jack couldn't bite back a cry of pain, and he honestly wasn't sure if it had penetrated the armor or not.
There was a flash of savage victory in her dark eyes. "Give the order, or I'll make the little fool listen while I kill you."
Riley.
Riley could hear. On coms. She might even have eyes. She knew what was happening.
His next breath was unsteady, and Aydin's hacker shoved the gun, barrel first, into the slug she'd just put into his vest. He managed to keep his response down to a pained grunt. He could hear voices, on his com and on the radio, but he tuned them out, staring the woman down.
There was no way in hell he was giving that order. If she was desperate enough to ask him, it meant that things weren't going Aydin's way.
"You'd prefer that I leave you alive, and make you listen while the men tear her apart?" The woman's voice dripped acid. "Now that you mention it, I think I like that way better too."
"Ain't gonna happen," he grated out. "War's over sweetheart . . . you lost."
He thought she was going to pull the trigger, but instead she dragged the gun lower, straddling him, and pressed it uncomfortably firmly into his crotch. Her sharp eyes never left his. The threat was obvious; give the order or take a bullet where there was no armor. Jack picked up his head a little, glaring at her, then let it fall back to the ground as the world spun.
He'd seen what he needed to see.
"Oh, it's not over, sweetheart," she corrected him, and then angled the barrel of the gun until Jack flinched. "It will never be over. Not until every one of you pays for what you did to him. I started with your director . . ." and she pressed the gun in, just a little further, "and then your partner . . . and now you."
He felt himself smirk. Wrong on all three counts, bitch. Then Jack yelped, as she indicated that she didn't appreciate his response. He turned the noise into a fairly passable chuckle. "Thanks, but . . . already got me a gun there . . . that shoots . . . way better."
Her eyes narrowed in rage, and he heard her pull the trigger, heard the hammer and firing pin cycle through the process of lining up to strike the cartridge.
He hadn't heard the shots, not all of 'em. But he hadn't needed to hear them to count them. And he didn't hear one now. Instead, he heard the click of an empty chamber. Her eyes, still fixed on his, widened a little in surprise.
Jack gave her a dark grin. "Mine don't . . . run outta ammo . . ."
The problem with easily concealable weapons was that the magazine was a lot smaller. You sacrificed bullet count for size. He'd have explained that to her if she hadn't picked it up to see for herself before growling in frustration and hurling it at his face. In her anger, she missed him entirely, and that only served to enrage her further.
She pushed herself to her feet, probably to find another gun, but he already had. His own sidearm, that he'd never gotten a chance to pull in his fight with Hakan. And she wasn't even looking, didn't see him unholster it at all. His right arm was dangerously weak, he could barely wrap his fingers around the grip, but he was still able to balance his elbow on the ground and raise the nine mil high enough to target her.
The woman had time to kick it aside, but she didn't; she wasn't a soldier, and she froze, instead. Even the small motion of raising the weapon reminded him his collarbone was dislocated – if not outright broken – and his expression slipped into a grimace. The hacker sneered, even as she half-heartedly raised her hands in surrender.
"Arrest me, then." Her voice was like ice. "Bring me to America. And when you hear that I've escaped, run to the little fool. She'll already be dead."
For the first time, there was something on her face besides calculated anger.
It was hatred. Pure, unadulterated hated.
Her sneer turned up at the corners, and she backed up several steps. He was in no condition to get up and follow.
And she knew it.
"And when I finally take her life, she will thank me for ending the pain."
She was never going to stop trying to get revenge. She was never going to stop coming after them.
Coming after Riley.
The hacker dropped her hands with a snort, still backing away.
He looked her dead in the eye, and pulled the trigger.
Even shooting from the hip, essentially, he couldn't miss at that range, and Jack groaned as the recoil reverberated around his aching chest. He still couldn't catch his breath, and he knew his right arm was out of commission. It was the collarbone on the same side, at least he had a working left arm –
"DALTON! Goddammit, respond!"
He moaned several curses as he picked up his head, confirming the crumpled form on the other side of the clearing was indeed dead. "'m still here -"
There was hardly a pause. "How bad you hit?" It was Saito, his voice clipped and professional. No indication that he'd just watched via satellite while Jack got his ass handed to him by a computer nerd.
Jack glared up at the sky, dappled between all the leaves above him. "Can't tell . . ."
"Can you move?"
Jack thought about that a second, trying to decide if he should be pissed off that Si clearly didn't care about the aforementioned ass handing, or concerned that yet another overly persistent motherfucker was about to come into the clearing and finish him off.
"Stay put, you dumb . . . son of a bitch," another voice ground out, sounding not much better than he did, and Jack let his head fall back against the dirt and did exactly that.
"Kuso, bakayarou! You okay?!"
Judging by his tone, Saito was definitely not talking to him. And suddenly his previous question made sense – John was clearly in trouble, or Si would never have slipped back into his native tongue. Jack's Japanese was a little rusty – hell, he'd never been close to fluent – but he was pretty sure Si'd just called Tunne-
"No I'm not okay, I . . . ow, shit - caught a fuckin' rocket backblast in the face," John growled, and Jack winced a little on his behalf. He also started thinking about trying to move. John's voice was still harsh, and even over the ringing in his ears Jack could hear the pain in it. "I don't think I got eyebrows anymore."
The next voice on coms couldn't have sounded less sympathetic. "Tunne, are you mobile?"
While he was willing to swear at his partner, for their boss, John kept it professional. "Yes ma'am. I'm oscar mike to Dalton. My guys are down, rockets won't be a problem anymore."
Jack ceased thinking about getting up. It sounded like John was okay, even if he wasn't happy about it.
"When you get to Jack, stay put. We'll send medical to you."
Jack snorted aloud. Fat fuckin' chance of that, Webber.
He knew damn well what the next phase of the mission entailed. Once the fighting was driven back to the last pocket of resistance – which would almost certainly be the semi – the plan was to have the helo touch down, toss a walkie to Aydin, and have Matty and Wolfie ask him all nice-like to roll over in return for his men being left alive.
And since two of Aydin's presumably favorite people were lying dead in the clearing with him, Jack was pretty sure the colonel was going to tell them to go to hell. The original plan was predicated on the idea that they had something to offer Aydin. Even over the sound of his own wheezing, Jack could hear the firefight was winding down.
That probably meant they hadn't left the colonel much. This had last stand written all over it. One last effort to take down the oppressors, and go down in history as a martyr.
Matty had to know that.
And just because she did, it wouldn't change a damn thing.
Jack picked up his head again, testing the waters, and the clearing tilted disagreeably to the right. By the time he'd gotten it more or less level again, there was an embarrassing level of noise coming through the underbrush. He'd gotten himself into a half-sitting position, cradling his right arm to baby the collarbone, before John finally stumbled into view.
The former Delta stared up him, and his smartass comment about disgracing the Green Berets died in his throat.
"You look like shit, dude."
Probably not the best thing to say where Saito could overhear, but he'd sure as hell find out about it eventually.
John wasn't kidding when he said he'd taken a backblast to the face. It was red and angry looking, and his eyes were narrowed, either from the pain of keeping them open, or because he was supremely unamused. The top of his uniform shirt was a little toasted, as was the collar of the vest, but he was moving okay. When he spoke, his voice sounded even worse than before.
"Look who's talking."
Jack cracked a little grin. "Can you? Look, that is?"
John scowled and knelt stiffly beside him, then put a hand on the vest. It felt like the equivalent of getting hit in the chest with a mallet.
"Good enough. Stop whining, ya big baby."
Jack hadn't been aware that he'd made a sound, and ever cognizant that they were on coms, he released his right arm – very carefully, and in full view of Tunne, who seemed to think it wasn't a great idea – and signaled to him silently.
Let's head back to the rally point. Which was right on the edge of the trees near the convoy.
John simply shook his head.
Jack glared at him and repeated the visual order.
John made a gesture that indicated he thought Jack was retarded, and held out his hands to see the arm.
Dalton shook his head. "Collarbone's busted."
"Your whole goddamn upper body is busted," Tunne corrected him, quietly. He also started digging in his vest. "Did you fucking try to catch every slug? This isn't baseball."
Still, the Green Beret helped him sit up all the way, and Jack grimaced and clenched his teeth to keep from giving it away to everyone listening on coms. Definitely a couple busted ribs. But he didn't taste any blood, and even though he was wheezing, it wasn't any worse. John gave him another evaluatory look. Then he reached up and clicked off his coms.
Jack gingerly set his right arm in his lap and did the same. "Dude, that's an ambush out there waitin' to happen, and I ain't trustin' Wolff's guys to protect her."
"Jack, my face feels like I put it on a fuckin' barbeque grill. I don't know if I can shoot straight further than about ten feet away, and your right arm's a damn disgrace. If you're right, we are worse than useless out there."
Jack's com clicked. "Uh . . . you guys still okay?"
It sounded like Bozer.
"I need to be there to call it." Jack wasn't going to accept no for an answer, and John clearly saw it on his face, messed up eyes or no. "I'll be your eyes, man, but we're both blind if we stay out here. Now get me the hell up."
Tunne stared at him through his squinty eyes, then he shook his head with a curse and tapped his ear. "We're good, Boze. Stayin' put as ordered."
It sounded pretty final, and Dalton stared the man down as he made no move to silence his com again or offer him a hand up. Instead, he finished pulling a clotting bandage from his vest, and motioned that he wanted access to the arm.
Jack didn't fight with him – it was gonna need stitches, easy, if not outright surgery, and despite the pain, Jack knew it was the right move. John seemed to take the acceptance as some kind of sign, because he started talking as he ripped the plastic open.
"Riley, I gotta patch this guy up, it's gonna get loud. I'm going off coms for a sec."
Once he had, Jack opened his mouth, only to have John shake his head. "No, Jack. We're staying and waiting for medical."
"Last I checked, I'm your goddamn boss."
Tunne gently moved Jack's arm into a position he could wrap it. "Last I checked, you're not stupid enough to put yourself into a position where you could become a hostage, or worse, a casualty. We're staying put."
There was no replying once the QuikClot hit – Jack could barely keep from screaming. John worked quickly, getting the compression bandage full coverage over the slice, and he tied it off pretty tight, just under Jack's elbow. The fuzzy curtain came back, briefly, dulling everything but the chattering on the radio, telling Jack the helo landed, telling him the support agents and 'Momma' and 'Poppa' had disembarked the bird.
He'd mostly gotten his breathing back down to 'slower than hyperventilating' speed, and was considering arguing his position for a third time, when there was an almighty blast from the direction of the convoy.
-M-
I know, I promised you an update and a major cliffhanger, and I didn't deliver. I'm actually tied up with other projects this week and know I'll have very little time for writing this week, and it's been far too long since the last update, so consider this the first half of Chapter 14, and expect the second half next week!