Page 113 of Peace Under Fire

“Somewhere in Alaska. That’s all I know. These dudes give new meaning to mysterious and closed-mouthed.”

Right. Squish shrugged.

“When is the ETA for evac? And do you have a location for the drop?” Squish asked.

“Evac is set for 0700. Pipe will need to identify the drop point. Put me on speaker and I’ll give him the coordinates.”

Squish’s thumb hit the speaker icon before his brain caught up to what Tex had said. The bird was coming in from Alaska? With an ETA of 0700? He stared in confusion at his watch. Alaska was thousands of miles away and they were making the trip in five hours?

That couldn’t be right.

As far as he knew, the fastest chopper flew in the two hundred miles per hour range. Alaska was a hell of a lot farther than a thousand miles. Try three thousand. No bird could fly that fast.

“Squish? You still there?” Tex asked.

“Yeah,” he said with a frown. He must have heard the ETA wrong. Or had Tex meant 0700 tomorrow? “There’s been a misconnect. Did you say 0700?”

“Copy that,” Tex said, his voice suddenly cautious, as though he knew where this conversation was headed.

“Is that tomorrow?” He caught the puzzled look Pipe sent him. As though he couldn’t figure out what the big deal was.

“That’s a negative. We’re looking at today. Five hours from now,” he specified in a cool, deliberate voice.

“Fuck, dude,” Squish said, his voice dumbfounded. “Unless these Shadow Mountain folks have a transporter, there is no way they can pilot a chopper from Alaska to the Refuge in five hours.”

“Bloody hell!” The curse burst from Pipe as he did the crazy math.

“Did they get their hands on a Blackbird or something?” No, that didn’t make sense, either. Nobody could land a Blackbird in the middle of the woods near the hatch. Hell, the Refuge didn’t even have an airstrip. Besides, a Blackbird couldn’t carry an extraction team.

“Look, brother, I know the math doesn’t add up, but you’re gonna have to roll with it. I can’t go into details—I don’t know the details. What I do know, is that, if these boys say they are setting down at 0700 hours, you can pin your life on the fact that they will be there.”

But he wasn’t pinning his life on that fact. He was pinning Mandy’s. Squish pinched his nose and thought. Hard.

He had no choice.

CHAPTER 30

His head pounding, Squish slipped between two trees and stopped to scan the forest. The flashes hadn’t started strobing across his vision yet, but they were coming. He just hoped they remained at bay long enough to get Mandy to safety. There were no cockroaches in sight, but he could sense them out there. Sense them creeping through the woods behind him, following him, waiting for him to expose Mandy’s location.

No fucking way.

They’d parked a couple of klicks from the Refuge, on an old logging road, hoping to slip into position without being detected. Yeah, that hadn’t worked. At least the cockroaches hadn’t become a nuisance yet. If they did, he had the means to protect himself, thanks to the rifles Pipe had unpacked from the trunk of his Challenger.

“Evac site’s up ahead.” Pipe still carried the confused expression from when he’d talked with Tex about the site coordinates.

When Squish asked him what was wrong, the dude just said the site was too bloody small. He hoped Pipe was wrong. The clearing the Shadow Mountain boys had targeted was so close to Mandy’s bunker, he could practically touch it. The distance made it more likely he could get her to the chopper without cockroach interference.

Still…it was weird.

Too damn small…and too damn fast.

His life had gone bizzarro lately—psychics, mind readers, mental healers, phasing in and phasing out of reality, mysterious mountain bases, and impossible aircrafts.

No wonder his brain was trying to explode.

When they reached the tiny—read miniscule—clearing Tex had sent them to, his confidence in rescuing Mandy crashed. There was no way a chopper could set down here. And they had no backup plan.

“Maybe you got the coordinates wrong?” That was the only thing that made sense.

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