Page 80 of Cooper

“How many are there?” he asks.

“We think three. I saw five, Natalia already took out two.”

“How the hell did they know where we were?” he mutters, peeking through the windows.

“We’ll figure that out, but not now. I’ve got the right.” We hear the guys yelling Arabic and I swing my arm around to the right, gun pointed at whoever comes around the corner first. Marcus automatically points his gun to the left and we wait.

The prisoner is banging on the inside of the van, letting them know he’s there, and yelling in Arabic.

“Did he just say ‘shoot him’?” Marcus asks rhetorically.

“I don’t know. They’re talking too fast for me.”

Everything seems to happen in slow motion then.

Someone fires a gun, and a masked man fires as he comes around the front of the van, but I’m ready for him, taking my shot before he shoots so his goes wild, missing us by a mile. Someone else is coming around the rear bumper, but Marcus is ready and does the same thing.

I hear a yell and then Natalia’s voice.

“We’re clear!”

“Fuck.” I step over one guy’s body and hurry to the back.

Natalia is standing over the guy she shot in the knee, her booted foot on his stomach. “What’s your name?” she demands. She asks in English, then Limaji, then French. When she asks in French he looks up and scowls.

“Fuck off.”

Well, if nothing else, he can curse in English.

“Get him up,” Marcus says to me. “Gag him, put his hands in zip ties, and put him in your SUV. Natalia, you get the prisoner. I don’t think the van is going anywhere any time soon.”

Natalia moves toward our van, and I grab the guy who’s still holding his knee. We have a first aid kit in the back, and I use some bandages I found to create a tourniquet. He’s no good to us if he bleeds out—that’s the whole reason we kept him alive.

I hear Marcus on the phone to someone, probably Sandor, and Natalia has wrestled the prisoner out of the back. He’s not being cooperative, and my every instinct is to go help her, but I can’t. She’ll hate it and it would make her look bad, like she can’t handle herself.

This is a dynamic I’m going to have to think about when I have time.

The prisoner is leering at her now, but to her credit, Natalia is unfazed, merely yanking him forward. He’s trying to refuse to walk but when he falls to his knees, she pulls out her gun.

“Get up and walk or I’ll take out your knee next. Donotfucking test me.”

Oh, hell yeah.

There’s my badass girl.

I love when she talks kneecaps to bad guys.

The fact that he slowly gets to his feet is a testament to her power, and I get our wounded prisoner into the back of the SUV.

“Put them in the middle row,” Marcus says, “and I’ll sit in the far back.”

“I’ll get in the back,” Natalia offers. “You can’t climb well with your arm like that.”

“All right.” The fact that he agrees tells me how much pain he’s in.

“Sandor says to keep going to the prison,” Marcus tells us once the prisoners are secured, and we regroup outside the SUV. “We’ll drop off the first one, and if the second one dies while we’re doing it, it’ll hopefully send a message to whoever this is. But we’ve got some antibiotics to give him. Hopefully, that’ll stave off infection until we can get him medical attention. Sandor is meeting us in Vinake.”

I nod, and we get situated in the SUV. I’m driving, Marcus is in the passenger seat and Natalia is in the far back, at the ready in case there’s any more trouble.

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