Page 24 of Skull

The eerie quiet continued as they stacked up on the door four on one side, five on the other. The two Shadowguard were at the tail end, flanked by one man each.

“Stay here, ladies, while we clear.”

Strekoza looked at Walker. “Who is he calling a lady?” she said with a wry smirk.

Walker grinned and shrugged her shoulders. “Apparently, he has us mistaken for someone else.”

Strekoza snickered, and Ice shook his head. “Boomer,” he said, and Boomer reached back for his shotgun, and the distinct sound of him racking the slide was loud in that still silence as he angled the barrel down toward the door locks.

“Execute.”

Two shotgun blasts later, the double locks were obliterated, and Boomer kicked the door in, dropping the Mossberg and taking up his automatic rifle. Kodiak, who had been focused on the door the whole time, entered first, Boomer behind him. To their left, was a narrow concrete platform that sent them down a long corridor. Kodiak’s sightline never wavered as he led the team toward an entrance inside. Chemicals were thick in the air as they entered an open room filled with racks, wooden, slatted boxes. No one was inside, but the sheer force of their assault carried them into the next section of the facility, but as they climbed the stairs up to the second story, Kodiak still on point, his weapon raised, Boomer turned around to cover the platform behind them at the top.

As they reached the top, gunfire exploded around them, behind them was the clean area partitioned off with plastic. The only cover was a narrow frame in the doorway. Kodiak returned fire, as they backed toward it and piled behind it.

That’s when shots started flying from their guardian angel outside. The sound of breaking glass and the cries of their enemies sent chaos into the ranks. With that, Iceman said, “Let’s move.”

“Boss,” Breakneck said, “you’ve got squirters. West side of the facility, moving fast.” There was silence. “It’s Vega, and two of his guys.”

“Copy that,” Iceman said.

“Clean up those fuckers.”

“Boss! One of our Shadowguard is in pursuit. It’s—it’s Hummingbird. God, she’s fucking fast. I didn’t hear an order,” Breakneck reported.

That’s because there wasn’t an order. Dammit, Ice was going to chew up that lovely ass. “Move! We can’t leave her unprotected,” Iceman said, and with that they had to break cover before they were sure it was safe. It didn’t matter, Walker was chasing their guy in a hostile town, and he bet that fucker was headed for numbers and safety. They couldn’t waste a moment. The team surged forward. A round flew past his cheek, he could feel the heat and the displacement of air as it rushed by him. The guy who had sent that lead flew back from Skull’s attack, two bullet holes in his chest. They entered the ambush room and took out the remaining guys.

“Boss. We’ve got a fucking truckload of tangos converging with the HVT and the Shadowguard,” Breakneck said. “Coming to you.”

For one agonizing second, fear—akin to the news that his dad had been shot, and again when he’d been admitted to the hospital—unlike anything Skull had ever known gripped his brain and damn near paralyzed him. In the next second, he pulled himself together. He turned and sprinted down the stairs and out of the warehouse. “Bones,” he ordered, the command exploding out of him, sounding desperate, and Bones picked up on his tone immediately. He directed him after Walker, agonizing that the dog would reach her long before he could cover his furry partner’s back. The MWD took off, the urgency driving his four paws, his body a dark green blur in the night.

He couldn’t hope to keep up with a full-out Belgian Malinois in his prime, whose top speed was thirty miles per hour, with the kind of focus that was laser-beam strong, launching himself forward like a heat-seeking fur missile. Something came over Skull as he ran in Bones’s dust. Something that he had mastered in combat—fear—was driving adrenaline up his spine. Okay, so maybe he was irrational. She was a spook, an assassin, an excellent fighter—all in all a formidable opponent, and not for the first time he was thankful she was on their side. But none of that seemed to matter when he thought about her getting overrun by thugs who had no care for human life, and even less for women. He couldn’t bear it if she?—

He put his faith in Bones, his partner fueled by an endless reserve of determination to catch whatever Skull pointed him toward, and his command was to guard Walker. She was now under the dog’s protection. Only he could get to her fast enough.

That uncomfortable fear rose up again, tightening his skin, pushing his heartbeat up several notches when even gunfire didn’t affect the steady beat.

That fucking woman loved trouble, beyond a doubt, the kind of trouble she could dish out, which Skull had a tremendous amount of respect and appreciation for. But this kind of trouble made that fear morph into anger, a kind of protective anger that also was starkly new to him.

He was going to throttle her, then lay down the law, and then, he was going to lose it and probably ravish her within an inch of her fucking life, fuck her over and over again until he could breathe without the anguish of losing her before he’d had a chance to have her filling him up. Then he was going to getreallyserious.

8

Walker sprinted through the quiet,muddy streets. She and Eva had an advantage over Blade and his bodyguards. Their equipment was state-of-the art, and the lightweight fusion goggles were more like glasses and not head mounted like the SEALs’. The glasses included infrared, and she could see the heat signatures as she chased their HVT and his men. Their suits, complete with hoods, were also tech-advanced with a waterproof but stretchy, almost alien-like black catsuit, a non-reflective fabric that repelled light with a built-in bulletproof vest and neck guard, the stealth booties on her feet part of the garment, their faces concealed in black mesh to hide their skin tones. This version of the suit was designed for tropical use with built-in, organic ways of keeping her cool. They looked like the highly advanced assassins they were if anyone could actually see them in the shadows.

She followed the three red blobs of movement and increased her speed. “Gotcha,” she murmured. Eva was pacing her a street over, both of them nothing but dark blurs in the deep shadows. Those three men would never see them coming. It is what they did best.

They were just that one step closer to Hazard and Leigh, and she wasn’t going to fail the couple, not now, not ever, especially with the Justice Department dicking around with their lives. Typical. Just casualties in the War on Drugs, like she was a casualty of her mother’s machinations.

She survived, and they would, too, especially if she had a say about it. They couldn’t lose this guy. He was the linchpin in their strategy, and they had no time to start from scratch as Hazard and Leigh’s lives were measured in days. Risking everything was the name of the game. She’d rather go down fighting than lose this dirtbag in the rundown maze disjointly spread out before her.

This slum was nothing but a shantytown, the homes packed tightly together, leaving only narrow alleyways somewhat open, and they became the informal dumping grounds for anything residents couldn’t easily reuse or dispose of properly. Everything was haphazard, from the building materials to the layout.

From the facility, she raced through one alleyway after another, avoiding broken cinder blocks, loose bricks, pieces of corrugated metal, wooden planks with protruding rusty nails, scraps of plastic sheeting, and heaps of tarps, apparently what these residents used as roofing materials. She came to an abrupt stop, up against a dead-end, the stench of household garbage strong, distinctly fruit peels and veggie trimmings.

She could see the blobs of red moving away from the alleyway. Her mind was going a mile a minute, her lungs pumping. She looked around, realizing that the HVT had found a way through that wasn’t open to her. He must have gotten away using a home, or some secret passage, slipping through a solid barrier. She looked up, a makeshift staircase led to a flat roof.

“Koz, I’m heading up,” she said, her throat so dry it hurt. There was no response from her partner, and she swore softly, damning the spotty comms. The sheer volume of buildings must be blocking her signal. She didn’t have a choice. She couldn’t lose that man. She attacked the rickety structure, climbing them like they were made of strong construction instead of spare parts of suspect wood, held together by corrugated metal and rusty nails.

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