Hostage Zero

From the back door, he picked up his pace toward the woods line, about seventy-five feet from the back wall. If he had, in fact, designed this property as a fortress of sorts, then he had obviously planned more for defense than offense. The wide fields of fire were great for fending off an attacking force, but they were exactly the wrong choice if you were trying to make a break without being seen. Ask any prison yard designer and he’ll agree.

The rotor sound crescendoed at about the halfway point of their run for the woods, and Navarro really poured on the gas to get to the tree line before being spotted. With the carry handle for the AR-10 clutched in her right fist, and the spare mags in her left, Gail kept up step for step.

With ten yards left, she would have sworn the chopper was immediately overhead. As if to confirm her worst fears, the voice of God said, “Federal agents. Stop where you are.”

For an instant-no longer than the width of a heartbeat-Gail considered complying. Even Navarro slowed by half a stride. But this wasn’t right. She didn’t quite know why yet, but something about the scenario was wrong for an action by any federal law enforcement agency. “Keep going!” she yelled. “Go, go, go!”

It was all Navarro needed. He picked up speed again.

There’s no way to accurately track time in stressful conditions, but in the seconds that separated them from some measure of shelter, the hairs on the back of Gail’s neck went to full attention. Out of sheer instinct, she cut hard to her right, and then back to the left again to ruin any shooter’s aim.

The first bullet didn’t arrive until after they’d crossed into the trees, and at that, it went two feet wide, drilling a pine between the two of them.

Navarro dove to the ground for cover, and Gail was three strides past him before she realized what he’d done. “Bruce!” she yelled. They weren’t deeply enough into the woods yet for adequate cover. Two more rounds screamed in, way too close to him. The shooter was getting better.

“Stay down!” Gail yelled. She took a knee behind a hardwood and brought her rifle to bear, trying her best to stay invisible as she searched the horizon for a target. The hammering sound of the rotors hadn’t lessened a bit, but it seemed to be coming from directly overhead. She didn’t have a clue what the shooters were up to, but she knew that if she couldn’t see them, then they couldn’t see her. “Bruce, get up now. Find cover.”

Navarro reacted quickly, again surprising her with his lithe flexibility. He got his feet under him and more sprang than ran to a different tree. “What are they doing?”

The rotor noise had stabilized, as if they’d parked the chopper in the air overhead.

Directly overhead.

“Oh, shit,” Gail breathed. “Run, Bruce!” she yelled. “We’ve got to move. Follow me.”

She took off at a dead run, staying inside the tree line, but running parallel to the clearing, sprinting in the direction she thought they’d least likely anticipate.

Inside ten seconds, the grenades started falling through the canopy of leaves. The explosions were not as loud as she expected them to be-no louder, really, than the flash-bangs she’d used during her HRT days-but the fragmentation damage was staggering, obliterating bushes and smaller trees, and stripping bark and leaves off the larger ones. She knew for a fact that she heard three explosions, but after that it was just a cacophony that reduced their abandoned hiding spot to a lifeless crater. She ignored the two hornet stings in the back of her right leg, which she knew had to be grenade fragments finding their mark.

She drew to a stop behind another tree, the largest one she could find, and Navarro joined her. “Bombs?” he shouted, nearly hysterical. He’d lost his steely calm, and what had replaced it was not at all endearing.

“Hand grenades,” she said. “I suspected they were going to drop something once they moved over the trees, where a sniper would have no shot. Then, when they went into a hover, I knew for sure. Are you okay?”

“They threw hand grenades at me!”

“Are you hurt?”

Navarro shook his head, then grew concerned as his gaze shifted to Gail’s backside. “You’re bleeding,” he said.

“I’m hurting, too,” she said. “Seems only reasonable.” Now that they’d stopped running, she could feel the trails of blood running down the back of her right leg.

“Are you okay?”

“They dropped grenades on me!” Gail tried to match his incredulous tone, and succeeded in eliciting a chuckle. “I think I’m fine.”

She forced herself not to look, deciding that as long as the pain was tolerable, and the flow was a trickle and not a gush, it was a minor wound. To look now and discover otherwise would help no one and change nothing. The bones were intact, and she was alive. In times like these, it pays to take things one step at a time.