John Gilstrap - Threat warning

“Shut up,” the man said.

“Where are we going?”

“I said shut up!” His grip tightened around Ryan’s chest enough that he had a hard time breathing.

They’d just reached the corner of the building and turned right to head toward the back of the house when he heard a voice yell, “Ryan Nasbe! Shout out! I’m here to take you home!”

His captor must have heard it, too, because his grip turned pythonlike, squeezing so tightly that Ryan couldn’t move air in or out.

This is bullshit, he thought. This was the moment. He’d already messed up his first chance to get away; he wasn’t going to let something as transient and insignificant as pain ruin his second shot at freedom.

Live or die, this was the time.

Kicking his legs at the air and tossing his head and his good arm, he wriggled like a grounded fish, making himself impossible to hold on to.

“Stop that!” the man commanded as he stopped and grabbed him with both arms in a futile effort to control him.

Ryan heard his name called out a second time, just as he felt his captor losing his grip.

“I’m over here!” he shouted. His voice broke with the effort and rose an octave, but man, was it loud. “On the side of the building! Over here!”

As he slipped through, his captor lost his grip on everything but the boy’s bad arm. “Shut up, kid.” He tried lifting him by the arm again.

Ryan howled. “The left side of the building!”

Up ahead, at the edge of the shadow, he saw the silhouette of what could only be his dad. He had the night vision and the vest, and he had a rifle at his shoulder.

“Here!” Ryan yelled as he fell to the ground.

Gail’s bursts of gunfire had brought instant darkness and panic. From back here, from this elevation, she witnessed the pandemonium. People were running everywhere. The NVGs erased a lot of detail, but muzzle flashes popped right out. From their location, and from the results-bad guys falling down-she figured that her team must be winning.

When she saw Boxers bolt onto the stage and cover PC-Two, she knew it was time for her to get back to work.

She slid on her butt down the windshield onto the hood, and from there darted around to the driver’s door. She slammed it shut, adjusted the seat-nothing last driven by the Big Guy could be driven by anyone else without adjustment-and dropped the transmission into gear.

The plan was simple. The guys would seek primary shelter inside the armored walls of Building Alpha, but only long enough for her to drive around to the back, and then they’d get the hell out of there.

How they were going to do that without being torn apart by superior numbers was a little fuzzy, but a plan is a plan. In dynamic situations like this, plans were little more than fantasies, anyway-pictures in your head of how things would go if everyone else played their parts perfectly.

She hit the gas hard to get ahead of the wave of fleeing Klansmen, or whatever the hell they were, and pointed the nose of the truck down the red side of the building.

She was too late. She hadn’t yet driven fifty feet before the leading elements of the fleeing terrorists caught up with her.

She hit the brakes hard to keep from running over one of them, and that proved to be her big mistake.

“It’s one of the shooters!” someone yelled, and then they swarmed the vehicle. In an instant, they were everywhere. Two of them climbed onto the hood, and God only knows how many climbed onto the flatbed. They stomped at the hood and the windshield, rocking the vehicle violently on all axes of motion.

“Gunslinger’s in trouble,” she said on the net. “They’ve got me in my vehicle.”

She stomped on the gas again. The wheels spun in the gravel, and as the truck slid sideways, the attackers on the hood and the roof went flying. But the additional two thousand pounds of humanity in the flatbed made the truck sluggish to respond.

Gail dropped the transmission from Drive to Low for the extra torque, and it helped for a second or two.

In her ear, Boxers’ voice said, “PC-Two is in hand, we’re going to Alpha.”

Then the glass in her door erupted in on her, showering her with ragged beads that bloodied the side of her head. Someone pulled her NVGs from her head.

Hands reached through the opening and grabbed the wheel, cranking it hard to the left.

She pressed harder on the gas, but with the wheels turned so acutely, the rest was inevitable.

The centrifugal force flipped the vehicle to its side. Just before she lost her grip on the wheel and was thrown across the cab into the inside of the passenger door, she radioed, “They’ve got me.”

Jonathan saw the man torturing the boy, but there was too much movement for a clear shot.

“Gunslinger’s in trouble. They’ve got me in my vehicle.”

Jonathan’s heart skipped. He threw a glance over his right shoulder, to where Gail had to be, but all he saw was the crowd of bad guys.

“PC-Two is in hand,” he heard Boxers say. “We’re going to Alpha.”

When he looked back down the green side, the torturer had let the kid drop and was already disappearing around the corner to the black side of Alpha. His distraction with Gail had let his moment to shoot evaporate.

“They’ve got me.”

Jonathan cursed under his breath.

And he turned his back on Gail. He had a job to do. This mission was first and foremost about the Nasbes. Once he had them secure, he could start worrying about the team. This wasn’t the way it was supposed to go.

With his weapon pressed against his shoulder, he made his way down the side of the building to the boy. “Ryan Nasbe,” he said.

The kid looked confused. “You’re not my dad.”

“No, I’m not,” Jonathan said. “But I sure could use his assistance right now. Can you walk?”

He was already rising to his feet. “My arm’s broken.”

“Then I promise I won’t make you walk on your hands. Stick very, very close to me.”

In his ear, her heard all kinds of commotion as people grabbed Gail and pulled her out of the pickup. It filled the airwaves.

“Who are you?” Ryan asked.

The distraction of Gail’s capture unnerved him. It would unnerve all of them. He switched his radio to push-to-talk. “Big Guy and Mother Hen, switch to channel two and PTT. Mother Hen, continue to monitor channel one. Hang tough, Gunslinger. We’ll come and get you soon.” The words hurt his stomach. Gail was on her own.

“Are you talking to me?” Ryan asked.

Jonathan placed a protective arm around the kid. “Scorpion on channel two. PC-One in hand, on our way to Alpha.”

The words had barely cleared throat when he heard intense gunfire from inside the building.

“We’ve got bad guys in Alpha,” Boxers said on channel two. Another burst of gunfire followed his words.

To Jonathan’s ear, they all sounded like rifles. Five-five-six millimeter, if he wasn’t mistaken, and some were set on full-auto.

“I’m coming in on the green side,” Jonathan said. “How does it look there?”

“I’m looking forward to you telling me when you get here,” Boxers said. Translation: Hurry the hell up.

“What’s going on?” Ryan asked.

“The beginning of a long night,” Jonathan said. “I need you to do exactly what I tell you, in exactly the way I tell you to do it.”

Ryan nodded.

Behind them and to the right, the crowd was catching on. They needed to get inside now.

Jonathan moved to the green-side door and tried the knob. Thank God it was unlocked. If he’d had to blow it to gain entrance, there’d have been no way to lock it behind him. He pushed Ryan flat against the wall. “Crouch down,” he said, and the kid did exactly as he was told.