Дэвид Балдаччи - Mercy

“You don’t have to do it all,” said Pine.

“I won’t. There are too many of them. They’re going to breach our outer defenses. When they do, well, it’s going to come down to hand-to-hand and whatever tricks we can come up with. But I’m betting on us.”

Pine looked at the sniper rifle. “You sure you don’t want me to do that part?”

Spector looked uncomfortable. In a low voice she said, “You know HRT?”

“The FBI’s Hostage Rescue Team? Yes, of course.”

Spector gripped the rifle. “Well, I was a sniper with them for two years. This is the same model rifle I used back then.”

She didn’t meet Pine’s gaze. At first. When she did look up, Pine’s eyes were boring into hers.

Spector licked her lips nervously.

“Then you better get in position. And good luck,” Pine said finally.

“Thanks, Agent Pine.”

She hustled off. Pine checked on Blum, and then had a brief word with her sister.

Pine handed Mercy her walkie-talkie and told her if anything came up to contact Spector right away. She added, “If this goes sideways... I... Look, I’m just so happy that we found each other.”

Mercy clipped the walkie-talkie to her waistband and looked down at her sister. She put a hand on her shoulder. “It won’t go sideways. We’ve got a job to do and we’ll do it. These assholes won’t know what hit them.”

Pine gripped her hand and squeezed it.

“I just have to get us down the tree, like you said.”

“But this time, I’ll help you do it, Lee.”

Pine hurried off with the drone and took up her position. She glimpsed Spector up on the ledge in a prone position; the tripod legs of the sniper rifle were deployed, and she was sighting through the night vision scope. It seemed the woman’s focus was complete.

HRT? thought Pine. They were the best of the best. It was good to know about the woman. And also troubling as hell.

Pine set the drone down and fired it up. Manipulating the controls, she watched as it rose into the air, then she directed it toward the road.

She guided it up to a hundred feet and drove it forward some more. Pine studied the illuminated screen closely. Threading across the screen was a cluster of heavily armed men. They were outlined in black and gray on the screen and were making good time, but there was caution in their movements. The lead man knelt down, scanned the ground, picked up a handful of loose dirt, and sniffed it.

The gas, thought Pine. The smell was still in the dirt.

The group moved forward. She thought she could make out Buckley. He was near the front, a shotgun in his hands.

She let the drone hover over the group for a few moments. Then she put her finger on the button Spector had showed her, said a silent prayer, and pushed it.

The darkness over Buckley and his men was ripped away as the drone’s searchlight exploded down on them like a sunrise of startling proximity.

A bare millisecond passed before Pine heard Spector’s rifle begin firing.

On the screen Pine saw a man shot and he fell. Then another, and a third. The rest scattered, trying to avoid the light from the drone that made them sitting ducks. But Pine moved the drone to keep them in the spotlight.

Spector’s rifle roared again and again. And more men fell.

Shit , thought Pine. That gal can shoot.

The next moment the drone was blown out of the sky by a shot from one of Buckley’s men. The darkness instantly returned.

But the damage had been done.

Spector scrambled down from the ledge as return fire hit all around her position, blowing off shards of rock with each impact. She met up with Pine.

“We need to fall back.”

“The road gets narrower up ahead,” said Pine. “We can funnel them into that.”

They raced away as shots continued to fly at them, and the sounds of running feet echoed off the canyon walls as their pursuers closed in. The gunfire became so intense that they finally had to stop running and duck down.

“Look out,” screamed Spector a few moments later.

A man appeared out of the darkness and charged forward, firing at Pine. She turned and shot him in the chest. He fell dead to the dirt.

Then Pine groaned as a piece of sharpened rock, blown off by all the concentrated gunfire, slashed her in the arm, shredding the skin and flinging blood over her.

Pine grabbed her arm but managed to turn and run.

Spector slung her rifle over her shoulder, pulled a pistol, and sprayed the area behind them with gunfire to buy them some time. They rounded a bend, sprinted ahead, and reached the SUV.

Pine grabbed the first aid kit, and Mercy helped her bandage her arm.

“You gonna be okay?” asked Mercy.

“Oh, yeah,” said Pine. “No way I’m missing this shit.”

Pine grabbed some spare mags from one of the duffels.

Mercy snatched up the shotgun and held the weapon at the ready.

“I laid Carol down in the back seat,” she told Pine. “Figure bullets are going to be flying.”

“You’re the failsafe, Mercy. If they get past us it’s up to you.”

She racked the pistol’s slide, slid the mags into her jacket pocket, handed some to Spector, and said, “Now, let’s finish this.”

Pine was on the left side of the trail and Spector on the right. They crept forward, trying not to make any noise, and pausing and listening in the still air for the sounds of anything coming their way. Pine knew that the fact that they were hearing nothing meant Buckley and his men had hunkered down and were reevaluating things in light of their heavy losses.

Pine looked across the trail and saw Spector pause and kneel down. She glanced at Pine and pointed ahead, held up her pistol, and then made an X with her forearms followed by a sweeping motion in front of her. Pine gave her a thumbs-up.

She took aim with her pistol, pointing it to the far right, about two feet in front of Spector’s position.

And waited.

When the two men came into view, Spector’s gun fired; a split second later so did Pine’s. They were employing a cross-stream tactic, meaning they had overlapping fields of fire covering the entire space in front of them.

They both emptied their fifteen-shot mags, paused to reload, and commenced firing again.

Three men eventually dropped dead in front of them.

The only drawback to this tactic was their muzzle flashes had revealed their positions.

Concentrated gunfire started to rain down on them. It was so intense that both women had to hurl themselves over rocks and fall flat to their bellies. When it stopped, Pine jumped up and ran over to Spector, and helped her up.

“We need to go, now!” barked Pine.

Out of the darkness, two men appeared, guns pointed at them. Pine whirled and kicked the weapon out of one man’s hand. The other man fired at her, but missed because Spector had kicked him right in the nuts.

Then they went at it, hand to hand. The men were far bigger and far stronger. And they ended up being no match for the two women because, in a fight like this, physical strength was vastly overrated. Spector ended the life of one by gutting him with a knife. Pine broke the neck of the other man by pinning him with her legs and wrenching his head violently to the right. Both women rose, breathless and hurting. They had won this battle, but the men had managed to inflict considerable damage on both of them. The women were cut, bruised, and exhausted. Pine could barely move her left arm, and her right knee was swollen tight against her pants.

“Let’s go,” said Spector.

The next moment she grunted as a round pierced her left calf and shot out the back, taking part of her with it. A piece of shrapnel sliced into her cheek, another gouged deeply into her oblique.