Aimee Thurlo - Undercover Warrior

Although he avoided the truck, it was too late for the ambulance. The pickup slammed into its right front end, pushing the emergency vehicle around ninety degrees with a sickening crunch.

Kyle skidded and barely missed clipping the tailgate of the pickup as it fishtailed around in the intersection. Hitting the brakes hard again, he finally managed to stop about fifty feet beyond the crash site. He looked back in the side mirror just as a familiar-looking van drove up and stopped a few feet behind the pickup.

“That idiot just ran the light!” Erin cried out, her voice shaking.

“It wasn’t an accident. Get down on the floorboard now,” he ordered, grabbing his pistol. “Call 911,” he instructed the online computer, not taking his eyes off the van. “Federal officer needs help, GPS location.”

“The van! Those are the same men,” she said, her voice rising. “Give me a way to fight back.”

“Here, defend yourself, but stay down.” Kyle handed her the Glock, then threw open his door, reaching behind the seat for his M4 as he jumped down to the pavement. He’d replaced the magazine with a full load when he put it away, but the thought of a firefight in a city intersection brought him back to his deployments in Afghanistan. Yet here he was in Hartley, New Mexico.

Two men wearing ski masks had already exited the van, both upgunned to assault rifles. They were possibly wearing vests beneath fatigue jackets, too, though he couldn’t tell for sure.

As the gunman from the passenger side approached the disabled EMT vehicle, the driver of the van watched the man’s flank and front, providing cover. To their right, the pickup driver was limping away from his badly disabled vehicle, pistol in hand. Clearly the collision had crippled his effectiveness.

Kyle advanced to his left, intending on approaching from behind. There was no cover here in the street, but he was sure they were out to nab Hank and were confident that surprise and firepower had put them in control.

The gunman came up to the rear door of the emergency vehicle and rapped on it with the butt of his assault rifle. “Open the door!”

The man’s partner, the driver, looked over at Kyle’s SUV. Knowing the fight might shift to Erin’s position, Kyle moved in.

“Put your weapons down!” Kyle yelled, now partially screened by the van.

Both gunmen whirled instantly, spraying bullets in his direction.

Outgunned for the moment, Kyle dropped to the pavement and rolled left as bullets kicked up chunks of asphalt. He returned fire, but he wasn’t alone. As he glanced back, he saw Erin lying flat beside the SUV, firing beneath the engine block at the men’s legs.

Both suspects jumped to the driver’s side of the van, moving out of view.

Not wanting to shoot in that direction and risk hitting the ambulance beyond, Kyle circled to his left.

The pistol-wielding pickup driver snapped off a few rounds, but shots from the SUV forced him to take cover beside the pickup. Erin had Kyle’s back.

Kyle couldn’t see the men any more, but he was advancing, weapon up, when the van roared to life. Tires squealing, the vehicle raced backward straight at him. He fired twice, then jumped to his left as the van brushed by him.

Swinging around, prone, he tried to bring his rifle to bear on the van, which had now done a one-eighty and was racing down the street. A bullet screamed past him from behind. Realizing it had come from the pickup’s driver, Kyle forgot about the van, rolled and squeezed off three rounds at the driver, who was leaning against his ruined pickup, still shooting.

The shooter flinched, grabbed his side, and slid down the side of the pickup to a sitting position.

Kyle jumped up, weapon aimed at the wounded man, and advanced quickly.

“Drop the weapon now!” he yelled. To his left, he could see an EMT sneaking a quick look out the back door of the unit. “Stay inside!” Kyle ordered.

Kyle was within fifteen feet when the badly wounded man looked directly at him, put the barrel under his chin and shot himself.

Chapter Three

Kyle lowered his weapon and looked away, shaking his head in disgust. A life wasted, just like that. Up to now, he’d only seen that kind of hardcore reaction overseas.

He moved toward the ambulance, put his hand on the door handle, then yelled, “Federal officer. Open up!”

The EMT inside did so quickly, throwing his hands up as the door opened. “Officer, we’re not armed, and our patient needs us right now. We’ve got to keep working, okay?”

Kyle nodded and realized, from the monitor’s tone, that Hank had flatlined. As both EMTs worked to revive Leland, one of them talking back and forth with an emergency room doctor through a headset, Erin rushed up. She stood silently beside him, watching.

Minutes passed, the medics working feverishly. After four attempts to restart Leland’s heart with the paddles, the one with the headset reported the results, tapped the other EMT on the shoulder, and shook his head. “Call it.”

The second medic noted the time and pulled a sheet over the patient’s head.

“What are you doing? Don’t give up!” Erin demanded.

“Ma’am, his blood pressure bottomed out even before the accident, probably from trauma-induced internal bleeding. Even if we hadn’t been stopped here on the street, I doubt he would have made it to the hospital.”

She bit down on her lip until it turned white, but when Kyle tried to get closer to comfort her, she stepped away. “I’m fine,” she said, though her voice was shaking.

“Everyone here, including us, did everything possible to save him,” Kyle said. “Hold to that.” His voice was quiet and calm, a tone he’d learned people responded to, and it broke through to her now.

“We might as well go back to the warehouse. There’s nothing else we can do here now.”

She nodded, and walked back to the SUV with him. Her movements were slow and ponderous as she continued to struggle with what she’d just seen. “I should notify his brother...make funeral arrangements, or at least help with that. I...”

“That’ll wait. Right now you need a little time to process what’s happened and so do I,” he said.

As they climbed into his SUV, he saw her staring ahead, a glassy look in her eyes. Shock. “Seat belt,” he said, and she absently complied.

“What I saw today is going to haunt my nightmares for as long as I live,” she said after a moment.

Her words touched him. He knew all about things one could never unsee, and memories that refused to die.

“You’re right, some things can’t be forgotten,” he said, his voice nothing more than a deep rumble, “but you’ll learn to deal and, in time, the images will come less often.”

Kyle started the engine and called his brother on the phone. After a few minutes he ended the connection and glanced at her. “We’ll head back to Secure Construction. My brother will wait for us there and he’ll want a detailed account of everything that went down.”

Ten minutes later, they parked outside the now closed access gates of Secure Construction’s fenced compound and waited in the SUV. After several moments a uniformed Hartley police officer came to unlock the gate.

“Have you given any more thought to what these men may have wanted, Erin? You already ruled out cash, but do you keep anything that’s dangerous or of high value here, like maybe explosives?”

The person who’d encountered Hank overseas was said to be a bomb maker with ties to extremists. Firearms were easy to get in the U.S., but finding high explosives was a lot more difficult.

“We use explosives to test the construction of newly designed safe rooms, but we hire out those tests and pick up what’s needed en route to the test site. We never really store anything here. There’s no need.”