Bone Rider (33 page)

They stood locked in a battle of wills for a few minutes, then Misha huffed quietly, spun around and walked over to the dresser. Riley saw him reach for the pitcher of water and turned away abruptly, suddenly very aware again of how thirsty he was and angry at Misha for reminding him. His throat was almost painfully dry, ached with a soreness not even McClane could soothe, and, damn it, but he was hungry too. They’d never gotten that breakfast. He stared blindly at the window, drawn to the sound of water pouring into a glass, but too proud to give in and acknowledge his need. Thankfully, Misha didn’t make him ask for anything. He filled the glass to the brim, came over, and offered it to Riley with a one-sided shrug.

“We both know I’m an asshole sometimes. I’m sorry.”

Riley scowled some more, mostly annoyed with himself now for letting the barb get to him so much. It was an uncomfortable truth, but Misha was right: Riley had fucked a hit man and he’d liked it. Not Misha’s fault Riley didn’t know how to handle that.

“Don’t be so fucking stubborn,” Misha growled when Riley didn’t react to his apology quickly enough. “Take the damn water, you need it.”

We do
, McClane piped up and nudged Riley’s hand up gently.

“Stop pushing me.”

Riley said it quietly, but he meant it, and he could feel McClane backpedal even as Misha’s lips tightened. Misha lifted the glass. Riley hesitated just long enough to make his point before he accepted it. He did need it and he might’ve had a temper sometimes, but he wasn’t a complete jackass. He drank slowly, careful not to upset his stomach, then wordlessly handed back the glass. Misha took it and immediately went to get him another. Once again, Riley’s attention was drawn to his hands, scraped and bruised against the clear jar.

“What happened?” he asked, nodding at the abused fingers.

Misha glanced down, frowning slightly as if he’d forgotten about his injuries. He shrugged dismissively.

“I had to dig you out of the rubble,” he explained, as though it was nothing, as though he hadn’t damn near cut himself to ribbons to get to Riley. Misha waited until Riley had emptied the second glass before he came back with a careful, “What happened to you?”

There simply was no way to make this sound anything but ridiculous, so Riley copied Misha’s shrug and tried for nonchalance.

“I got body-snatched by an alien.”

McClane grumbled a protest.

“A sentient alien armor and weapons system,” Riley clarified. “Very sophisticated. Very unique. Very much a smartass. His name’s McClane.”

L
EANDRA
B
UTLER
had never been a coward, but as she walked down the drab corridor leading to the infirmary and a very unhappy general, she seriously considered a tactical retreat. Young would never know she’d been on her way to him. She could simply head back to her assigned lab, give him time to cool down, wait until he summoned her. It might’ve been the smartest thing to do. She wasn’t exactly in the man’s good graces after hitting him with the non-lethal edition of friendly fire. Of course, that was one of the reasons why she couldn’t turn tail. Like it or not, she owed him. Leandra could tell herself her doubts in the general had been based on experience and rational considerations until the cows came home; fact was she’d been prejudiced against him. Didn’t matter that it was usually the other way round. She’d lost the high ground. She owed him; maybe an apology, certainly someone to yell at so he could vent, and somehow, between sliding over that file to him, burying the metaphorical hatchet in his back, and setting up camp in Fort Bliss—in command of the base unit, no less—Leandra had become the prime candidate for that.

The air seemed to grow thicker the closer she got to the infirmary. A medic walked out of a room looking somewhere between cowed and irritated, a sure sign the general was close by and his mood hadn’t improved since his arrival. She couldn’t blame him. Operation Ripley had blown up in their faces spectacularly. Young’s troops had taken heavy losses, and not because of the armor system. Young himself had been taken hostage, jumped out of a moving car, and slammed up against a light pole. There was going to be hell to pay and she was about to volunteer for a first taste.

“General Young?” she asked the medic, mostly to stall for a little more time.

“Get your ass in here, Lieutenant,” a deep voice bellowed from the inside of the room.

The medic gave her a pitying look. “Good luck, ma’am,” he murmured, and then he saluted and made tracks.

Leandra straightened her shoulders and pushed open the door. The general was sitting sideways on a gurney, still mostly dressed in his black combat fatigues and scowling darkly as he picked at the bandage around his head. Even smelling faintly of sweat and smoke, bloodied and tired, the man cut an imposing figure. Part of it was that he was built like a tank and the lack of a uniform jacket helped drive that point home. Mostly, though, it was the force of his will, almost tangible now that he was too focused on the hunt to rein himself in and let others breathe. The result was that Leandra was extremely aware she was about to face down the huge, hurt, ill-tempered head of SOCOM who was, understandably, carrying a grudge.

Too late to run
, she thought, and strode through the doorway with her head held high and her face carefully blank. Medical branch or not, she was a soldier. Her posture was flawless. Her salute perfect. If her pulse was elevated, she didn’t acknowledge it.

“Sir!”

Young gave her a dirty look and tugged on the wrappings again. “You take a wrong turn somewhere, Lieutenant?”

“Yes, sir!”

Her answer must’ve surprised him, because Young stopped what he was doing and raised one blood-crusted eyebrow. “You did?”

It was now or never, so Leandra took a deep breath and stared resolutely at the wall two inches from the general’s head. Time to try and salvage this situation… and her career.

“Yes, sir. When I went over your head, sir. Wrong decision, sir. I came to apologize.”

There. She hadn’t even choked on it. Her mama would’ve been proud.

Icy blue eyes tried to drill holes into her composure, but Lieutenant Dr. Leandra Butler was a tougher nut to crack than most people. She stood her ground stoically, didn’t allow herself a single twitch of nerves. Apparently she passed muster, because Young grunted grumpily and went back to disassembling his bandage.

“When this is over, you and I are gonna have us a talk about this,” he promised ominously, though it didn’t sound quite like the threat it could’ve been. “What about the entity? No, wait,”—he lifted a hand to forestall her answer—“what about those fuckers who ambushed us? Did any of the CCTV cameras catch them?”

“No, sir.” She’d double-checked her facts before coming to see the general, knowing she had no more leeway. “The garage is under construction, so the security cameras were down. We’re still going through the material on the confiscated phones, but so far no luck.”

Even the most hardcore voyeurs had scattered once the shooting had started. Good thing, too, or civilian casualties would’ve been even higher. As it was, two bystanders had been killed and six wounded. Leandra had been forced to contact the Commander in Chief, who’d put a gag order on the press and local police citing national security reasons. The Internet was already buzzing with speculation anyway, but most of the theories out there were going the terrorist route, not even close to the truth. So far, the situation was under control, but she doubted they could afford another public shootout.

Young yanked on the dressing again in irritation. “Damn it. Only reason they’d drive into that garage was to switch cars. You put Cabrera on it?”

“Yes, sir,” Leandra confirmed. “Only three vehicles got out before we sealed off the area. We’re tracking all of them.” Might as well give him a full report. “The Chief of Police threw a fit, by the way. So did the mayor. And the press.”

The restless fingers paused for a moment. “How’s the kid?”

Not the first question Leandra had expected, but something shifted a little when he asked, made her feel even worse for screwing him over. She cleared her throat, uncomfortable with the feeling. “She’s fine. No lasting damage. We’ve put her in quarantine just to be on the safe side and are running tests, but it doesn’t look like it got to her.” And thank God for that, because if the alien had jumped into the child, that would’ve been an ethical and tactical nightmare. “Her parents were already lawyering up when we got to them. It’s taken care of.”

Mr. and Mrs. Padilla had been convinced to accept a generous financial compensation rather than go to court. They’d also signed an airtight non-disclosure agreement. They hadn’t wanted to at first, but Young’s staff had turned out to be scarily efficient in making problems go away. Emphasis on “scary.”

Young nodded, accepting that without further questions. “Did the CID find anything we can use?”

And there he went, tug-tug-tugging again.

Leandra barely suppressed a grimace. The United States Army Criminal Investigation Command, USACIDC for short, had flown in a team that was at the scene now, but that was about the only thing that had gone right. She’d talked to the lead investigator, gotten a lecture on procedure and fiction versus reality, and had then been told in no uncertain terms that it was kind of difficult to do one’s job when the building in question was still smoldering where it wasn’t soaked through.

“Not yet.”

The bandage was loose enough Young could tug it off now. He glared down at the bloody material for a moment then balled it up and tossed it at the trashcan. Leandra was reluctantly impressed when he sank the lumpy missile without even looking. The gash on his head had been cleaned and stitched up, but the area around it was starting to swell. It looked painful, not that Young deigned to flinch when he prodded at it.

“None of this shit makes sense,” he huffed, and finally left the wound alone. He glanced at her ramrod stiff posture. “At ease, Lieutenant. Did you watch the debriefings?”

Leandra eased into the more comfortable stance with relief and nodded. “I talked to Sergeant Vasquez.”

“So what do you think?”

Surprise made her look him in the face for the first time since she’d entered. She’d fucked him over; he had no reason to listen to her opinion or trust her in any way. Yet there he was, meeting her gaze with those keen, cool eyes. He was giving her a second chance, she realized. Wasn’t making a big deal of it like every other superior officer she’d known up to then; just offered her an opportunity to do her job and prove she’d really meant the apology… and for the first time in a long while, Leandra found she actually did mean it, if only in retrospect.

“Frankly, sir,” she said, proud of how steady and dry her voice came out, “the whole story sounds like what passes for the plot in a summer blockbuster.”

Young laughed; a sharp boom of a sound that seemed too loud in the small infirmary room. He winced and swayed briefly before he caught himself. Exhaustion and possibly a minor concussion, Leandra diagnosed, plus he had to be black-and-blue after that tumble out of a moving car, controlled fall or not. She was smart enough to keep her mouth shut. He couldn’t be in any immediate danger or the medical personnel wouldn’t have left him alone, so she might as well save her breath. He wouldn’t have listened anyway.

Luckily, Young might be goal-oriented, but wasn’t an idiot. He clearly knew his limits and thus didn’t attempt to stand up and be a hero but settled back on the gurney to wait until his body gave him the all clear.

“I agree,” he told her. “And the fuckers didn’t even bring their own guns to that fucking gunfight.”

That was news. “How do you know?”

“I had Peterson count the weapons.”

“Three missing, no extras?”

This was ridiculous. No sane person would’ve attacked US troops unarmed and unequipped. It would’ve—should’ve—been a suicide run.

“Three missing, no extras,” the general confirmed sourly. “They waltzed in and rolled us like amateurs starting out with their bare hands.” He frowned and one of his hands twitched as if he wanted to finger the cut on his head again. “I don’t think they were after the alien at all. I think they were after the host. Which means as soon as the entity wakes up, things are gonna get interesting.”

That was putting it mildly. “What’s the plan, sir?”

Young’s eyes turned flinty. “I’m done fucking around. This time, we’re taking the Spitfire and if the alien fucker doesn’t put up its hands and surrender, it is
toast
.”

T
HERE
was something slightly surreal about sitting in the shade of a desert canyon with the burn of southwestern spices painting over the memories of bland breakfast cereal eaten in the New Orleans Garden District and the livid images of recent violence slowly fading into sepia in the quiet of the afternoon. Andrej was used to short bursts of adrenaline-driven carnage followed by periods of forced inactivity, but this time he was having trouble with the disconnect. He didn’t know whether it was because everything had happened so fast, so unexpectedly, or because they were moving way outside of their usual pattern. Not only had this mission been unsanctioned, it had proved to be eminently uncontrollable, which wasn’t something that sat well with a man of his profession.

Yet no matter how unsettled he was, Andrej felt himself relaxing slowly, lulled into some semblance of calm by the heat and the paradoxical sense of security that came with the presence of far too many weapons not currently pointed at him.

The company might’ve had something to do with it too.

“So that’s Misha.”

Andrej glanced up from his bowl of chili, but J.C. looked perfectly neutral. Just making conversation. No pressure. It made Andrej grin, because, damn, that must be taking some effort. J.C. was curious by nature and paranoid by choice. He had to be dying to know what the hell was going on. So, of course, instead of answering, Andrej only nodded an affirmative and went back to eating. There might’ve been the tiniest grinding sound from J.C.’s jaws working, but when Andrej checked, J.C. merely blinked lazily and took a pull from his bottle.