Buried Flames (31 page)

Brenna knew that Prue and Jason both carried the M4 Carbine like Mason had on the ride to Lost Summit. Each carried six extra round magazines—the same as Brenna. They only had three round burst capability and she could also fire full automatic; however, her weapon had a shorter range and she couldn’t trade magazines with them.

The checkpoint above them held Missy and she could nail anything she could in the valley below her position with her Remington 700 Short Action because of the Schmidt and Bender PM II 3-12x50 scope. Anyone trying to advance in the open across the river road approach would be exposed to withering fire from four prepared defensive positions.

Brenna wasn’t sure if she actually believed what Prue was saying, but she hoped her acquiescence would spark a fire. This deep-rooted panic was getting old and she would have loved to be able to claim some of Prue’s conviction. Taible was a trained NSA operator. She’d heard Mason tell enough stories about the agency to have a healthy fear of what the organization was capable of and those who followed in their footsteps.

Five minutes passed and Brenna was now able to count how many trees were in the front row to her left. After ten minutes, she noticed her breathing becoming slightly erratic. By the thirteenth minute, she wanted to take off her gloves to wipe the perspiration from her fingers. Each second was mounting a pressure she’d never faced before.

Brenna was coming to understand—ever so marginally—why men and women came back from war a different person. To be under this strain of not knowing whether or not she’d be alive in five minutes was surreal. It changed her body’s chemistry. Something was shifting inside of her and she truly believed she wouldn’t be the same Brenna who lived in Nebraska on a farm she’d loved so dearly. No. That woman no longer existed. She would never be that innocent again. A longing to go back struck her hard and her eyes filled with tears despite her best effort to keep them at bay.

Was that a shadow in the distance? Brenna leaned forward, ignoring the abrasive chafe her jacket made. Her throat closed and she braced herself for what was about to descend on them. A few more seconds passed…revealing nothing where she’d thought she’d seen movement. The ash didn’t stir and nothing appeared out of the dense residue.

Brenna wanted more than anything to have Mason by her side. She wasn’t alone and yet she experienced a loneliness only he could fill. She hadn’t told him so many things that were now running through her mind. She wanted to tell him that he was beautiful…not in spite of the scars, but because of them. They stood for everything he was…loyal, compassionate, honorable. She needed him to know that his bark was a hell of a lot worse than his bite and nothing she couldn’t handle.

What if this was the end for her? What if she wasn’t around to soothe Mason’s anger, his fear, or his nightmares? He’d lived alone for so long and yet there time together had changed both of them. She wasn’t ready to give that up. No matter what they’d come up against, they’d faced it together. Now? They were separated and she hadn’t told him the most important thing—she loved him. She loved him for who he was now and not the young man he’d been. She loved him in this moment and not in a life that could have been.

Brenna’s heart rate accelerated when she thought she caught sight of another silhouette. She wasn’t sure and no one else had taken action. This waiting was pure hell on the body and mind. How much time had passed? Twenty-five minutes? Shouldn’t Taible and his men be here by now? Was she just seeing things? There! Wait. The ash continued to fall as if to wipe away her illusion and tell her she might very well be losing her mind.

Thwack! Thwack! Thwack! Thwack!

The rounds of fire exchange came so fast that Brenna’s first reaction was to duck out of the way. Thud after thud of bullets hitting the trees over her head had caused a scream of terror to catch in her throat. This was it. Taible and his men had arrived.

“Return fire!” Jason shouted his commands. “Return fire!”

It was a war zone. At least, this was what Brenna would have pictured one to be. Gold sparks could be seen firing from multiple positions while the impacts of the bullets reverberated throughout the air. When she wasn’t hit in the first few seconds, the innate fear she’d experienced earlier switched to a fighting instinct. It swept over her and rooted within her stomach, clawing and clenching to be released.

Brenna raised her weapon and looked down its iron sights, aiming at the dodging silhouettes. She selected three round bursts and squeezed the trigger. She thought maybe she heard shouting and screaming above the loud rounds, but she couldn’t be sure. She didn’t know if the cries had come from their side or the enemy’s territory until she realized they were one and the same.

Taible and his men had gained some ground coming up the inside of the roadbed cut back into the mountain. Two of them had somehow darted across the road and dropped into the creek on the far side, though Brenna was positive a couple of bodies were also lying on the ash in the middle of the road. Something caught her eye on the other embankment and she spun the barrel of her rifle, pressing the trigger repeatedly as the rounds exited the chamber. She was caught by surprise when she hit her target and even more shocked by the fact she was numb at just having taken a human life.

How long had this fire exchange been going on? It felt like hours, but it was most likely only a few minutes. Had it been enough of a delay to allow Mason and the team to close enough distance?

“Cover me!” Prue called out, her request bursting through Brenna’s ear bud and pulling her attention down across to the main road. Where was Jason? One of the enemies had a weapon—something Brenna had never seen before—aimed high. He was gunning for Missy, who had eliminated a couple more of their men. “I’m going after them! Someone follow behind!”

Brenna figured Jason was ahead of her, so he wouldn’t be able to backtrack without getting caught in the crossfire. Missy was on the overwatch above and wouldn’t be able to make it down without getting hit, especially since it appeared she was being targeted. Brenna couldn’t leave her position without taking a round from the man below her and she realized that Prue was on her own.

“You have no cover below your position!” Brenna yelled back, looking around for Jason. Where was he? “Jason? Jason, are you there?”

“Go!” Missy shouted as the fire exchange continued all around them. “I’ve got you covered!”

“Shit,” Prue spoke over Brenna in a huffing breath. Alarm laced her tone, which told Brenna something worse than what they were dealing with was about to happen. It spurred her on and she ran without hesitation while at the same time bracing for impact from multiple rounds. They never came. “Explosives. They have C4 and are going to try to flank us and move up the valley to take the bunker.”

Brenna struggled to understand how Taible would even know about the bunker as she continued to run up the incline, displacing from one improvised position to the next in search of Prue. They had to be several hundred yards south of the entrance to the bunker. There was a cinderblock building farther up the hill. It looked like a World War II hardened shelter. It must have been the natural gas wellhead Mason had mentioned. Questions swarmed in circles, much like the falling ash.

Taible had followed Fairfax a long way to eliminate the threat of him releasing classified information, but it had always been about Truman’s team, right? How would they have knowledge of the bunker? Had Truman set this up from the beginning? Had Fairfax? Were the two units working together?

“Do you want to be responsible for her death?” a deep voice called out from the steep forest path in front of Brenna. She abruptly stopped, her ragged breathing and racing heartbeat swooshing the blood through her ears. Had she heard right? Had Prue been caught? Nausea gripped Brenna. “Drop the weapon.”

As if someone had flicked a switch, everything had gone quiet. Brenna strained to hear sounds from behind her. Where they thought there would only be six team members from Taible’s unit coming through, there appeared to be more. Where had he gotten these men? Why weren’t Jason or Missy still shooting? The thought of running loomed over her as a shadow started to form in front of her.

Oh my God. Was that Missy? She was being held like a shield in front of Taible. At least, Brenna thought it was him. She’d never seen him personally, but who else could it be? Missy was gripping her gasmask, which looked to be lifting up slightly from the arm around her neck. There was an S&W .40 caliber semi-automatic handgun pressed against her head, very similar to the one currently in Brenna’s holster. The previous swell of panic overcame Brenna once more and she wasn’t sure what steps to take from here.

“I won’t repeat myself.” Taible appeared to pull his arm a little tighter across Missy’s chest, proving his point. “This is how the next few moments will play out. You’re going to drop and kick your weapon away from you. Then your partner is going to come out from wherever she is hiding.”

“Prue, stay where you are!” Brenna called out before she thought twice about it. This was what Taible wanted. It had to be. She thought of what she would do in his place. His team had all but neutralized everyone on the outside of the bunker. He didn’t need someone to start picking his remaining teammates off one by one. If he had leverage to draw everyone out, he most likely would shoot all of them in cold blood. “Taible, there is no way for you to get inside that bunker.”

“You’d be surprised at my abilities.”

So it was Taible underneath that mask. Brenna tried to think through what she should do now, but the panic was almost too strong to struggle through. She swore she caught a sound behind her, but nothing manifested and she was still alone in her standoff with Taible.

“Let me in! Please! He’s going to kill me!”

What the hell? Brenna swung her gaze behind the duo in front of her, but she couldn’t see that far into the ash. She brought her weapon up higher while Missy kept trying to keep her mask in place. Taible didn’t seem to be all that concerned when Prue stepped out from the wall of falling residue, her weapon also trained on him farther up the hill and at a ninety degree angle from Brenna’s position.

“You have reinforcements coming through the mountain pass to the north,” Prue announced, still confusing Brenna as to where this standoff was going. “You brought Paige with you and sent another woman in her place to throw off our people.”

“Don’t move.” Those two words blended with Prue’s in a way that Brenna thought she’d imagined them. Prue continued telling Taible her views on how he’d managed to outfox Tank and his team, which conveniently gave way to another encrypted message. Relief flooded Brenna’s system until she comprehended what Mason was saying. “Don’t even flinch. I’m going to take the shot over your left shoulder.”

M
ason brought up
his Springfield M1A .308 rifle. He was certain the FLIR RS64 Thermal Rifle Scope was dialed correctly. He’d spent a fair amount of time the previous visit sighting it in since the town had experienced an increasing amount of animal attacks months before the arrival of Tank’s boys, as they were called.

A mountain lion had discovered that taking domestic animals were quite a bit easier than hunting in the wild. Anyone that has ever hunted a mountain lion knew there was only one harder animal to hunt over rugged terrain and that was man. Mason had only took the job no one wanted because it was just a matter of time before someone’s child got between the family pet and the hungry lion.

Most men living in this part of the great northwest would live their entire lives without seeing this particular animal due to its superior skills as a hunter. The real reason Mason finally accepted the task wasn’t his fear of having to explain to some child’s mother why he’d let it go until their greatest fear was realized, but truly because Tank’s insistence that it be done right. Mason had understood his prey, so he’d taken the task at hand and done the job like he was expected to do—one apex predator for another.

Mason aimed in and put enough faith in Brenna to know that she wouldn’t move as he directed. He’d just arrived on the scene, but it was easy to figure out the only reason Taible hadn’t shot and killed either Brenna or Missy was the fact that Prue had still been in the forest of shadows. She’d been an unknown and that wasn’t acceptable in a situation like this. Now that she’d shown her position, it was all or nothing as he squeezed the trigger.

Mason and the rest of the team had covered a lot of ground in a short amount of time. They’d taken chances where normally they wouldn’t have, not knowing if Taible had left behind any other snipers at intervals to slow down their progress. The stress level of all of them had risen dramatically once Owen realized Paige was with the group, confirming that Truman and Dean had been sent on a fool’s errand.

And then to hear the fire exchange coming from up at the checkpoint and not being able to protect Brenna? Mason understood the saying
seeing red
now, and never wanted to experience that again. She was now standing fifty yards farther up the incline in the valley floor close enough for him to touch in the scope’s sight picture, but he ignored the impulse to reach out and touch her illusion.