Breaking the Rules (64 page)

And Eden knew that Izzy and her brother were SEALs, and that they were good at taking care of themselves, good at what they did. But they weren’t invincible.

Still, she also knew no matter how many additional men came in on that plane to provide backup for Jake, that Izzy and Dan weren’t going to let that stop or even slow them. In fact, it was likely that they’d use the incoming plane as a diversion.

And she found herself waiting, heart in her throat, listening for the sounds of gunshots or shouting—sounds that would let her know the battle had begun.

Izzy had done everything but kiss Dan good-bye.

“Okay, bro, change of plans.” After that initial
what the fuck
, Izzy’d taken the landing jet in stride. And they needed a change in plan because they both realized that their new priority one was to make sure that Jenn, Eden, and Ben did
not
get on that aircraft.

“Go around back,” Izzy said, “take out those two guards, ammo up, and get inside through one of the air vents—think you can do that, Gimpy McBaby-Man?”

Dan laughed as he said, “Fuck you!”

“I’ll take that as a
Yes, Mommy
. Once you’re inside, locate the women and Ben. Stay put if you think it’s safe; if not, get them out of that northeast room, but I want you to
avoid
the front of the building. Do you hear me? Stay back from the airfield.”

Dan nodded, because he knew what was coming.

Izzy said it anyway. “Because I’m gonna disable the plane, and if I have to, I’ll make it go boom.”

“How the hell are you going to …?” The words were out of Dan’s mouth even though he knew the answer.

“I’ll improvise.” Izzy held out his hand to Dan, and what started as a handshake turned into a tight hug. “Fuck you, asshole. I hate you and
your ass face. Keep Eden safe for me,” he said, and it was the closest the irreverent SEAL would ever come to a
should I not return
type appeal.

“Make sure you improvise an escape while you’re at it,” Dan said, past an inexplicable lump in his throat.

Izzy pushed Dan away.
“Go.”

Dan went.

Whoever was in charge of security here was a total fool.

As Izzy watched, the two guards in the front of the building went to meet the plane with another two men, who came out of the building with a portable set of metal stairs, after pulling up one of the garagelike bay doors and leaving the damn thing wide freaking open.

He wanted to call Dan on Eden’s cell phone and say,
Come on back, bro, lookie here, you can sneak right in
. Thing is, Dan needed the firepower he was going to borrow from the guards around back—except, oh,
sweet!
The guard who was built like a linebacker actually set his AK-47 down, leaning it against the side of the building so he could help move the stairs.

Izzy helped himself to the weapon donation and ducked inside—and nearly ran into the guy with the hat he’d seen visiting Greg’s house with skinhead Jake. The guy’s gun went up in a classic gangbanger sideways hold, and Izzy opened both hands in a gesture that said
Whoa, Nellie
, even though he was still holding tight to the linebacker’s weapon.

“Who the hell are
you
?” the guy asked.

Jesus, what
was
Hat Guy’s name?

“Nathan,” Izzy said, pulling it out of his ass. “Damn, you scared the shit out of me, man. I just came in from the plane. I’m looking for Jake …?”

The fact that he used their names worked like a charm, and Nathan lowered his weapon just enough for Izzy to hit him in the face with the butt of that AK-47—no, wait, it was an AK-74 with a slightly smaller-caliber bullet, but the same grand Kalashnikov design.

Nathan went down, his lights out, and Izzy dragged him back
behind a conveniently parked A&B Storage truck, relieving him of his various weapons—that very nice Smith & Wesson 9mm pistol that he’d held like a dipshit, and a backup SIG Sauer with the same caliber; okay, so maybe he wasn’t a total dipshit. Maybe he just liked the drama of an unconventional handgrip. Maybe he found that holding his handgun like that got him laid.

Although, truly? What it had gotten him this morning was laid out.

Nathan was carrying magazines for his weapons in his pockets, as well as a set of keys—one of them bearing the symbol for a Ford, and no doubt belonging to the van that was parked outside, near a fucking Volvo.

Hi, my name is Bob, and I’m a security guard for an organization that sells children as sex slaves, and yeah. I drive a Volvo because I’m into auto safety
.

Right.

Nathan also was carrying a set of plastic restraints—no doubt because they had cargo that needed to be restrained, aka Eden, Jennilyn, and Ben, due to be shipped out on that plane. Izzy hummed a few bars of “Bohemian Rhapsody”—
Mama, just killed a man
—as he opened the back of the truck and used one of the pieces of plastic to restrain Nathan, hands behind his back, to one of the anchors on the floor that was inside of the truck, rather than breaking the motherfucker’s neck the way he kinda sorta wanted to.

But in the aftermath—at least the aftermath Izzy was envisioning—it was good to have one of the bad guys still be capable of communication. And someone relatively far up the chain of command was particularly likely to start communicating effectively; i.e., confessing to all of his evil boss’s sins, when faced with life in prison or worse.

So Izzy yanked off the guy’s sneaker, stripped off his smelly-ass sock and jammed it into his mouth, then gave him one more tap on the head to make sure he stayed unconscious, before closing and securing the truck door with another of those handy plastic restraints.

Outside on the runway, the sun had risen, and the metal stairs were in place as the plane’s door popped opened. And as the two
guards stood there along with two of the men from inside, like neatly lined-up little ducks in a shooting range, Izzy knew he’d never have a better opportunity to take all of them out.

And whether they drove a Volvo or not, they
did
willingly work for an organization that sold children—internationally—as sex slaves.

So Izzy did what he had to, knowing as he did it that all hell would break loose at the sound of that AK-74, but that the dirty dozen that they’d started with—if Danny’d done his job, and if he knew Danny and he did, Danny
had
done it quickly and efficiently—would drop down to a far more manageable five.

Not counting, of course, the potential army that awaited him in that plane.

The climb up to the air vent on the north side of the warehouse was a bitch and a half.

But Dan did it, because he had to.

Because he could not fail.

Because he’d trained and trained and
trained
for this. For getting the job done despite the pain.

So he made it up and he made it inside, and he swung himself onto a series of catwalks that crisscrossed the ceiling, up near a set of big, slow-moving fans.

Jesus, it was hot in here, but there was no time to rest or congratulate himself for making it this far. Gimpy McBaby-Man, he was not.

Infrared images had put the three hostages—his potentially pregnant wife, his brother, and his sister—in a small room in the northeast corner of the building. He found it easily. The entire back of the building was partitioned into a row of rooms, with lower ceilings covered by rolls of insulation, probably because those rooms were air-conditioned and the rest of this place sure as hell wasn’t.

As Dan made his way over in that direction, he could see the tops of the walls that segmented the rooms, and he saw there was a long hallway that connected them all.

It was then that he heard it—the unmistakable sound of gunfire.

And five men burst out of the single door in that long wall that separated the warehouse from the back rooms.

One of them—a man with a shaved head—stopped a second and snapped out an order as the remaining three ran for the airfield. “Go to the prisoners and get one of them.”

The man who’d been given the order hesitated. “Which one?”

“I don’t give a shit! Just
do
it! Now!”

They were too far away, and outside of the range of the weapons that Dan had acquired from the obviously inexperienced guards—which was a shame, because if he had more than this stupid lightweight room broom or these small-caliber pistols, he could’ve taken them all out when they’d come through the door.

And as the skinhead followed the other men toward the open warehouse bay and the brilliant morning light, and as that last man ran back toward the partition door, Dan ran, too, heading for that northeast corner of the building.

There was no ladder down. He was going to have to jump, counting on the ceiling’s tile-and-metal framework and that insulation to break his fall.

Dan swung himself over the edge of the catwalk and let himself drop.

Eden and Ben were both talking at once.

“It’s Izzy!”

“It’s Danny! It’s got to be!”

They both started yelling. “Hey! We’re in here! We’re back here!”

Jenn, too, had heard what undeniably sounded like gunfire. She’d heard shouting, too, but none of the voices belonged to Dan, and that worried her.

But then she heard the sound of footsteps running down the hall.

“Here comes the guard,” she said. “It sounds like only one …”

Ben and Eden both moved into place.

The door opened with a crash, and the guard—the man Jenn thought of as Nathan’s brother—was standing there, waving a gun at them, shouting, “Get back from the door!”

They couldn’t get close enough to stick him with the glucagon. At least not yet. But maybe if he ordered them out of there …

“Down on your knees, hands on your heads,” he shouted. “You! The big girl! Get over here!”

He was talking to Jenn—she was larger than Eden—and she was going to have a chance to do it.

It was then that the ceiling exploded and Jenn threw herself down on top of Ben, who was still pretending to be unconscious, only to find that Eden had done the very same thing.

But it wasn’t an explosion, it was an entrance. The ceiling tiles had shattered from the force of a man plunging through them, bringing insulation and pieces of the metal framework with him, and God, it was not just any man, it was …

“Danny!”

The jet was one of those personal-sized baby jets that richie-riches or celebrities with pilot licenses used, to flit from L.A. to Palm Springs.

Izzy charged up the stairs and hit the door to the plane with his shoulder before the frightened-looking man standing there could swing it all the way shut.

The guy was a flight attendant, or maybe the copilot—either way he was unarmed—and Izzy pushed his way past him into the cabin, which was wonderfully empty, thank you, baby Jesus, for that lovely surprise.

It had been stripped of seats—all except for the very front row on both sides of the aisle—to make room for the kind of sturdy cages that could be used to transport dangerous animals.

Or human beings.

And shit, he was wrong about the cabin being empty.

There was one little girl locked in the cage in the back. She poked
her head up to look at Izzy with brown eyes that were wide with alarm, but then ducked back down, as if trying to hide.

Behind the cages—there had to be a half dozen of them—was what looked like a bar setup.

Just in case the slave traders wanted a gin and tonic midflight.

Izzy tossed the flight attendant into the plush leather of that single row of seats after the guy went unconscious due to his head connecting solidly with Izzy’s elbow. He was definitely a flight attendant, because the copilot was up with the pilot in the cockpit, both of them fumbling for weapons as they gazed at Izzy with alarm through the open cockpit door—which had a pre-9/11 design, seeing as how it swung open into the cabin so they couldn’t kick it shut.

If the cages and that little girl hadn’t been there, Izzy might’ve tried a
Freeze!
or a
Hands where I can see ’em!

But that child made it so clear that these assholes knew
exactly
what they were doing. They’d chosen to dance with the devil.

So Izzy sent them to hell.

Dan hit the ground hard amid the rubble and dust from the ceiling, but he rolled, and as he rolled, he brought up his weapon and he fired, and the man in the doorway fell.

“Is Ben badly hurt?” were the first words out of his mouth as he reached for Jenn’s hand, to pull her up to her feet.

She was shaking, she couldn’t help herself—that man was
dead—
and she wanted to throw herself into Dan’s arms, but she knew there was no time. She settled for looking hard into his eyes—that fall had hurt him, but he’d never admit it—as Ben answered for himself. “I’m fine. I was just pretending—”

“Good,” Dan cut him off, even as he squeezed Jenn’s hand and released her to help Ben up, because there was no time for even the briefest of kisses.

“Is Izzy here?” Eden asked.

“He’s out there,” Dan said, crouching next to the dead guard as if
he were no more than an unpleasant pile of trash, and taking what looked like a rifle and a smaller handgun off the man’s body.

“By
himself
?” Eden asked, her worry radiating off of her.

He nodded. “Yeah.”

“Oh God,” Eden breathed.

“We counted seven of them,” Jenn told Dan. “Two outside and five in.”

“We got an infrared head count of twelve from the FBI. Who are on their way, but it’s going to be a while before they get here,” Dan told her as he handed what looked like a small machine gun to Eden and the handgun to Ben. He offered a similar weapon to Jenn. “Baby, I know you don’t like firearms, but—”

She didn’t, it was true, and she’d discovered she liked dead bodies even less, but she took it from him willingly. It was heavy and solid. “I’ve never even held one before.”

“Don’t point it at anyone you aren’t willing to kill,” he told her, told all of them. “And if it comes to it, aim for the biggest body mass—you’ll have a better chance of hitting your target.”