Under Fire (38 page)

Liam closed his eyes briefly as he absorbed the news of Sylvia’s death and how her plans to bring them in had led to it. He would mourn the loss of his friend later. Right now, he had to focus on Rachel. They couldn’t have called him in to watch her die too. “And I was brought here because…?”

“NORTHCOM has a track on the craft and is launching fighters from Homestead.” Silence hung in the room for a few seconds.

Finally McCabe spoke. “They’re going to shoot it down.”

Colonel Zogby nodded. “General Sullivan is over the water, heading south, so he isn’t an immediate threat to homeland security. But once he turns toward land, we’ll have no other options.”

Options? She was talking options?

Hope stirred and took root tenaciously. “Ma’am, are you telling me we have a window of time to come up with a better plan before NORTHCOM launches that shot?”

“That is exactly why you were called in and exactly how I expect my elite force to react. My battle staff is already convening, awaiting you and your team.” She walked through the door, talking as he kept stride with her. “We want General Sullivan taken alive. And of course we want to prevent the loss of an innocent life.”

His creaky old knees didn’t give out on him, but it was a close call, with relief threatening to down him. He would hold strong, focus, and work with this colonel who’d offered an unexpected second chance for him.

For Rachel.

“Yes ma’am. I assume you are already getting a new alert aircraft fired up.” Determination powered his steps.

“We are.”

“Do you have a track on the aircraft?”

The colonel opened the door into the “war room.” A wall-size screen lit up. Rows of manned computers packed the room. She gestured toward the screen. “Our stolen aircraft headed away from the coast and is now turning south. Fighters have launched from Homestead, but they really can’t reach out to them until a tanker from MacDill gets to the area. Any idea where the general’s headed?”

“No, ma’am.” McCabe cleared his brain of distracting thoughts of Rachel playing with her dog. Or her standing down an alligator. Of her face just before he kissed her.

He focused everything he was and everything he’d learned on this moment. He studied the electronic map showing the stolen aircraft and the F-16s waiting farther south.

“Looks like we could cut them off if we took an angle and stayed near the coast.” The logical plan of action took shape in his mind, the one a team leader should propose. He was zeroed in for Rachel. “What do you think about getting my team on the alert plane? Have the F-16s force the airplane down in the water instead. Then we can parachute in with rafts and secure survivors until the chopper arrives.”

“Roll it,” the colonel said without hesitation.

She’d accepted his long-shot plan, one that stood such a miniscule chance at succeeding, even he couldn’t believe he’d suggested it. Yet what other choice did he have, to save Rachel?

Less than ten minutes later, Liam and his team piled out of a bus up the back ramp of an HC-130. Propellers were already turning. The loadmaster pointed the team to the troop seats lining the walls in the rear of the aircraft, the same red nylon and metal tubing, uncomfortable seats they had spent countless hours strapped to. Before they were even settled in, the ramp was coming up and the plane was taxiing toward the runway.

He took in the faces around him, the gritty resolution in their eyes, the readiness to give their all for the pararescueman’s motto, “These Things We Do, That Others May Live.” That today, Rachel would live.

These were his men. His team. There wasn’t anyone on earth he’d rather have with him. And yet something about his plan didn’t sit right with him. His team would follow him. He didn’t doubt that for a second. However, something tugged at the back of his brain, a sense that there had to be another way, one that didn’t involve Rachel stuck inside a plane crash-landing into the ocean.

McCabe unstrapped from his seat and moved up to the cockpit and the communication station. Studying the radar screen, he watched the
blip, blip, blip
of light pulsing like a heartbeat. That light was his only connection to Rachel.

He tapped the staff sergeant manning the position on the shoulder. “What is the status of the target?”

The sergeant moved one of the cups of his headset off his ear. “The F-16s have just left the tanker and will intercept in ten minutes.”

“What are their orders?”

“They are going to intercept and attempt to turn them back toward the United States, forcing them down into water. Air traffic controllers tell us he’s having a helluva time flying the plane. He’s all over the place.”

“And if they don’t turn back?” he asked, even though he already knew. Hope was a crazy bastard that ignored reason.

“They were told to be prepared to shoot them down, but they are weapons tight right now.”

Weapons tight, not allowed to shoot yet. He didn’t like the notion “yet.” And he wasn’t feeling as good about the plan of an erratic pilot’s ability to crash-land in the ocean.

McCabe patted the sergeant on the back and headed aft to the team waiting in the cargo bay.

Barely contained fury welled inside him for coming back to the base. Anger at himself. Had he been so eager to push her away with both hands—so cry-ass scared of taking a chance with her—that he’d missed a warning sign that they were walking into a trap? He would not accept,
could
not
accept, that anything would happen to her on his watch.

He paced the metal deck, then stopped and stared at a winch fixed to the aircraft. An alternate plan formed in his mind. An even crazier plan than the one he’d proposed first, and a plan he would never assign to anyone on his team.

But then he wasn’t asking them to carry it out.

This was his mission. His woman. No room for failure, because a world without Rachel…

Facing his team, Liam cleared his throat and his thoughts. Lining up his plan. Becoming one with the uniform as he’d intended since he was eleven years old, patting his mother’s hand while they watched old war movies. He would win this battle or die trying.

“Hey, did you ever see that movie where a special-ops guy is lowered from one airplane to another to save the president?”

Rocha stared at the winch and shook his head. “Yeah, and I thought it was bullshit Hollywood glitz. Besides, that was a different kind of plane than this. I don’t think that would have a chance of working unless the back ramp was down. You can’t just open the doors from the outside, and the props are way too close anyway.”

“Valid points”—which was why he had a team, to think through all angles—“but if the ramp is still down… If Sullivan didn’t close it after takeoff because he’s a fighter pilot, unfamiliar with the cargo plane… If we flew at just the right altitude above him so he can’t get a visual on us…”

Cuervo asked, “What makes you think that he just won’t crash the plane once the PJ boards?”

That part was easy. He’d had a wealth of training on getting inside a person’s head after all his time in therapy. And from the start, he’d had the general’s number—an intense narcissist. Once he was face-to-face with the guy, he knew just how to play the bastard. “I don’t believe that anything is more important to General Sullivan than General Sullivan. He won’t risk a crash landing. If he was on a suicide mission, he would have shot himself back in his office.”

Decision made, Liam charged up the deck to the communications sergeant. “Get me a patch to NORTHCOM. I need to get clearance for a change of plans.”

For the millionth time, Rachel looked around the cockpit and toward the back of the plane for a way out. Although that seemed an unlikely occurrence.

Even if she knocked the general unconscious, grabbed his gun, or clawed his face until he bled to death, she was stuck in an airplane she couldn’t land. The back ramp was still open, but it was a long, long way down into the darkening sky. Panic had shifted into a dull numbness.

Bump.
The cargo plane bounced, then settled.

Hell, the general could barely even fly this aircraft. Every few minutes he pulled his attention from the early-night sky to the instrument panel. The plane would lurch, drawing him back to the yoke. The general would curse the airplane again.

Bump.

Right on time.

“This airplane blows,” he shouted over the roar of wind through the back. “I don’t think they rigged it right.”

Sullivan looked down again, searching for something. The airplane jolted.

Bump.

He gripped the yoke tighter. “Autopilot? How’s the damn autopilot work?”

Like she would actually answer? Shivering, Rachel turned her head and looked out the window at the dim shadow of a fighter jet that had been trailing them just off the wing for the last thirty minutes. It stayed on her side of the plane, where the general couldn’t see. She wasn’t ready to surrender. She was willing to fight. But she feared the decision might be out of her hands.

How much longer until the fighter shot them down? The jet
was
there to shoot them down. She accepted that and wondered why Sullivan hadn’t considered it. Granted, he didn’t seem to be thinking all that clearly.

Bump
. “Fuck!”

Hysterical laughter bubbled inside her. She clapped a hand over her mouth, but she couldn’t hold it back. It just flowed and flowed out of her until tears ran down her face, blurring the stars winking to life outside the windscreen.
Starlight, star bright, first star I see tonight…
She gasped for air. Okay, she was on her way to a major panic attack.

But what did that matter? She was about to die anyway. All her great intentions to fight her way out of this were just that. Intentions. She needed something with a lot more firepower.

It wasn’t as though Liam would come swooping in to save her. She couldn’t even leave him a message about how much she loved him and how deeply sorry she was for fighting with him earlier. How she wished she could go back and treasure up every minute they’d had together. How she wished she hadn’t wasted the past six months they could have spent together. He wouldn’t know any of that even if she could write it down, since paper and the rest of this plane would be at the bottom of the ocean very shortly.

Bump.

She considered just jumping out of her seat and making a mad dash toward the back after all. Maybe she could grab a parachute. She knew how to jump from a plane. Well, not with a parachute, but she’d been lowered on a cable with her dog countless times on search and rescue missions.

God, she’d had an amazing life, but she could have had more. She
wanted
more. The waste, the futility, clanked inside her again and again until the sound became an almost tangible part of the roaring wind.

Was her subconscious trying to tell her to go for the parachute anyway? Even if she wasn’t sure she could put it on right? If the general couldn’t find autopilot, he couldn’t chase her down in back. He might try to shoot her, but at least she would go down fighting.

Maybe
he
planned to parachute out before they shot him down? If there was any justice in the world, he would suck at parachuting as much as he sucked at flying planes.

And if he planned that escape route, she needed to beat him to the punch before she was left in a plane she most definitely couldn’t fly. She glanced over her shoulder to assess the possibility of—

In the gaping back hatch of the cargo plane, another plane flew higher and just behind. Not a fighter jet, either. It was larger, much like the one she was in, so she didn’t think a final shot was pointed their way. Images shifted in the shadowy haze between day and night. The other plane coasted so close, she couldn’t fathom how the pilot maneuvered. Or why. She squinted at something off kilter, something strange about the whole vision.

Oh
my
God.
She jerked back reflexively.

A man dangled from a cable harnessed to his body. She inched to look again, careful not to draw attention from the swearing general. The cable swung closer to the back ramp. The helmeted man came closer.

Toward the open back ramp.

A man was—no kidding—being lowered into the plane. And not just any man. Somehow she knew it could only be Liam.

Bump.

The ramp slammed into Liam and sent him spinning away into the evening sky. She bit back a scream of horror. Heaven forbid that Sullivan figure out what was happening and jerk the plane around even more.

Then impossibly, incredibly, Liam swung closer again, arms extended, reaching for a cable that supported the ramp. He missed, swinging out to the side.

But he hooked his leg.

Then a hand.

And suddenly he was standing on the metal ramp. He released the cable attached to his vest, sending the line snapping away into the night.