Читать книгу Tactical Rescue - Maggie Black K. - Страница 12

FOUR

Zack watched in amazement as Rebecca launched herself at Dmitry, landing hard on the criminal’s back. The gun flew from Dmitry’s hand and disappeared into the undergrowth. Rebecca clung to his back, swinging at his head and scratching like a wildcat. So, she’d been hiding up a tree waiting for a member of Black Talon to run out of bullets? Rebecca might not be the easiest target he’d ever extracted from danger, but the woman had serious guts.

Zack burst through the tree line and started running. Dmitry tossed Rebecca to the ground. She leaped up and charged right back at the burly man, even as his fist flew at her. She fell back. But only for a moment. She charged again.

“Rebecca, wait!” Zack threw the strength of his bulk in between Rebecca and the professional killer. Dmitry swung toward Zack. Zack blocked the blow and leveled a decisive punch at the man’s jaw. Rebecca took off running through the woods again.

You’ve got to be kidding me!

The Black Talon killer scrambled to his feet and took off running back toward the road. Rebecca and Dmitry had disappeared through the trees in opposite directions.

Okay, now what? Zack glanced up to the sky, but even before a prayer could leave his lips, he knew exactly which way to run.

Zack took off after Rebecca. He gave up on stealth and went for speed. She was smaller, lither and better able to weave through the dense underbrush. He felt like a rhinoceros crashing after her. But she would never be able to beat the sheer strength of the adrenaline that surged in his veins. He caught up to her, slowly and surely. Then for a moment they were pacing each other, his feet just a few steps behind hers.

Zack’s hand reached out and brushed her shoulder, even as he dreaded the moment he was going to have to grab her and force her to stop. “Rebecca.” He panted. “Please.”

She stopped running. So did he. They stood there together, face-to-face in the forest, catching their breath. Her hands grabbed both of her knees, as her head swung down between her legs for a moment, panting. Then she swung her head back up, and he watched as dark hair cascaded around her shoulders, dancing like grass in the wind. His mouth went dry.

Rebecca’s hands rose up in front of her face in two small fists. He watched as her legs moved into the perfect lines of a fighter’s stance. Something inside his stomach lurched. He watched her take the pose he’d seen her take so many times before, back on the mats when they were so much younger and knew each other so much better. His heart remembered how there’d always been a slight smile on her lips and a twinkle in her eyes as she challenged him to a fight. Now, the look in her eyes was deadly serious and the curl of her lip almost trembled.

His heart sank down to the bottom of his chest. He leaned back against a tree, suddenly feeling all the fight leave his body.

“Aw, come on, Becs. Don’t look at me like that. I know this situation is crazy, and I can’t begin to imagine what’s going through your head right now, seeing me again like this after all these years. But I promise you, I’m on your side here. And no matter what, I’d never hurt you. Ever.” He ran one hand through his hair, suddenly conscious of all the white that had crept into it over the years. Then he glanced down at his chest and arms, feeling almost self-conscious about the physique he’d worked so hard to build. “I’m still the same guy you used to spar and joke around with back when we were younger. Only a whole lot older and in slightly different packaging.”

As he watched, something softened in the lines of her face. Her shoulders relaxed slightly. But still her hands didn’t drop.

“I’m not going anywhere with those men,” she said.

“Of course you’re not!” He chuckled without even meaning to at how ludicrous a thought that even was. Then he winced, as fire flashed in the depths of her eyes. She’d always hated being laughed at.

“You told me to go with them.” She leveled the words at him like blows.

“No, I didn’t! I told you to go around to the side of the van and fall flat on your face.”

“You never told me to fall down. You just kept making stupid, Seth-like comments about how clumsy I was and that I was likely to fall down—”

“Because I was signaling to you that I needed you out of the line of fire. I needed you to get around the van, drop to the ground, so I could take them out without risking you getting shot. But I could hardly telegraph my plans in front of them. So I was trusting that you’d get what I was saying.” His voice turned hoarse in his throat. “How could you not get that? What? Did you think I was just randomly insulting you, while your life was in danger, like some arrogant jerk?”

She raised her hands to her face. Her fingers pressed into the corners of her eyes, like she was fighting back tears. Oh, wow. She had. She’d been terrified, and in danger, and for some reason thought he was actually taking potshots at her. His head shook.

What happened, Rebecca? What happened to you? What happened to us?

In all the years she’d lived as a smiling face in his footlocker and as a memory at the corner of his mind, he’d focused on the good times. The mornings they’d gone jogging around the base together before anyone else was awake. The infectious laugh that would slip through her lips when he managed to surprise her. The way her fingers would brush against his arm.

But now, that final time he’d seen her, that painful moment he’d tried to forget, filled his mind in blaring sound and color. How she’d stood, just inside the shelter of the school archway, while the rain poured down around him. Smudgy lines of makeup making her eyes look even bigger. Her hair twisted around her head like something off a movie screen. And wearing some sparkling, extraordinary getup that had blown his mind and made him forget how words worked.

What are you doing here? Her eyes had narrowed. You missed me getting the trophy.

She’d been angry. Hurt. He hadn’t known why.

He’d looked down at his feet. I just enlisted.

An engine rumbled in the distance. The van was leaving. Rebecca’s fingers were still hiding her face.

His soldier’s mind reminded him that she was the stepsister of a man who’d stolen government secrets. The fact that Black Talon mercenaries had come after her and Seth had blown up the road to her property meant she was somehow involved, whether she knew it or not. And his own CO had suggested he simply take her to Timmins and let the police handle it. Yet, for one brief moment, all his heart could see was his former best friend—frightened, overwhelmed and desperately needing someone to wrap their arms around her, pull her into their chest and hold her tightly.

Even if right now that person couldn’t be him.

He stepped forward and reached for her hands. “I’m sorry. A long time ago, we had such an amazing connection. It was like we could read each other’s minds. It was wrong of me to just assume you’d get what I was saying back there or what I was asking you to do.”

She let him peel her hands away from her face. Her eyes were dark and brimming with questions.

“You didn’t even tell me it was you,” she said.

I was hoping you’d recognized me. I was hoping you’d know.

Maybe he’d even been hoping on some level that she’d never forgotten him just like he’d never forgotten her.

“I’m sorry,” he said again. Her fingers fluttered in his. But she didn’t pull away. “My real name is Zack Keats. I dropped the ‘Biggs’ when I enlisted. Keats was my mother’s maiden name, my middle name and the last name of the uncle and aunt who raised me. I was the last of their family tree. I am a sergeant with the Canadian Armed Forces. Trust me, this is hardly the way I wanted this reunion to go and there’s so much I want to tell you that I can’t. But ask me any question you want, and I promise that even if I can’t give you an answer, I will not lie to you.”

She stepped back and pulled her hands away. Then she crossed her arms, leveled a steady, unflinching gaze at him and asked him the one question she’d know he’d never be able to answer. The one question he’d spent his whole adult life hoping no civilian would ever ask him:

“Are you with special ops?”

* * *

Zack didn’t answer her. He didn’t need to. The split-second flash of alarm in his eyes was all the confirmation she needed. In a nanosecond, his facade was calm again, expressionless, like that of a man who’d worked very hard at learning how to hide everything he really thought and felt so very deep down inside, so that it never came close to hitting the surface.

“The Canadian Forces special operations are highly classified,” Zack said, almost mechanically.

“I know.” Just how I know that if you are special forces, you won’t be able to tell me. “But would it be okay if I told you a story?”

His eyebrows rose. “Go ahead.”

“When I was a teenager my best friend, Zack, was a total genius. When it came to puzzles and figuring things out, his brain just seemed to work twice as fast as everyone else’s.” She watched as Zack swallowed hard. “My friend Zack told me once that his life’s goal was to join the Canadian special forces. Showed me all this research he’d managed to do about them. He had a binder of it. A literal three-ring binder. He took it that seriously. I never forgot that about him. So, over the years, I kept my ears open for news of the Canadian Forces special ops task force, especially when I was working on projects overseas. I always wondered if he’d made it and if my friend Zack was now one of those brave, unknown people secretly keeping the world safe.”

His eyes were locked on hers, filled with words she knew he wouldn’t be able to say. For a brief moment, the sheer pride she felt swelling inside her blocked out every other question in her mind. No matter how upset and frustrated I am right now, I hope you know just how insanely impressed I am with you, too.

Then she looked away and started walking back toward the direction of the road. He matched her pace.

“Then again,” she added, “he was only eighteen at the time. He’d be in his late thirties now and getting close to forty. And how many people actually grow up to become exactly the man they’d always said they’d be?”

Certainly nobody else I’ve ever known. The forest floor crunched under their feet. Zack pulled his phone from his pocket, frowned, then slid it back.

“How about your stepbrother?” Zack asked. “What did he turn out to be?”

“Seth?” She blinked. Why did Zack want to know about him? He couldn’t still be sore over how bad Seth had treated him. “What about him? He works in computers. We never talk.”

There were handcuffs on Zack’s belt, tucked under his sweatshirt, but still they jangled just a little as he walked.

“I overheard the phone conversation you had in my truck,” she added. “I didn’t set out to eavesdrop, but I’m a videographer and my truck is wired for video and sound. Who were you talking to and why did you tell them you were bringing me in?”

“That was my commanding officer, Major Jeff Lyons. I’d told you I was going to call him. I was just telling him that I was going to escort you to the police station in Timmins.”

“Why does that require handcuffs and a gun?” She shot him a sideways glance. “You made it sound like you were going to drag me there against my will.”

“Those aren’t for you. They’re for in case we run into trouble on our way there. The police want to talk to you about something, and he wanted to make sure I was going to remain professional and not accidentally compromise an active investigation because of our past friendship. I might’ve gotten a little emphatic about it.”

“What kind of open investigation?” she pressed. “Why does the police want to talk to me?”

“Telling you that could compromise the police’s ability to question you.”

“Okay, but is it safe to assume it’s linked to the fact that someone blew up the road?”

“I can’t tell you about that.”

“How about Ivan and Dmitry?”

He ran his hand over the back of his neck in a gesture so familiar it rattled something at the edges of her heart.

“I think it’s safe to assume you’re going to remember the tattoo those men had and look it up online,” he said, carefully. She nodded. “When you do, you’ll find references to a major Eastern European crime syndicate, which translates roughly as ‘Black Talon.’ Basically they steal things, smuggle things, sell things illegally and kill people, and to make matters worse there are warring factions within Black Talon violently fighting for supremacy over the group. You’ll also discover they tattoo themselves with the name of their first confirmed kill. So technically, those two men would be The-Man-Who-Killed-Ivan and The-Man-Who-Killed-Dmitry, but I’ve been mentally calling them Ivan and Dmitry for short, too. But what I don’t know is why two members of Black Talon would be in Canada or why they just tried to kidnap you. I wouldn’t even want to guess. As you probably noticed I tried fishing for information a bit, trying to see if they knew who I was and if they’d been hired for money.”

“Could you understand what they were saying?” she asked.

“Yup.” He chuckled slightly. “Basically, it all came down to ‘Shoot him!’ and ‘Take her!’ and ‘Stop acting like an idiot or I’ll kill you.’”

They reached the road. It was empty. The kidnappers and their van were gone. They walked back toward her camper. Every inch of her skin seemed to tingle with electricity from being this close to him. The old, familiar smell of him filled her senses. I’m frightened. I’m angry. I’m beyond frustrated that Zack won’t give me answers. And my heart won’t stop fluttering whenever he glances my way.

She could now see the camper between the trees. She stopped walking and turned toward him. They stood there a moment, chest to chest, face-to-face, just inches apart in the dirt.

“Can you tell me one thing?” she asked. “Is your target the man who blew up the road? Or Black Talon? Or me?”

“None of you are my target.” His hands swung wide above his head, as if he was trying to swat the horizon. “Like I told you before, I’m not on assignment right now. I’m on vacation. On leave. This is my holiday. I actually need to report back to base in less than two days for overseas deployment.” His arms dropped back down to his side. “This morning I was camping at the side of a lake about an hour south of here, then I heard something on the news—which I’m guessing you haven’t heard or you wouldn’t be asking so many questions—and I figured you might need an old friend to talk to.”

His hands parted slightly like he wanted to hug her but wasn’t sure if he should.

“When you climbed out of the rocks, I didn’t think you recognized me,” he went on, “and I was trying to figure out how to tell you who I was when my commanding officer called and suggested I shouldn’t.”

“How did he know you were with me?” she asked.

“He guessed.” He looked past her into the trees. “I have a very old news clipping about you winning that martial arts trophy taped inside my footlocker. Now, please stop asking me questions I can’t answer. Just stop. Please. I’m already in trouble enough with my CO for potentially barging onto a gigantic mess for personal reasons.”

A “mess” that involved foreign criminals, explosives and weapons.

“Just let me ask one more question, please, then I’ll stop.”

He ran both hands over his head. “Go ahead.”

“Why is there a newspaper article about me in your locker?”

An article about the night you broke my heart?

His eyes glanced to the sky and his lips moved for a moment like he was praying.

“Because you changed my life, Rebecca.” His eyes dropped to her face. “You believed in me and stuck by me when nobody else did. I’d never forgotten what it was like to walk into that gym, overweight, out of shape, feeling laughed at, and yet wanting to be better than I was. And you...sorry to be so blunt, but you were the cutest thing I’d ever seen and yet you walked right over and asked me to partner with you. You befriended me. You encouraged me. So yeah—” and here his voice rose, as if he was arguing with an opponent she couldn’t see “—today when I realized you could be in trouble, and knew I’d followed your career just enough, and remembered your stories well enough, to know you might not be too far away, I came to find you. Because you had my back when nobody else did and I wanted to make sure I had yours now.”

Her heart flipped in her chest, as if they’d been standing on the mats and he’d just grabbed her by the heels and tossed her end over end.

“But it was a mistake,” he said. “Because there’s something big going on and guys like me don’t have the luxury of making personal decisions. Not where stuff like this is involved.”

He stepped back, reached into his pocket and pulled out his phone. “Now that I’ve got a signal, I’m going to call my commanding officer again and tell him we just had some unwanted company. Do you need any help packing up your camper?”

She shook her head. “No, thanks, I’ll be fine.”

He walked her to her camper door, waited until she stepped inside and then dialed a number. She could hear his voice fading in the distance as he strode off through the trees. She sat down on her bunk and dropped her head into her hands, feeling as if she should pray but not even knowing how to start sorting out the scattered feelings of her heart.

Her gold martial arts trophy sat on the small shelf beside her bunk, on top of the glossy hardcover copy of General Arthur Miles’s autobiography that someone on his staff had mailed her, she guessed out of courtesy, even though she and her mother weren’t in it. Rebecca had never been close to her stepfather, which had probably disappointed Zack a bit when they were younger, considering how much he’d admired the man and how often Zack had hinted that he hoped she’d introduce them. It’d been odd being in the same family as someone whose name everyone seemed to know and yet she’d never personally felt close to, even though her mother had insisted she and Rebecca both change their last names to “Miles.”