Page 26 of The Dauntless (Spy Girl 5)
Peter nods as more bullets ricochet in front of us.
“Viktor, I want you to stay at the very end of this wall. Peter, stay where you are for now, but, ideally, you’ll move to what’s left of that doorway over there. You’ll have a better line of sight. I’ll be exposed for a moment. Try to give me cover. We’re a team. And don’t forget, this is all the fire power you have.”
“In other words, save a bullet for yourself?” Viktor says grimly.
“And don’t forget to watch your back.” I nod.
I can’t downplay the seriousness of our situation, particularly when a grenade is launched in our general direction. It doesn’t hit but does provide me with cover.
I close my eyes and repeat the words, I’m the firestorm.
The dean used to tell me to think of myself as the firestorm in situations like these. A hailstorm of chaos and bullets, punches and explosions. An unstoppable force with an impenetrable armor that can’t be beat.
I rise up out of the smoke as time slows down.
I can’t tell you exactly what happens next.
It simply becomes a series of well-executed moves—running, pivoting, firing, killing; rolling, ducking, firing, killing; climbing, aiming, firing, killing.
I move quickly, not stopping to think, purely functioning on the instincts built into me from years of training.
Soon, five out of the eight are dead.
The three who remain will become more cautious. They expected this job to be easy.
Their training will kick in now, more than likely skills learned in the military, which teaches precision and preplanned responses. Covert agents are taught to survive in a more creative way.
I carefully climb a small pile of rubble, praying it won’t collapse under my weight, in an attempt to get a bird’s-eye view of my opponents’ locations. I spy two of the men working their way around the edge of the ruins, trying to sneak up on Peter and Viktor. I take aim and fire at one after the other, quickly dispatching them.
The minute I’m ready to turn around to locate the last man, I hear a noise near me and know it’s too late.
The remaining man is at my side.
His gun is trained on me.
And he’s getting closer.
“Don’t move,” the man yells in German-accented English as a red dot, one I recognize, targets his forehead. I know what it means.
“Don’t even flinch—”
I drop to the ground, knowing there is a shooter hidden in the hills, who was just lining up his aim at the back of my head.
My would-be-captor’s face explodes, and he crumples over dead before I hear the sound of the suppressed long-range rifle.
I roll down the pile of rubble, seeking cover, and then peek around a wall, hoping to see the sniper. I’ve got to figure out a way to kill him, or we’ll be the sitting ducks in a carnival shooting game.
What I see surprises me.
The sniper reveals himself, standing up and giving me an unusual two-fingered salute. I can’t make out his face or tell based on his clothing.
But it’s not possible that he’s here.
In the middle of the desert.
When he is dead.
Regardless, I stand up tall—tears streaming down my face as I remember how my dad used to salute me as opposed to waving good-bye—and return the gesture.
“Holy shit, Huntley,” Peter says, he and Viktor running up to me. “You killed them all.”
“I guess all those hours spent playing video games paid off,” I reply with a chuckle, momentarily losing sight of the sniper. When I look back to the hills, he’s gone.
“Plus, you’re a girl. They probably didn’t see you as a threat.”
“They didn’t have a chance to see me as a threat because I snuck up on them.”
I don’t have time to search the hills further because the sound of vehicles approaching fills my ears.
“More are coming. Hide!” I pull the boys behind a wall. “There’s no way we can take on more.”
“So, we die?” Viktor asks.
“I was thinking we hide. Maybe we can bury ourselves in this rubble until they leave.”
“THIS IS THE UNITED STATES ARMY,” is shouted over a voice amplifier in two languages. “PUT DOWN YOUR WEAPONS AND PUT YOUR HANDS IN THE AIR.”
They say curiosity killed the cat, and in this case, I’d probably be dead for peeking out and giving away our location, but when I do, I see a rescue team of American soldiers from the nearby base. They are moving through the ruins, clearing the area.
“It’s the Americans!” Viktor yells.
“She’s safe,” The Ghost says, calling Black X headquarters from Iraq. “They’re headed back to the base.”
“How’d she do?” the leader of Black X inquires.
“I wish I’d had a video camera, so you could have watched her. As I’ve said before, you need to give the old man some credit. She’s incredible. Like nothing I’ve ever seen before. Combine the military precision of an elite soldier and the creativeness of an artist with the grace of a ballerina, each step in sync and fluid, like a choreographed dance only she knows. She killed one of the mercenaries by shooting the top of the doorway he was standing under. The whole thing came down on him in a heap. He never saw it coming. For another, she used parkour to go up the walls of the ruins, got above him, and shot straight down through his skull. She picked them off one by one, moving through the battlefield with ease.”
“She didn’t make any mistakes?”
“Only one. When there were three men left, a pair of them was attempting to sneak up on the boys. While she was killing them to protect her friends, she forgot to protect her six.”
“That’s going to be her downfall. She’s forming friendships and falling in love despite her training. What happened next?”
“I had taken up location in the hills above the ruins with my sniper rifle.”
“And?”
“I shot him.”
“You were told to follow, not interfere!”
“I wasn’t going to let her die!” The Ghost argues.
“Did she think you’d accidentally killed your own man and come after you?”
“No, I, um, sort of let her know that I was on her side.”
“And just how did you do that?”
“A simple gesture. No big deal. Shall I follow her to wherever she goes next?”
“Absolutely, but just like Omaha, the Stones, and DC, don’t let her know you’re there.”
Once back at the base, I suggest departing for London immediately. The base will be glad to have us gone, and the boys are still pumped up. I’m pumped up, too, but not because of the shoot-out. My mind is racing, trying to put all the pieces of this puzzle together.
It’s one thing to see a vault filled with more gold than you could have ever imagined. It’s another to possibly have been saved in a shoot-out in Iraq by your supposedly dead father.
“Did you know that modern-day Iraq is considered the cradle of civilization?” one of the crew members says as we board. “It was the former home to the Sumerians and sits on the thirty-third parallel north at the junction of the rivers Tigris and Euphrates. Some even believe that is where the Garden of Eden was located.”
“Somehow, I doubt that.” Peter takes his seat, getting buckled in. “Although the Sphere was cool, I have no desire to come back here.”
“I suppose not,” Viktor says, giving him a playful shove in the shoulder. “You have some dirt under your nails.”
“Are you sure it wasn’t a simple technical malfunction?” the leader asks.
They are sitting in Ares Von Allister’s living quarters in the TerraSphere, his second-in-command hunched over a computer that he had hooked up to the locking mechanism on the vault.
“This shows the vault was open for nine minutes and forty-two seconds. Same as the alert shows.”
“Is anything missing?”
The man shrugs, holding his hands upward. “Who
knows? There’s a full inventory, but it would take months to go through. I will say though, nothing looks out of place. If someone was in here, they took the first thing they saw, or they knew what they wanted and exactly where to find it.”
“What do you think happened?” he asks, pouring them each a drink.
