Page 51 of Fight or Fly

The three-and-a-half hour flight dragged, but the closer we got to our destination, the more my damned alpha instincts took over. My pack was in trouble, and I was coming to get them out. The rightness of that part of things threatened to overwhelm the very real fact that I was following the orders ofKostya fucking Nikolayev, and I’d basically just sold my soul to the Committee on the basis of Leona McCready’s hunch.

Get them out safe, and worry about the rest of it later, I told myself firmly. It wasn’t as though I could change my mind now, with the Alabama coastline a brown and green smear in front of us.

Irina was strapped in directly across from me. Her gray eyes had barely left me during the long flight, but she’d wisely refrained from trying to make conversation over the headset. I got the impression that she was a focused and no-nonsense commander in the field—not surprising, given what I’d known of her from the time before the mess with Alex.

Now, she pulled out a semi-automatic pistol and checked the clip before handing it across to me. It was a SIG P210, stamped with the Swiss army designation in the serial number. I checked the safety and pulled back the slide, chambering a round before stowing the gun into my shoulder holster, cocked and locked. Irina passed over four extra magazines. Forty rounds. I supposed if I ended up needing more than that, it would mean we had bigger worries to contend with.

I offered her a wary nod of acknowledgement.

We were approaching land. In the cockpit, the pilot hailed someone, speaking in a bland UFNA Midwest accent at odds with the Eastern European drawl I’d heard in my headset earlier.

I supposed that if you were going to try and infiltrate a Committee facility by air, actually being part of the Committee was a big help. The mic from the cockpit cut out. Presumably, the pilot and whoever he was talking to had started exchanging sensitive security codes.

If clearance wasn’t granted, we’d bluster our way in regardless. Sloane’s compound was unlikely to have robust ground-to-air defenses...supposedly. It was a prison facility, not a military installation. Besides, the list of organizations that would dare attack the Committee openly like this was, shall we say, somewhat limited.

Long minutes passed before the mic crackled into life again.

“Landing clearance granted,” the pilot said in his native accent. “ETA in eighteen minutes.”

“Prep for action, boys,” Irina said crisply. “We only get one shot at this.”

* * *

Sloane’s compound screamed‘prison’ in a way that Nikolayev’s property in Cuba didn’t. It was likely that it had, in fact, been a federal or state correctional facility in its former life. Chain link fencing and razor wire surrounded the stark rectangular concrete building, while guard towers dotted the perimeter.

Those towers would be the first order of business, but they weren’t my problem. I was part of the tactical group tasked with retrieving Flynn and Alex. Meanwhile, Irina would be leading the group going after Beckett, on the assumption that he was likely being held in high-security solitary confinement.

All of Nikolayev’s forces would be wearing balaclavas to hide their faces—all except me. My Judas goat role relied on letting my packmates see me and be reassured enough to let a bunch of armed troops drag them onto a helicopter.

The political fallout of our smash-and-grab operation was outside of my purview, and I wasn’t sure I really gave a shit about it anyway. I wondered, though, if Nikolayev would plead complete innocence when Sloane came screaming to him afterward, blaming the breach on lax security in Sloane’s own operation and using any security footage of my face as supporting evidence of an alphomic operation, perhaps by the underground Sloane was so set on dismantling.

Again—not my problem. I’d have plenty of fallout of my own to deal with, once the others realized what I’d done.

The chopper settled onto the helipad on the building’s roof. Around us, the other two would have done the same, landing in a triangular nose-to-tail configuration that gave the door-mounted machine guns on the outer sides complete three hundred and sixty degree access to our surroundings.

We waited—unstrapped from our seatbelts and ready to move fast when the order came.

Within minutes the roof access door opened, and a delegation in blue uniforms approached. I had a perfect view through the open side door of the helicopter as the machine guns opened fire and mowed them down before turning their collective firepower on the guard turrets.

Glass shattered, ensuring that the chaos inside the towers would delay any return fire, on the off chance that any of the guards inside had survived. We poured out of the choppers, guns drawn. Those of us assigned to the two retrieval teams made straight for the roof entrance, while the remaining troops dug in around the helicopters, ready to protect our only transportation out of here.

The door was locked—proof that the people who’d come out to meet us weren’t complete idiots, at least. Irina stuck a directed explosive charge over the mechanism, and we fell back as it deployed with a dullcrump. The door swung open, the metal warped and glowing red where the lock had been blown out. Around us, klaxons began to wail.

We swarmed inside. Those in the lead shot down the handful of guards rushing up the stairwell to meet us. I hopped over the slumped bodies as we hurried downward into the guts of the building, cursing the weakness on my left side as my leg threatened to waver beneath the extra strain.

Those damned klaxons weren’t doing a thing for my aching head, either.

The helipad stairwell led down to the admin wing, as we’d anticipated. Security wasn’t as tight here as it would be in the prisoner areas, and we only had to blow one more door to gain access to the main administration area. Terrified desk jockeys huddled inside offices with inadequate wooden doors—easy to kick down.

“Who in here knows where the high-value prisoners are being kept?” my team leader—a beta male named Kowalczyk—bellowed in a passable UFNA accent. “Point them out or we mow down everyone in this room!”

Several tentative fingers pointed toward a harried looking man in a tan suit, whose face paled when he realized his colleagues had just given him up for slaughter like a Christmas turkey.

“The rest of you lie face down on the ground!” Kowalczyk ordered, while two other soldiers grabbed the guy in the suit. One of them jammed a gun in his ribs, and a high-pitched whimper of fear escaped him.

“Out,” the trooper with the gun ordered, managing a less convincing attempt at a local accent.

We left the other admin workers cowering on the ground, waiting until we were back outside before Kowalczyk grabbed the man’s jaw in one meaty hand and said, “Lead us to the omega named Rhys Beckett and the alphas designated Alex and Flynn, or I shoot out both your kneecaps.”

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