Page 55 of Fight or Fly

TWENTY

Jax

THE PAIN OF the bulletwound in my thigh hit me once Alex and Flynn were safely strapped into their stretchers and having their injuries assessed. Blood was oozing from my wound but not pulsing, despite the strain of half-carrying Alex up the final couple of flights in the stairwell. That alone told me it hadn’t hit anything vital.

One of the soldiers cut a slit through the heavy fabric of my trousers to check it, and confirmed it was barely more than a graze. The man slapped a gauze pad over it and gave it a perfunctory bandaging job, after which I put it out of my mind as unimportant.

We’d gotten them out. All three of them. Now that the rush of battle was fading, I had no choice but to start thinking about what came next. What would I be delivering them into?

My headset crackled to life with the tinny sound of the pilot’s voice. “We’ve got enemy choppers incoming. Strap in and get ready for an interesting ride.”

Right. Maybe I’d spoken too soon. Apparently, Sloane’s cavalry was about to arrive.

The Black Hawk lifted into the air, spraying a final hail of machine gun fire over the section of the compound on our port side. No doubt the other two helicopters were doing the same. Within moments, we were gaining altitude and angling toward the coast, with the Gulf of Mexico beyond.

“Are they armed with missiles?” asked a voice I didn’t recognize—probably whoever was in charge in the absence of Irina and Kowalczyk.

“Can’t tell,” the pilot replied over the comms. “I expect we’ll find out soon enough.”

This had always been a possibility. To be fair, it could have been worse; if they’d managed to scramble military jets instead of helicopters, we’d be screwed. As it was, it would be a straight-up horse race. If we had more fuel than they did... if they weren’t armed with weapons that could be used at long range... if we weren’t appreciably slower than they were... if all of those things were true, we might get out unscathed.

“Range is an estimated forty-five nautical miles,” said a voice that I tentatively identified as the copilot. “Calculating the pursuing choppers’ flight speed now...”

I waited with everyone else, trying not to hold my breath.

“Pursuing aircraft are traveling at one hundred sixty knots,” said the copilot.

I wracked my brain for the Black Hawk’s specs, but the pilot saved me the trouble.

“Our top sustained cruising speed is one hundred fifty-two knots. I can punch it up to 159 knots if you don’t mind guzzling fuel. Orders?”

There was a brief pause, and then the soldier who appeared to be nominally in charge now said, “Punch it. If they get close enough to shoot us down, fuel won’t matter.”

It was the right call... unless we ended up having to ditch this bird in the ocean after running out of gas. I felt the slight increase in g-force as the chopper sped up.

“Choppers Two and Three are accelerating to match us,” the pilot said. “The hostiles can still catch us, but it will take them a while at this speed.”

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