Page 71 of Baby One Last Time
“Dammit!” Mai yelled into the comms. “Missed him, Command.”
“He’s headed for that staircase,” Bond said.
“Sparks is seventy-seven percent sure his bunker connects to smugglers’ tunnels,” TJ said. “We don’t know where they dump out.”
As TJ barked orders to the cleanup crews to get as far out as possible in the hope he’d emerge inside their perimeter, Bond jumped to her feet and dashed toward Derek and me. She knelt in front of him and cut away the soaked bandage with small scissors to examine the wound.
“Command,” Bond said. Her voice was steady, but her jaw too tight. “How far out is the medevac?”
“Three minutes.”
“Make sure they know it’s clear so they get in here right away,” she said.
Derek’s eyes blinked open again, just barely, and he put what seemed to be all his effort into smiling at me. “Bond’s got this, Cynth. Go after Beecher. Go get your man.”
But I could read Bond’s face. My tourniquet wasn’t working and she had work to do before paramedics could reach us. She needed an extra pair of hands. My hands.
“I’ve already got my man,” I told Derek. “And I’m not going any damn where.”
Chapter 19
The whirringchopper blades shook every cell in my body, but it couldn’t loosen my grip on Derek’s hand. His very limp, very clammy hand.
“Bond said he’d be fine,” I told the paramedic who knelt on Derek’s side opposite me.
He was wiry guy with the patchy beginnings of a twenty-something’s beard. His eyes were kind, but he was so damn young. His older colleague repeated Derek’s stats into his headpiece, communicating with the doctors waiting at the hospital. I repeated Bond’s words, willing Derek take them as an order.
“I know he looks bad,” the older paramedic told me, “but his vitals are stable, the blood loss was manageable, and he looks strong as an ox.”
“He is,” I said. “And stubborn as a bull, if that helps.”
“It does,” the older man said.
The medevac helicopter banked ever so slightly as we approached the hospital roof. We stopped, hovering in midair, then set down gently on the helipad. The world went still for the space of a heartbeat, long enough for me to whisper to Derek.
“I love—”
The medical team burst into life around us, rolling Derek out of the chopper, lifting him onto a waiting gurney, and whisking him away before I could finish telling him. I stood in their silent wake, unmoored, unanchored, lost and alone at sea.
“I’ll show you to the waiting room,” the kind-eyed kid said, so I followed him.
He led me to a room with puke-green walls and institutional plastic chairs. He hesitated until I waved him away. Alone again, I paced for what had to be a day and a half but was, according to my watch, only ten minutes. Sound and energy bounced off the corridor walls outside the room, and I turned to see the entire Reindeer Team, plus X, pour through the door. The team surrounded me in a group hug and anchored me to the earth.
The unwritten rule of HEAT might dictate no crying on a mission, but the mission was over, so I burst into tears. Mai shifted uncomfortably but didn’t look too horrified. Alder patted my back, and TJ put his arm around my shoulder.
X stared at me.
Well, hell. There was probably an unwritten rule about cryingaftera mission, too, and I didn’t doubt she was adding that violation to her pile of evidence that I wasn’t HEAT material.
“Bond went to check on Derek,” TJ said.
That reassurance stopped my tears. TJ stepped away to give me space, and the rest of the team settled into chairs. I couldn’t rest until I knew more about Derek, so I resumed pacing.
While I did that, TJ gave a quick overview of the mission outcome, mostly for my benefit. Then he turned to Penn and Sparks. “Cleanup found the weapons when they went into that escape tunnel.”
Sparks grinned. “The whole fucking lot of them.”
That stopped me in my tracks. “They didn’t have time to move any of them?”
