Page 109 of Edge of Darkness (Night Prowler 4)
In the huge, luxurious living area that sprawled in an elongated oval behind the bridge, Nico dumped the semi-conscious girl he’d carried from the trunk of the car onto the sofa, and bound her wrists together with plastic zip ties. She was bleeding profusely from the nose and made a soft, choked moan when Nico stuffed a handkerchief in her mouth.
Seeing that, Caesar snapped, “If she suffocates, I’ll cut off both your hands!”
Nico removed the handkerchief. Caesar turned back to the bridge and fired up the engines.
Shaking in a fury that felt thermonuclear on the other end of the phone Caesar had just answered, Christian scrolled through the recent calls menu, selected the stored number he’d dialed, brought up the GPS option, and pressed “locate.”
Google maps appeared in a browser window, then a red dot followed, along with coordinates.
Port Vell.
He looked up just as a dozen SUVs chasing a lone sports sedan came roaring over the crest of the hill toward the bunkers at top speed.
Then he watched as chaos unfolded.
Thirteen knew it was over the minute he heard the tiny click when he stepped on a small, innocuous-looking mound of dirt. He just had time to look down at his feet in horror before the world exploded into a huge, orange fireball of heated gasses and pain.
That fucking albino. This was all his fault.
Even the dumbest soldier knows you don’t stage a direct assault on a highly motivated enemy in a heavily fortified encampment with zero intel about their numbers or weaponry and no offensive strategy of your own. Direct assaults don’t work. Guerilla warfare—now that works, especially when dealing with non-human creatures far stronger and faster than you are, accustomed to living in hiding and fleeing at a moment’s notice when discovered.
But Jahad was like Rambo Jesus: he was on a holy mission to kill. Apparently he didn’t have time for pesky little things like plans.
So he’d blown their cover at the bookstore, and he’d blown their cover at the bunker by driving up the dirt road in single file behind the sedan like the biggest bunch of idiots on planet Earth. Then Jahad and all his minions had jumped out of the SUVs, screaming like banshees, when the sedan screeched to a stop at the top of the hill in a billowing plume of dust.
Then came the firefight.
The two males who exited the sedan started firing first, one of them laying down cover for the other, who ran across the dirt expanse between the car and the chain link fence topped with barbed wire in less time than it took Thirteen to blink. Jahad’s men returned fire, but not before the man at the fence turned into a huge, snarling animal and leapt clear over the top of the barbed wire in a single bound, then took off toward the main concrete building on the other side in a streak of black, almost imperceptible against the night.
He’d disappeared inside the building, while the other one continued to exchange gunfire with Jahad’s men.
Thirteen had a weapon as well, the H&K P8 semiautomatic pistol he’d kept from his time in the Kommando Spezialkräfte, but he didn’t bother to engage in the stupidity, and instead crept off behind the line of SUVs, around the back of the bunker where the barbed wire fence disappeared into a stand of trees.
There he cut a five-foot tall opening in the metal links of the fence with a bolt cutter, and stepped through.
From his vantage point behind the main building, he saw a flurry of activity that was hidden from the front. Emerging from a hole in the ground bedside a large boulder that clearly served as hidden access to the bunkers, dark shapes quickly and efficiently loaded small plastic boxes into the back of a pickup truck. There was another narrow dirt road that led off through the trees, and when the back of the pickup was fully loaded with boxes, it set off down the road, the sound of its engine concealed entirely by the loud reports of gunfire from Jahad’s men.
The pickup was followed by a silent line of figures, moving fast, who quickly melted into the night.
Shit. They were getting away. He had to capture at least one of them.
He withdrew his gun from the waistband of his pants. He slunk forward in a crouch, scanning the darkness ahead of him, grateful he was upwind of the hole and the bunkers.
Then came the little, horrible click. Then the orange fireball of pain.
Then there was nothing at all.
Feeling as if her head had been used for batting practice by an entire team of sluggers, Ember slowly swam up into consciousness.
Gritting her teeth against the shooting pain in her skull, she opened her eyes and found herself lying chest-down on a sofa in an unfamiliar room, hands tied behind her back. Without lifting her head, she glanced around and quickly determined she was on a boat—a yacht, more correctly—in the marina.
Through the windows she saw night sky, bobbing masts of adjacent boats, and the graceful, lighted arches of the pedestrian bridge that connected the city to the aquarium and Maremagnum shopping complex. Nearby, voices murmured and the vibrating hum of big engines shivered the walls.
She was alone. The Semtex vest was casually draped over a desk beneath a window across the room, as if deposited there in a hurry and forgotten.
Carefully, holding her breath, she swung her legs over the edge of the sofa, sat upright and tested the binds around her wrists.
Tight. Unbreakable. Shit.
