Page 91 of Hotter than Wildfire

The plane was slowing. One of the ailerons had sheared off, a section of the sheet metal of the leading edge had buckled.

The cockpit would have registered this. There would be alarms going off, visual and aural. No pilot on earth would ever try taking off under these conditions. The engines disengaged then throttled back.

The pilot was braking.

Harry scrambled over the wing, using every single handhold he could until he made it to the fuselage.

The overwing emergency exit had a manual opening mechanism. He engaged it as the plane finally came to a shuddering halt, skewed across the runway, smoke rising from the shot-out tires. The engines abruptly cut off and there was absolute silence except for the ticking sound of metal cooling.

The emergency exit door popped inward. For a moment, all Harry could see was darkness through the doorway, into the cabin of the plane. It looked deserted. Harry clenched his jaw. He hadn’t made a mistake. This was the plane and Ellen was somewhere on it. He’d stake his life on it. He’d already staked his heart.

Without even thinking about it, his Desert Eagle was in his hand.

He didn’t dare take his eyes from the black, empty hole to look down at his brothers. He didn’t need to. He trusted them to do what was necessary at the exact right time.

Time stretched. It felt like hours, lifetimes had gone by but it had only been a few seconds since the plane had come to a screeching, shuddering halt. The dust hadn’t even had time to settle back to the ground.

Shadows moved in the dark interior of the cabin and suddenly two figures appeared on the threshold, brightly-lit figures on a stage against a black backdrop.

Harry’s heart nearly blew.

Gerald Montez, holding a limp Ellen, an unconscious Ellen, but please God not a dead Ellen. A Glock 19 pressed against her head so hard a trickle of blood fell down her temple, down her cheek, dripped off her chin.

If she was bleeding, she was alive.

He knew who Montez was but Montez didn’t know who he was.

“You!” Montez screamed. “Whoever the fuck you are! Weapon down! Hands out to your sides and back away or I blow her head off!”

He had no choice. The heavy Desert Eagle bounced on the wing and slid off, the clatter as it hit the tarmac loud in the silence. He had two other backup weapons but he couldn’t go for either one as long as Montez was holding that gun to Ellen’s head.

Montez was having trouble holding Ellen, who was so limp her feet rested awkwardly on the ground, not holding her up. His left arm was doing that. He took one step forward and her legs bumped and dragged along the cabin floor behind her.

Montez was strong but holding the entire weight of an adult woman with one arm was straining him. Sweat dripped off his face.

Or maybe it was fear, because he didn’t have too many options here, other than blowing Ellen’s head off.

He knew that Harry had backup. The van with a driver was visible off the trailing edge side of the wing. Mike was nowhere to be seen, but he was there. Oh yeah, he was there.

Montez screamed down to Sam. “And you! Driver! Get your fucking hands off the wheel!”

Through the windscreen, Sam lifted his hands off the wheel.

Montez turned to Harry. “Back away!”

Harry backed away, glad to give Mike a clear shot, but how could Mike take it? Oh God, Montez’s gun was screwed tightly against Ellen’s temple and his finger was white on the trigger. Mike couldn’t even try the old trick of blowing his forearm off at the elbow, because it was tight in against his stomach.

Blowing a round into Montez’s cerebral cortex, putting the bullet right at mid-point between the eyes, on the bridge of the nose, would be child’s play for Mike. Hell, it was be child’s play for Harry, if Harry’s Desert Eagle—with almost too much stopping power for this distance—wasn’t down there on the tarmac.

The thing was, if Mike caught him between the eyes, Montez would be blown backwards and even if he was already dead, the sheer physics of the situation would guarantee that his dead trigger finger would be pulled back, too, and Ellen’s brains would spatter the elegant interior of the fancy jet.

Don’t even think of that. He couldn’t. It would make him weak.

He knew, like he knew that the sun would rise tomorrow in the east, that all he needed, all he and Mike and Sam needed, was the tiniest window of opportunity, the merest flicker of a chink, and Montez was history. It would come down to a fraction of a second and he had to be ready because his whole life had come down to this exact moment.

He stood on the balls of his feet, muscles ready but not tense, mind empty of everything but the permutations of geometry necessary to wipe Gerald Montez off the face of the earth.

All he needed was a second. A microsecond. Just a tiny little something.