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The warlord squinted, then cleared his throat. His arm trembled with rage as he shook the emerald back at me.
“Oh, you’ll talk,” Ferrera sneered. “And in the end, you’llbegto tell me where the rest of these are.”
He laughed, and his laughter was pure evil. Like something out of a nightmare.
“You’ll wish you had an easy death,” Ferrera spat. “As easy as this man, right here.”
His eyes shifted to the one man still standing over Ripley, and nodded a silent order. The man raised his pistol again. This time he pointed it at Ripley’s head.
“NOOOO!”
There was no time to move, no time to act. No words that might stop what happened next, because I knew in my heart anything I said would fall upon deaf ears.
But that’s when things got totally surreal.
Forty-Nine
QUINN
The man holding the pistol to Ripley’s head stood stock still as his arm came apart at the elbow. The forearm spun away like a helicopter, end over end, his fist still clenching the gun as he stared down at the impossible. It all happened noiselessly, at least for a full second. That’s how long it took for the crack of the sniper rifle to finally reach our ears, echoing hollowly from somewhere off on a distant hill.
“AIIIEEEEE!”
The man screamed, distracting the others who were just now figuring out what was happening. But by then it was too late. Two fell immediately, then three more. Their bodies spun violently in a macabre dance of death, as they absorbed the full or partial impact of the .50 caliber rounds that tore them to shreds.
“YOU!”
I looked up and saw Ferrera staring at me with murderous eyes. He was practically foaming at the mouth now, his skin almost purple with rage. If looks could kill I’d be dead six times over, but he was more than willing to seal the deal…
I shuddered as he raised his arm and leveled his own gun my way.
Fuck.
I dove. It was the only thing I could think of to do at the moment. My wounds ripped even further as I impacted the ground again, overwhelming my brain with razor-sharp signals of white-hot pain. I couldn’t stop there though. I kept rolling, kept moving as bullet after bullet impacted the ground in places I’d been only a split second ago.
Ferrera was roaring like a caged animal. Some of his men tried running for cover but they were cut down quickly and brutally. He had the strangest expression now, too. There were still miles of rage behind those soulless eyes, but that rage was now tempered with the unnerving coolness of someone who’d already accepted his fate.
He was defeated. Beaten. A dead man walking.
But the dead had nothing to lose.
An all-new pain blossomed in my leg, followed by the warmth of fresh blood splattering against my face. I willed myself to ignore it, still rolling through the dust. I was running out of energy and momentum when the gun he was firing finally clicked empty.
Ferrera screamed and flung his weapon away. Then he rushed me. In doing so he saved his own life — for a few more seconds, anyway — as the air where he’d just been standing was ripped by the high-pitched whine of a supersonic bullet.
I kicked at his hands, which were now scrabbling at my feet. The fallen warlord half-crawled, half squirmed through the dirt and sand, raking my legs with his grubby fingers. One of them found its way into the new bullet-hole in my thigh. He snarled in triumph and twisted that finger, while I cried and kicked and screamed uncontrollably…
Then he was on top of me, with both hands clamped around my neck.
I fought like hell, but the man was just too big, too bulky. He straddled my body, using his knees to pin my shoulders to the ground. It gave him all the leverage in the world with which to strangle me. As my vision began closing in on all sides, a cruel grin painted its way across Ferrera’s face…
And then suddenly Cole was standing over him, gripping his head in both hands.
The Navy SEAL’s face was utterly grim. His eyes were wild and feral — like those of a wolf, or something even more primitive. His arms flexed as he twisted Ferrera’s head so hard, so fast, the vertebrae of his neck literallycrunchedlike dried pasta. The hands wrapped around my throat dug in for a half-second more, then finally relaxed.
Cole dropped the warlord’s corpse in disgust, Ferrera’s head now tilted at an impossible angle. Then he reached down for me, just as Joshua and another man came running up.
“A--Are you—”
