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He ended the call, left the tent, and went to join where the rest of the team was gearing up. Before strapping on his equipment, he reached inside his pocket and tapped Ayesha’s gift three times.
CHAPTER30
Joel’s lungs burned, his arm throbbed, and he was certain he’d fractured a bone in his shoulder. A high-pitched ringing in his ear deafened him to the noises around him, so he repeated his statement.
“Dez, I’m hit.”
It was Gage who answered. “Hit? What’s hit?”
The burning lungs leaped to his shoulder as he searched for Giorgio.
The shot had gone off.
He’d heard the shot go off.
If Giorgio wasn’t standing, that meant he didn’t get there in time, and that wasn’t a bullet Giorgio would have survived. As inhuman as Giorgio was, his head was still only a skull and gray and white matter. If Giorgio got hit, Giorgio was either already dead or on his way out, and there was no way in hell he could tell Mo that.
“Lattimore, fucking answer me! What’s hit?”
“Where’s Pozza?” he asked.
“Fuck this.”
The ringing in his ears slowly died.
Then he heard a child’s cry.
He turned toward the sound, looked up, and all the air temporarily left his body. Giorgio was standing over him, still holding the little girl, looking down at him with an expression he was one hundred percent sure he’d never seen on Giorgio’s face.
“Pozza,” he let his head fall back to the concrete, “you’re okay. Thank God you’re okay.”
Giorgio handed the child off to someone, kneeled beside him, and examined his shoulder. Not long after, Gage’s face appeared, and if he wasn’t mistaken, the big man looked concerned.
“What’s hit?” Gage asked again.
Joel shook his head. “I don’t know.”
“One to ten?”
“Not bad. Five, six.”
“Flesh,” Giorgio said. “In. Out. Lattimore will need stitch. After stitch, I kill.”
“For what?” Joel asked.
“Lattimore, you take my bullet.”
“Pozza, I’m sorry, but I’d do it again. We’re a team. Plus, I’m more expendable than anyone else right now. Mo would have—”
A blade went into the floor next to where he lay, the tip penetrating the concrete surface.
Joel clamped his mouth shut.
This was the sixth compound they’d cleared since their first appearance in Luanda, but this time, they ran into over a dozen gun-wielding kidnappers.
At first, they sent Giorgio and Mike in to quietly neutralize the hostiles. Then, the next thing they knew, shots rang out. Mike and Giorgio were some of the most stealthy human beings on the planet, so there was no way someone had heard them. More than likely, someone had tipped off the men inside.
After the gunfire started, the rest of the team breached the compound, cleared it out in no time—Mike and Giorgio left little for them to do—and they found the last child, a tiny boy, hiding in a cabinet.
