Wolf Under Fire, page 20
Once on the sidewalk, he slowed long enough to see four large SUVs squealing out of the hotel’s parking lot and onto Grosvenor Place, heading south. Damien and the three men from the Bilderberg Society he’d kidnapped were in the first vehicle, which was the only one Jake cared about.
Knowing it was probably insane, he took off running down the sidewalk with a growl, refusing to let Damien get away that easily.
Keeping his claws and fangs hidden from people was easy, but no way were they going to miss how fast he was running as he cut across the major intersection south of the hotel, darting around moving cars and leaping over the ones that stopped right in his path. Hopefully, no one had their cell phones out or this was going to be difficult to explain.
The traffic was fairly heavy, which slowed down the four SUVs a little, but they drove like psychos, not stopping for lights, and slamming into any vehicle that had the nerve to get in their way.
Jake was only fifteen feet behind the last vehicle in the escape convoy at the intersection of Grosvenor and A3214. He thought for sure he was going to catch up when the back window of the SUV exploded.
Even though he knew what was coming, Jake barely avoided the bullets as they slammed into the asphalt around him. Cars squealed and jumped up onto the sidewalk to get away, pedestrians screaming as they threw themselves down behind anything that would protect them.
Still ducking bullets, Jake pulled his Glock, waiting for the right moment to surge ahead and get close enough to put a bullet in one of the vehicle’s back tires, not to mention one of the shooters. He could tell from the stench coming out of the broken rear window that the guys with the MP7s weren’t normal humans, but shooting them in the stomach wasn’t an option from this angle.
Jake was less than half a dozen feet away when Damien’s vehicle suddenly turned down a side street near the post office just as a woman with a tiny toddler in her arms was crossing the street. Eyes wide with panic, she quickly backpedaled, only to nearly get hit by the second SUV. She stumbled forward to avoid it, her arms wrapping desperately around her child as she fell. The third vehicle missed her by inches and the fourth clipped her just enough to send one of her shoes flying.
The woman had somehow avoided getting run over, but when the two men in the last SUV started shooting at him again, Jake knew the woman’s luck wouldn’t hold.
Taking the turn at a sprint that would make an Olympic runner seem slow, Jake ducked down to scoop up the woman and kid even as bullets kicked up fragments where she’d just been. The woman and her little boy weren’t much in the weight department, but when you’re trying to take a turn at thirty-five miles an hour, it was still enough to throw him off balance.
Jake went down hard, protecting the woman and her kid as he took the impact on his shoulder, then rolled violently, trying to stop his momentum. And after running as fast as he’d been, there was a lot of momentum to lose.
He ended up slamming into the side of a parked van, hard enough to leave a deep dent, but when he finally stopped and rolled onto his back, the woman and her little boy were fine. Well, maybe they were a little scuffed up and rattled, but they were mostly undamaged. Out of the corner of his eye, Jake caught sight of several Metro foot patrol officers coming his way, staring at him intently as they spoke urgently into their radios.
“Sorry,” he muttered, setting the woman on the ground as gently as he could as she stared up at him in disbelief. “I gotta go.”
Then he was up and running again, the Metro Police yelling at him even as the row of dark SUVs disappeared out of sight around a corner three blocks up.
Shit.
He was going to lose them.
Jake was damn close to stealing the first vehicle he came to when he heard the roar of an engine behind him. He threw a look over his right shoulder, expecting to see a cop car full of pissed-off Metro Police officers. Instead, it was a familiar silver Audi, Harley behind the wheel.
“Get in!” she shouted out the open passenger window as she drove. “We can still catch them!”
Jake didn’t pause to wonder how the hell she’d thought to get the car when it hadn’t even occurred to him. He simply veered to the left, grabbed the edge of the window, and vaulted inside. The moment he did, Harley punched the accelerator.
Two blocks down, Harley took the same right turn Damien and his crew had—at sixty miles an hour. Jake grabbed the overhead handle, pretty sure the tires on her side of the vehicle actually left the ground. Oncoming cars swerved wildly, honking horns and running up onto the curb.
“You’re on the wrong side of the road!” he yelled.
“No, I’m not,” she shouted back. “They are!”
Jake didn’t bother to point out the obvious: Their country…their rules. Instead, he grabbed his seat belt and prayed they survived long enough for him to get it on.
Harley caught up with the SUV convoy in an amazingly short period of time. Probably because she was driving like a frigging lunatic. But he guessed he couldn’t argue with the results.
The men in the vehicle with the broken rear window didn’t see them coming until Harley slammed the front of the car into the back of the SUV. When one of the men flew out, landing on the hood of the Audi, Harley tapped the brakes hard enough for the creature to roll off, then punched the gas and drove over the top of him as if stuff like that happened to her all the time.
The thud and subsequent crunch as the thing passed under the car sounded bad, but when Jake took a quick glance out the back window, he was stunned to see the man already scrambling to his feet, arms held out to his side at weird angles.
Shit.
Harley was just approaching the last vehicle again, a little more carefully now, when the second and third vehicles suddenly turned left, splitting from the others.
“Which ones do we follow?” Harley demanded, hands gripping the wheel as if ready to spin the car into another crazy turn at Jake’s word.
“Stay with the lead SUV,” he said without hesitation. “Damien is in there with the Bilderberg hostages. We can’t lose them.”
Harley nodded and kept with the two vehicles going straight, weaving as the lone man left in the backseat of the one in the rear tried to get a bead on them with his MP7.
How much frigging ammo are these people carrying?
Just then, two Metro Police cars pulled across the intersection ahead of the first SUV, probably thinking it would stop. Instead, it smashed right through both vehicles, sending the smaller cop cars spinning away into traffic.
“Jake, where are you?” Jes’s beautiful voice suddenly asked through his radio earpiece. “Misty said you need our help. What’s the situation?”
Relief like he couldn’t believe flooded through Jake’s body, and it was all he could do to keep from asking if Jes was okay, if she’d gotten hurt in any way.
“We’re heading west on Redesdale Street,” Harley answered for him. “Just past the Royal Hospital Chelsea, running parallel to the Thames, following two SUVs.”
“Damien has three of the Bilderberg people in the front vehicle with him,” Jake added. “The bad guys are heavily armed.”
There was a moment of silence over the radio, then Jes was back. “Okay, got ya. We’re coming toward you from the west, only a couple minutes away. We’ll try and cut them off. Let us know if they change direction.”
Jake wanted to ask how the hell they’d gotten down from St Albans so fast, but with Harley still trying to avoid the bullets coming at them from the SUV in front of them, he knew the questions would have to wait. Instead, he focused on continuing to provide position updates to Jes, leading her and Caleb closer to them with every passing second.
Less than a minute later, Jake spotted Jes and Caleb coming toward them in their rented SUV. Damien must have seen them, too, because his SUV abruptly turned left on a much smaller road heading straight for the river. The other vehicle went with them.
“According to the map on my phone, this road is going to dead end at the river in a few hundred feet,” Jes called out as she and Caleb followed him and Harley. “There’s nowhere for them to go.”
The side street weaved in and out of several big industrial-looking buildings, Dumpsters, and haphazard piles of boxes and pallets. But at least there wasn’t any traffic or people around. If this was going to turn into a shoot-out, an abandoned dead-end street was the best place for it to happen.
“Remember there are three hostages in the lead vehicle,” Jake said. “Check behind your targets before you pull the trigger. Assume they may try to use them as human shields.”
The slow-moving water of the Thames came into sight as the rearmost SUV slammed on their brakes, kicking up loose chunks of the pavement as the vehicle slid to a stop sideways on the narrow road, completely blocking the way ahead. Damien’s vehicle kept going, racing for the river’s edge.
Harley immediately slammed on the brakes, and Jake tensed, waiting for impact when Caleb smashed into their rear bumper. Thankfully, that didn’t happen because Caleb was able to stop in time.
Jake jumped out of the car along with Harley to confront the three men who’d taken up defensive positions behind their SUV. His nose told him all three of them were creatures like Darby and Damien, their muddled scent heavily camouflaged by the acrid stench of smokeless powder from all the shooting they’d done.
The automatic weapon fire from their guns shredded the Audi’s exterior like it was tissue paper. Jake rolled to the left, finding cover behind a heavy-duty Dumpster full of construction debris, while the men—creatures—continued to rip both the Audi and Caleb’s SUV to pieces. Out of the corner of his eye, Jake saw Harley scramble away to safety. He prayed Jes and Caleb found something to hide behind as well.
As he, Jes, Harley, and Caleb returned fire, Jake quickly realized the men with the submachine guns were going out of their way to make a mess out of the two rental vehicles while doing little more than making him and the rest of his team duck and cover.
A sinking feeling in his gut, Jake risked standing up behind the Dumpster, peeking around the back side to get a view of the river. What he saw confirmed his worst fears.
“Dammit,” he growled. Now, he knew why the a-holes had been willing to drive down a dead-end street. “Damien had a boat waiting for him. They’re getting away!”
Moving out from behind the safety of the Dumpster, Jake ran toward the SUV, ignoring the hail of bullets that came his way. Out of the corner of his eye, he caught a glimpse of Harley and Caleb sprinting to catch up to him. Hopefully, Jes wasn’t foolish—or brave—enough to follow. He didn’t want her anywhere near those effing creatures.
A round tagged Jake in the left calf, then the right thigh, and then another one sliced through his left upper arm. He ignored all of them, running faster, then throwing himself down and into a slide across the broken asphalt in front of the SUV.
The move momentarily took him out of the line of fire of the three creatures on the other side of the vehicle, and before his slide had even come to a stop, Jake fired under the vehicle, aiming for the only part of the three creatures he could see—their lower legs and ankles. The screams of pain told him he’d hit what he was aiming for.
Jake was up and running a split second later, slipping around the back of the SUV as Harley and Caleb went over the top of it. He slowed only long enough to put a couple rounds in the gut of the nearest creature, then he hauled ass for the river, leaving the creatures for his teammates. He heard the rapid thump of lighter shoes behind him and knew without looking it was Jes. She was ignoring the risk of the creatures putting a bullet in her back so she could chase after him. He let out a growl, fighting the urge to spin around and tell her she needed to be more careful. But there wasn’t time for that. Not that she’d listen to him if he tried.
Jake heard the dull thrum of boat engines before he reached the dock and the abandoned SUV parked there. There were several larger, commercial-looking vessels lined up at the concrete pier, so it took him several seconds to find the one Damien had taken.
It was a fancy yacht, all gleaming white and chrome, already in the middle of the river. A good seventy-five or hundred feet out, it was moving upstream quickly. The three hostages were lined up on their knees in the back of the boat, a creature behind each of them, claws digging deep into the men’s necks. Damien stood to the side, a smirk on his face that Jake could see all the way from the dock.
One by one, the creatures jerked the black bags off their captives’ heads. The men blinked rapidly in the sudden bright sunlight, pain etched on each of their faces. A dark-skinned man with a heavy black beard, a white man with gray-flecked hair and a matching beard, and a dark-haired man with olive skin, they all shook their heads as if to clear them.
As Jes came to a stop beside Jake, he raised his weapon to get a shot lined up on Damien, but then hesitated. At this distance, aiming at a moving boat, he’d be just as likely to hit the hostages as that bastard. And unfortunately, getting out to that yacht wasn’t an option. None of the commercial vessels were going to have keys in them, and trying to race along the shore to keep up with the boat as it moved upstream would be impossible with all the buildings and fences along the river. And while he was a damn good swimmer, he wasn’t nearly fast enough to catch up to a boat.
“Jake, look,” Jes said softly, pointing.
He turned his attention back to the yacht to see Darby step out from the cabin. As if knowing Jake and Jes were there, he looked their way for a long moment, then walked up to stand behind the three men kneeling on the deck. Taking a handgun from inside his jacket, Darby shot each hostage in the back of the head in quick succession, then turned and walked back into the cabin without a backward glance.
“Shit,” Jake muttered.
Lifting his weapon, Jake pulled the trigger while Jes did the same. They hit the rear of the craft several times but didn’t do any damage, and all either of them could do was stand and watch the vessel disappear from sight around the next bend in the river.
“Why the hell did he go to all that trouble to kidnap them and drag them halfway across the city only to effing shoot them after he got away?” Jake growled, fangs and claws extending in frustration as much as anger. “It doesn’t make sense.”
Jes rested a gentle hand on his arm. “I don’t know why he did it, but at least we saved all of those poor kids he kidnapped as well as the other members of the Bilderberg Society and countless other people at the hotel. That has to count for something.”
As Jake stared at the dark blue water of the Thames, listening to the drone of Darby’s yacht fading away, he wasn’t sure he believed that. They’d lost the three men Darby had grabbed and some people at the hotel, too. On top of that, there was the insane number of crashed vehicles as a result of their chase through the city. It would be stupid to think no one had gotten hurt—or worse—during all that mayhem.
He doubted anyone would call this a win.
“Jake. Jes,” Harley called from behind them. “I think you two are going to want to see this.”
He clenched his jaw. What the hell else could go wrong today?
Sirens filled the air as he and Jes headed back to where Harley and Caleb were standing, staring down at something on the ground by the bad guys’ SUV. Luckily, the police hadn’t realized they’d come down this side street, but sooner or later, the cops would figure it out. Somebody had heard the gunshots for sure.
Jake stopped cold when he saw what Harley and Caleb were looking at. Although, he wasn’t exactly sure what the hell he was looking at.
What the…?
He thought they were the bodies of the three men Harley and Caleb had tussled with and killed, but they didn’t look like men. In fact, they didn’t look human. Which made sense, since they were supernatural creatures.
They reminded him of mannequins you’d find in a department store. Pale, almost translucent skin was stretched tightly over androgynous, nearly featureless faces. The mouths were evident and filled with what had to be a hundred tiny, needlelike teeth, but beyond that, there was almost nothing else recognizable. A vertical ridge divided the top portion of their faces in place of a nose, and two sunken patches of skin were where eyes should be. The things had no ears or hair of any kind.
Seriously, it was the creepiest thing Jake had ever seen, made even worse by the fact that all three of these things had looked like completely normal humans a few minutes ago. Humans that could have walked down any street in the world without attracting attention.
The sounds of rapidly approaching sirens shook Jake out of his musings. He lifted his head and listened closely. The cops were getting closer. They’d deployed a helicopter, too, if the droning sound of a propeller was any indication.
“We need to get these bodies, and ourselves, out of here,” he announced. “We can’t get caught up in trying to explain all of this, and we have to get these things back to McKay to be examined. We need to figure out what the hell we’re dealing with and what they’re up to. We keep coming out on the short end of this deal because we don’t understand the script these things are following. That changes now.”
Jake turned his attention back to the three creatures on the ground, taking in their disturbing faces again as Jes called in the support team, telling them they needed an immediate extraction and a priority airlift back to the States for three supernatural bodies.
Chapter 15
Jes stared at the remains of fluffy scrambled eggs and buttered toast on her plate. She should eat the rest, but she was simply too damn tired to do it. She’d gotten an hour’s worth of quality sleep last night and the lack of rest was taking its toll. If it wasn’t for the gallon of coffee she’d consumed already, she wouldn’t even be capable of functioning as a human being right now.
