Gone Forever (Jack Widow Book 1), page 28
Then I swung blindly at Tega with a powerful left hook. I hit him square in the shoulder. He had the gun pointed in my direction. He fired it. But my punch flung him off balance, and several bullets whizzed by me. The Five-Seven takes the same rounds as the FN P90, with the same non-ricochet bullet technology. They slammed into the metal walls of the plane. No penetration.
The plane bounced, and the suction in the cabin grew more intense. I came back at him with a right jab, but it was hard to aim my blows. This one got him dead on the solar plexus. But it wasn’t the most powerful blow ever—not my best work. Even if I hadn’t had to fight in sketchy conditions, I was still exhausted from being awake for over twenty-four hours.
Tega dropped his gun and let out a loud shriek. He flew back against the starboard bench, and I felt the body armor he was wearing under the rain slicker when I punched him. He jumped up and came at me. I grabbed him and tried to throw him out of the plane, but he seized my collar and used the momentum of the throw against me. He returned with a fast-right jab and then a left hook. His fist was small, but he had some muscle. He knew how to fight, and he was fast—most little guys were. That was the biggest advantage small opponents always had over me. They were weaker, but they were quick.
He aimed for my face, but he missed and caught me in the chest. He would’ve been better off if he had gotten me in the face. Still, I was exhausted, and it hurt, but I didn’t squeal, not like he had. I shook it off and reared my right fist back. But he fought dirty. He kicked me in the groin.
Any man anywhere has at least one major weak spot—the groin. I was no different. I pulled my punch and grabbed at my groin. It hurt like no kind of pain I had felt in years. But I didn’t have time to worry about it. I tried to go at him again, but the pain hit me like a truck. I clammed up again.
Tega went for the Five-Seven. He got to it. He stood about six feet from me. We were both at the back of the plane. The rear door was now completely open. He pointed the gun at me. Once again, I thought I was a dead man. Game over.
Tega squeezed the trigger, but just then, from out of left field, a flare from the flare gun launched out of the barrel. It hissed past me and torpedoed in Tega’s direction. It lit up the cabin in a bright orange flash. The flare flew right between us and shot out into the night. It exploded behind the plane.
A split second before it exploded, Tega had turned quickly and returned fire in the direction of the flare’s origin. He had intended to hit Faye Matlind—she was the one who had picked up the flare gun, loaded it, and fired it at him. But the explosion caught him by surprise. It threw him off balance and caused him to misfire. Instead of the one bullet intended for Faye, Tega fired two rounds. And each bullet hit two different targets.
One round shot into the plane’s gauges. It caused all kinds of noises and alarms to beep and ding.
The second bullet caused more damage. It did something very rare for one of those rounds—it penetrated the pilot’s seat and went through Hank’s chest. The old guy fell forward against the controls, clenching his sternum. The plane dipped into a quick nosedive.
The girls tumbled forward into the cockpit. They were all wide awake now. The adrenaline from all the danger had jump-started their bodies.
Tega stumbled a couple of paces forward, and I stood my ground.
Hank’s head rose up. He pulled the controls back and got us out of the nosedive almost as fast as we had gone into it. Hank was a tough old guy. He had fought in the Navy. I remembered.
Tega jumped back to his feet and pointed the gun at me before I could attack him. He aimed at my chest and screamed, “Te vas a morir!”
Then Hank pulled back hard on the controls. Tega lost his balance and stumbled back a few feet toward the rear, near the edge.
I swiped at his gun hand with a fast backhand. The Five-Seven went flying into the air, and the slipstream sucked it out of the plane. Then I reared back on my heels, bent my knees, and leaped forward. Using every muscle from my legs to my neck, I delivered the most powerful headbutt of my life, far more powerful than the one I had given years ago on the football field, or since. My brow was rigid and powerful and landed flat against Tega’s face, concaving it, crushing his nose and bashing his face to a pulp in one powerful and fatal blow. He was dead instantly. I knew it, but I’d never find out for sure because he went flying backward, and the night air sucked him out of the rear door. I almost got pulled out after him, but I reached up with both arms and locked my palms against the ceiling, bracing myself. I watched Oskar Tega’s departure with great satisfaction. His body whipped around just outside the plane like a leaf in a storm, and seconds later, he was lost to sight.
I said, “Adios.”
That was the last anyone saw of Oskar Tega.
59
The seaplane dipped and bounced. Hank tried his best to keep it steady, but the controls were damaged beyond the point of repair. He had bled all over the place. I knew he was going to die soon—no doubt about it.
I held my hands over his wounds—one over the hole in his back and one over the hole in his chest.
“Ya gotta get da girls outta da plane,” Hank said to me, breathless.
I said, “Can’t you land us? Or tell me how?”
“I’ve lived a long life. My kids are grown. My wife died two years ago. Dat bastard killed da last friend dat I had in dis world. I’m dyin’. Let me go.”
I moved my hand and took a peek at his chest. He was right. Blood splattered and pooled out of the wound. There was no going back for him. Not under these conditions. Even a doctor onboard wouldn’t be able to help him. He had a slim chance at a hospital. He wasn’t going to make it.
He grabbed my hand with his and squeezed. He said, “Let go.”
I nodded, pictured my mom, and then I let him go. He gripped his chest and tried to stop the bleeding as best he could.
He said, “I’m gonna fly low above da lake. You take da girls and jump out. And don’t wait. I won’t last.” Then he took the plane down into a slow dive.
I grabbed his shoulder and said, “I’m glad I met you.” I turned to the girls and said, “Ladies, listen up. The plane isn’t going to land. We’ve got to jump.”
Faye was almost fully alert. The drugs had worn off for her. So at least I had her help.
Then one of the other girls seemed to be more cognizant of what was going on. I confirmed that she really was Ann Gables. This was the first time I had really looked at her. She was still alive. Skinny but alive.
She asked, “Jump?”
“Ann, there’s no time to explain, but you’re going to have to jump and swim,” I said.
Faye grabbed her and said, “Remember me? It’s Faye. We’re free now, but we have to jump from this plane. Can you swim?”
Ann’s face came alive and alert at Faye’s words. She said, “We’re free? Yes, I can swim.”
I said, “Good.” Then I said to Hank, “We’re ready.”
Hank took us down above the lake. Thunder rumbled above us. He shouted back to us, “All right. Head all da way ta da back. Jump in ten seconds. No time ta waste.”
He flew low over the lake like he was going to land. I pushed the ladies toward the rear. I grabbed the third girl, who was still woozy, and Faye helped Ann. At the rear of the plane, we felt the starboard engine explode in a sudden wave of fire and wind. The plane lurched through the air, and Faye and Ann both flew out the back before they were ready. I grabbed the other girl and leaped out after them.
We dropped through the air for not even three seconds and then crashed through the surface of the lake like boulders. We sank several feet down, and I started swimming with one arm. I pulled the girl with the other. I swam and paddled upward through the water with all my strength. I kicked and kicked. After a long moment, I burst through the surface. I filled my lungs with the warm, damp air. I sucked down the oxygen like it was my first time breathing.
The girl floated next to me, unconscious. Then suddenly, she was awake and completely confused. Second-nature kicked in, and she treaded water on her own. She coughed and gasped and stayed quiet. Then she started swimming away from me toward the shore. She might’ve thought I had abducted her or was trying to drown her. Neither would’ve surprised me. But she was alive. That was all that mattered.
I turned and swam in the opposite direction toward the other shore. Not sure why? I just followed my instinct, which was to paddle to the other side. I kicked and paddled and swam as hard as I could.
I heard my mother’s voice. She said, "Do the right thing."
I heard her repeatedly in my head as I swam. "Do the right thing."
Eventually, I reached the shore and pulled myself up onto the rocks with my arms. I didn’t stand up. Not yet. I just rolled over and lay on my back and stared up at the sky.
The sun had broken through the storm clouds. Thunder still roared every other minute, but the sunlight was there. Then there was one loud, thunderous sound that was a little different from the rumbling thunder. It was much closer. I looked up in the noise's direction and saw that it was the seaplane. It had exploded above the town of Black Rock. Pieces of the plane fell to the earth in a rainstorm of shrapnel and broken metal fragments. I thought about Hank, and then I thought nothing else.
I sat up and looked around the lake for signs of Faye Matlind. I didn’t have to search for long. Directly across from me on the opposite shore were all three of the women—the drugged one I had jumped from the plane with Ann Gables and Faye Matlind. They were holding each other and hugging like long-lost sisters who had survived a horrible plane crash and more, which they had.
I smiled.
Do the right thing.
I lay back down on the hard stones and closed my eyes. I had felt nothing more comfortable in my life than that bed of rocks.
60
It was well into the early morning hours. Cars had lined up to leave the town of Black Rock like it had an outbreak of the plague. The traffic to exit the town was heavy and thick.
Emergency vehicles from the neighboring towns, the state government and state cops, the FBI, the DEA, and the ATF were all lined up within twenty-four hours to get into the town of Black Rock. They had set up their own traffic stops and perimeters and security stations. The local motel, which had survived the fires, was fully booked.
The national media had canceled all of their regularly scheduled programs to report on both a small town in Mississippi that was on fire and a missing international criminal named Oskar Tega. He was now thought to have crashed his plane over Black Rock. It was also reported that he hadn’t been a drug kingpin after all, but a human trafficker. He and his gang had allegedly been responsible for dozens of abductions of young women in the last five years along the highways and interstates in multiple counties.
Much, much earlier than all of this, I had left Black Rock. While all the government agencies were fighting to get into the town, I was already miles away. I stood on the side of Highway 82, just outside a small town called El Dorado. The sun was out, and it was hot. I had my thumb out when a bright-red Scion pulled over to the shoulder. I lowered my arm and started walking toward the car.
I was exhausted. I had slept for only about an hour on a bed of rocks, and my back was sore. My shoulders hurt, and I felt my bones with every step I took, but I had to keep moving.
I stepped up to the passenger door. I was so tired that, without even leaning down to meet the driver, I opened the door and dumped myself into the seat. Casually, I gazed over with sleepy eyes and then laughed. I laughed louder and heartier than I had ever laughed before because the driver was Maria from the diner.
She smiled at me. She looked good in the morning, but she also looked a little tired, but better than me, for sure.
She said, “Hi.”
“Well, hello.”
“I never thought I’d see you again.”
I nodded.
Then she said, “I called you.”
I shut my eyes tight, and a deep frown fell across my face.
She asked, “What?”
“My phone.”
I pulled it out of my pocket. I was amazed because it was still in one piece, and it was dry, like my clothes, but surely the phone had been ruined.
“I was in the lake earlier. I forgot to take it out of my pocket.”
She said, “Put it in rice. It’ll work again.”
I shrugged.
“Don’t you have it all backed up, anyway?”
I said, “It’s not my phone. Why are you here? Where are you going?”
Then I noticed that the back seat was loaded up with her belongings.
She smiled and said, “There’s nothing for me in Black Rock, even when it wasn’t on fire. I’m headed home. Back to Austin. What about you? Where are you headed?”
I looked around the car, and then I looked back at her. Our eyes connected. I could’ve headed back to Killian Crossing. I could’ve called Cameron, explained that I wasn’t coming back to the NCIS. But then again, I didn’t have to say anything.
I said, “Austin sounds great.”
She nodded and smiled.
“Mind if I sleep a while?”
She said, “Not at all.”
Then she took her foot off the brake, merged with the traffic, and drove off.
Before I dozed off, she asked, “Hey, you wanna meet my parents?”
I laughed again. This time, I laughed so hard that it hurt.
She laughed too. Then she asked, “Why are you going to Austin?”
I said, “I gotta be somewhere.”
We said nothing more. I lay back against the seat, closed my eyes, and fell into a deep, deep sleep.
WINTER TERRITORY: A PREVIEW
Out Now!
WINTER TERRITORY: A BLURB
A terrifying bioweapon…
A hidden terrorist…
Only Jack Widow can stop them.
Out for good, former NCIS agent, Jack Widow goes undercover to stop an unimaginable terrorist threat in the second "electrifying" book in the Jack Widow series.
Deep in Wyoming, the dead of winter, CIA Agent Alex Shepard is desperate. A few days ago, he sent an undercover agent to the Red Rain Indian Reservation to investigate an unthinkable terrorist plot. However, when his man was supposed to check-in, Shepard heard nothing.
With a snowstorm fast-approaching, Shepard's secret mission is in peril. There is no time left, and lives are on the line.
Enter drifter Jack Widow--Shepard's one hope to recover his agent and stop the deadliest domestic terrorist plot in American history.
Readers are saying….
★★★★★ A first-rate page-turner! -Amazon Reviewer.
CHAPTER 1
The man was about twenty-five years old and freezing.
The cold pierced through his skin and shot straight to his bones. The temperatures outside dipped into the low twenties, and the winter hadn’t even come on yet. Not fully. It was still the middle of November, but the mountaintops were snowcapped, and the sky was wet with the cold, dewy feeling that came with high altitudes and frigid skies. Which exactly described his location—high up in a stark, cold winter. He was in the Absaroka Mountain Range, a part of the Rockies. The elevation was somewhere around thirteen thousand feet, but he wasn’t sure of the exact number.
The man was hiding out in a familiar place—a place he used to hide when he was young. He felt safe there.
Outside, the night wind blew and battered the ruggedly built wooden structure. It was primitive, but had endured the cold winters for many, many years. For the moment, nothing and no one would find him. The man was safe, but it wouldn’t be for long. He had nowhere else to go. He had run out of options and time.
They were coming for him, and they would come in hot with guns blazing. They would kill him for sure—no doubt about it. He had been running for days, and he knew he would come face-to-face with them soon enough. His cover had been blown all to hell and back.
No changing that now. No changing the past.
But that wasn’t the thing that worried him at the moment. The thing that was the immediate danger wasn’t the guys coming to kill him for betraying them. It wasn’t the fact that they had trusted him, and he had turned on them. It wasn’t the dangerous enemies who had once terrified him. The immediate danger wasn’t the contents of the stolen bulletproof briefcase that was covered in dirt and grime and still damp from being dragged through the snowy terrain.
The immediate danger that ate away at him was that he was starving. He hadn’t eaten in days, so many days that he had no idea when the last time was.
Two weeks ago, he had been on a military stealth helicopter on his way into Mexico, or maybe back from Mexico, across the Mexican–United States border. He couldn’t remember for sure. The details were fuzzy because his thinking was muddled. Five or six or seven days without food will do that to a man. He tried to remember his training, his tradecraft, but all he could focus on was the stealth helicopter.
He had thought it was such a cool thing. It was a Comanche RAH-70, the most terrifying machine he had ever seen. Reports from around the world had claimed that highly modified Black Hawk UH-60s were the stealth helicopters used in the raid on Osama bin Laden’s compound in 2011. He hadn’t been there in 2011—he had been far too young at the time to have been involved in that operation—but he had top secret clearance and was privy to knowledge that the helicopters used were, in fact, Comanche’s RAH-70s, cousins of the RAH-66.
Public knowledge said that the Comanche helicopters had been canceled way back in 2004. The programs were too expensive for the US military, but not for his employer. His employer had found a use for them and had financed dozens of them to be created for stealth missions. They were housed in strategic military installations all around the world. Military service personnel were restricted from accessing them. Authorized persons had been told never to reveal any details about them to anyone.
