Message received. Tactical gear aside, he wasn’t an assaulter, but even he knew interwoven ballistic fibers housed in lightweight thermoplastic wouldn’t stop a bullet between the eyes.
Fighting the temptation to surge ahead as his adrenaline response kicked it up a notch, he moved back into formation and waited for the all-clear. Becca was close. He could feel it in his bones, and he wanted eyes on her. Now.
“Clear,” Cody said, reappearing at the head of the group. “Looks like—what the fuck!” he shouted, jumping out of the way as a tiny blur ran by his foot. “Was that a rat?” He squinted in the direction the animal had skittered off in.
“Cat,” Doc huffed, doing a terrible job of smothering a laugh.
“Jesus Christ,” Cody wheezed, readjusting his gear. “I hate cats. Little dick scared the shit out of me.”
Behind Jay’s back, Chase snorted. “You were saying, buttnut?”
“Looks like someone was scooped in a hurry. Jamb’s busted, bed’s rumpled, and there’s a set of bear paw slippers beside the night table.”
“It’s Becca,” Jay said, conviction flushing his body with adrenaline. He hitched his chin, indicating the direction they needed to go in. “They’re taking her to the computer room to get comms back online. Take a left at the next T-intersection.”
“You sure?” Cody asked.
“Positive.” Even if he’d only seen the facility layout once, his eidetic memory would allow him to recall the location of every room. But he’d spent the last two days studying every nook and cranny of the building’s floor plan. No way his brain had this one wrong. “Next left. Then seventeen feet ahead, there’s a corridor that branches off on the right. The door to the computer room will be at the end. It’s the only one in the hallway.”
“Copy that,” Cody said. “I’m guessing they’ll have the area heavily guarded. You ready, Mac?”
“Yep,” Chase replied, switching places with Jamie.
“You two hang back and cover our six. Shoot anyone who comes our way. Once the threat’s neutralized, I’ll breach the door. If Rebecca’s inside, Chase tosses the flash bang. Then we move. Clear?”
His muscles taut with anticipation and his skin buzzing with the electrical energy of imminent action, Jay added his clear to the other two. Every nerve, every neuron, every cell in his body alive and attuned to the impending moment of engagement and ultimate reunion with Becca, he had zero doubts about the validity of their mission.
She was the key to stopping Dominion.
And the key to his heart.
Nothing else mattered.
With another hand signal from Cody, they continued down the dimly lit corridor, gun barrels swinging left and right in a coordinated fashion as they made their way deeper into the belly of the building, one cautious step at a time.
With a limited number of emergency lights illuminating the area, and little in the way of natural sunlight reaching them, they were relying solely on each other and their instincts to guide them down one shadowy hallway after another.
In preparation for breaching the main door, Jay had hacked the building’s electrical systems on the flight over. As soon as the first explosion had announced their arrival, he’d cut the island’s power supply at the source. Easy.
Unfortunately, there’d been nothing he could do to permanently disable communications. By targeting the third-party vendor who’d installed the standby generators needed to provide a continuous supply of juice to the computers in the event of a blackout, he’d managed to get his hands on a set of construction blueprints.
The computer systems had redundant emergency power supplies housed in a concrete bunker directly under the server room. Impossible to get to from the outside without blowing the state-of-the-art facility, and everyone in it, sky-high.
Sure, he’d jammed the signal, temporarily knocking out communications—but any halfway decent hacker could find a workaround in minutes, and these motherfuckers had one of the best coders he knew.
Wouldn’t take Becca long to figure out how to switch to an alternate frequency and boost signal amplification, allowing for an SOS to be sent to Volkov and his security team in Moscow. Once alerted to the ambush, any Russian fighter jets in the area would be rerouted to the island.
They had to be wheels up and halfway back across the Bering Strait before that happened, or they’d all be dead. Nothing but body parts and twisted metal raining down on the dark waters below.
Not how he wanted the reunion with the love of his life to go.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
The sound of gunfire drew closer—sharp bursts ricocheting off concrete and steel. “What’s happening?” Becca cried, her heart hammering in her chest.
“You tell me,” Roman growled, tightening his grip on her arm and pulling her closer. “We both know you’re responsible for this.” Fingers digging into her flesh, he dragged her the last few feet toward the computer room.
Shit! Deny. Deny. Deny.
